Complete Mor(m)ons

Some years ago, while I was still in the Air Force and stationed in Wyoming, the base got a Mormon chaplain. Now, the military has had Mormons in the chaplaincy since 1917 when three Mormons, including Elder B. H. Roberts of the Seventy, were appointed. But they aren't real common.

And since my wife was working in the chapel at the time, I got to see the reaction of the other chaplains to this guy. I'd never really paid attention before, but apparently, certain flavors of Christianity believe that the Mormons don't qualify as Christian.

So I looked into it. And, you know, with just a little research, you can pretty much see what they mean. In fact, some of their more off-the-wall beliefs start to sound a lot like Scientology.

The Mormons belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints, or LDS for short ("Mormon" comes from their earliest religious text, the Book of Mormon). The LDS have some good beliefs: the healthy lifestyle (no alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea - except herbal tea), the much mellower attitude toward strangeness - although they have damned little acceptance of outsiders, they do make some of the best neighbors of any "true believer," after Wiccans.

But you pretty quickly get into weird ground. There's the spiritual aspects: the pre-birth life, the ability to have spirit children in one of the three heavens (the Celestial kingdom, the Terrestrial kingdom and the Telestial kingdom). But they believe that all other modern Christian faiths have departed from true Christianity, and the LDS church is a restoration of 1st century Christianity and the only true and authorized Christian church.

They have a doctrine called "exaltation" which (as stated in the Doctrine & Covenants 132:20) allows true followers to become gods in the afterlife.

Then shall they be gods, because they have no end; therefore shall they be from everlasting to everlasting, because they continue; then shall they be above all, because all things are subject unto them. Then shall they be gods, because they have all power, and the angels are subject unto them.

They also believe that God (Elohim) lives with his many wives on a planet (or by a star) named Kolob, God wants you to wear special underpants, and Joseph Smith really did not want to start polygamy, but a powerful angel with a sword threatened him and made him do it.

There's basic structural changes to how the Earth was formed: apparently, Elohim wanted to build Earth to give his billions of "spirit children" real bodies. His two oldest sons, Jesus and Lucifer, offered plans on how to do this. Elohim went with Jesus' plan, and Lucifer got angry and started a big war between the spirit children. After this war, any spirits that had stayed neutral were cursed to be born with black skin. (Hence the long-standing racism in the church.)

Elohim and one of his wives came to Earth as Adam and Eve and had a buttload of kids. Centuries later, Elohim left Kolob again to have sex with the Virgin Mary, to give a body to Jesus. Jesus took three wives (Mary, Martha and Mary Magdalene), and had a bunch of kids with them (and, of course, Joseph Smith was one of the descendants of Jesus).

After His resurrection, Jesus came to the Americas to preach to the Indians, who the LDS believe are really Israelites. In fact, according to Prophet Spencer W. Kimball in 1960 (and the words of a Mormon prophet on church business become canon law), as they convert to Mormonism, Native Americans skin lightens to a more Caucasian hue.

Yes, that's right. It turns out that Mel Brooks was divinely inspired by Elohim.



Which, of course, brings us to the story of Joseph Smith himself. In 1820, Joseph Smith said he had his first vision, which he said was God telling him that all of his sins were forgiven, and that all other churches were false. (You know, like he'd told Mohammed that all churches were false over twelve centuries earlier. It's weird how many people claim that God tells them this.) Smith made his living by putting a rock in his hat (calling it a "seer stone") and claiming that it would lead him to buried treasure. And then a few years after his first vision, an angel named Moroni showed him where to find a breastplate fitted with two "seer stones" (we'll just call them his "magic glasses") and some golden plates inscribed with the story of those Jewish Native Americans I mentioned before.

After being unable to bring back the plates from where they were buried, because apparently he was using the wrong helpers, he finally got the plates and locked them in a box, because the angel told him that nobody else should see them (and that didn't sound suspicious at all). But the magic spectacles would let him translate them, and write them out in book form, and he could publish the books. (He made some of the later translations by sticking a rock in his hat again, but who among us hasn't misplaced their glasses, right?)

It's weird that nobody has ever found evidence of a gold mine used by the indigenous people of North America, particularly not in the New York or Pennsylvania areas where Smith was living at the time.

Smith was mostly illiterate (education being what it was then) - he could read some, but really couldn't write. So he had to sit in the kitchen on the other side of a blanket (or a screen, or a curtain, depending on the source you read) and dictate, first to his wife, and later to a guy named Harris.

A few years later, Smith had about 118 pages translated, and Harris lost the first translation (let's call it a "rough draft"), the angel took the plates away, and Smith lost the ability to read words from a rock in his hat. Until a few months after that, when he magically got the ability back, and God gave him a new set of plates, so that Smith could to rewrite the story - it had to be changed, of course, because the first draft might be in the hands of Satan by now.

(An uncharitable reading of the events of those days might be that Harris' wife, tired of her husband getting conned, took the pages and hid them, saying that God could just dictate them again and they'd be exactly the same; so Smith had to come up with a cover story to work around that. But we aren't uncharitable people, are we?)

So there Smith sat, dictating to some scribe or another. ("Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!") From words he could see on a rock. In his hat. Which came from plates that God had recalled and replaced. (Maybe Smith hadn't been making payments - gold plates cost money, after all...)

So Smith gradually had the translations written out again, and set up his church. Of course, since people might not believe in plates that had been returned to heaven, Smith had eleven followers write statements saying that they'd seen, or even touched, the plates. The plates that the angel Moroni had said that nobody but Smith could ever see. (Maybe that's why God took them back! Hey, I think we've solved a mystery here!)

Weirdly, God couldn't be bothered to create a better story than he'd used before - he cribbed widely, from the New Testament, the Old Testament, and even from a crackpot book called View of the Hebrews: A History of the Ten Tribes in America, which claimed, yes, that the Native Americans were really Jews. (God as plagiarist; what the hell, right? But it had worked for Mohammed centuries earlier.)

Some years later, after escaping from the law in Ohio on charges of banking fraud, possibly marrying (or possibly just screwing) a 15-year-old named Fanny Alger, marrying several dozen other women and then claiming (since it was illegal) that he'd never supported polygamy, starting the Mormon War of 1838 in Missouri, bribing a sheriff to escape from jail, mobilizing the Mormon Nauwoo Legion to quell uprisings in the church (they later surrendered to the state militia), and finally going to jail and getting shot by unknown assailants, Smith died.

Today, the Mormons have almost nineteen million members worldwide, with at least 46 different schismatic versions of the religion still remaining, and at least 25 defunct, dissolved, or deceased sects fading into history.

But on reflection, I guess I can see where Mormonism doesn't really fit in with the more "standard" versions of Christianity.

Ready! Aim! ...

So, I decided to reclaim my back yard a little, and things just went downhill from there. Nothing disastrous, just a pain in the butt.

Now, we have this part of my yard where nothing grows. I'm not clear why (you know, except for that part about not watering it or seeding it or anything...), but it had dead grass, a couple of dead trees, some tumbleweeds, and general natural detritus lying around. And a lot of dog turds, because we ignored it, knowing that it would be a pain to get around in and clean up. Just kind of a mess, and I wanted to take care of it.

So I raked and I shoveled and I got it all piled up, and it seemed like a hell of a lot of stuff to try bagging and toting to the dump, particularly since I don't own a truck. And I figured, why not burn the stuff?

Now, I haven't lived in Albuquerque my whole life, so I wasn't clear on the requirements. I do know that some radio stations gets these "no burn days" announcements, so I knew that there was some kind of regulation on it. And the week before last, figuring that I needed a permit, I had gone hunting for one.

I found two. One of them seemed to be primarily for big monster events. and neither one seemed quite right. So I went looking for the rules. Couldn't find them. I called one of the numbers listed on one of the forms and left a message, but he never called me back.

Finally, last Sunday, I went to the Fire Department to ask just what the deal was - we have a substation just about a minute and a half away. Of course, as I pulled up to the light within site of them, they went racing off, lights flashing and sirens wailing. And when they head out, they don't leave anybody behind. They lock the place up tight and they're gone. And they could be gone for hours.

I could have given up at that point, but I'm stubborn. There's other fire stations around. So I went to one I knew about, a little farther away, at the corner of Menaul Blvd and Eubank Blvd. (That's the only identifier I'll be giving of our public servants in the course of this little story - I'm not trying to get anybody in trouble, I'm just venting.)

And once I found a firefighter, I asked what the rules were. He explained that a permit wasn't required (which I didn't expect), agreed that leaves, sticks and branches were OK, it had to be away from any flammable structures, had to have a hose, and (here's the kicker) to find out what the "no burn days" are, I could either go to the City of Albuquerque website, or call 3-1-1 (the Albuquerque government information line).

And let me be clear here - he specifically mentioned those two information sources.

It all sounded clean and civilized to me, but it was getting later in the afternoon, so I put it off for this morning. When it was overcast, with a prediction for scattered showers today (seemed like a bonus, really) and humidity of 39% (which may sound like a drought to somebody in, say, Florida, but it's huge around here).

And about ten thirty, I called 3-1-1, to discover that they had limited services, mostly pre-recorded, on Sunday (and only from ten to six, for that matter).

Undaunted, I went to the website, where I poke around until I found this, under "click here for today's No Burn status."


So I'm feeling pretty good about it. I'm monitoring the fire, I've got rakes, shovels, the hose, an actual fire extinguisher, a metal rod I can use to bring the unburned stuff in the middle up. And it's just about out when a fire truck pulls up in front of my house to tell me that I had to put it out.

I didn't get a citation, so pretty much no harm, no foul. But they were pretty clear that it had to be put out.

Not really a problem. Like I said, it was pretty much done. (It had been a good-sized pile, but more on that in a second.) But these guys tell me you have to call 768-BURN (which the other firefighter didn't even mention), and that today was a no-burn day. I explained the situation, and they contradicted themselves at a couple of points (regarding what you can burn, "you can only burn tumbleweeds" became "weeds and grass" became "leaves" at various times). But I didn't argue, and I put out the smoldering embers.

So, a couple of points.

One - shouldn't the website and the phone line match?

Two - wouldn't it be nice if they had some webpage to explain the rules?

Three - should I be angry that none of the firefighters seem to agree what the rules are?

And (most importantly) four - remember how I said it was a good-sized pile? Should I be upset that the fire truck (that is, as I also said, only 90 seconds away) took an hour and a half to come tell me that I was doing wrong?

Been a busy week

Things just pile up sometimes.

I'm in charge of putting together thirteen medical staff meetings, on schedules ranging from twice a year (one of them), quarterly (two of them), every other month (five of them) and monthly (the last five). So why don't we put the one with the most involved set-up on a short week? That will make things fun, won't it?

So, you add to that the fact that the Trophy Wife and Last Son are assistant music director and lighting/sound tech/grip/general-guy-getting-electrocuted-jobs on the Opera Unlimited Outreach production of the Mikado (last performance tonight), and it's been a hell of a week.

Plus, I've been spending a lot of time on a blog called Debunking Atheists, which, to be honest, doesn't do a good job of it (in case you weren't aware, atheists are immoral and Satanists (despite the unreasonable premise that you can believe in Satan, but not God), oil is produced by the earth (as opposed to being rotting dinosaur parts under pressure), and the Shroud of Turin is not a 14th century fraud).

So, instead of posting anything of note, I'll just point out something that I was unaware of: Steampunk Star Wars seems weirdly popular.

Admittedly, some versions...



...work better than others.



But they all show an unreasonable amount of work that has been put into this odd little hobby.


Well, it probably keeps them busy and off the streets. Which may be a very good thing...

Sometimes you aren't paying attention

I guess I slept on my shoulder wrong last night. It's been bothering me all day. Well, at least most of the day.

But then again, I could be wrong.

I was in the first relief unit into Baghdad. The first troops hit, boots on the ground, on March 20, 2003. My squad had already been mobilized at that point, all our equipment was set up, and we got on the plane on July 3, en route to Baghdad. Between holidays, brainless bureaucracy, and flying into war zones, we eventually ended up in Iraq on the night of 8 July.

We were Security Forces, the infantry of the Air Force. Our purpose was to guard the military side of the flightline of Baghdad International Airport; we were armed troops, but we were also surrounded by a large, comforting womb of Army forces. We never took any direct fire - the only bullet that came through our camp (that we knew about) was when somebody, after responding to a report of gunfire, didn't clear his weapon before coming back to camp. He walked into a bunker, put down his rifle a little too abruptly, and fired a round through an innocent case of water bottles.

We did have hostile fire to deal with, though. We were located right off of the flight line - rockets and missiles were being fired at our planes all the time, mortar rounds landed all around the camp, shells would fire off over our heads all day and all night.

I started to block it out. In direct violation of Darwin's laws, I learned to sleep through things blowing up around me. It's still true - I sleep through loud noises that bring my wife sitting straight upright in the bed, like a car crash directly in front of the house that left a Geo Tracker upside down in my yard.

Good times.

We eventually got back to the states, I volunteered for the Kerry campaign (you see where that got us), and eventually, on the day that John Kerry conceded the election to George W. Bush, I filed my retirement papers.

After shopping around a little, I made a conscious decision to avoid any job where I might eventually have to shoot someone; this meant I was stuck with essentially entry-level positions, but I could live with that. It's a much lower-stress job, I'm not in charge of anybody, I do my work and everybody's happy.

I'm a fairly private person, but that's only because I get bored with the minor, petty problems of the majority of people. But overall, I think I'm a pretty cheerful guy.

Just this week, when people would ask me what I was doing for the Fourth of July, I've been telling them that I'd be curled up under the bed peeing myself as the fireworks went off. Then we'd all laugh, and I'd explain that, even though I knew people who had problems with explosions, I wasn't one of them.

Meanwhile, my body was telling me what my brain was too stupid to see.

We're in New Mexico, where fireworks are sold by people smoking cigarettes in flammable tents, because that's the American way.

I was watching TV tonight, and during a commercial, I got up to get the Trophy Wife some ice water. Halfway down the hall, my foot cramped up. I don't know why - I guess I was sitting too long in one position. But between that and my shoulder, I ended up limping back into the room like a bad Igor parody.

I think I made some stupid joke at that point, about how I wish I was under enough stress to justify all this. The Trophy Wife took that moment to tell me that I was always irritable on the Fourth of July. And on New Year's Eve. Any time fireworks were shot off.

I like to think I'm a fairly introspective guy. I've got a pretty good handle on my emotions and how I react to other people.

My shoulders are so tight you could bounce a quarter off them. My head feels roughly like I've got a clamp attached to my temples. And I've got tension forcing my muscles to seize up at random moments.

The Trophy Wife tells me that it's like this every year; I've just been blocking it out. I've been telling myself that I'm in my forties, and this is what I can expect as I'm growing older.

Outside the house, another bright red explosion has just lit up the sky, along with a loud crack. It startled me and I misspelled the word "older." Twice.

I'm in good shape. I don't even want to imagine what they're going through at the VA Hospital tonight.

And tomorrow night is the Fourth.

McChrystal's Balls

For those of you living in a cabin in the Montana woods for the last few weeks, Rolling Stone magazine did an interview with General Stanley McChrystal, where he (and many of his aides) were making unflattering statements about the president, the vice president, and pretty much every politician involved with Afghanistan from the top down.

So, Obama called him back to Washington, perhaps to sit down with him, along with General Clown, Envoy Animal, and Vice President Bite-me, to discuss McChrystal's future career plans.

And now General Petraeus is in charge, and like so many politicians and military men before him, McChrystal is being given a chance "to spend more time with his family."

Now, the unhinged Right has gone off the rails so fast that at this point, if Obama were to single-handedly parachute into the Pakistani mountains, capture bin Laden, and use his bleeding corpse to plug the pipe that's pumping oil into the Gulf, they'd complain that he's a socialist for interfering with British Petroleum's efforts to fix their equipment.

Hell, even if Afghanistan suddenly becomes heaven on earth, with free democratic elections that put James Dobson in charge, with the Pope as his Vice Prophet, Liz Cheney would still talk about how "Obama castrated an entire country! He's trying to feminize the planet!"

But that's OK. If Obama had left McC in charge, those same people would complain about how weak Obama was appearing, and how he was making America a laughingstock on the international stage.

It doesn't matter what Obama does on any subject — the far right will spin it so hard that it will drill down into the ground. But really, on the fire/don't fire spectrum, there was a third option that nobody seems willing to talk about.

The Right likes to complain the Obama is "arrogant" (i.e., he isn't Steppin' Fetchit), and he's "thin-skinned." (What? He didn't smile and nod when you called him "Hitler" for the sixtieth time?)

But if Obama was really "thin-skinned," he would have taken that third option. And General McChrystal wouldn't have been allowed to retire. He would have been courtmartialed.

Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ)

ARTICLE 88. CONTEMPT TOWARD OFFICIALS
Any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the President, the Vice President, Congress, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of a military department, the Secretary of Transportation, or the Governor or legislature of any State, Territory, Commonwealth, or possession in which he is on duty or present shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

ART. 133. CONDUCT UNBECOMING AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN
Any commissioned officer, cadet, or midshipman who is convicted of conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman shall be punished as a court-martial may direct.

ART. 134. GENERAL ARTICLE
Though not specifically mentioned in this chapter, all disorders and neglects to the prejudice of good order and discipline in the armed forces, all conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the armed forces...

It isn't hard to figure out. The military goes everywhere, and laws change. And sometimes, the military goes outside of any American jurisdiction.

So, instead of having to pay attention to the weird local laws, like the fact that it's still illegal in Kansas to ride a Grévy's Zebra, Tibetan ox, or any similar animal down a main thoroughfare (unless there's a parade in progress), or in Thailand, where you can be arrested for not wearing underwear, we have federal laws, which take precedence... most of the time. Unless they don't...

OK, mostly, the local government will give up their right to prosecute, since the military member is going to face military justice. It costs them less that way.

(There's actually a lengthy and somewhat boring discussion of jurisdiction that can be inserted here, but why bother?)

So the UCMJ tends to trump local law. Which means that General McChrystal was guilty of the military equivalent of jaywalking. Really, these were all minor offenses - no jail time would have been involved.

At worst, McChrystal would have lost a star. But because of the "high 3" rule (your retirement pay is based on the highest rank you held for three years), he would have still retired at the 3-star pay rate that he's getting now. (Of course, things might have gone worse for the various lower-ranking officers who were with him, and just as guilty.)

Nothing would have changed. The whole mess would have just lasted longer.

But that's OK. Our friends on the Right will figure some ignorant way to spin this.

So alone

So, I was working on a post (and then, realizing that I was kicking a paraplegic, I moved on to a second one), and then things got all caught up in my son, home in one piece from Afghanistan, who proposed to his girlfriend (who's also in one piece, if it matters), and relatives from North Carolina. So instead, here's an essay on the nature of existence from P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula.

Scientists and atheists do something that many believers find repellent: we shatter their perception of their relationship to the universe. And understandably, they don't like that.

Most religious people in the West have a very specific model of the way the world works that is based on our cultural history as the progeny of nomadic herdsman, and that still resonates strongly with all of us — the father-child relationship, the patriarchy. We have a wise leader who guides us all, punishes us when we stray, offers largesse to those in his favor, and unites the whole tribe in common cause. Those bronze age sheepherders lived this way, and it made sense. It was a strategy for survival that worked well, and that shaped the way we see the world even now. Ask any Christian on any Sunday morning about flocks and sheep and shepherds, and they will understand the metaphor even if it is highly unlikely that any of them have been in contact with any animal other than a household pet.

It's also a powerful idea because it posits a set of very personal relationships. The father is remote because of his great responsibilities, but at the same time, we all want that pat on the shoulder, the encouraging word, the opportunity to serve and win distinction in Father's eyes by virtue of our dutifulness. It's a familial relationship, tightly-knit and long-established, where we are respectful dependents and the leader of the tribe relies on our service.

Beyond just the family and tribe, though, this vision has been extended to the entire universe. There is a great Patriarch in the Sky, who is our leader and guide, responsible for making the grand strategic decisions about where our tribe will go, and is also watchfully making sure the unity of the tribe is not disrupted by wayward ideas from nonconformists. He has a central concern that we all share, that our people should thrive, and even if he is stern at times, it is because he cares so much that we succeed. And of course, he knows each one of us personally, just as the leader of tribe or clan in our pastoral days would have, and he can give us an approving stroke or a damning angry smiting, depending on whether we help or hinder the work of getting the flocks to the summer pasturage.

Read your bible. It's saturated with this primitive herdsman mentality: God the Father, sheep and goats, lost lambs and the Lamb of God, flocks and herds. It's anthropologically fascinating, and it's also not necessarily an evil metaphor (unless, of course, you're a woman — the patriarchy is also deeply misogynistic). One of it's most appealing aspects is that it makes the relationship with the universe a close and personal one, of a very simple kind of relatedness, that of father and child. It's one metaphorical generation, direct and immediate, and it colors everything about how we view our place in the world: dominant and submissive, leader and follower, wisdom and naiveté, master and servant, command and obedience. It also tangles up our relationship with the world in those paternal virtues of love and concern and discipline, and often with those less savory issues of the complicated relationships many people have with their fathers, because, face it, sometimes men are jerks. Which also fits with the portrait of the omnipotent god painted by the Bible.

I can sympathize. I loved and respected my father, and any attempt by an outsider to defame or complicate or diminish that relationship would trigger a resentful response from me. Christians and Muslims and Jews have been told from their earliest years that God is their father, with all the attendant associations of that argument, and what are we atheists doing? Telling them that no, he is not, and not only that, you don't even have a heavenly father at all, the imaginary guy you are worshipping is actually a hateful monster and an example of a bad and tyrannical father, and you aren't even a very special child — you're a mediocre product of a wasteful and entirely impersonal process.

It makes that whole business of breaking the news about Santa Claus look like small potatoes. Reality is harsh, man.

But it is reality. We've done the paternity tests, we've traced back the genealogy, we're doing all kinds of in-depth testing of the human species. We are apes and the descendants of apes, who were the descendants of rat-like primates, who were children of reptiles, who were the spawn of amphibians, who were the terrestrial progeny of fish, who came from worms, who were assembled from single-celled microorganisms, who were the products of chemistry. Your daddy was a film of chemical slime on a Hadean rock, and he didn't care about you — he was only obeying the laws of thermodynamics.

You aren't you because of some grand design, but because of chance, contingency, and selection. Your genome is a mess of detritus with a tiny fraction of well-honed functionality, and your body is cobbled together from the framework of a tetrapod — you bear the scars of chance throughout, and you are mostly unaware of them because selection, that is the death of millions, has patched them over…but they're there to the eye that will look. You aren't even the best at much of anything: you're weaker, slower, more fragile, clumsier than the other species we compete with, and although you've got a bigger brain, the majority of Americans, at least, consider it a virtue to keep it ignorant and unused — and universally, we have difficulty thinking in the long term while we are very good at exploiting our environment in the short term, which is leading to some interesting and possibly fatal consequences.

The legacy of good husbandry, we are not. Our cosmic father did not and does not exist, which is a good thing, because if he did, he's the kind of lazy, destructive deadbeat we'd be ashamed of.

This is our new heresy. We have killed our heavenly father, demolished that cozy personal (but imaginary!) relationship with a great and caring being. We are alone, orphans in an indifferent universe. We atheists must be a cold and broken people, without hope, without love.

But of course, we're not, and I think this change in our vision of our relationship to the universe is humankind's great good hope. Primitive monotheistic religions have shackled us to a limited metaphor and model, the father and child, and erected an entire invisible heavenly mouthpiece to help us maintain that comfortable delusion — but it's like relying on the Great and Powerful Oz to help us out of our problems, when Oz is only a sham and a show. We have to escape out of this narrow perspective.

Reality doesn't just destroy the patriarchal model, it gives us new and better ways to visualize our relationship with the universe. Father and child is inadequate; we have to think in terms of populations and species interacting (not dominating), of being part of an environment. There is more to life than the father and child bond. I am the outcome of a trillion coalescing possibilities, with a vast population of brothers and sisters acting out our brief lives on a background of gas and stone, water and light, grasses and fishes, and my responsibilities are far greater than obedience to a father figure. Breaking that illusion of a personal tie to one grand elder lord can briefly leave us feeling abandoned and alone and lost, and I can understand how some people find severing that imaginary relationship a horrible prospect.

But here's the wonderful revelation. If you're a well-adjusted person, once you've discarded the unhealthy fictitious relationship with a phantasm, you can look around and notice all those other people who are likewise alone, and you'll realize that we're all alone together. And that means you aren't alone at all — you're among friends. That's the next step in human progress, is getting away from the notion of minions living under a trail boss, and onwards to working as a cooperative community, with no gods and no masters, only autonomous agents free to think and act.

On Father's Day, hypocrites are all in the family

by Colbert I. King (Washington Post)

Family, marriage and the contribution of fathers come together as topics for reflection on Father's Day. So I'd like to know why Barack Obama, a husband and a father in a family structure that encompasses bonds deemed essential to our society, is constantly and savagely attacked by conservative leaders whose personal circumstances undermine the family values they espouse?

Consider Obama: Raised by a single mother in a middle-class family where hard work and education were watchwords, Obama graduated from two of the top schools in the country, Columbia University and Harvard Law School. His legal scholarship was recognized when he became the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review. He married and, equally important, has stayed married to Michelle Robinson, a Princeton graduate and Harvard Law alumna. He lives with his wife, two children and his mother-in-law. Obama: constitutional law professor, civil rights lawyer, state legislator, U.S. senator, 44th U.S. president, family man.

Now let's turn to Obama's foremost critics: Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, Newton Leroy Gingrich and Sarah Palin.

Limbaugh and Gingrich have said too many negative things about Obama to count. "I want him to fail" (Limbaugh) and "secular socialist" (Gingrich) are just two of their attacks. Yet two of the nation's loudest proponents of family-values issues are serial husbands. Between them, the two men have had seven wives.

Limbaugh, who dropped out of college after one year, married his first wife, a sales secretary, in September 1977. She filed for divorce three years later; it was granted in July 1980. Limbaugh next married an usherette in 1983; they divorced in 1990. In May 1994, he married an aerobics instructor he met online. They separated in June 2004 and divorced that December.

Two weeks ago, Limbaugh married a Florida party planner. He's still wedded to her as far as I can tell.

Gingrich is one nuptial behind Limbaugh. But he started earlier. In 1962, at age 19, Gingrich married his 26-year-old former high school geometry teacher. Gingrich left her in the spring of 1980. He did return to see her at the hospital where she was getting treatment for cancer. He was there to discuss divorce terms. Formally divorced in 1981, Gingrich remarried six months later.

That marriage lasted until 2000. By his own admission, Gingrich started an affair with a woman 23 years his junior during his second marriage. It was around the time he was taking Bill Clinton to task over Monica Lewinsky.

Gingrich's second marriage ended in 2000, and he married his girlfriend the same year. The current Mrs. Gingrich is still with him, as far as I can tell.

Gingrich and Limbaugh, national icons in the conservative movement -- and mockers of this country's most traditional and honored symbol of commitment: holy matrimony.

But what would a Father's Day discussion of the nuclear family and a moral society be without bringing into the picture Mrs. Family Values herself, Sarah Palin?

The same Palin who last week said of President Obama, "It sounds like the inner circle that he has are some Chicago thugs." Well, Palin knows lawbreaking, too.

Her sister-in-law, Diana Palin, half sister of the former governor's husband, got a 15-month sentence this year. Burglarizing the same Alaska house three times for money to satisfy a drug habit is the kind of thing that can get you arrested. Thuggery? How about Sherry Johnston, the mother of Levi Johnston, the high school dropout who fathered Palin's grandson? She was arrested and charged with selling drugs; after pleading guilty to one count with intent to deliver the drug OxyContin she was sentenced to three years.

Because of her medical condition, the woman who was once Bristol Palin's future mother-in-law was released from prison to home confinement, where she wears an ankle-monitoring device.

And the whereabouts of 19-year-old Levi on this Father's Day weekend? His bonds with the Palins were so tight, he said on TV, that Sarah and her husband, Todd, allowed Levi to live in their house with Bristol while they dated. Conservative family values?

Levi can be found on the cover of Playgirl magazine, his nude body blocked from full exposure by his strategically placed arm.

And to think, as we prepare to celebrate this day of men and family, Limbaugh, Gingrich and Palin have the unmitigated gall to look down their noses at our president.
_____________

For Father's Day, President Obama was asked by Parade Magazine to write an article on parenting, summarized here.

Webber thou goest...

I just saw "Cats" for the first time the other night, and I have to admit, it's not as horrendous as I've always feared. The fact that I was drinking helped, admittedly, but the show doesn't actually make you want to slash your wrists. And in context, the old cat singing "Memory" actually redeems that song from the Muzak Hell where people like Barbara Streisand, Barry Manilow and Celine Dion have sent it.

On the other hand, you know what gets really irritating? People repeating nonsense words over and over (and over and over and over). For example, jellicle jellicle jellicle jellicle jellicle jellicle jellicle jellicle jellicle jellicle jellicle jellicle jellicle jellicle jellicle jellicle.

Oh, and by the way. Jellicle.

"Cats" opened up on the West End in 1981, and was Lloyd Webber's fourth successful staged musical (preceeded by Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita - there was also Jeeves, based on the Jeeves and Wooster novels by P.G. Wodehouse, but it closed after only three weeks).

Say what you want about Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber (Baron Lloyd-Webber of Sydmonton, in Hampshire), but he's composed 13 musicals, two film scores, a song cycle, a set of variations, and a Latin Requiem Mass. He has also earned six Tony Awards, seven Olivier Awards, three Grammies, an Academy Award, one Golden Globe and the Kennedy Center Honors (and has been nominated for each more times than I can count).

He's also a known plagiarist, accused by people from Roger Waters of Pink Floyd to Christian singer-songwriter Ray Repp. In fact, Lloyd Webber settled out of court with the estate of Giacomo Puccini (Tosca, La Boheme, Madame Butterfly) for an undisclosed amount.

Know why? Remember "Music of the Night," the big number from Phantom of the Opera? This is a brief excerpt from a little-known Puccini opera called Girl of the Golden West. Pay close attention about 44 seconds into it.



Anyway, Lloyd Webber has been married three times; he met his second wife, Sarah Brightman, while still married to his first wife, Sarah Hugill (so he's got a thing for Sarah's - there are worse kinks...), and married her within 4 months of his divorce being finalized. He, in fact, wrote the part of Christine Daaé in Phantom specifically for Brightman, and she has since gone on to relative success in the "I want to be taken far more seriously than I deserve" category of pop music.

Not blessed with a particularly strong voice or a talent for finding the right note consistently, Ms Brightman also has a dark and ugly past she'd probably like to forget. See, before she met Lloyd Webber, she was a dancer, first on the British TV show Top of the Pops with their house dancers, Pan's People, and later as the lead in the leather-and-grinding group Hot Gossip.

(I remember Hot Gossip as a staple on The Kenny Everett All-Electric Video Show, the perfect British series for an adolescent boy - edgier, and funnier, I thought, than Benny Hill, the two shows actually used to make fun of each other; you might even have seen some of these sketches on Benny Hill and had no idea what they were doing. For some reason, the show never caught on in the States, although you can occasionally find it on more progressive PBS stations late at night.)

What Ms Brightman, in her continuing quest for dignity, would probably like to forget, is her disco career from that era. Her first hit, for instance, was the mind-meltingly horrendous "I Lost My Heart to a Starship Trooper."



She followed that up with the non-hit "Adventures Of The Love Crusader," and a truly depressing cover of "My Boyfriend's Back."

She may be reinventing herself as a classic/pop diva, but it's hard to escape your past.

Let them eat dumpster scraps

from Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Marie Antoinette: "Let them eat cake"(*)
Rush Limbaugh: Let them eat dumpster scraps.

That's Rush Limbaugh's child nutrition program for poor kids. No, I'm not joking. Really. Not joking.

It's clear Rush hasn't studied history, because if he had, well, he would have remembered what happened to Marie Antoinette. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the Neck-measurin' Penguin

* Marie Antoinette never said that. That's right, the cake is a lie. But it was certainly well within her mentality, she said plenty of other things over her short life that were similar in nature.

Howdy, Cowboy Bob!

Well, I had a nice chat with another crazed fundamentalist this week. Those are always fun.

See, I ran across this guy from New York named Bob, who runs a blog he calls Stormbringer's Thunder. (I think it's interesting that he'd use Norse allusions in his blog title when he claims to be a born-again Christian, but what do I know?)

He'd apparently gone on some message board (which he never identifies) and exchanged words with a group of atheists, and this made him cranky. So he made the usual mimeographed arguments, claiming that atheists "hate God and the Bible, but have no ultimate source for their morality."

Because, of course, anybody who isn't Christian is an immoral nutjob, likely to grab a Glock and start capping pedestrians at any minute. You know, like the Dalai Lama (I never trusted that guy...).

He almost made a decent argument at one point, saying:

Where does morality come from?

We have bunches of places for our personal morality input:

- Friends
- Family
- Man-made religious directives
- Society
- Our own experiences and opinions
- Race
- Social class

Of course, you read through that list a second time, and you realize he included "race." Really? Especially since the next line is:

Fine. They all combine to make us what we are to varying degrees. But they change.

It does? I thought that those back-alley race-change operations fell out of fashion back in the Sixties. (I mean, I know that it was a hit in Asia a while back, but I thought we were past that...)

Anyway, I figured I'd chime in and see how things went.

OK, I'll bite. Let's start with the most obvious issue here.

(Atheists) hate God and the Bible

Uh... OK. Do you understand what an "atheist" is? "Lack of belief in a god or gods" is not the same as "hating God." In fact, either state kind of rules out the other. At best, the person you describe would be called an "anti-theist."

What a lot of atheists do hate, though, is being lectured by smug, moralistic theists with no actual comprehension what the phrase "burden of proof" actually means. (You know, as in "You want me to fall down and worship your God? So prove He exists.")

As to the source of morality, you'll find that every society, not just the Christian ones, have some form of the Golden Rule - "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." As for other sources, you did a fairly good job listing them right there.

You really should consider those secular authorities a little harder, though - the fact that you can get arrested for killing somebody has probably stopped more people from committing murder than the Bible has (especially since the Bible speaks favorably of any number of immoral acts).

Yeah, I was relatively sure that last line would make him cranky, but it seemed appropriate.

And he answered.

Prove he exists? Sure, I'll do that at your command in the comments section of a Weblog. Here's an idea: Check the links on the side there for apologetics. The main problem I have with proving anything to atheists is that they refuse to believe any evidence that is offered, so I refuse to waste my time.

Atheists irritate me. Either it's simple, or there are so many different kinds of atheists, or... whatever. The point is to dodge and confuse the issue. You have your own definition of atheist, others go along with other definitions. But with your sneering remarks, you've shown that you do indeed hate God.

As for "burden of proof", smug atheists believe that everything came from nothing, and the Big Bang and Evolutionism are so full of scientific and rational holes, you can drive trucks through them. Yet you people insist that they are "facts", but "we don't know quite how they happened". Yeah, real science. Burden of proof, indeed.

And where do you think laws against murder came from, Cupcake? Natural selection? Darwinism? Human nature? Get real.

You have not shown me anything other than lame, canned railing that atheists spew all the time. And I have not seen that you have a consistent, unchanging source for what you consider to be your morality other than your opinions and emotions. Yep, you're rock solid, Sally.

As far as your misstatements and slander of the Bible, do your homework. You have posted a typical but ludicrous atheist response.

I like this guy. He's got spunk.

Limited logic, he ignores the primary arguments I made to rail against atheists who confuse him by not being cookie-cutter clones of each other, and he gets to throw in random insults that make no sense. ("Sally"? That's the best you can do?) But he's got spunk.

So I figured it was my turn. (I ran a little long. Had to split this into two responses. But it went something like this.)

Check the links on the side there for apologetics.

Unfortunately, all the reasons boil down to "you must have faith that God exists." Which offers no proof.

Atheists irritate me. Either it's simple, or there are so many different kinds of atheists, or... whatever.

And there's part of your problem right there. Atheism isn’t a religion - it's a lack of religion. Atheists are a diverse group. There's no single guiding philosophy, just a lack of belief in one certain philosophy. It’s right there in the word: a- ("without") + theos ("a god")

But with your sneering remarks, you've shown that you do indeed hate God.

(Sneering? Yo, pot - check your voicemail. Kettle left you a message.) I don't feel hatred for a concept I don't particularly believe in. I do have a strong disgust for people who refuse to think for themselves, and do ignorant, savage things in the name of their "god."

smug atheists believe that everything came from nothing yadda yadda yadda

Speaking of "lame, canned railing" - people who understand science realize that there are things they can't explain. Yet. People who don't understand science dismiss it and say that a Bronze Age mythos explains everything. By saying “See? Magic!”

And where do you think laws against murder came from, Cupcake? Natural selection? Darwinism? Human nature?

Maybe they're a system of behaviors that societies have agreed must be prevented, in order for said society to continue to exist. For that reason, those behaviors were codified into a system we call "laws." (Here's another hint for you. Nonchristian societies have laws against murder, too. Why do you think that is?)

As far as your misstatements and slander of the Bible, do your homework.

Really? You don't think that the Bible supports immoral acts? Have you killed a child for mouthing off to their parents? You should. (Lev 20:9) Goes hand-in-hand with the story of the bears killing all those children for making fun of Elisha. (2 Kings 2:23-24)

For that matter, all of Leviticus 20 is a killer. Literally in some cases: adultery or marrying your mother-in-law or daughter-in-law are apparently capital offenses; weirdly, having sex with your sister just gets you shunned.

While you’re at Leviticus, though, skip back to 19: note that you are allowed to have sex with another man’s slave, but you have to sacrifice a ram to do it. (Lev 19:20-22).

In fact, the Bible supports slavery very strongly, from Genesis 9:25-27 onward. It tells you how to beat them (Exo 21:20-27), where to shop for them (Lev 25:44-46), when to have sex with them (fine examples can be found all through Genesis, but especially 16 and 30). Paul even told slaves to obey their owners the same way they obey Christ (Eph 6:5-9).

Is setting people on fire considered a good thing in your world? What about abortion? In Gen 38:24, there's a pregnant woman convicted of prostitution. Though the leaders of Israel knew the woman was carrying a fetus, they still decided to burn her. Why does the fetus have to die for the mother's crimes?

Of course, abortion is fine if you're at war with somebody. Especially if they aren't the same religion as you.

At that time Menahem, starting out from Tirzah, attacked Tiphsah and everyone in the city and its vicinity, because they refused to open their gates. He sacked Tiphsah and ripped open all the pregnant women." (2 Kings 15:16)

"The people of Samaria must bear their guilt, because they have rebelled against their God. They will fall by the sword; their little ones will be dashed to the ground, their pregnant women ripped open." (Hosea 13:16)

There is, in fact, all manner of murder and rape in the Bible. But it's the good kind of murder and rape, because it's done in the name of the Lord, right? (Jgs 21:10-24, Num 31:7-18, Deut 20:10-14, 2 Sam 12:11-14, and on and on.)

Maybe you should be doing your homework. What d’ya think, Cupcake?

I thought I did OK there. Matched his tone, made some decent arguments. But it seemed to make him unhappy or something. I guess he was practically sputtering. Because a little over ten minutes later, he responded. (I'm not sure you can trust these times, though. Maybe they reflect when he clicked "approve" on my comment or something.)

No, gutless cynic. You're boring and predictable, you know that? You don't have any interest in finding the truth, you just want to cry about things that you don't like, taken out of context. Instead of investigating serious apologetics sites, you want to throw stones at me. But I have no patience for intellectually dishonest cowards projecting their inadequacies on me.

And then, about ten minutes later, he was back.

By the way, I know you don't have the courage to do this, but call Rev. Matt Slick at his CARM radio show. He loves to debate atheists live, on the air. You missed today's show, try Monday http://www.carm.org/radio. Or you can listen to how he humiliated an arrogant atheist just like you, with the same canned "I don't like the Bible" crap here: http://xrl.in/5kpj about ten minutes into the show.

And then it wasn't even five minutes before he was back again.

One more PS and I'm done with you. You quoted me with, "Check the links on the side there for apologetics."

Your response was, "Unfortunately, all the reasons boil down to "you must have faith that God exists." Which offers no proof."

Intellectual dishonesty. You won't even bother to check the links and already know what they say. You're a troll at heart, wanting to destroy the faith of others. Search this site for "Why I Don't Trust Atheists", and you'll see that I've experienced quite a bit from your kind.

"My kind"? Doubtful.

But I've been down this road before. So I thought I'd see if I'd run out the clock here.

Wow. Look at that. It took you three responses to fail to address anything I said. Does your entire argument consist of insults and ad hominem attacks? I'm just curious. I mean, if it does, I can see why the posters at that "other" site might have attacked you.

I mean, really? "gutless cynic"? "I know you don't have the courage..."? I mean, I'm hunting through your "responses," and I can't help but notice how you have this combative style, but you don't have any substance to it.

Oh, and the best one: "I have no patience for intellectually dishonest cowards projecting their inadequacies on me." Care to explain any of that sentence? Because it doesn't seem to apply here.

You're a troll at heart, wanting to destroy the faith of others.

Really? All I've done is pointed out statements you've made in the course of this one thread, which were either mistaken or openly dishonest. When did I try to "destroy your faith"? You're the one trying to ridicule atheists, but refusing to answer any questions.

Here's something you should consider, though. Reread everything you've written. Then consider the following:

For by your words you will be acquitted, and by your words you will be condemned. (Matthew 12:37)

With it we bless our Lord and Father, and with it we curse men who are made in God’s likeness. Out of the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers, these things should not be this way. (James 3:9-10)

O generation of vipers, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? for out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh. A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things. (Matthew 12:34-36)

Do you want to actually discuss issues, or do you just want to throw insults? Because I'm only seeing you "bringing forth evil things."

And he jumped all over that, too.

Oh, drop the innocent victim act, I've seen that time and time again, too. While projecting your failures and atheist script onto me, you do the things you are accusing me of by dodging my points. You are done here, Bubbles. This is not an atheist troll playground.

So, yeah. Not too happy with me.

(* sigh *)

And I do so try to talk with people. Why must they be unreasonable? Is it my cologne?

So, to recap: he's got no arguments that don't boil down to "You suck and I hate you!" He can't accept that anyone doesn't believe in his myth-system, but he's unable to articulate it, and he believes that random insults constitute proof that he's correct. Like I said. Spunk.

I liked the way he kept talking about me "projecting" onto him. It's like he almost understood what he was doing in his responses.



Besides. I'm an agnostic troll.

A Few Million Bodies Between Friends

from Fafblog

Well now. Israel, the Palestinians, and Gaza. It's a sad story, and we're terribly sorry about it all, of course, feeling pronounced Official Regret in our pronounced Official Regretbones, and we feel compelled at this juncture to demand a request for an investigation into the possibility of an inquiry into the formation of a select bipartisan panel looking into whether or not to request an investigation. Which would be conducted by Israel, of course. No need to get too pushy here.

Now, you might say this week's events represent an atrocity, a massacre, a savage and criminal slaughter of humanitarian aid workers by a paranoid, murder-happy police state to further prolong the suffering of a million and a half refugees penned up in an open-air concentration camp. And you'd be right. But what you'd be overlooking is the fact that Israel has a right to defend itself. In particular, Israel has the right to defend itself from the millions of non-Israelis stubbornly living on land seized from them by Israel. Indeed, every day the Middle East's Only Democracy finds itself surrounded by a deadly horde of beggars, children and amputees who would stop at nothing to live next to it, with nothing to defend itself but two hundred nuclear warheads and one of the best-financed militaries in the world. Who in that position wouldn't attack a flotilla of aid ships attempting to smuggle contraband food and terrorist medicine to the stockpile of potentially rogue humans in Palestine?

Indeed, it's only at times like this that we can fully appreciate the Special Relationship between Israel and the United States. For is there any other country in the world that can so fully appreciate Israel's dilemma? To be hobbled by money, power, and privilege, menaced on all sides in a world in which there are too many Palestinians in Palestine, an overflow of Afghans in Afghanistan, a dangerous surplus of Iranians in Iran, a grave and growing stockpile of Pakistanis in Pakistan, and only we - we! - have to courage and conviction to do something about it.

Heroes

I considered writing this for Memorial Day, but I guess even I have standards.

I come from a long line of military men. Hell, I was one of them. (That's not a sexist term, by the way; it's a descriptor. If there were any WACs or other military women in my family tree, I've never heard of them.) My dad did two tours in Vietnam. His brother was an enlisted man, also in Vietnam, and in various parts of the Middle East in some lesser-known mopping-up actions. Both of my grandfathers were Army - on my father's side, he was doing clean-up after Japan surrendered in WWII. Keep going farther back, and you can keep digging up my relatives in both major and minor conflicts around the world (brobably on both sides of the battlefield every once in a while - we're an obstinate bunch like that). My son the Marine has just come back from a tour in Afghanistan.

Screw all of them. My hero is my wife.

She has a condition called polycystic kidney disease. It's the single most common life-threatening genetic disorder in the world. 12.5 million people worldwide (six hundred thousand Americans) are afflicted with PKD - that's more people than Down syndrome, cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy and sickle cell anemia combined.

But it's not one of the sexy diseases. It doesn't get the pink ribbons of breast cancer, the celebrity support of AIDS, or yet another "concert to raise awareness of..." like so many lesser problems.

Meanwhile, the cysts, not content to remain in the kidneys, can grow pretty much anywhere in the body. My wife has them throughout her torso, meaning she can't stand up easily, she can't walk without pain, and if she's in the car and I take a corner just a little too fast, she gets hurt.

Plus, her exercise options are limited. Aside from the fact that she can't move easily, if she were to lift weights or torque her body around, or do anything, really, that put enough pressure on a cyst to pop it, then the liquid in the cyst gets to leap out and flood the surrounding tissue. Does the phrase "searing agony" mean anything to you?

So she lives in constant pain, she can hardly move, she can't sit comfortably, and... oh, by the way, did you know that the kidneys handle a number of metabolic processes? Like that whole "dealing with sugar" thingy? Yeah, she's been diagnosed as "pre-diabetic." (Which is less of a deal than you'd think - with PKD, you know that you're going to end up on dialysis at some point, anyway.)

Normally, this disease is diagnosed in older people. So, at the age of 30, when she was diagnosed with both PKD and osteoarthritis, it was like she won the retirement home lottery.

Oh, remember how I said that this was one of the most common life-threatening genetic disorders? Yeah, a parent with this little problem has a fifty percent chance of passing it along to their kids.

Kids. Of which we have three. Do the math.

Not that she feels any guilt about any of this. Not at all.

So, faced with all of these problems, a normal person might become a trifle bitter, right? See, that's where things get a little unusual.

Annette is one of the only truly good people I've ever met. She's generally cheerful. She doesn't judge people. She doesn't like to complain. Where most of us have a little dark part of our soul where all the evil feelings fester, she's got a brightly-lit room filled with kittens and puppies.

She has a giggle that I've always loved that dances across the room, and she uses it all the time. Life dumps crap down on her, and she just wonders if she should make a bigger garden with all this new fertilizer.

So if, once in a while, faced with debilitating pain, she might get a little cranky, she doesn't let it show much. And, faced with all these other problems, she's also beset with entirely too much of me. And she really doesn't complain about that, despite what a big pain in the ass I am.

I don't know what I did in a previous life to end up married to her, but I'd do it again. Twice. She's worth it.

Sadly for her, she's stuck with me.

Family Research Council: "Pray that Gay Rapists Don't Infiltrate Khaki Ass" (perhaps NSFW)

From the Rude Pundit

As a loyal member of the Super-Duper Prayer Team, yesterday, the Rude Pundit received his weekly Prayer Target list from the evangelical Family Research Council (motto: "Here a queer, there a queer, everywhere a queer queer"). The Rude Pundit joined the Super-Duper Prayer Team a few years ago under a secret nom de rude, which means that he gets emails o' faith that tell him what causes need some hot oral action on his knees. Each Wednesday, a letter arrives that says, more or less, "Hey, Jesus didn't shave his balls for nothing. Get busy."

And so he dutifully opened up the email and, lo and behold, what do you think our praylatio orders were about? It's a motherfuckin' emergency, man: "FRC President Tony Perkins believes the President's effort to infiltrate our military services with practicing homosexuals through the repeal of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell' (DADT) is a 'Gettysburg' moment in the war for the soul of our nation, and that it is time for God's people to 'pull out all the stops.'" Yes, preventing gay men and women from serving their country in the military is the equivalent of 50,000 casualties in a Civil War battle. And, by the way, which side of the Civil War is the FRC saying it's on? The side preventing people from having rights? Or the side that was fighting to keep the Union together and end slavery?

(On another note, one of the Rude Pundit's favorite Civil War stories: In 1864, Massachusetts soldiers encamped in Virginia decided to have a formal ball. Sixty of the males, including the drummer boys, dressed in gowns and were the "women" for the evening. One soldier wrote, "Some of the them looked good enough to lay with, and I guess some of them did get laid with. I know I slept with mine.")

This is important, goddamnit: "We need prayer for God to show us just what is being said in secret government counsel chambers and to give us creative ideas to stop these evil schemes." Perkins apparently went into some kind of psychological collapse over the threat to repeal DADT for a bill that says, if the Pentagon gives the thumbs-up, the Navy won't know what to do with all the seamen: "In his prayer time yesterday morning, Tony wept for our nation. He saw in his mind's eye the oil now spewing from the Gulf of Mexico and polluting the gulf coast and saw it as a picture of the sexual immorality now polluting our land."

As if to demonstrate this immorality in the hottest way possible, the possible future is described as intensely homoerotic: "The sexual immorality that has oozed in our culture for decades with government consent and support has been bad, but under the legislation now being offered, it will become 'an unstoppable gusher and the damage will be catastrophic.' Please pray fervently." Dude, the Rude Pundit prayed all over his jeans reading that.

The problem, see, according to an FRC "researcher" who "analyzed" (with an emphasis on "anal") data about same sex assaults in the military, is that gay people are just too into raping straights. You put a straight guy in front of a gay one and a raping's gonna happen. His study proves it. Now, one could argue that the paranoia and self-loathing that enforced closeting has engendered in gay soldiers has led to such incidents. One might also argue that the number of assaults, while serious in and of itself, is a mere drop in the bucket compared to the assaults on women by male soldiers. One might argue that so many of the incidents involve drunk people that maybe alcoholism is the real problem. One might even argue that if you have a few million people in a group, there's gonna be some assholes who like cock. And assholes.

But then you'd be thinking with your logical brain and not just outright hating you some homosexuals. 'Cause we gotta pray, motherfuckers. We got our orders: "May God stir his people to 'take out all the stops!' May they aggressively pray and take action to stop this morally, spiritually, and in every other way senseless measure. May God open the blinded eyes in both Houses of Congress in sufficient numbers to stop this measure in its tracks. May God enlist believers who will pray day and night until the efforts to overturn DADT and to pass ENDA, have both been defeated!" No sleep, you Jesus-hating pussies. Day and night.

One of the bible passages we're supposed to read to accompany our prayer is Jeremiah 5:21-29, which is God getting all pissy and wanting people to tremble before him or whatever. Of course, if you go one verse more, you get this: "A horrible and shocking thing has happened in the land: The prophets prophesy lies, the priests rule by their own authority, and my people love it this way. But what will you do in the end?" To put that another way, all those people, like, say, Tony Perkins, telling you what to say and what the invisible sky wizard think? Their own God thinks they're full of shit and that you're a loser if you believe them.

Self Abuse

I didn't realize that I was suicidal. But apparently I'm not very good at it. That, or my subconscious hates me, but only in a passive-aggressive way.

We got all kinds of work done this weekend. We got the pool opened (even though it's too cold to swim yet), we got the garden started, and we kicked off the biggest part of Spring Cleaning (a roughly bi-annual event at our house - hey, no need to go overboard, right? Spring will come back around if we miss one...).

Meanwhile, I skinned three knuckles, scraped up my left knee, whacked my head on a cabinet, and got a good-sized scrape on my toe where I stubbed it on one of the triceratops femurs that our horse-sized canines like to gnaw on.

Then, on Saturday evening, I was walking out of the kitchen, and as I walked past the watering trough, I didn't realize that one of the dogs, and I'm suspecting Tasha here, had decided that she needed to wash her muzzle rather than drink. And in the course of dunking her head and violently shaking it side-to-side, she'd left a coating of water on everything for ten feet in every direction.

Anybody want to guess at the frictional coefficient of bare feet on wet tile? I hit the ground pretty hard, scraping the other knee and my elbow. Oh, and spilling the glass of water I was carrying, which seemed redundant somehow.

(Technically, it was slightly under the elbow, a few inches down. Exactly in the same place that you rest your arm when sitting in a chair or leaning on a counter. And rotated slightly inside the arm, so it's right where your shirt rubs against it when you move your arm. Little things you don't really notice until something like this comes up.)

And then, Monday morning, I see my bus pulling up while I'm still fifty feet away and at an angle to the rear of the bus. So there's limited chance that he'd see me. I go sprinting to catch it. And as I rounded the back of the bus, my foot flexed just a little more so I could go up on the curve. The barest amount more than it had before.

Remember how I had a scrape on one toe? Something you don't really notice until your shoe bends just right, sending a small jolt of pain through your foot? Just enough that you can't recover quite right when your other foot comes down on a rock?

Yeah, I went sprawling. Sprained my ankle, bruised my hip, scraped the heel of my hand, and caused some kind of soft tissue injury on my shoulder so it's good and stiff and uncomfortable when I move it. Of course, that's not a problem - how often do you move your right shoulder, huh?

On the bright side, I managed to not rip my pants. That would have made the morning complete. (Kind of surprising, considering the fist-size purple bruise I have there now.)

So essentially, my superego, in collusion with my dogs, is trying to commit the Death of a Thousand Cuts on me. Except that I have a very imaginative superego, and it likes to throw in a little blunt force trauma, just to keep things exciting.

So this morning, I got to work, and the first thing I managed to do is give myself a paper cut. Definitely can't blame that on the dogs.

My subconscious and I are going to have to have a long talk.

Letters to the Senator

Senator Bingaman,

(and Senator Udall, and, even though he isn't mine, Representative Grayson - hey, I'm a completist...)

So, I'm curious. How much do you know about the newest Social Security commission? Now admittedly, parts of this are from Huffington Post, and I haven't been entirely satisfied that they aren't trying to be a left-wing Fox News (which, God knows, is the last thing we need - we're getting enough lies from the Republicans).

However, we seem to have a group of white, middle-aged millionaires, meeting in secret to decide the fate of Social Security, Medicare, and all the other social programs the GOP hates.

They're the National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and they seem to be trying to stay under the radar, possibly until the midterms are over. But some of their members are fascinating. For example, the only member who knows about defense spending, for example, is David M. Cote, CEO of Honeywell (you know, the major defense contractor).

And Peter G. Peterson, billionaire and former Nixon administration Secretary of Commerce (and former Chairman and CEO of Lehman Brothers) has already sponsored an event attended by both co-chairs and two other members of the commission, where they ignored a lot of the real problems we're facing, and tried to get all banker-friendly.

(Peterson, by the way, has been on a crusade to destroy Social Security for decades now.)

Just thought you should consider looking into this. I'd appreciate it.

Thanks for your time.

Adventures in cooking

So, the Trophy Wife was out the other night, doing Engelbert Humperdinck's opera "Hansel & Gretel" for the schoolkids of Gallup, New Mexico. (That's the Engelbert Humperdinck who was writing fairy tale opera's for children in the 1890's, not the one who was singing crap pop music for the soulless masses in the 1960's.) She's been doing this with Opera Unlimited for just shy of five years now.

So there I was, my son and I, left to my own devices for dinner. Not the first time - I am a passable cook; although not nearly as good as the Trophy Wife, I can follow a recipe with the best of them. ("Recipe" being a moderately important word here, though. I don't have a lot of instincts for cooking, so if I don't have a list of ingredients and instructions, it might be best to have the pizza place on speed dial.)

But we really had no idea what we were going to eat, and Christopher went rummaging in the pantry. The first thing he turned up was a can of Spam that dated back to when Luke headed off to the Marines. (For some inexplicable reason, both my sons like Spam.)

The second thing he turned up was a can of chipotle peppers in adobo sauce. And he put these two cans on the counter and grunted in his pidgin Neanderthal "Make food." Then he wandered off to finish digging the pit-trap for the mastadon.

I looked at the two cans for a minute, as they sat there on the counter, mocking me. And I decided to go with a really simple application. I cut the Spam into five slices, put them in a skillet to sear slightly on each side, and dumped the chili's in on top of them.

The first thing that hit me was the smell - it was like barbecue sauce, only good. (Sorry, I'm not a big BBQ sauce fan - that doesn't mean I'm a bad person, does it?) After I flipped the Spam slices, I poured some red wine in on top, and let it cook it down a little. Then I just served it over rice.

Then Christopher and I sat there, watching the fourth Die Hard movie (easily the best since the first one), and reveled in our pain.

See, my wife isn't exactly a fan of spicy food (and when I say "not a big fan of," what I mean is "kind of a wimp about"), so I've cut way back on my capsaicin consumption over the last two decades or so.

In case you aren't aware, chipotles are just the smoked version of jalapeno peppers. So not the hottest thing out there, but once you've worked your way through four or five of them, the built-up heat gets pretty intense. Take a drink, the heat just goes downstream, without lessening at the top at all.

The thing about capsaicin is that it clings to everything. I once picked up a bottle of some seriously kick-ass hot sauce when I was helping a guy move, and I didn't know that he'd spilled some on the outside. An hour later, after washing my hands once, I rubbed my eye where some dust had gotten in. I was reasonably certain that I was going to go blind (possibly by plucking my eyeball out to stop the burning).

The smokiness of the chipotles was mostly overpowered by the adobo sauce, but the heat? Not even close. It was awesome; we both ended up with a chili high that had us laughing at each other for no good reason.

(It's amazing, as puritanical as some people are, that chili's haven't been banned yet.)

Capsaicin has a number of uses other than tormenting the cowardly gourmands. It's one of the main chemicals in one of the varieties of mace (specifically, the one referred to as "pepper-spray," by some weird coincidence), and a number of pain ointments use it as a key ingredient (for example, a product called Capzasin).

Oh, and one final note. I'd forgotten that, when you severely overindulge on chili peppers, you need to understand that everything goes somewhere. And capsaicin doesn't always break down as readily as you'd expect in the digestive system.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the next day, you'll be sitting on the toilet, and it will feel like somebody coated their finger in Capzasin and shoved it up your butt. Just a thought.

But then, last night, I took my first crack at making soba noodles. And that is a truly weird experience.

There's all kinds of good reasons to eat soba noodles - they're made from buckwheat instead of processed white flour, and, you know, the less processing of your food the better, right? Plus, they're high in fiber, which is something everybody needs on a regular basis (so to speak). And in one study, it was shown that buckwheat lowered the serum glucose levels in rats by 12 to 19 per cent. And with growing numbers of diabetic Americans, that might just be something to pay attention to.

Now, the package instructions were pretty much written by a crazy man. Basically, you bring the water to a rolling boil, toss in the noodles, and keep the heat cranked. When the water tries to boil over, pour in a cup of cold water, and when it tries to boil over again, kill the heat. Rinse.

And boil over it did. (Or actually, it tried to - I was just too fast for it.) I suspect it's the variety of starch that buckwheat throws off, but it's pretty damned similar to boiling a pot of detergent. It foams up like a mad dog chewing a can of shaving cream.

It's the insane way to deal with soba. People who cook their soba that way will probably also serve it by reaching into the boiling water and pulling out handfuls of noodly goodness.

Fortunately, a little research found me a food blog by an ex-pat Japanese woman living in Switzerland (hey, welcome to the 21st Century), who shows us a more reasonable way to cook soba. (Possibly, in fact, too controlled, approaching anal-retentive; I mean, come on! "hold the noodles over the water and sprinkle them in strand by strand?" Really?)

Basically, boil the water (or broth - whatever), toss in the noodles, stir... hell, it's her story, let's let her tell it.

Bring the water back up to a gentle boil, then lower the heat so that the water is just simmering. (This differs from the ‘rolling boil’ that’s recommended for pasta.) If the water threatens to boil over, add about 1/2 cup of cold water (but if you lower the heat to the gentle simmer, and have a big enough pot, this shouldn’t be necessary). Cook for about 7 to 8 minutes, or following the package directions (for thinner noodles 5 to 6 minutes may be enough. Test by eating a strand - it should be cooked through, not al dente, but not mushy either).

At this point, you may want to reserve some of the cooking water. This is called sobayu (そば湯), literally ‘hot soba water’, and many people like to add it to the remaining soba dipping sauce at the end of the meal to drink like soup!

Drain the noodles into a colander. Immediately return them to the pot and fill the pot with cold water. When you’re draining the hot water you may notice that it smells quite ‘floury’. This is what you want to get totally rid of.

If the noodles threaten to flood out over the pot, put the colander on the pot to hold the noodles down. Leave the water running for a while over the noodles.

Once the water and the noodle are cool, start to ‘wash’ the noodles. Take handfuls and gently swish and rub them in the water. Your goal is to wash off any trace of starchiness or gumminess on the noodles. When you’re done the water should run clear.

She goes on to talk about presentation and stuff, but basically, it's noodles. You know the drill, right? Then just rinse them when you're done. They'll be fine.

Stormy Weather

Lena Horne died on Sunday, May 9, 2010. The circumstances of her death were withheld by the family, but she was, after all, 94 years old.

I'm not old enough to really remember her at her peak - for me, she was always a presence on TV variety shows and a legendary name in a type of music I've only lately come to appreciate.

While the nascent civil rights movement was struggling to gain any kind of foothold, she had the advantage of being "traditionally" beautiful (that is, attractive to white people). As she put it:

"I was unique in that I was a kind of black that white people could accept. I was their daydream. I had the worst kind of acceptance because it was never for how great I was or what I contributed. It was because of the way I looked."

Lena Mary Calhoun Horne was born in Brooklyn on June 30, 1917. She dropped out of school at age 14, and began working as a singer and dancer at New York's legendary Cotton Club two years later.

She quickly became a featured singer, and after a series of nightclub and touring jobs (and one failed marriage), she signed on with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Her debut role with MGM was Panama Hattie (1942).

Despite the fact that the star of this unmemorable picture was Red Skelton, Ms Horne continued to have a career afterwards. (Oddly, so did Mr. Skelton.)

It wasn't until the next year, on loan to 20th Century Fox, that she would sing what became one of her signature numbers, the title song to the all-black musical Stormy Weather. Her voice, at the age of 20, had yet to gain the power or the depth she would have later in life, but the song still became a hit.



Because of the prevailing racism of the day, her film appearances most often had to be "stand-alone" scenes that could be cut out when the movie played in the South. In fact, for much of the early part of her career she couldn't even stay in the hotels where she was performing, because they wouldn't accept blacks.

She spoke briefly of her relationship with Count Basie in a 1982 tribute to the jazz legend.



She was an activist and civil rights pioneer for most of her life.

In 1941, she sang at Cafe Society and worked with Paul Robeson. During World War II, when entertaining the troops for the USO, she refused to perform "for segregated audiences or for groups in which German POWs were seated in front of African American servicemen" according to her Kennedy Center biography. She was at the March on Washington and spoke and performed on behalf of the NAACP, SNCC and the National Council of Negro Women. She also worked with Eleanor Roosevelt to pass antilynching laws.

It was, in fact, her friendship with Paul Robeson, himself an activist (he was openly pro-Soviet and fought to end the oppression of the colonized people of Africa, Asia and the Atlantic and Pacific nations, among many other politically unpopular causes) that got Ms. Horne blacklisted during the Fifties. But by then she'd given up movie work and was a nightclub performer once again, so it really didn't affect her all that much. She only had two movie roles after that, Death of a Gunfighter (1969), and, sadly, The Wiz (1978).

Although she never seemed to be truly comfortable when surrounded by a crowd of Muppets, she still appeared on Sesame Street multiple times throughout the 70s.



Lena Horne fought her entire life for acceptance and for the rights of others. Like so few others, she qualifies as an American legend.

Death of the Conservative Meme

So, while I've been engaged in a pitched battle with ABQ Ride, it's been a hard month to be a Republican, hasn't it?

For those of you who've been living in a cave (and come to think of it, bin Laden probably heard about this one anyway), a man named Faisal Shahzad loaded a car with a badly-made bomb and a chest full of fertilizer, parked it in Times Square, and went to Kennedy Airport, where he paid cash for a ticket to Dubai. But despite this brilliant escape plan, his plane was stopped on the runway just before it took off and he was arrested.

Shahzad drove a Nissan Pathfinder (which he'd planned to use to destroy the Disney Store - and really, who among us hasn't?) which he'd purchased for $1,300 (again, in cash), and had filed to VIN number off of the dashboard. But, because he was a cartoon villain, he apparently didn't realize that it was also stamped on the engine. The police tracked down the original owner through the VIN, which led them to Shahzad.

I really don't know if I'm relieved or unhappy that he used a Nissan. I mean, come on, Faisal, I know we're the children of the Great Satan, but you could at least buy American, right?

The bomb could have produced a significant fireball, even though the fertilizer wasn't the volatile ammonium nitrate used by so many terrorists. But that's OK, because a dirty bomb is a dirty bomb, right? Radioactive waste spread over a 5-mile area, versus flaming poo in Times Square. No real difference.

Shahzad was a naturalized American citizen from Pakistan, who had recently gone back on a visit. He apparently received his explosives training on that visit (although, if this bomb was his final exam, I think he failed).

In fact, there is some evidence that Faisal received both training and funding from the Pakistani Taliban, which, in the larger sense, makes me wonder why we haven't wiped these idiots out already. They're apparently led by Wile E. Coyote, so why hasn't reality manifested itself as a giant anvil in midair, and crushed these morons?

Now, despite all of the conservatives screaming incoherently about the dangers of illegal immigration, has anybody noticed that Shahzad, was a legal immigrant? Like all of the 9/11 terrorists, and pretty much every other terrorist responsible for pretty much every terrorist attack in pretty much the entire history of America. (You know, except for all the ones who were actually born in America - we can't forget them, can we?)

There's another opinion that the GOP likes to throw into the debate, most publically articulated by Dick Cheney (a man who hasn't made a good, decent or moral decision in his entire life).

"We made a decision after 9/11 that I think was crucial. We said, 'This is a war - it's not a law enforcement problem,' " Mr. Cheney said. "Once you go into a wartime situation and it's a strategic threat, then you use all of your assets to go after the enemy ... you use your intelligence resources, your military resources, your financial resources, everything you can in order to shut down that terrorist threat against you.

"When you go back to the law enforcement mode, which is what I sense they're doing, closing Guantanamo and so forth, they are very much giving up that center of attention and focus that's required, and that concept of military threat that's essential if you're going to successfully defend the nation against further attacks."

Shahzad was captured thanks entirely to police work. I would like to be the one to mention this to the aptly-named Dick, but he can't come out of his coffin during daylight.

Related to that sneering attitude toward our law enforcement community, there's the GOP's entirely unchristian, anti-American opinion that torture is good and civil rights are bad. The most recent example, in fact, involved the Shahzad case, where Grampy McCain was asked whether this failure of a terrorist should be Mirandized.

"Obviously that would be a serious mistake... at least until we find out as much information we have... Don't give this guy his Miranda rights until we find out what it's all about."

Well, guess what? Just like the Underwear Bomber before him, a fully-mirandized Shahzad is spilling his guts. Without one single cattle-prod, without watering any boards.

("Oh, come on," I can hear you saying. "Unamerican? Unchristian?" Yes. You want to take the civil rights away from American citizens? Because that's what Shahzad was. On top of which, foreigners still have rights under the Constitution; the courts have said that over and over. And while you're mulling that over, consider that Christ was supposed to have been tortured and then nailed to a tree; would He support you treating another human like that?)

Of course, our friends in the GOP also support other ideas, but very few of them are good. (Anybody remember Terri Schiavo?) For example, "Deregulation of industry is a good idea! If you don't tie the hands of the Free Market, they'll regulate themselves, and puppies and kittens will drop into the laps of all the good boys and girls!"

I believe we all saw what happened when Wall Street was deregulated. (And yes, this all stems back to legislation put out by Bill Clinton. But it was only under Bush the Younger that the full flower of GOP policy could take place.)

And, of course, since it was deregulation that allowed British Petroleum to omit a simple acoustic trigger which would have prevented the devastation to the Gulf Coast following the recent explosion on the oil rig, we have yet another example of the world-wide consequences of allowing the mythical "free market" to police themselves.

And speaking of the Gulf of Mexico, does anybody remember the phrase "Drill, baby, drill"? Yeah, that worked out well, didn't it?

So, really, has the GOP gotten anything right? Let's be real. What we have here is the Universe getting together to show people what an idiot Sarah Palin really is.

But are any of the teabaggers listening?