House of Eratosthenes

From the President of the United States, all the way down to the guy who cleans gum off the sidewalk after a carnival or a parade, I have a lot more confidence that these offices will successfully fill their assigned duties when they’re filled by Republicans than by Democrats. That is not to say, however, that I trust Republicans much. Now that the Grand Old Party is kicking ass for, oh, what is it now, about six years straight…we’re heading into a time when I’m going to run out of reasons to support them. When the delta between their priorities, and mine, is going to start to mean something.

First things first, though. I want Democrats to be defeated a few more times. Until they’re all the way gone, and not coming back. I believe that’s the American Way, because it hasn’t escaped my notice that on every issue that comes down the pike, Democrats seem to consistently take the position that makes America weaker, less important, embarrassed for itself, ready to compromise prematurely, restricted by special rules that apply to no one else, or some combination of those five. They’ve gotten so much better at proclaiming their outrage about this, that, or some other silly damn thing, than they are at articulating what is to be done about it. I’m looking forward to the day they go away.

And I really like looking at beautiful women in bathing suits. They brighten my day, and besides, like millions of other men, I’ve learned something about women: When women are insecure, trouble looms ahead. Insecure women are black holes for your energy. And they tend to be expensive. So women in skimpy outfits appeal to both of my “heads”.

So this offends me on two fronts. It is a call to action from the American Decency Association, and it has two likely effects, one intentional, one perhaps not: 1) To get rid of the famous Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, and 2) to give people a reason to vote for Democrats again.

Lisa VanHouten, ADA Executive Assistant, writes an analysis of this highly erotic magazine - offering further commentary as to why this magazine needs to be avoided and combated.

“…. Each lust-producing pornographic pose reinforces the message, to the ogling men and boys who pick up this smut mag, that women are nothing more than sexual objects to be used. And wives and young girls, whose husbands or fathers bring home this issue, are taught that their worth depends on the sum of their body parts…

… This outrageous display of pornography is nothing more than a Playboy, yet, to some in America, the name Sports Illustrated seems to give it a semblance of �acceptability�. Men who would not dream of buying a Playboy, without a thought have the SI Swimsuit Edition in their home or on their coffee table. However, there is nothing acceptable about pornography and that is exactly what the SI Swimsuit issue is � material produced for the purposes of eliciting a sexual response. There is nothing acceptable about the degrading display of women as sex objects. There is nothing acceptable about luring susceptible young boys and men into a pattern of lust and escalating pornography use. There is nothing acceptable about looking the other way when local grocery stores, gas stations, or other shopping establishments such as Target or Wal-Mart display this filth in their magazine racks. …”… Also revolting are the numbers of American companies that have debased their corporate name by aligning with this smut. Many of the corporations stoop to the same level as Sports Illustrated by using very sexual, erotic imagery and innuendo in their ads. In some cases there is little difference from the ad displays of bikini clad models to the SI photo displays.

That this collection of pornographic images is produced in the guise of a �legitimate� sports magazine should outrage you. The fact that this too easily accessible magazine has the potential of starting many young boys down the path to a life-destroying addiction to pornography should anger you. These reasons and many others should drive you to speak to store managers at stores that carry this magazine. And the fact that mainline companies such as McDonald�s, Wendy�s, General Motors, Dodge choose to advertise in, and thus condone, this smut should cause you to exercise your calling to be ’salt and light’ and email, phone, or write the corporations who align their name with pornography.”

Filth. Smut. Unacceptable. Should outrage. Should drive you. Should anger. Must. Ought. Gotta, gotta, gotta.

Hey Lisa, what happens after we get rid of the SI swimsuit issue? Should all the men become gay? I’ll bet some of the supporters of your boycott would say so…or should American society look to the parents of adult singles to arrange marriages for them, as they do in other countries? Some of your supporters would approve of that, too. In fact, I’ll bet this is the kind of question you wouldn’t want to have asked. I’ll bet if you get this boycott off the ground, it’ll be a critical-mass hodge-podge of lefty-loosies and tighty-righties. Man-bashing ugly feminists who haven’t had a date in years, and don’t want the sexy single men to have dates either…and stuffy Christian fundamentalists who don’t want anyone looking in magazines they wouldn’t buy themselves.

Either way, your little jungle-telegram boycott, here, is likely to flood the American environment with two things I want to see even less than you want to see Sports Illustrated: Democrats, elected by well-meaning imbeciles who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the Democrat agenda, but simply want to be protected from puritans like you; and otherwise-gorgeous women with shrunken titties in short boy bowl-haircuts and ugly fat-jackets and long pants.

Who do you represent, anyway? You look like some misguided conservative bible-thumper; but I couldn’t help noticing you’ve got all these brittle-feminist-hippy buzzwords in your little screed. “Reinforces the message that women are nothing more than sexual objects to be used”; “wives and young girls are taught that their worth depends on the sum of their body parts.” That’s not Christian-fundie talk, those are brittle-liberal-feminist talking points. And what’s with all the victim-moaning? Call the Waaahmbulance. Do men and young boys complain when they’re taught their worth depends on looking like Orlando Bloom — or on the size of their paychecks? Or on their family’s trust funds?

No, they don’t. Men don’t whine about these things…although they certainly could, if they were so inclined. I can’t help noticing, when you tune into television networks made for young, starry-eyed women…like WB, for example? What do men look like on those shows? Do they look like men you meet in real life? Certainly not. They’re overwhelmingly caucasian, with hairstyles defined by the costuming department to be chiseled just so, and either long, or layered. Primped and preened and gelled and blow-dried in such a way that you’ll never see a man in real life who looks like that if you walk around the hardware store or the shopping mall all day and night. And always talking in that alto/falsetto voice. And wearing a purple shirt. With a skinny violet necktie. You won’t see a flesh-and-blood man, of any persuasion, doing that either.

Do men whine about this? It’s not even thought of as a cause for whining by most men. It’s something that simply is. Some guy on a silly show they don’t watch unless their girlfriends want them to watch it. Just a bunch of guys on one show, all with the same height and build and hairstyle, making it hard to tell ‘em apart.

But act all put-upon and victimized about it? Men don’t do that. Maybe if someone started to ask why that is, they’d have a better handle on this self-esteem issue for women and young girls, than you’ll ever get with your boycott.

Oh, do go back to bed and take your “must ought should gotta” screed with you, Lisa. I like the landscape the way it is just fine. Gorgeous women in swimsuits and microskirts and Hooter’s outfits, and Democrats getting their asses kicked in legislative chambers and Congress from sea to shining sea. Tax cuts and dead terrorists, as they say. Just for a change of pace, now that things are working that way, let’s keep them like that awhile, m’kay?

Besides, if this is your idea of “pornography,” you would be amazed at what’s out there, for a lot less money than a Sports Illustrated issue. And you can get it in ways that, trust me, will not be the least little bit congested or obstructed in any way, regardless of what GM, McDonalds or Wal-Mart decide to do.

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Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… V
Friday, February 24th, 2006

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… V

A few hours ago, this article rolled into my inbox. It’s worth a read. I agree with the sentiment involved, but the format of the article is wrong. It has all of the ingredients of a speech and a miniskirt: Long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to hold your attention. Be that as it may, the issue of the right to free speech, versus the responsibility of governments to prevent chaos and protect people, is a complex issue in which the briefest recitation of the facts often results in bad decisions.

The issue is the prohibition in Austria, and nine other European countries, against “Holocaust Denial” and the consequent legal problems of noted author and suspected Nazi sympathizer David Irving…

There are many reasons to regret the decision by Austrian authorities to prosecute, sentence and imprison for three years or more British pseudohistorian David Irving. Liberal democracies ought not to be in the business of criminalizing speech, except speech that incites violence. Prohibitions against specified types of speech, such as Holocaust denial, have a tendency to invite further prohibitions and risk rendering the concept of free speech a nonsense. Imprisoning people for their views alone has a way of turning louts into “martyrs.” And just when the Danish government is under unprecedented attack for its refusal to intervene in the editorial decision-making of a private newspaper, it seems perverse to offer Muslim provocateurs an example of a European country catering to one set of sensitivities but not another.

I have nothing to add to the core message, but I would like to expound on the whole business of “martyrs.” My dictionary says a martyr is “one who makes great sacrifices or suffers much in order to further a belief, cause, or principle.” Problem: The usage of the noun, in context, is much broader than the definition specifies. You punish David Irving simply for holding contraband views, and what you have to do is punish in like manner anyone else for holding similar views. The intent on their part to further their cause through self-sacrifice, becomes a non-issue. They may intend to go to jail to further the political cause in the public eye; or, they may not. (According to this News.Telegraph article, Irving had already purchased his plane ticket to London, confident that the arrest would not be forthcoming.)

Does it really matter? The population of people born after 1945, myself among them, is swelling rapidly. A lot of us embrace the American value, even in other countries, that truth has no need to be enforced through the police power of government. This contradicts the European value that if government should ever stand mute on any particular question, government runs the risk of being thought to endorse the less appealing answer — and therefore government is obliged to form, maintain and enforce an answer to everything that comes along.

Well, Austria is part of Europe, and I’m not empowered to vote in Austria or affect Austrian policy in any way shape or form. But I know a bad idea when I see one. To place the public bureaucracy under the burden of opining on everything, using legal pain to silence dissenting views, creates the appearance that those contraband dissenting views have the grain of truth. And who, among those born after 1945, is to say they do not? After all, it’s not like the argument is being granted a fair hearing.

Worst of all, according to this principle government is obliged to haul out all kinds of things decided privately, and turn them into public matters. Here in America, we get to make up our own minds about whether man-made global warming (MMGW) is contributing to irreversible damage to the ecosystem, or not. On both sides of this question, we can find a good helping of scientists with sturdy credentials who agree with whatever we think. Is there an official government opinion? Maybe we should criminalize whichever opinion is opposite. Why not? If MMGW is destroying the environment, people like me who say it isn’t so may be defeating our last, best chance to save the planet for ourselves and future generations. That’s genocide! On the other hand, if MMGW is a myth, or exists but is entirely benign over time, those who insist it is a danger are threatening the world economy over nothing. Mass starvation is bound to be the result. Off with their heads!

Now, imagine the arguing that would take place if one of these factions, or the other, was up for being thrown in jail like David Irving — but it was an open question as to which one. Hoo, boy. The Florida election of 2000 would look like a Sunday picnic.

What about abortion? There are a lot of people who think if you’re a man, you shouldn’t have an opinion about it one way or another. (Curiously, those people never rush to silence a “pro-choice” man.) Maybe we should legislate that. We already argue about abortion a whole lot more than we did when the matter was left up to the states. We have special-interest groups who exist specifically for the purpose of keeping the states from being able to vote on the issue, and we have millions of people who maintain a white-hot fiery interest in the Supreme Court, but labor under the delusion that the Supreme Court’s only job is to keep people from being able to vote on abortion. Why not take it a step further? Why not make it a crime to speak out against abortion, if you’re a man? Or suppose the other side wins, and we criminalize anything said in favor of it? Why not? There are plenty of people who think it’s murder. Usually, when free speech is criminalized in “free” societies that normally would stand against censorship, the objective is to uphold the “higher ideal” of keeping innocent people from being hurt.

Again: If you want every presidential election to teeter on the brink of a civil war, it’s a great idea.

Some conservatives say we were winning every battle in the Vietnam War before Walter Cronkite offered his opinions on the Tet Offensive and effectively turned the tide of the war against his own country. I notice liberals never seem to have a snappy comeback to this, even the ones who are hooked on “The Daily Show” and live every single waking moment according to the rule of snappy comebacks. Why not simply criminalize people who say it? When the opinion is allowed to stand, it seems almost compulsory to get a revolution going against our “fourth estate” of journalism. Appearances being any indication, we lost a war solely because of them. Well golly, if a revolution is imminent, doesn’t our government have a responsibility to protect us from the speech that might incite it? Or why not go the other way, and use the government’s legal powers to lock up Cronkite for saying what he said? I see no reason for a statute of limitations to apply for such a heinous act of sedition.

Why not?

It would make for a critically important campaign issue, after all. Lock up Cronkite, or lock up his critics. Why, I’ll bet the voter turnout would be ninety percent or more.

That’s exactly the problem.

This is America. And this is yet another reason why it kicks so much ass to be living here. We embrace the ideal that there are some issues on which government should just keep its big mouth shut…and in order to maintain that day-to-day, we have to believe that when government keeps its silence on any particular matter, it means just that. Silence. Nothing.

It’s not good enough to have the First Amendment. You have to have the culture that goes with it. A culture that says when someone is saying something that’s wrong, we believe in giving them enough rope to hang themselves, instead of trying to shut them up. And that’s why, when we let them keep talking, the opinion our government holds about what he’s talking about, can be inferred to be…nothing.

A couple years ago, some senator from Massachusetts was running for President on the platform that he wanted us to do things more like the way Europe does them. I may think David Irving is a kook, and a bigot, and it even seems an almost settled matter that he’s a Nazi sympathizer. But his troubles with Austria make me happier than ever that that senator lost the election. Had the election gone in that senator’s favor, we would have lost our national identity, and we would have never gotten it back again.

Thing I Know #8. It is hard to get people to argue about private matters, but easy if you can somehow turn them into public matters.

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Nobody Ever Asks
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006

Nobody Ever Asks

Michael Angelo Morales killed Terri Lynn Winchell twenty-five years ago, by stabbing her after striking her in the face two dozen times with a claw hammer. This week, he was up for execution. Everybody loves to ask why we execute people. Everyone loves to ask if this is for justice, or revenge — and who knows the difference between the two? It’s also popular to ask if anybody thinks the execution will bring Terri Lynn Winchell back to life. And those of us who are in favor of the execution, have we ever watched one. That’s a real thigh-slapper, that one. Oh, and even more popular still, is the question of how would we feeeeeeeeel if we were the ones being executed, knowing we were falsely accused.

Well, as of last night, Morales walks. Not because he was exonerated by DNA evidence, or even because new evidence placed his guilt into any degree of doubt. Not because his execution would have been cruel or unusual, since California just got done executing Tookie Williams and Clarence Ray Allen exactly the same way they would have dispatched Morales, after a long, drawn-out episode of harsh scrutiny over the cruel-and-unusual clause.

No, Morales was allowed to walk because of media noise. That’s it. Oh, we had media noise with Williams and Allen, but this time it stirred up just the right tempest in a teapot to coincide with unfolding events, to produce the desired result.

Morales is the guy who wrote in with his fears that the lethal injection process would not subdue him adequately before the final serum would bring paralysis to his heart, killing him. If he wasn’t properly put under, he would feel everything, and be able to communicate nothing.

Gee. That would hurt. Like…being bashed in the head with a hammer.

Well, at the eleventh hour, the Ninth Circuit Court issued a decree denying clemency to Morales, but empowering the anesthesiologists to take “all medically appropriate steps” to make sure the convict stayed under. The unnamed anesthesiologists, who apparently were under the impression they’d merely be observing the execution, had ethical problems with taking a more active role. With them walking off the job, the state explored other alternatives for carrying out the prescribed punishment, and essentially gave up. Now Morales’ execution has been postponed indefinitely.

Indefinitely. Anti-death-penalty weenies 1, sensible people 0.

Well, now. I just find this interesting. Morales’ guilt has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt according to established law. His crime being deserving of the death penalty, also, is a matter of established law, and for now California is a state that allows the death penalty. There is precedence to indicate that the lethal injection process is constitutional, including but not limited to the cases of Messrs. Williams and Allen. By any reasonable standard of equal protection, Morales should be wearing a toe-tag.

Yet he lives, and only for two reasons: 1) he requested a entitlement to be spared physical pain, superior to any entitlement he recognized on the part of his victim, and 2) our media, justice system, and activists granted that request for superior entitlement.

Nobody ever asks the anti-death-penalty types any schismatic questions, inquiries that would surely tear their gatherings asunder ideologically. Questions, such as: Are you opposed to Morales’ proposed execution because you want him to live, or because you want to make absolutely, positively sure he is spared pain?

Do you believe the death penalty has a deterrent effect? If not, do you think it would have a deterrent effect if it was carried out more quickly? And if that’s the case, do you feel responsible for some of the murder rate? Do you ever think there may be some dead people under ground who would be walking around today, enjoying sunshine, fresh air and love, if it were not for your activist efforts?

If you do think the death penalty has a deterrent effect, do you ever feel some pang of conscience about trying so hard to get rid of it?

How is it you feel the sanctity of human life trumps the administration of justice, but at the same time, is too trivial to be enforced by that same system of justice?

That last question pretty much sums up all the problems I have with these people. One subject is under discussion, and human life is all-important, taking a back seat to nothing; and then it’s time to ask what the innocent among us can be protected, and whoops! Suddenly, human life isn’t all that important anymore.

I guess they need to see the human life in the flesh (or on TV) before they pay it any importance. Some creep who “found religion” or wrote children’s books, after murdering people in cold blood for a couple hundred dollars in cash, is worthwhile. A young lady smiling into the camera in a black-and-white quarter-century-old photograph, even with her whole life ahead of her, isn’t quite as important. Sure she’s a pretty girl. But she doesn’t move. She doesn’t gasp, or sob, or even put a lilt into her voice, like the man who killed her. She can’t. She’s dead.

We’re always going to have people in our midst who like to make life-changing decisions for other people, based on their feeeeeeeelings. Instead of with their deep, quality thinking about what’s good for society, or what it takes to protect people more innocent. Those people will always be around. And I’m even in favor of listening to them…we should listen to them.

I just don’t understand why the “gotcha” questions, with no easy answer, are saved for the rest of us. For those of us who think rationally, recognize the ugly truth that some people’s gears are permanently stripped, and nobody ever said that everyone can live in close proximity with everyone else.

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Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… IV
Monday, February 20th, 2006

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… IV

One of the things I find particularly enjoyable about Neal Boortz’ program notes is that when he gets excited about something, his grammar, punctuation and spelling just start to go to hell. Well lately, I notice I’ve been slipping in that department myself, and now Neal and I are neck-and-neck. It gets worse. Today, he’s absolutely in a lather. Boy, the words are so angry they just leap off the paper or out of the screen. And near as I can tell, everything’s perfect. Perhaps I’m biased in this case because I agree with the sentiment a hundred and ten percent.

As is usually the case when I find something so precisely dead-on and accurate that I couldn’t have said it myself, I have nothing to add to the core message, but I do have a few things to bolt on to the end. Which I will do after giving proper credit/linkage, and quoting verbatim. Enjoy.

Those of you who are constant listeners know my feelings about government schools and teachers unions. I firmly believe that in the long-term this country has more to fear from teacher’s unions than we do from Islamic terrorists. I fully believe that Islamic terrorists will once again strike this country, and they may well manage to kill ten thousand or more, but at this point I don’t think they can kill the dream of our forefathers. We recognize (I hope) the terrorists for the enemies that they are. We don’t recognize government education and teacher’s unions for the enemies that they are. Because we are so unaware and asleep at the switch, the education establishment can bring us down, where the terrorists probably cannot.

There is a level of ignorance in this country that the word “stunning” does not even begin to describe. Not only are we producing high school “graduates” who cannot read and comprehend the most basic of writings, they have no understanding of American government or our true history. These kids couldn’t even begin to tell you the difference between a constitutional republic and a democracy. They have no concept of the differences between the rule of law and the rule of men. They cannot tell you that our founders feared a democracy, nor why a democracy should be feared. They’re ignorant as to our culture, our history and our form of government … not to mention basic math and science.

And then there’s economics. Our typical high school grad has no clue as to how a free enterprise economy works. He couldn’t write a cohesive paragraph on the law of supply and demand or the difference between a profit and a profit margin. This, of course, makes the high school grads just lumps of clay ready to be molded into whatever their union officials or teachers want them to be.

I was listening to my pal Sean Hannity do an “I hate Hannity” segment on his show last Thursday. Several callers began slamming Hannity on, believe it or not, the Wal-Mart issue. They just couldn’t believe that Sean wasn’t joining them in their hatred of Wal-Mart. It was clear, of course, that these were uneducated, union-oriented people. They would come up with lines like “Well, if the unions aren’t for the workers, who will be?” Duh … how about exercising that responsibility for yourself! At any rate, one caller really caught my attention. He started out with this “Republicans are for big business and rich people” nonsense. Then somehow he got into the subject of income taxes. Everybody knows, he said, that rich people don’t pay income taxes. Sean reminded him that the top 10% of income earners in this country pay about 70% of all personal income taxes collected by the federal government. The caller said “That’s only on paper. They have all these write-offs so they really don’t pay anything.”

That conversation was four days ago now, and I can’t get it out of my mind. How, in this country, can anyone possibly be that completely and absolutely ignorant? How can they actually believe such nonsense? One answer — government schools. There is no excuse for this level of stupidity, and it must be turned around or this country just flat-out isn’t going to make it. The most immediate answer? Get rid of teacher’s unions. Across the nation job one for teacher’s unions is to fight school choice. Parents must be denied the opportunity to chose where their children will go to school at all costs. In Florida the teacher’s unions recently managed to kill a voucher program in the courts. Only children who went to government schools that failed to get a passing grade for two years in a row were eligible .. but the teacher’s unions declared war … and won. One teacher-plaintiff even said that competition is not good for schools, and it’s not good for humans. This is the lesson she’s teaching someone’s son or daughter right now.

Wake up folks. This country was handed to us on a sliver platter. Now it’s up to us to save it, and we’re not doing all that good of a job.

I particularly like those last three sentences. If I were condemned to relegate my gravestone epitaph to the pet peeves that had upset me in life, and I were allowed to choose only two, my top two pet peeves would have to do with our ancestors: 1) We commit sacrilege against them by comparing our contemporary challenges with the problems that had been faced by those ancestors, and pretending that the two were somewhat equivalent; 2) we take for granted the gifts we were given, by them, failing to treat those gifts with the protection and respect they deserve.

We have the luxury of waking up, stumbling into the kitchen to grab a bite to eat, invading the refrigerator and pantry, and discovering — Surprise!! — that we’ll just have to go to Carl’s Jr. because we forgot to go shopping. A hundred and fifty years ago that would have been a fatal screw-up. FATAL. In those days, if you wanted to eat in January, you had to be thinking about your January empty belly in the previous freakin’ March. No harvest, no eat; no sow, no harvest; no seed, no sow. Rich man, poor man. Grab that plow in the spring, and get those veggies planted — and that’s whenever you’re finished with your “real” job, representing your constituents in Congress, or building horseshoes, or cleaning stables — or else you starve.

And now? If you want a belly full of food, you can get one. If you want to get it through hard work, by means of a job, you can have one. If you want to have it given to you, and someone else’s expense, you can have that done too.

At the Constitutional Convention of 1787, the phrase “separation of church and state,” which was not yet used verbatim anywhere, meant that if you were a Quaker and had been voted into public office, you could take your oath of that office by “affirming” instead of by “swearing.” Now we get to debate whether our government is obliged to deny the existence of God. Therein arises a deep constitutional schism, because our Founding Fathers failed to anticipate this. Why did they fail to anticipate this? Atheism just wasn’t taken seriously. Not that it was personal or anything. There are no records of atheists being forced to use back entrances, or to use different drinking fountains; persons known to us, or suspected by us, to be atheists — were actually treated fairly well. The principle simply wasn’t taken very seriously.

Try living in an agricultural society for five years solid, in which there is a good assortment of diseases that will almost certainly kill you or your children once those diseases set in. Try being an atheist. Just try it. You’ll be praying every day before Month #20. Maybe even before Month #3. Today, atheism is much more “important” simply because it is much more plentiful…and atheism is much more plentiful, simply because we can afford it. We have gained perspective technologically, and in so doing used science to explain things that were formerly attributed to God. But we have lost perspective spiritually. We get out of bed in the morning, and we don’t really know what we need to do that day to survive. Where did this food come from? What makes the electricity? Why is the water hot? A lot of people don’t know…but back in the day, Joe Six-Pack got out of bed, and he knew exactly what he needed to do to survive. And he knew exactly what kind of help he needed and from whom. So, naturally, he maintained his relationship with Almighty God, just as he would maintain a piece of critically-important, life-sustaining farm equipment. And taught his children to do the same.

It was a matter of survival. We think of it as a matter of personal preference, because our limited capacity for understanding precludes us from thinking of it in any other way. Stripes versus plaid. Sunroof versus soft-top convertible. Chocolate chip mint versus Rocky Road. That is our prevailing sentiment about the question between spiritualism and atheism…and the word “foolish” doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Some of us who live in a city that is about to be flooded, are fortunate enough to receive word from the Government that we should get out. And when those fortunate persons ignore the warnings, they get to tell stories of their ensuing adventures from their government-funded hotel rooms and act as if their “civil rights” have been violated. Mass communication makes it possible for their stories of misery to reach tens of millions of sympathetic souls, in a heartbeat; it also makes it possible for the money to come pouring in, from great distances, as quickly as you could physically carry a golden coin, say, across a small town. For a farmer struggling with a flood crisis at the beginning of the nineteenth century, this would have been such an abundance of miracles that any one of them would have been beyond imagining. “Miracle,” to that farmer, would have meanth he could get sufficient help from the twenty or thirty souls it was possible to contact, that his family wouldn’t starve. And staying put, after he was told to leave? It would have been unthinkable. Or suicide.

The point is, the things that divide us today, are things we can afford to have that divide us. Atheism. Secularism. Nihilism and apathy. Going through life as a “Yang”, concerned with the perpetual stimulation of your own emotions and the emotions of those around you, above the fulfillment of previously defined objectives. Like Jack Nicholson said in “A Few Good Men,” “you have that luxury.” Perhaps these perspectives on life would be somewhat valid…if that luxury had been free.

The school student body that Boortz is using as a warning signal, letting him and the rest of us know that something is terribly wrong, could be given a precious education about all this pretty easily. A simple timeline of human history would show with crystal clarity that something is going on here…perhaps a roll of butcher paper all around the classroom, with little push pins demonstrating when exactly we could start being assured of our right to vote. When we could start refrigerating our food. When we could start surfing the “innernets”. To say nothing of where. Why are so many push pins crammed into this one small space, right where we happen to be?

What does this say about how lucky we are?

What does this say about our purpose for being here? What does this say about our character, if we consciously conclude that we grew here like a fungus, as opposed to being placed here by a Higher Power, and therefore have no compelling purpose in life?

And if my skin happens to be darker, do I really have a “civil right” to have a certain number of points added on to my college entrance exam, so an equivalently-qualified white candidate will be arbitrarily dismissed in my favor? If so, is this “civil right” on par with my right not to be forced to work in a cotton field for someone else’s benefit eighteen hours a day?

And what does it say about how many people toiled throughout their entire mortal lives, for little-to-no material benefit of their own, just to provide more opportunities to their children and grandchildren? Is there not some injustice to be observed, knowing these ancestors died generations or centuries before it could be confirmed that this objective had some measure of success?

Some will think Neal is being pretty hard on the teachers’ unions. But I’ll guarantee you this; you’re not likely to see those teachers’ unions provide sanction to the lecture I’ve just outlined. And that’s a shame. A student who attended a lecture like that, would never look at the bellyaching about what passes for “civil rights” nowadays, quite the same way again.

Nobody’s being forced to ride in the back of a bus now.

Nobody’s playing games to try to keep groups of people from voting. Minorities, women, the handicapped, urban people, rural people.

Our social safety nets, should they fail, fall back on other social safety nets.

Nobody has to think about an empty belly in January, during the previous March.

There is no such thing as a “local” famine anymore. If the riverbeds run dry during the spring, and that summer is light on sun and heavy on parasites — produce will be trucked in from somewhere else. Economic injury results for those who have an economic stake in the local produce market…but it doesn’t qualify for what your great-great-grandfather would have called “economic injury,” by any means.

And when we safeguard our liberties against the tyranny of government…more than half of us think that means bellyaching about the administration of a President who will be out on his ass, no matter what, on January 20, 2009. Only when our mass media instructs us that we should be vexed and frustrated about this issue, or that one. And we have little, or no, vision of what to do after that. Just bitch about Bush. That’s it.

Unbe-freakin’-lievable.

Thing I Know #7. A lot of what passes for bad news in a technological society, wouldn’t be discussed in an agricultural one because it would be a waste of time.

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We Love Racism
Saturday, February 18th, 2006

We Love Racism

No, I don’t think we really love racism. But there is one thing we continue to do that makes it a real possibility.

Here’s a hint. KWWL TV has put up a short article listing the ten greatest Presidential errors. One massive, glaring error remains unmentioned on the list…as does one bad, racist President. This racist President will show up this President’s Day on many, many “Best Presidents” list, more often than not, in the top three slots.

Tomorrow we commemmorate the 64th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, which authorized the internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry.

We’re supposed to think that was a really bad idea, but we still have the face of the guy who signed that instrument on our money. Something to do with our country winning a really big war at the time he was President.

That’s a load of crap. If FDR were a Republican, it would be universally acknowledged that it really doesn’t matter how much credit people would want to give him for the war…his racist actions would be a black eye on all Americans. And so it is with FDR. Somehow, Japanese Internment remains a deplorable chapter in American history…not Roosevelt history, but American history. As if there was some kind of referendum on whether or not the policy should have been put in force.

In short, if FDR were a Republican, he’d be treated the way George W. Bush is treated. Except a whole lot worse. You see, when the Bush administration appears in court to provide a legal defense for the indefinite confinement of “enemy combatants,” they are relying on precedent. You know what else? They are relying on precedent from the Franklin Roosevelt administration. Yeah, Roosevelt’s brain trust invented the whole concept of “Enemy Combatant.” Learn something new every day, don’t you?

On the other hand, the Roosevelt defense against charges of constitutional skullduggery, was “hey, we’re at war…that’s just tough.” Yeah, they browbeat the Supreme Court into upholding the idea that the Constitution just doesn’t work all the time. The Supreme Court, at a low point in honoring the principle of judiciary independence, working as soft puddy in Roosevelt’s hands, recognized the Constitution as a peacetime document in Korematsu v. United States (1944):

We uphold the exclusion order as of the time it was made and when the petitioner violated it…. In doing so, we are not unmindful of the hardships imposed by it upon a large group of American citizens…. But hardships are part of war, and war is an aggregation of hardships. All citizens alike, both in and out of uniform, feel the impact of war in greater or lesser measure. Citizenship has its responsibilities as well as its privileges, and in time of war the burden is always heavier. Compulsory exclusion of large groups of citizens from their homes, except under circumstances of direct emergency and peril, is inconsistent with our basic governmental institutions. But when under conditions of modern warfare our shores are threatened by hostile forces, the power to protect must be commensurate with the threatened danger….

Good stuff, huh? Has the Bush administration even tried for something like this, let alone twist the arm of the Supreme Court into going along with it?

Wait, it gets better.

It is said that we are dealing here with the case of imprisonment of a citizen in a concentration camp solely because his ancestry, without evidence or inquiry concerning his loyalty and good disposition towards the United States. Our task would be simple, our duty clear, were this a case involving the imprisonment of a loyal citizen in a concentration camp because of racial prejudice. Regardless of the true nature of the assembly and relocation centers — and we deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps with all the ugly connotations that term implies — we are dealing specifically with nothing but an exclusion order. To cast this case into outlines of racial prejudice, without reference to the real military dangers which were presented, merely confuses the issue. Korematsu was not excluded from the Military Area because of hostility to him or his race. He was excluded because we are at war with the Japanese Empire, because the properly constituted military authorities feared an invasion of our West Coast and felt constrained to take proper security measures, because they decided that the military urgency of the situation demanded that all citizens of Japanese ancestry be segregated from the West Coast temporarily, and finally, because Congress, reposing its confidence in this time of war in our military leaders — as inevitably it must — determined that they should have the power to do just this. There was evidence of disloyalty on the part of some, the military authorities considered that the need for action was great, and time was short. We cannot — by availing ourselves of the calm perspective of hindsight — now say that at that time these actions were unjustified.

Pretty cool, huh? It wasn’t because of Korematsu’s race, it was because we were at war with the Japanese Empire!

What a great decision. What are your Fourth and Fifth Amendment protections worth?

Why do I blame Roosevelt for a bad Supreme Court decision that happened to be in his favor? He packed the court…or he threatened to, anyway, and by threatening to he got exactly the Supreme Court he wanted. This thing that George Bush was accused of doing when Alito was nominated to the Supreme Court late last year…as if the President’s constitutional authority and duty to simply name someone, constituted a “packing” of the court. That is bull feces. That’s not packing. Packing is what Roosevelt did. Go on, do some research: What did the Supreme Court do that caused indigestion over at the White House, before 1937? What did it do after 1937? Not nearly as much. They were afraid to go against America’s first third-term President.

We’re supposed to abhore racism in this country. How about showing how much we despise racism, by sanding this bastard’s face off the dime and putting someone else on there instead?

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Whatever Happened To Free Speech?
Saturday, February 18th, 2006

Whatever Happened To Free Speech?

I remember soon after the September 11 attacks, we had a lot of discussion about what was happening to free speech in our society. I was told that people were being called unpatriotic for questioning the government. That struck me as interesting; questioning the government, certainly, is part of what should be protected speech. So is calling someone unpatriotic. No matter, however, because in this case the “being called unpatriotic” was supposed to be a sinister harbinger of intolerable free speech restrictions yet to come.

This eerie premonition floated around for awhile, free of any noteworthy real-world examples, until Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon were booted out of the fifteenth anniversary Bull Durham celebration for having used their celebrity status to promote our “Just Don’t Fight Terrorism” terrorism-fighting strategy. Dale Petroskey, President of the Baseball Hall of Fame who made the decision to revoke the famous couple’s invitations, was a former press secretary for President Reagan…so there ya go. A solid link had been established between the “Chill Wind,” in the words of Robbins, and the government. Of course, if Dale Petroskey had simply been a private citizen with a semi-consistent track record of voting Republican, this would have been just as solid a link, but no matter. The argument was kind of legitimate. And to today’s anti-war liberal, a kind-of-legitimate argument, so long as it’s friendly to liberals, is every bit as potent as a proven fact. Ergo, George W. Bush personally kicked Tim Robbins out of the Bull Durham anniversary, as Madison, Jefferson, and other free-speech advocates spun in their coffins in horror.

“I was looking forward to a weekend away from politics and war to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of ‘Bull Durham.’,” said Robbins in his response. You know, as long as kind-of-legitimate arguments are being given the equivalent weighting of proven facts…it impresses me as a kind-of-legitimate argument that I can count all the weekends Tim Robbins has wanted to spend “away from politics,” since about 1980, on one hand. Anyway, if both sides agree the issue is keeping baseball insulated from politics, and it appears that both sides do — it all boils down to this: Is a politically-neutral gathering more safely insulated from politics when Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon participate in it, or when they are absent from it? The answer to that seems fairly obvious.

Funny. I don’t remember all this concern about “free speech” a decade ago, outside of right-wing talk-radio shows, when the Clinton administration began promoting hate-crime legislation. Very seldom was a hate-crime-bill proponent called upon to explain how our right to free speech would remain unscathed by this new legal concept, and when/if any of them graced us with an answer, it was a variant of the old “if you don’t kill or hurt anyone you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Well, I doubt Ann Coulter’s killed anyone lately, and yet here we go with that mindless buzz phrase we never heard before the death of Matthew Sheppard: Hate speech, hate speech, hate speech…

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter received a rock star welcome at the Conservative Action Political Conference (CPAC) Friday, but when she used the term “ragheads” twice in a speech before a crowd of college students, bloggers accused her of “racism” and “hate speech.”

Referring to Iran, Coulter said, “What if they start having one of these bipolar episodes with nuclear weapons? I think our motto should be, post-9/11, ‘Raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.’”

“Ann Coulter Hate Speech Gone Wild” quickly became the headline story on BradBlog.com. The story then spread to the rest of the blogosphere.

The owner of BradBlog.com was one of a select group of bloggers “credentialed” by CPAC to report live on the conference. Brad Friedman, owner of BradBlog, had turned his CPAC blogger duties over to Dan Borchers, founder of the Citizens for Principled Conservatism website and CoulterWatch.com.

You know, I’m no judge, but if “hate speech” has a practical meaning to me, it would have to indicate the underlying desire to cause harm to someone’s safety or property through one’s speech. The “yelling fire in the crowded theater” scenario, in other words. I don’t see any indication that Coulter was trying to do this…and I certainly haven’t demonstrated any desire to do this in my own use of similar epithets like “weird beard” and “goat molester”. To the contrary, it would appear what Ms. Coulter is describing, is a scenario involving this “raghead” engaging in exactly that kind of malicious activity: making comments for the express purpose of injuring people and/or damaging property. And as for my own comments, I was describing someone actually doing the injury and/or damage.

Yet there’s nothing in the liberal anti-war mindset, I’m quite certain, to separate what Ann Coulter said, from what I said.

So if you’re going to muzzle Ann Coulter, for putting out phony “hate speech” about REAL hate speech, then you also have to muzzle me, for putting out phony hate speech about people actually doing things.

And by extension, logically, you would have to muzzle everyone else who says anything similar. Now we have acts of murder and property destruction, being incited on a massive scale within a certain culture and/or ethnicity, and simply noticing the patterns of culture and/or ethnicity qualifies as “hate speech.” That’s what these bloggers want.

Yeah, they’re just highly-adrenalized protesters at a speech Ann Coulter was giving. Nothing to worry about. Well, I’m not resting easy. I’ve heard that “hate speech” thing thrown around far too often over the last decade, to be relaxed about anything. It would be awfully hard for any single individual to sit down and, between his own ears, come to the conclusion that Tim Robbins is the victim of a widespread conspiracy to

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Must-Tards VFriday, February 24th, 2006

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… VFriday, February 24th, 2006

Nobody Ever AsksWednesday, February 22nd, 2006

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… IVMonday, February 20th, 2006

We Love RacismSaturday, February 18th, 2006

Whatever Happened To Free Speech?Saturday, February 18th, 2006

Must-Tards V
Friday, February 24th, 2006

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… V
Friday, February 24th, 2006

Nobody Ever Asks
Wednesday, February 22nd, 2006

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… IV
Monday, February 20th, 2006

We Love Racism
Saturday, February 18th, 2006

Whatever Happened To Free Speech?
Saturday, February 18th, 2006