FARMER/RANCHER SUICIDAL BOO HOOS CAUSED BY LOSS OF MOO MOO MOOLA

Thanks to Cliff “Ahem” Smith for the information which informs the following tale of mud and guts.

Eric Schlosser reports in his book, FAST FOOD NATION, that the nation’s fast food empires like McDonald’s are one more of the pressures destroying family farms and ranches by helping to grow agribusiness. “Small towns are now being turned into rural ghettos. The USA now has more prison inmates than full-time farmers.” Whether or not the loss of family farms is the cause, Schlosser says, “The suicide rate among ranchers and farmers in the USA is now about 3 times higher than the national average.” Now, now, now, Schlosser, don’t get carried away.

Not to be unkind, but some of that rural suicide rate, if you ask me, is because farmers and ranchers continue to live in the world that George Bush paints as real, refusing to modernize their thinking. They voted for him (and against themselves) because they bought the idea that he still believes in 19th century America. Bush saws them in half by pretending he cares about the little guy while doing everything in his power to make the average working stiff totally subservient to Bush’s big business buddies. Bush plays them like fish in a barrel, running them around the edges of their cage and teasing them into his net. Whack, off go their heads, and he guts them. Their guts spilled out on tables, they’re ready to die. Come on, rural America, if you follow that Pied Piper, you’ll die with the rats. If you follow the evangelist, he’ll chum you like so much fish guts. The following poem is about sucker bait. I wrote it years ago as I left my foolish past behind.


THE EVANGELIST

resisting
his way to surface
air alive with death
chopping block
offering of flesh cut open
the cleaver
aimed to just behind the gills
mouth
works a silent something

from water
to unfamiliar air
hooked
brought gasping chopped and cut
his song of water in the guts
spills out

guts
returned as chum slick on the water
one eye staring glazes up

by George


EARLY SUPPORT FOR THE EXISTENCE OF THE SOUL (i.e. BEFORE REAL SCIENCE)

Speaking of a gut full of pain—Steven Pinker discusses why some people have way too much soul and not enough sense. In his talk before the membership of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (October 29, 2004), Pinker explained some of the conclusions that people might have reasoned to by pure supposition, given the state of science in the earlier days of the human race. Steven Pinker is a scientist and author of several important books in neuroscience, including his most recent, The Blank Slate: The modern denial of human nature. The following is excerpted from Steven Pinker’s talk at the annual convention of the Freedom From Religion Foundation:

“In fact, the l9th-century anthropol-ogist Edward Tyler pointed out that in some ways, there is good empirical support for the existence of the soul, or at least there used to be, until the fairly recent advent of neuroscience, which provides an alternative explanation for how minds work. Think about dreams. When you dream, your body is in bed the whole time, but some part of you seems to be up and about in the world. The same thing happens when you're in a trance from a fever, a hallucinogenic drug, sleep deprivation, or food poisoning.

“Shadows and reflections are rather mysterious, or were until the develop-ment of the physics of light with its explanation of those phenomena. But they appear to have the form and essence of the person but without any of their actual matter.

“Death, of course, is the ultimate apparent evidence for the existence of the soul. A person may walking around and seeing and hearing one minute and the next minute be an inert and lifeless body, perhaps without any visible change. It would seem that some animating entity that was housed in the body has suddenly escaped from it.

“So before the advent of modern physics, biology and specially neuroscience, a plausible explanation of these phenomena is that the soul wan-ders off when we sleep, lurks in the shadows, looks back at us from a surface of a pond, and leaves the body when we die.”

Some people are still stuck way back then.


ETHICS PUT OFF AS DELAY AND DELAY TRIES TO SAVE CROOKED DELAY

Speaking of a real Bushman evangelist with the accompanying set of morals:

“The House majority leader, Tom DeLay, is facing new ethical questions after the disclosure that a timely infusion of gambling-lobby money helped underwrite a golf junket to Scotland in 2000. Intrigued taxpayers should expect no investigation, however, because Speaker Dennis Hastert stripped the House ethics committee of power this year in a blatant move to shield Mr. DeLay from scrutiny.”

You didn’t expect these guys who went after Clinton no holds barred to be honest themselves did you? Here's the whole story.