I'M GOING AWAY...

...for a few days, so the one or two of you who read this blogestimus effort on my part will have to go elsewhere for your ration of intelligent commentary, wit and humor. This is not like the month long trip driving around the United States when I made a few entries while on the road. I'm just gone and back like Jumping Jack Flash, and until I return silence will reign on this site.

Here's a parting word or two:

Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
Fool me thrice, I must be a Republican.

My youth was like a visit to a clothing store. I tried on lots of costumes, hoping to find out which fitted me best in the mirror of your shifty eyes.

Atheism is a viewpoint for the mature of mind. Not many youths find it compatible.

When you group together any collection of vulnerable people, such as prisoners or children, you attract both the best and the worst of caregivers. To children you attract pedophiles and to prisoners the sadistic. These misfits, however, are the minority, but they will always be drawn to their potential victims.


WHAT WOULD THOMAS JEFFERSON BE?

These Jeffersonian opinions tell me that Thom would go for “intelligent design”.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that "the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."

Thomas Jefferson also wrote (concerning slavery), “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep forever.”


CONSERVATIVE’S WOULD CENSOR DOG SEX IF THEY COULD

“We're setting ourselves up as the butt of future jokes—

BY RICHARD ROEPER, SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST February 28, 2005

LOS ANGELES -- Unbelievable. The New York Times reported Sunday that ABC executives were so worried about offending Oscar telecast viewers and/or the FCC that Robin Williams had to kill a goofy, one-minute song lampooning the recent controversy about whether SpongeBob SquarePants is gay.”

Let me suggest that if a bunch of sex-crazed, frightened, neurotic Christians can cause a giant network to back down, American freedoms are in certain danger. “Neurotic,” you charge. “How can you say that?”

All I got to do is look into the smile-warped face of one of them, out through which glare completely humorless eyes to see it. I can recognize the smile of my stepmother in almost any crazy fundamentalist’s Christian face. If you can’t see the parallel between Rome silencing Galileo and Dobson silencing network TV, then your analogizer is broken.

Read it and weep the whole story here.


SPEAKING OF OTHER CONSERVATIVE SILLINESS

As I’ve often pointed out, reason, in some people, is only an excuse-making machine for irrational behavior. What follows has to be the dumbest ever, conservative thinking I’ve ever come across, but, hey, when a man ain’t rational, he can only sound dumbly Bush like and without nuance.

I was buying a few things at my local Sears/K-Mart recently. I’ve been a Sears man most all my life and no WalMart is going to change that piece of irrationality on my part, no how, but... the sales guy noticed my Nation Visa Card and wondered aloud about it. I told him that THE NATION is a long standing progressive magazine that’s been around since 1865.

He asks, “You mean, ‘progressive’, like in ‘liberal’?”

“Yeah,” I say, awaiting the attack. “I’m a liberal Democrat.”

So immediately the sale’s guy gets on his rant why we must censor this Professor Churchill fellow for having an opinion different from his, my sale’s person’s, opinion. I guess my sale’s fellow imagines that only his opinion must be taught in colleges. I don’t think he’d nuanced the idea that education is supposed to broaden one’s experience to ideas and not narrow them down to the majority’s narrow view. Typical conservative lockstep thinking approach.

But that’s not the worst of the man’s silliness (not to mention my wife’s observation that the man in his official position as salesman for Sears ought not be alienating Sears lifetime customers). Speaking of inappropriate interjection of opinion! Maybe Sears ought to be informed about this alienator so they can censor him. But, to return to my subject:

The next silliness out of the man’s mouth was a harangue about why no company would kill off its customer base so why should we be watching out for the environmental depredations by capitalistic businesses. It’s as if the man had never heard of W. (something) Grace company in Libby, Montana or Union Carbide in India or how coal companies cared not a whit about their worker customers in West Virginia or about Five Mile Island or about the million other care not a whit atrocities by careless and profit-driven companies.

It’s not the killing off of all its customers, stupid, it’s a business not caring if their business practices harms a few dozen children or, as in the case of Libby, Montana exposing perhaps a third of that city’s population to lifetimes of ill health. We are talking about written down, observed, undeniable cases, numbering in the thousands, of businesses not giving a damn about the people who work for them or live around them. I’m not even bringing in here the lives ruined in other ways than physically by bad businesses. Need I say “Enron” to get the lame-Os attention?

It was if the man were totally separated from the real world, which is why, sorry to say, I can almost conclude that he was a fundamentalist Christian, for who more than fundamentalists are so detached from reality? The guy was so incapable of putting together a couple of sentences of rational thought that I am almost certain he was a fundamentalist Christian. Or Moslem. I can’t tell much of a difference in the reasoning powers of either group. Boooooom!!!!!!!!!!!


WE’RE THE EYES, EARS AND MIND OF THE COMING ALL

The title to this section says it all. Joseph Campbell after spending a book, MYTHS TO LIVE BY, showing us the obvious, condenses it to a nutshell in the following brief passage (p. 257):

“The solar system and the atom, the two extremes of scientific exploration, recognized as identical, yet distinct! Analogous must be our own identity with the All, of which we are the ears and eyes and mind.”
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“The fundamentalist delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.” —Yasutani Roshi