“Oh, this one’s *easy*!”

God can look like George Lazenby if He wants to.

The intercom on His desk buzzed. He put down the latest copy of Playboy and thumbed the switch. “Yeah?”

“Peter would like a word with You, Sir.”

“Send him on in.”

St. Peter stuck his head in the door. “Got a second, Big G?”

“Sure.” God’s eyes wandered over his desk, and his eyes locked onto Miss January’s splendors, which were open for all to see.

“Sir, I’ve got a problem at the Gate.”

“Yeah?” God’s eyes didn’t move.

“Yes, Sir. I’ve got Joe Paterno wanting in.”

God was obviously more concerned about where he wanted to put his Godhood than he was with Peter’s issue. “Yeah?”

“There’s a problem, Sir. The man knowingly let his subordinate…Sir, are you listening to me?”

“Yeah. I’m omniscent, remember?”

Peter waited. He knew better than to intrude when He was in one of His Moods.

Finally God noticed the silence and looked up. “Sooooo, what about it?”

“Well, Sir, I’m not quite sure what to do. Paterno was a game-winner that made a lot of money for his school, and he showed a lot of young men what it was like to be winners. He was dutiful to the rules that were set before him by his superiors at Penn State, but he let those awful things go on for years without taking any action.”

Peter waited. God finally said, “Pete, what does that plaque over My Door say today?”

Peter turned and read it. God was fond of changing what was on the plaque, and Peter hadn’t glanced at it when he came in.

“Sir, it says ‘There is no higher Law than doing Good.’ “

“There’s your answer, son. Paterno knew what was going on, and that asshole’s moral compass worked about as well as Frothy’s. Following the letter of the law without doing what is Good gets him a big ‘Fuck Off!’ in my book. It should in yours as well. Call Lucie and tell him to reserve a big pot of boiling pitch and an ass funnel. Joe’s in for a bad time.”

“Yes, Sir.” Peter watched as God picked up his Playboy. Lindsey Lohan was on the cover, and Peter had no doubt at all as to what to do to HER when the time came.

Published in: on 22 January 2012 at 22:06  Leave a Comment  
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“Be true to yourself, and you cannot be a traitor to any good cause on earth.”

Harriett got tired of standing by passively and watching the U.S. government give away peoples’ rights in pursuit of the illusion of safety. She watched the Patriot Act become law. She watched as habeas corpus was suspended indefinitely. She watched as the NDAA was passed, allowing possible incarceration of American citizens without benefit of counsel and to be held incommunicado for as long as the government wishes.

As a result, she helped some friends break into government computer networks in an attempt to find damning evidence that could be made public.

Soon afterward a SWAT team breaks into her apartment at 0300, takes her into custody, hoodwinks her, and transports her to an undisclosed location. There she is informed that, under the provisions of the NDAA, she is being held as “an enemy combatant”, and she will not be able to call upon the rights and privileges of a U.S. citizen. That is because, by Justice Department dictate, she is no longer a U.S. citizen.

Click to enbiggen, and see Representative Charles Dent's comments below

Couldn’t happen, you say? Not possible? Harriett performed no act heinous enough to invoke USC §1481, the provision that allows the government to strip her of her citizenship. Right?

Think again.

The Enemy Expatriation Act (H.R. 3166 and S. 1698) is a bill currently before Congress that makes one small change in USC §1481. 1481 defines what offenses could cause U.S. citizens to have their citizenship revoked. Those conditions include conviction for treason, joining the armed forces of a foreign country, or becoming a naturalized citizen of another country.

The change invoked by H.R. 3166 and S. 1698 involves one small addition to USC §1481 to those existing conditions. The addition, per the proposed bills, is simply:

(8) engaging in, or purposefully and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States

There is also an addition that defines”hostilities” as:

(c) For purposes of this section, the term ‘hostilities’ means any conflict subject to the laws of war

The “official” reason for this modification of existing U.S. legal code is cover the military’s ass in the case where an American citizen openly foments war against the United States; in such cases, U.S. citizenship can be revoked and the military can treat the subjects of that revocation as if they were enemy combatants — i.e., they can killed without the legal ramifications of ensuring the human rights guaranteed to U.S. citizens by the Constitution.

However, there is a darker side to this. Define “engaging in, or purposely and materially supporting, hostilities against the United States”. Is it firing a Stinger missile at a Army chopper? Is it exhorting militants to engage in jihad against the U.S.? Is it shutting down the Department of Justice computers, as was (allegedly) done recently by members of Anonymous?

Might it be tearing down the NYPD barracades blocking off Zuccotti Park?

Before you exclaim that Occupy activities could never be construed as “hostilities” against the United States, take a good look at the history of the Espionage Act of 1917 and ask the ghosts of E. E. Cummings, Eugene Debs, and the other 200 detainees about it.

See what Anonymous, a probable target of the EEA, has to say.

Here are the comments of Representative Charles Dent, H.R. 3166′s sponsor:

Published in: on 20 January 2012 at 10:56  Leave a Comment  
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“It’s like we’re all amnesiacs.”

Chunks of the ABC interview with Newton Gingrich’s second wife Marianne are starting to ooze out into the public eye, including:

Marianne Gingrich, a self-described conservative Republican, said she is coming forward now so voters can know what she knows about Gingrich. In her most provocative comments, the ex-Mrs. Gingrich said Newt sought an “open marriage” arrangement so he could have a mistress and a wife. She said when Gingrich admitted to a six-year affair with a Congressional aide, he asked her if she would share him with the other woman, Callista, who is now married to Gingrich…. “He wanted an open marriage and I refused.”

She [Marianne] said Newt moved for the divorce just months after she had been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis, with her then-husband present. “He also was advised by the doctor when I was sitting there that I was not to be under stress. He knew.”

Gingrich divorced his first wife, Jackie, as she was being treated for cancer. His relationship with Marianne began while he was still married to Jackie but in divorce proceedings, Marianne said.”

(Gingrich divorced his first wife while she was battling cancer.)

Dan Savage added a potent comment about Newton’s actions:

Technically you’re not asking your wife for an open marriage if you’ve already been fucking another woman for six years. You’re presenting your wife with an ultimatum. That doesn’t make you a proponent of open marriage, Newt, it makes you a CPOS.

Uh, folks?

If any of you were paying attention to the second Mrs. Gingrich in 2010 when she was interviewed by Esquire, you’d know all this already:

Early in May, she went out to Ohio for her mother’s birthday. A day and a half went by and Newt didn’t return her calls, which was strange. They always talked every day, often ten times a day, so she was frantic by the time he called to say he needed to talk to her.

“About what?”

He wanted to talk in person, he said.

“I said, ‘No, we need to talk now.’ ” He went quiet. “There’s somebody else, isn’t there?”

She kind of guessed it, of course. Women usually do. But did she know the woman was in her apartment, eating off her plates, sleeping in her bed?

She called a minister they both trusted. He came over to the house the next day and worked with them the whole weekend, but Gingrich just kept saying she was a Jaguar and all he wanted was a Chevrolet. ” ‘I can’t handle a Jaguar right now.’ He said that many times. ‘All I want is a Chevrolet.’ “

He asked her to just tolerate the affair, an offer she refused.

He’d just returned from Erie, Pennsylvania, where he’d given a speech full of high sentiments about compassion and family values.

How could anyone support a man who espouses one set of values and then shits on them in his private life? How could anyone support a man who is so erratic and secretive, and (ultimately) personally and politically unstable?

How?

Published in: on 19 January 2012 at 14:14  Leave a Comment  
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I’m very confused, but he’s not.

Kentucky Senator Rand Paul fashions himself as the libertarian standard bearer who will carry on his father’s political legacies after Ron Paul goes to that great Objectivist Utopia in the sky.

However, it seems that the libertarian rules of “less government, more personal freedom” have gone out the window. He’s now flip-flopping for government intervention at the womb level:

Senator Paul is now pushing for popular support for legislation that calls for a definition of “personhood” that goes all the way back to the moment of conception. This would satisfy both the anti-choice religious airheads who demand that the womb belongs to God and the anti-choice political airheads who demand that womb belongs to the State. It would mean hundreds of thousands of unwanted pregnancies, and hundreds of thousands of illegal abortions.

The law would thus prevent any sort of contraception that doesn’t prevent sperm from penetrating ova. That would outlaw everything except condoms and diaphragms/cervical caps — two contraceptive methods that are known for their relatively high levels of failure.

Of course Prince Paul the Younger has let the cat of the political bag early. He showing his true colors here; he no more wants less government and more personal freedom than his old man. They’re just another couple of right-wing Rethuglican morons who use the youth vote to grasp power.

Published in: on 16 January 2012 at 18:20  Comments (2)  
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“But it’s **fun**!!”

Many (most) of us do at least one thing in our lives that is life-threateningly stupid. (Me? Skydiving. Once.)

I have never, ever been the least bit interested in bungee jumping.

I am even less interested now.

Published in: on 9 January 2012 at 13:52  Leave a Comment  
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IQ vs. Religiosity

Click to enbiggen

So, it seems that religiosity and average IQ are inversely proportional. This should not come as a complete surprise to most of us:

(As usual, a great job of digging this up goes to Mr. Stanfill, and as always an encouraging shout-out to Calamities of Nature for making a complex concept easy to perceive.)

Published in: on 5 January 2012 at 8:42  Leave a Comment  
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“Can we count on this, Mr. Obama?”

To paraphrase Tom Clancy, “Why should I trust you? You’re a politician.”

Published in: on 1 January 2012 at 17:49  Leave a Comment  
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“And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

Published in: on 22 December 2011 at 14:37  Leave a Comment  
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Message from Ladybird to the rest of the world!

As an obvious dig at Michele Obama’s urging for children to eat healthier meals, Mr. Michele Bachmann has this to say:

“I’ve decided my cause is not going to be happy meals. We are going to be the message-givers…we are going to get this message across. Marriage is between one man and one woman. We are going to promote families.”

Now listen to this and tell me that we don’t have a major closet case acting out as a homophobe:

 

Published in: on 17 December 2011 at 17:10  Leave a Comment  
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The difference all lay within the roots

From the Urban Dictionary:

  • grassroots (noun): (2) having to do with something that originates from the common people
  • astroturf (noun): (1) creating the impression of public support by paying people in the public to pretend to be supportive

Grassroots movements almost always start on a local basis and slowly (or quickly) grow to the extend that public interest exists. A recent example would be the Occupy movement, which started as a group of New Yorkers who wanted to protest the legal abuses within the U.S. financial industry. It quickly spread across the world.

Astroturf (fake “grass”roots) movements, on the other hand, consists of groups that usually spring up from nothing to a national (or international) “following” within a very short period of time. One can identify astroturf organizations by comparing the size of their publicity campaigns with the size of physical meetings and rallies.

A good example of an astroturf organization is the National Organization for Marriage (NOM). Claiming to be supported by “50,000 pious Christian households”, their 2010 “Summer of Marriage” bus tour (the family went to the St. Paul appearance) would attract more counter-protesters than the NOM “faithful”. The St. Paul appearance attracted perhaps 50 true believers, with twice that number protesting.

And now that NOM has had its 2011 financial disclosures made public, we can see that two donors gave NOM $6 million — 85% of a $7 million total — while an additional 20 donors brought the percentage up to 92%. (Rumors abound that the two big hitters on NOM’s donor list are affiliated with the Catholic Church.)

Hardly “50,000 pious Christian supports”. Hardly a grassroots effort.

Here's the family at the St. Paul protest

(On a semi-related note, spec-fic author Orson Scott Card is a member of NOM’s board. I have never bought or read a Card story, and never will now.)

Published in: on 12 December 2011 at 11:54  Leave a Comment  
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Deciphering the real message?

There really isn’t any other sort of (semi-)rational explanation for it:

(T minus 2)

Published in: on 8 December 2011 at 19:16  Leave a Comment  
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“What is the true meaning of Christmas, guys?” “PRESENTS!!”

When I see/hear something like this:

I think this:

Click to enbiggen.

Published in: on 7 December 2011 at 16:44  Leave a Comment  
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How far to Kent State, indeed.

With all the humorous Photoshopped images of UC Davis police officer John Pike floating about, here’s an image that should pull us back to reality:

When do we, the 99%, finally put an end to this fascism? Do we just meet peacefully and ask nicely? Do we take matters into our own hands by voting the bastards out of office and positions of power? Or do we take more direct measures?

When there are four more murdered students lying in the sun?

(Thanks to Mr. Oliphant for this necessarily grim reminder.)
Published in: on 25 November 2011 at 12:33  Leave a Comment  
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Now *this* is one scary Halloween haunted house; or, Truth is where you find it

Watch how you buy America’s electoral process:

Note: I have a moral dilemma going here.

The above documentary was created and distributed by al-Jazeera English, the English-language branch of a media outlet that is well-known for acting as a propaganda mouthpiece for terrorist groups. However, the documentary illustrates and corroborates facts that I’ve run across from other sources, so in that aspect it is something that I’m more than willing to propogate.

Hence the dilemma.

Published in: on 27 October 2011 at 8:32  Comments (1)  
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“From the grave, Howard P., from the grave.”

“As for the Republicans — how can one regard seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would contravene some vague and mystical ‘American heritage’…) utterly contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human experience?

“Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance and respect one gives to the dead.”

–H.P. Lovecraft, 1936

Big tip o’ th’ hat to Er Wi and The Spouse for this one.

Published in: on 21 October 2011 at 10:38  Leave a Comment  
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