Category Archives: Responsibility

Fresh from Morality Central…

The Intercom rang. “What is it, Michael?”

“Uh, Sir, I…uh, think we may have a situation here.”

God heaved a sigh. “Okay, my calendar’s clear for the next split millenium. C’mon in.”

There was a knock at the Door, and a winged angel quietly stepped in. A piece of Paper was clutched in his hand.

“What is it this time, Michael? Frothy Mix step in it again?”

“No, Sir. It’s worse. Crazy Eyes didn’t vet her staffers very well. Again.”

God gestured at the Paper. “Let’s see it.”

~~~

It seemed that Peter Waldron wasn’t the nice, well-organized campaign staffer that Michele Bachmann hired him to be. Waldron spent February 2006 in jail in Uganda under arrest for terorism. He was caught with possession of assault rifles and ammunition, with intent to distribute. The local police thought he might have been planning to help local militias hunt down and capture Joseph Kony, a warlord with a $1.7 million bounty on his head. Others suspected the timing of the arms importation, just before the first free elections in Uganda in 20 years. Waldron was released and deported after pressure was applied to the Ugandan government from the Bush Administration.

Others thought Waldron was trying to set up his own political powerbase with the idea of turning Uganda into a “Christian nation”. Waldon is good friends with Martin Ssempa, a Ugandan evangelist who has been spearheading the move to make homosexuality a crime in Uganda (and in some cases a capital crime).

Waldron is now a high-level Michele Bachmann staffer, reportedly working in the faith-based support campaigns in Iowa and South Carolina. He…

~~~

“Oh, for Son’s Sake!” God slapped the Paper down on His Desk. “Where do these idiots find these idiots??!”

Michael shuffled uncomfortably.

God stared out His Office Window for a moment. “First it was Huckabee and his ‘coming back to God’. Then it was Perry trying to summon My Presence at that rally of pinheaded religionists in Texas. Now it’s Bachmann. What the hell has happened to My Faithful?”

Michael cleared his throat. “Uh, Sir, what about releasing a plague or something…”

“No, no. Aren’t the American people suffering enough as it is? Besides, that would just make martyrs out of those morons.”

God heaved a sigh. “I’d do the Burning Bush thing on Perry’s head, but that ugly animal hide on his head would just go up like a torch.” Pause. “I’m just going to let things ride, I think. Bachmann will try to weasel out of this, as usual, and I’m not inclined to save her ass.”

Michael started to leave, but just then his cell rang. He picked up, listened for a moment, turned back to God who was still staring out the Window, and murmured, “Uh, sir, Christine O’Donnell just walked out of an interview on CNN, and she’s on the horn…”

Without looking up God interrupted, “Her I’ll burn! She’s a witch, anyway.”

“Eat our veggies–they’re good for you”

Proper morality includes the drive to care for the ones you love to the very best of your abilities, and to work to fulfill the goals that your drive dictates.

One good example: growing your own vegetables.

Aside from the physical beauty and healthy green of a garden:

Purple broccoli from our garden

…there is a bountiful harvest of food bursting with freshness and flavor, and not bursting with pesticides, herbicides, preservative waxes, over-fertilized soil, fungicides, artificial color, irradiation, and using genetically modified stock whose nutritive values are greatly reduced for sake of color or shelf life or resistance to weeds (in other words, a sacrifice of food value for monetary gain).

This came from our garden just today. Clockwise from left--broccoli of various colors, zucchini, thyme (hiding behind the broccoli leaves), beets, garlic, a couple of kinds of cucumber

You can do this, too. The internet is full of good sources of information on how-tos, suggestions for garden designs, and how to prepare the food you grow.

But you have to take that first step–you have to do it.

(For all this, I most humbly thank The Spouse®. With a little help from me and the Four Horsemen, she makes all this happen. And baby, we haven’t even gotten to the tomatoes, which will start ripening in about two weeks.)

Fair and balanced, my rosy-red a$$

Anyone catch the media analysis portion of Fox News Watch lately? Have you noticed that there is one major-league story about the media that Fox News Watch doesn’t blather on about? At all? Not even on the on-screen news ticker?

The Fox News pundits sure talk around the issue:

CAL THOMAS: Anybody want to bring up the subject we’re not talking about today for the — for the [online] streamers?

JAMES PINKERTON: Sure. Go ahead, Cal!

THOMAS: No, go ahead, Jim.

[LAUGHTER]

THOMAS: I’m not going to touch it.

JUDY MILLER (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): With a ten foot [inaudible].

Hint: Rubert Murdoch owns Fox News. (Oh, and stay tuned. The News Corp. scandal is about to spread onto our own hallowed shores soon.)

Sure. “Fair and balanced.”

Right.

It’s time to play “Pick Those Tomatoes”!

Let’s play our game! Here’s the situation:

American unemployment is at 40%+. The few jobs out there pay far less than a living wage. We have the 21st-century equivalent of hundreds of thousands of Okies wandering from town to town looking for work.

On the flip side, Canada is rich. Global warming (which doesn’t exist, according to some) has changed Canada’s climate so that it has become the breadbasket of a world that is increasingly water- and food-poor. Jobs are plentiful and wages are far above anything available in America. Canada has become one of the major economic powers in the world. However, Canada has a restrictive immigration policy that minimizes the number of foreigners that can apply for residency and citizenship.

You’re the head of a household in St. Paul, Minnesota, and you haven’t worked in over a year. You’ve lost your house and most of your possessions, you and your extended family are living in a shelter, and your kids are eating one meal a day. You know about those jobs in Canada, and a group of people you know are planning to sneak across the border to Manitoba to pick crops for cash. Doing the same would give you the opportunity to send money home so that your children could eat and go to school wearing shoes.

What do you do?

Indeed, what do you do?

Paging the Ministry of Records!

In 1996 Barack Obama, then a candidate for the Illinois state senate, signed two questionnaires that stated his support for gay marriage, and that he would fight efforts to make it illegal.

So it seemed.

The hot news out of Netroots today is that the White House is now claiming that Obama didn’t sign those questionnaires. There was an inference that his signature had been forged.

Really?? Those questionnaires have been out there for 15 years. They’ve been written about several times between now and then, and the White House is just now getting around to denying them?? This is nothing like “change” or “hope”.

Maybe we’ve been at war with Eurasia all this time.

Never fail to pass moral judgement

From Ayn Rand’s The Virtue of Selfishness:

“Nothing can corrupt and disintegrate a culture or a man’s character as thoroughly as does the precept of moral agnosticism, the idea that one must never pass moral judgment on others, that one must be morally tolerant of anything, that the good consists of never distinguishing good from evil.”

Like much else in life, this is always subject to context. Sometimes you have to keep it to the level of “I disagree with you”, and leave it at that. If you don’t like biker gangs, it’s not a smart idea to talk into one of their bars, brandish a cue stick, and yell, “You’re all idiots!”

But one must take moral stances; doing so is all that keeps this world from swirling all the way down the toilet bowl. One owes it to your loved one and (more importantly) to yourself.

“I’m going to Montana soon/Gonna be a dental floss tycoon.”

I stumbled upon a page of Frank Zappa quotes today, and I was reminded of how much I miss Mr. Zappa:

“The establishment of a rating system, voluntary or otherwise, opens the door to an endless parade of moral quality control programs based on things certain Christians do not like. What if the next bunch of Washington wives demands a large yellow “J” on all material written or performed by Jews, in order to save helpless children from exposure to concealed Zionist doctrine?”

–statement to the Senate Hearing on “Porn Rock,” 1985

“My best advice to anyone who wants to raise a happy, mentally healthy child is: Keep him or her as far away from a church as you can.”

“You hold on to the tin cans and then this guy asks you a bunch of  questions, and if you pay enough money you get to join the master race.  How’s that for a religion?” (referring to the auditing process in  Scientology)

…and my favorite Zappa quote:

“May your shit come to life and kiss you on the face.” (He said this during his testimony before the Parents Music Resource Center, as he addressed Tipper Gore’s insistence that music use a rating system similar to the movie industry.)

Quote with one comment

“[E]conomic power is exercised by means of a positive, by offering men a reward, an incentive, a payment, a value; political power is exercised by means of a negative, by the threat of punishment, injury, imprisonment, destruction. The businessman’s tool is values; the bureaucrat’s tool is fear.”

–from Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand

And before the above quote attracts people who only know Rand’s work and philosophy from tropes they pick up from the internet and other people’s condemnation, remember that America is not a capitalist society. Nor is any other country in the world right now. (And look at my Me and Ayn Rand page).

The greed we currently see in the upper echelons of business is not any capitalist in any sense. It is wholehearted theft, and has as much to do with capitalism as did the Politboro in the old Soviet days; both groups stole as much as they could because they could.

It always pays to read the fine print

At one time, Gamestation stores in the U.K. owned the immortal souls of 7500 of their customers.

It seems that those customers didn’t read the end-user license agreement when they agreed to buy games from the stores’ website:

GameStation added the “immortal soul clause” to online purchases earlier this month stating customers granted them the right to claim their soul.

While all shoppers during the test were given a simple tick box option to opt out, very few did this, which would have also rewarded them with a £5 voucher.

The store claims this shows 88 percent of people do not read the terms and conditions of a website before they make a purchase.

The Gamestation folks were kind enough to later send emails to those who “lost” their souls, explaining the situation and relinquishing any legal claims.

Nice of ‘em.

“Always do the right thing.” “That’s it?” “That’s it.”

From former NBA player Don Amaechi’s blog concerning Kobe Bryant’s outburst of “fucking faggot!” aimed at a referree during last Tuesday’s NBA game:

“A young man from a Los Angeles public school e-mailed me. You are his idol. He is playing up, on the varsity team, he has your posters all over his room, and he hopes one day to play in college and then in the N.B.A. with you. He used to fall asleep with images of passing you the ball to sink a game-winning shot. He watched every game you played this season on television, but this week he feels less safe and less positive about himself because he stared adoringly into your face as you said the word that haunts him in school every single day. Kobe, stop fighting the fine. Use that money and your influence to set a new tone that tells sports fans, boys, men and the society that looks up to you that the word you said in anger is not O.K., not ever.”

Four words that the American rich should fear: “Let them eat cake.”

From Vanity Fair’s latest issue:

“The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent….The Supreme Court, in its recent Citizens United case, has enshrined the right of corporations to buy government, by removing limitations on campaign spending. The personal and the political are today in perfect alignment. Virtually all U.S. senators, and most of the representatives in the House, are members of the top 1 percent when they arrive, are kept in office by money from the top 1 percent, and know that if they serve the top 1 percent well they will be rewarded by the top 1 percent when they leave office…As we gaze out at the popular fervor in the streets, one question to ask ourselves is this: When will it [revolution] come to America?” [emphasis mine]

When a magazine like Vanity Fair runs an article like this, it really is time to consider the question seriously.

“I gotta get outta this place!”

Humanity has all of its eggs in one basket–Earth.

If we hope to have our race survive into the distant future, we’ve got find more baskets. So where do we find them? The Solar System is not a very viable source of new home planets (with the scant possibility of Mars).

The asteroids and stars provide that answer.

DARPA is working on development of the processes needed to find more homes for humanity. A conference of scientists, thinkers, and (yeah!) a few science fiction writers was held last month to chart out some answers to three questions:

  • Why go to the stars?
  • What kind of organization is optimal to make it happen?
  • What will an organization need to succeed?

There’s an interesting read on Tao Zero Foundation’s blog from Marc Myers on what was discussed. The conference focused more on how to run an organization that would get the job done, rather than how the trip would be made, but it was interesting nonetheless.

No answers yet, but at least someone is starting to form the serious questions.