Dispatching The Dispatch

Earlier today I called and cancelled my subscription to the Columbus Dispatch.

Why?

I no longer wished to subsidize the extreme right-wing political agenda being promoted by that rag.

Historically, the Dispatch has leaned right politically. I've known that since I moved to Columbus in 1961. And it's understandable, given the demographics of the population of central Ohio.

Until recently, however, there was at least a semblance of balance in its editorial content, and one could draw conclusions based on a range of presented opinions.

That is no longer the case.

After a long, unscientific examination of the paper's editorial content since 2008, I have concluded that 80% (or more) of the cartoons and op-ed pieces present bald-faced propaganda of the extreme rignt-wing of the Republican party. The most partisan pieces appear in the editions with high readership (weekends and Mondays). Dissenting opinions are primarily relegated to the less-read mid and end-of-week editions.

The propagandizing becomes even more apparent when one recognizes that the Dispatch apparently believes that presenting the views of a few moderate liberals is an appropriate balance to the opinions a host of contributors clinging to the ragged, right edge of the political spectrum.

As a result, I now consider The Columbus Dispatch to be worth neither the paper it's printed on nor the energy it takes to deliver the electronic edition to my computer.

If I owned a parakeet, I'd at least be able to put the editorial pages of Ohio's Greatest Home Newspaper to good, and appropriate, use.

He Is Still Dangerous

Perhaps you've seen reports on this story, which is currently playing out in Columbus, Ohio.

Carla Hale, Gay Teacher, Fired From Catholic High School After Being 'Outed' By Mother's Obituary

Carla Hale, a beloved teacher at Bishop Watterson High School, was fired because of her sexuality. She was a teacher who cared for her students and treated each one with respect. The school, however, did not reciprocate that respect in its treatment of her. Discrimination and injustice is something that we all have a duty to fight in today's society. It's unfair that someone who cared so much about her students and her job should lose them on the basis of something she cannot even control.

Read more about this story here.

What follows is my take on the dynamics of the situation:

Whether they know it or not, the people who fired Carla Hale are reenacting what the Pharisees did 2000 years ago to the itinerant carpenter, whom they claim to follow and whose authority they have appropriated and assigned to themselves.

He's the guy who refused to condemn the adulteress; the guy who supped with tax collectors and sinners; the guy who preached love for all and said "The Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath" when questioned about allowing his followers to ignore a "law."

Yep. That guy - the one they nailed to a cross to protect their positions of power and influence within a stagnant social structure clinging to the past and peddling a snake oil security at the cost of one's personal integrity and worth - the very items "that guy" declared to be the essence of the good news - that you, and in fact all people, are worth God's love (Matthew 10:31).

The posturing of those who fired Carla Hale reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from the movie "Jesus Christ Superstar." The Scribes and Pharisees stand upon and protect a flimsy scaffold amid the ruins of the temple as they sing sing "He Is Dangerous!" and "This Jesus Must Die!"

It is no accident, of course, that the scene opens with an overhead shot of buzzards soaring and the Scribes and Pharisees are dressed in black robes.

Link to source

Drone Warfare

As I mentioned in yesterday's post, I just finished reading "The Social Conquest of Earth" by Edward O. Wilson. Since then, Wilson's observations on the biological underpinnings of human nature and social structure have rattled around in my head.

Then, yesterday a friend posted the following on her Facebook page:

Discussion at my house today centered on junior high and how it starts at 7.35am. Freddie said.... I don't want to get up that early. It doesn't matter, that's the way it is, i said. And then she said, "Why do adults get to be in charge? I don't want to be a puppet. Why do kids have to be mindless drones?" and I laughed my head off. "Remember dad's last job?" I asked. "Remember how clockiing in one minute late got him a write-up, and he had 7.5 minutes for break? We're all drones. Only the people in charge get to make the rules. You want a job? Want to drop out?" Welcome to Monday...with a new resolve to stay in school. :)

Her post resonated with those rattling, Wilsonian thoughts and inspired me to write the following:

We become drones when we accept without question the "truths" our tribal leaders feed us to maintain their positions of power and influence, even when those "truths" don't square with reality.

Such "truths" offer safety and assurance to all who willingly abandon intellectual freedom and personal worth, both of which are considered dangerous, sinful, or criminal transgressions against the tribe's very essence.

People who avoid becoming drones come to recognize that they have individual integrity and worth with or without the blessings of the tribal leaders, even as they play the tribal game.

This is painful.

Once recognized, these individuals become outcastes who can never return to the mindless safety of the tribal hive-mentality.

Yet there is an upside, and it is of great value.

Whenever the rules of their particular tribe demand sacrificing truth to myth, these outcastes discover that they are free to find another tribe or none at all with only a minimal amount of guilt and pain. They know that they are simply playing one version of a game played by countless similarly constructed social groups, so they are also free to choose to retain their position within the tribe.

Now, however they play with access to the complete rule book, not just the rules their self-serving leaders have parceled out to them.

So, a resounding Yes!

"Welcome to Monday...with a new resolve to stay in school."

The Social Conquest of Earth

I recently finished reading "The Social Conquest of Earth" by Edward O. Wilson.

The book is long, and so is the video linked below. The reward, however, is worth the price of admission, which is a considerable investment of time and attention.

Like all transformational ideas, however, what Edward O. Wilson has to say cannot be boiled down to a 60 second soundbite for easy consumption by the masses.

Those willing to pay the time-price will come away with a deeper understanding about the origin of and the dynamics which drive the conflicts in today's world. Those unwilling to do so will remain willfully enslaved by the dogmas and ideologies which require conflicts to justify their continued existence.

Edward O. Wilson “The Social Conquest of Earth”
from The Long Now Foundation on FORA.tv

Cold Dead Hand vs. Cold Dead Brains

Last week on Funny or Die, Jim Carrey released a music video called "Cold Dead Hand." The video presents a satirical view of those who blindly follow the NRA as it shills for the gun manufacturing industry while claiming to represent hunters and sportsmen.

Watch Jim Carrey's original "Cold Dead Hand" video by clicking here.

Shortly after its release, FOX "News" went apoplectic over Carrey's music video. Click here for the FOX response.

Those capable of critical thought will immediately recognize that the commentary from the propagandists at FOX is an ad hominem diatribe comprised entirely of opinion with neither substance nor factual support for what is said about Carrey. That, of course, is to be expected from FOX.

This is Jim Carrey's response to the FOX attack dogs.

Since I released my “Cold Dead Hand” video on Funny or Die this week, I have watched Fux News rant, rave, bare its fangs and viciously slander me because of my stand against large magazines and assault rifles. I would take them to task legally if I felt they were worth my time or that anyone with a brain in their head could actually fall for such irresponsible buffoonery. That would gain them far too much attention which is all they really care about.

I’ll just say this: in my opinion Fux News is a last resort for kinda-sorta-almost-journalists whose options have been severely limited by their extreme and intolerant views; a media colostomy bag that has begun to burst at the seams and should be emptied before it becomes a public health issue. 

I sincerely believe that in time, good people will lose patience with the petty and poisonous behavior of these bullies and Fux News will be remembered as nothing more than a giant culture fart that no amount of Garlique could cure. 

I wish them all the luck that accompanies such malevolence.

Click here to view one of the many online postings of Carrey's response.

Having read Carrey's words, I'm quite sure a lot of folks won't like them. They'll say he's doing the same thing as the talking heads on FOX and simply attacking them. There is one critical differences, however.

Carrey clearly  states that his harshly worded response is his opinion; FOX packages its rant as "News."

The inability of many people to recognize that difference is the secret behind the success of FOX "News."

Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes have profited greatly by pandering to those who lack such understanding, but  they do so at a tremendous cost to the nation. The FOX formula of disinformation, deceit, and diatribe is the engine which drives the ultra-partisanship and inflexibility in today's America that renders political compromise almost impossible.

Marriage, A Defining Moment

Link to source: 320331_10151088367411851_811808197_n.jpg

Language is a function of culture. Definitions are a product of language. Cultures, like all living things, evolve in response to changes in the environments in which they exist. As cultures evolve, so do languages and their concomitant definitions.

Yet there are those in every culture who deny any and all forms of evolution while claiming to have knowledge of a "traditional" cultural milieu which must be defended against change. In America, they call themselves conservatives and fundamentalist Christians.

I find it most interesting that such folks are by and large the same people who embraced the myth of the Tea Party, which claimed to be a grass-roots movement and a champion of individual liberty although it was fully controlled by the Heritage Foundation.

They are rabidly opposed to the currently evolving shift in attitude toward gay and lesbian members of our society. They fear it, and are fighting against it just as their philosophical forebears fought against other such cultural shifts in attitude such as racial equality, interracial marriage, unionization of workers in sweatshops, and women's suffrage.

Of course, being the father of three sons, I may simply be envious of those who would have us go back to "traditional" marriage so they can profit from the sale of their daughters.

The Price of Enlightenment

Link to source

This Frank & Ernest comic provides a perfect metaphor for what's going on in D.C. on many levels:
1. the electorate looking for change from the D.C. establishment
2. President Obama negotiating with John Boehner
3. Republicans expecting reason from the Tea Party whackos they embraced in 2010
4. Sen. Harry Reid trusting Mitch McConnell on anything
5. Congress giving money to the banks to help folks with mortgage problems
6. ...

The list is endless. What would you add?

There is a lesson to be learned from this, of course.

True enlightenment comes when one recognizes that believing those in power will place your interests above their own is, in fact, ignorance and that those we call leaders hold their position at our behest.

Thomas Jefferson declared as much during The Age of Enlightenment with these words:

...Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The price of enlightenment is active involvement in holding one's leaders accountable when they fail to live up to the tenets of the organizations over which we have given them control.

When such a leader is the head of a church or social organization, we are free to leave and join another or none at all.

When the leader is a politician, we can, and we must, vote that leader out of office.

Failure to do so confirms our preference for ignorance and condemns us to climbing mountains in order to squander our most valuable possession on empty promises.

Jurisimprudence? You be the judge.

Last week Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said of the challenge to Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act now before the court,

"I think [the repeated passage of the Voting Rights Act] is attributable, very likely attributable, to a phenomena that is called perpetuation of racial entitlement.  It's been written about.  Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get out of them through the normal political processes."

Yes, "it has been written about." However, a bit of digging by investigative reporters at the Baltimore Sun and the Providence Journal has revealed that the writer to whom the justice refers, may be none other than Scalia himself and an article he wrote in 1979.

If this is the case, Justice Scalia's comments constitute a blatant manipulation of the facts by a jurist set to rule on the very law about which those facts are crucial.

Even if he is referring to another writer, Mr. Scalia's comments are clearly prejudicial to the case, and he should recuse himself in order to maintain the honor and integrity of the court as an impartial arbiter of the law.

Either way, I would not be at all surprised to find Mr. Justice Scalia's picture next to the words disingenuous and duplicitous in the next edition of Webster's Dictionary.

Link to Baltimore Sun article

Link to Providence Journal article

Link to Justice Scalia's 1979 article on race

H2 Oh Oh

Wearing a blue tie, possibly to make him appear more moderate than right, and spouting inconsistencies about how the government he wants to dismantle helped him and his family, Marco Rubio interrupted his rebuttal to President Obama's State of the Union address and made a mid-sentence lunge for a bottle of water.

Some have wondered what that was all about. I believe I know the reason.

I'd reach for a water bottle, too, if my mouth were that full of s#it.

A Sucker's Bet

A friend recently posted this image to his Facebook page and thereby gave me a reason to create today's blog post.

If Margaret Thatcher’s comment is accurate regarding socialism, it is also accurate regarding of the problem with capitalism, except that with capitalism you don't eventually run out of other people's money, “you” eventually run out of suckers.

Strict capitalism is, at its core, a Ponzi scheme in which the value inherent in the skills and labor of a group of people is converted into currency and deposited into the bank accounts of the capitalists with successive groups of people becoming the unwitting investors (AKA suckers) in the scheme.

Capitalists use people who are destitute to do the real work in an economy. They bamboozle those people into believing they are being “given” a job when they are actually entering into a contract where their valuable skills and labor are being traded for wages.

The scheme begins to unravel when the workers come to realize that they don’t have to settle for a “take it or leave it” wage and attempt to organize as a bargaining unit (union).

The response of the strict capitalist is to resist and break the union; and, if that does not work, to simply replace those workers with another group of destitute people. This was previously called "hiring scabs." That term has now been replaced by the modern euphemism known as "outsourcing."

Both capitalism and socialism are viable economic systems when tempered by justice and fair play within a system of government designed to benefit the general population. Both become oppressive when there are no regulations to curb the zealotry and greed of those running the economic system or when those economic systems are believed to be inseparable from the system of government and thereby achieve the status of holy writ, exempt from examination, evaluation, and modification by the population.

* * *

Ponzi scheme |ˈpänzē|nouna form of fraud in which belief in the success of a nonexistent enterprise is fostered by the payment of quick returns to the first investors from money invested by later investors.ORIGIN named after Charles Ponzi (died 1949), who carried out such a fraud (1919–20).

Choosing Knowledge Over Ignorance

The worship of ignorance as a virtue has led to the current state of gridlock in D.C.

As proof of that observation, I offer two items for your consideration:

1. the chasm between reality and the Tea Party's fraudulent claim that President Obama is a foreign, Muslim, communist
2. the fact that people holding those ridiculous beliefs now dictate the agenda of the majority party in the House of representatives.

The only antidote to the such mind-numbing venom is knowledge.

Whether you like, dislike, agree or disagree with, Barack Obama, he's the President; and it's your responsibility as a citizen to be informed about, not ignorant of, what is required of the person who occupies the Oval Office and the effect it has on his/her family.

Take the time to read these two excellent articles.

1. David Gergen's analysis of President Obama's second inaugural address:

2. Jodi Kantor's commentary on the effect of the past four years on the Obamas:

Fact vs. Fertilizer

Telling the difference between fact and fertilizer is as easy as A, B, C.

A. Here's what President Obama said in today's press conference on gun laws:

I will put everything I’ve got into this — and so will Joe — but I tell you, the only way we can change is if the American people demand it. And by the way, that doesn’t just mean from certain parts of the country. We’re going to need voices in those areas and those congressional districts where the tradition of gun ownership is strong to speak up and to say this is important. It can’t just be the usual suspects. We have to examine ourselves in our hearts, and ask yourselves what is important? This will not happen, unless the American people demand it. If parents and teachers, police officers, and pastors, if hunters and sportsman, if responsible gun owners, if Americans of every background stand up and say, enough. We’ve suffered too much pain, and care too much about our children to allow this to continue, then change will — change will come.

President Obama's Gun Control Measures [Fact Sheet, Speech Transcript, and Video]

B. Here's what the chairman of the Republican National Committee, Reince Priebus says he's doing:

President Obama's series of gun control measures amount to an executive power grab that may please his political base but will not solve the problems at hand.

Reince Prebus's Full Response

C. Now it's your turn.

Watch the video of the press conference, then guess which of those two men believes that Americans are capable of making decisions to control their own destiny and which believes they are too stupid to know the difference between fact and fertilizer.

Update - Jan 22: Sorry folks. The Reince Prebus video is no longer available, but you can read what he had to say here and at the link above.

Winner of the NRA's Coveted, Artistic Achievement Award

Starry Night 20

• Medium: bullet holes in black velvet
• Brush: Bushmaster AR-15
• Artist: Adam Lanza, son of a faithful NRA member and gun enthusiast (deceased)

Link to source

Scrip-ting A Way Out Of A Bogus Crisis

Before clicking on the link below, it's important to realize that most Americans don't know squat about the federal debt ceiling. Nor do they understand that the debt ceiling "crisis" is completely artificial.

The folks trumpeting and ballyhooing this "crisis" as the end of the world are the same ones who uttered nary a peep when the debt ceiling was raised eleven times under Ronald Reagan and nineteen times as "W" started two unfunded wars.

In reality, this "crisis" is the bastard child of an unholy marriage between power-politics and hatred for the Black man who now occupies the oval office.

Can you say "Racism and fear are useful tools for getting folks to believe that horse manure is a gourmet meal"?

I knew you could.

Click the link below to read how President Obama could outmaneuver the fear and hate-mongers.

An Escape Hatch for the Debt Ceiling

Political Theater

Now Playing:

President Obama vs. the GOP Snow-Jobbers

(with a supporting cast of blue-dog Democrats)

Link to Source

How The Pledge Works

This short video shows the relationship between GOP members of Congress and Grover Norquist.