xtcian

Ian on NPR! Cool! Please, please, please be sure to let us know when it airs. Hey, I think it is time to consult with an intellectual property attorney. I don't like how your words and ideas have been cut and pasted and circulated as an "anonymous" letter. Credit must be given where credit is due! Anyway, looks like you have created quite a stir. . .

Yeah--Ian on NPR! Way to go, dude. In this era of any-publicity-is-good-publicity, surely this exposure will help you.

It's not surprising at all that so many conservatives missed the joke. They're used to Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly and TV; they've been systematically dumbed-down to the point that they're no longer any good with the written word.

Without shouting, a laugh track, fart jokes or a kick in the crotch, irony and sarcasm sail right over their heads.

But we can keep trying. If at first you don't succeed, right?

Or should that be: "if at first you don't *secede*?"

The Republicans now offer a very limited view of what a moral person is. The suggestion is that a family man who owns a couple of gas-guzzling cars, several homes, a motor-yacht and a private plane, who avoids taxes by clever siting of his company, and who can't stand "queers" and foreigners, yet goes to church twice a week, is living an ideal moral life. In fact, for many of us, he would be about the least moral example we could think of.

As you all know last week the greatest democracy of the world (if not the universe) held another passion filled election. This thrilling contest put a neo-con, multinational backed, Christian against , er, Bush. Thanks to it's fabulous democratic record, it's unparalleled freedom and, lets not forget, God's personal support, we were able to see a free and fair election. Any talk of flawed electoral machines, disenfranchisement among black and Hispanic voters, media bias, legal subterfuge and of thousands of voters taken of the electoral rolls is purely communist propaganda.
Seeing as we were all particularly lucky we will see our favorite dictator, George W Bush, win another term in office and thus our great crusade against all evil (particularly if it involves people with slightly darker skin) will continue for years to come. Who knows, we may be able to bomb loads of new and exotic countries like Iran, Syria or North Korea. We will be able to kill thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of little chocolate colored terrorists, some of them only children. We will be able to liberate millions of selfish Arabs of their oil while flooding their countries with good ol uncle Sam’s materialistic products. And if we grovel and beg enough our soldiers will be able to go to war as well. Our own brave lads will be able to kill and mutilate their very own personal victims. And of course our proud countries will be then allowed to stuff themselves at the collective pig trough called reconstruction.
Those benevolent organisations at the pentagon may even back a dozen or so new military coups around the world so that business and free market policies can triumph over those pesky communists who seek to redistribute wealth or simply feed the poor. All those friendly CIA agents will share their knowledge by teaching local intelligence agents all the fabulous intricacies of topics as diverse as the most efficient torture methods and novel ways of intimidating trade unionists.
If we are particularly lucky we will also see a new rise in born again Christian, bible belt morals. All those wicked gays, abortionists and single mothers will be burned at the stake like in the good old times while the bible will replace all those impertinent history and biology books in school. God will look down on his chosen people with pride and angels will descend amongst our overlords amongst cheers of hallelujah! and USA, USA!
Thus, fellow underlings of the american empire it is time to rejoice! Our masters are about to choose which right wing politician will lead them in to another four years of shaping our inferior and surpassed culture in to the image of their own superior and god blessed society. Oh, how I envy my english friends especially. You are so lucky to be america's favourite lap dog amongst the whole pack of yappering and begging mongrels that make up our respective governments. How happy will your leader Blair be when his master is re-elected for another term! What other wacky adventures will they be able to take together! What other wonderful and exotic countries will they be able to bomb back to the stone age!
In conclusion, my friends, this posting is to remind you all to spare a moment tonight to think about how lucky you are and how wonderful the world is. Whatever happens on Tuesday we have another four years of crusading before us, another decade of mindless pre-emptive strikes, another century of american rule.
Long live our masters from across the seas, long live the USA!

Hi.. I too am confounded by the anger on the winning side when they now hold both houses, the white house, and soon the supreme court.
I have never traveled much in America until the last 3 years when I have done some long driving tours. I was astounded by the deep vastness of our great counrty. I thought back to the times of early white western settlers and how I just couldn't understand with all this vastness that we couldn't have shared more or better found a way to get along with the Indians.
The sad story is as Bob Weir says.. "too much of everything is just enough" is pervasive in our society.
Not until we have it all are we happy and then we realize we don't have anyone to play with. Does this also apply to our standing in the world now?

There was also a mention in Newsday:

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/columnists/ny-etcolumn4035371nov10,0,311852.column?coll=ny-entertainment-columnists

I want to say hi to Laurie from Manly Dorm because I always like your posts.

As for the conservatives being sore winners, some of them probably feel that we are just not "getting" why we lost. I do want to understand the lessons of the election...but that doesn't involve coddling homophobes, etc. I want to get beyond my rhetoric and assumptions IF they're willing to do the same.

To all: an apology in advance for yet another rant.

To "U.S, Ally": So many of the bad spellers and sore winners on the right have missed the irony and humor in Ian's original post, that I'm sure many of them will miss the irony in yours. (sigh)

To Kevin and his note on the vastness of our country: For the past ten years I have made about seven or eight cross-country drives, mostly alone, and whenever possible have taken my time in order to appreciate what we have here. There is every imaginable terrain, every conceivable kind of mountain, city, hamlet, plain, canyon, and roadway. And a wide and wonderful diversity of people. We are so lucky to be part of it all, even as cyber-mental-emotional residents of Coastopia.

But this land and our history deserve better than they are getting at the moment. Our inspired (and yes, human and flawed, but inspired nonetheless) founding fathers gave us the treasure map which is our constitution (no reference to the upcoming movie fantasy). If you read enough about those men (and women (see Cokie Roberts' book on the founding mothers), you will see them as real people: passionate, brave, imperfect, sometimes petty, but fired by a "cause," that of starting a new nation, conceived in liberty etc. etc.

We need to accept one another, do our best to understand one another (even the bible belters), but we need to fight to give this amazing, glorious, spectacular country and all its people the liberty and respect those early leaders were fighting for. It is an uphill road, if the "moral" rightwingers cannot let go of the idea of making everyone and everything conform to their interpretation of scripture. But we have to try. We have to somehow take away the fear factor. No easy thing, but worth working toward.

What concerns me is not so much Iraq, the economy, the environment--though I'm horrified by what has become of all those. My principle concern is that we need a new way to vote, on every level. I could do a whole essay on some of the things I think need to happen, but I'll spare y'all from wading through that on this forum. Suffice it to say that the process is not just flawed. It is broken. It is a sinkhole.... every part of it, from the barrage of negative ads to the morass that is campaign financing, to the stranglehold of the corporations on the candidates and the media, to the selling of fear to as a campaign strategy, to the electronic no-paper-trail voting machines, and everything in between.

Until that is fixed, the other problems will never be dealt with in the way this magnificent country and her diverse and wonderful people deserve.

My head and my heart are in Coastopia, and I'll wear my T shirt prooudly. But my version of Coastopia includes all the compassionate, open-minded, free-thinking, and, in my view, very moral people in Coast-to-coastopia.

Meanwhile, I will continue to offer my ancient, creaky mind and body, in whatever way I can, to the cause of fixing what ails us.

I may have missed something,If so never mind...Anyway how come Wisconsin and Michigan aren't on the Coastopia Map? or the T shirt? They went Blue didn't they? That would make for a far more substatial Great lakes coastal region. Aren't you gonna revamp Detroit for all those Hybrids? And the Cheese damnit! Don't forget the CHEESE!

Hi to you, too, CL. I like your posts as well.

To Ian's Mom: please consider creating a blog of your own. . . I would love to read it everyday. Judging from Ian's comments section, you have quite a fan base already!

They're cracker assholes, that's what they are. and they'll never be happy until there's gas ovens in Guantanamo, and maybe not even then.

And they think we look down on them because of where they live, or because of their income, or because of the educations they may or may not have, or even because they're WHITE for God's sake, and "white men are the last minority group who can be legally disciminated against with impugnity" [sic].

Well, we don't. We look down on them because they're cracker assholes.

There are rural white folks, maybe in the lower income brackets, maybe whose schools aren't of the best, maybe they have a good religious upbringing, and they think for themselves, work hard, enjoy bluegrass and other good music and eat Cajun and barbecue and other good food, a lot of which they grew or caught themselves, they join unions, get involved in the community, help each other out, think good thoughts, live by the Gospels, treat others as equals, respect the whole Constitution, and vote Democrat.

And then there are Crackers.

Racist, fundagelical, gap-toothed, beer-bellied, pigeon-chested, red-necked, hypocritical, snarling, smirking, jeering, "lookat my white sheet", pellagra-suffering, lynching, wife-beating, pig-fucking, Coors-drinking, bellyflopping, Civil war-reminicing, Limbaugh-listening, Newt-voting, date-raping, sister-marrying, yee-hawing, fag-bashing, grit-cooking, Bible on the bedstand, Penthouse hidden in the basement, Supporting cast of "Deliverance", shitkicking, "You liberals all gonna die", belching contest-winning, kill-em-all, Dale Earnhart-died-for-your-sins, soul-all-black-and-shiveled-like-a-coal-miner's-lung, petty, cruel, vicious, loudmouthed, misanthropic, chaw-spitting, Semper Fi-tattooed, swerve-to-hit-the-varmint-in-the-road, fuckhead Republican Cracker Assholes.

And they get all hot under the collar because we think we're better than they are. Well, fuck you, crackers. Maybe we are better than you! I've made my efforts to understand your culture and respect our differences and mind my own business, and I've been kicked in the balls for it every goddam time! And I'm sick of playing nice. I can kick ass now, because finally, you've made me hate, just like you!

It ain't about skin color, education, location or wealth. It's about character.

George has a good point- Wisconsin was a blue state too. And they got the CHEESE...and cheese curds...Plus my family all lives there and even though they'd come to Coastopia kicking and screaming, can they come too?

Easy on the grits, pal. The finest breakfast (and beyond breakfast, with shrimp and bacon) food in the South should not be a pawn in any political system.

When you link food and politics, you're playing with [insert cooking-based pun here]. For example, I'm sure Ian is regretting the "hazelnut latte" reference in his original post. It's the one one phrase that everyone who has picked up the "story" has quoted and seems to stand in for a whole host of reasons to dismiss the entire essay for some people.

To answer George's query: MI was left off because they passed an anti-gay-marriage amendments - or something like that. I suspect WI was the same, but I'm too lazy to look at last week's comments to verify.

To Piglet:
[Insert advance apology for rant/lecture here.]
I wish I could agree with you, but after spending a substantial amount of time with supporters of GWB I am pained to say that many of them are far more complex and intelligent than you're giving credit for.
Talking with my family in rural NC I am struck by how little information they have at their disposal (not everyone lives on the internet) and how willing they are to beleive the misinformation that is fed them by the right. They are mostly just not interested enough in the political process and too busy with their day-to-day lives. It is possible for intelligent people to still be threatened by cultures that they are unfamiliar with, especially if they think that the media and democrats are pandering to those minorities in an attempt to build a political base of power.

On the other hand, speaking with associates that are fiscal conservatives and social moderates, I find them voting for Bush based on their desire to return to the Reagan years. None of these people are as stupid, hate-filled or racist as we'd like to claim, they just have come to different concludions based on different worldviews.

If we're going to change the world, it's important that we see it for what it is and not create a caricature that only serves to deepen the hole we're in.
[end rant, with apologies for the disjointed nature of my writing]

Ian: any word on whether we'll be able to get the Soy hazelnut lattes I requested?

Lindsay's right, the "hazelnut latte" line has become something of an albatross. Keep in mind it was written late at night, and I actually love hazelnut lattes (I'm drinking one right freakin' now - soy indeed, Greg).

Carla, Wisconsin, of course, is in - but the whole map thing got away from me before I could do anything about it.

Piglet - nice rant! You too, mom!

Ian et al.,

First, congrats on getting the conversation going, Ian. The email I sent to Michael Moore the other day came back because his inbox was full. Now I have no worries that he'll find out about your idea...which some are taking far too seriously.

Also, I have to tell you that I proudly wore my t-shirt today, which is, by the way, supremely comfy and sexy. I was in a rather large, crowded mall and wondered if anyone would say anything. The only reaction I got was from the guy at the Thai counter in the food court. He first had trouble reading "I seceded." I'm still not sure he got it because when I said, "Yes, because of the re-election of George Bush," he made me give him three high-fives! "Yes, yes!" he said. "My wife is very upset with me, she has me sleeping on the couch because of it." As a cultural exchange I'm not sure this was ideal. I'm afraid he might have thought "secede" was "succeed."

Just thought I'd share.

And everyone (you know who you are), thank you for your thoughtful comments about all of this. It really has helped and has made me see what we're up against.

Cheryl - I purposely made the front small, so it could be subtle, and get people interested.

Also, it means they are staring at your nortons. Sorry about that!

Ian--actually the type is well above my "nortons," as you call them, so I'm not worried about that. Staring of this kind is okay by me. Clever to make the type that size...

I think there's a large and well funded lobby in California that would be offended by certain folks' suggestion here that, without Wisconsin, Coastopia would be lacking somehow for cheese. With regard to California, says one TV ad beamed 50 times into fifty million homes, "It's the cheese" --fullstop. That said, I don't think I've ever had a decent California cheddar and the campaign's color theme is yellow.
http://www.realcaliforniacheese.com/

Check this out--not a Coastopia, but an urban archipelago.

http://www.thestranger.com/current/feature.html

Ian,

You've put Coastopia on the mat, literally.
I love the satire and it is a bit scary the ones that don't get that part of it. ouch!

I'm not kidding about taxing the pharmaceutical companies for their endless ads to pay for Healthcare. Between those and the political ads I've had about enough of T.V until 2007. Bring on the pole tax baby!!!!

Best wishes, Lori

Your Nov. 2nd Fort Sumter is still being held down ably by that Ishtar (does that mean peace?), her Dad Dan, and all of the other Washington, whatever that means now. I think you'll survive the mortar rounds from the normal and abnormally moronic visitors, but the site-dialogue was (and in the real world will continue to be) rabid and really rattling.
Gotta get a tarheel fans only password (NODOOK) for regular republican in-droppers, and not these eerie eavesdroppers. Seriously, hasn't Bubba been used up as a real name for people? Didn't Forrest wring all the good out of that name that he could in the movie about his life? Wasn't there at some point a ridiculous commenter named BubbaBob for real? I don't know, I had to secede and sever myself from that conversation.

anyway, Thanx for starting such a great and necessary national bowel movement wherein Coastopians (and not in a boasting way) can claim innocence in our, uh the nation's 'decision'.

Viva Coastopia, Vast Cornucopia of like and high mindedness.

I hear you Ian, but I don't agree with your regret today "Looking at it now, there's plenty of clunky language I'd change." I wouldn't ... it was a rant, and that's what made it successful (feel free to have a few more now and then).

As for hazelnut lattes ... I thought your point was: this will be a fun, civilized, relaxed place. I didn't take it to mean effete and snooty. But then, we read into things what we want to hear right? If nothing else, the various comments so far have shown that !!

Cullen,

To answer your question, The other Washington is a nickname Washingtonians have used for themselves .
Say any Washingtonian is travelling on Ian's side of Coastopia. The conversation would go like this:

Where are you from?

I'm from Washington.

Oh I used to live in Silver Spring.

NO, the OTHER Washington.

Once when I was registering at a hotel on the East Coast, The clerk asks my name and where I was from. She's faithfully typing in the information and asks, now where are you from again? Olympia Washington....oh cripes she replies, she had typed in my name as Olympia Washington. Holy cow that's the Capital here.
We had a good laugh over it.

Have you seen this explanation of the election. The facts explain it all.

The proof is in the pudding! (so they say)

Maybe we should put all of our efforts into education!!!

Ranked State's Average IQ/Voted for :

(1) Connecticut................113 Kerry
(2) Massachusetts..........111 Kerry
(3) New Jersey................111 Kerry
(4) New York....................109 Kerry
(5) Rhode Island..............107 Kerry
(6) Hawaii....................... 106 Kerry
(7) Maryland.....................105 Kerry
(8) New Hampshire..........105 Kerry
(9) Illinois...........................104 Kerry
(10) Delaware..................103 Kerry
(11) Minnesota.................102 Kerry
(12) Vermont....................102 Kerry
(13) Washington..............102 Kerry
(14) California..................101 Kerry
(15) Pennsylvania............101 Kerry
(16) Maine........................100 Kerry
(17) Virginia.....................100 Bush
(18) Wisconsin.................100 Kerry
(19) Colorado...................99 Bush
(20) Iowa...........................99 undecided (Bush)
(21) Michigan...................99 Kerry
(22) Nevada.....................99 Bush
(23) Ohio..........................99 undecided (Bush)
(24) Oregon......................99 Kerry
(25) Alaska......................98 Bush
(26) Florida......................98 Bush
(27) Missouri....................98 Bush
(28) Kansas......................96 Bush
(29) Nebraska..................95 Bush
(30) Arizona......................94 Bush
(31) Indiana......................94 Bush
(32) Tennessee...............94 Bush
(33) North Carolina.........93 Bush
(34) West Virginia..........93 Bush
(35) Arkansas.................92 Bush
(36) Georgia...................92 Bush
(37) Kentucky..................92 Bush
(38) New Mexico.............92 undecided (Bush)
(39) North Dakota...........92 Bush
(40) Texas........................92 Bush
(41) Alabama..................90 Bush
(42) Louisiana.................90 Bush
(43) Montana...................90 Bush
(44) Oklahoma................90 Bush
(45) South Dakota..........90 Bush
(46) South Carolina........89 Bush
(47) Wyoming..................89 Bush
(48) Idaho........................87 Bush
(49) Utah.........................87 Bush
(50) Mississippi..............85 Bush

Not only that, Susie, but check this out...

STATE 2004 VOTE AVERAGE BENCH PRESS
MS BUSH 85
AR BUSH 86
ND BUSH 88
OK BUSH 93
WV BUSH 95
WY BUSH 95
UT BUSH 98
KY BUSH 101
LA BUSH 102
AL BUSH 104
KS BUSH 105
DE KERRY 110
NB BUSH 111
AZ BUSH 112
IN BUSH 113
NV BUSH 113
HI KERRY 114
IO BUSH 116
CT KERRY 117
MN KERRY 119
MO BUSH 120
TN BUSH 120
SD BUSH 120
RI KERRY 121
MT BUSH 122
DC KERRY 122
MD KERRY 122
VA BUSH 124
CO BUSH 125
WI KERRY 125
NH KERRY 125
GA BUSH 125
OH BUSH 127
ID BUSH 128
FL BUSH 129
NC BUSH 129
SC BUSH 129
WA KERRY 132
IL KERRY 136
ME KERRY 137
NM BUSH 137
MA KERRY 143
AK BUSH 148
VT KERRY 151
PA KERRY 155
MI KERRY 162
OR KERRY 169
TX BUSH 175
NY KERRY 188
NJ KERRY 193
CA KERRY 206

We Coastopians are not only smarter, but we're stronger, too.

We also have better senses of humor, more refined culture, better sex lives, and softer bathroom tissue.

Ishie, Dan et all,

I reckon you closed out the Coasta-peons comment board so I'll post here....

Came across this rant and left a mouthfull of French Market(w/honey & coffeemate) on my keyboard! This is the mother of all red-state-rants (R3).

Pretty much says it all for me...

Ishie- please take a "stab" at it. No hollow points, please?

Your buddy (remember- buddy is only 1/2 a word!),

badbobusnret
off "Jousting with Sam & Charlie"

Living on the southern most point, of the reddest of counties, in a blue state, below the Mason-Dixon line!
-------------------------------------------
Whatcha gonna do

Okay, is anybody but me sick yet of the Left’s floundering and flailing about, trying to find any way they possibly can to blame somebody else for their failure to espouse a message remotely palatable to the majority of eligible American voters? Is anybody but me wishing right about now that somebody would clong them upside the head with a shovel and say, “Look, morons, here’s the deal….”?

Well, let’s try this then. Let’s stipulate for the sake of argument that everything the Left claims to fear about the Bush admin and mainstream red-state America is true.

Yep, that’s right, you commie bastiches, we’re coming for you. It’s only a matter of time now until you hear that late-night knock on the door you’ve been dreading all along. Our jack-booted gendarmerie is going to be working overtime rounding up every non-white and non-rich subject of our fascist regime, and we’re going to be baking every last one of you into pies that we’ll then refuse to share with the poor and hungry. We’ll be baking those pies in coal-fired ovens, and those ovens will be devoid of any sort of exhaust-scrubber whatever, because we want to release all the toxic gases and chemicals we can into the atmosphere.

We’ll be spiking the rivers with DDT, alar, thalidomide, and whatever other chemical bugaboos we can think of so as to pollute the drinking water, too. We’ll cram the landfills (which will be more numerous than ever) with deadly silicon breast implants, and we’re going to wipe our asses with copies of the Kyoto Treaty, after which we’ll staple the soiled pages to your foreheads. Halliburton will be sending you the bill for that, too; we’ll call it “cosmetic surgery” and charge a rate tied to the market price for the harvested, tanned, and cured pelts of starving homeless Americans, whose numbers will be rocketing even higher than those for the aforementioned landfills, which is where said homeless will be forced to live while we hunt them down for sport.

We’re going to subjugate the entire world through violence and capitalist exploitation. We’ll be sending our duped, mindless killerbot soldiers to the remotest corners of the Earth to deny freedom to every little brown person currently enjoying an idyllic, bucolic existence in harmony with unspoiled nature, every racial, religious, and cultural minority who has thus far lived relatively free of the sting of our rapacious lash. We’re all going to get rich from it, and we’re going to make the poor noble Bob Cratchets and Tiny Tims of the world pay for our sumptuous lives of piggish, rankly self-indulgent consumerism, and then we’re going to kill them when we’ve bled them completely dry.

Yep, it’s all true, every bit of it; the New Gulags, which we Nazified Tolkien geeks like to refer to as Barad Ashcroft, or just Shrubthanc, have been under construction since early 2001 and are almost ready to open for business. The ultra-right-wing corporate media establishment has known all along, and have been helping us cover it all up, and now it’s too late; there’s nothing you can do to stop us. You all are going to be fed into the ovens by the millions, and we’re going to destroy the environment and nuke the Third World, and it’s all going to be done because Jesus told us to, and that’s the only reason we’re ever going to need. Because hey, we’re stupid.

Michael Moore? Dead soon, at our hands, as punishment for daring to dissent. Karen Finley? Ditto. Hillary Clinton? She’ll be crawling around our (segregated) private club on all fours in a Playboy Bunny costume, forced to beg for the privilege of bringing us drinks, dropping grapes into our mouths, and mopping the floors with her hair—just to remind any of you other strong, uppity women who might get ideas about overturning the established patriarchal order who’s really in charge here. Other younger, more attractive women will be forced into sexual slavery, and abortion will absolutely not be an option for dealing with the inevitable unwanted pregnancies that will result. Rusty coathangers will be available at the door, although using them will be punishable by electrocution—electricity provided by the nuke plants that will be on every corner and completely unregulated and unsafe. But it’s just as well that they are our slaves, because there ain’t gonna be no welfare to help them out, and they’re not going to be allowed to work at anything other than pleasing their oppressors.

We’ll be burning the UN HQ in New York down, of course, and we’ll be locking all the delegates inside the building before we set it alight. Then we’ll be invading France, just to teach ‘em a lesson about how we Texas cowboys do bidness. The world’s oil, of course, is ours, and we’ll be boiling tons of it and pouring it over the heads of those who refuse to acknowledge our Xtian God. There’ll be no stem cell research, there’ll be no health care at all for the poor (whose numbers we will be increasing by every means we can think of), and if you dare to complain about life in the New Conservative Amerikkka, we’re going to kill you for it.

All of that: so stipulated. Now, the question for you moonbat Lefty baglappers: what the hell are you going to do about it?

I mean, seriously; if you truly believe that all this is now in the process of happening right before your very eyes, doesn’t it become incumbent upon you, as the most basic imaginable of moral obligations, to do something to prevent it, or overturn it? I mean, obviously, you tried peaceful means of stopping us, but that didn’t work—because us right-wingnuts rigged the election and disenfranchised everybody. And you can’t go to the courts because they’re in the Bushitler’s pocket too, all the way up to the Supreme Court, which you’ve been saying for four years now illegally handed him the White House after the tainted 2000 “election.” So your last legal, nonviolent means of resistance has been taken away from you, and you can’t even count on the media to publicize the reality of what’s going on because of their right-wing slant, their fondness for the status quo, and of course the fact that they’re really nothing but money-grubbing corporations themselves whose only concern is the bottom line.

So what’s left, Lefties? Where do you go from here? What are you gonna do about it?

I’ll tell you what you’re going to do about it: you’re not going to do one damned thing but continue with your whining, that’s what, and it’s not because deep down you’re all cowards either. It’s because deep down, you know you’re full of shit. You don’t even believe half the stuff you’re currently crying about yourselves.

Because if you did, you wouldn’t be talking about it. You wouldn’t be writing whiny letters to the editor; you wouldn’t be fearfully mincing down to the Canadian Consulate to half-seriously inquire about moving; you wouldn’t be sitting in coffee houses denouncing the moronic inhabitants of Jesusland with your fellow smug, self-satisfied pseudo-hip doofuses. You’d be gearing up and arming yourselves for the fight of your lives. And much to your surprise, you’d have a lot of us over here on the right offering to help load mags.

And that’s why you’re going to keep right on losing elections. If even one third of what you say was true, you’d have Americans of every political stripe rushing to your side to man the barricades. But it isn’t anything like true, and we all know it, and we’ve all known it ever since you tried to claim that proposed reductions in the annual rate of increase of various federal budget items during the Reagan years were actually heartless “slashing” of the budget by people who wanted poor people to die. We’ve known it ever since you railed during the Clinton years about how the welfare reform forced on him by the evil Gingrich Repubs amounted to cultural and economic genocide, and then watched as hordes of welfare cheats—who you always claimed didn’t exist—were quietly expunged from the rolls and went back to work.

In other words, you’re all hype and no hump. Your party has become the Chicken Little Party, weeping and wailing about disaster, catastrophe, and the end of the world as we know it every time a new idea for running the government gets put forth by someone who isn’t a card-carrying liberal.

And the proof is in the pudding. Your delirious ideas don’t even inspire your like-minded cohorts—those who really do believe the sky is falling—to get out and fight to save their very lives; you certainly aren’t going to inspire a majority of Americans to rally to your banner if you can’t even get your own true believers off their asses and into the streets. That’s the problem with what you people used to like to call “false consciousness,” which is exactly what you’re now reduced to peddling. Your hysteria is based on plain and simple untruths, and nobody is willing to go out there and risk injury or death for something they know in their hearts is a lie. There ain’t gonna be any Revolution, televised or otherwise, because too many of us know that none is really called for, and the more you try to promote an addle-pated apocalyptic vision of a theocratic MegaMurrika the more the rest of us just sit back and wonder what the hell you’re talking about, as we watch life gradually improve for more and more of us despite your doomsaying.

Afghanis just voted, in the first real free election they’ve ever had; they didn’t vote in any Lefty flamethrower, and they didn’t vote in any Islamist terrorist either. And this occurred only a couple of years after we all watched you people wax apoplectic about the coming disastrous “quagmire.” Well, if that’s a quagmire, most of us figure the world could do with a few more of ‘em. It didn’t come cheap, and it didn’t come easy, but it came anyway, and no thanks to any of you, either.

And the same thing is going to happen in Iraq soon; the ordinary people you claim to be concerned about will see how their lives have improved since Saddam’s removal, and, despite all your supposed “concern” for their welfare, they’re also going to remember who it was who bitched and whined about the only recent President who was willing to lift a finger and take a political risk to help make it so.

And you smarmily call yourselves the “reality-based community.” What a laugh that is.

And that’s what it all comes down to, really. Those of us who do have some adult grasp of reality are sitting back and laughing at you and your dipsomaniacal ravings. You don’t inspire trust and confidence in your ability to run the world’s only remaining superpower, because you can’t resist the adolescent urge to hyperbolize every last little thing. Just as a small example, look at your pals in the liberal MSM. There are no mere “problems”; instead, we’re deluged with one “crisis” after another in their newspapers and on TV. You’re like little kids whose experience of the world is so limited as to define the boundaries of your intellect far too narrowly to ever be trusted with the responsibility of governing a nation.

Grow up, Chicken Little. Lead, follow, or get out of the friggin’ way. Or, at the very least, you can stop trying to get the rest of us to guzzle a bunch of Kool-Aid that you can’t even swallow yourselves.
http://coldfury.com/index.php?p=5071

Posted by badbobusnret at November 14, 2004 07:06 AM

(Oh badbo, please. Put a cork in it. We had to listen to the sputtering of Gingrich and the screeching of that harpy, Coulter. Get a sense of humor and move along.)

Now, Ian. Are you seriously going to be on Morning Edition? Because the Morning Edition anchor in Chicago is a very good pal and will get me a tape of you. When will you be on?

The North shall rise again!

Ukraine gets it:

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=564&ncid=564&e=3&u=/nm/20041201/ts_nm/ukraine_dc_206

"(Oh badbo, please. Put a cork in it. We had to listen to the sputtering of Gingrich and the screeching of that harpy, Coulter. Get a sense of humor and move along.)"

Damn, why didn't I think of that??

"(Oh badbo, please. Put a cork in it. We had to listen to the sputtering of Gingrich and the screeching of that harpy, Coulter. Get a sense of humor and move along.)"

Damn, why didn't I think of that??
----------------------------------------

That's rich, coming from you, Ishie.

The rest of us are subjected to the long-winded (extremely so!) empty rhetoric between you, Randall and Patriot...and when B2 fires off a round, he should put a cork in it??

Please.

B2 has a great sense of humor...sarcastic, sure...makes it interesting.

B2: Well said!

Ishie,

Good points about the lyrics of music dating back some centuries (and probably longer). But a key difference would be the proliferation of that severly negative media and the access that young children have to those songs thanks to the internet and the materialistic society we now live in.

Take a child or an adult with a borderline mental problem (or verified mental problems like I believe the Columbine killers were), deluge them with negative lyrics about killing (that they can easily access through the internet) and let them practice with violent video games about killing people (see Lt. Colonel David Grossman's work as previously mentioned) and I'd say you have a good recipe for disaster. Thanks to the evolution of media, people have such easier access to this stuff, therefore it is much more prevalent and I would say that's a reflection of society and the moral decay that has happened in the last couple decades.

"That's rich, coming from you, Ishie."

Thank you!

"The rest of us are subjected to the long-winded (extremely so!) empty rhetoric between you, Randall and Patriot...and when B2 fires off a round, he should put a cork in it??"

I was actually making fun of myself. I could (and did) answer things point by point, taking my time and yours to hash things out, or I could have, from the start, told them all to stuff a cork in it before I got started, and they could have appropriately done the same, saving us all a lot of time and energy. I wasn't specifically thinking of B2, but I have also answered his posts with my typical long-windedness, though I appreciate his humor and have enjoyed many of his articles.

But bravo for the sentiment. I'm weeping, truly.

Ishie

"Take a child or an adult with a borderline mental problem (or verified mental problems like I believe the Columbine killers were), deluge them with negative lyrics about killing (that they can easily access through the internet) and let them practice with violent video games about killing people..."

Visit the 50s, deluge these people with popular murder ballads, give them real weapons as Christmas presents (which was far more popular back then), teach them to hunt, and you have the same problem, except you've already armed them. Probably something else. Lack of responsibility and parental control, perhaps?

Oh, apologies on assuming you were a Christian. Your points are the exact same ones made by the Religious Right with similar terminology.

On the body belonging to the owner, keep in mind that illegal drugs are illegal outside or inside the body. Switchblades are no more legal in CA if you stuff them in a body cavity, so it is not a fair comparison to abortion.

Ishie

"Visit the 50s, deluge these people with popular murder ballads, give them real weapons as Christmas presents (which was far more popular back then), teach them to hunt, and you have the same problem, except you've already armed them. Probably something else. Lack of responsibility and parental control, perhaps?"

It seems like you're almost agreeing with me. Prior to a couple decades ago, this stuff was not as prevalent thanks to technology. Hunting was much more common back then, but usually with adult supervision, unlike the video games so popular today. Lack of responsibility by parents may be part of it (see all of the children drowning in swimming pools, sometimes even when they have fences with the gates propped open, or children who shoot themselves or other kids because their parents or other adults leave firearms unsecured,etc.), but as stated before (and I don't think you've disputed it), there's no way the government can ensure that all parents in the country are being responsible. They can help keep our environment cleaner, though, as the FCC has made somewhat of an attempt to recently (much to the consternation of Howard Stern).

"Oh, apologies on assuming you were a Christian."

No problem. Now if we can get you to see how unwise that is along with other similar methods like extrapolating, perceiving insinuations or implications or reading between the lines, especially when it comes to the constitution.

"On the body belonging to the owner, keep in mind that illegal drugs are illegal outside or inside the body."

I disagree that it's not a good comparison. It shows there are other examples that prove you can't do with your body what you want (you didn't respond to the suicide point as the other example I gave) and with these examples, you'd only be effecting yourself instead of another life like abortion.

"It seems like you're almost agreeing with me. Prior to a couple decades ago, this stuff was not as prevalent thanks to technology. Hunting was much more common back then, but usually with adult supervision, unlike the video games so popular today."

I think the technology isn't as much of an issue, because the songs were not hard to come by. They were on the radio, kids knew violent silly songs in schools; it isn't like they were never exposed to it.

For target practice (not as much hunting), kids were typically shown how to use weapons, but shooting birds in the woods or more, cans off fences was kind of part of "playing outside" for weapons like the .22 rifle.

I'm all for adult supervision. What I am not for is the government trying to raise all kids and particularly adults based on the irresponsibility of parents by cleaning airwaves for me, or banning violent video games that *I* enjoy playing. There needs to be a greater crackdown on parental irresponsibility rather than making excuses all the time.

One thing often overlooked in this context that might help a lot is class size. Teachers used to catch a lot of things. Increased class size seems to correlate with when discipline problems starting being met with psychiatric prescriptions rather than discipline, conferences/counseling (to determine home conditions, often linked to kids acting out), and so forth. There has been negligance in child raising forever, but we need to work harder on fixing the situation where it is (at home) rather than simply Disnefying the airwaves and assuming kids left to their own devices will be fine as long as they aren't influenced by violent or sexual media.

While we're at it, how are you planning to police the internet?

Ishie

"No problem. Now if we can get you to see how unwise that is..."

Perhaps "we" need to stop patronizing me. I'm not a recruit for your side, and I really don't care how much potential you think I have or whether I'm a "lost cause" to the conservative agenda.

"I disagree that it's not a good comparison. It shows there are other examples that prove you can't do with your body what you want"

Any that involve something that can ONLY happen to a woman as the result of either a legal activity or an act that makes her the victim of a violent crime? Any that force a person to carry something that drains their system unwanted, using their bodies as incubators? Any that cause a person (only a woman) to change shape, undergo social stigma, risk discrimination at work, cause financial hardship?

Didn't think so.

"(you didn't respond to the suicide point as the other example I gave) and with these examples, you'd only be effecting yourself instead of another life like abortion."

That's actually because I think people have a right to hurt themselves if they want to. My problem with SOME illegal drugs is the repeatedly cause people to hurt others (like crack and acid). For the others, I don't think they should be illegal to adults either. Though it grates me, that includes suicide. My life has been directly affected by my grandmother's suicide, and I think suicide in people who are not in active dying pain is a selfish, horrible act, but it's also your life and your body.

By the way, do you think abortion should be illegal at ANY stage? Like in the beginning when you have a literal cluster of cells?

Ishie

Windrider/Ishie,

The cork has de-popped! (nah, that can't be right).

Who ? Me...? Sarcastic amongst Coastopians? Tell me it ain't so!

Ishie was just baiting me to see if I was still around. I are! I think she digs me! Sort of amazed she hasn't taken the bait on my last post re the B2 "cold cock" list of Rall, Scheer and Van den Huevel!

I have got to say we have reached a statis here. Hearts and minds are not being won in discussions of religion or with discussions on the constitution! Both can be interpreted multiple ways. In my way of thinking one requires faith and the other requires simple reading comprehension..... If you have neither of these talents they shouldn't be discussed! I have attempted to steer the conversation (herding Coastopians is like herding cats!) into a security issues discussion about the things we all can agree on like- we don't want to die from terrorists. But alas, I have not read one coherent post regarding the matter. It's either the Bush administration's fault the "evil ones" attacked us (huh?) or it's the redstates fault somehow (double huh?) Very little on the enemy or his nature.

Coastopians are a fairly young lot and they have been taught (almost programmed really) to only viewing three things as truly evil and WORTHY of being judgemental of. They are:

1. NAZIs
2. smoking
3. polluters

and oh yeah---- those who ARE judgemental!

On everything else they attempt to understand the both sides of the issue. To this end they consider themselves more enlightened then us redzoners (or so they think...)

I submit the real reason they don't want to discuss this issue is they may "feel" the "evil ones" are like Nazis' but they also feel compelled to try and understand them..After all this is how they have been programmed. Ishie is a little different, probably because as an Anthropology major she has studied a lot of different cultural "things". Her mind is partially open..... and I find endlessly amusing.

Enough soap-boxing for me..I don't want "Granny" to start tearing me apart for being a fighter pilot with a huge ego...
-----------------------
Erica the "shrink" said-

"About the folks in the "field" voting for their Commander-in-Chief (was it 3 out of 4??):"

I'd say it was probably more like 9 of 10 of the mil folks who actually voted. It's a fact that young folks predominate in the services and that yopung folks don't participate as we would expect.

"1. The folks in the field do not, for the most part, get much of the news "we" get, in spite of Internet access (I have spoken with returning soldiers about this fact). They don't know what W is doing/has done/what a CF he is making of things."

Not true. Again young folks don't watch/read as much news because most young people aren't informed....As far as the availability of the internet and media you are dead wrong. They have 20 times the access we had a short ten years ago!
Oh yeah- for you that don't know:

CF = "Cluster fuck" (it has nothing to do with group sex). Being in the Navy..and naturally an officer and gentleman we use the term "goat rope" to effect the same meaning...;-)

"2. They are indoctrinated from Day 1 in the military to support the C-in-C, and to obey all commands without question. Loyalty is ingrained; it would be highly unusual to see the (mostly younger - the older ones are developing minds of their own)troops NOT pledging undying devotion to the C-in-C or "The Cause". "

Sure Erica..we get our lobotomies right after we get our high and tights....you are being chavinistic here and you definetly must hate us. Folks- Erica is FOS (another mil acronym) on this one!
FOS= full o'shit

"3. Perhaps the most significant fact here: what we see operating is ther psychological phenomenon known as "cognitive dissonance". That is, it would be AWFULLY hard to get up every morning, day after day, for who knows how many days, pick up your rifle and grenades and whatever, face death every minute, and NOT BELIEVE 100% (or convince yourself that you do) in what you are doing and in the ability and wisdom of the person(s) who put you there. IT IS UNACCEPTABLE to put your life on the line every day FOR NOTHING !!!! One therefore MUST believe that, if one has to die or may die, that it is/was for a noble cause. It is absolutely humanly unacceptable to believe otherwise, and still be able to get up every day and do what we are asking our soldiers in Iraq to do. The same phenomenon can be said to operate with their families as well: a Mother or Father of a dead soldier must absolutely believe that their child has died for a noble cause, because to believe otherwise would condemn them to a life of internal torture and regret; the only peace they will "know" is that their child did not die for no reason. To oppose the C-in-C (in an election) would be seen as an admission (wrongly) of that did not support the country....the war... the military.... and by extension, their child. That, also, would be an unacceptable psychic burden."

Hmmmm...then it must be a "genetic thing" Erica, because I must have always had this "dissonance"... must of got it from my WWII paratrooper father and his father the WWI 7th cav horseman....

Did you ever think that you do it because it is your job that you have volunteered/trained for and that many others are depending on you?

I wonder if all those cops and fireman who rushed into the WTC buildings suffered from this also?

No sweety- YOU exist for nothing.

"And yes, I have been a psychologist, have worked with veterans for many years."

Which community college did you get your degree from? Hopefully those vets weren't damaged for life! Do you actually tell those poor folks your theories or do you just share them on the internet?

B2

Erica,

On your explanation of why the military voted the way it did, if that's true, then we should be able to look back at the other presidential elections and see a similar percentage of military votes for sitting Commander-in-Cheif, right? Maybe the Google-enlightened Ishie can help us out with a link or source that would confirm this.

Also, I've heard at least two soldiers interviewed on the radio that claim they have reasonable access to the media, I know that plenty of them can listen to Armed Forces Radio and each individual certainly knows whether or not they agree with what our country is doing over there. When you consider they have first hand knowledge of the death and destruction (or the other side of the coin is the gratitude and re-construction that doesn't get much press) going on over there, they could actually be considered more informed that most Americans who only get the negative side of what's going on.

I know I've also seen at least one and read a couple newspaper articles about some others who were wounded in Iraq and while they could easily milk their injury, the ones mentioned asked simply when they can return to their unit.

If your statement about cognitive dissonance was correct, then wouldn't there be only a small fraction of the military voting for the opposition? I know I've also seen a couple of soldiers in the field who were interviewed on camera and stated they were going to vote for Kerry.

B2

"Ishie was just baiting me to see if I was still around. I are! I think she digs me!"

Actually, I do, though I'm seeking treatment for it. Unfortunately the aromatherapy, pressure point yoga sessions won't start until next week. But yeah, you won me with those parody articles, I'm afraid. Hey, I'm cheap and easy.

"Sort of amazed she hasn't taken the bait on my last post re the B2 "cold cock" list of Rall, Scheer and Van den Huevel!"

Need to read up, I think. Ian directed us in here after we shorted out the other board, so I just got here.

"I have got to say we have reached a statis here."

Seems likely. To think my head only just got sore from beating my head against that wall.

"we don't want to die from terrorists."

Versus wanting to die from rabid bear cubs? ;)

"It's either the Bush administration's fault the "evil ones" attacked us (huh?) or it's the redstates fault somehow (double huh?) Very little on the enemy or his nature."

Uhh... not exactly. I think the current Iraq war aids current terrorist recruitment which may lead to having more "evil ones", increasing chances that one will slip through security. I'm too lazy to look up how many miles of border this country has, but it's a lot. For 9/11, at first I didn't think the administration held any blame, and then when some memos were coming out, it looked more like they dropped the ball. Doesn't mean they did it though. If a cop ignores information that says a murder is going to happen and a murder happens, while the cop gets heat, the murderer is still the one who did the crime. I know perfectly well that Bush did not order the planes into the buildings (though I know some extremists think he knew specifically). I also approved of most of his actions immediately following. The Patriot Act early worried me a lot, and then with the Iraq War, I figured he'd gone out of his mind.

I did comment on the nature of the enemy. It's not that I feel they're in any way in the right. I am sympathetic to a cause right up to the point before they decide to kill innocent people. What I think is crucial is trying to humanize the attackers sufficiently to gain an understanding of their logic and their motive, which can help prevent future attacks. We can look at past attacks off our soil and gain other perspectives, such as the points I made on the female suicide bombers out of Palestine. They don't fit into the neat mold of the article you linked to the other board.

Why not just classify them as evil? Because it isn't helpful to prevent terror. It just feels good. Many act like the terrorists are sitting around going "Now I will wreak chaos on the world to feed the black lusting of my soul!! Mwa ha ha ha ha ha!!!"

We need to understand that to them, they are the good against the Western Unspeakable Evil, and we need to figure out why, so we know where they are most likely to hit us and how. I don't think serial killers are good either, but sometimes to stop them, you need to think about "Filthy women with their filthy lies; I'll show them all". Otherwise you're just sitting in graveyards waiting for the "evil ones" to show up to sacrifice their nightly ration of puppies.

"Coastopians are a fairly young lot and they have been taught (almost programmed really) to only viewing three things as truly evil and WORTHY of being judgemental of. They are:"

Plenty is worthy of being judgmental of, such as terrorists. The question is, do we want to stop them or do we want to sit around convinced of our moral and proper judgments until they fly a plane up our asses?

"On everything else they attempt to understand the both sides of the issue."

Why is this a bad thing? For terrorists, it's a useful strategy. The FBI uses it all the time. For other issues, it keeps you from only getting your side's version of the story.

"I submit the real reason they don't want to discuss this issue is they may "feel" the "evil ones" are like Nazis' but they also feel compelled to try and understand them."

Understanding them is step one to not getting blown up. Pure self interest. I think killing children in Iraq is wrong for other reasons, but from a "don't want to get blown up" standpoint, it concerns me that we're opening recruiting grounds.

"Ishie is a little different, probably because as an Anthropology major she has studied a lot of
different cultural "things"."

Yup, though I stayed for the science. I'm actually not a fan of post-modernist "everyone's opinion is equally right even when based on fiction, because one person's fiction is another person's reality".

I'm interested (and trying to get into) criminalistics, and forensics is a hobby of mine, so I think of "both sides" of the terror issue more from a psychological profiling angle, and less from a "let's hear what the terrorists say! Maybe they have some good points!"

Perhaps due to the cultural anthro background, but more from my own experiences, I do have a low tolerance for "The ____ Mind" sort of headset because it is often bigoted, and usually inaccurate. My own experience with that has been categorizations of the "Atheist Mind" that have been so far from reality, they needed a plane ticket to get back. The "terrorist mind" might be more helpful, but needs to be divided into more subcategories than political and apocalyptic to be useful in fighting them. Those divisions will net us a number, I'm sure, but it only takes one to kill a lot of people, and it might be that pissed off woman no one bothered mentioning who had her whole family killed and wants revenge, who gets through. I don't really want to be on the bridge she nails. Do you?

"Her mind is partially open..... and I find endlessly amusing."

Should I ask?

Ishie

Patriot:

"Maybe the Google-enlightened Ishie can help us out with a link or source that would confirm this."

How exactly did I get dragged into this one?

Typing words into a search engine, particularly one as user-friendly as google, isn't difficult. I am not a professional researcher, nor have I claimed to be. They get paid more than I do.

I seem to have gotten this reputation from having the unique capability of typing "politics 'sign vandalism' Kerry". If this qualifies me for genius status, then we *really* have got to do something about the public schools.

Ishie

Something for "Erica"- sleep well sweetie!

HERO IN FALLUJAH: Marine Laid Himself on Top of Grenade to Save Rest of Squad
by Oliver North
Posted Dec 16, 2004

"It's stuff you hear about in boot camp, about World War II and Tarawa Marines who won the Medal of Honor," Lance Corporal Rob Rogers of the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment told the Army Times. Corporal Rogers was describing the actions of his fellow Marine, Sgt. Rafael Peralta, a Mexican immigrant who enlisted in the Marine Corps the day he received his green card.

Most readers of this column probably haven't heard about Rafael Peralta. With the exception of the Los Angeles Times, most of our mainstream media haven't bothered to write about him. The next time you log onto the Internet, do a Google search on Rafael Peralta. As of this writing, the Internet's most used search engine will provide you with only 26 citations from news sources that have bothered to write about this heroic young man. Then, just for giggles, do a Google search on Pablo Paredes. Hundreds of media outlets have written about him. The wire services have blasted his story to thousands of newspapers. Television and radio debate programs gladly provide the public with talking heads that can speak eloquently on the actions of Pablo Paredes.

You see, Pablo Paredes, a Navy Petty Officer 3rd Class, did something the liberal elites consider "heroic" and the media consider "newsworthy" - he defied an order. Last week, Paredes refused to board his ship bound for Iraq along with 5,000 other sailors and Marines. He showed up on the pier wearing a black tee shirt that read, ``Like a Cabinet member, I resign.''

We know this because Petty Officer Pablo Paredes had the courtesy and forethought to notify the local media that he would commit an act of cowardice the following day. Perhaps he hoped to follow the lead of another famous war protestor who went on to become a U.S. Senator and his party's presidential nominee by throwing away his military medals. Petty Officer Paredes stopped short of trashing his military I.D. in front of the cameras because he said he didn't want to be charged with the destruction of government property. The media, we are promised, will continue to follow this story intently.

It is a shame that the media focus on such acts when they could tell stories about real heroes like Rafael Peralta who "saved the life of my son and every Marine in that room," according to Garry Morrison the father of a Marine in Peralta's unit - Lance Cpl. Adam Morrison.

On the morning of November 15, 2004, the men of 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines awoke before sunrise and continued what they had been doing for seven days previously - cleansing the city of Fallujah of terrorists house by house.

At the fourth house they encountered that morning the Marines kicked in the door and "cleared" the front rooms, but then noticed a locked door off to the side that required inspection. Sgt. Rafael Peralta threw open the closed door, but behind it were three terrorists with AK-47s. Peralta was hit in the head and chest with multiple shots at close range.

Peralta's fellow Marines had to step over his body to continue the shootout with the terrorists. As the firefight raged on, a "yellow, foreign-made, oval-shaped grenade," as Lance Corporal Travis Kaemmerer described it, rolled into the room where they were all standing and came to a stop near Peralta's body.

But Sgt. Rafael Peralta wasn't dead - yet. This young immigrant of 25 years, who enlisted in the Marines when he received his green card, who volunteered for the front line duty in Fallujah, had one last act of heroism in him.

Sgt. Rafael Peralta was the polar opposite of Pablo Paredes, the Petty Officer who turned his back on his shipmates and mocked his commander in chief. Peralta was proud to serve his adopted country. In his parent's home, on his bedroom walls hung only three items - a copy of the United States Constitution, the Bill of Rights and his boot camp graduation certificate. Before he set out for Fallujah, he wrote to his 14-year old brother, "be proud of me, bro...and be proud of being an American."

Not only can Rafael's family be proud of him, but his fellow Marines are alive because of him. As Sgt. Rafael Peralta lay near death on the floor of a Fallujah terrorist hideout, he spotted the yellow grenade that had rolled next to his near-lifeless body. Once detonated, it would take out the rest of Peralta's squad. To save his fellow Marines, Peralta reached out, grabbed the grenade, and tucked it under his abdomen where it exploded.

"Most of the Marines in the house were in the immediate area of the grenade," Cpl. Kaemmerer said. "We will never forget the second chance at life that Sgt. Peralta gave us."

Unfortunately, unlike Pablo Paredes, Sgt. Rafael Peralta will get little media coverage. He is unlikely to have books written about him or movies made about his extraordinarily selfless sacrifice. But he is likely to receive the Medal of Honor. And that Medal of Honor is likely to be displayed next to the only items that hung on his bedroom wall - the Constitution, Bill of Rights and his Boot Camp graduation certificate.

Yes, Virginia, there are still heroes in America, and Sgt. Rafael Peralta was one of them. It's just too bad the media can't recognize them.
Lt. Col. North (Ret.)

Something for Ishie-

So as not to be outdone by all the redneck, hillbilly, and Texan jokes,

You know you're from California if:

1. Your coworker has 8 body piercings and none are visible.
2. You make over $300,000 and still can't afford a house.
3. You take a bus and are shocked at two people carrying on a conversation
in English.
4. Your child's 3rd-grade teacher has purple hair, a nose ring, and is
named Flower.
5. You can't remember . . . . . is pot illegal?
6. You've been to a baby shower that has two mothers and a sperm donor.
7. You have a very strong opinion about where your coffee beans are grown,
and you can taste the difference between Sumatran and Ethiopian.
8. You can't remember . . is pot illegal?
9. A really great parking space can totally move you to tears.
10. Gas costs $1.00 per gallon more than anywhere else in the U.S.
11. Unlike back home, the guy at 8:30 am at Starbucks wearing a baseball
cap and sunglasses who looks like George Clooney really IS George Clooney.
12. Your car insurance costs as much as your house payment.
13. You can't remember . . .is pot illegal?
14. It's barely sprinkling rain and there's a report on every news
station:"STORM WATCH."
15. You pass an elementary school playground and the children are all busy
with their cells or pagers.
16 It's barely sprinkling rain outside, so you leave for work an hour early
to avoid all the weather-related accidents.
17. HEY!!!! Is pot illegal????
18. Both you AND your dog have therapists.
19. The Terminator is your governor.
20. If you drive illegally, they take your driver's license. If you're here
illegally, they want to give you one.

B2's epiphany:

The Gospel According to St. Fresnel

In the beginning, the lord God hath created the heavens, and the aircraft carrier, and the seas upon which to float it; and yet there was complete darkness upon the face of the Earth. And as I traveled there came to me, as a voice out of the darkness, an angel of the lord, saying, "On centerline, on glideslope, three quarters of a mile, call the ball." I reflected upon these words, for I was engulfed in darkness, and I raised my voice saying "Clara..."

And God hath spoke to me, and he said, "You're low...power." As the Lord sayeth, so shall it be; and I added power and lo! The ball riseth up onto the bottom of the mirror. But it was tainted with a red glow and surely indicated Satan's own influence. And God spoke to me again, saying "Power! Power!...Fly the ball!" And Lo! The ball riseth off the top of the mirror and darkness was upon me.

And the voice of the angel came to me again, saying, "When comfortable, twelve hundred feet, turn down wind." Whereupon I wandered in the darkness without direction, for surely the ships radar was beset by demons, and a great confusion was cast upon CATCC. Even my TACAN needle spinneth from time to time like a crazy monkey and I fell into dispair...and Lo! There was chaos, and a great turmoil within my cockpit, for a multitude of serpents had crept therein and I smiteth them.

And though I wandered, as if by providence I found myself within the holy corridor, at twelve hundred feet, among my brethren seeking refuge; and the voice of the angle of the lord came to me again, asking about my needles, and I raisied up my voice saying, "Up and centered," and the voice of the angel answered, "Report coupled." I reflected upon these words, and I raised my voice in prayer, for though both of my gyros indicateth it is not so, surely my aircraft hath been turned upside down. Whereupon I laid my hand upon that holiest of devices, and moved the switch, and Lo! The spirit of the Lord did fill my aircraft, for it seemed to take a life of its own, and guideth me onto a centered glideslope though I toucheth not the controls myself.

And God spake to me saying, "Roger ball, coupled." And though the ball began to riseth at the in-close position, miraculously my jet stoppeth upon the flight deck, for it hath caught the four wire which God in his infinite wisdom hath placed thirty feet farther down the deck than the three wire.

And thus bathed in the golden radiance from above, my pilgrimage was at an end, and my spirit rejoiced and was truly reborn.

California: By 30, Our Women Have More Plastic Than Your Honda

"You know you're from California if:"

A Republican gets so irritated with you in a debate that they immediately go home and meditate to try to "channel their negativity."

Your pastor has a tattoo.

You've ever referred to a great white shark as "the landlord".

You discuss the evils of large corporations milking profits off unsuspecting people while destroying their health while sipping an eggnog latte at Starbucks.

You know how to cook at least three vegan meals.

You know what vegan means.

"18. Both you AND your dog have therapists."

Actually, Muffy didn't get along with her therapist, but the pilates classes have been really helping her destress.

"20. If you drive illegally, they take your driver's license. If you're here
illegally, they want to give you one."

Actually, we take our driver's licensing very seriously. Observe:

Greater Los Angeles Area Driver's License Application

Name: _______________
Stage name: ________________

Agent: ______________
Attorney: __________________

Sex: ___male ___female ___formerly male
___formerly female ___both

If female, indicate breast implant size: ____

Will the size of your implants hinder your ability to safely operate a motor vehicle in any way? Yes___ No ___

Please list brand of cell phone: __________________
(If you don't own a cell phone, please explain.)

Please check hair color:
Females: [ ] Blonde [ ] Platinum Blonde
Teenagers: [ ] Purple [ ] Blue [ ] Skinhead

Please indicate activities you perform while driving:
Check all that apply)
[ ] Eating
[ ] Applying make-up
[ ] Talking on the phone
[ ] Slapping kids in the back seat
[ ] Applying cellulite treatment to thighs
[ ] Tanning
[X] Snorting cocaine (already checked for ease of application)
[ ] Watching TV
[ ] Reading Variety magazine
[ ] Surfing the net via laptop

Please indicate how many times
a) You expect to shoot at other drivers: _____
b) How many times you expect to be shot at while driving: _____

Please indicate your number of therapy sessions per week: ____

Are you presently taking any of the following medications?
a) Prozac
b) Zovirax
c) Lithium
d) Zanax
e) Valium
If none, please explain: _______________________________

What is the length of your daily commute?
a) 1 hour
b) 2 hours
c) 3 hours
d) 4 hours or more

TEST (Please indicate the correct answer):

If you are the victim of a car jacking, you should immediately:
a) Call the police to report the crime
b) Call Channel 4 News to report the crime, then watch your car on TV in a high-speed chase
c) Call your attorney and discuss a lawsuit against the cellular phone company for your 911 call not going through
d) Call your therapist
e) None of the above (South Central residents only)

In the event of an earthquake, you should:
a) Stop your car
b) Keep driving and hope for the best
c) Immediately use your cell phone to call all loved ones
d) Pull out your video camera and obtain footage for Channel 4

In the event of rain, you should:
a) Never drive over 5 MPH
b) Drive twice as fast as usual
c) You're not sure what "rain" is

When stopped by police, you should:
a) Pull over and have your driver's license and insurance form ready
b) Try to outrun them by driving the wrong way on the 405
c) Have your video camera ready and provoke them to attack, ensuring yourself of a hefty lawsuit

Please turn your test in to the lady behind the bulletproof virtual window on your left.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Californians
A Texan, a Californian, and a Nevadan were out riding their horses.

The Texan pulled out an expensive bottle of whiskey, took a long draught, then another, and then suddenly threw it into the air, pulled out his gun and shot the bottle in midair.

The Californian looked at the Texan and said, "What are you doing? That was a perfectly good bottle of whiskey!! The Texan replied, "In Texas, there's plenty of whiskey and bottles are cheap.

A while later, not wanted to be outdone, the Californian pulled out a bottle of champagne, took a few sips, threw the half full champagne bottle into the air, pulled out his gun, and shot it in midair.

The Nevadan couldn't believe this and said "What the heck did you that for? That was an expensive bottle of champagne!! The Californian replied, "In California there is plenty of champagne and bottles are cheap."

A while later, the Nevadan pulled out a bottle of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale. He opened it, took a sip, took another sip, then chugged the rest. He then put the bottle back in his saddlebag, pulled out his gun, turned, and shot the Californian.

The shocked Texan said "Why in the hell did you do that?"

The Nevadan replied, "Well, in Nevada we have plenty of Californians and bottles are worth a nickel."

:P

Ishie

WindRider
Sorry for the long-windedness. I'm passionate.
If I'd known that you were keeping score, I'd have reduced my rebuttals to offering bullet responses to paragraph and sentence fragments taken out of context and dispelling true intent(you too, Ishie). I refuse to do so, so if in your eyes I lose, then I lose. Actually, I'm learning a few things from both sides of the fence, and that is exactly why I am here.

Ishie
Keeping up with you is tough, and I probably haven't accurately conveyed my points of view worth a damn. I respect your intellect more than you may give me credit for. As to the simple truth of the message of Christ, it really is just that. Simple. Believe! Far too many folks complicate it to further an agenda. It's kind of like law, or perhaps the tax code. Let's also include the Constitution (and organized religion). It starts out simple, then people fuck it up with all sorts of convolutions to justify a position, usually in order to reap what they consider to be a tangible benefit. We see things in markedly different perspectives, and that's fine. Hell, if we all came to the same conclusions, that would indicate that not enough people are doing the thinking, and it would be rather boring. The only real disagreements (all tangential issues aside) I have had with you concern the positive (some not-so-positive) and historical impacts that Christianity has had on the genesis of our nation, and the fact that you seem to view all people who claim a Christian faith as belonging to one "vast right-wing conspiracy" that seeks to force the country into a theocracy and religion into every home. Frankly, I see the threat as coming from the other direction. As I have stated before, I will stand opposed to either.
(Damn, my head hurts!) Now, let me have it!

B2
Great stuff! I have been enlightened at the knee of the Great Fighter Pilot in the sky! You are correct. Hearts and minds aren't being won, and I never expected as much. I just like lively discussion (although I don't think I'm doing very well). I'm more than happy to discuss security matters, but I think we're gonna run into the same problem as with other topics. Far too many folks of the (liberal?) bent just won't realize the threats that are staring us in the face. Appease! Acquiese to all demands! Let's pull a Frenchie (surrender) and all will be okay. That's really all I'm hearing from the other side. Did another five bombings in Madrid bring anyone around? I hardly think so. You and I have had the benefit of military service. We have operated in an environment where revisionist history and notions of knee-jerk appeasement are about as useless as tits on a chicken. We understand the threats that are out there and we understand what has to be done to vanquish them. One would think that all of that would be clearly visible to any thinking person, but obviously it just ain't so. I am convinced that we are basiclly on the right path, but I am not overly optimistic that a lasting democracy can be established in Iraq, due to the religious and historical disposition of its peoples. Your thoughts?

Piglet
Medications are available for afflictions such as yours. (I have "Deliverance" on DVD!)

Patriot
I loved your stuff. You are right on, but I think B2 is right. I've stopped banging my head against the wall. Join me.

"and the fact that you seem to view all people who claim a Christian faith as belonging to one "vast right-wing conspiracy" that seeks to force the country into a theocracy and religion into every home."

Not at all. There are many Christians I love and respect deeply, even though some have been classified as "not real Christians" by those who seem to view religion as an exclusive club. Many Christians oppose much right wing action and do not favor a theocracy or forcing religion into the public sector for a number of reasons. Some feel it is unfair to nonbelievers; some feel shoving God down people's throats only drives people further from religion; some feel that State religion waters down religion so much to lose the message, and some feel that the frequent union of God and patriotism in this country is blasphemous since it elevates the country to the status of God, who presumably knows no national allegiance, no matter how often our leaders want to claim He is on our side.

The Christians I find suspect are the ones who seem to not only view Christianity with club status, but view the religion itself as a status symbol while assigning lip service to its all-inclusive nature. If they are tolerant at all of other beliefs, it is in a patronizing manner, and they seek to revise history to suit what is the most religiously appealable rather than what the facts support. They appear to me to be extremely insecure in their own faith because they not only seem to feel a need to renew it to themselves as often as possible, but to talk about it as often as possible, much like a child who is trying to keep a lie from a parent. They have also hijacked a bizarre set of "Christian principles" that has very little to do with the actual Bible, but has easily identifiable classified characteristics so that one can easily tell the "real" Christians from the "liberal fakers". The two most obvious are gay rights and abortion. To the people I object to, Christian means anti-abortion, and anti-gay. I do not object to them because they personally feel these things are immoral, but because this has become the Christianity of the Right, often associated with things like anti affirmative action, pro death penalty, and pro Ten Commandments in public buildings. Despite these things having no intrinsic logical link, and in many cases, have absolutely nothing to do with the Christian faith, these characteristics have not only gone to defining the Right (and disagreement with one of them is treasonous to the party), but have extended themselves to defining the religion that so dominates the Right. A Republican Bible, so to speak.

For these people, religion cannot be unwound from politics, and to suggest such a thing means the speaker is anti-religious, specifically anti-Christian. The speaker is subject to a number of stereotypes and accusations based on largely false views of anti-Christian liberals, while these people, claiming to be the true Christians, refuse to acknowledge that the majority of Dems, liberals, whatever you want to call them, are Christians as well.

The Christians who appreciate the importance of the separation of church and state for the sake of BOTH are allies. They are not people I take issue with, and though I'll engage them in a debate if *they're* interested in a civilized discourse about religion, I have no interest in tearing down their religion simply because I think it's implausible, and they typically have no desire to force their religion on me.

Those that pray/prey on streetcorners, and those that think they are being persecuted if they cannot teach creation myths in science or have the school administrator endorse Christianity over the intercom are the ones that concern me. You can often recognize them by their complete disrespect for any of the contributions of the current or past generation, preferring instead to characterize the vast lot of us as violent, liberal, PC Nazi, short attention span, morally downspiraling pinko atheist sociopaths with no intrinsic values except to possibly grow old and wise enough to find Jesus and hate gays. For *that* crowd, and I am not making the claim you are among them, despite not believing in the place, I will wholeheartedly tell each and every one of them to go straight to Hell.

In the past, my experiences with the Carrie's mom Christians has been hideous but at least has been a phenomenon characterized by living in the Bible Belt. Unfortunately, now many have taken a huge deal of political power and are crowing their superiority to us younger, unfortunately-uninspired-to-vote godless heathens, and acting in a decidedly unamerican manner by essentially telling us to take it like good little girls, and it chaps my ass.

I mean no denigration towards mentally balanced Christians, of which there are plenty, and whom I take no issue with.

Ishie

Sorry, B2, your first comments about my previous entry are just too immature to dignify. Read my entry again, slowly, and you will answer most of your own questions/comments. Try to stay objective while you are reading.(Patriot, same for you.)

B2, ever heard of "nature" vs. "nurture"(re: your father and grandFather)? And frankly, your experience as a pilot (in combat, I presume?) would be quite different from that of someone on the ground (infantry/grunt/call it what you want.) These folks will never get over the horrors of their experiences. I have nothing but the GREATEST respect for these people, men and women. I just personally think they are getting a raw deal (well, fucked, if you must know), but would never let on to them: they already know it, and don't need their wounds compounded by me. And there will be many, many more of them. Such a human waste. And for what????

And please, don't quote criminals (Oliver North) to me as if they, too, are heroes. They are not. They're just a bunch of guys who are very full of themselves. Now, B2, try to get off the machismo wagon for just 2 seconds, you are not impressing anyone except maybe yourself. But self-delusion is a whole other diagnosis......

Erica

I stand 100% behind what I said to you above. You may call me whatever you wnat..say whatever you want about me but don't mess with the troops! In your world no sacrifice can be worth it...unless of course YOU define what "worth" is.

As a matter of fact regarding my statement to you:

"Which community college did you get your degree from? Hopefully those vets weren't damaged for life! Do you actually tell those poor folks your theories or do you just share them on the internet?"

I now add that if, in reality, YOU are "counseling" real vets (especially male types), God (big G) help us all!

I will re-emphasize.... they are not "fucked"..YOU, "Erica Whatever" are (well...maybe you haven't been....)

re your:
"I have nothing but the GREATEST respect for these people, men and women..."

You are F.O.S. ! I thought only that kind of patronizing blather only came out of the mouth of Hogzilla Moore himself!

No "Erica", you seem to suffer from "cognitive dissonance"..because it appears to me that you have the empathy of Eva Braun.

B2,

Eight words: Afghanistan - Yes; Iraq - NO!
America/Freedom/Troops - Yes; Terrorists - No.

Now, calm down. So what do You know about MY world???? You don't know anything, so let me tell you:

No, I am retired and no longer counsel vets (Yay! you say...) Long before that I was working with the "troops" in ways that maybe you can or can't imagine. I don't know what YOU have seen or how. You and many of the others of you participants in this blog talk as if all of this business of war is just a computer game of some sort, full of guns, bombs, noise, fighting heroes and righteous causes. I agree, there are things worth fighting and dying for (I just don't happen to agree that Iraq was one of them). Once all of the excitement and dust have died down and cleared, I have gotten to deal with what's left of war. Let me explain:

Did I mention that I have the greatest respect for these men and women? You mocked the sentiment, as if it was so much verbiage, "blather".... just talk. My dedication has not been just bluster and talk. For many years as a VA nurse, I changed bandages on bloody stumps; pushed "guts" back into open wounds; stood on my feet for 17 hrs straight, and never once even sat down, while I worked madly to keep one desperatwly ill patient alive; transfused gallons of blood into bodies that could hold blood no longer; sat countless times holding the hand of a dying patient so he wouldn't die alone when no other family would bother to come and be there; I have hauled tons of human waste, vomit, and blood, and at wages below that which I could have made elsewhere. Did I do this for glory? to bask in their expressions of gratitude? Most of them weren't even conscious enough to remember my face, never mind be in a position to thank me.

I have seen years of broken bodies AND broken spirits, and have done everything humanly possible to try to make one day - just one second - just a little bit better for someone who has put so much on the line for MY freedom and the rights that I enjoy because of it. That's where MY values are.

So please don't condescend; you don't know "me" OR "my kind" -- but "we" have been there quietly behind the scenes for years, and will be there for many years to come -- seeing the "other" side, less "macho" side of war. And I say again, such a waste ..... such a cost.......

Ishie,

"I'm all for adult supervision. What I am not for is the government trying to raise all kids and particularly adults based on the irresponsibility of parents by cleaning airwaves for me, or banning violent video games that *I* enjoy playing. There needs to be a greater crackdown on parental irresponsibility rather than making excuses all the time."

Just how do you propose to "crack down" on irresponsibility of parents? I've maintained that it's not possible, but it is possible to keep the public airwaves as clean as possible to limit the amount of filth the children are exposed to like the FCC is kinda doing.

"While we're at it, how are you planning to police the internet?"

Hadn't really thought about policing the internet. I was thinking about the public airwaves. Let me give it some thought though. That could be as impossible as cracking down on irresponsible parents.

"Just how do you propose to "crack down" on irresponsibility of parents?"

Start decreasing class sizes again so that teachers can be on the look out for problem behavior in kids and start some investigations into the home conditions. This used to be fairly commonplace, but now schools are overcrowded enough, they're just medicating the troublemakers.

"I've maintained that it's not possible, but it is possible to keep the public airwaves as clean as possible to limit the amount of filth the children are exposed to like the FCC is kinda doing."

Why not just keep the v-chip in tvs? What all are you going to censor to keep kids from it? Irresponsible parents will allow their kids access to anything. Are all bad movies, bad games, bad songs, and bad television off limits?

"Hadn't really thought about policing the internet. I was thinking about the public airwaves. Let me give it some thought though. That could be as impossible as cracking down on irresponsible parents."

Well, then you have a problem. This is where a lot of your "greater availability" comes from. Last I heard, it was hard to find games and music that told kids explicitly how to build bombs. You can also get any music you want, any media you want, and play all the shoot em up games you want.

You can't clean the internet, particularly with much of it coming from other countries and if getting irresponsible parents is too problematic, well, they allow their kids unlimited internet where they can join together with others who share violent tendencies.

Suggestions?

Ishie

Ishie,
Liked your response! Wow! I found myself in almost total agreement with you (I experienced some chest pains). I loathe the "club Christian mentality" just as you do. What's interesting about that is those folks detest us both! The only point I take issue with, and only in part if I understand you correctly, is your reference to what you believe charachterizes the "Christianity of the Right". You mentioned anti-abortion and anti-gay positions. We have covered the subject of abortion, and really, I don't think one has to view that terrible procedure through a "religious values" lens to see how utterly stupid, senseless, and wrong, in the absence of VALID medical (and rape) exceptions, it truly is. I would like to think that common sense and a basic HUMAN respect for life would suffice. I think most people who have that "post-screwing contraception" procedure performed are so selfish as to put only THEIR concerns above everything and to hell with all else. And now, today in good ole' Europe (I believe specifically in the Netherlands and one Scandinavian country) we are seeing the emergence of state-sponsored and enforced euthanasia of FULL-TERM babies who are determined to be "defective", the defintion of and the degree to which being determined by doctors. No consultation with the parents is necessary! The "justification" for this new Nazi-style horror is to save on future social spending to care for these people. How absolutely wretched! Hence, my concerns about moral decay. What we attempt to justify today merely becomes a stepping stone to an even more treacherous position tomorrow. An act such as the aforementioned, my friend, is indefensible under any circumstances.
As to the anti-gay reference, I don't think MOST Christians are against homosexuals as much as they are against homosexuality. (Hate the sin, love the sinner). Let's be clear on this point. Two men doing the "bone dance with Mr. Spinchter" or two women engaging in a bit of "carpet munching" is none of my business. I could care less. People are free to do as they please, and most folks I know feel the same. Most Christians believe its morally wrong and that's that. It's a PERSONAL belief. It doesn't even affect how I vote, because frankly, homosexuality in and of itself doesn't constitute an issue at all. The problem begins when the "homosexual community" demands that society as a whole accept their practices as "socially acceptable" and "normal". Hell, it ain't normal because if it were we would all be doing it. Aside from that, I just resent having their agenda and their desire for acceptance of their practices crammed down my throat. The solution is simple. For those of us who view it as wrong, respect their right to live and do as they wish. The sodomy laws are off the books! Frankly, they never really belonged there. For the gay community, just shut the hell up and do as you wish.
You mentioned affirmative action. I detest it due to its constituting nothing more than the very discrimination that it seeks to redress. The death penalty? The only problem I have with that is that our judicial system is so sick that I fear it cannot be justly applied. Got plenty of undisputable PHYSICAL evidence or a confession? Great! Fry 'em!! CIRCUMSTANTIAL evidence "created" by some full-of-shit high dollar attorney seeking his place in the spotlight? Nope.
Ten Commandments displays in public buildings? No big deal, as long as the community supports it. Someone would probably choose to be offended (a liberal with nothing better to do, no doubt), but then someone (liberal or conservative) will always choose to be offended by something. What I find really amazing is that so many people choose to take offense at some particuliar thing, and rather than just moving along to the next activity and reveling in the freedom and opportunity to do as one wishes (without hurting others) that this society offers to all, that they would then wish to restrict the freedoms of others to do as they wish. Liberal or conservative? Religious or secular? I think most folks in any of those categories want pretty much the same things in life. Those tags are not the problem. It's the degree to which we take our own sense fo self-importance. Extremism. Just as I detest Religio-Nazis who would feel no sorrow for the murder of Matthew Shepard, I equally detest ultra-liberal, cultural Marxist, enviro-weenie, politically correct whackjobs who would use revisionist history and hack science to promote and justify everything from the removal of all things of a religious nature from society to the modern day psychological malarkey bullshit that would have us believe that a woman in Texas could murder her five children in a bath tub and not understand that what she did was wrong. There's a death penalty case for ya. Those same mental midgets would also force the "theory" of evolution to be taught in school as "fact" with no mention given to the "belief" of creationism. Hell, even Darwin admitted that he fucked that one up.
Whatever one chooses to believe in is okay. I think we would agree that it is the power-bent assholes who want to force all of us to think the same that are the problem.
You aluded to negative experiences in the Bible Belt. What were they?

WindRider
Another long-winded diatribe. If you don't want to read it, SCROLL QUICKLY!

Patriot
I share your concerns about some of the negative influences that our children are bombarded with in society today, but are you advocating censorship? When I caught my daughter viewing a show that I considered inappropriate and had told her not to watch, I responded by merely taking the television out of her room. She gets it back when she is willing to follow the rules. I like most any parent wish to keep the all garbage away from my children, but I know that's impossible. I fear any degree of censorship. It could too easily be used wrongly by the irresponsible idiots in charge. The less the government has to do with anything in our lives, the better off we are.
Thoughts?

Randall

Ishie,

More proof that you are wrong in your belief that the positions taken by all politicians on the Second Amendment is just lip service. Check out this link that states the DOJ's position on the Second Amendment for the first time is that it stands for an individual's right. I guarantee you that Senator Kerry would never have appointed someone to that position that would take such a strong politically incorrect stance on our right to bear arms.

http://www.usdoj.gov/olc/secondamendment2.htm

This is one of the most entertaining sites I've seen yet. Being from Blue Pennsylvania I am stronger and smarter than average {see previous postings}.

I must conclude from the venomous attacks posted from end to end of this tirade that you {collectively} are no longer "true blue" but rather closer to "purple". Much the same as your faces when writing these opinions. So much for compassion and peace. Practice what you preach.

PS I have a wonderful 4 bedroom house for sale in a lovely small town in Eastern PA {1 hour from "blue" Philadelphia} to the first $450K cash laid at my feet. I would gladly leave this union infested, liberal breeding nest to all pansies who want it. I going South to warmer {redder} climates.

TTFN

Patriot,

Awesome link. You are correct that John Kerry would not gone out of his way in support of our second amendment rights. In fact, a question begs to be asked. How much would he have gone out of his way to take away that right, or at least hinder our ability to excercise it? Our second amendment right is one of the most important of all, in that it not only gives us the ability to protect ourselves against criminal elements (which the police cannot do), but it is the people's ace-in-the-hole to guarantee that our government does not become overly oppressive toward us, as governments can do. I won't try to put a historical perspective on this, as the revisionists would only reject such out of hand. I think you and I understand the reality of just how important this right is, though. It is important enough to me that I carry 24/7.

Liberal Bonechrusher (and all of you)
Merry Christmas from Alabama!

Randall

I am for the type of "censorship" that usually prevents (or at least makes it difficult) juveniles to see pornographic magazines in the supermarket or nudity or profane language over the public airwaves like the FCC kind of does. Adults can access that stuff if they want through cable and while it won't prevent kids from viewing that stuff, at least it would make it a little more difficult for them (like the pornography example) and make it easier for responsible parents to allow their kids to watch some television without worrying what they'll see or hear.

This is the kind of negative influence (I'll bet Ishie can't find any studies that show this kind of exposure to violence in previous decades, hence the moral decay) the government can have a positive effect on through already existing regulation powers like the FCC unlike cracking down on irresponsible parents (Sorry Ishie, but I'd bet money that you'd never get any laws passed in any state allowing police to investigate the job parents are doing because their kid is unruly in school):

According to the National Institute on Media and the Family, the average child sees about 200,000 violent acts on TV, including 40,000 murders, by high school graduation. These numbers don’t include what children see on the big screen or the Internet (Mediafamily.org).

American children, ages 2-17, watch television on average almost 25 hours per week or 3 ½ hours a day. Almost one in five watch more than 35 hours of TV each week (Gentile & Walsh, 2002).

Twenty percent of 2- to 7-year-olds, 46% of 8- to 12-year-olds, and 56% of 13- to 17-year-olds have TVs in their bedrooms (Gentile & Walsh, 2002).

The average American child watches more than 35 hours of TV per week (Mediafamily.org).

Patriot,

I understand your concerns. I am currently fighting the battle of the TV with my 11 year-old daughter. I had enough of the smart-aleck responses to me and her mother that came from some of the programs she had been viewing. The shows I am talking about are really benign in nature, yet lacking in meaningful content and promoting a form of dialouge that lacks respect for parents and authority figures. I removed the source of our dissatisfaction until such a time that I see a behavioural change. It is working.
I asked the questions I did because I, at least initially, distrust anything that involves the government. I would have great difficulty in identifying anything that government does well other than defending the country and collecting taxes (I'm sure there are a few other things).
Also, I am a rock and roll fan. (Actually, I love all music from country to classical.) I remember years ago when several well-meaning, yet rabid men of the cloth saw evil in virtually every rock song recorded. Remember the rave about playing songs backward and the hidden messages? What a bust! I can just imagine government beaureaucrats with too much time on their hands wishing to "protect" us from what they consider to be "evil" or "unhealthy" choices in either TV or radio. What our kids see and hear has to be controlled by PARENTS and parents alone. Parents have allowed public schools, which unfortunately due to financial concerns my kids attend, to slide into the condition they are in (taught hack philosophies by hacks). Parents have allowed their children to be brought up without the moral framework needed to sustain them in life. Parents have allowed the churches to slide into a mode of almost complete inaction. I know that most parents love and care for their children, but we as a whole are not paying the attention required to what our kids really need. That means giving them good examples to live by and taking care of the business of the country (Civics?). We are allowing all manner of politicians and administrators to usurp our parental responsibilities. Until we take charge and do our jobs better, no amount of censorship will do anything other than lead to the banishment of the gory mafia and war movies that I personally enjoy, as well as other forms of entertainment that others enjoy, whatever they may be. I don't disagree with you, but I think we would be better served by applying our efforts in a different direction. Your thoughts?

Randall

Hello, everyone. For a truly sobering war holiday message, please go to NY Times and read the OpEd column by Bob Herbert. Then give yourself a Christmas present by going out and buying the book, "Bush on the Couch." As always, try to read it with an unbiased (that means OPEN) mind.

I hope your holidays are peaceful.

By the way, another of my nephews (the one with 4 little girls) ships off to Iraq next week.

Merry Christmas.

Randall,

I agree with you on your apprehension about the ineptness of government and them getting involved in aspects of our lives, but I don't have a problem with them saying "No profanity, no nudity and no sexual scenes in shows that air over the public airwaves."

So I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree on this point. Appreciate your points and your distrust of the government, though.

Everyone have a safe New Year's Eve.

Pro-gun control=Democrat voter=high crime

Wednesday, December 29, 2004

I host a radio program in Memphis, TN called The Political Cesspool.

We are a conservative, pro-second amendment radio program. In doing the show and the research I have found that areas with strict gun control laws tend to be higher crime areas and vote Democrat.

Out of the top 25 most dangerous cities in the U.S., 19 voted mostly Democrat. This should tell you what type of people vote Democrat and that their peace, love, welfare and no firearms utopian society doesn't work. You could say the majority of criminals vote Democrat.

The liberals think that the only people in this society that should have guns are the criminals. This seems an outrageous claim but how many crimes were prevented by gun control? None, they actually happen because of it.

Austin Farley
Memphis, TN

http://www.illinoisleader.com/letters/lettersview.asp?c=21723

Ishie,

“Start decreasing class sizes again so that teachers can be on the look out for problem behavior in kids and start some investigations into the home conditions.”

You’d never get laws passed to allow investigators to start checking into the “home conditions” because some kids are acting up, strange or doing other things of concerns. Probably not even in a lot of the blue/communist states.

“Why not just keep the v-chip in tvs?”

V-chips would help out the responsible parents, but also make it at least a little difficult for the children to find these things by using already existing FCC controls over the public airwaves -- fines and revoking licenses if necessary.

“What all are you going to censor to keep kids from it?”

Profanity, sexual scenes and nudity. The same things that currently aren’t allowed on broadcast television and radio. I'm not talking about a major deviation from what already exists.

“Irresponsible parents will allow their kids access to anything.”

True about the irresponsible parents, but as I mentioned, I don’t think that’s remotely feasible.

“Are all bad movies, bad games, bad songs, and bad television off limits?”

You do what you can with rating systems (movies and games) and FCC control (songs and television over public airwaves). It’s better than doing nothing and it’s clearly more feasible than your alternative because it’s already in place.

“Well, then you have a problem. This is where a lot of your "greater availability" comes from. Last I heard, it was hard to find games and music that told kids explicitly how to build bombs. You can also get any music you want, any media you want, and play all the shoot em up games you want.”

“You can't clean the internet, particularly with much of it coming from other countries and if getting irresponsible parents is too problematic, well, they allow their kids unlimited internet where they can join together with others who share violent tendencies.”

“Suggestions?”

True, but see the previous posting (December 23 2:39 p.m.) about how much television the average child watches every day and how many violent acts they see by the time they graduate. We could clean up a lot of that and you gotta do what you can.

Patriot,

I too am concerned about what kids are absorbing through various media today, but I've gotta say that, in my opinion, the problem here has less to do with what is out there on the "public airwaves" than what parents allow their children to see and hear of it. Obviously there is a market for the garbage, because it is there. We have to make sure the kids are denied access to it. Irresponsible parents may not make the attempt, but then such parents are by nature irresponsible and no amount of legislation is going to force them to ensure that their kids are well fed, clothed, housed, educated, etc. either.
You desire government censorship of the airwaves? My friend, I understand that your motives are good and true, but please take it from one who has lived in a socialist country. You don't quite understand what you are asking for. To begin with, by allowing the government to censor anything we are simply abdicating our responsibilities as parents and government will gladly oblige us. The problem is that governmental bodies can't do much of ANYTHING well. Examples of past performance of the INS, the Dept. of Education, the UN's oil-for-food debacle, etc. should suffice to show us that. Furthermore, take a look at campaign finance reform. We now have a law on the books that attempts to censor what candidates can say about each other. First Amendment infirngement to solve a problem! THAT is how government solves problems. No thanks.
Your response to Ishies's mention of home inspections was correct, but I am disturbed that you didn't completely disassociate yourself from such a hairbrained notion. Surely you wouldn't advocate anything as communistic as that? A look into the performance of various state departments of child protective services should be enough to debunk such an idea. There are children today who can't even be accounted for while under the umbrella of supposed "state protection" and many more suffer abuse and neglect and their being wards of the state just means that we are footing the bill for their suffering. Government control of anything is not the answer.
LOCAL government can play a role here. I support your idea that stores should keep suggestive publications out of view. That equates to restricting "access" rather than restricting "content", and I am in favor of that all day long. Perhaps internet access providers should be forced to incorporate more controls into their services that would better restrict what kids have access to. I don't have all the answers, but I do know this. As long as the soul of our nation is as sick as it is (moral decay again!), no amount of governmental intrusion into our lives is going to make one bit of difference other than to serve to usurp more of our liberties than it already has. Frankly, I fear our government much more than the effect that a TV show or a video game might have on a child. A kid who had no access to obscene or overly violent entertainment yet who at the same time lacked loving parents and a supportive home environment would still be screwed up and just as vulnerable to other forms of less-than-wholesome influences. We've got to find some solution to this problem other than government interference.

Randall

"God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?"

Thomas Jefferson
1781

Happy New Year to all!

Randall

"God who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God?"

Thomas Jefferson
1781"

I'm back, guys and gals!!

This quote sounds decidedly un-Jeffersonlike. Reference? If it's Barton, the guy's a hack.

Ishie

Ahh... Apologies for length (which has gotta be funny, coming from me)

From: http://members.tripod.com/~candst/studygd7d.htm

There Are Actually Two Versions of This. The mere fact that there are two versions of it is a good indication it has problems.

Version #1

"The God who gave us life gave us liberty... Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction... That these liberties are the gift of God? The bible is the cornerstone for American liberty." -Thomas Jefferson

Version #2

"And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever." Thomas Jefferson

Beginning with the first version:

First problem is that this quote is not cited, i.e., its origin isn't stated--probably for the reason that it doesn't appear in Thomas Jefferson's works as quoted. If you break it into pieces, you can find some of the pieces in Jefferson's works.

[1]"The God who gave us life gave us liberty. . . [2]Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction. . . That these liberties are the gift of God? [3]The bible is the cornerstone for American liberty." -Thomas Jefferson

Part [1]

We can find the first phrase in Jefferson's 1774 publication to the English king, A Summary View of the Rights of British America. Notice that by extracting only part of Jefferson's entire phrase, the manufacturer of this invalid quote, gives it a different slant than Jefferson's original. Also notice that the rest of the problematic quotation isn't found in the document.

. . .This, sire, is the advice of your great American council, on the observance of which may perhaps depend your felicity and future fame, and the preservation of that harmony which alone can continue both to Great Britain and America the reciprocal advantages of their connection. It is neither our wish, nor our interest, to separate from her. We are willing, on our part, to sacrifice every thing which reason can ask to the restoration of that tranquillity for which all must wish. On their part, let them be ready to establish union and a generous plan. Let them name their terms, but let them be just. Accept of every commercial preference it is in our power to give for such things as we can raise for their use, or they make for ours. But let them not think to exclude us from going to other markets to dispose of those commodities which they cannot use, or to supply those wants which they cannot supply. Still less let it be proposed that our properties within our own territories shall be taxed or regulated by any power on earth but our own. The God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time; the hand of force may destroy, but cannot disjoin them. This, sire, is our last, our determined resolution; and that you will be pleased to interpose with that efficacy which your earnest endeavours may ensure to procure redress of these our great grievances, to quiet the minds of your subjects in British America, against any apprehensions of future encroachment, to establish fraternal love and harmony through the whole empire, and that these may continue to the latest ages of time, is the fervent prayer of all British America! . . .

Source of Document:

University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center Jefferson, Thomas, 1743-1826. A Summary View of the Rights of British America, p. 122, Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library

Part [2]

[1]"The God who gave us life gave us liberty. . . [2]Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction. . . That these liberties are the gift of God? [3]The bible is the cornerstone for American liberty." -Thomas Jefferson

Part [2], the middle section, does come from a bona fide document written by Jefferson: Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XVIII, "Manners". Jefferson was speaking of the evils of slavery, not the virtues of religious morality. Here is the paragraph from which the quotation (bolded) is taken:

Excerpt From: Notes on the State of Virginia by Thomas Jefferson

. . .The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execrations should the statesman be loaded who, permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part and the amor patriae of the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labor for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavors to the evanishment of the human race or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him. With the morals of the people, their industry is also destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labor for himself who can make another labor for him. This is so true that, of the proprietors of slaves, a very small proportion are ever seen to labor. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure, when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of god? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice can not sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! . . .

Source of Information

American Studies at the University of Virginia website Notes on The State of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson

Part [3]

"[1]The God who gave us life gave us liberty. . . [2]Can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction. . . That these liberties are the gift of God? [3] The bible is the cornerstone for American liberty." -Thomas Jefferson

This final phrase is totally imaginary! It does not appear in A Summary View of the Rights of British America, nor in Notes on The State of Virginia. A web search for the quotation shows it only as a part of this invalid quotation. It does not appear anywhere on the University of Virginia site on Jefferson's works. Moreover, the phrase is completely inconsistent with Jefferson's views about the Bible.

Now for the second version

And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with His wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever. Thomas Jefferson

The above is a valid quotation as shown in the Notes on the State of Virginia extract above. The problem with it is that it is often used to make some sort of point with regards to Jefferson's religious beliefs--usually to claim that Jefferson was a orthodox Christian. Quoters fail to explain that the quotation comes from a section of Notes on The State of Virginia in which Jefferson was discussing slavery in Virginia and has nothing to do with Jefferson's religious beliefs..

-----------------

Now since no one (other than 18th Century New England Puritans) is calling Jefferson an atheist, instead linking to Deism, which further supports the inclusion of "Nature's God" in the Declaration of Independence, the inclusion of the divine hardly seems surprising, but in NO way endorses the Christian religion which Jefferson was extremely skeptical of, and expressed this sentiment in his writings quite often.

Ishie

Randall (WindRyder, don't read this; it's frigging long):

"I loathe the "club Christian mentality" just as you do."

Uhhh... I'm glad, but you're endorsing many of its founding principles?

"You mentioned anti-abortion and anti-gay positions."

Yup. It's the Christianity of the Right. The importance of these issues to the Christian religion among general Christians is a topic of debate, and the opinions range anywhere on the spectrum.

To the religion of the Right, it is a litmus test for faith. True Christians are anti-abortion, anti-gay, and for some bizarre reason, pro death penalty.

"We have covered the subject of abortion, and really, I don't think one has to view that terrible procedure through a "religious values" lens to see how utterly stupid, senseless, and wrong,"

This is an ad hominem and has no argumentative value. Abortion is also a many-factioned debate, and saying "anyone can see" essentially is merely an appeal to the crowd.

"in the absence of VALID medical (and rape) exceptions, it truly is."

I still haven't heard a valid plan for determination of a rape exception.

"What we attempt to justify today merely becomes a stepping stone to an even more treacherous position tomorrow."

Slippery slope argument. Also indefensible even if mainstream Europe were performing said practices, which I'm willing to bet ten bucks they aren't. Reference?

"The problem begins when the "homosexual community" demands that society as a whole accept their practices as "socially acceptable" and "normal"."

How so? Marriage requires nothing of the kind. Many feel marriage ending in divorce is far from socially acceptable, as do people that condemn 'open marriages' and other things they find morally offensive.

You do not have to accept anything you do not want to as normal. However, YOUR standards of personal morality and a desire to butt into other people's lives should NOT interfere with what a so called secular government is doing.

"Hell, it ain't normal because if it were we would all be doing it."

No argumentative merit whatsoever. If we are to define normal as something over fifty percent of people are doing, we can conclude that it is NORMAL and socially acceptable for married men to cheat on their wives. Over fifty percent do at some point.

We can also conclude that high intelligence, by definition comprising less than half the population, is morally wrong.

"The solution is simple. For those of us who view it as wrong, respect their right to live and do as they wish."

Bingo!!! That's all I'm saying. Why civil unions and marriages suddenly gets people whose business it isn't up in arms is beyond me. You don't have to accept anything. Just do not turn that lack of acceptance into laws prohibiting them from legally recognized unions. I may not think your marriage is moral, but it is NOT MY PLACE TO SAY.

"You mentioned affirmative action. I detest it due to its constituting nothing more than the very discrimination that it seeks to redress."

Yup. It's a problem. The problem is... racism in the work place still exists. They did recent studies sending out equal resumes with 'white' names vs. 'black' names as the only difference and found that the 'black' names were called back fifty percent less frequently. Unsettling.

On the other hand, quotas really lend themselves to unfair standards. They do not prevent minorities from being mistreated, and it risks outing more qualified people to "make" the quota even if you're outing other minorities, for example "well, you're the most qualified, but we already have an african american, but we're short a woman, so we're going to hire her".

Solution? I don't know.

"The death penalty? The only problem I have with that is that our judicial system is so sick that I fear it cannot be justly applied."

My problem with it is that at one point about a third of people were released off Death Row when DNA evidence demonstrated they were innocent. Placement on death row seems to have to do more with social ranking, racial profile, and lawyer fees more than actual guilt.

If they revise the system, I'm all for it. What confuses me though, is why so many Christians are. Eye for an Eye is in the Old Testament having been lifted from Hammarabi's Code. Much, once people have repented, not really Jesus-like. This isn't an issue for me. I don't turn the other cheek either. I think it's suicidal.. but I'm not Christian.

"Ten Commandments displays in public buildings? No big deal, as long as the community supports it."

How is this not endorsing public religion by using my funds?

"Someone would probably choose to be offended (a liberal with nothing better to do, no doubt),"

Interesting the way you phrase this.

I was interested in a news article about a guy leading a group of people to boycott Macy's. Granted, he had every right to do so, as did the others in his circle. The reason? Macy's turned "Merry Christmas" into "Happy Holidays" on their signs to be more inclusive. Now... I drove by the Macy's in Union Square in SF before Christmas. Hardly grinchy... HUGE frigging tree in the opening, wreaths and ribbons everywhere, very celebratory, very pretty, very Christmasy.

This guy and his crew was fundamentally offended by their horrific attempt to take "Christ out of Christmas" so staged a protest.

And people say liberals have no life.

So I'm not buying into the 'whiny liberal' myth anymore. Both groups, when met with things they feel discriminatory or violating their interests, throw just as much of a tantrum.

"that they would then wish to restrict the freedoms of others to do as they wish."

Like marry if you love someone of the same gender or get equal status in a courtroom. Whose freedom is being restricted if you do not allow the Ten Commandments in public buildings? Christians? Who are free to etch them in seventeen foot letters on the sides of their houses? Who can wear them on t-shirts, sell merchandise with them, release movies about them and so forth?

I think not.

"Extremism."

I wholeheartedly agree. Despite what you may think, I am not an extreme atheist. I believe in the values of the Constitution and I believe in personal freedom, so I am very strongly for the establishment clause.

On the other things, I have gotten into rather vicious exchanges with atheists who think it is their purpose to "de-religify" the masses by preaching Biblical fallacies to Christians who aren't bothering them. Now once Christians are trying to convert others, they're fair game. When they're minding their own business and you try to hand them a pamphlet or engage in a debate saying their God is a lie... rude. Extremist.

"Just as I detest Religio-Nazis who would feel no sorrow for the murder of Matthew Shepard, I equally detest ultra-liberal, cultural Marxist, enviro-weenie, politically correct whackjobs who would use revisionist history and hack science to promote and justify everything..."

Unfortunately, I think you may be referring to me, because of your use of the terms "revisionist history" and "hack science", which tends to refer to what the conservatives accuse everyone else of doing for generally telling the truth.

"Those same mental midgets would also force the "theory" of evolution to be taught in school as "fact" with no mention given to the "belief" of creationism."

Buzzer sound. Sorry, you're wrong here. I'd like to be more nicey nice and use relativistic language, but you're dead wrong. Please read why, though it's long.

Those who put 'theory' in quotation marks, have ever used the term "just a theory" demonstrate no knowledge of science because they do not understand the scientific process, and they do not know what a SCIENTIFIC Theory is, which differs markedly from the common use of the word theory.

Additionally, those who do not "believe" in evolution have every right not to believe in it, but unfortunately for them, they're wrong. Evolution is a series of facts, theories, and hypotheses. It has been confirmed by independent discoveries in biology, chemistry, physics, geology, archaeology, physical anthropology, genetics, paleontology, and probably a bunch of other fields I can't even think of. An old earth has been confirmed through multiple fields with multiple dating methods.

And speaking of dating methods... carbon dating, dendrochronology, obsidian hydration dating, molecular clocks, coral clocks, K/Ar dating, Pb/U, dating, and countless others confirm this information.

How do I know? Did I buy into the hype thrown at me by spin doctors?

No. I studied it. Extensively. For years. Got my degree in it as a matter of fact, not by listening to "liberal professors", but by studying the stuff, specifically myself. Want a thirteen page paper on the Lothagam Jaw? Cause I wrote one! I have personally studies fossils and casts of fossils of all the links that creationists have been lying for thirty years about by claiming they don't exist. I can actually DO the DNA tests that examine close genetic ties. I can even screw with bacterial DNA by inserting pieces of other things in it by cutting it up with restriction enzymes and turn it different colors (fun experiment).

I know these techniques because I have worked my ass off learning them and studying them because I think it is fascinating.

What have you done? Are you qualified to comment? Do you know the process by which a Theory becomes a Theory?

I'm not saying "I know, so just believe me", though I am more qualified to comment on the subject. I don't accept evolution because I have a personal anecdote. ANYONE can do what I've done provided they have the intitiative. If you're that interested, I can link you to some websites that cover evolution quite nicely. What's nice about evolution is though there are heated anti-creationism websites because people like me get righteously pissed off, evolution is not about trying to disprove creationism, which actively proves nothing. Can you say the same about creationism? Evolution can be actively demonstrated. We are seeing it with increasingly nasty antibiotics-resistant bacteria. You can easily direct selection yourself (though it ceases to be 'natural') relatively quickly with dog breeds.

Creationism, creation science, intelligent design, theistically guided development or any of the other bullshit ways these liars want to try and push their religious agenda, is not scientific. Why????

Because the existence of God is not a testable hypothesis. They are working backwards, which usually screws up science (like in the much lauded "Piltdown Man" which creationists love, because scientists were expecting a different model of evolution than what actually occurred), and when they have a testable hypothesis, which is exceptionally rare, not ONE has stood up to error testing.

There is absolutely no evidence for creationism whatsoever, not a shred of it, and to insert it into science class undermines the scientific method so that children do not properly understand what science is. As a result, they grown not to trust the scientific method, and may not develop a good sense of scientific skepticism about suspect scientific claims, such as "eating shark cartilage helps you lose weight".

On the flip side, there has been absolutely nothing that has cast evolution in even the slightest shadow of a doubt. Not a THING.

You want transitional fossils? We have museums full of them. I'm not sure if you've been updated on this since the sixties (I'm not being snide; my mother didn't know this stuff and she has no trouble with evolution, but the major discoveries have been largely in the last thirty years), but the concept of the 'missing link' is now laughable because we have SO many early hominids popping up in East Africa, that we have a family 'bush'. I can probably still name twenty fossils in the hominid family tree, and that's only what we have in the way of human transitional fossils, and that's only what I can remember!

You want genetic linkage? No problem, we can examine genetic similarity. Humans are very very genetically similar to chimps and bonobos (by the way, cousins, not 'fathers'), less so to gorillas, previously speculated (before molecular testing) to be less related, less so to orangutans, less so to old world monkeys, less so to new world monkeys, less so to lemurs, less so to tree shrews, less so to horses, less so to ostriches, and so forth.

This isn't speculation. This just shows the genetic similarity with different types of animals.

You want independent methods of dating fossils? Got that too. Yeah, we know about the window in carbon dating, but we don't really care because we don't use carbon dating to date fossils and we never have. It doesn't go back far enough (if you look at a number of creationist websites, you will hear all about carbon dating and dinosaurs. This alone is enough to discount everything else because it is stoo-pid. Carbon dating can only trace back 50-75K years and has NEVER been used to date older things).

You want physics? Not a problem. The types of dating we DO use fall in line with that. Also, creation institutes like to talk about the Second Law of Thermodynamics because it sounds scientific. Unfortunately, they screwed that up too.

You want geology? No problem. No global flood by the way, at least not in the last several million years. As far as strata being deposited quickly by a flood, sorry, washing bedrock quickly doesn't cause it to do that, and it doesn't produce animal footprints between the strata. Also geology, earth science, and a bunch of other things that begin to stray from my major demonstrate a great deal about fossil fuels (do creationists believe in oil?) not to mention fossil build ups.

You want increased complexity in microorganisms, which is what creationists were screaming for so long didn't exist (still do, actually)? We got that too. Despite the difficulty in fossilization imprints of soft-bodied organisms for obvious reasons, check out the Burgess Shale among other things.

We got plate tectonics too. Anyone not believing in the movements and shifting of the plates has a lot to explain to about 150 thousand people who died as a result of a massive geological shift.

If you want to look at the "science" of the creationists, check out some of their institutes. The acclaimed one the so-called Dr. Dino Ken Hovind went to is not an accredited university, and the only requirement for admission (I think you can still download the form) is that you SIGN a contract STATING that you believe the Bible is the unaltered, uninterpreted word of God and that he made the Earth as it is described in Genesis.

If you have to sign a loyalty oath to it, it's not science.

STUDY evolution. Personally study it. Do the research yourself as I have. Those who have not studied it are not qualified to claim it's false.

You want to pick on string theory, be my guest. I don't understand it either, and I'm not sure if it's a true theory or a hypothesis, nor am I qualified to comment, because I don't understand it.

If you want to tangle of evolution, I can pretty adequately demonstrate it's airtight, and I'm not even one of the big experts. I'm just an evolution geek. Has nothing to do with is there a God; isn't there either. It's fascinating either way, though if there is a God, I want to shake its hand for that one.

By the way. Other "theories".
Gravity
Germs
Atoms
Electricity.

Should we put a disclaimer in the textbooks about those too?

Theories do not "become facts" if they are good enough. Facts tend to be step one of the process. Theories are explanations of facts. Hypotheses are educated estimates of those explanations that can be tested.

Fact: There's a small skull buried three inches under top soil at this GPS location.
Hypothesis: This is the skull of Julie Lynch, who went missing from San Andreas two years ago.
Testing: The skull is confirmed to be human and confirmed to be a juvenile human. Julie Lynch's dental records match those of the skull. DNA extracted from the skeletal material shows a match with Julie Lynch's DNA. The skull shows a healed hairline fracture in the frontal bone consistent with medical treatment Julie Lynch received after falling off a swing.
Theory: This is the skull of Julie Lynch.

The other way science works?
Same fact; same hypothesis
Testing: The skull is confirmed to be human and confirmed to be a juvenile human. Independent dating methods demonstrate the skull to be approximately three hundred years old.
Hypothesis thrown out.

"Hell, even Darwin admitted that he fucked that one up."

The Lady Hope urban legend.
First of all, Darwin never said anything of the kind, but creationists like to claim this, despite the fact that it's a lie. This is not uncommon for creationists.
Second of all, had Darwin said that, it would make no difference. Darwin lit the spark; that's all. Actually, when Darwin *first* came up with natural selection as the mechanism for evolution, it was a hypothesis.

Nicely enough, over a century of scientific research has solidly confirmed it, including work by the Christian monk, Gregor Mendel, who, other than Darwin, probably contributed the most to the development of evolutionary theory, since Darwin himself couldn't figure out the mechanism of natural selection (genes).

Sorry to be harsh on that part, but since I've studied it, I get REALLY sick of people who have NEVER studied evolution dismissing it when they're not qualified to comment and then using that to attempt to force their agenda into public schools. It is wrong. It is insulting to religion because it is equating true Christianity which is something that is a disingenuous lie, and it is depriving children of a true science education based on the schoolboard's desire not to offend anyone. It actually makes me angry because I have worked so hard on understanding it, because religion or not, Evolution is frigging fascinating. It truly is. It's a shame more people don't study it. It says nothing about God, and for the people who equate Christianity with Creationism to their children, SHAME on them. They're setting their kids up for a fall. I grew up never having evolution threaten my Christianity. When I learned about evolution (fairly early in my life because it's frigging fascinating!), it did nothing to my faith.

When you teach kids that the two are equivalent, if and when they do find out that creationism is a load of deceitful steaming piles of pigshit fed on them by people who have known better for thirty years, you risk compromising their ACTUAL faith in God because you, the parent, have linked the two!

Creation "science" is bullshit. Sorry. It's not liberal propanda; it's not the crying of 'mental midgets' as you so eloquently put us... it's unadulterated dishonest bullshit. I don't think you are dishonest. But the people forwarding creationism have been making the same arguments for decades and refuse to take down the information when it has been PROVEN WRONG (such as the "human" footprint next to the dinosaur footprint). They are con artists who will sell you a thirty year old lie for only a hundred dollars for the boxed video set. And people believe them. A LOT of people believe them. Because they don't understand science, and now they want to raise YET another generation of people who don't understand science, who will buy the same video collection (now on DVD!) and the same shark cartilage pills, and the same cold fusion creators and then teach their kids to do the same. A generational cycle of ignorance.

I'll tell you something very candidly. I am an atheist (duh) and I've dedicated a good portion of my life to studying evolution.

Let me tell you something else. If, in my studies, I had an inkling of something that blew evolution wide open, I would SOOOOO publish the SHIT out of it and milk it for all it is worth. Despite having a decided reason not to (atheist), even I would reveal any research that cast reasonable doubt on evolution because, not only am I a fan of the truth, even if I don't like it, but it would bring wealth and fame to me throughout the world!

Accepting evolution kind of sucks financially, if you love it. Unless you're Johanson, a Leakey, or one of the Leakey women (Dian Fossey; Jane Goodall), studying evolution means you are going to spend a lot of time begging minimal grant money to kneel in the dirt in someplace generally unpleasant and torn by tribal wars and dig in thousand degree heat.

Hell, even the famous ones have to do that kind of stuff, but they get the big bucks. When you're on my end of the totem pole, they make you pay your own airfare to Africa! Is it reasonable then to think that every top scientists, every middle scientist, and almost every bottom scientist, every accredited university, every peer-reviewed scientific paper... ALL of them are keeping some huge conspiracy, or are merely too dumb to know better?

Is it more reasonable to believe that because the ICR says the Bible says so, to discount all of the evidence for evolution, all of the arguments for evolution, and because of a smattering of largely unaccredited people working outside their chosen field of study, claim that creationism is at the very least 'equivalent' science, thus bankrupting our kids of a scientific understanding?

You want more reasons, I can dump a truckload of them on you. And please.. real research. I am sick of quotes by supposed PhDs from unaccredited universities, community college professors, and people whose accredited degrees have absolutely nothing to do with evolution. Having Dr. JesusLove, professor of English literature from Bob Jones say a pithy quote does not constitute "research". In fact, 'quote lists' do not constitute research.

"I think we would agree that it is the power-bent assholes who want to force all of us to think the same that are the problem."

You don't have to think that way. And if you do accept evolution, there isn't one way of thinking about it because there are a number of hypotheses within the study of evolution that are still fair game for death matches between scientists.

Additionally, you don't even have to accept it or have your kids accept it. You just cannot insert something that isn't science into science class, and creationism ain't science. Religion doesn't typically purport to BE science. God isn't a testable hypothesis. That doesn't mean He doesn't exist; it means you can't test it.

Hypothesis: God exists.
Testing: Uh...

"You aluded to negative experiences in the Bible Belt. What were they?"

Being told I wasn't a "real Christian" for accepting evolution, being not angry about gay people, not having a particular problem with Catholics(???), not going to church when I first moved there, and not being baptist. Being called a witch and a satan worshipper while still Christian for wearing black. Getting hit, having rocks thrown at me, having a group of redneck morons try to run me over in the school parking lot. Having Christians smash out a friend's taillight (had my best friend called a witch in the Fellowship Hall of her church; love the irony!)

Once I was Wiccan (which I am no longer), being told by a teacher that the Bible says thou shalt not suffer a witch to live. During all stages having teachers and administrators ignore abuse of people they perceived to be "unChristian", including seeing them come around the corner while we were being harassed and then turn and walk away.

Being told on the street by a little old lady that I was going to hell for listening to Nine Inch Nails (that was a weird one), and a whole lot of stuff related to that.

Surprisingly enough, it was in the South that I lost my faith, not in ultra agnostic super liberal California which is where I chose to be Baptized.

"WindRider
Another long-winded diatribe. If you don't want to read it, SCROLL QUICKLY!"

Triple ditto.

"When I caught my daughter viewing a show that I considered inappropriate and had told her not to watch, I responded by merely taking the television out of her room."

**clapping**

"I fear any degree of censorship. It could too easily be used wrongly by the irresponsible idiots in charge."

Yup. If the ultra right and ultra left had their way, we wouldn't have anything left to read or watch. Goodbye Bible; goodbye Harry Potter; goodbye Tom Sawyer; goodbye Catcher in the Rye; goodbye Silent Spring, etc ad infinitim.

Ishie

Enough already of Jefferson..this small piece sums up his religiosity:

Jefferson's Religious Beliefs

Jefferson was always reluctant to reveal his religious beliefs to the public, but at times he would speak to and reflect upon the public dimension of religion. He was raised as an Anglican, but was influenced by English deists such as Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury. Thus in the spirit of the Enlightenment, he made the following recommendation to his nephew Peter Carr in 1787: "Question with boldness even the existence of God; because if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear." In Query XVII of Notes on the State of Virginia, he clearly outlines the views which led him to play a leading role in the campaign to separate church and state and which culminated in the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom: "The rights of conscience we never submitted, we could not submit. We are answerable for them to our God. The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg . . . . Reason and free inquiry are the only effectual agents against error." Jefferson's religious views became a major public issue during the bitter party conflict between Federalists and Republicans in the late 1790s when Jefferson was often accused of being an atheist.

With the help of Richard Price, a Unitarian minister in London, and Joseph Priestly, an English scientist-clergyman who emigrated to America in 1794, Jefferson eventually arrived at some positive assertions of his private religion. His ideas are nowhere better expressed than in his compilations of extracts from the New Testament "The Philosophy of Jesus" (1804) and "The Life and Morals of Jesus" (1819-20?). The former stems from his concern with the problem of maintaining social harmony in a republican nation. The latter is a multilingual collection of verses that was a product of his private search for religious truth. Jefferson believed in the existence of a Supreme Being who was the creator and sustainer of the universe and the ultimate ground of being, but this was not the triune deity of orthodox Christianity. He also rejected the idea of the divinity of Christ, but as he writes to William Short on October 31, 1819, he was convinced that the fragmentary teachings of Jesus constituted the "outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man." In correspondence, he sometimes expressed confidence that the whole country would be Unitarian, but he recognized the novelty of his own religious beliefs. On June 25, 1819, he wrote to Ezra Stiles, "I am of a sect by myself, as far as I know."

--Rebecca Bowman, Monticello Research Department, August 1997
http://www.monticello.org/reports/interests/religion.html

re Erica's post ( or is it Janet or Granny?)

"Hello, everyone. For a truly sobering war holiday message, please go to NY Times and read the OpEd column by Bob Herbert. Then give yourself a Christmas present by going out and buying the book, "Bush on the Couch." As always, try to read it with an unbiased (that means OPEN) mind.

I hope your holidays are peaceful.

By the way, another of my nephews (the one with 4 little girls) ships off to Iraq next week."

b2 says:

Herbert is a NYT's hack...totally partisan putridity.....week after nauseous week....

re "Bush on a Couch" by Justin Frank (check out this guys level of partisanship- unfrigginbelievable!)

I agree with this review on the book at Amazon.com:

"partisan, mean-spirited psychobabble, October 30, 2004

Reviewer: D. Rieck (Ohio) - See all my reviews

In a recent C-Span appearance, Dr. Frank openly admitted that he wrote his book after being persuaded to do so by someone who despised Bush and was shopping around for someone willing to provide a negative analysis to help remove him from office. He admitted that he is a hardcore liberal political activist who has, in his own words, "hated" several Republican presidents. He admitted that he is totally partisan and biased in his views. And he even admitted that the American Medical Association has proclaimed that his methods of analyzing someone without ever meeting that person are not only impossible, but also unethical and unprofessional.

Such admissions are stunning, since they would completely discredit any other author. Yet he made these admissions gleefully and went on to suggest that more such analyses should be made of people running for office. And in a grandiose and somewhat disturbing tribute to his own self-proclaimed intellectual and political superiority, he suggested that psychoanalysts like himself should play a greater role in weeding out the wrong kind of politicians because, he said, "Who knows more about people than those who study people?"

This is basically just a Kitty Kelly style hit job. It's partisan, mean-spirited psychobabble for the Michael Moore crowd. And while it reveals little about President Bush, it reveals volumes about Dr. Frank and the angry, elitist hate-mongers who have, unfortunately, hijacked the political left in recent years.

I'm shocked that Dr. Frank is allowed to maintain his medical license and practice. And I'm saddened that so many Americans choose such infantile slander over mature political discourse."
-----------------------------------

In summary, I would only add that you have been many people, Erica/Erika/Janet/Granny .

VA nurse, Psychologist speciallizing in cognitive dissonance, mother/aunt of Iraqi bound soldier(s), wife to disabled veietnam helo pilot vet, partisan liberal and anti-war activist.

I get the feeling you are trying to run a "psyop" on me- poor old BadBob.

Good luck Erica/Janet or whoever you are!

PS- all one has to do is track back your posts to the original Coastopia blog and figure it out.......

B2

Ishie,
I am impressed (really) by your list of academic achievements, but you are defending your embrasure of evolution to the wrong person. I don't disavow evolution entirely. Perhaps it was the process by which God created the universe? I'm not sure, so therefore it is to me a "theory". On the other hand, human evolution seems a bit whacked to me, as does "strings". I think Darwin was whacked as well. Calm down and read again. You will see that I was not attacking one, but the exclusion of the other.
I do not think of you as a whack-job, but your sense of history does seem a bit revisionist. I was actually referring to the academic elitists who desire to create an environment that is totally devoid of morality. Any sense of personal responsibility for one's action seems to have been fallen by the wayside when Andrea Yates can do what she did and not be shot immediately. That she was suffering from some mental derangement, is a diagnosis that was arrived at by the application of "hack science" and milked by completely full-of-shit lawyers who have no interest in justice. Those people are the mental midgets. The ones who insist that people are no longer responsible for what they do because of some new-found "syndrome". The ones who insist that all traces of religion and or morality be done away with. Want a reference to infant euthanasia? Google it. AP ran the story. When you read it, hold on and try not to slide down that proverbial slippery slope. My God, even the liberal press headlined it as the "Dutch having lost their moral compass"! And just how is my view on said slippery slope indefensible? Even Lenin (I'm not suggesting that you are a Commie) held fast to the proverb about the hole in the dam. Everything has to start somewhere, and human beings operating outside moral boundaries ALWAYS progress to darker and darker limits. Contest that if you will, but it is a fact.
Homosexuality. Fags should shut the hell up and screw away if they wish. I find it wrong, but its none of my business and wouldn't dare to interfere. I wouldn't want to butt into other people's lives as you contend that I do. Don't know where you got that from. I think we may have to consider allowing civil unions to keep everything fair. It's not a marriage and I could never consider it as such, but then again we don't live in a theocracy.
Forgive the "ad hominem" regarding abortion. An appeal to the crowd? Damned right. Even the majority of liberal politicians speak of abortion in negative terms and profess a personal dislike of the procedure. They just lack the personal courage to follow their own convictions and stand against it. It's easier to rationalize it and pander to a few who wish put their own interests and convenience above life. It's not a case of doing something that's not hurting someone else. It's killing babies, for God's sake. How much fucking intelligence does it take to get that straight? Sure, we can call it a fetus, but it will "evolve" into a full term baby. Damn, that one pisses me off because that IS indefensible.
I'm sorry that you experienced the negative things you did here in the South. I have also had unpleasant experiences with holier-than-thous who wished to screw around with my beliefs and who insisted that I follow their dictates, rather than the dictates of God. I just chose not to let them ruin my relationship with Him.
The references to Jefferson came from monticello.org

Randall

"I don't disavow evolution entirely. Perhaps it was the process by which God created the universe?"

Evolution very well could be the way a god created life on earth. It could very well be the way aliens setting up an otherworldly experiment created life on earth. It could be the way the Egyptian God Nut created life on earth.

My point is that all these claims have equal evidence: None. All are speculations; not hypotheses; speculations based on personal beliefs, which is fine, but it isn't science, and has no place in a science class. Additionally, to single out God as the 'possible' originator, despite there being NO scientific reason to do so excludes all other completely scientifically unfounded philosophies and undermines the actual science.

Religion does have a place in the schools, but not in the sense many creationists and church/state separation opponents would like or want to acknowledge. Religion is an extremely important part of history, culture, and in text-based religions, literature. In THIS context, to exclude religion from schools is to rewrite history. Keep it out of science class, and keep it out of administrative endorsements.

Why have God in science class? Two reasons:
1. Science threatens the religious beliefs of some people.
2. People do not understand the science due to poor presentation to them, thus feel the religious argument has equal merit, which it does not.

Were high school science classes to present the evidence for evolution vs. the 'evidence' for creationism honestly and with full knowledge, creationists would be VERY unhappy, and claim that schools were trying to disprove Christianity. Creationism does not propose a single valid scientific hypothesis and presents not a SHRED of evidence.

"I'm not sure, so therefore it is to me a "theory"."

You are not using the word "theory" in the proper scientific context. Science does not depend on whether YOU are sure or not. I can think the sun revolves around the earth, or not be sure if the sun revolves around the earth, and that makes no difference to what actually happens. By the way, the heliocentric solar system is, you guessed it, a scientific Theory too.

"On the other hand, human evolution seems a bit whacked to me, as does "strings"."

Fortunately, science does not depend on whether you think it is "whacked". Since human evolution is my specific field of expertise, I have seen such overwhelming evidence for it that there really is no question. I have personally examined the fossils and casts, have seen the genetic evidence, have done the behavioral studies.

Additionally, with the exception perhaps of pigs and horses, who were apparently abundant enough to spread transitional fossils EVERYWHERE, we know more about human evolution than almost any line due to the fact that as humans, we are specifically interested in ourselves (plus clues about our more recent biological origins and genetic structures help us do things like fight cancer and pick animal subjects closely related to us to test cures), thus we've spent more energy and grant money looking for ourselves.

Like I said, I don't know about string theory or if it's an actual theory, but instead of proclaiming that it is 'whacked' or even that I think it is whacked, I prefer to be intellectually honest and say I do not understand it at all, thus I will have to leave the dissection of it to people who at least have a smidgeon of a background in the field. I do not even have enough of a knowledge of the subject to claim the slightest opinion whatsoever.

From your use of the word "theory", your characterization of evolution and its internal workings, I suspect the same is true of you and evolution. That's not to say you can't have an opinion; this is America after all. It's just reasonable then that having studied it, an unfounded opinion is going to mean absolutely nothing to me, and SHOULD mean absolutely nothing to a school board.

Unfortunately, many of the people with unfounded opinions somehow feel qualified to tell school boards what their kids should be learning, because apparently their knowledge of science is so poor that it works as a democracy. To paraphrase Penn Jillette, "Teller and I are going to vote on the sex of this rabbit." Do votes affect the sex of the rabbit? Nope. The rabbit either is or it isn't. It may not seem fair. If all scientific evidence points to the rabbit being male (examination of genitals and chromosomes), isn't it UNFAIR not to present the argument that the rabbit could be female? Isn't it sexist?

Science isn't fair. It just is. Sorry. It's not fair that kids are formed with hideous birth defects either, but voting that it's a bad thing won't change it. Only science potentially can.

"I think Darwin was whacked as well."

Why's that? I studied his life in a history/philosophy class, and other than being willing to spend more time in a boat than I would and being Victorian, for a historical figure, he seemed fairly normal. You want to compare him to characters like Newton, Edgar Allan Poe, and Benjamin Franklin, he was downright uninteresting.

"Calm down and read again. You will see that I was not attacking one, but the exclusion of the other."

Yup, I saw that. And it disgusts me. Sorry. People not qualified to speak on science are not qualified to set its teaching policies and referring to people as mental midgets for excluding unfounded, untested hypotheses from science class is ignorant. If they want to handicap their children with unfounded beliefs as well, they can be my guest, but then they can either teach the kids themselves or pay for the private schools.

Creationism should be excluded from science classes because it isn't a science and has no basis in science. Intelligent Design, Theistic Guidance, and any other bs way creationists try to ram God into science should also be excluded. It is not only a rampant violation of the establishment clause, but it compromises the scientific education, and many districts and educators, to avoid the contraversy, have watered it down so much that they refuse to discuss either, instead presenting biology and a venue of disconnected and boring facts that are not united by a common thread. The students who are being gypped by this dumbing down of biology get a NASTY shock when they hit college and learn that they have to relearn science the right way because accredited professors do not pander to ignorance. Unfortunately, many high school teachers do not even have the academic background to know better.

"I do not think of you as a whack-job, but your sense of history does seem a bit revisionist."

Interestingly, so does yours. What I have gotten from your posts is that the intensely Christian settlers/founding fathers set up this country under the name of morality and God and only included the establishment clause to protect religion, but somehow these incredibly intelligent men were too stupid to say what they REALLY meant. From your posts, I also learn that America has been place of high moral values since the settlers got here and began slaughtering and enslaving the indigenous population, but only since about... oh, my generation, has morality begun a downspiral that will take us into chaos.

Considering this view directly contradicts historical facts and writings from the very people who founded this country, I see far more revisionism in your approach to history without any evidence to back your point of view. You present isolated hysterical news articles to attempt to back your claim of moral decay while neglecting acknowledgment of moral advancements and neglecting presentation of negative news articles and events in the past.

The fact that you do not LIKE a lot of history does not change whether or not it happened. Believe it or not, as hard as people make it at times, I do love my country. Part of loving my country is accepting its past, even if we have acted (or are acting) badly. Part of loving my country is examining where we have screwed up so that I can love my country by helping improve it, rather than claiming it is and has always assumed the position of moral superiority, and if there is something in its past COMPLETELY indefensible, arguing that at least we weren't as bad as other countries.

It does not help America to pretend that we are infallable. It does not help America to pretend that if there are problems, it's all the younger generation's fault. It does not help America to rewrite her history and it does a disrespect to the Americans who saw problems of their times and worked and died to change them. For every horror we have committed in our past, there have also been those people standing up and saying "NO!"

*That* is the beauty of America. The potential power of the citizenry to change our course, not its position of moral authority. Otherwise, America is no more special than any other country proclaiming the moral high road, which would be almost all of them.

You choose only to focus the spotlight of negativity and my generation and the one that follows. Forgive me if I take exception to being villianized as part of the cause of all that is evil by a generation who was probably considered the exact same way by the generation that proceeded them. Watch old movies and shows and read old books. The "kids are lacking respect" and the "moral downspiral" arguments have been persistant throughout history. Hell, Plato was lamenting it in his writing! So either we started at a high moral ground with ancient greek (which embraced homosexuality AND pedophilia) and have been on a downspiral for the last... oh, 2300 years, or we can conclude that it is common for the generation rising in age to fear, lament, and degrade those rising behind them, apparently forgetting the lamenting of their own generation by the older ones.

"I was actually referring to the academic elitists who desire to create an environment that is totally devoid of morality."

How is it you know the desires of the so-called 'elitists'? The portrayal of those that chose higher education as somehow elitist in this country, by the way, is another problem that is perpetrated by many in the conservative propaganda machine. For someone who claims to hate the "Right Religion" as much as I do, you are *really* toting the game plan. I think it can be summed up by the popular advertising mechanism of "Well, I ain't a fancypants scientist, but I know what works."

Pursuing academics is not elitist. It rises out of a desire to be informed, and tends to be a far cry more difficult and expensive that inheriting daddy's money (not that the two are mutually exclusive) and power position, which currently seems to be considered being part of the "salt of the earth". People who have worked waiting tables to finance their way through higher education while supplementing their incomes with loans that will continue to haunt them once they've attained a career while they are treated like crap by the 'salt of the earth'? Elitist bastards. Trying to strip morality.

Screw that. I'm sorry. I have known FAR too many people who have worked too hard to be treated like that. I have seen how the "salt of the earth" treats friends of mine who work on graduate degrees while working at Red Lobster. You want to talk about elitist? Let's talk about having people you'd probably consider good and moral seem to try to make a sport out of making waitresses cry.

Elitist my ass.

Additionally, I have seen no anti-moral movement. In science, I have learned about the key role in science to help provide people with better living conditions, no matter where in the world they live. I have watched scientists struggle to develop more climate tolerant crops with higher yields that are decried by the uninformed, despite a potential to help curb starvation and malnutritrion worldwide. I have seen 'elitist' doctors with too much education and liberal backgrounds risk their lives by flying to impoverished nations to distribute medical care for free. I have watched anthropologists talk about the biological background of morality and our responsibilities to the world population because empathy improves our individual fitness as well as the social condition. This notion of evolution as justifying an "everyone for themselves" flies in the face of biological evidence and is generally only believed by anti-evolutionists and social darwinists, and the latter group has been debunked almost as many times and as thoroughly as creationists.

Does this mean all academics are world-loving, empathetic selfless saints? No. Some are overprivilaged, power-hungry elitist bastards, but so are an equivalent population of non-academics.

Speaking of which, why do many people who hate academic types, or consider them immoral elitists, think of Dubya as a good individual? He was born into power and money, used that influence to relatively squander an education at one of the most prestigious private universities in the country during which time he acted like a spoiled brat. Why is he exempt? Because he has an accent and says "Jesus" a lot? Not saying you like him, by the way. But it says something about perceptions in this country.

Is he more elitist than I am? I went to a public university which I was largely able to do using loans I am currently paying back. My school was not ivy league and while possessing an excellent reputation, it is best known for agricultural advance and large animal veterinary medicine. For 'elitists', our academics certainly spend a lot of time kneeling in cow shit. In my field, our academics spend a lot of time either trekking through cold water in waders to collect samples, crouching in the burning heat to uncover fossils with a paintbrush, or chasing monkeys through a parasite infested jungle.

And guess what, all these muck encrusted elitists support the 'exclusion' of creationism from science. Dubya favors "equal" presentation, apparently because he was too busy drinking beer out of a funnel to pay attention in science class.

"Any sense of personal responsibility for one's action seems to have been fallen by the wayside when Andrea Yates can do what she did and not be shot immediately."

I agree that we have problems in personal responsibility. I do not see this as the fault of academics, since I have seen far more accounting for personal responsibility in college then I ever did in high school. In high school, when darling little Donna cut school, talked in class, and failed tests, mommies and daddies, often Christian came in and accused the underpaid, overworked, often undereducated teachers of discriminating against Donna or not giving her the proper education. In some cases, proper churchgoing Christians have defended their children's idleness by claiming their child failed because of the moral convictions of not accepting evolution rather than acknowledging that their child is a lazy bastard.

The lack of accountability CREATES a moral issue, but seems to have no basis in the moral convictions of the parents. I've seen fundamentalist Christians blame everyone but themselves for having a child that goes bad (it's the secular media and violence!) and I've seen a philosophy professor who is an error theorist (the philosophy that all ethical proclamations are false; in other words, true moral relativism) chew his kid up one side and down the other for disrespecting another professor by interupting her class.

And yes, you see more moral relativism among philosophy professors and cultural anthropology professors than probably in the population. The weird thing is that these people who *should* produce the most morally bankrupt, disrespectful, accountability free children by your logic, somehow don't. Their kids are gay with about the same frequency as the children of fundamentalist Christians (though with far less emotional damage to the child).

In fact, as I've mentioned before, the population of imprisoned atheists far underrepresents their percentage of the population, which is not true of Christians. What's going on? We can raise our kids to be moral despite having no theistic standard of morality with greater success that Christians. What do you make of this? Perhaps your convictions about what causes moral problems are incorrect? Perhaps you claim that we are being influenced by the Christian culture to produce good kids? Then why aren't Christians succeeding as well?

I see an ATTEMPT at accountability in college. Fortunately the relativistic, morally bankrupt, elitists professors will have none this 'blame others' crap, and if Donna fails, well, she probably should have sought help earlier, and Donna will continue to sport an F, no matter how much she and her parents bitch and moan. College also teaches science as science should be taught, which means that if you have a beloved hypothesis proved wrong, you can whine about it all you want, but you'll be blasted in the peer reviewed literature and have your data picked apart by anyone who gets to it without worrying that they're damaging your precious self esteem.

There is a problem with personal responsbility, but you're pointing your finger in the wrong direction.

"That she was suffering from some mental derangement, is a diagnosis that was arrived at by the application of "hack science" and milked by completely full-of-shit lawyers who have no interest in justice."

What hack science? Lawyers aren't scientists. In fact, one of the problems with denying people a good scientific education is that it allows them to be manipulated by pseudo science. And if you want to get into what I think of many defense attorneys, that is something else entirely. Here's a common lawyer abuse that has caused murderers to walk away scott free.

Forensic science involves a lot of scientific fields and has very precise tests which can actively link a person to a crime scene. These tests often involve minute details and rather intensive scientific processes not well understood by the general public, such as mass spectrometry. A 'good old boy' lawyer (one with an accent who says Jesus a lot) claims he may not be a scientist, but thinking that some mumbo jumbo junk science based on "theories" proves this innocent family man guilty is a travesty of justice. The lawyer then calls a 'scientist' to the stand, whose qualifications may include a community college degree in philosophy. The 'scientist' talks about how faulty DNA evidence is and how it can be contaminated by anything. He provides an anecdote about some test showing dog hair to be human hair and doesn't mention that the error was immediately caught and the evidence disgarded as valid.

Now the jury, hypothetically untrained in science, merely sees two scientists; one for; one against. How can you convict someone of murder when you aren't sure? An 'expert witness' merely needs to sound impressive.

"Those people are the mental midgets. The ones who insist that people are no longer responsible for what they do because of some new-found "syndrome"."

That was not the implication of your post, and you tied it DIRECTLY to people who sought the teaching of evolution but NOT creation.

"Want a reference to infant euthanasia? Google it. AP ran the story. When you read it, hold on and try not to slide down that proverbial slippery slope."

Okay. Found an article. Found proposed euthansia for infants that had absolutely zero chance of survival, such as being born with almost no brain, that will jerk them along their first few weeks or months in severe pain before they drop dead.

Though you may see this as symptomatic of 'moral decay', we do a similar thing in America, but do not wait for live birth. We have amniocentesis, which can determine some conditions that guarantee the infant will die early, and in some cases, may die in the womb, endangering the mother. At that stage, women may make a choice to abort, rather than going through the danger of a potentially difficult pregnancy and then the physical and emotional pain of giving birth and having the child die. The rightness or wrongness of this action is debatable, but this hardly is the claim you were making.

Now, the proverbial slippery slope would have some in hysterics claiming that this sort of action will lead to euthanasia for children considered undesireable, such as ugly children or children with nonlethal genetic disorders such as Down's Syndrome, which seems to be where you were headed. The practice of euthanasia on infants with NO chance of survival is as contraversial as the practice of euthanasia with patients who have painful terminal illnesses, but it is a conflicted and multifaceted issue rather than indicative of moral decay.

"My God, even the liberal press headlined it as the "Dutch having lost their moral compass"!"

Ah, the myth of the liberal media. The fact that this WAS the headline shows a biased media because they are clearly casting judgment rather than reporting facts, which is hypothetically what they are SUPPOSED to be doing.

And yes, I'm sure you can dredge up some articles that show a decided liberal bias. I can do the same with conservatives, and see more of a market for conservative spin at this particular time because ::gasp:: there are more conservatives, and the news largely reflects that.

"And just how is my view on said slippery slope indefensible? Even Lenin (I'm not suggesting that you are a Commie) held fast to the proverb about the hole in the dam."

Um, a slippery slope is a logical fallacy that is not a valid basis for an argument. If you have a problem with it, take it up with the people who founded principles of debate.

"Everything has to start somewhere, and human beings operating outside moral boundaries ALWAYS progress to darker and darker limits. Contest that if you will, but it is a fact."

Fortunately, I do have a scientific background, so I am not going to 'take your word for it'.

Additionally, ANYTHING can be made into a slippery slope. Christians are gaining increased power in politics and seeking to infiltrate more government organizations with Christianity. If this trend continues, Christians will become more and more restrictive, ban other philosophies and religions, prohibit dancing, acts they consider immoral, and finally, will start killing non-Christians and then Christians they disagree with.

Furthermore, if the government continues its increased trend of eroding civil liberties in the interest of security, it won't be long before we are all walking around with encoded chips that allows the government to watch us. Upon commission of a crime, they could overload our nervous system, and throw us in jail without a trial, or even use these implants to kill us. You can't argue with this imaginary scenario, because I'm going to state that it's a fact that we always take things to the next extreme. If you disagree with me, you're stupid. Anyone with any intelligence can see I'm right.

See how it works? See why it isn't valid in an argument? It leaves the other person trying to debate the validity of things that are hypothetical extrapolations. Things stand alone for debates about their merit. If people take and run with them, that says nothing about the merit of the original argument. The invention of the computer actually DID lead to an ability for neo-nazi organizations to unite more easily. Should we then argue the invention of the computer? No, we should argue the merit (or lack thereof) of Neo-nazis.

"Homosexuality. Fags should shut the hell up and screw away if they wish."

Wow. I think that stands alone. I'd add something, but ::shrug:: You really demonstrated some point better than anything I could say.

Of course, if I were equally intolerant I could say "Christianity. Lemmings should shut the hell up and pray to each other if they wish". But this would not be conducive to respecting their rights.

"I wouldn't want to butt into other people's lives as you contend that I do."

Well... you've said plenty against allowing them marriage rights, which for some reason, you consider your business, and think it is your business to tell them to shut the hell up in a country that supposedly has free speech.

Granted, you are free to tell them to shut the hell up, but they are similarly free to tell you to go shove your head up your own ass.

"I think we may have to consider allowing civil unions to keep everything fair. It's not a marriage and I could never consider it as such, but then again we don't live in a theocracy."

Hallelujah. And I'm not saying YOU should consider it a valid marriage. I'm saying the state should, because the state is supposed to enact secular law. Marriage shouldn't be religious in the legal context, and in the current context, so long as it fits to the "man/woman" dynamic, has absolutely no state requirements to be anyone's standard of moral. In fact, one party often continues to get a financial 'reward' for a broken marriage.

"Forgive the "ad hominem" regarding abortion. An appeal to the crowd? Damned right."

Using loaded language to attempt to sway people may work like a charm and is the basis for politics of all forms, but it is morally and intellectually dishonest, thus useless in an actual debate. If you want to get into a "sway the crowd" contest, enter politics.

"Even the majority of liberal politicians speak of abortion in negative terms and profess a personal dislike of the procedure. They just lack the personal courage to follow their own convictions and stand against it."

Wow, psychic powers.
1. One can dislike abortion (as I do) but still feel the government cannot and should not legislate a woman's rights over her own body.
2. Saying you have no trouble with abortion may be the true feelings of some of these people, but that is political suicide, so they're pandering.
3. Some may be as you say, but I do not think it is all or most. Some, like me, are conflicted between the problem of abortion as a form of birth control, but feel it is NOT THEIR RIGHT to force a woman to be a brood mare.
4. The complications with allowing SOME abortions would be impossible to enforce. The right is either pandering or not thinking things through when they say "rape, incest, and danger to the mother", because to say otherwise seems extreme, but in practice, you can't enforce these things.
5. Many on the right are equally pandering about being pro life. There has been a demonstrated hypocrisy among many anti-abortion activists to get abortions as soon as the 'bad thing' happens to them or one of their own.
6. A ban on abortion favors the rich who are more likely to have the 'convenience' abortion because they are financially capable of raising the child. These individuals can afford to travel to places where abortion is perfectly legal AND safe.

"It's easier to rationalize it and pander to a few who wish put their own interests and convenience above life."

Wow. How... elitist of you to assume such things about anyone who has had an abortion.

"It's killing babies, for God's sake. How much fucking intelligence does it take to get that straight?"

::yawn:: Whenever you're done with the ad hominems?

"Sure, we can call it a fetus, but it will "evolve" into a full term baby. Damn, that one pisses me off because that IS indefensible."

It is? Without risking a slippery slope, where is the line where something 'evolves' into a full term baby rather than being cells? All sperm and eggs have the potential to be children. All fertilized eggs have the definite potential to be children.

Yet somewhere around fifty percent of these fertilized eggs somewhere along the line spontaneously miscarry. Most of those miscarriages result because the conditions of the uterus or the location of the egg at the time of fertilization and they pass straight out of the woman without her EVER knowing she had a potential life in her. Others, early in implantation and almost always prior to knowledge of pregnancy, can be outed by a condition as simple as mild to moderate dehydration.

Are these instances unknown tragedies? Some fertilized eggs can actually grow to quite a cluster on its way to being a baby, but implant in the wrong place, like in the fallopian tubes and suddenly explode into a SERIOUS danger to the mother.

And what about your rape cases? Now, I think that forcing women to carry their rapist's child is wrong, but if all abortion is baby killing, do you condone as you call it "baby killing" so long as the woman was first victimized?

Abortion is hardly an 'obvious' issue that takes no fucking intelligence, as you so eloquently put it. To say so undermines the intelligence of those who disagree with you simply because you refuse to see anything from their point of view.

I can see your position. I sincerely disagree with it, but I can see where you are coming from. You demonstrate no similar tendency, instead preferring to blindly characterize the opposition as either gutless or selfish. You use explosive, negative language, and justify your logical fallacies while continuing to commit new ones. You may not care, but if you want to look at it from a persuasive viewpoint, your addressing of the issue may rally cheers from the choir, but it does not impress the opposition and only validates the stereotypes of pro-lifers as hysterical and uninformed. This risks, for your side, continuing to alienate people who are pro choice, so they will continue to fight you, and risks driving the few undecided to the other side.

"I'm sorry that you experienced the negative things you did here in the South."

Shit happens. But it did awake me to the fact that those most loudly proclaiming their own moral position tend to be the people who are most morally bankrupt. I have seen more immorality and hypocrisy out of the Christians who "pray on streetcorners", so to speak, then I have of any atheist I have personally known.

I wish I could blame this on the religion of Christianity, but when you examine Christianity in countries where they do not dominate the majority, almost none act in this manner. When you examine other countries and intrinsically link a specific religion or philosophy as fundamental to the political infrastructure, this power gluttony happens almost every single frigging time, including with atheism.

Perhaps the best solution would be to establish a government that establishes NO official religion or philosophy and has checks and balances to ensure the survival of this clause.

Hmm...

Ishie

To clarify my own fall from Faith...

"I just chose not to let them ruin my relationship with Him."

The jackass-Christians were merely the catalyst. Reading the Bible itself is what helped ruined my faith in Christianity. I just couldn't believe what was in it. There were too many things that were just too improbable, starting on page... oh, three or so, with a talking snake. Snakes can't talk. They have neither the intelligence nor the equipment. But that belongs in science class as a reasonable alternative to evolution? The other problem which led to an undermining of my faith? This one's kind of ironic... morality.

Yup. Found the Bible immoral. It condones activities that are horrific, including baby killing, child abuse, misogyny, and slavery. It doesn't just mention them. God is said to direct this. While the creator of an entire universe would probably consider us more like ants (which also isn't a view most Christians like), thus not particularly caring whether we lived or died, I can't see one that powerful and that awesome, for good or evil, wasting the time to pit us against each other and direct orders.

It also seemed like given the number of species on this planet that are currently here and given the time the Earth and Universe has been around prior to the oh, one hundred thousand years or so modern humans have been around, having the creator of all things as essentially a superhuman with human emotions and motivations seemed like a huge coincidence. Why would something as powerful as this God possess the same personality defects that cause humans to murder each other? Jealousy?

I'm a fallable human being. I am far from perfect and given to my own emotional temper tantrums and have made many errors in my life.

If *I* created billions of microbeings, even loving them all as my children, I would not make the sole criteria for eternal happiness (or more importantly, avoidance of eternal misery), acknowledgement, belief in, and love of me. Even if I gave them a book (in competition with many other books) that chronicled what I did and gave them a piece of their history, I still would not make loving me a criteria for success. Why would I? It is enough that I created such a thing; why create something simply to glorify myself? If I want something to love me unconditionally and trust me to always care for it, I'd get a dog.

Does that make me a better person than God? The mind boggles. I'm not an extraordinary individual in any way, shape, or form. Many many people are far better people than I am. Are they better than God? We can rise above jealousy and anger, but God cannot? If God created the universe according to his standards of right and wrong, should I, being created in his image, have the capability of even speculating that he is morally wrong? If I view a God-action as morally wrong, doesn't this mean there's a higher standard of morality than God? If I am merely following the law of man, then why do actions in the Bible, such as the murder of women and children, burn me to the core, but physically contacting a male when I'm menstruating doesn't? It doesn't make sense.

As far as truth was concerned (because something can be evil, but real, an acknowledgement made by cultures that included evil gods), it seemed that given the personality of God expressed by the Bible, events happening on the planet would be FAR less random than they actually are.

It seems like, as an atheist, given that God is a jealous God, and through most of the Old Testament, an incredibly vengeful one, I should be living a rather miserable life compared to the starving converted Christian children in Ethiopia. If God protects humanity in general, we have a LOT of people slipping through the cracks. If God protects his children, it seems like murderous tribal dictators would not have the opportunity to rape, torture, and kill millions of charitable and impoverished Christians in genocidal massacres.

Some things are viewed as tests of faith. Your affluence should not affect your faith in God. Okay... but is it fair for affluent or at least, comfortable or happy Christians, who are never challenged with misery to get a free pass to Heaven, versus people whose entire miserable life is a disease-ridden, child dying fight for food and water ending in a painful and early death? The comfortable Christian may have abandoned God quite readily given an equivalent situation, but he got a pass. If the other gives up God in misery and abandonment, hypothetically, the individual is hellbound.

This not only seems immoral, it seems illogical. If you want a true test of faith in yourself, consistently apply the standards or you'll get a bunch of watered down rich kids bugging you in Heaven.

When I look at the world, I find the best indicator of tragedy and living conditions is primarily determined by your location. At least we can claim human horrors are part of free will, but natural disasters? Punishment for being born in coastal Asia? One can claim people "choose" to live in dangerous locations, but there are no locations safe from some variety of disaster, and many do not have the resources to relocate anyway.

I've got no problems with belief (love is another issue though) in a being that exists but contradicts my moral compass if only there were a shred of evidence to convince me... if nothing else, if said being could appear a LITTLE less completely random in who suffers. It's no problem in my life. My success and happiness actually confirms my belief. When you read the Bible, you get the feeling that God is not cool with the godless. Less cool with pagans.

Suffering pagans and godless? Not more than anyone else, unless it's at the hands of people who disagree with them.

It seems like if one religion were correct, this religion would stand out. Christianity doesn't really stand out to me in any way, shape, or form. When power is gained, Christians abuse it just as wholeheartedly as any other philosophy. The followers do not follow a higher standard of behavior than anyone else. The philosophies of Jesus, while profound and inspiring, also echo much of what Siddhartha said five hundred years previously. ::shrug:: Best reason for me to be a Christian? Generally because I was born in a majority Christian country. Location is one of the best predictors of religious affiliation. U.S. babies have a pretty good chance of being in goods with God. If you live in India, Saudi Arabia, Nepal, etc, you have your entire culture and upbringing to dismiss. Somehow you think this could reflect as a FAR greater statistic of Americans in Heaven?

All of these factors combined in me to make it impossible for me to believe the Christian faith. Just seemed FAR too unlikely and contrary to observance. I do not say this to question your faith nor am I trying to deconvert anyone. But it's not like a bunch of intolerant assholes in high school made me disbelieve in God. They sparked questions in my mind, and those questions expanded and effectively tore my faith to shreds.

Ishie

Ishie,
YOU are an academic elitist! You actually contend that because you have gained a certain amount of expertise in a particuliar field, and I don't know what standard we are to go by in determining just how much is sufficient, that YOU are the one qualified to determine what a school board should approve to be taught in our schools. Parents with only a superficial knowledge of science, such as myself, are not qualified to determine how their children should be taught? How absolutely arrogant! Bullshit!
I said fags should shut up and screw. Okay, a bit crass, but I was just being colloquial. I meant no disrespect to those who refer to themselves as "queer". (I will now state for the record that I am even a fan of the Fab 5! They're funny and entertaining!) Of course they have a right to voice their opinions, but their aggressive persual of acceptance while displaying rather juvenile and shocking behaviour at times only alienates those they wish to reach, the very thing you accuse me of regarding the issue of abortion. I have always said that abortion should be available when the life or health of the mother is in question, as well as in a situation involving rape. The reason I could justify that is because of the reading I have done that suggests that the potential trauma of carrying a child conceived under such circumstances to term could be overwhelming for the mother, thus being injurious to both the child and the mother. Yes, it's "baby killing", but then the difference here is akin to the difference between murder and capital punishment. Justification. Motive. Since you say you are big on personal responsibility, the fact that women have abortions because of "unwanted pregnancies" should, I would think, cause you concern as well. Taking personal responsibility means accepting the consequences of one's actions, not merely acknowledging a mistake. The consequences of irresponsible sex may well include disease, emotional upset, as well as pregnancy, and that is the case where I can find no justification for abortion. That is merely killing a child rather than taking responsibility and bringing that child into the world and caring for it. There is a blessing awaiting in that rather than the emotional trauma of an abortion. In my opinion, a woman, and to the extent that a man is involved, who has such a convenience abortion is gutless, and deserves to have their intelligence undermined. It should require very little fucking intelligence to see that. I do not hold this view because I'm all that worried about the adults. I have no desire to atempt to regulate the sexual practices of grown ups. I'm concerned about the babies. And if the "organized churches" in this country would get off their asses and stop building gargantuan cathedrals and do something positive, I think we could offer people a powerful resource and alternative to this terrible procedure. As to infant euthanasia, you didn't research very well. Dig a little deeper and you will find that this has been practiced for around 30 years, and not just in the Netherlands. One unsubstantiated report suggests that a Brithish physician even advocated such a grisly end for a child born with a severe cleft palate. There are new surgical procedures to aid babies born with spina bifida. There are circumstances where comfort care would be the course for babies born with the most severe of birth defects, but State-sponsored, LEGAL euthanasia just ain't the way to go. It's another example of that slippery slope. That moral vaccuum that somehow gave two teens the idea that a baby could be aborted by slamming a baseball bat into the girls stomach over a 2 week period. Damn! It worked! (You can google that one under "baseball bat abortion"). Makes one proud to be an American. Dr. and Mrs. Mengele at a tender age in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
I've heard enough. All you want to do is rant against Christian beliefs and Christians themslves because of some unfortunate situations you have encountered with people who do not represent what Christianity is supposed to be about. You were condemned for harboring views that were not to the liking of some who misapplied their faith. Now you condemn Christian values with a bitterness because of that. That is not conducive to presenting yourself as the educated, open-minded individual interested in truth that you say you are. Take comfort in your science, and take care.

Randall

"YOU are an academic elitist!"

Interesting approach. Am I? Wow, apparently anyone who doesn't apply to this BS post-modernism view that truth is democratic is an academic elitist.

You never answered anything I said on the characterization of academics in this country. Perhaps you are afraid to? Of course now, supposedly, this is moot, because you have run off, lobbing accusations you obviously will not support in your wake. Instead of defending a thing you've said, you make parroted insults, take your ball, and go home.

I'll answer anyway though. Never one to let "Well, you suck!" be a last word. Besides, it's a slow day, and this 'elitist' has to wait until she gets home to keep putting out her resumes for one of those "elitist" positions that might score her some health insurance.

"You actually contend that because you have gained a certain amount of expertise in a particuliar field, and I don't know what standard we are to go by in determining just how much is sufficient, that YOU are the one qualified to determine what a school board should approve to be taught in our schools."

Actually, I don't. I contend that people who have no experience in the field shouldn't CLAIM knowledge of the field and use that to influence school boards. Actually, the science has been well tested by people far more experienced than I, and they are the ones who should provide the clout. I claim that people who tell me what 'truth' is when they haven't studied it piss me off. Can't tell you how many times I've had creationists tell me evolution is 'wrong' like they're letting me in on a secret, and then proceed to spout decades-old debunked crap at me. When I ask how much they've studied the subject? None.

On the subject of evolution, do these people have the same authority that I do? No. Do I have the same authority Dawkins did? No.

What have you spent years doing? Because whatever it is, I'm betting you could smoke me at it.

This is basic, has everything to do with common sense, and nothing to do with elitism.

Mechanics are not considered highly educated or elitist (don't know why). The way a car work absolutely mystifies me, though I've gained a bit of knowledge through a patient boyfriend. If you ask me how an engine works, I am more likely to say "Magic" than anything else, because I have no idea.

I am not qualified to give my opinions to a school board on how auto shop should be taught! Even if it means I don't get to say what my kid should be taught. I can get a bunch of people together who have no idea how a car works, and we can tell you how to teach auto shop by getting a majority, but all you are going to do is get a piss-poor auto shop as a result.

MAYBE a mechanic who has STUDIED this issue, and has EXPERIENCE, should advise on that issue, you think? Not me? Is the mechanic (or junior mechanic, even) arrogant because he thinks I don't know what I'm talking about? NO! Because I don't!

But the academics get labeled with this. I touched on this last time, and your response? Calling me an academic elitist. VERY mature.

"Parents with only a superficial knowledge of science, such as myself, are not qualified to determine how their children should be taught?"

In evolutionary biology? Nope, you're not. If you think it is mental midgets (talk about arrogant bullshit) that would suggest evolution be taught at the 'expense' of the unscientific creationism, particularly when you have demonstrated an ignorance of the scientific definition of the word "Theory", you have demonstrated that you are not qualified to determine a science curriculum. If that chaps your ass, maybe you should take a class entitled "It's all right not to know fucking everything about everything". Might help.

Now you may decide how your children will be taught. They're your kids. What I oppose is when people with no knowledge of a subject push these unscientific views on schoolboards insisting EVERYONE's kids be subjected to their ignorance on the subject, despite their alternate proposal violating the Constitution.

If you want to exclude evolution or teach evolution and creation side by side, then either do it yourself or find a Christian school. You should NOT get to make the decisions for the public schools if you are uninformed on the issues.

Some people don't think the Holocaust happened. Should we teach their views?

"How absolutely arrogant! Bullshit!"

I think it a far more elitist position to take your stance on it. No one can tell you that you don't know something even when you clearly do not. To do so is elitist and arrogant.

I admit what I don't know. I know what I do know because I have worked to know it. You haven't worked to know it. It is understandable that you wouldn't know as much about the subject as I do, just as I am sure you know many things I do not. Yet the fact that I know things you don't profoundly offends you; you call me arrogant, elitist, and a host of other things, and throw yourself into a full blown rage.

"I said fags should shut up and screw. Okay, a bit crass, but I was just being colloquial. I meant no disrespect to those who refer to themselves as "queer"."

Colloquial? Would you say similar to someone who said "Ni****s should just shut up and pick cotton"? Because the attitude matches.

"Of course they have a right to voice their opinions, but their aggressive persual of acceptance while displaying rather juvenile and shocking behaviour at times only alienates those they wish to reach, the very thing you accuse me of regarding the issue of abortion."

And yet, when they do it (not that all of them do), you bitch and moan about it, including lodging ignorant slurs, but when you do it regarding abortion, you're justified.

I think I figured this one out. You're a complete and utter hypocrite in pretty much all subjects. Wow. It all makes sense now.

"as well as in a situation involving rape."

And I want a scenario in which this can happen.

How do you determine who is raped? How do you prevent people from faking rape? How do you help the people who don't want to admit they were raped?

"Since you say you are big on personal responsibility, the fact that women have abortions because of "unwanted pregnancies" should, I would think, cause you concern as well."

It certainly does. It causes me more concern that the people think that the government has the right to legislate what an irresponsible person or any other does with their own body, particularly when the legislation only affects one gender. The fathers, if they can jump state lines quickly enough, gets off scott free. If there will be prosecution for abortion, it will only be the women and practitioners who suffer. The men? No crime.

You claimed I was a number of things for, due to my studies, feeling more qualified to advise a school board than you are, a decision that potentially affects people equally and strives to teach kids truth and process.

What is it when you feel qualified to inform the passage of LAWS based on actions that would give the government legislative power over women's bodies, despite the fact that you, as a man, will NEVER be in the position to have this forced on you? You are equally capable of making a bad decision as a woman who gets pregnant, yet with the proposed legal changes, you would face little to no consequence.

And you call me arrogant?

"There is a blessing awaiting in that rather than the emotional trauma of an abortion."

Elitist. Arrogant. Girls (often of fundamentalist parents; isn't that a lark?) often suffer extreme consequences of pregnancy, such as losing their homes when their parents kick them out. Some lose work; some cannot afford to feed or house their child. How is that a blessing?

Should they have taken responsibility before having sex? Absolutely. Am I so cold that I think that that one bad decision should destroy the mother's life as well? No.

"In my opinion, a woman, and to the extent that a man is involved, who has such a convenience abortion is gutless, and deserves to have their
intelligence undermined."

Hmm... in other words, the woman, and perhaps the man, but only to the extent that he's involved, "asks for it"?

"It should require very little fucking intelligence to see that."

Elitist. Arrogant.

"I have no desire to atempt to regulate the sexual practices of grown ups. I'm concerned about the babies."

Then raise them yourself. Help fix the foster care program. Help push legislation that allows loving gay couples to adopt. Become a foster parent. Offer your home to girls who have been kicked out of their homes due to being pregnant.

Are you willing to actively participate? Or are you content to merely tell women what *you* think we should do with our bodies?

"I think we could offer people a powerful resource and alternative to this terrible procedure."

Some churches are extremely charitable about this sort of thing and do absolutely everything they can. They need more help and fewer people telling them to get off their asses. They also, along with secular organizations, have their work cut out for them. Churches overflow with battered women and children, homeless people, canned food for tragedy victims...

Despite my problems with the internal structure of Christianity and despite my problems with some churches that have no redeeming values, I do not typically have a problem with the church network, except when it's helping imbeciles get elected.

But churches receive money from donations; they receive workers from volunteers. What are you doing to help them? Hell, I donate time and money and I'm not even Christian and I don't propose forcing girls to give birth. What are you doing?

As for the alternatives, they have helped. Teen pregancy and abortion rates are down. Sex education has been working wonders in my state. Rates haven't dropped as much in states where they only advocate abstinence. Hmm.

"As to infant euthanasia, you didn't research very well. Dig a little deeper and you will find that this has been practiced for around 30 years, and not just in the Netherlands."

I was following your vague reference. People have been killing infants for centuries due to numerous reasons, including 'euthanasia', if you will, of female babies in China.

Question. Is it moral decay if it's been happening for thousands of years?

I was referring specifically to medical research killing off the undesirables. I linked the key words YOU USED to find articles, and came across the Dutch articles, which you were referring to.

If you want to change the argument now, be my guest, but don't act like I'm the one with the problem.

"It's another example of that slippery slope."

I agree wholeheartedly. Unfortunately, you seem to think that the slippery slope isn't a logical fallacy, despite the disagreement of every book on logic, debate, and argument, ever written.

Or is this me being "elitist" again?

"That moral vaccuum that somehow gave two teens the idea that a baby could be aborted by slamming a baseball bat into the girls stomach over a 2 week period."

Ooh, anecdotal evidence. By that logic, we can claim that the moral vaccum created by Christianity somehow gave a couple the idea to lock their kids in chains in the basement for YEARS to protect them from sin. You can google that one too.

Is this an indictment of the entire religion? No. It's trying to broadbrush an entire religion (or in your case culture) by using two nuts as evidence.

You know, late nineteenth century London was a bastion of low morality. Somehow that culture gave rise to the idea that killing prostitutes and taunting the police was a good idea. Every generation (every year!) has its idiotic, sick whackjobs. A better gauge of society is to examine the response to them.

"Dr. and Mrs. Mengele at a tender age in the land of the free and the home of the brave."

And Jeffrey Dahmer, and Ted Bundy, and Susan Smith, and John Wayne Gacy, and Charles Manson, and a whole cast of horrors.

Perhaps if you didn't apply the conservative revision blinders to our country's past, the latest crop of sociopaths wouldn't surprise you so much?

There are bad people in the world. They do bad things. Amazingly enough, the world isn't always a happy basket of sunshiney flowers. As a response, you can either try and fix what you can fix, or you can bitch about the whole world going down the moral pipes. Your choice.

"I've heard enough."

Then run off with your tail between your legs.

"All you want to do is rant against Christian beliefs and Christians themslves because of some unfortunate situations you have encountered with people who do not represent what Christianity is supposed to be about."

At which point? I specified why reading the Bible disintegrated my Christianity because you arrogantly assumed that a few idiots cost me my faith. I tried to explain precisely where my problems occurred, and since you are so preoccupied with morality, I emphasized where my debased generation whatever morals found moral defiency in the Bible which taxed my faith. You link morality and religion by decrying a lack of both, and then when I protest your baseless claims, you then accuse me of railing against Christianity. I'm not. I have ethical problems with the proposals made by the internal structures of the religion, as I do with almost all of them. The followers can go a multitude of directions. Now, I may think you're a poor representation of Christianity, and pretty much the all-grown-up version of the people I dealt with, but that's your defiency, not Christianity's. You do the common things. You tote the religion of the Right, force Christianity/the Bible into a position where you are trying to use it as a justification for claims it was not meant for (historical revisionism; science), and then claim those who do not support your position of it are against Christianity.

What I posted was MY very personal experience with losing faith. If you are so secure in yours, that's great; I'm not out to convert anyone. It does make me wonder how secure you are in yours though when any critique I bring up sends you into a temper tantrum. If you are having your own crisis of faith, it's not my problem or my fault. Deal with it yourself.

"Now you condemn Christian values with a bitterness because of that."

Elitist. Arrogant. I explained precisely why that is not the case. You claim to know me better than I know myself despite not having lived my life?

I do not condemn Christian values because I do not know what they are. Even you can't define them. You can not pull consistent values out of the Bible because there are too many changing expressions. YOU were the one leaving the Bible up to critique by claiming we were founded on Christian values. I asked what they were; you listed universal values, many of which have no basis in the Bible. I pointed this out. I'm against Christians.

You claim to hate the hypocrites, and yet, you are right with them! I have met MANY Christians who are wonderful, decent people who feel perfectly secure in their faith, love God, and so forth.

You aren't one of them. You act like the others who sit in a comfortable majority, honestly befuddled as to why people won't see things your way. You could be any faith to me, or no faith. You aren't special in that respect. If I go to any country, and look at the people whose majority is ruling, I'll see you.

Don't indict Christianity with this. I have my own philosophical problems with the Bible, which I explained in my previous posts, after you falsely implied I had lost my faith because kids are kids. My problems with you are with YOU. Your desire to pass this off onto your religion only reinforces the disrespect you show for it.

Ishie