The Amazing Adventures of Foster Disbelief

Moving.....

2012-01-13T11:01:00.000-08:00

Goodbye, Blogger.

New site: Foster Disbelief

Breaking Local News: 19 year old girl charged with Felony; Bedford Co. DA Gloats

2011-11-16T06:47:00.000-08:00

Note: Just as in my previous piece, Bedford (PA) County Drug Task Force Creates Jobs , I do not condone or support any illegal activities. Drugs are illegal, and selling them is idiotic. Don't do it.

Another drug bust in Bedford County, this time without a catchy operation designation. How about Operation: Lolita? Operation: Goodbye Future? Operation: Welcome to Adulthood?

Via my local sports section disguised as a newspaper, The Altoona Mirror: (They do not have this story posted online yet. When they do, I will provide a link as long as they still only publish the mugshots in the print version.)

The case is pretty basic. Idiots drive to Baltimore. Idiots buy decent amount of heroin. Cops get tip and stop idiots on their way back from Baltimore. I'm not even going to use the "innocent until proven guilty" cliche this time.

The idiots involved and charged in this case are a 29 year old man, a 31 year old man, and....a 19 year old girl.

They are idiots, and they got caught. And now their lives are forever changed thanks to the unattainable quest to eliminate drugs from our society. They are victims as well.

Bedford County District Attorney Bill Higgins was overjoyed at the arrests.

Our relentless attack on drug dealers in Bedford County is not going to slow down. We have far more information about the dealers than they think, and we will continue to use that information to our advantage. [Male Suspects Name withheld by blogger] thought he had a nice little enterprise going. It's over now.

Yes, the enterprise is over, although another will fill the role quickly. And a large part of the suspects future is also over. What isn't over is their addictions or this pointless war against our citizens.

19 with a felony, and the DA can do nothing but gloat.

Linking to LEAP and shutting up....

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

Quickies....

2011-11-15T07:49:00.000-08:00

Full schedule today, but I want to at least touch on a few things quickly....

Item: Crazy, in over his head quarterback continues to be worshiped by crazy fans.

A handful of Denver fans have decided a customized Tim Tebow jersey would make for the perfect Christmas gift. What could possibly be troubling about that? A whole lot, depending on who you ask.

Rather than have the last name "Tebow" on the back of the Broncos jersey, these fans have placed "Jesus" above Tebow's No. 15.

Via Thepostgame.com

Remember, this past Sunday Tebow was 2 for 8 for 69 yards passing. Somehow I think Jesus would have a better completion percentage. If he existed, that is.

But I am much less interested in what crazy football fans or crazy Jesus fans do to worship their new saint of Denver than the larger perception of the story.

He's the model citizen, the guy you want your daughter to date

Really? Brain dead religiosity, anti-abortion Super Bowl commercials, and writing Bible verses on your eye black make you a model citizen? No wonder our democracy is in trouble. And, no, if I had a daughter, Tebow would not be on my list of men I wanted her to date.

Item: GOP candidates live in a fantasy land.

Via Yahoo News....

Republican presidential hopefuls are assaulting a proposal by GOP lawmakers on a bipartisan deficit-reduction panel that calls for increased tax revenues even as the special supercommittee appears increasingly headed for deadlock.

Can we officially point and laugh every time a Republican uses the word bipartisan now?

Item: Understatement of the Year Award, Penn State Edition.

From the Chicago Tribune, because I hate linking to my local fish wrap.

Jerry Sandusky: "I shouldn't have showered with those kids."

Unfortunately, the article doesn't say if he followed that admission with "the anal and oral sex was probably a bad idea as well, but hey, hindsight is 20/20."

Blog News....

2011-11-15T06:59:00.000-08:00

Greetings once again, readers of Foster Disbelief. (Yes, all three of you.) Apologies for the sporadic updates. Most of my time recently has been devoted to work, family, and sleep. The holiday shopping season seems to start earlier every year, and more shoppers means more business and more hours at my place of employment. My very Christian sister and her very Christian new husband are leaving Florida to visit us in PA, and with my mother's health, I've been helping her prepare for company. And perhaps most importantly, it appears that the last gasps of methadone withdrawal have finally disappeared. Sleep is no longer a pipe dream, and when I do fall asleep I no longer stay out for 12 hours.

I've also made a decision regarding this blog a few weeks ago that has affected the amount of updates. Rather than force out scatter-shot daily updates that only end up being read by a few people, I have decided to post more selectively and on the issues that matter the most to me. Eventually something I write will find an audience, and I will revisit the option of daily updates. Something like this blast from the past from July 2008, my first article that actually got noticed. Evidence? Who needs evidence to start a panic?

If I would have had a clear head in 2008, there is a decent chance you would now be reading an established blog. Instead, the needle and I chose to let opportunity keep on knocking. One mistake I will not make again.

So what will you see here? There will still be a healthy dose of snark for the religious right and the current Republican leadership, but politics on the whole will take the back seat. Every now and then I may pull out the soapbox, especially during the coming election, but as we all know, there are already too many political bloggers. Instead, I will be concentrating on subjects in my wheelhouse. Science (Anti-Vax, Evolution v. Creationism, Cognitive Dissonance), Skepticism (Especially when I can tie it in with my past as a witch/druid/pagan/whatever), and Atheism. My past hasn't changed, so there will also be pieces on the drug war, and perhaps a touch or two upon music and culture.

That is all. Keep coming back, keep reading, and hopefully, you will find something worth your time.

What If They Held an Election and Nobody Showed?

2011-11-08T15:29:00.000-08:00

Election Day is upon us once again, and like most off year elections, only a distressing minority of the electorate will bother sacrificing a few moments of their precious time to make their voice heard.

The projected turn out in my state was listed as 20 to 25% of eligible voters. Most commentators I've read consider even that projection to be an overestimation of the probable result. From the Altoona Mirror (print edition only, it's an AP story so I'm linking to it at PhillyBlurbs):

Political science professor Christopher Borick, of Muhlenberg College in Allentown, predicted Monday only 20 to 25 percent of the state's 8.2 million registered voters will bother to cast ballots in the election, which comes between last year's elections for governor and a U.S. Senate seat and next year's campaigns for president and the other Senate seat.

Franklin & Marshall College pollster Terry Madonna, in Lancaster, leaned toward the lower end of Borick's turnout range.

"I think, if we get to 20 (percent), declare victory," Madonna said.

Why is the estimated turn out so low? Let's take my home county as an example.

For Tuesday's election, Blair County has 83,650 registered voters, the county's voter registration office reports. Those who go to the polls will be able to cast ballots for county commissioner, municipal and school board candidates and judicial candidates for the commonwealth, superior and magisterial district courts.

Two years ago, with the same kind of public offices up for grabs, 19.93 percent of Blair County's 84,305 registered voters showed up to cast ballots.

In contrast, more than twice that - 43.4 percent - voted in November 2010 when the ballot had gubernatorial and legislative contenders.

In November 2008, when Barack Obama and John McCain were seeking the nation's presidency, Blair County's voter turnout was 64.87 percent.

Above quote from an online Altoona Mirror article on voter turn out. Why they have two separate articles on the same subject with the same message, one for the fish wrap and one for the interwebs, is a question I can not answer.

Pushing that mystery to the side, we see a rough 60/40/20 split in turn out, depending on the offices up for grabs. Presidential elections get about 60% of my neighbors off their ass, State elections draw 40ish%, and local contests are decided by a few people who got lost and randomly showed up at the polling place on their way to lunch.

I know this isn't a glamorous election year locally. I realize that judicial elections in PA are a strange beast that end up confusing more than a few voters. I assume that more than a few people who would never think of missing a presidential election are staying home today because they think this election doesn't really matter.

And turn out like this causes me to worry about the future of democracy in our nation. People get sucked in to the big races, the nationwide and statewide contests, to the point that they forget how local elections actually effect their lives. Other than 2 state judicial elections, today's ballot also included retention votes on several other judges, the election of Blair County commissioners and leadership positions for individual municipalities, and school board contests for most local school districts. These offices set local tax rates and make decisions that effect every citizen in the area, decisions that can arguably effect us all much more than decisions made at the National or State level, and yet only 20% of my neighbors will take the five minutes required to cast a ballot.

While I was at my polling place, only one other voter showed up. Two high school students with the look of the truly bored roamed the parking lot with campaign literature on the local school board race. Four poll workers with an average apparent age of 70 cackled, drank coffee, and gossiped loudly about how the town liberal showed up for another year. This is democracy?

If 60% of registered voters showed up at the polls today, I can honestly say that my vote would have been worthless. Since I am from an incredibly red district in a bluish state, most local elections offer me no real choices. If a Democrat even bothers to run for whatever office is up for election, they get crushed 70-30, and half the local offices have unopposed Republicans, which leads to some creative write in votes. In cases like that, I pick out one ignorant, far right, wingnut who's annoyed me recently, and take solace in the fact that I just cancelled out his vote.

But when only 20% bother to cast ballots, every member of that 20 suddenly has much more clout than they should. It is still 1 person, 1 vote, but when 80% of voters check themselves off the list, that 1 vote is cast in a louder voice. What havoc could we cause if a significant portion of local registered Democrats made it a point to go to the polls no matter what the contest? Could we turn the county blue, if only for a year?

Voting is a right people are willing to die for, yet we voluntarily sacrifice the right for no good reason.

All elections affect you. Your vote counts. Wake the fuck up and be a citizen of the country you claim so much to love.

Yes, the system is damaged, if not broken. Yes, change is needed. But not voting is not an effective strategy for self-governance, or for change.

Vote or shut the fuck up.

Help, Help, They're Being Oppressed!!!

2011-11-07T11:21:00.000-08:00

Ed Brayton of Dispatches from the Culture Wars over at Freethought Blogs has a story detailing yet another horrible example of persecution against Christians.

The EEOC recently ruled against an employee of the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment who complained of religious harassment because the director of the agency sent an email to all employees about an office party to celebrate another employee’s marriage. The employee, who is Pentecostal, didn’t like that because it was a same-sex marriage. And apparently, informing him that he works with gay people is stomping all over his religious views.

Oh no's! I werk wit teh gays!

In case you suspect I am selectively quoting in order to make the complainant sound like an idiot, The Volokh Conspiracy provides excerpts from the ruling, Walker v. Jackson (EEOC Oct. 6, 2011).

On December 1, 2011 [sic], Complainant filed a formal EEO complaint alleging that he was subjected to harassment and reprisal on the basis of his religious beliefs (Pentecostal). Briefly, the complaint alleged that, on November 18, 2010 [sic], Complainant was the recipient of an email from the Acting Director, sent to the NCEA [EPA’s National Center for Environmental Assessment] global list-serve (which includes Complainant and all other NCEA employees), announcing an on-site celebration of a same-sex marriage of an employee which read as follows:
[Employee A] and his partner [named] are getting married this Sunday. The IO is sponsoring an informal celebration to congratulate [Employee A] on this happy event. Please feeI free to drop by the IO conference room on Thursday, October 7 at 4:30 P.M. to wish them well.
Thirteen days later, on October 18, 2010, Complainant responded to the Acting Director’s email, with a copy to the NCEA global list-serve, with the following message:
I feel your message announcing the celebration of the “union” of [Employee A] and his “Partner” was offensive and insensitive to my religious faith as a Christian. I think it is general knowledge that the Christian faith only condones “marriages” between men and women, not men and other men. As acting Office Director, I feel you could have been more “sensitive” and “neutral” with regards to this issue.
The next day, NCEA employees sent approximately 15–20 emails on the global list-serve (including Complainant) congratulating Employee A on his marriage. None of these emails specifically mentioned Complainant or his email. The record does show that two employees did email Complainant personally (not sent to the NCEA global list-serve) and expressed the opinion that Complainant’s email was insensitive because it was sent to everyone, including Employee A, rather than just to the Acting Director.

By final decision dated April 14, 2011, the Agency dismissed the complaint, pursuant to 29 C.F.R. § 1614.107(a)(1), for failure to state a claim. The instant appeal followed. On appeal, Complainant argues that the 15 employees who copied him on the congratulatory emails despite receiving his email protesting the Acting Director’s original email were retaliating against him and harassing him because of his religious faith and beliefs. Complainant claimed that the barrage of emails “affected his psychological well-being in the office.” ...

Oh no's! I werk wit teh gays!

People. Your religious faith, no matter how strongly you believe, does not give you the right to not be offended. Gays do not have to go back into the closet if the very knowledge of their proximity gives you the cold sweats. Your co-workers do not have to agree with or respect your bigotry. You are not being oppressed.

Volokh sums it up perfectly:

Hint: If you publicly complain about a colleague’s celebration, and a bunch of people respond by conspicuously congratulating the colleague, that’s disagreement — it’s not harassment.

Worst.....Apologetics.....Ever.....

2011-11-02T22:05:00.000-07:00

The Atheist Experience gets email. Sometimes that email contains questions from believers trying to understand the atheist position and coherent arguments intended to start a dialogue both sides can learn and grow from.

This is not one of those emails.

Normally, I would just let Kazim's response speak for itself. The gang over at The Atheist Experience needs no help from me to deal with this attempt at apologetics.

But I just had to clean coffee off my monitor, the wall behind my monitor, my keyboard, and my desk. Not only was I forced to spit-take by this email, but I almost choked on my beverage. This email owes me.

All quotes are from the email to The Atheist Experience, written by someone with the handle “Advanced Technology Solutions.”

I have a few questions for you. I am a Christian, and a strong Man in my faith, therefore these questions may be hard for you to respond to

I hope they are difficult. I love a good argument. Allows me to strengthen my own points, and perhaps learn something new. Bring on the intellectual stimulation!

1.) Are you a scientist?
2.) Do you speak, write, or translate Hebrew, or Greek?
3.) Are you a parent?

Wait, what? Those are random. I bet he's building to a killer argument, starting with three seemingly unconnected questions before dropping the proverbial hammer that ties everything together. The only reasons I am not literally quaking in my boots in fear of my faith in atheism being destroyed are my complete lack of faith and my current lack of boots. I've dealt with too many bad arguments lately, but this one shows promise, if only because I have no idea what rabbit hole I will wind up down. I need to arm myself for this one. Bible, stack of books on atheism and counter-apologetics, textbooks on Christianity, and french pressed coffee; I am prepared, do your worst.

1) No I am not, although I am studying psychology with the goal of doing research. So no, I am not yet a scientist. Although, philosophically, are we not all scientists? Our whole existence is a series of experiments, from which we learn about ourselves and our world, using the resulting data to build our lives.

2) No, I can not. I would love to have that knowledge and the ability to read the bible and the apocryphal texts in the original language, and perhaps someday I will, but one can not be an expert at everything. I still take classes on Christianity, other religions, and biblical scholarship when I can, but psychology takes up the majority of my time and effort.

3) No, I am not a parent, although my ex has two little girls whom I love and fathered for 4 years. Since they were not my seed, I can not say this with complete confidence, but I feel like I loved them as my own.

Below are my reasons for asking these questions

I can not wait to see where this is heading.

1.) If you are not a scientist, then in fact you must take the word of someone you have never met, and use it as evidence for your case. Guess who else does that? That’s right Christians do that every day.

*insert raised eyebrow here*

Is that really "in fact" what I must do? I, as well as all other atheists, just take anything some random "scientist" says and immediately incorporate it into my worldview as gospel truth? Do I really have to explain how science works again?

Scientist looks at issue. Scientist develops a hypothesis concerning the issue. Scientist tests the hypothesis. Scientist publishes the results of the test. Other scientists read the published paper, critique it, and try to replicate the results of the test. Scientists either confirm or debunk the results of the first test. Each scientist and his/her test brings a little more knowledge to our table of understanding the issue. Eventually, if enough scientists and their tests all converge on one answer, the hypothesis may become strong enough to be called a theory. Even then, scientists will continue to poke, prod, and test the theory, using new methods, new ideas and new evidence to try to either strengthen or bring down the theory. Some theories have been tested and confirmed by so many scientists with so much evidence that they are considered by everyone who honestly examines the evidence to be fact. Some of the strongest theories include the germ theory of disease, the theory of relativity, the theory of a spherical earth, and the theory of evolution by natural selection. No matter how strong a theory may be, there will always be scientists examining the evidence and retesting them, because producing the evidence to overturn an established theory is the career equivalent of winning the Powerball for scientists.

I can see how you got confused. Cause believing a Bronze Age text was written by your god, accepting everything your priest/pastor tells you, and having faith that billions of people and their beliefs are wrong while you know the true mind of God is exactly the fucking same.

Next!

2.) If you answer no o this question, then how can you understand how these ancient texts were to be translated? Oh I know you rely on an expert who has studied these sorts of things their entire life. They have read the books, and been well educated. Let me ask who wrote these books? Men, flawed creatures, who believed the world was flat, and that the center of everything was the earth. Again blind faith in Men.

The stupid is starting to hurt. Is he arguing with himself in this paragraph? Let me see if I can get this straight. I can not read/translate Hebrew and Greek, therefore I must depend upon experts who have studied the languages and the texts to translate them for me. But it doesn't matter either way, because the ancient texts were written by flawed men from the Bronze Age.

If “Advanced Technology Solutions” is arguing that belief in the Bible as the word of God is blind faith in flawed men, men who clearly did not understand the world and the universe, and thus an outdated worldview, he'll get no argument from me. I know the bible was written by men from a pre-scientific time who used a tribal deity to account for their ignorance of the world they lived on. I know scribes added and subtracted from the manuscripts, I know certain books were written with ulterior motives, I know some books were outright forgeries, and I know the gospels were each written to make specific points, not as history. I also am aware of how the Bible was pieced together, by flawed men, and that there were many other books they could have included in the bible, yet instead decided to burn. Flawed men once again making the decision. And I am not even going to touch on the many different flavors of Christianity jockeying for dominance prior to the establishment of orthodoxy. Established once again, you guessed it, by flawed men.

At least we agree on something.

Although I get the feeling that what “Advanced Technology Solutions” really means here is that his experts have a direct line to God and can accurately explain the meaning of Scripture, while secular experts, who we apparently lack the ability to question, can only fuck it all up.

And if that is what he meant, he is not only an idiot, but an arrogant idiot.

On to number 3. Don't take a drink while reading.

3.) If the answer is yes, then you understand the rage of God “The Father.” Sometimes as parents we do become angry with our children, and we tell them “you will understand when your older.” And things of this nature. And to say that God is the same today, yesterday, and tomorrow is correct. Look in exodus where he plans to kill the Israelites, but Moses intercedes for them, and God spares them. We see his rage in the great flood, and his compassion, and we read in the new testament that Jesus is seated at his right hand and makes intercession for us. He gives one reason for his wrath, he cannot stand Sin, but Jesus intercedes for us so that he not wipe us out.

If I was a believer, I would be praying right now that “Advanced Technology Solutions" is not only not a parent, but also infertile and unable to ever adopt.

Think that's a bit harsh? Then reread what he wrote. If you are a parent, then you understand the "rage" of God.

That quite frankly scares the shit out of me. My ex has two little girls whom I love dearly. While I was their step-father, I could never have raised a hand against them, let alone drown them, turn them to salt, stone them, have them gang raped to death, have them gang raped (but not to death this time), sacrifice them as a burnt offering, have sex with them, sell them, kick them out for eating fruit, tell them their sex makes them second class citizens, and/or condemn them to eternal torment.

Of course, he'd just claim that I don't understand any of those passages in the Bible, although I'm not really sure how else to interpret them. So fine, I'll toss the Bible aside, his own words are enough.

Look in exodus where he plans to kill the Israelites, but Moses intercedes for them, and God spares them......He gives one reason for his wrath, he cannot stand Sin, but Jesus intercedes for us so that he not wipe us out.

So when one of your kids does something bad, someone has to stop you from fucking killing them?

We see his rage in the great flood, and his compassion,

So if you had 5 kids and they did something bad, and your wife wasn't around to stop you, your bipolar response would be to kill 4 of them and compassionately allow 1 to live?

You either are sick, or just completely fail at constructing analogies. As much as I hope it is the latter, I still wouldn't let you within 100 yards of any children I know.

On a side note. If you are going to accuse Christians of Being “Stupid” You should understand that without proper theological training that you have no case for the non-existence of God, Just as I am not a Plumber, therefore, I must take his word when he says “frozen pipes.” The point is Pastors, or other men with theological training are here to help us make sense of the teachings in the bible, just as your “experts” help you understand the world. Without objection (right, everyone has an agenda, even Atheist) In closing learn Hebrew, and Greek, Translate the Bible for yourself, and ask where is YOUR proof that God does not exist, not the proof from another group of “experts” Who like everyone else is left roaming the earth looking for a

[It just cuts off there]

I do not claim that Christians are stupid. Misguided, mistaken, and wrong, perhaps, but not stupid. You, however ......

You are not a plumber, so you have to take it on faith when he tells you that your pipes are frozen? I so wish I was your plumber. $$$$$

So without theological training, I have no place in the debate? Then cough up your PhD in Theology or shut the fuck up.

The point is Pastors, or other men with theological training

Why do I get the notion that his idea of "theological training" has nothing to do with any University and everything to do with bible study at the local church?

In closing learn Hebrew, and Greek, Translate the Bible for yourself

Why? Didn't you already say that the bible was written by flawed men? And even if I could translate it myself, I don't have the rigorous theological training you claim I need to make sense of it anyway.

ask where is YOUR proof that God does not exist

Burden of proof. I don't claim to be able to disprove the existence of God, only that there is no evidence to make me believe one exists. You're the one making the claim, you're the one who needs to bring the evidence. Disagree?

Then disprove my invisible pink unicorn.

.....

I can only assume that while composing this letter, “Advanced Technology Solutions” believed he was writing a scathing, effective rebuke of atheist arguments.

Which makes reading his critique of atheism even more painful.

When I first began reading Christian responses to atheist arguments, I would immediately chalk pieces like this up as a Poe and move on to the next. I spent a lot of time and effort going over the atheist position and studying Christianity and other religions. It is obviously an issue I care deeply about, and I wanted to make sure that my arguments were well thought out, rational, and effective. I assumed that since Christians believe their eternal soul is at stake, they would seriously examine their own beliefs and be able to coherently explain not only what they believe, but why as well.

It took about 1 day for me to shelve that notion. I don’t pretend to understand why so many believers lack the ability to win an debate with a piece of lint, but I’ve argued with enough of them to no longer be shocked at the low quality of arguments they consistently put forth.

Their confidence while spewing forth these horrid arguments however, never ceases to amaze me.

This is the non-Kirk/Ray equivalent of the banana debunking evolution. 3 questions that have no bearing on the topic whatsoever, that he strongly felt would rock the foundation of atheism and force us all to find God. Normally, the points I see repeated by those suffering under blind faith are points that have been dealt with so many times that they are ex-parrots, only not pushing up daisies due to being nailed to the perch of apologetics. This however, this is just nonsense. I know 4 year olds who can structure a better argument. Things like this, they make me laugh, but then they get me depressed. Presumably, “Advanced Technology Solutions” is an adult with probably at least a high school education, and in his mind this was an effective argument.

And that is just sad.

Least Surprising News of the Year.....

2011-10-31T09:50:00.000-07:00

Congrats to anyone holding 72 days in the pool.

The next part of Kim Kardashian's master plan to smother the dying breath out of American culture began today with her divorce announcement.

Sham marriage, sham divorce, sham reality show.

Sham celebrity.

Yet somehow, this is front page news.

....

Almost forgot. In case you care, here's the link.

Bedford (PA) County Drug Task Force Creates Jobs.

2011-10-26T09:20:00.000-07:00

(Story is from the Altoona Mirror.
The only reason I am linking it is the online version does not include the mug shots or names of the accused. Believe me, the print version took great joy in including both.)

After an eight month investigation, the Bedford County Drug task force ruined the lives of 21 addicts in a show of force and idiocy on Tuesday. In a second "fuck you" to the accused, the Altoona Mirror published color photos of each of the 21, who I must add, are supposed to be innocent until proven guilty.

"Operation: Scarecrow," as it is called, follows "Operation: Cupid's Arrow," which in February took 15 ~~of the most violent~~ non-violent addicts off the streets. Bedford County DA Bill Higgins, of course, thinks this is serious business. At a press conference, he said "Just like the 15 arrested in 'Operation: Cupid's Arrow,' these offenders will be zealously prosecuted."

"Operation: Scarecrow"? "Operation: Cupid's Arrow"? Can we have "Operation: Harm Reduction," next please?

Sheriff Charwin Reichelderfer then proves that he almost gets it, but that his mind just can't finish the leap.

I know from experience that many of these people will be characterized as just users by their friends and family. While they may be selling stuff to support their own habit, there is no question they are bringing this poison in our community and selling it to our kids. And for that they're going to be held accountable.

Bolds are mine.

Let me scan through the list quick and see how many have charges related to selling drugs to minors. Perhaps one. I say perhaps, because a few of these hardened criminals apparently were also parents, and got charges added if they had a child in the car with them.

Which I admit is not only stupid, but child endangerment. Drugs are illegal, leave your damn kids at home, or with a sitter.

But selling it to "our kids"?

Do you have proof of this assumption, Sheriff Charwin, or are you just jumping right to the most emotional target possible to corrupt the jury pool and further tar these ~~child murderers~~ drug addicts? Or are you trying to convince your self? Asshole, or asshole suffering from cognitive dissonance, I can't decide.

There is no reason to try to corrupt the jury pool, since I'd bet my car all 21 will take a plea. That's how it works. The ADA offers you a shitty plea, and then threatens that if you take it to trial, they will push for whatever crazy number of years they think sound believable. All 21 of these ~~criminals~~ victims are going to be facing felonies, and chances are all 21 will take the plea. The only ones who actually should take the plea are those offered ARD or IPP or some other path to clearing their record, but the threat of years in prison can affect your decision making.

Look, I know. Drugs are illegal. Selling drugs is illegal. They all broke the law. I get it, I really do. And unless it is far down the memory hole, I do not know anyone affected by this operation.

But I still know them. I see my past self in every picture. I know the game, I know the story. Some of them are runners for the actual dealer, delivering drugs and protecting the dealer. Some of them were hooking up a friend they probably used with a hundred times before. A few of them were probably straight set up by the Confidential Informant and actually are innocent. Some of them were only getting for someone else so they could make enough to get a fix. And, yes, some were driving to Baltimore and bringing back product to sell and support their own addiction.

8 months. Untold amount of tax payer money. 21 low level dealers, at the worst, off the streets facing a felony that will follow them forever. The one girl is only 18. One guy is 19. Welcome to adulthood.

And by the end of the week, 21 more will step in to fill whatever cog in the machine they happened to occupy. The heroin and cocaine will keep flooding the area. More people will get addicted. Then in 8 months or so, "Operation: June Bug," or the like will scoop up another group.

The cycle, it keeps on cycling.

21 jobs available today in Bedford County. It's high risk, but the profession is booming no matter the economy. No experience needed, just a self-destructive personality.

We've lost the war on drugs. The war was never winnable in the first place.

Why are we still fighting it? Why are there still casualties?

Isn't it time for harm reduction?

Going to link to LEAP, and shut up.

Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

Psychic Kids, Skepticism, and TMI

2011-10-21T10:58:00.000-07:00

And the most evil show on television not involving Jenny McCarthy marches on......

Rebecca Watson posted Mark Stewart's report on the Psychic Kids panel at DragonCon today over at Skepchick. I urge you to head over there to read it. Nothing really has changed. The show still makes me physically ill, their psychologist is still a full fledged believer which makes her largely useless for these poor kids, and the believers still ignore all skeptical criticism by building strawmen to beat on while ignoring our actual arguments.

The "all psychic children are mentally ill" strawman always gets under my skin.

I'm not going to deal with Mark's report here. If interested, go read it. It is good shit.

Instead, I want to try to explain why I hate this show so much. Yeah, other paranormal shows presented from the classic believer viewpoint annoy me, but nothing else paranormal inspires this level of revulsion in me.

I haven't always been a skeptic. From 12 to 20ish I was heavily involved in Wicca and other new age forms of witchcraft. If this show existed then, I could have been on it.

Was I mentally ill? Not at all. Part of it was rebellion. I wasn't indoctrinated into a religion until 11 when my mom decided to return to Catholicism and force it into me. Part of it was the time period. In my backwater town, Wicca and the like had just began hitting the bookstore shelves in force and I would read anything. And a large part of it was just feeling broken and searching for anything to believe in. Every member of my family, all my friends, everyone my young mind knew at the time all believed in some form of God.

I believed because my extensive pagan library told me what I was doing was real. My mind would seek coincidences and attribute them to spells. My experiences were filtered through the lens of pagan belief. And of course, my circle of close friends all either believed as I did, or weren't confident enough in their own beliefs to question mine.

Belief in magic, witchcraft, psychic ability, etc, is set up to defy any proof against. Spell didn't work? Sometimes they don't. Couldn't connect with a spirit? Sometimes they don't want to connect. Asked to prove it? Sorry, nothing will work if a non-believer is around. Bending reality is hard enough work as it is.....

My first year in college, I would sit in the off campus coffee house and read the Tarot for spending money. My accuracy amazed not only those I read, but myself as well. At first I'd maybe do a reading a day; after the first month I had to turn people away. I thought I had proof finally.

Then I took my first Psych class and my entire worldview shattered. I didn't know the term "cold reading" yet, but I knew why my readings were so accurate, and it had nothing to do with the cards or the paranormal. I was using what I had picked up of human psych on the streets to read people for clues. I would start with classic general cold reading statements, stopping at each card until the client recorded a hit no matter how many different avenues I had to travel to get the hit, and gradually forcing them to give me enough information to supply a stunningly specific hit on the last cards.

I spent the next 4 years examining every other paranormal belief I held without the assumption that they were true, while still clinging to any shred of belief I could muster.

Then came the self-destruction as I could no longer be the person I had been for the last 12 or so years.

All kids who claim to have "powers" aren't mentally ill. I've never even seen any of us make that claim. Some are to be sure, some are attention seeking, some are suggestible, and some just have a perfect storm of causes surrounding them.

I can not even begin to imagine how much worse off I would have been with a tv show and adults I respected confirming my beliefs at every turn. Could I have ever escaped? And, perhaps more importantly, how much worse would it have been if the beliefs did crash around me?

These people are sick, and I don't mean the kids. Some of these kids will become the next generation of TV psychics, and some of them will get out relatively unscathed.

But some of them are going to watch their entire lives crumble around them. Watch the persona this show helped to create disappear leaving them alone to try to figure out who they are and how to make sense of the past how many years.

And some of them are not going to be able to get through the fallout.

Based on my own anecdotal evidence, I'm convinced this show is going to have a body count. If not from outright suicide, then from drug abuse or other self destructive behaviors.

I tried it all without a TV show.

I hope in 15 years or so when we can do actual follow-ups on these kids that I am proven wrong.

Catholic Bishop Finally Charged in Connection to Child Abuse

2011-10-19T10:11:00.000-07:00

Ed Brayton over at Dispatches From The Culture Wars brought this to the attention of the blogosphere, so I will let his words and the original article speak for themselves, while I concentrate on the upcoming response from the Catholic League.

For the first time ever in the U.S., a Catholic church official has been criminally charged for failing to report suspected child molestation by a priest in his charge to the police. The New York Times reports:

The details from said New York Times piece:

A bishop in the Roman Catholic Church has been indicted for failure to report suspected child abuse, the first time in the 25-year history of the church’s sex abuse scandals that the leader of an American diocese has been held criminally liable for the behavior of a priest he supervised.

The indictment of the bishop, Robert W. Finn, and the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph by a county grand jury was announced on Friday. Each was charged with one misdemeanor count involving a priest accused of taking pornographic photographs of girls as recently as this year. They pleaded not guilty.

The case caused an uproar among Catholics in Kansas City this year when Bishop Finn acknowledged that he knew of the photographs last December but did not turn them over to the police until May. During that time, the priest, the Rev. Shawn Ratigan, is said to have continued to attend church events with children, and took lewd photographs of another young girl.

A decade ago the American bishops pledged to report suspected abusers to law enforcement authorities — a policy also recommended last year by the Vatican. Bishop Finn himself had made such a promise three years ago as part of a $10 million legal settlement with abuse victims in Kansas City.

Ahem.

People, people, calm down.

Bishop Finn, as a moral and ethical leader in the Roman Catholic Church, was more than likely just holding on to the pictures to protect the innocence of the little girl in question.

There is just no reason to jump to wild conclusions like B.Finn was attempting to protect a struggling artist/priest from a world that would never understand the artistic vision of naked kids representing the Innocence of the Virgin Mary. There is no evidence that Bishop Finn was masturbating wildly to the photos while in his office or the confessional, or that he paid the priest in question with envelopes filled to bursting with money from the Offering to produce the artistic visions.

Only in a culture as Evil as ours would someone point the finger of blame at the Roman Catholic Church and its leaders, when the true danger to our children is obviously from the Gay Agenda. The Catholic faith, and its leaders are servants of God. Whatever a priest or Bishop deems fitting to do to a younger member of the flock, whether it includes nudity, fellatio, buggery, whips, ball gags, video/photographic equipment, and/or large amounts of drugged communion wine, we can be sure that it is for God and God alone, and not due to any base desire of the priest.

You should all be ashamed of yourselves.

….

There, I already wrote Bill Donohue’s response for him. The bigot better give me credit if I see any of this in a press release from the Catholic League.

Obama is a Liberal Liar

2011-10-17T17:29:00.000-07:00

I find the Obama-as-a-liberal meme to be quite amusing. Faux News and the Conservative Media Machine have conned the majority of their base and a great deal of the political center into acceptance of the meme. True, at times they seem confused over whether Obama is a far left Marxist communist or a far right fascist National Socialist, but discarding the coocoo-for-cocoa-puffs Hitler comparisons they have been largely successful painting him, along with most of the Democratic Party, as dreaded Liberals.

Rationality, to where have you disappeared?

We can argue for days over where on the political spectrum Obama and other Democrats land (I've heard center-left and dead center, while I would argue for center-right) but can we please stop this "Liberal" nonsense? No matter the cause, be it their true political beliefs, or just political opportunity created as the Republicans go off the rails of their personal crazy train, there is no viable national party representing the views of those of us firmly on the left. I don't expect for the Tea Party to see this as a negative, but I hope those on the right who still look at knowledge, logic, rationality and education as virtues realize that this is poison for our Nation.

The talking points are too easy. Effective policy needs criticism to blossom, it forces those on both sides to dissect their own ideas, tempering them to survive the attack of the enemy, leading to stronger more effective policies. Yes, I am a Liberal and I feel Liberal policies are best for this Nation, but that doesn't mean I want my ideas enacted without debate, rubber stamped blindly with any opposition shut down by the call of "fascists!"

*sigh* After that preamble, let me make one thing clear. I do not advocate "making Obama pay" in 2012. There is no viable 3rd option, and with the batshit insanity of the current Republican party, anyone they nominate for the Presidency is a danger to our Constitution and economy. So hold you nose and vote for Obama, but we need to start pulling the Democrats back to the left. That being said.....

Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars, we once again find our President breaking campaign promises and doing a two-step on our rights.

Apparently not satisfied with completely breaking the promise not to prosecute medical marijuana patients and providers who comply with state law, now the Obama administration has set its sights on the First Amendment as well by prosecuting media outlets that accept advertising from medical marijuana businesses.

From the original article, Feds to target newspapers, radio for marijuana ads on California Watch:

Federal prosecutors are preparing to target newspapers, radio stations and other media outlets that advertise medical marijuana dispensaries in California, another escalation in the Obama administration’s newly invigorated war against the state’s pot industry.

This month, U.S. attorneys representing four districts in California announced that the government would single out landlords and property owners who rent buildings or land where dispensaries sell or cultivators grow marijuana. Now, newspapers and other media outlets could be next.

As Ed Brayton writes to finish his piece, "I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: When it comes to civil liberties, Obama hasn’t just been bad, he’s been an absolute disaster."

I could not agree more.

For Republicans, It Is All About Jobs And The Economy

2011-10-15T16:47:00.000-07:00

It's a no-brainer.

The Country is mired in the Great Recession with little signs of recovery. The sitting Democratic President, sharing dangerously low approval ratings with Congress, has finally appeared to grow a spine, aggressively pushing his jobs package while painting Congressional Republicans as obstructionists. And as the Occupy movement continues to spread from city to city, nation to nation, struggling Republican presidential candidates have a surprising chance to get back into a race that Mitt Romney, despite every opportunity, has failed to claim.

The plan?

1. Bring the 7th anti-abortion bill of the year to a vote in the House.
2. Have candidates double down on anti-abortion rhetoric.
3. Watch as a former Republican State Attorney General, who discussed patients private medical records with Bill O'Reilly on national television as part of his witch hunt against Dr. George Tiller, a doctor who I must point out was gunned down and killed in cold blood by an anti-abortion fanatic, faces the suspension of his ability to practice law for ethics violations without a care, thanks perhaps to his new found prominence in the anti-abortion movement.
4. ?????
5. JOBS!!!!!

It could be worse, I guess. They could be hypocritical as well. I mean, imagine if, at the same time they were trying to massively increase the power of government over a woman's body, they were also portraying themselves as the anti-government party, telling their supporters that government was the problem, and that less government interference with private citizens was the solution.

While you're imagining, here's Rachael Maddow with the story.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Hulk Turns Heel On Obama

2011-10-15T00:48:00.000-07:00

In what may be the most shocking event of the political season, Bruce Banner turned into a large green creature and ripped into President Obama.

Wait. What? Are you sure?

Hulk Hogan rips into Obama?

He's still alive?

His political opinions are relevant because............

I got nothing.

Via Yahoo News reporting off of Faux News' cutting-edge, pulse of the nation show Fox and Friends:

Fake wrestling champion Hulk Hogan supported President Obama in 2008, but alas, the honeymoon is over, Hogan said Thursday during a Fox News appearance.

"I was a big Obama supporter and kinda, like, believed everything he said he was gonna do," Hogan said on Fox and Friends. "But now that nothing's happened..."

Hogan said he was still sore about the president using his theme song, "I Am a Real American" when Obama addressed the 2011 White House Correspondents' Dinner shortly after he released his long form birth certificate earlier this year.

"I kinda was a little upset that he didn't ask me permission to use my music," Hogan added. "But the change of heart is that I think I should be president. I know nothing about politics. I think a flat tax across the board would straighten everything out."

When told that the Hulk's idea sounds something like presidential candidate Herman Cain's "9-9-9 Plan," he responded, "Wow, yeah well he's not a real American like I am. . . . I've been around, people know me, they know everything about me, they know I'm for real, they know I know nothing about politics. I'll just make decisions on what's right or wrong."

How is it even possible to force that much stupid into such a small space? The Incredible Hulk could grunt out a more coherent and nuanced political stance while smashing things with a tank. How exactly do you go from being an Obama supporter to supporting a flat tax on Fox and Friends?

Easy! Just follow these simple steps.

1. Watch Hank Williams Jr. bring the stupid on Fox&Friends.
2. Watch a washed up, irrelevant former star like yourself receive tons of negative publicity.
3. Decide that negative publicity is better than no publicity.
4. Bring the stupid on Fox&Friends!

In Vol. 22, No. 4, the Fall 2002 issue of Free Inquiry Harlan Ellison had a piece that I will never forget titled "Terrorists". I can not locate it online for free, but I have the issue in front of me. He begins the piece

It is wickedly difficult attempting to generate a sense of gravitas when you have convinced yourself that you have nothing to say that anyone should properly need to hear.

Let me try this:
Why can't I get that portion of the human race to which I have access to understand that it has been systematically gulled, hoodwinked if you will, had enough smoke blown up its kilt to refloat the Lusitania, by disingenuous egalitarian bunkum, into believing "Everyone is Entitled to His or Her Opinion" when, in truth, everyone is only entitled to his or her informed opinion; and all the witless upchuck devoid of fact or common ratiocination is merely the chittering of intellectually-arid hominids swathed in Old Navy shmatahs.

No, I can't launch into it that way. Sounds too Elitist. Don't even dare to suggest that some folks are smarter than some other folks. That ain't The American Way. All opinions have the same weight: Herman Kahn, Debbie Reynolds, Miss Cleo, Colin Powell. Joyce Carol Oates. Adam Sandler.

And may I add, Hulk Hogan?

Skipping ahead a bit...

Everybody wants to be on television. Everybody. At the scene of a fifty-car smashup, bodies strewn everywhichway like bloody pick-up-sticks, there will invariably be some gobbet of human phlegm who, with slack jaw and extruded tongue, positions him or herself behind the stringer with the mike, who waves to the world or to Mom while squishing an ejected large colon 'neath his/her Nikes. Pedestrians in malls, passersby in markets, patrons in moviehouses, all pant and drool as their progress is impeded by a total stranger with a hand-mike, seeking their oracular wisdom. The late British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once wrote, "I have never found, in a long experience of politics, that criticism is ever inhibited by ignorance."

And, hell, we pay politicians to have opinions.

Everybody wants to be a dancing bear on television, and everybody deserves to shoot off a big mouth on the tube, because as everybody knows....We Are All Entitled To Our Opinion.

Doesn't matter if we're dumb as a box of Hamburger Helper, as uninformed as a hemorrhoid, as surfeited with jingoism and urban myth as a foot-soldier in the White Aryan Army, by gosh we're entitled to express that bone-stick-stone opinion, endlessly, at the top of our lungs, ungrammatically, like uh totally and, gawd willin' and the crick don't rise, on telemuthuhfugginvision

With no intent to do so, nine years ago, Harlan Ellison wrote the most accurate review of Fox&Friends I have yet seen. (Apologies to Harlan Ellison for using such a small piece of a great article to make my point. I urge you to track the article down if you have never read it, the full work is definitely worth a few moments of your time.)

So who is next, Fox&Friends?

Britney Spears? Lindsey Lohen? Jeff Foxworthy? Billy Ray Cyrus? Smilin' Bob from the old Enzyte commercials?

You've got us hooked, don't leave us hanging now.

Screw expert opinions. We want ignorant opinions!

Hasa Diga Eebowai

2011-10-13T09:19:00.000-07:00

Yep. Ah ha. There is a omni-benevolent god. Yeah. I believe. Keep talking.

Apologies for a few days off....

2011-10-13T08:54:00.000-07:00

Right now, I feel like a cross between Christopher Hitchens and Ke$ha.Make of that what you will........

Protips:

1. Lucretius is a bitch to read sober, let alone on single malt.

2. Brushing your teeth with a bottle of Jack, or any other whiskey probably isn't the best idea for a good morning.

3. The safe word is always "Red".

Venue Cancels Christian Speaker: We don't want your kind here!

2011-10-10T22:49:00.000-07:00

No, not really. But could you imagine the outcry if the tables were turned?

Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars

My friends at the Center for Inquiry were set to host Richard Dawkins and Sean Faircloth for a talk Wednesday night at the Wyndgate Country Club in Rochester Hills, a suburb of Detroit. But the club has now canceled the event, saying they don’t want to be associated with such an evil person.

Apparently,

The Wyndgate terminated the agreement after the owner saw an October 5th interview with Dawkins on The O’Reilly Factor in which Dawkins discussed his new book, The Magic of Reality: How We Know What’s Really True.

In a phone call to CFI–Michigan Assistant Director Jennifer Beahan, The Wyndgate’s representative explained that the owner did not wish to associate with individuals such as Dawkins, or his philosophies.

So he had no idea what the CFI's purpose is, and no idea who Dawkins was until he watched the O'Reilly Factor? I can see that, most bigots are ignorant. Oh, well. It is his right to be a bigot.

Although privately owned, The Wyndgate facilities are open to the public for special events and occasions. According to Title II of the Federal Civil Rights Law of 1964, “open to the public” means “all persons shall be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the goods, services, facilities, privileges, advantages, and accommodations of any place of public accommodation, as defined in this section, without discrimination or segregation on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin.”

Right to be a bigot? Check. Right to discriminate due to his bigotry? Not so much.

Now I finally understand how all the poor oppressed Christians in the U.S. feel.

“It’s important to understand that discrimination based on a person’s religion—or lack thereof—is legally equivalent to discriminating against a person because of his or her race,” said Jeff Seaver, executive director of CFI–Michigan. “This action by The Wyndgate illustrates the kind of bias and bigotry that nonbelievers encounter all the time. It’s exactly why organizations like CFI and the Richard Dawkins Foundation are needed: to help end the stigma attached to being a nonbeliever.”

And that is exactly why I came out publicly, no matter how much grief I get from my family/religious friends.

Here's the CFI-Michigan page for the fundraiser with Richard Dawkins. It found a new location and will go on as planned. For an evening with Dawkins, the cost is a value.

Hopefully, the eventual legal judgement against The Wyndgate is nowhere near as reasonably priced.

Alt-Med Vampires

2011-10-10T18:19:00.000-07:00

Feel the need to comment on this. If you want the full story, head on over to Respectful Insolence to hear from someone actually qualified to take this on. Much thanks to Orac for watching this trash so I don't have to.

Alt-med practitioners, at least the slimy ones, seem to have a habit of abusing dead celebrities to sell their woo and attack modern medicine. Why would Steve Jobs be any different?

Orac, you are a stronger man than I, because I can't get through 10 minutes of that before the nausea sets in.

Mercola:This is not routinely done for two primary reasons. The first is that it in no way, shape, or form addresses the original cancer, and it can easily spread to the new liver. But more importantly, he had to be placed on large doses of drugs to suppress his immune system so he would not reject his new liver. Tragically this is the very system your body uses to help control cancers. The liver has enormous regenerative capacity, and if they only removed the portion of his liver that contained the malignant cells, he would not have to take those dangerous anti-rejection drugs.

Orac? Insolence please.

I've discussed the issue of liver transplant for neuroendocrine tumors like insulinoma (which is what Jobs had) before. While it is arguable whether a liver transplant was the best decision for Jobs in 2009, it was certainly not outside the standard of care, nor was it unreasonable. Mercola also makes a very silly statement when he states that "if only" they had removed the portion of the liver containing the cancer, Jobs wouldn't have needed all those nasty immunosuppressants. Well, duh! Give that man a prize for stating the obvious as though it were some brilliant insight! Here's the issue: Transplant is not even considered for insulinoma metastatic to the liver unless the metastases are unresectable (i.e., they involve two or more lobes or are too close to major vascular structures). And what defines resectability? To boil it down to its essence, although there are certainly other considerations (the aforementioned vascular structures, for example) it's basically the ability to remove the liver tissue containing all of the metastase(s) and still leave enough liver tissue behind to survive on. Contrary to what Mercola thinks, the liver's regenerative capacity, although truly impressive, is not limitless, particularly if the liver is compromised by cirrhosis. Take too much liver, and the patient will die of liver failure because the liver can't regenerate fast enough (or just enough) to achieve function consistent with life. In addition to that basic equation, we just don't know whether Jobs' liver had been damaged or otherwise compromised by the insulinoma; it's possible that his liver wasn't in the best shape at the time, leaving less capacity to regenerate.

Thank you, back to the woo. From the interview transcript....

DM: There were some comments that he was leading up to his death, and people would post comments on Facebook and are asking why I couldn't get in touch with him and offer him some therapy. I'm not a cancer expert like you are, of course, but I believe someone like you could have really made a difference. My understanding is that your therapy was offered to him, but could you go to that process of why he chose not to undertake a natural or alternative approach to cancer?

DG: He wanted to see an alternative. In fact when he was first diagnosed, he got some dietary program - again, he was very secretive of that - So I don't exactly know what he did at that point. But through his acupuncturist, there was communication. He was getting acupuncture, and he was doing some alternative things as far as I know. This acupuncturist actually talked to me, discussing the situation. She was really anxious for him to come and see me. But he chose not to do that.

You know, I always respect the patients' right to choose the therapy they want to choose, so I would never dispute that. The patients have to make the decisions based on what they want to do. But she was very adamant; in fact, she knew about all my works in the alternative world. He had seen alternative-type practitioners. She really wanted for him to come and see me. He chose not to do that. From my perspective, it was unfortunate, because he was such a gift to the world in terms of his inventions and genius in the past 30 years.

I don't need a medical degree to deal with this one. This is simply two vampires pissing all over a deceased man to sell their "treatment." The "phantom acupuncturist" is a great touch. It lends the story a certain aura of verisimilitude. I'm sure the acupuncturist is unnamed due to privacy concerns, and not lack of existence.

Not that it matters one bit, since Steve Jobs is conveniently dead and unavailable to either confirm or deny any of this. Of course, if he just would have went to Dr. Gonzalez for treatment, he'd still be with us today. *insert eye roll here*

Orac, can you deal with this, because if I do it is going to be libelous.

Particularly vomit-inducing is the way Gonzalez turns around the argument based on a "patient's right to choose." Frequently, those of us who support science-based medicine, when confronted with the story of a patient who chooses quackery instead of medicine and suffers harm or dies as a result, will sadly say that a competent adult has the right to choose quackery if that's what he wants, mainly because he does. Self-determination is a basic human right. Here, we have Dr. Gonzalez turning that argument on its head, sadly shrugging his shoulders and expressing regret that Jobs had the right to choose his own course and chose SBM instead of quackery. After his flirtation with some sort of diet and unknown "alternative" therapies, Jobs appears to have turned to scientific medicine and never looked back, at least as far as we can tell based on the limited information available from press accounts. There's one thing that's for sure, though. If SBM couldn't save Jobs, Gonzalez sure as hell couldn't save him either, his claims otherwise notwithstanding. Now that Jobs is dead, Gonzalez's claims have the added bonus for him of being unfalsifiable, even though Gonzalez's methods have already been shown to be worse than useless for pancreatic cancer.

Thanks again, Orac.

Seriously. Dr. Mercola? Dr. Gonzalez? How about less pissing on the dead and more proving your treatments work, and no, I am not talking about anecdotal "evidence." Give me five bucks and ten minutes and I'll provide anecdotal "evidence" that I can cure cancer with a kick to the shin. Real evidence. Major journal articles. Double blind studies. Documented case histories. Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?

I'll wait.

Seriously, I'm in no hurry.

Got all the time in the world.

La la la la la.

Protip: Real evidence is not coming because their treatments do not cure cancer, or anything else for that matter, other than perhaps heavy wallet syndrome. Think I'm wrong? Then fucking prove it.

Prove your treatments work and I'll be right there in line to kiss your ass. Until then, can you please leave the dead to rest in peace?

Iran sentences film actress to 90 lashes, I check calendar to make sure this isn't the year 1316

2011-10-10T16:23:00.000-07:00

Patriocentric Theocracy? Check.
Whipping women who don't know their place? Check.
Punishment that proves the point of the woman's "illegal activities?" Check.

Is this the plot of an important novel showing how religion can warp peoples sense of morality? A film showing how women suffered in a long ago, unenlightened time? A parable on the dangers of Dominionism and Patriocentric bronze age beliefs in the modern world?

Nope, it's just "modern" Iran.

The Envoy at Yahoo brings us today's news to both make you sick and piss you off.

An Iranian court has sentenced an Iranian actress to 90 lashes for her role in a new Australian-made film

90 lashes? And not with a wet noodle either? What the hell did she do, shoot a porn in Mecca?

portraying social alienation, drug use and political oppression in Iran.

Oh. Ah. Um. All I can imagine is the following exchange.

"This film says that we alienate and oppress people here in Iran."
"Those bastards! Round them up then alienate and oppress them. That will teach them!"

While I hesitate to use the word "lucky" at anytime when referring to the violent abuse of women under a draconic theocracy, at least they didn't try to stone her to death.

Which I am sure would have been the sentence for filming a porn in Mecca.

"In an outcome that could have been lifted from the pages of the movie's script"--"My Tehran for Sale"--the film's lead actress, Marzieh Vafamehr, "was arrested in July and received her sentence at the weekend, according to reports quoting Iranian opposition website kalameh.com," the Sydney Morning Herald reported.

"Vafamehr often appears with a shaved head and no headscarf in the film, which also explores cultural oppression in Iran and taboos such as drug use," the paper said.

Granaz Moussavi, the Melbourne-based Iranian-Australian director of the film, declined to comment to the paper out of respect for the actress' family's wishes. Her portions of the film were "shot on the sly in Iran with a local crew in 2008," the paper said.

No headscarf? Shaved head? Shot on the sly? ....

Sorry, I can't bring myself to sarcastically imply this is a rational reaction. I try not to use the word much, but this is evil.

And fucking insane.

Since its disputed 2009 presidential elections, Iran has intensified a harsh crackdown against those perceived to violate its strict Islamic code, but often sentences are cruel and arbitrary. A moratorium had been declared on stoning in 2002, but the nation's Islamic courts have continued to hand down stoning sentences in accordance with the strict wording of the law. Reliable numbers are hard to come by, but human-rights groups estimate that scores of women were stoned to death in Iran during the 1980s and 1990s. One documented case of such a stoning was captured on a horrifying video in 1994. In 2009, two men were stoned to death in Iran on charges of adultery and murder.

Two gay teenagers, identified only by their initials, were stoned to death in Iran in 2005, and two gay men received a death-by-stoning sentence last year after filming themselves having sex.

Various parliamentary reforms have been mounted to reduce the penal system's harsher sentences, but they are not binding on the country's independent judiciary.

Wait....what?

not binding on the country's independent judiciary.

Once more?

not binding on the country's independent judiciary.

They are killing people with fucking stones! Who thinks that is a just punishment? Religious fanatics who believe every word of their holy book is true, other than the parts that don't let them stone people to death, rape their own wives, and in general be self-righteous pricks. Fuck parliamentary reforms, fuck independent judiciaries. Religion is the issue here. Yeah, it is batshit insane religion, but it is still religion. No change is going to come until the underlying cause is dealt with, and that requires dragging Iran kicking and screaming into at least the 20th century.

They whipped a woman, 90 times, for acting in a film. Not a porn. Not a snuff film. Not even a breast filled teen comedy. It was a film with a message, a point, and no matter how much the Iranian authorities dislike the point, they proved it with their actions.

Let me be clear.

There is no justification possible for whipping a woman. There is no justification possible for whipping a dog, let alone a human. This isn't about a film, just as the stonings aren't about gay sex or adultery. It is about a patriarchal religion taken to extremes by men who have lost all touch with actual ethics and morality, refusing to accept the passing of time and the end of male values uber alles attempting to put uppity women in their place and GLBT people back in the closet through fear and violence.

Patriocentric theocracies have no place in the modern world. People are not property. Women are not your slaves, your wives are not sperm receptacles, girls are not fuck machines, and no matter how hard they make you, gays are not temptations sent by the devil.

If God exists, and agrees with Iran, I would rather burn in hell.

*sigh*

At least it could never happen in the United States.

The Constitution Restoration Act of 2004 and 2005

and

According to Gary North, women who have abortions should be publicly executed, "along with those who advised them to abort their children." Rushdoony concludes: "God's government prevails, and His alternatives are clear-cut: either men and nations obey His laws, or God invokes the death penalty against them." Reconstructionists insist that "the death penalty is the maximum, not necessarily the mandatory penalty." However, such judgments may depend less on Biblical Principles than on which faction gains power in the theocratic republic. The potential for bloodthirsty episodes on the order of the Salem witchcraft trials or the Spanish Inquisition is inadvertently revealed by Reconstructionist theologian Rev. Ray Sutton, who claims that the Reconstructed Biblical theocracies would be "happy" places, to which people would flock because "capital punishment is one of the best evangelistic tools of a society."

and

For connoisseurs of surrealism on the American right, it's hard to beat an exchange that appeared about a decade ago in the Heritage Foundation magazine Policy Review. It started when two associates of the Rev. Jerry Falwell wrote an article which criticized Christian Reconstructionism, the influential movement led by theologian Rousas John (R.J.) Rushdoony, for advocating positions that even they as committed fundamentalists found "scary." Among Reconstructionism's highlights, the article cited support for laws "mandating the death penalty for homosexuals and drunkards." The Rev. Rushdoony fired off a letter to the editor complaining that the article had got his followers' views all wrong: They didn't intend to put drunkards to death.

Ah, yes, accuracy does count. In a world run by Rushdoony followers, sots would escape capital punishment--which would make them happy exceptions indeed. Those who would face execution include not only gays but a very long list of others: blasphemers, heretics, apostate Christians, people who cursed or struck their parents, females guilty of "unchastity before marriage," "incorrigible" juvenile delinquents, adulterers, and (probably) telephone psychics. And that's to say nothing of murderers and those guilty of raping married women or "betrothed virgins." Adulterers, among others, might meet their doom by being publicly stoned

Yep. Could never happen here.

Glenn Beck Still Insane! I Feel Much Better Now.

2011-10-09T13:12:00.000-07:00

I try not to just repost other bloggers work here, but this is just too good. If you want to watch the video, go give Ed Brayton some more traffic.

Via Dispatches from the Culture Wars

Glenn Beck continued his pattern of finding proto-Hitlers everywhere he looks. President Obama is the next Hitler for wanting to give health care to those who don’t have it — because, as everyone knows, Hitler began his campaign to exterminate the Jews by giving them health insurance. Even empathy leaders to Hitler. And this time, the winner is — spins the wheel — the Wall Street protesters.

Why is this man still relevant? How insane do you have to be to look at the Occupy Whatever protesters and think "yeah, Hitler!"? How insane do you have to be to listen to him and then say "yeah, he's got a point"?

I'd laugh if I didn't think a decent percentage of the far right thinks Beck is hitting nails square on the head.

George Will Makes Sense. I'm Going To Go Lay Down Now

2011-10-09T12:24:00.000-07:00

Here in Pennsylvania, the Republicans are attempting to change the way PA's electoral votes are awarded, with 2 going to the State-wide winner, and 1 to the winner of each congressional district. There is little doubt that this is political electionrigging of a new level. For those unfamiliar with Pennsylvania politics, the Pittsburgh and Philly areas are deep blue, while the rest of the state is called Pennsyltucky.

Let's take where I live. The last time my district had a democratic rep was in 1939. To say my district "leans right" would be the understatement of the year. While Obama carried 54.7% of the PA vote in 08, my district went to McCain 63% to 35%. And Obama personally visited my city, tried to bowl, and ate a hotdog, yet still only got 35%.

If electoral votes are awarded by district, why the fuck would a candidate ever campaign here again? Hell, I already know my half the votes I cast are only to cancel out a Tea Party member, now they want my Presidential vote to be meaningless?

And then, George Will brings the sanity....

Republicans supposedly revere the Constitution, but in its birthplace, Pennsylvania, they are contemplating a subversion of the Framers’ institutional architecture. Their ploy — partisanship masquerading as altruism about making presidential elections more “democratic” — will weaken resistance to an even worse change being suggested.

Hi, my name is Foster Disbelief, and I agree with George Will. There are word combinations I am less likely to type, granted, but damn. So far this week I've agreed with Bill O'Reilly, found AL-Queda to have the rational position in an argument, and now am quoting George Will like a fanboy. I need to go lay down.

More from Will.

The 2012 Republican candidate might lose the statewide vote but carry, say, nine of the 18 congressional districts, cutting President Obama’s yield to 11 electoral votes. But if the Republican candidate carries nine of Pennsylvania’s 18 districts and the statewide vote — Obama’s Pennsylvania poll numbers are poor — Republicans will have cost themselves nine electoral votes, which would be condign punishment.

Not since 1988 has a Republican carried Pennsylvania, a state described as Philadelphia in the east, Pittsburgh in the west and Alabama in between. Incongruous political cultures coexist in many states, so the temptation to which Pennsylvania Republicans may succumb could become a national contagion.

Look, I'm not too sure on the Electoral College. I've read arguments for and against reforming it, but it has never been an issue I've concentrated on. Too much else going on, not enough time in the day, picking your battles and so on. But I am sure that the path to reform should not be blazed by partisans with an eye to the next election.

Wonder what my rep has to say about it?

Rep. Rick Geist, R-Altoona, said the proposal would be closer to a "one man, one vote" attitude, giving more importance to each individual voter in the state.

I need to move.

How To Clean Everything! Reviews of Vital Punk/Hardcore Records

2011-10-08T22:19:00.000-07:00

Every Sunday here at Foster Disbelief I will look at one album that made me who I am, and how it has stood the test of time. No matter what my current beliefs, I never would have been interested in politics if it wasn't for political punk. Yeah, sometimes the lyrics are cringe inducing, but some ideas are still vital.

One of my goals with this blog is to prevent young, brilliant, radicals from throwing their lives away, either thru naivety, or self-destruction. That Circle A shirt I wore? Naive. The heroin I shoved in my arms? Waste of life and talent.

Here's to reaching one person. That would satisfy me.

With that being said, perhaps the most influential record of my youth, and one of the best political punk albums ever, Propagandhi's first album, from 1993, How To Clean Everything

First cut, Anti-Manifesto

Listen to Anti-Manifesto Here

Dance and laugh and play. Ignore the message we convey.
It seems we're only here to entertain.
A rebellion cut-to-fit. I refuse to be the soundtrack to it.
While we entertain we're still knee-deep in shit.
There's something wrong inside.
We've played it safe, enjoyed the ride.
You won't like this but I've something to confide.
We stand for something more than a faded sticker on a skateboard.
Now we've rained on your parade and we're out the door.
And I don't even care any fucking more.

How many times, in bands or in the crowd, have I felt the same way? The knowledge that 99% of the people listening are ignoring any purpose you have? Watching as the words go unnoticed? Political punk is not just entertainment. Punk was never supposed to be just entertainment.

I am so full of shit.
But I will remain until this self-awareness fades
Until I defeat the purpose of this soapbox that you made.
That you made.

Hypocrites, everyone of us. Some of us realize it.

It don't really matter cuz nothing's ever felt as right as this.

Even when naive, the moral highground was still ours. Anti-Manifesto is still perfect for summing up the thoughts and feelings of those who know versus those who don't care.

Cut two! "Head? Chest? or Foot?"

Listen to Head? Chest? or Foot?

Both an anthem of the underclass and a indictment of the ignorance of the masses.

You're all the same. Just part of their machine.
Perpetuate their dream.
They subsidize your nightclubs and they subsidize your malls.
They herd and brand the masses within painted prison walls.
'Til your freedom of assembly becomes the missiles they create.
Or just mass delusion dancing to this music that you fucking hate.

Ouch.

I'd rather be imprisoned in a George Orwell-ian world
Than your pacified society of happy boys and girls.
I'd rather know my enemies and let you know the same.
Whose windows to smash and whose tires to slash
And where to point the fucking blame.

I would also prefer to know where to focus my rage. If only it was that easy.

Cut three is "Hate, Myth, Muscle, Etiquette"

Listen to Hate, Myth, Muscle, Etiquette

Mark your point of failing. It begins where you concede.
Hesitate. Procrastinate. Sedating.
All configured to impede your path.
You need a good kick in the ass.

In today's society, it is so easy to not care. Internet, tv, movies, etc. The masses need to wake up.

Mark my point of failing. It began where I gave in.
Comfort. Convenience. Placating.
Construed to suck me in, to their trap.
I need a good kick in the ass.

Even the Dissenters need a kick in the ass at times.

As time passed I realized we don't need rules to survive.
Just common sense and means to subsist.
So from here on in I will resist.

Cringe worthy naivety. No rules? Who's going to stop that big idiot from raping your daughter? You? Good luck. Anarchy is a great thought experiment. Not very good in practice, and I haven't even asked about who is going to fix the sewers.

And then they follow that with perhaps the best lyrics of the whole album. Figures.

The basis of change: educate! Derived from discussion,
not hate, not myth, not muscle, not etiquette.
Intellect, not "re-elect!".
Status symbols yield to respect between sex, species, environment.

One point I will always hammer home. Educate. Educate. Educate! Educate! Without education we are ignorant, and while ignorance may be bliss, it is not useful or helpful.

Next comes Showdown Listen to Showdown.

At first glance, it seems like a strange song. Then you realize what the name means, and it makes sense. There are two perspectives in this song as I see it. The view of the dissident, and the view of the man just trying to make it through life emotionally intact.

Compare.

Waking up each morning with confusion in my eyes.
The wind is biting through to wave "hello".
Seeing my reflection, an exterior of lies.
I hope this shaky feeling doesn't show.
As if I had to tell you there was little left to say.
Stilted conversations colored blue.
You were sitting down and you got up to walk away.
I tried to stay but I was right behind you.
Tension in the stair, I cannot bear so close to helpless
as this song I sing. Inside me ring.
Final words are boring, never touch,
I know you whispered something in my ear.
I couldn't hear you.
Girls with the greenest eyes. The first time you have kissed.
Our quiet softest sighs.
A song for all of those who shot and missed.

Vs.

Welcomed to this world, imputed identity.
Born, tagged, tattooed, pacified.
Generously bestowed my rights and privileges replete.
Arbitrary values ascribed.
There's nothing I can tell you. There's nothing I can say.
Stunted conversation, censored thought.
I'm completely free, at liberty, guaranteed
Unless of course you decide I'm not.
But I'll not be resigned to, fall in line behind you.
Tension in the air I cannot bear
So what the fuck am I accomplishing? Absolutely nothing.
All these words are boring, it's time for action.
But you've taught me to be a pawn.
It won't last for long.
Those who see through the lies are quickly gagged and bound.
Ambition realized, tear the whole fucking thing down.

Can't get much different than that. And a special roll of the eyes at the "tear the whole fucking thing down." Really? Destruction is the easy part, it's the rebuilding that is a bitch.

5th song is Ska Sucks. On a future album, you can hear the singer chanting "I hate this song" as the opening notes are played. Not even going to cover it. All ska bands are in it for the money? Pot, I'd like you to meet kettle. Oh, you aren't in it for the money? Then why the fuck do you think all ska bands are?

6th Cut. Middle Finger Response.

A song dealing with how comfort can cause us to close our eyes.

Why am I not part of this?
Pine cone wealth and cedar fence bliss?

The cry of the underclass.

Nobody cares about the state of affairs.
You can turn blue in the face, but you cannot erase.
Oblivious to the obvious.
I'm making perfect sense but I'm not getting through.

Yeah, I feel like that once a day.

But don't expect to find me with a note left to be read.
Pistol in my hand and a bullet in my head.
Because this census indicates and this atlas has related
3 billion humyns I haven't irritated.
I've got a lot of work to do. 3 billion people.
That's 3 billion snotty Fuck you's
Fuck you, fuck all of you.

Yeah, it's snotty, it's cliched, and it is naive. How is telling the whole world to fuck off going to solve anything?

At the same time, I'm alive because of that cliched lyric. Sometimes, even cliches can make you think twice.

Next cut, "Stick The Fucking Flag Up Your Goddam Ass, You Sonofabitch"

And this is the cut that went on the comps, that was fucking everywhere during my junior and senior year. And this is rhetoric that does nothing to help us or our cause. "Fuck the troops?" Welcome to political irrelevance. And then there is this:

Well, if you're dumb enough to vote,
You're fuckin dumb enough to believe him.

Great. Tell a generation of leftist radicals not to vote. Good idea.

The next track is "Haillie Sellasse, Up Your Ass" Those not in the know, know it as "Fuck Religion." One of the classic punk songs of the last 30 years. No comment needed.

You speak of Rastafari, but how can you justify belief
In a god that's left you behind?
You've simply filled the gap between the upper and lower class
And your faith merely keeps you in line.
An amalgamation of jewish scripture and christian thought.
What will that get you? Not a fuck of a lot.
Take a look at your promised land.
Your deed is that gun in your hand.
Mt. Zion's a minefield. The West Bank. The Gaza Strip.
Soon to be parking lots for American tourists and fascist cops.
Fuck zionism. Fuck militarism. Fuck americanism.
Fuck nationalism. Fuck religion.

How do you follow absolute perfection? How about with the song that made me a feminist? "Fuck Machine"

It's something physical, conditioned reaction.
It's something physical, conditioned attraction.
But have I finally escaped?
Will my eyes no longer rape the innocent womyn, children, humyn beings?
Seeing the pain that it brings.

There is no way I could ever explain how much these lyrics still affect me. What is my failing?

Shallow, superficial decision.
Real beauty obscured by my television.
But this just in! Bikini film at ten.
The female anchor smiles and shrugs it off,
"Boys will be boys!"
Do you really wanna be our fucking toys?
And in again, condone it with a grin.
Sit back, idly chat, smile, prove you're just a fuck machine.
Is that what you really wanna fucking be??
Conditioned reaction. Conditioned attraction.
Conditioned suggestion. Conditioned rejection.

36 years of social conditioning to find one and only one body type attractive. I could never explain how hard that is to fight, especially when so many women accept what they are told and play to it.

And yet again, subjecting womyn.
The female anchor's fists finally clinched,
"I'm not your fucking toy!"

Yes, I get chills every single time I hear that lyric. This song beats me down, and then builds me up, reminding me of my failings, while expressing my beliefs and calling my bluff. The end of the song is everything I want in a womyn.

And though I long to embrace, I will not misplace my priorities:
Humor, opinion, a sense of compassion, creativity,
And a distaste for fashion.

Nail? Meet hammer. Foster? Meet Failing. This society does not make it easy.

Next cut, "This Might Be Satire" And yeah, it just may be satire.

I wanna chew my bubble gum with you.
And I wanna walk you home from school.
And I wanna carry your books to every class.
And I wanna fuck you up the ass.
Girl, don't you know it's true, how much I love you.
I wanna sing it 'cross the land, oh won't you hold my hand?
She tells me that she loves me,
Now I'm gonna tell her that I love her.
She tells me that she loves me,
Now I'm gonna try and fuck her.
But where the hell are my priorities?
Left in the hands of the authorities.

They follow the satire with a song that I hope the GLBT movement found and made their own. I know I heard myself called "fag," and "queer" once too often for a straight guy. I have no idea what it would actually be like to actually be what people fear that much. This song got me through some tough times, I hope it reached who it was intended for. It works for any dissenters. The gay rights message is overt in my mind. I will never forget this band for helping me with this issue. As a straight male in pennsyltucky, believe me, peer pressure was not leaning towards being Gay-Positive.

"Who Will Help Me Bake This Bread?"

You can rearrange my face but you can't rearrange my mind.
You can beat this shell about me, but you can't touch what's inside.
So now who will help me bake this bread?
Who will be the first to speak and leave complacency for dead?
I've done all that I can on my own.
But stagnant minds persist to squeeze blood from this stone.
But I won't bleed for you. I have no need for you.
Death will be the day I concede to you.

"Death will be the day I concede to you." If I adopted one motto from the punk scene, there it is.

Then, for some reason they finish the album with a Cheap Trick cover with a vegan message added in.

"I want you to want me" Which honestly is a confusing end to a masterpiece of political punk.

The vegan message involves a girl named Megan who obviously doesn't eat meat. The song ends with:

Megan.
She don't eat bacon.
She'd never kill a sweet little innocent piggy to get bacon.
She's one of them vegans.
She's so sweet loving sweet talking lovable vegan.
And that's alright.

And then comes a chorus of "Fuck" Don't ask me, it's not my album.

Propagandhi is still around, although the bassist from this album, John K. Samson split off and formed The Weakerthans Personally, with the departure of Samson, Propagandhi went in a musical direction I didn't like, although I always check up on them and would definitely see them if they played close.

Some lyrics are cringe inducing, yet the over all pro-feminist, anti-racist, gay-positive ideals were/are vital to young punks forming their ideals, especially in conservative areas. As long as education is mixed in, this is an album that will have meaning for years, if not decades.

Next Week? The Subhumans, The Day the Country Died.

Preserving the Radical, Killing a Movement Exasperated Sigh Here

2011-10-08T20:13:00.000-07:00

According to Kasama, Ride the Tiger this is a liberal hit piece on the Occupy Whatever Movement

From The Daily Beast

For two-and-a-half long—and believe me, they’ve been loooong—years now, people on the left have been wondering: How on earth is it that we were hit with the greatest financial crisis since the Depression, very obviously caused by deregulation and adherence to other conservative nostra, and yet the only protest movement to arise from these ashes is one ... of the right? It has been, to put it mildly, exasperating. But now comes Occupy Wall Street. Is the cosmic score about to be evened? Maybe. But paradoxically, only if this new left protest movement embraces some crucial lessons from the Tea Party movement—and if it outgrows certain impulses from 1968 that continue to loom large in the left’s imagination.

Damn that Michael Tomasky is vicious. He's on our side and has advice, he must be a witch!

Continuing....

I want to stipulate up front that I am firmly on OWS’s side. I don’t really know who its leaders are, and I don’t especially care. I don’t know its exact goals—a subject on which the movement has been roundly, and in my view pointlessly, criticized. But it is desperately needed. It needs to succeed. And I fear it won’t.

Let's see, on the side of OWS? Check. Agrees it is desperately needed? Check? Has concerns over the movement's tactics? It's a hit-job!!!!!

No I am not exaggerating. Kasama actually calls it a "hit-job." And that isn't out of context. Back to the vicious screed:

And this is where today’s protesters need to steal a page from the Tea Party activists. I beg, plead, implore, importune: Get some spokespeople out there for the cause who are just regular Americans. Don’t send Van Jones out there to be the public face of this movement. I happen to have a high opinion of Van Jones personally. He’s dedicated his life to justice in a higher-stakes way than I have. But any movement that is led by someone who was forced to resign from the White House and who signed a 9/11 truther petition will be dismissed by the mainstream media as left-wing and elitist in three seconds. You may like that or not like that, but it’s true.

Honestly? Sounds a lot like some of what I just wrote in Occupy *Insert Anything Here* I'm a muthafucking hitman!

Seriously though, it is also rational, logical, and realistic. And very, very true.

Moving on....

The OWS movement is part of the way there. The “We Are the 99 Percent” trope is powerful. It is true. But the movement has to prove that it really is the 99 percent. It has to win middle America, and the way to win middle America is to be middle America. For all the Seattle-ish longhairs down in Zucotti Park—whom the mainstream media and the right wing will undoubtedly highlight—there are, to be sure, homemakers in Wilkes-Barre and IT guys in Dubuque who sympathize. Find them. Put them out there. Get them on cable.

Strategy?!? Propaganda? Using the media for our own ends? Oh, the shame. The shame. Excuse me as I hide my eyes...

And finally, don’t fight the man. Maybe in 1968 in Grant Park, the cops were pigs. Today, the cops aren’t pigs. They aren’t the man. They’re working stiffs, and they’re part of the 99 percent. They have underwater mortgages in Ronkonkoma and Orangeburg. Don’t make them arrest you. Make them part of the 99 percent. And don’t mess with traffic. That just pisses people off.

Seriously, out of all of Tomasky's points, this is the one that really grinds at me. I've seen the videos. They make me sick. Police beat and pepper spray protesters on 10.05.11 PEACEFUL FEMALE PROTESTORS PENNED IN THE STREET AND MACED! NYPD pepper sprays peaceful protesters Foster Disorder (or hell, Ed Brayton) won't let me forget that there are still cops that abuse their power. But he is right to a point there. Making them arrest you leads to jail cells, not success. And yeah, messing with traffic does piss people off.

On to the coup de grace of this attack piece.

An execrable legacy of ’68 is the temptation to treat politics as a realm of self-expression. But it isn’t. Politics is where you go to get things done, to change things. Changing things means persuading those people sitting at home watching on TV. The bulk of those people have been persuaded that they don’t like government. But they also know that the system is rigged against them. Get them on your side. Be them. They’ll be with you, if you only invite them along.

Seriously, that is a hit piece? What does Kasama call Fox's coverage?

Fighting against your own allies. Perfect plan for success.

/sarcasm

I humbly admit my error. Kasama calls it a "hit-job," not a "hit piece." Edited for accuracy, although I fail to find any distinction between the two.

Occupy Insert Anything Here

2011-10-08T14:34:00.000-07:00

Thoughts while pondering the Occupy Pittsburgh meeting tomorrow.

It is so difficult to be rational sometimes. I am watching my teenage wet dream happen across the Nation, and I'm having flashbacks to my days as Foster Disorder and all the naivety that colored my political ideals at the time.

I watch commentators such as Ed Schultz try to make sense of this movement as it pertains to electoral politics. Thanks to Kevin Gosztola of The Dissenter (I'll get to him in a second, calm down) for the transcript.

Schultz brought Salon’s Justin Elliott and GRITtv’s Laura Flanders on during the segment to add their take. Here’s a key exchange that took place between Elliott and Schultz:

SCHULTZ: Many of the things that I heard were that of the Democratic platform. Not to overstate or simplify the frustration of people but some of the major issues are right from the Democratic platform. Are they the winners here?

ELLIOTT: Maybe. I think there’s a mix. I haven’t found many Obama supporters in the crowd. As I said, one of the chants I kept hearing is how do we cut the deficit? End the wars. Tax the rich…[cutoff]

SCHULTZ: I think they’re Obama supporters. I do. I just think they’re frustrated Obama supporters.

ELLIOTT: Perhaps, there’s a strain of Obama supporters but there’s a strain of people who are far to the left of people here and they’re very dissatisfied.

Flanders jumped in to help Schultz understand:

What I heard is people wanted change. They wanted an end to war. They got more war. They didn’t want to see drone attacks, even taking out people who were threats to the country. They didn’t want to see a little bit of healthcare reform. They needed to see profit seeking out of healthcare. So, they’re frustrated and they are creating the movement that four years ago was channeled into electoral politics. This is being channeled into a global movement. And I think that’s what’s exciting about it because we need global change.

Ed may have today confused with a time in the past where the left actually had a part in shaping politics. The Democratic Party has ran from the label "Liberal" and have consistently moved to the right over time. Granted, much of that move has been due to the absolute insanity of the right, but moving to the center to pick up sane moderate voters is still a political decision that has caused many on the left to feel abandoned.

The Right controls the media yet still trots out the "Liberal Media" hoax. And it isn't just Faux news. Remember who gave Glenn Beck his first national TV gig? Hint: It wasn't Fox. What about MSNBC? Surely they are the liberal voice? Ahem. I would love to be convinced. I think Rachael Maddow is the most progressive voice on a major network right now and a vital part of the left. But when I think of MSNBC, I can't help but also think of Michael Savage(No link. I refuse.), Don Imus(of Nappy headed ho's infamy), and Joe Scarborough. I have a feeling that the only reason MSNBC is left-leaning is it makes sense going up against Fox from a ratings perspective. Hell, even when MSNBC trots out the "liberals" sometimes you have to shake your head. From the magic wikipedia on Chris Matthews.

Liberal blogger Glenn Greenwald has called Matthews "the most vivid example of all that is wrong with political coverage," saying "[h]e’s endlessly obsessed with personality-based politics and likes to promote the strong, masculine tough guy who you can have a beer with, versus the nerdy loser. And he has a cast of characters who go on his show, like Newsweek’s Howard Fineman, who gush over the maleness of the Republican candidates and warn Democrats about how that has real appeal to American voters. Most political reporters judge candidates on the basis of the likeability factor–Matthews is just more explicit about it."[20]

The progressive media watchdog group Media Matters for America named Matthews its 2005 Misinformer of the Year, in part for statements he made in support of President George W. Bush.[21]

On January 9, 2008, the morning after Hillary Clinton's surprise victory in the New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary, Matthews appeared on MSNBC's Morning Joe program and said of Clinton,
“ I'll be brutal, the reason she's a U.S. senator, the reason she's a candidate for president, the reason she may be a front-runner is her husband messed around. That's how she got to be senator from New York. We keep forgetting it. She didn't win there on her merit.

[22][23]
”

The comments were criticized by such media figures as Bill O'Reilly, Joy Behar and Gloria Steinem.

When Bill O'fuckingReilly has the moral high ground, you are obviously fucked.

The point is that I don't trust anyone in the media to cover this without an eye towards promoting their own agenda. When Shultz claims the protestors as "democrats" or "Obama supporters" he is ignoring the fact that the Democratic Party abandoned these people in their rush to the center and now are stuck trying to court people who just do not trust them. How many times does the Democratic Party get to lie to us? How many times are we going to let them do it? Do not get me wrong here. I know the conservative right has gone off the deep end. I know rational Conservatives who are disgusted at the culture of Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity, Geller, and the Palin/Bachmann/O'Donnell Overdrive. The Republicans have lost control of their own party, while ours abandons its own platform to get elected.

Let's just look at Obama. I make no excuses for the fact that, barring a revolution, I will be working on his campaign in 2012 and holding my nose while voting for him. Why? Because the fear of what the Republicans/Tea Party could do if in power scares the living shit out of me. If that makes me an "Obama Supporter" then I guess I am guilty. Guilty, but not blind.

Obama Campaign Promise: Develop an alternative to President Bush's Military Commissions Act on handling detainees. Result?BROKEN

Obama Campaign Promise: Reform the Patriot Act. Result? Obama seeks longer PATRIOT Act extension than Republicans Er..BROKEN

Obama Campaign Promise: Urge states to treat same-sex couples with full equality in their family and adoption laws. Result? BROKEN

Obama Campaign Promise: Tougher rules against revolving door for lobbyists and former officials. Result? BROKEN

Obama Campaign Promise: To respect State's Medical Marijuana Laws, and bring sanity to the nations drug policy. Result? Liar, Liar, LIAR! 3 Liars = BROKEN

I know, I know. Obama is dealing with one of the most obstructionist Congresses since Civil War days. How can he get anything passed if Congress says "NO!" to every idea he has? Note, please; that is why I picked examples that have nothing to do with Congress.

And don't get me started on AL-Awlaki.

So now we have a political party reaping everything they have sown. I must admit, watching the Democrats try to figure out what to do with this movement of the left amuses me to no end.

But I don't need multiple personality disorder to also be saddened.

Back to Kevin Gosztola of The Dissenter (Ok, it was more than a second but I told you I'd come back to him.)

What should the Occupy Wall Street organizers do? They should continue on the path they were on prior to all the labor and Democratic Party support. They should put the movement first and not bow to any Democratic Party or liberal organization operatives who seek to channel the movement into electoral politics or compel the movement to lower its sights.

To borrow a Streetlight Manifesto lyric, "I'm not going to play if there ain't no way I'll win!" An end to electoral politics would require what exactly? The overthrow of the United States Federal Government? Constitutional Amendment? Good luck with that.

Look, I'm right there with you. The system NEEDS to change. If not broken, the two party system is definitely damaged. But part of this is our fault. Where were we as the word "Liberal" was demonized by the media and abandoned by the Democrats? As the mainstream media slandered the left as weak on terror, as taxandspenders, as anti-military, as anti-family, as anti-christian, as anti-white? Where was I? Fair question. I was shooting fucking heroin. I claim no innocence here. But even shooting dope, I kept informed, I read books, papers, journals, blogs and the like from all political persuasions. Apologies for quoting Streetlight again, but...

And I won't claim to believe the things I read
Black books or agenda magazine
I'd rather see in shades of gray

We, the people of the left, the people of the Occupy Whatever movement, we are NOT the 99%. We are not the 98%. We may feel that we represent the 99% or 98%, but a good portion of that 99% thinks we are dirty lazy hippies who need to go home, take a shower, and quit blocking the road. If you believe that we could ever actually BE the 99%, you are living in a dreamworld that I would really like to visit. Look. I would love to, in the words of The Broadways, "build a world where smiles and love are worth more than money," but reality check time. We live in a nation where millions of people vote against their own economic interests to save a fetus. Where ignorance is considered a positive by a large portion of the electorate. Where fucking Dominionism is invading the mainstream. Where a fraudulent study and Jenny McCarthy's mommy instincts can cause a fucking measles outbreak and KILL children.

Even if all of our desires are in the best interest of the 99%, a large portion of that will never identify with us. Are you willing to tell that feminist marching beside you to shelve reproductive choice as an issue for the "greater good." Are you going to tell the GLBT protesters to hold back on equal marriage rights until after the revolution? To tell the atheists to just shut up so we can get more Christian support? To tell Muslim friends that they should go away, because they scare too many middle americans? I'm not.

How is Fox covering this anyway? Remember, they are the most trusted name in news.

From Fox, who doesn't even believe their own tagline, comes the following:

The protest began with no stated goals, no public spokespeople and many of the most ridiculous attendees you could imagine – socialists, Code Pinkers, anarchists and more. (Anarchists are notoriously poor organizers.) Their slogans (they have many) include: “We are the 99 percent” and “This is what democracy looks like.”

First off, no they are not the 99 percent. They are a very tiny piece of it, many of whom hate capitalism and want to see it overturned. You know, that system that helped make this country great and provided the wealth they now loathe. That’s why a bunch of the protesters repeatedly interrupted an art auction at Sotheby’s. It’s even easier to mock the other slogan as “This is what democracy smells like,” or as one person on Twitter said, “This is what hypocrisy looks like.”

That’s the kind of criticism they bring on themselves. The group’s live video feed, which is often not live, is headlined “Global Revolution.” They can’t use megaphones (illegal), so they embrace “the people’s microphone” where the crowd repeats each line a speaker says. It brings to mind laughable socialism such as actor John Candy in “Volunteers” discussing “the people’s truck” filled with “the people’s gas.” Annie Day, one of the arrested protesters, told The New York Times her profession: “I’m a revolutionary.” The headline of their protest paper, The Occupied Wall Street Journal, is “THE REVOLUTION BEGINS AT HOME.”

Not exactly how to sell a movement to ordinary, taxpaying Americans, but demonstrators don’t really care. Remember, this is a global effort. Many protesters aren’t even American or despise American exceptionalism. But they have the force of propaganda on their side to push a typical liberal agenda and the media are throwing support behind them as well.

“A freelance reporter for The New York Times, Natasha Lennard, was among those arrested,” wrote the Times. Unsurprisingly, the police can’t tell Times reporters apart from radical leftists, a problem Americans have been grappling with for years.

Bolds are mine. FD

Excuse me as I go vomit while realizing how large a percentage of this Nation is getting their news from this propaganda machine.

Back to Kevin Gosztola once again. Just as an aside, the only reason I'm picking on Kevin here is because I agree with a lot of what he says. You don't have to be enemies to disagree on issues.

It should work to maintain a level of discipline and make sure it establishes what it is not. It should continue to aim for the impossible and remember that they have earned their power because they have occupied the park and stood their ground in the face of a media blackout, police brutality and contemptuous criticisms.

Establish what it is not? How about establishing what it is? Every single sign that mentions the Socialist Party, the Workers World Party, or some form of anti-Capitalism is a piece of propaganda for the other side. The word "Socialist" killed national healthcare, and now we think it can win the people to our causes? We have the nations attention. It's time for more concrete demands and less scaring the fuck out of middle America. Aiming for the impossible is fine, as long as you are willing to only hit the possible. Capitalism isn't going anywhere. Socialism is a dead issue in this Country at the moment. But we scare the fuck out of the Democratic Party, because they need our votes. This system of government has worked before, and it can work again. Yeah, it's broken, but are we going to chase ideologically pure pipe dreams or actually cause some change?

*Sigh* The truth? If this would have happened in 1995 or so I would have been there with a Circle A shirt waving around The Communist Manifesto. Of course, in 1995 I also believed in ghosts, psychics, fairies, witchcraft, Bigfoot, homeopathy, and shamanistic healing. Make of that what you will.

As for "remember that they have earned their power because they have occupied the park and stood their ground in the face of a media blackout, police brutality and contemptuous criticisms," I honestly can't help but laughing. Media Blackout? Perhaps at first. Now this is the story of the year. Police Brutality? No argument from me there, although if you think that was brutal, wait. Contemptuous Criticisms? You haven't even warmed up the republican noise machine yet.

If the stand you want to make is truly to tear the system down, I wish you the best. My heart goes with you, and I will shed tears when the ones with the guns, the prisons and the money either kill you, jail you, or send you home with a note to stay the fuck away. The revolution will be televised; on their terms. The most radical amongst us will be trotted out to show the public how lucky they are that the government cracked down, and the common man will be disappeared from the screen.

Last bit from Kevin Gosztola:

they need to make clear this is not about building a better Democratic Party. This is about the war on poor, working class and middle class Americans, the constant attacks on unions and how Americans are begin to have influence over their government so the assaults on poor and working Americans come to an end.

I've been wrong before, I was a junkie for the love of FSM, and as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow (or more accurately, as sure as the earth will rotate us back into sunlight), I will be wrong again. I see great things in this movement, I believe it is the most important story going on today, and I feel that it can cause great change. I also think it could just as likely overstep the possible and crash like Prometheus. Yes, this is about the war on the underclasses. Yes, it is about ending the war against working Americans. Once we have public opinion on our side, we will be unstoppable!

Call me when the Tea Party calls to sit down, break bread, and rationally discuss the issues. Or just email me. It will take a few for me to get back to you, because I will be in church since 2 plus 2 now equals 5 and I have a lot of explaining to do.

I want change. Not Barack Obama "Change!", but real change. This Nation was founded out of the Enlightenment by imperfect men who through the Constitution and the Bill of Rights sought to limit the effect of their imperfection on the people and the Nation. Yes, they made mistakes but that doesn't change how remarkable our founding documents were then and still are today. We the People have given the government too much power over us, or sat back while the power was taken. We let the monied interests takeover politics as we watched blue-filtered light from our window to the outside. How many of us gave a fucking damn when we were employed? Where were we when Florida was stolen? When Clinton fucked us with NAFTA? Were we all playing video games as the Republicans made intelligence, caring, rationality and knowledge handicaps in politics? Perhaps we weren't even born when the Right started playing us against each other, through racism, sexism, homophobia, religious bigotry and fear, but we were alive while they continued doing it, and we let it happen. You show up now, after 40 years of the country being dragged to the right, and think the system is going to crumble because you finally woke up?

Do not get me wrong. Do not misinterpret what I am saying here. I am glad you are now awake. Fuck, I'm ecstatic! Welcome back to the discussion. We NEED you! Solidarity! Where the fuck have you been since the last G-8 or WTO summit? But this is a long term fight we have picked. To win, we need the hearts and the minds of a majority of Americans. That is not going to happen over night, and it is not going to happen just from protests. The system exists. No, it isn't fair. But the system does give us one advantage; the power to swing elections and the power to hold those we elect accountable for their actions once in office. We've been ignored for far too long by the Democratic Party. It is time to pull the party back to the left, and to pull the whole political debate back towards the center. We need to reach out and educate those who we know, because the media's propaganda isn't going away, and our beliefs will be slandered to no end. Yes, I know. This path will not get us everything that we want. No one gets everything that they want. But harnessing our power towards causing constant change with an eye toward the future just seems a better choice than wasting it on a pipe dream.

We can reform the system. It will take years, dedication, compromise, and hard work. When the economy improves, it will take effort to stop people from fading back asleep. Nothing will come easy. Nothing good ever does.

I will end with the words of Naomi Klein

We all know, or at least sense, that the world is upside down: we act as if there is no end to what is actually finite—fossil fuels and the atmospheric space to absorb their emissions. And we act as if there are strict and immovable limits to what is actually bountiful—the financial resources to build the kind of society we need.

The task of our time is to turn this around: to challenge this false scarcity. To insist that we can afford to build a decent, inclusive society—while at the same time, respect the real limits to what the earth can take.

What climate change means is that we have to do this on a deadline. This time our movement cannot get distracted, divided, burned out or swept away by events. This time we have to succeed. And I’m not talking about regulating the banks and increasing taxes on the rich, though that’s important.

I am talking about changing the underlying values that govern our society. That is hard to fit into a single media-friendly demand, and it’s also hard to figure out how to do it. But it is no less urgent for being difficult.

That is what I see happening in this square. In the way you are feeding each other, keeping each other warm, sharing information freely and proving health care, meditation classes and empowerment training. My favorite sign here says, “I care about you.” In a culture that trains people to avoid each other’s gaze, to say, “Let them die,” that is a deeply radical statement.

If we waste this chance, how long til the next? And will it already be too late?

Flame away.

Women’s Rights Activists Win Nobel Peace Prize

2011-10-07T15:48:00.000-07:00

Much thanks to Skepchick's Rebecca Watson for this one.

Although the committee has made some strange decisions in the past, (such as Obama's prize. Still not sure what the hell he did to deserve one, but anyway...) this one is, to borrow a cliched sports metaphor, a slam dunk.

The plight of women in Africa and the Middle East is one that we can never forget. All the freedoms I enjoy mean jack and squat until freedom is enjoyed by all.

Here's to Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Leymah Gbowee, and Tawakul Karman.

Here's to Heroes!

TV News? What the...... Oh, There is a Point to It....

2011-10-07T14:08:00.000-07:00

The first casualty of the fall TV season is NBC's Playboy Club. As an anti-sexist with feminist theories swimming in my mind, I'm immediately tempted to cheer.

But of course, nothing is that simple.

From the Advocate...

The number of LGBT characters in primetime on broadcast channels is decreasing in the next season, according to a count by the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation.

And of course, one of the shows that featured LGBT characters was, you guessed it, Playboy Club. And not as the stereotype you may expect. At least, according to Out Magazine.

Judging by the pilot, one of Playboy's focal points is the proliferating gay rights movement, told through the story of lesbian bunny Alice (Leah Renee) and her gay husband, Sean (Firefly's Sean Maher). The two have a marriage of convenience and host secret meetings of the Mattachine Society, one of the first real-life gay rights organizations, in their apartment. As domestic and political co-conspirators, Alice and Sean put a new spin on the stock gay TV character, often depicted in this era as tragic and isolated.

The atheist movement has found many parallels with the GLBT movement. Unlike racism and sexism, both atheists and GLBT people can chose to hide their true selves in an attempt to avoid persecution. GLBT's came out of that closet en masse and forced society to admit that they not only existed, but that they were their friends, family, co-workers, and teachers; that they were their peers and that they were not going anywhere, so people may as well get used to it.

And it worked. All statistics and graphs from P.a.p.-Blog/Human Rights

Is there still work to be done? Of course. I would never claim that LGBT's are now free of discrimination. Homophobia still runs rampant, and the conservative christian movement is not helping. But when you look at that graph, one point stands out. It's the "By Age Group" portion. 62% acceptance by those in the 18 to 29 category. This is a war that we are winning. The bigots can only win if we stop fighting, if we stop forcing people to admit that they know LGBT people, and that these people are not monsters.

And that is why, despite my immediate feminist preconceptions towards Playboy Club, I am saddened that it was cancelled. More exposure leads to more acceptance. More GLBT characters in prime time equals more exposure.

Here's hoping Bravo gives the show a new home.

Speaking of exposure, how many characters on TV are atheists? Quick, name three other than House.

Having problems?

The GLBT movement has given us a blueprint that works. They still face discrimination, but attitudes are shifting, and the youth has been won. I will continue to back them, to take homophobes to task, and strive to be as gay-positive as a straight man can be.

But this graph scares me.

53% would not vote for an atheist, in a nation with no religious test for office. Disgusting bigotry.

We aren't going away. The "New Atheist" bestsellers were a great start. The Out Campaign is a strong step in the right direction. But for every step forward made, we fragment over how to deal with the religious, over how outspoken to be, over the inherent problems of sexism in a movement that for far too long has been patriocentric, just to name a few stumbling blocks.

None of that matters if the simple fact of our atheism causes our opinions to be disregarded. We can fight each other until the theocracy, or we can come together and force society to acknowledge our existence. There are real world battles outside the movement that we must fight. Yes, we have serious inner issues as well. We need more women, and we need more men who don't treat the women as "geek whores." We need to decide how diplomatic to be to the religious when there is a common goal. We need to understand that atheists do not hold one political philosophy. I don't want all atheists to be liberals. I want a sane opposition party.

Believe me, I am not innocent here. It took until yesterday for me to come out as an Atheist under my real name, to my real friends and family. I've flamed Chris Mooney so many times I've lost count. I've refused to compromise when compromise was needed. Ideological purity is not a possibility. Would I love a world of rationality and logic, where people make decisions based on evidence, and no one follows outdated bronze age concepts of morality? You betcha. But I also live in reality.

Any change we can cause is limited as long as we are the hated "other."

I am an atheist. It is not because I am "mad at God," or any other rationalization you can come up with. It is because I followed the evidence.

I am not alone.

Totalitarian Turkey: Revenge for Thanksgi....Oh, Sorry. Wrong Turkey

2011-10-06T10:33:00.000-07:00

Missed this the other day. Hat tip to Butterflies and Wheels.

From The Hurriyet Daily News,

The Istanbul chief public prosecutor's office charged cartoonist Bahadır Baruter with "insulting the religious values adopted by a part of the population" and requested his imprisonment for up to one year.

Shit? A year in jail for insulting religion? What the hell did he do, draw Allah?

Baruter's caricature depicted an imam and believers praying in a mosque. One of the characters is talking to God on his cellphone and asking to be pardoned from the last part of the prayer because he has errands to run.

Sounds like rather decent commentary so far, trying to make the point of how in a connected civilization, sometimes we should slow down, break the connection, and...

Wait? He what?!

Within the wall decorations of the mosque, Baruter hid the words, "There is no Allah, religion is a lie." The cartoon was published in the weekly "Penguen" humor magazine.

Damn sneaky cartoonists. Next you'll be telling me Peanuts was Christian propaganda.

Here's the cartoon if you want to see it for yourselves. The red circled part is the hidden message.

This cartoonist is facing a year in jail for that little hidden message. For words.

As much as I complain about the United States, sometimes I forget actually how good I have it. I'm free sit here at a desk and yell/type "There is no Allah! Religion is a lie!" without fear of the police showing up to drag me away.

Dr. Rachie, Myth Buster

2011-10-04T13:02:00.000-07:00

Tip of the hat to Richard Saunders.

From MamaMia.com comes Dr. Rachael Dunlop (Dr. Rachie to those in the know) to restore my faith in humanity. Just as a recently released study in Pediatrics breaks the bad news that 1 in 10 children are being put at risk by their parents, (see my previous post...) Dr. Rachie shines the light of science on the very myths that cause parents to make this horrible decision.

I am sure that those in the anti-vax community are already preparing their misinformation filled response. I'll personally be disappointed if they don't offer up at least 9 logical fallacies to promote the 9 myths Dr. Rachie has so effectively busted. My money is on at least two fallacies being of the ad hominem variety.

If you haven't heard, the anti-vaxxers can be just a tad nasty to those who disagree.

How Nasty?

This nasty.

I Should Have Stayed Asleep....

2011-10-04T11:43:00.000-07:00

From the The News Herald amongst others.

1 in 10 children put at risk of life threatening diseases by their well-meaning but misinformed parents.

Kandace O’Neill is a Lakeville, Minn., mom whose views are shared by many parents who don’t follow federal vaccine advice. Her 5-year-old son has had no vaccinations since he turned 1, and her 7-month-old daughter has received none of the recommended shots.

“I have to make sure that my child is healthy, and I do not want to put medications in my child that I think are going to harm them,” said O’Neill, who was not involved in the survey appearing in Pediatrics.

O’Neill said she’s not an extreme anti-vaccine zealot. She just thinks that parents — not doctors or schools — should make medical decisions for their children.

The classic anti-vax slogan, "we're not anti-vaccine, we're pro-safe vaccines." The addition of the appeal to American ideals of freedom of choice is typical as well. I hope with all my heart that Kandace's decision never hurts her children or any other child. She seems like she not only cares deeply, but also honestly believes that her decision is correct.

She is wrong.

And she is dangerous.

Excuse me as I offend some "liberal sensibilities" here. Yes, everyone has the right to their opinion, just as everyone has the right to be an idiot. Opinions unsupported by evidence and facts are worthless, possibly harmful, and deserve to be ridiculed at every opportunity. All manners of insane beliefs manage to find people to champion them. The anti-vaccination crusade is just one of many, yet there is a extreme difference between this belief and so many others.

This belief kills children.

Want to practice a little google-fu? Let's start with the basic search, "measles outbreaks in the united states." Hmmm. Measles cases at 15 year high. I know, I hear you. "But it's just the measles! Who cares?" Well, I said to question everything I said.

Here. From the WHO

Key facts

Measles is one of the leading causes of death among young children even though a safe and cost-effective vaccine is available.

In 2008, there were 164 000 measles deaths globally – nearly 450 deaths every day or 18 deaths every hour.

More than 95% of measles deaths occur in low-income countries with weak health infrastructures.

Measles vaccination resulted in a 78% drop in measles deaths between 2000 and 2008 worldwide.

In 2008, about 83% of the world's children received one dose of measles vaccine by their first birthday through routine health services – up from 72% in 2000.

Yep, it's only measles. What's the harm?

738 vaccine preventable deaths in the US since June 3, 2007. Stat from Jenny McCarthy Body Count An important site, I highly recommend it.

It is not just measles. It's not about any particular disease. It is about the health of our children, the importance of protecting herd immunity, and the propaganda war being waged by the anti-vaccine sycophants. They claim they want safe vaccines, yet study after study after study not only shows no correlation between the MMR vaccine and Autism, but also shows the overall safety of vaccines.

Look. I understand the pain parents with autistic children must feel. I also understand this.

I lost a patient this season, an infant, to pertussis. After falling ill he lived for nearly a month in the intensive care unit on a ventilator, three weeks of which was spent on a heart/lung bypass machine (ECMO) due to the extent of the damage to his lungs, but all our efforts were in vain. The most aggressive and advanced care medicine has to offer couldn’t save his life; the only thing that could have saved him would have been to prevent him from contracting pertussis in the first place.

He was unvaccinated, but that was because of his age. He was part of the population that is fully dependent on herd immunity for protection, and that is exquisitely prone to a life-threatening course once infected. This is a topic we’ve covered ad nauseum, and I’m not inclined to go into greater depth in this post. Suffice it to say his death is a failure at every level; we, both as medical professionals and as a society at large need to do a better job of protecting our children from preventable diseases.

~Joseph Albietz

From Science Based Medicine.

I get it. I do. You want someone to blame, and the government and "big pharma" are all too easy of targets. But you are being played. The study that started this all, Andrew Wakefield's fraudulant study that ended his medical career in the UK, was a undisclosed-conflict-of-interest filled attempt at winning lawsuits that included all of 12 children. And yet Wakefield is still a hero to the anti-vaccine advocates, because reality is not the world they inhabit.

For the anti-vaxxers, this is a crusade where evidence does not matter. It's just that in this crusade, the only causalities are children.

More information on the anti-vax "evidence" here, here, here, and here.

Insert Rambling Manifesto Here!

2011-10-03T23:39:00.000-07:00

I get into arguments frequently with others who either once were "punk" or who still claim the label. The arguments that don't involve me laughing hysterically at "anarchism" or "communism" as valid options general boil down to one issue. They say the system is broken and needs to be brought down. I say the system isn't going anywhere, and as dysfunctional as it may be, change can happen if the effort is made. There are times that I wonder if I am right, but the alternative is unthinkable to me. There is not going to be a workers revolution. Violent revolt is a one way ticket to the ever growing corrections industry. Rioting may be a way to a free TV, but it is not a legitimate road to political change. I wore the Circle A in my youth. I've read the Communist Manifesto and marveled at Marx's words. I've had my fantasies of a non-violent revolution making this a country for the common man.

And then I both woke and grew the fuck up.

Any change must come from within the system and it won't be over night. As much as I admire many of the protesters camping out in NYC, Wall Street isn't going to decide "Hey, these kids are serious, let's put liberals in power!" What those protesters are doing is important, but change is going to have to come over years if not decades.

We have the opinion of the public on our side. The right has the media, the money, and the sound bytes. Our views take thought. They do not fit in a short attention span society that feeds on TV news. It's easy to say somebody hates God, or is un-American, or blames America, or is a socialist. It is hard to explain the other side, it takes time, the views are more nuanced. Education and information are both vital in our fight, yet so many I know who once cared live for nothing but day to day comfort and entertainment. And how can I blame them? While the wheels of power turn, the under class struggles to eat. The very people who should care the most have more important things to worry about; their survival.

*sigh*

Yeah, I'm ranting. But it's stopping my legs from crawling, so oh well. I make no claims to be anything more than I am. A 36 year old citizen of the United States who has nightmares of what change I could have caused, if I wouldn't have chosen the needle instead.

When I read the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, other than not seeing all the references to God conservatives claim are there, what I see is a document that makes me proud of where I live. I see a result of the Enlightenment, written by imperfect men with the idea of a secular society where every citizen is not equal, yet has equal opportunity. Yes, there is racism and sexism as well, but it is a document from the 18th century and yet it holds up remarkably well today. Yet when I look at the current state of the United States, well, that is when I start researching other countries immigration requirements. I see a nation that is unequaled in the west in the separation between the haves and the have-nots. I see a nation that sends the youth of the middle and under classes off to die without any sacrifice asked from those with money and power. I see a nation that cuts services to the poorest while cutting taxes on the richest. And I see a nation of middle and under class citizens who have been duped by the rich. The term liberal, although almost every liberal political goal enjoys majority support, is a one way ticket out of the national conversation. One party, using tactics of division, breaks those with common economic interests apart with religion, with race, with sex, with homophobia, with fear. The other party is center right. Probably pretty close to where Republicans would be if opinions were based on nothing but issues that matter. There is no credible voice of the left in American politics. Liberals themselves fear the label. And although barriers of race, sex and sexuality will fall with time, no matter how hard people fight against it, progress will not solve all our problems.

The time to take action was years ago. I am late. So are many others. What can we do now?

To be honest, I do not know. I have ideas, and I am willing to work, but I do not know if it is too late already. But I will never give up.

Random Ideas:

1. The left must either reclaim the word "liberal," or just toss the damn thing away. The conservative controlled media has demonized the word. Watch as Democrats cower from the label. I love the label, as I love the Enlightenment that created it, but the word may have been lost. Reclaiming it will be difficult, and I am not sure if it is worth it.

2. No matter what your political beliefs, we must all tell our elected officials of either party, to put an end to the political gerrymandering of congressional districts. It is not right when the left does it, it is not right when the right does it. Changing district boundaries for political gain should be criminal.

3. We must stop allowing our government to disenfranchise citizens of their right to vote. From *sigh* Wikipedia....

the Voting Rights Act and three constitutional amendments that prevent discrimination in granting the franchise have established in United States Supreme Court jurisprudence that there is a "fundamental right" in the franchise, even though voting remains a state-granted privilege. However, states are given considerable leeway when it comes to this "fundamental right".

What is the considerable leeway given? Disenfranchising ex-felons who have paid their debt to society? Yep. Requiring a government issued photo ID card? Even though large numbers of citizens in some states do not have them, yep, perfectly legal. The leeway also includes restrictions on election day Voter Registration, as well as limited early voting periods, amongst other strategies.

Want to know a secret? There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. Yet that is what the (normally) republican controlled state governments use as an excuse to limit registration, require id cards, and cut down on early voting. (In case you were wondering, yes, those who do not have id cards primarily vote democrat. Same with early voters, ex-felons, and those who register on election day. What a coincidence!)

LAW.com

ACLU Petition

4. End the failed War on American Citizens. Prohibition did not work in the 20's, why would anyone think it would work now? How many lives are we going to ruin? How much money are we going to lose to the cartels? How much are we going to spend on law enforcement that does nothing to slow the abuse? Could it be it is time for an education and treatment based approach, while taxing the proceeds of the sale of something the consumers want.

I have read articles by those who favor marijuana legalization that are as coocoo-for-cocao-puffs as anything Sarah Palin could come up with. No, it is not going to solve all of our economic problems. It won't erase the deficit. And I will scream the next time I hear a stoner claim he wants it legalized "for the people that need it as medicine, man."

But the war on drugs is an endless money pit. And yet, no matter how much money we throw down that hole, drug gang related violence increases, corruption runs rampant(forfeiture laws, anyone?), an entire generation of African American men rot in jail in spite of less involvement in drugs than whites, crimes related to drugs soar, and the numbers of users stays just about the same over time.

Yeah, I know. Just what you'd expect an ex-junkie to say, right? Then get it from Law Enforcement. Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

We believe that drug prohibition is the true cause of much of the social and personal damage that has historically been attributed to drug use. It is prohibition that makes marijuana worth more than gold, and heroin worth more than uranium – while giving criminals a monopoly over their supply. Driven by the huge profits from this monopoly, criminal gangs bribe and kill each other, law enforcers, and children. Their trade is unregulated and they are, therefore, beyond our control.

History has shown that drug prohibition reduces neither use nor abuse. After a rapist is arrested, there are fewer rapes. After a drug dealer is arrested, however, neither the supply nor the demand for drugs is seriously changed. The arrest merely creates a job opening for an endless stream of drug entrepreneurs who will take huge risks for the sake of the enormous profits created by prohibition. Prohibition costs taxpayers tens of billions of dollars every year, yet 40 years and some 40 million arrests later, drugs are cheaper, more potent and far more widely used than at the beginning of this futile crusade.

We believe that by eliminating prohibition of all drugs for adults and establishing appropriate regulation and standards for distribution and use, law enforcement could focus more on crimes of violence, such as rape, aggravated assault, child abuse and murder, making our communities much safer. We believe that sending parents to prison for non-violent personal drug use destroys families. We believe that in a regulated and controlled environment, drugs will be safer for adult use and less accessible to our children. And we believe that by placing drug abuse in the hands of medical professionals instead of the criminal justice system, we will reduce rates of addiction and overdose deaths.

There. Happy now? That is from a cop, not an ex-junkie.

5. We must understand that some compromises must be made. There is a lesson to be learned from the crawling, blind outer god the Republicans have conjured and named the Tea Party. As the Republicans move farther to the right and commit to the Tea Party's insanity driven politics, they move farther away from electability. The average American, no matter what they want you to believe, agrees with us in a large part. Look at the polling data if you don't believe me. If you are feeling lazy, ask and I'll dig it up. That being said, they don't agree with us on everything. We must be prepared to not win every battle. As surprising as this may sound, with the media filled with the likes of Bill O'Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity, there are conservatives with well reasoned, rational, logic based stances on the issues. I'm not looking for a leftist utopia. Hell, to start, I'd be happy with the return of the two party democracy. Neither side is going to win the hearts and votes of everyone. I am not suggesting that we sell out our principles, only that we accept reality. That leftist utopia in your dreams is not a possibility in the United States. That leftist utopia probably isn't a possibility anywhere but fantasyland. But equal rights, health care, more equal opportunity for all, and less economic stratification are all possible.

6. We must stop destroying ourselves. I am the last person who has any right to tell someone not to use drugs, but believe me. Be smart. Get educated. In school, they lied to me about the dangers of every single drug until they got to heroin, and then they decided to mix in some truth. I know the allure of the needle, of the escape, of the rush that takes all of your problems away until the demon needs the next fix. I have also watched too many great minds waste away, strung out, and too many kindred souls turn blue and stop breathing. I've seen myself turn a career and a 3.9gpa into 14 wasted years and the mess I now call my life. I know what that felony means on your record, and I've seen hundreds of peers saddled with one just in my small city. I'm not going to tell anyone to draw an "x" on their hand. I have no right. But educate yourself. Know what you are putting in your body, and for fucks sakes, do not let the system have you.

Point six is more than just drugs. Our society makes it too easy to turn on and drop out without intoxicants. Television, pop music, movies, video games, the internet; each can be a force for good, and each can also be an opiate of the masses. We must stay involved and we must stay educated. We must not let race, sex, creed, or sexuality fragment us. We must forget whatever naive ideas look good on a t-shirt, and embrace rationality.

7. Perhaps the most important point in this rambling 7 point list. We must get involved, and we must educate our peers. The Right has money, desire, belief, and simple talking points that can fit on a bumper sticker. We have a discouraged base, a lack of funds, politicians that run to the right away from our beliefs, and intelligent, rational stands on the issues that do not fit into the sound byte culture of modern media. Insert your favorite overwhelming underdog sports analogy here. We have at least two things on our side. We are right, and the majority of the nation, once the issues are removed from the sound byte culture, agree with us. We will never get a fair hearing in the major media until we start changing things. But we have blogs, we have facebook, we have youtube, we have the letters to the editor, and we have brilliant minds who need to get involved. When confronted with the negative stereotypes forced on us, we need to speak up, we need to educate. We're soft on terror? 90% of liberals supported military action against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. We're not soft on terror, we just don't agree with war under false pretenses, and we're not too fond of torture. We hate God? No, we believe in the Wall of Separation as Jefferson and Madison intended. The majority of our citizens may be some denomination of Christian, but we are specifically not a Christian Nation. The Constitution and Bill of Rights protects the minority from oppression by the majority. We blame America? No, we understand that our foreign policy has consequences, and jingoistic belief that whatever we do is right is counterproductive to relations with other nations. When we torture enemy combatants, that gives other nations implicit consent to torture our soldiers. When we engage in Realpolitik overthrows of other nations governments, it does not endear us to that nations citizens. When we start wars under false pretenses, that leads to increased threats to our national security, and increased recruitment of terrorists. There is no longer a Cold War. The threat facing the west is no longer Mutually Assured Destruction with the USSR. We must understand the threats of today, join with our allies to face them, and stop thinking that whatever choice our leaders make is right just because we are the USA.

We can not get away with just shouting out a slogan. We must know the issues, and be prepared to defend and explain our stances at the grass roots level. Those of us who can must vote, not just in presidential years, but every year. Those of us who can must run for local office. Conservatives have taken over school board after school board, we must be represented also. The mainstream media has little use for liberal views. We must get our voices heard. Write letters, call your congressperson, work on a campaign, volunteer, drag the "moderate" position back to the center, as the conservatives have pushed it to the right in the last 30 years.

Education means more than just learning the political issues. We must also learn to confront pseudoscience, conspiracy thinking, dogmatic superstition and the like no matter which side of the political spectrum it comes from. It pains me as much to see those on the left embrace the anti-vaccination movement as it does when the right embraces creationism. 9/11 was not an inside job, the Illuminati is not controlling all governments, the Bilderbergers do not control the world economy, vaccines do not cause autism, and the world is not six thousand fucking years old. We live in the 21st century, with laptop computers, smart phones that keep us constantly connected, and easy travel to any spot on the planet. No matter your views on religion or spirituality, we live in a world best explained through the lens of material naturalism. Science works. It doesn't matter if you like it or not, this magic box I am currently typing this on says it does, as does the MRI machine at the local hospital, the eradication of small pox and almost of polio from the Earth, the Apollo Program, your cell phone and countless other examples. (Yes, the Apollo Program. Don't be the creepy moon landing denier guy. Seriously. Don't be that guy.) If a method comes along that explains the evidence better in the future, then we can talk again on the issue. Until then, get a grip. Base your opinions on evidence, and not evidence from only biased sources. Just because the HuffPo or Faux News says something is true does not make it so. Remember the old line: Keep an open mind, but not so open that it falls out. Question everything I say. Follow the evidence yourself.

And with that last bit, gentle reader, I have hit 70 hours with no sleep. My bed, and hopefully the dreaming are calling. If you have made it to the end, then you get a gold star and my gratitude. This manifesto has no bombs attached. It is a program of education and action, change from with in the system that exists with our consent. Violence and hate are not the tools we choose. Unity, knowledge, evidence, desire and love are much stronger.

Will anything change? Is it already too late? There is no such thing as psychics, so I am sorry, but I do not know. What I do know is that I am no longer willing to do nothing.

Change requires action. Never forget that.

And never forget these words. "We the People...."

Note: My desire for this blog is not to have any more rambling manifestos. Posts like this one will not be common here, although the ideas represented within will be. I have seen too many self-destruct, fall victim to conspiracy-driven or pseudo-scientific thinking, or just tune out and fade away. That is a vital part of why I am writing this blog, so much needed to be said. If you just care about the atheism and skepticism, you'll get your fix in the morning. Over the next week I will also delve deeper into the war on drugs, and its effect on both my life and the lives of others. The beginning stages of a blog, before an audience is secured, gives much room for exploration and experimentation. Methadone has slowed my mind for too long. As it drains, my mind sharpens. It has been years since I have felt the demon driving me to write. I almost forgot what it felt like to be honest. So far, I am happy with nothing I have posted here except for a line or two here and there, yet every word written is vital to my growth. I have no idea if blogging is the format for my message. I only know that I have wasted far too much of my life already to waste another day.

~Foster Disbelief

Apologies for Off Day; Have I Mentioned Withdrawal Sucks?

2011-10-03T18:14:00.000-07:00

Let us see. Two, carry the one, divide by the sum of the....

Yep, Just hit 67 hours without sleep.

Methadone maintenance has served me well. I would have much rather taken a longer taper instead of the 10 day "um, you lost medical assistance, sorry" taper program I received, but the time had come to toss the crutch away. It actually makes a decent point in the current debate over health care in the United States. As a single male with only "drug dependance" as a medical issue, I would lose my government cheese medical benefits on the day I became employed. If I could muster up a psych diagnoses, I would be eligible for subsidized health insurance under the Medical Assistance for Disabled Workers program in my state, but alas, I am not a welfare fraud and not about to lie to a doctor about how depressed I am.

Methadone treatment, while I was employed, cost me 500$ a month. Roughly half of my take home, depending on tips of course. That is a lot less than an opiate addiction costs, I know. Believe me, I know, but still. I was referred to the clinic by one Doctor, who was backed up by both my PCP and a third opinion I decided to get. The clinic itself called me "a classic case of exactly who methadone is for. You are the client type we want to have here." I have forms upon forms stating that methadone is a "Life and Health Sustaining Medication" for me, yet once the failing economy touched me and I became unemployed, I went from 80mg a day to 0 in ten days.

Yes, I know. There are ways I could have played the system, but the reason I finally went on methadone was to stop living that life. It did its job, and no matter the discomfort I feel now, I was ready to get off the drug.

I did learn one very important lesson however; Don't get sick. As a single male, I am a persona non grata to government assistance. No matter the income, as soon as I am employed I am ineligible for every program. Don't get me wrong, I have no desire to live on the dole. Government cheese doesn't fuel my appetite. But how are the poor, the underclass, hell, the middle class without health insurance supposed to better their lives, to be productive, when one sustained illness can force bankruptcy? If I want to get an annual physical, which I should start doing as I am not getting any younger, then that money has to come out of either my food budget or my college fund. At least that I can plan for, what happens if I need an antibiotic? There goes at least one month of saving. FSM forbid I have an accident, or a long term illness, or need surgery. I have struggled for years to work on the debt I have without declaring bankruptcy. I have made many mistakes in my life, but I have taken responsibility for them and am trying to turn things around. I will have chronic health problems for the rest of my life, and it scares me that no matter what choices I make from now on, it's up to the roll of the dice whether I succeed or end up on disability. Cancer, heart disease, COPD, diabetes, high blood pressure, and strokes all run in my family, and I haven't even mentioned any of the health problems I do have. What kind of a modern society makes health care a privilege, not a right?

For any one ready to pounce, ready to point out the obvious fact that I made my choices and now I am reaping what I have sown, fine. What about the countless uninsured children who are only guilty of being born poor? What of those struggling to escape poverty who are law abiding citizens? When I was 6 my appendix almost burst. If my parents wouldn't have had insurance, they could have been wiped out. When I was 23 I broke both of me feet in an accident. One of the benefits I had at the time was health insurance. I paid nothing for my treatment, and although I was only supposed to get 40 to 60% usage back, due to the quality of care I received I have over 95% of the usage I had before the accident. Although I have pain management issues, I can still go backpacking and hiking thanks to health insurance. Accidents happen to everyone, the drug addict and the teetotaler, the rich and the poor, the young and the old.

Health care is a right. It isn't socialism. You are being played by those who control the talking points.

Southern Baptists Consider Name Change; I Offer Suggestions

2011-10-01T20:40:00.000-07:00

Via no one. This is mine.

The Southern Baptists have established a task force to look at whether their 166-year-old convention should adopt a new name with no regional nature and no links to slavery

That is from Politic365.com although you can find the story many places.

Hmm. I have a few suggestions.

"Homophobic Baptists: We're the Ones that Still Hate the Gays"

"American Baptists: Because you don't have to live in the south to be a bigot!"

"Un-American Baptists: Yeah, We're the Ones that Boycotted Disney and Now Huckabee thinks We're Un-American"

"The Forged Pauline Epistles Baptists: Women Need to Keep Their Damn Mouth Shut Unless We're Trying To Stick Something In It

"The Fucking Dick Baptists: Yeah, We Like Rick Warren, Why?"

"American Baptists Who Acknowledge That Barack Obama Tried to Include Us, Yet We Still Hate Him. Because you Know....He's Black!"

"The Fuck Apologizing Baptists. Because even if the world thinks we're Bigots, We're still going to hate those gays!"

"The 166 Year Bigots: Hey, it's worked for 166 years, why change now?"

"The Hypocrite Baptists: Help, We're Being Oppressed!"

Somehow, I think the name they decide on will be less descriptive of their mission.

Huckabee Calls Supporters Un-American

2011-10-01T20:19:00.000-07:00

Via the New York Times although Ed Brayton beat me to it.

“This is economic terrorism,” said Mike Huckabee, the former pastor, governor and presidential contender, who is a paid CGBG consultant. “To try to destroy a business because you don’t like some of the customers is, to me, unbelievably un-American,” he said in an interview.

Ok. Is that really your position on this issue, Mr. Huckabee?

Do me a favor quick, will you? Google "Christian Boycotts". Ignore the first hit. What do you find?

Christian boycotts of Disney, Ford, Nickelodeon, The Da Vinci Code, and Action Comics. And that is ignoring the fact that the second hit is a site dedicated to Christian's boycotting those who hold opinions and beliefs that they disagree with.

Un-American, everyone. Don't look at me. I'm just following the lead of Mr. Huckabee.

Jay Sekulow brings the crazy

2011-10-01T09:43:00.000-07:00

Via Ed Brayton

Seriously?! Is it April 1st and I slept through the whole fucking winter? You have to be kidding me. Is there any end to the insanity coming from the religious right?

Do you know what it takes for the Constitution to be amended? 2/3rd super majority in both the House and the Senate, and then ratification by 3/4 of the States.

As Ed says at his blog, "Paris Hilton will win the Nobel Prize for Physics before that happens."

Muslims make up 1% of the United States. Only a small percentage of that 1% wants Sharia Law imposed in this country. Almost without exception, everyone else is opposed to the idea. It isn't even an option in my dystopian fever dreams of theocratic future American, let alone the current, modern US.

Sekulow,of the American Center for Law and Justice, is fear-mongering. He can not actually believe the words coming out of his mouth. If he does, he needs serious help. This is a calculated lie to scare the fuck out of Christians that he obviously feels are stupid. We do not live in a country where a significant percentage of the population wants Sharia law. It is a non-issue. It is a scare tactic that insults the intelligence of those it is aimed at. I can only hope that Christians realize this and stop letting people like Sekulow play them.

*sigh*

Paris Hilton winning a Noble Prize for Physics? Hell, it's more likely that Sarah Palin will be appointed Empress for life of the United Christian States of America tomorrow by Barack Obama.

Sharia is not taking over the United States. Get a fucking grip on reality.

United States Murders 2 Citizens Without Trial

2011-10-01T07:34:00.000-07:00

Via CBS news

Was al-Awlaki a danger to the United States? Probably.

Was he someone the United States needed to deal with? Probably.

Is execution without trial a dangerous precedent to set? Absolutely.

Realize, this was not Osama. This was an American Citizen. Executed with no due process. "Self-defense" seems to be the justification of this extreme act. I am tempted to agree with that. It sounds right, and will play to the masses, especially after the media spins it. We do need to be tough on terror, right? That is one of the main perceived weaknesses of Liberals, correct?

*sigh*

I understand that the slippery slope is a logical fallacy. But normally, that seems to be due to the slope being taken to the point of absurdity. You don't have to follow the path that far to realize why this is dangerous.

The President of the United States has now claimed the power to execute US citizens without trial, based on classified information, with no checks or balances on this power. The citizen does not need to be on a battlefield. He may be sleeping. He may be playing with his children, eating dinner, anything. This places Obama to the right of George W. Bush, to the right of Antonin Fucking Scalia!

Glenn Greenwald had this to say on April 7th, 2010:

No due process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family). None of that.

Instead, in Barack Obama’s America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens — and a death penalty imposed — is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone’s guilt as a Terrorist. He then dispatches his aides to run to America’s newspapers — cowardly hiding behind the shield of anonymity which they’re granted — to proclaim that the Guilty One shall be killed on sight because the Leader has decreed him to be a Terrorist. It is simply asserted that Awlaki has converted from a cleric who expresses anti-American views and advocates attacks on American military targets (advocacy which happens to be Constitutionally protected) to Actual Terrorist ”involved in plots.” These newspapers then print this Executive Verdict with no questioning, no opposition, no investigation, no refutation as to its truth. And the punishment is thus decreed: this American citizen will now be murdered by the CIA because Barack Obama has ordered that it be done. What kind of person could possibly justify this or think that this is a legitimate government power?

Full article is HERE

Honestly? This scares the living shit out of me. This is not a power I trust the Government to have. Innocent people are executed in this country with due process. I trust no one with the power to unilaterally decide who lives and who dies.

Can the media please stop claiming Obama is a liberal now? Seriously?

Nothing to see here......

2011-09-27T19:10:00.000-07:00

Restarting blog soon. New look, new purpose, new posts.

Be back in a day or two.

Dr. Frank is an asshole.

2008-08-22T04:05:00.000-07:00

Dr. Frank's Pet Pain Spray

Homeopathic pet pain relief. 5 sprays in your pets water bowl everytime you give it water. 20 bucks for a 200 spray bottle.

I have a blind dog. He had poor vision as a puppy when I adopted him from the humane society (who found him left along the side of the road. How can anyone leave a puppy on the side of the road to die? Anyway,....) and lost the rest of his vision before he was a year old. He gets around pretty well. He has a habit of picking up one of my sneakers and carrying it around the house. If I didn't know better, I'd swear he uses the sneaker like a blind person uses a cane, carrying it so when he runs into something, the shoe hits first instead of his head.

I bring up my dog because I feel the pain of the people in the commercial for Dr. Frank's. I wish I could give my dog sight. I feel horrible when he runs into something, especially something new I just brought into the house that he isn't familiar with. I know that a lot of people, myself included, consider their pets part of the family. Ranger (my dog) dislocated his shoulder one day, and I held him, comforted him, and cried until he stretched out and popped it back in place. I can not stand suffering, and I would do anything that I could to prevent any member of my family from suffering.

And now, for 20$ to start, Dr. Frank will take advantage of our love for our pets, and sell us a bottle of flavored water.

I hate people.

Evidence? Who needs evidence to start a panic?

2008-07-24T04:42:00.000-07:00

Oh what the fu....

I remember the good ole days, when a flawed study actually had to be released for the panic to hit the streets. You may remember it as well. Power lines. Childhood Leukemia. Well meaning social scientists. Lack of control groups. Lack of proper methodology. Logical fallacies. The end result being widespread panic as people began believing that the electromagnetic radiation from power lines was causing cancer in little kids. An entire industry sprung up to take advantage of it, and it took real scientists years of real science and proper studies to convince people of the truth. Living near power lines is not going to kill your child. There is no increased cancer risk from the power lines. Hell, even today, you will find people who still believe the lines are giving tons of innocent children a horrible disease and the scientists are covering up the truth. All from a couple poorly done studies.

Well, now you don't even need a study. You can just wake up in the morning and decide to freak half of the United States out.

Front page of my local fish wrap today, Ronald B. Herberman, MD, the director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute has issued a warning linking cell phone usage with brain cancer.

So I know what you must be thinking. The head of a major cancer research center issues a warning that using cell phones can cause/causes brain cancer, he must have some hard evidence to back it up. Surely he wouldn't freak out the country and start another cancer panic without knowing what he was talking about, right?

Right?

Nope. Dr. Herberman issued his warning based on "early unpublished data." And you know, if this "early unpublished data" was coming from the first study ever done on the possible link between cell phones and cancer, I may give him a pass and assume that the "early unpublished data" actually backs him up on his claims.

But this is a subject that has been studied before. And the results are always the same. There is no link between cell phones and brain cancer. The study that his "early unpublished data" comes from, a multinational research project known as Interphone has already released peer reviewed results. And guess what? No cancer link so far.

So why issue the warning? Well, the good doctor says that "it takes too long to get answers from science and he believes people should take action now — especially when it comes to children." JENNIFER C. YATES and SETH BORENSTEIN AP News

Let's let Dr. Herberman speak for himself.

"Really at the heart of my concern is that we shouldn't wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe rather than sorry later"

So rather than letting science work, and seeing if there is a risk involved, let's throw it all out and go with our gut feeling.

Pushing this man to yell, "fire!" in a crowded theater, apparently, was Devra Lee Davis, the director of the university's center for environmental oncology. She says:

"I don't know that cell phones are dangerous. But I don't know that they are safe."

Isn't that precious? Well, let's warn people about breathing. I mean, I don't know that breathing is dangerous, but I don't know that it is safe either! 100% of all people who breathe end up dying, after all.

Seriously. Technology comes with a price, whether it's pollution, health risks, or just that it makes us a little bit lazier. We really don't know the looooooooong term effects of cell phone use. But we really don't know the long term effects of countless new inventions. Maybe my ipod is giving me herpes and my flat screen is turning my brain into lettuce. Right now, all available evidence shows no link between cell phones and cancer. The FDA states on their website that if there is a risk from using cell phones, while stressing that they have no evidence that there is a risk, the risk would be very small.

We can live in fear, or we can live. Each and everyone of us has so many real terrors to worry about. To issue an unsupported warning like this is irresponsible and a slap in the face to science. Dr. Herberman probably thinks he is saving lives, but all he is causing is this:

Susan Juffe, a 58-year-old Pittsburgh special education teacher, heard about Herberman's cell phone advice on the radio earlier in the day.

"Now, I'm worried. It's scary," she said.

She says she'll think twice about allowing her 10-year-old daughter Jayne to use the cell phone.

"I don't want to get it (brain cancer) and I certainly don't want you to get it," she explained to her daughter.

Thank you for giving millions of people something new to worry about, for no reason at all.

Polygamists 1, Texas 0

2008-05-23T02:46:00.000-07:00

Is forcing your teenage daughter to get married to a man with multiple wives and have her first sexual experience on a bed in the middle of the chapel an act you should lose custody of your children over?

Not in Texas.

In an embarassing ruling for the Texas State Child Protective Services agency, the Third Court of Appeals ruled that the state had no right to take custody of the more than 440 children living at the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints compound in West Texas. Read the whole story HERE.

The court ruled that there was no proof the children were in immediate danger, which is apparently the only legal justification for seizing custody in Texas.

This whole case bothers me. In a country built upon freedom of religion, this case toes the line of what is acceptable religious beliefs and what requires government action. Clearly to me, these children are being abused. Isolated from the world and born into the sect they will most likely die a part of because of an accident of birth. The male children are routinely abandoned so there are enough wives for the current men. The female kids have it worse, being in my eyes little more than property, sheltered from the world their whole lives, forced to conform and believe, until their parents marry them off in their early teens to a much older man. These kids are brainwashed from birth, and as a free citizen, I honestly have trouble imagining what it would be like to have no opportunity at all to make choices in my life.

One of the founding principles of this country is freedom to choose and practice your own religion, or no religion. But there has to be limits. Where do you draw the line? When does a belief stop being protected, and start being child abuse?

Biblical ignorance.

2008-05-19T03:18:00.000-07:00

I was over at Fundies say the Darndest Things this morning, catching up on the lunacy, and everytime I'm there I am shocked as to how little some christians know about their own bible.

I'm not talking about biblical scholarship here either, although that would definately be a topic I could rant over. I just mean the actual contents of the book that they claim is infalible.

This quote by NewLifeInHim here! is what brought the topic to mind today. For those who don't feel like clicking the little linky link, NLIH is throwing a hissy fit over dancing, saying how his daughters will never dance and how dancing is the ebil. Phonix immediately schools him in the comments by quoting several verses of the bible that celebrate and encourage dancing.

Look, if you are a fundementalist Christian, that's your choice. I obviously think your beliefs are wrong, and I will argue and debate them with you, but I know that is as effective as mowing the lawn with nail clippers. But it is your right to believe what you want, and I'll fight for that right even though I disagree.

But seriously. Crack open that bible. Do some reading on your own, and not just the chapters your pastor tells you to read. If you believe that book is the living word of god, perfect and inerrent in all aspects, then don't you owe it to yourself and to god to read the whole thing?

You place so much trust in the bible, using it to justify and defend your worldview, yet so many of you seem to only know the verses you are told to read. That's not the bible influencing your worldview! That's your pastor telling you what to believe. Who are you going to trust? Your perfect book, written by god himself, or a sinful man prone to mistakes?

So open up that book and read something for yourself. If you are going to base your life off the bible, at least read it. You'll learn more about your own religion, you may grow spiritually, and at the least you'll be better prepared the next time some smarmy atheist like me who knows the bible decides to debate your beliefs.

I recommend the Song of Songs as a good starting point.

Now go! Read! When you're done, we'll talk about some biblical scholarship. Because really, you look like fools when you insist the gospels were really written by Matt, Mark, Luke, and John.

Court ordered drug treatment part 1. The life of a junkie

2008-05-19T03:13:00.000-07:00

Imagine for a second you are someone else. No longer safe behind your computer, you now are in the body of a heroin addict. You wake up every morning sick. It starts with just the sniffles and the shivers, but you know it will progress rapidly into the worst flu you can imagine, until your legs kick involuntarily, preventing sleep, until the bile burns your throat from the endless vomiting, until your body aches with every move, and every minute is sheer torture, until your mind screams for either death or the one thing that can instantly end your suffering. Heroin, beautiful heroin.

And so when you awake, your priorities are different than the common man. While others shower, shit, and shave, brush their teeth and break their fast before continuing their productive lives, you have one and only one thing on your mind. Getting the next fix. If you have the money and live in a major city, your quest can be as easy as walking to the corner. But if you live in a minor city, or a rural area, suddenly things aren't that easy. Besides being charged 2 to 8 times more (when I was in active addiction, a bag of heroin sold for $5 to 10$ in Pittsburgh and Philly. The charge in Altoona? $30 to $40) than you would in a big city, dealers in the small cities and rural areas can't set up shop on the corner. So you start making phone calls, hoping at least one of your dealers woke up before you and has your poison in stock. To keep this mental image moving, we'll assume someone actually answered their phone. (Most drug dealers have no respect for their customers. When you move away from the city, less competition leads to worse and worse treatment. Drug dealers don't have normal hours of business. Their hours are "When I feel like it," to "When I don't feel like it.") So now it's off to meet your dealer and get your drugs. If you are lucky, you know someone who lets you come to their house. If not, expect to stand on a random street waiting for someone. When that someone actually arrives, 9 times out of 10 it isn't your dealer, but a runner (drug addict who earns his dope by delivering the drugs, thereby lowering the risk to the dealer while putting his own freedom on the line) who probably pinched (took a little bit out for himself) your bag.

So now you got your dope. You are probably late for work, or cutting it close, you haven't showered, but at least you can function....if you had the money. In the big city, a one bag a day addiction is comparable to smoking a pack or more a day. But it never stays at one bag, because of tolerance. At my worst, I had a 14 bag a day addiction, and from talking with a lot of addicts in my time, my addiction was minor. 14 bags a day is a $70 to $140 dollar a day habit. If you are paying rural/small city prices, we are talking up to $560 a day. Where does the money come from?

It comes from stealing. It comes from running into Wal-mart, filling a shopping cart with dvd's and electronics, and running out the door with it. It comes from crooked pawn dealers, from bad checks, from selling every item you own. It comes from ripping off fellow addicts, or if you want to put your life on the line, ripping off your dealer. If you don't live in the city, the cost is just too much. So you begin driving to the city to get your drugs. For one 4 month stretch, I drove the 4 hours to philly 5 times a week. You start to pick up drugs for your friends while you are their, and then you may start to sell the drug yourself. The legality doesn't matter. What matters is heroin, and to get that you need the cash, so getting the cash becomes an "at all costs" propisition. For some, even their body is on sale.

But heroin costs much more than just money. Your friends disappear because you either stole from them, ripped them off, or just stopped calling. Your new buddies are all heroin addicts. Your girlfriend is now either addicted or gone. Kids? Ha, you just spent their diaper money for a bag of dope. Your teeth are rotting, veins collapsing, chances are you have Hep C now, and if you are really unlucky, HIV. Eventually, you are going to fuck up at work or school. Can you have a heroin addiction and still get good grades or be a good employee? Sure.....for a while. I carried a 4.0 for two semesters while using, only to have to withdraw after I started driving to Philly. I was head bartender/head trainer of a Don Pablo's until I walked out one day because my dealer couldn't deliver. Eventually, the house of cards you built will come crashing down.

And then it happens. The police kick in your door at 6 am, guns drawn, and they drag you out of bed, to a holding tank with 20 other addicts. It's a drug sweep, and they don't care if you don't steal, if you don't sell. All they care about is the fact that you use, and they have a confidental informant that they paid with money to get high, who will swear you sold them dope. In your boxers and t-shirt, you go in front of a magistrate who sets your bail, say 10% of $50,000. If you are lucky, you have someone who will bail you out. If not, get ready to go to county jail. If you can hire a lawyer, he may be able to get your bail reduced before your court date. Or you can sit in jail, innocent or guilty, until you take a plea bargin or take your case to trial, 6 to 10 months in the future. They will ask you to be a confidental informant, offering to keep you high as long as you get busts for them. They will lie to you about the evidence, overcharge you, and threaten you with years if not decades in jail. No matter how suspect the evidence, they will not drop all the charges. The plea bargins will get sweeter and sweeter as time goes by, because they don't want the case to go to trial. C.I.'s have a habit of not showing up at trial. Of course, you don't want to go to trial either, even if you are innocent. A jury trial in front of 12 non-heroin users in a town where the newspaper has trumped the drug problem up to be the end of the world as we know it? "We find the defendant Guilty!" "But sir, we haven't even started the trial!" A trial by judge can be just as bad, as they were all elected to be tough on crime, especially drug crime.

So you take a plea. If you are a non-violent drug offender on your first offense, and they don't have evidence that you are a major dealer, you are probably looking at probation, some minor jail time and drug treatment. Yeah, you probably have a felony on your record now, closing many doors in your future, but it's not the end of the world. Except you are a heroin addict. And one of your stipulations of probation is to not use drugs. You better hope the drug treatment works.

Jesus takes break from not existing, helps Lions to victory!

2007-09-18T10:15:00.000-07:00

This is just perfect in contrast with my last post on the Kathy Griffin incident. Not only does God take time out from not doing anything useful to guide teams to Super Bowl victory, actors to Oscar wins, and musicians to Gold records, but now he is healing injured quarterbacks in the second week of the NFL season.

Says Yahoo:

ALLEN PARK, Mich. (AP) -- Detroit quarterback Jon Kitna expected people to snicker and laugh when they heard his explanation for his comeback against Minnesota after getting knocked out of the game with a concussion.

"It was a miracle," Kitna said Monday.

Kitna left the game in the second quarter, returned in the fourth and led the Lions to a 20-17 win over the Vikings in overtime on Sunday.

He said it was the third concussion of his NFL career, and the first since 2001. Kitna said he also had a concussion playing for Seattle against San Francisco in a 1997 preseason game.

"I've never felt anything like that, and for it to clear up and go right back to as normal as I can be, is nothing short of a miracle," Kitna said. "I just definitely feel the hand of God. That's all it was. You can't explain it.

I could fill about 20 blogs listing more important things that God could have taken an active hand in, rather than helping a second rate quarterback lead a mediocre team to victory in a meaningless early season game, but why bother? Too easy.

Ok, I can't resist. Suck it, Jesus!

Suck it, Jesus.

2007-09-13T21:25:00.000-07:00

Could the title be any more clear? Let's try this. Suck it, Jesus. Hmmm. Still not enough. Suck it, Jesus!

And not just Jesus, oh no. Suck it, Catholic League, Suck it, Donohue, and Suck it! to anyone who honestly believes Kathy Griffin saying "Suck it, Jesus!" is hate speech.

Are you offended? Are you upset? Are you ready to flag this blog as offensive? Is your persecution sense tingling?

Then buy a fucking helmet and get over yourself.

Christians, seriously. You are a majority in the United States. At the least, 90% of elected officials are members of a sect of your religion. There is a church on every corner. Four stations on my cable system are dedicated to worship services and creationist lies. Your holidays are national holidays. To be elected president, you must at least claim to follow your fairy tale. From the Super Bowl to finding a quarter on the street, everytime something good happens to someone, you can bet they will be thanking your sky daddy and his son.

The "Help, help, I'm being oppressed" routine is getting old. No one wants to feed you to the lions. No one wants to outlaw your religion. We just want to live our damn lives without being affected by your belief in your imaginary friend. I don't want my tax dollars to support the study of unicorns, or invisible dragons, and I don't want it to help your faith based whatevers, your attempted destruction of science, your "christian nation" mythology, or your abstinence only course in how to get pregnant as a teenager.

Kathy Griffin saying "Suck it, Jesus!" and stating the truth; that jesus had nothing to do with her winning an emmy, is not persecution, it is not oppression, and it is not hate speech. Next time you want to open a bottle of whine over how unfairly christians are treated in this country, don't. Instead, go talk to a holocaust survivor, or a christian from a part of the world where they actually face death due to their belief. Or hell, just read Maus. It's even in graphic novel form, you can pretend it's a book length Chick Tract that replaces the lies and slander with actual truth.

Then go here and sign the petition to uncensor Kathy's award speech.

So Suck it, Jesus. Hell, even my sidekick, the Holy Ghost says "Suck it, Donohue."

Somehow, I don't think my boss would go for it.

2007-09-08T20:42:00.000-07:00

So say you are the head of a government agency. And not an insignificant joke of an agency like the EPA under the Bush administration either, but a real agency with an important job. Like say, the agency that is responsible for delivering benefits to our veterans. What would you say is more important than your job? Your spouse? Your children? A sick friend?

Well, if you are Daniel Cooper, undersecretary for benefits at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the man resposible for ensuring our veterans are taken care of for the service they have provided the United States, the answer is simple. Bible study.

Yep. Bible study. Since Mr. Cooper took over at the Veterans Benefits Administration, the waiting list on benefits has increased from 325,000 in 2002 to a modest 600,000 today. The average veteran faces a 6 month wait for an answer to his (or her) application for benefits, and if denied, an appeal process that can last up to 3 years. And if you're one of the unlucky 52,000 Iraq/Afghanistan vets diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by the Veterans Administrations, you have a less than 50% chance of being approved for disability compensation.

So what does dear Mr. Cooper have to say as those who risked their lives for our country wait endlessly for the benefits they deserve? Well, about the backlog of cases, nothing that I could find. But when it comes to bible study, he gives us this gem:

"it's not really about carving out time, it really is a matter of saying what is important. And since that's more important than doing the job -- the job's going to be there, whether I'm there or not."

Yes Mr. Cooper. The job will be there whether you are or not. And here's hoping it's the latter very soon.

Sources:
IPSnews
Priorities are Important@Pharyngula
More on the Christian Embassy in the US military.
WWJD..with a cruise missile@Pharyngula