Fair and balanced campaigning

OK ... so you can't see this in the e-mail version. You'll just have to click on the article title.

Straw Poll?

"So it’s an election with no Democrats, in one of the whitest states in the union, where rich candidates pay $35 for your votes. Or, as Republicans call it, their vision for the future."

- Jon Stewart

Check out the Indecision2008 web site, too.

Texas Canyon Revisited

People visiting the Amerind often comment on what a nice place Texas Canyon would be to live. Actually, people have been saying that for thousands of years. the canyon is filthy with archaeological potential. I imagine that's why William Shirley Fulton purchased the 1,600 acre ranch in the canyon in 1930.

John Wayne used to stay at the Triangle T Guest Ranch in the canyon while filming in the area.

During WW-II the guest ranch was commandeered by the Federal government as a place to hold under house arrest the entire diplomatic staff of the Japanese embassy from Hawaii.

Just for the fun of it

These 16 Police Comments were taken off actual police car videos around the country:

#16 "You know, stop lights don't come any redder that the one you just went through."

#15 "Relax, the handcuffs are tight because they're new. They'll stretch after you wear them a while."

#14 "If you take your hands off the car, I'll make your birth certificate a worthless document."

#13 "If you run, you'll only go to jail tired."

#12 "Can you run faster than 1200 feet per second? Because that's the speed of the bullet that'll be chasing you."

#11 "You don't know how fast you were going? I guess that means I can write anything I want to on the ticket, huh?

#10 "Yes, sir, you can talk to the shift supervisor, but I don't think it will help. Oh, did I mention that I'm the shift supervisor?"

#9 "Warning! You want a warning? O.K., I'm warning you not to do that again or I'll give you another ticket."

#8 "The answer to this last question will determine whether you are drunk or not. Was Mickey Mouse a cat or a dog?

#7 "Fair? You want me to be fair? Listen, fair is a place where you go to ride on rides, eat cotton candy and corn dogs and step in monkey poop."

#6 "Yeah, we have a quota. Two more tickets and my wife gets a toaster oven."

#5 "In God we trust, all others we run through NCIC."

#4 "How big were those 'Just two beers' you say you had?"

#3 "No sir, we don't have quotas anymore. We used to, but now we're allowed to write as many tickets as we can."

#2 "I'm glad to hear that Chief (of Police) Hawker is a personal friend of yours. So you know someone who can post your bail."

AND THE WINNER IS....

#1 "You didn't think we give pretty women tickets? You're right, we don't. Sign here."

A little burned out

Most of what we're going to pack has been packed. The rest will have to wait for the pros.

Most of the office is still in tact. I'll keep working right up to the bloody end ... then I'll be out of business for a couple days while the movers drive our stuff around town for a while, eventually delivering it to the new digs.

The day before yesterday we bought a new counter high dining room table and a herd of chairs. Yesterday, we dumped another load of buckaroos on a new refrigerator ... one of those 50/50 door configurations with the water spigot inside (I hate the look of those jobbers with the plumbing on the outside of the door ... MUCH prefer clean lines). Black ... matches the other appliances.

Got a call at 1:20am here time from one of my industry newsletter readers in the UK. He was trying to track down a bit of market research done by an Irish company ... he didn't realize that my office number is also my residence number. We had a delightful little conversation from what I recall ... ending with me rephrasing the Editor's Note I'd included with the newsletter item about the research report: "This study is NOT available through the resources of the OPI Report. It must be purchased from the vendor."

I guess there's a difference between British English and American English. I would have been happier if he'd e-mailed me his question. Still in all, it's nice to find that someone out there is actually reading what I send out.

We still have more furniture to purchase ... some of it will wait until we find a buyer for the current digs.

There are so many things to do, I don't what I don't want to do first!

Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris: The Unholy Trinity

... Thank God.

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What a great read .. I almost wet myself laughing while reading it!

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by Robert Weitzel
http://www.opednews.com

Christopher Hitchens, contrarian atheist and slayer of all beasts fascistic and theocratic, will be in Madison, Wisconsin, this fall to present the keynote address at the Freedom From Religion Foundation’s fall conference. Anyone who is familiar with Hitchens’ substance and style will expect a speech that is irreverent and uncompromising and totally worth the price of admission.

Predictably, faster than a fart can make a tent full of Cub Scouts giggle, letters to the editor and op-ed pieces appeared bemoaning Hitchens’ upcoming visit and calling him a boorish bigot for his willingness to describe the emperor’s nakedness in all its scabious and purulent magisterial arrogance.

Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris are not bigots. They are an unholy trinity of bestselling atheist authors who are fed up with having to tap dance around people of faith whose religious beliefs are as irrational as they are ubiquitous, and as potentially deadly as they are personally cathartic.

Wet yourself here ...



Of course, reading through some of the comments on the web site posted above, I can assure you that "faster than a fart can make a tent full of Cub Scouts giggle" is functioning quite nicely ... without even realizing how ironic their responses are.

Try THIS on for size ...

Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch

By JOHN TIERNEY | New York Times
Published: August 14, 2007

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

Read the rest of this thought here ...

What's wrong with this picture?

Iraq's Chritians 'need assistance'

Tuesday, 14th August 2007. 4:03pm
By: George Conger | Religious Intellignece

THE PLIGHT of Iraq’s embattled Christian minority is dire and little has been done to alleviate the suffering, the vicar of Baghdad, Canon Andrew White told the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) at a hearing recently in Washington.

Coalition forces have ‘done nothing to support the Christian community,’ nor respond to Christian ‘suffering’, while the country’s Jewish community -- once one of the largest in the world, has shrunk to eight people, Canon White said.

The July 25 hearings were called by the US government to examine the serious threats faced by Iraq's ‘communities of antiquity’: the country's non-Muslim religious communities, including Chaldo Assyrian Christians, Yazidis, Sabean Mandaeans, and other minority religious groups.

The rest of the article is here ...

Correct me if I'm wrong but, isn't it the fundamentalist Christian Right that most favors and supports the war in Iraq? Isn't it a little disingenuous to be barking after the blood of Islamists while turning your Christian back on the plight of fellow Christians as if they weren't there? Somehow, it seems so .... uh ... un-Christian of our Christians.

Republicans: Bringing another load of honesty and integrity to American politics

Romney Fund-Raiser Resigns

By Michael Luo / New York Times

AMES, Iowa–

A top fund-raiser for Mitt Romney who was indicted this week in Maryland on a $32 million fraud scheme has resigned from his position with the campaign as a national finance committee co-chair, a spokesman for Mr. Romney said.

A federal grand jury in Maryland unsealed its 23-count indictment of the fund-raiser, Alan B. Fabian, 43, on Thursday for money laundering, mail fraud, bankruptcy fraud, perjury and obstruction of justice.

Mr. Fabian, who had been one of 35 co-chairs on Mr. Romney’s national finance committee, allegedly ran up $32 million in fake purchases with his consulting company, Maximus Inc., based in northern Virginia, and pocketed the money for himself.

More here...

And you believed those campaign promises, didn't you? The lesson should be to beware of those who set themselves up as paragons of virtue and those who are ever so quick to point fingers at others. Me thinks they protested too much ... but you bought it ... hook, line and sinker.

Me? I can point a finger. I ain't running for office and I'm certainly not saying I've never sinned.

Think we need another 4 years of bringing this brand of honesty and integrity to American politics? Come back when you've got your own house cleaned up. I figure it will take at least a generation.

Sometimes the obvious answer is not the right answer.

Among my favorite sources of news and perhaps among the least biased in any direction is the weekly digest of global news, The Week Magazine. I think the editor, William Falk, has a good handle on reality. the following is his brief editorial from the August 17, 2007 edition of the magazine:

"On my Saturday shopping excursions, I’ve noticed a change over at the Whole Foods. A new sign has popped up here and there amid the heirloom tomatoes, specialty cheeses and fresh roasted coffees, bearing the single virtuous word “local”. It’s a wonderful salve to the conscience: My fellow shoppers and I live amid such an embarrassment of abundance, yet simply by paying $4 for a head of local lettuce, we can do our part to save the planet from global warming. Or so it seemed, until some scientific spoilsports at Lincoln University in New Zealand ran all the numbers. To accurately calculate a products carbon impact, they found, you have to go beyond “food miles” – the distance that kiwi or artichoke flecked sausage traveled before reaching your table – and figure in how much fertilizer, transported water, electricity, and other energy was used to produce it. Lamb raised in New Zealand’s sunnier, grassier hills and shipped 11,000 miles to Britain, the study found, produced a mere 1,520 pounds of carbon emissions per ton. “Local” British lamb, which requires more intensive care, produced 6,280 pounds – four times as much."

"As if that heresy were not upsetting enough, a British scientist has calculated that walking to the store contributes more to global warming than driving a car, Walking, it seems, burns calories, which have to be replaced by eating food. And producing food – especially beef and dairy products – is more carbon intensive than burning a smidgen of gasoline, particularly since ruminating cattle emit so much methane. Now, does this mean we can do nothing to slow global warming? No. It only means that the world is enormously complex, and that simple solutions to big problems – solutions that make us feel comforted and virtuous – are almost always illusionary."

The Red Wall

Thunderbird Lodge, Canyon de Chelly

I'm not sure if I put this one up in this blog. If I did, its worth sharing again.

File under "If I only knew now what I knew then"

Dick Cheney speaks on the subject of invading Iraq in 1994.

WTF?

Sad, Poor Americans Finally Give Up On Republicans, God

on Wonkette

A shocking new study by the Pew Research Center proves that Americans overwhelmingly identify themselves as Democrats today — 50% compared to 35% who say they’re Republicans. And they’re increasingly weary of religion, religious conservatives, stagnant and shrinking wages, income inequality and the sad toil of their miserable lives.

Just as beaten Depression-era voters would vote for anybody who wasn’t a Republican and specifically not Herbert Hoover, today’s ruined citizens have a vague notion that things might not be as bad with a Democrat in the White House. Still, voters don’t like Dems a whole lot more than they like the GOP: 54% approve of the do-nothing Democrats, while a deluded 41% still stand by Republicans.

Read the rest ...

The Bible's literary sins

from theblogbooks - Sam Jordison

Whether its central character exists or not is beside the point - the Christian scriptures are a barely readable mess.

Contrary to popular belief, the Bible is not a good book. I'm not talking in a moral sense and it's not my purpose to discuss its malign social influence, scientific absurdity, historical implausibility and the rather sordid origins of Christian orthodoxy. There's been plenty of that kind of thing recently from Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. I'm talking about the book purely as one that an intelligent person may enjoy reading, or (discounting the pretty slim possibility that labouring through the Testaments may win you a pass card through to heaven) find rewarding.

The literary quality of the Bible is an issue that I think is worth addressing. Firstly, there's the simple point that if the Bible really were the word of God, you'd think that He would be able to make it more interesting. Secondly, there's a war being waged against reason at the moment and it's gone time that reason started landing a few punches of its own. Why not freely state the obvious, but hitherto rarely mentioned, truth? The Good Book is not, as is so often suggested, a damn good read. It's crap. If the two Testaments tell the greatest story ever told, I am a monkey (and not just the distant descendant of one).

Now, I'm aware that saying the Bible is crap rather a crude statement. So, let me introduce a few points to qualify my basic assertion.

Finish the thought here ...

Actually, I've read through it. It's not an easy read nor is it a particularly enlightening read ... at least not in the way it was intended. It found the Tao Te Ching much more spiritual, peaceful, and enlightening (in the way it was intended).

The Tao doesn't take sides;
it gives birth to both good and evil.
The Master doesn't take sides;
she welcomes both saints and sinners.


The Tao is like a bellows:
it is empty yet infinitely capable.
The more you use it, the more it produces;
the more you talk of it, the less you understand.

Hold on to the center.

Redefining Left and Right

In an earlier post I suggested definitions for Fascism and Communism, the extremes of Left and Right. I suggested that Fascism was when "the Corporation ran the State" and that Communism was when "the State ran the Corporation".

I think it's time to revisit the idea and refine those terms and maybe a few others.

First, let me refine the definitions of those two positions.

Lets start with the term "Corporation" and for the sake of this discussion, lets say that represents the means of manufacture and distribution within the nation.

For the sake of this argument let us consider that Fascism, the position of the extreme Right, is when the State or Government acts in the best interest of the Corporation. At the other end of the spectrum in Communism, the opposite is the case. The State or Government "owns" the corporation or, one might say the Corporation must function in the best interest of the state.

In both cases, and in many ways, the State and the Corporation become an identity. As in the mathematical definition of an "identity", they become one and the same thing. The distinction between the State and the Corporation become more and more blurred the further one moves either to the extreme Left or to the extreme Right. At the greatest extreme, there ceases to be a functional diference between the State and the Corporation.

This suggests a slightly different functional perspective might be applied to the political spectrum.

Figure 1 (below) illustrates the common view of the political Left/Right dichotomy, outlining the extremes while Democracy ... the expressed will of the governed, occupies a middle position.



I've used the colors blue and red to denote the current Left wing liberal and the Right wing conservative approaches to American politics.

I would submit that the extreme Right wing and he extreme Left wing have more in common with each other than they do with a democratic (with a small "d") approach to government. Both are totalitarian, neither is concerned with the will or the welfare of the people.

By "folding" the diagram in the middle in order to put "likes" together we get something that looks a lot like Fig 2.



Fig 3. (below) is the final view when the totalitarian systems are superimposed on each other.



It is a little more difficult to place individuals on a political spectrum than it is to graph political philosophies. However, I've made an attempt based on my own personal perspective. Some may disagree with my assessment of the degree of extreme I've assigned to individuals and organizations in this example but it serves to illustrate a point.



I believe the point is, for the most part, those involved in the Democratic and Republican parties have more in common with each other than they have with the extremes. It is certainly true that the extremes on the Right and on the Left have more in common with each other than they have things that differentiate them from each other. From my perspective, the more extreme one's position is, the less in touch they are with the needs of the American people and, as a consequence, the less attractive they are in the up coming 2008 General Election.

The root of the overall feelings of dissatisfaction in this country stem from the fact that, post 9/11 the Bush administration has taken a position beyond the fringe of the overall Republican Party and, for a time at any rate, carried the Party along with it.

Echoing the general dissatisfaction of the public at large, significant segments of the Republican Party are now waking up to that fact and starting to express their own dissatisfaction with the course of the nation. The war in Iraq has moved their constituents to point out that they are not representing the attitudes and opinions of the people they are supposed to represent ... and the bottom line message is clear. Neglect the people and they will neglect to vote for you! They'll vote for someone who will address their needs and wants ... regardless of party affiliations. There will always be "die-hard" party members who will take the attitude "my party, right or wrong!" but the majority of voters possess that level blind party affiliation. They are much more interested in their own health care issues, food on the table, education for their kids and a world of peace and prosperity. They will support a war as long as it makes sense to them. They will swallow a party line for a while but, in the end, if their perceived self interests are not served, they'll vote the bastards out of office. That's the way it works in a democratic republic such as this, where the bottom line is that the government does not originate orders ... it follows them. In the end, in a democracy, the people set the policies. It may take some time, but the will of the people will be served ... as long as the Constitution stands.

The sooner both sides recognize, in their quest to serve "We the People" and that they have more in common than they have to differentiate them selves, the sooner we can all get back to a bipartisan government of the people, by the people and for the people.

There are good people and good ideas on both sides of the aisle. However, allowing lobbyists representing special interests other than the will of the people governed applies pressure on good people to do things that have dubious consequences. Special interests seek to create that "identity" between government and the corporate special interest.

Treating corporations as if they were individuals in a democracy is dangerous business. The corporate mandate is not to serve the people. It is to make a profit and the more entwined corporations are with government, the more government is pushed to the extremes at the right side of the scale in Fig 3 - where the corporation and the state are the same thing.

During the 1930 there was a phrase uttered mostly by capitalists on Wall Street. They said "what ever is good for GM is good for the country." That's not necessarily true.