Recently in angarrrrrgggh!!! Category

someone else gets it.

Anyway, there was a big fake blowup yesterday when Hillary Rosen said Ann Romney's "actually never worked a day in her life." Republicans promptly clutched pearls and pulled out their smelling salts. "Why, I never!"

i was finally going to write another blog post, but the rude pundit said exactly what i was going to say, only with better writing.

oh well.

edit: actually, it's not what I was going to say, but it's close. old RP missed what was bugging me.

whether or not being a stay-at-home mom is a "job", the problem that this whole pathetic episode exposes is this: we can't have a serious conversation in this knee-jerk sound-bite future of ours. hillary rosen, whom I despise for her work at the RIAA, said something very simple and clear: it's idiotic to call someone who has never held a job your economic advisor. that's all she said.

but instead of addressing this, the right wing smarties de-contexted what she said in order to enrage stay-at-home moms. and the idiots on the "left" took the bait and rather than saying "that's not what she said, your distorters", they went straight into apology mode, blah blah blah, moms work hard, etc.

it's truly pathetic. and because of how this country's media works, we can't have an actual conversation on anything, because "both sides" would rather pander than address the factual content of what anybody has said. i haven't heard anybody address the outrageousness of the obamas responding to the right wing distortions rather than addressing what was actually said. the obamas are plenty smart enough to understand the actual point rosen was making. but they'd rather pander.

it's stupid, and because our popular media engages in it, it enstupids us all.

the frothy mixture flew to Puerto Rico and demanded that they make English their official language prior to joining the Union, citing nonexistent federal regulations as the reason.

having been through the PR airport twice, i can imagine PR's response to frothy's demands: "besa mi culo!" only with better spanish grammar.

not only is PR mostly bilingual, english is the backup language, used only with tourists. at least, that was my impression after 2 hours in the airport. all the signs were spanish first, with english subtitles. even with my pale skin and my not-hispanic wife, we were often addressed first in spanish, then disappointedly in english.

what's so astonishing about frothy is that he's got an uncanny ability to single out the most irrelevant issue on any topic and focus on that -- and better, rally his base around it. of all the obstacles to PR becoming a state, who teh fuck cares about the official language? how many frothy supporters have ever even been there? how many have ever left mississippi (and I don't mean to spend time in a federal pokey)?

republicans are all about state's rights, until it comes to ridiculous wedge issues. i would love to see PR join the union as a spanish-only state. i heartily support their state's right to do so.

the people I met in PR were extremely proud of their home island. I would in fact say that I've never met airport employees who were so enthusiastic about their homeland (you could tell which employees were shipped in from the mainland, they wore TSA outfits, were fat, pasty, didn't smile or speak spanish, and didn't constantly stop you to tell you how great Puerto Rico is).

What a terrible insult to the proud people of Puerto Rico. I imagine there is very little danger of them wanting to become a state, even prior to frothy's ridiculous language demands. I really don't see why PR would agree to surrender its culture in exchange for paying higher taxes, and I don't think the people of PR see any good reasons either.

We let Boston become a state, and they don't speak English there. Where's frothy on that one?

i got myself a garmin forerunner 410 because my old forerunner 210 is a piece of crap. it's a nice enough watch, the 210, but if you want it to actually tell you where you are, or how far you've run, or how fast you went, as a gps running watch ought to do, you'd better not have a tree or a 3 story building anywhere within 20 miles. or a cloud. or a passing airplane. or a freeway overpass.

it got to the point where my 210 eventually wouldn't get satellites right outside my door, because there's a large tree and a 4 story building.

so i got a 410 from rei, fully intending to take it back if it didn't perform. well, it performs. it's fantastic as a gps watch. it gets satellite lock quickly, even when it's cloudy or an airplane passes (snort), and once it's locked, it's actually locked, in the sense that it doesn't get unlocked easily. that's great! it tells me my instantaneous speed which is a great heuristic.

but.

garmin just can't help but to suck. despite the wonderful functionality, the watch has an idiotic, inexplicable, totally avoidable design flaw: it will run itself down. i think i am not alone in the running community as being NOT a daily runner. that means my gps watch will have stretches of downtime -- if i'm traveling, or just don't feel the need for a watch, those stretches may exceed two weeks. so i would expect that a dingus designed for running, which KNOWS when it's been immobile for two days, would turn itself off. but no, instead, it will merrily eat up its own battery and THEN, when i am ready to go out for a run, i grab my ridiculously expensive gps watch only to discover it's unusable.

great.

so, why not just power it down after each run?

aha! what a great idea! the watch has two buttons and a "we're so clever!" touchscreen type interface. no amount of button presses will power the watch down. no, instead, i have to long-press the screen to get to the menu. then i have to swipe to "settings". then swipe more to "system". then swipe more to "shut down". THEN i have to press one of the two buttons. and then i have to swipe, and press the button AGAIN to confirm shutdown!

that required reading the manual, and i bet i'll have to re-read it next time.

it's the stupidest design possible, and it wouldn't even matter if garmin hadn't stupidly made the thing a battery suicide machine.

a rabbi's job is to get me thinking, and in that, the rabbi last week succeeded. my motto has long been: da lifne meh atah omeid. "know before whom you stand".

i know the hebrew god. his holy book tells me he is a god of vengeance, wrath, and destruction. i do not believe that god exists.

and yet, the jewish religion is all about peace and love. these are the things that jews talk about when they worship. they call their god a benevolent creator, and yet the bible is one long story of the benevolent creator beating the shit out of everyone, the jews and the non-jews alike. the holy books do not agree with the spoken message, even a little bit. god tests abraham's faith by asking him to sacrifice his only son. as a reward for his faith, he spawns a race of holy people who go on to be sold into slavery, freed by a wrathful god who indiscriminately slays egyptian children then leads his chosen people to slaughter women and children all over the middle east, until they reach the holy land, whereupon he kills his greatest prophet because of a minor mistake the prophet once made. a lifetime of faithful behavior is not enough to redeem moses for hitting a rock, so while the faithless jerks that crafted and worshipped the golden calf were welcome to enter the holy land, the prophet was forbidden.

the story of the bible tells us of a creator who is an epic asshole. he is not worthy of worship. this is a gnostic view, popular in the 2nd century AD, and at the time of christ, and again in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly in the science fiction writings of philip K dick. the notion being that the god of the jews is not at all the creator, just a sub-deity who thinks he is the creator, and behaves the way any asshole with way too much power would behave. the real god is obscured by the demi-urge yahweh, and reveals himself to those who are ready to receive his message of redemption.

that's the story, anyhow, and whether it's true or not is pretty irrelevant.

here on planet earth, "faith" is defined as believing in something absent evidence of its existence. there is all too much evidence in this life of hate, anger, destruction, wrath, vengeance, bait-and-switch tricksterisms, and the murder of the defenseless -- all favorite pastimes of the god of abraham. there is no need to have faith in such a being. if you want to worship anger, go look in the mirror and worship yourself. if destruction is the object of your worship, then good news: we live in a time of epic destructive power, and our leaders and our neighbors are all too eager to unleash it upon the defenseless.

there is no need to worship a god of destruction. we ourselves are gods of destruction with incredible powers far beyond anything moses could have imagined. how quaint the horns of the israelites, which dropped the walls of jericho. today a single missile launched half a world away can do the same thing. a destroyer of millions need not ever look upon even the hemisphere of the target of his wrath. we are gods of destruction putting sammael/yahweh to shame.

but brotherly love? universal peace? freedom from hatred, intolerance, and mindless violence? these are things to have faith in. these are things that are not abundant and innate in ourselves and our neighbors. these are the attributes of a being greater than ourselves, and worthy of our pursuit, if not our worship. we are imperfect beings, in that we can choose to be wrathful and destructive, but we cannot choose universal peace, or live in harmony -- these things require more than just our own decisions. they require cooperation, consensus, and a global desire for an end to war.

war is a small, easy thing. it can be done by a single man. peace is so much bigger, and harder to attain. it is the attribute of a true god, worthy of worship. it is something that is in no single man. it is something that does not come easily.

and so i reject any "god" who demands blood, either of his own people or his people's enemy. i think so petty and small of a god does not deserve the name "god". i reject anyone who claims to speak for such a god. they speak for no god, they speak from their own pained heart. to invoke god while harming another person is to prove that one acts only on one's own behalf. what use does a god have of humans to harm humans? he can do his own dirty work. a true god does what no one man can do by himself.

these thoughts were brought to me, with great sadness, by the speech of a hateful man in a temple of god. i sat for an hour and listened to words of love and peace, and then this man came up and claimed that the love and peace was only for a small group of 7 million jews in israel, and not for their neighbors, who were, according to him, "evil" and backwards savages. he begged us for money (when israel has already received hundreds of billions of american dollars to make war on the backwards savages that surround it) to plant trees -- but not peaceful trees. in the holy land, trees are weapons of war, symbols of ownership of land. homes are demolished so that trees may be planted, like a conquistador's flags planted firmly in a mound of skulls.

i barely consider judaism to be a part of my life. but i had always told people it was a beautiful culture of peace and love, of quiet contemplation, of faith and hope and acceptance. my wife was there to experience this first-hand for the first time ever, and her experience was spoiled by this horrid man whose angry begging wiped away all the good words of the rabbi before him. but the rabbi was the one who introduced him, and called him up to speak, and thanked him when he left. the rabbi endorsed the message. the congregation, endorsing the rabbi, also endorsed the message.

and so again, after a long absence, after testing the waters and being embarrassed to find them marred by blood and anger and divisiveness, i find i still have no use for organized religion. the loving acceptance of those who would use majestic trees as weapons, the unquestioning hatred of billions of my fellow humans, the ease with which a congregation full of children of the holocaust could be moved by a message of "us" vs. "them", the endorsement of the abandonment of hope for peace -- these things have driven me out again. i am a ceaseless wanderer in the desert, like so many jews before me. but unlike the congregation that saddened me by inviting a man to stand up and tell us that peace is a hopeless cause, so we'd better just dig in and prepare for war, i still have hope for my people.

François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, a Catholic Archbishop of all things, said, All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born.

I argue that the same applies to the religion which a man has chosen. I will forgive any man the mistake of participating in a religion if he will make peace with me. This is the Hope of which the rabbis speak, no matter what is written in the holy books. This is a noble goal, not building walls to keep our bothers in misery.

this is the radical hope for which the world's most famous and vocal jew was nailed to a tree. it is no wonder they decided he was a god -- he stood for a noble and worldly peace that no man could find in himself.

went to shul with the wife last shabbat. i haven't been in years, and she's never been. we were both really digging the experience, it was incredibly positive, welcoming, and lively. i was feeling proud of my abandoned religion, and planning more temple visits, until the guest speaker got on and pitched us for money by telling us how evil and subhuman the enemies of our religion are.

that is when i thought: my god is the lord of peace, the king of love, the spirit of harmony and freedom. for hatred, for destruction, for blood and fire, i may as well worship a man.

happy valentine's day. love your sweetie, but love your neighbor as well, and leave room in your heart for those that hate you. nowadays one can say such things without getting nailed to a cross, but it wasn't always so. be thankful for the peace that you have, and consider whether it was achieved by demonizing your neighbors.

let's hear it, voters: do you want

New Gingrich War With Iran®
or
Mitt Romney War With Iran®

?

or shall we all just settle for more handouts to the banks? choices, choices!

by DOSing the websites of democratic congresspeople who support SOPA, you make it difficult/impossible for their constituents to contact them and change their minds.

so desperate for a candidate that, as long as he said he believes he's made peace with God, they wouldn't care if Newt had strangled his second wife with his first wife's intestines.

also: Oh, hey, looks like wee little Ricky Santorum might have won Iowa. And? The real story is that eight precincts lost their votes and can never be recounted. If that had happened during a Democratic caucus, Fox "news" would already be screeching about voter fraud and produced scary black people who did it.

listening to the radio yesterday, i heard some interviewees talking about the horrid newt gingrich. they were being asked something along the lines of "how can you, as a conservative, vote for someone who was having an affair while impeaching the president for having an affair? doesn't the immorality and hypocrisy make your head explode and thus render you physically incapable of voting?"

the answer was typical: the poll-ee said that she was pretty sure the execrable newt gingrich had repented to jesus for his sins, and she was pretty sure he did it authentically, and she was pretty sure jesus forgave him, and thus, he had a clean bill of spiritual jesus health and moral authority to run for president of the Conservative States of America.

this is the problem with the forgiveness myth: a person of obvious moral ineptitude can run on a platform of morals quite easily. in fact, the more turpitude in their past, the better. all they have to do is get the voters to believe that they sincerely "came to jesus", and not only does this anoint them in sinlessness, it grants them an even higher moral high ground -- after all, like all of us, they're just a poor sinner, only they've found the path to righteousness and can lead us there, too.

it's all nonsense, of course, especially in the case of the hideous newt gingrich. there's no evidence whatever that he's particularly christian. he certainly doesn't love his neighbor (willard mitt romney, for example) as he loves himself. his second ex-wife (have to be specific, mister family values the repugnant newt gingrich had a bunch of them) is now explaining that he asked for an open marriage, just like jesus and the pope had. classy!

but even though the intolerable newt gingrich himself isn't particularly running as a jesus candidate, his supporters, being nominally jesus followers (until faced with the prospect of applying the Golden Rule, of course. after all, Jesus himself said to Paul, "nuke Iran, slaughter their children, and make war on their homes") simply presuppose since they are going to vote anyway for whomever they've managed to randomly pick, such candidate must be a devout christian, just like them. projection, in other words. you pick a candidate that you like for whatever reason, then project your values on to them, then vote for them. anyone who has paid attention to the left blogosphere in the past four years will recognize this pattern.

but the danger with this pattern is that it is totally permissive. it allows behavior of any kind.

there is only one jesus candidate, and as much as i dislike him in every way, santorum appears to live what he believes. there's no need to project religious adherence on to him, he seems like the real deal (of course, that's probably just image management and if he gets to the general we'll be treated to the gay sex tape). but my point is simple: if morals and values are really important to you (and if they're not, why are you voting GOP?), then the herpetic serial-philandering but presumably forgiven newt gingrich is too complicated of a choice. why not keep it simple and cheer for the frothy mixture, who has nothing to apoligize for, no need for forgiveness?

after all, jesus himself was born without sin. he lived without sin. if you're so big on jesus, why follow a monster like the squamous horror newt gingrich? jesus defined a set of values, not economic or foreign policy principles. if jesus is a big in your life as you say he is, shouldn't you pick a candidate based on his similarity to the sinless so no-need-for-forgiveness jesus?

the answer is no, because the sort of people who would vote for the reptillian newt gingrich aren't actually christians any more than their candidate is. they just need some way to justify their voting habits within the framework of their socially-mandated religion. just like the disgraced speaker likely needs some bullshit self-justification for why it was okay for him to cheat on his wife while impeaching the president for cheating on his wife, the rubes who vote for him need to believe he was forgiven, so they can vote for him and still consider themselves good people.