Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Defending the separation of church and state

My second blog today. Feeling ambitious.

A long, long time ago, like in the late 1980s, I was talking to this very devout born again Christian and said something about being grateful for the separation between church and state in the USA. She said, "I don't think there should be a separation between the church and state. I think God's law should be THE law."

I was little taken aback by that.This woman was not really in the mainstream of organized religions, and I thought for sure she'd appreciate the legal protection of minority religions (and minorities in general) that the Constituion extends.

The thing is, she wanted a union of church and state if it were her religion running things.

Hmmm....let's see. What nation is notorious for uniting the church and the state?

Iran, perhaps? Egypt moving in that direction? Libya, maybe? Chad? Mali? Saudi Arabia? Yemen? Places where they cut off your hands for theft and stone you death for talking to strangers.

Here's why there's a separation between the church and the state, and why it's in the First Amendment, accompanied by Freedom of Speech:
  • When the government is also your religion.... oh dear, there's a horrendous way to start, no? Just smacks of something like marxist zeal, doesn't it? I mean, if you make it "secular."
  • When those who violate government regulations are "condemned to burn in hell forever and ever"... oh heavens, is there no way to express this in a temperate way?
  • When criticizing the government sets you up for charges of blashphemy... good grief, here we go again. Just sounds so extreme, doesn't it?

So maybe you begin to get the idea.

No accident I call this blog "The end of enlightenment." The era of Enlightenment, though it made tons of mistakes and was just bustin' with hubris, also ended 200 years of religious warfare in Europe -- and perhaps even including the Crusades, though apparently the Crusades are ongoing in some peoples' minds.

North America became something of a haven for groups of people persecuted by other groups of people -- Protestants against Catholics, Protestants against Protestants -- look it up. Once Henry VIII rejected the Holy Roman Church and established his own little religious empire, the floodgates opened for all sorts of smiting in the name of tiny variations in doctrine and/or practice, and the rampant breaking off the noses of the other guys' religious statues.

So we had Mary massacreing Protestants, and Elizabeth getting even. And Calvinists, and people for whom Calvinism was not brutal and self-loathing enough riding down on the Calvinists, and Huguenots who were pretty much slaughtered by.... somebody. And the Spanish Inquisition going after Christopher Columbus because he mentioned in his ship's log on a trip to the New World, that lights appeared in the sky arranged like a Minorah. Oh, my God, was he a closet Jew or what? Off with his heaed. And whoever it was who founded Rhode Island -- then promptly outlawed the practice of any other religion but his own. And spiders dangling over the fiery pit of Hell, and all that.

In Virginia, founded by the Crown and mostly loyal to the Crown for the most part, the planters got all pissed off about the "Parson's Pence." See, as a loyal English colony, settlements in Virginia had to have an Anglican parsonage. They paid for this with a tax on the goods (hemp, tobacco, indigo and the like) that they sent back to England. They wanted the tax to be a percentage of the value of their goods, so that if they had a bad year, the amount of the tax would go down to reflect that. But the Crown didn't like that idea. Anyway, it raised a big stink in the southern colonies, which were mostly agribusiness and not established by religious dissenters.

So when push came to shove over the Stamp Act and the tax on tea - and the repeal of the tax on tea, which actually sparked the Boston Tea Pary -- Adams and Jefferson, Madison, Hancock -- you know, all the Usual Suspects, decided -- Stuff it all. People can believe whatever they want. Like, "Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's" and leave the rest alone.

So what does this have to do with Freedom of Speech?

Well, what do people talk about? Stuff they believe in? Policy issues? What's right and wrong?

If the government is God, can you speak against it/Him? That is, without being burned alive, stoned to death, beheaded, drawn and quartered, keel-hauled, imprisoned?

Yet I'm not condemning religion. (Yeah, LOL about the irony of that.) Religion -- or any set of principles and ethics -- provides individuals a personl foundation for making their own decisions and managing their own lives -- without the interference of government.

People need religion. And I'm quite certain the fact that America is such a religous nation, and always has been, is why it's remained relatively free for so long. Prior to Franklin Roosevelt and then Johnson's "Great Society," it was always the church or even non-demonomational religious organizations that provided charity, welfare, medical assistance for the poor, education for the poor, rescued women from brutal husbands, cared for orphans, and supported familes in poverty. So many fiery Victorian-era reformers demanding the construction of sewers, discouraging alcoholism and drug abuse. And they were rather more efficient than today's government bureaucracies -- even though it was these same reformers that launched the push to have their reforms inscribed in law.

In other wods, we didn't need no stinkin' nanny state. We had other resources. We still do. It's just that searching out and finding, and then publicizing and politicizing pockets of poverty and injustice has become a sort of state religion nowadays, as practiced by the Comrade and all his little cohorts -- Pazzo Pelosi, Brain-Dead Harry Reid, et. al.

If they can't find some downtrodden wreck in the USA to hold up as evidence of indifference and cruelty, they go hunitng overseas. And I think that's probably why they're so loathe to recognize that jihadists are a total mess and a threat to the world. the jihadists, in their view, are simply the next batch of misunderstood, discriminated against victims in a cold, mean world. I mean, this is the kind of bullshit they truly believe in. Be nice to the cutthrats and pirates, pander to their whims, send them F-16s and billions of US aid and they'll come to like and respect us.

The thing is, the jihadists have learned to "work the system." I mean apart from Saudi Arabia, who funds these guys -- the USA, through so-called "humanitarian" aid.

And I can say it's bullshit, and even prove that it is bullshit, because of The First Amendment -- free speech and the separation of church and state..

The fact that so many "progressives" -- including the Comrade -- don't like the First Amendment and often suggest it should be "corrected" or "protected" proves my point.

The fact that the Founding Fathers understood the importance of their own rhetoric... those guys were just amazing. They dug so deep, got so close to the heart of political matters, understood so well what government should and shouldn't do -- complete genius. Figured out how one tiny little rule could remake the whole world -- those guys were something else.

I miss them.

A mission for murder and destruction

Hate to say it, but I'm sick of hearing about the Boston Marathon, where two psychos, the brothers Tsarnaev, decided to blow up as many people as possible with bombs made from pressure cookers. I figured it had something to do with Islam from the start. Other people avoided making such claims, and crazy assholes like Michael Moore even suspected it was "right wingers." But the thing had the earmarks of some drunk-on-Allah crazy bastards with a bone to pick with human civilization.

I started out wondering why theTsarnaevs did this. They were from Chechnya, had been granted asylum here. The younger brother who, as it turns out, is the only survivor after an extensive manhunt to track these guys down, had scholarships for school and stuff like that. Their parents were professionals -- the family aren't like ignorant peasants or anything like that.

So, kind of curious. How do you wake up one morning and decide to start killing people? I mean, how does that become your mission in life unless you're Ted Bundy?

Apparently the older brother, who was killed while apparently trying to blow up even more Americans, was supposedly a devout muslim, and over the last few months, preached really hard at his younger brother to join him in the faith.

I'm sorry, but that "faith" is looking more and more like one of not much more than murder, death, destruction every day. I mean, does it have ANY redeeming qualities?

Well, I suppose there's the 72 virgins.

The more civilized muslims -- who anyone rarely hears from, not even a peep of shame or apology, though the world pretty much demanded the Pope apologize for pederast priests -- claim that Islam teaches peace. Apparently that's in the back of the book somewhere and most muslims don't read that far into it.

But if it does teach peace, then how come muslims keep blowing things up and killing people? In the name of Allah, mind you. I mean, if they were just run-of-the-mill mass murderers... plenty of those. But all these jihadists are shouting ally akbar or whatever as they shoot down everyone their bullets can reach (like that nutjob in the military), or like these Tsarnaev brothers, the latest wingnuts, dropping bombs next to children and smirking happily with their little secret, and no doubt praying to allah that the thing goes off and kills as many people as possible.

I just don't think the world can afford these people. They don't play well with others. And why, for Pete's sake, if they hate America so much -- why the hell do they come here? Why don't they stay in their armpit countries and bow and scrape towards Mecca in peace?

So these Tsarnaev brothers were killed/captured, but that's not enough. Now we've got to hear about whether the surviving kid is considered a common murderer or an "enemy combatant," the latter so that US security people can get information from him.

Here's the thing. I doubt this punk has any information. His big brother apparently proselytized a number of people -- including an American ex-wife who now totters around with a bag over her head, having converted to Islam. The big brother also reportedly had a Web site where he routinely published a bunch of jihadist, anit-American bullshit, like your average, every day loonie toon. I don't think the little brother knows much about anything. He just bought the image of being some kind of "freedom fighter." It redirected his life from efforts to develop himself into a human being. A lot easier than finishing school and actually working, starting a family and all that.

Yeah right, a "freedom fighter." Freedom to kill anyone who doesn't agree with you? Freedom to beat your wife and kill gay people, deny women education, and stone them if they dare speak to a man who is not their husband. Sound like "freedom" to you?

Sort of adolescent, really, isn't it? This all-consuming passion. Reminds me somehow of Judy Garland singing to a photograph of Clark Gable.Though I don't think Judy wanted to kill Clark.

I mean, these guys are like two-year-olds having a temper tantrum. If the only way your life has meaning is when you're the only human being left alive on earth, you've got some serious problems. "Control freak" hardly covers it.

So Bob Beckel, the token liberal at Fox, has suggested that the USA stop allowing muslim students into the USA. Sounds like a plan. I'd guess most of those admitted aren't really students anyway. They're just self- or otherwise-appointed murderers. I don't want them here, either. We don't have to actually import psychotic murderers. We have plenty already. I mean, I don't think that Holmes kid, with Joker fantasies, will we running around loose any time soon, either. Prisons serve a purpose, and it's not rehabilitation.

But if muslims in general refuse to be civilized, refuse to respect or even recognize the rights of other people, the world simply can't afford to have them around. They cause too much trouble -- and for no good reason. They seem to be causing enormous problems in Europe and don't respect the laws of the nations where they migrate. So perhaps the UN or someone should brick them into Iran or someplace and let them happily kill each other and leave the rest of us alone.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

"Over their dead bodies," or the Constitution dies for [somebody's] sins

We have this rather disgusting tradition in America when it comes to 2nd Amendment issues. I remember when that Brady guy was shot. Actually, it was during an assassination attempt directed at Ronald Reagan, and Brady very heroically stepped in the way. Reagan was shot anyway, but not fatally. Brady ended up with a bullet in his head and severe physical disability.

So his wife would routinely roll him out in a wheelchair and parade him around in front of the press and at rallies to advertise for gun control.

I always felt sorry for him.Thought he was something of a hero. But looking like a helpless, damaged wreck at the gun control functions. And felt doubly sorry for him, that his wife was so enthusiastlic about exploiting him in that way.

Then there was the so-called "trial" of Tim McVeigh, the guy who bombed the federal Murrah building in Oklahoma City. Not saying McVeigh was innocent, but the trial was a complete joke. Get a prosecutor in a wheelchair to awkwardly maneauver himself around the courtroom, self-righteouslessly interrogating "witnesses," most of whom turned out to be relatives of people killed in the bombing.

"Tell me, Mrs. Smith, how do you feel about your husband being blasted into jelly?" Or, "Did you have enough identified body parts left to bury or no?"

What this had to do with McVeigh's guilt or innocence, I don't know. None of those people knew a damn thing about how or why McVeigh committed the crime. They were just "misery props." "See how hurt they are? Don't you want convict somebody just to get even?"

The US mainstream news was so saturated with sympathy unadulterated by any thought and/or logic that I started reading the reports on the trial from European sources. The European press, slaves to socialism as they are, were rather appalled that the event proved to be a "kangaroo court." And they happily crowed about the shocking lack of any kind of intelligent standard in the American judicial system.

So now with this latest rash of mass shootings. Apart from hearing Michelle Malkin argue with the pro-gun control people in Colorado, I didn't really follow the anti-gun legislation that generated a bunch of new restrictions on gun owners in that state. But I'm quite sure the friends and families of survivors, and the survivors themselves, had an opportunity to talk to state legislators and explain in bloody detail all the horrors of that night at the movies, and how events have negtively and permanently altered their lives.

And now about the schoolkids shot in Newtown, Connecticut, and citizens of that town generously taking the time to volunteer to serve as misery props for the Comrade's tirades against gun ownership. Its' really kind of sad. That is to say, it's horrible -- horrible -- what happened with Adam Lanza going off and shooting the place up, killing those kids that had nothing to do with his twisted fantasy life. But I believe it's equally tragic that the parents and families of those dead would promote destroying the concept of individual rights just to be "doing something" about lunatics running loose among the population.

Nothing anyone has proposed so far would have prevented the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Nothing, except maybe Wayne LaPierre (NRA chief) suggesting the schools have armed guards.

And I think really how low, mean, cynical, and just generally vicious and unethical, for the Comrade to so cheerfully exploit those families' grief to promote his political agenda. Hey, Comrade, do you pack a tiny coffin to roll up onto the stage beside your teleprompters to gain support for gun control? Apparently his ideas aren't persuasive enough otherwise.

It would be probably more effective for the Comrade to address his staunch gun-toting supporters among the gangstah rappahs and drug dealers in the Inner Cities -- most of whom I doubt have or would even dream of taking the time for a background check or to voluntararily register their weapons. That's more the crowd to be filing off the serial numbers on their AR-15s and Glocks, no? Why doesn't he talk to them? They're much more of a problem than NRA members if you follow Chicago crime statistics. You want dead kids? Ride along with Chicago police on Saturday night.

It seems kind of stupid to me, that in the face of people being killed because they could not adequately defend themselves, to demand that no one be allowed to adequately defend himself.

Is this some kind of twisted variation on "turn the other cheek?" Like, "You killed my first grader, here's my kindergartner. We won't defend him, either."

It's based on this crazy -- can't say "logic" so let's call it "dialectic" -- that swears up and down that if you lay down your weapons, your enemies will, too. Does that work in the real world? Seems to me that if you render yourself defenseless, you only invite bullying and intimidation and worse.

So I'm just not getting the pro-gun control arguments, but then I value reasoned debate above Comrade-style cheerleading over the corpses of tiny dead bodies.

I guess I'm just not very susceptible to the notion of "collective guilt."

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

Sibelius surprised the nation still rejects socialized medicine

Blockhead Sibelius -- sorry, I'm not sure what her first name is so I'm going with the descriptive -- who's in charge of grinding out tons and tons of health-related regulations that nobody will ever use, told a group at Harvard that she's "surprised" that the population, especially the individual states, are resisting socialized medicine.

What an idiot, no?

Doesn't anybody remember? Surely Sibelius doesn't. That bill only passed because so many senators were bribed -- like Senate Whore Mary Landruie from the Big Easy (figures), who happily acceptedd not $100 million, but $500 million for her vote for socialized medicine. And she was proud of it, (in fishnet stockings and a push-up bra, right?)

The Nelson moron from Nebraska, who was pressured into voting for the bill -- actually, it was rumored the White House threatened to shut down a big Air Force base in Nebraska -- only to have the Governior of Nebraska and hundreds of citizens publish lots and lots of statements disowning him, claiming they were ashamed to be associiated with him. I bet he has lots of fun when he goes back home, if he does. He's not running again, by the way. Why waste the time and money?

Then another jughead in Florida who voted "yes" because he got an exemption in the bill so that retirees in Florida could keep their Medicare Advantage -- the bill actually terminates Medicare Advantage for everyone else.

Dont' remember this? The disgraceful armtwisting and pay-offs? It just kills me when people say, "Well, it's the law now. Congress voted for it."

Congress -- and the rest of the nation -- had it shoved down their throats.

And NOT ONE REPUBLICAN voted for the bill.

So if you've conveniently forgotten all of this, maybe you do recall ol' Max Baucus on some kind of toot -- whether he was drunk or had just taken too muich Prozac is probably debatable -- whining on the Senate floor about how his eat-shit party would be stuck with the whole blame for socialized medcine, since NOT ONE REPUBLICAN voted for it.

Dontcha remember? It was a real show. Your senators at work. Whining like a bunch of half-assed, addle-brained babies.

And the population -- 57% opposed to passage of the bill.

Since the bill passed a couple years ago, public opposition to socialized medicine has hovered between 53% and 57% ever since. And it's trending up.

So to head-up-her-ass Pazzo Pelosi, who blithely commented, "We have to pass the bill to find out what's in it!" like she was entertaining her usual constituency of pot-smoking tree-huggers... Well, you stupid, crazy fool -- we're finding out what's in it and it reeking more and more every day. Stinking up the whole damn country. Quite effective in that way.

And Blockhead Sibelius is "surprised?"

Where the hell ya been, Blockhead? Maybe if you stepped your sorry ass outside the Beltway every now and then and acquainted yourself with the citizenry, you could save yourself the spike in your blood pressure.

She's "surpirsed," She's also quite obviously stupid. But then we could probably assume that. I mean, look who she works for.

She said she thought after the Supreme Coirt ruling, the US population would just lay back and enjoy it.

But we don't typically make very good rape victims, Blockhead.

And here's a suggestion for you -- shred that bill into confetti and use it to fill your empty head. That's probably the best use for it.

Tuesday, April 2, 2013

Obamacare going down

Very interesting news today. Apparently the federal government has decided that the medical insurance exchanges for small business (or something) for Obamacare won't be ready on time, so they've delayed implementation of Obamacare for another year. Pushing it back to 2015 -- after the next mid-term elections. And I hardly think that's a coincidence.

I wrote "the insurance exchanges for small business (or something)" might not be ready because I'm not exactly sure if that's what's holding everything up. It may be that the feds don't quite understand what's holding everything up. Businesses can't get any straight answers from the feds about what they're supposed to do, and there are still at least a dozen states that have refused to set up the insurance exchanges. They're free to refuse, in which case, the feds say they will do it.

Additionally, the US Senate -- at least -- has voted to repeal the tax on medical devices that is part of the bill. No less a jughead than Senator Al Franken, clown prince... or rather senator from Minnesota, actually stood up in the Senate and recited a litany of reasons that the tax would pretty much destroy any innovation in medical devices (evertything from rubber gloves to prosthetic limbs), and how the tax penalizes the successful firms in the industry.

I -- and thousands of other people in the USA, the reasonably intelligent among us -- could have told Franken that, and probably did, before he voted for the damn bill. So perhaps spending a few years in the US Senate and actually confronting the issues head-on has ground away some of his sharper socialist edges. Who knows. Quite possibly he's simply not as blankly ignorant as he was four years ago, but I'm sure he makes up for his revelaton about medical taxes with stubborn blockheadedness in other areas.

Also, I think it was Senator Mitch McConnell who issued a photo of a stack of standard typing paper about 10 feet tall -- maybe even taller -- the 20,000+ regulations that Obamacare has spawned so far.

Have to laugh,. It's just impossible. No one will be able to track or monitor any of this.

Many of the regulations that have been publicly discussed -- and not many have been -- seem to contradict oithers.

Doctors don't know what to do, and a recent survey done by Pew Research, if I recall correctly, noted that 60% of doctors now in practice plan to retire or otherwise leave their practices over the next three years. Not enough medical students are coming up to replace them.

Insurance premiums have been steadily rising. At least one government agency reports that insurance premiums will increase anywhere from 20% to 100% when Obamacare is implemented. Insurance couild run $20,000.00 per year for a family of four.

A big issue is that with Obamacare requiring that small businesses with more than 50 full-time employees will be compelled to buy the cadillace Obamacar health care packages or pay a penalty. No one's hiring because of that, and many companies are contemplating reducing workers' hours to less than 30 per week. And most would prefer to pay the penalty for NOT providing insurance than to pay for the insurance. They're not being mean or stingy, just trying to survive.

And because of the above, the latest estimates indicate that about 70 million people who are now insured will lose their insurance when Obamacare goes into effect.

And wasn't Obamacare supposed to solve the problem of soemthing like 30 million uninsured?

Hate to dance a jig while singing, "Ha ha, told you so!" But, you know, "Ha ha! Told you so."

Considerable hopes that this killer legislation will see repeal or piecemeal demise before it ever goes into effect. It's a crock of shit, pie-in-the-sky nightmare scheme and it's not surprising that it's not even remotely workable.

Ha Ha! Told you so!