Is There No Hope?

From here.

I am one American that is ashamed of what this nation has become. I am sick to death of watching my country invade other nations for their oil. I am ashamed of the people we wantonly attack in the “name of democracy”. I cringe when I see police officers kill citizens with impunity and beat people as if they the police were nothing but state sponsored gangs. I am disgusted with this so-called Presidential race where you can’t tell one candidate but for their gender or race and the citizens of this country fall for the same old tired rhetoric that there will be “change”.

As for whether or not Obama represents real change, see here and here.

The Truth About Veal

Lying About Veal

Our Enemy In Blue

The enemy is armed to the teeth and wearing blue.

Under Siege

THE DISAPPEARING BEES

A new survey had grim news about honey bees: Slightly more than a third of the nation's commercially managed hives died in the past year. It's the second consecutive year of "substantial" losses of bees...

Big Mac? A Tax!

The idea of taxing fast food came up in New Jersey recently and Gov. Jon S. Corzine called it a "constructive suggestion".

"I think this country has gone too much in the direction of fast and unhealthy food, and if people are taxed they may terminate that and turn toward more healthy foods," said West Orange resident Maureen Felix.

In other words, because Maureen Felix doesn't like the way other people choose to live their lives, she wants to change their behavior by taxing it. This is a perfect example of the danger of giving government the power to rule over us. It leads ultimately to this kind of fascist thinking and policies. Most fast food may not be very healthy, but then a lot of restaurant food in general isn't good for you. Neither are many items you can buy in the supermarket. Should we tax ice cream, frozen pot pies and potato chips as well? I was sitting in Jack In The Box just yesterday after a hard day of moving and watched as an obviously not-well-to-do family enjoyed a hot meal purchased from the dollar menu. Burgers, chicken sandwiches, fries, tacos, all available for about a buck each (or in the case of the tacos, two for a dollar) and while a steady diet of such foods would not serve anyone well in the long run, their cheapness makes it easy to get out of the house and have a little fun and fill an empty stomach. If I am ever homeless, the spare change I manage to scoop up will partly be used to get a quick hot meal from such places. Thank God for fast food, and the freedom that made fast food restaurants possible. Thank the other guy and his evil minions for pro government busy bodies like miss Felix that want to control our lives. To hell with such dictators!

The Only Good Deal Is No Deal

So last week I happened to catch Dull or Not Dull? It was the episode where "President" Bush made an appearance. One of the contestants was Joseph Kobes, an Iraq War veteran. Mr. Kobes served a tour of duty in Iraq and then volunteered for two more. This lead Deal or No Deal host Howie Mandel to call Kobes "the ultimate American" and then gush about how this hired killer had "served our country" and that he was a "hero" and the he had "protected us" while in Iraq and that he (Howie) was "proud to be here with you" and lots of other bullshit. Whether or not Kobes actually killed anyone personally as a solider is irrelevant, he was sent to kill and "serve" by helping to illegally and immorally occupy a country we had no right to invade in the first place. This makes Mr. Kobes a criminal agent of a criminal government and even more so as he willingly served two more tours of duty. One might argue that he could not have known when he joined the military that War Criminal Bush would send him to Iraq, but Kobes is without excuse for his last two tours in Iraq, for he volunteered. He was praised by Howie and the audience for this, when he should have instead been booed and tarred and feathered and booted out of the studio on his traitorous war criminal ass!

I would like to ask Howie (a good juvenile name for an ignorant juvenile fool) how exactly Kobes served us by being in Iraq? What benefit have the American people received from such service and how, Howie, has this "protected" us? And why exactly does joining the military and getting yourself wounded (the jackass Kobes received the purple heart; big fucking deal) make you the "ultimate American"? More of an American than everyone else in every other profession, no matter how much real good they do? Any idiot can join the military (and many do, as the standards have gone way down due to the shortage of pawns recruits) and even get themselves killed but this does not make them a hero or a better American than anyone else. We should praise real heroes who support and defend our constitution by opposing illegal wars and the vast evil we have committed against the Iraqi people. I'll bet we'll never see Cindy Sheehan on Howie's idiotic, time-wasting, super moronic game show, but if anyone should be dubbed the ultimate American, it should be her. Instead we get NBC on their Deal or No Deal website saying of Kobes "A true patriot gets personal thanks from the President", a true patriot! How about all those who do real acts of courage by protesting this evil, illegal Iraq War and those who defend the Bill of Rights against the outrages perpetrated against civil liberties by the Bush administration? How about those who are sickened by the evil of holding people for years without charging them with a crime, as our government is doing now at Guantanamo Bay and that is considered just a joke to some, something to laugh about rather than cry about. But on Deal or No Deal we get an appearance by Bush, the man ultimately responsible for the injustice of Guantanamo, laughing it up and making jokes about his low approval rating from the American public. I guess its okay to have an unpopular criminal "President" on your show though, isn't it? That's not too controversial, is it lapdog NBC, you cowardly, unpatriotic traitors! And by the way, if Bush is so unpopular and the people oppose his policies so strongly (else why is he so disliked)? wouldn't the "democratic" thing to do be to change your polices to suit the people's wishes? Wouldn't that be "democracy"? I guess democracy is okay for other countries where we are supposedly trying to establish it by force but not good enough for Americans, eh, Howie, Kobes and Bush? If Howie had the guts (as a real man would have) to denounce Bush and his crimes against America on the show, well, then Howie would have been the true patriot and the real "Ultimate American." By the way, the idiot Kobes kept turning down the banker's offers and ended with just $26,000, at least until he spun the wheel at the end and tripled the amount to $78,000. During his case-opening I was rooting against him (I always root against military assholes) but just so you don't think I'm completely without empathy even for bad people, I was hoping he'd triple that $26,000. That's how much of an ultimate American hero I am. Praise me and kiss my ass!

The Smog Monster

Short-term exposure to smog, or ozone, is clearly linked to premature deaths that should be taken into account when measuring the health benefits of reducing air pollution, a National Academy of Sciences review concludes.
Ground-level ozone is demonstrated often by the yellow haze or smog that lingers in the air.
The findings contradict arguments made by some White House officials that the connection between smog and premature death has not been shown sufficiently and that the number of saved lives should not be calculated in determining clean air benefits.
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Must Children Be "Socialized"?

There is some good info over at Survival Blog including this on Fostering the Survival Instinct in Babies and Young Children:

There has been a great push in this country by child rearing experts and the medical profession that children must be "socialized". It has been a pivotal buzzword for educators and parents alike. It is a main reason for the negative swell toward homeschooling. Yet, it is my contention that what we need to foster, from birth, is natural instinct. Natural instinct is what we understand as the survival instinct. It is an innate instinct of distrust. It is the instinct that alerts us as we start down a dark alleyway on our way home from work. It is the instinct that forces us to take a step back from a new person that we meet that sets off alarm bells in our brain. It is this instinct that must be fostered in our children and future generations.

From the moment our children are born, they are whisked away from the mother in the arms of another. As parents, we hand our babies off to Aunt Betty and Uncle Ernie, the day care worker, people we meet, and those we don't even know, the girls at the office, and those child care workers at church and the gym. It is expected. Those that don't hand their children over are scolded, scorned or scoffed at. Negative comments about the welfare of the baby are passed around behind the back of the cautious parent.

All of this passing around from person to person and situation to situation kills the child's very first survival instinct- distrust. A baby who is bonded closely with his primary caregiver will not take kindly to being passed from person to person. They will scream until they are returned to that person whom they trust above all else. A child who has been passed around and has never bonded closely with one primary caregiver will not display any sense of distrust with strangers or strange situations at all.

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Walking With Bees

I took my walk again the other day and I stopped by the drug store on the way back to browse. After I left the store to walk the rest of the way home I saw a girl a little ways in front of me on a bike. She stopped at one point on the sidewalk and then crossed the busy street in the middle, then continued on her way on the other side. I wondered why she had decided to cross right there. I kept going and soon came upon a swarm of bees next to a wall by the sidewalk. It happened very fast so I just stepped to the side as far as I could to go around them as they were buzzing and flying in a big cloud almost out to the curb. A horrible thought entered my mind as I hurried along, "What if these are KILLER BEES?". I know that much of the southwestern US has been invaded by the Africanized Honey Bees that are very aggressive as opposed to the more docile European honey bees. I have read stories of the killer bees chasing people for blocks and stinging them to death. Well, I kept walking without looking back but I heard a buzzing around my head and a few of the bees were following me! I walked faster and soon they gave up the chase and left me alone.

Democracy Sucks

You better believe it does!

The Income Tax Is Theft

"Stop thief! Help, help! I've just been robbed!" If you were to hear someone say this and you ran to find out what had happened and they told you that an organized group of thugs had stolen a large portion of their hard earned income, you would certainly be sympathetic, wouldn't you? Of course you would, until they explained that it was the government in the form of an agency called the IRS that had committed the thievery. Upon hearing this you would probably laugh or call the person insane or a nut or something. But why would you react in such a manner? Here is one definition of theft:

In the criminal law, theft (also known as stealing) is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given consent. As a term, it is used as shorthand for all major crimes against property, encompassing offences such as burglary, embezzlement, larceny, looting, robbery, mugging, trespassing, shoplifting, intrusion, fraud (theft by deception) and sometimes criminal conversion. In some jurisdictions, theft is considered to be synonymous with larceny; in others, theft has replaced larceny.
Someone who carries out an act of or makes a career of theft is known as a thief.

I like that last sentence in particular. It means everyone who works for the IRS and almost all of those holding elected public office is a thief. Beyond that it's important not to be confused. If something is wrong or immoral, it doesn't matter who does it. Just because something is "legal" by the laws of a country means nothing. If you believe theft is wrong when an individual or private criminal organization engages in it, then you have to be consistent and oppose it when government does it, otherwise you have no real standard of morality that can be called objective, but a sort of divine command theory with government as God deciding what is right or wrong and granting to itself the right to violate the rights of everyone else in the society.

I was originally inspired to write this by an atheist who had written against conservatives and libertarians who want lower taxes or the income tax eliminated. This atheist thought this was immoral, as to oppose taxes is to take money from programs that help the poor, etc. This same atheist also is against the Iraq war! Why the exclamation point? Because your taxes, idiot, also support the war and the US occupation of Iraq. You are funding the killing of thousands of innocents with your tax dollars. Fool! Be consistent, you politically correct jerk. Massive taxation means a huge federal government, and only a massive tax base can support our current evil interventionist foreign policy.

And whoever came up with the notion that wages equal income? Most of us that pay the income tax do so on the remuneration we receive for our labor, not from interest or dividend income. If I trade 40 hours of my time and labor for a weekly paycheck, I have gained nothing. It no more can be called income than if I trade you a bag of apples for an equally valued bag of oranges. Should I be taxed on such an exchange? What if I had to give the government 30% of the oranges I got from you? I'd actually be behind on the exchange, wouldn't I? But that is what is actually happening when I pay tax on the wages I've earned by the sweat of my brow. Think about it. Not only am I a victim of theft, but I'm now also a part time government slave, being forced to work for my master, Big Brother.

I was listening to some stupid talking airhead news anchor on one of the cable networks regarding the rebate most tax payers will start receiving beginning in May. The airhead asked what people are going to do with that "free" money. That would be like a burglar stealing things from my house for years and then giving back a TV set and then having someone ask me "What are you going to do with that free TV?".

Atheist Fools

The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God (Psalm 14:1)

Taking the above bible verse as his starting point, Zachary Kroger made the following short video, which became a YouTube sensation, garnering both praise and condemnation from thousands. If you haven't seen it before, it will either inspire you or (if you are religious) possibly anger you (Kroger received the usual Christian hate emails, such grown-up stuff as "you'll burn in hell"). Such nice Jesus-loving people!

Here is an interview with Kroger by the Secular Student Alliance. In the interview Kroger (a film student) explains what inspired him to create the video.

While I loved it, I wish he had included the following atheists:

John Lennon

Katherine Hepburn

Charlie Chaplin, and

Stanley Kubrick.

I also wonder about Charles Schulz being included. He may very well have been agnostic, but I always assumed he was a least a nominal Christian, what with A Charlie Brown Christmas having an overtly religious message and the Bible so prominent in so many Peanuts strips. Schultz was a member of the Church of God until he died, but did say in the late 80s that he considered himself a secular humanist, so his final view on God seems ambiguous.

But why quibble. It's a great video!





Note: I originally posted this at another blog. I have also posted this video before at Skeptical Eye, but without the additional commentary. I thought it was worth posting again. On whether or not John Lennon was really an atheist, see here and here. As someone commented at the first link: "... it pretty much surmises that we don't really know if Lennon was an atheist when he died, more probably an agnostic. However, for me, "Imagine" is quite telling - only an atheist could have written it. But, having said that, the most I would offer is that he was probably an atheist at the time it was written."

Thomas Szasz and H.L. Mencken could have been included in the video as well. I think the video included too many Hollywood figures, so more people outside of entertainment would have been nice.