Tannishblog

Its high time governments of the world append the Endangered Species list to include humans. I’m serious! We are the Next Great Disaster waiting to happen.

Muslims have a 20-year plan to take over the United States. Many in America believe its our right to seek global imperialism. Some tie that in with a religious mandate. Christians are more militant as they anticipate Armageddon (brought about by their belief in the End of Times - a self-fulfilling prophesy.) Climate changes is already rampant. The deserts will grow as the seas rise. Oil production, the base of our society, has peaked, threatening whole economies.  Genocide occurs unchecked in the poorest parts of the world, as the fight for dwindling resources escalates. Soon this will occur in other regions. Nuclear proliferation is still happening despite the dearth of news items on the subject. More small nations have them, and some of them are hostile to America (imagine that!)

More and more rational, intelligent people are forming questions about the fate of mankind. The average American’s I meet can’t help but wonder if the Christian prophesies they’ve grown up with are imminent. Yes, people have been wondering this for ever, but each decade there’s more evidence accumulating. Alfred Nobel saw this coming a century ago. These aren’t your stereotypical bearded ragamuffin ravings.

So, I think it would be prescient to add humans to an endangered species list in small hope of someone at a bureaucratic level taking notice and trying to address the issue. A slim chance, I know, but a slim change may be all we have left.

Happy Easter!

For those of you contemplating a huge meal in honor of the gruesome death of a Jewish rabble-rouser and his subsequent mysterious disappearance, please remember, as the saying goes, "He Died For Your Sins."

This simple yet unsubstantiated claim is ambiguous: Did he die to absolve us of past sins, thereby cleansing humanity of its depravity, or did he die to pave the way to a continuation of sins, compounded by a deific belief in this peaceful man as a reason for violence and by technological advances in warfare? Much ill has been perpetrated in the name of Jesus. Much good has been done, as well, but the ill lasts longer.

 Jesus Christ, by all accounts, was a peaceful, tolerant man. More of a political advocate that a religious figure, he bucked the trend of his time and caused the Roman government some consternation. For this, he died a gruesome death, a public spectacle for political gain. What humanity has done to him since is even more frightening. Whole nations have been destroyed because they didn’t see the need to convert to Christianity. Just ask any of the vestiges of the great Sioux nation, for one example. The list is too long to enumerate here.

 Our president believes in Jesus. He leapt to the forefront of the world stage propelled by his stated religiosity: "I listen to a higher father," he said. I wonder whom he meant? Not long after he stole the presidency through illegal vote-purging in Florida, he was presented with a world-class disaster from which to make a name for himself and to show the world what he’s made of. He did all of that.

Our born-again Christian president twisted truth in order to go to war on a nation unconnected to the aforementioned tragedy, causing repercussions not limited to bankrupting the richest nation on earth, killing tens-of-thousands of innocent people, destroying a nation and killing or damaging thousands of young Americans, their families, and ensuring a continued drain on the national economy in the form of providing for the maimed soldiers and their families. The full effect of this disaster will be felt for at least a generation. So much for believing in the Prince of Peace.

Is this what it means to "listen to a higher father"? Is this what it means when people say Christ dies for our sins? I didn’t work; we continue to sin, but now we can do it in Jesus’ name. Any true follower of Jesus would put a stop to war. Any true follower of Jesus would hold accountable the people responsible for destroying so much for lies. :Thou Shall Not Kill", yet this man does. "Thou Shall Not Steal", yet this man and his allies are stealing the sovereignty of a proud people only to steal its oil. That covers covetousness as well. "Thou Shall Not Lie", yet that’s all we hear from our administration.

Are these actions of a Christian nature? Did Jesus die for this? Or perhaps the ill-fated Jew died so you can eat Ham at Passover? Bon Appetite.

The papers are screaming it: Barack Obama has money! Because the papers all feature this tidbit, Americans will reflexively believe that this is important. That he is young, fresh, idealistic and charismatic is no so important. What matters is that he has the money to take on the Clintonian machine.

I’m sick of America’s money-centricity. What good has it done our nation or our world that every facet of life in this country is measured in dollars? What good has it done you personally? Be honest!

 A Canadian friend of mine mentioned recently how, in America, "everything is money." Say what you want about our northern neighbors, but she was right. Status equals money. Marketing determines status. Sales determine jobs, and jobs determine salaries which determine what status symbols one might afford.

The car I drive tells others about my economic strata, as does the neighborhood in which I live, as does my choice of clothing, my hobbies, my job… From these cultural cues, strangers decide how to treat with me, how to behave. Opportunities are given or withheld entirely due to perceived social-economic criteria and not based upon evaluation of the capabilities of a person. Money drives this, and in America, there is no escape from the ingrained discrimination built into this system.

In America, money is all - money is God. We are, to a certain degree, enslaved by our addiction to money. The freedom that the political right love to espouse is relative to how much we tow the line of cultural expectations, and not at all an expression of true freedom. This is on many levels a necessary trade-off, as humankind has continually proved it is incapable of living with itself. So a set of rules that limit chaos and anarchy an unlimited free choice is necessary.

Money sets that limit. It determines who is ruled and who makes the rules. If one is to join the latter class, one must adhere to the machinery of moneymaking, and give a substantial portion of their freedom to the mechanism. To date, this is the best system humans have produced to purge the world from the failings of humanity. It’s not perfect. I would argue if any system devised by us can ever reach perfection.

But in America, the only nation which I am familiar enough with to comment upon, we have exceeded the necessity of such a monetary measuring stick and taken things to an extreme. Our culture, for all it’s homage to a Judeo-Christian Godhead, worships wealth above all. As a result, we have become dysfunctional members of a global society, of a world brimming in humanity and stunted by the false perception of gaining happiness through material acquisition. The spirituality assumed by the founders of the constitution, the religiosity they fought for and took to be a inherent part of the human experience, has evaporated.

That is why the news services make such noise over a presidential candidate’s coffers. It is more important than the man or his message, and will be given more airtime as the contest continues. In this century, more perhaps than any other, power is commodity - just another thing to buy and sell. The common denominator of America is $.

The following is  from Sara at Orcinus:

Hate crime is a low-level form of terrorism designed to disenfranchise, stifle, and ultimately remove certain people from the public sphere by forcing them to erect imaginary boundaries of fear in their own heads. It causes people to change their behavior, shrink their horizons, and stop participating fully in their own lives. Suddenly, there are places — the synagogue, the clinic, downtown after dark, professional conferences, the comments threads that form the living rooms of their own online homes — that they can no longer approach with a feeling of acceptance, belonging, and safety.

This is from Michele Malkin’s site:

Dear Muslim Terrorist Plotter/Planner/Funder/Enabler/Apologist,

You do not know me. But I am on the lookout for you. You are my enemy. And I am yours.

I am John Doe.

I am traveling on your plane. I am riding on your train. I am at your bus stop. I am on your street. I am in your subway car. I am on your lift.

I am your neighbor. I am your customer. I am your classmate. I am your boss.

I am John Doe.

I will never forget the example of the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 who refused to sit back on 9/11 and let themselves be murdered in the name of Islam without a fight.

I will never forget the passengers and crew members who tackled al Qaeda shoe-bomber Richard Reid on American Airlines Flight 63 before he had a chance to blow up the plane over the Atlantic Ocean.

I will never forget the alertness of actor James Woods, who notified a stewardess that several Arab men sitting in his first-class cabin on an August 2001 flight were behaving strangely. The men turned out to be 9/11 hijackers on a test run.

I will act when homeland security officials ask me to “report suspicious activity.”

I will embrace my local police department’s admonition: “If you see something, say something.”

I am John Doe.

I will protest your Jew-hating, America-bashing “scholars.”

I will petition against your hate-mongering mosque leaders.

I will raise my voice against your subjugation of women and religious minorities.

I will challenge your attempts to indoctrinate my children in our schools.

I will combat your violent propaganda on the Internet.

I am John Doe.

I will support law enforcement initiatives to spy on your operatives, cut off your funding, and disrupt your murderous conspiracies.

I will oppose all attempts to undermine our borders and immigration laws.

I will resist the imposition of sharia principles and sharia law in my taxi cab, my restaurant, my community pool, the halls of Congress, our national monuments, the radio and television airwaves, and all public spaces.

I will not be censored in the name of tolerance.

I will not be cowed by your Beltway lobbying groups in moderate clothing. I will not cringe when you shriek about “profiling” or “Islamophobia.”

I will put my family’s safety above sensitivity. I will put my country above multiculturalism.

I will not submit to your will. I will not be intimidated.

I am John Doe.

Pass it on.

Thus goes the battle cry of the Paranoid Pandemic. Google shows a measly 1,730,000 iterations of this meme-of-madness. The first several pages illustrated the depths of the Wingnut Echo Chamber. Truly astounding how many otherwise healthy Americans are willing to sell their liberty for the freedom to cower in fear behind the shield of racism. Or, and the General says:

Dear traitorous Brownislamunistofascist, Homoislamunistofascist, Femislamunistofascist, Poorislamunistofascist, JehovahWitnessislamunististfascist, Hebrislamunistofascist, and/or Libislamunistofascist,You do not know me. But I am on the lookout for you. You are my enemy. And I am yours.I am Michelle’s hood.

You do not know me. But I am on the lookout for you. You are my enemy. And I am yours.

I am Michelle’s hood.

In the spirit of good blogmanship and in fear of the holy wrath of the General’s Glorious Conservative Christian Cultural Revolutionaries, I cannot post the attendant picture of the Divine Miss M in a very fashionable white silk, pointed KKK hoodie.

I’m sure everyone will be wearing one soon. Make them red-white and blue, though, and sell them at Wal-Mart.

Apologies to the makers of the famous powdered H2O additive:

That must be good stuff they pass around the sauna stones at Republican National-whatever gatherings. To say it’s Electric Kool-aid doesn’t cover it; the Merry Pranksters gang got some compassion from their experiments. People like John McCain and Mike Pence (R-IN) are drinking Crack Cocaine Kool-aid to think that a staged, one-hour "tour" of the Shorja market in Baghdad was anything like a normal shopping trip.

The delegation arrived at the market, which is called Shorja, on Sunday with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company — and attack helicopters circled overhead, a senior American military official in Baghdad said. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit.

I regularly don body armor, hire sharpshooters and a full company of soldiers with Humvees when I go to the market. Apparently so does Mike Pence:

At a news conference shortly after their outing, Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, and his three Congressional colleagues described Shorja as a safe, bustling place full of hopeful and warmly welcoming Iraqis — “like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summertime,” offered Representative Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican who was a member of the delegation.

I’m glad I don’t live in Indianapolis. Meanwhile, in Realityopolis, the Iraqi merchants view yesterday’s pageant differently:

“They paralyzed the market when they came,” Mr. Faiyad said during an interview in his shop on Monday. “This was only for the media.”

He added, “This will not change anything.”

I’m sure the impact of such high-and-mighty Americans will make no difference to the beleaguered Iraqis, but this silliness may have profound impact on John McCain’s electability quotient. Pass the juice, son!

Four years ago and then some, the Bushniks created the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) out of fear and the need to look like something was being done about their fear. Amorphous and veiled behind a blackout of news coverage and secrecy, this huge addition to our already vast bureaucratic behemoth has

Just for giggles, I searched the following phrase in Google to see all the great and wonderful things the Wizards of DHS have been doing for our country:

"What has the Department of Homeland Security done for you?"

This is the resulting page; one article that has little actual substance. I tried a different tack:

"accomplishments of the department of homeland security"

Much to my bemused un-surprise, the Greatest Search Engine Yet Created, after years of aggregating the collective knowledge of the Known Universe, found one page of entries. A grand total of seven items, most involving testimonies of DHS officials to congress after only the first year. At least one entry is a duplicate. Nothing since then.

Has congress not bothered to monitor the fledgling agency? Perhaps the information is part of the mountain of classified documents our secretive, paranoid administration holds so tightly. Whatever the cause, information about the DHS is not the the delectation of the masses.

I ask this: What has the DHS done for you? Name five clear accomplishments of the Department of Homeland Security? I can only think of one. The politically expedient and curiously convenient thermometer of Terror Alerts. (did you know in the new Windows Vista sidebar gadgetry you can get the latest terror alert downloaded right to your desktop?) It’s not like the DHS has hammered out a smooth protocol for airport security. Besides absorbing long-standing governmental agencies like a cancer gobbles up cells, or putting spin to the impossible and impractical "problems" the DHS was supposed to be tackling, (PDF) is there anything concrete the agency has done for the People of the United States?

Well? Do you feel safer?

What is that sound… Oh. Crickets.

It annoys me how Republican "pundits" are attacking every idea with which they disagree. Most especially the whole Stay The Course / Get them Out debate. Yes, its a tough decision.

What everyone seems to agree upon is that Iraq is a mess. In four years, the greatest military machine in the world cannot re-stabilize what it has destroyed - namely the sovereignty and economic stability of Iraq. We broke it. We should fix it. But how long do we continue to try?

The same opinions that rile me scoff at the Democratic congress’ recent attempts to pin down a plan from the president: timetables, measurable progress by the Iraqi government, and conditions met to bring our soldiers home. In order to show they’re serious, the tackle the issue when money is on the table. Money is what all Americans understand: when money is involved, people pay attention. Surely, congress did get the president’s attention - along with its attendant anger - and a threat to veto. The Righty opiners think this proves (yet again) how the left is unsupportive of our military. The Lefty pundits say that a veto of the appropriations bill without stipulations of progress would endanger the troops just as surely as the alternative.

This argument should have taken place two years ago, but a Republican majority refused to oversee expenditures. Since the start of Armageddon until today, the richest nation on Earth blindly wrote blank checks to fund a questionable military pursuit. Most of the money wasn’t real, but borrowed from future Gross National Product and from taxes our children have yet to pay. The Righties seem okay with that.

If our World’s Greatest Military(tm) cannot manage a regime change in more time that it took to end WWII, then it’s high time to rethink things. If a thirteen-digit expense account cannot fund this endeavor - or any, for that matter - how is the delaying tactic currently being played on the beltway going to change anything one way or the other? In a war of trillions of dollars, what’s a few billion between rivals?

Four years. Eight TRILLION dollars carte blanch. How much is too much? How long is too long? How many thousands more dead and injured? How many more survivors psychologically damaged?

We blew it in Iraq. We’ve broken something that we cannot fix. Conventional warfare does not account for amorphous combatants and suicide troops. We cannot win by doing "What we’ve always done." We’ve already spent too much money and time. Staying the course and expecting different results is a textbook definition of insanity. The whole Iraq situation is insane.

Let’s be sane, now. It just might help.

Well that proves it. He says he’s guilty then he must be. This proves that Gitmo is relevant as a tool for finding terrorists, that it should stay open indefinitely. This proves that the president was right all along, and that we should stay the course. Right?

Except for a few minor details:

One of his Australian lawyers, David McLeod, had said on Sunday that Hicks was convinced he will not get a fair trial. "He expected that he would be convicted even if he defends the charges," McLeod told reporters on Sunday. Hicks has said he was sodomized, beaten, and subject to forced injections while in U.S. custody, allegations the military calls untrue and nonsense.

"He’s really changed a lot in three years," said (his father, Terrence) Hicks, who had last seen his son at the 2004 hearing.

No shit. The last guy to get released after years of Guantanamo incarceration suffers severe mental disorders. And he was found innocent. It seems that after three years of US hospitality, Mr. Hicks will say anything to be back home, even if home will be another prison. It can’t get much worse that what he’s already endured.

That’s what the teenager’s sign read as the Olympic Torch passed through Juneau, Alaska and the cameras rolled: "Bong Hits 4 Jesus". Joseph Frederick, as part of a school group allowed to leave Juneau-Douglas High School grounds to watch the quasi-historic event, unfurled his banner at the opportune moment. For that he got ten days suspension.

He is suing the school’s principal for violation of his freedom of speech. That was in 2002.  Last summer, former White House special counsel Kenneth Starr petitioned the Supreme Court on behalf of the school district to adjudicate the case. As the Wall Street Journal aptly shouted: "Starr Goes From Cigars to Bongs."

As the case is heard, Religious E-zines have followed the story, some with wry bemusement, some with fire and brimstone. Some in the latter community believe the nature of the case is religious, not civil, and fear the association of their beliefs with illegal drug use. Thankfully, some Christian groups are keeping their heads clear on the matter:

"It’s disrespectful to God and disrespectful to believers," said Kevin Theriot, an attorney for Alliance Defense Fund, a conservative Christian legal network based in Arizona.

Nonetheless, a number of Christian heavy-hitters, including ADF, the American Center for Law and Justice and the Christian Legal Society, have filed briefs defending the student.

"I’ve been doing religious (legal) work for almost two decades, and in my opinion this is probably one of the most dangerous cases to religious freedom in the last decade — because you don’t think it’s about religion," said Kelly Shackelford, chief counsel for Liberty Legal Institute. The Plano, Texas-based institute has filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of the student.

The Education community is also anxiously awaiting the verdict. To them, this case represents a blurring of jurisdiction between the school’s view that , because the teenager and his friends were at a school outing, and because Mr. Frederick refused to drop the banner when asked by  the school’s principal, Deborah Morse, the suspension was warranted.

The crux of the case is as follows:

“The phrase ‘Bong Hits 4 Jesus’—to me, it’s absurdly funny,” said Joseph Frederick … “Of course,” he added in a conference call with reporters this month, “I knew there was a possibility that some people would not take it well.”

[…]

“We didn’t view the sign as serious speech on a political topic,” said Peggy Cowan, the Juneau superintendent, who was an assistant superintendent at the time.

Absurd it is. Morse V. Frederick is a classic example of the occasional absurdity inherent in what passes for Civilization in this century. It also exposes the fragility of the more paranoid sectors of the Christian community who gleefully torch anything remotely ill-associated with their Jesus - no matter how petty and, yes, absurd.

Yesterday the Supreme Court heard the arguments; the third court to review this case. Its decision, no doubt, will heavily influence the continued rise or disastrous fall of Civilization itself. Your tax dollars at work.

This from TPMmuckraker: A White House insider, speaking anonymously (and who wouldn’t these days?) said the following:

“I think (Karl) Rove and (Joshua B.) Bolten (Chief of Staff) believe there is the potential for erosion of the president’s credibility on this issue.”

The context is the wanton, blatant political firings of US prosecutors last year. This story is getting traction everywhere news might be hiding.

What’s the big deal? this is just the latest scandal of… How many? Has anyone kept score? Isn’t it amazing how much hubris is exhibited by the brigands ostensibly running this government? Running this nation into the ground, is what they’re doing.

But "erosion of the President’s credibility?" Doesn’t that imply he has some left? That can’t be right! This is the guy (with a little help from his friends) who will forever be known as "The Man Who Started Armageddon." I can’t begin to list all he has done to erode credibility - of the office of President, of the institution of Congress, of the United States of America - let alone list his numerous character flaws that chip away at the President’s credibility in a personal, human level. Strip away the titles and privileges; as a person this man is literally incredible!