If Pigs Had Wings …

Adolf Godwin Hitler, in his book, Mein Kampf, defined the “big lie” as one so “colossal” that no one would believe that someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously”. It’s a propaganda technique, not terribly effective but often used. Sometimes one can spot a “big” lie by an overly specific account of something. For example, Karl Rove says that George W. Bush read 95 books in 2006, 51 in 2007, and 40 in 2008 (his total has declined – I can only assume he will slip in another 20 or so today).

It seems appropriate that it is Rove spinning this fanciful tale, as he is often referred to as “Bush’s Goebbels”. Rove is a professional liar and not a man to be trusted about anything, even the color of his eyes. He’s endured, for eight years now, the uppity criticism of Bush from the nation’s effete snobs – Bush is maligned as the C-student who is sheltered from bad news. He’s being replaced now by an intellectual, a man who thinks, writes, and above all, reads. Rove is a little testy.

There’s a reason – the critics, effete though they may be, are right. And eight years of the Bush Administration have yielded a major terrorist attack on the country, two unwinnable wars, unimaginable deficits, decrepit federal agencies unable to respond to disaster, and financial collapse. That’s only a partial list of major failures. Add an attack on the Constitution.

That’s the price of not reading.

I know Rove is lying – heck, most of us figured that out right away. But I’ll put up a little evidence. One, many have opined and offered anecdotal evidence that Bush is dyslexic. That doesn’t mean that he is not smart – only that reading is troublesome to him, so that he has to rely on other traits (such as an uncanny ability to read people, if not books) to gather data from around him and process it. Bush relies on staff to verbally summarize reports – due to trust issues, he only likes to hear one side. Hence, disaster.

Winston Churchill was dyslexic. It’s not necessarily debilitating. What undid Bush was not dyslexia, but rather isolation from competing viewpoints. But one thing it certainly means is that Bush did not read books.

Secondly, Bush has himself admitted that he does not read newspapers. As he told Brit Hume in 2003, he started his day by asking Andrew Card “what’s in the newspapers worth worrying about? I glance at the headlines just to kind of (get) a flavor of what’s moving. I rarely read the stories.”

A man who can’t bring himself to read a full newspaper account is unlikely to dive into the tomes that Rove credits him with reading – “David Halberstam’s “The Coldest Winter,” Rick Atkinson’s “Day of Battle,” Hugh Thomas’s “Spanish Civil War,” Stephen W. Sears’s “Gettysburg” and David King’s “Vienna 1814.” … U.S. Grant’s “Personal Memoirs”; Jon Meacham’s “American Lion”; James M. McPherson’s “Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief” and Jacobo Timerman’s “Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number.”

I challenge anyone reading this to cite an instance in any of Bush’s extemporaneous, unscripted comments, in which he made a historical reference. Any.

Bush might have been an adequate president if he had actually read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals”, as Rove claims he did.” He might not have surrounded himself with yes-persons. His administration is legend for being wrong with extreme clarity of vision, of the tunnel variety. Indeed, if George W. Bush could read a book, he could have spared us all a load of grief.

P.S. New Yorker writer Brendan Gill recalls roaming the Bush Kennebunkport compound one night while staying there looking for a book to read — the only title he could find was “The Fart Book.”

P.P.S. From one of Bush’s Yale classmates: it’s not the substance abuse in Bush’s past that’s disturbing, it’s the lack of substance … Georgie, as we called him, had absolutely no intellectual curiosity about anything. He wasn’t interested in ideas or in books or causes. He didn’t travel; he didn’t read the newspapers; he didn’t watch the news; he didn’t even go to the movies. How anyone got out of Yale without developing some interest in the world besides booze and sports stuns me.

The Silence of the Liberals

Steve noted below the silence of American liberals (I was about to say “American left”, but that’s not where the silence is coming from) regarding the most current Israeli atrocity, it’s attack on Gaza. Israel has, like the U.S. after 9/11, the luxury of disproportionate response. Further, they are immune, as was the U.S., from ever having to address core matters – U.S. behavior in the Mideast, or Israeli behavior in Palestine. They simply get to go in and blow them up. Small acts of terrorism justify massive acts of revenge – state-sponsored terrorism.

The silence of liberals is another matter. The current reason is clear – Barack Obama guaranteed silence in his campaign, and even if liberals wanted to say something or do anything, they couldn’t. They had to strike a Faustian bargain to gain power, and now they are bound to honor that bargain. Israel under Obama will behave no differently than it did under Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush II. It has carte blanche.

The core problem between Israel and Palestine is dispossession, common throughout human history. The Palestinians are being systematically deprived of their land and livelihood. Israel never states openly what its true objectives are, so we can only judge by its behavior. They want to forcibly eject Palestinians from their land, perhaps forcing them into Jordan, which does not want them either. Israel wants all of Palestine for itself.

To accomplish this on the world stage (outside the U.S., Israel’s behavior is widely condemned and criticized), Israel has to act in increments. It routinely steals land and water resources, and is daily engaged in building a wall on Palestinian land to quarantine the Palestinians, who are pretty much powerless to stop it.

The current justification for Israeli behavior is rocket fire from Gaza into Israel. It does exist; it is stupid behavior. The response is wildly disproportionate, but makes sense in terms of the wider effort to dispossess the Palestinians. Israel is using the opportunity presented by the rocket fire to advance its own long term agenda. It’s an incremental thrust, part of a final solution.

Palestinians have two choices – to be silent and endure, or to behave badly. Either alternative produces the same results. So they are behaving badly. It’s stupid, futile, frustrating. But it would be no different even if they behaved well. Israel would still screw them over.

That is the essence terrorism: Futility.

Disproportionate response is the luxury of the powerful. Bush seized on 9/11 to justify a long term policy goal – the conquest of Iraq. So too has Israel seized on relatively minor rocket fire as justification for a major attack that is part of a long term policy goal – the removal of Palestinians from Palestine.

The silence of American liberals is deafening. They are a disgrace.

Addendum Here’s a story of some leftists (possibly even liberal) trying to help. Their boat was, they say, rammed by the Israelis in international waters.

Leftist Pussies Strike Again

Sorry folks, we’re at it again over here, whining about Israel’s “excessive” response to almost daily rocket fire from Hamas militants.  While the death toll from the rockets is unacceptable – 13 Israelis killed over the last 3 years – The Israeli response has been simply barbarous.  In two days, they have killed more than 300 Palestinians.  But you won’t hear any complaint about this from the American Media or from many of my friends on the left.  For that, you have to go to an Israeli newspaper.  From Ha’aretz:

Once again, Israel’s violent responses, even if there is justification for them, exceed all proportion and cross every red line of humaneness, morality, international law and wisdom. What began yesterday in Gaza is a war crime and the foolishness of a country. History’s bitter irony: A government that went to a futile war two months after its establishment – today nearly everyone acknowledges as much – embarks on another doomed war two months before the end of its termIsrael also proves that it has not internalized the lessons of the previous war. Once again, this war was preceded by a frighteningly uniform public dialogue in which only one voice was heard – that which called for striking, destroying, starving and killing, that which incited and prodded for the commission of war crimes.

Once again the commentators sat in television studios yesterday and hailed the combat jets that bombed police stations, where officers responsible for maintaining order on the streets work. Once again, they urged against letting up and in favor of continuing the assault. Once again, the journalists described the pictures of the damaged house in Netivot as “a difficult scene.” Once again, we had the nerve to complain about how the world was transmitting images from Gaza. And once again we need to wait a few more days until an alternative voice finally rises from the darkness, the voice of wisdom and morality.

In another week or two, those same pundits who called for blows and more blows will compete among themselves in leveling criticism at this war. And once again this will be gravely late.

It struck me as I read this that the last sentence here – the last step in the process of a failed war – was one that the American media failed to go through after the Lebanon War.  Its cheerleading of the war went from start to finish, and then coverage simply stopped as the Israeli media was getting to the heart of the matter – the war in Lebanon had been a failure.  Israel’s overreaction – killing almost 1,000 civilians and destroying Lebanon’s infrastructure in response to the kidnapping of two of its soldiers- accomplished nothing.  Hezbollah was strengthened, and elements in Lebanon that had been nominally pro-Israel had turned decidedly against it.  The same will be true here.  American and Israeli hawks will get hard-ons from all of the death and destruction while lambasting us leftist pussies who have the audacity to oppose Israel’s right to self defense.

Glenn Greenwald, on the article that I quote above:

What’s most striking about it is that this scathing criticism of Israel’s behavior can — and does — appear in one of Israel’s leading newspapers, but not a paragraph of it could ever be uttered by any American politician, in either party, of any national prominence.

And you’re not going to hear much else about it from the left side of the blogosphere either.  Just as in the runup to the Iraq war and Israel’s 2004 War against Lebanon, the heads are all bobbing in unison.  The right does have a point sometimes. We’re a bunch of gutless pussies over here.  It’s not because we’re against war, mind you – it’s because we don’t have the guts to speak out against it even when it’s clearly wrong.

The fear of appearing weak is one of the greatest failures of the Democratic Party over the last 8 years – and even with 2008’s sea change election, it’s a trend that’s not going to change any time soon.

Reality

Free enterprise is a term that refers, in practice, to a system of public subsidy and private profit, with massive government intervention in the economy to maintain a welfare state for the rich.
Noam Chomsky

Capitalism will never fail because Socialism will always bail it out.
Nathra Nader (Ralph’s Dad, attributed by Ralph)

We do a lot of arguing here about various abstracts – see below. Dave Budge informed us in that thread that his philosophy, libertarianism, has not failed because it has never been tried.

I wanted to deal in something less abstract, something that is not only tried, but is always practiced in the real world, and not held out as some potentially beneficial abstract theory (if only we would come to our senses).

The quotes above are dead-on. Hard to dispute what is happening right before our eyes.

The Pompous Pontificating Professor

I’ve been struggling with this for a while, a personal matter. The center of the Montana blogosphere shifts from place to place, even on rare occasions coming to rest here. At the current time, the most lively debate is going on over at Electric City Weblog – this since the addition of Rob Natelson to the mix.

Natelson is pedantic by nature – a tenured law professor at the University of Montana. He is widely admired by his students, and is apparently well-versed on constitutional law. He’s insulated – he has guaranteed health care and retirement, and probably inheritance, to get him through life. Yet despite this sheltered existence, he presumes to know what is best for all of us.

Outside the classroom, he has long been a political activist, a libertarian extremist who doesn’t understand the very basic notions of democratic societies. In the words of Benjamin Barber, he “…continues to mistake popular sovereignty for illegitimate coercion and to confound the public weal with the repression of liberty.” He hasn’t a clue what a social contract is. He’s thoroughly convinced that any act for the public good weakens the individual, that we are all cowboys and cowgirls.

At ELW, he has brought the classroom to the web. But he has a slight problem – classroom behavior. Students talk back, some are disrespectful. As any good teacher knows, you don’t encourage disruptive behavior. You punish it. Natelson has always been thin-skinned, not a virtue on a blog.

Here’s my conundrum – it’s purely personal. I love to engage Natelson, and since he never leaves ELW, I have to take it to him there. I don’t show proper deference, and attack the essence of his being, his extreme philosophy. One doesn’t do that for long with a teacher without soon being removed from the classroom.

This post is purely personal. At a certain point in time, I found that my comments there no longer posted. Gregg Smith, the moderator of the blog, told me it is the Askimet spam system that is intercepting me. It’s a WordPress thing, one which he doesn’t understand, he said. At this blog, Askimet will filter out spam, and uses certain criteria, usually the number or type of links included in a comment. It’s very good at picking out real spam, but often takes real comments out of the mix too. That part is annoying.

I recently stopped by our library and posted from a public computer at ELW, and it posted, no problem. That means that whatever is happening at ELW is unique to my IP. Since Gregg doesn’t know what is happening, that means that whatever was done was done by the other administrator, Natelson, or others who may have privileges there. Since my blog is not my own domain, I cannot block IP’s. However, if I were to create my own domain, I could. ELW is its own domain, and can therefore block certain IP’s.

Hence, I conclude that Natelson blocked my IP. This fits his personality – the pedantry, the professorial condescension. He doesn’t want a forum, but rather a podium. He’s not one who learns from others. He only teaches.

Oh well. It’s a free country, and there are plenty of people like Natelson with whom to do battle. But he’s a juicy target. I’ll take on some of his more duncey posts here at this website, which I’m sure he’ll never visit. It’s half the fun, but needs be done.

P.S. I just posted over there using Anonymouse – but I did use my real name. Not kosher, but it does prove the point that it is my IP that is banned.

Collective Punishment

Well, Israel is at it again, launching air strikes on it’s own version of Guantanamo, Gaza. So far, they’ve killed around 200, and who knows how many maimed.

The Fourth Geneva Convention outlaws torture and collective punishment (and the resettlement by an occupying power of its own civilians on territory under its military control – another day). The current bombing campaign is a war crime and an atrocity – but really now, it’s Israel, and we all remember that Holocaust thing, so no matter what they do, we dare not comment. No matter that the oppressed have turned into the oppressor, that agreements attempting to civilize our behaviors are set aside by people who are supposedly the most cultured and educated among us.

Technically, the Swiss have to call for a meeting of signatories to the Convention, and a majority have to agree, and those things just don’t happen in the modern world. The U.S. has repeatedly and flagrantly violated Geneva. But the U.S. has the power to punish any nation that would dare bring charges. So the Convention, along with buggy whips and Atari’s, has become “quaint”.

Nonetheless, Israel’s behavior is barbaric, even if the noise of protest is now muffled. She is not a civilized nation, not quite yet. She’s a nice fit among Arab states, a barbaric interloper among barbarians. They deserve one another, but the innocent civilians who are today paying the price did nothing and deserve no punishment.

Hence, the Convention.

P.S. In advance response to the inevitable protest that the Palestinians are launching rockets at Israel, and that too is a form of collective punishment: Yes, that is correct. The only difference – the only difference between those launching the rockets and those launching the air strikes is that one has access to the American weapon arsenal, while the other is limited to cheap smuggled rockets. Furthermore, Palestinian behavior is typical of a powerless people – terrorism is the voice of the voiceless. Palestinians are imprisoned, cut off from making a livelihood, shunned and demonized in the “civilized” world – their land is stolen out from under them, and their youth disappeared into a black hole prison system. When they protest on the legal stage, they achieve world wide support, but not from the U.S., which alone has the power to contain the Israelis. When they fight back with rocketry, which is indeed terrorism, they are butchered. If ever there were a reign of systematic dehumanization that needed to be disassembled by the world community, with prison terms and nooses awaiting perpetrators, it is the West Bank and Gaza.

A Christmas Present

9:00 PM Portland Time, December 25th, 2008 – 8 lb. 3 oz. Mother and child are doing fine, dad is at their side.

Seamus Walter Dubarry (sounds like a writer, doesn’t he?)

Most important of all: I’m a grandpa. Mom is a great-grandmother.

Disturbing …

Top-Term-Paper-Sites.com sells term papers to kids. The advertising is sensational. I never thought denial could be practiced so openly. Here’s what they say:

Don’t Compromise

Is it high time that you should have a place where you can find term papers that will help you in real?

Never underestimate the teacher. (They have some tricks up their sleeves)

Tools like anti-plagiarism sites & softwares nail your grades and essays.

Numerous anti-plagiarism softwares are readily available online.

These online softwares come in very handy for the teachers, which makes your job really difficult.(Emphasis added.)

Guarantee # 1: A completely new research/term paper – You won’t find it anywhere.

Guarantee # 2: Professionally written term papers by American research specialists.

Guarantee # 3: Your essay will be completed on time or its FREE.

Guarantee # 4: Customer support, e-mails & requests replied within 2-4 hours.

——

Do you notice how crappy the writing is? It cries out for [sic]’s. I suspect that English is the author’s second language. Even our kids’ term papers are being outsourced!

I did my share of bad writing in my school days, but I never stole anything. No doubt some plagiarizing was going on, but I never heard anyone openly rationalizing it.

An Unbeliever’s Christmas Stocking of Quotations

So, what do confirmed agnostics do on Christmas Eve? Why, they wait for the lasagna to cook, 5PM to roll around so they can have a beer, and go through old quotation files looking for things that might offend religious people.

The lasagna is almost done.

By fearing whom I trust I find my way
To truth; by trusting wholly I betray
The trust of wisdom; better far is doubt
Which brings the false into the light of day.
Abdallah al-Ma’arri (973-1057)

These [Christian] principles seem to me to have made men feeble, and caused them to become an easy prey to evil-minded men, who can control them more securely, seeing that the great body of men, for the sake of gaining paradise, are more disposed to endure injuries than to avenge them.
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

For if we could guarantee them their dogma of immortality in some other way, the lively ardor for their gods would at once cool; and… if continued existence after death could be proved to be incompatible with the existence of gods…they would soon sacrifice these gods to their own immortality, and be hot for atheism.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860)

For those who live there insist, at least in our generation, on the total acceptance without reservation of their revealed religion. And I cannot surrender the liberty of my mind to any authority. Free reason, my son, is a heady wine. It has failed to sustain my heart, but having drunk of it, I can never be content with a less fiery draught.”
Milton Steinberg (1903–1949)

Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends.

Maybe God does exist, but he is an underachiever.
Woody Allen

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason than of blindfolded fear….If it end in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise and will love others which it will procure for you.
Thomas Jefferson

It is likely that the whole world is deceived in this common idea of immortality, for if we assume that there are three major religions – Christ’s, Moses’, and Muhammad’s – either all of them are false and the whole world is cheated or two are wrong and the greater part of mankind is deceived.
Pomponazzi (1462-1525)

One of the ironies of the cold war, and one of the things Marina Oswald’s story tells us is that you could have taken 100,000 American fundamentalists, even at the height of Stalinism, dropped them in Russia, and they would have been happier there that than they ever were in the United States. I mean, what a dream for them: “Bad people were sent off to camps, and good people could walk the streets safely. Children were very law-abiding and honored their parents, and sex was very restricted.”
Norman Mailer (1923-2007)

The last Christian died on the Cross.
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.
Wilson Mizner (1876-1933)

With or without religion, good people can behave well and bad people can do evil; but for good people to do evil — that takes religion.
Stephen Weinberg

Out yonder was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and stands before us like a great eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation, and I soon noticed that many a man whom I had learned to esteem and to admire had found inner freedom and security in devoted occupation with it. … The road to this paradise was not as comfortable and as alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it.
Albert Einstein

Theology: “a rhapsody of feigned and ill-invented nonsense.”
Scriptures: “so stuffed with madness, nonsense, and contradictions, that you admired the stupidity of the world in being so long deluded by them.”
Jesus must have “picked up a few ignorant blockish fisher fellows, whom he knew by his skill in physiognomy, had strong imaginations.”
Moses: “if ever there was such a man,” had, like Jesus, “learned magic in Egypt, but that he was both the better artist and better politician than Jesus.”
Thomas Aikenhead, executed January 8, 1697 for heresy, at age 20.

”Jesus himself was a Jew speaking to Jews and not promoting much of a mythology – and – of course, his conversation about belief and doubt was not about Greek philosophical objections to faith. But his ideas and his image came to the real attention of the Roman Empire after he was long gone. He came to Rome in a story from the East, told in common Greek and already incorporating major tenets of religions that were familiar thought the empire. The ubiquitous image of Isis holding her divine son Horus was transformed into Mary and the infant Jesus.”
Jennifer Michale Hecht, Doubt: A History

Just prior to his death, Freud wrote a treatise called “Moses and Monotheism” in which he proposed that Moses was not a Jew and was actually an Egyptian aristocrat. Dr. Yahuda gets wind of this and screams at Freud, “The Myth! The myth is all! You take away that and you take away our faith!” Freud replies that the human mind is divinity enough. I agree with that idea, which is why I don’t like religion, politics or any kind of tribalism. I do think the mind is divinity enough, and that it’s much more incredible than any god, Christ, Buddha, or Mohammed you could concoct with the human mind.
John Malkovich

If I have any beliefs about immortality, it is that there are certain dogs I have known who will go to heaven, and very, very few persons.
James Thurber

Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb.
Mel Brooks, Space Balls

The references to Mary in the Gospels are relatively few; John does not even mention her by name, A particular emphasis on her virginity first arose when a verse in Isaiah “Behold a virgin will conceive,” was interpreted as prophesying the birth of Christ and hence inspired or corroborated the Gospel accounts of the virgin birth. This interpretation, however, was drawn from the Septuagint (Greek) version, which had used the word “parthenos” to render the Hebrew for “almah” which was no more than a young girl, so the scriptural base of Mary’s virginity was shaky, especially as the Gospels specifically mention that Jesus had brothers and sisters …
Charles Freeman, The Closing of the Western Mind

The last recorded astronomical observation in the ancient Greek world was one by the Athenian philosopher Proclus in A.D. 475, nearly 1,100 years after the prediction of an eclipse by Thales in 585 B.C., which traditionally marks the beginning of Greek science. It would be over 1,000 years – with the publication of Copernicus’ De revolutionibus in 1543 – before these studies began to move forward again.
Ibid

One of the great consolations of the monastic life is the assurance that we have that in obeying we can commit no fault. The Superior may commit a fault in commanding you to do this or that, but you are certain that you commit no fault so long you obey, because God will only ask you if you have duly performed what orders your received, and if you can furnish a clean account in that respect, you are absolved entirely.. The moment what you did was done obediently, God wipes it out of your account and charges it to the Superior … So that Saint Jerome well exclaimed, “Oh holy and blessed security by which one becomes almost impeccable.
William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience

And since they condone capital punishment, I want them to stop bitching about Jesus getting nailed up.
Lenny Bruce

One is presuming (one is not?) that this is the same god who actually created the audience he was addressing with the Ten Commandments. This leaves us with the insoluble mystery of why he would have molded (“in his own image,” yet) a covetous, murderous, disrespectful, lying and adulterous species. Create them sick and then command them to be well? What a mad despot this is, and how fortunate that he exists only in the minds of his worshipers.
Christopher Hitchens

You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.
Anne Lamott

The chief contribution of Protestantism to human thought is its massive proof that God is a bore.
H.L. Mencken

The world would be astonished if it knew how great a proportion of its brightest ornaments, of those most distinguished even in popular estimation for wisdom and virtue, are complete skeptics in religion.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)

When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion, it is called religion.
Robert M. Pirsig

No, I don’t know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God.
George H. W. Bush to journalist Robert Sherman

To Pray: To ask that the laws of nature be annulled in behalf of a single petitioner, confessedly unworthy.
Ambrose Bierce

Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
Seneca the Younger (4BC-AD65)

The gods come and go; man remains.
Edward Abbey (1927-1989)

Advertising’s Man of the Year, 2008

It should not pass without notice that Barack Obama has been named Advertising Age’s Marketer of the Year for 2008, beating out Apple and Nike. His was a dynamic campaign which promoted mass participation (many small donations) even as it was mostly funded by fat cats — over $34 million from from the finance sector alone. His twin logos, “Hope” and “Change” were blank slates on which devoted followers could write their own script. And they we did.

Clever. Very clever.

In the meantime, Obama has embarked on a course traveled by Clinton in the 1990’s – heavy dominance by financial insiders and war hawks. No change, little hope.

The primary task of advertising is to bamboozle consumers, overwhelming their senses with useless and often prurient information, luring them into making irrational choices. Advertising stands capitalism on its head, negating the notion of informed choice. Obama’s choice by Ad Age is more than informative. It’s illustrative of business dominance of society. The heavy-handed thuggery of the Bush Administration had driven 75% of the population to cry out for change. Democratic leadership noted this public sentiment, and gave them what business wanted them to have – an advertising icon.

But no change. That is not allowed.