It’s all about winning

If Brown loses to Coakley tomorrow, there’s no moral victory, there’s no national referendum. It’s a very important real loss. The Obamanistas will have won a deeply important real victory.

They have control of the levers of power and they will exercise that control immediately in ways that we will live with for decades. They’re hanging on by their fangs, but if they hang on, you will feel their fangs.

UPDATE 4/6/2010: Wow. We shot that dog and it kept coming and bit us anyway. November will tell whether we’ve got rabies. We need to shoot the Republican dogs and zombies too, and this time we need flame-throwers. Republicans are pretending they are against the new health care entitlements, but they are making it pretty obvious they’re just trying to use it as a wedge issue.

Defensive much?

This stunt ad on the side of a London bus provoked outrage (click to enlarge):

According to the London Guardian, one offended mom said it was like “a punch in the stomach.” If there’s anything we know, we know that woman secretly is afraid it is true.

Only an Idiot

Only an idiot American could be in favor of the health care bill. I’ve not met one ordinary citizen in favor who can answer both questions,  What do you like about it, specifically? What don’t you like about it, specifically?

Congressmen voting in favor of the bill can answer quite specifically what they like. They’ve each launched a self-seeking snot-rocket into the bill, and they don’t care about the rest of it.

This bill isn’t your garden-variety legislative sausage. This bill is snot-rocket stew.

This isn’t about normal compromise and reconciliation. I promise you there will be court fights for years settling contradictions in this bill, if it passes.

This bill isn’t socialized medicine–remember, there’s no single payer. This is just throwing everything at the wall and expecting that all the powers granted in the bill can be turned to useful purposes later.

There’s no excuse and no reason to do something this complex and important in one fell bill. All you need to know to oppose this is that it’s longer than Gone with the Wind. If you don’t get that, you’re too stupid to try to convince.

It’s a thin line between love and hate

Coakley vs. Brown in Massachusetts.

If Brown wins, he derails Obama. If he doesn’t, Obama wins on the razor’s edge.

I’d say Obama’s a doofus who’s screwed up 99 times out of 100. We won’t be talking about the dumbness and mendacity of the Bushies for a while.

What Obama and the terrorists have in common is almost comical incompetence. Oh, and they also just have to win once, and that once is right now in Massachusetts.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the future of the nation depends on this election.  Stopping the health care bill is the only issue right now. Those who think we can repeal it afterward are wrong.

Think of all the other horrible government bureaucracies that have been spun up over the last 100 years and how few of them have succeeded or stayed within their original mandates.  This will be the worst of them all, by an order of magnitude.

There will be no way to chop off all the tentacles of this 2500+ page monster. You won’t get it repealed wholesale — various provisions will quickly find constituencies with sob stories that will squirm and wriggle and band together to derail any serious rollbacks.

Stop this now or, yeah, you will have government death panels (we have death panels now, but they’re not monolithic like they will become). You will have DMV-level customer service that will leave you nostalgic for fighting with your insurance company. The state of the art will freeze in many respects. You’ll pay more out of pocket than you do now through various back door fees and taxes.  You’ll have to do the medical tourism thing not just for cheaper Lasik and boob jobs but because there will be doctor shortages and waiting lists like everywhere else that has socialized medicine. Have you seen how much they’re trying to reduce this bill’s fiscal footprint by cutting doctors’ pay and upping medical technology manufacturer costs? How long before they have to suppress “white flight” to grey-market medicine, and how long before experienced doctors with screw you money reduce their hours and then retire entirely?

I Hate Haiti

I didn’t used to care about Haiti, till my wife started making noises about going down there for humanitarian reasons. That’s when I started to hate Haiti.

Haiti is one of the most….what? How do you describe Haiti? Shithole doesn’t even come close. None of the scatological pejoratives that we usually rely on when talking about the third world capture the redolent stench of how horrible a place Haiti is. Not even Muslims can wreck a country this bad for this long. To make something stink this bad, you need the French.

Everyone’s falling all over themselves to send money. If you’re reading this, please don’t. There will be plenty of money without you piling on. Take this as an opportunity to send money to a serious cause dealing with an ongoing problem, not just an ephemeral Sally Struthers moment. 

Anyhow, my wife wanted to go to Haiti to do her medical thing, and I stamped my little foot. Had she gone, I’d have divorced her. All you other people with spouses spending time down there in that voodoo-infested petrie dish, you should stamp your little feet too, especially now. Though you might not think it’s possible, hygiene’s about to get a lot worse in Haiti.

She didn’t go and I think she was secretly grateful that I nipped that little bit of altruistic insanity in the bud.

So what should the US do when bad things happen to shithole countries?

I’m thinking we should stop giving foreign aid to anyone on any basis, including military, except to countries that agree to be a protectorate of the United States, subject to adult supervision of their governments and legal structure.

Forget no taxation without representation, no help without strings.

There are a ridiculous gaggle of spoiled teenager countries out there who will never get it right until they have to live by adult USA rules.

If we want to help Haiti, we should take it over, right now. Otherwise, this is exactly like putting more money into your heroin-addicted adult child’s payment card because you can’t bear what’s happening.

Haiti needs to change, and they won’t do it unless we make them do it or die.

Harry Racist

Harry Reid has admitted that he applauded Barack Obama’s candidacy for president in part because Obama was “light skinned” and had no taint of “Negro dialect–unless he wanted to have one.”

Reid has groveled and apologized, but not explained how he has evolved from his recent racism. Until he explains, I’m counting Harry Reid as one of the more obvious racists of recent times.

First, Reid is a member and has been an official (a bishop) in his racist church. He’s Mormon. Until the late ’70’s, Mormons denied blacks “the Priesthood.” Every white male in good standing in the Mormon church age 12 or above held some Priesthood rank. This policy was changed (due to financial pressure on Brigham Young Universtity from the Justice Department), but not repudiated. The Mormons didn’t say the previous policy was wrong, just that God had decided blacks had been punished enough, purely coincidentally with government threats to yank student loan funds from BYU if the Church didn’t knock it off.

Mormons still believe that God banned blacks from their Priesthood for 150 years. They don’t think the previous policy was wrong, but that God for whatever reason decided blacks no longer needed to be discriminated against. (Mormons still believe in polygamy, by the way–they’ve just suspended the practice temporarily, like they’ve suspended, not repudiated, their institutional racism. Ask a Mormon whether the church should officially apologize for denying the Priesthood to blacks, and watch the tapdance.)

Second, let’s look at what’s logically implicit in Reid’s statement: a dark-skinned black who you could tell was black over the phone would be someone Reid wouldn’t be happy about having as a candidate. That’s pretty racist.

Barack O-Tom-a has forgiven Reid, on behalf of all black people everywhere, of whatever skin hue. White racists should take heart–clearly, Obama doesn’t put race issues above partisan politics.

This may be the most gutless thing I’ve seen Obama do yet. I’m sure it won’t be the most gutless thing I’ll see in the next couple of years.

Trent Lott was hounded out of Harry Reid’s job for remarks that were much less explicitly racist.  Gushing over Strom Thurmond at a 183rd birthday celebration for the old codger, Lott made remarks that could be interpreted as supporting Thurmond’s racism. That’s not what Lott meant, but that didn’t matter.

On the other hand, Reid’s racism is inescapable. But he’ll survive because he’s a useful idiot.

On Fox News Sunday today, Michael Steele, embattled head of the Republican Party, squared off against Bob Kane, his Democrat counterpart.  Steele (who is black in a way that even Harry Reid would approve of) tried to score off Kane by saying that what’s sauce for Trent Lott should be the end of Harry Reid. Steele was pathetic. He should have relentlessly badgered Kane to apologize for what the Democrats did to Lott. Were Kane to refuse to apologize, Steele should have demanded he admit hypocrisy of support removal of Reid. or to support removal of Reid. Instead, Steele let Kane get away with saying things like, Yes, but Reid meant it as a compliment….

Steele is what happens when Republicans try to play their own race card. He has dared Republicans to fire him. They should. He would never have gotten this job if he weren’t, ahem, a light-skinned black who speaks Negro dialect only when he wants to. Wow, I guess there are some Republican power brokers who are as racist as Harry Reid.

Rehabilitating Gitmo

Obamanapalitano and their little Sunday morning lapdog Brennan. Grrrr….

John Brennan hasn’t gotten near the bad press he deserves. I know Brennan is just Obamanapolitano’s poodle, and I know he’s being held in front of them like a hairy hostage shield. But he’s an American who should have a little dignity.

Here’s what Brennan had to say on the Sunday talk shows:

• The right thing to do is try the crotch-bomber in normal US courts so we can use plea-bargain leverage to get information out of him.
• We’ll be sending more “detainees” back to Yemen to be “rehabilitated.” Can’t see any reason not to.
• Guantanomo is tainted. Must close.

Let’s take this point by point and lay it at the door of Obama, because no question Brennan was spewing Obama’s talking points.

The first is such a stupid thing I’m not going to waste time on it. Even the media are pshawing the notion that interrogating him under Miranda rules is likely to work better than an army transport to an Egyption black site.

On the second point, let’s quit calling them detainees. Name one person incarcerated in Gitmo who shouldn’t have been executed already. Seriously, here’s how I’ll close down Gitmo: machine gun every cell and let Castro swab it down and turn it into a 4 star hotel. I’m against torture, and waterboarding is torture. I’m in favor of killing these guys. Any “detainees” who want to beg for their lives and provide us intelligence that makes it worthwhile for us to feed them, great. You guys better have 1001 nights of really good Arabian tales for us.

Guantanamo is actually one of the most humane, decent, serious things that America has ever tried to do in dealing with an insane world filled with rabid Muslim wolverines and their Eurotrash weasel enablers.

We should flaunt Gitmo as a symbol of our humanitarianism, not close it.

And we should not release anyone currently in Gitmo. Ever.

How scared would the rest of the world be if we embraced Gitmo?

If we don’t, what do we do next?

Taking Comfort in Incompetence

If there’s one thing that Obamanapalitano has done to make us feel safer, it’s reassure us that the terrorists aren’t trying very hard to attack us or else planes would be falling out of the sky every 5 minutes. I don’t want to let Bush off the hook either. In this case, Obama is right to blame the former administration. 7 years to get the terrorist security information systems hooked up and functional is not being serious.

You may remember how many years it took for the IRS to connect and modernize all their systems. For all I know, they’re still working on the project, and you just don’t see it in the news anymore. Government is horrible at this kind of systems integration. And it ain’t that hard a technical problem. Private organizations get this right in a matter of months. Huge consulting firms stand ready to take huge fees to make this work PDQ for any customer who wants it. I speak with some geek cred here–Nobody should accept government excuses based on technical issues with integrating disparate data systems. If  you don’t believe me, ask the geek you’re with.

The real lesson here, one that shouldn’t be a surprise, is that government, at least civilian government, is sloppy, lazy and you’re a fool to count on it for anything important except in short-term emergencies.

(The organizational brilliance of the U.S. military, achieved over the last few decades, remains an inexplicable wonder to me — I wish Malcom Gladwell would get interested in understanding what it is about our armed forces that explains their transcendence of government dynamics as usual.)

UPDATE MAR 2019:  I believe the above can be fully explained by the combination of American exceptionalism and the exigencies of an emergency. 

Compared to the rest of the world, Americans are phenomenally competent. Only a few other nations–Germany, Great Britain, Japan–come anywhere close to the American standard, and it’s not coincidence that American culture was forcibly imposed on Germany and Japan, and the Brits are our close cousins.

We carry American competence into the field of waging war when there is an emergency. As emergencies recede, our military recedes closer to normal government-level incompetence.

Democratic administrations tend to start as foreign policy doves, get embarrassed and then overreact, sometimes effectively, sometimes not. Soon enough, Obama is going to go Chicago Way on somebody if he keeps getting embarrassed by anti-terrorist flubs.

I suspect the near future holds a lot of dead Yemeni women and children who happened to be in close proximity to suspected terrorists. Good. I never understood all the mea culpas about killing Khadafy’s baby. Like you should be upset about killing maggots before they grow up to be flies.

(Ooh, snap! Did Scipio really call innocent babies maggots? Why, Yes I did. Babies in proximity to terrorists are more likely to grow up to be terrorists than I feel like risking. It is tragic. But I’m doing the Mafia math–you have to get the whole family to stop the, ahem, cycle of violence. While I’m going over the top, let me say very seriously, I’d rather kill a million innocent Muslims than have one of them get on a plane with a crotch full of explosives with my daughter. Maybe if Muslims realize I’m weighing it like that, they’ll go, Oh, maybe we better take it down a notch…”)

John 3:16

OBNOXIOUS DISCLAIMER:  If you’re happy with your Christian faith, I suggest you skip my posts on the subject of religion. What I have to say is not for you. It will just annoy you, and I won’t argue with you about it in any way that will be satisfying to you. Only if you are already looking for an exit strategy from your faith should you read what I have to say about it.

Here’s how arrogant I am about this: There is no such thing as an intellectually respectable Christian, at least when it comes to their Christianity.

Let me define Christian so I’m sure to offend exactly whom I intend: A Christian is a person who believes that Christ’s Atonement (crucifixion) was real and necessary to avert universal damnation for the human race.

I make no allowance for the possibility of engaging a Christian in intellectually rewarding discussion about the central truth-claims of Christianity. I’d rather debate a 9-11 Truther.

If you believe in the Atonement, you may be perfectly smart, moral, nice, loveable and respectable in other areas of your life. But you’re a crackpot goofball about this.

As for discussions of morality, ethics and politics, I’m happy to talk about all of it, as long as you don’t pull a “God said it, I believe it and that settles it.”

Now, on to John 3:16:

At every pro football game, you see the camera pan to John 3:16 painted on the belly of some fat fan with enough belly to support painting the numerals large enough to be seen from the Goodyear blimp. This New Testament Bible verse reads (KJV):

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth on him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

This short sentence packs up all the things most fundamentally wrong with Christian belief, so it’s worth unpacking it. Implicit in it are these propositions:

• The default fate meted out by God to every human is to perish (go to hell, experience eternal damnation — to end up in some very bad state that everyone would want to avoid — I’m going to call it going to hell).
• Contradictorily, God loves all us people he is sending to hell. Why then would he send us to hell? Because we deserve it for not being morally perfect.
• God has provided a Get-out-of-hell-free card: You must believe in Jesus as your personal savior. There is controversy in the Christian world about whether mere belief will avert God’s wrath. Belief is definitely the sine qua non for salvation, but there may be other requirement and indications of sincerity, such as living a reasonably moral life.

To those raised in Christian churches, the above points seem obvious and unremarkable. They’ve been breathing it in since they were toddlers and don’t smell anything off anymore.  To those not raised Christian, it seems bizarre and convoluted and more than they want to take on thinking or arguing about.

My first close experience with someone not raised Christian was with my daughter. I abandoned Christianity before she was 2 years old. She was raised in a religion-free bubble. You should have heard the hilarious middle school conversation that occurred when I tried to explain the Eucharist…”Dad, shut up! Normal people don’t pretend to be cannibals in church!”

So now let us reason together about what’s wrong with John 3:16. If you’ve been raised Christian, it’s going to take some effort to look at this with fresh eyes. You’ve heard this so many times that, like any phrase repeated over and over again, it loses semantic content and just becomes sound.

The first thing wrong is the binary view of justice implicit in Christianity: If you are not morally perfect, you deserve eternal punishment, no different from that deserved by Jeff Dahmer or Ted Bundy. Absent from Christianity is the sensible notion that the punishment should fit the crime. Instead, it’s “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God” and all deserve eternal damnation. Doesn’t matter whether the worst thing you ever did in your whole life is stand up your prom date, or if you raped her and killed her and then took her home. God cannot look upon sin with the least degree of allowance. Every misdemeanor deserves the same punishment as capital felonies.

The second thing wrong is the notion that punishment should obviously be eternal. Really? Unending torture, eon after eon? How does this protect the innocent or reform the guilty? Inflicting eternal pain for the sake of making what point? Even for Jeff Dahmer or Hitler this seems over the top and…considerably more evil than what Jeff or Adolf did.

The best depiction I’ve seen yet of the morals of the Christian God is in the Hellraiser movies. Eternal sadism for its own sake. How morally numbed have Christians become that they don’t recoil from Jehovah like they recoil from Pinhead?

The third thing wrong is the idea that only believing will save you. Nothing else matters if you don’t believe. Let’s get clear here about what “believing in Jesus” really means. It means submitting to Jesus under death threat. Not just accepting that Jesus exists. Whatever Jesus says goes. Not my will, but thine, O Lord. The demand is that you give up independent moral reasoning and self-determination to a being you don’t have sufficient logical reason to believe even exists, on pain of eternal hellfire. (This last is what Christians call “having faith.”)

In what important way is knuckling under to Jesus different from

“He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

If Big Brother takes the rats away from Winston’s face, and the Christian God takes away the threat of eternal damnation, what’s left?

But, wait, the Christian god isn’t like Big Brother. God commands us to do what’s right. A few Biblical counterexamples:

•  God told Abraham to murder his son Isaac, purely as a test of Abraham’s obedience. Yes, at the last moment, Jehovah relented. So what? Doesn’t that prove that God knew murdering your kid is wrong? Here’s a case where fresh eyes help: What if you saw a woman on Oprah telling a story about how her boyfriend told her to kill her child to prove her love. And she was just about to do it too, when he let her off the hook. You’d consider her contemptible and him a monster.
• Jehovah commanded Moses to commit genocide against nearly all the inhabitants of Canaan. And this time, Jehovah didn’t say “April fool’s!” Why was this genocide ordered? Because Jehovah was worried that the Israelites might, over time, be influenced by unbelievers and fall away from the faith. To put this in similar fresh eyes terms as above: What if you heard about a Protestant parent who killed all the Catholic kids in the neighborhood so there’d be no chance of his kid growing up to be a bead-jiggler?
• Jehovah allowed slavery and even accepted actual human sacrifice of slaves, not just of animals (read the last chapter of the book of Leviticus, closely). The central event in Christianity is exactly the murder of an innocent to appease God’s rage. Fresh eyes, people: how can you be revolted by the Aztecs sacrificing virgins and not see that the Christian god’s bloody demands are the same?

Homework:

• Why would God care whether you believe in him or not? What difference would it make to God what you think? If it matters so much to God that he’ll burn you in hell forever just for not acknowledging him, what does that tell you about God?
• Why does God demand your belief by appealing to your fear of damnation? Is that all he’s got? Why doesn’t he make better arguments?
• What other arguments than believe in me or burn in hell  has the Christian God offered to get you to believe in him? (I mean arguments in scripture, not arguments from human apologists trying to defend the Christian God against reasonable questions.) (Hint for mainstream Christians: there’s a thing called a concordance which is like an index to the Bible.) Before taking up all the craven apologists who’ve tried to make up for and explain away contradictions and absurdities in the Bible, let’s get a good grasp on what’s actually in there.
• What offense would make you sentence one of your children to eternal torment? Can you imagine the eternal hatred you would have to feel to not relent on that sentence.
• Punishment is usually justified on grounds of (1) deterring others from committing the same crime (2) protecting others against the criminal, and (3) rehabilitation, or deterring the criminal from committing the same crime again. What other justification for punishing someone can you think of? How does the threat of eternal hell for unbelief serve any of the purposes I listed or that you added?
• How well do you think the threat of hell works as a deterrent? Which important moral offenses or crimes do you think are most deterred by the threat of hell? If you didn’t think you were going to go to hell for it, maybe just to Purgatory, which moral offenses or crimes would you commit? (I hope you said fornication, like a normal person.)
• What is it that keeps most atheists and even Christians who don’t believe in hell from being habitual criminals?  Make a list of all the moral rules you think are important. Which ones do you obey mostly to keep from going to hell? which ones would you discard if there were no hell?
• Make a list of the moral offenses you think that unbelievers are more likely than believers to commit. Why are they more likely to commit these offenses? Are you sure they’re really offenses?
• Do you think that not believing in Jesus is in itself is a moral offense? If so, why? If not, why should not believing be sufficient reason to send anyone to hell forever? Does belief in Jesus excuse other moral offenses? Of course it does–that’s the whole point. So, what moral offenses, unrepented of, should be minor enough to not get you sent to hell?  Should people who don’t believe in Jesus, but commit the same offense, go to hell while you don’t?  What moral or characterological virtue is conferred by merely by believing in Jesus?
• Let’s say you go to hell. Should you be able to do anything, ever, to get out of hell? Would believing in Jesus now be enough? (After all, you now would have plenty of evidence to believe and submit–you’d have to be crazy not to). Why shouldn’t believing after you’ve been sent to hell be enough to get you out of hell, if believing before you went to hell is good enough? Is it because believing per se still isn’t enough? You didn’t believe IN TIME and BY FAITH, so now it doesn’t count. How is Jehovah/Jesus different from a salesman who tells you that the deal is good TODAY ONLY? Why should your eternity be predicated on TODAY ONLY? If the important thing is that you believe, and you eventually believe, shouldn’t that be enough? or is the important thing that you believe NOW? Why is NOW and without intellectual foundation so important to Jehovah and used car salesmen?
• If you were God, what would you sentence these guys to?  Hitler. Tiger Woods. Torquemada. Ted Bundy. Jimmy Carter. Timothy McVeigh. Larry David. Christopher Hitchens. Sean Hannity. Stalin. Ralph Waldo Emerson. Christina Aguilera. Britney Spears. Khalil Gibran. The Christian God would probably give eternal hell to Hitler, Tiger, Larry David, Chris Hitchens for sure, Stalin, Emerson, Spears and Gibran. In heaven would be  Torqie, Teddy, Jimmy, Timmy, Sean and Christina. Seems about right. Doesn’t it?
• God sent His Son to save us. Jesus, by all accounts, lived a perfect life with not one moral blemish and was sent to Earth to be brutally tortured and murdered over the course of several days which made it possible for his father to not savagely torture all of humanity for eternity. What the fuck? I mean, what the fucking fuck?
• Last questions for today: what’s the difference between living in a Mel Gibson or a Clive Barker universe? Which would you rather watch again, The Passion of the Christ or Hellraiser? Which one has better moral lessons to teach? Why should you settle for either?

UPDATED 4/3/2010 – re-organized and removed irrelevant material…for a later, expanded post.