Crime is a lie

"The criminal mind is simple" says Roz-al gul to Bruce Wayne in the mountain fortress. This idea, although emanating from the villian, passes unnoticed into our consciousness. It reinforces a very dangerous notion which has been beaten into our brains since we were small: crime and justice are polar opposites. You are either a criminal or a law abiding citizen, choose wisely. Fortunately for me I became a criminal at a very young age so my mind was not pollutted with this false dialectic.

Soviet criminals were far more common than American criminals in the early 1990's. When I lived in the Soviet Union you were a criminal if you held a church service in your apartment, traded rubles for dollars anywhere but a state bank, or allowed a foreigner to make international calls. So at the age of 19 I began to recognize that the labels "crime" and "criminal" were arbitrarily created by those in power. Arbitrary is in fact a misnomer because while these petty crimes may have been arbitrary in relation to moral justice they were not arbitrary at all. The designation of certain activities as crimes always reinforces the existing order. In the Soviet Republics free market capitalism and religion were both a threat to the existing atheist/socialist order. Therefore all activity which related to capitalism or (not officially sanctioned) religion was illegal for individuals. Of course the Soviet Union and its satellite states were free to pursue capitalism without hindrance and the official Orthodox, Catholic, Jewish and Islamic houses of worship were left intact. So the ideas of religion and capitalism were not necessarily bad under Soviet Law, they were allowed when the state was in control.

In the United States of America in 2012 we have a strangely similar situation now as regards socialism. Although it is still encumbent upon police officers, fire fighters and members of the armed forces to swear that they are not members of any organizations which advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government, socialism per se is allowed when practiced by the true power masters of the United States.

Is it not a strange irony that in the U.S. the large capitalist powers, Citibank, GM, JP Morgan Chase etc. are bastions of free-market-only economics but are first to accept socialism when it comes in the form of a government bailout? The marching cry of American corporations should thus be "Capitalism for the individual, Socialism for the corporations, just as in Soviet times the motto was "atheism/communism for the individual, capitalism/religion for the State"!

Thus my friends in Russia and Georgia were all criminals. Some had been in prison for currency trading, convicted of selling trinkets on Red Square, or black balled in their careers for traveling abroad to the decadent west (i.e. driving over the border into Turkey to buy cheap leather goods for resale in Russia/Georgia/Armenia/Azerbaijahn at a PROFIT!!!).

Yet none of the "criminals" I ever met were ashamed of having a "criminal" record in the Soviet Union. My first Soviet psychiatrist told me matter of factly that he had been in prison, and had returned to society to have a family and pursue a career in medicine (not sure this is possible in the West, which is why I went to law school). He could not understand the notion that I would attempt suicide over a paltry seven year prison term (which was the penalty at the time for living in Russia without a visa as I'd been doing). In fact the very notion that the law on paper coresponded in any way to something meaningful was (and to some degree still is) laughable in Russia.

Having internalized this notion, that the law is merely a means of perpetuating the rule of those in power, I returned to the U.S. at age 25 and began to see that this was not unique to the Soviet system.

The zombie factories that we attended under compulsion from age 5-18 really have only one lesson which is repeated ad nauseum: "there are two groups, which group will you be a member of?". When I was in elementary school the bad guys were communists, by college the bad guy slot was transitioning to Islamic terrorists. This transition was not seen as problematic even though those same "terrorists" were our allies in Afghanistan from 1979-1989. Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega, Mohmar Qhadaffi, and Hosni Mubarak would all make the long march from paid U.S. thug to undesirable despot over the next 20 years or so.

The message of your compulsory education is this: "choose the correct group." This gives us the notion that we have a choice which of course we do not. Your grades in school are a reflection of your ability and willingness to parrot back what you have been "taught". The system is not seeking creative thinkers it is seekng cogs in a machine. If you parrot back the right answers and (much more importantly) do not have disicpline issues you have proven yourself fit for the next stage of your conditioning known as the university. And if you are extremely adept at suppressing all questions and apparent lies and falsehoods about what you are being taught you will be given the privilege of not going into crushing debt to obtain your university level conditioning program, you will be given a "scholarship" so that you can feel grateful to your masters and superior to your moronic classmates whose poor working class parents sweated, scrimped and saved all their lives to provide what you are getting for free by "virtue" of your ability to discern what your teachers wanted to hear and give it to them.

This is quite effective training for the working world because the terms "yes-man"/"company-man" (good) and "agitator"(bad) are certainly indications that parroting back the Party/company line is extremely beneficial to one's career and challenging power is fatal to advancement.

Thus we exist in a paradigm in which material success is directly connected to our ability to conform to the existing order, accept the moral compass of that order and spew our enthusiasm for it (remember in 'Office Space' when Jennifer Aniston gets in trouble for not haveing enough 'Flair')?

Thus the 'criminal' mind is one which refuses not only to pin on the requisite number of pieces of 'flair' but chooses instead to wear a 'flair' button which says 'stop bombing Iraqi children'. Having never had the pleasure of employment at TGI Fridays I cannot say with certainty that such a piece of flair woud be a problem but will assume for the sake of this argument that such flair would prohibited. When the unfortunate dissident is fired for wearing this flair she is the victim of an ideological crime. The master has determined that her ideology is defective. While her job performnace may be exemplary she is unfit for employment and thus deprived of her means of providing for herself and whoever is financially dependent on her.

It may be safe to assume that Jennifer is working in Fridays because she has already been unable to spew the enthusiasm of the corporate world to the minimum extent required to remain employed. Is it a crime to require Jennifer's ideological assent as a condtion of her employment? Is it a crime that Jennifer cannot bring herself to do so?

Let us imagine that Jennifer was able to effectively take her place in the American capitalist elite as a corporate lawyer for Union Carbide in 1984. Let us further assume that Jennifer was unable to continue working for Union Carbide because her conscience would not allow her to zealously represent her client against their opponents in December of 1984. When the families of the victims of the Bhopal disaster asked for compensation Jennifer was part of legal team whose function it was to "minimize financial exposure by mitigating liability". In other words it was Jennifer's job to deny that Union Carbide had done anything wrong. Jennifer happened to be Indian and have some relatives who worked at the plant, she was intimatley familiar with the details of what the Bhopal disaster had done to the people who worked there but more importantly to those who were dependent on the incomes of those who worked there: children, the elderly, and childcare providers.

Her previous conditioning demanded that she recuse herself from representing Union Carbide but let us imagine for a moment that she was able to resist the Imperial Conditioning and continued to familiarize herself with the intimate details of Union Carbide's practices in the Bhopal plant which were to be changed or covered up in the wake of the disaster.

Jennifer is now a criminal. Even is she finds out that Union Carbide has negligently or intentionally caused the loss of human life she is a criminal. Crime is ideology, ideology is crime.

Hegel got it wrong.

I have been trying to understand the terms "dialectic", "postmodern" and "poststructualist" for at least twenty years now so I thought I could think on paper for a bit. G.W.F. Hegel was THE philosopher who saw everything in terms of two opposing forces, thus dialectic. The dialogue between two opposng forces such as good and evil, sane and insane, war and peace, crime and legitimate activity, labor and capital is rarely simple. in any of the above pairs of opposing forces (dialectics)the conflict is never clear cut. To use a favorite topic of Michel Foucault mental illness (sane/insane dialectic) is culturally determined. Homosexual sex has been considered at differnt points in history the norm (ancient Greece), a sign of mental illness (The United States up to the publication of DSM IV), or a lifestyle choice. But do any of these classifications accurately descibe gay sex? Can it simply be good, bad, evil, normal, abnormal etc.? This we run squarely into the fundamental problem of dialectical reasoning.

The opposite of the Hegelian dialectic is postmodernism. For the purpose of simplicity I will use postmodernism interchangeably with poststructuralism. The "posts" are an attack the idea that the world can be neatly organized into opposing froces. It is thus an attack on Hegel, Marx. Freud, organized religion, the notion of progress. Hegel, Marx and Freud all divided the world into opposing forces. For Marx it was labor and capital, for Freud it was the Id (deep dark animalistric desires) and the superego (your ability to keep those desires in check). Good and bad, good and evil, progress and backwardness, right and wrong, these are notions rejected by postmodernism. Postmodernism is largely an outgrowth of Hitler and the Nazis. The postmodernist philosophers (Sartre, Camu ...) saw the rise of the Third Reich as the ultimate expression of dialectical thinking. Stalin's purges, Hitler's Holocaust, Mao's extermination campaigns, Japanese internment, slavery, the Crusades, the Red Scare (McCarthyism), dropping napalm on civilians in Vietnam, these things have as their fundamental underpinning a dialectic of good and evil. For the Nazi war man=chine to function the Jews ghad to be evil, for the cold war machine to function the communists (or capitalists if you were Russian) had to be evil, for slvery to function blacks and/or "barbarians" had to be evil (or cursed in the Bible).

Every system which would perpetrate a massive crime against humanity must first classify its enemy as evil and itself as good. Postmodernism/poststructuralism rejects this notion.

Does Sean Hannity know when he says "good and evil exist" that he is following Hegel and Marx? Sean Hannity does not believe in postmodernism which in my mind is the antithesis of dialectical materialism. If Sean Hannity rejects it that is my cue to take a good loing look.

Questioning Orthodoxy

In order to understand the world we must first understand ourselves. I have a personal orthodoxy, I'm just not sure what it is. To pin it down I have asked myself these questions in the past. Did Jesus use drugs and/or profanity? should children be taught about the origin of babies? and at what age? was the government of the US involved in 9/11? These are the provocative questions that come to my mind. Is monagamy and marriage natural states for human beings, what is their normal or natural duration? Is there life on other planets? Did alien species visit the earth in pre-history?

Down and Out in Moscow and Cincinnati

As I wandered Moscow in my early twenties I distinctly rember a feeling of melancholy pervading me. I was fascinated by the decaying revolutionary murals which covered entire buildings. I was not cynical enough to scoff, I looked upon these exhortations to collectively build a bright and bold new future for the world as inspiring and valid. The work I was doing seemed to lack purpose, to lack a greater meaning and a connection with my fellow man. I saw the old black and white Soviet films and just as Mikhalkov conveyed later in "Burnt by the Sun" these films were conveyed sincerity. There were subtexts of criticism but there was also belief.

In one of my many real or imagined arguments with my father I said "at least they tried!". Tariq Ali made a similar observation about the Bolsheviks recently but in a different way. Not the defeatist "at least they tried" but a victorious "where in the hell would Europe be without the Bolsheviks?". The United States was preparing for defeat in WWII, sending messages to the British that they should send the remainder of their fleet to the United States. The Soviet Army, Stalingrad, the slash and burn retreat tactics drawing the Germans deeper into the death of Russian winter as they did with Napolean helped to destroy the Third Reich. Without these actions of the Bolsheviks what would the world have looked like?

John Cusack Interviews Law Professor Jonathan Turley About Obama Administration’s War On the Constitution

John Cusack Interviews Law Professor Jonathan Turley About Obama Administration’s War On the Constitution

John Cusack, Bin Laden, the CIA and Gary Johnson

As much as I enjoyed John Cusack's interview of Jonathon Turley I was dismayed by the absence of two things. No mention was made of an alternative theory for what happened on 9/11/01. By saying that the attacks could have been prevented Turley tacitly implied that the attack did in fact come exclusively from Bin Laden. And secondly Cusack's exasperation at not being able to vote for either Romney or Obama in good conscience would naturally lead to the conclusion that one should vote for Gary Johnson but no mention was made of his candidacy.

The importance of delving into the alleged events of 9/11/01 can not be overstated. The crisis of freedom which is gripping our country began not with the actual events of that day but with the media portrayal and public consumption of those events. Every new government agency including the TSA and the Department of Homeland Security finds its raison d'etre in those events. Obama's new found powers to indefinitely detain and/or kill American citizens without warrant, charge, trial or legal process of any kind also have their origins in the supposed events of that day. But what if it's all a lie? While I'm confident that a President Paul or Johnson would do much to restore the civil liberties of Americans they would still face the ever present question "but what about the terrorists, how do we protect ourselves against them?"

My theory of what happened that day is (I hope) not unique. Although it involves information I have gleaned from a myriad of sources including Mike Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon and his source material, as well as the recent Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth documentary neither of those sources presents the whole picture.

My father was a combat pilot in Vietnam and later an instructor pilot for the B-52 strategic nuclear bomber. We grew up with aviation. In my twenties while living in Russia I flew Soviet fighter trainers as part of my work for a military tourism company. Planes, military planning and intelligence operations are nothing exotic to me and this is my humble opinion of what happened on the day our republic ended.

This operation required immense planning. Years of training and dry run exercises would be required. For the purposes of my theory I remove Bush and Clinton from any knowledge of the operation because (assuming the outcome of U.S. Presidential elections is not known in advance) neither of them would have been in place long enought to bring the plan to fruition.

By now it is relatively common knowledge that NORAD responded incredibly slowly to the reports of hijacked airliners that day. They had a 100% interception record in the previous few years yet they failed 4 times in 1 day on 9/11/01. This fact along with the demolition of WTC 7 which was not hit by a plane are sufficient evidence to demonstrate the involvement of an entity which had domestic control over U.S. military assets as well as access to the buildings themselves.

Until 9/11/01 Pearl Harbor was our most recent example of the effectiveness on popular sentiment of an outside military attack. There are a number of respected historians who have demonstated that President Roosevelt was well aware of the Japanese intention to attack. Just a few months before the Japanese attack Roosevelt had consolidated the Pacific fleet in the tight confines of Pearl Harbor much to the chagrin of senior U.S. Navy Admirals who could see the peril this placed the fleet in. Furthermore the diplomatic measures the Roosevelt administration had taken against Japan including embargoing oil imports were acts of war that they reasonably knew would require retaliation. Fast forward 60 years. Osama Bin Laden was a protege of Charlie Wilson's war. He had received arms and training at the hands of the CIA from 1979-1989 when he was a mujahadeen fighting the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Recent revelations about an Egyptian terrorist's FBI connection in the Oklahoma City bombing demonstrate the use of foreign recruited terrorists to carry out operations on U.S. soil. Bin Laden had a CIA handler and a long history of trust forged in battle with the Soviets. What if that handler or someone like him got wind of the plans to attack the WTC? The planning for such a complex operation must have begun not long after the Soviets left Afghanistan. In fact Bin Laden's "jihad" (which by the way he had no authority to declare under Islamic law as he is not a Sheikh) against the U.S. was rooted in the 1991 U.S. invasion of Iraq just two years after the Soviet pullout of Afghanistan. Bin Laden repeatedly stated that the basing of U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia was his reason for waging war not only against the U.S. but against Saudi Arabia as well.

As Bin Laden turned his asymmetrical warfare machine from battle with the atheist Soviets to battle with the "infidel" (also a misnomer as "infidel" in the Koran is a reference to pagans while Jews and Christians are most commonly referred to by Mohammed in praiseworthy terms as "people of the book")United States it is unlikely he severed all connections with his CIA handler(s). It is also possible that Bin Laden's CIA hander was not known to him as such. If his "handler", let's call him Ahmed, was a Saudi, Chechen or Dagestani who had been bloody and dirty with Bin Laden in the trenches for 10 years in Afghanistan plus a few in Chechnya there would be no reason Bin Laden would not continue to trust him.

And let's imagine that through Ahmed someone in a position of economic, political or military power gets wind of a planned attack on the WTC in the mid nineties. There is extensive FBI documentation of surveillance on suspected terrorists in flight schools in Florida in the mid 1990's. This person is savvy enough to realize that foiling this plot is not nearly as politically valuable as allowing it to happen. But the devastation of a plane hitting a building just isn't gonna be spectacular enough for his or her purposes.

This mysterious person, let's call him Charlie, also knows that U.S. F-16's are going to blow the shit out of those airliners 7 minutes after they are declared hijacked. So a military training exercise has to be scheduled for that day to buy a few extra minutes. More importantly Charlie knows enough about the way modern skyscrapers are built that they are actually designed to withstand a direct hit form a Boeing 707. So if this attack, conceived and carried out by Bin Laden and his cronies, is going to have the desired effect the buildings are going to have to come down. So Charlie gets somebody who is an expert in controlled demoltition to set that up. The military exercise is planned for 9/11/01, the airliners remarkably run the gauntlet of the most sophisticated and battle tested air superiority forc the world has ever knowm, the buildings are hit, a few mysterious explosions before and after the impact are not noticed, the wrekage is quickly carted away and boom, instant police state. As long as Charlie, for any reason we care to imagine, has much to gain by the expansion of U.S. military power arouund the world and domestic government expenditures this is the most reasonable theory I can see which takes into account all the available evidence. And Charlie knows that war is the best way to both things simultaneously.

Ender's Game, Armour, The Last Starfighter

Ender's Game and 1984, dust them off, no longer the province of nerds and sci-fi geeks, they became the required reading of the martial academies. We first had to understand the psychology of slavery if we were to become free. The classics of literature were studied just as the samurai had studied art, calligraphy, poetry and watercolors. These were studied alongside the disciplines of the sword. Just as the Japanese had taught: the complete warrior had to be a complete human being first. The mechanisms of modern technology were employed for combat training. In the Neo-of-the -Matrix like scenario children studied the arts of artillery, deployment of forces, marshaling of guerrilla tactics using asymmetrical warfare against a stronger opponent.

Asimov was a scientist. And then he decided there was too much beauty in science to leave it to the scientists, it had to be literary and imaginative. Winston Smith used his speakwrite to make history disappear and now I use my Siri equipped iPhone to make literature appear.

The alien invasion was an advanced race who had progressed beyond the human form; something like the brains floating in liquid that moms use to talk about. Because of their advanced telekinetic nature, projectile weapons are nearly useless against them. Projectiles can be diverted with minimal psychokinetic force. The only way to combat them is to slash past the Sentinel droids which protect their tanks in primal, edged-weapon, hand-to-hand combat. And once passed the droids to smash their liquid filled tanks and sliced them open as they quiver on the deck.

This new fact of history had created a renaissance in hand-to-hand combat. An ancient art form that had decayed into an obscure past time once again became a matter of life and death. Mock Renaissance wargames became the training for a mortal struggle as we began train our children at the age of three to be locked in a death strugggle to save the human race by age 13.

Attend your training. It's what was expected. The research had been done to show that 10 years was the period required to become an expert in anything. We were turning our children into killing machines to save the human race much as the cold warriors and medieval knights had done.

The suicide bombers, the jihadists and the imperial powers all came together with their former foes to fight and push back the alien invasion. The suicide bombers of the Afghan struggle in the New York war became the instructors with some training thrown in from a few old Vietcong left over from the Vietnam war.

The zeal for combat was inherent to human nature. It had to be massaged, encouraged and brought to fruition. The martial cultures of the Cold War, the Butlerian Jihad and the Renaissance had to be revived. It was a matter of life and death.

FPV/FPS masters were no longer quirks, they were a matter of life and death. There's a reason that Dungeons & Dragons was so successful. There's a reason that people play first-person shooter video games and go online with headsets and joysticks to have war with their friends on their team. It's a part of human nature that will never go away. DARPA had started their six drones per pilot program just in time. Finally in 2015 there was a foe worthy of worldwide combat.

Killian is Lying to You

Why are there so many coincidences between Bradley Manning's saga and the movie "The Running Man"? For those of you who don't remember the movie the "crime" which the main character (Ben Richards) is accused of committting is firing from a helicopter at unarmed civilians. Richard's real crime in the movie is disobeying the order to fire on people who were rioting for food. When he disobeys the order the commander back at the base orders the co-pilot to detain Richards and take control of the helicopter. They do, massacre the civilians anyway and then Richards is set up as "the butcher of Bakersfield" complete with doctored video/audio footage as evidence.

Coincidence number one: The "smoking gun" material released by Wikileaks from the alleged Bradley Manning material was a video of military pilots firing on unarmed civiilians while receiving confirmation from their commanders that what they were doing was legal. For attempting to tell the truth about this incident Bradley Manning has now been in solitary confinement for 4 years or so and awaits his February 2013 military show trial in which he could receive the death penalty for "aiding the enemy".

In the movie version of the story the American population has been lulled into compliance by a neverending stream of violent and meaningless television programming (sound familiar) until a group of activist/commandoes hijack the satellite signal and interrupt the broadcast with the text "KILLIAN IS LYING TO YOU". After this text appears on the screen the actual footage of Ben Richard's helicopter's attack is broadcast and the house of cards comes down for the government controlled media. So all we really needed was the text "KILLIAN IS LYING TO YOU" to appear on the screen as the Wikileaks video of the helicopter gunship attack was broadcast on the internet for this whole "Running Man" scenario to take place. The book is set in 2025, that makes us a couple decades early but then again who thought we would have drones patrolling the US as early as 2011-12?

There wasn't such thing as a public internet in 1982 when "The Running Man" was published so King's vision of the public suddenley becoming aware of the totalitarian state's machinations was via a hijacked satellite feed. But it's interesting that the Wikileaks infomation is often obtained when it is "hijacked" by whistleblower citizen activists like Bradley Manning (allegedly).

In a recent photo of Bradley Manning he was wearing a beret and I thought of the Dweezil Zappa character's beret in "The Running Man".

The moral of the story is: If you want to know what is going to happen in thirty years read Stephen King's sci-fi.

Why I'm Voting for Obama

When I watched the RNC use legal maneuvering to take silence the voice of dissent within its ranks I decided to vote for Obama. At first it was a knee jerk reaction of anger and frustration but the more I considered the decision the more I realized that there was more to it than protest.

I had planned to vote for Obama in 2008, something happened to me in the voting booth; fear, latent racism, lifelong Republican family brainwashing, who knows but I voted for McCain. That being said I was genuinely glad that Obama won, primarily because I was excited that the first President of the United States my son would know would be black. In my childhood black media figures were criminals on the local news, comedians, athletes and radicals. To my mind race would figure less in my children's consciousness if black was the color of the president as a counterbalance to all the negative stereotyping of non-white races that persists in the Western media. So far this theory appears to hold water as my son regularly tells us that he wishes he was black. Thank you President Obama.

I have always been a radical. I have never succeeded in suppressing my brain's need to point out every contradiction inherent in large bureaucratic organizations. Thus I have never understood how people who call themselves small government Republicans can advocate the endless growth of the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense, how people who call themselves Civil Libertarians can stand by silently while the Constitution is shredded, how people who claim to follow Jesus can advocate the accumulation of wealth and the waging of war, or how people who call themselves Muslims can send children to their deaths in a way which is forbidden by the Koran in multiple ways. The smear campaign which has been waged against Obama since the day he became president has been rife with all these forms of contradictions.

Obama is the poster child for the American dream: Kenyan/Arabic name, bi-racial, child of a divorced/remarried/single mom, childhood in Islamic as well as Christian cultures. His presence in the Whitehouse is a testament to every ideal this country has ever espoused: all men are created equal, race doesn't matter, we don't discriminate on the basis of religion, all families are equal, you can do anything you set your mind to. But what do the mouthpieces of the Party of Lincoln do the second he gets elected? "HE'S A SECRET MUSLIM, HE'S NOT A REAL AMERICAN, HE LOVES THE TERRORISTS BECAUSE HE WANTS TO STOP WAR, HE WASN'T BORN HERE' HE WAS EDUCATED IN A SHARIA SCHOOL". This makes me feel sick to my stomach when I hear it. Hannity, Boortz, Limbaugh and the millions of mindless minions who take this garbage and perpetuate it on Facebook and Twitter represent everything I hate about this country. This is the type of thinking that makes us the intellectual laughing stock of the world. This is why Americans who travel and live abroad pretend to be Canadian lest they are put at the children's table during adult conversation.

The most frustrating part for me is the implication that if any of the "horrendous facts" about Obama were true it would be a scandal. He's a Muslim who wasn't born in America who holds postcolonialist views and thinks America must abide by International law and this is a bad thing?

I remember when everyone in Republican circles was lamenting the birth in America requirement because it would have prevented the rising star of the party at the time from becoming President. When Schwarzennegar was married to a Kennedy and on his way to becoming the governator the birth requirement was bandied about as archaic and obsolete. The tenacity with which the Obama haters cling to this completely irrelevant law is indicative of how desperately they hate Obama for reasons they are ashamed to articulate.

Let's face it Libertarians: Obama is the most radical president we have had in a long time. He has basically opened the spigot on government spending for the middle class. Now before you roll your eyes and read me Austrian economic theory let's use basic logic to analyze our history. In the 42 years I've been alive the government debt has grown drastically but the lion's share of the money our government has borrowed has been used for purposes that 1) In no way benefit the average taxpayer who is ultimately on the hook to pay the money back, 2) Further enriches and entrenches the existing powers be they financial or military 3) have little or no beneficent for me or anyone I know.

Thus I ask you: why is it that the right's entire line of "rational" attack on Obama is based on the amount of money he has spent since coming to office? Why is it so radical and unacceptably risky for an administration to increase the federal debt to improve the lives of everyday people when EVERY SINGLE ADMINISTRATION (except Clinton) before Obama did the same thing but spent money on things like wars and tax cuts for the rich (Bushes), defense buildup (Reagan) and (see the internet for how all America's debt was accrued while the quality of life of the middle class steadily got worse every year).

So someday in the bright future Libertarianism may be the solution, but there is an ongoing fight for control of the resources from an inevitably expanding mountain of debt. Our government debt grows everyday, Obama's administration is using more of that money for the middle class than Bush did, or Romney would. That makes the choice easy.

Dinesh D'souza and his apocalyptic film "2016 Obama's America"

I witnessed a spectacle from Orwell's 1984 tonight. Goldberg was replaced by Jeremiah Wright but a packed cinema hissed at his appearance in what is perhaps the clumsiest piece of political propaganda I have ever had the misfortune of watching. I have listened to D'Souza and thought quite highly of him going into the film but that has changed.

At the most fundamental level the premise of the movie is ridiculous. It reminded of attempts to psychoanalyze Hitler using Mein Kampf and other historical research. The problem with D'souza's film is that his ominous warnings about who Obama really is are uninteresting and/or factually incorrect.

Let's start with a simple argument D'souza makes by implication, namely that Obama sympathyzes with jihadists and that's why he wants to "give them civil rights and close Guantanamo Bay". This statement drew the obligatory collective gasp from the theater of white hair but as a zealous advocate for the rule of law, trial by jury and other revolutionary concepts I can assure you that Obama has done neither of these things(and if he had so what?). What is strange to me is that I can't be the only one in the cinema who is aware that Obama has aggressively followeed the Bush Justice Department's lead on suspected terrorists. Attorney General Eric Holder's subordinates have vigorously opposed all attempts to grant Constitutional protections to detainees at Gitmo and it's still open for business.

A Jeremiah Wright sermon clip which showed the obligatory "God damn America" statement is no more revolutionary than an essay by Noam Chomsky and from a theological point of view not even conroversial. A nation that has wantonly bombed and pillaged every corner of the globe can hardly be expected to enjoy the favor and protection of a God whose theology is grounded in the concepts of self sacrifice and love.

In an interview clip of D'souza promoting his book on which the film is based he says he has a "new card to lay on the table about Obama". D'souza's "new card" is that Obama's worldview is shaped by the anticolonialist notions of his absent Kenyan father who was an "advisor" to the revolutionaries who kicked the British out of Kenya. Thus, stay with me here, Obama, in a futile attempt to win the affection or approval of his now dead father, is also an anticolonialist and therefore secretly trying to cut off America's strength at the knees. The premise that America was and is a colonial power/superpower is old hat. I read Edward Said (also listed ominously as one of Obama's "founding fathers")at the Univeristy of Cincinnati. It would be impossible for anyone to receive an Ivy League educaton and not be exposed to the scholarship of colonialism of which Said is a pillar.

Another one of Obama's deep, dark secrets is that his grandfather's friend ("his chosen mentor" as D'souza characterizes him) was on a list of radicals the FBI "could have detained in the event of a war with the Soviet Union". News flash, I'm probably on that list too. What literate person didn't join the Communist and or Socialist Party in their youth? In Sweden there is a saying "if you're not red in your twenties you've got no heart and if you're not blue in your 40's you've got no brains". Wasn't the ultra right wing "Project for a New American Century" founded by a group of ex-Marxists?

As for Obama's plan to destroy America's military has D'sousa ever heard of Ron Paul? Is he a socialist/jihadi sympathizer too? I am astonished that the notion of downsizing the world's largest military with 900 plus overseas bases is controversial. Shame on you Dinesh D'souza, the only possible motivation I can see for this horriby made, poorly researched, unentertaining, badly edited piece of garbage is money. His production cost couldn't have topped $50,000 so he's going to make a shitload of money. Too bad he will never be taken seriously again.

David Barton and Ayatollah Khomeini agree...

Day one of the new house. Landline internet and a desktop for the fist time in many years. I heard a story about David Barton on NPR yesterday. Pretty hostile tone, "not a historian etc." It brings to mind the critiques of Jonah Goldberg when he wrote "Liberal Fascism". I'm not sure what exactly a "real historian" is. Those in the ivory tower of academia seem just as likely as a lay person ignore evidence which conflicts with an emotional attachment to a position.

Steph and I ar trying to decide where to send the kids, or if we will send them at all, to school. We are enrolled in the K-12 Virtual Academy for Xander, thus the desktop computer, but planning to visit Miami Valley Academy next Friday. Dayton-Christian is less than a mile away and our home district is pretty decent.

The David Barton piece on NPR caught my attention because he was apparently involved in a change to the Texas primary school curriculum in 2010. Barton seeks to restore the strong role of the Bible in the Founding Fathers documents and day-to-day lives.

This is a very touchy subject in America. Having been subjected to a nearly useless American education I tend to think that whatever changes Barton is advocating and implementing can only be an improvement. I am a historian by education. I am baffled by the notion of whitewashing history to fit the current ideological undertone of the culture.

Religion is irrelevant in this debate. Whether one is a Muslim, Christian, Atheist or Hindu one is not served by the fallacy that the founding fathers were anything but Bible believing Christians. I do not believe in the infallibility of any religious text per se and this is where I would most likely differ from Barton or any orthodox believer. But to pretend that Christianity was not a massive underlying force in the creation of the United States is akin to deleting Gandhi from the Indian independence movement or Islam from the Iranian revolution of 1979.

We will differ on our religious and political beliefs forever. Let's not succumb to the temptation to rewrite history whenever the culture shifts. Just as the uprisings in the 60's were a backlash against the pervasive Judeo-Christian norms in a Euro-Centric West so too is the Evangelical backlash in the United States a rightful uprising against the Orwellian effacing of Christian texts from the teaching of history.

Even the most dyed in the wool Atheist must concede that parts of the United States Constitution were taken from the Old Testamant. In an era of Islamophobia it is perhaps unpalatable to acknowledge that Sharia may have existed in the United States for over 200 years.

According to Wikipedia:

Sharia, in its strictest definition, is a divine law, as expressed in the Qur'an and Muhammad's example (often called the sunnah).

If this horrendous affront to civilization called Sharia is to be exterminated it would not behoove those in the camp advocating such a policy to acknowledge that U.S. law, specifically the Constitution may in fact be a form of Sharia.

The apparent irony here is that in my mind it is the liberals who are opposed to the notion that the U.S. may have religious ancestry in its legal system but open to the acceptability of a religious based legal system in other cultures. Conservatives, on the other hand, strenuously advocate:

1. The infallibility of teh Bible and the Constitution 2. The interconnectedness of those two documents. 3. The inherent dangers of Sharis (creeping Sharia) being established in the middle ease, Europe and America.

Is it safe to assume that those who advocate Sharia in the middle east would not agree that the United States has a form of Sharia in place? Are David Barton and Ahmendinajad really ideological allies and would either of them be comfortable with such a characterization?

USCCB and Bishop's Response to HHS Ruling

USCCB and Bishop's Response to HHS Ruling

Mitt's Blood Money | The Truth About Mitt Romney's Medicare Fraud

Mitt's Blood Money | The Truth About Mitt Romney's Medicare Fraud

Restaurant technology at the Dublin Pub

I think it's time to invent a new technology which allows the server to interface with our guests with the kitchen and with payment systems all without leaving the table. It needs to have the utility of a handheld micros, the price point, which is zero, of the square credit card swiper and the underlying bility of the POS system

31 keywords in Python 31 Kings in Joshua 31 stumps

When I started going to the Vineyard Darlene told me to read the book of Joshua. there're 31 Kings whom Joshua vanquishes in the book and I felt compelled to write down the name of every one. I knew then that the number 31 was going to be significant and when I put the stumps around the cross in front of my church I counted them and there were 31. The number keeps coming up. I'm reading a book about the programming language Python and one of the first things I learned was that there are 31 keywords in the Python language.

Truly revolutionary technology

I want to go to the animal library and borrow a rhinoceros roo. A rhinoceros-roo stands on two legs pops up and down and has a pouch for its baby. Sophie says "where's the rhinoceros rude and daddy says it's right next to the Alligator-parakeet". They're really nice at the animal library to let you borrow whatever you want. Sometimes I borrow the tarantula but only if I have a terrarium at home, otherwise mommy gets mad.

The first time we borrowed a donkey from the animal library we never brought her back.

She did such a good job working on our cocoa bean plantation that we just didn't want to bring her home. And she loves to eat oats and hay in the barn and we knew she'd be lonely if she went back to the animal library.

Now that I've talked about my idea for the children's book I want to talk about what I dreamt about last night. I was sitting at a table having dinner with my parents and an older gentleman: whitehair, white beard who I knew as a friend of my parents and someone they respected. I also knew that this gentleman was a very strong Christian and wanted to stimulate conversation that question my parents assumptions about material reality. So I turned to him and said "hey Jim have you ever seen anyone raised from the dead"?


Without even pausing in his chewing and not even turning his head or looking for any of us he simply said "oh yeah".

I asked him who and he said said "old Marfa so-and-so's brother's wife". and still didn't stop eating to elaborate on anything. But when I looked at my parents they were clearly interested.

And of course if you can raise a human being from the dead you can raise a rhinoceros-roo from the dead.

Dutch court orders companies to block Pirate Bay | ajc.com

Dutch court orders companies to block Pirate Bay  | ajc.com

Ron Paul changes American politics forever

Regardless of the outcome of the 2012 election the Ron Paul presidential candidacy will change the face of American politics forever. Never before has someone reached the national spotlight with such a consistent, persistent, and undying message of liberty and opposition to tyranny in all forms.

Small government conservatives have been forced to drink the Kool-Aid of an ever expanding military-industrial complex for 50 years, with Ron Paul that comes to a screeching halt.

The other thing his candidacy is going to do is expose Neil Boortz, Rush Limbaugh, and Sean Hannity as the very, same mainstream media shills that they are always complaining about. They refuse to embrace the only small government conservative candidates in the race. I am so tired of listening to people that claim to have massive intellects refusing to look at simple facts about the voting records of the politicians that we call Republicans. It's disgusting and I think Rush Limbaugh should go sit next to Katie Couric if he is going to be a mouthpiece for idiocy.

Why do Boortz, Hannity, & Limbaugh consistently say that Ron Paul's foreign-policy is irresponsible?

Strawberry Shortcake is a Communist

In the Zizekian fashion I would like to analyze "Skydancers", a show my son watches from the mid 90s. Similar to my analysis of the movies "Ironman" and "Batman Begins" I'd like to examine the stereotypes which are reinforced by mass media entertainment, especially in children's programming.

The first thing I noticed was that the choreographer they hired to improve their dance routine had a Russian accent. So I was trying to make it a learning experience and said "notice how he talks? He has a Russian accent".

So right about the time Xander starts noticing that this guy is Russian the plot reveals that he is some kind of spy for the enemy. So of course I'm annoyed that the Russian guy has to be a bad guy first of all but even further annoyed that: One, not only is he a traitor but he turns out to be an effeminate weirdo driven by pride that just happens to be a ballet dancer.

So now I'm pissed off that they're not only taking shots at Russian, my favorite culture, but at ballet, one of my favorite art forms.

And since I'm ranting and raving about children's programming I might as well talk about why Strawberry Shortcake is a Communist. She and all her pals want to build this big community garden which is all good. The problem is that they want to have it on existing private property.

No, I'm not trying to say the Purple Pieman of Porcupine Peak is a nice guy but he does have the deed to the property. I'm all for using eminent domain to turn a defunct, weed-filled parking lot into a park but the Pieman shouldn't have his property taken by this little freckled fascist simply because he's disagreeable.

I hope you two are talking to each other...

I was thinking about that club in downtown Prague from "XXX". Same concept but flatscreen touch monitors on hallway walls and counters allowing people to access internet but always using a touch screen. This serves two functions beyond simple utility: 1. Tasks cannot be overly complex and time consuming (now 2012) on a touch screen user interface so it adds to mobility and multiple users, 2:It is an added layer of social interaction. Being in the same room with someone does not necessarily create an interaction. In an era where husbands and wive text each other while in the same home it is not unreasonable to expect initial social contact to need some help from our artificially intelligent friends.

Here's how I imagine a potential social interaction assisted by a computer:

Human 1 (via social media software/smartphone hardware/touchscreen hardware): We just met a few minutes ago, im a friend of...with the Black Mohawk and the green eyebrows. I'm feeling kinda anti-social right now and its really loud in here but id love to talk to you again sometime.
Human 2: Yeah, im actually leaving to go to XYZ hookah bar where its quieter.
Human 1: I love that place


i tak dali

So there is this big vacant industrial building in the bar district...