The Real Disrespect for the Troops. Cindy Sheehan, the antiwar activist whose son Casey died in Iraq last year, returned to Crawford, Texas (Dubya's hometown) over the Thanksgiving weekend to lead a new round of protests against the Bush War. Her protest led to counter-protests. As reported on AOL:

About a dozen Bush supporters stood downtown with signs, one reading: "Real America won't wimp out." Throughout the morning, shoppers and a few tourists leaving souvenir stores stopped in the tent to voice their support for the president. * * *

Sheehan's summer protest, particularly its use of crosses with the names of fallen soldiers, sparked the counter-demonstration in downtown Crawford by the father of a fallen Marine who felt his son and other troops were being disrespected by the war opponents.

Oh? Let's talk about disrespect for the troops. Who respects them more, the people who want to save their lives and their sacred honor, or those who are perfectly happy to see them dead in the service of things they don't understand?
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Let me explain to the empty-headed losers of the "support our troops" crowd what the rich who control this country really feel about their brave boys. (Oh, sorry: "men and women". Women must always be mentioned in this Communist age, even tho almost no American women are dying in Iraq — which seems odd, doesn't it, if they are so important to combat operations that we need to put women in harm's way.)
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The advent of the all-volunteer military has given the ruling class the chance to use otherwise useless human waste who would be a drag on society if they were here. The more such dumb beasts of burden the ruling class can kill off in wars abroad, the happier the rich are. Do you think the children of the rich are in harm's way? Get real.
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The people stupid enuf to take a job that could kill them are in many, if not most cases, too stupid to be of any real use to society. Those who take a job that requires them to kill people are violently-disposed antisocial losers who would be fiting each other, driving drunk or stoned on pot, and endangering the lives of decent people all over this country if we didn't quarantine them in the military, on bases surrounded by razor wire. The military is a very large "Dirty Dozen" kept away from decent people and marked out by uniforms so we know to avoid them.
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Remember The Dirty Dozen, a 1967 movie summed up thus at the Internet Movie Database website?

A US Army Major is assigned a dozen convicted murderers to train and lead them into a mass assassination mission of German officers in World War II.

Do you think the U.S. military wanted the Dirty Dozen to survive?
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That is what the bulk of our troops are to the rich: the Dirty Dozen, a bunch of stupid, useless, ghetto blacks, barrio Hispanics, and white trailer trash who are fit only to serve as cannon fodder and lay down their otherwise worthless lives as far away as we can get them. These are the brainless losers who can't get into college or even a good vocational school; who would be underemployed or completely unemployed if they weren't in the military; who take an extremely dangerous job because they can't get any other job; and who are so easily duped that they think that the military is going to take care of them, educate them, and give them a better life, and it couldn't possibly happen that they get killed before they get out with a useful education (as tho military skills are readily transferable into the nonmilitary economy), because only other people get killed, not them!
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If they were here, they'd be hanging out on street corners getting high, selling drugs, and joining gangs if they're black or Hispanic; or drinking themselves into a stupor in trailer parks or the parking lot of the nearest 7-Eleven or Winn-Dixie, then driving drunk in drag races on the streets, endangering upstanding citizens. A large proportion of them, of any race, would be costing us in unemployment or welfare payouts, prisons, support for illegitimate children and public-health clinics, and all the other costs the underclass imposes upon society.
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So, the rich think, if they're inclined to fite and join gangs anyway, let's recruit them into the biggest, baddest gang in all the land, the United States military. Put a uniform on the punks, grind down their undisciplined asses into obedient automatons, pay them a pittance, and send them off to war. If they survive, oh well, we tried. And maybe the discipline the military imposed on them will carry over for a while — tho we don't really believe that of most of them. If they die, so much the better. We won't have to worry about what kind of trouble and expense they'll put us to once they come back — traumatized by what they've seen and numbed to human suffering. Considering that some percentage of returnees will be permanently disabled and cost us a fortune in repair and ongoing medical treatment, and another percentage will suffer post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychological damage that could actually make them dangerous to themselves and their neighbors, it would be better if those specimens didn't return at all. Do you really want a sniper living nextdoor? The rich sure don't, and the returned walking wounded won't be living in their neighborhoods. They might, however, be living in yours.
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That is what the rich who control this society really feel about your brave boys and girls "defending their country" — as tho Iraq was ever a danger to this country! The rich are happy that the parents of the troops are stupid too, so will buy any lie and see the removal of their kids from society and sacrifice of their lives on the altar of militarism as noble and truly appreciated. They'll actually believe that Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the Republican leadership all share their pain, when the reality is that the more dead dopes from the lowest classes the Republicans can get rid of in Iraq, Afghanistan, and anyplace else far away that they can send them to, the happier they are.
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Wake up.
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The people who really respect your kids are the people who want them out of harm's way. Who want to offer them a free education, healthcare, and employment they don't have to risk their lives to get.
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So who's disrespecting the troops? The people who would like to see a world at peace where kids get to grow up and grow old without killing or being killed? Or those who see the world as a dangerous place that the least of us should die to keep at bay? Your call.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,108.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 2:47 PM

 
"Forward", Backward, It's All the Same. Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the Butcher of Shatila who has devoted decades to slaughtering Palestinians in pursuit of a Greater Israel, is now posing as peacemaker, only because he sees that the Palestinians have not been decimated but, quite the contrary, their burgeoning population threatens to flood Israel out of existence unless he can somehow pacify them.
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(This is a long entry, so if the topic doesn't particularly interest you, do not trouble to read on.)
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Abandoned by large parts of his traditional hardline, imperialist constituency when he withdrew from the Gaza Strip this past summer and forced the Greater Israel settlers out, Sharon has decided he must break with the Likud Party to create a new movement he hopes will finally make Israel secure within defensible borders. So Sharon has just founded a new party, called "Forward" ("Kadima" in Hebrew). Ah, but what is "forward" in a country that writes backward (right to left) and thinks progress is to go back 2,000 years?
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Sharon is forced to accommodate the Palestinians at a time when the United States, Israel's only ally on all of planet Earth, is wearying of the Middle East entirely, an unfortunate consequence (from Israelis' point of view) of the war that Zionists forced upon us and which has turned sour in American public opinion.
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Saddam's Iraq was the only credible threat to Israel's "survival" — an inflammatory word that Zionists like to use because it suggests not only that Israel as a political entity apart from Palestine is threatened but also that triumphant Arab armies would slaughter the Jews wholesale in genocidal fury that produces a second "Holocaust". In actuality, only a tiny minority of Arabs, many of them people who have had family members or friends slaughtered by Israelis, want the Jews all dead. Most Arabs want only (1) that the "State of Israel" be dissolved and its territories merged back into a united Palestine and (2) that any Israeli Jew who will not consent to becoming a responsible Jewish citizen of United Palestine leave the area forever, not necessarily in a coffin or body bag, but on the next available plane, train, ship, bus, truck, car — or camel for that matter.
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The Jews' own scriptures gave the world the term "handwriting on the wall", a reference to a supposed finger of God that wrote on the walls of a palace in ancient Babylon "Mene mene tekel upharsin", interpreted as meaning, loosely 'You have been weighed in the balance. Your days are numbered.' The future is looking grim for Israel.
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Jews, observant or not, are always aware of the thought that God is watching and judging, holding them in particular, the people of his Covenant (special deal) to a higher standard of conduct. Some Jews suspect, even if they won't admit it aloud, that their behavior in Palestine is not righteous, and that for that reason the tide is turning against Zionism. They were given 50 years to prove themselves worthy of receiving the 'Promised Land' a second time, and realize that they've blown it. The dream has turned into a nitemare, and far from expanding opportunities for the Jewish people, Zionism threatens to close in on them and turn the world to furious retribution, doing God's will in destroying Israel once again for the sins of the Jews themselves. The numbers (mene) being counted (mene) this time are the sins of Zionism and the children of Palestinians. God has found the behavior of the Jews wanting (tekel), and they will be divided once again, forced out of the Promised Land and scattered to the ends of the Earth (upharsin) a second time. Works for me.
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Among the sins of Zionism is compelling Zionism's slaves in Washington to start a war of aggression against Israel's only credible threat at the time, Saddam's Iraq. That war is turning out very badly in at least two ways.
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First, the justification given to the American people for a "pre-emptive strike" — war of aggression, not of retaliation — has been shown false, and people are now asking who was behind the lies, particularly the lies (a) that Saddam had Weapons of Mass Destruction and was even working on the ultimate Weapon of Mass destruction, a nuclear bomb; and (b) that Saddam was involved in the attack upon the World Trade Center. If those lies are traced back to Radical Zionists (with names like Wolfowitz and Perle) who manipulated intelligence for the express purpose of inducing the United States to attack Israel's worst enemy, we can expect a powerful, indignant backlash against Zionism on the part of all but the most slavish apologists for Zionism among American Jews and fundamentalist Christians.
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Second, and perhaps even worse from the Zionist perspective, is that Americans have established a connection with an Arab country that has made scores of millions identify with and feel sorry for Arabs, something Israelis never wanted to happen. American guilt for the terrible things we have done to that poor country, which never attacked us, are starting to be felt. And ordinary Americans have made very personal emotional connections to Iraqi kids, activists, fellow soldiers, government workers, and ordinary people in the streets whom they see blown up and killed by violence that our war has unleashed against them in removing a government that very effectively for decades suppressed such terrorism.
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To justify the unjustifiable, American politicians have had to change the rhetoric from protecting ourselves against imminent threat of destruction (by little bitty Iraq, 7,000 miles away!) to liberating Iraqis and promoting democracy. The first approach allows us to slaughter The Enemy with impunity. The second, however, requires us to identify with Iraqis and protect them, to work for their own best interest, to see them as like us and worthy of our help. That is the real kicker here: the longer we stay in Iraq, the more Americans come to see the Arab side in the Arab-Israeli conflict. And that is extremely dangerous to Israel.
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There are actually returned American soldiers who have come to identify with Iraqis so much that they have established as-yet small organizations to bring Iraqi children to American hospitals to repair war- or terrorism-related injuries, and raise funds for schools and libraries in shattered Iraq. A few Americans after release from the military have returned to Iraq as private citizens, or made plans to return, to help rebuild the country. Such activities must make Zionists shudder.
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And it likely will only get worse for Zionists.
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If the war goes even more badly, and Americans start dying at higher rates — or even at the same rate, which becomes unacceptable to a public that heretofore accepted it on the understanding that things would start getting better soon, because the war wasn't supposed to last very long — there will be a bitter call to withdraw, precipitously — to hell with the consequences! That could leave the region entirely destabilized, and no one can predict the outcome.
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Perhaps once the burr under the saddle that the occupation constitutes is removed, Iraqi society will calm down and make peace, one community with another in a successful and tolerant democracy. In the immortal sardonic words of comic Judy Tenuta, "That could happen."
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Well, actually, it could happen, but probably not without very substantial help from UN or Arab League peacekeepers.
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In the alternative, extremists could seize control of the Iraqi government, by defeating the army thru guerrilla war, thru assassination, thru military coup. And then Iraq, under extremist, even Islamist fanatics, could embark upon a program to destroy Israel. Especially could that happen if the extremists who seize control are Shiites and make common cause with Islamist Iran, their Shia brother. Then instead of Iraq being a bulwark against Shiite Islamism and a buffer between Tehran and Jerusalem, Iraq becomes an active ally of Tehran against Jerusalem. That would serve Israel right.
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Or Iraq could split up into three constituent parts (Kurdish, Sunni Arab, and Shia Arab), peacefully or by civil war. That would produce three governments whose attitudes toward Israel cannot be predicted.
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It has often been the case that societies with internal divisions have attempted to achieve national unity thru foreign wars. There's nothing like a common enemy to unite a people. What is the best common enemy for Iraq, or any of its constituent subparts, to unite against? Hmm. That's tough. Oh, I know! Israel!
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Israel might hope that the three countries into which Iraq splits focus their energies on fiting and hating each other, but that might well not happen. Rather, their leaders might decide that peace with their Moslem neighbors requires them to make common cause with them against a mutual enemy: again, Israel.
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And what happens if the Shiite south of Iraq decides to merge into Iran (culturally unlikely) or at least into a tight, formal alliance against Israel (not at all unlikely)? Iran's present government has announced very pubicly that it looks forward to the destruction of Israel, and the accession of oil-rich southern Iraq to the cause of Islamist Iran would not only strengthen Iran in its preparations for war against Israel but also bring its forces geographically closer to Israel's borders.
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Even a united and democratic Iraq would almost certainly be militantly anti-Zionist. It is almost inconceivable that an Arab people that is adamantly anti-Zionist will elect a government that is pro-Zionist. An authoritarian government could make peace with Israel against the will of its people. A democratic government could not. Isn't that ironic?
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So might the Iraq war turn out to be all for nought, as Zionists see things? They will have overthrown anti-Zionist Saddam only to install a democratically elected anti-Zionist government.
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Further, if the war goes well, U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces turn the tide and establish peace, and democracy flowers, the U.S. will beam with pride at its students' great success, and the U.S. will, by extension, think much better of Arabs in general.
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What happens if a new Iraqi government, however derived, does turn militantly anti-Zionist and makes preparations, at least with Iran and possibly with Syria as well, to destroy Israel? Will the United States intervene in yet another Iraq war? Or will the American public say "Hell no! We won't go!"
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Zionists may have overplayed their hand, and produced the predicate for the United States' not just abandoning them to their own devices but actually turning against Zionism in coming to appreciate the Arab point of view in coming to identify with Iraqis.
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That brings us back to Palestinians and the hope of Ariel Sharon and his ilk of making peace with Palestinians without merging "Israel" back into Palestine. Any such hope rests upon the base belief that Palestinians are so utterly defeated emotionally, so utterly hopeless of ever restoring unified Palestine, that they will make genuine peace with Israel, even to the point of normalizing relations, trading with the enemy, and making Israel not just secure within its borders but actually prosperous thru trade and peaceful Arab labor working in Israeli industry. That could happen. Sure it could.
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But do Palestinians feel hopelessly defeated? Or do they see the "Population Time Bomb" as getting ready to explode and thereby destroy Israel once and for all?
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In contemplating whether the Palestinians are ready to accept utter defeat, the Jews should look to their own history. Did they feel utterly defeated after Nazism devastated their community? Or did they bounce back to create a powerful Jewish state? If a calamity worse than the Palestinians have suffered did not utterly dispirit the Jews, why would Jews think that Israel's current overlordship has utterly dispirited the Palestinians? More fundamentally, if the Jews did not give up on returning the land of David and Solomon to Jewish control after almost 2,000 years of exile, why would they believe the Palestinians would give up on recovering Palestine after only 57 years?
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Palestinians have no reason ever to accommodate Israel. Their population growth forced Israel to withdraw from Gaza, lest the number of Palestinians within Israel's asserted territory surpass the number of Jews. And the numbers keep shifting in the Palestinian direction, as immigration to Israel dries up and emigration from Israel increases.
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Moreover, U.S. attitudes toward the Middle East are changing. Many Americans now feel that the Middle East is none of our business, and going into Iraq was a big mistake that has only caused us and Iraqis grief. Once the U.S. withdraws from Iraq, it is not going to want to go back, not to restore lost Iraqi democracy, not for Israel, not for anything. "Let the bastards kill each other if they want. Just leave us out of it" is already the attitude of tens of millions. Once the U.S. pullback from Iraq is completed, that view will be the intractable majority view.
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Moreover, Palestinians must see that American attitudes toward Arabs are undergoing a shift as a consequence of hundreds of thousands of different Americans being rotated in and out of Iraq, a percentage of whom believe the rhetoric that we are there for the Arabs, not against them. This puts Arabs in good position to argue the injustice of what Zionism has done to them.
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They can now argue, persuasively, since most Americans are now willing to listen to the Arab side, that what happened to them is like a bunch of American Indians landing on the shores of the Hudson River and claiming the whole of the United States as Indian land, then, with the help of Communist China and other powerful foreign countries, slaughtering by the millions Americans who did not gladly give up their lands, language, and culture for Indian versions, forcing them into refugee camps in Canada, then bombing those refugee camps, all the while claiming the moral high ground because the Great Spirit gave them this land and European interlopers have no right to be here.
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It is also easy for Palestinians to argue that they have been punished for the crimes of the Germans, and that Saudi Arabia's King Ibn Saud was right when he told FDR (on board a U.S. warship on Valentine's Day 1945) that if there were to be any state for the Jews, it should be carved out of Germany, not Palestine. Had that been done, they can as well argue, the Jews would have had fertile land in the heart of the advanced West, where they had long been accepted and made a place for themselves. They would not have had to give up Yiddish and sever themselves from the long and brilliant literature of that ancestral language. They would not have disrupted the peace of the Middle East and produced a decades-long, and still ongoing, war of religion and tribalism. No attack upon the World Trade Center would have occurred. No war upon Iraq would have been launched. The hundreds of billions of dollars — some $400 billion so far, and counting — expended on two wars against Iraq and on propping up an uneconomical Jewish ministate in a hostile region could have been redirected to other, productive purposes, like funding universal healthcare in the United States. Etc.
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Americans have been unwilling to hear any of this, and powerful Zionist forces in media, education, and government have suppressed all talk of how much Zionism has cost us financially, militarily, and in death tolls at home (9/11) and abroad. But the longer the Iraq war goes on, the more American minds are opened to how crazy this entire Zionist experiment has been. And Palestinian observers of the American scene know that time is on their side.
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The only way there will — or should — ever be real peace is if (a) the Jews leave or (b) the Jews consent to disestablish Israel and join with their Moslem and Christian Arab neighbors in a single, united Palestine in which no one is special.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,105.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 4:08 PM

 
Paying to Use Public Streets. The rich are now trying to ban the poor from driving on public streets in prime areas by imposing a fee to use public roads, so that the rich can ride in comfort and get around conveniently in their enclaves, free from the necessity of sharing the roads with their 'inferiors'.
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Of course, they don't come right out and say that's what they want to do. They couch it in other terms.
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Using London's "congestion charge" as a model, Republicans are now suggesting that congested city centers — for now — impose a fee per car to reduce traffic. Plainly this is a hugely regressive tax designed to victimize the poor and give the rich privileges that the poor do not get, indeed actively take away a right the poor have always had — to drive on public streets that their taxes helped build and repair — instead to reserve those streets to the rich alone.
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The New York Post, which should change its name to The Voice of Plutocracy, today published an op-ed piece by "Peter Hendy[,] the surface-transport managing director of Transport for London, which runs the city's public transit, and chairman of the UK Government's Commission for Integrated Transport" to argue (by implication) that New York should impose London's high-handed and regressive system.

In February 2003, London took a radical step to do something about [traffic congestion]: We introduced the congestion charge to the most clogged-up part of the city center.

Our aim was to cut congestion and raise funds to invest in London's transport system, which had suffered years of neglect.

Drivers are charged $13.75 to enter the zone or drive inside it. Cameras pick up vehicle registration numbers, which are later compared to a list of those who've paid the charge for the day.

$13.75 a DAY simply to drive on public streets that the public paid to build and maintain! That's an outrage. That the ruling class of Britain, the evil monstrosity we had to throw out of our country because of its vile high-handedness and aristocratic instinct, should inflict such a crime against its own people is hardly surprising. After all, Britain has been controlled by slime for centuries. Has our own country so completely abandoned its Revolutionary principles as to adopt a rigid system of class discrimination in which the rich get rights the poor and middle-class do not? I would rather we have a full-scale civil war in which we slaughter the rich and chop up their bodies for parts for poor and middle-class patients awaiting organ transplants.
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The rich plainly want to clear the roads of "riff-raff" so they can drive comfortably and quickly from place to place in areas reserved to them. The hoi-polloi are to be reduced to taking inconvenient, uncomfortable, and infrequent public transportation, or walking or riding bicycles in the snow and pouring rain so the rich can speed crosstown in their BMW's and limos. Sh*t on that!
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It's bad enuf that we have toll roads, bridges, and tunnels, but they were built as toll facilities and might not have been built had tolls not been charged to construct them. Even that is hard to argue as a practical matter. If the demands of society and the economy require us to span rivers and get vehicles quickly from Point A to Point B, and especially if, as is usually the case, efficient traffic flow is indispensable to a well-functioning economy, such structures should be built as every other public convenience is built, at public cost thru general taxation, and permitted to everyone in society without discrimination on the basis of ability to pay.
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In my state, our major interregional roadways, the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway, are toll roads. In California, similar roads are freeways, free not just of cross-streets but also of tolls. California's is far the better way. I do not for an instant believe that all the costs of the Turnpike and Parkway are covered by tolls. I suspect that at least some repairs and improvements, and emergency services to accident victims, etc., are funded by general tax revenues collected from people who can't afford to use those toll roads. That is immoral.
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Toll roads, bridges, and tunnels everywhere in this society should be abolished. We certainly should not be applying tolls to roads long ago built and always maintained at general public expense.
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What next? Charging people for the right to drive on Park Avenue in the middle of the nite, or on Rodeo Drive, or any surface street in Rancho Mirage or East Hampton? Why not charge a fee to walk or ride a bike on the streets of the rich? Oh, hell. Why bother with camouflage? Let's just erect gates across now-public roads and reserve them to the rich, barring riff-raff altogether? That is where we're headed: complete separation of the Two Americas that John Edwards talked about, the best parts of this country being reserved to the rich, and the rest of us kept out of huge swaths of our own country.
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Any public official who attempts to impose a "congestion tax" on any part of this country should be shot.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,097.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 12:03 PM

 
A Modest Proposal 2005. In 1729, the Anglo-Irish satirist Jonathan Swift wrote a now-famous essay in which he proposed that the poor Catholics of Ireland sell their one-year-old babies to the Protestant ruling class as food, and even suggested ways that this new meat might be prepared. Some people missed the irony and were appalled that anyone could suggest cannibalism as a cure to social ills. This same theme, albeit intended as a cautionary tale rather than a satiric absurdity, was pursued in the classic 1973 sci-fi film Soylent Green. My suggestion today is not nearly so drastic: let's abolish credit cards.
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Over the weekend one of the network evening newscasts (I forget which one; I watch all, bouncing between them depending on the topic of the particular story, timing of commercials, etc.) reported that the typical American family has $9,000 in credit-card debt, from which it will likely never be free. That report did not state the typical interest rate on such debt, and if one has several accounts with different companies, the rates can differ substantially. Let's say that the average rate is 17%, altho many companies dare to charge 21% as their ordinary rate and over 27% as their "default rate". Many companies that charge a more 'modest' rate, like 11% or 14%, often use a "universal default" policy to inflict a default rate on anyone who is late paying not just that company's own bill but any credit account: another credit card, their mortgage, their car loan — whatever. And the Government lets them get away with this.
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Default rates today are typically in the range of 25-27%, and some are even higher. The group Consumer Action says:

CA found default rates as high as 35% (Merrick Bank). Runners-up for the highest default rates are Citibank and Providian at 29.99%. The lowest default rate is 12% (Arkansas National Bank).

Why do we put up with any of that?
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Neither individual states nor Congress has done much of anything to rein in the hideous abusiveness of credit-card issuers, who have imposed indefensibly high interest rates and fee after fee after fee, some of them hidden from customers. The spread between the "cost of money", that is, what credit-card companies have to pay to borrow money from the Federal Reserve system, and what they charge customers is extraordinary. The Federal Funds rate is now 4%. The prime rate (commercial loans to solid companies) is 7%, and banks can make money from that 3% spread. But the spread on credit card rates is 10% and more, sometimes much more. How do they justify that? They don't have to. They charge what they can get away with, and nobody is doing a thing to protect us.
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Millions of Americans have sunk so deep into credit-card debt that they can't make even minimum payments, so are charged a late fee every single month, which can be as high as $35, even $39 per month. Those fees are treated as purchases, and themselves at once push one's owed balance higher and bear interest, so you are paying interest on fees! If those fees and/or the interest atop them pushes one's owed balance over his credit line, the card issuer then charges an over-limit fee, which could also be $35 (or higher) for each and every month that the borrower is unable to bring the balance below his credit limit. Even if he completely stops using the credit card but is unable to make timely payments or bring the balance down, he can be charged $70 (or more) in fees each and every month — for nothing. And that's just fine with our "representatives" and "public servants" in state legislatures and Congress, as are interest rates of 27%, 30%, and more!
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Credit-card issuers fite any restriction on their business. So let's just outlaw their business altogether. You won't let us regulate? Then we'll destroy.
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Altho it may seem to young people that credit cards have always been with us, they are actually a fairly recent phenomenon, historically speaking. Money (successor to barter) has been with us for thousands of years but credit cards for little more than 50.
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Charge cards for an individual merchant that allowed a customer to put off paying for a purchase until the end of the month (only; the balance had to be paid in full each month) started to be introduced in the United States in the 1920s, but the first multi-merchant charge card, Diners Club, did not appear until 1950. The predecessor to Visa, which is a genuine credit card that extends repayment times but charges interest on unpaid balances, did not come into being until 1958, and of MasterCard not until 1966.
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At the time credit cards came into existence, there was no such thing as a debit card nor a 24-hour-accessible ATM or cash machine. Banks had short hours, typically 9am-3pm Monday-Friday only, less holidays. Checks were not accepted from strangers nor outside of one's own vicinity. Out-of-state checks could take weeks to clear. All that has changed.
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Logically, the advent of the debit card has made the credit card obsolete, a needless drain upon people's finances.
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Myriad individuals are reduced to using credit just to get by, borrowing on one card to pay the minimum on another and getting ever deeper and deeper in life-crushing debt. Enuf! It's time to abolish the credit card and put the entire credit-card industry out of business.
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We lived without credit cards before 1950. We can live — better — without them now.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,096.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:01 PM

 
More Slimy Behavior from the South and Corporate Sleazeballs. EchoStar Communications Corp., operator of the DISH satellite TV service, has bribed a Texas town to change its name, permanently, to DISH (all caps) in exchange for 10 years of free satellite TV for the (existing?) residents. The Texas state legislature should revoke that act of inexcusable sliminess.
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(The same detestable corporation, Colorado-based EchoStar, is running a hideous commercial using the viciously antisexual expression "sucks" over and over. No decent person uses the sexual expressions "suck" or "blow" any more than "fuck" in polite conversation, and broadcasters should crack down on such usages.)
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Already there is talk, according to the Associated Press, of other towns renaming themselves in exchange for corporate bribes.

Across the nation, small communities are being courted by large corporations who say renaming a town provides a marketing buzz that can't be bought in television ads. Though some worry about corporate America's increasing influence in local government, many towns seem eager to accept.

There has never been a shortage of prostitutes. Nor of people willing to take bribes.
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Often, states have to step in to clean out local corruption. Texas needs to slap down, hard, the scumbags in Clark, Texas, who have disgraced themselves and their state by taking a bribe.
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Let's define "bribe":

Something, such as money or a favor, offered or given to a person in a position of trust to influence that person's views or conduct. [American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition)

That the bribe went to everyone in the town, not just to themselves — tho presumably they personally will also receive that benefit, valued at $4,500 per household — does not in any way alter the fact that Clark's two-member town council (in a settlement of 55 households) took something of value in exchange for an act of legislation.
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Our entire civilization is being contaminated by corporate bribery and name-branding. Here in New Jersey a public-private partnership built an arena for basketball and hockey in 1981, and named it after the State's governor (who was from my county, Essex), the Brendan Byrne Arena. Fifteen years later, Texas-based Continental Airlines paid $10 million to have the facility renamed the Continental Airlines Arena. The New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, a public entity, permitted that scandalous dishonor to the former governor and to the honor of the State of New Jersey. Some of us would like New Jersey to feel a sense of honor, but all too often this state has disgraced itself with corruption. Apparently Texas has passed us on the public-corruption ranking, with entire towns selling themselves.
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The Texas State Legislature should tell the greedy citizens of Clark "If you want to sell yourselves, stand on a streetcorner — and then we'll arrest you and throw you in jail with other people who have lost all sense of personal honor." The state government should not allow Clark to "dish-honor" Texas.
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Corporations are poisoning our civilization, and we've got to draw clear lines: this far but no farther.
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It used to be that major skyscrapers were named for the individual who built them or built the company that paid for them. Then a corporate name started to apply to the structure the corporation built; then to a structure in which a corporation would be the major tenant; then to a structure in which that company was just the largest of many small tenants. Then corporations started buying up names of public structures, whether they built or occupied them, or not: the Staples Center in L.A., Fleet Center in Boston, etc., which have no connection but greed with the corporations whose name they bear.
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Now corporations want entire towns to change their name. What next? The State of General Motors? United States of Sony? It's got to stop.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,085.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 11:50 AM

 
Rare Agreement. George F. Will actually wrote something I agree with, albeit the manner of his expression remained objectionable. I sent the following emailed letter to the editor about it.

Tho "rent-seeking" may make some sense to George F. Will, it makes no sense to the rest of us. I suppose this is a term well understood in some internal conversation of the conservative movement that the rest of us have never heard and do not understand. But Will doesn't seem much interested in making himself understood. He insists on using a pretentious vocabulary designed, presumably, to make his observations seem more impressive by showing us he knows words we see no need for, like "anodyne" and "encomium", or terms we use only for special purposes: Will says "government waxes"; the rest of us say only that the moon waxes, and most people wouldn't even know what that means except that "wanes" usually follows.
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It's nice to be able to agree with Will on isolated occasions, as I do with his (apparent) hostility to "social conservatives" trying to Talibanize the U.S. Government into forcing a medieval version of religion onto the unwilling. But must it be such a chore to plow thru his ponderous prose?

(Responsive to ""Dover, PA and the GOP: Seeking Rent, God", column by George F. Will in the New York Post, November 17, 2005)
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,082.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 5:38 PM

 
Prescription for Unfairness. The Bush Administration's prescription-drug benefit plan for recipients of Social Security goes into effect today. How many people died needlessly between passage of that measure and today, no one knows. More to the point for the future, however, is the issue of how astonishingly confusing and insane this program is.
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Ever the servants of the rich, the Republicans have 'crafted' — if one were to use such a tidy term for such an untidy "system" — a program that benefits private corporations at least as much as senior citizens. Instead of simply offering a Government-funded and Government-run program, like Social Security itself, the new drug plan requires people to contract with a private company and select from among "at least 40 plans", according to the Boston Herald. The privatization of the prescription-drug benefit is a caution against the madness of privatizing Social Security more generally.
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How many young people, in the prime of life, could carefully and intelligently evaluate the differences among 40 different plans to decide which best suits them, and commit to at least a year with that plan, no matter what may change in one's health status during that year? The Bush plan requires old people, many of whom have trouble focusing and concentrating, to make what could be life-and-death decisions among a dizzying array of options as to coverage and company. Republicans truly are slime.
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Why should some people get better coverage at better terms than others just because they chose one company rather than another? How could that possibly be fair? It's as tho we allowed some people to ride good roads if they chose one transportation provider but shunted others onto roads with potholes the size of foxholes if they chose another. People entitled to government assistance should get uniformly good service. They shouldn't have to hunt for good service, nor be shunted off to inferior programs because of cost or incomprehension.
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There is one good thing about the plan as it is explained at the Boston Herald's website: it is means-tested, as all Social Security benefits should be means-tested. Rich people don't need a handout from the Government.
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Now, if only the Republicans would means-test Social Security more generally, and set income levels at reasonable levels, we could push back the Social Security system's asserted bankruptcy date by decades. And if we also levied Social Security tax on every dollar the rich make, as we do on every dollar the poor and middle class make, the Social Security system would be rolling in dough forever.
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Genius and Me. The Romans gave us the word "genius". To the Roman (and we are all, in the West, merely latter-day Romans), "genius" was a family's personal little deity, a minor god or demigod who, from a niche provided for it in the house, watched over the home and preserved it against dangers.
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Somehow the definition of "genius" transmuted, to mean a spirit of invention and insight that moved individual recipient human beings to set out in writing, painting, music, or other creative medium, some divinely inspired message or scene.
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The modest creative person often wonders where his or her inspiration comes from. Sometimes, this marveling at the result causes creative people humbly to waive ownership of their creations and ascribe them to some other source. Whether you call it "inspiration", "divine inspiration", a sudden, unanticipated "insight", a "flash of recognition", or anything else, it all comes down to the same thing: we are sometimes astonished by how wonderful some of the things that we do, turn out to be. We are ourselves impressed, and wonder, "Did that come out of me?" Yes, it did. Who knows how? Who knows why? And, does it matter?
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I work very hard on my writing. Usually I don't regard it as work. I speak English; I write English. I speak my mind. So it should all come out easily, right? It usually does, often smoothly and (to my mind) persuasively.
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But sometimes I look back at things I have written — and rewritten, and rewritten, and rewritten, over and over until I am content with it — and am extremely, pleasantly surprised not just that I said what I meant to say but also that what I said was so insightful and the way I said it was so apt. I then understand the humility of the Roman writer or painter, who disowns the "genius" that created his or her works of unusual aptness: "It's not me. It is the spirit of the universe, the will of the gods, the hand of God that has grabbed my feeble but obedient hand, and made me write (paint, or otherwise render) this wondrous work."
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Religiously, I am an agnostic, inclined to atheism. I see many reasons to disbelieve in the existence of any god. But on rare occasions I feel, as uncountable numbers of other writers and artists have felt in the course of their creative lives, that what we have done is beyond our own abilities, at least as we ordinarily perceive them.
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I occasionally reread things I have written and already posted to the Internet. Today I ran across this passage, in this blog's entry of November 8th: "Few people living at any of the pivotal points of history have ever understood that they were living at such a time, much less in the very place where the fulcrum of history resided."
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I'm impressed. Not only is the language elegant (to my mind), but it is also clear, and expresses an idea that few people will have thought of in anything like that way.
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Sometimes, words come easily. They just pour forth to cover the issue at hand, and a given piece of argumentation, advocacy, or exposition needs only checks as to grammar and spelling to be finalized.
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Other times, the writer struggles to find the right word: "I think it starts with an S. It's on the tip of my tongue, but I just can't come up with it." A thesaurus often does not produce the word intended. Sometimes the writer will settle for a reasonable approximation. Other times the writer persists, putting things off a day or more, until the word finally pops into his head — and it is indeed exactly the right word. When that happens to me, I credit myself.
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Thus do I struggle, sometimes, to come up with a text that works, be it brilliantly evocative or merely clear as to what I mean. On isolated occasions, however, the words rush onto the computer screen in eloquent, eruptive flows, perfectly expressing, first time out, exactly what it is I mean to say. I credit myself for that, too.
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Sometimes, however, everything comes out so right — the idea pops up out of left field, but fits right in; the expression suits the context and states the case succinctly and memorably — that I am stunned. I'm not superstitious, so am compelled to give myself credit for things that people in superstitious eras dared not claim credit for but assigned to "Genius" in the sense of a demigod apart from the self, or to divine inspiration.
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Still, now and again every creator stands in awe of his or her creation and wonders how s/he could have made such a thing. "Where did that come from?" From "Genius" may seem a convenient way to claim credit while disowning pride. But at end, it is sometimes hard to see where it came from, and "Genius" seems as good an explanation as any.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,068.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 1:25 AM

 
Are They on Drugs? Here is one of the crazier stories of recent weeks, from Reuters yesterday:

An Israeli researcher said he has made a Goliath of a find — the first archaeological evidence suggesting the biblical story of David slaying the Philistine giant actually took place.

A shard of pottery unearthed in a decade-old dig in southern Israel carried an inscription in early Semitic style spelling "Alwat["] and "Wlt", likely Philistine renderings of the name Goliath, said Aren Maeir, who directed the excavation.

You read right: "Alwat" and "Wlt" are identical to "Goliath". Well of course they are. And "David" and "Sasha" are identical, as are "day" and "nite".
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I can almost understand how some demented archeologist digging in dirt for years in desert heat might lose his mind and think that "Alwat" or "Wlt", or even both "Alwat" and "Wlt", which aren't even the same as each other, are the same as "Goliath", but why on Earth would a reputable news organization, in this case Reuters, report without challenge or comment of any kind the insane assertion that "Alwat" and "Wlt" are "Goliath"?
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Taking that madness a step further, how does the existence of the name Goliath prove any story of any kind about one person who may have had that name? There is a name Solomon, so that proves that King Solomon threatened to cut a baby in half, right? The name Muhammed exists, so that must mean that Muhammed was truly the messenger of God, right? The name Jones exists, so all those people who committed suicide at Jonestown must have ascended to heaven, right? And the name George exists, so President Bush's claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction must be true, right? Wrong.
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The Reuters story is twice preposterous, first in asserting that "Alwat" and "Wlt" are "Goliath" and second in suggesting that the mere fact that a name may have existed proves something — anything — beyond the fact that the name exists. The shard dates back to at earliest 100 years after the time of the story about David vs. Goliath, so even if it had any relation whatsoever to that fable it might simply have been a literary reference, like those we ourselves make all the time to that mythical contest.
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The mere fact that something is written doesn't make it true. There is, Reuters might be surprised to find, an entire category of writing known as "fiction", which deals with things that are just made up. They never really happened. But people write these stories down and then make allusions to them, sometimes for millennia afterward. The mere fact that someone may write about "Archie Bunker" does not create the fictional character Archie Bunker into an actual, flesh-and-blood person. And writing "Alwat", "Wlt", or even "Goliath" on a piece of pottery does not create a fictional Goliath into a real person nor prove the truth of any story about him.
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How do people get so crazy?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,065.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:37 AM

 
Of Time Tracks, "Plass", "Hoffice", and "Evian Flu". My brother asked me recently what I've been doing (that I haven't tended to some of what should be high-priority items), and I realized that tho I'm very busy, I couldn't name much in the way of specific long-delayed projects that I know I have caught up on. After I hung up the phone, I remembered one such project that had slipped my mind: I decided on a webhost for four of my websites, reworked the HTML code to accommodate the change of location and add Java code for ads on about 110 webpages, learned an FTP program and how to use it to upload files to that webhost, and uploaded those 110 revised pages among four different domain names. You'd think I'd remember that, when someone asks me what I've been doing.
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But I had completed that project more than a week before, and moved on. I'm not good about looking backward in my personal life. I always have so much still to do that I'm constantly looking to the next thing. Were it not for records, I'd have very little sense of what I've done, ever. I did a webpage survey a couple of months ago and found that I had a total of 165 pages online, but 19 were sidebars to a main page, drafts, or private pages for small groups. Still, that's 146 pages in 8 areas on AOL, GeoCities, and HostOnce. I wrote approximately 140 of them and formatted all of them in HTML, added crosslinks, and found or made illustrations. My Resurgence City website has about 225 of my fotos on its various pages, and I used special effects in my graphics program to create another 20 or so illustrations from several of my fotos. I have three blogs on Blogspot, this one, with 409 entries since April 15, 2004, and two others totaling another 37 entries in a shorter timespan. One, Newark USA, also shows a number of my fotos as illustrations. I have as well kept my Simpler Spelling Word of the Day website current, since June 1, 2004, entailing some 540 words offered and discussed. I have also compiled, thru my own efforts and suggestions from other spelling reformers, a future-words list for that project of over 1,927 individual words and a bunch of groups of words all of which have the same kind of change that could be made.
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So I know I've been keeping busy, but with exactly what, when, I couldn't tell you five days later.
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Once before, many years ago, I realized this was happening, so decided to find out what I do with my time. I used my computer to create a form to show the entire 24-hour day in quarter-hour increments, and then filled in with handwritten notations what it is I was doing all day long. That was helpful then, so I decided to do it again.
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I've now kept track of my activities for about a week. I see odd patterns and no consistency. Sometimes I work ridiculous amounts of time on a range of computer and other activities. Other days I do little more than maintain myself, update the four or five files that change daily in the Simpler Spelling website, review and reply to email, and recover from the efforts of the day before. I see plainly that I have no diurnal routine nor regular sleep cycle, which can be physically and mentally wearing. I see that I can't always control things, nor focus on what I had intended to do because something else pops up. Worst, I see that I need to focus more on the priorities I set but then promptly ignore.
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Keeping track of things this way is a very useful "exercise". For one thing, it shows me I am too sedentary and need to get more exercise, as by strenuous yardwork and cleaning. I see no point to calisthenics or other exercise for the sake of exercise, when there is so much real physical work to be done. Sweeping, mopping, and vacuuming are good exercise, if not a lot of fun. Playing pool in the basement while the washer and dryer run is not as strenuous but a lot more enjoyable, and if I do it enuf, the walking does add up, as do the stairs I climb and descend all day long. My house (three stories plus basement) is my StairMaster®. Good thing, too, since I couldn't afford a real StairMaster. Those things cost thousands of dollars!
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In any case, in writing these Time Track notes, I get tired of writing out entire phrases, so use abbreviations, even when typing. Two that I have been using are "plass" for the large plastic glass(es) I usually drink from (plastic being safer when knocked over by my cats) and "hoffice" for my home office. I thought today to look for these words in dictionaries and on Google. Neither was in my two electronic dictionaries. But I did find "hoffice", in the sense of "home office", on the Internet.
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In the Google search results, I saw "plass" in Norwegian text many times, so looked it up. It's a cognate for "place" or "plaza" in the sense of a street or public square.
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On a different linguistic note, I have noticed that Lou Dobbs of Fox News Channel says "Evian Flu" (áe.vee.yon) rather than "avian flu" (áe.vee.yan, where A-alone represents schwa, the neutral, unstressed vowel of A in about, the second-E in telephone, and the U in circus). No, Mr. Dobbs. That flu is carried by birds. It is not (expensive French bottled-)waterborne.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,063.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 6:07 AM

 
"Telling" the Truth; Updating Islam. I had two email exchanges with my friend Joe in Belleville (a northern suburb of my city, Newark USA) that I think warrant wider readership.
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The first concerns discerning truth from lies. How do we tell when people are lying? In a notorious recent incident, a man claims to have gotten stuck on a toilet seat in a Home Depot that someone supposedly smeared with glue. I immediately disbelieved it. It shouted "Fraud", an attempt to wring big bucks from a rich corporation with a phony incident that almost certainly could not have happened. (a) How many people sit down on a public toilet seat without first looking to see if there is anything on it, especially in a men's room, where someone's bad aim could have wetted it? (b) If you sit down on something wet and sticky, don't you get up immediately, before glue could set? (c) Krazy Glue could stick instantly, but only if it were freshly applied. It dries very quickly, so if a prankster spread it on a toilet seat and left the area, it would in all likelihood have dried completely before the next person could sit on it. So I do not believe this tale.
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Besides, how is the Home Depot responsible for some malicious prank it did not know about, did not approve of beforehand or afterward, and had no reason to be on guard against?
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The accuser was given a polygraph "lie-detector" test, which he is said to have passed. Joe sent me a link to the story about that test, but the text of the story is too vague to know exactly what was asked.

A man who sued Home Depot Inc. claiming that a prank left him glued to a restroom toilet seat has passed a lie detector test with questions about allegations that he made previous[ly] a similar claim in another town, a newspaper reported.

Did the test ask whether he himself applied the glue? or only if he had ever made a similar claim in another town? Not clear. In any case, as I told Joe:

I still don't believe it. I don't know exactly what questions were asked, and also don't know the competence of the polygraph operator. We have four technologies now to check truth: polygraph, voice-stress analyzer, and two 'truth serums', sodium pentathol and scopolomine, plus hypnosis which I would not regard as a technology but only as a psychiatric technique. Tho all produce questionable results in isolation, I suspect that if you used all four technologies you might narrow doubt down to a very low level. Add in hypnosis, which some people claim is fraud and suggestibility rather than science, and you might narrow that down even further. But we really do need a foolproof lie detector. A woman attorney I once temped for said that if when you lied you peed orange she would trust a lie detector. I don't see that that would work — one would have to pee after every question — but maybe we can develop a high-accuracy mechanism. So important is truth, especially in, for instance, statements used to persuade people to go to war, that creating a reliable lie detector should be very high on science's priorities. It isn't, tho, is it?

In a different email, Joe alerted me to courageous behavior by a Danish newspaper editor, who has bucked a growing trend in Europe to self-censor out anything that Moslems might object to, in fear of demonstrations, fatwas, and even assassination. He published cartoons showing the likeness of Muhammed, founder of Islam, and thus outraged some Moslem sentiment, since Islam forbids the depiction in graphic arts of God, the Prophet, or of anyone else that might be worshipped as an idol. Some Moslems have interpreted the prohibition very widely to forbid the depiction even of ordinary people or animals. As the Metropolitan Museum of Art's website says:

Although the often cited opposition in Islam to the depiction of human and animal forms holds true for religious art and architecture, in the secular sphere, such representations have flourished in nearly all Islamic cultures.

The Islamic resistance to the representation of living beings ultimately stems from the belief that the creation of living forms is unique to God, and it is for this reason that the role of images and image makers has been controversial [note: not settled]. The strongest statements on the subject of figural depiction are made in the Hadith (Traditions of the Prophet), where painters are challenged to "breathe life" into their creations [which only God can do] and threatened with punishment on the Day of Judgment. The Qur’an is less specific but condemns idolatry and uses the Arabic term musawwir ("maker of forms," or artist) as an epithet for God. * * * As for manuscript illustration, miniature paintings were integral parts of these works of art as visual aids to the text, therefore no restrictions were imposed.

In the modern world, television and film have forced re-evaluation of objections to the depiction of people and animals. But there are always some nuts who insist on the most extreme version of everything.
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The Christian Science Monitor article that Joe referred me contains these passages:

When Flemming Rose heard last month that Danish cartoonists were too afraid of Muslim militants to illustrate a new children's biography of Islam's Prophet Muhammad [compare the mention of illustrated manuscripts in Islamic tradition above], he decided to put his nation's famous tolerance to the test. * * * "This issue goes back to Salman Rushdie. It's about freedom of speech and Islam," says an unrepentant Rose, who feels a culture of fear and self-censorship has taken hold across Europe since Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered for criticizing traditional Islam's treatment of women.

After reading the article, I sent Joe this email.

Islam has got to modernize and allow people full freedom of speech and conscience, or the world will have to exterminate it. Whether Islam CAN modernize is perhaps the single most important question this century will resolve. Because if it can't, there may have to be a worldwide war of extermination of the retrograde forces that keep Islam barbarous and violent against minorities and the remainder of the world. Whether that means that a kernel of Islamic beliefs and practices will remain or all traces of the religion will have to be stamped out thru thorogoing suppression, no one can yet say.
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The problem is that the Koran is disorganized and so poetic that it can be interpreted in myriad incompatible ways. German researchers have concluded that it was so long between the time Muhammed said whatever it is he said and it was written down (Muhammed was himself illiterate) that a lot of nonsense got into the written form. It's like the child's game where you have a ring of children in a room. You whisper something a sentence or two long into the first child's ear and tell him/her to whisper the same thing to the next kid, and so on around the room. By the time the last kid says what s/he heard, it is almost never remotely like what was first spoken. [See also this blog's entry of July 24, 2005 for other possible sources of confusion in the text of the Koran.]
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So confused is the message we got, say the Germans, that about every fifth line of the Koran makes no sense whatsoever. It's like the old SNL character Emily Litella, whose hearing was bad, and who would say things like "What's all this about muffins?" (muppets). Wikipedia has a list:
>>Other misunderstood topics [than the 'Deaf Penalty'] included Soviet Jewelry, Endangered Feces, Making Puerto Rico a Steak, Presidential Erections, Pouring Money into Canker Research, the Eagle Rights Amendment, Busting School Children, Natural Racehorses, and Sax and Violins on Television.<<
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Here, we can see what Emily meant. We can't even begin to guess what Muhammed really said, however, because (a) we don't speak Arabic — and nor do most Moslems, (b) even current speakers of Arabic don't know the medieval Arabic that Muhammed spoke, (c) conventional Arabic does not employ letters for vowels, (d) you'd have to know the political context of the times to see how a word might be used, and, the original problem, (e) there are similar words one might confuse a given word with, and once you make one substitution, you may have to make another to make the substituted word make sense.
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As regards (c), Arabic does have markings (dots and such) to indicate vowels (and note, there is no O in Arabic) but they are not generally used in everyday writing. So they write, say, NT, and everyone is supposed to know from context which of the various vowels goes between those consonants. In English, even knocking out the letter O, and disregarding spelling but heeding only sound, you would have to choose among nat, Nate, net, neat, (k)nit, (k)night, nut, newt. There is the further fillip that if one just wrote a character wrong or read it wrong — in English, it was supposed to be MT, but was misread as NT and then transmitted down thru history other than as MT (which could be read as mat, mate, met, meet, mitt, mite/might, mutt, moot). You see the problem.
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Once something has been handed down as "holy" or "divine", the "inspired word of God's Prophet", no matter how crazy the new version may on its surface seem, people will struggle to make sense of what is really just nonsense, not what Muhammed said at all. Imams (priests) will take the phrase "natural racehorses", which should have been "natural resources" or even "national resources", and contrive some explanation: "The Prophet was making a comparison between the healthy foals of a man's herd of horses and the lands and waters of the Earth that we all share." At least in that example you can make some sense out of nonsense. But what if it had caused people to move in an entirely different direction? "The Prophet tells us that the race goes only to the swift, and the foal that is born with 3 legs or 2 heads is unnatural and cannot compete, so must be cut out of the herd. Its defect must be excised from the gene pool, lest future generations be contaminated and more and more deformities creep into and subvert the race, each generation wandering farther and farther from God's plan. As a deformed foal must be put to death, so too must the terminally ill, the retarded, the deformed among us be mercifully euthanized." That's a drastically different message, isn't it? But you could get there from "natural racehorses".
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Alas, we can't just say, "Never mind" and move on, because the nonsense passages of the Koran are not to be questioned. No effort can be made to try to figure out what was really intended, because in questioning whether the text is erroneous, you would, to the closed mind of the True Believer, be questioning the teaching. So even if "national resources" occurs 9 times and "natural racehorses" occurs only once, in a discussion of a similar matter, you are required to believe that Muhammed did in fact say, and mean, "natural racehorses", and try to make sense of that.
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At end, however, there is no making sense out of scriptures. For instance, within 2 pages of the Jews' Old Testament the Bible actually does say that Adam was the only man and Eve the only woman, but when Cain was sent away from his family, which should have been the only family of people on Earth, into the land of Nod, he married a woman of Nod. Huh?? How did Nod come to have women? people of any kind?
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Religion, he is nuts.

(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,063.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:06 PM

 
Presidential Medal of Treason. George Bush yesterday conferred the highest civilian honor this Nation accords, upon "Muhammad Ali" (born Cassius Clay), the traitorous boxer who has betrayed everyone and everything of importance in his life. How desperate is Bush for black approval that he makes a mockery of the Medal of Freedom?
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Cassius Clay was born into Christianity but betrayed his family, and Christ, to convert to Islam.
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He proudly revoked his (family's) "slave name", but didn't understand that Christians had abolished slavery whereas Islam maintained it, at the very time he renounced Christianity and even into today! There is still slavery in parts of the Islamic world, even in black Africa! But not in the United States nor in any other Christian country. The idiot.
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He apparently led a life of easy sex before marriage, even tho fornication is forbidden by Islam. Indeed, so adamant is Islam about forbidding fornication that it takes extraordinary pains to prevent temptation by causing women to cover themselves from head to foot to maintain their modesty and chastity.
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He got married — and cheated on his wife. He thus betrayed both his wife and Islam, which forbids adultery, even on pain of death!
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He has had four wives, so was serially unfaithful to three of them, and is known to have committed infidelity against at least one and possibly more of them, maybe all.
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He was a draft resister who refused induction into the military on the preposterous basis that he was a conscientious objector. He was really just a coward and Communist sympathizer. He didn't want his dear friends the Vietcong and North Vietnamese Communists shooting at him. He might die! and of course he couldn't see himself going to Paradise upon death, could he?
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Defending his supposed opposition to war, he said in May 1967, "Many great men have been tested for their religious beliefs." How stupid does he think people are? The whole world knows that Islam has absolutely no problem with war. Alas, there are an awful lot of stupid people, including the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that his opposition to war was sincere. Ha!
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This is a man who risked killing every time he stepped into the ring to bludgeon a man into unconsciousness (see this blog's entry of September 18, 2005 about boxing; the boxer mentioned in that blog did indeed go on to die). That didn't bother this "conscientious objector" to violence. He was perfectly willing to risk killing someone for money and glory, but not step onto the battlefield for his country, nor for the defense of democracy or of little yellow people attacked by an international conspiracy of political lunatics like Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh. So he betrayed his country.
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What has "Muhammad Ali" not betrayed? He was praised by Malcolm X, whom he supposedly regarded as his hero, but accepted his new name from Elijah Muhammed, who was at that very time openly hostile to Malcolm X and shortly afterward had Malcolm X killed!
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The whitewashed biographies of "Muhammad Ali" that we now see trivialize or actually conceal his many betrayals of everyone around him and the principles he pretended to revere. But the information is there, if you look hard enuf. Why should you have to search thru source after source to uncover his huge character flaws?
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As against all his grave misdeeds, betrayals, and hypocrisies, what exactly did "Muhammad Ali" do to warrant a Presidential Medal of Freedom? He made a little noise about injustice to blacks — but was essentially AWOL in the civil-rights movement. He didn't sit at any lunch counter or try to enter any white school or university, nor even stand with those who did. He didn't board the bus for any Freedom Ride. He wasn't at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. He didn't even appear, much less speak at the 1963 March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech.
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Supposedly indignant about racism in the U.S., he lived his entire life here and did essentially nothing of consequence to change society for the better. He left that to others. He was too busy becoming rich and famous, saving his own skin in the Vietnam era (not a racial reference), and cheating on his wives.
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Now the bastard is a semi-vegetable, rendered a shaking, empty hulk by divinely just natural retribution. His long years of boxing may have produced Parkinson's Disease. Or may not. Katherine Hepburn and Michael J. Fox didn't box, but they did develop Parkinson's. In any case, the prideful swaggerer has been brought low by nature, and now we're supposed to feel sorry for him? I don't. And I don't forgive his treason.
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"Muhammad Ali" is unfit even to associate with decent people, and supremely unfit to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His life has dishonored his family, his birth religion, his adopted religion, his wives, and his country. He has hidden cowardice behind pretended religious and political principles — devotions he never pursued once he escaped military service. He was not a consistent voice of the progressive nor pacifist movement. He just used those movements to evade danger in Vietnam.
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At a time when the President is concerned about public support for another war, it is bizarre in the extreme that he would be rewarding treason and disingenuous pacifism. I know that Bush is an idiot, but are his puppeteers also idiots? Apparently so.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,058.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 3:41 PM

 
Blue States Remain True Blue. The Nation's liberals have much to rejoice about in the results of yesterday's election. In my state, the dirtiest campaign I have ever seen (and remember, I'm almost 61) resulted in a comfortable win by Democrats against the nastiest slimeball in memory, Doug Forrester. New Jerseyans in all the big counties except one went decisively to Corzine, the Democrat. Mine, Essex, voted 72% for Corzine! I knew when I voted around 5:30 last evening that the turnout had been heavier than usual, which suggested a big Democratic win, since I live in a predominantly black neighborhood that traditionally votes heavily Democratic.
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The counties with no major city but only suburbs and rural areas went Republican. All the others went Democratic, and New Jersey is very urban. We have the Nation's highest population density, because more people per square mile want to live here than anywhere else in the country. I was sad to see that the county I grew up in, prosperous, suburban, and populous Monmouth, went for Forrester. It disgraced itself, but I don't share that disgrace. Essex pummeled Forrester, and I helped.
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Schwarzenegger Rebuked. California's confused Republican, Arnold Schwarzenegger, was solidly rebuffed by the voters yesterday. Unfortunately, it wasn't in a recall election nor re-election campaign for governor, but only on four ballot propositions he backed. All went down in flames, leading observers to wonder if Schwarzenegger's star is falling.
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Schwarzenegger (whom I like to call "Scheissfurbrains", Germanglish for "Sh*tforbrains") had proposed, among other things, that the power to draw legislative districts be taken away from the legislature and turned over to a panel of retired judges. While we do need to do something about de-politicizing the drawing of legislative districts at both the state and national level (see this blog's entry of September 30, 2005), it is insulting to legislators to remove that power from their hands and put it into the hands of any unelected body. Worse, the particular plan Schwarzenegger offered, Proposition 77, would have made the redistricting plan that panel came up with binding for at least one election cycle even if voters were to reject the plan! Not well thought out. Voters were right to reject it.
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(I thought, after I formulated the term "Germanglish" above, to see if others had also done so. Naturally, "Germanglish" is an established term. Great minds... It's hard to come up with anything someone else hasn't thought of, especially now that there are so many people on Earth. I heard on some documentary that Alexander Graham Bell applied for his patent for the telephone only six hours before someone else brought in a similar device! I don't know if the other mechanism would have worked as well. Certainly I never heard of any competing technology making a play for the market, so maybe it was pretty much identical to Bell's device and thus precluded from the market by the patent laws.)
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57 States. Craig Ferguson, Scottish host of CBS Television's Late Late Show, last nite mentioned that people are still talking about amending the Federal Constitution to permit naturalized citizens to become President. The movement is tailor-made for Schwarzenegger, so might no longer be pursued aggressively. Such an amendment has, in any case, about as much chance of becoming "the supreme law of the land" as has a proposal to allow illegal aliens to vote.
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Ferguson, who was born in Glasgow, comedically not only came out in favor of such a constitutional amendment but also declared last nite his candidacy for President. He said he would seek the approval of 'all 57 states — Iraq, Puerto Rico, Canada'. When, apparently, some protesting groans came from the audience, presumably from Canadians, he added 'You know I'm right', or something to that effect. Well, I sure wish he were right.
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But the number of states is a little off. I figure Canada should be 7 states itself, Iraq and Puerto Rico 1 each, so that would be 59 states, not 57.
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He'll have to become a citizen before he can run for President. The Calgary Sun on January 22nd of this year said:

"A single dad, Ferguson has been working in the U.S. for 10 years and plans to go through his citizenship process on air."

As of October 2nd, however, according to Britain's Sunday Mail, he had still not become a citizen, tho he had started the process:

He also said he feels American and added: "I love this country and what it has done for me. I have applied for citizenship. I want to take the oath of allegiance on TV."

I'd like to see that.
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Under Fire but Not Under Oath. The CEOs of major oil companies testified before a U.S. Senate committee about the extraordinary profits they have reaped in recent months. Mysteriously, the vile Alaskan Ted Stevens, chairman of the committee, refused to require the executives to take an oath to tell the truth! One female Senator asked for a vote as to whether to require an oath, and the nasty little dictator Stevens wouldn't even permit a vote. Somehow that one person was permitted to evade even a vote! What kind of crappy rules does the United States Senate run under?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 2,058.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 9:47 PM