Nom de plume: Rivrdog

The Pope gabbles on...

...and all it is is socialist talking points. One tiny statement about terrorism, but not pinning it on Islam.

Summary: this Pope continues to march Leftward, and continues to fail to stand in the breach FOR Christianity and AGAINST Islam. In my book, he has abandoned the mission of the leader of Christians. He embodies the "Saint Peter Principle" to the max - promoted too many stations beyond his level of competence.

Pissing up a rope

If you are a sailor (sailboat sailor, not a Navy Swabbie), you will recognize the title. It is the mariner's way of expressing complete frustration with something. Of course, you CAN'T piss up a rope, something about gravity getting in the way of that.

One might surmise that any mariner who actually TRIED to piss up a rope once wouldn't try it again (unless said mariner liked the idea of "golden showers"), would use the scuppers instead or just hang it over the side and let fly, but then that would fail to account for STUPID.

Our Congress is Stupid, and they are about to Piss up a Rope again, the rope being trying to end or damage the right of women to control their own fertility, by aborting foetuses if necessary. The last time I saw a stat on this, 70 percent of US adults supported this right, as it came into being in the SCOTUS case of Roe v. Wade. It is NOT often that 70% of US adults agree on ANYTHING with political overtones.

The political Right has this Albatross around it's neck, and that albatross is the Religious Right, composed almost entirely of evangelical Christians. These Christians firmly believe that abortion is morally wrong, and ought to be made legally wrong again. Since they will never get anything stricter than the Hyde Amendment past a liberloon President like Obanana, one would think that they would stop trying, but they won't stop, because they are STUPID.

Here's my take: I am personally (morally) opposed to the very idea of abortion on several grounds, but I am opposed to Establishing Christianity (or any other religion) into our Constitution even more. Putting a religious idea such as a foetus being viable from conception into our law-books is strictly forbidden by our Constitution. Sure, let's have a debate to settle when a foetus can generally be considered viable (via scientific process), and give the foetus "person-hood" protection at that point, but that point is not now, nor ever will be, conception.

GOP, quit pissing up this rope. It could, and maybe SHOULD, cost you your majority if you try.

Religious humor

A fellow comments on a Facebook discussion of Obama's disparate comment about the evils of ancient Christianity being comparable to today's Islamist atrocities....

"Is that why the bombers yell 'Aloha Snackbar' just before they detonate?"

Many, many, many yuks at that one...

The Hobby Lobby SCOTUS case

Brief yourself on this legal issue here.

Now that you're briefed, let's think about the implications, something most ordinary folks don't do, and it's why the culture is going down the drain.

I'm taking the side of the Government in this case, even though Secretary Sebelius is on my Top Five list of people I would like to see removed from the employ of taxpayers.

This case is NOT about Obamacare, as much as the punditocracy would like you to believe that ("OMG, they're attacking the Law of the Land, these religious nuts are"). No, this case is about whether or not a CORPORATION may establish religion and require all it's employees to follow that religion.

If Hobby Lobby, a corporation employing 16,000 people, is able to deny it's employees ANY part of a Federal benefit, and do that in the name of the religion of the CEO (and Board of Directors, presumably), then Religion has been Established.

The First Amendment, and the "Establishment Clause" within it, says:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Okay then, does Obamacare "establish" a religion? No, it doesn't (except for that pesky provision exempting Islam and followers of it from some of the law's restrictions).

Does Obamacare prohibit the "free exercise" of religion? Hobby Lobby says it does, and insofar as the provision of birth control is concerned, Obamacare seems to go against the corporate diktat of Hobby Lobby, the Corporation.

Okay, it would appear that the crux of this matter will revolve around who the Founders were protecting when they wrote the Establishment Clause. Were they protecting classes, or were they protecting individuals? I'm in over my head divining Constitutional law here, but I've been told that the freedoms of the Bill of Rights were and are meant to protect individuals, not groups or classes, except as those classes have been proven to be victims of discrimination per se, as in racial discrimination.

The CEO of Hobby Lobby is claiming, by the fact of his lawsuit, that he has the right to speak for all the people working for the corporation, and thereby control their religious choice which is permitted, nay mandated, under the First Amendment. Of course, if the SCOTUS agrees with that, they have just established corporate slavery as de jure law.

All the Government has to do to defend Obamacare in this case is find a couple of Hobby Lobby employees who don't want their birth control rights proscribed by the CEO, and the Government wins, IMHO. If I am the Chief Justice, I communicate with the US Counsel, and ask him to present an order to require Hobby Lobby to poll their employees, all of them, as to their choice, and when the Government presents that request for injunction, I grant it. In granting the injunction, I warn Hobby Lobby, the Corporation, that the polling carries the weight of a Federal Order, and any interference with it would be considered obstruction of justice.

Back to my readers.

Why, you ask, would a blogger such as myself, having taken on the Government as many times as I have, be siding with them and encouraging their case?

The answer is simple, if you look very far beyond our borders. What is the biggest threat to the culture? If you said Socialism, you are wrong, dead wrong. The biggest threat is the ascendancy of  the culture of Islam. Islam is far, far more of a threat to our form of Western Civ than Socialism. No, I'm not downplaying the threat of Socialism to our Constitution, but just look at the European nations which fall all over themselves to accomodate Islam. In doing so, they have knuckled under to the establishment of Islam's claim of  "right" to rule it's adherents by Sharia Law. In France, for example, the Government drew lines on maps around all the Islamic ghettoes, and told the Imams therein that they could run those ghettoes by Sharia Law as enclaves beyond French control, except in matters of public safety, but in reality, public safety issues also are left to the Islamic religious hierarchy.

In other words, the Frogs have given away significant parts of their big cities to the mullahs to run.

Readers, do we want that here? No, I'm not saying that the Hobby Lobby CEO is a screwy as a mullah, or that his Christianity compares inany way to the inhumanity of Islam, but if he wins his case, people, we have started down France's road. We need to be fair in our application of the Bill of Rights, and I have a dollar to your dime that says that the day Hobby Lobby wins this case, a new case to require allowing Sharia Law primacy over local and/or Federal Law gets filed in a Federal Court somewhere in this Nation.

Any takers on my bet? 

 

Jesse pulls out the race card...

...and it's not a card game!

The "Duck Dynasty" fooferaw is a dice game!

Craps, you lose, Jesse. A&E rolled the bones and crapped out earlier.

Editor's note: Jesse got two people cornfused. It was Megan Kelly who opined that Santa was a Caucasian. "Duck Commander" Phil Robertson, a Christian evangelist, lay preacher and Sunday School teacher, referred to the Bible's position that homosexuality is a sin in his Gentleman's Quarterly interview. Megan Kelly might have raised a race issue, Robertson did not. GQ, of course, is concerned entirely with sexual identity conflicts in men's clothing, nothing more. Seems to me that Duck Dynasty-brand clothing is unlikely to be worn by GQ's metrosexual readers, whose idea of outdoors is sipping a latte at a sidewalk cafe, not hunting ducks in the Louisiana bayou.

Jackson's clumsy attempt to inject racial discord where none existed before seems to this observer as a desperate attempt to have "another fifteen minutes of fame".

The loud "THUD" you heard is Jesse Jackson's head hitting the deck after his latest swan dive, but don't worry, Jesse didn't hurt that head. Solid bone there; his brain, if any, is in his ass.

The best gifts

...have already stood the tests of Time:

"The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government, lest it come to dominate our lives and interests."

Patrick Henry

1736-1799

Merry Christmas!

 

Christmas Music

1. You are now permitted to listen to Christmas music. All previous Bah! Humbug! classifications of Christmas music before Thanksgiving are now removed.

2. You are now permitted to plan for decorating your abode and/or place of work to a Christmas/Chanukkah/Eid theme. Just call your theme what it is, not the generic "holiday" theme.

3. "Winter" is not a holiday, it is a season. If you "celebrate" Seasons, you may celebrate Winter. If you do NOT live/practice an Earth Religion such as Wicca, you may NOT celebrate a "Winter Holiday". You might bring this up at the next School Board metting you attend as the resident Culture Watch.

That is all. 

What is gun hate?

Reducing the question of "gun control", to it's simplest element, the hatred of guns, gun control is nothing more than a belief system.

Yep, gun-hate is a religion. The acolyte of gun-hate, gun-fear, is part of that religion.

Yep, according to the Establishment Clause of our Constitution, we have to tolerate all religions, but the Government SHALL NOT Establish one. Establishment means that they may not give their official stamp of approval to a religion, they may not promote one particular religion over any other religions, they may not force adherence to any religion. That's in our Constitution. It is an immutable, forever law, and our Supreme Court has vigorously upheld the Establishment Clause.

Yet, gun-hate IS fostered, it IS approved by our Government, it IS promoted, and above all, it's tenets ARE being forced on citizens by Government.

I say this to my Government: you insist that I NOT refer to the large, decorated evergreen soon to be placed in my downtown plaza as a "Christmas" tree during the Christian holiday of Christmas, it must be referred to as a non-religious "holiday tree", but that same Government tells me I MUST subscribe to all sorts of whacko conclusions about fear of firearms, and stand idly by while they are un-Constitutionally coded into improper Laws.

I stand for my Constitution. I protect my Constitution. I've sworn, several times, to DIE protecting my Constitution, if that's what it takes to keep it and it's legal precepts in force here in my United States of America.

What part of my Oaths do you NOT get, my Governments?

The Zeitgeist of ignorance

Warning: Philosophy ahead! Critical thought/analysis required!

That's a mouthful, but if you understand the Teutonic concept of zeitgeist, it is nothing less than the spirit which underlies thought.

Zeitgeist is neutral, it's a philosophical concept coming from the interpretation of how the human thought process works, and I won't go into who said what about it, read the Wiki for that. As an individual educated in the use of critical analysis, I have found that zeitgeist is useful to explain some of the underpinnings of more complex patterns of thought, for example, the political process.

Politics boils down to an application of power, one individual or set of individuals over another individual or another set. Politics is supposedly what you get when you replace the sword with the pen and paper, but that concept ignores the applications of power itself.

Power is ALWAYS projected as force, and in the end, it matters little whether power is projected by naked physical force (the sword), or by the more complex process of using words (the pen) to convince the recipient of the power-projection to accept the power of the person projecting it.

Stop me if you've heard this before, such as from the scribblings of Kant, or Marx, or Locke, to name just three who have trod this path....

(coffee break)

I arose this morning and grabbed my tablet, as I am a Modern Man. On the tablet is controlled my Facebook account, and on my News Feed is the timeline of a gracious lady of my acquaintance. On the lady's timeline, of late adorned with screed from energy-limiting and food-limiting Marxists, is an article about Vaccines and Autism, and a link to a book about same, with a "motivational poster" to boot:

The basic premise in that poster is laughable on it's face, but it DOES do an excellent job of pointing out the Zeitgeist of the whacko concept behind it.

This is part "big lie technique", part Earth religion, but mostly, a simple rejection of science.

Using Dr. Haley's premise, we can take any significant point on the common calendar, look up the day in a time-based history of mankind, find some invention and process which started on that day, and insert ourselves into History by making an unsupported association between something evil (or good) that has occurred since.

What I just defined is the Zeitgeist of Ignorance. Zeitgeist can, doesn't have to, include emotion. Emotion is used here ("it's about the children") to try to convince us that a common scientific practice, vaccinating our children against horrible childhood diseases, is somehow linked to an Evil, "autism".

I know about autism. I have an autistic child (now 40 years of age). You can't bamboozle me about Autism, I grew old handling it in my family. Our Government, in one of it's GOOD works, did an exhaustive study on the subject of childhood vaccination vs. autism. The study is science-based, and the science is very good and definitive, as well as repeatable for those who have the time and dollars to duplicate it. Vaccines don't cause Autism.

In Oregon, we have a case study in the danger of this belief system that blames Autism on vaccines. In the city of Ashland, OR, hard by the border of California on I-5, a significant number of parents of school-age children have been persuaded by this belief to not vaccinate their children. The inevitable outbreaks have not happened or have not been reported yet*, but a similar situation happened in SW Utah in 1996, and that WAS documented by the CDC.

Okay, what about Autism, you ask?

Autism is nothing less or more than a grab-bag term used to describe a set of behavioral abnormalities. The term itself is akin to using the word "retarded", which is not politically correct to use any more. Autism is not specific, and "increases" in the "autism rate" have come as science finds out more about these behavioral anomalies and have casually tossed their findings into the Autism basket. My daughter was originally described as " mildly retarded", but that term is not in favor any more, and was totally replaced by the use of the term "autism". What behavioral science has done is nothing more than change the name of their game. That name-change does NOT count scientifically as more disease, but those who would make their livelihoods from "researching" this "disease" will lie to you and say that it DOES count.

That, my friends, is the Zeitgeist of ignorance. As we crowd more and more people on the face of this planet Earth, we are more and more affected by the lack of scientific thinking. The effects of that affectation are serious, and Malthus wrote all about it.

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* the lack of accurate childhood disease reporting in Ashland is complicated by the fact that these earth-religion parents clustered there have networks, and they hold "pox parties" wherein they deliberately expose healthy children to measles, chicken pox or whatever else, they don't know what it is their kid may have, as their "workaround" so they don't have to get the eevill vaccinations for their kids.

 

"Million Muslim March"

A muzzie-hugging outfit I never heard of before has jumped up and claimed that they will put on a "Million Muslim March" to Washingon, D.C. on the twelfth anniversary of the muslim extremist attack on the USA on 9-11-01.

Well, this wins the prize for chutzpah, if nothing else.

It boggles the mind that there could be a million muslims who want this "expression of freedom", other than those coming from that number who have been converted to the religion while in prison for various felonies. If that's who this group (AMPAC) wants to turn out, there won't be many turbans showing. Quite a few black berets of the New Black Panthers, an associated group, but not many in authentic Muzzie clothing.

Never mind, the US Constitution, Edition 4,329, as promulgated by raised-as-a-muzzie Barack Obama, says that everyone must come to Washingtoon, DeeCee to count and be counted, and the muzzies must feel that they don't count in the country. I have no idea why they feel that way, since their President has bowed and scraped to all manner of muzzie kings and princes, has voluntarily given up two successfully-fought wars to put down muslim extremism, has punted on and allowed three muslim-extremist revolutions to happen, replacing muslim secularist leaders.

Nope, we're already friendly enough to muzzies in the US of A. and overseas. Why, when US muzzies confab with Al-Q, our sworn enemy, then conduct Jihad against soldiers and civilians at a military post, we don't even call that terrorism any more, just "workplace violence".

This march will happen, I guess, unless those real muzzies who are probably being solicited to pay for it, like the Saudi king and his oil sheik buddies, decline to support this inferior brand of the religion.

Okay, in honor of Jay Leno's coming retirement, I've written a gag for him to use on his "Tonight" show:

Jay: "What do you call a million muzzie wannabees gathered in Washington D.C.?"

Bandleader: "I don't know, Jay, what DO we call that?"

Jay (choice of answers)

1. Hot under the turban
2. A quran looking for someone who can read it
3. 500 imams competing for two taxi driver positions, and 999,500 prospective taxi-ride no-pays
4. A strange way to express reverence for the victims of 9-11 

There, my life as a comedy writer just flashed before me in an instant, and was gone.