Tag: Logic

I write very little political material here because there are so many more people who are better at it than am I.  I generally write about popular culture, science and technology, and early life experiences.

That does not mean that I am apolitical.  It is far from it.

Please let me recount a recent experience (last week) that shows a little of what I do.  I am very low key, and affect only a few people at a time.  But I think that this is still important work.

As the mood of the Cancun Conference tells us there is no realistic hope that anything meaningful can happen to stop the effects of climate-change. The United States has, from the beginning of the process, dragged its feet on taking responsibility for doing anything, however minor, to stop the process of climate-change. There’s a lot of noise and rhetoric that has come out of the government and corporations in order to mount PR campaigns but it is without substance. Even clear win-win situations like providing funding for green-energy as a way to revive struggling American funding is underfunded and cruelly mishandled. I refer here to an article written by Monica Potts in the American Prospect that shows that government money to train workers for green jobs does not and will not translate into real jobs because there’s little support for the alternative-energy industry and the dominant fossil fuels industry who thrive on public subsidies for their cheaper energy don’t want competition. The government, as near as I can tell, has no intention of even attempting to support anything like the Kerry-Lieberman bill which would  have been a start in moving us towards strengthening the industry and slowly weaning us from the domination of fossil fuels. Of course the administration knows any environmental bill is DOA in today’s political atmosphere of gridlock.

Cross posted on Orange.

I see things in wholes and in parts at the same time. We are each part of the Kollective Krazy of this time. Tea Baggers are examples of millions of Mad Hatter Tea Parties. We are not in the realm of reason — Marx would never have foreseen that Lewis Carroll would be the great thinker of our age.

Since WWI there has been a conscious and concerted attempt to control the minds of the American people. To rule in a democracy requires that minds be controlled and programmed–there is no alternative. Naturally, that is what has happened.  We are so used to it we normally don’t see it. We have to get out of our normal consciousness to see it–I think most of us here know this from having a long experience of being on the outside looking in.

I believe there is no hope at all for anything resembling the ideal view of a Constitutional Democracy ever flourishing in the USA. That period is over never to return. I suggest we adjust to that reality and try to build something relatively sane for our family and friends. I think life will go on but we have to get rid of the hope that anything can stop the march towards the clearly discernable neo-feudal order. There is simply no force in society that can help us at this time. American intellectuals and progressives have given up on integrity, reason and courage and are as much corrupted by konsumer kulture as the Tea Baggers — perhaps even more so.

cross-posted from The Dream Antilles

My wonderful phone company, Credo, sent me the following:

“Tiller the Baby Killer.”

That’s how FOX News host Bill O’Reilly referred to Dr. George Tiller who was murdered in cold blood Sunday while he attended church.

Tiller’s crime? He provided healthcare to women. Including abortion.

Salon.com reports that FOX’s “O’Reilly Factor” has  featured attacks on Dr. Tiller on no less than 28 episodes:

“He’s guilty of “Nazi stuff,” said O’Reilly on June 8, 2005; “a  moral equivalent to NAMBLA and al-Qaida,” he suggested on March 15, 2006. “This  is the kind of stuff happened in Mao’s China, Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Soviet  Union,” said O’Reilly on Nov. 9, 2006.

What happened Sunday was devastating. And it might not have happened if it wasn’t for the hate mongering of Bill O’Reilly and others.

There are two things you can do.

  1. Sign our petition to Bill O’Reilly. Ask him to take responsibility for creating an atmosphere in which the assassination of Dr. George Tiller comes as no surprise. And tell him to stop spreading hateful rhetoric which encourages violence against doctors who provide reproductive healthcare for women.

2. Make a donation to Medical Students for Choice in honor of Dr. George Tiller. We must lift up a new generation of doctors who are willing and able to provide reproductive healthcare to women.

This Epistle to the Subscribers made sense to me.  I signed petitions and I sent $$.  I thought about it. It made sense, sort of: Billo spews garbage, crazy persons ingest garbage, garbage in garbage out, crazy person kills doctor who provides abortions.  So it might go. But, alas, it didn’t make that much sense, because if somebody believes that the life of a fetus is precious, how much more precious is the life of a doctor?  Even a doctor who allegedly commits cardinal sins.  Have we gone insane, I wondered.