Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion

Weird headline of the day comes from Jake Blumgart of the Philadephia Inquirer, writing that U.S. owes dead coal miners real change.

Of debt and death: How can the U.S. government owe change to dead people? What are the dead people going to with change?

The article’s right that the U.S. government owes it to some people to force the lazy coal industry to operate safer mines. However, the people who deserve change are the people that change can actually help: The coal miners who are still alive.

A new social scientific study has found that higher intelligence is correlated with:
- monogamy among males
- liberal political identity
- atheism

If you can’t figure out why that correlation makes sense, why then, you must be a right wing fundamentalist who likes to sleep around.

A bumper sticker seen at a Tea Party convention:

Don’t mess with marriage

.

What does that mean?

If you’re not supposed to mess with marriage, why would you go ahead and tell huge numbers of couples that they can’t get married? Isn’t that messing with marriage?

The trouble with the right wing marriage pose is that it seeks to protect the institution of marriage by messing with actual marriages.

It’s the middle of a recession, so let’s talk career development. Have you thought about joining the Army? Just think of what the Army can do for you…

…it can turn you into a raving maniac, like soldier Joshua Tabor, who was found wandering around his neighborhood wearing a helmet and threatening to break people’s windows. Back inside his home, he beat his four year old daughter, and then waterboarded her because she couldn’t say her alphabet.

He’s an army of one, he is.

Barry C. Black the government-appointed, tax-paid high priest of the United States Senate, spoke yesterday of the evils of self-sufficiency. Praying to his Christian deity, which he wrongly presumes is the deity of every American, he preached, “Deliver us from the self-sufficiency that will not recognize our need of You.”

In these times of record-braking budget defecits and general economic disarray, is a message against self-sufficiency really what our nation needs to hear? Has the problem with Wall Street been that it was too self-sufficient? Do we need more corporate dependence on taxpayer bailouts?

Is corporate welfare the message Barry C. Black intended to communicate, or does he merely want the United States to become dependent upon his religion?

During the hours leading up to Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address 2010, his aides were promising a “feisty” speech. However, what I saw was President Obama spending a lot of time practically begging Republicans not to be so mean to him.

Did these pleas gain Obama any breathing room, or were they like a wimpy kid’s cries for help – a magnet for bullies?

Maybe you felt really sad when you saw Avatar: How could we humans attack those blue people… on that planet that doesn’t exist?

If you’re looking for something powerful, and blue, and real, take a look at some of the videos and photographs over at the Extreme Ice Survey. Deep blue ice from the bottom of glaciers is rising up and melting into our seas, and with some very powerful results, aesthetically and ecologically.

It’s a story about what we’re doing to our own planet, right now. The best part is that the story is actually all around you – in 3D.

Day after day, year after year, preacher Barry C. Black keeps on using his pulpit in the Senate, as its official, government-paid chaplain, to agitate in favor of mass conversion to Christianity. Yesterday, Chaplain Black gave a speech on the floor of the U.S. Senate in which he called upon his deity to transform United States Senators so that they would do the bidding of Christian religion: “Cause them to be men and women of integrity, so that our citizens can lead quiet and peaceful lives in all godliness and honesty.”

You know, Mr. Black, here in the United States of America we have a little old thing called the First Amendment to the Constitution. It guarantees us freedom of religion, which includes the right to lead lives that don’t fit with your definition of being godly and quiet. I don’t want to live a life in quiet godliness. It may not fit your religious ideals, which call upon everyone but preachers like you to be silent, but I’ll talk back to your continuing violation of the separation of church and state.

It’s an abuse of your power, Barry, to take a public salary and use it to keep pushing your religion. If you must pray using taxpayer money to do it, why don’t you do something useful, and pray for rain in the desert?

Last Thursday, Florida’s Republican Congressman Ander Crenshaw issued a press release in which he condemned “big government spending”. He worried about how government spending would create more debt, and promised “spending cuts”.

So, guess what Congressman Crenshaw did last Wednesday: He acknowledged that he had submitted two earmarks to increase big government spending.

Government-appointed Chaplain Barry C. Black was at it again yesterday, preaching bizarre Christian religious prophecies from the floor of the United States Senate. This time, Chaplain Black begged his deity to unleash some kind of weird cosmic attack against the Earth.

“God of grace and glory, pour Your power on Your people!” he prayed.

I hope Black’s prayer isn’t answered. Having God’s power poured onto me sounds kind of sticky.