News Flash: Hell is Real

Matthew 13:31-52
Matthew 25:31-46

Yes they Lied

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081219/ap_on_go_co/iraq_cia

Roberto Gonzales and Condoleeza Rice lied when they claimed they did not know the CIA had informed the Bush administration that "intelligence" that the Sadaam Hussein regime was seeking uranium to build nuclear weapons was not credible.

The central truth that no amount of shuffling, hemming, hawing and forgetting can alter is that the intelligence apparatus of the United States had made clear to the White House that (a) the basis on which the President sold the war to the public was not credible and (b) the war would further destabilize the region and enhance the power of Iran.

In spite of the warnings given by professional intelligence agencies, the Bush administration proceeded with its reckless, baseless war. The result has been thousands of needless deaths and a boon to mideast terrorists. Make no mistake: Bush, Cheney, Powell, Gonzales, Rice, Wolfowitz, Rove, et al. are guilty of treason. No lesser word truthfully describes their conduct. A special corner of hell is reserved for them.

Sometimes there are no good guys.

This is a follow-up to the July 6, 2008 entry below. There is nothing more to add to this story, which speaks for itself.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081206/ap_on_re_as/as_korea_mass_executions

A Glimpse of the Void

America values persons in terms of their income. We make celebrities of the rich, even when we know they are evil, because we envy and admire their power. We do this in spite of the fact that we know that income a is highly contingent and arbitrary matter, except perhaps in a limited way to those few and unfortunate souls whose entire lives are devoted to maximizing their income. Income is highly contingent and arbitrary because it is due to the vicissitudes of the market, over which we as individuals have no control. Therefore, we value persons in terms of highly contingent and arbitrary matters.

As a result, we dehumanize others and ourselves. We place more value on money than on moral character, faithfulness, and life itself. We are willing to die at our desks for money, because our income is what renders us valuable to the other people in our lives and makes us worthy human beings. We regard the ephemeral and fleeting as the Absolute and disregard the eternal as insignificant. We are truly alienated from ourselves, from other persons, and from God. From that condition of alienation, we have a glimpse of the void.

And Justice for All...

Here's a good one for the Fourth of July Weekend, as Brits are the heroes in the story. It reminds me of Albert Jay Nock's essay about Brits: "On Doing the Right Thing."

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/06/ap/world/main4235268.shtml

God is Watching

If the Cranmer photo doesn't clue you in, I'm Episcopalian. My church's number one issue is whether homosexuals should get married. Here's a story about a true injustice:

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/06/20/abused.boy.ap/index.html?section=cnn_latest

Now that you have wiped the vomit off your shirt, consider how white, middle class, American, and effete we are. We live in a country in which women and children are abused, neighborhoods are ravaged by drug abuse and crime, and people lose their jobs and homes so shareholders' stock values can be maximized. As you read this, children in China are making the crap you will buy in Wal-Mart in a few weeks, and a Mexican is cleaning your office and not being paid overtime. Right now, there are political prisoners languishing in Tibetan, Cuban and Burmese jails. Tomorrow, innocent people will be slaughtered in Darfur and Iraq. And we are worried about whether homosexuals can be "married" in San Francisco?

We all are given the gift of one life, and we will have to answer for the use we have made of it. There are plenty of real injustices in this world, and anyone who believes he was put here to help homosexuals get "married" is not paying attention.

Endless War

This is too simple to say anything clever about it:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/05/15/politics/main4098335.shtml

McCain makes clear why he will insist upon endless war. The stated purpose for the Iraq war was to eradicate its massive stockpiles of "weapons of mass destruction," which posed a grave threat to U.S. national security. When it became obvious that there were, in fact, no such weapons in Iraq, the Bushies decided that the purpose of the war was to bring democracy and freedom to the Iraqi people. Now, McCain tells us, on his watch we will see a future in which

The Iraq war has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced.

Iraq will never be a functioning democracy. In fact, Iraq will never be a functioning nation. In the best case scenario, there will be bloody fighting among Shiites, Sunnis, and Kurds until the country is partitioned, with the majority Shiite portion dominated by Iran, whose power in the region will have been dramatically increased by the Bushies' incompetent foreign policy. But the Bushies' and McCain's dream of a "functioning democracy" in Iraq will never materialize. Iraq lacks the cultural, historical, and material bases for democracy, period.

Note that McCain's vision of an Iraqi "functioning democracy" includes sectarian violence. Thus, there is no means to measure success and completion of our mission in Iraq, and no way for anyone to tell McCain that the war should be concluded. No, the war must continue until there is a "functioning democracy" in Iraq, which means the war will never end until we have honest leaders with the courage to admit that the Bushies' lies have cost thousands of wasted lives for no reason at all.

Jesus Just Left Chicago

"Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth." Jeremiah 1:9

We may rest assured that God did not put His words into the mouth of "Reverend" Jeremiah Wright, from whose mouth spews filth. Wright was the pastor of a church of racists who paid him to blame their own failures and discontents on others, which is always easier than taking responsibility for one's own decisions and conduct.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=4443788

Barack Obama did what he had to do to be elected to the Illinois state legislature from Chicago, and that included affiliating himself with a racist church whose leader could mobilize voters for him. Now that Obama seeks support from Democrats in a national campaign, he needs the support of voters who don't hate white people, and his karma from Chicago has come back to haunt him like a bad burrito.

So, Barack and his advisors were forced to decide what spin to put on this problem that would alienate the fewest voters. Obama doesn't want to alienate either his racist or non-racist supporters, so he did what he does best: say nothing with many words, beautifully. Thus the spin: disown Wright's "divisive" comments but not Wright and his followers. Americans will forgive anything, so those who want to believe Obama will believe him, and this will include both his racist and non-racist supporters. His old racist base will believe that he is winking and nodding at them and that he really believes, as they do, that their failures, disappointments and, yes, even their sins are caused solely by the blue-eyed devil. His new liberal base will believe that he sat in that church, offended by what he was hearing over and again, and never just went to another church instead. (Look in the Yellow Pages sometime--there are many, many churches to choose from.)

Obama, true to his vocation as an American politician, obviously believes nothing. If he really believed Wright's racist tripe, he would be saying it himself, like an Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. If he didn't believe it, he would have stood up like a decent human being and walked out of that church one day. The only way he can avoid doing one of these rational alternatives is to believe nothing, which accounts for his tremendous success in politics.

I once belonged to a Masonic lodge and, in fact, was one of the top three officers in the lodge. One night, nearly the entire lodge indulged in racist jokes, and I walked out that night and never returned. It's not that hard to stand up for what you believe in--that's what legs are for.

The Audacity of Lying About Lying

Democratic presidential candidate Obama's senior economic advisor met with Canadian officials recently and told them not to take seriously Obama's anti-NAFTA statements on the campaign trail, describing them as "political maneuvering":

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-03-04-canada-obama_N.htm?csp=34

In other words, Obama was lying to voters. Surprise! Obama is just another politician, so you know he's lying when his lips are moving. Then, someone in the Canadian government leaked a memo about the meeting with Obama's advisor to the press, revealing to the world at large that Obama is just another lying politician who will say anything for a vote. So what does Obama do? He lies about it! He was caught in a lie, so denies the whole thing, thus lying to voters about the fact that he lied to voters. This means he is more than just a liar--it means he thinks you are stupid too. And if you vote for him, he's right.

Bill Maher: "Rationalist"

I had to post this before I forget about it. Bill Maher, forgettable comic turned self-appointed political expert, stated tonight on the Larry King show (yes, I admit I watched it) that he is a "rationalist." Religion, he said, was how people explained reality before we "knew about germs and atoms," thus religion, Maher pontificates, is "dumb."

Unknown to Maher, rationalism is the doctrine that reason alone, not observation or experience, justifies knowledge. This is a view that predates modern science; the last great rationalist philosopher was Gottfried Leibniz, who died in 1716. A great deal has happened in intellectual history in the last three hundred years, and it is a fair statement that rationalism is now archaic. It is forgivable that Maher does not know this. After all, there is no reason why he should. What is less forgivable is his pungent combination of ignorance and condescension.

Nevertheless, Maher's existence on this planet is justified because he illustrates the antithesis of conservatism: he believes that he knows much, much more than he knows.

There is No Conservative Party in America (Part I of On Conservatism)

American political parties are not ideological parties. Instead, they are mass electoral parties that are coalitions of economic, social, ethnic, and regional intests. I didn't discover this, but listening to self-described "conservatives" whine about McCain's impending victory over Mitt Romney (who believes in nothing) forces me to point out the obvious.

Consider some of the things the so-called "conservatives" whine about. They don't like McCain because he doesn't want oil and gas drilling in the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve and he supports lower fuel emissions for cars. There's nothing "conservative" about oil drilling and air pollution. But there is something "Republican Party" (henceforth "RP") about those things, because the RP is supported by oil companies and auto manufacturers -- multinational corporations that don't give a rat's ass about the United States and you or me.

They don't like McCain because he supports campaign finance reform -- specifically, the McCain-Feingold Act, which limited the ability of big-spending donors (i.e., multinationals and big domestic companies like financial and pharmaceutical businesses) to support RPs with "independent spending" and the like just before an election. There's nothing conservative about garbage ads on television, whether they are hawking drug companies, financial institutions, beer or deodorant. But there is something RP about pouring money into them.

And oh, yes, there's "tax cuts." The self-proclaimed "conservatives" hate McCain because he opposed Dubya's tax cuts. Since these "conservatives" always like tax cuts, one would think they would be satisfied only when there were no taxes at all and government would be funded solely by voluntary donations (which would mean it was no longer government). But, no, what they really mean is that voters like to be told their taxes will be reduced, and, of course, no one wants to be told their favorite programs will be cut. So, the "conservatives" say, it's no problem: if the government cuts taxes, there will be so much more private economic activity that the government will raise more revenue and make up for the reduced tax rates. This, of course, explains the enormous budget deficits the federal government ran in the 1980s and after Dubya's tax cuts. Anyway, there's nothing "conservative" about tax cuts (the supply side "conservatives" always point (ironically) to JFK's tax cuts of the early 1960s), but there is something RP about tax cuts, because it's a way to win elections.

My favorite is the claim that McCain is not a "conservative" because he would close the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and is critical of harsh interrogation techniques used there. For the edification of the comatose, McCain was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam and was tortured by our enemies there. Somehow, it does not surprise me that he is critical of torture and abuse. There is nothing "conservative" about torture and abuse. But there is something RP about it, because people who can only think in short bursts do not realize that the law is the shield that protects our freedom, not Dubya, Dick Cheney, and Karl Rove or whoever happens to hold the reigns of power at a given moment.

No, there is nothing "conservative" about air pollution, oil drilling in wildlife reserves, big campaign contributions, tax cuts, or torture and abuse. None of these things are bound together by any common idea, philosophical or otherwise. The common thread of these things is the RP -- they represent the disparate supporters of a political party, and that is all. There is nothing "conservative" about the RP.

Lest anyone think I support McCain, think again. We need secure borders, and he doesn't believe that. He wants endless war in the mideast, and we don't need that. There is nothing conservative about open borders and endless war, and no, McCain is not a conservative either. I will try, in subsequent posts that no one will read, to explicate conservatism as I understand it. Neither the RP nor McCain represent conservatism.

I wrote mine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King%2C_Jr._authorship_issues

Remember the Maine?

The Navy Times reported the following today:

A threatening radio message to U.S. warships may have been a coincidence but was taken seriously because it came at the same time Iranian vessels swarmed the American fleet, the commander of one of the American ships said Sunday.

In other words, no one really knows what happened in the incident. Gulf of Tonkin, anyone?

Remember too that after the National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Iran had abandoned its nuclear weapons program in 2003, Dubya proclaimed that Iran was a nuclear threat (or has he always puts it, a "nookyoolar" threat) because it might someday revisit its former nookyoolar program.

If you think I'm paranoid because I believe the Dubya gang is looking for a pretense for war with Iran, think again. No one can seriously maintain that Dubya and company wouldn't do such a thing, because that's exactly what they did to lead us into war with Iraq. There was no factual support for war with Iraq, but Dubya and his posse assured us there was. We needed only trust their superior wisdom and information. Do you still trust them?

If you like the Iraq war, you'll love the Iran war.

Deja Vu All Over Again?

Due to the fact that we know the Dubya government lies to us about national security matters, we have to wonder whether they are lying about the alleged incident with Iranian naval forces in which Iranian boats allegedly attacked US Naval vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. Sure, the Iranians are bad guys, but Dubya and company are confirmed serial liars. Furthermore, our government has done almost the same thing to us before. Recently released National Security Agency documents demonstrate that the Johnson administration fabricated the Gulf of Tonkin incident, used to justify escalation in the Vietnam war. That incident involved a purported attack by Vietnamese boats on American vessls. Could Dubya's regime be lying to us about this? Of course! One of the truly scary things about our country today is what my pal Donald Rumsfeld called the "unknown unknowns," the things we don't know that we don't know. Applied here, that category includes the following: because our government feeds us a stream of lies, we can't know whether to believe our own government or our bitterest enemies.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Incident

http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2008/01/nsa_releases_history_of_americ.html

The Golden Compass

I saw this movie last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. It is reputed to have an anti-religious theme, and while the book may, the film need not be taken that way. The film contrasts the power of truth with the power of authority. Virtues, such as courage and loyalty, confront one another on both sides. Thus, when truth and authority are divorced from one another, conflict is inevitable.

The chief protagonist is a young girl who can read the Golden Compass, an instrument that tells her the truth. It would be convenient to have something like that but, alas, noone else does. Hence, the young girl, who is able to divine the truth and her colleagues, who cannot, reflect the value of freedom in a world in which no authority can tell us with certainty what is true.

It's also a great adventure story with brutal violence and beautiful women. Can't beat that.