Life On The World Of The Cross

A census taker once tried to test me.
I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice chianti.
~ Hannibal Lector, “Silence of the Lambs”

AP source: Census worker hanged with ‘fed’ on body

By DEVLIN BARRETT and JEFFREY McMURRAY (AP)

WASHINGTON — The FBI is investigating the hanging death of a U.S. Census worker near a Kentucky cemetery, and a law enforcement official told The Associated Press the word ‘fed” was scrawled on the dead man’s chest.

The body of Bill Sparkman, a 51-year-old part-time Census field worker and occasional teacher, was found Sept. 12 in a remote patch of the Daniel Boone National Forest in rural southeast Kentucky. The Census has suspended door-to-door interviews in rural Clay County, where the body was found, pending the outcome of the investigation.

Investigators are still trying to determine whether the death was a killing or a suicide, and if a killing, whether the motive was related to his government job or to anti-government sentiment.….

From Michelle Bachman on the issue of census workers :

The mother lode of all data information will be from the Census. … Unfortunately, the Census data has become very intricate, very personal, a lot of the questions that are asked. I know for my family, the only question we will be answering is how many people are in our home. We won’t be answering any information beyond that, because the Constitution doesn’t require any information beyond that.

From Michelle Bachmann on the need to be armed and dangerous:

I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous…

We report. You decide.

Do words have consequences?

UPDATE: Apparently the initial AP report contained some errors, according to the FBI. Ergo, y’all shouldn’t get your panties in a bunch. From TPM:

Bill Sparkman, the Census worker found dead in Kentucky recently was not found hanging from a tree, according to an FBI spokesman. Rather, David Beyer told TPMmuckraker, Sparkman’s feet were planted on the ground. A rope around Sparkman’s neck was attached to a tree.

Well, that certainly makes me feel a whole lot better. While Sparkman still died of asphyxiation, from a rope tied around his neck attached to a tree– I think that technically falls under the category of garroting– at least his feet were on the freakin’ ground!

While the possibility remains that he was killed by drug dealers or other criminals using the Daniel Boone National Forest as cover, it does, however, make the suicide scenario even less plausible. And the fact that there is no preliminary finding after nearly two weeks, and that the feds aren’t denying the “Fed” inscription on his chest, only deepens the suspicion that this was a hate crime directed at the government (run by you know who).

We return you now to your regularly scheduled inflammatroy right wing, anti-government hate show…

This could get old.  We’re back up, but we’re taking nothing for granted now.  We feel the need to blame someone for this shitty run of internet service, or the lack of it, so we put a bunch of suspects in the hat and had a drawing.  Here is the lucky whiner winner:

I tel ya, she’s malicious.

Well that was so much fun, we decided to do runner-ups:

Ooo yeah! have fun in yur new undisclosed location, DICK.

Well we were surprised;  an evil Biker Cockatoo.  Who knew.

Three evil dead guys;  to us, anyway.

Despite the innate evilness of having our site down, we had a good time learning about how insane the intertoots really are. So we’re taking steps to make certain that nothing bad can ever happen to our plugins, ever again;  but yeah;   if our past experience is any indicator, perfection is a long long way off, and we hope you’ll suffer gladly right along with the frailties we face here is cyberspace. Good on you all;  thanks for hangin’ with us.

The contents of General McCrystal’s top-down review of Afghanistan ordered by President Obama found its way into the front pages of the NY Times and Washington Post today. As expected, it paints a grim picture and calls for more of everything– more troops, more money, more nation building– on top of the $ 4 billion a month we’re already spending there.

And a promise that unless Obama goes all in (a prospect that the military-industrial-congressional-complex savors), defeat is inevitable. And even if he does, there’s no guarantee of victory. Talk about your proverbial shit sandwich.

During the presidential campaign, I never understood Obama’s Afghanistan policy. I assumed it was largely a political device to overcome the (media fed) public perception that Democrats were weak on defense; that Obama knew a “good war” (Afghanistan) from a “bad war” (Iraq); that it highlighted the macho Bush Administration’s promise and failure to bring bin Laden to justice; that Obama had the chops to deal with terrorism, etc., etc.

Obama has articulated the same basic strategic goals of the Bushies– preventing al-Qaeda from re-constituting its bases in Afghanistan to plan future attacks on the U.S., and to create a self-sufficient Afghan government capable of providing its own security while keeping the Taliban at bay, which currently controls 40% of the country and is actively contesting in another 20%.

First of all, al -Qaeda, or what’s left of it (there’s no hard evidence that Usama bin Laden is even among the living since he was cornered in the mountains of Tora Bora in late ‘01), doesn’t need Afghanistan to plan future attacks on America. An apartment in Hamburg, Germany, such as the one used to plan 9/11, will do just fine. By that strategic logic, we should be prepared to invade and occupy Germany immediately.

(I’m still waiting for John “I know how to do it” McCain to reveal his secret plan for capturing bin Laden that he promoted during his doomed run for the presidency.  Hopefully, he at least whispered it into the ear of his vice-presidential candidate before he forgets what it was.)

As far as living space goes, ‘the Qaedas” (as W liked to call them) don’t need much. And there are any number of countries where they can plant themselves– Pakistan, Yemen, and the country formerly known as Somalia come to mind.

As for the goal of creating a centralized democratic government capable of running a feudalistic, tribal society that’s never known one, surely you jest. Afghanistan is one of, if not the most corrupt and ineffectual governments on the planet. Obama’s decision to send an additional 21,000 troops to insure this summer’s elections did little more than insure the corrupt Karzai Government will continue to make the country safe for war lords and major opium dealers like his brother. As for Afghanistan’s major economic export, did I mention opium and the heroin trade?

The main function of government is to provide physical security to its citizens– in this case, security from themselves; i.e. the Taliban. Here again we see that Obama and McCrystal share the same delusions as the Bushies that if we only train and arm local Afghanis to provide for their own security, we can leave their country and everybody will live happily ever after. But it’s fair to ask exactly what spending $10 billion plus over eight years has produced in terms of creating a viable Afghan army and police.

Ann Jones asks a rather obvious question in her post today at Huffpo [emphasis mine]:

American and NATO officers often complain that Afghan army units are simply not ready to “operate independently,” but no one ever speaks to the simple question: Where are they??

My educated guess is that such an army simply does not exist. It may well be true that Afghan men have gone through some version of “Basic Warrior Training” 90,000 times or more. When I was teaching in Afghanistan from 2002 to 2006, I knew men who repeatedly went through ANA training to get the promised Kalashnikov and the pay. Then they went home for a while and often returned some weeks later to enlist again under a different name.

Or, some of them are simply Taliban agents to begin with, paid by Americans to learn our tactics in order to more effectively kill us.

Ann makes some pertinent observations about the physical and cultural differences between Afghans and Americans:

Their American trainers spoke of “upper body strength deficiency” and prescribed pushups because their trainees buckle under the backpacks filled with 50 pounds of equipment and ammo they are expected to carry. All this material must seem absurd to men whose fathers and brothers, wearing only the old cotton shirts and baggy pants of everyday life and carrying battered Russian Kalashnikov rifles, defeated the Red Army two decades ago. American trainers marvel that, freed from heavy equipment and uniforms, Afghan soldiers can run through the mountains all day — as the Taliban guerrillas in fact do with great effect — but the U.S. military is determined to train them for another style of war.

The attempt to turn young Afghani men into Mini-Me Marines is perhaps an inevitable result of American Exceptionalism. A belief in Manifest Destiny apparently gives its adherents the right to re-create the world in its own image and likeness. But the delusion of the Chosen People Syndrome is getting its karmic comeuppance in the rugged mountains and valleys of Afghanistan.

As for the domestic political ramifications, LBJ isn’t remembered so much for signing landmark bills on civil rights and Medicare, but for the quagmire he allowed to develop in Vietnam, which became so all-consuming that he chose not to seek re-election. It remains to be seen whether Obama and David Axlerod take his experience to heart.

Afghanistan is for good reason called The Graveyard of Empires. Says Ann:

Afghans are Afghans. They have their own history, their own culture, their own habitual ways of thinking and behaving, all complicated by a modern experience of decades of war, displacement, abject poverty, and incessant meddling by foreign governments near and far — of which the United States has been the most powerful and persistent. Afghans do not think or act like Americans. Yet Americans in power refuse to grasp that inconvenient point….no amount of American training, mentoring, or cash will determine who or what Afghans will fight for, if indeed they fight at all.

Louis Black, after a good nap.

BOULDER — Louis Black was in Boulder last night, chatting up the locals. He looked and sounded a little tired of it all, you know— having to tell jokes about all the adult children who are happy to continue shitting on the levers of capitalism until their butt skin is raw— and made the point right we should all lower our expectations about 20%, to reflect the economic downturn.  Twenty percent? Huh. That’s nothin’.

He confessed that he had actually lived in Colorado for a year, and he knew of Boulder’s reputation as a wretched hive of liberal scum and communist villainy;  also of Colorado Springs’ rep as a repressive fascist hive of fundamentalist Christian lunacy— with a cowboy rodeo clown twist.

You probably already know that Louis says the word “fuck” a lot when he talks.  I didn’t really notice, because what he was talking about was, as with anyone, more important than the words he used to say it;  that’s what personalities do— they make self-expression unique.

He bitched a little about his iPhone and thus Apple, chiding the Boulderhoids about having their Apple Store hidden in the mountains, and the probability that special Apple shoes were necessary to even get to it.  And he’s right, of course.  It does take special “shoes” to get to a special “place,” metaphorically.  Special shoes are a mindset that allows one to explore— and see— the already well-known terrain in a new and special way.  If the shoes fit, why not wear them, beaches?  How much time do you think you have, anyway?

He riffed all over the fact he’s 60 years old and his generation hasn’t accomplished squat.

And that’s really at the heart of what’s wrong with the Republicans and the Democrats, too;  both of whom received equal and virulent scorn from Mr. Black;  for they both lack the special shoes they need to actually see what must be happen before the necessary changes can get done.

He wondered what any young person in school today might see as an accomplishment by either party, anything that would induce their loyalty. Some might think the Democrats should get the credit for elected an African-American as president;  but that wouldn’t have happened if the youth of America hadn’t gotten behind Obama.

Louis was just expressing the anger and existential angst that he and all boomers eventually have to face— that they’re probably going to die before they get anything done, or figure anything out about life.  It’s typical of the age we live in I suppose, that sometimes, despite being born into the auspicious beginnings of the Age of Aquarius, blah blah fucking blah, the majority of them actually forgot to look for God.  All is not lost, however.  Some of them may yet use the motivation anger can provide to stumble onto the insight necessary to get their philosophical and spiritual house in order.

Hyeah;  and monkeys may fly outcher butt.

I’ve been visiting my cousin, Fullbright.

Sorry we’re late, but f*cking off takes time.  Thursday afternoon, our ISP locked down our site because of excess cpu usage, enough to destabilize the feeble server our data lives on. Uh, no, it wasn’t thousands of excited new visitors sucking up the bandwidth on our shared server, it was a renegade plugin.

Everybody wuz locked out, including us.  If you came by during that time, you might have seen a request for a password and user name. Papers!  We must zee your Papers!  Well, no more.  Things seem to be working again (crossing fingers, eyes, and toes) after some serious mud wrestling with some ugly little plugins.  We’re slowly turning them back on, hoping the ornery one is dead and gone.

You know, sometimes when it’s late, and the bits and bytes get all blurry, you wonder how any of this shit  works as often and as well as it does.  We’re trying to keep it simple here, but still want it to be a beautiful and edifying place to wallow in some political satire and bath in the light of the divine advantage.

Baby, it’s nice to be back.

Henry Gibson as an laconic little freak of a Nazi in The Blues Brothers.

MALIBU — Henry Gibson, a wry comic character actor who was an original cast member of “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” graduated to the next world Monday, from his home in Malibu.  He was 73.

His penchant for quirky dry comedy was perhaps best portrayed in his brief supporting role in The Blues Brothers, but you had to be familiar with his work to really appreciate his character’s nuance in the film. He was usually seen in a crappy little office with a Nazi flag in the background.  My favorite scene had him in full Nazi regalia quietly smoking a pipe while painting a crummy little plastic falcon;  the cheesy goodness of that bit of business was classic Henry Gibson.

Cheers, Henry.

Dickheads are of course, a dime a dozen at Tea Bagger rallies, but the 9-12 rally in D.C. which, depending on how much propaganda you can swallow, drew nearly 50 quadrillion angry pure-bred Americans, including this rare Tea-Bagger Dickhead, sporty a ginormous scrotum where his jowls should have been.

Fortunately, most of the Tea Baggers tend to be the oblivious type, and unaware of the generally bizarre physical appearance of many of their fellow protesters;  otherwise, there may have been a dangerous stampede when a rare Tea-Bagger Dickhead with huge balls where his jowls should have been, was spotted in the crowd by an alert Civil War historian.

American Dickheads (Republicana Freakoidia Americanus) are a disturbingly common Red State congenital defect. It is widely understood that in a majority of the afflicted, the testicles remain compressed inside the mandible (jawbone), usually near the maxillary artery groove.  But one in every 70,000 specimens exhibits gross enlargement of the testicles, which are forced into a grotesque make-shift scrotum along the mandible. The condition is known as, Ball Face.

First known exemplars were invariably members of the Tennessee Ku Klux Klan of 1865, which resisted Reconstruction by assaulting, murdering, and intimidating freedmen, and white Republicans. It is generally thought that the manifestation is triggered by abnormal stupidity, low i.q., or excessive exposure to Fox News Channel.

First known illustration thought to show Ball Face exemplar; holding up a “Holy Bible” while sitting on the death of Catholic influence in the United States. The irony is palpable.

Sissy-baby Beck delivers a huge steamy pile of propaganda for the 9-12 sheep.

Great Big Baby and colossal shithead Glen Beck has become the de facto poster-tard of the — well— whatever-the-fuck you want to call them, out there on the fringes of sentient reality.  And he’s now serving up shit that only his sheeple can appreciate;  what the rest of us should recognize as classic sociological propaganda. The 9-12 Fool Festival was a very real attempt to impose this festering plate full of fecal goojoo on the rest of us.

There are reasons their spokes-tards keep insisting that some two million such creatures managed to use our nation’s socialist infrastructure to assemble in Washington D.C., so they could, you know, chant “NO PUBLIC OPTION!  NO PUBLIC OPTION!”—which is the reality-based equivalent of, “PLEASE CUT MY HEAD OFF!  PLEASE CUT MY HEAD OFF!”

Don’t be puzzled that the Fringe’tard would boldly and repeatedly lie about how many of them showed up, or even that they left not a single scrap of trash behind.  Remember, it’s little white lies that such people specialize in.

Amanda at Pandagon:

The people lying about 2 million Tea Baggers are the same people that lied about death panels, killing old people, concentration camps, socialist takeovers, free health care for illegals, fake birth certificates and ultimately gave us 8 Great years of George W. Bush. They are the very same people. None of us should be terribly surprised that exposing their lies only makes them lie more.

And there’s a reason they “lie more.”  For as soon as a system of propaganda is organized around false claims, all good faith must per force disappear;  the lie has revealed itself to the liar.

Jacques Ellul:

One cannot make propaganda in pretended good faith. Propaganda reveals our hoaxes even as it encloses and hardens us into this system of hoaxes from which we can no longer escape.

Lying to others almost instantly becomes lying to yourself;  and when one loses the ability to see the line between the two, there’s very little chance the lying can ever stop.  Once the path of error is chosen, one’s own mind tends to justify continuing down the path.  And having started out wrong, it requires a great and noble character to turn around and go right.

Glen Beck:  “great and noble character”?

Recently, Beck said President Barack Obama has repeatedly shown “a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture” and, “I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people. I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.”

After more than sixty-two sponsors have insisted their ads not be aired during Beck’s scheduled rants, his unapologetic response for his remark was that the President is  “…not above criticism.”

Neither is Glenn Beck.  And such sophistic squirming to avoid confronting the fact his charge of racism was much more akin to sedition than mere “criticism” is much more typical of a coward; not a man possessing a “great and noble character.”

So, Big Baby:  keep slingin’ that shit;  keep lying your flabby white ass off.  The bed of vipers you’re making will be more than suitable for a weak and malignant character like you, to lie in. And when the truly great and noble Lord worshiped by the church of Latter-day Saints you profess to follow, chooses to judge you and your lies, be sure to tell him:  “But, but… didn’t I prophesy in your name? And and.. by your name do many wonderful works??”

Lift Your Spirit

IN THESE TIMES you cannot afford to meet the shock of life with emotion; you cannot hate, you cannot fear.  The evil that you see has always been here;  the ignorance is not for you to judge, nor should you respond to it even in the sense of so-called righteous indignation.  We have tried to teach you that you must defend yourselves with the knowledge you have received from this way of life so that you will not be dragged down into an emotional maelstrom of dark imaginings.  True creative sympathy does not throw one into the darkness of another’s life.  Stand in the light that has been revealed to you by your communion with him who said, “My joy I give unto thee,” and by so doing help to illuminate the one in need.  Divine wisdom is the antithesis of violence and despair; therefore if you have tendencies to strain and boil, to daydream, to think black in deep negations, you but add to the ignorance and are enslaved by it.

What holds the race back but fear thoughts— greed thoughts, self-thoughts, which are of the race? . . . this strange subtle pride of race!  They take so many shapes;  that is why one must be forever vigilant, forever remembering, forever holding oneself to the center and letting the Indwelling Spirit take possession, that it may fill your life to the uttermost with the realization that this infinite presence of the Spirit is actually present, is the actual stuff of love and peace and power.  And when you find yourselves pressed hard say, “I will not take in, I will give out;  I will not dwell in darkness, light shall be my life.  It will cleanse me and I shall go forth forgiving all things, knowing that this love will resolve all things and my way will be made straight, and I shall knock and it shall be opened unto me, and I shall find and receive.”  Keep awake in the victory of the Spirit; pour out thanksgiving before there is a sign of victory; thank the Father for the event before it happens; cleanse your hearts of all prejudices and the impotent rage against groups, enemies, and nationalities, and all the hot emotions the boil in the hell of personality.

Keep rather in that secret place where emotion is transmuted, and the human spirit is lifted by the swift transmutation.  A time will come when by your steadfast voluntary discipline of the pressures of actualities and the realities of your outer world you will be aware of the involuntary transmutation which comes quietly as a reward for your intent and desire . . . your desire above all others to know him in your everyday world, to know eternal life now. Fight on brave ones, and cast off the heavy vestments with despair in their folds!  Put on the garments of immortality;  be worthy, keep yourselves in freedom;  be stern with no one but yourselves, and do not go this way from a sense of duty, but for the fulfillment of joy!

“An interior man will make more impressions on hearts
by a single word animated by the spirit of God,
than another by a whole discourse which has cost him
much labor and in which he has exhausted all his power of reasoning.”
—Louis Lallement, 1587 – 1635

Restated from Letters of the Scattered Brotherhood, 1948

• • •

The hope of a better nation— a better world—
is bound up in the progress and enlightenment of the individual.

• • •

An attendee at today’s teabagger protest on the D.C. Mall

In the never ending triumph of form over substance, politics over policy, and emotionally charged food fights over actual debate, the MSM occasionally interjects some reality into their coverage of complex issues like health care reform. Example in a moment.

Take the issue du jour– fictional health care  insurance for non-documented immigrants, catapulted into our awareness by a former immigration attorney, South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson. Wilson interrupted President Obama’s address to a joint session of Congress Wednesday by shouting at him that he was a liar after Obama said there were nothing in the proposals that would extend coverage to said immigrants.  House Bill 3200, the proxy for the other three bills that have made it out of committee thus far, makes that explicit:

SEC. 246. NO FEDERAL PAYMENT FOR UNDOCUMENTED ALIENS.

Nothing in this subtitle shall allow Federal payments for affordability credits on behalf of individuals who are not lawfully present in the United States.

As far as I can tell, the arguments being made that such language is ineffectual are two-fold. The first concerns a bill signed into law by President Ronald Reagan requiring that emergency medical care be provided to anyone in need of it. In other words, if someone shows up at an emergency room gushing blood they don’t have to provide proof of a citizenship before a tourniquet is applied. In an example of gravity defying mental gymnastics, this essential moral fact of life is abstracted and re-packaged into a symbol that is then linked to other symbols to forge another bogus winger narrative: Providing Good Samaritan care for the undocumented will somehow magically enroll them into a public option insurance policy,  paid for by cutting Medicare for seniors.

The second concerns the rejection of two Rethug amendments that would also require proof of citizenship before enrollment in any government run program. This amounts to nothing more than grandstanding and playing to their racist base, given the results of a government study cited in an editorial in yesterday’s NY Times titled Health Care and Lies:

A House oversight committee reviewed six state Medicaid programs in 2007 and found that verification rules had cost the federal government an additional $8.3 million. They caught exactly eight illegal immigrants.

For Rethugs obsessed with illegal immigrants, that has to count as a rare example of GOOD and EFFICIENT government spending.

The editorial also says that it is

Time for a reality check. Illegal immigrants are here. They are not eligible for Medicaid, but many still get sick and many get care, often in emergency rooms.”

Which explains that $500 aspirin that shows up on the bills of the already insured. Their insurance companies pay for it without raising a fuss, because they just raise premiums a thousand bucks to insure their own profit margins, including  $25 million CEO salaries.  So we are already paying for the care of the uninsured, but instead of a paying the money to primary care physicians to prevent expensive illnesses, we spend 10x that in emergency room care. Another example of ass-backwards Rethuglican economics, which have never been anything more than a device to increase the wealth of their ruling class masters.

But back to the kind of magical thinking displayed by Wilson and his ilk. In their fevered imaginations, Democratic proposals for health care reform are designed to help invading brown hordes steal their country. Time and time again, immigrants are used as scapegoats for current problems (not unique to this country, for sure). Prior to the current economic collapse, undocumented immigrants were stealing our jobs. Now, thanks to Reganonomics and the deregulation of the financial industry, there are no jobs left to steal. (It was announced this week that California now has fewer jobs then it did in 1999.)

So undocumented immigrants have to be re-purposed, this time by the Medical Mafia as part of its sophisticated and well-funded efforts to derail health care reform. (Naturally, people with the least amount of power to defend themselves make the best scapegoats.)

More interesting, from a sociological perspective, is the neurological fact that the wingers who believe this crap can’t now believe otherwise. For forty years they have been propagandized by experts using modern media to keep them immersed 24/7 in a state of anxiety and fear. Having crossed what Jacques Ellul called the integration or eduction phase of propaganda to the agitation or activation stage, there’s no turning back. Fear and anxiety are supplemented by hate and anger in increasing doses, helping teh crazy to keep its freak on. (Already simmering in Glenn Beck’s agi-prop pot are attacks on Obama advisers (czars), a press for criminal racketeering charges against ACORN, and coming legislative battles over energy and labor reform.)

Villains are an essential component of this kind of pernicious political propaganda, necessary to satisfy both the narrative and emotional structures of the brain, as well as to justify the feelings of anger, hate, and violence that the propagandist is trying to arouse and redirect.

As Dr. Bryant Welch points out in his book State of Confusion: Political Manipulation and the Assault on the American Mind (often citing Fox News for examples), the continuous repetition of selected words can turn them into symbols with deep neurological roots, capable of exciting repressed emotions stored in the lizard brain.

When combined with other emotionally charged symbols, these can be twisted into a false narrative which is indistinguishable by the brain from the real thing. Cognitive science has shown that hallucinations use the same neural circuitry as does “objective” reality. That’s why a representation of a thing can become the thing itself.

Those of us in the “reality-based” community need a better understanding of how and why the wingers are acting the way they are.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXFHXqrrJ6g[/youtube]

What part of “it’s simple” do you not understand?

After “Christ carrying the cross,” by Hieronymus Bosch (click it)

We will know their faces and we will know their names