Tea-baggers, Galts, and Other Pachyderms

Worthy of mention, from Daylight Atheism:

[NOM Board Member, Orson Scott] Card isn't the most prominent member of the religious right to call for armed rebellion because the government won't cater to his wishes. He's not even the first. (Rick Perry may have that honor, along with a substantial portion of the Texas Republican Party.) But it is frightening that, as society moves away from accepting their views, these calls for revolution become more and more common among them.

What this shows, I think, is that the religious right is unwilling to participate in the social contract: the understanding that we all have a voice in directing the course of the state, but the price of that freedom is not always having one's own way. The religious right has no interest in that bargain. If they don't get to win, they don't want to participate. And as soon as events are not going their way, they immediately begin calling for armed revolt and insurrection, determined to achieve their goals by violence if they can't achieve them by democracy. The most insane aspect of this is that no one is taking away any of their rights - their clamoring for rebellion is purely because they can no longer control the lives of others.

This is what is silly, but frightening, about the extremely vocal right-wing Republican fringe. If you won't let them win, they'll take their ball and go home, just like kindergartners. Or maybe they won't invite you to their birthday party. But when they take their ball and go home, they would love it if they could cause everyone who wouldn't let them win to disintegrate in a painful way into dust and blow away. Or the people who aren't invited to their birthday party should die, disappear, and never be uncooperative with the toddler's desires ever again! It's toddler behavior, but these are supposed to be grown-ups. A toddler wishes another person dead or vanished because toddlers haven't developed a moral sense or empathy or a sense of responsibility. Toddlers are interested in doing what THEY want, when THEY want, and others must participate, assist, agree, or DIE. That's why we don't allow toddlers, for the most part, to choose how they will live their lives, much less allowing them to decide for others. They require supervision and education into how to hold up their ends of the social contract.

These latter day (there ya' go, a reference for you, Orson Scott Card, whose Ender novels have given me much now-tarnished-and-slightly-nauseous delight! Darn you, man! Grow UP!) revolutionaries seem to have been poorly supervised and educated. If these grown ups can't tell everyone how to live, they threaten to destroy society as we know it. What they would put in its place, in light of their vicious playground justice mentality, is not anything I like to contemplate.

Back In The USSA - Non-Kosher Edition

Upon our return, and having finally retrieved our pets and settled into our hotel, we first went to Fred Meyer, where we purchased several pounds of bacon, ham, and cheddar cheese.

We wallowed in bacon, ham, and cheese before making bacon-suits and ham-hats for ourselves, while munching on cheese covered pork chops.

Since then, we have made a point of eating meat, preferably pork, and dairy together at least once per day, with leavened bread products, since we arrived back just as Pessach began. Bacon cheddar burgers on fat buns! Ahhhh! It is good.

Back In The USSA - Pet Adventures Edition

The clan has returned from Israel to the USA.

The trip itself was, let's say, interesting. Delta lost our pets twice. It was due to a combination of uninformed employee error and Nigel's inability to believe anything I say unless I am backed up by at least 50 experts.

At Ben Gurion airport, we were told to pick the pets up from baggage claim and run them through customs when we arrived in Atlanta. However, Nigel, hoping they were wrong, asked a flight attendant about it and she informed him that, no, we didn't have to do that, and that the pets would just be put on our next flight.

Of course, I protested. But without 50 experts to back me up, Nigel insisted that the flight attendant was the person he would believe.

So, we got onto our next flight, and he asked if the pets made it on board. They said no, but that they would find them and get them on. This delayed take-off by 45 minutes. In the end, Delta informed Nigel that he was supposed to pick them up and run them through customs and returning them to baggage. Which I knew. At any rate, by the time we arrived in Portland, Nigel was angry with me because I was right and angry with Delta because they had effectively washed their hands of the issue.

We worked with a Delta supervisor for three hours upon arrival and discovered that Delta in Atlanta did not know where our pets were. While waiting for Nigel to come to pick us up at baggage claim with the rental vehicle, I called my mom. She informed me that Dennis from a kennel in Atlanta had called her and told her that he had our pets there and asking that she tell us to call him. I called Dennis and explained the situation. He said that we were not the only people to have had this happen, which was reassuring.

It took three days of negotiations and faxes and phone calls to get the pets to Portland, and when we got to Delta's cargo office, they couldn't find them. Turned out that Atlanta had left the baggage tags on their carriers and they were sent up with the baggage. Once that was discovered, they were brought to cargo, where we had to get paperwork and take it to Customs and Immigration, down the road, for an officer to sign. We brought the signed papers, paid 85.00, and took the pets to our hotel. They were quite happy to see us. Our poor dog had peed all over her carrier and the pad, which I ended up having to throw away after trying to wash the smell out twice.

I have to say that Officer Weddington of the Atlanta Customs/Homeland Security office was extremely helpful and sympathetic. I wrote an e-mail commending her. The Delta supervisor at Portland was also kind and helpful. The people at cargo were efficient and forced the baggage people to drop everything to find our pets.

Nigel plans to write nasty-grams to everyone at Delta even though this was the fault of only two people, one of whom doesn't work for Delta. That would be HIM. Sigh.

Lesson: In order to avoid Nigel's distrust of information provided by me, get everything in writing. Verify information with people other than flight attendants. Don't fuck around with customs.

Lovely Quotes From Men Series Opener

Simon Jones is a git.

Dude doesn't want to get married. Dude claims Frances railroaded him into marriage. Dude doesn't want children. Dude claims Frances railroaded him into fatherhood. Dude's true feelings about women in general come out:

And it’s not only Frances who’s become a boring frump — it’s depressingly common to see clever, attractive women become parenting bores. You can spot them at parties, in baggy clothes and making no effort to be interesting to men. Surely the ultimate mummy could still be a sex cat, if no longer a sex kitten?

Never forget, fellow women, that you are required by the patriarchy to continually be interesting to men at all times and in all places. Whether that interests you or not. Twisty has it right(though the subject of the linked post is much more disgusting than Simon's sad saga):

The sex class is responsible for maintaining its perpetual availability for the use of males.

She points out that women who do not feel obligated to conform to the requirements of patriarchical femininity will be punished. By being castigated and maligned by some git in the Times Online, for example.

Simon, however, for all of his whine-worthy suffering, did not learn from his experience with boring, frumpy Frances. He soon left Frances for Maria and repeated the whole ridiculous performance again. Git. I'm going to mail him a box of tissues.

Obama Starts Off On The Right Path

First, apologies to the two people who sometimes read this blog. I've been traveling and am now preparing to leave Israel to return to the US.

Now, today I read that President Obama has reversed the ban on US support to international family planning organizations that offer abortion or even information about abortion. This ban has been on (Reagan/Bush I), off (Clinton), and on (Bush II) again. Now it's off again, and I can only hope that it is off permanently.

Justifications for the ban are generally that no American tax payer should be forced to pay for what they believe are morally reprehensible programs. This is a silly argument on its face in that we all pay for things we would rather not - with our tax money. I would certainly prefer not paying Blackwater to terrorize various parts of the world on behalf of the US. I would certainly prefer not to have paid a penny towards the war in Iraq, which I was against from the very start. I would prefer not to pay for religious-based rehab programs. There are several morally reprehensible things my tax money supports.

Justifications for lifting the ban include the fact that funded programs offer many, many valuable services to women and families, including HIV/AIDS awareness and prevention programs, birth control provision and counselling, and general health and preventive care programs. It seems unfair that poor women and families cannot have access to these things while wealthy women and families can pay to go to private clinics, even traveling out of the area to do so.

This is one of the many reasons I have a problem with abortion restrictions here in the US as well. The wealthy seventeen-year-old who chooses abortion can afford to go just about anywhere to get one. The poor seventeen-year-old has no choice. She can't afford to travel to another county, state, or even country. Even if she can scrape up enough cash to go to some other county, she has to be "counseled," shown ultrasound pictures of her fetus, and otherwise delayed and delayed and delayed until she risks being fired from her job, missing important classes at school, or otherwise forced to take chances that the wealthy seventeen-year-old is not. This is a class and gender issue, not a moral one. If one set of morals apply to one woman and another set to another woman, that is just the type of moral relativism that the so-called Right to Lifers abhor. It is also annoying that, as the immortal George Carlin pointed out, right-wing fanatics' concern for life stops at birth - after that, they're on their own and social conservatives who made damned sure that they were born, wanted or not, able to be cared for or not, do not want to lift a finger to help them survive and thrive after they're born. Again with the moral relativism!

An interesting video is up on Youtube. A man visited an abortion protest and asked this question: If abortion is made illegal, what legal penalty should be placed on women who get an abortion. Most of the respondents were stumped by this question. One woman had the intestinal fortitude to admit that if abortion is killing a human, than murder laws and penalties should probably apply. She still hemmed and hawed with talk of "looking at the circumstances," but at least she is aware of the problems inherent in making abortion illegal.

Hmph. Rant over. Thanks President Obama. Let's try to work together to provide education and birth control to all the world so that abortion will be minimized.

Christmas Rant

I don’t give a crap about Christmas. There. Call me Scrooge, I don’t care.

I also don’t give a crap about my birthday, my wedding anniversary, Valentine’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, Thanksgiving, or, really, any day that has been set aside as something special, but seems to actually be set aside in order to encourage profligate and unnecessary spending.

Every day I am alive is as special as the day on which I was born. Every day I am married to my wonderful Nigel is as special as the day on which we married. Every day on which I have enough to eat is as special as Thanksgiving. Every day on which I act as a good citizen and enjoy the fruits of democracy is as special as Independence Day.

But I digress. Back to Christmas. Both my family and Nigel’s family are populated by several poor planners and spendthrifts. Without going into boring detail and a 40 page rant, let’s just say that my brother and his family, Nigel’s brother and his girlfriend, and Nigel’s mom and her boyfriend have planned their finances very poorly and can’t control their impulses to spend money they do not have to buy luxury items. We have given Nigel’s mom large amounts of money twice within the past year, simply to allow her to eat and pay her bills. My brother and Nigel’s brother generally leech off of my mom and Nigel’s dad respectively.

At any rate, the tale continues as we plan for our trip back to the US for Christmas. Nigel got an e-mail from his brother recently saying that he and his girlfriend have no money but that their mom has helped him get presents for us and for the kids. This pisses me off on several levels:
1) His mom doesn’t have any money. How does Nigel’s brother have the nerve to leech off her? Why give gifts at all?
2) Again, his mom doesn’t have any money. Why give gifts at all?
3) When we give his mom money to allow her to pay bills and eat food, why would she think it is okay to use that money to buy crap for our kids!? We can buy crap for our own kids without her as the middle man. Why would she think it is okay to buy crap for our kids for Nigel’s BROTHER to give them?
4) Why can’t we just have a nice dinner and stay up all night talking and laughing and listening to music? Why do there have to be gifts at all when nobody has the money to pay for them?

We have asked them NOT to give presents they can’t afford. Why do they insist on it? Especially when they can’t even buy themselves the requirements for life without subsidization? I understand the desire to give things to your grandchildren, nieces, and nephews. I do not begrudge them wanting credit for getting things for the kids. They want the kids to love them the most and apparently think that unless they buy crap for them, the kids won’t love them. Whatever – we’re trying to raise the kids not to think that way. We’re trying to raise them to be responsible and productive members of society, neither dependent on others nor with others dependent on them. We’re trying to raise them knowing that PEOPLE are more important than THINGS, and that love is better displayed through everyday kindnesses than through the occasional giving of things.

There is an additional angle here, too, in that MY mom spent her whole life planning for retirement. She invested the maximum allowable into her retirement fund, made sure she did not spend money she didn’t have, and hired a financial planner to help her maximize her money and prepare for the earliest possible retirement date. Because of her good planning, she actually has disposable income, not as much as in the recent past, due to the current economic crisis, but she does well for herself – through her own hard work and thoughtful planning. This is a bone of contention between her and MIL. MIL feels competitive. While she can’t buy the kids one expensive toy or other gift, as my mom has done in the past, she tries to outdo my mom in quantity, with bags and bags of crappy crap from the Dollar Store.
In addition, Nigel’s dad recently remarried a woman with seemingly bottomless reserves of cash. So there’s competition there as well.

Nigel and I have also been actively planning for the time when we either don’t want to work anymore or cannot work anymore. We have invested and planned for ourselves and for our kids’ futures. We have pinched pennies and minimized spending on non-necessities for the past 15 years and have built up a nice nest egg.

Am I wrong to be offended? Am I a bitch for thinking that the $100.00 my MIL spent on bags of Dollar Store crap that will be broken within 24 hours of Christmas would have been better spent on my MIL’s household heating bill, or that Nigel’s brother would be better off using any money MIL gives him to pay off one of his credit card bills instead of buying crap for my kids? Am I stingy for thinking that if she has the nerve to ask for financial help from Nigel and I this Christmas, I will put my foot down and tell her to piss off until she can swear on a stack of WalMart circulars that she will not buy a single thing for us or our kids during the year? I fear that Nigel and I will not benefit from our hard work and penny pinching because of the profligacy of our families. Will we have to continue working until we die so that our families can buy Christmas presents for people? Fuck that.

I need to think of some sort of solution for the dilemma. My first thoughts are that I need to get Nigel’s support and tell everyone, my family AND his, that next year, for the kids’ birthday and for Christmas, if they MUST give presents, they will contribute to a central pool of money and that money will be used by the kids to buy something they want or need. Nobody will know how much any other person put into the pool, thus removing the competition angle. Also, any additional gifts given will be returned and the money will be given back to the giver or applied to the giver’s utility bill or mortgage/rent. This should also apply to any gifts given to me or to Nigel. We do not need socks or sweaters or potpourri, and if we do, we can get it ourselves.

Can’t we make Christmas, which I hate anyway, into a simple day, one to spend with our family eating and talking and laughing and having fun? Now, THAT, I wouldn’t hate.

College Student's Suicide Blamed on Dawkins

A young college student has committed suicide. His father blames Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion for causing the young man to lose faith in God and in a fit of hopelessness, kill himself.

Keith Kilgore told WND he feels, by allowing his son to move into the atmosphere of a secular school, like "I put a toddler in the front of my car."

Exactly so. By teaching his child that there is nothing but but hopelessness and nihilism without a god, and that intelligent design is a viable alternative to the theory of evolution and then sending him out into the real world, to a real college, with a real biology class, he DID put his child in the front of a car. I have found nothing in The God Delusion that says life is meaningless and hopeless without a god; on the contrary, Dawkins is consistent in that he loves to write about how fascinating and beautiful life in the real world is and he encourages readers to seek that fascination in their own lives.

Any good biology class will challenge fundamentalist beliefs. This poor young man was taught from childhood all the terrible arguments anti-science religious people parrot long after they have been refuted. It would have been difficult for any child growing up knowing only the " then why are there still monkeys" and "where are the transitional forms" types of argument to stay faithful in the face of actual scientific knowledge that would contradict what he has been taught all his life. How difficult and depressing it must have been for this obviously intelligent young man to finally understand that his family and friends and community had been lying to him his entire life.

"I'm all for academic freedom," Keith Kilgore said. "What I do have a problem with is if there's going to be academic freedom, there has to be academic balance. They were undermining every moral and spiritual value for my [son]," he said. "They ought to be held accountable."

Because, obviously, and as many others have written, colleges and universities should be teaching future MD's how to balance the four humours through bleeding and purging in addition to actual science-based medicine, such as germ theory. And astronomy students should be learning astrology and geocentrism as well. And chemists should learn alchemy. And geologists should learn flat-earth theory. For academic BALANCE, you know.

Damn those scientists and their big brains! Don't they know it is their job to make sure their students' moral and spiritual needs are being met in their classrooms? If I choose to raise my child to believe things that directly contradict reality, and to take pride in his ability to debate his false beliefs against the blasphemers using stale and long-discredited arguments, they should respect that and cater to his ignorance by teaching the falsehoods WITH the reality! That's what I'm paying them for! They ought to be held accountable!!!

IMO, Mr. Kilgore, his family, his church, and his community should be held accountable for lying to this young man and encouraging his false beliefs and hopes, directly resulting in his loss of faith and suicide. Apparently and very sadly, based on the young Kilgore's lack of communication with his father and other family members in regard to his loss of faith, the poor young man felt unable to even discuss his despair with his family, and instead, only communicated his feelings to a few friends who apparently didn't feel it would be appropriate to inform anyone who might be able to help him. While that is not quite as morally reprehensible as watching a young man commit suicide on the internet and doing nothing other than express shock or laugh and encourage him to do it, I still have to wonder how these "friends" will handle the guilt of knowing how depressed and hopeless Kilgore felt while doing nothing to help.

I say that it was this young man's parents, his friends, and his church that betrayed his trust and set him up for this tragedy. Dawkins's books are chock full of hope. Religion is chock full of false hope.