Transparency
Sermons of Race and Multiculturalism
To Christians worldwide, Easter Sunday is a day of hope, of forgiveness, of God’s undying love and His promise of a better tomorrow. When Christians walked out of church this Easter Sunday filled with His message what did they then face from the secular world?
They heard that at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago the new pastor who replaced Rev. Wright preached a sermon titled “How to Handle a Public Lynching”. Rev. Otis Moss stated that the recent news stories on Rev. Wright’s vile anti-American hate filled statements were like lynchings and compared it to the crucifixion of Jesus.
They heard that Muslims are once again protesting and boycotting Denmark due to a movie they say is anti-Islamic. This comes on the heels of 17 Danish papers reprinting the 2005 cartoons which caused world wide protests. The reasoning behind republishing the cartoons was to strike a blow for free speech and stand up for it in the face of mounting violence.
While writing this blog, I went to YouTube and somehow stumbled onto a truly radical video by an Englishman. Pat Condell is a comedian and writer and gives a speech on race and multiculturalism that puts Barack Obama’s earlier speech to shame. For Pat doesn’t mince words as he bluntly and courageously speaks out against the real inequities in today’s society. He actually says out loud that not all cultures are equal. That to treat radical Islam the same as other cultures is to acquiese to Islams fascist regime, their degrading attitude towards woman and their archaic rules of law. I urge everyone to take a moment and watch this before it, too, gets pulled when Islams protest it, as they surely will.
">before it, too, gets pulled when Islams protest it, as they surely will." />If more people take an honest stand like Pat does then maybe there is hope for tomorrow….
">before it, too, gets pulled when Islams protest it, as they surely will.">before it, too, gets pulled when Islams protest it, as they surely will." />If more people take an honest stand like Pat does then maybe there is hope for tomorrow….
" />">before it, too, gets pulled when Islams protest it, as they surely will." />If more people take an honest stand like Pat does then maybe there is hope for tomorrow….
" />" />CROCODILE TEARS FOR TIBET
China slouches towards the Olympics with one hand behind its back, fingers crossed. The other hand is busier—fisting the face of tortured Tibet … again.
Darfur was bad enough. Hollywood types and even some athletes were getting queasy about attending China’s coming out party while Darfur bled white—or should I say black, because copping the crude is all the Beijing crowd cares about—and the glorious games were in trouble.
But Darfur was manageable. Hu Jintao and his CPC apparatchiks have all the muscle they need to make sure the world never sees kids from Beijing Polytechnic chanting “No Badminton for Oil!” on NBC’s Olympic feed.
China controls the news like a dominatrix controls her slave; I doubt many Chinese have ever heard the phrase, “genocide Olympics.” And for those few who know how to hack the no-no sites on the Chinese Internet, there are two magic words that keep them quiet as cold death.
“Tiananmen Square.”
But now this. Tibet in flames. And while the Party has locked out the media from that tortured place so effectively we don’t know if the official 22 have died, or the unofficial hundred plus (well, I guess we do know) enough news has leaked out to splash Egg Foo Young on their faces for everyone to see, if anyone cares enough to look.
As all the China experts and stereotyping racists will tell you, “face” is a big deal to the Chinese. That’s why the goon squads are pouring into Tibet by the truckload, squashing dissent—and more to the point, dissenters—as we speak. The Chinese Communist Party can’t afford to lose face; it’s how they keep their chokehold on power. Lose face and lose the Mandate of Heaven, lose face and people start to ask embarrassing questions, lose face and your ass will follow. Face must be maintained at all costs.
Tibet is paying that cost in blood. To save face, faceless Tibetans are being slaughtered by the dozens, or hundreds, or more. If this keeps up—and it will—soon there will be no face of Tibet at all.
This has not gone unnoticed here in the land of the free and the home of the maxed-out Visa. Here and there, when they can get a word in edgewise between the Barack/Hillary death match and the JLo twins, we hear cries of “Oh. The Horror!” from a few admirers of The Lama and a few more bleeding hearts, liberals and conservatives both, who never miss a chance to polish their morality haloes. Nancy Pelosi gushes outrage on the issue with admirable regularity.
Yes, I said admirable—because this time, she’s right, they all are, all the outraged, impotent hearts who bleed for Tibet.
But all the words are, to borrow a phrase, “Dust in the wind.” Because Darfur, Tibet, Falun Gong and the whole witches’ brew of Chinese oppression and callous indifference to the plight of anyone who stands in their way doesn’t amount to a hill of Mungbeans in American-Chinese relations. All that matters is cash. We are in bed with them.. If you don’t believe me, check the “made-in” tag on your pillowcase.
If our outrage was real, if we really meant it, we’d be screaming bloody murder.
“Hey, China! Cut out the crap in Tibet right now or we’ll void all those treasury bonds you hold and send our outsourcing to India.”
I’d love to live long enough to hear those words, but that would take several trips to the Fountain of Youth and I’m short of frequent flier miles. Instead we shed crocodile tears that make us feel noble about our cowardice in the face of brute power and hard cash.
But I can dream, can’t I?. My dream is for NBC to display the Olympic medal count using this graphic, come August.
Gold
Silver
Bronze
Dead Monks
It ought to be China’s dream too. It’s one category they’re sure to win.
Red Light Cameras. There to protect you?
Researchers at the University of South Florida College of Public Health are calling into question some accepted science data about red light cameras and safety. In the view of lead author Barbara Langland-Orban, professor and chair of health policy and management at USF College of Public Health, “The rigorous studies clearly show red light cameras don’t work.”
“Instead they increase crashes and injuries as drivers attempt to abruptly stop at camera intersections. If used in Florida cameras could potentially create even worse outcomes die to the states high percent of elderly who are more likely to be injured or killed when a crash occurs.” This was reported in Science Daily(mar 12,2008)
The logic behind cameras at red lights is of course, to try to get people to obey the law for fear of getting a ticket in the mail. The reality, the research suggests, is less clear due to “research design flaws” like incomplete data and perhaps more importantly and more pertinent to this post the connection with funding from the insurance industry.
Now what would the insurance industry have to do with this research and why would they “slant” the evidence in a way that would in any way increase accidents? Well, while even the most jaded amongst us might not be able to believe that an industry that has been proven capable of denying rightful compensation to its insured( no, no liver for you) and has been accused of having systematic “McKinsey documents” for systematically denying compensation to victims in car crashes, it seems hard to believe they would want to cause more car crashes. Hard but not impossible.
But you don’t have to believe that “crazy” idea to believe that the insurance companies have some financial interest to gain from the cameras at red lights. Does your insurance go up if you get a citation?
And where the money interests drive the study of science and not the hunger for knowledge the outcome of that science must be questioned.
It is thought by some that these cameras may case more accidents when motorist stop when they should not in an attempt to NOT get a citation and in doing so cause an accident. In the interest of public safety more studies must be done on this before these camera become more widespread. The studies should be done by independent sources and the insurance company should not profit from any new citations from these cameras until this is resolved.
For the insurance company to make money from a creation of their own with dubious health benefits would be, dare I say it, hypocritical.
SELF HYPOCRISY: THE LIE OF LUCK
Are you feeling lucky? I hope so. But don’t press your luck, because there is no such thing. There is only blind chance and randomness. Luck is a purely historical concept. It only works when you look backwards.
When the dice come up seven, then you know you were lucky. Luck is a word we use to describe the past, it has no meaning for the future.
People have a terrible ambivalence towards chance. On the one hand, we play with it. Blind chance is recreational, from the craps tables to the pick-up bars, we love to play the odds.
But blind chance also terrifies us. Humans need an explanation for everything, a reason. We need that reason because we like to think we’re in control. That’s what humanity is; we’re the animal that controls things, manipulates the environment, makes effects out of causes.
We realize that blind chance plays a big part in our lives, but as soon as it happens we explain it away. That’s where the self-hypocrisy comes in. We look back and attribute a cause to that which had no cause at all; it was merely the working out of random chance.
The upcoming baseball season will give you dozens of opportunities to see what I mean. Baseball is a game of skill and strategy, but it’s chance that makes all those strategies stupid or brilliant.
A fly ball tinks off the foul pole and becomes a grand slam. The pitcher goes from being a gamer to a choker, his manager goes from being a gutsy genius who sticks with his players to a blockhead idiot who froze when he should have yanked the pitcher.
That’s what the broadcasters will say, the sportswriters will write and that’s what we fans will believe. But it was really just a random gust that brought that foul ball back a quarter inch so it hit the pole. It was blind chance. But that’s not the way we’ll remember it. We’ll give it meaning, because that’s what we do.
The inexplicable drives us crazy. We can’t stand it, so we don’t.
We make up stories instead. The trendy, semiotic phrase for it is “the narrative.” People tell nice stories to make sense of the world. We write histories and attribute a cause to everything that happened. And when a better reason eludes us, we call it luck.
Darwin talked about survival of the fittest. He might have added a codicil to that profound thought—survival of the luckiest.
Once upon a time there was a trilobite who was smarter than all the other trilobites, but you never heard of him. He fell into a fumarole and boiled before he could reproduce. Maybe you were born because the two fastest sperm collided and let number three get to the egg first.
“Why me?” people say after a bad break. Well, sometimes it’s because you let yourself get fat, sometimes it’s because you drove drunk—those are reasons, things you could control—but the guy in the car you hit? That was just his bad luck.
Chance can reach out and grab you by the neck at any moment. No wonder we lie to ourselves with hypocritical morality tales about fate and luck, they are very comforting.
They are also highly dangerous. We need to be very careful when we look for reasons why whatever happened—by chance—happened. Because we are going to find some.
When things go our way we cheer our luck like it was real, like we earned it. Acting like we believe in our good luck is a silly hypocrisy, but it’s harmless enough. The real damage comes when things go badly and we look for reasons, for someone to blame, for a scapegoat.
Like, “the witches,” or “the black helicopters,” or “the Jews.” That’s when reason becomes hypocritical and bad stuff happens. Humans have been doing it since the first lucky, mutated ape picked up a rock and slew the first unlucky member of his new species because Zog had an ugly blotch on his forehead that angered the gods.
None of this is an excuse to give up, to do nothing, let the chips fall where they may. Quite the contrary, when you can’t control everything you better control as much as you can as effectively as you can. But save a little space in your worldview for blind chance. It will save you a world of trouble.
Heck, if you’re a politician it could save the world a world of trouble.
“Sicko” Died
And Hollywood breathed a sign of relief. The secret super delegates came thorough and did not repeat their previous embarrassments by giving Moore undeserved attention.
So many of his best followers are tired of Moore’s over the top slanted and incomplete portrayals of important
issues by requiring us to pretend over and over to suspend rational beliefs and be passive trusting Moore believers who do not look behind the curtain in order to “get the good stuff” from his movies.
At least there is an untapped market for him in Cuba. For some reason it is banned there. Perhaps because the Cuban people know what a ripoff the movie is and showing it might cause some rioting in the streets. So it is better left simply as Castro/Moore collaboration for overseas Propaganda for Castro apologists who have no real concern for objective facts.
Unsourced New York Times Attack On McCain 20 Years Old
Thursday’s NEW YORK TIMES writes in an unsourced article that John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, was romantically linked to a then 40-year-old female political lobbyist 20-years ago and accused him of granting her clients political favors. The story also appears on the Drudge Report although no one could explain how it got the article.
The NYTs says the potentially “most damaging allegations contained in the article center on Mr. McCain’s reported conflicts of interests in the areas of political funding and lobbying.” This story has been rumored since late last year. McCain, it says, “has built a reputation as a scourge of the excesses of both but is accused of several instances of hypocrisy.”
McCain has fiercely denied the New York Times and Drudge Report as political clap trap. Wednesday evening it was panned as foolish and unreliable by the left and right. It appears the NEW REPUBLIC magazine forced the NYTs hand by threatening to report the “Ol’ Gray Lady” wasn’t printing the two decades old allegation.
MICHELLE OBAMA HYPOCRISY.COM AWARD NOMINEE
“Michelle Obama’s comment that, for the first time in her adult life, she feels proud of America helps crystallize who Barack Obama is,” says Ronald Kessler chief Washington correspondent of Newsmax.com.
He observes it is difficult to imagine that she would make such a statement suggesting disdain for America unless she felt it comported with her husband’s views. Plus her statement aligns perfectly with the hate-America views of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s minister, friend, and sounding board for more than two decades.
Ready Rudy Interview, Chief Hypocrite with Giuliani after Concession to John McCain
CH: Before we begin, let me say how impressed I am with your performance during 9/11 and how you cleaned up crime in New York City.
RR: Thank you, that is what the citizens of New York hired me to do and I think I met their expectations.
The Artless Science of Communication
A friend called me up yesterday with a problem most of us have probably come across in one way or another. Her problem was she was using email to establish a rapport with a potential date. She had been using email as a social networking tool for some time now, and after catching and then losing so many potential partners in a wink of an eye she began to see the mistakes she was making as her inability to write with a true voice.
“I think I just offended another man.”
Hillary’s Trade-Offs
As the primary continues to unfold I can’t help but think about Hillary’s life. People forget that it was Hillary, not Bill, who was the “rock star” when they first met. But she gave it all up to move to Arkansas and help an unknown lawyer run for governor in one of the most backwards states in the nation. Her friends were appalled by her decision. I can’t help but think of the song from Chorus Line “What We Do for Love”.
It wasn’t all terrible. Arkansas is in the boonies but being a governor’s wife isn’t a bad deal. Then there were the ensuing connections and how that helped her career (and checkbook). Bill might have strayed but Hillary knew he loved her and Chelsea, and he always came back. So she stayed and ended up in the White House. Again, not a bad trade off. Then he cheated there and this time publicly humiliated her and her child.
Two Tales of Democracy, One Is Real
Fidel Castro, accustomed to hypocritizing his own single candidate elections, chose not to continue in his dictatorial role, but did appoint his broker without anyone able to oppose his actions, is an ostensible democratic voting system, but actually a one party system that prevent anyone from really changing leadership. Forces of nature but not of democracy were at work in this change, for democracy has always masqueraded in Cuba but only with heavy make up. Democracy was in no way behind this change of leadership. Hopefully forces of democracy will find a way to grow and bloom in the new regime.
Musharaff in Pakistan seems to have been moved aside
The Iranian Gunboat Hoax
I was just reading some articles here and saw some posts accusing the US Navy of fabricating the recent incident with Iranian gunboats. You just have to shake your head at times and wonder.
I believe that during this incident the Iranians themselves released video showing their gunboats in close proximity to US Navy warships. The Iranians themselves made reference to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. THAT fed the conspiracy theorists! The Iranians count on our own folks to do most of their propaganda for them.
Hillary Trumps Kennedy
Despite a full on assault by the Kennedy Clan from their beach heads in Massachusetts and Florida and despite Caroline Kennedy’s first real active campaigning for a specific candidate, Hillary won most of the non delegates tonight in Florida besting Ted Kennedy who turned on her and Bill officially just recently.
Anyone who successfully takes on the Kennedy mystic, money and mojo deserves kudos for shaking his hand at the State of the Union speech by that other guy.
Seat the delegates, seat the delegates! Michigan and Florida1 Michigan and Florida! Supreme Court here we come!
Bad Florida, bad, bad Florida, You Don’t Count
Florida will pay for it’s performance in past presidential elections by being banned from
2008. Democratic candidates are vacationing in Florida but refuse to campaigning there.
Olberman dislikes fist fights on his shows
So instead of having conservatives on his show to balance out liberals, he has chosen to only bring on like minded politicos. Sort of the One Handed Fist Fight he feels is the best he can do to being truth to his show.
Makes sense to me. Same thing worked for Stalin, Hussein, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Venezuela, maybe modern Russia. No nasty fist fights that offends Olberman, and a more uniform Truth that many give homage to a civilized uniformity.
Ringggg-Ringgg-Hello? Oh, Hi Michelle (as in Obama)
Very Paraphrased:
“I am Michelle Obama and I am calling everyone I know who wants to put a Democrat in the White House. Push 1 to help. Barack is the only one who can make that change happen. Push1 to help.”
There were probably a couple more push ones to help and then there was a part I missed just before she said”you may call 303-825-3481 for more information.”
After the conversation was over, I wondered if it was too late to push 1 to help.
Thank goodness for the national do not call list, now politicians have fewer competitors for household interruptions. What hypocrisy.
Martin Luther King
America was different in the past. It will be different in the future.
Let’s hope we have unique leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King whose life and accomplishments we honor with an annual holiday. Tomorrow, is that holiday.
MLK was a poet. He chose words that grabbed and touched people deeply. Unfortuately those words were felt by much of white America too slowly back then and in all races too shallowly today.
Suspenseful Cuban Vote Today
Cuba is a one party political system. It punishes dissent or diversity.
There are 614 candidates on the ballot and are unopposed.
Black armbands can result in losing housing or jobs.
When will they get the relief they deserve?
Why is there no media coverage of this “democracy”?
Heads a Win & Tails a Win for “Embarrased” BIA
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Four California Indian casino compacts got “lost” for 80-days triggering an automatic approval without review in 45-days by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as the law requires. It is those once missing compacts that California voters will vote on February 5th as Proposition 94-95-96-97 and would allow tens of thousands of slot machines to be added to the four casinos. The Indian tribes will pay California part of their new profits from the slot machines.