What the General Says
Please, no betray us jokes this time. That gave the warmongers a good distraction last fall.
General David Petraeus spoke to the press recently.
He said victory in Babylon would occur when there is:
“an Iraq that is at peace with itself, at peace with its neighbors, that has a government that is representative of — and responsive to — its citizenry and is a contributing member of the global community.”
There are a lot of differences between the United States and Iraq. The USA has 160k troops in Iraq. Iraq recently won a major soccer tournament.
One has to wonder, though, how the USA does at meeting the standards it sets for Iraq.
an Iraq that is at peace with itself
Last week, the major news story was an important minority bashing America from the pulpits of it’s churches. It’s just the way it is in the black church, you don’t understand.
at peace with its neighbors
Despite all the political noise the rightwing can produce, the border with Mexico is wide open. The effects of a poor country on the border of a “wealthy” country do not stop.
a government that is representative of — and responsive to — its citizenry
This depends on who you talk to. It seems like everyone has a gripe, from the right wing ( social issues, immigration) to the left wing ( the war, the environment, the rich-poor gap, health care). There are plenty in the middle who are tired of the whining, but essentially agree with both sides of the spectrum.
is a contributing member of the global community
In all fairness, we are contributing to the global community. We contribute carbon emissions to the atmosphere. We contribute interest to the Asians who are financing our debt. We contribute cluster bombs and depleted uranium to Babylon.
One of our presidential hopefuls was quoted recently as saying we might be in Iraq for 100 more years. Somehow, I don’t think the problems in our own country will be solved by then.
Seven Deadly Sins Test
Whatever you think about them, on line quizzes are here to stay.
They are not always accurate. I know a person who hasn’t drank in 19 years who rated 82% alcoholic.
The good news is, they are easy post fodder. Just take the quiz, observe the results, copy the code, and give credit to the person who directed you to it.
Today’s quiz is how I rate on the Seven Deadly Sins.
Your sin has been measured. You have committed many sins, but Lust is the mortal sin that has done you in. Just below, discover your full sinful breakdown and learn what it is about you that condemns you to hell.
Greed: Medium__Gluttony: Medium__ Wrath: Low
Sloth: High___Envy: Very Low__Lust: Very High__Pride: Low
The HT for this goes to Renegade Evolution, who stole it from Daisy. On the all important Lust issue, Ren scored (?) very high, and Daisy registered very low.
There is a bit of irony in finding this today. It is Easter Sunday. In the Jesus Worship tradition, this is the day Jesus rose from the dead, and in the process forgave our sins. ( I don’t see the connection)
In other words, my sins will not condemn me to hell.
The JW church uses the promise of life after death to justify verbal abuse.
I have my ideas about life after death, and I may share them with the internet someday. Suffice to say today that it has nothing to do with my opinions about Jesus.
This has been a bad week for Jesus. Jeremiah Wright has been much discussed. Mr. Obama made a speech. Very few people are looking out for Jesus.
| Greed: | Medium | |
| Gluttony: | Medium | |
| Wrath: | Low | |
| Sloth: | High | |
| Envy: | Very Low | |
| Lust: | Very High | |
| Pride: | Low |
Blogswarm against Theocracy Easter 2008
This is connected to the Easter blogswarm, about the notion that church and state ought to be separate.
The current drama involving Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is a good example of why this wall of separation is beneficial to both church and state.
Anything that makes a Presidential Candidate throw his grandmother under the bus to excuse the rantings of a preacher is not good.
Senator BHO has gone from being a closet radical Muslim to the open admirer of a lunatic. The warmonger crowd has replaced communists with Muslims in their hierarchy of enemies. Since communism has been described as a G-dless religion, this is not as much of a shift as you might imagine.
And, considering the weakness of his opponent for the Democratic nomination, BHO may be the nominee. If this happens, then the November election will be more about Religion than the guns and butter issues that are so important today.
Much angry rhetoric has surfaced lately. Speaking as someone who is profoundly alienated from Jesus, this noise is very discouraging.
I wonder if anyone is going to be “Saved” as a result of all this mess.
I also wonder who is looking out for Jesus. This squabbling does not speak well for him. While a separation of church and state is helpful for the state, it is essential for Jesus.
There is a story involving Jesus which might shed light on this subject.
One day, Jesus saw some moneylenders working in the temple. He caused a ruckus, said “This is my father’s house”, and evicted them from the premises.
The leaders of the day were not pleased. This is one of the reasons why the Roman soldiers felt they had to murder him.
Now, lets fast forward a couple of millennium, and move to a tawdry business in Atlanta GA. There is an employee of this business who insists on conducting a ministry on company time. It occurs to another employee that this is what Jesus was talking about…about the appropriate place for an activity.
The moneylenders in Jerusalem were conducting business in a place of worship. The employee in Atlanta was conducting worship in a place of business. Is one activity any worse than the other?
There is one difference to these scenarios. The moneylenders were not being paid to worship, but the employee was being paid to conduct business. He took this time and money, and devoted his energies to conducting a ministry. Some would say he was stealing from his employer.
Now, some might ask, what does this have to do with the separation of church and state? It is not much of a leap to go from conducting a ministry in a business, to bible thumping in government.
It is about conducting an activity in an appropriate place. It is about doing what you are paid to do, rather than what you want to do.
Cynic Swamp
There was a post at neo prodigy yesterday that got me thinking. It starts with a famous quote,
“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people. Micro minds discuss the color of people. “
I added the last part of that.
Now for the fallout of this. I may get motivated later to see if I can determine the author of that gem, but for now I do not know. For all we know, it is the same bartender who came up with the gem ” We are born naked, and everything after that is drag”.
I don’t know if what is going to follow is wisdom fatigue, thinking too much, or wallowing in a cynic’s swamp. As Oscar Wilde observed, ” A cynic is someone who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing”.
The point of all this ( besides providing text to go between some pictures) is that many well worded sayings turn out to be nonsense upon close examination.
Take today’s headline quote, about great, average, and small minds. The discourse that followed that platitude was a commentary on the folly of gossip. Now, I agree that in a perfect world people would not gossip. Adding the phrase “bless his heart” does not make it any better. ( Any Yankee who reads this can ask a Southerner for an explanation )
May those who never gossip throw the first pebble. Yea, I thought so, lots of folks are hiding. The truth is, gossip is about as human as lying and pretending. I imagine there is a study of chimpanzees where we see them talking about how mangy their neighbors fur is getting.
Another thing is that not all ideas are good ideas. ( I am going to use a favorite rhetorical stunt here, the Hitler argument ) Adolph Hitler talked about ideas all the time. And a few million folks died as a result. More recently, Jeremiah Wright talks about ideas. At the top of his lungs, and available on dvd.
I dare say the philosophers and thinkers of our time took an interest in the affairs of their neighbors. To think otherwise is to deny their humanity. “Great minds”…or the owners… have other shortcomings. I have heard too many stories about people who get a famous person to come to their party, only to get drunk and make a fool of himself.
There are other platitudes that sound good, but don’t hold up. “ I work to live, I don’t live to work” “ A man who stands for nothing will fall for anything” “youth is wasted on the young”.
Maybe the test of a mind is the ability to tell the difference between wisdom and a bunch of sweet sounding words.
Spell check suggestions for this feature:
neo- neon, no, Leo, Geo, net, neg, new , Zee
dvd- did, dad, dud
Happy SAD!!
So I was coming in on I-75, and listening to Glenn Beck. He was talking about the economy, and it was not pretty.
I don’t believe everything he said, but to hear him tell it, the dollar is about to become a worthless piece of green paper. The world economy is tied to this dollar, and this would make the world economy go into convulsions.
This is shock and awe day (SAD)…the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Babylon. The war ended quickly, but putting humpty dumpty together has proved to be a challenge. One of the effects of this war is vast amounts of capital leaving the country into the desert sands. Much has been lost to corruption, and more is being paid to “concerned local citizens” to fight Al Queda.
The latter effort is paying some benefits, and Al Queda is almost down to the level of pre war Iraq.
Getting back to the dollar, and the connection to our economy. One of the more bizarre features of this enterprise is having a tax cut before an expensive government program is going to start. This has created vast budget deficits, and huge interest payments that will continue for a long time.
Now, with the money to armor troops and buy smart bombs, there is a lot less money available for day to day life here. And when there is an emergency here, like a cajun hurricane or a New York broker banker gone bust, the government has to crank up the printing press and make more green paper. And the more this happens, the less the green paper is worth.
Maybe green is not such a great color anymore. Those environmental wackos have totally spoiled it.
So, Mr. Beck was crying about the dollar, while ignoring the effect of the enterprise in Babylon. After all, he is a conservative, who wants both a smaller government and 160k troops stationed eight time zones away. And, if we didn’t go into Babylon, then Al Queda wouldn’t be there for us to fight, and we have to fight them there rather than here.
Meanwhile, I looked up at the traffic. An 18 wheeler decided that the car in front was not driving fast enough. The big truck swerved into the next lane, and missed the little car by a couple of feet.
Happy SAD y’all!!
Shock and Awe Day
This is turning into a dandy holiday week.
Yesterday was Saint Patrick’s Day.
Tomorrow is Shock and Awe Day (SAD)…the anniversary of the invasion of Babylon.
Today, we had a presidential candidate, standing in front of four U.S. flags, saying that his preacher is a racist nutcase, which is why he wants to be president of our racist nutcase country,which he loves.
And this weekend we have a grand slam…Good Friday, Dead Saturday, Easter Sunday and the Spring Equinox.
This time, let’s put two boulders in front of the cave.
The best place to focus now is Shock and Awe Day. SAD is the initials.
The war is over. We achieved regime change, at least in Babylon. The occupation is what is going on now, and it just might be the death of this country.
Yes, there is less sectarian violence now. Al Queda is not as prevalent as it once was. Of course, it is still more active than when Saddam was in power.
Turkey has invaded Kurdistan, but just a little bit. Iran has not invaded Babylon, yet. The Saudi regime has not fallen, and they have a lot more money to finance terrorism.
The US economy is in trouble. Maybe we would be in this mess without a few trillion more in debt, and the healthcare bills for thousands of wounded soldiers coming due. Maybe we could build more levees if we weren’t paying the concerned local citizens of Iraq to help us fight Al Queda. We will never know.
It should be noted the the presidential candidate mentioned above has long stated his opposition to “Operation Iraqi Freedom”. Just what he will do about it, should he get elected, is another good question.
Kerouac
Ok,I finished reading this thingie about Kerouac, and now I have 19 minutes to go on my lunch hourj. I can write my addendum in that time.
I got my copy of “on the road” from a used bookstore in Cocoa Beach Florida. I was staying overnight at a house of a friend, while on my way back from Key West.
The owner of the house was an activist named Nichols. I saw a book in the living room, signed with the inscription,” i saw away the posts to which others tether their lives”, or something like that.
Back to Kerouac. I did read On the Road, and found it entertaining but not life changing. I get the sense that Kerouac and Cassidy could be real jerks if it was too their advantage, and that the printed page was the best way to know them.
Oh, and I have to throw this in. Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac’s books, thats not writing that is typing. Capote is another archetype of our generation, or is that degeneration.
Another story I like about Kerouac is the time he was in a bar in New York with John Coltrane and a jazz producer named Orrin Keepnews. Kerouac said to Keepnews, the problem with you is that you don’t like jazz. John Coltrane busted up laughing, the only time Keepnews ever saw this happen.
Keepnews produced “Stories to Tell” by Flora Purim. At 21 I thought this was the greatest record ever made. Today I don’t own a copy.
Nine minutes to go, and I have already run out of things to say about Kerouac. The man is really famous for being famous. The fifties were the kettle that these fish were cooked in, and I know little about it. OTR was published in 1957, when I was three years old and living on a street of always pregnant stay at home moms. Whether or not the world of the sixties and beyond would have appeared without the likes of Kerouac and Ginsberg is beside the point. I suspect that if Jack Kerouac had not written his books that someone else would have, and maybe survived fame in better shape.
I know one more story. At one time, Kerouac was staying with Neal Cassidy ( his uncredited co author) and his family. Mr. Cassidy thought that Mr. Keruac was smoking too much marijuana.
words you cannot say
Is George Carlin really that funny?
I saw a link to a routine about euphemisms at AtlMalcontent. I suspect that Malcontent is a euphemism, but who knows.
So, I have too much time, and I click on the link. Mr. C makes a bunch of obvious jokes about the evasion procedures we conduct with the King’s english. There is a link here somewhere, and maybe an embedded screen if I can get that gizmo to work.
One night, Lenny Bruce was performing in Chicago, when the police decided to review the show. Mr. Bruce was taken prisoner by the fuzz. The authorities decided to make the audience members show ID to get out, and one man loudly objected, and was arrested. The man was George Carlin.
Mr. C began to be poopular about the time I was about to graduate from High School. I heard the album about the Seven Words you cannot say on television once, which is enough. They all refer to body parts and body functions, and it does say something about our culture that these words are demonized like they are.
At this point, a look at wikipedia is in order. I was wondering if Mr. C was alive, or if I somehow missed something.
He is from New York.
His real name is Carlin.
He was the first guest host on Saturday Night Live.
In 1961, he married Brenda Hosbrook. The couple was together until her death in 1997.
The message of Jerimiah Wright
YouTube is an impediment to work. I was going to write some clever words to go with these pictures, but I looked at some videos first. All I wanted was the embed gibberish so I could show them to you, but YouTube has more videos on the same subject, and the only way to get rid of temptation is to give into it.
I am glad I got to see the videos of Jeremiah Wright. Friday I was hearing the tapes of him on the radio, and it was most discouraging. When I saw the videos, I realized that this was just another loudmouth for Jesus.
I worked for 6 years with a professional Jesus Worshiper. He was selfish, hateful, vulgar and loud. He frequently directed this anger at me. He used Jesus to hurt me. Often it was over trivial matters. His voice sounded a lot like Mr. Wright’s.
Once, this Professional Jesus Worshiper shouted me down and humiliated me in the name of Jesus. When he was through, he picked up the telephone and told his friend ” I never felt better in my life”.
People ,like Jeremiah Wright, who verbally abuse other people, bring shame to Jesus.
One of the videos I found was a man in Harlem named Manning. He has a video where he talks about the Obama name on the shirt of a woman with a 54 D bra. That is not what the number 54 in my screen name refers to.
Mr. Manning says that Mr. Obama’s African father found a trashy white woman to have his baby, and that the child was called Barack. He said this from a pulpit with a sign attached…”Jesus is Lord”.
This does not speak well of Jesus.
When you see these videos of Mr. Wright, you see people listening with great enthusiasm.
At one point, two men exchange a high five behind Mr. Wright.
One thing I learned while working with the Professional Jesus Worshiper was the importance of the audience. These hatemongers do not just talk to themselves. They need an audience.
These audiences enable these poison spewers. To pray with a loudmouth who shames Jesus is morally equivalent to buying whiskey for an alcoholic.
Barack Obama is that audience.
The candidate and the toilet seat
There are two stories in the media today. One is the unfortunate relationship with a loudmouth minister by a presidential candidate (PC).
The other is a lady who lived for two years on the toilet. The punch line is the same for both.
The lady has issues. She did not get off the commode for two years. Food, water, and clothes were brought to her. I dare say her enabler has a few issues.
Finally, paramedics were called. The toilet seat and grown into her body, and needed to be pried loose.
The PC has worshipped for twenty years at the church pastored by a terrible man. He yells a lot, and says things that many find offensive. He would not be saying these things if he did not have an audience. The audience is enabling this man in his noisemaking.
The PC listened to a hatemonger for twenty years.
The preacher needs to be pried off his butt.
Spell check suggestions for this feature-
Pastured- pastured
Pried- pride
Why Hillary won Ohio
Yesterday, I was looking through my “shortcuts” folder. This is where I drag links to sites that I have saved as favorites, but are not likely to go visit a lot. There are 585 items in this folder.
One that caught my eye was “Roses Reasonings“. Rose is a Christian lady living in North Ohio. I “met” Rose a while back. We exchanged a few comments, and went on our way.
The item that caught my eye was about the Ohio primary. Rose said that McCain had won the republican nomination, and that she would make a strategic vote for Hillary in the democratic primary. The thinking goes that Hillary would be easier to beat in the general election.
I suspect this is why Hillary won in Ohio and Texas.
I also think this is playing with fire.
In 1966, Lester Maddox ran for the democratic nomination for Governor of Georgia. In the (inevitable) runoff, many republicans voted for Maddox, in the hope that he would be easy for the republican Bo Callaway to defeat.
Well, to make a long story short, Maddox won the primary, and went on the win the General Election. ( It was a complicated technicality rather than a majority of votes, but the bottom line is that Lester served four years as Governor )
Another Jesus Worship blog was visited after an absence recently. From the Morning is more my style, a JW who doesn’t mind cussing and drinking beer. He, like me, is banned from commenting at the putrid Pyromaniacs.
Matt had quit blogging a while back, and out of boredom I hit the link today in the former chamblee54. Low and behold, he was back, nastier than ever. The first post was about the time he was working in a government office and “accidentally” ate some poor ladies lunch. This was the comment I left:
Matt
When did you get back? I quit checking on you a while back, but for some unknown reason checked back.
I have moved my blog. Google is stealing lunch from my refrigerator. My new home is https://chamblee54.wordpress.com/
I still read Pyroboi, but since I am banned from commenting I don’t take it as seriously. Why should I care what he says if he doesn’t care what I say?
Your story about government work reminds me of a story from a while back. I was on this company committee to improve the quality of the outfit. The fact that I didn’t work in the department that I represented was obscured by the fact that I was willing to show up for meetings. After a while, we started having our meetings in restaurants. One night, right after the food was served, the agenda item was “what can be done about the way the bathrooms smell”
Welcome back, and do drop by my new place
punishment
The message from blogger command was explicit…either comment on Eliot Spitzer, or face dire consequences.
Now, the democratic governor of new yuk got caught with a hooker. Yawn. All politicians are whores. The wonder is that the lady charged…it should be a n/c professional courtesy.
The yapping dogs of the media are calling for his resignation. To this reporter, the cruelest punishment would be for the moron to finish his term as Governor. The tabloid media will not let anyone forget what he did. Every time he appears in public, people will make jokes. He will be humiliated time and time again, and deserve every bit of it.
So does New York State, including the city at the perineum end.
Who Should Paint You: Alfred Gockel |
 All American yet funky, you inspire an artist’s imagination And while not everyone will understand your portrait, you will! |
So I was reading a comment thread at Renegade Evolution, and made a mental note to spell it right this time. I totally intend to blog about what I read there, but not today.
There was a lady named Daisy, who used a Grateful Dead logo to identify herself. I went to her site.
I found a test…who should paint your portrait. I took the test. The test said someone named Alfred Gockel should portraitize me. I had never heard of him, but his site says he is the best selling artist in Europe.
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