Christians in Nero's garden...

Christians have a PR problem.  Even though billions are dumped into the passed plates at least once every seven days, the brand is fading.  Could it be that too little of that largesse is making it back into the community?  Maybe.  Maybe it's because of too many instances of pederasty, lechery, buggery, wartime profiteering and oh-my-gosh that Hitler guy really was a bad guy.  Wise men and women know that the maiden-form of the faith is flawless even if its many derivatives and their acolytes are not.
 
To wit, Christian fundamentalists are as exothermic as any madrasa-boy.  Think: abortion clinic bombings.  It only takes a perceived crisis of Biblical proportion for them to bare their teeth at all enemies both foreign and domestic.  In the past, they would have sent an army of their own to quell the infidels.  Ahh, the good ol' days.

Warmed by their cloaks of denial and conjoined by their pinhole view of the world, it seems modern Christians are bereft of perspective and what it is to be human and more importantly--humane.  Think: English laundries staffed by unpaid Irish unwed mothers presided over by semi-celibate nuns?

Western civilization owes everything to the Mother Church's measurable sins of omission.  Everything we enjoy in our American culture of unchecked avarice we owe to the Church's dictum of controlling access to the hereafter.  Need forgiveness?  That'll cost you.  If you can pay, you can play.  Otherwise, clasp your hands together, step right up here on this pile of kindling and you wouldn't happen to have a light, would you?

The current paradigm of Christendom is nothing more or less than the normal accretion of faith into hereafter insurance.  Thus the PR problem.  Other competing brands of salvation have dulled the once shiny facade of Christianity.  No more clear broth for the faithful, only a hearty stew of ideas on what it is to be alive in a world full of heretics.  No more looking up in wonder at some grand medieval cathedral without thinking, "This must have cost a fortune?"

If we are to abide in a faith as written that all are precious in His sight and if we are to lay claim to Jesus' example, follow his deeds and heed his words, shouldn't we all be in full possession of the skill-set to love one another for who we are warts and all?  Didn't they teach us that in Sunday school?

If Christianity is to survive, it has to stand right-wise to the sword of truth.  There simply is no other way.  Science is not our enemy.  The only thing ever lost to science is ignorance.  Science reveals while religion obscures via the epithetical notion of God's will as yet unrevealed.  Gimme a break.

The truly faithful have nothing to fear from the truth.  They welcome it.  But, to continue with hatred for others paraded and parroted as a righteous mindset is to consign Jesus to the league of arcane and archaic deities along with Zarathustra and Baal.  Just sayin...

The Worst Government Money Can Buy...

I love this country.  I believe in it still.  There has never been one like it and it would be a shame to allow it to slip from our collective grasp for a return to feudalism. Or worse, a theocratic ultra-nationalist regime whose strings are plucked by a cabal of point one percent-ers.

Until direct contributions to individual politicians are banned by Constitutional Amendment, I fear America will join the list of once great empires that either forgot or ignored the need for a moral compass and the will to follow it.  Perhaps it is us and not those that seek their own advantage over the common good.   I have seen many of them in the mirror.  Just behind the eyes, the thing that dwells there to serve but one god--avarice.

George Orwell was correct in his notion about Big Brother excepting that it is NOT the government but rather corporatists and their brain-washed minions that owe fealty to the company.  

It is a sad short stretch of the imagination that neighbors will put each others children on spits to save their paychecks and the tchotchkes afforded thereby.  Corporate America, nay, the corporate WORLD wouldn’t have it any other way.

A Crisis of Confederates...

I am a Southerner and an American. I am white and a male. My home is near the geographic heart of the U.S.’ continental pudenda. A collection of sandbars connecting an archipelago of high spots now inundated with what passes for civilization. I say that without intending irony.

Florida, like so many places where the water meets the sea seems always in crisis. A crisis in the economy, a crisis in education, a water crisis, crisis ad infinitum and still a crisis over Confederates?  The war between the states may have ended in 1865 but not the strife.  Florida’s role in the conflict was negligible though decisive.  The Confederates held and many ancestral Floridians still take pride in that.

However, our governor and vampire-in-chief, Nosferatu, demurs siding instead with the righteous indignation of the NAACP in barring inclusion of a few distinguished members of the Confederacy precisely because they were NOT United States military.  Honorable service and post-war achievements aside, they were wrong, so nyah!  Serves you right you slavers!

But isn’t this place named the Florida Veterans Hall of Fame?  Weren’t they Floridians?  Or is this a Federally funded installation or another usurpation of state’s rights?  Or just the misgivings of a plutocrat ill equipped to see clear what is dear to many of his constituents? 

Who am I kidding?  By constituents, I meant the people of Florida.  Governor Scott’s constituents are predominantly transcontinental oligarchs sensitive only to a shortage of Beluga and Cristal.  So who can blame him?  He doesn’t know any poor or working class people.  Those characterized by the English author Lord Lytton as the great unwashed.  Those considered mere chattel to be corralled and ruled or at least made into cannon fodder to fight wars whereby some future stone edifice might bear the names of those sacrificed on the altar of a bad cause.  Sound familiar?

The governor should be ashamed for not finding a way to illuminate both sides of gallantry in this latest monument to a sanitized past.  Shame on Nosferatu. Bad vampire, bad!

It was either him or her...

    Are you freaking kidding me? A two year-old found his mom’s pistol and instead of blowing his own brains out, turned the electronics display at an Idaho Walmart into a bio-hazard with hers. And then we read that she was a scientist working for an obscure agency charged with design and development research for our government. 

    More proof that even brilliant minds can’t stand up to stupid in an unfair fight. A son has lost his mother in a way that surely will affect his care and keeping in the years to follow this wholly preventable occurrence. Further details are pending and warranted.

In the meantime, I don’t believe there is any malice in a two year-old, so I have to ask as a gun owner and parent, what style of weapon did she carry and why did she keep a round in the chamber? 

If it was an automatic, then she paid the ultimate price for her negligence. I do not care if I’m certified King of the World Champion Over All Others with that exact weapon, I would be guilty of reckless endangerment for carrying it with “one in the pipe,” in public.

If however, the weapon in question was a revolver, then it had a very slick action. One that could be squeezed by a two year-old. If that is the case, there is a reason that the old-timers kept only five rounds in their six shooters. To prevent this very thing from happening. 

With either design, this tragedy could have been averted with the “specific” knowledge required for the weapon in question. All the advanced academic degrees in the world cannot replace acute experience and self-awareness. 

I will pray for the shattered family she has left behind. I will also pray for a renewed sense of responsibility on the part of owners of firearms. Let us not let this happen again.

When there's blood in the water...

My local newspaper ran an article describing a child suffering the supposed ineptitude of the entire industrial-medical complex.  Even the institutions are included in the list of defendants.  Being good Catholics, they abstained from dragging the Creator into it deferring to His mysterious ways.  [cough]

Of course the loss of a child is a hole that nothing can fill but only be compromised with.   The vacancy sign will always flash in the night.  What remains of the child will have to be attended to and it will be expensive.  Anyone who has ever uttered the phrase, life is cheap, has never seen a hospital bill for life support services.

The plaintiff’s council believes there is a vein of malpractice gold to be mined and are merely waiting on the assay.  Their strategy is to indict everyone.  To sling blame in all directions and see what sticks.  Justice they will howl though there is none to be found, only the amount of remuneration to be haggled over and their 40% off the top.


This is but another reminder of the fragility of being born a human into a world beset with dangers large and small at every turn of every day.  Speaking for myself, if and when a doctor/hospital/et al fails at first to perceive and treat my child correctly, I will find another doctor/hospital/et al before sunset.  I love my children too much to keep doing the same thing over and over expecting different outcomes.

In the meantime, the sharks will always circle waiting for one of us to make a mistake.

On your mark, get set...

Okay, we as in members of humankind, and more specifically, a bunch of Europeans just landed a man-made object of space travel on a frigging comet this week! If you’re a member of the same species and did not get a bit tingly at the news then stop right here and read no further. But, if you stopped for a second and realized what just happened, then you know we have born witness to science doing what it does best — pushing out on the envelope of ignorance.

“With so many going hungry in the world, I just don’t understand how we can afford to go to space.” This is the constant refrain from the same people who see this milestone as nothing more than (insert favorite deity here) allowing mankind a bit more slack in the umbilicus that is our inseparable link to our maker(s). These acolytes complain at trying to understand the universe. To them, if reference to such things does not exist within the pages of their sacred scribble, then it must not be of relevance nor importance. Things like germ theory, evolution and historical facts are considered suspect. 

Remember Galileo? He’s the guy that described the universe without the Earth at its center and was summarily placed on house arrest for the remainder of his life. Even after it became old news, the Church did not pardon him till 1992. He died in 1642! Talk about holding onto a grudge.

I grew up during the Space Race fomented by the constant beep of Sputnik and our President’s admonition shortly thereafter. Like a latter day Babe Ruth he stood up at the plate and pointed his bat at where the country needed to put the ball. Out yonder, that bright disk in the night sky. That’s where we are going and back by decade’s end. And we did. I wish he could have seen it.

Cooler still, we did it in my own backyard. I was living one hundred miles inland from Cape Canaveral and on the day the first Saturn V rocket lifted off, I could see it climb into the sky from the rooftop of our home. Better still, I could hear it. A deep crackling sound as the ball of light trailing white condensation rose ever faster until disappearing into the ethers. When it broke the sound barrier the windows rattled. It was glorious.

I shinnied down from the roof and joined my parents in front of the large black-n-white Philco with Walter Cronkite reporting the event. He looked shaken. My parents told me that when the Saturn V's Rocketdyne F-1 engines fired up, things in the newsroom started falling off the walls.  

CBS had underestimated the harmonic resonance that the rocket’s five engines created. Visibly shaken, Mr. Cronkite, always the professional, composed himself and carried on though at a slightly higher pitch. Those engines remain the most powerful ever produced by mankind.

With that the Space Race was on and no expense spared. That is the America I miss. The one with the cojones and the chutzpa to get what needs to be done, done. We all benefit from it in measurable ways by the products and technologies born of the time and inclination. We as a country need that again. Make no small plans. Everyone benefits and besides, I want my Space Race back.

and a side of psychometrics too, please...

    My local school district has just dumped north of $106,000 dollars in annual salary for one newly minted expert in psychometrics.   
    Now wait a minute, I know what you’re thinking and that’s a little presumptuous coming from the likes of us. We simply do not know what the going rate is nowadays for good help in the field of study concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement.  Maybe we got her on the cheap.
    However, we do know what the going rate is for three newly minted teachers. And, that we could get two doctorate degree seeking teachers with a signing bonus of free parking, weekends off and all the bad coffee they can chug. And, we would know how to measure their performance. 
    The world would know them by the inspired and edified minds they’re able to turn out semester after semester year after year with dwindling support and little hope of advancement unless they join the likes of the new Senior Director of Assessment, Accountability and Evaluation.

How will we know how good the new Senior Director is at her job? How will the new Senior Director elevate the District’s credibility? Most important, how will the teachers and students of the district benefit from her expertise today and tomorrow?  Time will tell.

One thing for sure is the District has just added another layer of deniability in case the current direction of education in our fair county doesn’t markedly improve.  Even if the student's grades don't improve, I am sure that psychometrically they will track on an advancing plane adjusted for shift in the demographic mean.  Right?

Wait a minute, what am I talking about? This isn’t the REAL world where results are what matter most.  This the realm of school boards where our property taxes go to fatten the backsides of only those smart enough to ditch the “I do it for the kids” routine and latch onto the real money in education — administration — where no one ever gets fired, only laterally promoted with a bonus and a parking space upgrade. 

Silly me.