CNN.com – White House defends Bush’s post-invasion�WMD claims – Apr 12, 2006

a. Bush knew about the fact the trailers had nothing to do with WMD before he made his speech about them and LIED. Or b. He has so surrounded himself with people that adhere to his twisted idea of “loyalty” that they are afraid to tell him anything that he doesn’t want to hear, that he has created an administration of deception and incompetance.
Either way….

Why is this not “front page news”? Why is this not in the big box at the top of CNN.com? Why is it not on MSN news?
Cheney accidently shoots a friend, a Homeland Security rep. arrested for soliciting a minor, and they get days of high-profile news space, and stories that affect the nation get a small link, if anything.

Not that Cheney and Doyle aren’t news, but they’re human tragedies and limited in scope. The issues regarding the Bush administration sending us into war through deception and incompetance, about the administration giving contracts to rebuild Iraq and our Gulf Coast to companies owned by people in his administration that sub-contract and sub-contract to the point where people are making money but nothing’s getting done, voter fraud and irregularities, planned oil shortages giving rise to allowance of oil companies to raise prices making RECORD PROFITS for Bush and Ceheny and friends, record deficit spending for our kids and grandkids to pay off, creating the most convuluted and complex Medicare system ever, issues where all our lives are affected, and they get hardly any news play at all!

I just don’t get it. We Americans are so soft and uncaring about issues that matter, we’re sheep being lead about at the whims of people who have clawed their way into positions of power and authority. We care more about American Idol than the very democracy that affects our very lives. We’re so wrapped comfortably in our soft lives with no idea what the cost of freedom is we allow the news to feed us what they think we should care about.

“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” – Thomas Jefferson
“Give me liberty or give me death.” – Patrick Henry

And yet we have people in the government who think liberty and freedom are annoyances to their ideas of security and what they can get from lobbyists and stolen tax dollars. They think we citizens are tools for their gain, we’re their subjects. These people, if they’ve even read the Constitution at all, choose to completely disregard it. They have taken their oaths to protect it, and violate it every time they call someone a non-patriot for questioning them, every time they take away an essential liberty in the name of security, every time they lie to us.

And we don’t care.
So long as we have our reality TV and pop music and gourmet coffee, who cares if our elected servents are lying to us and taking our money and putting it in their pockets and leaving the quality of life for our children worse. The press is our eyes and ears in the government with a responsibility to tell us what’s going on when we can’t find out for ourselves and they’re violating that trust, and we don’t care. So long as they give us celebrity scandal sensationalism who cares what kind of corruption is going on the the government. After all, truth and facts don’t matter because we’re all supposed to “vote our concience” right? We’re supposed to vote on values, right? Vote for people who take on the appearance of some value structure and trump up issues of “value” that have absolutely nothing to do with the running of government, and like sheep we vote for them. We let the press organizations they own give lip service at best to real news. We let them lie and steal and run our country into the ground.

Is that what we want? Because if it is, if 200 years after people fought and died to give us freedom and liberty, if we are now a nation that doesn’t care, let’s ammend the Constitution and give the president dictatorial powers we’re allowing him to take anyway. Let’s make it official that the federal government can control state’s rights and soveriegnty and individual rights. Let’s just make it official. Heck, Thomas Jefferson, one of the most important architects of the Constitution believed we needed to rewrite the Constitution every 19 years or so anyway! To reflect the wants and needs of that generation.

So fine. Let’s do it. Let’s officially make the legal basis of our government, our governmental foundation, reflect our soft and pathetic inability to think and just react knee-jerk to non-governmental issues like marriage and gays and religion. Let’s give the government the right to feed us whatever liberties and freedoms they think we need instead of the role of protecting the liberties and freedoms we’re supposedly born with as human beings. Let’s mandate that the government can invade countries at will using lies, or no good reason at all. Let’s give all power to the White House to do what it wants for any or no reason at all including revenge, spite, political gain, or personal protection.

Meanwhile I’ll move to a free country that values the individual, liberty, freedom, the ability of the individual to make up their own minds, and doesn’t have dreams of world empire and domination. Because the United States of America will exist no longer in neither body nor spirit… if it even does now.

CNN.com – Bush acknowledges declassifying intelligence – Apr 10, 2006

OK, so lemme see if I have this right. Assuming everyone is NOW telling the truth, here’s the way it went down:

1. Ambassador Joseph Wilson is tasked with finding Iraq’s connection to nuclear material buying in Africa.

2. Secretary of State Colin Powell, upon hearing that the President was going to make public the Iraq/nuclear material buying connection, advises the President that the intelligence for that is spotty at best.

3. Ambassador Wilson publicly criticizes this assertion by Bush and provides his evidence that there’s no connection.

4. Bush then (supposedly) declassifies certain intelligence reports, including the fact that Wislon’s wife is a deep-cover, black-book active CIA agent, and tells Cheney to leak this to the press.

I have to stop here for a second and ask, why?! Why did the President decide to declassify the infomation on Wilson’s wife asfter he publicly criticizes him?

5. Cheney then tells Libby to spread the word about Wilson’s wife, Valarie Plame, for the purpose of (according to memos) bolster the President’s political basis for invasion.

I have to pause again. Isn’t it enough that the MOTIVE as established by the memos released by Libby is underhanded and crass? Just checking.

6. After it finally comes out that a leak exists, Bush comes out and says he would punish the source of the leak if it’s in the White House.

OK, two options here. Either he forgot HE was the source of the leak, or he was lying to the American public at that time. I wonder, if pulling executive powers and declassifying secret information on his own instead of going through the usual channels was so vital, would he have so completely forgot that he did that? Or does he declassify secret information on his own all the time?
Oh yeah, a third options: He’s lying now!

7. Then months after the origin of the leak points to Libby and things don’t look to good for him and Cheney, all of a sudden it comes out Bush authorized the leak. Which would make it legal, and get Cheney and Libby out of trouble. Convenient.

8. Bush then says “Oh yeah, it was me. Heh heh.”

There’s a great deal of lying going on here no matter how you look at it. A great deal of deception, manipulation, and treating the American people as royal subjects at best, complete and utter disregard at worst. How much longer will this kind of crap continue before someone does something?
Well, Russ Feingold tried, but no one had the spine to support him.

All I keep thinking about, is Clinton was empeached because he lied about a blowjob. And still his approval rating at the time was in the 70′s. Bush has lied and lied and decieved and manipulated intelligence in order to get us into a war where thousands are dead and dying. And no one seems to care.

What the hell is going on??!!

Played, ooh! paintball yesterday. Agh! Ow. First time in two, ow! years!
Ahrg. Pain, all owver.
So much fun! OW!
Need to ow play more often.
Sore, oh so OW! sore….

Listened to a very interesting podcast today:
Sam Harris – The End of Faith
Sam Harris is the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason.

He has an interesting philosophy: “Religion is what allows millions of people to openly believe what one person would be considered insane for believing.”

He posits that to a greater or lesser degree, ALL religions are dangeous as they allow people to inform their lives with beliefs that revolve around the absurd. And this becomes dangerous when people who believe in absurdities as truth are in positions of power and control.
For this and other reasons, we must be less tolarant of religion.

It’s like this: There are people who believe Elvis is still alive. And when someone expresses this belief they’re often met with ridicule and criticism and we are free to discuss openly the absurdities of such a belief. Believing Elvis is alive isn’t illegal, nor should it be illegal! But we generally don’t let people with such absurd ideas into positions of power and influence.

And yet, someone who believes in vigin births and talking bushes thousands of years ago, we are required by society to not criticize or challenge or speak ill of. And unfortunately, such as in the case of Islam, we allow such an exteme amount of tolarance that we allow it to flourish into cultures of hate and violence.

Suicide bombers are obvious, but the danger can also be less overt. We say “OK, so it’s fine that a Catholic priest wants to preach against contraception like condoms. What’s the harm in that.” But then you find out that Catholics in Africa are preaching the sins of condoms while literally millions of people are dying of AIDS and spreading the plague further and further.

There is danger in all religion to some degree. Harris, again, doesn’t believe religion should be outlawed any more than things like astrology, but we should be free to criticize and disagree and challenge religion openly and in public. And hopefully, eventually, religion may be believed in but won’t be as socially influential any more than beliefs in Elvis or UFO abductions.

CNN.com – Ancient�text offers revelations about Judas – Apr 6, 2006

Basically, this Gospel of Judas dated around 300 AD and written in the same Coptic Greek as the other Gospels, describes how Jesus asks Judas to betray him in order to fulfill the prophesy and free the spiritual Jesus from the flesh.

I’ve always thought, even back in my fundie Christian teenage days, that Judas got the short end of the stick. I guess I was doomed to skepticism and critical freethinking even back then, as I thought:

1. We celebrate Jesus for the fact that he sacrificed himself to free us from sin.
2. This was all planned in advance by God/Jesus to fulfill prophesy and free us from blood sacrifice.
3. In order to be sacrificed, Jesus by necessity had to be turned over to the Romans and killed.
(Of course, being a fundie Christian at the time, I didn’t yet question the necessity of the sado-masochistic bloody human sacrifice in the first place instead of the all-powerful God just changing the rules.)
4. Ergo, Judas was a tool of God in order to make the sacrifice possible. Judas was necessary and doing God’s will.

It’s one reason why I realy love (even now) the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar.” The British soundtrack is better, but I like the movie too. It shows more about how the Judas character was doing what he thought was right, and necessary for God’s will to be revealed. And in essence, he was! God’s will couldn’t have been fulfilled (so long as God decides to use human agents for his will,) unless Judas did his job.

So the villification of Judas for doing God and Jesus’ will and bringing about the necessary and pre-planned sacrifice is wholy unfair. And his suicide (depending on which gospel you read and how you interpret it) is actually quite sad, in my opinion. He felt so much guilt and sorrow for doing what he then thought was a mistake, leads to his death–meanwhile God/Jesus’ plan was all along going on smoothly. It’s a really tragic story, I think.

And so I’ve always thought it to be extremely absurd for Christians in general to despise Judas, and a lot of fundie Christians to hate Jews for their role in the sacrifice, when all along they were doing what God and Jesus needed and wanted to have done. According to Christianity, you can’t be saved except by Jesus who can only save you because he died, took the keys to hell from Satan, and came back to life to ascend to be at God’s side (wait, how’s the work if God and Jesus are the same?) And Jesus couldn’t have done that if not for the betrayal. Judas should be honored in Christianity as much as that symbol of the tool of murder, the cross, is. Moreso, in fact! Judas should be up there right below “the Virgin” Mary as being an agent of God and making Jesus’ ability to “save” possible.

The Judeo-Christian mythology is really quite fascinating, moreso than any other ancient myth I’ve encountered so far. There is a lot of drama, human character, alegory and metaphor, that is rare in a lot of other myths. Once you get past the instances of inhuman cruelty and absurd rules and advocation of rape, murder, slavery, racism, hatred, intolarance, brutality, infanticide, etc. etc. found all throughout the book, that is.

Dungeons & Dragons game humor:
“Jesus Saves!
…and only takes half damage.”

I’ve been so busy with work and with evolving Old Norse, Old English, and Gaelic into alternate modern language forms for a role-playing game (gawd, I’m such a nerd!) that I haven’t had time to blog anything.
Until something riles me enough to, like this:
As reported today on Phil Plait’s “Bad Astronomy” blog, he links to a post on “The Austringer” blog regarding a professor in Texas who is predicting that due to overpopulation, we may soon reach a critical point in which (as in all cases of animal overpopulation,) biological mutations in bacteria will create a highly destructive pandemic killing off as much as 90% of the population.

It’s a controversial prediction, and while based on years of study and research, is not a certainty, but has been upheld as a probable result of overpopulation by other respected scientists and anthropologists. But here’s what has me riled: The fact that William A. Dembski of the ironically named “Discovery Institute” and extremely vocal and active proponent of Intelligent Design, has reported the professor to the Gestapo, I mean… Homeland Security! Here’s his blog stating as much: http://www.uncommondescent.com/index.php/archives/984.

The actions of the intolerant and ignorant Religious Reich is also remarked on in the popular science blog Pharyngula.

Because Professor Pianka’s research is based in the fundamentals of evolution, the ignorant squeaky wheels have decided to completely and utterly misunderstand and misrepresent Pianka’s prediction of human devastation as an advocation of human destruction. Here’s what Pianka himself says on the topic:

If humans do not control their own population (and we seem unwilling and unable to do so), then other forces will certainly act to control our population. The four horseman of the apocalypse (conquest, war, famine, and death) are all candidates. Most likely, lethal virulent microbes like HIV and Ebola zaire will set limits on the growth of human populations. HIV, by allowing infected hosts to survive years while they spread the virus and infect new hosts, has already become a pandemic, but it will be years before it decimates the human population. Although Ebola kills 9 out of 10 people, outbreaks have so far been unable to become epidemics because they are currently spread only by direct physical contact with infected blood. However, a closely related virus that kills monkeys, Ebola reston, is airborne, and it is only a matter of time until Ebola zaire evolves the capacity to be airborne.

This is from his own page: http://www.zo.utexas.edu/courses/bio213/why.html. You can read his own words, he’s predicting, NOT advocating!

Yet because of vocal anti-evolutionists like Forrest M. Mims III, the Religious Reich are contorting the entire subject in order to bash it and turn a concerned scientist into some sort of mad scientist, all because of their unfounded beliefs in a dogma.

And as Phil on “Bad Astronomy” states very well, the issue is that the ID’ers feel they have a right to not only express, but get forced into public schools their opinions, but when someone else expresses a scientific based concern that uses concepts they disagree with out of principle, then those people are State criminals and dangerous people that must be reported to the Gestapo… there I did it again. Sorry. “Homeland Security.”

It literally sickens me.