Our oceans are dying

(via Daily Kos)

From Daily Kos:

Oxygen levels are dropping and ocean waters are acidifying at the fastest rate in at least 300 million years when the greatest marine extinction in earth's history took place according to The State of the Ocean Report 2013 written by an international panel of marine scientists.

Today's explosive increase in human CO2 emissions and warming of the oceans are recreating the conditions of the great Permian extinction 300 million years ago when massive volcanic eruptions in Siberia triggered the release of enormous amounts of stored carbon. A leading theory is that deoxygenation and acidification of the oceans led to the bacterial production of toxic hydrogen sulfide gas which poisoned species dependent on oxygen. By the end of this natural catastrophe 90% to 95% of all marine species were extinct. The biodiversity of the oceans took 30 million years for to recover.

the scale and rate of the present day carbon perturbation, and resulting ocean acidification, is unprecedented in Earth’s known history. Today’s rate of carbon release, at approximately 30Gt of CO2 per year, is at least 10 times faster than that which preceded the last major species extinction (the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum extinction, or PETM, ca. 55 million years ago), while geological records indicate that the current acidification is unparalleled in at least the last 300 million years. We are entering an unknown territory of marine ecosystem change, and exposing organisms to intolerable evolutionary pressure. The next mass extinction event may have already begun.

Human CO2 emissions directly cause both global warming and ocean acidification. But that's just the beginning. Mixing tends to decline in warming waters because a warm fresh surface layer is substantially lighter than colder middle and deep water. The surface layer tends to float and not mix. Organic carbon is always falling from the surface to deeper waters. Bacteria oxidize the fallen carbon to CO2. This process reduces oxygen levels and increases the acidity of the water. When the rate of mixing declines the residence time of water in a layer increases, so acidity levels tend to rise and oxygen levels drop in layers below the surface as the climate warms.

There's lots more, including examples of consequences we're seeing right now. And the article doesn't even mention over-fishing, pollution, or any of the other ways we're destroying our oceans. Nor does it mention how many millions of people depend on our oceans for survival. This is a matter of life or death to millions of men, women, and children.

But it does explain how slowly natural processes change. This isn't something we'll be able to undo in an instant, when we finally wake up to how much damage we're doing to our own environment.

Moreover, because processes in the ocean are slow to change this deadly water would continue to affect the Pacific northwest for another 50 years if all human CO2 emissions stopped today. It will take 30 to 50 years for the most acidic water already present along the west coast to well up. This is the beginning of a disaster that we cannot stop. The best we can do is to keep it from growing far larger and far more deadly. The changes happening in the waters of the Pacific northwest are the first stages of a global marine catastrophe if CO2 emissions are not rapidly reduced.

Obviously, all CO2 emissions aren't going to be stopped today. Or tomorrow. Or ever, probably. But whatever we do or don't do, our descendants will be living with the consequences for generations - at a minimum!

Sam Harris replies to William Lane Craig

I've heard this excerpt before. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've posted it before. But that time, I think it was part of a longer video.

I don't know. I like it well enough to post it again anyway, no matter what. :)

This is just one small part of the complete debate between Sam Harris and William Lane Craig, which took place at Notre Dame in 2011.

Still fighting the Civil War

Flying the Confederate flag at Obama's White House

(The New Civil Rights Movement)

Could this shutdown stuff be getting any crazier?

From AmericaBlog:

Sarah Palin, God bless her self-serving media savvy. As if the Republican party didn’t have enough troubles, Palin today emerged alongside Ted Cruz as the new face of the GOP government shutdown.

Yes, there really is a God.

Palin joined GOP Tea Party Senator, and shutdown leader, Cruz and other Tea Party supporters of the GOP’s shutdown of the federal government in a “million vet march” to protest the fact that the government has actually been shut down.

Point of fact: Neither Palin nor Cruz have actually served in the military, and both support the GOP government shutdown which closed the WWII memorial. But don’t let that get in the way of a good visual.

This was supposed to be the "Million Vet March on the Memorials," scheduled for Oct. 13, 2013, but they apparently ended up with less than one-tenth of one percent of that number.

Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Mike Lee were there to lead the faithful, and Sarah Palin - wonder of wonders - joined them. Of course, none of the three has ever served a day in the military. And they were for the shutdown before they were against it.

Palin on the shutdown not two weeks ago:

“Let government chill for a little bit.”

Palin said Republicans should not “fear some kind of government shutdown.” She then emphasized that Republicans must “stand firm,” “not blink,” and not “allow the media to drive this whole narrative” that a shutdown would be bad for Republicans.

Palin said that a shutdown would allow the American people to realize “how irrelevant the federal government could and should be in our lives.”

And now she’s leading a protest of the shutdown she supported.

Adorable.

Well, they're batting a thousand so far, aren't they? So what could make it better? How about displaying the Confederate flag at this supposed protest of United States veterans?

(image source?)

I keep reminding you of the Republican Party's notorious 'Southern strategy' of deliberately wooing white racists, because that's how we got here. The GOP thought to use those people, and Republican leaders were overjoyed at taking all those old Dixiecrats into their own party.

But this is what happens when you combine all of America's crazies into the same political party. Those Dixiecrats combined with the John Birchers and other crazies already in the GOP to become today's Republican base.

They may not be the majority of Republicans even now, but they're active, they volunteer, and they reliably vote, even in the primaries,... so they pretty much control the party.

And they're still racist,... not to mention, you know, crazy:

According to CNN, the Tea Party protesters gathered at the White House are also very concerned that President Obama is a Muslim:

One speaker went as far as saying the president was a Muslim and separately urged the crowd of hundreds to initiate a peaceful uprising.

“I call upon all of you to wage a second American nonviolent revolution, to use civil disobedience, and to demand that this president leave town, to get up, to put the Quran down, to get up off his knees, and to figuratively come out with his hands up,” said Larry Klayman of Freedom Watch, a conservative political advocacy group.

The Tea Party has a whopping 21% approval rating in America, which makes it even less popular - slightly - than the rest of the Republican Party.

So, hmm,... what could make that number even better? Ted Cruz? Check. Sarah Palin? Check. Non-veterans supposedly leading a "veteran's march" and promising a thousand times better turnout than what they got? Check. Waving the Confederate flag at our first black president and his family? Check!

Republicans in the George W. Bush administration might have been faith-based and ignorant, but they knew how to stage a photo op. Remember Bush, dressed in a flight suit, taking a helicopter to an aircraft carrier and giving a speech under that "Mission Accomplished" banner?

But I guess there's crazy and then there's crazy, huh?

An Imperial in Skyrim, Pt. 3

Valtheim Towers - and more bandits

(Continuing the adventures of Willam Kingsman in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim from this post. The entire series is here.)

When Erandur and I headed east from Whiterun, heading towards Riften, we encountered the usual bandits and other dangers on the road. Really, I'm getting to expect that now.

We even fought another vile necromancer. This was a young woman - very young - and I would have let her live, but she attacked us on sight with blade and magic, and sent a skeleton warrior against us, too. If I'd been on my own, she might have killed me, but she had no chance against the two of us.

Further along the road, we stopped to make camp by a stream, on the bank of which, when we went to get water, we discovered the body of a young peasant girl. Something had been gnawing on it. There were other bodies nearby, too, and we followed a bloody path to a dark cave.

Entering, we discovered trolls - and yet more bodies. It was horrible! To me, trolls seem to partake of both animal and human, making their dietary choices especially disgusting. And most of the bodies seemed to be of complete innocents, probably snatched off the road nearby.

I could barely speak, I was so angry - not at the trolls, but at the foolish people, busy fighting among themselves, who'd let the roads get this dangerous. That idiotic revolt was taking the Nords' attention from everything else, and their own people were paying the price. I was still angry as we left camp the next morning, and that probably explains what happened next.

Lucky's house, with just the foundation constructed

We stumbled upon a crumpled shack and a poor, dead Nord, ironically called "Lucky." He'd been working to build a home in the wilderness - we found his carefully described plans [this is the Build Your Own Home mod] - when a falling tree had crushed his dreams and himself.

I was still angry at the deaths we'd found the day before, and I got madder and madder as we dug a grave for Lucky. Here was a guy fighting back against the anarchy in his land. Building a house in the wilderness, far from any town, he was doing his part to civilize Skyrim. That's what it took, brave people willing to build, instead of destroy - and risking their life in the process.

So we started cleaning up. Lucky hadn't gotten too far, but we chopped up the tree which had killed him, cleared the debris, and then rebuilt the foundation of his house. I hadn't meant to go even that far, but it felt good to build, rather than kill, for a change. So we kept going, following Lucky's own plans.

At one point, we made a quick trip back to Whiterun to fetch supplies. Arriving in the middle of the night, such was our haste, we were ambushed by vampires. There really is a vampire problem in Skyrim, apparently. The next time we needed supplies, we headed towards Riften (as we'd originally planned).

Foolishly, we got lost on the road and ended up almost in Windhelm. As an Imperial, I wasn't sure how I'd be welcomed there (although the Stormcloaks we've met on the road have been civil enough), so we turned around and took what looked like a shortcut over the hills. And yeah, we made it to Riften after only getting lost one more time. :)

Lucky's house - mine, now - after some work

Erandur hadn't said a word about Riften before then, but it turned out he wasn't especially happy about our going there. Me, I really liked the weather down there, but Erandur kept muttering about how Riften contained "the worst Skryim has to offer" (apparently because of the thieves guild and the widespread corruption in the city).

Not that I didn't sympathize. We met a lovely young woman who'd been trying to clean up the town - all by herself, apparently - but it appeared to be a hopeless cause. And then I discovered that the man I'd come to see - a man who supposedly knew something about those women abducted in Dawnstar - was a member of the thieves guild, and that I'd have to join the guild myself before I could even talk to him!

By then, my opinion of Riften pretty much matched Erandur's. [One thing I dislike about Skyrim is that you apparently can't fight against the thieves guild, and indeed, you miss out on a lot if you don't join it. So it's hard to roleplay a decent character. Instead, you're always encouraged to play an amoral character - helping people when it's in your own best interests to do so, but harming them when that's better for you, instead.]

Again, my disgust probably caused me to react against it - more so than perhaps I would have otherwise. At any rate, we agreed to help an old alchemist by picking up an ore sample at Shor's Stone, a small mining village not far away. And when we got there, we volunteered to help clear the mine of the giant spiders infesting it, too.

Finally, we took a bunch of letters to a young woman's family, and brought their replies back to her. (Coincidentally, this woman knew Erandur, since he'd been passing through town on his way to Darkstar when she'd been injured, and as a priest of Mara, he'd healed her.) [Unfortunately, they didn't recognize each other, which was rather disappointing. Her story seemed to imply quite clearly that Erandur was the priest of Mara who'd healed her, but the two of them didn't interact at all.]

We set up camp [the Camping Lite mod]

Anyway, it was this little side trip, not far at all, which resulted in a very unusual experience. We'd entered a small cave - with just a single troll inside - to discover a beautiful magic bow and a chest with a strange gem inside. And when I touched the gem, a demanding, otherworldly voice commanded me to take it to Mt. Kilkreath.

As it turned out, I'd never heard of Mt. Kilkreath - well, I'm new to Skyrim, after all - but Erandur thought it was somewhere far, far to the northwest. I did discover that the voice belonged to a Daedric Lord - one of the few benevolent Daedric Lords - named Meridia, and that she shares my hatred of necromancers. So we might want to check it out.

On the other hand, I still haven't talked to the Dawnguard, per their invitation. And I'm thinking I might want to find out more about the war talk I'm hearing everywhere, too. We've been directed to Helgen for that. [Since I'm playing with that alternate start mod, and I haven't yet been to Helgen, I haven't discovered that dragons have returned to Skyrim. Now, I'm not particularly interested in the main quest, but I would like to encounter dragons in my travels throughout the land, so I need to get there soon.]

So I'm not sure where we'll go next. I'll have to talk it over with Erandur. We're still working on Lucky's house - ours, now, since we discovered the deed on his body - but it's expensive to get all the supplies we need. Erandur doesn't like Riften, and neither do I, much [I'm still disappointed that we can't help Mjoll the Lioness clean up the town, opposing the thieves guild instead of joining it], so we probably won't stick around here.

On the other hand, I'm not in a big hurry to head north into the ice and snow again, either. So I'll have to see. Maybe we'll explore west. [In my previous play of Skyrim, I didn't go west at all, so that's all new territory for me. Then again, there are a million dungeons elsewhere that I haven't seen yet, either.]

___
Note: This entire series can be found here.

Applying government shutdown logic to baseball

You've probably seen Paul Kaplan's letter to his congressman about applying Republican logic to baseball, but I thought it was worth posting here, especially since I can find no transcript of the letter (just an image of it):

Dear Congressman Kingston:

Thank you for your courageous stand against Obamacare and in support of the government shutdown. Your bold act of statesmanship has given me an idea that I hope you'll agree to help with.

Like you, I'm sure, I am profoundly disappointed that the Atlanta Braves lost the NLDS [National League Division Series] last night. And to the Dodgers - a bunch of California liberals!

This outrage cannot be allowed to stand. But the system has failed us. We tried to resolve this issue through traditional means: In last night's game alone, we must have sent batters to the plate at least 40 times. But just because we couldn't score enough runs, the Dodgers refuse to relinquish the title - and worse, they won't even discuss it.

LA's stubborn refusal to even talk to us about reversing the results of this series is un-sportsmanlike and un-American. But there is an answer: If the Dodgers won't listen to the cries of average Americans like you and me, then Congress should outlaw Major League Baseball until the Dodgers cave.

I understand this solution may sound unconventional. But we can no longer afford to play baseball as usual. This issue is too important. Americans - by which I mean Braves fans like me - overwhelmingly oppose a Dodgers win. Allowing them to impose their left-coast values on our post-season play is ruining America. And my fantasy team.

I know that some in the greater fan community and in the sportscasting elite may say that shutting down all of baseball is too drastic a step. That if this kind of hostage-taking is allowed to succeed, baseball as we know it will cease to function - that next time it will be the Dodgers demanding the pennant. That before long we'll see the Mets shutting down the league unless they get a Super Bowl ring, or the Diamondbacks halting play unless they win the Stanley Cup. But you and I know that's just a bunch of California double-speak.

Just because the Dodgers had more hits, scored more runs, and won more games doesn't make them right. You can help them see that. And if that means the country will be deprived of its national pastime - well, the Dodgers will have only themselves to blame.

Help us avoid the Dodger's cynical shutdown of Major League Baseball. Bring the National League pennant home to Atlanta today.

Go Braves!

Great, isn't it? It's getting a lot of attention, so maybe it will help make these things clearer to the many Americans who don't pay enough attention to politics (and so tend to be easily buffaloed by the GOP).

Misquoting Jesus, by Bart Ehrman

This is really fascinating. Yes, it's long, but just watch a little bit of it, and you'll probably stay for the whole thing.

The last part is all questions and answers, but that's just as interesting. I was sorry to see it come to an end, even after an hour and a half.

One thing - out of many - which really struck me was how people with an oral tradition don't expect stories to be memorized verbatim. Concern with literal accuracy has been a consequence of literacy. Earlier cultures expected storytellers to vary the telling, improving a story, adapting it to the audience.

Once stories were written down, there was a bigger concern with accurate copying. But even then, errors were common,... and so were deliberate revisions. Some of the most interesting parts of this are the examples of where the Bible was deliberately revised - sometimes significantly - by the people who copied it.

How Christian delusions are driving the GOP insane

Here's that article by Amanda Marcotte. The whole thing is great - if frightening - but here's an excerpt:

The press often talks about the Tea Party like they’re secularist movement that is interested mainly in promoting “fiscal conservatism”, a vague notion that never actually seems to make good on the promise to save taxpayer money. The reality is much different: The Tea Party is actually driven primarily by fundamentalist Christians whose penchant for magical thinking and belief that they’re being guided by divine forces makes it tough for them to see the real world as it is. ...

It’s no surprise, under the circumstances, that a movement controlled by fundamentalist Christians would be oblivious to the very real dangers that their actions present. Fundamentalist religion is extremely good at convincing its followers to be more afraid of imaginary threats than real ones, and to engage in downright magical thinking about the possibility that their own choices could work out very badly. When you believe that forcing the government into default in an attempt to derail Obamacare is the Lord’s work, it’s very difficult for you to see that it could have very real, negative effects. ...

In other words, the Christian right has worked itself into a frenzy of believing that if this health care law is implemented fully, then we are, in fact, facing down either the end of American Christianity itself or quite possibly the end times themselves. In comparison, it’s hard to be too scared by the worldwide financial collapse that they’re promising to unleash if the Democrats don’t just give up their power and let Republicans do what they want. Sure, crashing stock markets, soaring unemployment, and worldwide economic depression sounds bad, but for the Christian right, the alternative is fire and brimstone and God unleashing all sorts of hell on the world.

This is a problem that extends beyond just the immediate manufactured crisis. The Christian right has become the primary vehicle in American politics for minimizing the problems of the real world while inventing imaginary problems as distractions. Witness, for instance, the way that fundamentalist Christianity has been harnessed to promote the notion that climate change isn’t a real problem. Average global temperatures are creeping up, but the majority of Christian conservatives are too worried about the supposed existential threats of abortion and gay rights to care.

Under the circumstances, it’s no surprise that it’s easy for Christian conservatives to worry more about imaginary threats from Obamacare than it is for them to worry about the very real threat to worldwide economic stability if they go along with their harebrained scheme of forcing the government into default. To make it worse, many have convinced themselves that it’s their opponents who are deluded. Take right wing Christian Senator Tom Coburn, who celebrated the possibility of default back in January by saying it would be a “wonderful experiment”. Being able to blow past all the advice of experts just to make stuff up you want to believe isn’t a quality that is unique to fundamentalists, but as these budget negotiations are making clear, they do have a uniquely strong ability to lie to themselves about what is and isn’t a real danger to themselves and to the world.

This line bears repeating: "The Christian right has become the primary vehicle in American politics for minimizing the problems of the real world while inventing imaginary problems as distractions."

This is why faith-based thinking is bad. This is why believing things that aren't true - or that you have no good reason to believe are true, at least - is bad. It's not a coincidence that our politics these days has become so wrapped up in religion, any more than it's a coincidence that terrorism is likewise so closely wrapped up with religion.

The Bible, Pt. 4: Genesis, Chapter 11 - 13

Note: I'm continuing to read the Christian Bible from my previous post (you can find the entire series here). Bible quotes are from the King James version.

Chapter 11:

1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.

...

5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.

6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.

7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.

8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth

Here's God being a complete dick again! It's really something, isn't it? We saw this before, in Chapter 3. There, God was scared that human beings would "become as one of us."

That's why he told them not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (which they did anyway, since obviously they couldn't tell right from wrong before they'd eaten its fruit), and that's why he drove them out of the Garden of Eden, for fear that they'd eat of the tree of life, too. He seemed to be afraid of the competition. (Too many gods already, I suppose, huh?)

And now? Now that they've learned on their own how to make bricks, how to build a city, how to construct even a tall tower (the tower of Babel), he hates that. Those humans are just getting too smart for him! So he confounds their language, so they can no longer understand each other, and he scatters them across the Earth. What a complete dick!

Note that, this is another example, of many in the Bible, where it's obvious that God values only obedience. He never values intelligence, knowledge, competence - indeed, he positively hates those qualities in human beings.

[Edit: After watching Matt Dillahunty on the Atheist Experience TV show this week, I think I missed something here. Keep in mind the Bible's primitive ideas about our universe, which I noted in Chapter 1. They thought the sun, moon, and stars were set in a firmament - and that it wasn't very far above us. Heaven wasn't very far above us. I skipped this, but Verse 4 actually says, "And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven."

God was afraid that human beings would literally build a stone tower all the way up to Heaven! Yeah, that seems laughable these days, even if you actually believe in a Heaven. I guess I missed this, just because I couldn't imagine such an idea. But I was looking at this through modern eyes. We know how far away the sun and moon are, let alone the stars. So it didn't even occur to me that the Bible meant this literally, that they were actually planning to build a tower tall enough to reach Heaven. And God, of course, was afraid that they'd succeed!]

The rest of the chapter is another genealogy, of little interest except for the apparent discovery that women actually exist. Unlike in the earlier chapters, where men usually seem to create men, seemingly without any contribution from women at all, these men all "begat sons and daughters" (my emphasis).

And two women are actually mentioned by name! Admittedly, that was mostly to say that one of them was barren. But she also has a part to play in the next chapters.

Chapter 12:

1 Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee:

2 And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing:

3 And I will bless them that bless thee, and curse him that curseth thee: and in thee shall all families of the earth be blessed.

So, the Lord has another BFF! Nice, huh? But remember how he thought that Noah was "perfect"? Well, God can really pick 'em, apparently:

10 And there was a famine in the land: and Abram went down into Egypt to sojourn there; for the famine was grievous in the land.

11 And it came to pass, when he was come near to enter into Egypt, that he said unto Sarai his wife, Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon:

12 Therefore it shall come to pass, when the Egyptians shall see thee, that they shall say, This is his wife: and they will kill me, but they will save thee alive.

13 Say, I pray thee, thou art my sister: that it may be well with me for thy sake; and my soul shall live because of thee.

Yeah, God can really pick his best buds, can't he? (Of course, God isn't so great himself, since Abram suffered under a famine even with God's blessing.) But Abram tells his wife to pretend to be his sister, since he's afraid the Egyptians will want to make her a widow.

So, if they think she's not married, what will they do then? Keep in mind that this seems to be a culture where a woman's wishes matter not at all.

14 And it came to pass, that, when Abram was come into Egypt, the Egyptians beheld the woman that she was very fair.

15 The princes also of Pharaoh saw her, and commended her before Pharaoh: and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house.

16 And he entreated Abram well for her sake: and he had sheep, and oxen, and he asses, and menservants, and maidservants, and she asses, and camels.

17 And the LORD plagued Pharaoh and his house with great plagues because of Sarai Abram's wife.

18 And Pharaoh called Abram, and said, What is this that thou hast done unto me? why didst thou not tell me that she was thy wife?

19 Why saidst thou, She is my sister? so I might have taken her to me to wife: now therefore behold thy wife, take her, and go thy way.

Hmm,... so where did these Egyptians come from, anyway? After all, it wasn't so long ago that there were only eight people left on the entire planet.

At any rate, the Pharaoh behaved quite well here, didn't he? He thought Sarai was hot, but rather than just taking her (remember, Abram claimed that she was just his sister), he treated both of them very well.

Well, maybe not by modern standards, I suppose, depending on what "and the woman was taken into Pharaoh's house" actually implies. Still, he was the Pharaoh. And by ancient standards, that was probably being very, very generous. After all, there's been no indication that women had any choice about these things anywhere in the Bible - not yet, certainly. And the Pharaoh wanted to marry her.

When the Pharaoh finds out that Abram has lied to him, causing him and his whole household to be cursed with plagues, he merely tells the lying bastard to take her and leave. Apparently, the Pharaoh even let them keep the stuff he'd given them!

OK, I'm not completely sure of that, because the precise wording is "and they sent him away, and his wife, and all that he had." But Abram went to Egypt because he was suffering during a famine. And in the very next chapter, we learn that he's "very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold." It certainly sounds like he got those riches by selling his beautiful 'sister' to the Pharaoh - and that the Pharaoh let them keep all those gifts when he told them to leave. Not that's generous!

God, on the other hand, behaves like a complete dick, once again. God didn't punish Abram for his cowardice and his lies. No, he punished the Pharaoh for believing the lies - and not just the Pharaoh himself, but the Pharaoh's "house." How many people do you think would have died in those "great plagues," at a time before modern medical care (or any knowledge of medicine at all, really).

Of course, God has already demonstrated that he cares nothing for human life - just as he's clearly demonstrated what a poor judge of character he is!

Chapter 13:

1 And Abram went up out of Egypt, he, and his wife, and all that he had, and Lot with him, into the south.

2 And Abram was very rich in cattle, in silver, and in gold.

3 And he went on his journeys from the south even to Bethel, unto the place where his tent had been at the beginning, between Bethel and Hai;

4 Unto the place of the altar, which he had made there at the first: and there Abram called on the name of the LORD.

5 And Lot also, which went with Abram, had flocks, and herds, and tents.

6 And the land was not able to bear them, that they might dwell together: for their substance was great, so that they could not dwell together.

7 And there was a strife between the herdmen of Abram's cattle and the herdmen of Lot's cattle: and the Canaanite and the Perizzite dwelled then in the land.

So, Abram and Lot (and Sarai) went back to where they'd come from, only they went back loaded down with loot. As I said before, the Pharaoh was extraordinarily generous, wasn't he - especially after learning how Abram had lied? But maybe he was just afraid of more plagues, I don't know.

Still, Abram and Lot now had so many cattle, so many flocks and herds, that the land couldn't even support them all! So they agree to separate, dividing up the land between them.

Of course, there are already people living there. The Canaanite and the Perizzite already "dwelled then in the land." Neither Abram nor Lot seem to care anything at all about them. They just don't want strife between the two of them, because they're "brethren."

Again, this isn't all that long since there were only eight people left on the planet, supposedly, so the Canaanite and the Perizzite - and the Egyptians, for that matter - must have been fairly close relatives, too. But who cares about that, huh?

So Lot chooses the plain of Jordan for himself, and leaves. (The Bible helpfully notes that this was before the Lord destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, which were there.) But Abram, despite everything, is still God's favorite:

14 And the LORD said unto Abram, after that Lot was separated from him, Lift up now thine eyes, and look from the place where thou art northward, and southward, and eastward, and westward:

15 For all the land which thou seest, to thee will I give it, and to thy seed for ever.

16 And I will make thy seed as the dust of the earth: so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered.

17 Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.

This is where we get the unending battles in the Middle East. After all, God gave this land to the Jews, to the descendants of Abram, forever.

Of course, he also promised them that their seed would be as the dust of the earth, "so that if a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered." Um, I think he missed the mark a little bit with that one, don't you think?

Of course, like most prophecies - and most godly promises - he doesn't say when that will happen. But if God really liked Abram as much as he claims, if God really meant to bless Abram, why would he give Abram's descendants just about the only part of the Middle East which doesn't contain oil?

This is enough, for now. But there's lots more about Abram and Sarai coming up!

___
Note: This whole series, as well as my Non-Belief series, can be found here.

'Ted' Cruz, real American

(Pat Oliphant)

There's a lot of crazy stuff going on in America these days, so I'm not going to claim that this is the craziest. It might be a contender, though. It's closely tied up with a lot of other crazy stuff, certainly. Most of these things are connected.

But it turns out that I didn't know the half of it!

You know that whole 'birther' nonsense? Some people will just never accept a black man as the legitimate President of the United States. He can't be a real American. I mean, just look at him!

Obviously, Barack Obama must have been part of a decades-long plot to put a foreigner in the White House. I mean, what would make more sense in the 1950s than a black kid with a funny name from a broken marriage in a poor, mixed-raced household? He'd be a shoo-in!

But this isn't about logic, and it's certainly not about evidence. It's about racism. Barack Obama simply cannot be the legitimate president. He must be a Kenyan, a Muslim, a 'terrorist,' a socialist, a communist, a fascist - and besides, ACORN must have got him fraudulently elected.

20% of Republicans, even now, think that Obama is the antichrist. I'm not kidding! The antichrist! Twenty percent! One quarter of all Americans think that he might be. I'm embarrassed that so many Americans think that the boogeyman might be real, let alone that they suspect our first black president of being him!

The Kenyan claim is the one you hear the most, because it reminds people that he's, you know, black. My god, people, just look at him! He's black, he's black, he's black! Haven't you seen that??? Open your eyes! It's like racists just can't imagine how white people apparently haven't noticed that.

So along comes Ted Cruz, hero of the Tea Party, who's already running just as fast as he can for the presidency. And, er,... he was, um,... born in Canada (which, unlike Hawaii, is not actually part of the official United States - plus it has socialized medical care, too!).

His father was a Cuban who fought for Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution. Oops! In fact, the elder Cruz would have been an illegal immigrant when he arrived in America, except that Cubans are the only Latinos Republicans actually like, so they get an exemption from all that tedious immigration stuff.

(Actually, I don't know what his status would have been in 1957. The law which currently exempts Cubans from much of this stuff dates from 1966. But Cubans have long been favored like this.)

So, what about all that 'birther' stuff now? Yeah, there hasn't been one peep from the Tea Party about Ted Cruz being a foreigner, has there? Well, you know, Cruz just looks like a president, you know what I mean? This fine, upstanding white man is clearly presidential material,... unlike that Kenyan who's currently in the White House. Am I right?

This is crazy. But as it turns out, I hadn't known the half of it:

The state of Texas, home to George Bush, Rick Perry and Louis Gohmert, has seen to inflict on the other forty-nine states yet another right-wing nutjob who calls himself “Ted” Cruz.

“Ted” is not his first name. It is not even either of his given names.

The junior senator from Texas is named Rafael Edward Cruz.

He was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to an American woman and a Cuban father who, at one time, had been a soldier in Fidel Castro’s revolutionary army. The obstetrician attending his birth worked under a national health insurance plan a step beyond the Affordable Care Act that he so vehemently opposes (probably for his own reasons, not for the benefit of his constituents). How’s that for foreign?

So why “Ted”?

Is it so he can call his speeches and fauxlibusters “Ted talks”?

Or is it because of his base?

Is it that the same tea party who cannot accept that someone named “Barack Hussein Obama” could have been born in the united states would have their collective head explode at the notion of a “President Rafael Cruz”?

Funny, isn't it? You know how Republicans are always emphasizing Barack Hussein Obama's middle name? That's a continuing reminder to the American people that Obama isn't really one of us, that he's a 'Kenyan' (i.e. black), not a real American (i.e. white). With a name like "Hussein," why he must be a terrorist, right?

But 'Ted' Cruz? Well, he's just a good ole Texan boy, huh? Hmm,... I wonder how many of these people know what "hypocrisy" means? (Don't worry, I won't ask them to spell it.)

Actually, although I don't know if Cruz will ever play up "Rafael," even in the Spanish press, I have no doubt that Republicans will try to use his half-Cuban ancestry to woo Hispanics in the general election. (They might keep it quiet in the primary, or they might not. As I noted, to Republicans, Cubans are the good Latinos.)

After all, wooing Hispanics has been a concern of Republican political operatives ever since their hysterical anti-immigrant paranoia has started having a negative effect in the polls. They've pretty much given up on African-American votes, but they're still getting a third of Hispanic votes, for some strange reason.

Marco Rubio was their fair-haired Latino, so to speak, until he made the mistake of trying to compromise on immigration reform. It probably would have been a mistake to try to compromise with the Democrats on anything, but immigration is an especially hot-button issue in the GOP. So there's certainly an opening for Rafael Cruz now.

To be clear, I think they're just fooling themselves. But these are the same people who think that Barack Obama only won the presidency because he's black. (Those lucky black people, always getting everything, huh?)

They seem to forget that African-Americans overwhelmingly voted for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and John Kerry, too - indeed, that they've voted Democratic pretty much since the Republicans adopted their 'Southern strategy' of deliberately wooing white racists. (Gee, do you think there could be a connection there?)

But can you think of any other reason than racism for the difference in how 'Ted' Cruz is treated, as compared to Barack Obama? They're two men with foreign fathers and foreign names (to most Americans, certainly), one of them born in America and the other born in a foreign country.

Yet I haven't seen any hysterics about the actual foreign-born politician, have you? Indeed, I haven't even heard anyone questioning his legitimacy as a presidential candidate, let along imply that he's a foreign operative - or a supernatural operative! - sent to destroy America.

You're saying there's still a chance?

(Clay Bennett)

I've been meaning to post some cartoons about the current situation, but I put it off until there were a ton of them to choose from. Let me tell you, it was hard to narrow it down even this much.

Anyway, enjoy!

(Stuart Carlson)

(Mike Luckovich)

(Dan Wasserman)

(Clay Bennett)

(Rob Rogers)

(John Cole)

(Stuart Carlson)

The Nullification Party

(Mario Piperni)

Yeah, I re-blogged a post yesterday, without adding anything to it, and I'm going to do the same thing today. It's just too appropriate, although it was posted ten days ago, and just too good.

This is by Andrew Sullivan, a conservative (though, admittedly, not one currently in good favor in today's Republican Party):

How does one party that has lost two presidential elections and a Supreme Court case – as well as two Senate elections - think it has the right to shut down the entire government and destroy the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury to get its way on universal healthcare now? I see no quid pro quo even. Just pure blackmail, resting on understandable and predictable public concern whenever a major reform is enacted. But what has to be resisted is any idea that this is government or politics as usual. It is an attack on the governance and the constitutional order of the United States.

When ideologies become as calcified, as cocooned and as extremist as those galvanizing the GOP, the American system of government cannot work. But I fear this nullification of the last two elections is a deliberate attempt to ensure that the American system of government as we have known it cannot work. It cannot, must not work, in the mindset of these radicals, because they simply do not accept the legitimacy of a President and Congress of the opposing party. The GOP does not regard the president as merely wrong – but as illegitimate. Not misguided – illegitimate. This is not about ending Obamacare as such (although that is a preliminary scalp); it is about nullifying this presidency, the way the GOP attempted to nullify the last Democratic presidency by impeachment.

Except this time, of course, we cannot deny that race too is an added factor to the fathomless sense of entitlement felt among the GOP far right. You saw it in birtherism; in the Southern GOP’s constant outrageous claims of Obama’s alleged treason and alliance with Islamist enemies; in providing zero votes for a stimulus that was the only thing that prevented a global depression of far worse proportions; in the endless race-baiting from Fox News and the talk radio right. And in this racially-charged atmosphere, providing access to private healthcare insurance to the working poor is obviously the point of no return.

Even though the law is almost identical to that of their last presidential nominee’s in Massachusetts, the GOP is prepared to destroy both the American government and the global economy to stop it. They see it, it seems to me, as both some kind of profound attack on the Constitution (something even Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts viewed as a step too far) and, in some inchoate way, as a racial hand-out, however preposterous that is. And that is at the core of the recklessness behind this attack on the US – or at least my best attempt to understand something that has long since gone beyond reason. This is the point of no return – a black president doing something for black citizens (even though the vast majority of beneficiaries of Obamacare will be non-black).

I regard this development as one of the more insidious and anti-constitutional acts of racist vandalism against the American republic in my adult lifetime. Those who keep talking as if there are two sides to this, when there are not, are as much a part of the vandalism as Ted Cruz. Obama has played punctiliously by the constitutional rules – two elections, one court case – while the GOP has decided that the rules are for dummies and suckers, and throws over the board game as soon as it looks as if it is going to lose by the rules as they have always applied.

The president must therefore hold absolutely firm. This time, there can be no compromise because the GOP isn’t offering any. They’re offering the kind of constitutional surrender that would effectively end any routine operation of the American government. If we cave to their madness, we may unravel our system of government, something one might have thought conservatives would have opposed. Except these people are not conservatives. They’re vandals.

Yes, they are. (This is another post I wish I'd written.)

The Bible, Pt. 3: Genesis, Chapter 7 - 10

Note: I'm continuing my Bible study from this post (or get the whole series here). Bible quotes are from the King James Version.

Genesis, Chapter 7:

1 And the LORD said unto Noah, Come thou and all thy house into the ark; for thee have I seen righteous before me in this generation.

2 Of every clean beast thou shalt take to thee by sevens, the male and his female: and of beasts that are not clean by two, the male and his female.

3 Of fowls also of the air by sevens, the male and the female; to keep seed alive upon the face of all the earth.

Noah built the Ark, following the precise measurements of God, in the previous chapter, where God also instructed him to take aboard two of "every living thing of all flesh."

But now God changes his mind. Now he wants seven of every "clean beast" - without indicating which beasts are "clean" and which aren't - as well as seven of every bird. This is after Noah has already built the boat and filled it with food for the millions of creatures God told him to expect the first time.

Of course, let's face it, you have to be pretty dim to think this really happened, don't you? I'm not even going to argue about it, since I'm pretty sure that even most Christians don't believe it. Still, it gives us a pretty good idea of the kind of God Christians are worshiping here.

21 And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, both of fowl, and of cattle, and of beast, and of every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth, and every man:

22 All in whose nostrils was the breath of life, of all that was in the dry land, died.

23 And every living substance was destroyed which was upon the face of the ground, both man, and cattle, and the creeping things, and the fowl of the heaven; and they were destroyed from the earth: and Noah only remained alive, and they that were with him in the ark.

So God gets pissed and kills every man, woman, and child on the Earth, every fetus (so much for 'pro-life'), and every animal, save only Noah's family and two to seven of every other species. If this had actually happened, God would have been a worse mass murderer than every other mass murderer in history combined.

It rained for forty days and forty nights, until even the mountains were covered. And the water remained for 150 days. I guess God was worried that people might hold their breath, huh?

Chapter 8:

13 And it came to pass in the six hundredth and first year [of Noah's life], in the first month, the first day of the month, the waters were dried up from off the earth: and Noah removed the covering of the ark, and looked, and, behold, the face of the ground was dry.

Um, did Noah just not look outside for 190 days? I've been wondering what the deal was with the raven and the doves, since you could just open a window and look outside if you wanted to know if the flood had abated.

Of course, I know that there wasn't actually a world-wide flood - geologists would see the evidence of that if there were - but it would be kind of funny if Noah thought so, only because he hadn't bothered to open a window and look outside all that time, wouldn't it? Heh, heh.

20 And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar.

21 And the LORD smelled a sweet savour

Oh, yeah! As we saw in Chapter 4, God just loves the smell of burning sacrifices, doesn't he? And this is why Noah needed more than just two of everything, apparently - since he was going to kill one of every "clean" species after they made land again. (Of course, one of the doves had already escaped.)

Chapter 9:

1 And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.

Did you think we were inbred before, with everyone descended from Adam and Eve? Well, now God has killed everyone else on Earth, save Noah and his nameless wife, plus their three sons and their nameless wives. (I still find it weird how women aren't even worth mentioning by name!)

Note that Noah was 600 years old, supposedly. But he only had three kids? Or did God just drown all of the others - including any daughters? (Still, they did a pretty good job of replenishing the Earth, with 7 billion of us currently. I think we can stop multiplying now, don't you?)

2 And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.

3 Every moving thing that liveth shall be meat for you; even as the green herb have I given you all things.

4 But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat.

Yeah, every living thing will fear us (even sharks and piranha?), because we've got God's OK to eat everything (no worries about "clean" and "unclean" now, apparently). Well, we do have to wait until it's dead first. I'm glad God qualified things in that respect, aren't you?

(Yeah, that's not the interpretation of Genesis 9:4 that most Christian sects adopt. The Jehovah's Witnesses even reject blood transfusions because they see that as "eating blood." But how else does "flesh with the life thereof" make any sense? Well, either way, I kind of like blood sausage, myself.)

5 And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man.

6 Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.

OK, verse 5 seems to indicate that God requires people to kill each other (and for animals to kill us, too). But verse 6 says that those people, in turn, should be killed, as well. So wouldn't you quickly end up with no one left alive on Earth (finishing what God started)?

People are required to "shed blood" - at the very least, to kill the people who've shed the blood of others. But then those people must be put to death, too, right? Because man is made in God's image? This seems to be contradictory.

And note that this is another place where God has changed his mind. In Chapter 4, he specifically put a mark on Cain so that people wouldn't execute him for murdering his brother. Why can't God make up his mind about this stuff?

9 And I, behold, I establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you;

10 And with every living creature that is with you, of the fowl, of the cattle, and of every beast of the earth with you; from all that go out of the ark, to every beast of the earth.

11 And I will establish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth.

And this is why - because of a story no intelligent person in the 21st Century could possibly believe actually happened - that some Republican politicians - leaders in their party - say they don't believe in global warming! Is there anything more ridiculous than that? This is how they counter science? Why not just say that Bigfoot told them it wasn't true?

But even if you believe in Christian mythology, that's not what this says. This says that God won't cause a flood to kill everyone. Floods happen all the time, and obviously they kill people. They just don't kill everyone.

Likewise, God promises that a flood won't "destroy the Earth." But no scientist thinks that global warming will destroy the Earth. We might destroy our own environment, but the planet will be just fine. And no scientist thinks that everyone on Earth will die, either, even if millions do. So even if the Bible were more than just primitive superstition, it still wouldn't rule out climate change.

20 And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:

21 And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.

22 And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.

23 And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father's nakedness.

24 And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.

25 And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.

26 And he said, Blessed be the LORD God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

27 God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

OK, this is just nuts. First of all, this was the "just," the "righteous," the "perfect" Noah? This drunken sot was the one guy, with his family, who God decided to save when he murdered every other man, woman, and child on the Earth?

What did Ham do that was so bad? Getting drunk and lying around naked was Noah's fault, wasn't it? There's no indication here that Ham did anything other than tell his brothers, so they could cover up their drunken father.

And for that Noah curses, not even Ham, but Ham's son (who had nothing to do with any of this) and forces him to become a servant? Yeah, Noah sure is the "perfect" man, isn't he?

There are two other points I want to make about this. For one, this is another favorite passage of racists and slave-owners. They claim that the descendants of Canaan are supposed to be servants, that this is God's will.

But again, as with the mark of Cain, there's no indication here that this applies to anyone but Canaan himself. Maybe he was cursed to be a servant (a horrible injustice, obviously), but there's nothing about the curse being hereditary. Of course, maybe that was understood by Noah cursing Ham's son, instead of Ham himself (not that Ham did anything wrong, either)?

Well, in these primitive, caste-based societies, maybe it's just automatically assumed that the son of a servant can't ever be anything more than a servant himself. I don't know. Either way, this whole thing is completely nuts and shows Noah as a terrible person.

Yet God thought he was "perfect." That's the second point I want to make about this. What made Noah so perfect? He doesn't seem so perfect to me. Or was he just the perfect slave? Obedience seems to be the only quality God values in human beings, doesn't it? (We also saw that in Chapter 3) Or maybe it's even worse than that.

In Out of the Silent Planet, a 1938 science fiction novel by C.S. Lewis, God has set up the perfect (to his mind) society on Mars by killing everyone who even thinks about rebellion. For generation after generation after generation, God has culled the herd by killing any person who isn't naturally obedient - people who haven't done anything wrong, but might have a tendency for rebellious thought.

After millions of years, he has created a society where people aren't so much slaves as they are domesticated animals, with all the rebellion bred out of them. Lewis, a devout Christian, saw that as a good thing. Me? I thought it was the most disgusting idea I'd ever heard!

Well, maybe that's the idea here, too. Noah was a drunken sot who cursed his own grandson, not because his grandson - or even his son - had done anything wrong, but due to Noah's own faults. But according to God, he was "just," he was "righteous," he was "perfect" - the one person on Earth worth saving, basically the one person on Earth whom God wanted to repopulate the planet.

How else do you explain that?

Chapter 10 is just a genealogy again - boring to read and with nothing I care to comment about. But in Chapter 11, we get to the Tower of Babel. However, I'll leave that for my next post.

___
Note: Again, this whole series is available here.

GOP cuts off its nose to spite its face

The Daily Show
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The Daily Show
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,The Daily Show on Facebook

"What do you hate more: poverty or Obama?" Well, that's certainly an easy question for Republicans, isn't it? 26 states - all controlled by Republicans - refuse to expand Medicaid solely in order to thumb their nose at the President of the United States.

And the really crazy thing about this? 23 of those states - all but three - are already mooching off the rest of our country. Nearly all of them, hating government as they do, are getting more from America than they're contributing to it. Incredible, isn't it?

I'm sorry to say that my state, Nebraska, is one of those red states which is refusing to expand Medicaid. But as least we're apparently one of the few red states which pays our fair share, rather than mooching from blue states.

Sure, you don't like to pay taxes. Who does? (Unless you agree with former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: "I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.") But we pay for uninsured people already. As Mitt Romney said, we don't just let them die (although Republicans cheered that idea in the GOP debates last year).

Republican politicians in these red states are harming their own people just for spite. Well, Republicans in Congress have been deliberately sabotaging the economic recovery - deliberately sabotaging their own country - just for political advantage (and now, when that didn't work, for spite, too).

The Republican Party in general is throwing a hissy fit, and you really have to wonder how long it will take them to come to their senses.

Oops!

(Mikeb302000)

Remember Mark Kessler, America's dumbest police chief?  Well, the Gilberton Borough Council finally suspended him, and plans to fire  him, but Kessler had the right to a hearing, either open or closed (he chose open).

No one could have seen this coming, right?

The public hearing for suspended Gilberton police Chief Mark Kessler ended prematurely on Thursday evening when a spectator dropped a semi-automatic pistol on the floor in the meeting room.

Man, those gun nuts just make everything safer, don't they? Luckily, the gun didn't go off, so no one was hurt. But they suspended the hearing, for now. I guess maybe the council didn't feel so safe after all, with so many of Kessler's loony supporters in attendance.

Maybe now they understand how ordinary people might have felt with Mark Kessler as their police chief!

We ate the monkey brains

This is from Charles P. Pierce. I'm going to re-blog most of it here, because there's really nothing more I can add:

In the year of our Lord 2010, the voters of the United States elected the worst Congress in the history of the Republic. There have been Congresses more dilatory. There have been Congresses more irresponsible, though not many of them. There have been lazier Congresses, more vicious Congresses, and Congresses less capable of seeing forests for trees. But there has never been in a single Congress -- or, more precisely, in a single House of the Congress -- a more lethal combination of political ambition, political stupidity, and political vainglory than exists in this one, which has arranged to shut down the federal government because it disapproves of a law passed by a previous Congress, signed by the president, and upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that does nothing more than extend the possibility of health insurance to the millions of Americans who do not presently have it, a law based on a proposal from a conservative think-tank and taken out on the test track in Massachusetts by a Republican governor who also happens to have been the party's 2012 nominee for president of the United States. That is why the government of the United States is, in large measure, closed this morning.

We have elected the people sitting on hold, waiting for their moment on an evening drive-time radio talk show.

We have elected an ungovernable collection of snake-handlers, Bible-bangers, ignorami, bagmen and outright frauds, a collection so ungovernable that it insists the nation be ungovernable, too. We have elected people to govern us who do not believe in government.

We have elected a national legislature in which Louie Gohmert and Michele Bachmann have more power than does the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who has been made a piteous spectacle in the eyes of the country and doesn't seem to mind that at all. We have elected a national legislature in which the true power resides in a cabal of vandals, a nihilistic brigade that believes that its opposition to a bill directing millions of new customers to the nation's insurance companies is the equivalent of standing up to the Nazis in 1938, to the bravery of the passengers on Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, and to Mel Gibson's account of the Scottish Wars of Independence in the 13th Century. We have elected a national legislature that looks into the mirror and sees itself already cast in marble.

We did this. We looked at our great legacy of self-government and we handed ourselves over to the reign of morons.

This is what they came to Washington to do -- to break the government of the United States. It doesn't matter any more whether they're doing it out of pure crackpot ideology, or at the behest of the various sugar daddies that back their campaigns, or at the instigation of their party's mouthbreathing base. It may be any one of those reasons. It may be all of them. The government of the United States, in the first three words of its founding charter, belongs to all of us, and these people have broken it deliberately. The true hell of it, though, is that you could see this coming down through the years, all the way from Ronald Reagan's First Inaugural Address in which government "was" the problem, through Bill Clinton's ameliorative nonsense about the era of big government being "over," through the attempts to make a charlatan like Newt Gingrich into a scholar and an ambitious hack like Paul Ryan into a budget genius, and through all the endless attempts to find "common ground" and a "Third Way." Ultimately, as we all wrapped ourselves in good intentions, a prion disease was eating away at the country's higher functions. One of the ways you can acquire a prion disease is to eat right out of its skull the brains of an infected monkey. We are now seeing the country reeling and jabbering from the effects of the prion disease, but it was during the time of Reagan that the country ate the monkey brains.

What is there to be done? The first and most important thing is to recognize how we came to this pass. Both sides did not do this. Both sides are not to blame. There is no compromise to be had here that will leave the current structure of the government intact. There can be no reward for this behavior. I am less sanguine than are many people that this whole thing will redound to the credit of the Democratic party. For that to happen, the country would have to make a nuanced judgment over who is to blame that, I believe, will be discouraged by the courtier press of the Beltway and that, in any case, the country has not shown itself capable of making. For that to happen, the Democratic party would have to be demonstrably ruthless enough to risk its own political standing to make the point, which the Democratic party never has shown itself capable of doing. With the vandals tucked away in safe, gerrymandered districts, and their control over state governments probably unshaken by events in Washington, there will be no great wave election that sweeps them out of power. I do not see profound political consequences for enough of them to change the character of a Congress gone delusional. The only real consequences will be felt by the millions of people affected by what this Congress has forced upon the nation, which was the whole point all along.

Amen.

Elizabeth Warren on the debt ceiling

Again, another great speech by Elizabeth Warren! So, when is she going to run for president? She's got my vote.

An Imperial in Skyrim, pt. 2

Whiterun in the distance

(Continuing the adventures of Willam Kingsman begun in this post.)

Erandur was really impressed with Whiterun, but I thought it still felt cold, so we continued south.

Pretty soon, the weather warmed up nicely. The road took us alongside a small river, with flowers blooming and butterflies pretty much everywhere. For the first time since I'd come to this land, I felt at home.

Just before Riverwood, we saw a rough wooden footbridge across the river, so we walked across to take a look. The water was crystal clear and lovely [I'm using the Pure Waters mod], and there was a dock on the other shore that looked like a perfect spot for fishing.

Nearby was a tree house [the Hermit's Tree House mod] - a rough, but sturdy structure, with a ladder leading to a small bedroom (well, large for a tree house, I guess). The little place looked neglected, and we found a journal which ended in sickness and drug-induced hallucination. But although we looked around, we found no one nearby, living or dead.

Enjoying the view from the tree house.

It really was a neat little place, with a lovely view from the top deck. None of the people in Riverwood wanted to talk about it, except to indicate that it was empty - ours to claim, if we wanted it.

And I did, at least for awhile. It was such a lovely place to rest and relax. Unfortunately, there wasn't any work nearby, unless I wanted to chop wood for a living - which I didn't. But we thought we'd use the place as a temporary base, at least, while we looked around the area.

The next day, we walked up the river to take a look at the Guardian Stones a little ways past Riverwood. And there, in the distance, we saw what looked like a ship, floating high in the air.

A ship, floating in the air

Well, we couldn't pass that up! It was on the other side of the water, but the river was shallow there, so we walked down to give it a closer look. And sure enough, it was a ship floating in the air, with a long chain anchoring it to the shore.

There wasn't anyone nearby, and I didn't like the idea of trying to climb up the chain (especially since we didn't know what kind of greeting we'd get at the top). But as we were poking around on shore, I found a large statue and somehow triggered a spell which teleported us both to the deck of the ship.

It was really an incredible device [the Asteria mod], a Dwemer airship in perfect condition. Neither of us had ever seen anything like it. It looked fit for the Emperor himself, it was that luxurious, but there was no one on board. It looked like the owner had taken everything especially valuable, though what remained was in perfect condition, and there were enough trinkets left behind that we knew it couldn't have been the work of bandits.

Indeed, why weren't there bandits? Was that spell sensitive enough to detect that we meant no harm?

Well, we looked all around, but we didn't disturb anything. We found some bloody rags in the furnace room, and I'd swear that a manikin had moved in the master bedroom when we came back upstairs again, so we left. But I'll be back. Dangerous or not, I can't pass this up. If only I could learn to fly it around Skyrim! [You can't. It's just another player house mod, though a very fancy one.]

The Asteria, a Dwemer airship

There weren't any roads in this part of Skyrim, but it looked like there might be a pass over the mountains to our north - the cold, snowy mountains, of course. But while we were debating whether or not to attempt it, we discovered a cave, which turned out to be a shortcut - Brittleshire Pass.

And yeah, it turned out to be a shortcut infested with undead, but there weren't that many of them (or maybe I'm just getting used to this kind of thing now?), and there weren't any necromancers, thankfully. It took us to a well-traveled road west of Whiterun. We'd just made a big circle.

On the road, we met a traveler who told us how to get to the Shrine of Azura. That sounded interesting, though it's far to the northeast, in the cold, the wind, and the snow, again. So maybe some other time...

Instead, we thought we'd head back to Whiterun, and we stumbled upon another bandit-infested fort on the way.  Ft. Greymoor was apparently another casualty of the fighting in Skyrim - an Imperial fort overrun by bandits. Really, what are these Nords thinking? Don't they realize it's their own land they're endangering, their own people, in this foolish revolt?

Good people everywhere need to stand together against the bandits, against the necromancers, against the monsters. The Empire may not be perfect, but we're necessary. Besides, it's not just Nords in Skyrim, not these days. I've met people of every race. We're all in this together!

Erandur and I cleared the bandits out of Ft. Greymoor without too much trouble. I think I'm getting better with this bow. And the loot has been pretty good. Really, this seems to be a way I can do good for the people of Skyrim while doing good for myself, too.

Indeed, after returning to Whiterun, we heard of a bounty the jarl had put on a bandit leader at Silent Moons Camp, so we headed out there next. Hmm,... I've heard that danger is addicting. Maybe that's what's happening to me? I certainly haven't been trained for this (without Erandur's help, I'd have been dead long ago).

Downstream from Riverwood

Now we're heading back to Riverwood again, but then I think we'll head to Riften. In Whiterun, we ran into a member of the Dawnguard - an organized group of vampire hunters - and he invited us to go have a talk with his boss. (They're recruiting. I don't know if I want to join, but it can't hurt to talk, right?)

Also, I've been telling everyone I meet about that necromancer I discovered right after the shipwreck. I keep thinking of those poor women, abducted and murdered. I keep thinking of their families, actually. Wouldn't they want to know that the fiend had been killed?

Anyway, someone told me I might check around Riften. That's a long, long way from Dawnstar, but I suppose it can't hurt to give it a try. That's south, still, so it might be even nicer than Riverwood. You never can tell.

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Note: This whole series can be found here.