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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Saturday, April 30, 2005

REV. LIMBAUGH'S GOSPEL

...from Avedon, we discover the somewhat surprising revelation that Rush Limbaugh has figured out the theological differences between the religious right that is trying to impose it's narrow set of beliefs on the entire nation and all those other true Christians who actually devote their spiritual lives to trying to exist in a manner of which God would approve. It's most surprising, of course, because you wouldn't really expect a drug-addled, thrice-divorced, hate-mongering doper with no apparent personal relationship with Jesus or even a conversational knowledge of the tenets of Christianity (of course, I say this in the most nonjudgemental way) to weigh in on the subject, but there it is...

...I don't question that the far right religious believe in God, although I do reserve the right to question their interpretation of the Bible that leads them to think that it is their mission to legislatively and judicially force their beliefs on every citizen of the United States, regardless of creed or theology. Limbaugh, however, is a different - and much easier - question to address. Put quite simply, he has not earned the right to question the beliefs of anyone in that Christian community with which he is so clearly unfamiliar. Various moderate and progressive groups are talking about boycotts. Boycotts are fine, but there is another way: call the local radio station that carries his show and ask when that station's FCC broadcast license is up for renewal. Make it clear that, when the renewal period comes around, a large body of local citizens will be offering evidence that the station, through it's airing of this program, is operating completely outside of the FCC mandate of the community's "interest, convenience, and necessity" (which shouldn't be too hard to do, given that his show has started to sound like the sort of thing you only used to find on short-wave frequencies). The political center and the left, in the face of this sort of outrage, should come together to engage in concerted serious efforts to make a run at the licenses of stations that are willing to broadcast this hate-filled swill. As Avedon suggests, you might also want to write your Congressman and pointedly inquire why tax dollars are being used to transmit this hate speech (if you don't think it is, replace the moderate/progressive Christian references with "Jew" or the racist insult of your choice) on Armed Forces Radio...

...it's safe to say that - after the rapture comes - Rush Limbaugh will still be around to chat with for those of us who have fallen short of God's mercy and have been 'left behind', not that this is necessarily a good thing for a whole bunch of fairly obvious reasons. None of that, however, has gone down as of this particular moment, so there is no reason for anyone - in particular people of faith who don't agree with the "Justice Sunday" crowd - to sit on the sidelines and let the Limbaugh's of the world define the terms of Christian belief and its relationship to the world. I would rather drink my own bathwater that put up with this nonsense...

...cross-posted at Ruminate This...
Posted by: Jack K. / 9:02 PM 0 comments

Friday, April 29, 2005

OH, NOW THERE'S SOME GOOD NEWS!


...as I've mentioned before, I'm a Mt. St. Helens baby. In my very first year of my professional career, twenty five years ago next month, the picturesque white cone out my office window blew up, killing 57 people, flattening 150 square miles of private and public land - including a goodly portion of the public land on which I was employed, and introducing an odd kink to my previously envisioned career and life path. When people who know about volcanoes talk about volcanoes, and especially if that talking contains any variant of the word "erupt", I sit straight up and pay attention. This report by the US Geological Survey is a good example of one of those times...
http://www.olywa.net/radu/valerie/erupt.jpg
May 18, 1980 eruption photo by Austin Post

...in 1979, two young USGS vulcanologists predicted that the two most likely Cascade volcanoes to erupt were Mt. Baker and Mt. St. Helens at either end of the Washington Cascade range. They said that an eruption could very possibly occur any time in the next twenty years, a prediction that proved to be nineteen years and two months on the heavy side. I no longer have any delusions about these things only happening to peaceful native farmers on some far-off tropical island, so phrases like "very high threat volcanos" catch my eye. The thirteen "very high threat volcanoes" listed in this report include Oregon's South Sister, Newberry, and Crater Lake. Now THERE'S some good news! Lucky me, I live within thirty miles of all three of these "very high threat" volcanoes, less than 10 miles from one of them. I can see two of them from my rooftop...
"We cannot afford to wait until a hazardous volcano begins to erupt before deploying a modern monitoring effort. The consequences put property and people at risk including volcano scientists on site and pilots and passengers in the air," said Survey Director Chip Groat.
...truth to power, baby; truth to power. I'm going to write my Congressman today, demanding that the USGS be given the funding necessary to monitor the behavior of Oregon's "very high threat" volcanoes, and maybe even reminding him that his residence of record, Hood River, sits at the base of Mt. Hood, another volcano on this list. The hell with balancing the budget, man; this is urgent!

...I think I'll leave out the part about how I don't ever vote for him...
Posted by: Jack K. / 12:25 PM 0 comments

Thursday, April 28, 2005

THE LESSONS OF A FREQUENT WIND

...thirty years ago tonight, President Gerald Ford gave his approval for a dangerous and improbable evacuation, and an enormous gaggle of helicopters began the final removal of America's presence in South Viet Nam. It was a last chance effort, since fixed-wing flights and evacuation by sea were no longer options, to remove the last remaining American citizens and their most at-risk Vietnamese supporters as North Vietnamese troops entered the outskirts of Saigon. The clatter of all those Marine, Navy, and Air America rotor blades was the sound of failure heralding the total, complete, final, abject collapse of America's idealized effort to develop and sustain democracy and defeat the perceived insidious creep of communism in Southeast Asia. After a decade and a half of involvement, 58,209 dead and 153,303 wounded (according to the painfully precise accounting of the Pentagon), $584 Billion spent ( in current dollars), the full-blown quantification of Viet Nam's own condition - post-tramautic stress disorder, riots in our streets, gunfire on our campuses, the truncation of a Democratic presidency, the collapse of respect for our military and those who served, and a national loss of innocence regarding our national self-image and sense of place in the world, that distinctive sound of helicopters in the grey skies over Saigon announced an end that amounted to nothing, perhaps even less than nothing if history's calculus were to allow the use of negative numbers. To America's leadership generation of the time, which had seen Sherman tanks in Berlin's streets and the USS Missouri sailing into Tokyo harbor to accept Japan's unconditional surrender and had witnessed a bold counteroffensive after initial disaster in Korea - leading to the armistice-signing at Panmunjom, it represented America's first failure in the face of aggression by forces of evil, and the fact that American troops didn't do the failing was scant mitigation.


Photo from: Corbis Images
Photographer: Hubert van Es.

...it has so often been said that half the country's population is 35 or younger that I suppose I have no recourse except to accept it as fact. This means, of course, that over half of the country's citizens have no personal recollection of what we as a nation experienced through Viet Nam. Partially as a consequence, we've raised a crop of young adults who have no conception of the raw animal violence of the '68 Chicago Democratic Convention or any emotional connection to a National Guard shoot-out with unarmed students at Kent State, much less the constant dinner-time drum beat of war on the evening news. That may well explain the jarring dissonance that those of us who grew up in the Viet Nam era experience, finding it not only insulting but remarkably strange to be called 'traitors' and 'America-haters' over relatively calm, reasoned objections to a preemptive invasion of Iraq. As an aside, the younger conservatives doing this mudslinging just don't understand "how things could be" or the personal ramifications of being caught out in the open in one of their pathetic little counter-demonstrations if the 50-somethings in the crowd were to have some tragic flashback and decide to try a little good old-fashioned '60's-style war protest on these young collective asses. Not that anybody would intentionally go over that particular line without their cardiologist's approval, but you never know...

...it's always stylish at anniversaries divisible by 5 that weighty questions of "what have we learned" and "how have we applied that knowledge" get tossed around by all the highly paid Big Media pundits. The answers can be complex, but sometimes simple answers suffice, too. We have, over the last 15 years, seen two examples of the foreign commitment of troops that provide some of the simple answers. In 1991, those military leaders who were company and field grade officers in Viet Nam showed in Kuwait that they had learned what was called "the Powell Doctrine" for Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Colin Powell: strike hard with overwhelming force and a clearly defined mission, a direct repudiation of the politically micromanaged conflict in which they were engaged in Viet Nam ...

...it worked nicely...

...in 2003, however, the military leaders were cut out of the planning process by a gang of draft avoiders and people without creditable military service ("Donald Rumsfeld, White Courtesy Phone; Donald Rumsfeld, White Courtesy Phone, please"); two years after the invasion, planned and executed as the antithesis of the Powell Doctrine, we are still dealing with an Iraq that seems nowhere near pacification and not so much as a tunnel - much less a light at its end - in sight. The photo above of an Air America chopper snatching refugees off of the roof of the Pittman Building in Saigon is an icon of our failure in Viet Nam. If we've learned nothing else of value from that experience, given the way things are going in Iraq, hopefully we've at least learned to check the roofs of Baghdad buildings to see which ones will support a helicopter's weight...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:29 PM 0 comments

Wednesday, April 27, 2005

A DUCK'S TALE

...oh, sure, you may be proud of your state legislature. You may hold it up as a glowing example of how a group of honest, hard-working and undercompensated citizens can come together, employing the powerful synergy of their disparate backgrounds and philosophies, to make the sorts of bipartisan decisions that render the streets safe for your children to play in and assure that Muffy the dog never goes to the pound for leaving the yard. With all your civic pride, however, you must tip your hat to my citizen legislators here in Oregon, who have taken that bold first step down the road toward preventing the force-feeding of ducks to produce pate du fois gras...

...the state's highways and bridges are falling apart? School funding is such a mess that it has created a crisis that would make the Mississippi Dept. of Education hang its head in shame? The state taxation system is nothing less than a huge wreck looking for for a crash site at which to come to rest? There's a better chance that Harry Reid and Bill "Cat Man" Frist will start hanging together on Friday nights, knocking back whiskey shots and playing Texas Hold-em in the back rooms of some seedy D.C. bar, than there is of an Oregon state budget being produced that doesn't resort to smoke and mirrors to avoid deficit issues? These aren't problems! Artifically fattened duck livers are the problem, and the Oregon Senate has struck the initial blow in addressing that problem by passing Bill 861, which would criminalize the force feeding of ducks and the sale of fois gras produced in that manner...

...we are so very proud...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:58 AM 0 comments

Monday, April 25, 2005

DELAY MUST STAY

...or at least that is the contention in a new Jonathan Alter Newsweek piece. Despite all the blood in the water and those obvious distinctive dorsal fins slicing along the surface, it's a political angle that I've personally been supporting in posts and comments for a little while. I think that every little sleazy stunt Bug-Boy has pulled, from scandal-proofing the Ethics Committee through all those lobbyist-paid trips to his engineering the legislative interference in the Schiavo case and his subsequent oblique threats against judges should be linked - starting in...oh, say...June of 2006 to every Republican member of Congress - along with Delay's picture - to assure the delivery of the message that a vote for Delay and his gang will only earn you this and oh, so very much more: weakening of the standards for the purity of the air your children breath and the water they drink, tax cuts for the wealthy while you get to wrestle with the iniquitous inequity of the Alternative Minimum Tax, the vaporous economic "recovery" that is only measured by how rich folk's stock portfolios are performing and not by whether you have a decent enough job to afford the outrageous health-care premiums that they won't lift a finger to address, and on and on and...

...the drumbeating is loud, though, by the "Dump Delay Now" crowd, and the evidence continues to mound up suggesting that they are probably backing the winning horse. This sort of revelation doesn't help my contrarian "Keep Delay Around" stance one little bit; it forces him into the position of either putting on the brave face of acknowledging through a certain studied silence on the subject that he was lying through his teeth or trying to play some sort of Ken Lay/Enron defense, insisting that he is actually dumber than Aunt Tilly's poodle and probably incapable of being held responsible for even dressing himself, much less managing the Republican majority in the House of Representatives. If this crap keeps up, I'm probably not going to be able to afford the luxury of having Tom Delay to kick around during the next election cycle, which would be a crying shame; he is a true gift to the Democratic Party...
Posted by: Jack K. / 8:25 AM 0 comments

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