The American Culture of Death

And now the latest smash hit from that up and coming pop star, Rick Evanstan singing his latest sensation "I wish that I was Victor's whore".

Will Horton:  "I never intended to expose you as a Whore or anything like that"

Abigail:  "Well you know something- - what I did I take responsability for.  - - - I went into that affair with E J with my eyes open and we both knew what we were doing.  It was mutual.  But as for you, you were paid three thousand dollars for whoring yourself out to Victor Kiriacus.  Now you tell me, between the two of us, who is the bigger Whore?"

Have you ever asked yourself this question?  What do all of the infamous Cult leaders we know about have in common?  They’re all Alive.  People don’t go much for dead cult leaders.  You won’t find any Jim Jones veneration societies to honor his great teachings.  Elijah Mohamed used to be someone really great and influential, till he died.  Then you never heard any more about him.  How about Donald De Freeze of the SLA?   You don’t find any David Koresh societies around today.  If you saw last night’s “Law and Order” a dark thought may have entered your mind like it entered mine.   The minute the guy opens his mouth and says “I words have the authority of God”, just to put a bullet through his brain and see how long he lives, or people care to hear what he has to say.   Cliven Bundy is alive.  Do you think anyone will much care about Charles Manson once word comes of his death?  We in America have a culture of death, but unfortunately dead cult leaders are not high on the request list.  You don’t find religious memorials to cult leaders.  Some of you might say to me, “Well what about Jesus Christ.  He died yet his teachings live on to our day”.  Well, look again.  Do you remember that passage in Galatians where it talks about “he who has another teaching – let him be accursed?”  Some of you are nodding.  Well, let’s play a game of fill in the blank.  “Even if an angel comes down out of heaven and offers a teaching different from BLANK, let him be accursed”.  Some of you may thinking “what Jesus teaches” or “What the apostles teach” or “What the Bible teaches” or “What the Jerusalem Church teaches”.  No.  The blank in this case is “than - - from what I teach”.   The word is referring to self.  Acts portrays a church not cented either on Jesus, or on “the apostles” but on the person of St Paul.  So once again- - the guy holding the whip is alive and not dead.   We have a culture of death in society.  It should not even escape Sean Hannity’s notice that the majority of nations that still employ the Death Penalty are Muslem.  Check it out for yourself.  And unlike what the right wing says it isn’t just “Northern European liberal nations” that have abolished the death penalty.  It’s Mexico and Austrailia, and large portions of South America, virtually all of Europe, and even much of Africa.  In Japan the police carry guns but they rarely use them and deaths from police shootings are in the single digit zone going back years.  They are trained to use methods to subdue suspects other than firearms.  Some liberal spoke of this “Culture of death” such as the five percent of radical Islamics out there.  And George Washington’s blogs points out that both US wars like in Iraq, and things Israel have done lately violate the world standards of conduct of War.  Sean Hannity is a gun freak, and he admits he’s been on close terms with firearms since he was twelve.  He is now talking about his skills in the marshal arts.  If you’re like me you’ve noticed that people like Sean have really been negative all the time lately.  There is endless moaning and carping about how he’s being fleeced by the poor- - you’d think he was giving every last penny to the poor the way he talks.  And the attacks have taken on a certain personal, confrontative nature you don’t even hear from Rush Limbaugh.  It’s a personal thing with Sean.  He seems himself as kind of a victim.

There is a peace treaty that is being brokered by Egypt between Gaza and Israel, and the people of Gaza are already happy and celebrating.  We are told the same parties will meet again in a month to work out the thornier issues.   Leave it to Sean Hannity, though to say that “when the peace treaty is broken - - “ ruin will follow, or something.  There is the persistent roomer that on Labor Day the President is going to “pardon” five million illegal aliens, and that this will send the economy into a tail spin.  So we have to look at other claims “golden oldies from the past” like the 2012 movie that stated President Obama has plans to conthiscate all our guns after he gets reelected in November.  We were told that because of some new security regulation the stock market was going to crash starting the first of July.  We were informed a few days ago by these right wingers that “You see how just recently the market is already down a thousand points from its highs”.   We are told the price of gold could double before the end of the year.  I remember that California was supposed to have economic devastation in 2013 because of some ecology measures passed in California.  Of course forever we are told that President is a stealth Islamic agent and he’s just waiting for the right moment to sabotage our foreign policy.  We also were told “If we just had more domestic energy production that OPEC would no longer dictate the price of oil” and maybe domestic gasoline would be selling for a buck fifty a gallon because it was produced here or something.  How many times do these right wingers have wrong before we stop listening to them. 

Washington's blog features four new measures of what used to be known as "The economic Misery Index" other than the usual unemployment and inflation figures, which we both agree can't be trusted, and this has been the case for an awfully long time.  One of the four graph indicators particularly caught my attention and this was "the volecity of money".  Because money growth is a myth.  In fact if you looked at this chart it would seem we have been in a major contraction for years.  Also the number of people in this country who wand a job and don't have one- - or who otherwise do not have a job, this figure is constantly gone up over the past twenty years, believe it or not.  It has never NOT gone up during this whole period.  The two other indicators the blog mentions also have graphs to illustrate them.  Basically all four of these indicators have been getting continually worse for the past seven years, since 2007, without let-up.  You will note this is a period BEFORE when those who claim to be in the know, say that this recession even started.  But the biggest myth of all is that somehow there is any danger of what used to be known as "demand pull inflation", which the last few Federal Reserve chairmen have been so afraid of.  Inflation is one of those pavlovian bugaboos that when Right Wingers say the word, we're all supposed to tremble.  How strange it is that with all the things that actually ARE wrong with this economy, that the powers that Be, would fixate on the one indicator that is NOT any sort of economic threat. 

This afternoon I yelled back at the radio “Sean, are you done complaining- - are you sure?  Are you sure you don’t want to complain a little more.  Sean is all upset because Burger King finds their corporate taxes so high they have to move to Canada to have them reduced to 26 percent.   Taxes for corporations are only 35 percent to begin with and not forty.  And I’m sure Sean knows this.  Also President Obama proposed a plan a couple years ago too reduce corporate tax rates to 35% and close loopholes just like Romney wanted- - but this republican congress turns everything down this President proposes, including things they privately said they were in favor of.  And I guaren-damn-tee you that Sean Hannity does not pay sixty percent of his income in taxes.  He does know that when someone says “I’m in the 39% tax bracket they don’t pay 39%, but that tax rate is only on the top portion of their incomes.  Dr Levy in the past has slipped into this same rhetorical falsehood.  You know how I know Sean Hannity is full of it?  He’s been saying this for years now and he still hasn’t made that move to Florida or Texas, just like Ted Nugent isn’t “either dead or in another country by now” as he said in 2012.   One real gravy train issue for conservatives of course is abortion.  I don’t know what conservatives would ever do if they got their way on that issue.  They’d have nothing to talk about.  As for Linda, she’s worse than Sean and the more you hear her the less you like her, and I didn’t like her one bit the first time I ever heard her, and now she’s on all the time.  And then Sean and Linda say they have the goods on that Highway Patrol officer (Ron Johnson) who acted so friendly.  Because they have a photograph of him last year holding a gun on three WHITE bikers, as if that has anything to do with the price of tea in China.  First of all he didn’t fire any shots.  And the next thing is Sean goes on and says “Well - - if Michael Brown “came at Wilson in a threatening manner” then it’s a justified shooting”.  And then Sean goes on to say “I have two good reasons why I believe it’s more likely than not that Michael Brown came at Wilson”.  But then he didn’t say what those reasons were but only paused and (as if re thinking) said “Well, uh- - you know he MUST have done SOMETHING to make Officer Wilson feel threatened, or he wouldn’t have used his gun”.  In other words for Sean- - he takes his own mental conclusion as to what happened and then deduces BACK from his own conclusion to “figure out what must have happened”.

They DID NO INVESTIGATION in the Ferguson police shooting.  It was one thin fill-out form.  And whether that one page form is accurate remains to be seen.  Norman Goldman points out that when a death occurs- from anything- - it could be a traffic death, or it would be someone falling off a twenty story balcony with a loose railing, the police make twenty, thirty and even more paged reports complete with photos and diagrams.  Since there was none of that here, and no knocking on doors speaking to potential witnesses- - this in itself, this abnormal behavior, is indicative that the police KNOW this wasn’t a kosher shooting.   Conservatives are apparently criticizing Al Sharpton’s presence at yesterday’s funeral for Michael Brown, which was a good old time gospel revival.  But Reverand Al was invited by the family to speak.  And I have heard remarks attributed to Rush Limbaugh I don’t even want to repeat because they are so strange.  I think it actually BOTHERS the right wing that calm has returned to Ferguson now.

There are some strange birds in America these days, like no drinks bigger than sixteen ounces in New York City, as if there were some law compelling everyone to buy a large soft drink.   Personally I want freedom to either buy or not buy something.  I don’t like my behavior of NOT having insurance prior to 1997 as somehow “criminalizing my past”.   And people whine about high property taxes in California and keep threatening to move to Texas or Oklahoma.  All I’m saying is- if they were saying that in 2010 and they’re still here, then they prefer whining to doing anything about it.  And Rush brought up this strange story about some new kind of nail polish that changes colors if your boyfriend has slipped a date rape drug into your drink.  Apparently there are some queer forces out there (and I used that term in its generic sense) that believe merely by having the option of using such nail polish that changes colors you are living in expectation of rape and therefore somehow Encouraging rape.  This is like the old condom argument gone mutant.  There apparently (according to Rush) some queer bird feminists out there that actually believe that women should not have to take ANY sensible precautions against being date raped or actually raped.   In fact - - cop radar detectors - -  are things that it would be hard to take off the market once they’re on the market.  But once again, if you believe having such a radar detection device is somehow ‘cheating’, then you don’t have to buy one.  We learn from “Burn Notice” that a good way to knock out surveillance cameras and other security measures- - is to phone in a bomb threat because they bring in these powerful radio jamming devices to keep any bombs from being detonated remotely from a distance.