Monday, November 09, 2009

The Catholic church is a force for good in the world--Agree or Disagree?

A couple of Atheists take on a couple of Christians to answer that question.




And here are the results ...

It looks like the people at the debate decided that the Catholic church is definitely NOT a force for good in the world.  Look at those before and after numbers!  I guess there is hope yet to bring more of these folks into the reality based community.

Wednesday, November 04, 2009

Don't Have a Corkscrew? No Problem.

A drunk Frenchman teaches us all how to open a bottle of wine in an emergency.  Priceless!

Thursday, October 29, 2009

Where do people get those crazy ideas about religion and the supernatural?



Where do people get those crazy ideas about religion and the supernatural?

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Masculine Costumes for Effeminate Boys

The onion hits this one out of the park.


How To Find A Masculine Halloween Costume For Your Effeminate Son

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Protect Traditional Marriage--Ban Divorce!

An initiative to ban divorce in California might be on the 2010 ballot. This is in response to Prop. 8 which banned gay marriage in California after it being legal for only about six months. This ad is hysterical and I hope they get it on the air. So much hypocrisy in the world today.

Sunday, October 11, 2009

Sell the Vatican, Feed the World

This is too damn funny! Love it.

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Beneath the hype Pt.3: McGovern & Thielmann on consequences of US silence on Israel's nuclear weapons

Wednesday, October 07, 2009

Obama Shuts out Doctors Who Support Single Payer Healthcare

Friday, September 18, 2009

Rachel Maddow Show--Obama is the Anti-Christ

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Nice!

Friday, September 11, 2009

A Summary of Tarantula Mountain by Scarecrow

Slouching Away from 9/11

By: Scarecrow Friday September 11, 2009 2:26 am

I don’t think historians will have any disagreement dating the long and painful death of America’s most cherished ideals from the events of September 11, 2001.

To be sure, America had experienced troubling eras many times before then, but it had always fought back. The nation's more precipitous decline came after that event.

Nor do I think historians will blame America’s rapid moral decline on the handful of religious fanatics that shouted “god is great” as they crashed hijacked jets into the twin towers and Pentagon and murdered 3000 people. No, America’s heart-sickening fall from grace happened after that, in how it responded to the event by so easily abandoning every principle of enlightened governance that had made the country seem not just unique, but worth emulating.

Even in the wildest imaginings of Dick Cheney’s neocons, al Qaeda never possessed a tiny fraction of the power to challenge America militarily or economically. The idea that even a well organized and deranged band of murderous fanatics posed an existential threat to the most powerful nation on earth was always ludicrous. So when the nation unthinkingly responded to the 9/11 murders by foolishly declaring a “war on terror,” many Americans knew we were headed in the wrong direction.

It was entirely predictable that a President with the maturity and judgment of a spoiled teen frat boy would lead the nation into revengeful but irrelevant responses. It was even more predictable that he and the arrogant faux warriors surrounding him would exploit the national shock by pulling out their list of “get evens” they’d always wanted to do if only they had the opportunity – and there it was, presented to them with no grownups in charge, no wise men or vigilant media asking “why are you doing this?” -- and a shocked nation willing to trust that whatever their leaders did was meant to keep them from being murdered by fanatics.

The President’s men set out to get even for god knows what personal inadequacies, because they’d always wanted to. And they did it, as the quintessential journalist of the time bragged, because he and the child-men he listened to needed to say, “suck on this.” We were led by 12-year-old idiots.

What we, or at least I, didn’t see coming was how relentlessly, efficiently and remorselessly Dick Cheney and his morally depraved henchmen would pull America into the “dark side.” I would never have imagined how easily they conditioned the American soul to first tolerate and then defend a regime that committed felony after felony, including some of the most notorious war crimes perpetrated by military victors on their captives.

The media freely helped in this immoral conditioning. It was so thorough that David Broder, the "Dean" of America’s journalists, who had opposed holding accountable those responsible for crimes while they were in office, pronounced that it would be unseemly for the subsequent Administration to hold them accountable when they were out of office, thus completing the destruction of any principle of accountability for the highest officers in the land. That the man was not hounded from his Washington Post tells us how thoroughly corrupt the official media has become.

The rule of law was now undermined, along with major pillars of the American Constitutional framework -- separation of powers, an accountable executive checked by Congress, limits on war powers, and restraints preventing the executive from suspending the most sacred rights against arbitrary government arrest and incarceration. Hundreds of years of legal tradition and precedent, much of it bought with blood, were now gone. Even a Supreme Court whose majority can't wait to overturn precedents choked on that.

What is left of America is hard to see from these ruins. The news is dominated by mindless teabaggers, unchecked and relentless lying and town hall thugs. The worst are driven by gross stupidity and rage, encouraged by a cynical media and organized and directed by even more cynical interests willing to exploit the mob’s ignorance, racism and hatred. With the official media complicit or incompetent, there is no way to stop these man-made wildfires other than to hope they burn out before they lead to armed insurrections.

There are daily calls for rebellion and threats to the President’s safety, and the thuggery now infects the Congress with only a hypocritical veneer of official restraint. Without principled, courageous leaders on all sides condemning the breakdown, the nation can easily descend further.

I’m 65. I’ve lived through McCarthyism, racism and race riots, the civil rights movements, Berkeley in the 60’s, three assassinations, Nixon and Watergate. I helped kill some people in Vietnam and called in Medevacs for others, for no reason I can account for, and I’ve watched the American addiction to imperial adventures drag us into one quagmire after another. I lived and worked through the rise and neglect of environmentalism, Carter’s hapless energy wars and Reagan’s mindless wars against governance, science and rationality. I've watched the zealots of the nation's self-declared official religion become increasingly detached from reality and its humane commandments.

We managed to survive all that but paid a huge price; I've never seen America’s moral and legal foundations crumble as quickly as they have in the last decade.

We are in a dark period of decline, and I don’t know whether we can fight our way out. But I know, deep in my gut, that America is more profoundly sick than ever in my lifetime, perhaps since the Civil War that so many seem anxious to threaten. It is seized with multiple cancers of unbridled greed, concentrated wealth, racism and fears, and governed by corrupt institutions that not only tolerate but facilitate hugely powerful interests in looting the nation.

We remain willfully ignorant of how we got to this point, while we argue about innocuous presidential speeches telling kids to stay in school -- they should be in the streets; it is their future being stolen. America’s once hallowed press, most of it not worthy of its guaranteed freedoms, acts as though they’re watching the games at the Coliseum, and perhaps they are.

Today’s America is threatened by cynical opportunists and dangerously ignorant people who believe it’s rational to buy as much ammunition as they can, because they wrongly believe a President who can’t rhetorically disarm his most disingenuous critics is about to seize their guns and destroy their country. They don’t understand it’s already gone, though it's not one they ever understood.

Insanity is loose in the land, and here we sit trying to counter the craziness by writing blogs.

Sunday, September 06, 2009

Cloud Changing at Sunset

Click on photos to enlarge.



Sunday, August 09, 2009

One Last Political Post

This opinion piece by Frank Rich is exactly my take on the Obama presidency. All of my worst fears about Obama have been confirmed in his first six months in office.

Is Obama Punking Us?

Yet there is real reason for longer-term worry in the form of a persistent, anecdotal drift toward disillusionment among some of the president’s supporters. And not merely those on the left. This concern was perhaps best articulated by an Obama voter, a real estate agent in Virginia, featured on the front page of The Washington Post last week. “Nothing’s changed for the common guy,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been punked.” She cited in particular the billions of dollars in bailouts given to banks that still “act like they’re broke.”

But this mood isn’t just about the banks, Public Enemy No. 1. What the Great Recession has crystallized is a larger syndrome that Obama tapped into during the campaign. It’s the sinking sensation that the American game is rigged — that, as the president typically put it a month after his inauguration, the system is in hock to “the interests of powerful lobbyists or the wealthiest few” who have “run Washington far too long.” He promised to smite them.

(snip)

The best political news for the president remains the Republicans. It’s a measure of how out of touch G.O.P. leaders like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are that they keep trying to scare voters by calling Obama a socialist. They have it backward. The larger fear is that Obama might be just another corporatist, punking voters much as the Republicans do when they claim to be all for the common guy.


I've been telling my friends since before the election that Obama was not a progressive and that we needed a populist president at this critical juncture in our Democracy. Too bad we didn't have a decent populists that we could vote for instead of Obama. Looks like we're stuck with corporate rule for the forseeable future. I almost wish McCain had won so we could have another shot at getting it right in 2012. Now we're stuck with either Obama or some Republican nutjob.

We will only get a progressive president when progressives realize that their vote will only count if they withhold it. Voting for the least objectionable candidate only allows them to take advantage of us over and over again. Stop voting for corporatist Democrats. They don't have your back.

Friday, August 07, 2009

Moon Rise


The moon rose as the sun was setting so the sky was still relatively light and blue and the rocks showed the pink of the setting sun. It was quite the shock to be admiring the sunset and then turn around to go into the house only to see the moon cresting over the mountains. This is a magical place.

Herculean Tarantula Hawk Captures Huge Spider



For more info about tarantula hawks click here.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009