War On Contraception

I actually feel insulted that I wasn’t called for this war on religion that Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum keep talking about. Although that’s probably because it isn’t happening, but nevertheless I should have been contacted. When long shot Gingrich talks about how, on day one (skipping his inaugration ceremony he pledges) he’s going to repeal every anti-religious bill the Obama White House has passed* I would like to ask him a question: Could you name two laws? That’s all I ask: two. One is an anomaly, two, while not representing anything close to an agenda or a pattern could at least be recognized as a burgeoning trend. I, however can’t think of one.

Sure, one might be tempted to stop reading this post and scroll down to the “comment” button and let me in on the birth-control provision of the healthcare bill. A bill, that again, was approved by Republicans as well as Democrats. This provision which has been on the books since the law was passed is only now starting to gain some attention. I suppose one might be tempted to think that the uproar was only held off until it was an election year, but you would have to be a cynical person to think that. That cynical person would have to wonder why no one made any stink about it prior to the bill’s passing, or wonder why it is so egregious that a bill requiring insurance providers to cover what most insurance companies already cover is going to become active?

I digress.

While I am an atheist, I was raised Catholic. I understand the Catholic tenet that says sexual intercourse is only for procreation. So it should make sense that they would be against it. Not exactly. This is going to get a little tricky but here’s why they are wrong. True believing Catholics should have no problem with this provision. If they follow the Church’s teachings it doesn’t matter whether the birth control that is automatically covered by almost all insurance companies because the real true believing Catholics won’t be using it anyway. It’s a hair split but that’s what the Roman church is all about (see the Doctrine of Double Effect, Just War Theory, etc.); it’s not immoral to have contraception, it’s not immoral to employ a person that provides contraception, it’s immoral to USE contraception. The good Catholics should just chalk this up to another one of those temptation tests that they always talk about overcoming.

It’s ridiculous that this is even a controversy. How come the Bishops haven’t been in an uproar about the number of Catholic hospitals and colleges in this country that actively hand out contraception (in both pill and condom form) to people? Isn’t that much more dangerous or immoral than having an insurance policy that covers it if a person freely chooses to avail themselves of the service?

I suppose that the adherence to the rule of fun sex=sinful while reproductive sex=moral is a leftover by product from the fact that Paul couldn’t get laid.** Even if we disagree on this interpretation couldn’t we at least agree that this is something which should have been dealt with several years ago? I’m sure the recently adjudicated ministerial exception rule of the Supreme Court attaches anyway so it’s not really a problem.

This whole debate is also an interesting study in the “framing of a question.” If you ask most Americans if they support religious freedom in light of this law they’ll agree. If you ask most Americans if they want access to contraception they’ll agree to that as well. Despite the contradiction in the two positions on this issue, if the Obama administration wants to win it they should just start asking this latter question and not let the debate be run by the former.

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*That also the Republican House approved and the barely Democrat–not fillibuster proof Senate–sent up: but that’s not important right now.

**Citation needed. Although Paul is responsible for a lot of the church’s teachings on celibacy and the dangers of sex. See: 1 Corinthians 7: 1-2, 8-9, Matthew 19:12. I can quote the bible too.

Another Edition of “What More Do You Need?”

Our previous installments have covered the vaccination “controversy” and the “birther conspiracy” (which is sadly making a comeback because of an idiot’s inability to speak in front of crowds), this edition concerns climate change.

I’ve never been a major skeptic of climate change. I’ll admit that up front so that any conservative readers with no patience can feel free to just hit the comment button right now. The science always seemed to be convincing in the sense that it was certainly happening. How that became controversial is kind of hard for me to understand. Numbers don’t lie, but the accusations that the people compiling the numbers were lying was certainly worth inspection but with no evidence pointing to the existence of a worldwide conspiracy of scientists I never really doubted it.

Yes, Al Gore’s movie is full of errors. For instance, he claims that global warming caused Katrina to be a category five hurricane when it hit New Orleans, when in fact Katrina was only a 3. The flooding had nothing to do with Climate change and more about the rampant corruption in New Orleans regarding the maintenance of the flood levies. However the studies shown in Al Gore’s movie wasn’t really up for debate. There was about as much of a debate about Climate change in the global scientific community as there was about evolution, or gravity. Yet the topic for some reason was politicized, with Conservative congress members calling it junk science, Conservative pundits claiming that some sort of conspiracy must exist because as we all know, in the 70s they thought the world was cooling.

The problem for me was that none of these people were scientists. Rush Limbaugh is not someone I would listen to regarding climatology, Glenn Beck isn’t someone I would listen too ever, and I’m not really sure if O’Reilly ever commented on it (I only watch him when he has a guest I’m interested in…though I hear his Lincoln book is good). When an actual scientist raised questions of bias or flat out fraud in the study I was interested.

Professor Richard Muller of Physics at Berkeley University was that scientist. Concerned over the allegations he sought to disprove climate change through a review of the evidence, in part, by conservative super-contributors the Kochs. The Koch brothers being oil billionaires and supporters of the Republican party, were hoping that a scientist with skeptical concerns about climate change would confirm that nothing they were doing was harming the environment. Republicans even invited him to speak to the committee before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology last Spring.

What they were expecting was not what they got. The scientific method is, according to the philosopher Husserl, the greatest development of the Western world. It’s cold, objective, rational, and most of all its conclusions are irrefutable (excepting for human/mechanical error).

You start off with a hypothesis, an idea that can be—and this is important—tested. Develop a test, perform the test, collect the data, build a theory. Stronger theories are those that have been tested and confirmed multiple times (see evolution or gravity). When someone like Professor Muller, a skeptic, comes around with the theory that the data confirming climate change is skewed, biased, or fraudelent; we have an idea of what is hypothesis was: that the Earth isn’t warming as reported.

Yet his data showed otherwise. So in conclusion I must ask to the skeptics of climate change, how is it that a scientist who was previously a skeptic looked at evidence and drew the same conclusion that other groups have in the past? He even concedes in the Wall Street Journal oped piece that the previous science was done as carefully as his group conducted their research. In other words his experiment aligned itself with all of the other experiments previously done on the subject. If this doesn’t settle it, then please tell me what will.

How To Protest

My extremely fledgling political party last week threw its support behind the Occupy Wall Street protests, but we may have to retract that support if a few of the following demands aren’t met. We will always support the message but the protests aren’t doing anything or going anywhere, and largely this is the failure of the protestors themselves. It’s all related to a criticism that is often leveled at the military. The criticism is that the military is always preparing to fight the last war. For example, Vietnam was such a quagmire because the people in charge thought we were fighting the Korean War, a war with clearly defined battle lines and one in which the winner of the most battles wins the war; Iraq now was planned on being like Desert Storm. See what I mean, each time a failure to understand the proper context of the battle ground and a realization of who the enemy is/was caused a systemic failure of the war’s conduct.

This is only different in that there are no guns. Well there’s some guns, but we’ll get to that in a sec. The protestors are protesting what exactly? I don’t mean why, but against what are they fighting? It’s unclear. Wall Street isn’t where decisions were made, but I guess it’s symbolic. Still though it reeks of ignorance. Every once in a while I’ll get a facebook post where someone decides that they are going to start a boycott of a particular gasoline company, you probably know what I am talking about. The message is that no one should buy gas at a Sunoco/Mobile/BP/Etc. station for a week (or sometimes one day). The thinking is that the station will have to lower it’s prices to get people to buy their gas and then the other stations would have to do so as well and BANG the price of gas will drop. This post (which will get you blocked from my facebook page by the way) ignores several factors: first off, the station manager has very little control over the price of gas. He does exert some flexibility in the way of a dime or so but that’s really it. More importantly, the price of gas isn’t determined by a simple supply and demand economics. The price of oil is based on futures, the price of gas is thus influenced by that and by production. This is, at least the excuse, given when the price of gas shot up a dollar over the Libyan Revolution even though the US doesn’t receive any of its oil from Libya. So protesting the day traders, the grunts of wall street doesn’t make a lot of sense. Don’t protest the barista at Starbucks because of the price of coffee.

Demand 1: Pick a reasonable target and stick to it. By “reasonable” I mean pick something that is going to change. These 1% people aren’t going to turn over their money because you want it. For instance the surtax on the wealthy in New York is going to expire soon, so you NYC protestors ought to start raising a stink about that. Remember little victories give your movement not only morale but also legitimacy.

You have a problem that is a lot larger than just your protest as well. One enemy that you have is the conservative media. Yes, I know they are hypocrites for supporting the TEA party who allegedly* believed the exact same thing as you, but that’s not going to change. Yes, they are hypocrites–agreed? Let’s move on. The problem with them and with every movement is that change is difficult. There is nothing more troublesome than to refine an already established machine. As people fight hardest when they think they are going to lose what they have. In order to do this, weapons will be deployed and one of the most important ones your opponents have the media.

I know, the media has largely been able to convince the rest of the country that there is some liberal agenda that controls the news. It’s however, a lie. Conservative radio dominates AM, Fox News is the number one cable news station by a wide margin. One thing they don’t like is you. Understanding this is greatly important because they will use every misspelled sign, every arrest, every act of vandalism, to discredit the protest. Yes, they’ve ignored those very things in the TEA party but we already covered the hypocrisy, and yes, if you brought a gun they would scream terrorism even though they kept their mouth shut when their group did it. We already covered that.

Not to say that the liberal media, or the objective media is helping either. While they seem to be largely sympathetic to you, they are inadvertently hurting by describing the “air of friendliness” and “how everyone is being so nice” etc. It gives your protest the sense that it is a party. This needs to stop for the previous two reasons.

Demand 2: Put down the fucking drums and get angry!

People need to understand that you aren’t a bunch of rich college kids on vacation. You have a purpose and a message. Figure that out and get going. Furthermore, start organizing. Take the only good lesson we can get from fascism: organization is key. Go through your protest and start controlling who talks to the press, take down every misspelled sign, and every sign with vulgarities on them.

You don’t have to manicure someone to talk to a news reporter just use simple common sense. Ask yourself, is this person likely to be taken seriously? If that sort of hypothetical is too complicated in such a large group use simple formulae. I’ll give you a couple: dred locks=no talk, hemp clothing=no talk, more than three patches on a jacket=no talk. It’s easy. No I understand that this might be offensive to ideas of self-expression and it is. But needs must when the devil arrives and if you want to be taken seriously as to your message you have to eliminate the needless trivialities that the idiot general public likes to focus on.

Continuing on that idea. Remember the police officer telling you to do something is doing his job just the same as the barista telling you you can’t use the bathroom without a purchase. Most cops are decent people following the law, and if, say, a bunch of cops are telling you not to walk on the brooklyn bridge because of traffic issues, listen to them. Remember what I just said, every arrest makes you look bad. Yes, you have a right to peaceful assembly but not to forestall traffic or destroy property. The cops aren’t being fascists when they arrest you for doing that: they’re being police officers. Sure they may have orders to start enforcing every small pointless law in order to disrupt the protest, but the person doing the actual arresting isn’t in charge. Be polite, and follow their orders. As long as they aren’t themselves violating the law you can both co exist quite nicely. Most of you won’t listen to that, you have a preconceived notion of us vs. them and the police are them. It’s not the case though, they are in the 99% and given the fact that the GOP has decided to demonize public employees they probably have more sympathy then you realize.

Demand 3: Don’t break the law.

Finally, if you find a hostile reporter or counter protest or whatever…just ignore them. I know it might be hard to not want to get on television with today’s celebrity obsessed media but seriously if your words are just going to be twisted don’t talk to them. Pull an Anthony Weiner (not like that), and roll your eyes when they try and push an obvious false dilemma on you or force you to admit a straw man. The counter protestors, just let them be. If they want to brag about how shitty their lives are but they don’t blame wall street, fine. Whatever, you aren’t going to convince them anyway. Accept it, because they are still in the 99% anyway. You aren’t going to convince them of anything.

Demand 4: Control communications.

It’s the best thing you can do. Image is everything when you already have substance. Find well spoken individuals and make them your press liasons. You might also want to start petitions, written petitions (the ones that mean something), for new laws or whatever you want.

Good luck.

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*I say “allegedly” because I completely doubt it. Their big rally before the last election gave audience to the “birther” movement basically legitimizing it. The TEA Party is anti-Obama, not anything else.

We Support the Rest of US

The Founder’s Party supports the 99% protests in NY, Boston, LA, Philadelphia, and everywhere else the protest decides to crop up. The reason: The Founder’s Party is realistic. We understand that if you are reading this entry you are in the 99%, and more importantly you are most likely going to stay there. Not be down or pessimistic, but practically speaking you aren’t going to strike it big and the best the average American is going to do is live and die in the same economic strata they were born into. The Founder’s Party is admittedly self interested, and if a group aligns itself with our self interest we will support that. To do otherwise is foolishness.

The Founder’s Party believes in Adam Smith’s theory of Capitalism, that progressive taxes are necessary for the maintenance of the population’s ability to be educated and the general goodwill of our Republic. We also believe that if a company does business in this country it ought to pay taxes in this country no matter where it’s banks may be located. We follow the principle of Machiavelli in keeping the public rich but the private individual to poor to buy government. Under our government we will not permit individuals to become a Medici, Hearst, or Rockefeller; wielding the type of power that places them beyond the reach of the law.

The Founder’s Party opposes tax shelters. It also opposes tax subsidies for successful businesses instead believing that government money should be spent on research and propping up new emergent businesses. We understand history, that such revolutionary ideas like the internet wouldn’t have occurred without the infrastructure built with the aid of the federal government. Sure the market is great for developments within industry but new industries aren’t founded on their own. They need help, and the Founder’s Party is willing to take a gamble on new industries.

We aren’t Socialists, but we do believe in Socializing some aspects of society. The challenge we offer to those 1%, is that if you are so patriotic why don’t you help the rest of the country out? While we are non-religious we do support the Christian principle of helping the poor, something that seems even religiously Christian politics seems to be opposed to.

These are strictly superficial economic policies. Until the Founder’s Party gets an economist, or I start reading some economic books, I can’t be more specific. Also, until we learn of some hidden agenda in the “Occupy” Protests we support them but offer this piece of advice: That a crowd is useless without a head, for without a leader there is no one that can speak for you. Someone for whom questions and answers can be directed. More importantly, if you become successful who will negotiate? A multitude needs a leader as much as a body needs a head.

Reward

Remember when people were all fired up about the Michelle Bachman candidacy for president? What happened to that? Nothing really changed, none of her policies have shifted and she’s still just as insane as she was then. Now she’s relegated to the position of “also ran” as the GOP has basically dropped her into a spot where she has about as much of a chance of winning the nomination as Ron Paul does. Which, for me, is bitter sweet.

On the one hand I feel that she’s about as dangerous a person to put in the White House as it gets. Mainly because unlike Mitt Romney and some of the other people I see stumping their absurd theories, it seems to me that Bachman actually believes the bullshit she talks about. The re-education camps,  the shopping mall abortions, FEMA’s power to take away the consitutional rights of Americans, the gay-muslim-atheist agenda (I’m still waiting for my membership card but it’s just not coming)…etc. All of this was not only palatable to GOP voters but appealed to them, for whatever reason. She was representative of the ultimate contradiction in the right wing today, the one that wants government to push a Christian conservative agenda but at the same time wants less government. None of this mattered.

Until Rick Perry decided he was going to run. A person who is not possessed of any real difference from Michelle Bachman but has somehow overtaken her spot, despite the fact that she won the pointless straw poll. Which as a side note is a complete farce, as no one is considering the chance of the person who was in second place at all. Rick Perry’s tipping point seems to be that possesses that quality of “being a man from Texas” that Bachman does not. Since he announced, it seems that the only reason he is the front runner is because we’ve been told he’s the front runner. I’m not certain why people like him, but he does have that quality of insanity that seems to be popular in the GOP right now.*

Calling social security a “ponzi scheme” isn’t exactly inaccurate (today anyway, fifty years ago it wouldn’t have been true at all)
but it doesn’t mean you should say it, especially given the amount of voters currently receiving social security, or should I say that the largest voting demographic receives social security.

That however wasn’t the craziest thing said at the debate. That honor belongs to Michelle Bachman, reminding us just how important the “fun” is in “fundamentalist.” Bachman’s appeal must have always been the crazy things she says with little to no attribution. The night of the debate was no different and as usual she took things from a reasonably sane (although I disagree with her, but more on that later) to the edges of insanity…the far edge.

She was chiding Rick Perry for his program of mandatory HPV vaccinations as being another example of government run amok. That’s the reasonable position, it’s wrong, but it’s reasonable. A vaccination to prevent a disease that possesses a high tendency of causing cervical cancer seems like a good idea. I don’t know why anyone, especially a woman, would be against an issue that is a pretty central issue for women’s health…no wait, I do. It’s because HPV is a sexually transmitted disease, and her Christian fundamentalist outlook has to fetishize abstinence and procreation only sex. The good way to tell the difference is that she hasn’t come out against any other vaccinations, not even the eleven mandatory vaccines (most of them require multiple boosters) that her home state requires of all children that are planning on attending school. The Minnesota government even subsidizes the cost of the vaccine for low income people.

Then Bachman decided to take the fast train into crazy town offering that some woman claimed that her daughter became retarded after being given the vaccine. Of course, she can’t produce the person or anyone that will verify her claim. No scientist, medical researcher, or doctor will verify her claim. They won’t even concede the possibility. There has even been an offer of eleven thousand dollars for evidence that this actually happened. I’m sure if they applied the James Randi Foundation would probably pony up some dollars as well.

It’s too bad really, because even though I feared her presidency, I loved her candidacy. It pretty much guaranteed re-election.
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*When a candidate makes a statement that consists of him communicating the idea that he believes in “evolution” and that is considered controversial, you are in crazy town.

The Third Party

Author/Columnist Thomas Friedman said on CNN Sunday that what America needs is a legitimate third party that exists in every state in order to make the world flatter or whatever (I’m trying to make a pun on his books but its not going well, that terrible one you just read was my THIRD attempt so just bear with me). In short because of the complete gridlock that the GOP and the Democrats are going to continually get themselves into, a third party would break up the system giving Americans a choice between the party that says no to everything the other one does, for example in a week or so we are going to hear about a new debate. The president has the desire to extend a payroll tax cut that is set to expire and the GOP is prepared to oppose it.

That’s right the GOP is going to be in favor of raising a tax just because the president wants to continue the cut. It’s a complete reversal of the GOP’s normal position, although it is consistent with their doing-it-out-of-spite childishness behaviour of the last three years. I would say it’s a reversal of Democratic positions too, but they seem to be just fine with cutting taxes based on their voting (caving) record in same amount of time.

I kind of agree with Mr. Friedman, so I am proposing to start my own third party. Bill Maher joked that it seemed like we can never have a party that has both brains and balls, my party will be that party. I need a name for it, and “Davidians” just conjures up the wrong image. I like “Rationalist” but that’s too pretentious, or “Revolutionary” but that is too close to “Communist” and believe me we’ll have our problems with that enough. The name will have to something like “The Founders Party.” It brings up ideas of the Founding Fathers but also appeals to the sense of reason and rationality that most of them based this Republic on. It works on a marketing level that sucks in those who don’t think too much, along with the curious, and the skeptical. Our symbol will be a shark, because it must move lest it die and is incapable of moving backwards.

The first thing that we need is a platform issue. A one button issue that idiots will align themselves with ignoring the rest of our platform that they will probably disagree with and in their minds would actually be suicidal to vote for: like a teacher’s union voting Republican because they want lower taxes. The thing about the Founders Party is that we are going to steal all of the good ideas from both parties and weed out the stupid ones with a scythe. Plus the constitution of the Founders Party is going to have amendment one being: no contradictory policies. We are going to be idealists on this one point. Unlike say, the Democrats, who seem to be liberal when it comes to social issues like drugs for the reason that as long as it hurts no one it should be permitted but then want to ban all guns because of the possibility that someone might hurt another. Or similarly with right wing conservatives who want government to stay out of their lives but at the same time want the government to control who can marry who.

The initial platform issue is going to be personal liberty. And we’re stealing both issues just mentioned. The Founders are going to be against gun control (within reason: for instance convicted felons and mental patients aren’t going to be allowed) and for marriage liberality/drug legalization. We take the NRA sponsored GOP supported gun position, the limousine liberal line on marriage, and the Ron Paul Republican drug position. This way we have rural conservative support, hollywood/NYC elite support, and drug support. Although the latter can’t truly be counted upon because getting potheads to get up and do something with their day, even voting for the legalization of their “non-addictive” drug seemed to be too much for them in California last year. Is it pandering? Of course it is, but this party is going to be honest about its pandering. In fact our policy positions are going to be classified in two tiers: the pandering sound bite positions and serious policy.

Not to say that the pandering positions aren’t going to be held by the party but that there are some positions that you can just take and not be at all serious about it. For instance if someone is going to seriously propose a ban on guns they would have to propose a ratification of an amendment to the Constitution repealing the second amendment. It’s easy to take the position because all in all, it’ll never happen. More serious legislation, the ones that actually have a chance–those are what the party is going to go for.

I’m reluctant to give broad definitions on politics since I’m at heart a pragmatist, but some idealism has to guide pragmatism. So here are some issues that we are going to take:

I) End the US dependence on fossil fuels.
        -It’s not that original I know, but our reasoning is. See one of the problems with the debate on climate change is that it’s been ruined by morons for so long. I mean morons on both sides. One side tried to make everyone feel bad for ruining the environment while the merely put their hands over their ears and pretended like a debate existed over responsibility. Both of these sides are wrong. Our position is to end our dependence on fossil fuels because it puts the country in a position where we are depending on foreign countries for those fossil fuels. This makes the country weak, and as a matter of national defense and security we should be driving toward self-reliance. If OPEC decided to entirely cut off our oil supply, we’d be screwed. One little civil war in Libya, a country we don’t even derive oil from, and the price here shot up almost a dollar in a day. If our energy consumption ran off of sources that this country produced our military engagements would decrease, our expenditures would decrease as well, and our internal economy would increase. There are many different ways to accomplish this and I have a list, but this is a general overview.

II) Treaty review: It’s time that the US looks at the treaties that it has signed and seriously consider whether or not they can be dissolved. For instance the US has a huge military base in Germany. I understand why it was set up, and I understand why part of it still needs to be there, but I seriously doubt that the German military couldn’t defend itself. They are the most powerful economy in Europe with a top tier military itself. The 80s called, they want their existential threat back.

III) The drug thing. Legalize and tax. Fold the ATF and the DEA back into the IRS as tax enforcers. Possession will no longer be treated as a crime, but intent to sell without a tax license will result in hefty fines as well as possible jail time. We’ll probably keep the current definitions of “intent to sell” and “trafficking.” This will cut expenditures by the federal government as well as generate revenue. If the taxes are too high and people quit, then we did some good too.

Those are but three positions of the Founders Party. I’m working on many more as current politics will no doubt lead to the frustration that warrants more positions.

The Law of Non-Contradiction…

…is never applied by conspiracy theorists. It can’t be because like Okham’s Razor, the Falsifiability principle, or Russel’s Teapot (I just learned that one as well), if it were applied it would spell doom for the whole theory. Faithful readers are aware of my ongoing “debate” with a conspiracy theorist via email. The appeal of the “debate” was that this person was someone I knew in real life so I figured that it would not degenerate into name calling and insults that it normally does. As Tywin Lannister remarked, “most men would rather deny a hard truth than face it,” which is what usually results in the yelling and insulting. Ad Hominem is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

We went from a quick “debate” about Israel, Iran and impending war; to his insistence that the tragedy in Norway was some kind of coverup or plot or something. I feel like I’m failing as a writer not being able to describe accurately what he was saying, but the difficulty is real. The emails that I receive are rambling messes that seem to be unable to stay on topic. I have no idea what Iran has to do with Norway, as the emails jump around linking random facts and historical events to countries and people that if placed in a set that set could only be labelled “potpourri.”

Then we had the shooting down of Chinook helicopter in Afghanistan last friday causing the death of 30 people at least 25 of whom were Navy SEALs. I saw the news reports and thought that it some Talibani (is that right? I’m not trying to be insulting) really got lucky. The report was simple: there was a firefight in which Army Rangers were surrounded and called for help. The help arrived in the form of the SEALs, who apparently worked with these Rangers from time to time. The danger averted, the sailors loaded into the chopper as it was taking off it was shot down with an RPG. Not one point of this seemed suspicious to me, it was out of the ordinary that so many American military troops had died in one event (it was apparently the record for the entire ten year engagement). But that a helicopter was shot down? Not so much.

So here’s the theory that the conspiracy theorist came up with, immediately. By immediately, I mean that the event happened and the next day I got an email touting it as evidence of the conspiracy. The reasoning was that the SEALs are the same force that killed Bin Laden, so the CIA had to cover it up. Now, mind you, the official report was that while this was a group of SEALs this was not Team 6, the ones that actually got Bin Laden. What exactly is the cover up?

Well, I’m not sure. Since every Conspiracy is like a snowflake, superficially similar but never exact I had to press asking that very question. Now this person, “Nick,” never believed in a couple of things: the first was that Muslim Terrorists conducted the attacks on 9/11 nor did the US ever get Bin Laden. Both things were faked but in different scale. 9/11 happened but it was an inside job in which Bin Laden was framed. The second just never happened. Bin Laden was never killed.

Regarding the latter, I’m still unclear as to whether or not Bin Laden ever existed in the capacity that he is famous for, according to this particular conspiracy. If you’re paying attention you’ve probably already figured out why this post is titled the way it is.

If Osama Bin Laden is not responsible for 9/11 (P), and he was never killed by SEAL Team 6 (Q); then what purpose does the the killing of the 30 people in the Chinook (R) actually serve? What’s nice about that is we can actually logically symbolize it as:

P & Q –> R

Together P and Q actually contradict any reasoning for R. If we are understanding the theory correctly the SEALs were killed to cover up an even that never happened. Despite all reason. Practically, since the names of the SEALs who raided Pakistan and got Bin Laden wouldn’t be easier to cover it up by just repeated the word “classified?” Why go to the trouble of killing a bunch of elite soldiers when you could simply say, “no it wasn’t them, it was someone else” where the someone else doesn’t actually exist? That’s the beauty of my brand of cover up: it insures against no leaks because the only people that could leak it don’t exist. Kobayashi once said, that one cannot be betrayed if one has no people.

No it’s much easier his way, involving the wanton killing of the very type of people the conspiracists say carry out the assassinations and black ops to cover up a non-existent event. THat’s the real contradiction, you don’t have to cover up something that never happened. 

Drowning

Gorver Norquist is on record as saying that he wants to shrink the size of the government to the point where he can “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Is this really the way an American Patriot thinks? I know that I’m not exactly sympathetic to their cause but this is the speech of anarchy, not of politics. The only valid difference between the Norquist idea and what the anarchists want is in method. The anarchists would do it by any means necessary, while those following Norquist’s idea plan on doing it by just eliminating the money going into the government.

Still the end goal is the same. No government. The thing about no government is that it wants what Somalia has, but somehow with the idea that thing will work out differently. Why would they? Because we’re more civilized than they are? I doubt it, people are people and unfortunately Hobbes was right. The general population cannot be trusted to take care of one another, I don’t care how religious they think they are (in fact a great deal of the problems are going to be because of religion not despite it).

The position that they won’t no government but still somehow identify themselves as being American really boggles my mind. Sure I’ll grant that the Federal government spends too much on some things and that there are definitely some cuts to be made but in shrinking down the government to the size that it can be killed? That’s what makes a GOP American now.

It seems to me that someone in the GOP ought to begin the schism that seems so necessary right now. Instead of showing movie clips from “The Town” about hurting people maybe they ought to show some documentary about what happens when extreme ideology trumps rationality. I admire their ability to take a stand, truly I do. Willing to risk the credit rating of the entire country to prove a point? That’s as admirable as someone willing to strap on a bomb in order to blow up a bus. It takes courage, but then you have to point out that at some point you are no longer an American. You are a partisan.

When you would rather do what makes you right than what is right you’ve placed your party above your country. This shouldn’t have ever been a debate, or a deal. Considering that the ceiling has been raised every time it has been asked to, without a problem, that it would happen this time just reveals that one side is either being held hostage by their extremists or is in bed with them. What’s the goal here? To cripple the economy so that you can get an ideologue into office? I don’t know why the GOP panders to the Tea Party Extremists since it’s not like they are going to vote for Obama anyway.

I remember a time, not too long ago, when just questioning the president was considered to be anti-American by the GOP, but now apparently you can actively sign a pledge saying that you will destroy the US Government economically and that is somehow pro-America? It’s what is called a cognitive disconnect.

Manifesto

I’m hesitant to discuss Oslo more than I have already did, but since this is the free world and the press has decided to run with this based on their political slant I’m feeling like it’s a good time to do so.

First off let’s go with Glenn Beck, “‎“And then there was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler youth or whatever. I mean, who does a camp for kids that’s all about politics? Disturbing.”

I don’t know Glenn, who does a summer camp for kids that’s all about politics? You do, you sponsor one. Not to mention the numerous religious camps that exist throughout this nation (I just linked one, but I think 14 million results in a google search of “Christian Summer Camp” says enough). I guess these get to fall off his radar since they are Christian camps that align with his beliefs and a political camp that he helped create. Obviously he misspoke, that must be the case because he surely wouldn’t be comparing the victims of a massacre to being the members of the Hitler youth for being at the summer camp. That would be cold and purely inflammatory as well as not being based on any sort of rational measure. It’s also not like anyone is leaping to his defense.

I suppose that maybe he said it because for once, the person committing the deed was one of them. And you know what? Let’s not pretend otherwise. I want to be clear not everyone on the right wing of politics is a potential shooter waiting to happen. I have friends that are Republicans, Conservatives, and Conservative Christians; and I’m not lumping them in with the nutcase. But, sorry people, you have to eat this one.

Here’s why: everytime Jeanene Garofolo (or however you spell her name) explains to her audience that every person that disagrees with Obama is a racist, I have to take that. Everytime some dipshit atheist group sues to get “Christmas” removed from a school’s “winter festival” sign, i have to take it. Every time I talk about freedom of religion, or freedom of non-religion, I get called a “non-American” and someone who hates freedom and is seeking to destroy this country from within. So guess what? It’s time for you people to get lumped with the same kind of nut jobs that I get lumped in with.

What separates him from the great majority of you is that he really believed his own bullshit, delving deeper and deeper into a world of conspiracy and imagined persecution. But he’s been saying some of the same things that the right wing punditry has been saying for years: that multi-culturalism is destroying Europe,* that there’s an Islamo-fascist conspiracy, that Christians were being persecuted in the modern day, Marxism is going to ruin the world, and that Global warming is a hoax. What’s all of that, about the first hour of a typical Rush Limbaugh radio show? Not to mention his views on feminism. And these are just the parts I’ve read that weren’t copied from the Unabomber’s Manifesto (I swear I’m going to finish that someday).

If Benjamin Wiker gets to make the claim that Stalin’s crimes were committed because he was an atheist and get away with it; then this self proclaimed knight of the Temple (what the “templar” portion of the Knights Templar means) gets lumped in with the Christians. He’s a lunatic, and probably a psychopath but this one is yours distance yourself correctly, just as I have to do with Noam Chomsky.**

P.S. Also I don’t know how the insanity plea works in Norway, but this guy couldn’t get it in the US. He shows way too much planning and forethought to not understand either what he was doing or the consequences of his actions, in fact he clearly intended those consequences in order to wake Europe up against the islamo-marxist agenda.

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*Which is really odd because the culture of Norway is vastly different from that of say, Greece or France or Spain. But somehow the multi-cultural European continent has been getting along just fine. 

**Although he did have a good riff on the “journal of 9/11 studies”:  “There are submissions to the Journal of 9/11 Studies, but that’s about as convincing as submissions to the Journal of Intelligent Design Studies.”

Difficult

It gets harder to write a certain amount of posts every week. I used to try for four, but now I hope for three. The trouble is that with school I’m kind of sapped, it requires so much of my brain that when I sit down to try and write non-school stuff I have nothing. My real worry is that I will keep this blog only for doing the twilight thing, but I don’t want that. I suspect that some of you out there might not want that either. I’ll keep doing it.

I’m worried that I will become repetitious ranting my anti-conspiracist critical eye on the same things over and over again. Although that is kind of fun so I’ll probably do that until it becomes rote…even for me. Then came the thing in Oslo.

Now I had previously been arguing with a former classmate of mine regarding the possibility of a future war between Iran and the US based on a tenuous grasp of things that we in the philosophy and scientific disciplines call “facts” and “evidence.” My mistake was that I was demanding those two things and getting in return nothing more than coincidence and innuendo. I was told straight up by this person that he was forgetting that he was talking to a person incapable of reading between the lines (me). My expectation was that eventually the conversation would degenerate into this but later. The estimation was that since we were classmates and co-workers for a number of years that would prevent our disagreement from seeming personal. What I failed to realize is that I was basically asking for proof of this person’s worldview, and then not finding it telling him that the worldview isn’t true.

In a way it’s alot like arguing politics or religion. In those two cases one person’s beliefs are represented as being a truth. Yet in politics, even American politics, disagreements can happen between people who don’t agree without it getting personal. That’s because a political or religious argument is focused on those two things. I may disagree with my liberal friends on gun control but we are still friends. I may disagree with my Republican friends about this debt limit fiasco but we’re still friends. Yet so quickly was the conspirator calling me an idiot that I was taken aback.

Typically when this happens I like to take a breath and give it a couple of minutes then go back to the typing. This time I had to leave it for a day. Then I typed out my response, the first thing I did was remind him of Einstein’s maxim that if you can’t explain something simply you don’t understand it enough. Was it my fault that I couldn’t see the conspiracy? No, if he clearly saw it then he should explain it. Secondly I reminded him that burden of proof is on the proposing party. It’s not up to me to prove there isn’t a conspiracy it’s up to him to prove its existence. Thirdly, I closed with Karl Popper’s falsifiability test, what would it take for him to believe that there wasn’t a conspiracy?

I should back up a second and explain that we were arguing over whether or not this thing in Oslo was a conspiracy. Yes, a day after the massacre on the island, he sent me an email telling me that this was the first strike. Odd, because if these people are right it’s not even close to being the first strike. Words like “Illuminati” “false flag” and all of the usual suspects came up. A simple car bomb couldn’t do that to a building even though the suspect was said to have purchased six metric tons of fertilizer, and even though we can look at two examples on American soil that were the exact same thing, rental truck loaded with a deisel ammonium nitrate mix coupled with religious extremists and it is literally the same thing.

I tried my best to talk it out of him. However facts have no place in a debate of this kind. Then the suspect’s manifesto was found on the internet and he calls himself the “Knights Templar 2083.” Forehead, meet palm. I was so pissed off. It just had to be the Templars didn’t it? I spent a four paragraph email trying to explain that the Illuminati didn’t spin off from the Templars, and that in any case they were all gone. He replied that this was proof that they weren’t but 2083 had to mean something.

No, it doesn’t. One religious fanatic wants to identify himself with a holy war, it’s not like we haven’t seen that before. Maybe this guy had a second shooter, or some help; it’s certainly possible. Some survivors seem to recall a second person shooting, but why would the invisible hand that guides history do this? Not that it’s out of the moral scope of the mythology that the conspiracists have built, but what’s the goal? He called it a false flag, but that won’t work unless Norway really really wanted to go to war with itself.

It’s not new though. Alot of the times people make up these intricate webs because they don’t want to believe the truth. They don’t want to believe that one man with a gun and motivation can kill 92 people, or a president. Sadly it’s the case. I feel for the Norwegians, I hope they get justice somehow. The real danger of these theories is that for Norway the conspiracists believe that justice isn’t possible. It can’t be, because that invisible hand cannot be shackled.