Abandon Mythology

From this CNN story, a new study found that:

…on average, people who identified as liberal and atheist had higher IQs.

So now, if I call someone claiming to be anti-big gummint and pro-military expansion an ignorant shit-kicker, I’ll have statistics to back me up. Check it:

Participants who said they were atheists had an average IQ of 103 in adolescence, while adults who said they were religious averaged 97

And:

The study found that young adults who said they were “very conservative” had an average adolescent IQ of 95, whereas those who said they were “very liberal” averaged 106.

For those of you keeping score at home, that’s 6 points for atheism and 11 for liberalism. So theoretically I’m up 17 points and feeling smug going in to a debate with the average yahoo I feel compelled to overtly disagree with. Trouble is, lately I’m finding myself arguing with people who not only believe up is down, they feel ardently that we must keep it so in order to protect our country from communism and/or Sharia Law. My 17 point advantage won’t even remove the glaze from the eyes of a Teabagger.

The “Tea Party” is a year old now and fancies itself a force to be reckoned with. Maybe so, but I sure can’t see it. In IQ studies like the one I linked to above, most Teabagger’s scores would be referred to as “outliers.” Their whole “movement” — anti-government screeching built around the ludicrous libertarian fantasy that a government can exist without taxation, a country can exist without a government — seems destined to die of stupidity.

Apropos of nothing, the study also found that liberal, atheist men are less likely to cheat on their wives. I think that is probably more a side effect of liberal men being married to liberal women. Analysis of data from studies I conducted many years ago suggests liberal women are better in the sack. So we’ve got that going for us too.

Throughout the nine days since Michelle’s husband began getting his Surge^® on in Afghanistan, I’ve been bouncing around the intertoobz reading everything I could find about the operation. The problem is there’s just not much to find because one of dubya’s restrictions on freedom of the press is still in effect. Only journalists embedded with coalition military units are allowed in the Marja area while the offensive is under way. It would appear that this commander-in-chief likes to control the message as much as his predecessor.

From all the accounts I have been able to read, we appear to be implementing a simple three-step plan: Step one is to seize and hold portions of Afghanistan that have never in history been under the control of any central government, and place these areas under the control of Afghanistan’s weak and largely corrupt central government.

No problem. Alexander the Great and the Greeks couldn’t pull it off, nor could the British Empire or the former Soviet Union, but I’m sure it’ll be different this time. (’Cause we’re Amurkins goddammit!)

Step two is to help the Afghani people begin to “rebuild” a country that was never “built” in the first place. Check out this photo I stole from this New York Times story.

In addition to the complete lack of greenery that always catches my eye, I can’t help noticing that in Marja, a “city” of some 75,000 inhabitants, a meeting between village elders and US Marine commanders is held sitting in a dirt street.

Only about 7% of Afghanistan’s population has access to electricity, with most of those being concentrated in the capital, Kabul. The vast majority of Afghanis live in mud huts and shit in holes in the ground. By my estimate, it would take a zillion billion trillion dollars to even begin “rebuilding” a country for a people who would almost certainly remain far too poor to maintain what we built.

Which brings me to step three; Cut off funding to the Taliban by getting these dirt, dirt poor Afghani farmers to stop growing opium poppies, the only crop that brings any profit into their otherwise dismal existence. This is beyond stupid. The only way to pull it off is to hand out cash by the bucket loads, and as soon as we stop doing so the Afghanis will go right back to doing what is necessary to survive, just as they have for centuries. Just as all humans do.

Meanwhile the Taliban are doing what guerilla fighters do. Sporadic, hit and run attacks aimed not so much at inflicting serious damage, but more as a constant reminder to our troops and the civilian population that the victories we garner now blowing up mud houses with $100,000 missiles are ultimately unsatisfactory and temporary. It is a foregone conclusion that the Taliban will still be there when we leave.

I am reminded of an old saying; If all you have is a hammer, all the world’s a nail. The very ability to impose our will on other nations has an effect on our decision to do so. Michelle’s husband appears to have fallen into the same trap as all his modern predecessors. Wielding the reins of a superpower renders one unable to look at the rest of the world in non-coercive terms, leading to conflations of naked aggression with “defense” and US economic stability (superiority) with peace.

Until we get a government that is willing to start the conversation about scaling back the empire, it will be ever thus.

That’s so true. But it won’t stop me from adding a few of my own anyway.  I stole this from somewhere while bopping around the intertoobz one day. It really does sum up for me the level to which our national discourse has sunk. Sigh.

An old friend I hadn’t seen in two decades came to visit and we spent an afternoon catching up. We talked about all sorts of things past, present and future, and eventually our conversation circled around to politics.

It is a topic I often avoid in everyday conversation because most of my friends, co-workers and neighbors are conservative and I’ve just grown weary of arguing with them. Nothing saps my energy more than an argument with a friend.

So I was pleasantly surprised — particularly since he lives in an even redder part of red-state Misery than I — to learn my old friend is every bit as liberal as myself, if not more so. I was very nearly giddy when, for several minutes, we were practically completing each other’s sentences as we discussed the problems with modern conservatism.

One of the many subjects we touched on during our impromptu progressive summit conference was the bizarre ability of conservatives to believe the most outlandish lies about our preznit, and liberals in general, regardless of any contradictory facts.

My friend blamed the echo chamber of the right-wing noise-machine, and while I agree that it is certainly the source of most disinformation, the existence of this network of liars does not explain the willingness — eagerness even — of it’s target audience to unquestioningly accept falsity as truth.

It is an infliction that George Orwell returned to again and again in his writings. He called it nationalism:

I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By “patriotism” I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseperable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

Sounds a lot like American neo-conservative ideology, doesn’t it? It is a point I can’t make often enough. Flag waving and screeching about the world’s only superpower’s need to “protect” itself does not make you a patriot. Genuine patriotism does not require enemies. Full stop.

I’ve wandered off track again. I was talking about why people choose to believe bullshit. More Orwell:

The most intelligent people seem capable of holding schizophrenic beliefs, or disregarding plain facts, of evading serious questions with debating-society repartees, or swallowing baseless rumours and of looking on indifferently while history is falsified. All these mental vices spring ultimately from the nationalistic habit of mind, which is itself, I suppose, the product of fear and of the ghastly emptiness of machine civilization….

I love that phrase. It seems impossible to me that any thinking person could reach middle age in America without acquiring a visceral understanding of what Orwell means by ”the ghastly emptiness of machine civilization.” He follows with a bit of optimism that frankly I don’t share.

I believe that it is possible to be more objective than most of us are, but that it involves a moral effort. One cannot get away from one’s own subjective feelings, but at least one can know what they are and make allowance for them.

One can do that only if one is honest about one’s own ignorance, is in fact willing to accept the possibility that one could be wrong in one’s beliefs. That is an acceptance beyond the ken of your average Misery redneck listening to Rush Limbaugh for three hours a day.

Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right.

Still, none of this gets to the why of it all. I blame religion. (That is, after all, what I do here. I originally started this site with some form of evangelical atheism in mind, but quickly found I didn’t have the energy to fight those battles.) I see two things in particular shared by religion and conservatism; contrived persecution and anthropocentrism.

They both thrive on persecution to the point where they often create their own. Witness the persistent howling from the eighty-some percent Christian majority in the US that their religion is being oppressed or the right-wing paranoia that Michelle’s husband plans to take away their guns and put conservatives in re-education camps. It is as if they feel most alive when threatened. A religion without conflict is dying. So too with a political ideology.

Religion provides the human exceptionalism necessary for a belief in eternal life based solely on a longing for it to be true. But the concept of believing anything simply because you want it to be true is a slippery slope. If you already believe the world revolves around you — was, in fact, created for you — the greed and selfishness of modern conservatism become mere extensions of those beliefs.

From there, you can be led to believe all manner of stupid shit. Things like intelligence is dangerous because to be educated is to be elitist, or cutting taxes increases government revenue, or your preznit is a closet Muslim who plans to implement Sharia Law any minute now, or health insurance for every citizen spells destruction for your country, or … well, you get my drift.

From my vantage point, religion and conservatism carry the same definition: A toxic stew of ridiculous nonsense designed to render reality debatable.

For two days my comments section has been under sustained attack by a low-down, dirty Czechoslovakian spam-bot. At least I assume it’s Czechoslovakian. When I inadvertently clicked on one of the links in one of the hundreds of spam comments I’ve received, the four naked girls I saw there were advertised as being from the Czech Republic. Lena, Marina, Sveta and Viktoria. Oh my.

Apparently this thing figured out a way around my resident spam killer, so I had to find another. It has since been installed and has been terminating link-spam at a rate of 10-12 per hour since last evening, with a 100% success rate thus far. We’ve turned the corner in the War on Terra naked Czechoslovakian girls with vowels at the end of their names. {/darth cheney}

While I was searching the intertoobz for a new spamulator, I somehow stumbled onto this blog, written by a take-no-shit Texas feminist with about as much respect for religion as I have. In one post she referred to jeebus as “the ghost of a dead Nazarene on a stick.” That’s so good it makes me want to steal it. I contemplated popping into her comments section to tell her so, but I chickened out. She and her readers have a very low tolerance for the penis-burdened and their opinions. I’m still trying to work up the courage to put her in my favorites list.

Michelle’s husband has been in office for over a year, so as far as I’m concerned, he’s fair game. I’m still a little hesitant to take my shots at him because he’s been getting pummeled from every direction for months now, but deservedly so.

This man campaigned brilliantly and eloquently, energizing millions of young people and motivating liberals of every stripe with his message of changing the way Washington works. That message, along with the fact that his nitwit predecessor presided over the destruction of our economy, our international reputation and our constitution, got him elected preznit.

But a year later, he still hasn’t shown up for work. In spite of all the screeching from the right-wing noise machine about socialism and communism and liberalism and Marxism and every other “ism” they can throw at him, he hasn’t really done anything leftist.

He has, in fact, been infinitely and oh so frustratingly patient, deliberate and cautious in the face of this constant barrage of nonsense and lies. His supporters on the left have been lulled to sleep by pragmatism, bipartisanship and compromise and they are not likely to wake up unless the preznit decides to man up.

Health care reform, the one liberal social issue that Michelle’s husband purportedly supported, was handed over to the Democrats in Congress, who jawboned it for most of a year, butchering it along the way, yet were still incapable of passing even the severely weakened legislation. Talk about getting your ass handed to you.

And while it is deplorable that the richest nation on earth does not provide universal health coverage to it’s citizenry, despite spending 3 to 4 times what all the other civilized nations do on health care, what I find truly despicable is that the politicians who stood in the way of this legislation will be able to sell it as a victory for the American people.

When the economy picks up this summer, as it inevitably will given the cyclical nature of our economic system, the right-wing will take credit for it, claiming it to be a result of their defeat of health care reform. And our preznit will let them get away with it.

I’ve been having trouble writing, and for once it’s not due to a lack of effort. The problem is, lately, when I sit down to blog — which I still do frequently, despite the lack of published posts — I write these long, rambling pieces that start with one subject, end with another completely unrelated subject, and travel everywhere (and nowhere) in between.

When I first started this site, I labeled my efforts here rhetorical masturbation and the metaphor is now even more appropriate. Like masturbation, blogging is not as much fun if you can’t finish.

My current wordy period and my previous policy of saving unfinished pieces for later revision have combined to produce a remarkable — albeit mostly digital — pile of bullshit that’s become too daunting to wade into, so I’ve spent the morning doing a purge, clearing out most of the stale ideas.

It is my intention, and hope, that I’ll now magically be able to write about any new ideas quickly and concisely. Perhaps not surprisingly, my mind, like my blog, is littered with the shards of past resolutions of just this sort.

Hopefully I’ll soon be posting more frequently again. For anyone interested, I’ve discovered that the RSS feed all the way at the bottom of the page actually works. So, rather than come here to see for yourself how lazy I am, it’s possible to subscribe and have any new posts show up in your e-mail just like spam advertisements for dick-bigger pills and Nigerian money laundering opportunities.

For many years I have carried around in my head an allegory of human time on earth. I can’t be arsed to look through my boxes and find it, but I’m pretty sure it comes from one of Carl Sagan’s books. In it, the age of the earth is represented by a hypothetical stack of sheets of paper from the earth to the moon, and the sum total of humanity is then represented by a single sheet of that paper.

It is a good, humbling image. Even more so when extrapolated down to the individual. A single human life is far less than a blink in time, yet as we study our own past we think of ourselves as ancient.

A long time ago — at least to us — back when all humans were still dark-skinned, mankind discovered farming and animal husbandry. The combination of those two discoveries allowed us to gradually take control of our own food cycle. All of modern civilization arises from the spare time created when we learned how to feed ourselves.

With our existence no longer simply a quest to stay alive, we were able to stop wandering and establish our own permanence. We created cities in which to live, languages with which to communicate and learn. We brought ourselves in from the wilderness.

Unfortunately, we brought with us the violence native to our existence in that wilderness. As we were building civilization, we were also building armies and weapons of war. In northeastern Syria, at a place called Tell Brak, archeologists have spent years excavating one of the oldest and largest cities ever discovered. From Discover magazine:

Close examination reveals the settlement extending over an astonishing 136 acres in the period of 4200 to 3900 B.C., larger than other settlements of the time, with the sole exception of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia.

The site is rife with information about early urban civilization, and many discoveries are yet to be made. One of their latest finds is evidence of a mass slaughter, hundreds of bodies dumped into pits, nearly 6000 years ago.

The Sumerians seem benevolent in many of the images that they left behind, which depict feathered skirts, round faces, and shaved heads. Some artifacts had hinted at violence, but the new evidence from Brak shows that the conflict at the time of urbanization was at times appallingly brutal. When forensic scientists pieced together what took place during that bloody event, it was gruesome by any standard. The corpses of the losers in this conflict were left for weeks to rot in the sun, then dragged and shoved into shallow pits. The winners carved pointed sticks out of some of their enemies’ bones, slaughtered prize cows, feasted on roast beef, and tossed the scraps and plates on top of the decaying bodies.

Our concept of time is limited individually by our short lifespan and cumulatively by our brief total time of existence, so it is impossible to fix our own position (or course) on the evolutionary scale. There can be no sense of direction, but that’s never been a bar to speculation.

As for me, I take some small comfort in the fact that we have always been as bloodthirsty and incapable of compromise as we are now. Knowing full well that from within the confines of a single sheet of paper in a stack reaching to the moon, “always” is meaningless.

Well, the calendar shows today is December 25th. I’ve heard no reports from the front, but I guess that means Bill O’Reilly’s forces have prevailed in Fox News Outrage Channel’s annual “War on Christmas” despite the best efforts of myself and my fellow insurgents. 

This year my cell was assigned the vital and dangerous task of infiltrating several area Wal-Marts and saying “happy holidays” to unsuspecting patrons.  We struck a mighty blow, but alas, the world goes on pretending jeebus was born during the pagan winter solstice celebration. Maybe next year.

This year’s Giftsmas season found me a little more flush than usual. My grandmother passed away and a small sum of money unexpectedly made it’s way into my hands.  

Now where I come from, money that falls into one’s lap out of nowhere is called ”found money” and tradition holds that it must be spent. Not saved or invested. Spent. Preferably in such a way as to have nothing to show for it after the fact but a wicked hangover, a few shiny baubles and a suspicious rash.

So it was somewhat in defiance of tradition that I took half of the money and had some engine work done on my scoot, purportedly increasing the horsepower by 25-30%. I say purportedly because, as I write this, Pearl is not running well. She sits forlornly in my garage awaiting a warm enough and dry enough day for a return trip to the shop.

Obviously I couldn’t take a chance on any more bad juju with the remainder of maw-maw’s money. I had to stay true to my Arkansas white-trash roots. I had to get more frivolous… so I bought a big-ass teevee.  

My plan is now to monitor the Tiger Woods scandal very closely. At least until Brittany gets caught without underwear again or my motorcycle starts running right.

In the small Arkansas town in which I was born, there is an Emerson Electric plant that has been manufacturing fractional horsepower electric motors for all of my life. Many of my friends and relatives have worked there; it was at one time the towns largest employer and may still be, but over the last several years the company has been gradually moving jobs overseas, and everybody knows it’s just a matter of time before the plant closes.

It is, of course, a story that’s being repeated in small towns all over our country. It is not a new or unique phenomenon. Sadly, the loss of manufacturing jobs to overseas workers is the logical outcome of our own aggressive capitalism. It is, in fact, the continuation of a standard business practice. The pursuit of cheap labor is what brought those jobs to rural, right-to-work America in the first place. I can accept that. I don’t like it, but at least I understand it. What I don’t understand is how rabid capitalists like Emerson Electric CEO David N. Farr can continually get away with blaming the government for the results of that pursuit.

Last week, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ran this op-ed in which Farr sounds the alarm about America’s declining standard of living. A paragraph from early in Mr. Farr’s op-ed provides a nugget of truth:

Emerson has expanded globally to diversify and ensure that it can continue to win against intense global competition. We are well positioned to grow profitably in the United States and in international markets, including China and India.

Statements backed by these numbers from a speech Farr gave a few weeks ago in Chicago:

Emerson,… will keep expanding in emerging markets, which represented 32 percent of revenue in 2009. About 36 percent of manufacturing is now in “best-cost countries” up from 21 percent in 2003,

That’s right, Mr. Farr moved 11% of his companies manufacturing overseas between 2003 and 2009. But watch how his op-ed seemingly builds a case for why this was caused retroactively by Michelle’s husband and health care reform that does not yet exist. Farr lists three reasons for his concern. He begins by blurring the line of fiscal responsibility between our new preznit and his predecessor.

Federal debt: Over two administrations, the United States has created debt that is forecast to exceed $20 trillion within 10 years.

Over two administrations? Yes. For the purposes of assigning blame, the right-wing noise-machine has created a new math in which 11 months is greater than or equal to 8 years. Farr then moves on to something of a veiled threat:

Emerson provides health coverage to employees and their families in the United States — more than 100,000 people. Emerson would like to continue to do so. However, the bill that passed the House of Representatives and the proposed Senate bill could raise costs on private-sector plans. Basic economics could force many businesses, like Emerson, to seriously consider exiting employer-sponsored plans, requiring employees to shop for coverage or move to the government-based plan.

Nice health care plan you’ve got there. Be a shame if something happened to it. The bill “could” raise costs, therefore Emerson would be “forced” to dump all their employees health care onto the taxpayers. Farr follows up with an outright lie.

Tax policy: Major competitors in the European Union and Asia are taxed at lower rates than U.S. companies. That may be hard to believe, but it’s true,…

No David, it’s not true. It’s bullshit. The top US corporate tax rate is nominally 35%, but after factoring in all the tax breaks, loopholes and exemptions in our immense tax code, the effective tax rate is 25%, which is about the same as China and lower than most of Europe. Farr continues with this:

Emerson pays a substantial tax bill every year, as it should.

Sigh. Mr. Farr relies on the ignorance of his target audience, crying about how government policies are destroying his company knowing full well the rubes are too lazy to connect the dots and realize that since taxes are only paid on profits, a company paying ”substantial” taxes must necessarily be doing very well.

Despite Mr. Farr’s attempts to distract attention from capitalists doing what capitalists have always done, the declining standard of living of which he speaks is very real. As is our country’s slip into ”second-tier economic status.” It is not, however, merely a risk. It is an inevitability. It is, in fact, a work in progress. In a world of finite resources (what us lefties like to call the real world), globalization leads mathematically to some form of wealth redistribution, a more uniform dispersal of available resources.

The world simply cannot sustain a billion or more human beings leading the middle-class lifestyle most Americans have enjoyed for the last half century. What I see in my home town is a microcosm of working class America. As manufacturing jobs steadily disappear and wages decline, complacency turns to impotent anger.

David Farr and the rest of our corporate oligarchy engage in deflecting that anger away from themselves. I write a blog post and fling it onto the intertoobz. A modern variation of howling into the wilderness.