It's Spring here and simple human nature has taken over. We've come to life along with all the other animals and plants. The groundskeeper Butch and I have been exceedingly busy cleaning and servicing equipment, mowing and tilling and mulching and digging and scratching around in our little piece of the Earth. It's been mostly mindless, good-for-the-soul kind of toil, the kind that leaves you sunburnt and spent. Makes you sleep like a baby and get up a little stiff in the back. It's the type of work that I'm naturally good at. Both sides of my family go back at least two generations of Arkansas cotton pickers. The kind of people who take pride in working hard for low pay. Gratification through physical labor is in my genes.

And since the kids tend not to bother me when I'm running a shovel (they don't want to get involved), it leaves plenty of time for thought. My mind keeps coming back to the Believers and their incredible ability to believe anything their chosen authority figure tells them is true, regardless of it's connection to reality. I've been compiling a mental list of ludicrous and contradictory beliefs I've heard expressed by our own religious right:

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• Islam is one crazy messed-up religion. And the whole thing was stolen from Christianity.
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• 87% of Americans identify themselves as Christians. Christianity is under attack in America and Christians are being persecuted.
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• Tens of thousands of Iraqis protesting against dubya is a sign of democracy and progress in the War on Terra. Tens of thousands of Americans protesting against him emboldens the enemy and sends the wrong message to our troops.
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People who can ignore simple logic and believe like this are the reason the world is the violent place it is and always has been. James Randi says gods are childrens blankets that get carried over into adulthood. I think that's a pretty good analogy. Mankind just can't seem to give up his security blankets. The Believers are willing to do virtually anything, defy reality, even wage war trying to define reality just to hang on to those damn blankets. A basic flaw of religion is that in order to be taken seriously in the complete absence of evidence to support their sacred text(s), every religion must be completely intolerant of competing religions. To accept another belief system to be just as valid as one's own is to reveal them both to be smoke and mirrors and fairy dust. I'm not optimistic that we won't eventually destroy ourselves fighting over competing invisible cloud-daddies.

I snagged this pic off CNN's front page. It's from the Boris Yeltsin funeral. Pretty good shot of the last two presidents I voted for. One of them twice.

George the elder, smarter is starting to showing his age a little, isn't he? I just checked, and he's 83 in June. The lines in his face have really deepened over the last err... 6 years or so. I wonder what it's like to be him these days? The guy who chose not to invade Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein predicting that it would lead to a huge fucking mess. Even wrote a book about it. He was vilified for that decision by bloodthirsty neo-cons. Now, as events in Iraq have proven him oh so right, he doesn't get to crow about it because he's a father. Even with the neo-con hegemonic ideals going up in flames in Iraq, he would never - could never - publicly express anything but support for his dumb-ass son. Even when he tosses that son a life-line in the form of the Iraq Study Group and the son scoffs at it. I bet he's angry and sad inside.

One of the anti-abortion contingent's favorite misinformation tactics, the un-backed assertion that abortion causes breast cancer, has been debunked again. This time by what looks like a very thorough 14 year study. But that doesn't mean they'll stop spreading that particular pile of manure. From the LA Times story:

She said her group's study was "very much in line" with a 2003 expert panel convened by the National Cancer Institute that concluded no evidence supported a link between abortion and breast cancer. The institute funded Michels' study as well.

Karen Malec, president of the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer, took issue with the findings. Her group uses the purported link as an argument against abortion.

"Clearly [the cancer institute] must suspect a link, or else they know that a link really exists," Malec said. "Why else would they continue to pay for these studies?"

Get it? See, one study showing there's no link between breast cancer and abortion is fine, but two studies showing no link between breast cancer and abortion? Why that just proves that there is a link. Wow. Just wow.

In the ceiling of a coal mine in Illinois, geologists have discovered the world's largest fossil forest. It's a huge area of tropical rain forest that was abruptly buried in sediment, probably due to an earthquake, 300 million years ago. And it's pretty much completely intact.

...miners noticed shiny, funnel-shaped concretions that occasionally fell from the shale layer above them. They called them "kettlebottoms." But they were really fossilized stumps, whose roots fingered the peaty layer that ultimately became the coal seam the miners were working in.

"What's extraordinary about this discovery is that this forest has been preserved in its growth position," said Falcon-Lang. "It's an upright forest with trees still standing upright."


"We get to walk under it and look up at it," he said. "It's the earthworm's view."

That's just the kind of story that always turn a science geek like me on. It's always been that way for me. And it's those kinds of stories that, in a roundabout way, led to my general disdain for all things religious. As a kid I was a voracious reader of everything from trash to treasure, but it was real science that somehow just grabbed me. I had the chemistry set, the microscope, the pan balance, the whole bit. I mixed chemicals, I blew shit up. I dissected things. I think it was the logical, step-by-step aspect of science that struck a chord with me. The idea that for every action there is a reaction and every piece of knowledge gained adds to that great composite Body of Knowledge that might someday explain everything. And I really wanted to know everything. My goal was to put as much data into my brain as I possibly could. I loved school.

But on Sundays I used to go to church. Baptist church. Baptist Sunday School. I enjoyed riding the brightly colored bus, singing jesus loves me this I know, for the bible tells me so at the top of my lungs, but the Sunday School experience itself was difficult for me. I couldn't get my head around the whole leap-of-faith thing. I was expected to abandon all critical thought, interpret the bible literally and decide to believe all manner of what seemed to me to be nothing more than fables. I was very shy and I didn't want to be a problem so I tried to emulate the Sunday School instuctors. They were always so confident and smiling, like they secretly already knew everything. They Believed so fervently they had a light in their eyes and a kind of glow about them. I wanted to be that confident, I even got baptized looking to see if maybe it would put that glow in my eyes. I got nothing but wet.

So then I started asking questions. Simple stuff at first. I distinctly remember asking the pretty Sunday School teacher in the flowery dress where all the water from the great flood went. She told me it ran off. I asked where it ran off to, and she smiled condescendingly and told me it ran off into the oceans and streams like water always does. When another time I asked about dinosaurs and fossils, I was completely blown away by the answers I received. I was told the earth was only 6,000 years old and dinosaurs never existed. Fossils were put there by the devil to make men question their faith. The proof was right there in the bible for any fool to see. The bible says god created everything and the bible is right because it's god' s word. I hadn't yet learned the term circular logic, but I recognized bullshit when I heard it and persisted in my questioning. Over time the patient smiles went away and was rather sternly told that it wasn't my place to question the lord, he does not answer to us, we answer to him, blah blah blah. My inability to accept dogma at face value was, it seemed, a defect or weakness on my part.

I took the hint and stopped asking questions. I stopped going to church not much later. I chose to live in a world of science and logic over a world of superstition and magic. A world of no certainty over a world with no room for doubt.

According to this survey, 33% of Americans approve of dubya's performance as preznit. That number has been holding pretty steady. I think I'm going to have to accept that a solid third of my fellow citizens are essentially delusional. That 33% approval rating is probably about rock-bottom for dubya unless he suddenly comes out in favor of gay marriage or maybe gets himself a hummer from an intern. All he's got left are the believers-with-a-capital-B and their minds are tightly closed to any and all forms of doubt. This is the 9/11 changed everything crowd. They believe all manner of strange and bizarre things. Like: George Bush was chosen by gawd to lead us in these times of peril; We're in a battle of good versus evil and Muslims are our enemy; WMDs were found in Iraq; People from other countries are somehow less than fully human, and therefore insignificant; George Bush is a man of great wisdom.

That's just a partial list, but you get the idea. My point is that I believe dubya's base of approval now largely consists of those citizens who are ... let's saaaay ... comfortable ... believing some things despite a lack of any supporting evidence. They are in fact, fully capable of continuing to believe those things after they have been thoroughly disproven.

According to the same survey, 62% of Americans disapprove of our preznit. That's a lot of disapproval, innit? I don't have any conversion tables handy, but I'd say that's bordering on whopping disapproval. It gives me hope for a bright and shiny future for America to know that over half the population appears to be paying attention.

But what about that 5% of Americans who are undecided about this administration? Just who and where are these people? We're over 6 years into the presidency of tax cuts for the rich and the eternal War on Extreme Fear for everyone else. We've turned the largest budget surplus in history into the largest budget deficit in history. We've bombed and bluffed and bullied away our international reputation. We broke a whole damn country and we don't have a clue how to fix it. And still 5% of Americans are up in the air on whether they think dubya is a good preznit? This is me, sitting here baffled.

A visitor to the site left me a link to this video by Jim Hightower. In it he explains why we're dragging our feet in Iraq. If we get out, the chaos will escalate to the point where the oil law gets stalled out. And that's the disaster dubya keeps warning of in his speechifying of late. If we let Iraq out from under our thumb before the oil law locks in long-term American access to Iraqi oil, dubya will have failed his masters.

I keep remembering back to when dubya was trying to get the UN to sign off on his pending invasion of Iraq to give it some air of legitimacy. France, Russia and Germany weren't having any of it. Coincidentally, oil companies from those countries had been in negotiations with Saddam Hussein to upgrade Iraq's oil infrastructure when the UN sanctions were eventually lifted. And UN weapons inspectors had been on the ground in Iraq for 4 months (finding bubkus) when dubya set his jaw and did what was right for Amurka, ordering the inspectors out, and sending in our troops. After all, the security of the world was at stake, wasn't it? And hate radio filled the airwaves with patriotic war-mongering. We had to invade to keep the nuclear bombs out of the hands of brown people who want nothing more than to come here and take our jeebus away!! Ah, the good old days.

Now we're stuck in the drudgery of day-to-day, boring, old occupying-army-trying-to-force-a-balky-legislature-to-relinquish-their-only-asset-to-foreign-control stuff. If the Iraqi people had just elected Chalabi like we told them to, we'd have our oil deal and be out of there* by now. Damn democracy anyway!


* Except for the few thousand troops we leave behind to protect the oil pipelines freedom the children the future of Iraq Iraq's fragile democracy.

On Friday, the tsunami of conservative, flag-waving, false patriotism that has been washing over this country in the years since 9/11 finally crested right here in middle America and began to slowly recede. And though I was witness to the event, it caught me so completely by surprise that I did not immediately recognize it's significance. The full realization of it only came to me later with the clarity of an evening spent drinking beer and pondering life. It happened at my local barber shop.

I live in the heart of small town growing fast, white flight, suburban sprawl America. The barber shop is like most other small town barber shops. This one has 3 chairs and 3 barbers and they all have a good bit of grey in their hair, as do most of their customers. It's generally a place where I keep my politics to myself, because if voiced, the opinions of a liberal atheist are guaranteed to piss off everyone there. No exceptions. So I generally just talk motorcycles or Cardinal baseball while I get my hair cut and leave the hate-radio listeners to the repeat the latest right-wing talking point. I go there every couple of weeks and I've never heard a word uttered against dubya. I go there for the haircuts.

But on Friday something profound happened. In the middle of one of those continuous streams of multiple conversations that exists only in a busy barber shop, one of the barbers told a story of a recent customer who had just returned from Iraq. He quoted the customer as saying things were never going to get any better in Iraq because you just can't make people who've hated each other for centuries start liking each other, and we just need to get out. That last part - the words "we just need to get out" - landed like a bag of shit in the middle of the room. A bag of shit that everyone present studiously ignored. Silence. The sound of George W. Bush's political base blinking. They no longer have the energy to keep defending the indefensible. He's lost them. Hallelujah.

I say the wave crested here in the midwest, but it was actually broken by the rock that is Iraq. If he had not so confused the War on Terra with his dreams of Empire, dubya might still be pulling this country hard to the right. I feel confident, based solely on my barber shop and beer analysis, that the pendulum of public opinion has begun to move back in the direction of sanity. We are not going to end up as a military theocracy. This time. But we are going to suffer the effects of this preznit and our government's new authoritarianism for a long time to come.

It occurs to me that the reason Alberto Gonzales is still our Attorney General is probably because he has the president's balls firmly in his hand. They can't cut him loose and try to make him the fall guy because he's been part of dubya's inner circle for too long. This is the guy that dubya went to back in 2002 and said:

"Hey 'Berto, I need you to think up some fancy lawyer-talk way of saying them laws about torture and such don't apply to me when I'm busy making war. Okay? And use the word quaint, I like 'at word. Quaint, hee-hee."

This is a guy the preznit has to stand behind, but if this story keeps going where it looks to be headed, dubya will have to take a page from his father's book and issue a preemptive pardon on his way out of office. This administration and the policies they have implemented are looking more and more like an attempted religious coup.

Talking Points Memo has been bird-dogging the US Attorney purge story for weeks now and it's really getting good as the press begins to smell blood and look past the administration' lies. Make no mistake about it. This whole thing is about the administration trying to hide it's standard practice of bypassing Congress whenever possible to install unqualified, glassy-eyed social regressives in positions of authority in our government. I was over there catching up on the latest, and I found this post first.

It seems that back in early 2006, Rachel Paulose was appointed acting US Attorney for the District of Minnesota and in August she was formally nominated for the job. She was confirmed on the last day of the Republican-controlled 109th Congress without a hearing or vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee via some technicality (How is that even possible?) so the Attorney General didn't have to use the Patriot Act back-door method to appoint her. So, how's she been doing in her new job? Pretty much as expected:

Four of her top staff voluntarily demoted themselves Thursday, fed up with Paulose, who, after just months on the job, has earned a reputation for quoting Bible verses and dressing down underlings.

"They did it jointly because they couldn't stand her anymore," the source said, citing what been described as her "dictatorial management style and general lack of management experience."

No question, that's a loyal bushie, right there. But it looks like the politicization of the Justice Department actually began under the reign of that old sourpuss from right here in Misery, John Ashcroft. TPM also led me to this story in yesterday's Boston Globe about Regent University. That's what Pat Robertson's law school for jeebus in Virginia Beach is called now. It used to be the Christian Broadcast Network University School of Law. My what a name change can do for a "tier four" school, huh? The Bush administration is apparently chock-full of their graduates:

Graduates of the law school have been among the most influential of the more than 150 Regent University alumni hired to federal government positions since President Bush took office in 2001, according to a university website.

One hundred fifty? That sure seems like a lot. I wonder how that could have happened? Well, there's this:

Not long ago, it was rare for Regent graduates to join the federal government. But in 2001, the Bush administration picked the dean of Regent's government school, Kay Coles James, to be the director of the Office of Personnel Management -- essentially the head of human resources for the executive branch. The doors of opportunity for government jobs were thrown open to Regent alumni.

Yep. No conflict of interest there. And then there's this:

Their path to employment was further eased in late 2002, when John Ashcroft , then attorney general, changed longstanding rules for hiring lawyers to fill vacancies in the career ranks. Previously, veteran civil servants screened applicants and recommended whom to hire, usually picking top students from elite schools.

We don't need no fancy elite school education around here. This is a kick ass and take names Justice Department. But I'm sure all those positions are entry-level and relatively insignificant, right? Everybody knows Regent University's stated purpose for existence is to eliminate the separation of church and state, right? This is not a very prestigious law school. Nobody's going to give them any really important jobs, right? Right?!? Maybe not so much:

One of those graduates is Monica Goodling , the former top aide to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales who is at the center of the storm over the firing of US attorneys.

Documents show that Goodling, who has asserted her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to avoid testifying before Congress, was one of a handful of officials overseeing the firings. She helped install Timothy Griffin , the Karl Rove aide and her former boss at the Republican National Committee, as a replacement US attorney in Arkansas.

True believers always get their rewards, right? Which brings me back to John Ashcroft? What do you think he's doing these days? Go on, guess:

Adding to Regent's prominence, its course on "Human Rights, Civil Liberties, and National Security" is co taught by one of its newest professors: Ashcroft.

Oh yeah. You know he's practically a god among those crazies. This all ties in with my theory that pretty much the only people left who still support dubya are the same ones who believe jeebus is coming back just any minute now, and boy are some people going to be sorry. The thought that the same people are running substantial parts of my government is very disturbing for me.

While I was outside working today and listening to the radio, I got to hear dubya blither his way through another press conference. It was a real humdinger. As usual, he bumbled around not answering the questions posed of him while gamely trying to keep repeating what he said in his opening remarks. And as usual, the assembled press failed to call him on any of the blatant bullshit he was peddling. If the press really has a liberal bias as the right-wing noise machine constantly claims, why oh why do they keep letting him get away with this? When he dodges a question or tells an outright lie and then refuses to let the reporter ask a follow up question, why doesn't one of the subsequent reporters call him on it when it's their turn to ask a question?

Today's message was all about how preznit tough-guy is going to veto any spending bill containing an artificial timeline for withdrawal from Iraq. (By the way, what the fuck does he mean by repeatedly calling the timeline artificial? Someone needs to explain to him what that word actually means. It's a very real timeline with real dates and everything, you dumbass.) The whole purpose of this presser is to try to paint the Dems as insufficiently supportive of the troops and set the stage to blame them for not funding the troops. Not one reporter has the guts to point out that the bill the House and Senate passed - the one dubya plans to veto - actually gives the troops every single dollar he asked for. It also gives the American public what they asked for, an exit strategy. He keeps saying politicians in Washington shouldn't be dictating to our military leaders in Iraq how to carry out their mission, and of course no one mentions that when the previous military leaders in Iraq said we didn't need any more troops they got replaced by - ahem - a politician in Washington. Dubya says Amurkins will know who to blame if the troops don't get their funding. I sure hope he's right.

I've been looking around the intertubes for a transcript or a video of the whole thing because I wanted to get one quote in particular verbatim, but I haven't had any luck, so I''ll just have to paraphrase. At one point, dubya was going on about his puppet government in Iraq and the difficulties they have. He mentioned a couple of times that it was hard work (yes, we're recycling Election 2004 platitudes for use in Iraq) and then he said something along the lines of this:

There's no military solution to these problems. That's why I sent more troops to Baghdad.

No shit. He really said that. And I didn't hear any laughter at all. Apparently when a reporter gets that cushy assignment to the White House press corps, the sense of humor is removed along with the testicles. Hmm.

Life is pretty much by definition a competition for resources. Every living thing is constantly bumping up against all the other living things in a never-ending struggle to pass genes on to the next generation. At the cellular level there is, of course, no conscious understanding of life and death, but it's obvious that through evolution, the concept of win or die has somehow become hard-wired into the genome. It's present in all forms of life and I believe it carries over into human consciousness resulting in what has been called Social Darwinism. It's survival of the fittest on a societal level, with fittest being defined as strongest or most aggressive. That pretty much defines the United States right now. The fittest, top dog...

The American industrial revolution brought us to the comfortable, technology-rich, globally dominant lifestyle we've grown accustomed to, but it took a truly massive amount of energy to reach our current level and it still requires a tremendous amount of energy to maintain. That energy came from, and still largely comes from fossil fuels. Consider this. Americans now account for around 5% of the worlds population, but we use 25% of it's energy resources. China and India are only just beginning their own industrial revolutions. Both those countries have huge populations, many times the size of ours, which would indicate that their energy demands will rise at a much faster rate than ours did and their long term energy needs will dwarf ours. Basic math shows there is just no way things can continue as they are.

I am not an economist, and I don't profess to know a lot about how the stock markets work, but I do pay attention to what happens in the world and over the years I've come to have a gut-level understanding of how "the economy" works. The cost of all goods, from apples to zucchini, is tied to how much energy is used to produce and deliver those goods and recession is always just an oil price hike away. The development of alternative energy sources is beginning to ramp up, and the rest of the world is way ahead of us there, but the simple fact is that nothing yet available provides anywhere near the bang for the buck of fossil fuels. Barring the discovery (and rapid development) of some miraculous new energy source like nuclear fusion, the developed world's energy needs are going to continue to be met by a dwindling supply of fossil fuels. As China and India become more and more industrialized, oil prices are going to rise dramatically. There is just no way for us to stop that from happening. Indeed, if you factor in the military cost of our "peacekeeping" efforts in the major oil producing areas, it's easy to see that prices have actually already risen sharply.

I believe our current escapades in Iraq and the Middle East are a reflection of these realities. I believe we are building permanent bases in Iraq from which to exert our influence and ensure our access to the world's largest supplies of fossil fuels just like the boys at PNAC mapped it out. For me the idea that we have the right to keep our economy rolling through military force is ludicrous, but I know people who feel that it's not only perfectly normal for our government to do so, it's their responsibility. The real irony is that these people consider themselves (of course) to be conservatives, but to them, the very idea of conserving, of a national belt-tightening is tantamount to communism. These are the same people who are fond of saying war is good for the economy. I sometimes feel we are approaching a situation where war is our economy.

I look around and I see the US reputation in tatters (thanks dubya) and the rest of the world increasingly less likely to tolerate the escalation of US militaristic imperialism. I can't shake a strong feeling that America is headed for some very tough times. A recession may be the least of them.