Listics

I don’t know why "Intelligent Design" bothers me so much.  It seemed a reasonable approach to posit a metaphysical first cause in the ignorant Lutheran days of my pre-adolescence.  It all has to start somewhere, I thought.  Most of the other fourth graders in my set agreed with me in those rock skipping afternoons by the river when we would lose ourselves in discussions of the relative merits of GM versus Chrysler and catechism versus Sunday school.

Okay.  I really do know why it bothers me and the matter is complicated.  First, "Intelligent Design" is a disinformation technique, a propagandist’s approach to the introduction of religious beliefs to the public educational systems.  It is, in other words, a lie.

People who lie usually have a reason for it.  The first sentence of this post is a lie, stated for some light-weight rhetorical purpose and quickly acknowledged.  The people who promote the big lie of "Intelligent Design" do so to thwart public policy and democratic process, to pervert religious principles by rationalizing that the end justifies the means, to ultimately betray their own god by denying her place and her name in the structure of their political arguments.

Yet I am not a big fan of "Inherit the Wind" arguments either.  Spencer Tracy dropped the ball when he got into a pissing contest about the length of a biblical day.  We were very much in tune with Tracy’s arguments in the fourth and fifth grade, but since then the kids who were cannon-balling off the old 4-ton Bridge with me have pretty much come to the reasonable conclusion that it’s not about denying literalism in order to come to terms with biblical inconsistency, it’s simply a matter of dismissing theism.  Of course some of those kids grew up to cling to primitive xian beliefs and advocate that "Intelligent Design" be taught to public school children, but when I think of them I’m heartened by these words from Betty Bowers:

Jesus told us that the poor will always be with us. But this simple statement of a thoroughly annoying fact should not be construed as a direction to actually acknowledge them when they wander into your field of vision. I am reminded of the last time this passage from Matthew was quoted to me. It was by dear Juanita after she informed me that she was resigning from Golden Door Spa. As she carefully scraped the deep-cleansing Italian mud off my troublesome t-zone area, she said: "For you have the pores always with you; but me you will have not always."

If, like me, you would like to encounter the bizarre Bush-led Christian Jihadist movement and their Trojan horse issue of "Intelligent Design," you might consider signing up for membership in the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Today, we are all Hibakusha.
- Kofi Annan

In Honduras are many Chinese manufacturing facilities.   CAFTA drops trade barriers with Honduras.  Besides WalMart, who benefits?  There are people in Honduras with jobs and companies in China with revenue, so all in all I’d say the people of Honduras benefit because they have more jobs, and Venezuela benefits by getting a new hard cash customer (China) for oil exports.  It is probably more complicated than this.

Wow… my politics are slipping.  I almost failed to acknowledge the 26th of July.  Venceremos, dudes, dudettes…

Here’s an interesting link…

…and of course…

“Un pueblo unido jamas sera vencido!"

From Rodney King to the London tube, people have the means to record and share the record of tragic events.  What do we give up by turning these tools and these records to the cause of justice?  What do we gain?

Gary Turner and Euan Semple discuss the potential of grass roots digital vigilance.  Euan says, "…what if we spent less time on setting up social networking tools
targeted at getting inside each other’s knickers or selling drugs and
more time on working out ways to create real networks… in support of finding
peace, understanding and a way of living together."  In a typical Turner rare coinage, Gary says in Euan’s comments: "What we don’t want is a grass roots ‘digilante’ version of Flickr."

"…thousand webcams in the street"

t r u t h o u t needs financial support.  No corporations or governments are likely to sponsor the folks who bring us current updates on peace and justice, human rights, and egregious corporate and governmental acts across the globe.

Go kick in a few bucks so they can continue to operate.  Please.

We started TO in the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election hoping that we could reach a few people, have some small impact on the dialog, and maybe just maybe try to restore a little integrity. Today TO is visited more than 4 million times per month by readers seeking the straight story and wanting to be involved in building a better tomorrow.

The growth and success of TO can be linked directly to the support our readers have shown for the project. As many of you may know, TO is 100% reader supported. We have no corporate sponsors, no advertising, and no pop-ups. This news source depends upon its readers for its survival. Sure that can be annoying, and at times intrusive, but it’s better, because we answer to you.

Okay.  Call me picky, but I would like to know who is getting the debt relief and who does not qualify for it.  If there is a heavily indebted poor country in Africa that does NOT qualify, then I would like to understand what they would need to do to qualify.

Have you read the Gleneagles Communique?  If you are a USian, does our country’s posture embarrass the living shit out of you…  our unwillingness as a nation to join with the others and commit to a trivial percentage of Gross National Income as a contribution to alleviate African poverty… our unwillingness to fuck with the fossil fuel industry’s revenue streams or to challenge their right to dominate global capitalism?

Mark has many things on his mind this morning, among which - the following…

When it comes to Armageddon prep, the red states have
us city folk beat. Sure-sure, cities are the cultural and social and
economic engines of the nation; sure we have all the Ph.D.s and all the
artistic talents and all the book-learnin’ and progressive ideas and
cool European cars and the good wine and the better sex and the
polysyllabic words.

But when the economy collapses and the
End is Nigh, well, most of us shall fall by the roadside, begging for
scraps from the angry evangelical Idaho potato farmer in the beat-up
pickup with the little flags stuck on the bumper, and he shall chortle
and spit tobacco through his nine teeth and turn up the James Dobson
Christian Family Hour on the AM and drive off toward the mushroom
cloud, whistling.