Keep your prayers.

       In horror we watched another terrorist attack. At this point we don't know who is responsible or why. The why will never make sense. Killing innocent people never makes sense. Just please, people, stop with "my prayers go out to them". "We pray for their families." Save your breath! I you really want to help stop praying and do something worthwhile! Please.

       Stop for a minute and think that the attack may be religiously motivated. So many are. Someone intent on seeing his 73 virgins in heaven killing in the name of some imaginary being. So pray to your imaginary being too? Sure, pray for the parents who have to bury a child for help from god. Where was that god when the bomb went off and took an 8 year old's life?

      I heard one woman on the news saying that a runner she was waiting for had leg and feet craps that forced her to stop. Had she not she would have been where the bombs went off. The woman was sure it was divine intervention. God gave her cramps so she might live. I suppose he put the child close to the bomb so he wouldn't. People can't you see the total insanity here?

      It's insane that in 2013 superstition and belief in creation myths still is major cause of violence and strife in our world. Would anyone give a rats ass about Jerusalem if not for religion? It's a fucking desert! Yet peace will never come there until reason prevails.

      Stop the praying. Pick up a book about science and read it. Question things. I'm sick of the faith. Why is it a virtue to accept things you'd otherwise laugh at? Faith is nothing more than rejecting reason. There is no way you'd believe me if I told you that I could high jump 30 feet. Yet someone born to a virgin who rises from the dead makes sense to you. Only if you are brainwashed to believe it from birth and you turn off your ability to think. If you were born somewhere else and brainwashed by someone else you might strap a bomb to your chest to die for god.

       Praying will do no good. You're whispering to a myth. Blind faith will not help anybody and the stubborn belief that god wants you to do this or that only hurts. Want to help? Reach out to someone who needs help and help them. Don't do it because you want to go some place when you die. Do it because this is where we live now and it's all you get. Try to engage in some rational thought and help to spread it. The people who wrote the bible also believed the earth was flat and if you sailed too far you fell off the edge. They believed sun circled the earth. Why would you take seriously anything they wrote?

      If you think praying will solve anything you're a deluded as the people who flew the planes into the Trade Towers. You think they are crazy because they believe in a different god, different ways of living and a different heaven. Crazy is crazy no matter where you're born.

    

I hate the NRA.

I hate gun nuts and the NRA. Yes, hate them.

If anyone thinks the NRA speaks for anyone other than gun manufacturers they are crazy. The NRA has more blood on their hands than Bin Laden. You read that right. How many gun death are there in the US every year? 30,000. Can we get any kind of sensible gun legislation passed? Not with the NRA pressuring the spineless politicians and stoking fear into the dim witted. I'll agree with the NRA (National Reactionaries Association) on one thing. Banning assault weapons will do little. Why? Because thanks to the NRA they're already out there. If it were up to me they would be removed from society. There would be a buy back program for two years. After that it's a felony to own one.

Now we have these assholes who think that they need them to protect themselves from tyranny. From our own government! That's crazy on so many levels I don't know where to start! First of all our government is US! It's our friends and neighbors we elect. They are not tyrants who inherited a throne. There was no coup d'etat. Of the people, by the people, for the people.

The military is us. More so than the government! It's volunteers. Our brothers and sisters. Do you really think little Johnny from next door is going to attack you? Hell, he probably dated your daughter! Besides, moron, do you really think any number of AR 15's are going to do you any real good when a tank with 50 caliber machine guns and canons parks in your front yard? Really? Even if you were somehow able to stop the tank the Sidewinder through the front window sort of brings it all to a quick close.

The NRA likes to quote the second amendment but only the second half "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed". They never quote the whole thing "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed".

The Constitution did not provide for a standing army. They feared it because of their experiences in Europe. James Madison addressed the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on the dangers of a permanent army. “A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty." They envisioned a citizen army on call for national defense. A "well regulated militia". It's easy to see why they would not want one of the states who's rights are protected otherwise in the Tenth Amendment to deny the militia men of their guns.

However in time the need for a standing military became clear and we now have Marines, Army, Navy and Air Force. The dangers they feared never materialized and we now view our armed forces as brave servants of our nation. We no longer have a militia on call by the government. The Army Reserve and National Guard are about the closest thing but hardly a farmer with his flint lock by the door.

The Second Amendment is a conditional sentence. In a conditional sentence, there are two parts, (1) the antecedent = the protasis, and (2) the consequent = the apodosis. The potasis implies the apodosis. The first half, "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state" implies "the right of the people to keep and bare arms shall not be infringed." With out 1, 2 is invalid. Therefore when we adopted a standing military and the militia became obsolete the restriction on passing laws regulating gun ownership was nullified. Even is this is rejected (you'd have to explain to me why the first half is here) no right is absolute!

The first amendment: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. Free speech? Libel someone and see if you get sued.

Freedom of the press? Print military secrets and go to jail.

Right of assembly? Try assembling on the White House lawn. Hell, George Bush wouldn't allow protesters near him. They had "Free Speech Zones!

The Eight Amendment: Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted. All you have to do is think Marijuana laws.

So reasonable restrictions on guns is no different. In the 1930's machine guns were outlawed. No one is saying we need to repeal that law. There is a line drawn somewhere. It doesn't push us all down the feared slippery slope.

It's not a matter of what is needed. It's not a valid argument to say people don't need AR 15s or AK 47s. The question is balance. Is your desire to own your phallic symbol outweigh  the rest of societies need to have them off the streets and unavailable to homicidal maniacs.

It's cowardice that drives the people who think they need guns. Fear of everything and everyone. Yes, there is always a chance of something bad happening. I prefer to not live in that fear.

I have friend who has a 7 year old daughter. She cries now when it's time to go to school. She asks if she will be shot there. This is what the NRA has given us. A country living in fear of it's own government and everyone not like them. A country awash in guns where anyone who want to can get one. A country where we can't have background checks for all gun sales or even the most reasonable restrictions. But a country where children are afraid to go to school.

Thanks you cowardly assholes.

Shut down the Vatican

OK, first, full disclosure. I am an atheist. There is no god. No invisible cloud being guiding the universe. No fatherly figure waiting at the pearly gates to judge me, you or anyone. I'm amazed that in 2010 people are still buying this crap.

That said it's time to shut down the Vatican. The catholic church is a joke. What more proof is needed than what is coming out now? Pope Benny the Rat knew of abuse, both physical and sexual for years. What did he do? He protected the church. Not the defenseless children. The church.

How fucking ironic that these scumbags who profess to fighting evil are the sickest, evilest people around. Benny the Rat should be tried for aiding and abetting criminals. If found guilty he should be punished.

So what does this mean to the whole catholic church? Well, the pope is chosen by the cardinals but they will tell you that god speaks through them. So how could god chose a criminal? How could god chose a man who allowed children to be abused? If the Rat steps down then it means god made a mistake, god doesn't speak through the cardinals or the devil made them do it! Take your pick but it pulls the bottom card from the house of cards. It all crumbles. And it should!

He will not resign of course. The whole catholic hierarchy is too fucking arrogant and none more so than the Rat. They'll dig in and the sheep will protect them. Fucking morons.

If you're a catholic and put a dime in the collection plate then you are an accessory after the fact. Some of your money will go to Rome and to protecting sick bastards. Don't think so? Ask your priest. If he isn't a fucking liar like the Rat he will tell you they send money to Rome. They'll say its for missionaries or charities. Bull shit.

Ah, the money. You'll hold your bake sales and bingo nights to raise funds for local use. I know some of you are still holding on the the belief the church does some good. I know you mean well. But while you're trying to make ends meet the Vatican is so fucking rich it's scary. Do the research. Check to see what stocks they hold. I dare you. The "internets" are great. Use "the Google" and find out.

I wish religion would go away. I wish reason ruled. Whatever good has come from the delusion of belief in a god or gods is buried under all the bad. The Vatican is not a good place. It has done far more harm than good.

Sadly the sheeple will defend the pope and the church. It will continue. But if you're a catholic and give them money than I hope you think about it tonight and every night when you lay down to go to sleep. I hope you think about the poor children who whose innocence was taken by the fucking perverts they were told to trust and admire. And you helped.

Are conservatives really that stupid?

Listening to the likes of Hannity the manatee, Big Fat Idiot Limbaugh, just plain crazy Beck and everyone's favorite moron, Sara, plain and simple, question global warming because of the latest big snow storm makes me ask. "Are they really that stupid or are they just willing to damage any chance we have of stopping global warming for political gain?"

Now with Palin I think it is stupidity. Why is it the people who follow her just can't see how incredibly dumb this woman is? She is so simple she has the write her 3 talking points on her hand. The same 3 she's been pushing since she hit the big time! People, this woman is dumb! I'll steal a Kurt Vonnegut line. One he used for W. "She's so dumb she thinks Peter Pan is a wash basin in a whorehouse." Kurt, we miss you!

Palin is dumb enough to think a snow storm is proof the earth is not getting warmer. Never mind that the last decade was the warmest on record. No matter that the Olympics are in trouble because Vancouver has no snow! Did I mention this woman is dumb! What a sad statement this is about our country that she would be taken seriously for anything other than the manager of a beauty salon. No wait. That's an insult to someone smart enough to manage a business. She couldn't even do that! I guess when our great uneducated masses spend their time watching American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and all the other tripe out there it's to be expected.

Hannity, on the other hand seems to have a spark of intellect. He's no Rhodes Scholar for sure but he has double the IQ points of Palin. (Which puts him double digits at least.) In his case I think no lie is too big as long as it furthers his agenda or puts money in his pocket.

Beck is the same story except his audience is the dumbest on the planet and he knows it. He's a clown for hire.

Listen people. Global warming does not mean Maine is the new Florida. The effect are more complicated than that. Raising the temperature of the world's oceans had a huge effect on ocean currents which in turn changes weather patterns. Also warmer air holds more moisture. This leads to more precipitation. Rain and snow. In the northeast the great lakes get warmer in the summer and freeze later in the year. When the cold air comes down out of Canada it whips across the lakes and picks up all that water. When the air mass hits land the moister is dropped as snow. It's call "Lake Effect Snow". People who live along Lake Erie know when the lake water is warm they're in for lake effect. The warming leads to bigger storms. This concept is too much for stupid people like Sara.

The same holds for the Gulf of Mexico. As the water warms there hurricanes that pass over the water pick up more water and energy. Katrina. Remember that?

I have long held that there is a direct correlation between intellect and political leanings. Just look at some of the presidents. Bush Jr. was a C student at best. Conservative. Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar. Liberal. Ronny Ray Gun. Conservative. Palin is dumber than a box of hair. Conservative. Obama was a constitutional law professor. Liberal. No need to go on.

A Christmas wish

My Christmas wish is that people wake up and realize that there is no god.

The world be a better place without a doubt if people stopped believing in an invisible cloud being and started relying on science, reason and logic. I came to the conclusion there was no god when I was about 15. It was no easy thing to do as all around me people were saying there was. I set out to read everything I could on the subject. My high school girl friend had me meet with her Catholic priest so he might save me. It turned out he couldn't answer the simplest questions and he just got aggravated. I held out high hopes that as time progressed more people would accept the truth. There are more people saying they're atheist now but not like I had hoped. It is amazing that just days before 2010 most people believe in such crap!

Imagine where we'd be without religion! The trade towers were not taken down because as the boy idiot said "they hate our freedoms". They were taken down for religion. Their invisible friend is better than our invisible friend. And then the clueless dim son says "It's a crusade!" Good choice of words numb nuts! No reason the Muslim people would remember the crusades!

Look at the middle east. Do you think there would be all that fighting over what amounts to sand if the crazies didn't think of it as the "holy land"?

Look at what's been done by religion to slow the advance of science. Check out what the Vatican did to Galileo. Look at how the born again assholes want to teach creationism instead of evolution. Just recently the pope told Stephen Hawking not to study the first moments of the big bang because that was god's province. Oh, great. If we listened to religious nut cases, like the pope, we'd still be living in thatched huts thinking the whole universe revolved around a flat earth!

The Vatican and all other organized religion rely on faith. And what faith is is the ability to reject critical thought and accept things that if one examines with reason are totally unbelievable. Would anyone who relied on reason believe that a god so powerful he, or she, could create everything would impregnate a being he created so that these infinitely inferior beings could kill his son all so he could rise from the dead? And don't even get me started on Jonah and the whale, Noah's ark and all the rest of the fairy tales!

Bill Maher's movie "Relilous" is brilliant. I agree completely with his final words. Our long term survival depends on us getting past all these superstitions.

Merry Christmas!

Health Care Bull Shit

In my previous post I detailed why I think the US is in decline. An excellent example is the current state of health care. It's infuriating that we can not get a single payer system like most other industrialized countries. We can't even debate it in Washington. The closest we can come it a piece of shit call the "Public Option" and that looks DOA!

People, our government is owned by the insurance companies. There is no doubt of this. I have to give them credit for convincing some people that they have our best interest in mind. They've done an even better job of scaring the great uninformed masses with their talk of... ready?..... be scared......SOCIALIZED MEDICINE! Oh no! They ask "do you want a bureaucrat between you and our doctor?" What they don't mention is that if you have insurance now some college drop out is between you and your doctor.....and between you and the money you need to pay for your medicines and doctor bills. And guess what, morons. They get paid to save the insurance company money. Not to insure your well being.

During a recent visit to the great city of Toronto I asked some Canadians what they thought about our ongoing debate. They were at a loss to understand it. They couldn't understand why there was even a debate. They told me that whereas their system was far from perfect they were happy with it. There are things they would change but they would not trade their system for ours. NEVER! They said they do have to wait sometimes for routine care but never for emergency care or non-elective surgery.

I don't know how the Republicans and the likes of Weasel Joe Liebermann sleep at night. How can they when they know the money in their pockets is money that should be saving lives?

I know someone who is one of those, "keep government out of my life" types. She's against single payer... fuck it.. Socialized Medicine. She is always parroting the talking points. Until recently. She has a friend who has cancer. He's fighting hard to stay alive. He has a young son. She visited him recently in the hospital. He told her he didn't know if he would live. He said he was weighing his options and trying to decide whether to fight on or stop all treatments and give up. You see like most people his insurance policy has a life time limit. Cancer treatments being what they are he's behind in his mortgage, car payments and just about everything else. This 40 something man has to decide whether or not he should fight so his son can grow up with a father or give up so as not to risk leaving his wife and son with nothing. Sons of bitches! How do they sleep?

Now this woman is rethinking. No country with socialized medicine leaves anyone bankrupt because of medical bills. While he chooses life or death over money the president of Humana makes $3.3 million per year. John Rowe at Aetna makes $22 million!

Source : http://www.forbes.com/lists/2006/12/AG0Q.html

http://www.forbes.com/static/execpay2005/LIRS5NI.html?passListId=12&passYear=2005&passListType=Person&uniqueId=S5NI&datatype=Person


We won't get any decent health care reform. The insurance companies are buying the votes. They're busy scaring the shit out of uneducated mouth breathers.

Again how do they sleep at night. Oh, and all you out there how are fighting against socialized medicine. Blood is on your hands too!

The US is in decline.

Recently Bill Maher took a lot of heat for saying Americans are dumb. Funny, because he's right. If you don't believe me do a little research. Select 5 to 10 people you know at random. Now ask them some simple questions. Who is the Secretary of State? Name 3 of the amendments that make up the Bill of Rights. Why do we have winter and summer? Now ask who won American Idol? Who won dancing with the stars? What channel is Jon and Kate on?

I've done this. I have a co-worker who can not tell me who the Secretary of Defense is but can name all the backup dancers are on some TV show he watches. I don't even know the name of the show but he has a poster of them on his wall.

When John Kerry ran against the moron I heard a woman about 25 say she was going to vote for the boy idiot. Why? Because he accepted Jesus as his personal savior. I asked who his VP was. She didn't know! No wonder he got elected twice! She voted for the dumbest president we ever had because he was a born again Christian and he would outlaw abortion! Let me ask you this. In 8 years did he do anything to change the law? No. It amazes me how people can be upset because abortion is murder but have no problem with Bush's Iraqi war that killed as many as 1,000,000 people.

Every civilization reaches an apex then declines. We're in our decline. We think life is hard now but even with the economy struggling we live better than most people in the world. We have it so easy we don't fight for what's right. We're too content to sit on increasingly fat asses and watch the dumbest crap to ever be aired! Bush and his fellow neocons took away our most fundamental right, Habeas Corpus, and there was barely a peep! Anyone who did say anything was called un-American! Folks, there is nothing more American.

According to a Newsweek poll done in march of 2007:

Only 13% of Americans believe in naturalistic evolution (that is that God had no part in evolution)

However, 48% of Americans believe that God created "humans pretty much in the present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so"

See? How can we solve the problems of global warming, cure diseases and improve our technology so we can compete with other nations economically when we're so damn stupid?

Not only are most Americans dumber than a box of hair they're outright proud of it! I heard people say they voted for Bush rather than Al Gore because Gore was a know-it-all and Bush more like them! WTF people! I want the leader of the most powerful nation on earth to be smart! I wanted to puke when Bush was described as a regular guy, one you'd want to have a beer with. I have plenty of friends I can go have a beer with. A don't want to have a beer with him! I want him to the smartest fucking guy we can find when the shit hits the fan! Anyone who doesn't know that GW was fucking clueless is even more clueless. The guy said so many stupid things they could find enough to make calendars with a dumb quote for every day!

Bill Maher was dead on correct. Americans are dumb! So dumb the Republican party counts on it to get elected! How else can you convince enough people that John Kerry (Two Purple Hearts and Silver Star) was not a war hero and Bush was (Texas Air National Guard AWOL)?

Americans are so dumb someone like Sara Palin can actually be considered for president.

I rest my case!