Tributary State

Somewhere along the way to winning the War on Terror, the neoconservative cabal that is currently running (and I use the term loosely) this country completed the transformation of the United States of America into a tributary state to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The latest evidence of this transformation was when the cabal’s brain-dead puppet-president went over to SA last week and dutifully kissed the ass of one Saudi Royal after another to get them to increase oil production, and was soundly smacked down by his Saudi overlords. Meanwhile, one nation over, we have sacrificed the lives of over 4,000 US Soldiers, Marines, Airmen and Sailors to maintain the buffer zone that protects the Sunni dominated Kingdom from the hegemonic desires of the Shiite Persians.

Although it looks like we have dominated the region, with the application of vast and undeniable military power, the whole Gulf War-Iraq War series of events seems to have worked much more to the advantage of the Saudis, and ultimately to the detriment of the US. We stopped the secular socialist Saddam Hussein in his tracks with Operation Desert Shield, protecting the precious flogging and beheading way of life of the Saudi Royal Family. We pried Saddam out of Kuwait with Operation Desert Storm, ensuring that autocratic constitutional monarchy’s right to deny 85 percent of the population the right to vote (at least until reforms in 2005).

We then spent 12 years keeping Saddam in his corral, starving Iraqi children and pissing off Wahhabbi madmen by parking our over armed infidel ass on their sacred ground. And then when 15 Saudi citizens, two UAE citizens, an Egyptian and a Lebanese crashed four airplanes into the WTC, Pentagon and Pennsylvania, we didn’t invade any of those countries, but Iraq, a nation that contributed no men, money or material to the plot, and little, if any, moral support. This removed one threat to the Saudis, Kuwaitis and other nearby Sunni Arab states, but by bringing pseudo-democracy to the Shiite majority of Iraq, we have given these natural Iranian allies the political clout necessary to increase the power and influence of that state.

So our main goal in the region remains to protect the Saudis and their vast oil reserves. But what do we get for our 3 billion dollar a day expense but a trickling increase in the production of the oil we are protecting. If we’d let Saddam have all of Arabia we’d only have one asshole to deal with, the Iranians would be checked by Saddam’s power, and he’d probably sell us as much oil as he could pump to keep his military in shiny new tanks.

As it is, the oil barons who’ve hijacked our government seem committed to maintaining our status as Saudi Arabia’s bitch guard dog. So we sit in Iraq losing blood and resources, but getting very little oil for our troubles. And that’s just another reason to withdraw all American military forces from the mid-east. The Sunni-Shiite Jihad that we are currently keeping a lid on would explode in violent excess across Mesopotamia. In order to fund this war (and purchase American weapons) both the Saudis (backing Iraq’s Sunni tribes) and the Iranians would increase oil production. The whole region would be fucked up for decades, but there’s nothing that’s going to stop that now anyway, and at least the price of gas would go down.

On the Bones of the Dead

Having utterly lost the battle for credibility within the scientific community, the Intelligent Design Creationist movement has embraced a new tactic in their war against science. It’s a game of guilt by association in an instance were the association is entirely a figment of their own twisted imaginations. The argument goes like this: Darwinism = Nazism, Evolution = Anti-Semitism, Science = Holocaust. It is not enough, it appears, to fabricate whole lies about what The Theory of Evolution is, what it means and what it says, these sad, demented losers, and their mascot Ben Stein, have to build their lies on the bodies of the victims of the greatest crime in human history. Having lost every appeal that they have ever made to reason, they now appeal to hysteria by trying to connect Darwin to Hitler, and in the process are spitting on the memory of six million murdered Jews.

It is probably true that there would have been no Zyklon B without science. Neither would there have been the atomic bombs used to ravage Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Science and engineering allow us to discover and manipulate forces that can be used to slaughter millions, if we are so inclined morally to use them that way. Whether or not scientists and engineers should consider these facts before gifting humankind with such power is a valid question, but not related to the poorly drawn conclusions concocted by the IDC crowd. Their argument is that the notion of biological evolution, the brilliant explanation of the simple process by which life flourishes and diversifies, can turn us all into stark raving genocidal maniacs.

The truth is that the Holocaust was more deeply rooted in the Christian tradition of Anti-Semitism and the Colonial Era notion of race than it ever was in the Theory of Evolution. Certainly Adolf Hitler and the upper echelons of the Nazi leadership were influenced by Darwinism, but only as much as any late 19^th Century and early 20^th Century person would have been. Any true student of Darwin would have rejected the idea that one needs to segregate or slaughter people of another race. The well adapted will thrive in their environment, while the poorly adapted will fail. There was never any need for any extraordinary measures to be taken to ensure either event. If Hitler were truly convinced of the superiority of the German people, and even remotely understood the basic concepts of evolution, he would have been happy to have such strong Aryan Volk live in direct competition with Jews, Slavs and other so-called lesser people.

Like Hitler, these Intelligent Design Creationists are using the Jews to advance their own pathetic agenda. Having nothing real to offer, they can only make noise to frighten children and the gullible. Their attempt to rewrite the history of the Holocaust and displace the moral failures of Christian Europe onto a theory that merely describes a natural process is beyond preposterous. They are as morally bankrupt as the Holocaust deniers who pretend that the crime never happened in the first place. They dig up the bones of the dead to build their sad little house of lies and commit new atrocities upon all of the Holocaust’s victims.

Darwin's Dagger for Dummies

Simple Logic

If God is complex,
and God was not designed,
then complexity does not require design.

Leave Hillary Alone

The whole purpose of the process is to select a candidate. Only a dirty Republican would deny someone a fair shot at a free election.

Understanding

Imagine that I punch you in the face.
Imagine that I punch you in the face every time I see you, and that I see you everyday.
Imagine that I do this for five years, and that no one stops me, and that there is nothing you can do about it.
Imagine that after five years I am converted out of the Christian hypocrisy that allowed me to justify such actions and embrace a philosophy of tolerant atheism.
I no longer punch you in the face.
I become friendly.
I help you find a job.
I loan you a few bucks when you're in need.
I help you move into a new house.
I'm nothing but nice from now on.
Should I in my wildest dreams imagine you will ever forget that for five years I punched you in the face?
Should I be surprised to find out that you still expect, based on my past behavior, that one day I might start punching you in the face again?
Should I be angry if you tell people that I used to punch you in the face, or that, even though I'm currently Mr. Nice Guy, you remained worried that I'll start punching you in the face again, or even do worse things to you?

Now. Imagine that I punched you in the face for 300 years.

The Sound and the Fury

The current rage (last week anyway) in the atheist blog-o-sphere is the story of how PZ Myers, a biologist and associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris and author of the Pharyngula blog, was expelled from a screening of Ben Stein’s upcoming Intelligent Design screed EXPELLED: No Intelligence Allowed. Apparently the producers of this film, although perfectly willing to deceive Myers and others into appearing in their movie, are somehow threatened by the notion of allowing them to actually see the finished product. Ironically, although they were able to identify and expel Myers from the theater, his guest, Richard Dawkins, a far more prominent biologist and atheist, went unnoticed by the producer’s thought police.

A sample of Stein's paranoid ravings:

The biggest irony, of course, is to deny someone the opportunity to see a film when a major premise of that film is that certain scientist and teachers are being expelled from science labs and schools because of their particular scientific viewpoint, i.e. that they are advocates of the so-called Theory of Intelligent Design. Maybe the filmmakers were just playing some school yard game of ‘let’s show the dirty evolutionary biologist how it feels to be excluded,’ but that level of immaturity would do little to advance the cause of anyone who wants to be taken seriously.

And they do so desperately want to be taken seriously, these Intelligent Design Creationists. So they make bad movies or hijack local school boards (or state legislatures) and make all sorts of noise about how oppressed they are and how the simple notion of evolutionary biology is the root of all evil. They do everything but good science, because, at the end of the day, ID has nothing to do with science and everything to do with religion.

The notion of Intelligent Design was not founded on the observation of genuine phenomenon, but on the offense its originators took with the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. They were not inspired by the deep complexities of measurable reality, but by the desperate hope that they could force a worldview based on Bronze Age literature into scientific credibility. They did not create it as a genuine scientific discipline, but as a tool to wedge religion back in to public education. They created nothing new with their idea that the world was so complex that only an intelligent agency could have created it (that notion has been around at least since the Bronze Age), they simply sought gaps in current scientific knowledge that they thought would support such a notion.

Real scientists are aware that there are gaps in our knowledge. Some of them are huge gaps (exactly WTF is dark matter or dark energy). The essence of science is the exploration of all of the unknown quantities and qualities of the universe. To write ‘unnamed intelligent agent’ into any of those gaps as a means of explaining them is criminally lazy science. It’s like putting ‘there be dragons here’ on a map and pretending that, just because it says so, there really are dragons there. But until you show me a dragon, until you’ve taken photographs, or measured the wingspan, or recorded the temperature of its fiery breath, the existence of dragons is nothing more than wishful thinking. It’s not good mapmaking, and it's not good science.

There is a reason that ID has been expelled from the lab and the classroom, and it's as good as the reason that a school administrator might expel a bully from a school. It is because Intelligent Design is the worst kind of pseudoscience. It is an artifice created by religious fanatics, who are trying to cut the genuine truth out of education in order to replace it with a fairy tale. It is quintessentially “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

If Ever I Were to Vote for an American Idol

This is the performance I would vote for:

One God Under Nation

Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's.

Jesus of Nazareth

It’s hard to judge, from Gospels written three decades after his death, and translated or mistranslated over the course of hundreds of years after it, what an itinerant preacher from Galilee really meant when he suggested that the people occupying occupied Palestine should give what is due to both Caesar and God. It would seem that he felt that there was some separation of duties in what one may have owed the civil authorities and what one may have owed to God, and that these separate duties did not, in any real sense, infringe upon each other. Jesus of Nazareth, it seems, was an early proponent of the separation of church and state.

This is not surprising. Jesus, whether genuine historic man or mere fictional creation, was all about God. To know the God that Jesus spoke of was to know a being who transcended time and space and the trivialities of human existence. Still a bit attached to the occupied Jewish nation into which Jesus was born, this God was in the midst of a transformation from a local tribal deity to a universal (or catholic) trinitarian God of every nation. A God such as this, in the mind of Jesus anyway, was far above the pettiness of human politics.

But of course human politicians were never above using God, or the name of God, or the worshipers of God to pursue their own limited agendas. From Constantine to George W., Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit have been evoked to justify all kinds of dubious political enterprises, and at the worst torture, war and genocide. Jesus may have advised loving your enemies and praying for them, but most of the emperors, kings and presidents who have claimed to act in his name seem more interested in trying to figure out who Jesus would kill. Their clear perversion of what was generally a message of peace and brotherhood should fool no one.

Most people, however, are not politicians, and one might assume that they believe what ever it is that they believe with a certain sincerity. One might assume that they believe in the Big God, an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being who loves them dearly but will condemn them to eternal punishment for the temporal errors of faith that they commit with their tiny human minds. Nice guy, that God. But it’s who they claim to believe in, a God much greater than anything else in the created universe, a being who exceeds all things.

So you have to ask, why are so many of them intent on dragging him down into the stinking pit of human politics?

Among the prominent delusions of true believers with a theocratic bent is that they can sanctify the triviality that is their patriotism by wrapping God up in the flag. Their One Nation Under God is the best old nation on the whole damned Earth, or will be once they’ve scoured the Constitution of genuine freedom and forced the whole nation to live by their own version of Sharia Law. The insult to freedom is atrocious. The perversion of the Founder’s intent is horrifying. And the insult to God must be unforgivable.

America is a great nation. My nation. Not perfect, but I’ll be damned if there's a better society on earth to be born into. Still, it’s a mote, stuck on a dirt clod, orbiting a small yellow star in the middle of an unremarkable backwater galaxy. To a being both eternal and infinite the US of A is a big fat nothing. Less than nothing. A mere collection of real estate and people that, if it persists for 10,000 years, will still have only lasted a blink in the eye of eternity. Assuming that a God of such magnitude is in any way interested in the affairs of this or any state is absurd.

Theocracy is as much a crime against God, for its presumptions of divine entanglement, as it is a crime against humanity. For true believers to try and paint their God into a red, white and blue corner is an inconceivable hubris. They trivialize the divine by trying to put God their box, and the result is less to create a nation under God than to place God under their own political ambitions. They confuse their civil and religious duties, and as a result give everything to Caesar that they should be giving to God.

Blog Against Theocracy

Arthur C. Clarke: 1917 - 2008