Neverland

Not only do the "moral" among us wish to stop progress in the sciences, they'd be much seeing the legislated moral codes of the past more rigorously enforced:

March 30, 2005 | WILMINGTON, N.C. (AP) -- A former sheriff's dispatcher who quit her job after her boss found out she lived with her boyfriend is challenging North Carolina's law against cohabitation.

Debora Hobbs said she was told to get married, move out, or find another job after her boss found out about her living situation. The legal arm of the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina filed the lawsuit Monday on her behalf.

The lawsuit seeks to abolish the nearly 200-year-old -- and rarely enforced -- law that prohibits unmarried, unrelated adults of the opposite sex from living together. North Carolina is one of seven states with such a law.

Convicted offenders face a fine and up to 60 days in jail.

"The government has no business meddling in the private relationships of consenting adults," said Jennifer Rudinger, executive director of the ACLU-NC Legal Foundation.

Silly Ms. Rudinger. In the view of Left Behind crowd, meddling in the private relationships of consenting adults is the ONLY purpose of government. From attempting to permit doctors to refuse care to homosexual patients in Michigan, to defending pharmacists from dispensing medications with whose "morality" they disagree, to invading the "sanctity" of marriage which they're otherwise so eagerly and constantly screeching about by parachuting into the Sciavo case, the sanctimonious creeps who'll be (o happy day!) sucked up to their reward during the Rapture see government as nothing less than the opportunity to force everyone to ostensibly live as they profess to, but have so much difficulty actually managing.

These people NEED government to protect them from their own ungoverned appetites. Refusing to become adults, they want a perpetual, deathless Daddy to lecture and hector them, and everyone else, to keep them on the straight and narrow which they are unable to find with both hands and a compass.

Is anyone else uncomfortable with a nation directed by sanctimonious, hypocritical children?

Red Alert

Politics, blah blah blah.
Here's the scary stuff:

The study contains what its authors call "a stark warning" for the entire world. The wetlands, forests, savannas, estuaries, coastal fisheries and other habitats that recycle air, water and nutrients for all living creatures are being irretrievably damaged. In effect, one species is now a hazard to the other 10 million or so on the planet -- and to itself.
...
# Because of human demand for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel, more land has been claimed for agriculture in the last 60 years than in the 18th and 19th centuries combined.

# An estimated 24 percent of the Earth's land surface is now cultivated.

# Water withdrawals from lakes and rivers have doubled in the last 40 years. Humans now use between 40 percent and 50 percent of all available freshwater running off the land.

# At least a quarter of all fish stocks are overharvested. In some areas, the catch is now less than a hundredth of that before industrial fishing.

# Since 1980, about 35 percent of mangroves have been lost, 20 percent of the world's coral reefs have been destroyed and another 20 percent badly degraded.

# Deforestation and other changes could increase the risks of malaria and cholera, and open the way for new and so far unknown diseases to emerge.

In a way, who cares if we sign on to the Kytoto Treaty? It appears too little, too late.

The world is in need of a comprehensive environmental treaty covering air, water and food quality and production. Within 500 years, I'm betting on species extinction unless humanity drastically changes its methods of exploiting world resources.

Listeners to my off-line diatribes are well aware that I believe the "overpopulation problem" to be one of the better and most persistent bits of misdirection is examining world problems. The problem is not too many people, the problem is the distribution of world resources being at the mercy of political constructs.

Since the United States is demonstrably a rogue nation at this juncture, it's far too much to expect any leadership on a world resource distribution summit to come from that quarter, but, and I want to make this perfectly clear, humanity is staring down the barrel of its ultimate destruction in a tiny march of generations.

If technological civilization collapses at any point in the future, it cannot be recreated in the same way. Mineral desposits extractable with primitive tools are exhausted. Remaining resources of this kind require a technological level that will not be sustained in the face of massive destruction of the basic necessities of food, water, and air. The conflicts arising from political competition from a shrinking resource pool will degrade the capacity of civilization to sustain itself.

It's long past time to quit kidding around about this issue. Processes altering the environmental fabric have a way of reaching tipping points at which a trend accelerates unstoppably. If the the biomass in the oceans collapses, we're all done, and for eternity.

Such an outcome may be welcome to the Left Behind crowd of apocalyptics, but for the reality-based community, the end of the human species is pretty much an unqualified catastrophe.

Without children, I don't have a close personal stake in the long-term future unless some clever folks come up with Immortality for Everyone (TM) before I kick, but for those of you who contemplate descendants, you might want to consider handing over a world where they won't be using up the last of their ammunition to defend five gallons of drinking water.

My Life As A Doorstop

Like many people, I've been put in mind by the sad case of Terri Sciavo of the necessity for making one's wishes clear about medical care desired in the event one is unable to communicate following an accident or other catastrophic event. Therefore, allow me to make my wishes clear in this public forum.

1) ALL extraordinary measures are to be taken in my care. Feeding tubes, resusitating paddles employed at 10-minute intervals, a bellows to blow air into my lungs, painkillers of dangerous intensity -- if human ingenuity has devised a means to extend life in whatever fashion and of whatever quality, I want that means involved in my care. Disconnect nothing. Not even if all my brain readings are flatter than than Dick Cheney's warm-up jokes, or if all my smiles, grunts, flailing gestures, and attempts at articulation are clearly the efforts of my brain stem to cling stubbornly to life. It's my life, and I want to hang on to it as long as modern medical capabilities can sustain it. Before I shuffle off into the Long Dark, I'd like to see where this coma thing takes me.

2) However, if close relatives or friends are considering selling of houses, cars, children, or body parts to finance this full-court-press of medical care, I'll take my chances with the Infinite. No one's impoverishing themselves on my account. If, on the other hand, Medicaid is footing the bill, imagine my mirth at continued life, partially financed by the Red states. In fact, if aforementioned relatives and friends can siphon off thousands of dollars from some dolorous right-wing collection of evangelists for my care, do your best to skim off a percentage for yourselves. Feel free to use my "plight" as a prop to line your own pockets and improve the quality of your lives, as long as you sustain mine. I'm in a coma, what the hell do I care if my picture's in the paper?

3) If I'm screaming non-stop, despite the application of painkillers, keep injecting MORE painkillers until I stop screaming, or I'm dead. There are worse ways to go.

4) Please have John Edward, the psychic, attempt to contact me. We'll settle this afterlife question when he and I go mano-a-mano on the astral plane.

5) You who know the secret identity of Antonius are enjoined to wave this document in the face of overtaxed, despairing medical personnel attempting to provide me with "mercy".

I hope this makes my wishes clear.

Absence

I feel as if I owe readers of this blog a short explanation for the 10 week hiatus (or so) of Boring Diatribe.

A few conversations with Reductio last year convinced me that:

a) Boring Diatribe was gradually undermining what little remained of my post-election sanity, and
b) These Diatribes weren't making any difference anyway.

I admit to the accuracy of both statements. On the other hand, I no longer care if following the "news" drives me completely around the bend, or if the readers of this blog are unpersuaded, or even offended, by the application of reason to world events and their coverage by the media, otherwise and hereinafter known as "the hyenas of crony capitalism".

Someone has to keep the flame of the enlightenment burning in this increasingly benighted nation, even if that flame demands the fuel of repetitious harangues against the corrupt and mendacious rulers to whom 59 million Americans have handed the increasingly flailing whip.

The country has survived Willian Taft and Japanese internment, race riots and the Vietnam war. I believe, somewhat against my better judgment, that America will survive the rapacious rule of the would-be oligarchs currently in possession of the federal government apparatus.

My belief arises, not out of some faith in the eventual good judgment of the American electorate (sorry, Reductio), but rather out of a certainty that actions which contradict the dictates of reason must eventually fail, because reality is the final judge of all endeavor, which the Bush administration has discovered again and again, to the sorrow of its believers and detractors.

So, in short, if not having vanquished despair, having come to the point where the emotion can be regarded with amused contempt, Boring Diatribe is back in business.

Power

Yes. A long absence. But I've had it. I'm coming back there.

Do you understand, yet?

While there may be a few Republicans who hold dear principles of conservativism, such as limited scope of government power, local control of public policy whenever practical, reluctance to involve the United States in foreign wars, and protection of the rights of the individual against the compelling interests of the state, clearly, none of those Republicans occupy leadership positions in the Republican party.

The grotesque circus surrounding the fate of Terri Sciavo has finally and irrevocably demonstrated for the world what these crass and evil men intend for the United States of America and for as much of the world as they can seize. They will impose their arbitrary, illogical beliefs and desires everywhere they can because they want to, on as many victims as they can, to feed their overweening pride and greed.

From the soiling of America by officially sanctioned torture, to an illegal invasion of a defanged nation in pursuit of a personal vendetta and the profit of other fiends, to the endless examples of corrupt funneling of public funds into the private pockets of cronies, to this crowning achievement of a two branches of the federal government seeking to interfere in the life and death decisions of a single family by conducting a trial through legistlation, the real, naked agenda is clear.

Republicans are not trying to restore some mythic period when a noble citizenry shaped their own lives in peace and comfort. They have a single goal:

Power.

Power for its own sake. Not power to accomplish noble ends, or even ignoble ends. Merely an increasingly naked pursuit to fill an insatiable, endless, bottomless hunger for control of their fellow human beings, who they delight in degrading and reducing to penury to extend their control that much deeper into every human soul.

I pity the Sciavo family. My personal opinion is that it is immoral to starve people to death, whatever their state of mind or lack of it, but unlike Republicans, I do not believe that my personal moral convictions should necessarily carry the weight of law. If I did, in the face of overwhelming consensus that my opinions are not shared, then I would be a megalomaniac, whose joy would derive from tyranny. Instead, I believe in the rights of the citizenry and those affected by them to seek redress of their grievances through the American judicial system. Both sides of the Sciavo case have offered their arguments, and repeated decisions have unanimously consented and approved the current action of removing the feeding tube from Terri Sciavo. I do not agree with the morality of the decision, but I believe in the rule of law, a belief clearly lacking in the Republican party.

Don't refer to these people as our government, because that is not how they see themselves. They consider themselves our rulers, holding in themselves as much power over the life and death of each citizen as any king or dictator, and as Judge Scalia recently revealed, they believe this power stems directly from God.

You cannot argue with men who believe their decisions derive from the will of God. They will go to any lengths to impose their own will in the guise of doing the Almighty's work. They will kill millions, and pilot planes into buildings, if it serves God's purposes as revealed in the impenetrable midnight of their twisted souls.

They were elected. But in their hearts, in the hearts of their followers, they were appointed by God.

Do you understand?