NOTE: this blog is no longer active as of 12/07. New one: http://blog.kirchhof.com
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
Tue, 26 Jul 2005
On Fundamentalism
Friends and Neighbors, I am tired. It is a very difficult, 24-hour
a day job caring about my country and trying to peacefully wrest
control of my government from the hands of the greedheads and the
warmongers and the authoritarian religious fundamentalists to which
51.4135% of you gave it. Well, as is the case with a democratically
based republic, we have the government that we deserve. But we
don't have the government that my son deserves, so I'll keep on
trying.
I am especially tired right now of hearing that this country was
founded on so-called "Christian Values." Horse manure. If you're
talking about the far-right fundamentalist predestination-believing
settlers of Plymouth
Rock, all well and good. But they did not found this country. They
founded a settlement. And I don't see a lot of Puritan houses of
worship in my neighborhood. They were, and are, a dead
out-of-mainstream religious sect, worthy of an asterisk in the
religious history of our nation. The closest surviving relative of
that sect is modern Presbyterianism, and it survived because it
embraced a less Calvinist, more compassionate viewpoint.
This nation was founded on the values of The
Enlightenment. Our founding fathers were, above all, children of
the Age of Reason. (As a matter of fact, Both Jefferson and Monroe
urged Thomas Paine to finish his book of that
title after he was released from a French prison and returned to
this country.)
The very first words of the very first amendment to Our Constitution
read "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
religion." How clear is that? It means that I am free of your
religion, and you are free of mine.
It is none of my business if you believe that a collection of oral
mythology and badly translated ancient allegories are the "written word of
God, inspired by the Holy Spirit and without error in the original
manuscripts." That is your business, and I am morally, ethically, and
legally bound to respect your personal viewpoint. And to respect your
right to have that viewpoint. And to respect your right to peacefully
assemble with others of that viewpoint.
But you have the same obligations. I am a foundationally religious
person. There is no doubt in my mind that we are a part of a mystical,
greater whole that cannot be fathomed at this level. But my god
answers to every name, be it Yahweh, Jehova, Allah, Krishna, Baal, I
Am, Bagadjimbiri, Changing Woman, Djigonasee, Thor, Margawse,
Ama-No-Minaka-Nushi, Cerridwen, Athtart, Nu Wa, Hathor, Bastet,
Ururupuin, Xochiquetzal, Tsunigoab Khoi, Airmid, Isis or a million
other names. My god has malice and judgement towards no one. My god
doesn't do politics, because my god knows that nothing of lasting
import can happen on this plane except Love. No one can die or be
truly harmed here; we are all utterly and profoundly Safe, and we will
all realize this at the appropriate moment. We are simply here,
voluntarily, to experience the beauty of life in all the duality of a
physical manifestation, good and bad, and perchance to realize that we
are all a part of The One. We all know this when we choose to come
here; we come here to realize it.
You see, my god is so big a target that it is impossible to
miss. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin so profoundly and correctly puts
it, "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are
spiritual beings having a human experience."
If you choose to believe the idea that you will be physically
picked up and taken to a twelve thousand furlong cubed city with nine
gates surrounded by a 144-cubit-high wall called "Heaven," while
people like me burn in a searingly painful underworld Lake Of Boiling
Sulfur, being poked with spears by sadistic red bipeds with horns for
All Eternity (having been put there by your Compassionate God), then
feel free. I have no problems with that.
But if you want to take over my country, and force me to pay public
homage to the myriad illogical minutiae of your beliefs, and
teach my children your demonstrably flawed mythology in place of
proven physical reality, well, I have a huge problem with that,
and I will fight you at every turn.
Keep your beliefs in your heart, and in your home, and in your
church and I will do everything to defend you against all who would
try to abridge your right to keep close those beliefs. But keep your
beliefs out of my home, and my church, and my government, as I keep
mine out of yours.
That is freedom of religion. More specifically, that is freedom
from religion. There are as many paths to God as there are
human souls, and I fundamentally respect your right to your path. I also
fundamentally demand my right to mine.
That, my friends, is proper fundamentalism.
Posted at 10:26 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
[Reload all]
[E-mail]
Heh. Tell Us What You Really Think.
The gloves are really beginning to come off at the fringes of The
Punditry. Witness, children, Doug
Thompson over at Capital Hill Blue:
Bush, in my opinion, is criminally insane, a pill-popping dry drunk
whose erratic behavior and reckless actions threaten world peace and
the future of this nation far more than any Islam-spouting religious
fanatic. He is an enemy of the state, a mood-swinging despot whose
threatens the very freedoms that form the foundation for this
country. He has created a police state where basic American freedoms
have vanished under an politically-exaggerated threat to national
scrutiny, milked the human tragedy of 9/11 for his personal agenda and
ripped the Constitution to shreds through the USA Patriot Act, a
rights-robbing piece of legislation put together by his former
attorney general, the bible-thumping John Ashcroft, an inept former
Senator who couldnt even win an election against a dead man.
Nicely put. Shouldn't be long now until the mainstream begins to
start asking the right questions and expressing the appropriate
concern for our nation.
Posted at 10:14 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
[Reload all]
[E-mail]
Sun, 17 Jul 2005
Scary Stuff
Via Boing Boing:
Plankton levels have dropped precipitously
For reasons that mystify scientists, ocean temperatures are rising,
which is killing off the plankton. As a result, animals higher on the
food chain are facing mass starvation.
"Something big is going on out there," said Julia
Parrish, an associate professor in the School of Aquatic Fisheries
and Sciences at the University of Washington. "I'm left with no
obvious smoking gun, but birds are a good signal because they feed
high up on the food chain."
This spring, scientists reported a record number of dead seabirds
washed up on beaches along the Pacific Coast, from central
California to British Columbia.
In Washington state, the highest numbers of dead seabirds -
particularly Brandt's cormorants and common murres - were found
along the southern coast at Ocean Shores.
Bird surveyors in May typically find an average of one dead
Brandt's cormorant every 34 miles of beach. But this year,
cormorant deaths averaged one every eight-tenths of a mile,
according to data gathered by volunteers with the Coastal
Observation and Seabird Survey Team, which Parrish has directed
since 2000.
"This is somewhere between five and 10 times the highest number of
bird deaths we've seen before," she said.
Posted at 12:51 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
[Reload all]
[E-mail]
Thu, 07 Jul 2005
Why Wait Until The Last Minute?
The time has come to make the Official Epistemic Ingemination
endorsement for the 2006 gubernatorial race. Kinky Friedman gets the nod.
And, yes children, I am dead serious.
Those of you that read this weblog — and there are not a lot, maybe
500 unique visitors in a good month, but you are extremely high
quality visitors — know that I take politics
seriously. I am a proud progressive liberal populist. I am enough of a
liberal populist that I oft-times find common ground with far
right-wing conservatives over on the other side of "libertarian", much
as the ACLU does. Let me define "liberal progressive populist" as I
see it.
By liberal, I still think that Joe Conason illustrates it
best:
"If your workplace is safe; if your children go to school rather
than being forced into labor; if you are paid a living wage,
including overtime; if you enjoy a 40-hour week and you are allowed
to join a union to protect your rights -- you can thank liberals. If
your food is not poisoned and your water is drinkable -- you can
thank liberals. If your parents are eligible for Medicare and Social
Security, so they can grow old in dignity without bankrupting your
family -- you can thank liberals. If our rivers are getting cleaner
and our air isn't black with pollution; if our wilderness is
protected and our countryside is still green -- you can thank
liberals. If people of all races can share the same public
facilities; if everyone has the right to vote; if couples fall in
love and marry regardless of race; if we have finally begun to
transcend a segregated society -- you can thank
liberals. Progressive innovations like those and so many others were
achieved by long, difficult struggles against entrenched power. What
defined conservatism, and conservatives, was their opposition to
every one of those advances. The country we know and love today was
built by those victories for liberalism -- with the support of the
American people." -- Joe Conason, "Big Lies: The Right-Wing Propaganda
Machine and How It Distorts the Truth"
I define progressive (and I think that a better word should
be used in the political context) much as the Progressive
Party Platform of 1924 did:
Under our representative democracy the people protect their liberties
through their public agents.
The test of public officials and public polities alike must be: Will
they serve or will they exploit the common need?
The reactionary continues to put his faith in mastery for the solution
of all problems. He seeks to have what he calls the strong men and
best minds rule and impose their decisions upon the masses of their
weaker brethren.
The progressive, on the contrary, contends for less autocracy and more
democracy in government, for less power of privilege and greater
obligations of service.
Under the principle of ruthless individualism and competition, that
government is deemed best which offers to the few the greatest chance
of individual gain.
Under the progressive principle of cooperation, that government is
deemed best which offers to the many the highest level of average
happiness and well being.
It is our faith that we all go up or down together that class gains are
temporary delusions and that eternal laws of compensation make every
man his brother's keeper.
By populist, I mean that We The People are the entity to be
served by Our Government. The one great test of every piece of
legislation should be "How does this serve the common good?"
Government in its finest form should pool common resources for the
maximum benefit of the owners of those resources, the governed.
Government has no business serving the needs of an Exxon-Mobil where
they conflict with the common good. Let me quote my own writing here
to illustrate a point:
Now let's talk about HOW your captains of industry are able to "create
wealth." They use the infrastructure that was created with YOUR tax
dollars. The highway system. The air traffic control system.
Surface water impoundment and distribution. Traffic control and
routing. Weight, measure, and process
standardization. Telecommunications and telemetry. The water and
wastewater system. Railroads. Mass transit. Satellite navigation and
communications. Radio and television. Statistical information. Cable
television distribution from uplink to wall socket. Hydroelectric,
coal, gas, and nuclear power. The principles behind the computer
that you're sitting in front of. Medical research, statistics,
drugs, and technologies. The electrical distribution grid. The
Internet. Shipping and tracking technologies. Weather
prediction. Start-up loans. Geological, hydrological and
oceanographic mapping. The education of the workforce. The
development of all of these (and much, much more) were-or-are either
heavily subsidized or completely funded with taxpayer money. All are
managed, run, and regulated to varying degrees with your tax
dollars.
I am not anti-business. I am very much pro-small business. Small
business is the backbone of this economy; it is where innovation and
honesty and competition happens. But when small business gets big
enough to adversely influence fair competition, it becomes a
problem. For example, I love the things that Wal-Mart sells. I want to
see them widely available to everyone. That's why I buy them at
locally owned hardware stores, and not at Wal-Mart.
We see the logical end game of this big/small business schism
happening right now. And Texas Politics is a cesspool of cronyism in
service of these myriad big-business oligarchies, worse even than
Washington D.C.
The time has come for a populist resurgence. And it just so happens
that we have a populist in this horse race. I don't have a hair on my
ass if I don't grab on hard and help out in any way that I can. Hear
me well: Kinky Friedman is already more powerful than any politician
in Texas. He can stare down an Exxon-Mobil and make them blink with
nothing more than a microphone. He is smart, and savvy, and informed,
and fearless. And he is Ours.
He understands that Politics is
People. If you have the People on your side, you have more
power than all of the fat cats combined.
I have been talking with the folks in the campaign, and I have
agreed to blog about Texas Politics over at the Kinky site. This means
that most of the political stuff usually found here will move over
there; I'll be turning my attention and my available research cycles
to Texas. I'll still put "neat stuff" unrelated to politics over here,
though, and national politics will stay here.
The candidates in this upcoming race have no idea what
they're up against. They've never had to address a living
populist. Just dead ones. It is as if they will be trying to run a
campaign against a Mark Twain or a Will Rogers, and I pity the fool
that gets into a debate with the Kinkster. Richard "Kinky" Friedman
is an extremely intelligent, dedicated, compassionate and well
informed individual. And with that aforementioned microphone, he can
cut your legs off so cleanly that you won't even be bleeding when you
realize you've fallen over after you stop laughing.
Politicians hate being a laughingstock, but that is just about the
only kind we have in Texas. They're really going to hate this
campaign.
I strongly urge you to stay at home on primary day next spring; if
you vote in the primary, you can't sign the petition. On the day after
the primary, go and sign a petition to get Richard Friedman on the
ballot for Governor. And vote for him in November of 2006. In the
meantime, give what you can to his campaign.
"Why the hell not?" indeed. Just watch.
Posted at 16:19 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
[Reload all]
[E-mail]
Wed, 06 Jul 2005
A Good Day For Reading
I might have an interesting announcement in a day or two. In the
meantime, spend a day or two reading the information at http://texaspolitics.laits.utexas.edu
if you want to be informed of the way your gummint here works...
Posted at 12:09 by Randy Kirchhof [Permalink]
[Reload all]
[E-mail]
