Guns And Garden Hoses

I have been very troubled over the issue of providing arms to the Ukraine government. On the one hand, I feel the necessity to stand up to this kind of aggression both because the aggression is happening against a country whose  sovereignty we promised to protect and support and because if Russia is allowed to commit such lawless actions, I have no doubt it will do so in the future and this disease will spread at least to China and possibly elsewhere in the world.

But I did fear the escalation inherent in such an action. Having listened to John Herbst, former ambassador to Ukraine, make the case for such support on C-SPAN, I have concluded that it is an appropriate and effective action. I now believe we should make the commitment and provide the weaponry.

The garden hose reference is to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's declaration during World War II (before the United States had entered it) that if a neighbor's  house is on fire you lend him your hose so be can put it out. This was in support of the lend lease program.

Rob FromThe Poor, Give To The Rich

Responses to a Bernie Sanders Facebook post which read:

This is what class warfare looks like:

The business Roundtable – representing Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, J.P. Morgan Chase and others – has called on Congress to raise the eligibility age of Social Security and Medicare to 70, cut Social Security and veterans COLAs, raise taxes on working families and cut taxes for the largest corporations in America.

The responses:

Susan: welcome to the new America. Thank goodness I am so old they can't hurt me too much. I am ashamed that we are leaving our children and grandchildren a world that is worse than the one we were given. And you know as well as I do that or problems have not been caused by immigrants, illegal or otherwise, nor is Obamacare the cause of our decline

Lisa:  Glad I'm old too--we're f___d if Bernie Sanders doesn't take the helm.

Susan:  He would have my vote but only if he runs as a democrat.  If he runs as an independent, green or other party candidate, I'm afraid he will split the vote like Nader did in 2000. Look what happened then. All hell broke loose and we will not recover in my lifetime.

Me:  We'll recover when a Dem picks up Obama's defiance of Reaganism and we get a new FDR.  When Clinton declared the era of big government was over, he damned even Dems  to obey Republican ideology.  Triangulation is better known as capitulation.  Now, for the first time since then, Dems are saying Republicans are fundamentally wrong, so let's stop letting them tell us the rules of engagement.

Susan:  Think it will happen in our lifetime? I am afraid repubs would rather see our country go down in flames than work to fix it for the common good.

Me:  I would have to agree that the Republican Party has become as corrupt as a party can be. It is  endlessly pandering to it's fading base of aging, frightened white people, mostly male and to its robber baron bosses.  I would say within 10 to 15 years we will see a radical change as more and more young people become eligible to vote and and carry the resentment of Republicans trying to disenfranchise them. The Republican Party in America may well face the same fate that happened the Republican Party in California. The great victory of Prop 187 changed California from a conservative red state to a blue state in which republicans stand little chance of accomplishing anything.  More likely, Republicans will return to being a party which includes moderates and even some liberals.  The fanaticism has run so deep that this may not be possible.

But remember, the Republican Party was once the most liberal party in the Western world. The Democratic Party was once the party of conservative racial bigots. Things do change, and they often change almost overnight due to one great leader.  The Republicans became the home of  bigots and the Democrats lost that status because LBJ pushed through civil rights legislation.  It was almost literally overnight and shocked the world in its suddenness.

I deeply respect Obama's accomplishment in drawing the line in the sand and declaring that Reaganism would no longer be allowed to dominate unopposed, but he failed to go so far as to be an FDR or an LBJ. That is, to be a great president. Obama is only a much better than average president.

Big Bang Or Big Bust?

Very interesting new proposal. As many of you know, I really hate the Big Bang  theory, much preferring ekpirosis. We are supposed to believe that just because the universe run backwards shrinks, it therefore must continue to shrink forever until it becomes a dimensionless point? What's a dimensionless point? I have hated the concept since I first had to deal with it in a junior high geometry class.  Imagine a species similar to Ben Franklin's ephemera. Noting that humans get bigger over time, they would assume that our children must begin as dimensionless points. I don't about your kids, but mine did not begin as dimensionless points.

Also, the theory has the universe beginning with a Bose Einstein condensate. I like Bose Einstein condensates. (It's even got gravitons!)

-- Das and Ali propose that the universe is filled with a quantum fluid made up of gravitons, particles that probably have no mass themselves but transmit gravity the way photons carry electromagnetism. The follow-up paper suggests that in the early universe these gravitons would have formed a Bose-Einstein condensate, a collection of particles that display quantum phenomena at the macroscopic scale. Moreover, the paper argues that this condensate could cause the universe's expansion to accelerate, and so explain dark energy, and might one day be the only surviving component of the universe. --

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Hang 'Em How?

Am I the only one who ever noticed that when the gun nuts start talking (the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun) it's clear that they are not describing the real world in which we live but the last spaghetti Western they watched?

I Dub Thee Human

In response to the following article I posted:

https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10206089793113528&id=1523406287&_rdr#

The author agrees with many of the points I have previously made, however I think he misses a critical point. He suggests we must redefine everything as "human beings" if they are to be regarded as possessing natural rights. Which is simply silly. I do not imagine a dog must be defined as a human being to allow for the possibility that the dog may have some rights.

Is it not much more reasonable to accept the point that because animals posess all the abilities and emotions which we possess, although at a much lower evolutionary level, therefore, they have rights although that those rights are less than ours.
I do not perceive that it is necessary to turn a dog into a human being in order to acknowledge that it has rights. Many have already pointed out that we need only concern ourselves with the rights of sentient beings. That is to say, beings which feel, that have a sense of self, and which can suffer or feel pleasure. There is no need to create a forced choice false dichotomy of nothing has rights except human beings, therefore we must redefine animals as human beings if we are to contend that they have rights.

Property Rights

Yesterday  Sen. Rand Paul made the following comment in regard to vaccinations: "The state doesn't own your children. Parents own the children."

No one else seems to have noticed that he made a much more shocking statement than the suggestion that parents should be able to refuse to vaccinate their children, thus  putting all unvaccinated children at risk.

Surely, I am not the only person who noticed that he declared that parents own their children. Let me be clear. No human being owns any other human being. Your children are placed in your hands as a sacred trust. They are not your property.

I have no doubt that libertarian Rand Paul would disagree with his own point if pressed, but it  shocks me that he could be so careless as to suggest that children are their parents' property.  Am I alone in believing that this is the equivalent of stating that wives are their  husbands' property?  

The idea that children are objects to be owned snd exploited is ancient.  The Roman patriarch had control of his offspring for life.  Lincoln's father rented him out like a slave to make money.  We should be well past such abusive ideas.

 

The Quest For The Holy Snail

I'm finally finding a moment or two to begin watching the series, Sons of Liberty. I was very worried because it's on the History Channel, a channel infamous for programming which bears no relationship to actual history in the real world. I'm constantly amazed they don't call it the Silly Fantasy Channel. But I was so wrong! The show is amazingly accurate in every historical detail.

To sum up just the first few minutes:  Sir Samuel Adams, aka Hand Solo, knight of King Arthur's Round Table (located in fabulous Newark, New Jersey) has enraged King Palpatine III of England and the House of Handover by inventing beer and using the profits to finance his archeological adventures in seeking the Holy Snail. As you know, the Holy Snail was the snail Jesus ate at the Last Supper and which was brought back to eternal life upon Jesus's return to demonstrate to Doubting Thomas that he had risen from the dead and really, truly could still perform miracles, honor bright.

I don't want to do any spoilers here, so I had best stop and let you watch this amazingly historically accurate program for yourselves. I assure you, completely and sincerely, that the history in this program is as accurate as any fact that you are likely to hear on Fox News.

For even more utterly accurate facts about American history,  be sure to watch:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TXVq7IpCtF4