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The forces of patriarchy never sleep when it comes to their mission of teaching gender stereotypes. The following brief article by Abby Zimet has illustrations of a pink oven, a pink cleaning trolley and even pink computer dumbed down for the girls, contrasted with telescopes, chemistry sets and better computers for the boys. Why wait for your sons and daughters to grow up before they are injured by sexist attitudes when you can put them in their place with a simple trip to the toy store?

Along with the article is a clip of a 13 year old girl who isn’t having any of it.

http://www.commondreams.org/further/2012/12/07-3

“Fiscal cliff” is an apocalyptic image being used by policy makers convince America that we must act boldly and swiftly on budget cuts or disaster will follow. No one is better equipped than Monty Burns to express the rhetoric of why the have’s must take from the have nots. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c91usT4P1u0

Yesterday I wrote an article about scouting that some felt was unfair. I had based the article on the story of an atheist teen who wanted to be as scout but did not feel he could say the oath of membership. While I didn’t not specifically reference the story, I was also remembering the scout who was refused his Eagle badge because he is gay. Hundreds of scouts sent back their eagle badges as an act of solidarity.

One person who had been a scout said I was throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Another lifelong scout said he had never seen that kind of exclusion and felt there was some “reverse discrimination” going on.

I am a member of some very tainted groups myself. The Christian Church has a long bloody history that I don’t enjoy remembering. I have decided to stay in the church, but for that reason I have a special duty to resist injustice within that group. I have a duty to risk my own inclusion rather than co-operate in the exclusion of another. That does not mean I hate the church. Quite the opposite, it means I love the church enough to want to make it better.

I am also a registered Democrat. Before the election I had some friends who felt any criticism I made of Obama was an endorsement for Romney. But now that the election is over they refuse to weigh Obama on the same scale they used for earlier presidents. I believe I have a duty, if I am to remain in that party, to vocally criticize my party whenever it is unethical, which it often is.

There was a song some time back called “tainted love.” If we are going to live in community, we are going to live in ethical tension and some tainted loves.  So I stay church but I carry on a lover’s quarrel with my denomination. I vote for the candidate that seems best, but then hound him or her to work for universal human rights.  No human group is perfect, but in every case I must I risk my own inclusion for the sake of the outsider my group mistreats.

We all want a better world but all of us have sacred closets where we let the injustice hide. We must realize that the evil we deplore in the world hides in the little pockets where we refuse to be accountable.

Link to NBC coverage of story: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/10/09/14293913-gay-scouts-come-out-rally-around-teens-eagle-scout-bid?lite

Link to story of other scouts returning their eagle badges in solidarity: http://www.10news.com/news/eagle-scouts-return-honors-to-protest-boy-scouts-anti-gay-policy

Interesting piece on CNN on the controversy: http://www.cnn.com/2012/10/20/us/boy-scouts-future/index.html

I always cringe when a boy scout from the congregation asks me to work on their “God and Country” badge. The degeneration of religion to a kind of magic dust to place on our own purposes defeats any kind of meaningful ethics. Instead of the symbol “God” lifting my own will to consider what my choices mean to everyone else, such religion lifts my own purposes and those of my country to universal status.

My own church has had to reluctically decline requests to use our building for scouting events so long as they continue their discrimination against gays, but it is every bit as sinister to reject young boys because they do not believe in God.

Huffington Post has a piece linked below on the furor over a movement to allow scouts in England to use a nontheisic “values based” oath to join. Unsurprisingly religious people who think they have copyrighted truth and righteousness objected. Priest Peter Mullen wrote. “[T]he original boy scouts were not anything so woolly as ‘values-based’, which might mean anything from ancestor worship to declaring paid-up membership of the Amalgamated Coven of Tree-Huggers: they were founded as a Christian organisation.”

Many boys submit to the scouting oath out of peer pressure and the desire to belong to a group. It is a form of child abuse to pressure a young boy to commit to intellectual absolutes before the age of reason. It is a crime against humanity to propagandize a young boy to swear loyalty to nation, before he has discerned his duty to humankind.

Watch the full segment on HuffPost Live

Alternet has a great article called 10 brilliant thoughts by Noam Chomsky. I have shortened the quotes and eliminated some, but the link to the whole article and full quotes is below and is certainly worth reading:

“Concentration of ownership of the media is high and increasing. Furthermore, those who occupy managerial positions in the media, or gain status within them as commentators, belong to the same privileged elites, and might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations, and attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own class interests as well. Journalists entering the system are unlikely to make their way unless they conform to these ideological pressures, generally by internalizing the values; it is not easy to say one thing and believe another, and those who fail to conform will tend to be weeded out by familiar mechanisms.”

From Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies

“If the media were honest, they would say, Look, here are the interests we represent and this is the framework within which we look at things. …For example, I don’t try to hide my commitments, and the Washington Post and New York Times shouldn’t do it either. However, they must do it, because this mask of balance and objectivity is a crucial part of the propaganda function. In fact, they actually go beyond that. They try to present themselves as adversarial to power, as subversive, digging away at powerful institutions and undermining them. The academic profession plays along with this game.”

From Lecture titled ” Media, Knowledge, and Objectivity ,” June 16, 1993

“The leading student of business propaganda, Australian social scientist Alex Carey, argues persuasively that “the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy.”

From  World Orders: Old and New

“The public relations industry, which essentially runs the elections, is applying certain principles to undermine democracy which are the same as the principles that applies to undermine markets. …The goal is to undermine markets by creating uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices…  The same is true when the same industry, the PR industry, turns to undermining democracy. It wants to construct elections in which uninformed voters will make irrational choices. It’s pretty reasonable and it’s so evident you can hardly miss it.”

From lecture titled “The State-Corporate Complex:  A Threat to Freedom and Survival ,” at the The University of Toronto, April 7, 2011

“The Obama campaign greatly impressed the public relations industry, which named Obama ‘Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008,’ easily beating out Apple computers.

From Hopes and Prospects

“Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business…the public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products.”

From article ” Force and Opinion ” in Z Magazine

 “One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?”

From  Media Control

Truthout has an interview with Tom Hartmann about a new documentary he narrated called “Heist: Who stole the American dream in broad daylight?” The link below leads to an interview with Tom Hartmann, but I was struck by this quote by Donald Goldmacher claiming a memo sent in the early 1970’s symbolized the demise of any meaningful control by democratic processes over our own lives.

Lewis Powell was a corporate attorney from Virginia who was asked by his friend at the US Chamber of Commerce to write a secret strategy memorandum for the chamber in 1971. Two months later, Richard Nixon nominated him to the Supreme Court of the United States, where he served a number of years. The memo became a rallying cry among corporate executives for how to reassert corporate dominance over the American economy and its government, which it had lost during the era of the New Deal. The memo openly stated that corporations should punish their political enemies and should seek political power through both the law and politics. It encouraged challenges to what it saw as left-wing activities by people such as Ralph Nader and US academics. By 1978, the US Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable defeated pro-labor law reforms through a filibuster by Republican Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, which signaled the demise of organized labor as a significant opponent of organized money. -Donald Goldmacher

I’m sure it’s not that simple, and there is a whole other conversation about the sanity of “The American Dream,” but perhaps it will be a good place for some to begin the necessary conversation about how to get control of our lives back from corporate control.

http://truth-out.org/progressivepicks/item/13166-the-corporate-heist-of-the-united-states-government-began-with-a-memo-in-1971

Today is the birthday of one of the most remarkable minds our species has ever produced. You won’t see him much on major media, so here is one quote to celebrate a great friend of humankind.

“The US healthcare system is an international scandal.  It’s about twice the per capita cost of comparable countries, and there are relatively poor outcomes.  And the reason traces mostly to the fact, not entirely, but mostly to the fact that it’s largely privatized and pretty much unregulated.  And that leads to huge administrative expenses on other non-health expenses, like advertising profits, and so on; it leads to cherry picking, all kinds of things. So it’s a highly inefficient system, and it’s been [proved] – with pretty good evidence, some good economists worked on this, especially Dean Baker – that if we move to just the kind of healthcare system that other industrial countries have, it would wipe out the deficit.  Now, that’s not discussed, and instead what is being discussed are ways to make the system worse! So, for example, one of the proposals about cutting down healthcare costs is to raise the eligibility age for Medicare in a couple of years.  Well, what does that do?  That shifts people from a fairly efficient government run program — Medicare – to a highly inefficient private program, much more expensive, namely, private insurance.  So that’s a way of making the problem worse!  Of course it makes it look a little better from the point of view of the power system, because it shifts the cost from government to individuals; individuals are still paying more, just themselves, but the total healthcare expenses go up. “ Noam Chomsky

Get my chariot ready, the rapture is near. The Mormon Church has asked it’s members to be more compassionate to gay and lesbian persons.

The experience of same-sex attraction is a complex reality for many people. The attraction itself is not a sin, but acting on it is. Even though individuals do not choose to have such attractions, they do choose how to respond to them. With love and understanding, the Church reaches out to all God’s children, including our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters. -official statement on LDS website.

To be clear, the LDS still considers homosexuality to be a sin, but we must celebrate every step humankind makes toward compassion. This is why we must never give up on anyone.  While this statement is still arrogant and inadequate, it demonstrates a truth. Whatever religious approach one begins with, will become love if we allow it to broaden and deepen until it breaks the chains of its own sectarian superstitious beginnings.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/12/06/mormon-church-calls-for-more-compassion-towards-gays-homosexuality-not-a-choice_n_2252874.html?ir=Gay+Voices&ref=topbar

Capitalism eats everything (part 997)

Capitalism is not just an economic system, it is also a philosophy of value. Socialism was the view that human beings are the ultimate value. Capitalism has almost completely destroyed that vision and replaced it with a bloodless machine that recognizes only the accumulation of capital as a value. Human beings are free to form lesser values within that economic system, of course, but when capitalism is the ultimate arbiter of value, it twists and corrodes every lesser value to its own service.

I have a (perhaps fantasized) view of history that Universities arose out of the Middle Ages with a new hope for humanity. They were named after universality, the aspiration to rise above sect, family or nation to teach individuals to become citizens of the whole. They were called “liberal” not because they stood at one end of a political spectrum, but because they strove to free individuals from superstition and slavery to inhumane values.

I am a graduate of the University of Texas which is an example of the principle that capitalism swallows every lesser value. Because it has fallen captivity to funding sources opposed to universal or humane values, its academic work usually seeks truth only within realms that are profitable to capitalism in some way.

Recently the University released an academic study on shale gas drilling also known as “fracking.” McClatchy reported:

The University of Texas at Austin last month named a panel of experts to review its own controversial study. The Texas report found no evidence of groundwater contamination from “fracking,” the process of injecting high-pressure water and chemicals underground to free gas inside shale rock. But the professor who led the study, Charles Groat, failed to mention he’s on the board of a company engaged in fracking that paid him $400,000 last year. His ties to Plains Exploration and Production Company were previously reported by Bloomberg and others.           

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2012/09/25/169664/critics-question-university-research.html#storylink=cpy

In other words, an academic study used by the oil and gas industry to silence their critics was headed by a professor who was also on the board of a company that did shale oil drilling. This highly trained scientist did not disclose the fact that he being paid $400,000 a year by a drilling company.

I can imagine one of two things happening as a result of this scandal:

1. Universities will cleanse themselves of corporate money and return to the task of teaching us to be human beings. People will take responsiblity for the earth and for their own lives.

2. Capitalists will buy up the New York Times like they bought the Washington Post to end this kind of reporting. The masses that do hear about yet another scandal, not believing that solidarity is possible, will shrug their shoulders and procede into a future of slow suffocation.

And everyone of us will make that same decision this very day, to serve humankind or the machine.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/06/damning-review-of-gas-study-prompts-a-shakeup-at-the-university-of-texas/

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