jimrigby.org

Just a nice story…

 

(Former President George H.W.) Bush and his wife, Barbara Bush, attended the ceremony joining Bonnie Clement and Helen Thorgalsen as private citizens and friends on Saturday, spokesman Jim McGrath said.

Thorgalsen posted a photo on her Facebook page showing Bush signing the marriage license as a witness. She captioned the photo: “Getting our marriage license witnessed!”

In the photo, Bush is seated in a wheelchair, a stack of papers on his lap and his left hand poised with a pen. One bright red sock and one bright blue one peek out below the cuffs of his blue slacks.

 

http://m.apnews.com/ap/db_289563/contentdetail.htm?contentguid=W29Xyxqe

The early church called creeds “symbols.” They were cosmic hymns. But, then, the creeds became a kind of gauntlet. People could only join the church by repeatedly reciting specific words. No wonder the church became a flock of parrots! Councils used torture and exclusion to protect the purity of the creeds much like howler monkeys who have shouted down their opponents imagine they have won a debate.

I am against creeds so long as they make hypothetical truth claims, or when they become toll gates through which one enters community at the price of one’s reason, but I am in favor of creeds so long as they lead us to the song of our own heart.

Creeds should be love songs that help communities imagine what the world would look like through the eyes of universal love. Creeds are not to be recited individually as if reading an encyclopedia, but together as if reading a shared love poem to life. Despite their particular imagery, creeds are not the property of any sect, but are revelations of our one human family sharing one world.

Creeds are the noble but hopeless task of putting universal love into words.

Some days the barbarism of my nation terrifies me.

In his speech before the United Nations, President Obama pulled out an old Republican trick. He objected to the phrase “American exceptionalism” as if the term were an assault on the idea that America has special qualities. “I believe America is exceptional,” said the president.

The president knows very well that is not what the term means. He was responding to Vladimir Putin’s editorial in the New York Times accusing the U.S. of “exceptionalism,” which means seeing oneself as the exception to the standards one holds for everyone else. It is a polite word for arrogant hypocrisy at the national level.

For example, in his speech the president accused China and Russia of obstructionism for using their veto power to protect Syria from military action. This is manifest hypocrisy. In the same period of time that China has used that power 8 times, and Russia has used it 18 times, the US has used its veto power 83 times.

In 2003 the US blocked a draft resolution to make the Middle East a nuclear weapons free zone. Why? Because it does not wish to hold Israel to the same standards it holds the other nations in that region. The US has practiced that double standard numerous times.

Stephen Zunes gives a nice summary in the Progressive:

“UN Security Council resolution 487 calls on Israel to place its nuclear facilities under the trusteeship of the International Atomic Energy Agency. UN Security Council resolution 1137 calls on India and Pakistan to eliminate their nuclear arsenals and long-range missiles. But the Obama Administration has not only refused to support implementing these resolutions, it provides all three countries with nuclear-capable jet fighters and other military assistance.” 

No, Mr. President, we are not the exception to international law. We are not better than human beings born in other nations just because we are infinitely more powerful than they. The moral arc of the universe does not bend around our American interests. If America has ever been “exceptional” it was for values and principles you and your predecessors have almost completely betrayed.

http://www.progressive.org/obama-united-nations-speech

I am no longer one of those who would rather think objectively about life than live it. I still turn to science and reason to get my bearings, but I refuse to study the earth without allegiance to its preservation, nor to ponder the human condition without a sense of duty to reduce suffering.

Science is our most noble light, but it is not a life. So After you have told me what is true, I have two further questions:

“How have you made your life a work of art?” and “What is your duty?”

“Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?”

(“Who is watching the watchers?”)

                         -Juvenal’s Satires

 

President Obama promised to appoint a panel of “outside experts” to investigate NSA spying on U.S. citizens. The AP released a report Sunday revealing that the panel operates under the Director of National Intelligence and is comprised primarily of Democratic Party insiders.

[W]ith just weeks remaining before its first deadline to report back to the White House, the review panel has effectively been operating as an arm of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees the NSA and all other U.S. spy efforts.

The panel’s advisers work in offices on loan from the DNI. Interview requests and press statements from the review panel are carefully coordinated through the DNI’s press office. James Clapper, the intelligence director, exempted the panel from U.S. rules that require federal committees to conduct their business and their meetings in ways the public can observe. Its final report, when it’s issued, will be submitted for White House approval before the public can read it.

In other words, as Sarah Lazare puts it, “The review panel operates under the very office that oversees the NSA programs the panel is supposed to investigate.”  Unscrupulous Democrats may be fine with a deck stacked in their favor, but I can promise you they will howl like wolves under the moon when the next Dick Cheney comes along and turns this monster on them.

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/09/22-1

One would think any person of faith would recoil at the 40 billion dollar cut to food stamp programs in a time of high unemployment, but one would be wrong. According to an article in the Christian Post, Ken Blackwell, who is the Senior Fellow for Family Empowerment at Family Research Council, a conservative Christian lobbying group.

 “I think through empowering others and creating self-sufficiency…there within lies the path to sense of worthiness,” Blackwell told CP. “When I was growing up, there was fundamental belief, that there were times in people’s life when they needed a hand up…there were temporariness to those programs, where they were structured so that they didn’t breed, so that they didn’t breed dependency.”

Blackwell also suggested that there was “nothing more Christian” than “not locking people into a permanent dependency on government handouts, but making sure they are participants in their own upliftment and empowerment so that they in fact through the dignity of work and can break from the plantation of big government.”

Yes, there’s nothing more Christian than not feeding the hungry or clothing the naked. Thank you Family Research Council for setting the record straight. You just wonder how Jesus got Christianity so wrong?

http://www.christianpost.com/news/should-christians-support-food-stamps-cuts-depends-on-who-you-ask-105052/

Somehow lost in the fury and indignation of the Obama administration over Syria’s chemical weapons is the fact that the United States has chemical weapons of its own. Whereas Secretary of State John Kerry called such weapons “a moral obscenity” and gave Syria one week to turn over its chemical weapons, the U.S. has yet to finish the destruction of its own stockpile.

The production of such weapons by the U.S. began during World War 1 and lasted until 1969, although deadly herbicides and defoliants were still used until 1971. The U.S. still produces biological weapons.

The US did not renounce chemical weapons until 1997. Despite the tight time frame given to Syria to get rid of its chemical weapons, and despite promises to destroy all its weapons by 2012, the US has yet to completely get rid of its own supply.

It is estimated we have destroyed all but just over 10% of our original stockpile, still one has to think our indignation over Syria’s chemical weapons might have had more gravity had we not such weapons of our own.

“The Lorax” is probably Dr. Seuss’ most controversial book. Lou Dobbs said the movie was an attempt by the president’s friends in Washington to propagandize our children, even though the book was written in 1971. The book was banned in some schools for what some took to be an anti-capitalist message.

Dr. Seuss admitted that the book was propaganda, but that word just means persuasive speech, and there are somethings a human should not be objective about. To look at the earth objectively, which means without value, without reverence, without allegiance, means to be a stunted human being.

Dr. Seuss was attempting to give a parable whose truth is much needed today. He showed how the capititalist world view begins as an alienation, becomes an addiction and ends as a trance.

When we think of nature as property without intrinsic value, we become alienated from our own roots into nature. Like Woody Allen said, “I love nature I just don’t want any of it on me.”  Although we cannot eat or love the artificial symbols of value, and although they cannot nurture our bodies or our souls, we come to value them over the realities for which they stand.
Then capitalism becomes a kind of addiction. Because tokens of value cannot truly meet our needs, our appetites become insatiable. In the book, Truffala trees are chopped down to make a vague product called a “thneed” which is promoted as “what everyone needs.” The business must be “biggered” and “biggered.” Jesus made the same point by telling a parable of a rich man who had so much wealth that he sold everything to build a massive barn and died before he could fill it. While our natural needs can be satisfied, our greed for their replacements knows no bounds.

Finally, Capitalism becomes a kind of trance. We see persons and nature only for their exchange value. It does not bother us that some are born into wealth and others into poverty. We now see human worth not as intrinsic but as just another commodity. We only move to save the earth or human lives if we can find a profit motive in it. Even the movie, “The Lorax” was used to sell SUV’s and a plastic action figures of the Lorax that will pollute the earth for which he supposedly advocates. In a capitalist trance, even an anti-capitalist message becomes a commodity to be bought and sold.

So Dr. Seuss calls us to plant Truffula seeds, and Jesus tells us to consider birds of the air. Both of which are calls back into nature. Jesus says to “seek first God’s kindom,” which I think means something like Albert Einstein’s admonition, “Our task must be to free ourselves… by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature and it’s beauty.”

An immigrant dies every day trying to come into the United States in pursuit of the “American Dream.” The Webb County medical examiner places her identification rate on non-skeletal remains at 65-70%, but one particular body found last month remains unidentified.

The unknown immigrant was wearing earrings and a ring on the middle finger of her left hand. She wore pink sneakers and a Gold’s Gym T-shirt. In her pocket was a photograph of a little boy who looks to be about 5 years old. DNA samples will be taken on the hope that family members will trip across the information. Then, the unknown immigrant will probably be buried in an unmarked grave.

Few in the U.S. who discuss immigration, include the centuries of our own exploitation of the nations south of us that precede our current problems. A militarized border allows us to destabilize the nations and economies south of us without any consequence to ourselves.

For some, our militarized border protects the American way of life, but for the countless unknown immigrants who die trying to cross it, our border is a field of broken dreams. Can any nation claim greatness that does not have principles larger than it’s own boundaries?

“U.S. government has repeatedly publicly denied that its nuclear arsenal has ever put Americans’ lives in jeopardy through safety flaws.” So says an article in the Guardian this week that also revealed that the quote isn’t true.

“The story of Goldsboro, N.C. is well known. It was the Cold War and the U.S. had B-52 bombers in the air as a precaution, ready to strike if the Soviet Union made a move. As Rudolph Herzog explained it in his book A Short History of Nuclear Folly, one of the B-52s was carrying two Mark 39 hydrogen bombs, which are many times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Like the others, the B-52 flew huge circles around the U.S. and the Atlantic, needing to be refueled along the way.

The plane had reported an oil leak in its left motor.

“The third time [it was filled up], a filler neck broke off the plane … and kerosene began pouring from its right wing,” Herzog writes.

To make a long story short, the plane disintegrated and the two bombs fell from the sky onto American soil.”

Obviously the bombs did not go off, but it cleared six of the seven stages of detonation.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/09/20/224514980/doc-sheds-new-light-on-the-time-the-u-s-almost-nuked-itself?sc=17&f=1001