http://www.jewsonfirst.org/delaware_schools.php

As they say, Jesus Christ.

I’d like to show this to all those pig-fuckers pretending that the oppressive Christian dominioninism of the modern American discourse is just fine for religious minorities - especially those goddamned fools who play the Christian right’s little brown dancing monkeys, Dershowitz and Podhoretz and Prager and especially that cunt Horowitz - and ask them how they like their blue-eyed baby boy now.

Then I remember that they read stories about Israeli villages getting struck by missiles and pop a little boner, and I want to cry.

I’m glad I get to be Irish and a secular humanist (the real kind, not the dog-whistle-for-hebe kind) when people aren’t basing religion exclusively on whether or not one has what one of my exes once called a ‘Jewy nose’. This is terrifying on so many levels, and if I ever do have to move to Sweden I’m including this in my application for asylum.

Djur was originally going to help me with this one, but when I told him I was writing in favor of more active far-left, beyond-the-base campaigning, he accused me of formenting partisan rancor and class warfare and urged that I refuse to vote for an ‘extremist’ like Clinton. So I’ll be doing this one alone, folks.

There’s a very interesting thesis put forward by libertarian (read: corporatist republican) think-tankers and activists, the Overton Window . Stop right now and read that link; it should be required reading for anyone who cares for the Republic and its future. Come back only once you’re done.

Good stuff, eh? I’m very sorry I had to resort to a link to Daily Kos - or, as some wits would have it, Dago Cossack Queeratorium - but there you go. The right and the left have, since Reagan, been pursuing different political models, and the results of that are pretty much self-evident. As I explored in my last post, there’s a definite influence by the President and how the people treat him, along with any other major political figures. But the wider strategy is still extremely important.
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This is an article from MTV.com, inadvertently noticed when chortling at the buffoon from Death Cab For Cutie who claims he’s being persecuted by the Man. It’s not as if I expected insightful and penetrating journalism from the online arm of that great engine of juvenile vapidity, but this is technical idiocy on a par with “They’re stealing the Internet!” Alec was going to write about this, but he determined that it would interfere with the necessary triangulation of the interests of large and small businesses to more fully enhance the moderating power of the vital center. You know, I’m getting worried about him — in the posting queue here at It Is *Dancing*, he has a ten-page article that consists entirely of the words “Thanks, Ralph.”

BitTorrent To Serve Up Fall Out Boy, ‘Harry Potter’ Legally

Imagine if, back in the day, record labels had said to Napster, “Sure, take our stuff,” instead of bringing down the big legal hammer and crushing the pioneering peer-to-peer service. Times have certainly changed.

It truly is a brave new world, in which media companies have recognized that distributing promotional material for free can increase their profits. Such an unprecedented revolution of media distribution is certainly worthy of note, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that BitTorrent, Inc. has a partnership itself with MTV. Why, that piece of information would suggest that the media business is an incestuous, oligopolic orgy of “co-opetition”. In fact, it’d suggest that the media industry is a sort of sodomistic Ouroboros, where titanic media conglomerates slurp each other off into increasingly staggering levels of profit.

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My personal support for Barack Obama brings me a lot of flak from Djur, who believes that he lacks the Joementum of more sensible, moderate candidates like Bayh or a unity ticket (say, Giuliani-McCain). I’ve got an underlying reason, though.
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http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/24/richardson_obama/index.html

Note that Clinton is the only major candidate not to have come out against the bill - and Obama has (finally!) clearly indicated he intends to help stop the bill from reaching the floor.

Obama’s is a bigger move than it looks like, for the record: Obama, as a freshman senator from a state dominated by a single party (which is lousy with Daly-era machine holdovers). Dem lifers, who consider Reid one of their own, can crush him like a bug. If he doesn’t take the nomination - and at this point, it’s still very much in the air - he’ll have little to nothing to go home to, and will be a lame duck for the next two years.

I appreciate Richardson’s stance on the issue, although it is ever-so-convenient that, as an executive figure, he doesn’t actually have to put his money where his mouth is. Dodd and Obama are both in the odious position of finding themselves drawn by their campaign commitments to oppose a bill that the party lifers (generously bankrolled by AT&T et alia) love.

I’m disappointed in how long it took him to do this, but I’m pretty much all for Obama at this point. Here’s to hoping he doesn’t fuck it up.

(And Clinton? Still doing nothing - by all indications, she doesn’t intend to hand back a damned bit of the power Bush unilaterally grabbed. Fuck her noise.)
ADDENDUM: Well, there’s a lot to keep my support for Obama from being unambiguous. A major tick in the ‘con’ column, adding to his religiosity — which I find mildly repellant, although in general I understand him to be closer in the spirit of his Christianity to my parents than most Christians I’ve ever known: that is, genuinely interested in social justice, charity, and the equality of man, instead of just angry at people putting dicks in their mouths.

But on that score, his campaign unwittingly blundered into supporting a black evangelical/gospel group including virulent homophobes, ex-gays, and so on. A blogger subbing for Greenwald (I know, right - who the hell would let Greenwald top him???) calls black homophobia the third rail of the black religious community - one that Obama has dealt with head-on before. I’m willing to chalk up the involvement, along with the failure to eject the ex-gay asshole from the gospel thing (his campaign chose instead to engage in vicious rhetoric against him . . . but keep him in the tour), to inexperience. But it’s still pretty damning.

Doesn’t detract from my general reason for supporting Obama, but it’s still deeply disappointing.

Philosemitism (n) - the practice of obsessively and often only semi-sincerely praising the Jewish people in the abstract, often used as a crutch for anti-Semites unable to express their internal discomfort and unwilling to learn to accept Jews as human. Philosemitism is a common element of Christian-Reconstruction religion, was a major force in British support for Zionism, and is generally only slightly better than anti-Semitism; a refusal by European intellectuals to move beyond anti/philo discourse on the Jewish people and address the Jews as human beings - rather than hooked-nosed cardboard cutouts or a faceless aggregate of mighty social and religious forces - is probably the largest single factor in the Holocaust.

‘Rapture Ready’ is an excellent and extremely spooky portrayal of AIPAC & co working to foster support among people fixated on ‘the Jewish race’ as a bit player in their apocalypse. A group presumes Blumenthal is Jewish on the basis of his name (and, implicitly, his appearance), then harangues him about not believing in Christ, at a fundraiser for Israel.

Classic line: “We’ve been praying for the whole Jewish race for a long time.”

There’s a proverb in English about lying down with dogs and waking up with fleas. Read more »

Belief In Evolutionary Psychology May Be Hardwired, Study Says

I’ve riffed on this a few times various places, so I felt it necessary to put down my essential two cents in one place. To wit: we’ve got a compelling interest in state healthcare even by the debased standards of modern politics and management.

Why? Because the current system - and any system even close to it - is abusive beyond belief.
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The same people who tried to have Madonna thrown out of Germany for offending their precious religion, calling her blasphemous behavior degenerate, dangerous, and offensive - well, guess whether they were more concerned with offending religion or with Freedom of Speech when the Mohammed cartoons were released - and re-released, and re-re-released . . .

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Let’s save our great culture from we-all-know-who
CAIR the Nation and the ACLU
If a child should emerge that is less than pristine -
Among all the bastards of the Mussulman gene -
Post the police in the OB room and
Put it on record that he is subhuman
Pin him down in red tape and call ‘im a Moslam
Throw him in prison and strip ‘im and beat ‘im
Throw them all in a pile and point at their dicks
And laugh as they shake as we jerk at our pricks
Six thousand a row a hundred feet high
Gastarber bodies scraping the sky
This is the face of terror ‘gainst terror
The lampshades and gloves were a tactical error
And white phosphorous puts those crude ovens to shame
But all names and faces and phrases the same
Lock ‘em in camps and spurt on their face
Make elbow room for the American race