Wednesday, November 10, 2004

NASA's Super Plane: LA to DC in 20 minutes
NASA has unveiled its "scramjet" engine, an engine so fast it could power a plane and get it from coast to coast in 20 minutes. The bad news is, you won't get to eat airplane food and see a sliced-n-diced movie on the way. Read about it here, in the Washington Post.

Sunday, November 07, 2004

Post Electoral Blues
What does it mean when nearly half of a country votes against an incumbent president? The West Coast and the East Coast voted together, resoundingly voting to fire Bush and his corporate sponsors. With our hobbling two-party system, this is the sort of democracy we can expect. You think losing by two or three points is bad? Try thinking about having a permanent majority locked in. Remember the disgraceful gerrymandering in Texas last year and know that the GOP would like nothing better than turning the USA into a Soviet-styled state with one ruling party.

The remedies are threefold: one, proportional representation; two, coalition governments; and three, non-moneyed advertising on the national networks. The first prong, proportional representation, would mean that if your party gets 10 per cent of the vote, you get ten per cent of the seats in a parliament. The second, coalition governements, would mean that this Big Tent horseshit practiced by the two main parties would cease to be functional, that you could be the Green Party and receive a paltry 2 per cent of the vote, but you would then gain 2 per cent of the seats. In the House of Representatives there are about 435 seats, so this would mean about 9 seats would be Green Party. This would allow parties to actually stand for something and would enable voters to vote according to their beliefs, and not out of some lesser-of-two-evils scenario. Your party could be all about the environment, and you would join a coalition to support a leader as prime minister, being assured that he/she would take your views to heart in setting policy. The moment you felt betrayed, you could withdraw your support and cause the gov't to collapse. This is accountability. Third, the airwaves belong to the public and are granted without charge to the major networks. As owners of this airspace, it behooves these networks to allow political advertising without charge. The 2004 election dwarfed the 2000 election in terms of money spent on ads. Get the money out of politics.

So here we are in the tail end of 2004. The New Yorker two weeks ago published a four page dissection and denunciation of all things Bush. If you can, get ahold of a back issue and read this, it is incredibly forceful material, and something that could have won us the election had Kerry possessed the balls to call bullshit on Bush, as the New Yorker editors fearlessly did. Here is some food for thought, things that you should mention whenever a smug GOP stormtrooper crows about the Bush re-election:
1. record defecit. 3 billion surplus turned into a 2 billion defecit in 3 years. This is tantamount to taking a mortgage out on our future. We spent our grandchildren's money on bombs, not schools or science or medicine. Before Bush took office, each American's portion of the national debt was about $40. Now it is $23,000. The war in Iraq costs us $1 Billion per week. What is this getting us?
2. Abu Ghraib. The prison scandal's roots go all the way to the top, with a Bush Administration paper havering on what is and is not "torture." The USA does not torture suspects, full stop. Until Bush is commander in chief, and then we do.
3. Sudan. We stand idly by as millions starve to death. All our bluster about being a world leader are empty, shallow, nothings.
4. Patriot Act. Under Bush, Americans have experienced the greatest erosion of civil liberties in American history. Our reading habits, net surfing habits, and conversations are now fair game. Federal officers are barred by law from telling you that you are under investigation. This is a Nazi flashback.
5. Slavish devotion to oil. The Bushes have a long history with the Saudi royal family, as anyone who recognizes the name Carlisle Group can attest. This never came up. Our pimp/whore relationship to the Saudis has compromised our ability to maintain our integrity and security. We are addicts of oil, the supply is limited an dwindling, and the price is going up. Anyone who drives a Hummer or similarly conspicuously consumptive vehicles is not only a vain cunt, but also is directly responsibly for our involvement in the Iraq War. American consumerism (our "way of life") is why we are in Iraq. Those 1000 dead are the result of such crass consumerism. Hummer owners are cunts of the worst order, and getting a brick in the face is too good for them.6. Guantanamo. Never before has the USA held suspects without giving them the protections of the Geneva Accords or the hard-won international legal conventions we established after WWII. Now we are torturing suspects and holding them without trial, without charges, without access to lawyers or families, subject to military tribunals, and all in the name of Freedom. This is an outrage. Of the more than 5,000 people "detained" after 9/11, not one conviction has been made. Not one.
6. Democracy does not equal Christianity. The Bush people seem to think democracy and Christianity go hand in hand. We are mortgaging our future to establish a toehold of democracy in Iraq, but when the Iraqis are allowed to vote they will not vote for some secularists. The Middle East is full of people who want religious law. They want imams and ayatollahs telling them how to live. The Christian conservatives so bent on killing Muslims for Jesus are going to have their heads spin when our new allies in the middle east elect some rapacious cunt like Moqtada al-Sadr. That's the type of leader these people want. Iraqis should be free of religious control exactly like we in the USA should be free of religious zealots. For those of you not intimately familiar with the Bible, Jesus of Nazareth was part of communal sect known as the Essenes. They eschewed violence, advocated poverty and humility, and shockingly enough were vegetarians. The Essenes at Qumran wore white and removed themselves from society. The Christianity of today, which sprang from this modest soil, is as alien to the teachings of Jesus as a nuclear bomb. What they do, they do not do in the name of Jesus.
7. They divided our country. The USA has had a proud history of doing the right thing, although usually belatedly. Blacks were deemed 5/5 human in 1860, women got the vote in 1920, and so on. A little late, but the right call. Now, the GOP has succeeded in defining our country as two halves, one who is for a narrow, repressed, smug, violent, racist interpretation of Jesus, and the other that is for the common ground we all share as humans and Americans. The GOP successfully passed 11 anti-gay marriage statues. Listen up you fucks: you are born gay or heterosexual. It is not a choice.
8. Abortion. It's all about the little babies. The religious hypocrite army of the Republicans, those confused, ignorant dumbfucks who shoot family planning doctors for Jesus, are very vocal about telling women what to do with their bodies because Jesus is speaking to them. Well try this on for size you cunts: outlaw male promiscuity. That's right. Those same religious nutcases who equate abortion with murder should have no problem addressing the root cause of abortion, namely, sex. From now on, any male having sex out of wedlock should be guilty of murder. If you have sex, you will face 15 to 20 in prison for every offense. I promise you, abortion would disappear overnight. For the rest of those stupid motherfuckers in the GOP who get holy about abortion, hear this: the neo-natal intensive care units of every hospital in the country is desperately in need of money and volunteers. Those are real babies alive right now, and they need your help. Put your money where your mouth is, and help those babies and those mothers. I don't expect anyone to, because the GOP is all about smug self-righteousness and greed, and they don't give a fuck about compassion. Or how about a little bit of simply policy coherence? If you're against abortion, be against unwanted pregnancies, which simply means allow birth control to be handed out to those at risk. Allow the RU-486 pill to be sold over the counter. If women don't get pregnant when they don't want a baby, abortion will disappear overnight. What the GOP wants to ban is sex.
9. Weekends, 40 hour work weeks, overtime pay, health insurance, 8 hour days. All of these things are prizes won by the progressive movement in America. These are all battles fought and won by Democrats and unions to improve the lives of workers. They were vigourously opposed by unity and solidarity won out. If you are for the Republicans, start working 7 days a week and 12 hours a day for regular pay. And don't even get in the same room with me if you're going to mention sick leave or maternity leave: those would not exist without the labor movement.
10. Any health care at all. Because business in America is concerned with one thing only: profit. It means they don't care about making a city float bonds to build a factory and then when the economy pinches they close the factory and move operations overseas. It means they have an addictive junkie need to post profits, and the conditions of workers and communities fall by the wayside in the pursuit of executive bonuses and beating Wall Street expectations. Greed is not good. Don't forget, you GOP knobshiners, that Jesus preached poverty. Don't fuck with this, he meant exactly what he said: POVERTY. All of you rich fuckers are going to hell.

Now Democrats are wondering how far to the center they should shift to gain votes in 2008. Here's the answer: not at all. The Democrats lost the war on ideas. Our ideas are superior to theirs because they allow all manners of people to maximize their lives in the USA with all freedoms being equal. Those same GOP shitnecks who want prayer in schools would be mortified if we agreed with them --- and then made it a Scientologist prayer. This is known as bigotry. In America, Scientologists, Jews, Muslims, Ufo Cultists and Christians all need to be held equally at arms length to ensure that Americans can worship as they please. They need to explain to Joe and Jane Sixpack that their weekends, health care, and clean water come from regulations on industry. The Dems need to express the benefit of our shared humanity, or investment in our future, and the need to resist codifying religion and intolerance into law. The Dems need to be a liberal party again, a party that can see shades of gray in an argument, a party that values thought over faith, and values faith over atheism. For what is faith without good works? It is nothing. Americans made a horrible decision on November 2nd. For all those NASCAR dads and gun-toting hunter shitnecks out there, when your sons and daughters are blown to bits in Iraq (or Iran, Syria etc), that's what your vote for Bush got you. When interst rates skyrocket, that's what Bush gave you. When schools turn into shitholes and the students graduate without educations, job skills, or social connections and they come looking for your house to rob and then you pay $50K a year to imprison them when you could have paid a mere $10K a year to send them to college --- your crows have come home to roost. The Red States stand for intolerance, ignorance, fear, and greed. As much as Bush would like to say otherwise, those are not American values.