Drug Test Wall Street

Drug testing the unemployed and welfare recipients has been all the rage recently from Utah Senator Orrin Hatch to South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and Florida Governor Rick Scott among others.

While living in New York in the 80s it was common “knowledge” that many traders on Wall Street were addicted to cocaine. That was mostly among the younger traders who thirty years ago are now the old guard and the younger traders today have obviously grown up in the drug culture dujour.

With the severity of the recession we are in, and the focus of right-wing state and federal politicians on cutting spending and targeting the poor with cutbacks, is it not more logical to look at the source of the problem?

Is it not logical to assume that the abundance of drugs used on Wall Street, among bankers, stock traders and brokers—and maybe even the cops pepper spraying the protestors—may have altered their thinking in ways that exacerbated their greed about brought about, if not contributed to, the Great Recession we are in?

If yes, then is it not also logical to drug test someone who has access and an effect on millions and billions of dollars with an altered mind rather than someone who simply receives $250 to $500 per month?

Where are the priorities? Driving a car under the influence is a crime. Should the same or a vastly greater punishment and prevention be applied to driving an economy under the influence?

Drug test Wall Street now. And for a similar subject, check out this.

Thou Shall Not Kill

I haven’t posted anything here in months. Tonight I was beginning to work on a script while watching MSNBC’s coverage of the Troy Davis execution. Being bombarded with so much and so often in today’s news media cyclone, I was familiar with Davis’s case but not tremendously so.

I have tried to put myself in Davis’s shoes and it becomes uncomfortable.

I am very angry at those in the State of Georgia responsible for this right now that they would execute someone who I believe is obviously innocent.

I am very angry at Clarence Thomas for rejecting the stay of execution. I don’t care what narrow legal question the law permitted the Supreme Court only to consider. Something is wrong.

Isn’t Thomas famously quoted as saying he was the victim of a “high-tech lynching”? It seems to me Davis’s execution is the State of Georgia finding any ol’ black man and hanging him from a tree because it satisfies their racist blood lust.

As Lenny Bruce said, “Thou Shalt Not Kill means that, not amend section A”. Killing innocent people is wrong and we must end capital punishment in America.

Here’s a link to the Innocence Project. Please do what you can to change things.

http://www.innocenceproject.org/

God bless Troy Davis’s soul.  

Is Michele Bachmann’s Husband Secretly Gay?

I’ve been aware of Michele Bachmann for several years now. But I never knew anything about her husband—not even his name. I did, however, assume he was a rugged, self-made flannel-wearing man from pioneer stock who allowed Michele to bring home the bacon while he chopped wood as a lumberjack or raised livestock on a family farm—sort of the Minnesota version of Todd Palin.

As with Rev Ted Haggard and George Rekers, various right wing anti-gayers are many times are found in their own homosexual scandals. Perhaps Rekers can be most closely compared to Rep. Bachmann’s husband, Dr. Marcus Bachmann, in that both are proponents of gay-to-straight conversion therapy. Dr. Bachmann himself is rumored, according to Think Progress, Dan Savage and Democratic Underground to “straight-en” out gays.

On Wednesday, Think Progress reported that a year ago, Dr. Bachmann referred to gays as “Barbarians” who needed “to be educated” and “disciplined”. That was when I first saw a photograph of Dr. Bachmann. And that was when I first thought, independent of anything elsewhere on the internet, that Dr. Bachmann was a closeted gay man.

It seems to be a pattern: the self-hatred is so strong that a severely closeted gay man seems to spew his self-hatred at all gays as a way of making himself feel better about his own oppressive and repressive psychological dynamics. If my theory is true, it makes Michele’s blatantly obvious psychological issues so much more understandable. For example, it is so much easier for her to bend American history and her other Tea Party political proclamations into “pretzelized” versions of reality because she is in deep denial about her own husband and has been for more than 30 years.

Last night when I began “Binging” my theory about Marcus Bachmann I found I wasn’t alone.

If Dr. Bachmann ever revealed himself to be gay that would obviously ruin Michele’s presidential campaign, so I doubt that will happen anytime soon. It seems his denial is too strong. However, if he ever does, I hope he goes easier on himself than he does on the rest of gaydom.

Deities United: A Future Supreme Court Ruling

It will happen on a day in the not too distant future; maybe a couple of years from now, maybe a decade. The success of conservatives, corporations and the US Chamber of Commerce will guarantee it. Corporations will have won the day in November 2012—and the election.

In Wall Street boardrooms, suburban Washington think tanks and K Street lobbyists’ offices almost simultaneously, CEOs, Executive Directors and Policy Analysts will all smile the Grinch smile. You know the smile; when the Grinch decides to steal Christmas.

Their collective greed and corruption will want more after Obama loses in 2012 because Karl Rove and Tom Donohue will have succeeded in funneling Saudi, Chinese and Russian money to determine our election.

After the glow of victory wears off, and after their stomachs have digested their victory like a Quarter Pounder with cheese and they are suddenly hungry for more, they will all turn their attention to satiating their new pangs.

Suddenly, the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling will seem to them like leftovers or an item on the menu that no longer suffices. In an instant, corporations are people too will not be so tasty or filling. No, nothing will satisfy any longer. No, nothing short of…

Corporations are Gods too.

“Yes,” the lawyer for Deities United, America’s newest conservative 501c4, 50 year old Kirk Cameron, will proudly exclaim before the assembled Supreme Court justices, “corporations are gods too!”

The justices will lean back in their high-backed, black leather chairs, smiling with anticipation about the show that has commenced before them. 

The case before the nation’s highest court, Deities United v. US Department of Defense, will seek to overturn the DOD’s prohibition on corporations fighting the Battle of Armageddon against all the Middle Eastern countries immersed in the Arab Spring of 2011.

Deities United is the lobby group of Xe, formerly Blackwater, and filed the suit to make billions more by killing millions more.

“Corporations are as rich as god,” Cameron will shout, “not poor like churches. Corporations are responsible for inventions that change god’s laws in ways that people cannot, that corporations, perched atop skyscrapers way up in the heavens, tower above people like gods perched atop the clouds, that corporations inspire as much awe the world over as god inspires in His multitudes, and finally, corporations are more jealous, more wrathful and more vengeful than god.”

The Solicitor General, disgraced former Congressman, Anthony Weiner, will argue that corporations can never be considered gods because corporations’ CEOs do not have beards, they do not have moral codes conveyed in commandments and they are not invisible.

The Supreme Court will make their landmark decision 5-4 along party lines in favor of Deities United.

Justice Thomas will write the majority opinion, citing that corporations more than people and god are responsible for changing the earth and therefore fulfill the function of God on earth and that in time Corporations will supplant god in significance and importance on earth…”if corporations are allowed to have their way”, his wife Ginny will chime in, proving once again that Thomas is an activist justice.

House Speaker John Boehner, in an obvious dig at former president Barack Obama, will announce that the decision “gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington — while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred god”.

Former Blackwater president, Erik Prince will say, “Gods especially have the power to take lots of lives without the annoying interference of Congressional investigations.”

Senator Mitch McConnell will attend the announcement of the ruling and will proclaim “it a strong blow for the First Amendment and a victory for freedom of religion.”

And after the Deities United ruling was decreed in 2015 there was no need for the presidential election of 2016 or any other election in any other year thereafter, for corporations had more money than God.

And it was put forth to the people that as the Romans and Greeks had a pantheon of gods, a deity for every aspect of human existence, corporations as gods served the people in a similar way—the god of offshore drilling, the god of convenient shopping and cheap material goods and the god of weapons to keep us safe, among many others.

And Christians wept, not because of the allusions to Roman and Greek gods, but because from Deities United they believed there was now a greater appreciation of God throughout the land.

All Praise be to the Glory of Wal-mart and to Exxon and to General Electric in the recently renamed US Temple of Commerce and the Prophet Tom Donohue.

Amen!

SataYnism

Last week, after a religious conference, Paul Ryan was chased down by a young Catholic dude and offered a Bible, which Ryan turned down. The young Catholic asked Ryan why he preferred the extreme ideology of Ayn Rand over the economic teachings in the Bible. Here’s the vid:

 

A group called American Values Network created an ad which attacks politicians who have been inspired by Ayn Rand and uses her anti-Christian statement from a 1959 interview with Mike Wallace.

At the beginning of the clip Ayn Rand says she regards religion as evil. However, many would say that Ayn Rand has inspired "evil". This is very ironic, because what hasn’t been discussed in public yet is how Ayn Rand also inspired modern American Satanism.

Howard Stanton Levey became Anton Szandor LaVey and founded the Church of Satan and authored the Satanic Bible. As the Wikipedia article on LaVey states, LaVey created a “synthesized system of his understanding of human nature and the insights of philosophers who advocated materialism and individualism, for which he claimed no supernatural, metaphysical, or theistic inspiration.”

Ayn Rand’s “Objectivism” is just a fancy word for material selfishness. As John Kenneth Galbraith said, "The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

Rand’s atheism is no doubt from her upbringing in “godless” Russia. And It is perhaps convenient for the purposes of her Objectivism philosophy, which, given it promotes a self-serving series of choices should actually, it seems, be called Subjectivism.

But the compassion of Christ—obviously missing in many Christians—runs counter to Rand’s Objectivism. And it is perhaps also missing in many of LaVey’s followers. I hesitate to claim that as a truth because I’ve never met a Satanist that I can remember.

It is ironic that so many conservatives worship Ayn Rand because in 1979 on the old Tomorrow Show with Tom Snyder, she told Snyder that "conservatives will destroy this country".  You can find that clip on YouTube.

So, what many of us have believed for decades finally has a correlation: right-wing conservatives are evil and probably more so than Satanists because right-wing politicians are power hungry and persecute the weak and vulnerable.

Even Ayn Rand knew that--which goes for some liberals as well. And that is me being as "objectivistic" as I can possibly be.

Driving Change in the World

When I was three or four my parents bought me a pedal car, a small metal-bodied car with pedals that propelled the car forward. I loved that car. I became quite fast driving it around our house. When I was a little older my father put me on his lap and let me steer our car down the street. I absolutely fell in love with driving and got my first license as soon as legally possible, at sixteen years and one month old.

To me driving represented freedom and self-determination, thrill and satisfaction, solitude and meditation. It still does. I love to drive.

I simply cannot imagine how I would feel if, after all that, my government told me I was not allowed to drive a car because I was too tall, too dumb or because I was a man.

I’ve been hearing stories here and there about women wanting to drive in Saudi Arabia for some time now. Today I read a story on Huffington Post about Saudi women asking Hillary Clinton to help them be allowed to drive. I say go for it. They should also appeal to Laura Bush since “W” and his family are closer to the Saudi royals than Hillary.

There is a petition which I signed on the Change.org website, which was recently cyber attacked by China because of their support for Chinese artist/activist Ai Weiwei.

According to Women of the Revolution, Manal al-Sharif dropped her campaign to call for the driving ban to be lifted. She was detained and released on May 21, 2011 and rearrested the next day and released on bail on May 30, 2011. She’s a computer security consultant but she can’t drive.

A video of her driving and discussing the ban was posted on YouTube. It is here.

Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that prevents women from driving so it’s not a Muslim thing as perhaps the “Shariers”—my new word to denote those who try to scare gullible Americans that American Muslims are trying to institute Sharia law here in the US in much the same way the “Birthers” tried to scare gullible Americans that Obama…you know the rest—might have us believe.

Wahabism is the dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia. And Wahabism is as fundamentalist conservative as the Reverend Ted Haggard was before he realized the door to his closet was opened.

We cannot surmise for certain that granting women the right to drive would commence in Saudi Arabia a social revolution for gender equality, but there may, however, become a large number of Saudi soccer moms.

In Iran, women are working as taxi drivers, picking up only women as fares. And, as Lubna Hussein made progress for women in the Sudan in 2009 by wearing trousers, the Muslim world is slowly changing.

This morning, while driving to work, I saw a crowd of Syrians outside the CNN building on Sunset Boulevard holding signs that read “Free Syria” and “Where is the media?”

That may be their mistake; confusing CNN with legitimate media, thinking that CNN cares. But I used to do that too—protesting outside Rockefeller Center in 1986, hoping to raise NBC’s awareness and concern about the forced relocation of the Navajo just so Peabody Coal could strip mine coal.

A century ago the American Suffragist movement was working hard to gain women the right to vote, which it won in 1920. Saudi women will get the right to drive one day.

Maybe royal Saudi nephew and Fox News investor, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, can help. I suggest we all write him letters asking him to intervene directly at Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, c/o Fox News Channel, 1211 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY  10036.

This can have a double affect. Bin Talal has already called for it. Show him and shower him our support. And it makes visible again, the close connection between Fox and bin Talal, the guy who wanted to fund the Ground Zero Mosque that Fox on-air conservatives were against.

We may also want to write to “W” at his Presidential Center. The website talks about Middle East’s “Wave of Freedom”, a Bush Institute Area of Engagement is “human freedom” and one of the Bush Institute’s Integrated Initiatives has a women’s initiative. Bush has to do some good in the world. You can send them an email at lwike@bushcenter.com. You may need to copy and paste this email address. And I say why not?

Perhaps for the betterment of the world we should commit to this century being the century of women. We have Hillary encourage the Saudis to give women the right to drive and we allow the Iraqis, Afghanis and Libyans to successfully encourage Hillary, Barack and the rest of us to give women in those three countries the right not to have their children and babies killed in our wars.

I’m harping on the death of children in war again, eh? What a downer. Well, here’s an upper. “Drive My Car” performed by the man who wrote it (with Lennon) and sang it, ex-Beatle Paul McCartney.

The Problem with Some Christians

This whole end of the world-Armageddon-Anti-Christ mass delusion some Christians have perpetrated on us is actually more damaging to America and the world than it is humorous or  good subject for ridicule. It creates in conservative Christians the need to be righteous and pious and to them, I believe, it means controlling us by stepping on the rest of us.

Believing in a Messiah is akin to a drug addict believing that someone is going to come and cure him of his drug addiction and he won’t have to do anything. That’s not how recovery works and that’s not how the world will work.

My theory is supported by something in the Bible, Psalm 95. According to Wikipedia: “A common modern rabbinic interpretation is that there is a potential messiah in every generation. The Talmud, which often uses stories to make a moral point (aggadah), tells of a highly respected rabbi who found the Messiah at the gates of Rome and asked him, "When will you finally come?" He was quite surprised when he was told, "Today." Overjoyed and full of anticipation, the man waited all day. The next day he returned, disappointed and puzzled, and asked, "You said messiah would come 'today' but he didn't come! What happened?" The Messiah replied, "Scripture says, 'Today, 'if you will but hearken to His voice.'”

I would argue that there is not only a potential Messiah in every generation but there is a potential Messiah in every one of us.

This messiah prophecy stuff was developed at a time of relative primitivism. The mindset that developed the belief that someone would come to their rescue like Superman was the same mindset that also believed in hell.

The belief that a Messiah will come down and everyone will be saved creates the psychology that those believers do not have to be responsible for themselves, or others, or to the world.

There will never be a Judgment Day and there will never be an End Times just like there was never a Biblical Adam and Eve. Those are myths designed to convey the author‘s political point. They were not real, living, historical human beings. Doesn’t one think with the fervency of Christian validation by Believers through the sciences, that someone would find the Garden of Eden?

Maybe the messiah concept is based on Ezekiel’s wheel and the space aliens are the messiah Judaism believes in; they are little grey men.

What Jesus said was very instructive and beneficial to creating a just world for all. But Christians are more concerned with oppressing others than loving others.

Christians don’t have the right or the moral authority to force anything on anyone until they first abide by Jesus’ words. One commandment that is fitting today is “Love thy neighbor as thyself”. Many Christians don’t seem to be capable of that.

Greed is one of the biggest problems in the world today. It’s one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Don’t you think Christians would charge around the world battling greed just as Jesus charged into the Temple to battle the money changers who turned his “Father’s house into a den of thieves”?

Gandhi said: “I like your Christ; I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.”

”Love your neighbor as yourself” and “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you” are so very relevant today—and much needed. But for much of the rest of it, I believe it is important for humanity to get past these ancient beliefs because they do not serve us properly anymore. It’s like continuing to wear the same shoes as an adult that you wore as an adolescent. They hurt your feet and you cannot walk properly anymore

For those of us with a belief in “god” (I hate the word but it is easily understood by many) we must strip religions down to only what works and what creates a better world and discard the rest. We must only be interested in our spiritual reality. Our spiritual selves are bound by spiritual laws just as our physical selves are bound by physical laws. What really are those spiritual laws? And how do I, by using them, make myself and my world better for myself and others?

So, what next? Well, on to the next end of the world—October 21, 2011. And when that doesn’t happen, on to December 21, 2012.

And don’t blame that on the Maya for that. That’s a modern western interpretation of what is simply the end of a “baktun—a cycle in the calendar— in the Mayan calendar and is not meant to suggest the end of the world as the idiots would have us believe.

As a species we have always been very insecure about our origin, our destiny and our purpose. So we’ve created myths with our ability to reason in our limited ancient minds to answer questions we could not answer with science so long ago. We no longer have those ancient limitations and we must move forward. With globalism and the worldwide web, now is the time that we as humanity and we as a species take a quantum leap forward in understanding our spiritual reality and our true humanity.