Wednesday, June 22, 2011

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!

Friday, June 10, 2011

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.

Friday, June 3, 2011

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.