Life On The World Of The Cross

IN THE PAST, a fierce war would bring about social changes and facilitate the adoption of new ideas, such as would not have occurred naturally in ten thousand years. But the terrible price paid for these certain advantages was that society was temporarily thrown back into savagery; civilized reason had to abdicate. War is strong medicine, incredibly costly and extremely dangerous;  and while often curative of a number of social disorders, it can often kill the patient and destroy the society.

The constant necessity for national defense creates many new and advanced social adjustments, and the society of today enjoys the benefit of a long list of useful innovations, which were at first wholly military.  War has had a social value to past civilizations because it:

• 1. Imposed discipline on men, enforced cooperation.
• 2. Put a premium on fortitude and courage.
• 3. Fostered and solidified nationalism.
• 4. Destroyed weak and unfit peoples.
• 5. Dissolved the illusion of primitive equality and selectively stratified society.

War has always had a certain evolutionary value in the past, but like slavery, it must at some point be abandoned as civilization slowly advances. Past world wars literally forced us to travel and promoted cultural intercourse; but these ends are now better served by modern transportation and communication. Olden wars strengthened nations, but modern wars disrupt all civilized culture. Ancient warfare resulted in the decimation of inferior peoples; but the net result of modern conflict is the selective destruction of the very best human stocks. Early wars promoted organization and efficiency, but these have become the obsessions of modern industry.

During past ages, war was a social ferment which pushed civilization forward; but this result is now better attained by ambition, and invention. Ancient warfare supported the concept of a God of battles, but modern man has been told that God is love.

War has served many valuable purposes in the past;  it has been an indispensable scaffolding in the building of civilization. but it is now culturally bankrupt— incapable of producing any dividends of social gain in any way commensurate with the terrible losses it produces.

Physicians once believed in bloodletting as a cure for many diseases, but they have since discovered better remedies. Likewise must the international bloodletting of war give place to more intelligent methods for curing the ills of even backward nations.

The nations of our planet— Urantia— have long been engaged in the gigantic struggle between nationalistic militarism and industrialism. In many ways this conflict is analogous to the age-long struggle between the first herder-hunters and the farmers of land. But if industrialism is to triumph over militarism, it must avoid the dangers which beset it. The perils of corporate industry are:

1. The strong drift toward materialism, spiritual blindness.

2. The worship of wealth-power, value distortion.

3. The vices of luxury, cultural immaturity.

4. The increasing dangers of indolence, service insensitivity.

5. The growth of undesirable racial softness, biologic deterioration.

6. The threat of standardized industrial slavery, personality stagnation.
Labor is ennobling but drudgery is benumbing.

Militarism is autocratic and cruel— savage. It does promote social organization among the conquerors, but it disintegrates the vanquished. Industrialism is more civilized and should be so carried on as to promote initiative and to encourage individualism. Society should in every way possible foster originality.

We should not make the mistake of glorifying war; rather should we discern what it’s done for society so that we may the more accurately visualize what its substitutes must provide if we would continue the advancement of our civilization. And if such adequate substitutes are not provided, then we can be sure that war will continue; maybe even “a hundred years.”

We will never accept peace as a normal mode of living until we have been thoroughly and repeatedly convinced that peace is best for our material welfare;  and until our society wisely provides peaceful substitutes for the gratification of our inherent tendency periodically to let loose a collective drive designed to liberate our accumulating emotions and energies born of the self-preservation reactions of our species.

War might some day be honored as the school of experience which compelled a race of arrogant individualists to submit themselves to highly concentrated authority— a chief executive. Brutal and savage old-fashioned war may have selected the innately great men for leadership, but modern war no longer does this. The leaders our society must now turn to are the conquests of peace: industry; science; and social achievement. Fortunately, that choice has never been clearer.

Evangelical Jim Wallace:

Wednesday night, I heard Republican Vice-Presidential nominee, Sarah Palin, say that her experience as “a small town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” The convention crowd in St. Paul thought that was very funny. But it wasn’t. It was actually quite insulting to the army of community organizers who work in the most challenging places across the country and have such a tremendous impact on the every day lives of millions of people. I guess Sarah Palin and her fellow Republican delegates don’t know much about that. The “actual responsibilities” of community organizers literally provide the practical support, collective strength, and hope for a better future that low-income families need to survive.

“Politicians should thank community organizers, not insult them. As a longtime organizer, I’ve seen time and time again that we are the ones who make government work for the poor, the powerless and the marginalized.  Politicians’ policies and promises would amount to nothing without grassroots activists to hold them accountable. We are leaders of faith and stewards of democracy. In a time when the face of faith in politics is often ugly, community organizing is a valuable example faith’s positive role in public life,” said Pastor Mark Diemer, senior pastor of Grace of God Lutheran Church in Columbus, Ohio and a DART community organizer.

I’m sure Sarah Palin never wrote that clever Rovian put down of Barack Obama, she just read it off the teleprompter like a good soldier. It never entered her pretty little head that she was disparaging the service of thousands upon thousands of people who toil among their communities’ poor and disadvataged citizens with an aim to make a better world.

She was speaking to the Republican audience at St Paul, half of whom enjoy a personal net worth of over a million dollars; what they understood her to mean had nothing to with scruffing about on the streets with poor minorites.

The “leather boot” goes up their snoot, by way of wearing it out on the sidewalks of our inner-cities and the pavement of suburbia; the real energy of democracy will always emanate from the souls of men and women who love one another in a way that never fails to engender selfless service.  And that is what the “base” Republicans “don’t get.” That is what makes them the scourge of true democracy.  That is what divides our people and destroys our unity.

Gianardil:

WHAT POLITICIAN DOES NOT KNOW WHAT A COMMUNITY ORGANIZER IS? There are millions of people who do this thankless work. They do everything to help. At 41, I was diagnosed with Parkinsons. My insurance maxed at a million. Bankruptcy was next. I had five kids, 3 were my sister’s, who died at 39. I had an insurance policy owned by my children, which was paid in full.

Killing myself seemed the perfect way out. The kids could go to college, buy the house back, and stay together. I know, it was my fault for having a disease so I should have no insurance. My son suspected something, left, and returned with a lovely woman from the church. She told me that they would do everything they could to help me.

I thought this was a joke, but the joke was on me. They found a decent home, moved us, fed my kids, drove them to their activities, paid $1,000+ a month for my medicine, etc.  I absolutely adore these loving people. Someone comes over at least twice a day.

Hopefully, organizers are busy registering voters to make sure [Sarah Palin] never sees the inside of the Oval Office. Keep up the insults. Obama gets those votes. Face the fact dear, you are only on this ticket because you have a vagina. You also appeal to the gun lobby as a “moose hunting, salmon fishing, pistol packing mother,” who needs to learn a hell of a lot more before you go anywhere.

No “real responsibilities”? Well, none that are written down for you.  None that are not taken on voluntarily.  None that will bring you great wealth or recognition in this life. The candidate who understands this kind of responsibility has a chance to lead our nation to a new understanding of what it means to be American, to live up to the promise of our highest values. Help make Barack Obama our president, and we’ll see what real responsibilities mean to a real man of the people.

McSame demonstrates he no longer needs Cindy to access the internets*

Apparently the McSame campaign is ditching their previous theme of building a bridge to the 19th century and are trying to co-opt Obama’s change mantram. I guess they figure that if voters perceive both sides as agents of change, McCain would be the “safer,” more experienced bet.

Good luck with that.

Cindy takes John Sidney out for his first spin on the InnerTubes, part of the new high-tech frontier of Teh Internets he’s getting hip to. McCain said he was pretty sure he was “feeling the urge to email” now, and that the big GOP Elephant tube felt “really good” between his legs. —Terry Kruger

*[Image from Marc Luscher @luscher.org]

Bush: The Invisible Man at the Rethuglicans’ convention

For the first time in pundit memory, the president and vice-president of an incumbent party, in this case the Rethuglicans, failed to make a live appearance at their party’s nominating convention.

President George W. Bush phoned it in from the White House, while Vice President Darth Cheney reverted to form and was in hiding somewhere at an undisclosed location. There wasn’t even a customary tribute video of the Administration’s accomplishments (sic) over the last eight years.

Which explains why in his acceptance speech tonight, McCain mentioned Bush exactly ONCE.

And why a selection of other Rethuglicans convention speakers only mentioned Bush seven times, according to this index compiled by The NY Times.

The Grey Lady’s front page analysis of McSame’s speech is titled: “The Party in Power, Running as if It Weren’t.”

John McSame– you can run but you can’t hide.

[Photoshop credit to Terry Kruger]

Don’t know if this was a media pool camera shot or not, but clicking through the channels it seemed that it might have very well been. I think I saw it on MSNBC.

Anyone else see it on a different channel?

Unceasing Exposure of ALL Hypocrites from now on!

Permanent Prisoner Of War, John McCain

“A picture is worth a thousand words.“ — Napoleon Bonaparte

McPalin wowed the base* with Rovian rancor and division; what’s new.

Maybe Sarah Palin was a fine mayor of Wasilli; I ‘ownt even know. And, if in the performance of her “actual responsibilities” as governor of Alaska, she got a bad cop off the street and spared a family some domestic violence, well that’s wonderful. Alaska, and by extension, The United States, is a better place.  Above all, I even heartily applaud her personal dedication to God’s Will, and wish every American could live the moral and ethical equivalent of divine good to all mankind.  But the reality is, many Republicans, like John McCain, are just as Barack Obama described him in his acceptance speech. They just don’t “get it.”

They didn’t “get it” in the twentieth century, and they’re not going to get it in the twenty-first, either. Their moral and ethical clocks, wound so tightly around the culture war issues of the neocon religious right that they are frozen in time, will never catch up to the moving vanguard of twenty-first century morals and ethics. Ever.

That’s not to say they couldn’t drag America kicking ans screaming back into the twentieth century; [Read more →]

Palin’s initialed line item cuts

The audience for Sarah Palin’s speech last night at the Rethugs convention were all a twitter over her promise:

“To the families of special-needs children all across this country, I have a message: For years, you sought to make America a more welcoming place for your sons and daughters. I pledge to you that if we are elected, you will have a friend and advocate in the White House.“

With friends like her, parents with special needs kids don’t need enemies. Palin has cut funding for special needs by 62%. Can’t wait for the Rethugs to reintroduce the phrase “compassionate conservatism” into their political propaganda.

UPDATE: Gene in the comments section points out that the funds weren’t cut, but moved to another budget category, citing the progressive rag, Washington Monthly.

As for promoting counseling and adoption to poor moms she cut the budget for Catholic Community Resources in half. From the Fairbanks newspaper, Newsminer, on 5/23/08:

Palin vetoes millions from state budget

By STEFAN MILKOWSKI

Projects with funding reduced by 50 percent include the following:

[snip]

• Catholic Community Resources — counseling and adoption

And from today’s WAPO:

Palin Slashed Funding for Teen Moms
By Paul Kane

ST. PAUL -- Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee who revealed Monday that her 17-year-old daughter is pregnant, earlier this year used her line-item veto to slash funding for a state program benefiting teen mothers in need of a place to live.

After the legislature passed a spending bill in April, Palin went through the measure reducing and eliminating funds for programs she opposed. Inking her initials on the legislation — “SP” — Palin reduced funding for Covenant House Alaska by more than 20 percent, cutting funds from $5 million to $3.9 million. Covenant House is a mix of programs and shelters for troubled youths, including Passage House, which is a transitional home for teenage mothers.

According to Passage House’s web site, its purpose is to provide “young mothers a place to live with their babies for up to eighteen months while they gain the necessary skills and resources to change their lives” and help teen moms “become productive, successful, independent adults who create and provide a stable environment for themselves and their families.“

I spent three years as a paralegal in Alaska for an attorney that specialized in representing teens in trouble, and well know the essential work that Covenant House provides. What passes for family life amongst a large segment of the native Inuits is truly heart wrenching.

Palin, quite frankly, turns my stomach. A militaristic, hypocritical reform “maverick,” under Alaska state investigation for abuse of power, in deep with the energy industry — an ideal replacement for Darth Cheney, if only less practiced.

But give her time.

Like flies and maggots descending on a dead boar carcass, facts disproving the Palin maverick/reformer narrative are coming fast and furious.

Where to start?

Brent Bowdowsky over at TheHill.com yesterday wrote a blog titled “Pork-Barrel Palin, The Earmark Champ” that details some of the humongous amounts of money that Palin has secured for her constituents, thanks in large measure to her indicted Senator mentor, Ted Stevens :

Now John McCain learns, as we do, that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) sent a 70-page memo to Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) in February seeking $200 million for new Alaska earmarks, and as mayor of the village of Wasilla she lobbied hard for and won more than $26 million of earmarks.[...]

Palin long ago hired the prime pork lobbying firm in Alaska, which features Ted Stevens’s son, and Ted Stevens’s former chief of staff, who serviced her pork lobbying account.

The regular junkets of Palin and her staff to Washington, hustling earmark dough, are legendary in Alaska. Someone will soon add up the airfare, hotel and fine dining tabs to push for the pork, plus the lobbying fees, all at taxpayer expense, starting with Wasilla, continuing as governor.

The dead tree version of today’s LA Times has more, leading with “McCain had criticized earmarks from Palin”, highlighting the fact that Palin was for the infamous “bridge to nowhere” before she was against it.

This year, Palin, who has been governor for nearly 22 months, defended earmarking as a vital part of the legislative system. “The federal budget, in its various manifestations, is incredibly important to us, and congressional earmarks are one aspect of this relationship,” she wrote in a newspaper column [...]

McCain has made opposition to pork-barrel spending a central theme of his 2008 campaign. “Earmarking deprives federal agencies of scarce resources, at the whim of individual members of Congress,” McCain has said. [...]

When Palin spoke after McCain introduced her as his running mate at a rally in Ohio last week, she made fun of earmarking. She said she had rejected $223 million in federal funds for a bridge linking Ketchikan to an island with an airport and 50 residents, referring to it by its derogatory label: the “bridge to nowhere.”

In the nationally televised speech, she stood by McCain and said, “I’ve championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending by Congress. In fact, I told Congress thanks, but no thanks, on that bridge to nowhere. If our state wanted a bridge, I said, we’d build it ourselves.”

However, as a candidate for governor in 2006, Palin had backed funding for the bridge. After her election, she killed the much-ridiculed project when it became clear the state had other priorities. She said she would use the federal funds to fill those needs.

Over at the Politico, we learn that:

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told Washington Post editors Tuesday that issues will have an impact on undecided voters but will not be conclusive.

“This election is not about issues,” Davis said. “This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”

Thus the urgency of Palin’s prime time speech at the Rethuglican’s convention tonight, meant to define her as something she’s not, before her real character is exposed.

Barack Obama:

“Let me be as clear as possible:  I have said before and I will repeat again, I think people’s families are off limits, and people’s children are especially off limits. This shouldn’t be part of our politics. It has no relevance to Gov. Palin’s performance as governor, or her potential performance as a vice president.”

It may be politically correct for Obama as a nominee to say that, but he’s ignoring the real point:  Sarah Palin is a liar.

Obama is correct that the children of a candidate should be outside of the purview of the MSM slime-wad, but the interests of the American people do involve the character and judgment demonstrated by the actions and decisions of candidates. If Sarah “Hold Me Accountable” Palin covered up her daughter’s pregnancy last April, that’s a moral and ethical decision which reveals the worst kind of character flaw; hypocrisy.

So Yeah.

Let the MSM locusts do their job correctly for once, and get to the bottom of the mess McPOW has flung into the political arena.  Obama be chillin’ with the brosefs.

Sarah Baracuda explaining why she murdered Bullwinkle

John McSame’s selection of Sarah Palin for veep was too much even for a Village Elder like WAPO’s Richard Cohen who begins his column today:

One of the great sights of American political life — a YouTube moment if ever there was one — was to see the doughboy face of Newt Gingrich as he extolled the virtues of Sarah Palin, a sitcom of a vice presidential choice and a disaster movie if she moves up to the presidency: “She’s the first journalist ever to be nominated, I think, for the president or vice president, and she was a sportscaster on local television,” Gingrich said on the “Today” show. “So she has a lot of interesting background. And she has a lot of experience. Remember that, when people worry about how inexperienced she is, for two years she’s been in charge of the Alaska National Guard.”

Doing what, exactly, goes unmentioned. I watched McSame spokesmen Tucker Bounds duck and weave a question yesterday from CNN’s bantam weight anchor, Campbell Brown, to provide just one example of a Palin decision that even remotely had any kind of command effect on the Guard’s deployment in Iraq. Pressed repeatedly, Bounds muttered something about equipment choices and was almost laughed out of the studio.

As other Rethuglican apologists, including national security expert Cindy McCain (fresh off her triumphant trip to what’s left of the country of Georgia) have tried to explain, Alaska borders Russia. This makes it the front line in the new Cold War that the Cheneyites are so busily trying to reignite with the Ruskies. This is a propaganda twofer, since it also magically conveys the kind foreign policy experience on Palin that she otherwise totally lacks.

Cohen goes on to illustrate a time proven Rethuglican propaganda ploy of using a negative to prove a positive (as in “Bush’s war on terror is a success because there have been no attacks on the US mainland since 9/11″):

Still, you have to admit that in all that time, especially since Palin became governor about two years ago, no Russian invasion force has come across the strait, maybe because she was in charge of the Guard, maybe because she herself is a hunter and an athlete. The record is unclear because no high-ranking Russian appeared on any of the weekend talk shows to say how they had considered an invasion of Alaska and then backed off when Sarah Palin became commander in chief of the Alaska National Guard. Who could blame them?

As the Newt & Company rush to portray Palin as a tough and capable C&C ready to toss judo black belt Vladimir Putin to the mat, Cohen invokes a different image:

It’s a pity Gingrich was not around when the Roman Emperor Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus, better known by his nickname Caligula, reputedly named Incitatus as a consul and a priest. Incitatus was his horse.

Palin, we are led to believe, is a horse of different color. Call her “Maverick 2.”

UPDATE I: Here’s the Campbell Brown interview of Tucker Bounds.

UPDATE II: From TPM:

McCain Cancels CNN Interview As Punishment For Criticizing Palin
By Eric Kleefeld - September 2, 2008, 4:39PM

It looks like the McCain camp is now actively taking steps to punish media outlets that give them bad coverage.

Wolf Blitzer just reported that the campaign has cancelled a scheduled interview with Larry King due to an unfriendly segment last night on CNN — the segment we flagged last night where the network’s Campbell Brown grilled McCain spokesperson Tucker bounds over Sarah Palin’s lack of foreign policy experience.

[...]

Blitzer said the McCain campaign complained that Campbell Brown’s grilling of Tucker Bounds over Sarah Palin’s lack of foreign policy experience was “over the line.”

Is the corporatist media, who Chris Matthews has famously described as “McCain’s base” ready to wake up yet?