Gospel of Carlin - "I don't vote. Two reasons. First of all it's meaningless; this country was bought and sold a long time ago... Secondly, I believe if you vote, you have no right to complain..."

“I don't vote. Two reasons. First of all it's meaningless; this country was bought and sold a long time ago. The shit they shovel around every 4 years *pfff* doesn't mean a fucking thing. Secondly, I believe if you vote, you have no right to complain. People like to twist that around – they say, 'If you don't vote, you have no right to complain', but where's the logic in that? If you vote and you elect dishonest, incompetent people into office who screw everything up, you are responsible for what they have done. You caused the problem; you voted them in; you have no right to complain. I, on the other hand, who did not vote, who in fact did not even leave the house on election day, am in no way responsible for what these people have done and have every right to complain about the mess you created that I had nothing to do with.”

"The Science of Libertarian Morality."

Much more at the link.

The Science of Libertarian Morality - Reason Magazine:

"...A fascinating new study, “Understanding Libertarian Morality: The psychological roots of an individualist morality,” to be published in a forthcoming issue of The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In probing the moral thinking of libertarians, the study uses the “largest dataset of psychological measures ever compiled on libertarians,” involving moral surveys of more than 10,000 self-identified libertarians gathered online at the website yourmorals.org, run by Haidt and colleagues.

...the study found that libertarians show (1) stronger endorsement of individual liberty as their foremost guiding principle and correspondingly weaker endorsement of other moral principles, (2) a relatively cerebral as opposed to emotional intellectual style, and (3) lower interdependence and social relatedness.

In his earlier work, Haidt surveyed the attitudes of conservatives and liberals using what he calls the Moral Foundations Questionnaire which measures how much a person relies on each of five different moral foundations: Harm/Care, Fairness/Reciprocity, Ingroup/Loyalty, Authority/Respect, and Purity/Sanctity. Typically, conservatives scored lower than liberals on the Harm and Fairness scales and much higher on Ingroup, Authority, and Purity scales. In this case, libertarians scored low on all five surveyed moral dimensions. “Libertarians share with liberals a distaste for the morality of Ingroup, Authority, and Purity characteristic of social conservatives, particularly those on the religious right,” notes the study. Libertarians scored slightly below conservatives on Harm and slightly above on Fairness. This suggests that libertarians “are therefore likely to be less responsive than liberals to moral appeals from groups who claim to be victimized, oppressed, or treated unfairly.”

The Schwartz Value scale measures the degree to which participants regard 10 values as guiding principles for their lives. Libertarians put higher value on Hedonism, Self-Direction, and Stimulation than either liberals or conservatives and they put less value than either on Benevolence, Conformity, Security, and Tradition. Like liberals, libertarians put less value on Power, but like conservatives they value Universalism less. Universalism is defined as “understanding, appreciation, tolerance, and protection of the welfare of all people and nature.” All three put high value on Achievement. Taking these results into account, Haidt concludes that “libertarians appear to live in a world where traditional moral concerns (e.g., respect for authority, personal sanctity) are not assigned much importance..."

"3 Reasons This Election Didn't Change a Thing."

"Here's three reasons the GOP wave won't change a goddamn thing:

1. We're still on the fast track to the poor house...

2. Nobody's talking about foreign policy and ending the warfare state. In constant dollars, defense spending has basically doubled since 2000 and is projected to stay at levels hundreds of billions of dollars above what it was before the Cold War ended. Perhaps more important, neither President Obama nor his party's leadership has even begun a meaningful conversation about foreign policy. The same goes for the Republicans, who constantly exempt defense spending, one of the very largest annual items in the federal budget, from serious scrutiny, much less significant cuts. President Obama is following George W. Bush's painfully slow withdrawal plan from Iraq and has tripled down in Afghanistan without clarifying U.S. goals and leaving lots of wiggle room when it comes to supposed deadlines for leaving. The only folks more hellbent on maintaining an unexamined status quo than the president are the Republicans.

3. The only people worse than liberals on social issues are conservatives... If anything - and despite all the limited-government rhetoric - they'll be even worse when it comes to expanding individual autonomy and increasing lifestyle choice."

"Do as we say, not as we do." - America to, well, everyone.

Secretary Clinton: The past must be confronted - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com:

"Secretary Clinton instructed Kenya to proceed with war crimes trials of its former officials, while President Obama demanded that Indonesia continue investigating past human rights abuses on the ground that 'we can't go forward without looking backwards.' In other news yesterday: George W. Bush threw out the first pitch at the World Series baseball game while the Texas crowd cheered and chanted: 'USA. USA.'"

"You want to know about voting. I'm here to tell you about voting..." - the wisdom of Spider Jerusalem.

Heh. Never fails to amuse.

"You want to know about voting. I'm here to tell you about voting.  Imagine you're locked in a huge underground nightclub filled with sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pit bulls for fun. And you ain't allowed out until you all vote on what you're going to do tonight.  You like to put your feet up and watch "Republican Party Reservation". They like to have sex with normal people using knives, guns and brand-new sexual organs that you did not know existed.  So you vote for television, and everyone else, as far as the eye can see, votes to fuck you with switchblades.

That's voting.  You're welcome." - Spider Jerusalem

2NE1 kinda kicks ass.

2NE1 keeps popping up on my radar, here and there on the internets, so I checked them out, even with ridiculously slow internet speeds here. Ended up being worth it.

K-Pop is similar to J-Pop in that it can have the same kind of overproduced feel [hell, mainstream pop anywhere is like that, truth be told - very little difference between Morning Musume and Britney Spears, when you think about it...] but maybe it's just from my time in Japan they seem somewhat similar. But I dug the hell out of these. I dig on the cross cultural bits, the English mixed with Korean, the hip-hop-pop hybrid, the wicked choreography and the eclectic styling. Pretty damn cool. Catchy.

Halloween hijinks in Liberia.

Folks at the Marine House threw a Halloween shindig, so the Mrs & I were in attendance.  Hello Kitty and Sherlock Holmes wish you a Happy Halloween.

Kawaii Power!!!

Costume-y Competitions... 

She does love her cupcake treats. 

Bear witness to my crazy.

In summary, my computer died.  In tearing everything apart trying to make it work again, I'd pulled off the stickers I'd plastered all over it in order to easier get at the guts of it.  Nothing I did fixed it, of course.  So I put it aside, not touching it for 3 weeks or so, while ordering up a new laptop.  Go to check on it 'one more time' after 3 weeks and lo and behold, it works!  Huzzah!  Especially since the ordered computer hasn't routed its way through the overseas mail yet.

So, long story short [too late] - new stickers for the computer.  Bear witness.

All sticker awesomeness from here.

Freud, meet Jesus. Jesus, Freud.

There never was a golden age, politics has always been dirty and uncivil.

No sense of history, I swear.  Historical references for the quotes here.

Attack Ads, Circa 1800 - Hit & Run : Reason Magazine:

"Have this year's negative political ads really 'taken dirty to a whole new level, as CNN's Anderson Cooper frets? Is a 'return to civility...a relic of a bygone era,' as President Barack Obama laments?

Er, not exactly.

...attack ads are as American as apple pie. If you fancy yourself a patriot or a history buff, you will most certainly approve this message, which is taken from statements made by, for, and against the nation's founders."

'Torture and endless war have made America less safe, not more, and America is run by a oligarchic web of media, government, military, and corporate interests who profit by keeping Americans afraid of an external enemy.'

Inside Out was a well crafted, entertaining thriller.  [Though I still prefer the author's John Rain books.  You can't beat a half Japanese assassin with a heart of gold, I tell you.  With bonus points for the author's time living in Japan and also working for the CIA's Directorate of Operations.]

Here, the author makes a great point on framing the status quo, and how one side has constructed the narrative so that their political viewpoint seems like apolitical "common sense."  [Never trust 'common sense,' btw.  It's usually neither.]  More at the link, per usual.

The Heart of the Matter:

"If I had to encapsulate the politics of Inside Out, I'd say something like this: "Torture and endless war have made America less safe, not more, and America is run by a oligarchic web of media, government, military, and corporate interests who profit by keeping Americans afraid of an external enemy."

I don't deny that such a viewpoint is political. But now let's see if we can similarly encapsulate the politics of a more typical, ticking time bomb thriller:

"Alien, brown-skinned external enemy zealots seek to destroy us because they hate our freedoms, and through torture and a militaristic response, we can stop them and preserve our way of life."

For me, the second worldview is as political as the first (more so, in fact, for reasons I'll mention below). But my sense is that, for many people, only the first seems "political." If I'm correct, it suggests that the right has succeeded (at least in fiction) in establishing its own worldview as the norm, by comparison with which, other worldviews are suspiciously "political."

This success is striking for a number of reasons. Chief among them is that the "external threat is worst" view is contradicted by actual evidence. Multiple studies, including one commissioned by Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, have demonstrated that the majority of what causes terrorism isn't our freedoms, but rather our wars. To the extent a view is driven more by ideology than it is by facts, I would expect it to be recognized as more political, not less. In fiction, at least, this seems not to be the case..."

Bible Sex!

Interesting, in particular and as always, in comparing and contrasting what people *think* their religion says - which is all too often simply their particular cultural prejudices and mores - and what their magic books actually say.

The key to solving the riddle of the purpose of scripture in the Judaic sense is really - and I can't remember where I learned/read this, but it's a remarkably accurate template to study the bible - is that when you're the Jewish tribe, numerically inferior and beset upon all sides by bigger and stronger competition, anything that increases your numbers is a goodness, anything that does not is "evil." That explains why in the Bible polygamy, taking slaves, getting drunk and knocking up your daughters [Lot, of Sodom and Gommorah fame,] marrying your brother's widow... these all get the big thumbs up. But masturbation, 'laying with men' and eating pork [thought to be an 'unclean' animal with an increased likelihood of causing disease,] these all get labeled as "sin." The New Testament takes it to the next level, of course, by trying to make the whole Gentile world more philosophically "Jewish." But someone forgot to check in with the Jewish nation on that point. [Thanks Paul!]

The larger, unanswered question, of course is why on earth do the superstitious scribblings of a small Middle Easter sect of 2-3000 years matter at all? But I digress. Much more at the link.

Q&A: 'God and Sex' Author Michael Coogan on the Bible - TIME:

"Editor of The New Oxford Annotated Bible Michael Coogan recently applied his thorough knowledge of Scripture to a universal and eternally relevant topic: sex. In God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says.

Your book begins with a discussion of the erotic Song of Solomon. Does its inclusion in the Bible mean there was a positive attitude toward sex back then?
I think there was a positive attitude toward sex in general, because reproduction was essential. Anything that led to reproduction was certainly viewed positively, and the idea of refraining from sex for religious reasons was something that was fairly unusual in Judaism in most periods. In many passages it's a highly erotic text, and it was a text that rabbinic literature tells us used to be sung in taverns. Yet when I was in seminary many decades ago, it was razored out of many of the Bibles that we had.

...

How important is it to read the Bible in its original languages?
It's essential for some of us to do it, if for no other reason so that translations can be made that are as accurate as possible. Often translators reflect their own views and their own biases just as much as the biblical writers do.

[I'd insert a smartassed 'duh' here, but I know many folks who believe it impossible for there to be mistranslations and misinterpretations in the Bible.  The rationalizing mental gymnastics for that is quite astonishing. - Rob]

I was interested recently in this case that the Supreme Court had in the Westboro Baptist Church. I looked at their website, and he lists all the passages that he says the Bible talks about sodomy. Well, in most of them sodomy isn't discussed at all. The term sodomy is a translator's term to translate Hebrew words that never mean sodomy in the sense of anal intercourse between males.

...

Given all the examples of polygamy, where in the Bible is marriage sanctioned as a union only between one man and one woman?
There is no unequivocal statement in the Bible, especially the Hebrew Bible, that says that monogamy should be the norm. For the most part, biblical characters we know well, if they could afford it, had many wives. Solomon, the greatest lover of them all — maybe why he's attributed with writing the Song of Songs — had 300 wives. So the fundamentalist Mormons who insist that polygamy is biblical are right, in a sense. If you're going to be a strict literalist, there's nothing wrong with polygamy."

Liberian President's stepson went to West Point - damn service Academy grads are everywhere.

Kind of interesting, that. More at the link, of course.

Strained Relations: Liberia's President and Her Stepson - TIME:

"A federal indictment alleges that a group of traffickers sought to bribe the director of Liberia's National Security Agency to allow more than $100 million of cocaine to pass through the country. The Liberian official was cooperating with the Americans; he also happens to be the president's stepson, Fombah T. Sirleaf.

Operation Relentless has also focused attention on the ambivalent relationship between the much-lauded President (she was named to the TIME 100 in 2006) and her stepson, a West Point graduate she depends on for security in a Liberia deeply scarred by a horrific civil war."

Training.

10/28 - 8x8 - bw flyes, bw rows, db laterals, bw curls, bw tri x, back x 2x15/10, rc situp 1xmax

10/29 - 3x30s wall sits, 8x8 - sngl leg calf rs, rear delt bw flyes, db high pulls, gripper, 3x8 neck iso

Inspiring: Ross Enamait is just a MACHINE.

Wife finds most perfectly appropriate birthday card ever.

Boom.

When the wife craves southern food, she does not play around.

 The aftermath, less appealing.

Beaches in Liberia.

Once you get 10 miles or so out of "town" are actually quite nice.

 @ one of the Mrs co-workers' concrete palaver hut.

 And what is a "palaver hut?"  Glad you asked.

The Palaver Hut:"A Palaver Hut is a circular structure constructed of clay and bamboo or wood, with a thatched roof. Organic materials including decomposed leaves are plastered on the interior and exterior for preservation and decoration. In West African villages, the Palaver Hut is the place where guests are welcome."

Official "Member of the Foreign Service." In writing.

Even the President says so.

Tides bar in Monrovia.

Cool little bar, with a nice patio and a heckuva view.

Something very cool about a handwritten chalkboard drinks menu.

Me, drinking the "White African" [see above.]  How could I not try it, honestly?

When a bar has 1970s era insane-o movie posters, take it as a good sign.

American style pizza in Liberia is actually quite good.

And not really much more expensive than pizza in Japan.  Bamboo Bar FTW.