THE TRUTH ABOUT GOD

I have a few quibbling problems with Christianity, such as the story of the virgin birth; but fundamentally I just can’t accept the idea that God has a mysterious plan to help each and every one of us. For example; on Sunday, last July 26th, off Deerfield Beech, Florida, thirty-six year old Steven Wilson was scuba diving with three friends. At about 3pm, just as he surfaced, a bolt of lightning materialized and was instantly drawn to the highest and most metallic thing on the ocean surface, which at that micro-second was Steven’s oxygen tank. After the strike his friends saw him go under and quickly got him to the surface and back aboard their 20 foot boat. They preformed CPR, radioed ahead for help and headed for shore. An EMT squad met them on the beach and rushed Steven to the North Broward Medical Center’s Level II Trauma Center, where…Steven Wilson was pronounced dead. Now, I’m certain Steven’s family and friends all believe that God had a reason for hitting their loved one with 150,000 volts, and in an odd way I hope they are right. But I have doubts.
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I also have doubts about the whole association of sin and punishment. It doesn’t seem just or fair that a 34 year old sheet metal manufacturer and weekend rugby player such as Hiroshi Miyamoto, who had undergone simple surgery to repair a torn Achilles tendon, was then gunned down while recovering in his 2nd floor hospital room. He had a wife and two sons, and an aged mother who lived with them. What the hell kind of a moral plan accommodates that type of “final reward”?
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At about 7:40 am on November 8th, a nurse at the Saga Orthopedic Hospital heard gunshots and saw a man between 5’3 and 5’7 tall and of medium build, running down a stairwell. A patient looking out a window saw the same man wearing a black wool hat, a brown jacket and beige slacks get into a white Toyota, which then quickly pulled away driven by a woman. Back upstairs the nurse found poor Mr. Miyamoto lying on the floor with “several” bullet wounds to his back. About 40 minutes later he was pronounced dead. The cops were puzzled until a check of the records revealed that the previous occupant of that particular room had been Shigeki Koiga, leader of the Kyushu Seido-kai mob, which has been engaged in a turf war for over a year after splitting away from the Dojin-kai, one of the 39 recognized gangs that form the “boryokudan" (violent groups) of the Yakuza.
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The theory that poor Mr. Miyamoto’s sin was in just being in the wrong place at the wrong time gained credence a week later when Mr. Koiga was gunned down outside another hospital in Omuta. And a couple of days later Mr. Fumio Imada, a soldier in Dojin-kai, and his moll girlfriend were arrested on gun charges. Police said he was the “shooter” of poor Mr. Miyamoto, and she had driven the getaway car, his white Toyota.
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These guys are not romanticized master criminals, like the “Crazy 88” from Kill Bill Volume 1. These guys are violent thugs, as greedy and stupid and ruthless as any white supremacist gang here in the United States. And being murdered by them by accident carries no moral lesson, except that random murder is a lousy foundation for a social structure and pretty inefficient as a gang methodology as well And that remains true whether the society claims Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, or Shinto traditions. There are in the human world a handful of truths that are always true. They supersede religious morality, even though they are often mistaken for religious morality, like the eternal truth that going through life drunk off your ass is not a good idea.
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On American Thanksgiving of this year, humanity received yet another lesson of this latter “truth” when the Jackson County Sheriff’s Deputies responded to an early morning 911 call in the town of Nicholson, Georgia. At about 1am a middle-aged couple completed a night of drinking by getting into an argument. And at the some point the husband accentuated his position by describing his 43 year old wife with an expletive (presumably the “B” word) and she responded by throwing a raw potato at him. And, by some amazing coincidence, the potato struck the lucky hubby right on the bridge of the nose and knocked him cold. In a panic the wife dialed 911. The police and the paramedics arrived shortly there after. But, since he was not dead (yet), and since she insisted she had not meant to hit him (this time), and, since he quickly came to and was not permanently injured and refused to press charges, the deputies and the EMT’s went on about their duties. No arrests were made, not even a ticket for disturbing the peace was issued and thus no names were recorded for posterity. But I feel certain that, God willing, the whole gang will be meeting again this holiday season at their house in Nicholson, on New Year's Eve if not before.
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And that’s a truth.
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CURSED WORDS

I have not visited the community of Scranton, Pennsylvania since I passed through the “The Electric City” in the summer of 1971, and yet the police department of Scranton has recently offended me. This is sad because Scranton can not afford to be offending anybody. Every decade since 1930, when it had 143,000 citizens, the population of this town on the Eastern edge of the “Rust Belt” has shrunk, until today there are little more then 72,000 residents in a town the Washington Post described as “awfuler” (than neighboring Wilke-Barre, which The Post called “awful”). You wouldn’t think the Scranton Chamber of Commerce would be encouraging any more bad publicity and yet that is exactly what the Scranton Police Department has delivered right to the front door of Lakawanna county Court Magistrate Terrence V. Gallagher. And appropriately enough this load of “crap” was brought on by a backed up toilet.
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924 Lucerne Avenue in Scranton is a corner lot bordering Aswell Court. Living there at about 8pm on the evening of Thursday, October 11th of this year was 34 year old Dawn Herb, a single mother of four children. That night she was struggling with a backed up toilet in a second floor bathroom. And when the damn thing began spewing fouled water and soiled toilet paper all over the small bathroom, down the hall and through the ceiling of her kitchen, Dawn responded with a series of loud oaths and curses, all directed at the toilet and at urging her daughter to respond with a mop and bucket; but which also carried out an open bathroom window and across the street, where they were heard by 12 year old Sydney Gilman who was letting her dog in. This young lady dutifully told her father, Patrick Gilman, that there might be a fight going on and he went out to investigate.
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What he heard, he later testified, was a woman shout, “Are you fucking retarded? Get me a fucking mop!” In response Mr. Gilman might have been solicitous of his neighbor’s crises. But instead he says he yelled, “Watch your mouth! There are young children in this neighborhood!” Mr. Gilman says Dawn then shouted back, “Shut the fuck up!” However Dawn says he told her to “Shut the fuck up!” and she responded by telling him to “Mind your own business.” But whatever the particulars, Dawn was clearly exasperated and Mr. Gilman was clearly offended. Under normal circumstances he would have called the cops, who would have shown up, cautioned her to be quieter and asked him to be more understanding, or, if he insisted, Mr. Gilman might have sworn out a complaint, and that would likely have been the end of it. It happens a thousand times every night in neighborhoods all over America. But these were not normal circumstances because Patrick Gilman is a Scranton police officer. Officer Gilman was off duty at the time, but when a cop calls a cop, they respond.
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Specifically, Officer Gilman called on-duty Scranton officer Gerald Tallo, directly. He recorded Officer Gilman’s complaints and then wrote out a citation for Dawn Herb, charging her with disorderly conduct, which in Pennsylvania can be obscene language or gestures which “causes public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm”. Her punishment could be 90 days in jail and a $300 fine.
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The words Dawn admitted uttering have ancient and honorable origins and uses. One of the Christian-Judeo names for Satan, Beelzebub, is, in fact, an ancient Hebrew insult. Beel was the primary Philistine god and Beelzebub translates as “Beel eats shit”. Clearly that oath was designed to cause public inconvenience, annoyance or alarm amongst the Phoenician cities the Israelites coveted. But the Hebrew’s had it easy in the oath department because they had seven or eight names for their one God, most of which involved avoiding saying his “real” name, “Yahweh”, which would later be mistranslated as “Jehovah”. And, as Monty Python so artfully explained, using Jehovah's name (taking it in vain) in various forms, has always been a punishable offense.
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The Puritans we call the Pilgrim Fathers dealt with the same threats to their social structure that Officer Gilman deals with in 21st century Scranton. In 1637 two men, John Alexander and Thomas Roberts, were convicted of homosexual acts and were hanged. The next year Alice Bishop was hanged for the murder of her own 4 year old daughter. Thomas Granger was sent to the gallows for engaging in sex with livestock, and so were the livestock – which seems a redundant punishment for them. But cursing God was so common an offense amongst the punishment-happy Puritans that they merely sent the convicted to the stocks for three hours or so. It makes me wonder how many Pilgrim "Dawn Herbs" or "Larry Craigs" willingly took to the stocks to avoid the more serious charge of “denying the scriptures”, which was punishable by a whipping.
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But this Dawn Herb was not going to slip her head into the stocks quietly. (I begin to doubt that Dawn ever did anything quietly in her life!) That very night she composed a letter to The Scranton Times- Tribune’ “I was fighting with my overflowing toilet tonight, with a plunger and a mouthful of words…There was no criminal intent to do anything….I don’t even have a criminal record and I don’t want (one)… for this stupid incident.” The Times-Tribune wrote it up as a story and shortly there after the Washington Post awarded the Scranton P.D. “The Joe Friday Award for Overzealous Police Work.” The Associated Press picked up the story and that brought Dawn to the attention of the American Civil Liberty Union.
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Valarie Burch, and ACLU attorney based in Harrisburg said the ACLU gets “about one of these cases a year. It is simply unconstitutional for the government to criminalize the use of curse words.” And Mary Roper, another ACLU attorney called the case, “…an extreme example of the government trying to intrude into a place they have no business being, your bathroom and your home.” And Barry Dyller, who volunteered to defend Dawn, suggested “Even if you assume every fact…is true, its still not a crime to curse. All we need to do is say, ‘So what?”.
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And in front of Judge Gallagher on December 10th, that is pretty much what Mr. Dyller did. He questioned Officer Gilman on cross as to why he had called Officer Tallo direct, rather than dial 911, but basically the defense case was presented in closing argument. “There was nothing sexual about the words coming out of Dawn Herb’s mouth”, which meant, Dyller argued, they were not “obscene” and thus not subject to government intervention. “We’re allowed to swear at each other," he added. "It doesn’t mean we should, but we are allowed to, and the government and the law cannot stick its nose into these private matters.”
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Judge Gallagher said he would issue his judgment in two or three weeks, but actually, within 48 hours he issued his decision. He wrote that Dawn's choice of words might be "offensive, vulgar and imprudent ..." they were also "protected by the First Amendment. Meanwhile A Times-Tribune poll found that 85% of readers thought the charges should be simply dropped. Dawn Herb told the reporters before the hearing, “Just hopefully this is the first and the last time I have to come in here. Hopefully it doesn’t get extended, or, I hope the charges just get dropped. That’s all I’m looking for.”
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HOCUS, POCUS; Making the Elephant Vanish!

I would call it the elephant in the middle of the room, but that doesn’t begin to define its impact nor its opaqueness. It has been whispered about, smirked and wise-cracked about on Democratic net sites with increasing frequency and venom and decreasing impact on the mainstream press for seven years now. With 80% of Republicans still claiming to approve of President Shrub (at least until this latest fiasco) the mainstream press, striving for the appearance of neutral reporting, remains transported with their audience to an alternate universe, a sort of “Emperor’s New Clothes” world, where the unstated assumption is always assumed not be assumed, even while its assumption influences every nuance and inflection of political debate. That assumption is that George W. Shrub is the biggest idiot to sit in the oval office since Woodrow Wilson suffered a stroke and fell off a White House toilet. But while Wilson struggled to recapture his mind and body, G.W. Shrub has no such expectations or abilities.
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The latest fiasco was, of course, the newest National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), the collective work product of 16 separate government intelligence agencies. This collective brain power has decided that not only is Iran not currently building nuclear bombs, they haven’t been building bombs since 2004, despite the repeated doomsday predictions from that Cassandra of the NEOCONs, Dick Cheney. The Iranians retain the capability of restarting a nuclear program but if and when they do, we no longer retain the credibility of being believed when we cry wolf. That loss of credibility is just another legacy of his Shrub-ness. And now, if the press were actually reality based, they would be asking the question posed by a previous generation of Republican statesmen (when the Republicans still had statesmen), “What did the President know and when did he know it?” And the current in vogue unasked question; “Why didn’t Jesus tell him to know it?”
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It was almost amusing to watch the Shrub that exists only in the headlines, jumping through hoops of illogic. TIME Magazine found our Great Leader still competent enough to insist “…you can bet that an explosive, 180 degree turn on Iran like this one was greenlighted by the President.” While Michael Hirsh for NEWSWEEK described the “…second, and less noted, effect of the new NIE is that the already tattered credibility of this administration…is shredded – simply gone with the wind.” Less noted by whom? And less noted, why? In what must be the journalistic understatement of a presidency chronicled by journalistic understatements, Jonathan Landay from McCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS observed that, “The President will now find it difficult to persuade Russia and China – and even America’s European allies – to impose new sanctions on Iran.” True, but what would be truly amazing is if some allied nation does not seriously propose sanctions against us!
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In the JERSUALEM POST, Calev Ben-David struggled to contain his disgust with Israel’s most dependable friend – Shrub. “Whatever one may think of the new National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) report on Iran’s nuclear intentions and capabilities, there is no doubt it provides some telling and timely insights into a regime whose true direction and condition many analysts here in Jerusalem have been trying to discern for the past year, That regime is the Bush administration.” The allies of Shrub, from Britain to Australia to Israel, have already begun dealing with the Post-Shrub reality based reality, where they didn’t merely back the wrong horse, they backed a dead horse. Domestically,
Shrub’s job approval rating has been virtually unchanged from an abysmal 33% for over a year now, and, in the words of Gallup, “…it is unlikely Bush’s approval rating will get much better between now and the end of his term.”
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The Zogby poll found that “Among Republicans, 67% of likely Iowa caucus goers and 68% of likely New Hampshire primary voters said they are angry with the political system… (21% and 26%)…said they are “very angry”…Most of their anger appears directed at Congress…(but)Nearly half – 43% - of likely Republicans voters in New Hampshire said they were angry at President Bush.” As Gallup also noted, “…Bush’s support has eroded most among Republicans.” And yet, if you watch the polical-tainment programs like HARDBALL you would think that the machinations of Republican candidates to replace Shrub should be taken seriously. The best thing that could happen to the GOP in 2008 is if they go down to ignominious and total defeat.
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How rare it is to be able, in all honesty and sincerity, to tell Republicans that if they want to save their party, this year they should vote for the elephant in the middle of the room; Vote Democratic.
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EMILY, WE HARDLY KNEW YOU.

I am just pissed off. The violent death of Emily Sander has left the usual wreckage. Her family is devastated. Her friends are bereft. The Kansas towns where she grew up and went to college have been wounded. But in a month or two few of us will remember her name, and we will forget that once again we got a look behind the veneer and saw the true face of our news media; provocateurs who cater to the public’s prurient interests. Without the ennoblement of the Bill of Rights, they (we) would all have been arrested as pornographers long ago. And the truly ironic aspect is that the media have been selling their papers by billing Emily as an “internet porn star”, as if the pittance she made from selling her image and reputation had ever come anywhere near the treasure collected each day by CNN, NBC, FOX, and even the Associated Press, selling Emily’s image and reputation. Her life didn’t make her newsworthy to them. Marketing her self as the “barely legal, Zoey Zane” certainly did not distinguish her significantly from millions of others living a fantasy on the net. Even her brutal murder by itself did not earn her a dubious equation with “man bites dog”. But her life and death and that word “pornography” appearing in the same paragraph is what finally made Emily Sander “worthy” as news.
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The word “pornography” was born from an odd root. The ancient Greek sources are “porneia”, meaning fornication, and “graphein” meaning to write. They refer to the advertising signs hung outside the prostitute’s place of business. For three thousand years a “pornographer” was anyone who wrote anything about the lives of prostitutes or their customers. It wasn’t until the Victorian age (about 1850) that the noun “pornographer” evolved into the more specific meaning of “…Someone who presents, shows or sells writing or pictures whose primary purpose is to cause sexual arousal”. But the last 150 years has failed to inspire a simple accurate definition of what is now considered to be pornographic. In 1964 Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart admitted that the best description he could provide was, “I know it when I see it.” And it is that hazy justification which allows the news media to sell Emily Sander as an “internet porn star” without calling themselves “pornographers”.
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Emily was a lovely, vibrant 18 year old woman, discovering her sexuality at a time when the internet and the electronic revolution has given young women more power over their bodies than ever before in history. She wanted to make a profit from that power. And if that was a mistake it was her mistake to make. But Kansas is infamous for its fear of shifting that power away from the old men who have traditionally held it. In a battle reminiscent of the temperance movement, today in Kansas two separate special grand juries are seeking to punish doctors and nurses who perform “legal” abortions. But Emily Sander is and was proof that that cultural war has already been lost.
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Emily’s death is no more proof that internet sex sites are dangerous for women than the murder of Stacy Peterson, the missing Chicago cops 4th wife, is proof that being married to a cop is inherently dangerous. These two women (if Stacy Peterson was murdered, as I suspect) were not murdered as punishment for some moral shortcoming, no matter what the implied moral the media wants to tag on their lives. They were murdered by men. And 57% of all women who are murdered are killed by their husbands or ex-husbands or boyfriends. And that puts Emily in the unlucky minority. That should have made her worthy of being a headline; but it didn’t. As the saying goes, sex sells – especially it sells newspapers and cable news time. The slaughter of another young woman by an enraged male ego is simply another “dog bites man” story and not “news worthy”; unless she could be described as an “internet porn star”.
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Well, Emily wasn’t much of a “star” until she was murdered by the media. On what was once her web site (ZoeyZane.com) her business partners, RagingBucks, posted the following; “Emily was a solo nude model whose site went live September 25, 2007…the media…sent more traffic to Emily’s adult site in two hours then the site has received in the two months since the site has gone live”. The “Fort Worth Star-Telegram” printed the absurd statistic that 30,000 customers paid $39.95 a month to look at Emily’s nude photos. In fact “RagingBucks” offers access to images of dozens of young women at that price and Emily was merely one of the newest. And in any case, it is also an assertion that any one who has ever been the victim of internet porn pop-ups and seen the prices listed can testify is “not a viable business model”, as 5 minutes of investigation by this main stream media source would have shown.
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"RagingBucks has set up a fund for Emily's family and seeded it with $3,000. The least the "Star-Telegram" could do is match that amount, so that Emily might at least be paid symbolically part of the money she made for them. And in what may be the most poignant overlooked element of this story, in “cyber speak” to be “zane” is to be sane and insane at the same time. Who ever picked that “nom de internet” for Emily was prescient.


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But what finally, ultimately pisses me off is that if you “Google” the name Emily Sanders you get 1,920,000 references, and almost all of them refer to her at some point as an "internet porn star". But if you Google “Isreal Mireles” you get just 734 hits, and he’s the SOB suspected of killing her. He is still at large with his 16 year old pregnant girl friend. And I hope he gives himself up without hurting anybody else, including himself. Because what the media needs right now is a good salacious murder trial, ala O.J. Don't you think?
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CHOCOLATE FANTASIES

I was amazed when archaeologists found 4,000 year old ceremonial Mayan pottery in Honduras. Now, archaeologists and pottery go together like cocaine and addiction, but this fancy pottery had the remains of chocolate in it, and it was carbon 14 dated at about 1100 B.C., about 500 years earlier than conventional wisdom said that cacao plants were harvested by humans. It seems it was served at weddings and births, in much the same way we today use champagne Once again we have proof that if it’s addictive, humans will find it and even invent any chemistry required to gain access to it. It’s beginning to seem that it was our addiction to addiction that led us off the Savanna and into the crack house.
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Making chocolate is much more complicated than just stomping on grapes. You begin by harvesting the enormous seed pod, which you toss in a pile to let ferment for about a week. The first Mayans to do this threw the seeds away and brewed the meaty pods into a powerful beer. But then some Mayan Nerd noticed that the seeds abandoned in the sun smelled delicious. Of course if they didn’t dry fast enough they turned moldy, but if the beans dried quickly, and if the Mayan Nerd then roasted the beans, and then pried opened their shells, he or she would find what are called the nubs. And if this ancient chemistry Wonk then ground up the nubs (like a coffee bean) the Mayan alchemist would end up with a liquid called “chocolate liquor” – for obvious reasons – and when he or she then heated that material and allowed it to cool and solidify, they produced what we call “baking chocolate”, and what the Mayan called cacao. And then, some 4,000 later, some idiot convinced American school children that chemistry was boring. Chemistry gets you beer and chocolate. How could that be boring?
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Here’s some more chemistry. Chocolate contains anandamide, which is also found in marijuana, and a couple of chemicals that slow down your metabolism of anadamide; in other words they make the “high” last longer. Chocolate also contains tryptophan, which is the stuff in turkey that puts you to sleep after Thanksgiving dinner. And chocolate also contains theobromine, which is actually a superior opiate to the watered- downed opiates in over- the-counter cough medicines. Of course chocolate contains really small amounts of all of these compounds and for any or all of them to have a major effect on your brain you would have to eat so much chocolate you would likely die from dysentery. Getting your chemistry from the chocolate companies is as silly as getting your sexual counsel from the people who make Viagra.
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Chocolate also contains magnesium, a chemical that pre-menstrual females are short of. This is the usual justification given for women’s monthly chocolate cravings, but only 40% of women claim monthly chocolate cravings, and so do 15% of men. A more likely influence on chocolate cravings in both sexes might have been located by a British study that reported the very odor of chocolate reduces theta activity in the human brain, indicating calming and relaxation. This may explain why Hershey, Pennsylvania (Derry Township) has less than ¼ of 1% of the national rate of violent crimes. The whole town reeks of chocolate!
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The Spanish Conquistadors reported that the Aztec emperor Montezuma drank a big cup of cocoa before entering his harem. And that reputation was enhanced when Giovanni Casanova recommended the drink as an aphrodisiac. What is surprising is that the Church had no problem with all this chocolate inspired sex, probably because the Popes were amongst the first high and mighty who were seduced by the brown powder. Pius V decreed in 1569 that drinking chocolate did not break lent. The reformation tried to introduce the “sin” factor into chocolate, when, in 1624 a Viennese professor, Johan Rauch, condemned chocolate and called for it to be banned. But by that time the Protestant Dutch had reintroduced the “cocoa butter”, drained from the chocolate liquor during the cocoa stage, to create “Dutch Chocolate”. And after that, even chocolate’s role in masking the poison that killed Pope Clement XIV in 1774 could not shake the church’s addiction to the cocoa bean.
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But the sin of Chocolate has never really been “lust” but “avarice”. The Aztecs collected their taxes in Cocoa beans, as did the Spanish who succeeded them, dividing the world into the “have chocolate” and the “grow chocolate” populations. Like diamonds, chocolate has funded and fueled many wars across Africa and South America. (The Cocoa tree only grows within 20 degrees of the equator.
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Meanwhile the “have chocolates” are rich enough to support empires, like Hershey and Cadbury. These corporate chocolate factories are based on the concept of “chocolate for the common man”, often containing less than 10% cocoa butter, and sometimes closer to 1%. Less cocoa butter not only lowers the cost but raises the melting point, and was the original meaning behind the sales pitch, “Melts in your mouth, not in your hand”. It implied quality but also convenience. Today quality seems to matter only in Europe proper, where it is still easy to find “Chocolate” with 60% cocoa butter. In America the mega-mixers have asked permission to eliminate cocoa butter completely and still call the product “chocolate”, which would be like calling sugar cocaine, because you used to sell cocaine and because you package your sugar in little baggies.

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Or, maybe I'm pushing my chocolate analogies just a little too far.

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