An Effing Blog Post

 

 Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

   Social media (Looking at you, Facebook) has allowed us to practice incivility in ways that were social taboos at an earlier age. A whole lot of people can now toss around insults, freely proselytize our ideologies in ways that would have been offensive to earlier listeners, and practice assholery on unprecedented levels. Chief among the new standards is the use of the F-word.

We not only feel free to use the word now, but we also use it as if it had been dammed up inside us for lifetimes, and Facebook has broken the dam and pent-up vocabularies spill out in a gush, a tidal wave, a tsunami. We roll the word around in our mouths to get the feel of it, to relish it, to savor its newly found freedom.

 The use of the word in a social setting is not without its consequences, though. A few of my real-world friends deal with the trauma of sexual abuse, including rape and pedophilia and at least one Facebook friend suffers from the after-effects of sexual slavery. A casual “Fuck” dropped on social media can trigger the memory and the raw emotions that accompanied the trauma. Out of respect for others, some of us Facebookers now watch our language, not out of any puritanical motive, but out of respect for others.

 In part, I learned English from a great-grandfather who emigrated from Germany and learned English in his migratory trail from New York to Pennsylvania and down the Ohio River where river rats and hillbillies taught him an English that mastered the art of the expletive. The man had a vocabulary that could make a sailor blush.

When my mother visited him and his wife- my step-great-grandmother- he grew bored with the women’s talk and invited me to tour his basement workshop where, out of the earshot of the women, he was free to tell me about his brass-work machinery in the broken and guttural English of the immigrant- an English peppered with every word in two languages that were considered inappropriate in polite conversation. I was a teenager before I learned that a lathe is a lathe and not a fucking lathe. On my mid-life return to college, I took every English course offered, but continue to use the F-word as a common adjective. Seriously, how would one address a bigot without reference to “fucking bigot” or a racist without the use of "fucking Nazi"?

So, on Facebook posts, I restrain myself from using a language that comes as naturally as walking. But comments in other people’s posts, I’ll use whatever language is appropriate to the fucking OP.

Analysis: Garrett Hardin, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor”

     Garrett Hardin’s 1974 Psychology Today essay, “Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor,” plays fast and loose with the facts he presents to back up his argument, and comes across as a petulant diatribe against the poor rather than a coherent discussion. In short, Hardin is just another whack job who enjoys the public attention he gets from his proposal to starve the poor out of existence so that the rest of us can enjoy our luxuries.

     From the first paragraph, Hardin set out to define the terms of his case against the poor. It’s his essay, he can define terms any way he wants, he seemed to say. He took very seriously his metaphor of the lifeboat as the refuge of the wealthy, with hungry swimmers—his metaphor for the poor—trying to usurp his privileged place on the boat. Fortunately for his argument, he did not push the lifeboat image to its logical conclusion: the lifeboat passengers will deplete the boats resources and people will have to go overboard—the order of plank walkers would depend, of course, on the most able and not the wealthiest. Or Hardin will hope to be saved by a passing yacht, at which time he proves himself no better than the miserable swimmers for whom he expresses such contempt.

     Some of his arguments were just silly. He provided his own definition of “safety factor,” one that grants him the greatest amount of space for him and his dinner-party buddies. In fact, safety factors are built into engineered products. If his boat is designed to hold sixty people, any more would violate that margin for safety. But that’s nitpicking, and there are too many major errors in his thesis to dwell on the minor ones.

     He wrote that guilt is the motivating factor behind the urge to aid the poor. I can’t argue that, because I don’t have the statistics on the subject (and he doesn’t provide any). Those people I know who are willing to help, however, operate from an enthusiasm for life that they wish to extend to others, and consider themselves spread proportionately across the self-family-group-nation-humanity spectrum, and not stuck in the “it’s all about me” mode. Sorry, Garrett; we haven’t even turned the page yet, and you’ve been wrong on each point made. Let’s move on.

     On the disparity of population growth between rich and poor countries, he falls back on a Marxist quote: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” From that, he extrapolated the absurd idea that helping the poor amounts to a misinterpretation of the socialist ideal of economic equality. He confused “share” and “help” with “surrender,” as in his assumption that those who do not agree with him want him to give up all his worldly goods to the starving masses. He has not been asked to surrender all his worldly goods to the poor. St. Francis, we are not. A check to a relief agency does not amount to voluntary poverty.

     He introduced an equally ridiculous argument that he called “the tragedy of the commons,” a highly simplistic theory that the poor will ravage the world’s resources if allowed to reproduce at will. To that, I will introduce the “tragedy of the landed gentry.” In pre-Industrial Revolution England, the nobility often owned vast wooded estates. True to the “tragedy of the commons,” the English poor had all but denuded the countryside of woodlands in search of game and fuel, and were forced to poach the enclosed woods owned by the wealthy (and undeserving) nobility. For poaching, the hungry poor faced public torture, imprisonment, or hanging. The world had not run out of resources, but the wealthy and powerful had locked them up for their own use. Picnics in large groups, lavish outdoor parties, and game hunts were popular pastimes among the landed elite.

    Hardin abandons any pretense at reason in his “Tragedy of the Commons.” In those situations in which the “commons” face abuse, they are first abused by the privileged class for commodity resources. In that, the rich and the poor form a symbiotic relationship: the wealthy strip the land to provide products and services to the poor and middle class, who in turn form the source of wealth. Without labor and markets, there is no wealth.

     He confused the depletion of oceanic fisheries with an exhaustion of the commons by the poor, when in fact, the ocean is being over-fished by multi-national corporations owned and operated by… the wealthy elite.

     There’s more.

     His claim that Public Law 480, “Food for Peace” program, benefitted only wealthy U.S. business amounts to an argument against himself. Did he denounce the wealthy and well-fed along with the hungry poor? Maybe his complaint came from his statement that the U.S. taxpayer paid the cost of PL480. Not true. The middle-class taxpayer—not the wealthy elite—picked up the initial cost, but that cost was recovered in subsequent negotiations called for in the agreements with hungry nations and affluent partners. We gave away our surplus grain, he said. Not true. We entered into financial and foreign relations agreements in which we were to share a portion of our surplus in return for future markets. Tons of wheat sold to the former Soviet Union to help with an approaching famine, added to the tons shipped to markets and to starving masses around the world, still left us with enough surpluses that we risked the danger of spoilage. He wrote that “…international charity frequently inspires distrust and antagonism rather than gratitude….” Not true. Distrust and antagonism directed toward the U.S. comes from Washington’s insistence in propping up friendly foreign governments that are hostile to their own people. Food for Peace occasionally ended up in the hands of tyrants and their cronies who marketed it at pure profits. When it goes to the hungry citizens, it is almost always received with gratitude. I say “almost,” because of a famous incident in Africa, starving stick-figures broke down the barriers to a shipment to break open bags of wheat to consume them on the spot. The wheat needed processing but the people there had been reduced to desperation. The U.S. received a mild rebuke for sending unprocessed food to living skeletons.  We had seriously underestimated the severity of the problem.

     In his harangue against immigration, he blames some of the problem on the wealthy elite’s need for cheap labor; a position that, again, seems to argue against itself. Beyond that, his proposal to hermetically seal the borders amount to the same tired clichéd sloganeering that has haunted the immigration problem since the first European stepped ashore half-a-millennia ago. He craves a static America in which the status quo can be guaranteed. Is that even possible in an ethnically and politically diverse country? Or would Hardin deport all liberals and non-whites along with immigrants?

     I got the impression in reading his essay that Hardin would like for all nine billion of us to just get the hell out of his way so that he can have it all, the only survivor on the boat. “Lifeboat Ethics” is not a serious discussion about ethics, but a mere selfish, petulant, and ego-centered rant, and reads well as such.

Summary: David Cole, "Five Myths About Immigration"

     

Photo by Barth Bailey on Unsplash

David Cole, a Georgetown University professor asserts in his essay, “Five Myths about Immigration,” (The Nation, October 17, 1994) that five of the most commonly held and disseminated beliefs about immigration have no basis in fact. He writes that the “Know Nothings” of the mid-nineteenth century blamed every problem in American society on immigrants. The strongest anti-German, anti-Irish, and anti-Catholic hysteria centered in New York and Massachusetts, where most of the immigrants arrived into the country.
    Fortunately, the Know-Nothing movement died within fifteen years, but anti-immigrant fever is revived whenever the American public feels in need of a scapegoat for their social ills. The German and Irish immigrants--who were the focus of the Know-Nothings--have become “us”; and “they” are now the new wave of immigrants, this time from Latin America and Haiti.
The Five myths that fuel the current distortion regarding immigration:
    America is being overrun with immigrants. Cole argues that we are a nation of immigrants, and, in a sense, have thus always been overrun with immigrants. He offers statistics to demonstrate that first-generation immigrants constitute a lower percentage of the population now than during the German-Irish wave of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Further statistics and assertions indicate that undocumented immigrants make up a low percentage of the total alien population, and of the total American population.

    Immigrants take jobs from U.S. citizens. He dispels this myth with a reliance on a 1994 ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project report that states that immigrants create more jobs than they fill.

    Immigrants are a drain on society’s resources. Most studies have found that immigrants actually benefit the economy. Cole suggests that studies purporting to prove the truth of the third myth focus on taxes and services at the local level and fail when applied to the national level. The short-term costs of immigrants is offset and exceeded by the long-term benefits. Calls to deny public services to illegal immigrants are useless, because those immigrants already have no rights to services beyond basic education and health and safety services.

    Aliens refuse to assimilate, and are depriving us of our cultural and political unity. This accusation was made to exclude Chinese immigrants, and similar claims have been made about almost all immigrant groups.
     
The anti-assimilation “myth” in untrue in most instances, Cole says.
    Noncitizen immigrants are not entitled to constitutional rights. The Constitution’s Bill of Rights extends protection to everyone, with the exception that only citizens can run vote and run for public office.
    An 1893 executive branch defense of a statute that required the testimony of “at least one white witness” resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that the law was constitutional “because it was reasonable for Congress to presume that nonwhite witnesses could not be trusted.” Not much has changed: at the time of the writing of Cole’s essay, the executive office had sought to deny First Amendment rights to permanent resident aliens.
    Today’s generation of “them” might be the future generation of “us,” and they will not view our treatment of immigrants kindly.

#

Corporate Culture: The New American Electorate

Introduction

     Large corporations have commandeered the world economy to such extent that, of the one-hundred largest economies in the world, fifty-one are corporations (Shah). Those numbers don’t appear alarming on the surface but placed in the framework of the 2008 collapse of the world economy, the problems of what to do about “too big to fail” takes on an alarming importance. Only a handful of America’s largest corporations brought down the housing market, reallocated pension and retirement funds of millions of workers into exorbitant salaries and bonuses for corporate executives, produced massive job layoffs around the world, and caused a spike in personal and small-business bankruptcies.
     Corporate representatives in government, such as Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, have created a “shadow government” that essentially controls American economic policy. The recent granting of human rights to non-human corporate entities has turned electoral politics into a scramble for massive campaign funds from organizations with no stake in the public interest. The American political system is now governed by those fifty-one percent economies, which have perpetual life, unlimited resources, and the ability to make their own law to assure that their rights and their power take precedent over the will of the people and the public good.




     We’ve had amble warning about the excesses of corporate power. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1816:

        "I hope we shall take warning from the example of England and crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws our country."

And on another occasion:

        "This country is headed toward a single and splendid government of an aristocracy founded on banking institutions and monied incorporations and if this tendency continues it will be the end of freedom and democracy, the few will be ruling and riding over the plundered plowman and the beggar."

        "I sincerely believe that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies." –in a letter to Secretary of the Treasury, Albert Gallatin.

     The history of the United States has no shortage of great leaders who have alerted us to the dangers of the corporate monster; Along with Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Dwight D. Eisenhower issued public warnings of the encroachment of corporate money and corporate power into government.

A History of Corporate Personhood: Causes and Consequences

     Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed into law in 1869, reads:

     “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”

     The Amendment was written primarily to overturn the Dred Scott decision of 1865 that denied citizenship to slaves, and clearly refers to person and citizen. But Supreme Court decisions before and after the Fourteenth Amendment have resulted in the creeping—and creepy—definition of “person” to include corporations, including multi-national corporations.

     “A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law.” (Groningen) A corporation is not a person. American jurisprudence takes corporate strengths and human weakness into consideration in making and enforcing its laws. Prisons are built for people, but cannot contain a corporation. Corporations have perpetual life in which to realize their goals, while humans have about fifty productive and voting years. Corporations have, for all practical purposes, unlimited resources, while the average worker lives on a weekly wage. Corporations have the legal power to make laws as they wish; the citizen can cast a single vote for a representative he can trust to look out for his interest in the legislative and executive branches of government.

     Corporate personhood extends back to Roman law, but its American History began with the end of the American Revolution. Citizens of the newly-found republic held contractual agreements with agencies in the mother country. Did the Revolution nullify those obligations? Could the United States legislate new laws to supersede English law that created the contracts?

     Those questions came before the new Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall in 1816. The state of New Hampshire had passed laws changing the charter of Dartmouth College from a private institution, chartered by the British Crown in 1769, to a state university. The college trustees filed suit. The court ruled that the charter was a contract between the king and the college trustees, and that a state cannot pass laws to alter a contract. That ruling honored corporations and people as equals in contract law.

     In the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, filed before the Supreme Court in May, 1886, “Chief Justice [Morrison] Waite said, ‘The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does.” (Supreme Court) That statement was made before arguments were heard in the case, and do not appear in the court record. Subsequent cases before the court have drawn on that case as legal precedent regardless of the error.

     Since 1886, the court has heard a number of cases involving corporate personhood, and the benefit or loss to actual humans has swung in unpredictable directions. Then, in 1978, the issue of corporate personhood exploded.

     The Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall brought Marshall v. Barlow’s before the Supreme Court. An inspector for the Occupational Health and Safety Act (OSHA) entered Barlow’s Company, a plumbing and electrical installations contractor. The president and general manager of the company denied access to the agent on the grounds that he did not have a search warrant. OSHA had the responsibility and the authority to conduct warrantless searches of businesses as a means to guarantee worker safety, but Barlow’s argued that the corporation enjoyed the same Fourth Amendment guarantee of protection against illegal search and seizure as an individual. The court sided with him, and henceforth OSHA inspections of businesses must be enforced with a search warrant, or OSHA must make an appointment with the company to conduct an inspection (University of Washington).

      On January 21, 2010, an appeal from the United States District Court for the District of Columbia reached the Supreme Court. Led by the court’s conservative members, Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, citing free speech rights, struck down the McCain-Feingold Bill and allowed corporate entities to sponsor funds to political elections without revealing their source. Multi-national corporations now control the financing of elections in the United States, and political observers are predicting that corporate financial contributions to the political process could reach the hundreds of billions of dollars in the 2012 elections. Already, the Democratic Party under President Obama has appealed to the corporate interests for a détente (Reuters, Goldman). We can expect the Democrats to soften their support of workplace safety, a livable minimum wage, and government regulation of business.

     With Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell. the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit issued a stunning decision that a corporation cannot be sued for human rights abuses. “A panel of the court ruled 2-1 on September 17, 2010 that the Alien Tort Statute gives U.S. courts jurisdiction over alleged violations of international law by individuals only, not by corporations” (Cueto).

     Seeing the direction those court decisions will take the country, President Obama’s plea for détente with the corporate community makes good political sense, but has the potential to forever end the democratic system. His party has traditionally championed worker safety, equal employment opportunity, and a livable wage; issues at odds with corporations. If the Democratic party is to survive—that is, to receive unlimited campaign funds from the deep pockets only corporations can provide—it must relax its support of the proletariat. Ergo, détente.

Abuses Committed by National and Multi-National Corporations

     Who can forget the televised images of Enron company employees who found it hilarious that “grandmas” were in danger of dying in the heat due to the artificial electrical shortages created by Enron to hike their fees for services?

     “A Defense Department auditor testified [on August 10, 2010] that DynCorp International billed the government $50 million more than the amount specified in a contract to provide dining facilities and living quarters for military personnel in Kuwait” (Haynes).

     Headlines like that represent a common feature of Americans’ daily lives. We have become inured to corruption. The 2010 mid-term elections resulted in a turnover of the political majority in Congress as a result of the anti-corruption mood among the electorate. Yet, many of the very people ushered into power have praised the Citizens United decision. The revolution in Washington brings to mind lyrics from a rock anthem by the British rock group, The Who: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”

     Human rights violations by corporate entities don’t often garner headlines, though. The only way to get a handle on corporations’ involvement is through research. Here are just a few of those violations. For a full list of name brand-name companies engaging in behavior that might have made Genghis Khan blush, the Global Issues website at http://www.globalexchange.org/

getInvolved/corporateHRviolators.html offers a full alphabetical list of offending corporations and links to reputable organizations that back up its claims

     Caterpillar, Inc. supplies equipment to the Israeli army for the purpose of destroying Palestinian homes to facilitate annexation of East Jerusalem.

     The crimes charged against Chevron are too numerous to list in a paper of this scope, but they include rape, murder, political corruption, and—the plague of America’s dependency on oil—environmental destruction.

     Outside of the United States, the Coca-Cola Company behaves like a mafia family. Murders, kidnappings, and torture highlight its activities in Third World countries, and in some of the industrialized world, reads like intrigue and adventure fiction.

     Employees of Dynacorp have been found to have engaged in sex trafficking with girls as young as twelve years old.

The Future of Corporate Personhood: Consequences

     The year 2010 marked the crowning of transnational corporations as the new owners of the American government. Where it will lead us is, at this time, anybody’s guess. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have prepared the way for the new leadership with International laws that supersede federal and state statutes regarding relaxed food safety governance, reduced product quality standards, a virtual end to workplace safety regulations, and the erosion of individual rights and national sovereignty. We have already seen the cost of those agreements in the recent flood of product recalls, tainted food in the marketplace, and the undermining of workplace safety laws (Wallach 23-64).

     Social attitudes, too, have favored the growing power of corporate entities. Contemporary views of entrepreneurship no longer include the bootstrap legacy. An entrepreneur is now one with massive financial backing from banks and capital investment firms. The corporate culture is rapidly becoming the only socially acceptable course of economic pursuit. Employment in a large company, preferably a multinational corporation, is regarded as a most noble profession, one pursued by a majority of college students. The arts and crafts, manual trades, outdoor work, jobs in philanthropic organizations, and vocations in religious organizations are rarely considered by those who came of age in the corporate world, and—judging by a barrage of human interest stories in the media—shunned by even the chronically unemployed.

Conclusion

     Of all the conceivable results of the corporatizing of America and the world, the bulk of them are unpleasant But that need not be the reality. The companies that now own the country’s political and judicial system rely on consumerism to feed their gluttony, and they have the power to destroy the consumer culture through the elimination of a middle class with disposable income. They must take care that, in bringing down American wages, they do not undermine their own profits. Worldwide, people have shown a surprising tendency throughout history to sacrifice their individual pursuits and band together to resolve injustices. If our new masters do not tread carefully—with much more care than they have in the recent past—they could find themselves pitted against the very source of their power: the consumer.

   

Works Cited:

Santiago Cueto

            Kiobel v. Royal Dutch Shell Petroleum (No Corporate Liability Under AlienTort Claims Act). Order Affirming Motion to Dismiss

            Contributor: Santiago Cueto

            Retrieved from http://www.jdsupra.com/post/documentViewer.aspx?fid=80e9579b-4600-4e73-9fb6-3b0a7626ab09



V. Dion Haynes, “DynCorp Billed U.S. $50 Million Beyond Costs in Defense Contract”

            Quoting the Washington Post, August 12, 2009

            http://www.fairness.com/resources/category?node=160



Lori Wallach, essay, “Hidden Dangers of GATT and NAFTA”

            The Case Against Free Trade, San Francisco: Earth Island Press, 1993. Print.



Julianna Goldman, Hans Nichols, Mark Drajem and Lizzie O'Leary

“Obama Wants a Detente with Business: Once the midterm elections are over, the President plans to make up with business”

            October 6, 2010, 11:00PM EST

            http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_42/b4199029119904.htm



Groningen College; From Revolution to Reconstruction - an HTML project.                   Retrieved from http://www.let.rug.nl/usa/D/1801-1825/marshallcases/mar02.htm



Mythical Intelligence, Inc. and Thom Hartmann

            http://athenwood.com/uphistory.shtml

            http://www.thomhartmann.com



ReclaimDemocracy.org; 222 South Black Ave.* Bozeman * MT * 59715 * 406-582-1224

            “Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company; 118 U.S. 394;

            Error to the Circuit Court of the United States for the District of California”

            Retrieved from  http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/santa_clara_vs_southern_pacific html


Thom Reuters, “Obama Wants a Détente with Business,” Sun. 07 November 2010
            http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39988585/ns/business-us_business/


“The Rise of Corporations,” by Anup Shah

            http://www.globalissues.org/article/234/the-rise-of-corporations


Supreme Court; SANTA CLARA COUNTY V. SOUTHERN PACIFIC R. CO., 118 U. S. 394 (1886)
            Retrieved from http://supreme.justia.com/us/118/394/case.html

University of Washington

            MARSHALL v. BARLOW'S, INC., United States Supreme Court, 436 U.S. 307 (1978)
            http://courses.washington.edu/envh471/Readings/Reading17.htm





Suggested Reading

Timothy Gorringe, Fair Shares: Ethics and the Global Economy, New York, Thames & Hudson, 1999. Print.

The Sunlit Alley

     Some extra cash and an interest in photography led me to a downtown camera shop where I purchased a Nikon 35 MM item with a couple of extra lenses, a flash attachment, and a lot of film. I took to spending my lunch hours shooting photographs of architecture, antique and unusual vehicles that passed before my lens, textures and colors, and even piles of trash in a sun-lit alley.

     “What’s so special about that?” my then-wife asked about the image of the sun-bathed alley. “What makes it camera-worthy?”

     I explained that, coming from an industrial city east of the Mississippi River, alleys were dark, dingy, and sinister places steeped in gloom and shadow. An alley such as this, illuminated by a clear, bright natural light that outdoor photographers prayed for, would be an alien sight to the eastern native.

     The Nikon went everywhere with me. I took care to never leave it in the car while I shopped, dined, or handled business in the glass-and-steel towers downtown. I parked it under my desk at the office. 

     The camera and the images it captured had my attention so focused that I was unaware that I was being followed.

     I awoke one morning to the smell of rain and a battleship-gray sheet that stretched across the sky—the kind of light that would render photographs flat and lifeless. “No use carrying a camera bag around today,” I thought. I left it at home and went to work with an umbrella replacing the Nikon.

     My house was broken into that day. The thief took the camera and its accoutrements.
     I convinced myself that the crime was committed by the eldest son of a neighborhood family of slack-jawed white trash known as the source of neighborhood burglaries and petty thefts. Armed with a baseball bat, I paid a visit. My rage was only heightened when no one answered the door. I slammed the Louisville Slugger through a porch window and the cheap, hollow-core door and returned home, rage spent.
     Later, the weight of what I had done fell on me. I had no evidence that the young man whose home I lashed out at had actually stolen my passion. I promised myself that I would never again allow anger to do my thinking for me.
     The theft and the awareness that my actions were as immoral as the thief's broke my spirit. I lost all desire to ever shoot another photograph. The Nikon was the last camera I would own until the development and marketing of smartphones. The only thing I use that camera for is to photograph documents for transmittal. Not even the thought of a sun-drenched alley stirs my interest.

Pikkiwoki's Banana Clip

     Photo by Will Porada on Unsplash

    

We now know the cause of GOP/NRA-fueled  right-wing domestic terrorist attacks. They seem to be connected through some bizarre mental gymnastics to immigration:
"El Paso shooting: Trump demands immigration reform in wake of domestic terror attack – while admitting better gun controls needed." (The Independent)
     But wait! Immigration does not contribute to mass shootings. Hearts without Pikkiwoki are the problem (whatever that means). "NRA Board Member Ken Blackwell Blames Mass Shootings on “Hearts Without God”" 
https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2019/08/06/nra-board-member-ken-blackwell-blames-mass-shootings-on-hearts-without-god/

     Update. Turns out, the ventricle occupied by Pikkiwoki does not motivate shooters; it's all about the lack of wishful thinking.
     "Mike Huckabee: ‘Lack Of Thoughts And Prayers’ Causes Mass Shootings"
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressivesecularhumanist/2019/08/mike-huckabee-lack-of-thoughts-and-prayers-causes-mass-shootings/

     Dont give up on the Pikkiwoki hypothesis just yet: "Right-wing commentator: Liberals orchestrated shootings to ‘take away your ability to worship God’"
https://deadstate.org/right-wing-commentator-liberals-orchestrated-el-paso-and-dayton-to-take-away-your-ability-to-worship-god/

     Someone suggested that there weren't enough shooters at a recent massacre. I'm not sure how adding more shooters to the mix is going to end the carnage, but hey, Ricky is a smart guy, so let's turn Walmart into a war zone and see what happens. "‘Soft targets’: Rick Santorum suggests unarmed Walmart shoppers were at fault in mass shooting"
https://www.rawstory.com/2019/08/soft-targets-rick-santorum-suggests-unarmed-walmart-shoppers-were-at-fault-in-mass-shooting/

     "Kevin McCarthy Suggests Video Games To Blame In Wake Of El Paso, Dayton Shootings"
"The top Republican in the House said video games “dehumanize individuals.”"
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/shooting-video-games-mccarthy_n_5d46fc75e4b0ca604e339cc9

     It goes without saying that it's all Obama's fault. Thanks, Obama.
"Ohio politician blames mass shootings on 'drag queen advocates', Obama, open borders"
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/08/05/dayton-shooting-candice-keller-blames-shootings-obama-open-borders/1919638001/

     And then there is the old "mental illness" trope used by those who have no idea of what they are talking about:
"Trump calls for mental health reform after shootings — but his policies threaten coverage"

     These important "thinkers" have assured us that easy access to guns have nothing to do with mass murderers,  and I believe them. After all, they have no reason to lie to us, do they?

Do they?

Pikkiwoki Lives!

A well-meaning friend tells me that atheists cannot exist because they cannot prove that their god doesn't exist. I Attempted to inform him that (1) if an atheist claims god does not exist, the burden of proof is on her, but if a theist makes the claim that her god exists, that burden falls on her, and that evidence of non-existence is abundant, while that of a god's existence is thin to the point of near-non-existence in its own right; and (2) my friend is, himself, an atheist in regard to some 3,9999 gods* he does NOT worship.

I have not attempted to count the numbers of gods humans worship and have worshiped in the past, but my rough estimate has it at about 4,000-- and that does not include the FSM, John Carter, and Pikkiwoki. I do not differentiate between Allah and Yahweh, though they are said to be the same god, their followers give the two different characteristics and personalities and conflicting prophet/messiah. Religious texts are no help in determining the number of deities, as each one promotes the deity of the culture that produced the text and each refuses to expound on the validity of the others.

His Bible, my friend says, is proof of the existence of his god, but by that reckoning, Spiderman comics prove the existence of Spiderman and Honore de Balzac's Old Goriot proves the existence of Rastignac. Even Sasquatch has a grainy photograph to vouch for him. No, to convince me and many other atheists out there, you must introduce me to this god person and  have him perform a few miracles that can be duplicated in a scientific setting. Then, have him apologize for the misery with which he has plagued the world, and then, if I feel the apology is sincere, me and god can go out for a drink and maybe even become best buds.

Show me scientific evidence for the existence of dragons and I will consider the existence of gods, angels, demons, unicorns, lizard people, and all the other delusional claims of the lives of mythical entities. I do admit, though, to a fondness for Pikkiwoki.