The Baleful Trinity of Power, Alcohol, And Delusion

US lawmaker's aide draws ire over first daughter scolding
https://news.yahoo.com/us-lawmakers-aide-draws-ire-over-first-daughter-030751995.html

Washington (AFP) - A US lawmaker's communications director was facing social media calls she be sacked after her Facebook rant about President Barack Obama's daughters prompted widespread anger.

Elizabeth Lauten, spokeswoman for Republican Congressman Stephen Fincher of Tennessee, wrote a scathing post to her Facebook account scolding Malia and Sasha Obama, 16 and 13, for looking bored while attending a public event with their father on Wednesday.

In the post...  Lauten tells the girls to "try showing a little class. At least respect the part you play."

The girls stood beside Obama -- looking vaguely bored -- as he issued the annual Thanksgiving turkey "pardon," saving two birds from the dinner table.

The underwhelmed expressions of the teenaged sisters sparked mainly amused comment, but Lauten's remarks were notably more caustic.

"Then again, your mother and father don't respect their positions very much, or the nation for that matter," Lauten wrote in her post.

"So I'm guessing you're coming up a little short in the 'good role model' department.
"Nevertheless, stretch yourself. Rise to the occasion. Act like being in the White House matters to you."

Supremely inadvisable Facebook posting. In fact, it is the type of social gaffe that we would expect Ms. Lauten to preach to young folk about not doing, something like,  "Once you post it on the Internet, it'll be there forever! Use some good judgement, youngsters!"

It was Thanksgiving. There was probably alcohol or other feel-good stimulants. It amazes me how easily we forget that feel-good stimulants very often leave us not feeling good, but that is a post for another day.

Ms. Lauten needs to realize that she deals in politics, not in religion and metaphysics. It is dirty, power-grubbing politics, and it has many participants, and each participant has different views. To pretend to be above it all with her own glorific vision of the shining city of the USA on some hill... probably overlooking some heavenly Jerusalem... is painful to watch as it meshes with her mud-slinging and self-demeaning nastiness.

It's politics, Ms. Lauten. It is the parliament of differences. If difference to you means a moral short-coming, what have you learned from your own mess?

The USA is no shining city on a hill.
There was plenty of good seasoned by lots of evil. The notion that somehow this country has a blessed history is the stuff of kindergarten tales.

The country had slavery, and that evil could not be negotiated out of existence. There was no politics able to deal with it, so began the great blood-letting of The Civil War.

At the same time, there began the genocidal war against Native Americans:
The Horrific Sand Creek Massacre Will Be Forgotten No More
The opening of a national historic site in Colorado helps restore to public memory one of the worst atrocities ever perpetrated on Native Americans

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/horrific-sand-creek-massacre-will-be-forgotten-no-more-180953403/#f3JRR2k6oyxhkx5w.99

... When hundreds of blue-clad cavalrymen suddenly appeared at dawn on November 29, a Cheyenne chief raised the Stars and Stripes above his lodge. Others in the village waved white flags. The troops replied by opening fire with carbines and cannon, killing at least 150 Indians, most of them women, children and the elderly. Before departing, the troops burned the village and mutilated the dead, carrying off body parts as trophies.
Col. John Chivington led the raid. (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs division)

There were many such atrocities in the American West. But the slaughter at Sand Creek stands out because of the impact it had at the time and the way it has been remembered. Or rather, lost and then rediscovered. Sand Creek was the My Lai of its day, a war crime exposed by soldiers and condemned by the U.S. government. It fueled decades of war on the Great Plains. And yet, over time, the massacre receded from white memory, to the point where even locals were unaware of what had happened in their own backyard...

It seems to be our common condition to see things in black and white, we are either supremely good or we are incorrigibly evil; Wall Street is doing well or Wall Street is headed for disaster; it is the best of times or it is the worst of times... but not both: either Judgement Day or endless Progress to Utopia.

Politics is constant palaver and negotiation. If you make your opponent a devil, you impugn him and degrade yourself.

... and a "shining city" descends not into the valley of darkness violence.

Ms. Lauten goes on:

In her apology, Ms Lauten wrote: "After many hours of prayer, talking to my parents, and re-reading my words online I can see more clearly just how hurtful my words were."

It really took you "hours of prayer" to see how nasty you were being? Others can see how crude it was even without having recourse to the Deity!
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Humans As Chattels

The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/16/technology/facebook-amends-privacy-policies.html?_r=1&

... Facebook pressed forward on Friday with official changes to its privacy policies, first proposed in August, that make the terms of using Facebook more clear than ever: By having an account on the service, its 1.2 billion global users are allowing the company to use their postings and other personal data for advertising...

It is a wonder that a society can create such an entity, such as the Internet, which in its beginnings was hailed as a new liberator of the mind, and turn it into surveillance, repression, and exploitation.

There must be a different business model for a social website, and there must be a form of government which does not automatically infringe the rights of its people in as gross a manner as has the NSA and the CIA of the US government.

That is what the future is: new tools that resist being forced into the old dies of oppression and exploitation.

As long as human beings are fungible beings, mutually interchangeable beings within an economic system, there will exist this economic oppression and political oppression.

The great religions of the world are nothing if not the constant affirmation that each human being is individual and free, where the great politics and economics of the world are constant reminders that human beings are but chattel goods.

We will soon be called upon to leave it all behind. Some will depart, some will stay behind. They will look at the clouds and check which way the wind is blowing, just like the friends of Noah did.

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Un-Friending Right Wing COPD Types

Our choices have narrowed down to a purge; only a total purge will do, a cathartic, if you will - a great flushing out of the system.

We have to un-friend numerous people we know on Facebook.

It all started the other day when I heard She-who-must-be-obeyed sort of harrumph.
"What nonsense!" she expostulated.
"And so much of it, one right after the other!"
I looked up from reading Richard Rhodes' history of the development of the atomic bomb.
"Hmm?" I soothed, amiably, sort of an invite to share... but leave the big guns spiked: do not unload on my awareness with the entire imbroglio which discomforts you, my dear; merely share a hint of the troublesome and annoying which has come to you via the internet.

"Well, you know so-and-so..." she said, names being left out to protect the idiots.
"Yes, I recall." I said.

There was a short list of friends, amiable all, with whom we had spent time playing cards, Truth or Dare, and Dr. Ruth. (I remember that I always managed to seriously annoy some of them or their "spouses" when I played cards... I have a very idiosyncratic manner of card playing.)

There were an educated group, too.

So why must they continuously post things they know are going to scrawl across their Friends homepages that some Friends may find offensive? Why political pornography in the worst instance and why political tirades in the best case?
I mean, one's Democratic party friends might egregiously glom all over your sensibilities at lunch or at the bar at times, but they don't subject one to this constant wheeze of  COPD (Chronic Obstructive Political Disease) all the time, do they?
I mean, does everyone think they're running for office? And is such an onslaught effective for persuading the undecided? If I were undecided, I would find this cacophony repulsive; I would feel as if I were being felt up by gourmet zombies in the Hive under Raccoon City in Resident Evil.
For Pete's Sake! Find a cabal somewhere in some racially restrictive gated ghetto and have your crappy little tea parties of fear and loathing! Do not put it on Facebook where your inane vitriol spills over into your "Friends" space... and this is using "friend" very loosely; it is more like "those who overlook your nastier failings".

The last straw was a old Eucher-playing, erstwhile BFF, who started writing things about supporting Israel - particularly Christian support for Israel - based on Nostradamian and Fortean readings of scraps and snippets of holy writ.

I guess we have to put up with your thinly-veiled racist jokes and your tedious ill-formed opinions, but we draw the line at your obscure idolatry of religion and politics.
A purge it is. No Stalinist-era show trials, just a friendly un-friending...
We considered whether to send an explanation, such as "Dear friends, we remember your smiling faces, but do not wish your opinions to be in our faces all the time". Maybe we shall; do not know...

... but we do know that if we don't do it now, 28 Days Later will be too late................
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