all I want for Christmas . . .

Dear Prof. Hot Wind,

WASHINGTON –AP- An official briefed on the attack on a Detroit airliner said Saturday the U.S. has known for at least two years that the suspect in the attack could have terrorist ties. The Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment list is maintained by the U.S. National Counterterrorism Center. It includes about 550,000 names.

-Comment-

Well, guess we have about 549,999 remaining. I do hope they treat this guy real nice while we continue searching for his buddies. And what of the "hero" passenger that foiled the attempt? He'll probably be sued in civil court for attacking this citizen of the world and he’ll lose. I say American justice for American citizens. HEAR, HEAR! Punishment for all others can be found in the Old Testament, and dump the due process, please. Remember, they are not American citizens and have nothing more than the utmost disrespect for you, me, and this wonderful country in which we were born and raised. This douche bag tried to blow up a plane so put him in an old plane and blow it up. The passengers are already lined up at the gates of Gitmo, International.
Get real you say? I know this guy won't be blown up. How silly of me, but it's a pity. I say these things not to get under your skin but under the skin of the ideology you and so many others stand so strongly by. I don't feel the tactic of open field warfare should be employed in fighting this enemy. If we used this method against the English in the 1700's, today, you and I would be very pompous and we would be wearing powdered wigs to formal outings. I respect the spiritual beliefs of all religious denominations. I enjoy writing from left to right. I enjoy seeing our women dress scantly. I don't want to see these or others things changed for another's lack of respect for our beliefs. I don’t want to see their disagreement with western culture argued with the taking of life anymore than you. But taking this element to American court house is like yelling at your dog for shitting on the carpet. How much success have you experience when you’ve decided that screaming at doggie was warranted? Sure, you were able to vent but the stupid fuck shit on the carpet again. Making an example of this pond scum in a court house is as effective as verbally abusing man's best friend. The ASCPA and other animal rights groups would be satisfied but your home will stink like shit and the stains in your carpet will deepen and spread. But kick your dog in the ass a couple of times and I guarantee your results will improve. Pavlov was a reasonably sharp guy and his lessons can be of great value in dealing with more than just the canine species.

In a recent conversation you enlightened me with regards pragmatism. Don’t you think this county and our beliefs are worth the deployment of this way of thinking? We are fighting an ideology. The only way to prevail is to adjust ours. Being righteous is cool but useless if you’re dead.
This morning I herd on the news that the prosecution is working on building a case against this guy. Let's help him out here. 300 passengers were on the plane. A lot of these folks witnessed the crime as it was in progress. DNA is being collected? Give me a fucking break. He who lives by the microscope is going to die because of the microscope. Stop looking through that little fucking eyepiece. The view from the naked eye at times is pretty good. The guy’s legs were burned as well as the American citizen who intervened. He had explosives strapped to his legs. The accused chose a seat above the fuel tanks and an area of the plane where the skin is thin.
This attempted bombing was well planned. His own father turned information in to our government regarding his beliefs and his possible ties to Al Qaeda and Yemen. A couple of snapshots, some eyewitness testimony and we can start tying a knot. The rest of this shit is all just a show. It should all be page 6 news but it has turned into a show of weakness that we aren’t willing to do ALL that is necessary to defend what we all hold sacred. Why the Attorney General for the United States is involved with military matters is beyond me. He's a well dressed pussy and who ever is pulling his strings is an ass.
And now I hear that a second person, Nigerian, found locked in the plane's bathroom, has also been taken into custody. We should probably be nice to him too, I guess.
- Metal Guru

- and a brief analysis:

Dear Guru,

Well, guess we have about 549,999 remaining.
Impeccable mathmatics. Except for the guy in the bathroom which makes it 549,998

I do hope they treat this guy real nice while we continue searching for his buddies.
I am aware that any “treatment” shy of “death by a thousand cuts” will not satisfy your desire for speedy justice on the dime. Sit tight and let the Constitution breathe a bit.

And what of the "hero" passenger that foiled the attempt? He'll probably be sued in civil court for attacking this citizen of the world and he’ll lose.
Now you’re just being silly . . .

I say American justice for American citizens. HEAR, HEAR! Punishment for all others can be found in the Old Testament, and dump the due process, please.
What about the Preamble to the Constitution? How can America Dump “due process” and still be America? Reminds me of Rodger Waters traveling as Pink Floyd . . . without Mason, Wright and the other guy.

Remember, they are not American citizens and have nothing more than the utmost disrespect for you, me, and this wonderful country in which we were born and raised. This douche bag tried to blow up a plane so put him in an old plane and blow it up. The passengers are already lined up at the gates of Gitmo, International.
Great P.R. move! Why not simply provide free airfare to Yemen? This country raised me to believe in a little thing called “chex and balances” . . (and its not just a breakfast cereal anymore !) My feelings about Gitmo are available for leisure time reading on the blog, (ref.: Jeffreygiov.blogspot.com . . . . see September: Camp Iguana Redux)

Get real you say? I know this guy won't be blown up. How silly of me, but it's a pity. I say these things not to get under your skin but under the skin of the ideology you and so many others stand so strongly by.
If you are referring to the “ideology” of resolving to uncover the “root cause” of an issue, it behooves me to point out that you (and the ideology you share with so many others) always seem to be somewhere in the thick of it. Think of me, simply vacuuming the room while you sit on the couch complaining of having to lift your feet . . .

I don't feel the tactic of open field warfare should be employed in fighting this enemy. If we used this method against the English in the 1700's, today, you and I would be very pompous and we would be wearing powdered wigs to formal outings.
I lament all of your untapped strategic potential. Herein lies the second greatest waste of talent since Tiger hung up his clubs.
The tactic of King George failed because he underestimated the impact of British investment in the creation of a sovereign nation. Al Qaeda just wants our presence out of the picture. They don’t even want a cool flag. . . . besides, you and I are pompous!

I respect the spiritual beliefs of all religious denominations.
What does this even mean ? ! ? A conversation exploring this one sentence, especially within the context of some remarks you’ve made in this single letter, would be worthy of its own blog . . .

I enjoy writing from left to right. I enjoy seeing our women dress scantly. I don't want to see these or others things changed for another's lack of respect for our beliefs. I don’t want to see their disagreement with western culture argued with the taking of life anymore than you.
“He who ignores the lessons of history is doomed to repeat it”. Look for it all you want, but you won’t find Big Ben or one stitch of the English countryside anywhere in O’Toole’s “Lawrence of Arabia”. We (British, French, Dutch and American big oil companies and the like) brought the love-fest to their neighborhood, NOT the other way around.

But taking this element to American court house is like yelling at your dog for shitting on the carpet.
Interesting metaphor. That makes You “Master” and the depraved terrorists merely “dogs”. I always wondered if my poor old beagle, Bailey, understood her place in our relationship . . .

How much success have you experience when you’ve decided that screaming at doggie was warranted? Sure, you were able to vent but the stupid fuck shit on the carpet again. Making an example of this pond scum in a court house is as effective as verbally abusing man's best friend. The ASCPA and other animal rights groups would be satisfied but your home will stink like shit and the stains in your carpet will deepen and spread. But kick your dog in the ass a couple of times and I guarantee your results will improve.
I can tell you’ve never owned a dog. Trust me. It don’t work this way. I’d back-peddle a bit on that “guarantee”. Reminds me of an Abbott and Costello sketch where they’re trying to unload a vacuum on some lady. It ends with Costello asking for some ketchup to go with his hat. [seems the lady had no electricity in the house for the demo] . . .

Pavlov was a reasonably sharp guy and his lessons can be of great value in dealing with more than just the canine species.
Pavlov never kicked a dog. Come to think of it, I don’t think Pavlov ever kicked an Arab . . .

In a recent conversation you enlightened me with regards pragmatism. Don’t you think this county and our beliefs are worth the deployment of this way of thinking?
You and I are both interested in using our moral compass to make a tough decision easier to swallow. It is the beauty of our inheritance as U.S. citizens, under a Constitution as spectacular as our own, that you and I don’t need to share a compass. This is Pragmatism. Synchronizing our compasses is Philosophy. Compromising on North is Democracy.

We are fighting an ideology.
To some degree, this is true from one American to the next. For example: young kids are suited up and shipped to the other side of the globe to mop up the mess created by large international corporations who swindled the very civilizations who have finally achieved the means to blow up our planes and buildings in retaliation. These business men who hide behind our diplomats, dead soldiers and hijacked civilians then hide their profits overseas. They don’t give a damn about you or me. Sounds too familiar and equally unsettling, no? The only way to prevail is to adjust ours. Being righteous is cool but useless if you’re dead.
You’re confusing tactics with ideology. Many German citizens from the 1930’s and 40’s survived by supporting the Nazi war machine without believing Hitler was sane. I believe a nation of living monsters, scumbags and cowards is worse than a nation who chose to win the war without collapsing under the weight of moral fatigue.

This morning I heard on the news that the prosecution is working on building a case against this guy. Let's help him out here. 300 passengers were on the plane. A lot of these folks witnessed the crime as it was in progress. DNA is being collected? Give me a fucking break. He who lives by the microscope is going to die because of the microscope. Stop looking through that little fucking eyepiece. The view from the naked eye at times is pretty good. The guy’s legs were burned as well as the American citizen who intervened. He had explosives strapped to his legs. The accused chose a seat above the fuel tanks and an area of the plane where the skin is thin.
But they got all that cool shit down at the lab ! ! What the hell are they supposed to do? Let it sit on the shelf? Relax . . . Your witnesses will all get a chance to take a few days off from work to testify. What if this guy’s DNA helps clear up some question from an earlier crime? Thank God they have two guys working the case. This leaves three eyes to look around at the rest of the crime scene.

This attempted bombing was well planned.
Except the tiny detail of finding someone with experience lighting a fucking match !

His own father turned information in to our government regarding his beliefs and his possible ties to Al Qaeda and Yemen. A couple of snapshots, some eyewitness testimony and we can start tying a knot. The rest of this shit is all just a show.
The show is called our Justice System. Sorry it keeps interfering with your lynching. How about you and I go out this weekend, have a few pints and find us an illegal immigrant and taunt him until he hangs himself . . .

It should all be page 6 news but it has turned into a show of weakness that we aren’t willing to do ALL that is necessary to defend what we all hold sacred.
I hold “due process” sacred. This is protected by the Constitution. The United States is an idea, not a zip code. (I think I just heard a great “sigh” from Hawaii) Now I’m repeating myself. Sorry. Why the Attorney General for the United States is involved with military matters is beyond me. He's a well dressed pussy and whoever is pulling his strings is an ass. The Attorney General’s office was used by Alberto Gonzales to justify many military activities which chose to perform in civilian costume. This was the only way to avoid restricting our information gathering techniques to Name, Rank and Serial Number quality. (Sneaky devils, aint we?). I agree with you on one point however. His suits are very nice. Very sharp indeed.

And now I hear that a second person, Nigerian, found locked in the plane's bathroom, has also been taken into custody. We should probably be nice to him too, I guess.
I heard they were still negotiating with him to get out of the bathroom. Where did you hear that he agreed to wipe up and pull up his trousers?
I simply have to get out more.

love,
Prof. H W

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- and Mr. Metal Guru responded with:

Prof. H.Wind
Some points I'll bow too. As always, when I quick draw, I inevitably hit an innocent bystander. Other points we’ll "discuss" for the rest of our days. I imagine the two of us at sea. With an emergency at hand, you’d be found on poop deck spouting maritime law and regulations to disenchanted passengers. And I, in the wheel house screaming at the Captain for hitting that fucking iceberg. Either way, we wouldn't make Chelsea Pier.
I'm eagerly waiting to see the disposal of the very element that despises our constitution and all it stands for by the flow chart outlined within its binder. So many laws were broken in handling the Gitmo detainees that our judicial system could in theory allow these scumbags their freedom. Here's what's troubling. This possibility was brought to the attention of Attorney General Eric Holder. He indicated it wouldn’t happen but if so we would still hold them as enemy combatants.
So in essence, we allow enemies of this country the rights provided to Americans for a fair trial. If things don't go in our favor we just detain them anyway. There's a lot of righteousness at stake. That's what this is all about, right? “You’ve been found not guilty but we're going to throw you in jail for life, regardless". I fail to see anything righteous with this charade and it sounds like another black eye for the USA.
With a system like this, OJ shouldn’t have walked, although he didn’t fall into the parameters of an enemy combatant. But if we were to have applied the same thinking, I’m sure something could have been written quickly to detain him. He allegedly killed citizens of the United States. That’s not much different that what Al Qaeda wants. The phrase enemy combatant with regard to definition has been danced around since 9/11. I urge you to become confused with the newest rendition of the definition at the following site:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_combatant
I think we’re only fooling ourselves by redefining words and phrases so we can say we’ve remained on the side of righteousness. Global sentiment wouldn’t be any more favorable with “we’ll hold him anyway’ then with our current policies. Sweeping any resolution to the misdeeds of yesterday behind the protection of the constitution doesn’t secure justification. Changing direction to a suit and tie approach at the 11th hour is only allowing for borrowed time that our foes will exploit. We’ve called for a “time out” by extending our hand but their ordinance has already released in the form hatred and is being delivered by their clenched fists.
The past actions of this country have opened Pandora’s Box. If you honestly believe we’ll be able to close it with some hand shaking and the backing of our court houses, you better get home before midnight or your coach will turn back into a pumpkin. If the goal is to remain honorable in the face of adversity, that’s very nice. I, however, would prefer an offensive defense and without prejudice. We try, convict, and imprison criminals not only as punishment for their wicked deeds but to deter other from continuing in there evil ways. These lunatics won’t flinch with this tactic and the physical damage that an “Al Qaeda” can unleash grows exponentially. We need to hold up more than a bible and the American Flag to distance their eagerness to cause harm from our shores.
I may be softening my views but I’m easily confused with much of this issue. Although I continue to search for the ideal scenario, I would feel a hell of a lot safer if we could replace Eric Holder with George Patton.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
and another brief (point by point) analysis:

Some points I'll bow to.
This is entirely unnecessary. . . . Unless you were just shooting from the hip with a nautical pun.

As always, when I quick draw, I inevitably hit an innocent bystander.
The deck is awash with the blood of these innocent, collateral victims. Every American deserves to wake each morning knowing the law of the land survived the night. It is with full knowledge and respect of your contempt for microscopes that I nonetheless urge you to slip into an Optician’s shop and be fitted for a pair of glasses.

Other points we’ll "discuss" for the rest of our days. I imagine the two of us at sea. With an emergency at hand, you’d be found on poop deck spouting maritime law and regulations to disenchanted passengers. And I, in the wheel house screaming at the Captain for hitting that fucking iceberg.
The analogy is perfect with one exception. I am using Maritime law to prevent you from hoisting a captured Terrorist over the rail and into the briny deep without a trial. Maritime law holds no jurisdiction over stray ice. The image of you in the wheelhouse however, seems consistent enough.
Either way, we wouldn't make Chelsea Pier.
No ship with a tear in her hull would make it without assistance. The question here is whether or not the prisoner would survive, given his right under the law, to meet his fate in court.

I'm eagerly waiting to see the disposal of the very element that despises our constitution and all it stands for by the flow chart outlined within its binder.
Translation: I can’t wait to destroy Al Qaeda because it despises our Constitution.
I couldn’t agree with you more. It is the Mona Lisa of the world’s governments; each line placed in exact balance to its neighbor, creating a scaffold of “checks and balances” that liberate our freedoms while bracing our vulnerabilities. Whoever would destroy this set of principles destroys our nation. To remove a single brace for one isolated convenience (say, ignore “due process”) would cause the scaffold to fall. Al Qaeda knows this and will destroy our country as much in this manner as a hundred planes into a hundred buildings. I’m simply not going to watch this happen with my mouth shut.

So many laws were broken in handling the Gitmo detainees that our judicial system could in theory allow these scumbags their freedom. Here's what's troubling. This possibility was brought to the attention of Attorney General Eric Holder. He indicated it wouldn’t happen but if so we would still hold them as enemy combatants.
How do you interrogate prisoners from an unconventional war? Alberto Gonzales threaded this needle with a jack hammer. We wanted more than name, rank and serial number so Geneva was out. We needed to hold them indefinitely and force them to incriminate themselves, so Miranda was out. So we create a third category of prisoner: the “enemy combatant”. By this date, even those wretched souls picked up or sold to the US army without the slightest crime on their file, have learned enough to make them valuable informants or dangerous targets upon release. These are the “white hair” decisions each president is expected to make during his time in the oval office. Who could have guessed that such a mess would have been left by one Administration for the next? Seems almost “un-American”, don’t it? Nevertheless, with the clock ticking and the media asking questions, all that has been resolved it seems is a concrete list of reasons that these prisoners are too dangerous to house somewhere between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Add the fact that Fox news announced that Barak Obama is African American, and what was a Puzzle becomes a time bomb.

So in essence, we allow enemies of this country the rights provided to Americans for a fair trial. If things don't go in our favor we just detain them anyway. There's a lot of righteousness at stake. That's what this is all about, right? “You’ve been found not guilty but we're going to throw you in jail for life, regardless". I fail to see anything righteous with this charade and it sounds like another black eye for the USA.
Ask Richard Reid (the “shoe Bomber”) if the system worked for him. He was found guilty and is enjoying his wonderful accommodations a few hundred feet underground, somewhere closer to the center of the earth than the Colorado landscape above him. That is the life he worked so hard to achieve. And no American has Al Qaeda-style blood on their hands.

With a system like this, OJ shouldn’t have walked, although he didn’t fall into the parameters of an enemy combatant. But if we were to have applied the same thinking, I’m sure something could have been written quickly to detain him.
These are the times, Mr. Metal Guru, that you make my case for me. Am I finally getting through . . . or is this merely irony? How sinister the law becomes when you bend the first brace; just remember the scaffold above.

He allegedly killed citizens of the United States. That’s not much different than what Al Qaeda wants.
He also made many Americans smile as a sports hero. That’s not much different than what sports hero Derek Jeter does. This is simply flawed association. It is the sum ideology that is at focus here and not an isolated behavior. It is the ease with which the undisciplined argument slides from focused to hazy that sidetracks honest discussion. Just watch Fox News to see this technique brought to an art form.

The phrase enemy combatant with regard to definition has been danced around since 9/11. I urge you to become confused with the newest rendition of the definition at the following site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_combatant
I think we’re only fooling ourselves by redefining words and phrases so we can say we’ve remained on the side of righteousness. Global sentiment wouldn’t be any more favorable with “we’ll hold him anyway’ then with our current policies.
I think I can go with you part way here. Changing the sign on the elephant’s cage does not make him a monkey.
- John Brown was charged with Treason and Insurrection for the attack at Harper’s Ferry, (“terrorism” as a moniker not on the radar yet)
- Sept. 16, 1920: Wall Street Bombing, 38 dead, 400 injured. Called an anarchist attack by the Galleanists (Italian Anarchists). (nope, still not “terrorism”)
- The Weathermen: Simply known as “American radical left organization”

Every one of these events would be labeled as “Terrorist” by the standards of legal and media protocol today. “Unlawful or Enemy Combatant” was a separate designation coined to slide our legal ass through the tight diplomatic channel I mentioned above. This is the story of our language.

In England they call sausages “bangers”. Still tastes like sausage to me. Our discussion is about an idea. If the current label or word, applied to an offensive action is placed on another, dissociated action for the sly purpose of creating an association where none exists, then it should be exposed as such and the charade ended. This is the case of our overuse of “terrorism” by the media and politicians to excite fear and cooperation from a society, half informed and battle hungry.

Sweeping any resolution to the misdeeds of yesterday behind the protection of the constitution doesn’t secure justification.
Hear, hear! But . . .
It was never my purpose to confuse the term “misdeed” with any implied morality; and for shame as it would have added a specific sexiness to your statement. Assuming that a Democracy can, by popular vote, apply equal legal protection under the system of justice for “immoral” activities, (I.e.: abortion, capital punishment)then “protection under the Constitution” not only secures, but is the very definition of “justification”. (Please read my essay: the Freedom of Speech)

Changing direction to a suit and Kevlar tie approach at the 11th hour is only allowing for borrowed time that our foes will exploit. We’ve called for a “time out” by extending our hand but their ordinance has already been released in the form hatred and is being delivered by their clenched fists.
This is the most compelling sentence in the entire letter. I perceive the situation to resemble an American call for sanity after a long lost Frat house weekend of binge drinking. Those parts of our war effort that shocked and disgusted the world, which can be immediately corrected, are being corrected. The acknowledgement of other areas which need correction but pose challenges to our national security are under study for correction. This is the area which you refer to as a “time out”.

The Obama administration has never offered al Qaeda clemency of any kind. The efforts have instead been focused on bringing a sense of world class justice to this war. These changes have been directed at our allies and our own, increasingly partisan citizens; they are in no way designed to soften our stance with the terrorists. If some al Qaeda operative accidentally arrives to an authorized Federal Penitentiary to begin serving his life sentence without the mysterious and unauthorized scars or contusions you appear to relish, accept my dog-eared copy of the United States Constitution as a token of friendship, but don’t wait for an apology.

The past actions of this country have opened Pandora’s Box. If you honestly believe we’ll be able to close it with some hand shaking and the backing of our court houses, you better get home before midnight or your coach will turn back into a pumpkin.
It troubles me more when my own countrymen begin tearing into each other over ideology than when the same conflict is the result of foreign savagery. This attitude toward the global threat of terrorism has as much and as little to do with al Qaeda as it has to do with the rift between conservative and liberal sensibilities which have controlled the nations conscience since the days of Hamilton vs. Jefferson.

Rush and Fox care far less about securing the rights of citizens than securing the rights against non-citizens. On the other hand, Maureen Dowd(NY Times) and Keith Olberman seem to have lost their edge since Bush has gone and the Democrats gained the Congress and Presidency.

Al Qaeda is simply the latest excuse for Americans to stretch our necks out of the car window to scream how little our spouse truly understands us.
Yes we can end this whole thing tomorrow. Close the borders, airports and harbors; kill all “detainees” everywhere. Tell all U.S. citizens currently abroad that they are on their own. Isolate all non-citizens in the Nation and send them packing. Fuck everyone but us. Al Qaeda can now go back to farming or textile weaving or something. I’ll bet over thirty percent of the country would support this.

But over thirty percent of the country would not support this. You cannot edit the rules when it is simply more convenient to do so, they will tell you. The rules, these folk would insist, are exactly what makes us a Nation. Break the rules and we no longer have an identity to defend.

And now, my pumpkin: the honest, ugly truth uniting both perspectives is our freakish size as a nation. The war-hungry conservatives are delirious with our current military might and find it beneath us to make the smallest concession. We can “go this thing alone”; we answer to no one. Case closed, (and on the dime).

To the more wary, peace-at-all-cost liberal, our size is a call to modesty. With the dollar losing ground and the Chinese industrial influence on the rise, our world wide reputation will soon account for more than our checkbook. If you honestly think this issue can be closed without some hand shaking and transparent court room ethics, they have a 1975 Chevy Vega for you.

If the goal is to remain honorable in the face of adversity, that’s very nice. I, however, would prefer an offensive defense and without prejudice. We try, convict, and imprison criminals not only as punishment for their wicked deeds but to deter other from continuing in their evil ways.
This has never worked. The death penalty for example, has shown no influence over the frequency of violent crime. Harsh sentences have been proven more effective in providing victims with healing through some proxy-revenge than deterrence through negative example.

These lunatics won’t flinch with this tactic and the physical damage that an “Al Qaeda” can unleash grows exponentially.
Yes. I see your point. In eight years al Qaeda has advanced from planting a bomb in some lunatic’s shoes to stuffing it in his underwear. Perhaps our single stumbling block has been operating like fucking cowboy idiots without inter-national cooperation.

We need to hold up more than a bible and the American Flag to distance their eagerness to cause harm from our shores.
Our “shores” are nothing more than a line on a map without our Flag and the Constitution behind it. The Bible only confuses the issue.

I may be softening my views but I’m easily confused with much of this issue. Although I continue to search for the ideal scenario, I would feel a hell of a lot safer if we could replace Eric Holder with George Patton.
We’re all confused. How could anyone hate us??? We’re so great and excellent. All we’ve ever done was use our friends, abuse the third world and fix everything through the IMF. Thank God my T.V. dinner is finally ready . . . Gotta go !

Love,
Prof Hot Wind

P.S.: Patton would certainly end the guessing, that’s for certain.

et tu Yemen?

Dear Prof. HW

HONOLULU – An al-Qaida affiliate in Yemen apparently ordered the Christmas Day plot against a U.S. airliner, training and arming the 23-year-old Nigerian man accused in the failed bombing, President Barack Obama said Saturday.

"This is not the first time this group has targeted us," Obama said, reporting on some of the findings of an administration review into how intelligence agencies failed to prevent Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab from boarding Detroit-bound Northwest Flight 253.
In his most direct public language to date, Obama described the path through Yemen of Abdulmutallab.

He also emphasized that the United States would continue its partnerships with friendly countries — citing Yemen, in particular — to fight terrorists and extremist groups.

- comment -

Yemen is friendly? This is wonderful to hear! Thank God the press was available to bring this breaking news to our attention. I feel better already. I mean, I had no idea where we stood on this. Did you?

- the Party Planner


Dear Party Planner-

We have a naval base in Yemen. I guess its just diplomatic to refer to them as our friends. The government of Yemen cooperates with us; they receive millions of dollars annually from us, (to fight al Qaeda). A large percentage of the Yemeni population do not agree with another large percentage of the population about this "friendship" thing. Some people have organized into a gentleman's club called Al Qaeda . . . these gents operate with a power and autonomy independent of the Yemeni government. They, al Qaeda, happen to be a major thorn in the side of Yemen's best efforts to rise from the diplomatic snake pit into which they have fallen.

This is part of the reason I find "gut-feeling" or impulsive diplomacy so tiring. It simply sets the stage for endless conflict.
Obama should speak ill of everyone in the region. I get it already.

Haven't we tried this for eight years under the previous administration? How well have these tactics woked in the past? You remind me repeatedly of the diagnosis of an individual repeating the same behavior expecting different results. Total annihilation of everyone who looks different from us, who hates us, who threaten and successfully kill us, who worship a god that instructs them to kill us. . . as frustrating as you find it, the concept of a total and successful annihilation of these people is not an option. Think about them as a tumor whose surgical removal will destroy the patient. If I were the oncologist in this scenario i would seek to cut off its nutritional supply;
- starve it of money,
- turn the tide of the people away from desperation caused by poor health and unavailable education, the very diseases of the mind that al Qaeda exploits
- foster a willingness to bring international business interests into the region.
- encourage these people to want to join a healthy economy without selling out their souls.

Al Qaeda can and will be out-maneauvered, but not without such work. Its called winning the "Hearts and Minds" of the people.

This of course requires a military dimension, an Intelligence dimension and a pedestrian or soft-target Security dimension, like airport screening and seaport security, (as usual, those rascally conservatives need to be watched carefully here, as I firmly believe unwarranted spying on United States civilians is an illegal and dangerous precedent. Bug the "visitors" all you want, but leave Me the fuck alone!If you are a civilian and you happen to be on the phone with a non-civilian, keep in mind that your conversation might be legally tapped.) I am also not suggesting these areas of the war are obsolete. I'm just sick and tired of the thick headed loud mouthes and their talk radio Chicken Hawks who dismantle every effort to sow the seeds of future harmony with their John Wayne, WWII, "America is above reproach", give that Boy a uniform and a gun and let me get back to my WWF Cage Match, Drop The Bomb answer to areas of crisis far beyond the intellectual rat-hole of their stalled, college-fratboy interpretation of a planet simply too complex for them.

The heros of WWII were greeted as "liberators". This was a diplomatic advantage of incalculable proportions: The soldier as ambassador. Evidence of prisoner brutality by the Axis forces didn't hurt when contrasted to our sterling example of "good egg" hospitality. We rebuilt schools and municipal buildings; helped recover stolen and misplaced works of art and other cultural significance. This was simply a different set of circumstances which precluded the need for today's transparent effort to double step our way onto their Christmas card list.

The chance might well have been there were it not for Bush's one, simple oversight: After "Shock and Awe" we should have remembered to have a "Sweep and Dust" plan. Looters raped the very museums which held treasures from the Cradle of Civilization. No resources were allocated to the rebuilding of Police Stations and Schools and Fire Houses (the backbone of any community) because he had no Policemen, no firemen and no teachers. When money was finally found to hire Haliburton civilians in to do the job of construction and Blackwater for security, (yes, civilian contractors to provide "security" in a war zone . . ?), it simply meant that less money was available to supply the actual Army soldier with a bullet proof vest and a battle ready Humvee.

Just for the record, Haliburton pulled out of Iraq cashing their last check in 2007. They were paid in full for services less than 50% fullfilled. Blackwater . . . . just forget Blackwater or whatever name they hide behind today. Talk about "cut and run" ! !

Yes Hoop, I believe we need to plan for a post-war relationship with our current enemies. A good step towards that future is tilling the fields today. Libya's government is unfriendly to the U.S. They bombed a plane right out of the sky and laughed in our face. Their leader is a monster. We reserve the right to pick and choose our friends. Qhadaffi is not our friend. Apparently some chap named Ali Abdullah Saleh is on better terms with us. Lets have him and his lovely wife over for some cake and conversation sometime, ok with you?

- Prof. Hot Wind

P.S. Timothy McVeigh was born in New York, spent time in Arizona (where he and others hatched their plan to blow up a building in Oklahoma), and also visited Mississippi at some point to gather intel. At this time I believe the United States maintains close diplomatic ties with these regions. Will advise of any updates.

- followed by this reply-

Hot Wind,

The only reason I send this shit to you is out of frustration. I didn't agree on how the Bush administration handled the terrorist issue and I'm not too thrilled with the Obama clan's plan either. The bully approach was useless. The suit and kevlar tie approach will prove to be useless as well.

The United States' ground war involvement in WW2 was roughly 5 years. We had to reduce a good portion of Europe to rubble to get rid of the Nazi threat. We fucked up a reasonable amount of property in the Pacific, including the deployment of two nuclear devices, to get the Japanese out of our asses. We've been fucking around with this Iraq/Afghanistan thing for 18 years. That's a little less than 1/3 of my life. Enough.

First off, we need a President of the United States. I'm tired of the globe trotting. The office was always predominately here for us. Now we have to make a fucking appointment. My shallow side doesn't give a shit about what goes on outside our borders and won't until some internal issues have been resolved first.

The John Wayne approach you say? At best what we currently have is a John Wayne lite approach. You say it's difficult because were not greeted as liberators. Then we absolutely have no fucking business being there. If you knew you weren't welcome somewhere, how long would you hang around?

Oh, this is complicated? Uncomplicate it rudely and immediately. We should pack our army toys up and leave. I don't see a level of cooperation from our overseas buddies that's worth my tax contribution or my concern. And whether we're directly involved with the hunt for these animals or not, we still have to look over our shoulders so best do it from here. And yes, I called them animals. They're no better than the scum that murdered the 6 million Jews we recently spoke about.

Our threats are worthless. The "better stop or else" thing is embarrassing. Our field annalists wanted 40K troops in reinforcements. We should have sent 80K and not over 9 fucking months. If we're going to commit, let's roll up the sleeves of this effort and give it everything. If not, fuck it. I would demand a greater involvement from everyone who is currently pussy footing around their commitment otherwise, they're on their own when the shit hits the fan. No more threats. No more media coverage. If we are attacked, take action and without CNN. What ever country is hosting enemies of the United States will be held accountable for the lack of doing their part in eliminating the common threat.

I'm sorry but World Peace is something that Miss America prays for to impress the judges. World Peace would be wonderful but let's get real and put an end to this shit.

yours truly,
Party Planner


copyright Jeffrey Owen Thomas 2010

The Freedom of Speech

"but if you want money for people with minds that hate, all I can tell you is brother you have to wait . . . " John Lennon

Dear HotWings,

I read an article on a website belonging to News 3 of Las Vegas. The story was about a teacher at a Las Vegas high school. While in the presence of her students she said the holocaust never happened. She also elaborated on why she has this belief. So, blah, blah, blah, a cry from the public has surfaced to have this teacher fired. I was happy to see a link at the conclusion of the article where I could post a comment. Participants were greeted with, “We welcome your participation in our community. Please keep your comments civil and to the point”. I was looking for your opinion. Do you believe I’ve followed the rules. The following is the comment I submitted:

“So unfortunate that people tend to forget about the Freedom of Speech. It's equally unfortunate when people act irresponsibily when exercising this Freedom. When a teacher can't speak responsibly, ignorance and stupidity are at work. This is truly a shame. But, the firing of this teacher shouldn't be mandated because someone is upset over this incident. The Freedom of Speech is a beautiful thing”.

I’m looking forward to your assessment.

- Let 'er Speak


Dear Let 'er,

The freedom of speech is not without sensible jurisdiction. Think "Fire" in a crowded theater, or the public disclosure of sensitive information on national security. Imagine an American President claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, knowing full well that he could not prove it; or worse, the claim was unlikely. Now imagine your own child failing an important exam as a consequence of wrong information he accurately recalled from the teacher's council. Now consider the possibility that his teacher used her position to undermine your child's chances on the exam for reasons that some might claim were protected by her freedom of speech. I could imagine a single opening at a prestigious university which the teacher held in preference for a competing student.

Now replace this motive with a political agenda, like saluting the flag while reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. Or perhaps learning about our young nation's obsession with its Manifest Destiny; the sanitizing of our treatment of the Native American in the process. How about the reluctant humility with which we recount our days of slave trading and the deafening silence on the subject of compensation to the families of these victims. I could go on. This essay will not simply discuss the legal parameters of Ms. Sublette‘s right to express her incendiary opinion of the Holocaust in the classroom of a public high school, but rather examine the situation to refine a common consensus on why decisions about the law might be upheld, independent of a balanced sense of moral, logical or civic accountability.

We have a responsibility to view these issues in the context of our imperfect contract as a community, if for no other reason than to validate the coordinates of the line we oblige our soldiers, law officers and politicians to hold. If we send our kids into action in Iraq, you'll want to know that we really needed the oil back home. We salute the flag as a five year old because our government needs to know that the principle of individual sacrifice for the Nation, trumping loyalty to family, is instilled before the child's mind can wrestle with its more unreasonable implications. In most discussions on group or congregational psychology this would be referred to as “indoctrination”. To salute the flag and recite the pledge is a display of patriotism and serves to reaffirm our place in a safe, functional community. Refusing to salute the flag and recite the pledge, although an individual's right or privilege exposes both an irony in the protection he enjoys, while coincidentally alienating him to suffer the derision of the remaining community. I want to focus on the consequences of populist influence when examining the opinion expressed, of a teacher's persecution by her community; the confrontation between laws and popular sentiment.

The laws exist to insure our society against the imperfections of its citizens, the premium being the restriction from absolute free will. In a republic, the laws are both established and periodically reviewed by a pyramidal consensus; that is to say that “We the Public” gather on Election Day to elect an elite handful of representatives who then decide which issues become the subjects of debate by a network of committees and councils whose influence and power is inversely proportionate to the size of its staff. The broader the influences of the decision, the fewer officials are tasked to consider it. It is the struggle for control of the law between the Federal and State/local governments that agitates the ambiguities in the pure logical framework over which the system is stretched.

I propose that it would be correct to describe myself as both an American and a New Yorker. It is my intention to emphasize to the reader that I recognize no redundancy in this. New York is a fine example of one region of American citizens whose majority opinion on many issues remains at odds with those of both our fellow states and the nation as a whole. Issues such as the death penalty, abortion, car insurance and gay rights serve to illustrate my point. As an American, I am a member of a society which sent soldiers into Iraq. From the first moment I recited the Pledge, I accepted my role in a contract with my neighbors which required my compensation of the afore-mentioned premium each day and on time: in this case I would support the American Servicemen and women involved with the campaign while using my modest influence, my First Amendment right to speak freely, to end the war through writings, conversations and the voting booth. I am not in a position at this time to offer the anti-war effort more. This then, places the consequences of a failure to rally enough of my fellow Americans to effectively oppose the war directly on my shoulders.

The image of America by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century became one of arrogance and clandestine tyranny throughout the world. To our allies we simply succumbed to a fevered paranoia through a sense of rage at the terrorist success on September 11th and our own impotent might. We stated our disregard for the Geneva Articles on a world stage, undermining the single most influential text on the subject which we, ironically, were instrumental in drafting. As a nation, we operated a campaign of aggression into a sovereign nation (granted, a nation ruled by a despotic lunatic and his creepy family) with an increasingly unilateral mission statement. Disagreement with this mission resulted more readily in alienation than dialogue; thus we expressed an unwillingness to cooperate with our allies to an unparalleled degree.

To our enemies, we simply reinforced a caricature of “the Great Satan”, by our interrogation techniques, our extraordinary renditions, our incident at Abu Ghraib, with world condemnation and weak domestic support, all which helped the recruitment of fresh, young jihadists immeasurably.

My continuing denial of "America's" justification for this aggression changes nothing with respect to the actions of my country and the disgust of the rest of the world. However, my "free speech rights" allowed me to help change the tide over the past eight years. By speaking out against our behavior in the Middle East, bonds among my New York neighbors were created and broken at a rate more favorable to those in my community opposed to the war. Hence the establishment of a growing "Blue" voice in a time of a "Red" administration. New York's voice against the war eventually out-paced the incumbent Red majority and joined with similar sentiments gathering force in other states to win the majority voice in the 2008 Presidential election. The face of America is slowly beginning to regain its former, multi-lateral sophistication and intelligence.

We are likewise a country of increasingly diverse racial and ethnic complexity where you will still find a majority of American communities utilizing a social structure founded over a few centuries and many generations ago by powerful western European traditionalists. Our laws, our economic structure, public school system and in some cases the faith in Jesus Christ, are all staunch examples of specific, essential tools variously adopted and employed by a broad spectrum of the nation's ethnically diverse communities, while maintaining a fixed philosophical core. We live our life in a community as unique from our distinct individuality as the neighboring town’s collective identity is from our own. Multiply the degree to which this phenomenon might divide two small fractions of a society, in a nation as enormous as our own and the question which began this dialogue becomes less about a common sense of moral or legal purpose, overshadowed instead by the miracle of any remaining consensus of purpose at all.

The issue of United States compensation for the Native Americans for example has been stalled until fifty years ago by a predominantly white fist on the throttle of Western academia. The telling of America's Manifest Destiny was sanitized up through the nineteen-sixties as much by a vilification of the indigenous opposition as the censorship of our frontier, genocidal wickedness. It was perfectly acceptable by such standards to shoot and distribute Hollywood movies capitalizing on a palliated retelling of events. These films simply provided action footage of the caricature of American integrity as recorded in our public school textbooks. However the conspiracy to whitewash the truth about the adolescence of our nation was as near complete as it was doomed to fail.

The notion of truth among the predominant culture of late eighteenth through late nineteenth century was quite different from the truth we pursue today. Our early curiosity about a democracy based form of capitalism led to the development of ever larger investment and trading institutions which proved an ironic obstacle to the extrapolation of severe future economic penalties and moral debt. These circumstances coincided with the discovery of an "endless" supply of natural resources. The industrialization of our cities permitted an explosion of white babies with European genetics whose destiny lay in providing for a perpetual husbandry of the cycle. The savages who feebly defended their ancestral homelands were a modest inconvenience to efforts of a superior sensibility struggling to achieve the bewitching promise of unlimited potential. However, the sciences of these times did not have the methods or tools to calculate the limitations of the dream. That discovery would have to wait another century. The genocide of the American Indian culture, its religions, its languages, art and so on, was simply accepted as the collateral price of bringing Christ's brand of capitalism to the new Promised Land. As Stalin once mused: one cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.

History is primarily the story of past events as regaled by the victor; leave the facts for the anthropologists. The story of the United States was handed down from one generation of white men to the next. Nothing would ever need to change as long as the fist on the throttle was white and the blood running through it was from our European cousins. The story of the American West as understood by most children from the nineteen fifties and sixties was the same story told to our parents by their grandparents. This fact, supported by television's successful broadcasts of Wild West shoot-'em-ups like The Lone Ranger, Gunsmoke, Bonanza, F-Troop and Davy Crocket establishes quite an impressive provenance. This was not the same conspiracy we were taught by our schools and newspapers and radios to fear, like socialism, communism or Orwell’s 1984 nightmare. Instead, this tale came directly from a charming, wondrous past, where fine, strong white American men were reclaiming Eden from the pagan savages; and where our pioneering women were the resourceful, hard working , church-going hostages of the unscrupulous, barbaric Red-Skin. This was our Freedom of Speech speaking.

The history of the American slave trade is equally disgusting. Our contemporary dialogue on compensation for crimes committed centuries ago is the single most conspicuous vacuum of conversation we actively dismiss. Rather, it is far more effective to reinforce our cultural association of black men with crime and prison, black women with welfare, prostitution and fatherless babies and black children as the future of illegal drugs, more feral babies and violent crime, then to face the insidious mechanics of an economic system created by us, White America, to restrict African American families from every fair chance at opportunity’s dinner table. It is criminal of me to write so little of this issue, but in the context of brevity, I will assume that the topic is understood in context well enough by the reader, admit to my fault and maintain focus on the specific topic.

I've often wondered if our Constitution was written to protect these events or simply allow them. In a Democracy, a lie with enough votes becomes the new, legally sanctioned truth. Either way, I am reminded that our courts insist, upon swearing in, that a witness "speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." This is as surgical as one can come to exposing our society's acknowledgement that an individual's truth is held on a separate plane from our collective sense of what is true and what is not. This fact is of profound importance to any discussion of legal limitations of Constitutional rights. Our Laws after all, are never more perfect than our most pragmatic sensibilities, our practical morality; a distinct yet often misunderstood cousin of philosophical ethics. No person who knows that stealing is wrong, would let their child suffer without considering the morality of not stealing. Immanuel Kant(German Philosopher 1724-1804), suggested as much with his Second Formulation of the Categorical Imperative, “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end.” This is the logic that confounds our world; this is why our judges, philosophers and clerics must always live on the same street but under separate roofs.

So as our history as a Nation progressed, many immigrants came to fill the labor vacuum created by the success of our explosive industrialization. These were people whose ethnicity was increasingly non-white and non-European. Their cultural diversity and immense numbers soon changed the demographic landscape beyond the threshold of political and economic anonymity, and by the early twentieth century began exercising their own brand of cultural self-esteem. As the ghettos of foreign, impoverished outcasts matured to become the neighborhoods of increasing cultural and economic depth, these concentrated pockets of mutual interest were beginning to consolidate their voices, asking for answers to the discrepancies in the white man's school books. They familiarized themselves with the ways of business and began investing these profits in education. They learned about the laws of the land and its politics. They began to hold political office and positions in banks and businesses. Now, when faced with invisible and unlawful restrictions to opportunity, these men and women were positioned for the first time, as plaintiffs, to hold the mirror of fact up to the face of their pink faced oppressors. Now they were positioned to expose "the man" and his “system” in his own court room and be heard in his newspapers.

I am a white man, born of white parents from Western Europe. Being raised during the period when this Renaissance of the Minority reached critical mass, it is difficult for me to understand the contempt of my contemporaries to the call for equality and affirmative action. Rather, I am exposed daily to hard evidence where individuals from my community, a predominantly caucasian suburb on Long Island, would spend the greater amount of energy and resources preventing the proverbial mirror from telling its tale than improving the system. It is far better to ignore the debt than assume the burden of spiritual austerity required to level the playing field. This effort has simply resulted in a phenomenon where two adjacent towns can coexist, sharing no sense of community, the barest, begrudging cooperation between municipal services and zero cultural exchanges. The Freedom to speak in either town would be understood to mean radically different things based on separate rationalizations of identical events.

I am reminded from my elementary school days back in 1960’s Commack, of the annual celebration of Columbus Day. Here was an occasion to interrupt the regular dull classroom routine with a hallway pageant and an assembly in the cafeteria, which served double duty as an auditorium. Speeches by Grown-ups and high-octane classmates recounted the heroic tale of a brave sailor with a profound vision, battling tremendous odds and triumphantly discovering America so we could have a park with woods to ride our bikes, build our forts and a shopping center to get some soda at. All the pictures in my school books of the landing showed how happy the Indians were to finally be discovered. These were prints of naked savages emerging from the darkness of the dense forest to greet the tall, well dressed sailors in shiny, bullet shaped helmets, with swords and muskets arriving on a ship from the wide expanse of the bright beach and sea. How cool was this?

Commack’s southern border was shared by a small town named Brentwood. Brentwood’s territory began up north at its boundary line with Commack and rolled south along a five mile parcel of Long Island’s flat, featureless midland. Let me remind the reader that Long Island is an island. I’m not talking about vast expanses of land here. This was an area that puzzled me as a kid because it was dull looking . . . very dull. Except when it was quaint and run down. This is the area along Fifth Avenue where all the small fruit stands and gas stations and auto shops and barber shops had signs in Spanish. Sun bleached concrete block shops seemed to sprout like weeds between the harsh factories like Entenmann’s Bakery, with its towering stacks coughing smoke and steam into the vapid sky. Guys would be hanging around in t-shirts and jeans in the middle of the hot summer; guys who looked to be the same age as my father. Why are they dressed like kids and sitting around outside the deli’s, laughing and drinking beer? My father dressed in a white shirt and tie. He went to work every day at the LILCO headquarters in Hicksville. Besides, it’s so hot they should be inside somewhere, drinking in the air conditioning or laying around in a swimming pool. Don’t they know someone with a swimming pool?
These were not “pink people”.

Brentwood was two or three miles from my home, yet somehow it seemed, from the window of my mother’s car, that we were driving through a third world nation. Columbus day in Brentwood was a time to remember the persecution of the Native American tribes; North and South American tribes that is. The people of Brentwood were black and Hispanic. These neighborhoods displayed all the consequences of cultural segregation, high joblessness and anemic buying power. In Brentwood, a tradition of white economic dominance allowed for a low-brow zoning aesthetic, where large factories and clusters of small industrial buildings and warehouses nestled among the tight neighborhoods of low income, multi-family houses. This was the place where low-tech things were made, sorted and distributed, owned by the more successful Americans who chose to keep the industrial landscape out from the viewing distance of their own more exclusive communities just a few miles and many light years away. It was only logical that the unskilled labor necessary to feed the furnaces and dunk the donuts and load the trucks live within walking or bicycle distance, as these jobs didn’t earn enough to by a car, let alone buy the education required to consider achieving the citizenship necessary to come out from the shadows of illegitimacy and drive legally.

Nevertheless, they came, settled, worked and sent for their brothers and cousins and friends. Cheap labor was a profitable resource so the business bosses were delighted. Unskilled jobs were plentiful and the housing was at worst equivalent to the squalor they left behind in El Salvador, Trinidad or Puerto Rico. So another unique community was born. The large majority of the Brentwood population shared more values and traditions amongst themselves, despite their diversity, than with the larger surrounding communities. It was therefore not considered unusual to maintain the customs and languages from far away homes, practices considered alien and hence inferior by our White society. This failure to assimilate enhanced their status as both separate and stubborn, while as unskilled they became merely “inadequate” and conveniently inferior. The resentment by these recent immigrants of such a lousy, self-perpetuating position eventually expressed itself in a simmering rage; the rise of imported gang activity and drugs moved into the vacuum of hope to empower a formerly invisible caste of “illegals and undesirables.

Christopher Columbus is a powerful icon of the Western European tyranny they feel each and every day as underpaid, under-educated, under-skilled, unemployed “brown-skinned”, Spanish speaking, unwelcome “guests” in the White man’s living room. I would hazard a guess that there is considerable animosity among the Brentwood population associated with the holiday. The right to express one’s outrage of such a symbol of exploitation and genocide by the ancestors of the original victims is assured by the First Amendment. But what about the hypothetical aggression of this same community towards a white man from another, non-Hispanic town, who dressed like Christopher Columbus and marched down Fifth Avenue on this October holiday?

I am aware that one’s right to throw a punch ends where another man’s nose begins, but in the context of an employment of the truth, it could be suggested, by an examination of the extenuating circumstances, that the victim in this case is the community and not the individual. The law is simply a formality of that distinction; a formality of consensus. What could resolve an issue in Brentwood might create an uproar in Commack. The concept of justice is never to be resolved among the Nation’s communities along strict federal lines of jurisdiction, yet the door to depravity remains unguarded without it. This is the quandary of the First Amendment.

I would further add that any suggestion that I dress like Christopher Columbus and attempt to march down Fifth Avenue in Brentwood is a waste of time. I would consider it disrespectful and incendiary.
Considering our conjectured free-for-all is eventually resolved by a police citation for both parties to appear in court, I can only assume that the case would be held against some standard of existing ruling from the vast record of precedent. Failing to provide a suitable match, our case becomes a formalized debate on the finer details of our Freedom of Speech. (It would be of equivalent interest to me how the police decided the roles of defendant and plaintiff.)

Either way, our common bond as a larger community under the First Amendment is hauled before a judge because another ambiguous portal of depravity was breached by a single citizen’s choice to exercise his insensitivity inside the gray, valance band of the Maxim. It is my comfort and conviction that these ambiguities in the law exist to allow our differences room to breathe; for our individual ears to hear the distant drum beats of our own uniqueness. And every time a Judge is called upon to settle such disparity, a small piece of our individuality is neutered, then crystallized into a greater homogonous culture, a ruling which of necessity tolerates fewer and fewer outbursts of expression, further codifying the legislation of simple tolerance and respect. This is too great a loss to my cultural singularity to acquiesce to. Decency is always found under the rubble of the ill-fated temple of best intentions. The irony here seems to suggest that the right to express one’s aggressiveness trumps the right to ignore it. Or is this always true?

I searched for exceptions to the concept of unrestricted speech and found the following eight exceptions on a Web site hosted by the National Endowment of the Arts:
csulb.edu/-javajvancamp/freedom1.html:

1] Defamation: a publication of a statement of alleged fact which is false and harms the reputation of another person.
2] Causing Panic: Shouting “fire” in a crowded theater, for instance
3] Fighting words: words which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.
4] Incitement to Crime: It is a crime to incite someone else to commit a crime.
5] Sedition: The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld statutes which prohibit the advocacy of unlawful conduct against the government or the violent overthrow of the government.
6] Obscenity: U.S. Supreme Court established a three-pronged test for obscenity prohibitions which would NOT violate the First Amendment: a) does Joe Average, with a mind to “community standards”, find a statement/work appealing to erotic interests; b) whether a statement/work depicts in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by State law; and c) whether the statement/work, taken in whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value.
7] Offense: Tossed around by theorists, this states that speech which is merely offensive to others should be an exception to the First Amendment. It failed its first trial in American courts. Please visit the web site for further information.
8] Establishment of Religion: Some speech is restricted because it constitutes the establishment of religion, which is itself prohibited by the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.”

So it is with this perspective that I visit the question of Lori Sublette, a Gym teacher in Las Vegas, and the issue of her protection under the First Amendment to use such a platform to express her opinions about the holocaust.

I was born into a family that worshipped at an Episcopalian church. I have had no connection with the Christian faith for over thirty-five years, with the single exception of my wedding, for which the Church served as a mere backdrop for the secular romance of a shared literary/traditionalist theme, and made for some fine photo-ops. My views of the Christian church are not hostile and my relationship with my brothers, who remain within its congregation, is loving and healthy. I hold a similar contempt for the persecution of any individual on the singular basis of their spiritual opinions. An outline of my religious inclinations, “Spirituality and Culture in the 21st Century”, is among the essays I have posted, for public scrutiny on this blog: jeffreygiov.blogspot.com.

The holocaust is a reference to the mid-twentieth century campaign by the German Nationalist party, the Nazi Party, to first, blame the economic emaciation of their country on all individuals who did not fit the socio-ethnic framework of the vast white, Germanic majority, and secondly, resulted in the isolation, collection and murder of these individuals. The number of people estimated to have been slaughtered during the Holocaust exceeds six million. The process of such an extensive scheme produced mountains of records and accessory artifacts. These victims are documented variously to include the Jews, the Blacks, the Gypsies and the handicapped. The Jews constitute the overwhelming majority who suffered under this campaign. After the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945, the surviving Jews, exiled by the devastated villages and cities of the Eurasian world, who were anxiously and resentfully working to recover from the devestation, were forcibly settled in the former homeland of the Palestinian people. The boundaries of this new country, Israel, have been expanded through several wars and occupations. The plight of the displaced Palestinians and the occupation of territories gained by illegal settlements and wars have created an environment of perpetual conflict and animosity, erupting periodically to the resolution of continued Israeli dominance. The line between the Jewish State and the Jewish religion as practiced globally has become the victim of collateral obscurity, hence the social persecution, by association, of Jewish citizens in nations and religious temperment unallied with the nation of Israel and its controversial politics.

The distrust and virulence toward the Jew which predated Nazi Germany for thousands of years is an interesting study in and of itself. No discussion of the incendiary potential of Sublette’s irresponsible and insensitive abuse of authority can ignore the briefest acknowledgement of its influence in the incident. It is, after all, the eight-hundred pound gorilla in the room.

The first people of the Jewish religion presented to the world as a community which regarded no ruler or law as having authority before the Word of their monotheistic creed. The obvious annoyance of the remaining society to this perceived arrogance and nonconformity landed the Jew on a hit list for criminal beliefs resulting in prison, slavery or death. Thus eventually exiled, (not a bad story at that) they broke from this fate to roam the various lands, chased from one fertile region to the next without the propensity to organize the necessary forces to stay, develop and defend a homeland. History unfolds the tale of a culture of “immigrant guests”, emigrating from the wilderness, to establish the ghettos of Europe and Russia’s urban concentrations. With neither the physical or social means to establish the influence required to rise from the savage, competitive depths of city squalor, the Jewish people drew instead upon the Capitalistic structure of their religion, the first true and modern enterprise of the individual as self reliant; responsible alone before the eyes of his single God for personal success or failure, and applied it to the economic world otherwise consuming them. What these towns and cities welcomed from the Jew was a monomaniacal approach to meticulous form of record keeping; a manner of weaving statistics and predicting events heretofore considered immaterial. With this skill came certain influence and personal, yet modest financial power. The application of these techniques may well have improved their status as skillful businessmen, but at a great price. Debtors, fueled by regret and unregulated interest rates were soon and easily resentful of these marginally welcome “guests” and periodically rose en masse’ to exercise their frustration in violent, mob style outbursts. The Jew was painfully aware that the laws of the city were no place to turn. And so the history of the Jew continued, with subtle variations, with its ups and downs until the philosophy of Herzl and the Great Plan of Adolf Hitler. It is unfortunate for our contemporary society, that vestigial remnants of the less congenial relationship between the Jew and the non-Jew survived the war. This is best evidenced in the denial of the Holocaust and anti-Semitic violence witnessed with alarming frequency in our post World War civilization. Few topics in history are as knotted in social and violent tensions as the story of the Jew’s place in society. Few stories of the Jew’s place in Society are as blatantly obscene and explosive as the programmatic annihilation of six million Jews in mid-twentieth century Europe.

I cannot rationalize one reasonable alternative to the denial of this event outside its capacity to injure the memory and history of the holocaust and the Jew as an individual and the Jewish people as a whole. The sum effect of this claim can neither be understood to provide anything beneficial to a clearer understanding of those times but rather, simply resuscitate the weakly veiled threat that such group-think is alive and well and should be feared some fifty years after the fact; a grisly warning to look often and forever over one's shoulder. Is this speech protected by the First Amendment? As I look at the list of exceptions above, I can see how it might win a debate against any claim that it could, by sheer utterance, cause someone to commit a crime. In the same spirit, I can see how one might argue against someone’s claim of personal harm from such postulations. [Mind you, I would be both proud and anxious to debate the opposing side to both charges of any infringement of their speech.] Our communities set the standards of civil tolerance in our school rooms. The important events in the life of a man named Christopher Columbus have been cherry picked by teachers on both sides of the Commack-Brentwood border, yet both schools draw from the same legitimate resources. The respective teachers simply enhance or omit facts relevant to their ultimate beliefs, and the fallout of the community is left to grade the effort. One can see how two different communities might condone antithetical summaries of the same event. I find it difficult to believe the community in Las Vegas, Nevada would condone the use of their public school rooms to provide the stage for an intimidating teacher to lord her students with a tale of such proven hurtful capacity and factual vacancy. I find it equally amazing that the same community could acquiesce to such impotence of retribution to the same, yet this woman has indeed managed to keep her teaching position without even apologizing.

The lessons are quite clear. The First Amendment is extraordinary, quite powerful for one. I am an artist and a writer. I hold my freedom of expression as sacred. I further believe that it was this very Freedom that exposed the crimes of the previous Administration, for which I am profoundly greatful. I have no axe to grind with free speech. As Voltaire once famously said: "I may disagree to the core of my soul those things you say, but will defend with my life your right to say it." I simply believe an individual's right to use this freedom for results which harm another individual or group may be debated and censured in accordance with my own right to maintain some truth and civility in my world.

The rules by which Sublette was able to worm her way out of termination were available for scrutiny by representatives of the community long before this fiasco. But it would have taken someone equally sleazy to anticipate this travesty and expose the loophole in the contract which allowed her to remain in her predatory position. But that didn’t happen. Perhaps its human nature to assume that these freakish aberrations of the social contract, of mutual respect for cultural cooperation, occur only on the pages of our tabloids and TV screens; that this brand of filth could never come home to us. Thanks to this example, I’m sure we will all lose another small piece of that fragile truth we treasure in an effort to tighten our hold on whatever uniqueness remains in this crazy quilt of the Nation that we still are.

- Prof. HotWind

copyright Jeff Thomas 2010

Black Entitlement TV

Prof. HotWind,
Prejudices. Let's talk briefly about BET, Black Entertainment Television. How much opposition would be aroused if someone was to try launching the White Entertainment Television Network?
- Disgusted

Dear Disgusted,
I have wonderful news. You can tear the boards off your windows, put the rifles back in the gun case and eat uncanned foods again. WET exists! It began in 1949 showing Gene Autry and Hopalong Cassidy Westerns .

Sure, those rascally Black entertainers tried to infiltrate the White-man's gig ever since, making buffoons of themselves for us in Amos and Andy satires or that snake Rochester on the Milton Berle show, but rest assured, we Pink People never let them get much more substantial exposure than that. (Unless of course you want to throw "Sanford and Son" in my face. There was another wonderful example of Black sensitivity training at work.)

My memory of Blacks employed to advertise home products doesn't seem to stretch further back than the late seventies; Ahh, remember OJ running for his Rent-A-Car? Yeah, we troubled White folk are doing OK. We just always seemed to have more class . . . no running our cultural dominance up the flag pole or junk like that.
Better to lay low and control the buying power of the typical American couch potato. . . invisibly.

Reminds me of an essay I wrote last year I called "On the Liberal Media". You'll find it on the Blog, "August". It was a response to an e-mail from Harry that called on America to wake from the Liberal Media's hypnotic manipulation of the Nation's news services, undermining our war efforts and selling the country to our enemies. One afternoon of research was enough to gather statistics on Broadcast dominance, audience reach and Newspaper circulation. All results clearly supported the Conservative Right's vast superiority in the game. I urge you to read it.

I say, Let them have their little program . . . we'll simply use the remaing seven-hundred channels or so to quietly seduce "our own people" into puppet-like consumers with little regard for cultural content.

I simply hate it when the Star whines about the conditions of his dressing room. In your case, you made me laugh. Thanks.
- HotWind

Terrorism: the movie

This next one from Somewhere out West:

Dear Prof. Pacifist:

AP - President Barack Obama on Monday vowed to use "every element of our national power" to keep Americans safe and said the failed Christmas Day plot to blow up a Detroit-bound airliner was "a serious reminder" of the need to continually adapt security measures against changing terrorist threats.

-comment-

I'm actually surprised this happened. Who would dare defy Obama after he spent the past year inviting everyone to be his facebook friend? The man's wisdom is astounding, and with Eric Holder at his side, hell they're like . . . . . Batman and Robin. Just knowing they're on the case makes me feel so much safer.

Oh, I was confused about one thing. Obama said terrorist in his little speech. I thought we had purged that word from the National Vocabulary?

- Unbewitched


Dear UnBewitched,

This one is rich in venom but a little obscure in info . . . why did this one make you angry? I promise you I have no interest in becoming Obama's Facebook friend, however I just don't get the connection. Without some extra effort to help me, I am left to assume that you either don't want him to use "every element . . " or think he should not have tried to be so friendly.
Throw me a bone here.

The point of this Administration's referencing the word "terrorism", as I understand it, was to stop the over-use. Words like "genius", "excellent" or "awesome" have simply lost their connection to the original level of significance they received just a few generations ago.

The word terrorism was recently associated with a hate crime in Farmingville, the rampage at Virginia Tech., the killings at Fort Hood and a host of other non-terrorist crimes. We used to call these mass murders, a term which the public understood to mean "unrelated to organized subversive activity". Son of Sam would have been a "Terrorist" if the word had any credence back in the 1970's.

Using the term for shock points just distracts from its effectiveness by our security organizations who need to connect with a public sense of legitimate urgency. I think a guy wearing C-4 socks on a packed jet warrants the word.

I would like some time to read from Obama bashers one, single alternative approach to any situation that does not employ "Rat Patrol"/cowboy diplomacy.

- Prof HotWind

Dear Prof.,

For some reason, I'm finding it necessary to back though your letter with the answers to some of your questions.

I don't know of any methods to dispose of rats other than the deployment of snare traps or poisons. They can't be reasoned with. Yes, a rat is not a human being, but how do you protect yourself against those that infest as rats do and are willing to die for their beliefs? We do, as Americans? No, we don't. We've hired from within to take care of that dirty job. Do you suggest our military should trade in their weapons for note pads; write letters asking the rats to stop? You wish for an imaginary line to be drawn on the shore line. Beyond this point we are civil. For a terrorist to step foot on US soil with the intentions of in gauging in any form of terrorism should be dealt with by the military in a swift manner. Giving the terrorist page one coverage in court houses reserved for Americans only helps their effort. Turn these individuals over to the military, and without parade, guarantee our citizen justice will be served. And punishment doesn't need to be death. Maybe American citizens might fear treason once again.

Now, in picking on HisObamaness' use of the word terrorist, he really couldn't resist. Why not call a spade a spade. I can appreciate the President's desire to hang curtain and install glade plug ins on this one, but you can't sweep this shit under the carpet. This stinks. We have to look it in the face and deal with it for what it really is and it's more than a line item in the budget. The American citizen's killing people are criminals and terrorists as well. Once again, turn off the fucking microscope. It makes no sense to arm wrestle over a word.

Now, the facebook comment. Obama has really done a great job in reaching out to countries and cultures that our past administrations misunderstood, used and bombed.
I was pointing out the incident regardless of our efforts to be friend the world. I wasn't trying to be trite. Fanatics and terrorists have been opened for business for all of time. There will always be someone that feels it's necessary to hurl a rock in order to get their point across. They may be right as there is always someone that doesn't want to hear about it.

My anger stems from this. I love our country. I love our freedoms. As I take a stand in defense of these things, peaking over my shoulder, I've come to realize that clowns are wearing the ringmaster's hat. So many elements and elected officials of our government are criminal. It's the pomp and circumstance that surrounds this group of people that have taken these temporary jobs that has me so angry. The President is nothing more than a temporary landlord. In fact, better described as a CEO on a board of directors. The government has lost it's honor. It's been examined, exposing so much corruption, by the very microscope that you and yours find so necessary to look through. I have no respect for what is said by our government officials. They should keep their mouths shut and try to do a good job. The media needs to get off the White House front lawn and stop the applause. It sickens me. These has nothing to do with Obama as an individual or as the President. I'm examining his campaign promises. It's possible that he sold us to get. It's also possible that he had to sell himself out to maintain a certain degree of cooperation. I don;t know and never will but he has three years to go.

By the way, Somali pirates grabbed two more ships but I don't give a shit and neither does anyone one else, right?

I have to break from this. The news is going to post a picture of the underwear the plane bomber was wearing. See, it was C4 boxers and not socks.

- UnBewitched

To Catch a Thief

Dear Prof. HotWind,

-excerpt-

LONDON – For a priest in northern England, the commandment that dictates "thou shalt not steal" isn't exactly written in stone. The Rev. Tim Jones caused uproar by telling his congregation that it is sometimes acceptable for desperate people to shoplift — as long as they do it at large national chain stores, rather than small, family businesses.

-comment-

Apparently, our online bible scholar has a little competition. Talk about drifting from what you hold true, in a sometimes acceptable manner. We all thought George Carlin was just being funny when he said, “Sometimes the church grants dispensation”. Man, he would have a field day this. I would like some insight on the good Reverend’s twenty first century view on the coveting of thy neighbor’s wife.

We need to reset for a moment. The Reverend isn’t throwing out a blessing to would be thieves. His sermon is a reminder that we need to help our brother in his time of need; turn a blind in a manner of speaking. Other religious factions sanction the taking of life in HIS name. We’re only talking about a loaf of bread here, not a beheading. And hi def telis are right out!

Although the Reverend meant well, the phrasing of his thoughts should have been reconsidered. If we really need to hang a priest, we should go after the dirty bastards that like touching little boys.

Puzzled in a pew


Dear Puzzled,

A fine and sensitive treatment of the story my dear friend.

I marvel at a cozy scene where you, still bent over a warm internet keyboard, are visited by the resplendent visage of sweet Wisdom herself, draped in a shimmering irridescent lame' with an open back and plunging neckline. Whose soft council spills like sunlight over the war torn fields of your fatigued philosophy.

"Think of the poor, the tired, the homeless", she purrs, "it is Christmas."
. . and your dick stirs.

"But think also of the victims and their ruined plans, their loss " she whispers, and the soft folds of her loose gown slide over the smooth white skin of her naked shoulder.


You smile weakly, turning your eyes from her fresh licked lips, but find your nose a mere two inches from the deep roundness of her anxious, rolling bosoms, almost begging to be set free . . .
"Remember the story of Lot." she teases, "What manner is a village that simply watches its saddest, most unfortunate die without helping?"

Her hand runs across your hair; at this point you can't possibly stand from your chair without embarrassment . . .

"Remember also" she breathed, "this same village might well perish but for its love of the truth in the Commandments and the law."

At this point a small, bare foot steals out from the garments trailing hem.

"So small, so perfect." you think to yourself as you stare helplessly at the tiny toes which slowly brush, seductive yet somehow indifferently across your leg.

"But we can't just go around, having our priests tell the people that its plum all right to go around stealing tits from Wallmart ! ! ! . " you shout, . . . . at which point you freeze having realized the slip of the tongue.
"I mean 'shit'; that's 'shit from Wallmart' " you explain.

If your priest can only find the right rhetoric, I'll bet we can anticipate a future where some judge releases a poor, desperate homeless man who was arrested by a friendly cop who answered a 911 call from Wallmart who eventually gave the wretch a scarf they caught him trying to steal. Every one is happy, every one feels good about helping the poor; everyone feels good about obeying the law.

Now how are you going to "adjust" your metrics of morality and tear a piece off Wisdom?

The UnForgiven

jt,
-excerpt-
CHARLESTON, W.Va. – The Gospel of Luke records that, as he was dying on the cross, Jesus showed his boundless mercy by praying for his killers this way: "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do."
Not so fast, say contributors to the Conservative Bible Project. The project, an online effort to create a Bible suitable for contemporary conservative sensibilities, claims Jesus' quote is a disputed addition abetted by liberal biblical scholars, even if it appears in some form in almost every translation of the Bible.

Comment: In these hard times, to thrash out at the center figure of the beliefs of so many spiritual factions is an affront to those that worship his godliness and is more than in poor taste. If they need to soften the power of mercy for conservative sensibilities, let them first examine the feeding of many with two fish and six loaves of bread. Can't get too much more conservatively merciful than that.
hoop
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Hoop,
I've come to a workable compromise when faced with the similar frustration born of dealings with powerful groups and their misguided aggressions. Aren't these the same people that would have America's socialized education system withhold Darwin's theory of evolution from our children on the principle of Biblical infallibility? And all this while simultaneously denouncing Socialism? Philosophy, like personal hygiene, is an abstraction from nature of its more intrinsic subtleties directed toward the development and employment of a system devised to neutralize man's vulnerability to the natural order.

From these elements and axioms we sculpt our laws and physics, humanize our enigmas and sanitize all record of our contemporary membership in the animal community. But as Jerry Seinfeld once remarked, personal hygiene is a labor intensive compulsion. "If your body was a car, you wouldn't buy one." If clear, logical thought came without effort to an individual, you would most likely find him heavily sedated in some Asylum for the Fragmented and Despondent. We debate as a species for the simple reason that no argument is of itself an end, but rather an invitation for a multitude of contradictions. No great campaign was ever satisfied but that it edited life to fit some predisposed, amputated objective; each man satisfied to yield some portion of fact for a tidy summation of his personal, inevitable truth.

And what is an opinion but some position along a scale on which the pleasant is measured against the unpleasant by virtue of an individual's agility with numbers and ingenuity with the language. Many a fact was held to be unsound for centuries before that certain "character" arrived with the skill to express its evolved truth. Though the metrics of the condition remained fixed for those many years, it was the elasticity of the words, the rough distinction of their definitions and the syntax which provided a fresh opportunity for the new interpretation.

Take for example the Pythagorean superstitions of numeric coincidences; the five "Platonic solids" and subsequent "music of the spheres"; our profoundly diverse interpretations of the appearance of life on Earth or the polarized approaches of Keynes and Friedman to economic practices in the United States. Each "truth" exists consequent to the edit and particularly, the dismissal of related data whose mere acknowledgement would challenge the primary objective.

In the case of Pythagoras, the crisp, objective discovery of numeric coincidence transposed a degree of unwarranted authority to a framework of intangible spirituality, a cosmic force, whose legitimacy survived the absence of equivalent interrogation.
Pythagoras' legacy alone was enough to excite Johannes Kepler's imagination to conclude the existence of a relationship between planetary orbits and the geometric volumes of Plato's five ideal solids. Although he outlived the conviction of own his epiphany, he would survive to witness a greater personal achievement.
Darwin's version of evolution simply challenges the authority of Judeo/Christian scripture. A true mess here.
. . . and Keynes, noted British Economist, would take your paycheck and put it in the bank for a steady, moderate return, whereas Friedman, (think "de-regulation"), would aim for higher profits at the track.

In every case we approach our subject with some primary assumption, trusting our scales, watches and thermometers to reveal some accountable fact of its nature. These instruments then cough out their numbers onto pages where they are arranged and subsequently shuffled into some context. Though the numbers present themselves as metaphorical stones whose face value is presumed eternal and unyielding, such is not the case with the language used to relate them.

Words begin at their core like the pit inside a peach, firm and distinct. But through context and metaphor, idioms are born and layers are grown onto the seed, not unlike the juicy meat of the peach. It is through this process we learn to value and treasure our language and cultivate our long fascination with literature. And from this peach we must provide a context to our arithmetic.
How could one expect mankind to have the accuracy of our deliberations keep pace with our predilection for ambiguity; our love for association? Philosophy is as difficult on the mind as weight training is on the body; an inconvenient fact has never stopped the idiot from expressing an opinion, formed in the vaccuum if its conspicuous exclusion. Outmatched by disciplined logic, these passionate yet compromised individuals have leveled the playing field with a spurious approach to an art form called Rhetoric, designed by their adversary and used to considerable effect against them.

Rhetoric is the skill of leaning words of specific innate potential, soft sides back to back, until they no longer stand perpendicular to the flat baseline of reason, creating instead a fresh, innovative angle closer to the craftsman's object yet further from the original ideal, namely: Truth. Cases are constructed in this manner that conform to a logical framework, woven of dubious, unsubstantiated or concocted material; a Christmas tree adorned with sugar ornaments in the rain. It is small wonder therefore that the history of our development, through its art, literature and science, has continually wrestled with a reluctance to acknowledge the ironic reflection staring back at us from the shiny lenses and forceps of our kitchens, laboratories and temples. It was essential that God's decision to create man in accordance to his own likeness was addressed so early on in the Bible. In this manner it was established as an axiom, beyond further analysis.

I believe firmly that our single common denominator as a species is a specific form of loneliness, that painful emptiness felt most figuratively by the child in an orphanage. We ache to discuss our achievements, our self love and our plans for the future with some paternal, guiding soul. We desperately wish to impress, to be counseled and caressed by something not simply equal to our race. How ironic that this wonderful blue planet, teeming with life, should leave us so lonely this way. So our Gods came to interview for the position. Some came and left for better employment elsewhere, some were layed off and some were fired. Some are with us today, hired when the company was smaller and charged to reinvent themselves as the corporation grew.

In light of this brief discussion of my opinion of opinions, I would like to close by applying some principles to the subject of your letter.

1] If there did indeed exist a man named Jesus, was he the Son of God?
- if yes, then move on to his life's work.
- if no, then the issue is done.

2] Was he executed for his life's work?
- if yes, then move on to his dying words
- if no, then why was he executed? (i will not continue this here)

3] Did he ask forgiveness for his executioners?
- If yes, what are the positive and negative implications?
- If no, what are the positive and negative implications?

Assuming these individuals who are editing the current version of the book of Luke are concerned with the Bible's legitimacy as an authoritative text, I can only conclude that they are amputating such knowledge from their rhetoric to protect a higher ideal, some greater good. If this is correct, I need someone to explain the potential, viral harm which hides in Forgiveness.
Then I would like an explanation for the use of the "infallibility" clause with respect to Genesis. The Bible is infallible or it is not. You must not confuse your stones for peaches lest you lose a tooth.
jt,

A rare occasion it is when, meeting at the railway depot of thought, we're not found standing on opposite platforms. Although easy to follow, the simplicity of your flow chart seems to have eluded many "great thinkers" of these times. But the true/false method of quizzing time-honored "givens" leaves little room for the filibustering responses of those who like to think they know better than the annals of the brilliant, celebrated and/or righteous ones.

The analogy to the peach with regard to this discussion was appropriate. As such, I offer the rhetoric of the worm and it's need to feed as nothing more than an attempt to spoil the fruit for the many that enjoy it's nourishment. Our twenty first century, online bible scholars need a reminder. Our beliefs are healthy and living well within the pit of our souls. And lest they fear otherwise, our fruit is dusted daily. If I may quote a phrase, most associated with the journalist Ernie Pyle, "There are no atheists in fox holes".

Believing must be complete. Besides, The Pearly Gates would be an awful place to learn of holes in their sacred story, and peaches as well.
- hoop

Hoop,
Why must "believing" be complete?
- jt

jt,
With respect to your response, you've got quite the economy of words. Running low on hot air to keep your balloon aloft? I doubt it.

I’ve apparently used a phrase that didn’t convey my thought as I intended. Perhaps I should have written "We must be true to the beliefs we embrace". Stated facts are often questioned. This can be expected and is often necessary to reach a full understanding of what one has engaged. In taking hold of a belief, specifically one's spiritualism, we can’t simply pick and choose specific aspects of the facts, myths, and tales, ignore the rest and still profess our faith. If you wish to believe in the legend of Paul Bunyan, that's OK with me, but then you can't disavow the existence of his rather large blue ox.

Do Christians believe that Jesus turned water to wine? Was it the process of fermentation or divine intervention? Did Jesus walk on water or did he step on the backs of turtles sunning in a shallow stream bed? Whatever the circumstances of these (apparent) miracles, free of physical evidence, they will always remain miracles in the hearts of those who have chosen to believe in Christ and his teachings.

Did Christ forgive those who put him to death? The question relates to the speaking of these words as he, nailed and tied to a cross, was dying. Writing of a verbal forgiveness may have been done to exemplify the height of his mercifulness. From what I’ve learned of crucifixion he would have had difficulty breathing let alone attempting to speak. So when asked if Christ forgave his executioners I answer, in accordance with his teachings, yes. By the way, research concludes that a cross true to the shape we now associate with the son of God may be inaccurate. Do we strike this image from the records as well?

Our Conservative Computer Bible Scholar has a right to question the Book of Luke. This freedom however doesn’t permit him to re-write Luke to meets his needs. To edit the Bible could therefore only be for his personal gain and is suspiciously hypercritical. Personally, I don’t think he knows how to believe. Oh ye of little faith. Sorry, you can't change the control group so the hypothesis is correct without raising the price of the book.
-hoop (aka:Our Lady of Pulpit Software V1.2)

. . . and this from Karen in Fla.:

Merry Meet Jeff......
I was reading your blog the other day. I found the topic of Jesus going on between you and hoop... I loved your questions.

Your first question, "was he the son of God" got me wondering. My initial reaction is then who was his mother?? How are we created through man? Why can't it be Mary?
How would God, a spirit, be able to do that...?

My next question: is there one shred of evidence that Jesus existed.? The stories tell us he died for our sins. What sins ! ! ? What did you or I do when we were born that we already had sin? I don't understand a religions that claims we are bad the minute were born. And this man died for these sins? How much guilt is that to be on our heads from young children to adults?

I guess I spent most of my young life believeing in him. That was what I was taught. As I grew older I began to question it. Now, I don't really want to say too much because I don't pretend to know any of these answers. Everyone is has the right to their own beliefs. I happen to believe that John Lennon said it best : "What ever gets you through the night."
......Blessed BE
-your little pagan friend...
( karen) I don't want you to get me mixed up with any of your other pagan friends.. love you