The 27% Crazification Factor

The number of contenders courting publicity by publicly flirting with the idea of running for the Republican party’s nomination for president seems to be growing exponentially, ranging from those who are crazy to those who are pretending to be crazy in order to attract the crazy base of the party, though it is hard to tell the difference between the two groups. Me, I am waiting for the King of Crazy, Alan Keyes, to throw his hat into the ring to indicate that the craziness has reached a critical mass and we are truly off and running.

Some observers are bemused that Donald Trump has been leading the other contenders in some polls and is able to garner support in the mid-20% range, purely on his crazy birther shtick. His performance does not surprise me in the least because we now have, thanks to Keyes, a benchmark that says that the craziest of candidates can get 27% of the population to vote for him or her. It is only when candidates crack the 27% mark that I start to take them seriously.
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Shaming people for being poor

Sometime ago, in my series on how poor people have dignity too, I praised the recent adoption of debit cards instead of food coupons as a good way for them to purchase food without others knowing that they were down on their luck.

But some people want to deny even that minimal level of dignity and label the poor with a scarlet, or rather orange, letter. An Arizona Republican legislator wants the debit cards to be a bright orange color. Of course, his stated reason is to prevent ‘fraud’, that useful word that disguises hateful motives as noble ones.

Chris Hondros and Tim Hetherington

US photographer Chris Hondros, along with British photojournalist Tim Hetherington, were killed in Libya yesterday.

Hondros was the person who took the iconic photographs of what happened to an Iraqi family, especially a terrified little Iraqi girl, just after her parents were killed by US soldiers at a checkpoint in Tal Afar in 2005.

I cannot see that picture without the sickening brutality of war being brought home to me once again. I wrote about war and death and the impact such photos before.

Journalists like Hondros and Hetherington take great personal risks in order to remind us that was is not a video game but that real people, ordinary people, innocent people, suffer and die unnecessary deaths because of the ambitions and power lusts of a few.

And now they have become the latest statistic.

Imagine there’s no hell

20110425_107.jpgThe latest issue of Time magazine has as its cover story the question “What if there’s no hell?” which focuses on a 40-year old evangelical preacher named Rob Bell who is head of a megachurch in Michigan called Mars Hill Bible Church that boasts 7,000 members attending its services each Sunday. He is described as a ‘rock star’ in the evangelical movement and has just published a book titled Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived that is causing consternation in evangelical circles by arguing that hell may not exist and that heaven may be open to everyone, not just those who accept Jesus as their personal lord and savior, the usual standard for admission among evangelicals.
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Eating more humanely

In response to my earlier post on the hostile response that vegetarians and vegans experience, commenter Mary Jo said she became a vegetarian but later returned to eating meat but with a renewed sensibility, saying “I still feel really sorry for the animals I eat. I eat meat that is certified to be humanely raised and slaughtered by the Humane Farm Animal Care organization.” She gave a link to Certified Humane, an organization whose label on products certifies that it “Meets the Humane Farm Animal Care program standards, which includes nutritous diet without antibiotics or hormones, animals raised with shelter, resting areas, sufficient space and the ability to engage in natural behaviors.”
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