The Indecisive Moment

Photography with occasional opinions & other nonsense

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Today’s political rhetoric has become so very weird that the politicians about whom we should be most suspicious are the very ones telling us we can’t trust politicians. They actually want us to believe that every politician has been bought, that giant corporations are running everything, and that our government has not functioned as a democracy in decades.

Why?

So we will acquiesce to the direct control of government by corporations and the elimination of democracy altogether. If we are convinced it does not matter because democracy is already dead, then we won’t fight it.

They have long since had the racists convinced of the lie that white Americans will soon be a minority, leaving the racists willing to give up democracy with its majority rule. For that same reason they have convinced a large number of Christians that they are becoming a minority, too.

Powerful people in government and major corporations have been talking seriously and openly for a long time about democracy being outdated and inefficient, meaning that democracy interferes with their unregulated pursuit of profits. They need only convince the majority of Americans to passively go along with giving up the only control the people have over their government. And they are damned close to doing it.

Pay attention. Ordinary people you probably know have repeatedly posted online that democracy does not work, and that America was never meant to be a democracy. They try to make hay out of calling this country a constitutional republic and denying it was ever a democracy, repeating but hardly understanding what they have been told by far right podcasters, politicians, writers, and preachers.

Their understanding of history and constitutional law is slight, but their fear of losing control of their country to non-white, non-Christians is huge. Add to that their baffling devotion to the president and willingness to support anything he does, and we find ourselves faced with the biggest threat to democracy in our nation’s history.

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"We who have gone before have performed an honest duty, by putting in the power of our successors a state of happiness which no nation ever before had within their choice. If that choice is to throw it away, the dead will have neither the power nor the right to control them. I must hope, nevertheless, that the mass of our honest and well-meaning brethren… will discover the use which designing leaders are making of their best feelings, and will see the precipice to which they are led, before they take the fatal leap."

— Thomas Jefferson, 1820

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Reposted from 2018:

Next week we celebrate the work of an extraordinary group of men who wore ponytails and short pants. They were fond of ruffled shirts, long-tailed coats, and triangular hats, and they tied their hair with silk ribbons.

When they really wanted to look fly they wore velvet. Many of them wore wigs, even if they had full heads of hair, and powdered them white. A few even wore makeup at times.

They could be a witty bunch whose humor leaned toward long, multi-layered insults. A number of them were inventors. A great many were fluent in Latin and Greek, several in Hebrew and Aramaic, and most in two or more modern languages. All of them knew their Bibles very well, even the ones who were not believers.

They did not all agree on anything and arrived at their most important decisions only through a great deal of horse trading and compromise, which is why nearly every argument today based on "the original intent of the Founding Fathers" is pure fiction. The founders were rarely of one mind.

They were not all good men. They were not all honest. They were not all revolutionary idealists, and those who were would each ultimately compromise his ideals out of necessity, or for political gain, convenience, or money. Usually for money.

But despite their flaws, there was a moment — one brief, heady, and glorious moment — when they all truly believed they could remake the whole world. Novus Ordo Seclorum, a new order of the ages, was what we called it before we forgot a little of what we were about as a nation and forgot all the Latin our founders knew.

Our purpose as a country was written down as a statement of eternal truths in phrases prettier than any poet or lyricist has ever penned: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."

Next week we celebrate with fireworks, songs, speeches and flags. We will, as always, compress into that celebration everything we think is good about America. But what we celebrate, the real reason for the holiday, is not about flags, songs, and fireworks. It is not about the military or the great men of history.

Next week we celebrate our reason for being a nation. We celebrate our commitment to those eternal truths expressed in the Declaration, the truth of universal human rights, and we celebrate in the knowledge that we have a part to play in the cause our Founding Fathers handed down to us because the Revolution of 1776 is still on.

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Hey look! I’ve launched my own news site called Hoots & Howling Madness. Find it at Hoots.News. The news on it, along with its history features, will be mostly about the goings on here in Liberty County, Texas, but I will also publish feature articles on Texas history, short story fiction by local authors, humor pieces, photo essays and the meanest editorials I can think up. H&HM’s motto is “Truth without bias. Sarcasm without mercy.”

The first edition of Hoots & Howling Madness is available for free at Hoots.News.

I’ll create a separate tumblr for it, too. So look for that soon.

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When does life begin?

I’m still waiting for mine to begin, but that’s really a different subject.

When a living sperm cell fertilizes a living egg cell they form a single living zygotic cell.

Whatever that animating force is that we call “life,” it is present throughout the process of conception without interruption. Therefore, life itself cannot begin at conception, not literally. Life is inherited. It is passed from parents to offspring, just as it has in an unbroken chain back to the first life.

However that first life started, a share of that same life has been handed down to each of us and to every living thing. We are all part of that one life.

There’s plenty of fodder in that for some very cool mysticism, if you’re into that kind of thing, but mysticism has no place in American law, even if it is mysticism pulled from the Bible. Mysticism, like all other -isms, are useless for resolving complex legal issues.

This is not an argument for or against legalized abortion on demand. I do not want to change anyone’s position on that issue because I do not have a position on it myself. The whole subject is beyond me. This is instead an argument against the thoughtless repetition of meaningless and misleading rhetoric. It is an argument against simply deciding you know a truth you cannot possibly know merely because you like the sound of a slogan, or choosing to believe a thing only because you are comfortable with it.

Truth doesn’t work that way.

Think what you want about abortion, but please think hard about it before taking a position, and try to say exactly what you mean.

No need to read between the lines here. My reason for posting this now is to discourage you from using your position on abortion as a rationalization for reelecting a sociopath to the presidency. You cannot elect the devil to do the Lord’s work.

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Who am I? I’m Samuel L. Corona Fucking Virus, that’s who I am.

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I don't remember who, but someone once wrote that there is nothing more human than to stare out into a silent and indifferent universe and ask, "Why?"

That might be the real message behind the story of Adam and Eve. Offered paradise and eternal life, man would prefer to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. It might not be a story about a fall from grace so much as a story about what it means to be human.

There is nothing more human than the desire to know. We will still risk death for knowledge. Every astronaut who has gone into space has done it. So has every explorer. Laboratory workers do so routinely. Everyone who has ever crawled into a cave or snuck into an abandoned building has put himself at risk just to see what was inside.

In the late 1990s, scientists discovered a bacteria buried deep in the polar ice cap that had not lived anywhere else since the last ice age. They pulled it up and cultivated just to see what it was, never mind that it might have been what wiped out so many species before the last ice age.

At Alamogordo in 1945, the men producing the first atomic bomb were unsure of whether the chain reaction started when the bomb was detonated wouldn't continue into the atmosphere and destroy the whole world.

They calculated the odds of it the way gamblers do at a race track and determined that their likelihood of blowing up the entire planet was no more than one percent. So they decided to chance it.

All of that might be taken as an argument for remaining ignorant, but that is no way to live, and we can't resist the temptation of knowledge, anyway.

Eat of this fruit and you will become as gods, knowing good and evil, and you will not surely die.

Come on, who can resist that?

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Jeff Chambers, as a young man, probably taken in the first 10 years after the Civil War. He would later found The Liberty Vindicator in 1887, a newspaper that is still going after 131 years.

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Just a note to all of the people out there who drug themselves out of bed this morning, against their will, with no feelings of hope that anything will ever get better, to face another seemingly pointless day among family, friends and co-workers who do not understand; to all of you who had to force yourselves to ignore everything your right brains were telling you and once more obey the rational left side as it quietly reminded you that how you felt this morning was only the product of chemicals, only temporary, push on, wait it out, balance will come again, eventually; to all of you who made it through another day without publicly bursting into tears, screaming at your bosses, or simply giving up — that was enough for today, you have done well, the day was not wasted.

"What cannot be overcome must be endured."

I'd like to say that's an old proverb, and maybe it is, but I heard Willie Nelson say it in some movie I can't remember back in the 1980s.

It's still true, though.

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I hate it when people try to make sense out of life by saying something like, "everything that has gone before has led us to this moment."

I heard something along those lines in a commercial a few minutes ago.

First off, duh. It couldn't be otherwise. That's saying only that cause and effect occur in chronological order.

But, even if it is meant to suggest something mystical, something planned from the beginning of time, that makes it worse. I'm sitting here five blocks from where I was born, watching a rerun of Gomer Pyle. If this was the intended outcome, the universe has engaged in some wildly inefficient planning.