Smearing a Justice - The Poison of Progressive Bad Ideas is the Breakfast of Champions

Bad and chemicals and Bad Ideas are the Yin and Yang of madness -from Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

I had an exchange with a young Progressive teacher recently.  This person is smart, but, in the words of Kurt Vonnegut poisoned with 'bad ideas."  We were discussing youth boxing programs.  I stated that The Leo Boxing and Celtic Boxing programs did more for poor inner city young men, than activists, race hustling political priests and tweedy academics.  In our exchange Gandhi came up and I noted that lawyer Gandhi was not averse to actually showing up early and helping others to set-up chairs, as far cry from media hungry street agitators and activist.  This teacher responded that Gandhi was " better man than our late Supreme Court Justice, Scalia, who sat in his chair and took this county back 100 years. Gandi did not harm anyone working with a chair...but Scalia's politically/religious motivations continue to help the wealthy and hurt the poor. He was pro birth and anti life"

The young teacher applied the talking points (bad ideas) right out of Talking Points Memo - a script warehouse for group thought

This is nothing new, shocking, or something required to be ignored by the media. They will and do.

The trouble comes when people accept and never challenge bad ideas.

Justice Scalia was a towering intellect and probably the greatest Supreme Court Justice, since Oliver Wendell Holmes - the Great Dissenter.

However, immediately upon his death the folks at Bad Idea Central began to smear Justice Scalia and it continues.

Bad Ideas are the coin of our realm, I am sad to say.

In his hilarious and humane novel Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut's protagonist, Dwayne Hoover, is mentally ill.  In Vonnegut's way of thinking,  human beings are just 'large rubbery test tubes' and we are filled with either 'good chemicals, or bad chenicals' - Sometimes 'bad chemicals' sit deep in our bodies like fused explosives that will only go off, when triggered by 'bad ideas.'

Vonnegut, who was raised as an atheist by German American Free Thinkers seriously doubted free will.  He disliked religion entirely.

Free Will was something that Vonnegut thought was a dodge, created by organized religions. Rather, we were products of some cosmic crap-shoot and endowed, by No One, with either good chemicals, or bad chemicals and introduced to good ideas, or bad ideas.

Vonnegut seemed a very good, kind and wildly thoughtful man.

Today, I think he might  agree with me that our American condition is quite mad - nuts, milky in filberty, off the chump, crazier than rodents in that old timey out-house.

I do not necessarily believe that our God-given human make-up is a crap-shoot.  Neither did the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia believed that human beings are free agents and the Law was provided to protect, check, or correct the choices we make as individuals and citizens.

Bad ideas abound, because bad ideas are agreed upon and forced down the throats of Americans.  The bad ideas are rooted in group thought.

This morning, I read the latest "Kick the Corpse of Scalia" in  The Washington Post, 

When Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia died 11 days ago at a West Texas ranch, he was among high-ranking members of an exclusive fraternity for hunters called the International Order of St. Hubertus, an Austrian society that dates back to the 1600s.
After Scalia’s death Feb. 13, the names of the 35 other guests at the remote resort, along with details about Scalia’s connection to the hunters, have remained largely unknown. A review of public records shows that some of the men who were with Scalia at the ranch are connected through the International Order of St. Hubertus, whose members gathered at least once before at the same ranch for a celebratory weekend.

The piece goes on to 'suggest' -in an investigative report - but no where reports a nefarious plot in involving Justice Scalia with some crypto-Masonic Catholic Odessa File billionaires.

A Secret Society? They must not be trying too hard.  Hillary's e-mails and Obama's college records stay hidden in plain sight to the American media 'investigative reporters."

I want Glenn Greenwald to fire up The Guardian and all of his satellite hipster-doofus websites to get to the bottom of Justice Scalia's possible membership in the Ancient and Honorable Order of Turtles!*

I read this piece of "investigative journalism" and thought about Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions(BoC). Wheaties is not the BoC, but the martini's served to Dwayne Hoover by a wise-cracking waitress, which adds to his Cosmos-given 'bad chemicals.'  Wheaties had Bruce Jenner on its boxes at the time it was published in 1973 - how about that?

Justice Scalia will never appear on a box of Wheaties and, unless bad ideas get called out for what they truly happen to be, more young, earnest teachers will help the Talking Points Memos - Our National Warehouse of Bad Ideas - murder memory, shared truth and our country.

Speaking of Bad Ideas: Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.

Breakfast of Champion, anyone?

* I am a member - inducted 1972 by Buzzy Lawson, Ma Fleming's Saloon at Swedes in Delavan, WI.

The Clearest Statement on SCOTUS's Gay Marriage Works

Francis Cardinal George, OMI, Archbishop of Chicago is a scholar.  The Gay Marriage initiative is a pop culture civil rights demand that opinion triumphs over truth.

It takes a man and woman to make a baby in Nature. Dow Chemicals or Green Futures BioGenetics, LLC might work on some form of Insta-Kidz, but that would not be natural - as the organic and free range farmers are wont to note.

Gay Marriage is a political power play candied up as civil rights, by hack journalists and pricey politicians. Andrew Sullivan is a homosexual writer, baptized a Catholic, and branded by his liberal publishers as a 'conservative voice' on American culture.  The breathless and the clueless on MSNBC, Fox and CNN will c cite Andrew Sullivan, or Dan Savage, the borderline Kiddie porn advocate and Gay sex-life advice columnist as Catholic opinion on the SCOTUS Rulings and Gay Marriage.


Here is the only succinct and cogent reaction to the twin rulings of last week found in my vast and eclectic readings during the last few days.

STATEMENT OF FRANCIS CARDINAL GEORGE, O.M.I.
REGARDING SUPREME COURT DECISIONS ON MARRIAGE
June 26, 2013
This morning, in the guise of technical legal language, the United States Supreme Court advanced the project of making marriage in the United States a genderless institution. Since women and men are not interchangeable, the Court's action is illogical and pretentious. The Court abuses its own authority when it permits civil law to alter the definition of marriage, which is a natural institution. What is truly at stake in these decisions is not the right of adults to love whom they please, but rather the right of children to have both a mother and a father.

Today's decisions also bring us one step closer to the day when those who continue to distinguish between genuine marital unions and same-sex arrangements will be regarded as "bigots." We have already seen the negative result of gender-free unions on Catholic social services here in Illinois and other states.

We can all be grateful that the Court did not create a new "right" to same-sex marriage, allowing Illinois and other states to continue to acknowledge in law what nature and nature's God already tell us: that marriage is the union of one man and one woman for the sake of family.

That about sums it up.

Catholics have had a target on their backs from the Founding Father and 1st Chief Justice John Jay through the evolved out of the faith Justice Kennedy, who like the evolved Justice Brennan who poked the Pope in the eyes with Roe v. Wade in 1973, proved that he his religious beliefs matter not at all.  The target is getting bigger.

SCOTUS Ruling on Campaign Cash - Prometheus Unbound!

Last week's Supreme Court Ruling allowing corporations and Unions to side-step 527 -Groups like the Swift Boaters and others has the Birkenstock-Soul Patch and Academic Think Tankers running in circles like a dog with three legs.

Calm down Cupcakes. It will be Okay. Not that such admonitions ever lessen the pace of the earnest hearts pounding in those Saltine-thin chests.

Campaign Reform is always an after thought, like locking the doors of the house after second-story engineers looted the place while Dexter and Tanya and the kids were on vacation at the Sun dance Film Festival.

In Greek mythology a set of twin Titans Prometheus and Epimetheus represented forethought and afterthought. James Baldwin retells the tale for all of us Helots:

In those old, old times, there lived two brothers who were not like other men, nor yet like those Mighty Ones who lived upon the mountain top. They were the sons of one of those Titans who had fought against Jupiter and been sent in chains to the strong prison-house of the Lower World. name of the elder of these brothers was Prometheus, or Forethought; for he was always thinking of the future and making things ready for what might happen to-morrow, or next week, or next year, or it may be in a hundred years to come. The younger was called Epimetheus, or Afterthought; for he was always so busy thinking of yesterday, or last year, or a hundred years ago, that he had no care at all for what might come to pass after a while For some cause Jupiter had not sent these brothers to prison with the rest of the Titans.

Prometheus did not care to live amid the clouds on the mountain top. He was too busy for that. While the Mighty Folk were spending their time in idleness, drinking nectar and eating ambrosia, he was intent upon plans for making the world wiser and better than it had ever been before.

He went out amongst men to live with them and help them; for his heart was filled with sadness when he found that they were no longer happy as they had been during the golden days when Saturn was king. Ah, how very poor and wretched they were! He found them living in caves and in holes of the earth, shivering with the cold because there was no fire, dying of starvation, hunted by wild beasts and by one another–the most miserable of all living creatures.“If they only had fire,” said Prometheus to himself, “they could at least warm themselves and cook their food; and after a while they could learn to make tools and build themselves houses. Without fire, they are worse off than the beasts.”

Then he went boldly to Jupiter and begged him to give fire to men, that so they might have a little comfort through the long, dreary months of winter.

“Not a spark will I give,” said Jupiter. “No, indeed! Why,if men had fire they might become strong and wise like ourselves, and after a while they would drive us out of our kingdom. Let them shiver with cold, and let them live like the beasts. It is best for them to be poor and ignorant, that so we Mighty Ones may thrive and be happy."

(Emphasis my own.)

The Progressive Olympians need to shout down orders to the Helots - Rubes, Tea Party-go-ers, Regular Democrats, Republicans that can't afford to join the country club, folks who eat lettuce and not Arugula - you know Rubes - clinging religious gun loving Rubes.

Read some more from James Baldwin or in the original works of Hesiod. My students at Bishop Mac in Kankakee and at La Lumiere School ( Alma Mater of Chief Justice John Roberts) in LaPorte, IN were introduced to Prometheus and his daffy Bro.

It always seems to me that Progressives and Goo-goos are the New Olympians - Jupiter's In-Crowd and they take orders for the top.

If you are like Epimetheus and live by "afterthought" and lock step political principles then everything is Jake, Swell, Hunkey-Dorey. Epimetheus did Okay because he pretty much did nothing - that's the idea.

If, like Prometheus, you live by "forethought" common sense and devote yourself to independence and Liberty - then you get your ass chained to the Carpathian Rocks for eternity and have vultures snack on your livers.

The Supreme Court stood up for Forethought, Common Sense, Free Speech and Liberty and it won't be too bad. even the smart guys at Politico.com say so. Check this out:

But the reality is likely to be something more modest, mainly a shifting of cash that’s already in the system away from so-called 527 groups.

In the past decade, corporations have actually been trying to get out of the business of big political giving. They sided with reform advocates when the McCain-Feingold law was first challenged in 2003 and testified on behalf of its ban on unlimited corporate giving to the political parties, which were dubbed “soft money” donations.

The reasons for this reluctance were complex. Some executives hated the way politicians always had their hands out, making appeals that were difficult to turn down for fear of retribution in the legislative process. Others didn’t like the lack of control they had over how their money was spent.

The court ruling would give corporate officials that control, but many of them may decide — especially those in publicly held companies — to keep the cash for their real business needs.

Running attack ads against political targets would create real risks of alienating customers and shareholders. And, given voters’ sentiments toward corporations today, most politicians would probably not welcome a glowing ad campaign on their behalf that was funded by Big Business.

Most CEOs will avoid the whole question by simply sticking with their traditional — and safe — government relations package of lobbying and limited giving through the in-house political action committee, experts said.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31878.html#ixzz0dXWzQVIU

Prometheus was the Titan of Forethought and it was tough to be Prometheus. It is tough to be an American citizen - it is supposed to be!