Once again, I will reiterate: no scientist in the world that is not prostituting him/herself out to either a polluting industry or one of numerous right-wing political movements denies the fact of global warming.

People that claim otherwise do not accept the philosophy of science. What bothers me is that they fully accept the trappings of science. I would suffer science deniers a little better if they would self segregate. That way, they could test their conspiracy theories on water fluoridation by allowing their children to grow up missing a large fraction of their permanent teeth. They could test their conspiracy theories on vaccines by allowing their infants to break their own ribs with the violent coughing of pertussis. Unfortunately, they can not do anything of the sort with their conspiracy theories of global warming. They insist in damning all of us with their absurd rejection of science. They drivel on in their twitter feeds and on facebook while using smartphones that they must believe were created using magic.

And that leaves us at an impasse. How does one argue with someone who denies the rules of argument? Could we disagree about mathematics in the same way? Can one insist that 0=1 and continue to enjoy a sane audience? The real reason why the sane have no dialogue with the right wing kooks in the recently off-the-rail Republican Party is that they refuse to even agree to obvious premises. It’s not just science. Even accounting is considered subjective to these people. How adding and subtracting numbers in columns of data can be screwed up is beyond me. It is apparently not beyond them, though. I should give up even trying.

But how can we get beyond the craziness of the current political scene if we simply dismiss the 27% of the population for whom anything supported by the Democratic Party is, by definition, wrong? I honestly wish I knew.

I have been asked, on occasion, why I should be interested in policies or activities that have been aimed at blacks, Muslims, gays, or women. The fact is, that I am all of those things. Not literally, certainly, but figuratively. Something implied in the founding documents of this republic has been lost on so many of its beneficiaries. The primary goal was protection against “tyranny of the majority.” I am not sure how anyone could miss this. Most of the people who signed on to a document securing freedom of religion were in agreement about religion. But the fear that Mr. Jefferson so eloquently put to rest, was that religion would become a means of controlling the populace. I believe he would be rolling in his grave, were he not a filthy heathen like myself. No one, on either side of the aisle, can even run for the presidency without an acknowledged claim of belief in some magical bullshit about invisible helpers from beyond the “firmament.” This comes despite the fact that neither Washington, Adams, Jefferson, or Madison made overt claims to such beliefs. Were they inferior to people such as Santorum, Romney, Huckabee, or even Obama? None of them would be electable now. That is due to the hive mind of the religious. People suffering from that disability will not even entertain the possibility of voting for a person that claims no magic friends. This comes despite the fact that the beliefs of religious adherents are less different from those of us heathens than they are from the believers of other sects.

…but I digress…

I started off on niche areas of blogistan. I read about the feelings of oppression expressed by everyone. That includes both the oppressed (the aforementioned) and the wildly unoppressed (reactionary wealthy white Protestant Christian males). In that way, I maintain an understanding of the political context in which myriad peoples view the unfolding events.

Some opportunists play to the uneducated (Hannity, Beck, and Limbaugh). These do not interest me terribly. What I find more interesting is people outside of the ruling caste that play the same tune. All of this is, to me, a vast area of interest. I wonder about which of the puppets in this play are playing their assigned roles, and which are true believers.

As I’ve often said, I’m really into the Christian bible. That is to say, I enjoy listening to or reading biblical scholars discuss interesting minutiae and I find the literary and linguistic history fascinating. As well, I like to read items about and by crazy Christians. But it still strikes me as odd when the Google Ads seem to be targeting me with ads for Christian dating and such nonsense. Isn’t it weird, too, that Christian dating is apparently such big business? Shouldn’t the church serve as the ideal place to meet potential mates? And if the supposed “man upstairs” wanted you to get hitched, isn’t this the sort of service “God” is supposed to provide? Doesn’t preemptive self-segregation effect social insularity as well? Of course, that is rather important to the Jeebus Kooks of the world.

I didn’t watch too much of the Republican National Convention. I saw the Clint and Willard speeches, but didn’t see either Mrs. Willard or Paul Ryan. In addition, I saw snippets that were quite interesting. I have already commented on both the Invisible Obama speech and the Shout-Down-the-Meskin incident (to people wearing cowboy hats, all Spanish speakers are illegal immigrant Mexicans). But one thing difference I found striking between the RNC and the DNC is that the latter was almost annoyingly cheery. Much has been written on the relatively monochrome crowd at the RNC and the diversity of the DNC, but I was considering more the source of their enthusiasm.

Look at the faces of the two different crowds while shouting the obnoxious “USA! USA! USA!” chants. In Charlotte, those faces were goofy and silly and appeared to be having a good time. In Tampa, they were sinister and serious, and appeared to only be having a good time in a mean-spirited way.

If I had to boil it down to a couple of images:

Two different ways of performing obnoxious “USA! USA! USA!” chant: angry and aggressive (RNC Tampa, above), or with some semblance of dignity (DNC Charlotte, below)

I only wish the picture on top could more reflect the audience reaction to the bellicose attempt to shout down a small middle-aged woman for the crime of having a Spanish accent. Some joined the mean-spirited cacophony, while others mouthed the words with a look of confusion while looking around for any sign of what the hell was going on. It is interesting that the two angriest groups were the baseball cap wearing group in the picture and the cowboy hat wearing contingent from Texas. Too tight, perhaps?

I just read an article in Rolling Stone. It was from Matt Taibbi. I’m nearly certain that if I regularly consulted a health care professional, that person would advise me against reading anything written by Matt Taibbi. The article was titled Greed and Debt: The True Story of Mitt Romney and Bain Capital.

You must read this. Prior to today, I had not fully appreciated the kind of business Bain did.

Now I do.

There is no reasonable way to describe it. Instead, Taibbi must resort to mafia terminology:

“Fans of mob movies will recognize what’s known as the ‘bust-out,’ in which a gangster takes over a restaurant or sporting goods store and then monetizes his investment by running up giant debts on the company’s credit line. (Think Paulie buying all those cases of Cutty Sark in Goodfellas.) When the note comes due, the mobster simply torches the restaurant and collects the insurance money. Reduced to their most basic level, the leveraged buyouts engineered by Romney followed exactly the same business model. “It’s the bust-out,” one Wall Street trader says with a laugh. ‘That’s all it is.'”

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/matt-taibbi-mitt-romney-bain-rolling-stone-2012-8#ixzz25NiXpm00

Now I understand. And it makes such sense when concatenated with the “I’m not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.” For those with an IQ in the double digits, I’ll remind you that the one kind of entity that can be drowned in a bathtub is something defenseless. Like a child. Aye, that is the sort of creature Grand Poobah of the Republican Party Grover Norquist is. Yes, indeed, our own personal Quisling has vowed to destroy our government. The first, as Lincoln so eloquently put it,

government of the people, by the people, for the people

shall indeed perish from the earth. In a bathtub. At the hands of men like Willard “Mitt, because Willard sounds like a name for the sort of nerd I would have had my henchmen beat up for me back in college” Romney.