May 5th was the anniversary of the day in 1925 when John Scopes was charged with the hideous crime of teaching evolution to schoolchildren. Today, 83 years after the event that culminated in the Scopes Trial, we’ve come a long way; evolution is now part of the science curriculum in every US public school. Still, there are many who would take us back to those days, banning scientific theory in favor of mythological studies of the nature of life. Many creationists and their less honest “Intelligent Design” brethren (who hide creationism behind a politically correct facade) would happily greet a return to the era when an educator could be arrested for presenting course material which had no biblical basis. The leaders of this movement have deep pockets, numerous followers, tremendous political power, and the support of much of the right-wing punditry in America. They’re well organized, through groups like the Discovery Institute, and they’ve got the wherewithal to produce major motion pictures based around their propaganda. They’re a legion of quote-miners and defiers of logic, they’re relentless, and they only need one judge in one state who supports their tactics at the right moment to start us on that slippery slope that leads us downhill toward theocracy.

Fortunately, we have one great defense against this encroachment of faerie tales into science: observable reality is on our side.

Ironically, this close to the anniversary of Scopes’ arrest, another teacher was fired this week for an alleged offense against all that is holy. Jim Piculas, a frequent substitute teacher in Pasco County, Florida, lost his job because a sleight-of-hand magic trick he did in front of students was deemed to be the practice of wizardry. The district has said in its defense that there were other performance issues involved in the dismissal, but if that was the case, why bring up Piculas’ diabolical spell-casting at all?

The Evangelical Manifesto released this week by a group of conservative Christian leaders purports to be a call to “find a new understanding of our place in public life”, but a quick read through it hints that the “new understanding” is pretty much the same as the “old understanding”. Evolution is wrong, gays are bad, et cetera.

The statement, called “An Evangelical Manifesto,” condemns Christians on the right and left for using faith to express political views

Hey, maybe we are making some progress after all!

without regard to the truth of the Bible

Then again, maybe not.

The writers do seem to have some understanding of what has happened to their movement, though:

“[…] Christians become ‘useful idiots’ for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology,” according to the draft.

Could recognizing one’s own useful idiocy be a first step toward recovery?

Face it, evangelicals, maybe your efforts aren’t bearing the fruit you’d wish them to because your creeds are at best shortsighted and bigoted, very often dishonest, and yes, at times downright crazy.

Lastly we turn to this week’s litany of sex crimes and murders brought to us courtesy of the various Sky-Daddies and their most ardent followers.

The Messiah himself (at least according what Wayne Bent, AKA Michael Travesser, proclaimed about himself in 2000) was arrested on multiple charges of sex with minors. A former member of Bent’s The Lord Our Righteousness Church said Bent had told him to have sex with seven virgins, including two of his own teenage daughters.

But for the last and sickest godcrime this week, we turn to Islam, the good old Religion of Peace. A Pakistani woman named Rukhma was brought across the border into American-made Free Afghanistan in recent months. While there she was able to enjoy the freedom to be raped and the freedom to watch her rapist beat her three year old son to death. Charges were filed, though, and the man was sentenced to 20 years in prison. That means Rukhma will be released from her own prison cell, where she’ll spend four years for committing adultery in allowing herself to be raped, sixteen years before her assailant is released.

The chief prosecutor of eastern Nangarhar province, who oversaw Rukhma’s case, suggested she got off lightly.

“If my wife goes to the bazaar without my permission, I will kill her. This is our culture,” Abdul Qayum shouted scornfully.

His colleagues laughed approvingly. “This is Afghanistan, not America,” Mr Qayum said.

Aaah, sometimes it’s heartening to be reminded just what it is we’re fighting for over there.

There’s been a lot of high-profile praying going on this week. In addition to the general-purpose mass groveling inspired by the May 1 National Day of Prayer, there have been a few notable instances of specific requests to the almighty.

One of these was arranged by Birmingham, Alabama mayor Larry Langford, with costumes paid for by Alabaman taxpayers. It seems Larry purchased 2,000 burlap sacks for a special April 25th ritual he’s dubbed a “day of prayer in sackcloth and ashes”.

Says Larry:

“the Constitution of the United States calls for a separation of church and state - it never said anything about a separation of church from state.”

Normally if someone told me there’d been a San Francisco Pray-in, I would simply assume it was a group of homophobes speaking out against satanic gay lifestyles. This week, though, believers lead by one Rocky Twyman took to their knees to combat that other ungodly menace to America’s spiritual well-being: high gas prices. Now, to be fair, oil prices did actually drop a bit today for the first time in 18 days, though oil futures shot up. If the momentary price drop was God’s doing, he waited a week after the first prayer session to do anything, and he seemed only willing or able to affect a small, temporary change.

Speaking of ineffective prayers: the parents whose daughter died in April because God didn’t want them to seek medical treatment for her diabetes are being charged with second degree reckless homicide. Let’s hope they’re given a fair trial, and by “fair” I mean untainted with drivel about their religious rights. Separation of church and state does not carry with it the freedom to kill - even through well-intentioned wanton neglect - just because God’s name is attached to the process.

Where American Christian fundamentalists have a tendency to kill mainly through ignorance, their middle-eastern Islamic counterparts tend to take a more active role in slaughtering their families. The honor killing of the week was carried out by Abdel-Qader Ali of Basra, Iraq, who took it upon himself to murder his 17 year old daughter over an alleged affair with a British soldier she hadn’t seen in months. Ali of course carried out the act in front of his wife and other children, teaching them a valuable life lesson as he strangled and stabbed the teenager. His wife has divorced him and has sincereceived death threats of her own.

It just wouldn’t be a This Week In Fundies without a little sex talk, and at least two recent news stories involve preists’ favorite kind of sex: child molestation!

Rev. James L. Bevel, former confidante to Martin Luther King, was convicted of incest this week; apparently he decided that the age of six was the right time to start teaching his daughter “the science of marriage”. He faces up to 20 years in prison, during which time he will presumably embark upon a study of the “the science of pleasing his cellmate Bubba”.

Getting off easier (No pun intended! Honest!) was Rabbi Yehuda Kolko or Brooklyn, whose plea bargain in the face of multiple sexual charges involving minors scored him a three-year probation on misdemeanor charges but dismissed all felony charges. I suppose that means he won’t have to wear an orange jumpsuit to attend trials for the multiple civil suits he faces for the same alleged crimes.

That’s all for this installment. Until next week, I’ll keep praying that people will come to their senses.

Er, that is, praying in a metaphorical sense, because… well, you know.

Now that I’m actively collecting odd and/or disturbing news stories about the religiously inclined, I find myself in the position of having so much material to write about that I don’t know where to start, or how to condense it all into a blog entry that won’t run on for too many pages.

Let’s warm up with links to the story about the priest who disappeared while flying under party balloon power and the story of the priest in Russia who was tricked into blessing a strip club. Then of course there’s the tale of magical penis theft from Brazil and the conference where Muslims are trying to push the idea of moving the international date line to Mecca. Best quote from that particular farce:

In a clear support for the call, Islamic scholar Yousuf al-Qaradawi said Islam, “unlike other religions, never contradicted science”.

Since “Jedi” is apparently now a religion as well, I can even include the story about the drunken Darth Vader’s arrest on assault charges.

Now on to the fundies’ favorite subject to try not to think about - or at least, to try to hide from everyone else how much they’re thinking about it: sex.

I’ve written once or twice here about the Bush administration’s abstinence-only sex education program, and it’s been back in the news again lately. House democrats convened a panel this week to discuss the elimination of this program, and were told of its many shortcomings by members of the American Public Health Association, the American Psychological Association, and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. This was not enough for at least one republican in the room, though:

Rep. John Duncan, a Tennessee Republican, said that it seems “rather elitist” that people with academic degrees in health think they know better than parents what type of sex education is appropriate. “I don’t think it’s something we should abandon,” he said of abstinence-only funding.

I suppose that if parents truly believe that institutionalized ignorance is the solution to the problems of teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease, they should be allowed to opt their children out of real sex ed classes, but I don’t want my tax dollars spent to support an anti-educational agenda.

LaVern Jordan, founder of the Parkway Christian School in Texas, knows a little about sex. Or, at the very least, he’s eager to find out about it - so eager, in fact, that it seems he solicited sex from a student’s mother in lieu of tuition fees, and was caught on tape doing it. Sadly, the comments on this YouTube video are full of Christians screaming that he’s being persecuted for being a Christian.

Speaking of persecution of Christians: Mount Vernon, Ohio middle school teacher John Freshwater made the news over claims his first amendment rights were being violated when administrators told him to remove all religious items from his classroom; these included a bible on his desk and a copy of the ten commandments on the classroom door. A large group of student supporters responded by bringing bibles in to sit on their desks during class, and a rally was held in his honor.

I don’t really have a problem with someone sitting a bible on his desk in a school setting, so long as that bible in no way becomes part of the curriculum he’s teaching. So I fully support him unless, of course, there’s more the story. For instance, I’d have a problem if he were to promote creationIDsm in class by, I dunno, including anti-evolution propaganda pamphlets in the course material or doing something totally goofy like throwing a bunch of Legos on the floor and asking the students how they could possibly randomly assembled themselves. I mean, really, the way this guy is being harassed for his faith, you’d think he’d done something totally inappropriate like, just to make up some random, cruel example, using an electrical device to burn crosses into his students’ flesh.

The fax stated, “We are religious people, but we were offended when Mr. Freshwater burned a cross onto the arm of our child. This was done in science class in December 2007, where an electric shock machine was used to burn our child. The burn was severe enough that our child awoke that night with severe pain, and the cross remained there for several weeks. … We have tried to keep this a private matter and hesitate to tell the whole story to the media for fear that we will be retaliated against.”

Oh, what will those poor, harried Christians be persecuted for next?

For people who are so afraid of death that they need to pretend it’s only a temporary state, the religious sure are in a hurry to send other people to theirs early. Another child, this time a fifteen month old, has died because her parents wouldn’t seek medical attention for conditions that are easily treatable by antibiotics. One imagines those same parents would have no problem marching in a rally shouting, “abortion is murder!”, but neglect of the living is just fine as long as it’s done in God’s name.

Christianity has no monopoly on the death-for-God notion, though. In fact for the most part they’re not very good at it. The BBC this week published an article about the imposition of the death penalty under Islam for people who leave the faith, and the London Times ran a story about a gay Iranian whose partner was executed for his sexual orientation and who now fears for his life because the Dutch government denied him the political asylum he requested to help avoid a similar fate himself.

I’m guessing the gay marriage thing is still off a little in the future for the middle east.

Turns out there’s a wikipedia page featuring a list of high-profile evangelist scandals as far back as the 1920s. It’s a fascinating collection of felonies, rank hypocrisy, con artistry, extramarital affairs, and sexual misconduct. How is it that so many people continue to put their trust in men and women like these in the face of so much evidence that so many of them are nothing but two-bit crooks gone big-time?

Could it be related to the same lack of reasoning that led them to accept the invisible sky fairy to begin with?

“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman: it is an abomination.”

That line from Leviticus is the one most frequently referenced by Christians to justify their opposition (in various forms) to homosexuality. It came up in a discussion over on the Richard Dawkins forums recently, and inspired me to dig into that sentence a little, try to understand what it’s really trying to say.

I was shocked, I tell you, absolutely shocked at what I discovered. But it’s all so clear now.

“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman: it is an abomination.”

You, in this case, is not explicitly specified, so it has to be assumed that you refers to the reader, which could be a man or a woman (unless of course women shouldn’t be able to read… and while misogyny isn’t specifically a sin, we all know that the loving Christian God would never lower himself to such assumptions, right?) So for each reader of this rule, there are a limited number of possibilities:

• The reader is male and homosexual, in which case he clearly can’t lie with another male
• The reader is female, in which case she clearly can’t lie with a male (read the passage again - it says so!) By logical extension, then, any sexual contact between male and female is also an abomination.

If the reader is female, Leviticus does not, however, impose any limits on your lying with another woman. Conclusion:

God loves him some hot girl-on-girl action.

I know it’s hard to believe, but once you accept lesbianism as a holy institution, so many mysteries are unraveled!

The male-dominated priesthood takes vows of chastity because all male-female sexual contact is sinful!

Why do so many women become nuns? Just what do you think they’re talking about when they mention “doing their devotionals”? Come on, admit it - how many nuns have you seen who didn’t look like stereotypical butch lesbians? And those vows of silence they sometimes take? Those are just excuses not to talk because their tongues are so tired.

The bible goes on to say: “And you shall not lie with any beast and defile yourself with it, neither shall any woman give herself to a beast to lie with it: it is perversion.”

Sorry, ladies, I’m afraid that means the oversized battery powered contraption you’ve nicknamed “The Beast” will have to go. God says so.

It seems as if every day there’s some new scandal or story of stupidity involving members of the holier-than-thou set. Except on Sundays, of course, which are their days of rest. You’d think they’d be lying low for a while after the recent national embarrassment of PZ Myers’ expulsion from Expelled! Let’s Show Pictures of Hitler (while Richard Dawkins walked right in), the subsequent attempts to make excuses for their ineptness, and most of all, the recent tragic news of the 11 year old girl who died because her fundamentalist parents thought prayer would be an effective cure for her diabetes. But no, they soldier on, almost as if they don’t understand that these stories reflect negatively on them…

As the latest of my occasional attempts to coerce myself into posting more often, I’ve titled this post “This Week In Fundamentalism, Volume 1″. The “Volume 1″ part implies there will be more, and the “Week” part implies that it might appear something close to weekly. Maybe I’ll take the hint I’m dropping myself, but it’s hard to tell; sometimes I can be pretty thick-headed.

Anyway, on to the subject at hand:

I remember a story from while back about an outspoken atheist named Rob Sherman, who fought a court battle against a mandatory Moment of Silence at his daughter’s school. I was less than thrilled by this action, because there was never a mandatory prayer involved (though the word “prayer” was in the name of the act that created the MoS) and there was no indication that it would be anything other than a quiet moment when those who wanted to pray or gather their thoughts could do so. Railing against an optional, voluntary, quiet, unguided religious rite seemed to me to play right into the stereotypes religious folks have about militant atheists who want to take their rights away.

Mr. Sherman’s recent actions, however, I heartily approve of. He’s involved in the investigation of some shady dealings involving the Illinois governor’s alleged funneling of $1 million to a religious school, and it was during his testimony before a House committee on April 2nd that he was verbally assaulted by a legislator:

Davis: I don’t know what you have against God, but some of us don’t have much against him. We look forward to him and his blessings. And it’s really a tragedy — it’s tragic — when a person who is engaged in anything related to God, they want to fight. They want to fight prayer in school.

I don’t see you (Sherman) fighting guns in school. You know?

I’m trying to understand the philosophy that you want to spread in the state of Illinois. This is the Land of Lincoln. This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their children.… What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it’s dangerous–

Sherman: What’s dangerous, ma’am?

Davis: It’s dangerous to the progression of this state. And it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! Now you will go to court to fight kids to have the opportunity to be quiet for a minute. But damn if you’ll go to [court] to fight for them to keep guns out of their hands. I am fed up! Get out of that seat!

Sherman: Thank you for sharing your perspective with me, and I’m sure that if this matter does go to court—

Davis: You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.

(Audio of the exchange here)

Eric Zorn, the Chicago Tribune reporter who covered the story, made an excellent point:

“Consider what the outcry would have been if a lawmaker had launched a similar attack on the beliefs of a religious person.”

I also wonder if Rep. Davis - a black woman - sees any irony in standing in front of a legislative body attempting deny a person’s rights based on his beliefs, when it wasn’t so very long ago in this country when she would very likely have been similarly shouted down when fighting for her rights in front of earlier generations of righteous bigots who would see her as an uppity negro or a woman who didn’t know her place.

I was intrigued by her repeated “Land of Lincoln” reference. Intrigued enough to see if I could find some information on Honest Abe’s thoughts on religion. The results of a quick Google search are quite interesting; there exist a large body of quotes attributed to him that seem to indicate a belief in the Christian god, but also a number of quotes that seem strong indicators that his view of the world might have been a little closer to Mr. Sherman’s than to those of the representative who invoked his name. Perhaps he presented one face publicly, knowing he needed the support of the religious community, while presenting another in private? Maybe he was simply a deist like most of the founding fathers, believing in some sort of creator but rejecting dogmatic attempts to understand that being.

My earlier views of the unsoundness of the Christian scheme of salvation and the human origin of the scriptures, have become clearer and stronger with advancing years and I see no reason for thinking I shall ever change them.

What is to be, will be, and no prayers of ours can arrest the decree.

The Bible is not my book nor Christianity my profession.

The United States government must not undertake to run the Churches. When an individual, in the Church or out of it, becomes dangerous to the public interest he must be checked.

There was the strangest combination of church influence against me. Baker is a Campbellite; and therefore, as I suppose with few exceptions, got all of that Church. My wife had some relations in the Presbyterian churches, and some in the Episcopal churches; and therefore, wherever it would tell, I was set down as either one or the other, while it was everywhere contended that no Christian ought to vote for me because I belonged to no Church, and was suspected of being a Deist and had talked of fighting a duel.

(All of the above, along with some testimonials written by people who knew Lincoln personally, are collected at PositiveAtheism.org)

And there’s this one, which seems almost prophetic these days:

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.

Land of Lincoln, indeed.

On the international front, the leader of the Russian doomsday cult who had his followers holed up in a cave since November awaiting the end of the world, was understandably upset when it didn’t happen. So upset, in fact, that he tried to commit suicide by beating himself on the head with a log.

In the spirit of modern American foreign policy, I suggest embarking on a policy of preemptive log-beatings to guard against this sort of behavior in the future.

Normally I’m hesitant to post just to show a single image or link, but I came across this on The Stubborn Curmudgeon and had to share:

I haven’t been closely following the twin brouhahas in Florida and Texas, where fundamentalist school board members are pushing to add Intelligent Creationism-In-Disguise Design to the science curriculum, and science-minded folks and supporters of church-state separation are fighting tooth and nail against it. I have, however, skimmed a little of the IDers’ propaganda and seen a number of their most common arguments posted various places around the net.

I’d like to address this post directly to the CreationIDsm supporters out there and offer some helpful advice that will help to keep you from sounding like morons in front of anyone with an open mind who paid attention in their high school biology classes. The crux of that advice would be the following:

Attack science all you want. Science is a big boy, it can handle the teasing. The advancement of science progresses when rational, intelligent people find flaws in our understanding of the universe and point them out and try to find better explanations. Believe me, if any of you really do at some point come up with a valid, testable alternative or addendum to the theory of evolution, eager scientists will flock to your door.

Here’s where you seem to have the biggest problem, though. You only get to attack actual science. Arguments against assertions that scientists have never made will only fly among people who are just as willfully ignorant as you have decided to be. You don’t get to make up your own phony straw-man scientific theory and disprove that.

Let’s take a look at some of the creationist arguments I’ve come across and how they distort some of the basic premises and evidence for evolutionary theory.

“Nobody’s ever seen one kind of animal turn into another!”
I’ll wager nobody’s ever seen anyone outside of religious circles claim that this is what Darwin’s theory predicts. I guarantee there is no scientific journal that ever published a prediction that a goat and a lemur would tap limbs together, shout “Wonder twin powers, activate!”, and turn into a food processor and a racehorse. Evolution, for those people who for some reason haven’t figured this out yet, is caused by the accumulation of minor changes in each new generation of a species over time.

“If we come from apes, then why are there still apes?”
There are still apes (including ourselves - see below) because we haven’t managed to make the surface of the planet unlivable just yet. The modern creatures we refer to as apes simply share a common ancestor with us, but have evolved differently to suit the environments where they’ve lived.

“No way do I come from an ape!”
Yes you do. Your mother is an ape. Dad too. So are you, and George Bush, and me, and Angelina Jolie, and everyone you’ve ever met. Big brains and less body hair do not a Get Out Of Hominidae Free card make. If this is merely a clumsy way to argue that you can’t possibly be related to anything that can’t read a holy book, your DNA begs to differ.

“There are no transitional fossils!”
Bullshit. Every fossil is a transitional fossil. I can spend an afternoon digging with my hands along the C&D Canal and bring home fifty transitional fossils. Just because we haven’t found preserved specimens of every single life form from the earliest glop of protein up to, say, John Travolta (yeah, I know some evolutionary leaps are smaller than others), doesn’t mean they never existed. Stuffing God into those gaps is akin to me watching your favorite Veggie Tales movie with you, and when it skips a few frames from a scratch on the DVD, shouting, “See! I told you this was a drama about Hispanic street gangs in 1930s Chicago!”

“Believing that something as complex as a human could come about randomly is like believing that a tornado in a junkyard could assemble a 747!”
There is a certain amount of randomness to mutations themselves, but the evolutionary process itself is anything but random. The phrase “Natural Selection” should be a dead giveaway.

In order for your 747 analogy to work, the junkyard would have to have all the basic building blocks of the 747 in great number. Further, those parts would have to be inclined to naturally link up with the correct matching parts whenever they come in contact, the way the substances that make up living things are inclined to chemically bind with one another. Lastly, and here’s the really important part: whenever correct parts link together they stay together. Survival of the fittest. Now spin your tornado for 4.5 billion years, give or take. Maybe, given all those conditions, your - uh… no, never mind, it’s still a stupid analogy.

How about if we try it this way: If the tornado selects for characteristics that allowed flight and two airborne pieces of scrap metal could share a special kind of hug, nine months later you’d have a swarm of little baby gliders, and their great, great grandchildren might develop little propellers, and on, and on.

The point here being that the construction process of a 747 is significantly different from the development of a life form - even the observable, single-generation process of a child forming in the womb - so comparisons of the two just don’t work even if you do have some clue about evolution.

“No one has ever seen one species evolve into another!”
Well, despite the fact that evolution is a process slow enough that it seldom happens at a rate where major changes accrue over a time span so sort as a human lifetime, speciation has been observed.

“I accept microevolution - small changes from one generation to the next - but not macroevolution, or large changes.”
Macroevolution is nothing more than the cumulative effects of micro. Pretty simple and straightforward.

“The [eye, bacterial flagellum] is too complicated to have evolved by chance!”
There you go with that ‘chance’ thing again. Natural selection. Selection selection selection.

In the specific case of the eye, scientists actually have a pretty good idea of its evolution from the simplest of photosensitive cells - perhaps enabling an organism to find sunlight for warmth, or to warn it of movement nearby - to the complex (but flawed - your creator is a lousy engineer) mechanisms I’m using to help me proofread this before I hit the ‘Publish’ button. As for the flagellum, I think the Dover, PA court battle brought to light that its “irreducible complexity” was in fact very reducible, as each and every one of its component parts was found to serve a purpose independent of the flagellum assembly as a whole.

There, I hope I’ve given you a good starting point. Now scamper off and work on coming up with some new arguments, this time against a non-hallucinatory target.

To my fellow atheists:

Here it is, December 21, start of the Winter Solstice and 4 days until Christmas, and I still haven’t received my invitation from the secret non-believers’ cabal to join in on the annual War on Christmas. I’ve been posting here about my non-belief for months, but have yet to be given the decoder ring or even taught the secret handshake. What gives? I know you people can’t be that disorganized that I’d be lost in the shuffle, because how could such a group like that such an effective multi-pronged attack on all things Christian?

Please get in touch ASAP. I won’t post my contact info here because I know you can get it easily through your allies in the Godless Secular Liberal Media(tm). Just, uh, don’t call me on the 25th - I’ll be busy celebrating a holiday with friends and family.

UPDATE: The Daily Atheist has posted an interesting historical tidbit today about the history of the “War on Christmas”.

After two elections defined by the “values voter” crowd and framed in fundamentalism that tells us our sexuality is to be denied and hidden, the morality crusaders of this nation have begun to see the fruits of their labor. In a nation where “abstinence only” sex education is the rule if your school wants federal funds, and pharmacists who refuse to sell birth control due to religious convictions, there’s good news: the spread of sexually transmitted diseases is at an all time high!

In addition to upswings in chlamydia and syphilis, a gonorrhea superbug (which sounds like a 70’s rock band) with a high resistance to antibiotics is spreading quickly not just in the liberal heathen oasis of California, but in the midwest and south as well, where one would presume the dominance of red-state values and healing prayers would alleviate the problem.

Ah, well… another victory for the forces of ignorance.

I don’t know what’s got me down this week - maybe the news, maybe the switch back to Standard time from Daylight Savings over the weekend, or maybe the arrival of cool weather after several unseasonably warm months has finally convinced me that summer might, possibly, be over. Probably some combination of all of the above.

World news certainly isn’t cheerful. That nuclear-armed “democratic” dictatorship the US has supported, in much the same way it used to support Saddam Hussein when he was our puppet, is crumbling. The declaration of martial law there and the imprisonment of dissenting voices are examples of what can go wrong when one single executive is given too much power. They’re also examples of steps Bush can legally take now in America, thanks to a batshit-insane executive branch and a congress packed with lapdog Republicans and invertebrate Democrats.

On the flip side, the folks in Pakistan who are standing up to Musharraf are mostly sympathetic to the fanatical Islamists (like Al Qaeda, the real, Osama Bin Laden one, not the made-up Al Qaeda of news reports from Iraq). So if the military dictatorship fails, it will most likely be replaced by a cruel and corrupt government that enforces oppressive sharia law at nuclear-missile-point.

So, really, it’s a lose-lose situation, exacerbated of course by our little adventures in Afghanistan (where the Taliban are taking back control of one large province after another) and Iraq (do I even have to mention how well that’s going?)

Hey, but at least the economy is good! Well, okay, the dollar is plummeting. Yeah, our national debt is skyrocketing faster than oil prices. It could be that the fall of our currency will make the price of goods from all those third-world countries (you know, the ones that decades of of Free Market Uber Alles economic policy have sent tens of thousands of US jobs to, all in the name of saving 10 cents on a pack of socks at Wal-Mart) more expensive for us.

Not to worry, though, I’m sure our friends in China and Saudi Arabia will take advantage of the exchange rate and bolster our economy by investing billions more in US-owned companies. I hear the auto industry in particular is ripe for tak- er, “investment”.

There are a few uplifting stories in the news this morning, though.

I’ve been following the news about the 8-limbed little girl in India who underwent surgery to have her not-fully-formed conjoined twin removed so she can do normal things like walk and live. Word on the news networks this morning is that, though she’s not out of the woods yet, the surgery was a success. (As an aside, I wonder if births of children like her were the basis for the many-limbed deities of the Hindu religion. Certainly seems likely, and she herself was worshipped by some in her village.)

In a stunning turn of events, Republican Chuck Grassley has launched an investigation into the finances of several prominent televangelists. Go get ‘em, Chuck!

As I wrote this, the sun finally peaked out from behind the clouds, and my mood has begun to improve. I think I’ll slip on a jacket and take a short walk amid the fall foliage. The fact that a species evolved that can take such enjoyment from the feel of sunshine and the sound of a breeze blowing through colored leaves is one of those many wonders of the universe that are cheapened when we ascribe them to some imaginary higher power. The fact that such wonders exist in such great numbers, and that most of them will go on existing no matter we hairless apes do to ourselves, is uplifting. I feel better already.