Keeping pests “in their place”— i.e., ground under the heel of a boot— is seldom the first priority in the political arena, let alone out on the far fringes of suburbia. . .

J.A.F. Shackleford.
It would be one thing if Republicans/Conservatives only lied to Democrats and Independents. But they lie to themselves, too. And when you lie to yourself you never learn.

And they lie to each other.  Lying to one’s self is the most destructive form of betrayal of trust;  if you can’t trust your self, who can you trust?  Eventually, no divine light can penetrate. When you realize the counseling it would take to get such people to functionally honest levels of reality comprehension, you realize it’s a task that requires more than the power of man.

NonyNony.
When I was growing up, the argument was always “Well, the GOP may not be perfect but at least they stand for something – Democrats don’t stand for anything.” I still hear people say that but it just makes me laugh – the GOP may stand for something, but who can tell what it is? You can’t trust them to tell you what they stand for – they’ve been lying for so long that I’m not even sure that they know what their “core principles” are anymore.

Precisely where we must go— to begin an accounting of moral behavior that knowingly distorts truth— what your parents called  lying— to reinforce what they claim to believe is truth. The more they personally engage in the corruption of truth, the more inherent lying becomes, the more permanent their departure from the nature of reality becomes;  the more unreal they become.

That’s not a small problem.  Remember, just a few of the MSM only recently found the balls to call a lie, a lie, to call liars, liars.  Lying has become such a commonplace occurrence, so much a part of our daily lives, that it is accepted as just a necessary part of reality.  It’s not.  There is no actual giant cockroach at the door.  It doesn’t have a human voice, it doesn’t have pizzas for you.  It doesn’t drive a fucking primered Fairlane.

The fact that so many elected politicians and members of the press are liars, that they actually expect their lies to be taken seriously— as reality— makes them a tremendous challenge to the integrity of our nation.  When will betrayal of governmental trust be punishable by death?  When we finally learn to take governmental trust as seriously as we do any other capital offense.

Public Liars— and the stinking lies they tell— must be met with the full force of righteous indignation, public exposure, and condemnation of the full extent of their moral hypocrisy.  And always— when appropriate— prosecution and even extermination— to the full extent of our laws as a people and as a nation.  True reality deserves nothing less.

The Bushies settle into private life with an innocent lil’ barbecue.

James Moore.

[N]one of this is our fault. America is not to blame. There are just some bad actors in high profile positions. Really? Our sports heroes are gone, exposed as liars and cheaters. The people we trust with our money turn out to be thieves of a magnitude not known to history. Our president lies us into war, ruins damned near every institution of our government with political folly, and then retires safe from the law in the western sun. You can’t even ask the question “What the hell’s wrong with us?” because the answer requires decades of explanation. An increasing number of Americans wonder if our country will even survive and a scary proportion of those have asked the troubling follow up question as to whether we deserve to survive and have entered our final decline.

Do we deserve to survive?
It’s an intricate question, even if a blunt one.  The people of America, taken as a whole, certainly want to survive, but to qualify that want with “deserve” questions whether or not we are entitled to survive, and that inquiry must take into account our national and personal values, and how we live them.

At least some of the outrage that courses through the American psyche today derives from recognition of our shredded values of justice, and whether we can still claim we are a nation of law when our leaders suffer no consequences for their crimes.

The Republicans can feign shock at such suggestions, and the Democrats can attempt to ignore the anger of the people, even as Obama skirts the issue with his remark that “No one is above the law,” which becomes a hollow platitude when divested from the will to prosecute War Crimes committed by the Bush-Cheney regime.  At the end of our days as a nation, should this sorry state of affairs be our undoing, history will certainly condemn our lack of will to live the truth of our professed values;  the dream that was America will have become a nightmare.

But it may also be worse than that.  At the end of our days as individuals, there will only be one judge whom will be deciding our fate as continuing self-conscious, personal beings. Pleas of “It wasn’t my fault” will fall on the ear of infallible Deity;  not the bored and callow critics of the failings of a faint-hearted people.  The personal cost for the failure to live the values we say we profess in our hearts will be far more dear than the mere degradation of a failed nation.

•

But look you well to the goal of destiny! Pleasures are indeed suicidal if they succeed in destroying property, which has become the institution of self-maintenance; and self-gratifications have indeed cost a fatal price if they bring about the collapse of marriage, the decadence of family life, and the destruction of the home— man’s supreme evolutionary acquirement and civilization’s only hope of survival.

—The Urantia Book

•

•  •  •  SCATOLOGY WEEK  •  •  •

Joe Lieberman offers up a ginormous double shitburger to the Senate Democrats that allowed him to continue as chairman of two senate committees. “I made it myself,” quipped Lieberman.

WASHINGTON — Senator Joe the Lie berman, with McCain Campaign trail makeup still etched in the folds of his face, presented the Senate Democratic Caucus with one of his legendary homemade, giant double-shitburgers, after emerging victorious from a secret caucus vote which allows him top off his stint as a disloyal Dick with the retention of his two senate chairs.

Although many members of the caucus are privately furious over Lieberman’s ugly butt-sucking behavior during the campaign, they are betting their “lingering resentment” will cause Lieberman to cooperate with them when it comes time to get down in the sewage again. This kind of “you rub shit on my back and I’ll rub shit on yours” ploy has always produced reciprocity in the past, but some senators are openly skeptical about ever trusting Lieberman again.  “He’s a giant double-shitburger-making machine,” said one senator who voted against Lieberman. “Some of my colleagues think this is politically smart,” he said, “but just wait. Lieberman is a lying sack of shit, and he doesn’t care who steps in it. There’s no more trusting toads like that.”

Sarah Palin’s political career will probably be studied for quite some time, but not because she’s ever going to be elected to anything again.  It’s going to be studied as the culminating disaster of a disastrous political campaign and philosophy that shredded every value America has ever embraced as the true American Way in an effort to grasp power.

Frank Schaeffer

Sarah Palin will never hold national office nor will any Republican at the presidential level for a long time to come. Why? Because America has uneducated jerks in it but is not a nation of uneducated jerks. The Republicans are done, hoisted on the petard of their own “southern strategy.”

The Republican Party is only a step away from becoming the fringe of the fringe, identified more with cross-burning weirdoes wearing hoods, folks like the Alaska secessionist party, all those gun owners stocking up on assault weapons before the “Socialist/United Nations/Obama/Muslim” conspiracy comes to fruition, than with anything remotely like a serious national political force.

The Republican Party— and I speak as a former lifelong Republican who, up through the 2000 primary campaign supported John McCain and even worked for him by arguing his case on various conservative and religious radio stations— is now the toy of the Rush Limbaugh windbags. These folks include outright crazies (such as Sarah Palin’s Assemblies of God pals who are waiting for Spaceship Jesus to rescue them and/or rooting out “witches” from their midst), white racists and a few not-very-bright attention seekers, including Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity etc.

Read their blogs! Listen to their talk radio! You’ll be in the twilight zone of front page tabloid fantasy on a par with Bat Boy Attacks! headlines. Bill Buckley roll over.

The Religious Right, the racists, the anti-gay hate-mongers are now not only marginalized but thoroughly out of step with even members of their own former constituency. For instance the Gordon College student newspaper (Gordon is an influential Evangelical College north of Boston) endorsed Obama this year. Many young evangelicals voted for the Democrats. James Dobson, Fox News, Limbaugh, et al, were utterly powerless to do more than stir up hate. They are losing the next generation of their “base.”

And that’s a good thing. The under-educated will always be with us, but we cannot allow them to be used by the unscrupulous to control our elections ever again. There’s simply too much at stake.

Meanwhile many former Republicans— like me— ran to Obama as fast as our legs could carry us and away from our willfully “we’re not an elite” moronic former party. Republican commentators such as David Brooks and George Will mourned the loss of the Republican center. Others noted the Republicans have become anti-intellectual. “Anti-intellectual”?  They wish!  How about simply anti-literate?

Indeed.  But what will we do about it?  Will we find the spine to do what’s right?  Cradle to grave education opportunities for all our citizens; mandatory graduation from statemanship schools for all who would enter public life;  schools of philosophy;  an overhaul of our nation’s plan of suffrage.

Meanwhile the fringe of the fringe is holding meetings where they’ll talk to themselves and look at the “facts” of their alternative universe in order to figure out “what went wrong.” These are the same “leaders” (like William Kristal) who think Sarah Palin has a big political future!

Sarah Palin will never be president because the right wing of the Republican Party has perfected the art of believing their own bullshit, starting with the idea that is-Africa-a-country-or-a-continent?-Palin has a future. Palin and her fans don’t know it yet, but having reduced itself to a grim angry joke, the Republican Party has also divorced itself from American politics and. . . is destined for the garbage can.

I agree;  but a grim angry joke with any political power is still a serious threat to the health of the nation. When the majority of Americans vote for a new direction, it cannot countenance a political party trying to pull us back to an ignorant and immoral past, a politics of fear and hate.  If the Republican debacle of the last three decades has produced anything of value, it is the crystal clear knowledge that their politics and their philosophy must be abandoned to oblivion.

It was late; my eyes were bloody red tired; I needed some music to get me focused for one last paragraph. But the debul must be fuckin’ with me. Who else could slip Wayne Newton’s “Dake Shaen” into my iTunes?!
Anyway. I put it in the trash, and played this.

A little out of sync maybe.  Maybe insipid to some. Lyrically, not all that inspiring, but yes, everybody is changing, like it or not.  Change is the watchword of the universe, after all.
And I wondered;  why can’t the electorate look like this?  Why can’t earth-shaking, paradigm-shifting change occur this election?

What would it be like to live in a true blue liberal land?

Moral choices.  The highest moral choice anyone can make is the choice of the highest possible value.
And that choice— regardless of wildly divergent intellectual or philosophical diversity— will  always be to choose to do the will of God, consciously, or unconsciously.  The problem is, of course, too many of us haven’t any clue what is of highest possible value. That’s why people watched “Dancing with the Stars” instead of the last presidential debate. That’s why people yell  “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” back at John McCain when he says, “Who is the real Barack Obama?”  That’s why this world is so backward, barbaric, and beleaguered.

But still. What a thing it would be to watch a presidential election unfold a blue map like the one above; state by state, filling in a blue victory— not for “Democrats” over “Republicans,” but for hope, fairness, progress and cooperation— over hate, anger, fear, and class culture warfare.   An unfurling of a blue field of fifty white stars unified and working together to form a cohesive nation of Americans, united for truth, justice and the American Way. . .

Oh;  wait. . . I remember now. That’s just a tee vee dream. . . foisted on us by. . .

Superman.

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The little man rises up on his toes again.  It’s an uncontrollable urge to be bigger than he really is, if even for a split second. The little arms shoot out in tandem, fingers splayed as wide as they will go;  the gesture is brief, tentative, and awkward, out of sync with his emphasis:  “Sentor [sic] Obama took a very different approach to the count- [sic] crisis our country faced [sic]. (Loud Boos)  At first he didn’t want to get involved.  You may have noticed it’s not my style to phone it in. (Cheers) I went to Washington last week;  to make sure that the taxpayers in Ohio and across this great country were not left footing the bill for mistakes made in [sic] Wall Street and evil and greed in Washington.” (Cheers)

But just like Sarah Palin knows foreign policy because of her state’s proximity to Russia, John McCain solves economic crises by moving his phone closer to Washington.  That means he got involved, and that he didn’t “phone it in” like he claims Obama did, because he made a “local” call.

Stalemate of the dominance of mediocrity
What happened on Capital Hill today was the stalemate of the dominance of mediocrity. House Republicans threw a shit-fit because Naughty Nancy insulted them by having the cojones to actually blame them for the mess their deregulation of the banking industry has created.  Of course there were Democrats who were complicit;  there always are. But all these incompetent politicians are reflective of the dominance of mediocrity in government, and now, as someone has famously said, “The chickens [have come] home to roost.”

Anyone who can dress themselves knows we’ve had evil idiots at the helm for nearly eight years; but what is not more commonly understood is that no state can transcend the moral values of its citizenry as exemplified in their chosen leaders. Ignorance and selfishness will insure the downfall of even the highest type of government.

But America is still determined to flirt with impending disaster by electing to its highest office an angry little midget, a small and arrogant-minded little weeny of a man, who masquerades as a hero, a man of the people, as “one of us.” As “anything” that will garner him a few more votes. And to add catastrophe to injury, he has selected a total incompetent to step in when he strokes out.

He has said he will do whatever it takes to win, including the worst that boundless selfish ambition can dredge up, and he’s proving it day by day. His ridiculous antics of the past week should leave every rational American indignant that a prospective president would grandstand in such a juvenile fashion, and in thrusting himself into a problem beyond his abilities to comprehend let alone resolve, to do absolutely nothing to solve the problem.

Wall Street may yet burn to the ground;  good riddance. The banking industry may get the ass-whipping it has deserved for decades, and the middle class may finally rise up and make it clear whom these mediocre little pricks work for. Whatever happens, make no mistake:  the change we need has come very much closer.

Ex-president Bush shakes hands with ex-president McCain, who was officially replaced as president today, after a stroke left him with the communication skills of a very bright rutabaga, (a cross between a cabbage and a turnip.)  McCain’s wicked shiner was not explained.

Excerpts from Mark Crispin Miller:  (my emphasis)

The choice of Sarah Palin has been widely and repeatedly assailed as evidence of John McCain’s “bad judgement.” Certainly that choice was very bad. Indeed, it may prove to be catastrophic. But to take it as a sign of John McCain’s mere recklessness is probably a big mistake. First of all, there is no reason to believe that the decision really was McCain’s, since Karl Rove’s minions are in charge of his campaign, which means that Rove himself is running it (as he evidently has been from the start). And while it surely was a rotten choice in moral and/or civic terms, it certainly was not an instance of “bad judgement” in Rove’s moral universe, where winning is the only thing that counts; and Sarah Palin was selected so that (she and) John McCain could “win”—and, even more important, get away with it.

They picked Palin not because she is a woman, and might therefore appeal to diehard Hillary supporters. They picked Palin because she is a theocratic true believer, who has the Christianists all swooning at the prospect of her reign (which will commence as soon as Jesus answers all their prayers for John McCain’s quick death). To get some sense of their millennial excitement, read this excerpt from an email recently sent out by one of them, to others of her kind:

I believe you are aware that Dutch Sheets [http://www.dutchsheets.org/] was used by the Lord to call prayer before the 2000 election that was so close. He said this morning that this election is perhaps even more critical than 2000 because of the Supreme Court. If the right political posture is not elected, we stand to lose decades of progress and the results could be enormous. Last year Chuck Pierce and Greg Hood prophesied that in 2008 we would not be electing a president but a vice president. Dutch said he could get no release in his heart to back Huckab[ee] even though he was pressured by many in the body of Christ. Huckab[ee] is a good man and a strong believer, but he was not God’s choice. Dutch also told us that he knows a man who gave McCain a prophetic word that McCain had made a vow to God when he was at the bottom during his POW days and now God was calling in that vow. McCain was visibly moved by this word. Dutch was traveling to Texas on Friday and when he landed in the airport his wife called and told him to get to the TV asap. He watched McCain introduce Governor Palin and he said he began to weep, even though he knew nothing about her. He asked God, “What is the significance of this 44-year-old woman?” And he saw the clock said 4:44. He asked the Lord what that was all about and the Lord said, “Ezekiel 44:4.” “He brought me by way of the north gate to the front of the temple; so I looked, and behold, the glory of the LORD filled the house of the LORD; and I fell on my face. NKJV ….. North gate representing Alaska [sic].

And so on.

We could take his arrant fetishism in a positive light, and reason ourselves lucky he didn’t take all those 44’s to mean a 44 caliber Peacemaker to blow the toes off McCaint or even sister Sarah; sometimes these things can go every which way.

Such fervor, which now unifies the Christianist community, was not stoked merely by the sight of Palin’s glowing kisser on TV. More importantly, the governor became the instant darling of the Christianist far right once all the top dogs of the theocratic movement looked at her, and pronounced her good. To some extent, she was their choice—and so it’s wrong to claim, as some indignant pundits have, that Sarah Palin “was not vetted.” The governor was vetted by the Council for National Policy, the secretive and highly influential steering committee of the Christianist far right, which seeks to junk the Constitution and replace it with Leviticus and other flights of Holy Writ.

[Palin's] reckless policies derive from an apocalyptic wish to see the planet die, so that Lord Jesus will come back here, and start kicking ass and taking names. [Read more →]

John McCain reveals how many fingers he uses to access the Internets.

When seventy-one year old John McCain acknowledged earlier this month that he was “computer illiterate,” it confirmed to many in the blogosphere (wherever that is) that the Republican presidential nominee was essentially clueless about politics in what some are calling the “digital age.” McCain’s commitment to this straight-talk strategery has also led him to previously admit economics and the economy is one other thing that he doesn’t understand very well, either.

However, at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York on Monday, conference organizer Andrew Rasiej pointed out that McCain was approaching 152,000 hits on something called “Facebook,” a kind of “social networking technology” the Senator is getting hip to. Senator Obama was said to have passed the one million mark last week on the Facebook thingy, but Republicans feel that does not necessarily indicate that their grassroots supporters are any less active than their Democratic opponents.

The Pew Internet and American Life Project released statistics earlier this month which show Democrats are using the social networking thing to actually contribute money to the Obama Campaign, something else McCain is said to be “aware of.” A spokesman for the McCain camp clarified that McCain’s recent comment — “F you! I know more about this than anyone else in the room,” was directed at immigration reform and not computer literacy.

McClatchy News Services reports:

Cheney on Wednesday told the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that “oil is being drilled right now 60 miles off the coast of Florida.”

“We’re not doing it. The Chinese are in cooperation with the Cuban government.”

”Even the communists have figured out that a good answer to high prices is more supply,” he added. “Yet Congress has said … ‘no’ to drilling off Florida.”

The claim was immediately repudiated by U.S. Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., an independent congressional report, industry experts and other observers, who said there is zero evidence that China is drilling in Cuban waters.

China doesn’t even hold a lease to drill offshore…

With both parties squabbling over what to do about rising gasoline prices, Democrats had seized on the remarks to bash the GOP, accusing it of spreading the Cuba-China rumor as a “scare tactic” to force Congress to lift a ban that prevents drilling along the Outer Continental Shelf and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Same old scare tactics Darth Cheney and his his oil buddies used to launch the Iraq war and drive up the price of oil 600% since 2002.

NEW ORLEANS— John McCain stammered his way through one of his more memorable speeches ever Tuesday night, but unfortunately it was memorable for the number of speaking miscues off the teleprompter, not the content. It was memorable for the forced, creepy smiles at the end of sentences that didn’t warrant them. Even his repetitious blinking was unnerving. And with more than twenty word fumbles through the course of this painfully long Geritol info-mercial, it was particularly telling that CNN felt it necessary to put a “HAPPENING NOW” tag directly over McCain’s right lung.

I knew the evening was going to go badly when the Phoney from Arizoney began by adding an extra syllable to “New Or-le-ans.” Bush’s constant mangling of “nu-cu-lar” sprang instantly to mind, and thus a speech designed to separate the two men joined at the fragile hip of John McCain was doomed to failure.

Then this mis-speak, only two and a half minutes in: “I believe that still; but we must rise the occasion as we always have.” Well, he didn’t “rise the occasion.” He sank, and he continued to sink until CNN cut away. But all was not lost. My favorite McBushism from the speech was this line: “The right change will stop impeding Americans from doing what they have always done, overcome every obstacle to our progress, turn challenges and opportunity into opportunities. . .”

Over-powered by what the press called the “Lime Green Monster,” the background from hell gave McCain a pallor only a cadaver could love. But with timing that could only have been arranged through divine providence, McCain dropped this turd-bomb bomb bomb right before one of the most historic speeches ever to be delivered in America, Barack Obama’s announcement to the world that a black and white man had turned an opportunity into an opportunity to run for president of the United States.

A venue tip to McCain’s advance people: Never— ever— choose a venue where the acoustics are such that one big-mouth supporter can rise teh occasion by drowning out the rest of the audience. Very creepy. And speaking of loudest. McCain drew his loudest applause when he read without error, “They might think me an imperfect servant of our country, which I surely am; but I am her servant, first, last, and always.” Great.

But we don’t need another “servant” in the white house. We need a leader.

Where have I seen this movie before?

Oh yeah. Here:

[Due to formatting limitations in the comments section, I have chosen to reply on the main forum.]

Hi Stan:

Thanks for reminding us of the bigger picture. I’ll have fewer bald patches from frustrated hair-pulling that way.

A few passages from The Urantia Book (TUB) lit up my synapses as I read along. But in the ecumenical spirit you showed by quoting Wallace Stevens, let me first add this related thought from the great German idealist, Immanuel Kant:

“Enlightenment is the emergence of Man’s self-incurred immaturity.”

You wrote:

For two days following nine-eleven terrorism had already been defeated in a spiritual sense, by the unity of the world community, and needed only forward-looking leaders who could help people sustain that unity and expand on it, calling not only for the capture of the perpetrators but also for a truly reflective investigation into what had led people to want to do such a thing. Without this curiosity, we began just another endless conflict. . . This need for reflection before action, especially when gripped by fear, is something self-righteousness will only blind us to.

There’s a lot to unpackage here. Explicitly: fear, world community, forward looking leaders, curiosity, reflection. And implicitly, the roles that intelligent patriotism and emotional maturity should play in the response to events like 9/11.

Adjusting the lenses in my UB kaleidoscope accordingly (i.e., making those kaleidoscopic adjustments in the comprehension of meanings and values), I find the following passages instructive:

1. Unreasoned fear is a master intellectual fraud practiced upon the evolving mortal soul.

2. Political wisdom. Emotional maturity is essential to self-control. Only emotional maturity will insure the substitution of international techniques of civilized adjudication for the barbarous arbitrament of war. Wise statesmen will sometime work for the welfare of humanity even while they strive to promote the interest of their national or racial groups. Selfish political sagacity is ultimately suicidal — destructive of all those enduring qualities which insure planetary group survival.

3. The ideal state functions under the impulse of three mighty and coordinated drives: Love loyalty derived from the realization of human brotherhood. Intelligent patriotism based on wise ideals. Cosmic insight interpreted in terms of planetary facts, needs, and goals.

4. A moral society should aim to preserve the self-respect of its citizenry and afford every normal individual adequate opportunity for self-realization.

Since the last shall be first, I’ll start there.

(4) Self-realization is, naturally, a product of reflection and curiosity. Imagine a society where reflective meditation was actively encouraged, if not mandated outright. (”Woman, get thee to a nunnery!” would have a radically different meaning.) Europe seems to have a head start on us, where shorter work weeks and much longer vacations are de rigeur. Locally, initiatives like employer tax incentives and community zoning variances could help establish appropriate mediation and reflection centers. (Inspired by this passage, I started a non-profit 503c corporation some years back to network otherwise vacant vacation homes, time share condos and the like, for the purpose of “serving the servers”— providing the necessary space to recharge one’s physical, emotional and mental batteries.)

(3) While the whole tone of your piece underscores the need for the realization of human brotherhood and the role that cosmic insight plays in the context of planetary facts, needs, and goals, I would add a word about “intelligent patriotism.” Intelligent patriotism naturally stands in contrast to the kind of knuckle dragging nationalism reflected in the “My country right or wrong” slogan that leads to an end-justifies-the-means, “Kill’em all and let God sort’em out’ ethic— the implicit and explicit mantram of so much right wing media. One can lay claim to loving and being loyal to one’s country, but until we shift our individual and collective identities to the brotherhood of all humankind, war and lesser conflicts will continue as population pressures and resource demands escalate.

(2) If one needed to provide an example of the exact opposite of how an ideal state functions, one need only note the track record of the Bush Administration. Led by an incurious, emotionally arrested adolescent who has never had to account for his actions, it has brought monumental suffering to untold millions of innocent people. It’s neocon driven, “unipolar” foreign policy, and its “might makes right” national security strategy is exemplified by its self-proclaimed right to wage preventive war on anybody it wants— the very definition of war crimes that emerged from the Nuremberg Tribunals.

(1) Like the modifier “intelligent” used with patriotism, the modifier of “unreasoned” with respect to fear is a typical use of nuance by TUB’s authors. Evolutionarily speaking, fear is a survival function of our repto-mammal limbic system, a highly efficient threat assessment computer that emerged from millions years of adaptation to various environmental challenges. (This legacy of animal fear is what TUB refers to as “the mark of the beast,” so powerful that it isn’t completely expunged until considerable adjustments are made in the afterlife.) Politically speaking, it is the target of so much right wing Republican propaganda that it has succeeded it painting the Democrats as weak on national security. This, in turn, has prevented them from bringing the Iraq war/occupation to a close by the simple device of refusing to provide further funding for this highly immoral and destructive enterprise.

The good (and bad) news is that the economy has finally reached the breaking point where further expenditures cannot be sustained. Foreign countries (like Kuwait), which have provided the money (at interest) no longer seem willing to do so for sheer economic, if not political, reasons.

I would close with this very timely passage from TUB, which can be excused for being a bit self-referential, given the problem it addresses. It also serves as a useful theme for what I see as the purpose and potential of UrantianSojourn.com:

Hunger and love drove men together; vanity and ghost fear held them together. But these emotions alone, without the influence of peace-promoting revelations, are unable to endure the strain of the suspicions and irritations of human interassociations. Without help from superhuman sources the strain of society breaks down upon reaching certain limits, and these very influences of social mobilization— hunger, love, vanity, and fear— conspire to plunge mankind into war and bloodshed.