Urantian Aborigine

The NEW YORKER cover of Barack and Michelle Obama as Muslim terrorists rekindled an old debate about satire, humor, racism, and fear. It was spun around a satirical cartoon which illustrated the lengths some human minds are willing, and able to go, to mask rather than transcend the racism inherent in their human nature.

Yes; racism is inherent in human nature; we don’t hate “others” by an act of will, we do it quite naturally. What’s up with that? Just like our mammalian ancestors, all humans beings are bellicose— exceedingly pugnacious as a rule, and with fiery tempers. Originally it served a useful evolutionary purpose when it came to survival; the more motivated monkey of the day did not hesitate to take his sundry weapons to the neighbors’ skulls and exterminate them. The species that won these battles most often progressively improved and therefore multiplied, and survived to wax fat on the land.

Soon they fanned out over the Mesopotamian peninsula, and with just seventy generations of evolution at work, they produced a singularly remarkable pair of twins, one male, one female. They had almost perfectly opposable thumbs; they walked upright. Their brains were smaller than yours and mine, but their improved intelligence propelled them into the leadership of their tribe, and their family grew to become the nucleus of the mid-mammals.

The mid-mammals begat the Primates. After almost nine hundred generations of development, covering about twenty-one thousand years from the origin of the dawn mammals, the Primates suddenly gave birth to two more remarkable creatures, the first true human beings.

[Read more →]

Back in the day in America, we lived in a free country. In America, you could, if you wanted to, rake up a bunch of leaves and burn them, if you felt like it. Or you could burn trash and garbage in your very own trash barrel. You could fire up a chain saw and cut down a tree on your property if you had the urge to. You could shoot a bird or a squirrel with a gun; you could buy fireworks, or other dangerous chemicals, and blow things up in the yard, at your leisure.

So you might well imagine when the press reported that on May 9th, an American soldier took a Quran— the “Holy Bible” of the Muslim religion— to a shooting range and used it for target practice, that many Americans just yawned. Or laughed. Or muttered self righteously, “Fuck yeah”— echoing the two words found written in English on the Quran that was used for target practice. After all, wasn’t that U.S. soldier just exercising his freedumb to do whatever the hell he pleased? Uh, no.

And that was not the public reaction of President George Bush. In a regularly scheduled phone conversation with Prime minister Niouri al-Malaki, Bush quickly apologized for the incident.

One Sunni Arab lawmaker said: “It is a dangerous case. We had been silent and accepted the killing of our sons, the destruction of our homes and the theft of our money, but we do not accept insults to the holy Quran,” he said at a news conference.

And there it is. It is one thing for the Iraqis to be understandably insulted, humiliated, and angered by such a stunt; but why is it more outrageous than all the senseless slaughter of innocent Iraqi men, women, and children during the seven year invasion and occupation of Iraq?

Perhaps their culture places more value on the Holy Quran than Americans might on the Holy Bible, if the circumstances were reversed. But ask yourself: what kind of man recognizes and apologizes for the childish insult against the Quran a little more than ten days after it happens, but has yet to say a public word about the deaths of untold hundreds of thousands of innocent human beings killed by our military and mercenary forces in Iraq??

There are good reasons why we as free Americans have evolved in our understanding of what constitutes the exercise of moral and ethically-sound freedom. Communities recognized that the freedom of every citizen to burn plastic and other garbage would produce enough toxic smoke and air pollution to quickly make their little slice of heaven uninhabitable. So too, the freedom to discharge a firearm whenever you wanted to get rid of a rodent in the yard, or let your child blow their hands off with dangerous fireworks.

Sound morals and ethics are essential to the responsible exercise of freedom— freedom that respects the rights of every human being. But the sacredness of every single human life cannot compare with the ignorant and thoughtless destruction of a religious symbol, even if it contains the revelatory word of God. Our Creator wants each of us to LIVE the truth; not treat it as a sacred symbol that is more important than the gift of life itself.

Hillary Clinton once said all she had to do to knock a story off the front page was change her hairstyle. This past week, as it rained nine-inch deep double-basin shameless-steel kitchen sinks in Ohio, it was clear that something a little stronger than a hairstyle had knocked Barack Obama off the primary juggernaut he’d been on since the fifth round of this scheduled 55 rounder.

The bobble-head punditry had been salivating for the return of negative campaigning, those nasty blows below the belt, not just to give them the highly addictive shivers down their quivers, but to escalate the too-often civil discourse which makes for boring endless news cycles.

“I’m a fighter!” Clinton cries, “”Let fly the sinks!” And the MSM goes ape-shit, blathering on about the necessity of returning to uncivil discourse and unsportsmanlike conduct between the two democrat contenders, attributing Clinton’s victories in round Ohio and round Texas to an intensifying downpour of Clintonian sinkatude.

Sinkatude consisting of, as our Carpetbagging friend Steve Benen observed:

* Rezko
* Canada/NAFTA
* Accusations of “plagiarism”
* Obama’s crisis-management abilities at 3 a.m.
* The media has given Obama a break
* Obama’s healthcare mailings are “Karl Rove-style politics” (”Shame on you”)
* Obama’s experience is similar to George W. Bush
* McCain’s experience is preferable to Obama’s
* Pictures of Obama wearing African garb
* Obama didn’t hold holding hearings as chairman of a Senate subcommittee that is in charge of overseeing NATO troops in Afghanistan
* Obama “denounced” Farrakhan, but didn’t “reject” him
* Obama’s message of “hope” is worthy of mockery and derision
* “60 Minutes” — Obama’s not a Muslim “as far as I know”

Hillary “The Fighter” Clinton’s barrage of sinkatude unleashed on Barack Obama makes for an impressive looking late flurry, but the delegate math of the judges are still scoring Obama in the lead with 1,386 delegates, compared with 1,276 for Clinton — a 110 delegate advantage.

But a quick glance around ringside, and there in the smoky dark you can begin to make out the fat-cat superdelgates, who are masticating those big Cuban ceegars with a nervous vigor that gives a tell— while there may be twelve more rounds, and even though Obama could score a technical knockout, they’ll still have their say in Denver.

Or Obama, because he was photographed wearing a turban?

Obama (right) wearing Turban and Somali Robes

Of course not, since Islam didn’t come into existence for another six centuries or so.

Did Bush wear a turban?

Yeah, but does anyone care?

Did Jesus wear a turban? Most likely, since turbans were far more than a fashion accessory for the Semites who lived in a desert environment, noted for its sudden sandstorms.

Message to the Clinton op research team, and/or the Repugs and the Christian Right: Jesus wore a turban, as did all Aramaic speaking Semite tribes of his time.

Get over it.

As Jesus saw his mother, with John and his brother and sister, he
smiled but said nothing. Meanwhile the four soldiers assigned to the
Master’s crucifixion, as was the custom, had divided his clothes among
them, one taking the sandals, one the turban, one the girdle,
and the fourth the cloak. This left the tunic, or seamless vestment
reaching down to near the knees, to be cut up into four pieces, but
when the soldiers saw what an unusual garment it was, they decided to
cast lots for it. Jesus looked down on them while they divided his
garments, and the thoughtless crowd jeered at him. —The Urantia Book.