Shaky Danny

  Venezuela has the largest oil reserves of any country in the world. We don’t yet know about the artic circle, Somalia, or the Philippines. In spite of their resources, history and wealth, the US sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba have succeeded. The refugees are proof. It is silly to blame those governments because they couldn’t effectively fight the US. The only thing holding up those nations is their own desperate need for sovereignty. Maybe Venezuelans should install a Saudi prince. Everyone has noticed that the United States absorbed the Ukrainians and Venezuelans are on the street. The Ukrainians flee war. The Venezuelans flee poverty. Ukrainians got here first. There are more Ukrainian refugees. Venezuelans have more skills, that is why they came. As far as the initial brunt of refugees, the Orthodox take care of their own and Catholics don’t. The pope finally popped the Texas bishop. I don’t know how much say that bishop had, but he was representing his constituency....

  Right after I saw The Banshees movie, I blocked someone boring on Facebook. I doubt you will find any of this new, does it need saying? I like that there are four gospels. Four gospels refute literal truth. Christ is a descriptive name. There were no Cross kids running around Nazareth. Is Jesus also descriptive? In some gospels the name Jesus is a big deal: -Name him Jesus. If Jesus were just a name, would they have said: -Name him Ralph. Jew Zeus comes to mind. A later interpretation says that Jesus is a Greek mistranslation of Joshua. Joshua made it through translation just fine in Torah. Mathew affixes the name to another character; thus, arguing that it was a name of the time. Ancient people were aware that the name was descriptive. They didn’t care about literal truth. The story spoke to them as they spoke it to each other. Every holiday but Hanukah was trashed, every commandment broken. Ruled by the future Italians, monotheists were confronted with evil. The stor...

At first I was sort of pleased with the increase in declared atheism. I told my son: -I just don’t want to hear about flying saucers. I suspected that most atheists had some sort of belief; we just hadn’t added the conspiracy or UFO check boxes yet.  But now I’m getting irked. I had blamed Benjamin Franklin. Once lightning was explained, God didn’t seem as necessary. But there seems to be a general failure to declare, not just religion, but anything else. Is other going to become its own gang? Caucasian is a racist term, predicated on the belief that we all came from some group in the Caucasus that was considered attractive.  Colors seem to be acceptable for black and white, but the brown, yellow and red people don’t approve. Now we need ten check boxes for sex: -Sex? -Yes I can see why people resist classification. I’m worried that we will lose culture. Christine recently dragged me to church and they had a reading from Jonah. I don’t know of any other stor...

For thousands of years Jews have had a prohibition against mixing meat with milk. This is a lot of work. It involves separate sets of dishes, and by separate I mean compulsively separate.  In the last hundred years some of our rules have found scientific justification. One might suppose that correlations were noticed between behaviors and consequences, but given the short life spans it is puzzling. A lot of this stuff didn’t make sense until we saw germs under the microscope. I can imagine some saying: -I defecated near the well and nothing happened. Torah sometimes cloaks common sense rules in mysticism. If they told men that sex after childbirth is bad for the mother it might not have made an impression.  I knew an obstetrician whose children were born nine months apart.  Telling him: -She’s unclean, dammit, might have been more effective. Sorry to go mystical but there is the possibility that the prohibition on mixing meat and milk may one day find hygienic ju...

At the end of 1971 the draft had ended and my school no longer had any ethical reason to keep me and I flunked out.  At the beginning of 1972 I obtained employment as a medical records clerk at University of Chicago Hospitals.  The mother of a girlfriend quit her job as an admitting clerk in the hospital and recommended me as a replacement. So part way through 1972 I became the night admitting clerk working from midnight to 8 in the morning at Chicago Lying In, the obstetrics and gynecology hospital at University of Chicago Hospitals. Termination of pregnancy was illegal and every few weeks I would admit from one to three emergency patients for botched abortions.  I suppose the illegal operation would do all its patients on those particular evenings.  After a few months it dawned on me that those I admitted were the ones who had made it to the emergency room and if there were these many botched procedures there must be others who had not made it to the emergency r...

Chanukah is packaged as some sort of gooey sweet adjunct of Christmas.   Maccabees were sick twisted.    They hated the Greeks.    That’s understandable: -Oh, you have a god; well of course we can include him. -He’s the greatest? Hmm, work with me here, we conquered you, right? -So you study the law while we study the world, how interesting. Here you are, proud of reading, writing and developing a sophisticated integrated society and the newbies are in charge, treating you like hicks.    What we are celebrating is a fundamentalist homophobic resistance movement engaged in terrorist activities against a modern world civilization.

It all started, like most things, back in the 1800’s when people started digging things up.    They found rocks, fossils, and human artifacts.    The British went to Egypt and Greece.    The French preferred Italy.    But the Germans headed for Mesopotamia.    While there, they noticed that the Torah was written in two languages and different hands.    They found out about Zoroaster.    They really weren't scholars, they shot from the lip, and if it sounded true, it was true.   They didn't ask why these stories had been so important and were still so important.    They just bottom lined it:  -Ha, it’s not true. In the United States that wasn't particularly interesting.    But Germans treated their scholars almost as though they were basketball players.    These stories had been used to convince them to quit lighting up wicker cages full of people to celebrate the solstice. ...

As I move from one town or city to the next I am always amused by their various claims to celebrity and achievement.    I grew up in Hyde Park in Chicago.    The only plaque or monument I am aware of there, honors the first nuclear chain reaction.    Most places would give such an event its own acre, perhaps with a museum and diorama.    Hyde Park keeps shuffling it around,  -Look, it happened nearby, OK, maybe not exactly right here, but in the general vicinity and anyway we've got a few things going on right now. When I was a child, living in Hyde Park, my mother introduced me to Hannah Arendt.    She was a member of our congregation. Hannah Arendt told me she studied evil and I said that sounded boring.    My words were not flippant.    Evil people did not impress me.    We agreed that evil was worth studying. I wish I could tell you that Hyde Park lionized Arendt; instead, we subjected her to...

I’m surprised that no one has recognized Obama’s speech in Tucson.    The papers give credit to a young speechwriter from Wilmette.    This same well-worn speech has been given thousands of times by ministers across the country.    Whenever someone has died for standing, the ministers trot out this chestnut.    You can’t beat them on hatred, stupidity or bitterness, so you concentrate on love, decency, truth and caring.     Because we are the good, the righteous and just, and they are filthy swamp slime and don’t you ever, ever, ever forget that. I can’t stand watching Palin.    I just don’t have the tolerance for it.    She may be some kind of smart, but when she is talking, she gets an irritating unfocused stupid look. Reading the text of her speech, it seemed reasonable. Except that while I understand that she talks in code, people should say what they mean. If she meant votes, she should have said votes. ...

Adam Smith’s  Wealth of Nations  is misrepresented as claiming that the marketplace is perfect.    His argument was that regulation benefits the manufacturers and merchants rather than the nation as a whole. This is the fundamental market place paradox of Adam Smith: the winners get to change the rules.   For instance, Ronald Reagan fought long and hard to limit the maximum tax percentage and to eliminate the capital gains deduction.    This was the central tenet of his first presidential campaign. His argument was that everyone needs incentive and that the government should not tell us how to invest.    He was very upset that the owners of the film studios by buying and selling the firms to each other pay taxes at a much lower rate than the actors, such as him, paid on salary. Bill Gates wanted to sell his stock, and today the capital gains rate is restored.   When Republicans talk about tax reform they bellow that they want to e...