The Nappy Cat Chronicles

My father receives these from his AOL buddies. There are three circulating the internet. I’ve only received two.

The first of the anti-Obama emails regards his body posture during the national anthem at the September 2007 Iowa steak fry:

Confirmed at Snopes.com
http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/anthem.asp

Incidentally, the Snopes page includes Obama’s response:

“My grandfather taught me when I was 2. During the Pledge of Allegiance, you put your hand over your heart. During the national anthem, you sing.”

I like Obama’s explanation. Unless the case regards straightforward espionage, the impugning of another individual’s patriotism is, simply, asinine. The verisimilitude of this email further sinks into the mud of general idiocy and falsehood by switching the narrative midway through. The photograph was taken during the national anthem and not during the pledge of allegiance.

The second anti-Obama email regards Obama’s church:

Obama mentioned his church during his appearance with Oprah. It’s the Trinity Church of Christ. I found this interesting.

Obama’s church:

Please read and go to this church’s website and read what is written there. It is very alarming.

Barack Obama is a member of this church and is running for President of the U.S. If you look at the first page of their website, you will learn that this congregation has a non-negotiable commitment to Africa. No where is AMERICA even mentioned. Notice too, what color you will need to be if you should want to join Obama’s church… B-L-A-C-K!!! Doesn’t look like his choice of religion has improved much over his (former?) Muslim upbringing.

Are you aware that Obama’s middle name is Mohammed? Strip away his nice looks, the big smile and smooth talk and what do you get? Certainly a racist, as plainly defined by the stated position of his church! And possibly a covert worshiper of the Muslim faith, even today. This guy desires to rule over America while his loyalty is totally vested in a Black Africa!

I cannot believe this has not been all over the TV and newspapers.

This is why it is so important to pass this message along to all of our family & friends. To think that Obama has even the slightest chance in the run for the presidency, is really scary.

Click on the link below:

This is the web page for the church Barack Obama belongs to:

www.tucc.org/about.htm

This email is, like its brother, teeming with falsehoods. I don’t have the patience to cover the combined nuance of religion, society, and race that is sadly ignored by this email, but, I will say that the black community has been perpetually marginalized by individuals like the the man or woman who wrote this email. Additionally, Obama’s middle name is Hussein, not “Mohammed.”

So, what can these emails teach us? Nothing we didn’t already know. For me it’s further reinforced my beliefs that idiots abound and that, much like President Bush has exemplified, if reality doesn’t comport and you need an advantage, lie to everyone.

*****UPDATES*****

Update 1: The AP asks: No flag pin, no hand over his heart: Is he exposed?

Update 2: Regarding their article covering Obama’s response this bullshit, CNN piles on more bullshit through their front page poll:

Update 3: At ~10:15 PM, CNN yanked the above poll question and replaced it with with a question about Raul Castro’s style of dictatorship.

That is the brilliant title of Frank Rich’s examination of the Obama v. Clinton campaign. Money quote:

But it’s the Clinton strategists, not the Obama voters, who drank the Kool-Aid. The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done. The Clinton camp has been the slacker in this race, more words than action, and its candidate’s message, for all its purported high-mindedness, was and is self-immolating.

So, right after I popped a chicken and stuffing dish into my oven, I sliced open my pinkie finger on a knife in my sink. I think it just stopped bleeding so stitches are unnecessary. Hopefully this thing will not get infected.

After more than a year of heated political wrangling, the Senate handed the White House a major victory Tuesday by voting to broaden the government’s spy powers after giving legal protection to phone companies that cooperated in President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

…

But supporters of the plan said the phone carriers acted out of patriotism after the Sept. 11 attacks in complying with what they believed in good faith was a legally binding order from the president.

…

“This, I believe, is the right way to go for the security of the nation,” said Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who leads the intelligence committee and who was a pivotal supporter of the White House-backed plan approved Tuesday.

The ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee wants N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell to explain why the league destroyed evidence related to spying by the New England Patriots.

…

When Mr. Specter was asked if he could envision a situation in which employees of the Patriots or the N.F.L. were called to testify before the committee, he said he wanted to take the investigation “one step at a time.”

“It could,” Mr. Specter said. “It’s premature to say whom we’re going to call or when. It starts with the commissioner. He had the tapes, and he made the decision as to what the punishment could be. He made the decision to destroy them.”

[photos courtesy of nytimes.com]

– British Sea Power photo courtesy of mog.com –

February is here and, aside from the occasional 70 degree day, winter is in full blast. But, that doesn’t mean you need to curl up with a warm blanket and an Elliot Smith album. During this month, like every other month, rock bands are playing rock music. February highlights include an anthem-rock single from the reunited British Sea Power, pop offerings from the Headlights and Lightspeed Champion, an alternative-rock single from Nada Surf, a nerd-folk single from The Mountain Goats, a heroin-noise-rock single from The Raveonettes.

(Click the arrow after each track for more info.)

I like Will Wilkinson’s blog a lot. But, if there’s one thing about think-tank types that’s for certain it’s that they’re at least a decade behind anecdotal experiences. Recently, Will appeared on NPR’s Marketplace and made the following claim:

In his 2005 book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, Harvard economist Benjamin M. Friedman shows that time and again, economic expansion has fostered greater opportunity, tolerance, social mobility and a concern for fairness. Meanwhile, economic contraction has gone hand-in-hand historically with xenophobia, self-defeating trade protectionism and the political persecution of minorities.

This is a great argument, except I made it, like, 10 years ago while riding with my father. I told him that the correlation between economy and social tolerance is a lot like driving: When the roadway is humming along, we tend to let people into our lanes easily even though too much of this will inevitably lead to congestion due to increasing demand for road and a withering supply. On the other hand, when the roadway is congested, we tend to stand our ground and stay close to the car in front of us because, even when a little portion of our resource is lost (e.g., one minute of our time), the anxiety we experience is exaggerated when the net loss is unknown and uncontrollable.

YourMorals.org is a website designed to easily and efficiently turn us into the guinea pigs of five social scientists. The results of the various personality tests are presented in bar-graph form: one bar for your results and one bar for the results of everyone else. Additionally, on more than a few results pages, the results of Democrats and Republicans are represented by separate bars.

The researchers’ central inventory is the “Moral Foundations Questionnaire”:

The scale is a measure of your reliance on and endorsement of five psychological foundations of morality that seem to be found across cultures. Each of the two parts of the scale contained four questions related to each foundation: 1) harm/care, 2) fairness/reciprocity (including issues of rights), 3) ingroup/loyalty, 4) authority/respect, and 5) purity/sanctity.

Democrats hold the “harm” and “fairness” foundations more dear than the remaining foundations. Republicans place equal value on all five foundations. My results (in green) are closest to those of Democrats (in blue):

The researchers’ article on their 5-foundation theory of morality begins with an interesting scenario:

Suppose your next-door neighbor puts up a large sign in her front yard that says “Cable television will destroy society.” You ask her to explain the sign, and she replies, “Cables are an affront to the god Thoth. They radiate theta waves, which make people sterile.” You ask her to explain how a low voltage, electrically-shielded coaxial cable can make anyone sterile, but she changes the subject. The DSM-IV defines a delusion as “a false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary” (APA, DSM-IV, 1994, p.765). Your neighbor is clearly delusional and possibly schizophrenic. She is responding to forces, threats, and agents that simply do not exist.

But now suppose another neighbor puts up a large sign in his front yard that says “Gay marriage will destroy society.” You ask him to explain the sign, and he replies, “Homosexuality is an abomination to God. Gay marriage will undermine marriage, the institution upon which our society rests.” You ask him to explain how allowing two people to marry who are in love and of the same sex will harm other marriages, but he changes the subject. Because your neighbor is not alone in his beliefs, he does not meet the DSM-IV criteria for delusion. However, you might well consider your homophobic neighbor almost as delusional, and probably more offensive, than your cable-fearing neighbor. He, too, seems to be responding to forces, threats, and agents that do not exist, only in this case his widely shared beliefs have real victims: the millions of men and women who are prohibited from marrying the people they love, and who are treated unjustly in matters of family law and social prestige. If only there were some way to break through your neighbor’s delusions-some moral equivalent of Thorazine-which would help him see the facts as you see them.

Additionally, each foundation is defined in full. In my mind, I cannot understand how all five foundations can be given equal consideration. In order to ensure its survival, authority often becomes oppressive through the harming of others and the subjugation of fairness. Deference to authority is usually manifested through loyalty to the group. So, not only is individualism an affront to authority, it threatens the existence of the group and the life of every member. For more reading on authority and loyalty, 1984 covers the dangers associated with group thought and group submission well.

If the strength of that sweet tooth of your’s hasn’t provided enough indication, our desire for sweets is hardwired:

Monkeys and ape spend their days in the forest searching for ripe fruit. They have been selected to prefer sweet, ripe fruit over unripe, bitter fruit because it has higher sugar content and supplies more ready energy. Ripe fruit also has more water, which can be hard to find high in the canopy.

So it makes sense for primates, including us, to have a highly developed palate for sweet things. And we primates have extended that preference beyond mere fruit.

In the 1990s, William McGrew, now at Cambridge University, reported that chimpanzees used sticks to dip into beehives and extract honey.

And they suffer to get it. Chimps break into a hive with their fingers, ignoring the buzz of angry bees and the sting of those that bite, and get down to business like Winnie-the-Pooh with his hand in the honey jar.

Researchers have also discovered that honey dipping is a multi-cultural chimpanzee behavior; at different sites across Africa, chimps use different sort of tools to pull out the sweet stuff.

Sex change surgery finally takes its rightful place next to the freedom fry and the running over of nomads while driving large vehicles. Another component of our great “American dream.” I’d get this surgery, oh, about twice a week only because, if you work for Goldman Sachs, you’ve got to show it off.

Provocative and sexy describe Juan Francisco Casas‘ Bic-drawn artwork. Juan reportedly uses up to 4 blue ballpoint Bics per canvas. Like most creative males, Juan is inspired by the female form: Roughly 90% of his drawings appear to be of his girlfriend in either the fully nude or the semi-nude.

Incidentally, Lewisville, the town in which this incident occurred, claims to be progressive and urban. However, it’s 25 miles north of Dallas, Texas, a state that executed a mentally retarded man in 2007.

From the article:

Mr. Ortiz said the family’s ordeal began Oct. 19, when his son picked up a bottle of hand sanitizer from the desk of his fifth-period reading teacher at Killian Middle School in Lewisville. He rubbed the gel on his hands and smelled it.

In the view of school officials, the boy “inhaled heavily,” according to Mr. Ortiz, who said his son sniffed the cleanser “because it smelled good.”

The youth was sent to the principal’s office, and the Lewisville police officer assigned to the school began investigating.

“The event happened at the campus,” said Dean Tackett, a spokesman for the Lewisville Independent School District. “But once the police took it over, it was a police investigation. They decide if there are charges and what kind of charges.”

The teen was required to serve a brief in-school suspension and was also fingerprinted and photographed at the Lewisville Police Department.

But it wasn’t over:

Mr. Ortiz said he believed the matter was over until Tuesday when he was served with a petition charging his son with delinquency for inhaling the hand sanitizer to “induce a condition of intoxication, hallucination and elation.”

The frightening paternity and the kicker:

Joni Eddy, assistant police chief in Lewisville, said Friday that hand sanitizer has become a popular inhalant. “That is the latest thing to huff,” she said.

She said officers felt they were acting properly when they pursued the case against Mr. Ortiz’s son under a complex state statute governing volatile chemicals that could be abused.

“The charge said he was using the product other than its intended use,” she said. “Huffing hand sanitizer is certainly using it for something other than its intended use.”

Shirley Simson, a spokeswoman for the National Institute on Drug Abuse in Washington, said in an e-mail that the agency had no data about hand sanitizers being abused as inhalants [emphasis added]. She noted, however, that there have been news reports of some people drinking hand sanitizers for their alcohol content.

The good news is they didn’t pursue the charges:

Mr. Ortiz’s attorney, J. Michael Price II of Dallas, said he believes that the Denton County prosecutor’s office acted quickly to drop the case once he brought the matter to the attention of Ms. Beck on Friday morning.

“I told her I didn’t think a law had been violated,” Mr. Price said. “She made the appropriate decision without a lot of delay.”

More for parents to worry about! If this is a legitimate risk according to school officials, why had they allowed the teacher to have a bottle on her desk? This likely snowballed terribly: The boy probably did inhale deeply, the principal, who has probably never probably never gotten high in his life, said something to the effect of “We know you kids sniff stuff like this to get high.”, and the boy, who has probably never gotten high in his life, agreed.