Schadenfreude

So ... looks like something positive may have happened tonight in electionland. The demopublicans took the House, and they may get the Senate. Regardless of whether or not the republicrats hold on in the Senate, we should be in for two years of bickering, investigating, name-calling, finger-pointing, and posturing.

Which is another way of saying that it will be very hard for Shrub and his christo-fascists to accomplish anything, yet it will be equally as hard for those who oppose him to promote their agenda in any meaningful way (as an aside, am I the only one who is saddened by the fact that American politics has pretty much degenerated into an endless tug-of-war between the christo-fascists and the socialists?).

However, gridlock is a good thing. A government in gridlock is a government that grows more slowly ... and that's a thought that should warm the heart of every working, wage-earning, tax-paying American.

I'll sleep better tonight.

Voting Blues

So today's the big day ... time for less than 50% of the eligible voters (80% of whom are so utterly uninformed or misinformed that they shouldn't be allowed near a voting booth) to trudge to the polls and cast their ballots. The media is really rooting hard for the demopublicans to take the House and Senate, and they may well do it. Many of my friends and colleagues are no doubt all excited about this prospect. While I certainly would agree that the republicrats deserve a swift kick in the ass, I can't get too worked up about it. In fact, I would argue that voting is a wholly futile undertaking for the following reasons:

1. Since our system is wholly undemocratic to begin with, voting only helps those in power pretend that the system is open and fair. But it's fixed. The winner-take-all nature of it insures that both demopublicans and republicrats have to essentially stand for nothing and run to the middle. After winning, they then do whatever they can to sure up their bases (i.e. pork, grants, entitlements, etc.), while pretending to run to the middle.

2. No matter who wins, the taxpayer loses. Government will continue to get bigger, more intrusive, and more expensive.

3. Nothing significant will happen, regardless of who wins. We'll still be in Iraq. We'll still be in Afghanistan. We'll still have hoards of illegals crossing the borders to get in on the welfare state gravy train. We'll still have the Patriot Act looming over us.

4. Our domestic political situation is nothing but an endless series of "who robs from whom" pseudo-crises. The overwhelming majority of Americans are totally disinterested in freedom -- what they crave is security. Whether it's saving the children, subsidizing the old geezers' prescription drugs, saving tender liberal lungs from cigarette smoke, or making sure that not a single breast appears on TV during prime time, the sheeple will continue to look to government as a parent-figure, and expect government to solve all their problems and absolve them of all responsibility for their lives. If there aren't enough real problems, the politicians and do-gooders invent more.

5. This election is just a teaser, anyway. Once the dust clears for a few days, the real campaign will begin for the White House in 2008.

So have fun y'all ... it's like the song from South Park says:

Let's get out and vote - Let's make our voices heard
We've been given the right to choose between a douche and a turd
It's democracy in action - Put your freedom to the test
A big fat turd or a stupid douche - Which do you like best?

The Powerlessness of Prayer

Since I've been on a sports kick for the past few posts, I thought I'd follow up today with a nice example of the second thing that really bothers me about sports today: the fact that superstitious Christian types have taken it over. You know the kind of athlete I'm talking about. The guy who spends years practicing and training and straining to become great, and then makes a big play and attributes it to Jesus (curiously, Jesus is never blamed when the guy screws up). I challenge anyone to show me tape of Jesus having his ass out on the practice field just once. These guys are successful because they've worked hard and sacrificed a lot to become that good, yet they have to attribute their success to some kind of vaguely defined yet highly personalized supernatural force.

This behavior is not accidental. These athletes were targeted at a young age by fundamentalist recruiters who recognized that athletes are frequently ... to put it kindly ... prone to accept groupthink and authority. And why target athletes? I'd wager that the main, largely unspoken motivation is money. Weak-minded, authority-accepting jocks make huge amounts of money these days, which means they won't miss the few millions that get siphoned off over a few years by Reverend Billy Bob's Old Time Gospel Ministry. Jocks are a bottomless well of money -- money that can then be turned around to brainwash generations of adoring young people and keep us intellectually mired in the 14th century. I would argue that the flow of money from athletes to preachers contributes greatly to our country's medieval attitudes toward science, reason, and logic. Hence, when these cash-laden jocks-for-Jesus blatantly (and unknowingly) demonstrate that their superstition is just plain old hooey, I think we really need to point this out.

That being said, today's prize for firing intellectual blanks goes to Seahawks running back and 2005 NFL MVP Shaun Alexander. On Monday, September 25th, the Seahawks announced that Shaun had a cracked bone in his foot and would be out for 4-6 weeks while it healed. Shaun, in typical evangelical fashion, came out shortly thereafter and said he'd be ready to go the next week because he'd been healed by "the power of prayer". Fortunately, the team physicians had enough sense to use the secular, objectively-arrived-at technology at their disposal to assess the injury. Turns out Shaun could have prayed until his knees were bloody .... the bone did not magically heal in less than a week. In fact, as of today, he's still on the mend. Maybe by next week (which falls into the medically predicted 4-6 weeks) he'll be ready to go.

What should this teach us? That prayer is powerless to change reality. It may make believers feel better, and it may have a placebo effect in non-serious cases, but when stacked up against the power of logic, reason, technology, and evidence-based medicine -- when its actual, objective efficacy is examined, it's pretty useless. Moreover, every news/sports reporter worth his salt should be riding Shaun about this mercilessly. This man uses his celebrity status to raise money for his favorite preacher/church/outreach ministry, and he has demonstrably shown -- in public, no less -- that he's selling snake oil. He was not magically healed by prayer (or anything else, for that matter). He has objectively demonstrated that the very thing that he's advocating did not do what he claimed it would.

When a politician does this, most would agree that he or she has betrayed the public trust. When a business does this, we can take it to court for false advertising. Why doesn't this simple, fair, and reasonable standard apply to religion and its advocates?