Tuesday November 10th 2009

Hour One: If we're going to purge Muslims from the military, should we purge all religious fanatics? Thom is challenging Bryan Fisher www.afa.net
Hour Two: "Everything You Know is Wrong...about the Rules of the Game!" Neil Strauss, the "world's #1 pick up artist," joins Thom neilstrauss.com
Plus...Did The Family play a big role in the Stupak/Pitts Amendment to the Health Care bill in the House...with Jeff Sharlet www.rollingstone.com
Hour Three: "Should children who kill get the death penalty?" Thom spars with death penalty proponent Dudley Sharp www.homicidesurvivors.org
Comments
The company I work for at the airport employs women from the U.S. territory American Samoa; I have to say these women are quite capable of holding their own with any man when it comes to performing manual labor. We probably could have used one or two at my former place of employment, looking back now on that experience. I called a former colleague to find out what was going on there, since I had heard the warehouse was closing. Apparently it is still inching along, the near empty warehouse staffed by a skeleton warehouse crew. The only employment sector that didn’t take a major hit was the one upstairs, where in good times it constituted 50 percent of the payroll, and now about 80 percent. The downstairs people were always the ones who had to make the sacrifices, to be under a constant cloud of paranoia and uncertainty, to take the blame for any failure in the business.
But this digresses from the point I want to make. I was given the names of the warehouse workers who were still there; all were female save for one male who was hired after I left. It caused me to remember how in my last few years there was this undercurrent of discontent among the male warehouse employees. When things were riding high, the warehouse manager was given a certain amount of authority in who he wanted working for him; he seemed to take a shine to people who had an assertive attitude, since these people tended to take their work seriously. When sales started to tumble (especially when competitors began snagging the company’s best sales reps), the Chief Operating Officer, a floozy-looking blond who I originally took for trailer trash (her bigotry bore that out), decided to take control of the minutiae of warehouse operations. The manager didn’t cooperate, so after he was gone, a guy with no management experience who could be controlled was brought in, along with his worthless daughter and her equally worthless boyfriend—whose parents had some money and threatened to cut him out of their will unless he got a job.
The COO was also one of those people with a certain amount of gender sensitivity, and when someone like that is in power, politics tends to take precedence over productivity—and physical wellbeing. The discontent was over the fact that the health of males in the warehouse was something the COO did not take into consideration in her hiring approvals; women had priority. If all there was to warehouse work was picking and packing, this would not be an issue; but we routinely had 40-60 foot shipping containers with up to a thousand 40-60 lbs boxes that had to be loaded or off-loaded, and unless we had temps who did that work during the summer, it was the five or six full-time male employees who were called off their regular responsibilities (which were stressful enough) to perform this function, sometimes all day. None of us were what you would call “young men,” but not old either.
The result was as follows: One man had a stroke, before he died of cancer; another man had a mild stroke, and went blind in one eye; another man developed Parkinson’s right before our eyes in a very short time. Another man had a heart attack; I recall the last time I saw him, the company gave him a rather belated farewell luncheon so that we could also see him in his last throes. The president of the company toasted him, and enjoined him to give a speech; unfortunately, he was so far gone, that speech escaped him altogether. Watching him make a painful effort to speak and failing, I decided to end this pathetic, embarrassing spectacle myself by initiating an applause. As for myself, I worked for the last three years as the shipper, usually by myself. Whenever I had to race to measure, weigh, manifest and label hundreds of packages in a few hours, and load them onto trucks myself, I would find myself needing to sit down, experiencing a sensation of lightheadedness. I could feel that my pulse was beating a few hundred beats a minute; the strange thing was that I wasn’t breathing hard, and hardly felt my heart beating. Had I continued like this—well, I don’t want to think of such things.
It’s no use laying blame for these things that all happened in the five years worked for that company. I am just saying that there are reasons why men have shorter life spans than women.
Health Insurance Reform is Now Regressive
(I will no longer refer to health care reform, since legislation now under consideration only concerns itself with insurance, not CARE.)
With the Pitts/Stupak antiabortion amendment now part of the house health reform legislation, insurance companies who want to get part of the new government-created market of formerly uninsured will no longer be able to include coverage for abortion, even though premiums will be paid with PRIVATE dollars. This has the potential to effectively end safe abortions in this country. Rachel Maddow traced the relationships of the antiabortion legislators to "The Family":
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/ns/msnbc_tv-rachel_maddow_show#3381...
I have a personal story to inject here. Years ago, I took the responsible "prevention" step of pregnancy prevention by obtaining an IUD (the now-infamous "Copper 7". This IUD was later recalled.) Within a few months, I experienced hemorraging and terrible pain. I had it removed. However, my doctor told me at the same time that I was pregnant. Because of the possibility of complications, my doctor performed an abortion in the safe, sterile setting of a hospital. I am afraid to think of what would have happened had this not occurred.
Now, years later, we are here in this very anitabortion environment due to ignorance, religious fervor and male dominance. I am outraged that this has become the norm, when I believe that the procedure, just as with any other personal, surgical procedure, should be between a woman and her doctor (and the father, if the woman wishes.)
Abortion has been part of the human culture since humans were humans. Only in the last century did it become a powerful tool with which to create a political wedge issue.
This is another reason that I am an angry American.
Why would an "American FAMILY Association" have any particular knowledge on military affairs?
Why not have a dentist?
A little more biblical ammunition: The New Testament says very explicity Christians are to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them. They are to turn the other cheek.
Never mind the Old Testament commandments to commit genocide (and livestock-cide ... those poor Amalekite animals!), the hero of one of Jesus' parables was a Samaritan.
Samaritans were those who stayed behind during a Babylonian exile, and whose Bible only consists of the Pentateuch (the first five books of the old testament), no prophets.
So Samaritans were not only traitors, they were heretics (worse than Muslims -- although Islam hadn't been invented yet)!
Yet Samaritans get to be the heroic, good people while the priests ("Levites") show up as the bad guys. To see Jesus' thoughts about those "good" people, see Matthew 23. He calls them "Whited sepulchres" (whitewashed tombs) full of unclean things while the outside looks good.
One other handy Biblical phrase from this passage that applies to the neo-cons in spades: "Straining at a gnat, swallowing a camel."
Dr. Hasan wrote about suicide is never allowed in the Muslim faith. I believe that Dr. Hasan was so distressed about the possibility of being required to become active in a war against people of his faith that he wanted to end his life. To justify an act that was repugnant to him and against his beliefs the only out was to declare a Jihad against his own comrades in the name is Islam and thus die by being shot by the police. This would allow him to enter heaven as a martyr.
Another Idea. Let's reinstate the draft and make those of the Muslim faith exempt.
@ AZAFVET - Let’s reinstate the draft and make those of the Muslim faith exempt.
Seems to me that might incentivize conversion to Islam. That's not really your goal, is it?
It seems fairly obvious to me that what happenned at Fort Hood is that a soldier who was somewhat unstable in the first place went over the edge. If this man were a Christian or a Jew (or a Hindu, Bhuddist or Druid, for that matter) I doubt there would be ANY discussion of his religion at this time.
Perhaps, some of us DO see the "War on Terrorism" as a war against Islam, eh?
Actually, I was trying to be sarcastic.
Re: Kucinich & Massa's "No" votes on the House Reform Bill -
I'm fairly sure that both of them held their votes until they were certain that those votes would NOT defeat the measure.
In regard to the conversation with Bryan Fisher, if the Army should be concerned with Muslims in its ranks and expelling them, why stop there? After all, Timothy McVeigh served in the first Gulf War, and that wasn't even a real "war." I remember a soldier who posted his gang colors on the wall of his barracks' room, and no one told him to take it down; I recall that "respect" was an issue with him, and there was always the suggestion of menace and violence if he thought you were "disrespecting" him. More recently, it has been noted that the Army was relaxed its standards in regard to "moral" character, meaning that recruits with Nazi tattoos are not questioned about their beliefs; the SPLCenter has reported the infiltration of the military by white supremacists, especially on the airborne bases like Bragg and Benning.
Thanks Adam.
In the healthcare debate Republicans have been hysterical about government bureaucrats dictating what healthcare procedures Americans can receive. Now before legislation is even enacted they are doing that very thing with abortion coverage. The Republicans must have been warning us about themselves.
People! Celebrate with this lovely cartoon Pirates of the Health Care a bean http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNuCfD5bICQ
Thom invites conservatives on his show. My only suggestion to Thom is to please not let these conservatives fillibuster the question or a response with their babble and rambling of nonsense.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-National-Insanity-by-martinweiss-0911...
Thom, when Bush was in office, there was a psychiatrist who wrote an article or book with the title, "Bush on the Couch." I cannot remember the writers name. Maybe you or someone can write a book, "A Nation on the Couch." The path that our nation is on is insanity. I believe that we are becoming a certifiably crazy nation.
I know that psychiatrists are reluctant to voice their professional diagnosis of a person or a nation but we need someone to reveal how crazy we are as a nation. Would it be possible to find a person who is willing to talk about our nation's insanity.
My country and its people really frightens me!!!
"Jesus speaks sanity to a world of lunatics." - G.K. Chesterton
Thom, you solved the problem today... No fed abortions... no viagra. Start making protest signs. .It's a quick fix.
Quark, thank you so very much for your post and sharing your experience. We are going to have to keep speaking up. My experiences with abortion occurred because I was not with men who loved me, and I was not in a financial position to have the child. They have re-ignited a sisterhood by endangering the lives of our very-beloved, child-bearing age daughters, a sisterhood that will defeat them in many many other ways. I thank you for that vote against abortion, conservative, women-hating blue dogs in the House of Representatives, because I am more than fired up to defeat you. You are going down!
loretta,
:)
Quark, hugs to you. (we'll get those rat..bas,,,)
It is fascinating what the alternative to the public option that Texas' two Republican senators are offering their constituents, where one-quarter of all residents have no health insurance--the highest in the nation. They claim, of course, that they want health care reform--but only the kind that amounts to tax cuts ("tax credits") and malpractice reform, which only means more money in the pockets of insurance companies. Basically, these two senators (along with Texas' state lawmakers) are showing the uninsured their pallid, flabby posteriors.