The Rule of Law is More Fragile than We Know

Poster Art from the WPA.

It is against the law to sell an ounce of MaryJane. Or sell a couple of your Percocets to get cigarette money.  And both those events go on in my Hood on a regular basis.  And the people committing these "crimes" are just everyday good folk. I know them. They are my neighbors. Draconian drug laws caused the Philly police to illegally search my daughter one day when she was coming home from work. Just putzing along one block from our door. They ridiculed her, they attempted to intimidate her, and they searched her.

We have many people in everyday and political life who are "moral indignation junkies." They love being able to pounce on people and prove what morally superior people they are. And they genuinely believe they are morally superior. Kind of like Religious Authoritarians do. They have no idea how off putting and morally offensive they themselves are. Too bad malignant scrupulosity is not painful, except to others.

For the powerful, this moral indignation and scrupulosity and enforcement does not seem to apply. Being a SCOTUS Justice is a license to cheat on your income tax evidently. The IRS will ignore your August Ass "forgetting" to file all your income, although Al Capone went to jail for that. What would happen to the Average Joe who hid thousands from the IRS for years?

Being a law abiding person is not a sane strategy in America any more. When the government takes money from us to run things properly, and we see corruption at every level of leadership, what is the incentive not to be a Crook or a Corpo? There is none. Public corruption destroys more than the economy. Public corruption destroys public trust. Public corruption is turning our cities into wastelands, our roads into rubble and destroying our souls.

57

Govern the country by regular rules;
Direct the army by cunning moves;
But win the world by avoiding fuss.
How do I know that this is so?
Inward light!

Beneath heaven,
The more rules and prohibitions there are,
The poorer the people become.
The sharper the weapons there are,
The greater the country's confusion.
The cleverer the people become,
The more cunning acts take place.
The more laws and orders there are,
The more thieves and robbers appear.

Therefore the sage says:
I do nothing,
And the people of themselves reform.
I love stillness,
And the people of themselves grow straight.
I don't fuss,
And the people of themselves get rich.
I don't want,
And the people of themselves grow simple.

Time Wounds All Heels. Did somebody famous say that? TO BE CONTINUED - I NEED COFFEE.

Graphic by Favianna Rodriguez

Fannie Brice: “Time heals all wounds and wounds all heels.”

I have killed people. God saved me from succeeding. I would tell the story, but in our current civil condition, it would seem more like braggadocio than confession. Lady Shrink and I are talking about rage, mine specifically and otherwise.

I have not been able to write more so I have not come back for awhile. While I was trying to figure out wtf I am doing here, I came across the best depiction of bipolar rage and working class pain I know about. And I discovered that Nina Simone is also bipolar. So I am sharing it to compensate you for this literary interruptus. It is embarrassing but I do not want to tell lies...

If you want or need Attitude Adjustment on Turkey Day...

...this is what you take PRN. 

Illegitimi non carborundum. 

Joy to the World!

Ram Sex. Seriously?

UPDATE: 
I think it important to note that Albert Mohler Jr. was running for President of Southern Baptist Convention.

Citing a desire to serve as a uniter amid turbulent times, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary President R. Albert Mohler Jr. said in October he had agreed to accept a nomination to serve as SBC president at the 2021 SBC Annual Meeting.

So, I made myself read an essay Is Your Baby Gay? What If You Could Know? What If You Could Do Something About It? by Albert Mohler Jr.. Nothing like a good dose of old time Religion early in the day. Bracing. Woke me right up.

Mohler makes a mad dash for Reality. You, Cher Reader, must tell me if he made it. This is one of his conclusions:

Christians must be very careful not to claim that science can never prove a biological basis for sexual orientation. We can and must insist that no scientific finding can change the basic sinfulness of all homosexual behavior. The general trend of the research points to at least some biological factors behind sexual attraction, gender identity, and sexual orientation. This does not alter God's moral verdict on homosexual sin (or heterosexual sin, for that matter), but it does hold some promise that a deeper knowledge of homosexuality and its cause will allow for more effective ministries to those who struggle with this particular pattern of temptation. If such knowledge should ever be discovered, we should embrace it and use it for the greater good of humanity and for the greater glory of God.

The essay gave me cold chills. My Pervert Alarm is clanging bigtime. There is a detailed discussion about the mechanics of turning gay Rams straight. Not the football kind of Rams.

The most interesting research along these lines relates to the study of sheep. Scientists at the U.S. Sheep Experiment Station are conducting research into the sexual orientation of sheep through "sexual partner preference testing." As William Saletan at Slate.com explains:

A bare majority of rams turn out to be heterosexual. One in five swings both ways. About 15 percent are asexual, and 7 percent to 10 percent are gay. What makes the sheep "sexual partner preference testing" research so interesting is that the same scientists who are documenting the rather surprising sexual behaviors of male sheep think they can also change the sexual orientation of the animals.

The vision of a bunch of men sweating in a barn, tugging off some ram's penises and telling themselves they are doing Science cracks me up. Think their penises were flaccid during the event? I wonder if there were any women present.  LMAO. Fluffing rams for Jesus.

Asexual folks need to recuse themselves from discussions about Sex and Society. Illiterate consumers of the Bible the same. Most folk with sexual fetishes do the decent thing and make home videos. Albert Mohler, in the marketplace of ideas, all you are is what you write. Bestiality for Science and God? Cover your proclivities, Love, because your ramrod is out.

Note: I work with this definition of Religion. One can be an anti-theist or atheist and still be 'religious' if we see Religion as a function of the human psyche as Wm. James attests:

Religion...shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. - The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"