Off the Grid for a Couple of Weeks

Olaf's off to Berlin on his first vacation in fourteen months, so the postings will likely be very thin for the coming weeks. However, if I find a friendly internet cafe and a little inspiration, perhaps I'll post from abroad. Those damned European keyboards are mapped differently, though, and can really confound these old American fingers, so if my spelling or punctuation goes to hell, please cut me some slack.

I'll be back, my friends, bigger and badder and uglier and madder than ever.

All the best!

Olaf's New Face

My new look. Hope you like it.


The Reign of the Moronic Chimperor has finally gotten to me. Trust me, I feel worse than I look. Time to return to Berlin for a rejuvenatory vacation.

Oh, Barack Obama! Whither Thou Goest?

This is for my friend MB:

I was as excited as anyone to see Mr. Obama elected to the Senate two years ago. Dick Durbin has always been one of the few true Democrats and adding Mr. Obama as the junior senator was something to make every Illinois citizen proud. But something has happened to him since he's arrived in Washington, and it's the same disease that has destroyed the Democrats as an opposition party. Here's an example in today's press.

In a speech last month that drew fire from liberal bloggers and raised eyebrows in Washington, Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., warned that far-right conservatives like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson would continue to hold sway unless the Democratic Party competes for the support of evangelical Christians and other churchgoing Americans.

"We make a mistake when we fail to acknowledge the power of faith in the lives of the American people and join a serious debate about how to reconcile faith with our modern, pluralistic democracy," Obama said.

Here's the problem--a modern, pluralistic democracy cannot exist without a strict separation of church and state and there's a damned good reason why: bending public policy to fit the superstitions of people of "faith" rather than reason and experience is destructive. Any examination of history shows that faith-based or faith-influenced government (and that includes ideological "faith" as well--fascism, Stalinism, cults of personality) always, ALWAYS leads to totalitarianism and disaster.

Religion should be free from government intervention and government should be free from religious intervention. Until Obama quits catering to fanatics who believe their mumbo-jumbo should dictate our lives, he's a loser in the Democratic Party. Falwell, Robertson, and Dobson are power-mad charlatans, con men, and anti-democratic fringe fanatics who, were it not the usefulness they provide to the fascist wing of the Republican Party, would be raving on a street corner somewhere in shit-stained smocks. They are not to be catered to, or even acknowledged as contributors to any discussion of how our democracy should operate. They believe that invisible beings speak to them and through them. I call that mental illness, not leadership.

Shame on you, Mr. Obama. Compromising with the likes of Falwell, et. al. does nothing for the progress of democracy; in fact, it inhibits it. We cannot "reconcile" foolish superstition with self-governance based on reason and experience. One if absolute fantasy, and the other is all that saves us from the more malevolent exploiters of such fantasy, like Falwell, Dobson, and Robertson.