A brief personal note

A note to regular readers:

Obviously, I've not posted anything new on this blog for nigh onto two months. There are multiple reasons, all of which would make boring reading. Mostly they have to do with a major project going on in my house, with workers showing up at odd hours and staying unpredictable lengths of time, and with my desk, computer and other gear covered in plastic and unreachable, and most my files and research material stowed in boxes on a porch. There's also a bit about an elderly friend who has required a considerable amount of help lately.

During this time, I haven't kept up with all the news to the degree I usually do, and I'm behind by about 300 emails, despite periodic attempts to get through them and dump trivia.

But....I've followed major events, have been closely watching a developing story on an escalating push by the far right to cast out the devils and do away with separation of church and state. Just yesterday, I sent a list of questions having to do with that development to the Internal Revenue Service, and have been promised at least some sort of answers to those questions.

One of the results of attention to the religious right is a heightened awareness of the similarity of religious extremists around the world, regardless of what faiths they profess, or profess to profess, and how different they believe themselves to be.

Open involvement in violence is less among Christian fanatics – in this country in this year – than among Islamic fanatics, but in all other respects they are closer in outlook to each other than to calmer believers in their respective religions.

And, please note and be watchful, there is an unmistakable undercurrent of violence and threat in the words and actions of America's Christian extremists. Sharron Angle is not alone in wanting us to fear a “second amendment solution” if we fail to give the extremists what they want.

Isn't it interesting that our Christian Right is as determined as the Muslim Right of Afghanistan and Pakistan and Iran et al to force others to live according to their beliefs? And that their religious beliefs often have only a passing similarity to those of the vast majority of people who claim Christianity or Islam as their faith?

That aside, like you I've been watching the buildup to the midterm elections, of course. In that, I've found the attitudes of Democratic Party insiders, and the party's true believers, and the silliness of the corporate media more interesting than most of the political races.

The party and their panicked followers have been working hard to excuse themselves from what appears likely to be some considerable loss of offices. Many of them are devoting major effort to building up a cover story in which Democrat losses are entirely the fault of those who recognize that If You Always Do What You Always Did, You Always Get What You Always Got – who have recognized that the Democrats, as a party, are crap, in other words. (Noting, of course, that there are several individual exceptions to the rule of crap.)

It's the same election cycle after election cycle, with a little more hysteria each time than there was the time before. It allows the Democratic faithful to absolve themselves of responsibility for the overwhelming failures – from the viewpoint of poor and middle class American – of that now long-failed party.

As for the corporate media – especially those who write from inside the Beltway – if you believe anything they say, but especially the core common beliefs of the Washington press corps, you are going to be wondering for a long time how things came out so differently from what you expected. They learn everything they think they know from each other and from a few political insiders whose sole reason for existence is to sell stories to benefit themselves and their clients. Washington and state house journalists, with very few exceptions, know less about what we're thinking than they know about economics or quantum physic – both total mysteries in their world.

Will be back in a few days.