In past years, I've always had some post-Christmas blues. Sort of, anyway. More like post-Christmas disgusts, actually, after family members spend absurd amounts of money on stuff we neither need nor want, leaving us with wads of guilt about what the heck to *do* with the stuff, plus the inevitable "we didn't spend enough on THEM" stuff, and so on.

This year, due to a combination of factors that led to our relatives not having time to buy so much crap (and therefore spending more money on one *decent* present, off a list of things we suggested), plus our endless complaining about not having any room in the house, we actually didn't have that happen. We got some quite nice gifts, we managed to buy stuff for relatives that *they* wanted rather than feeling like we had a quota, and we don't have a houseful of stuff to find homes for.

It's progress. Perhaps next year we'll persuade them that alternative gifting (heifer.org, and the like) really *would* make us just as happy as still more material possessions.

Meanwhile, my husband has the week off, and incentive to help with the basement (making room for the pottery wheel I bought him!) so hopefully we'll make some housecleaning progress. I also commissioned his brother to do some of the kitchen work that we now have even less time for, and he properly installed our stove while we were gone this weekend (the previous stove was a built-in, and this one's not, so it's been sitting an extra 3-4" up on the cabinet base for I-don't-know-how-long). Progress, hurrah.

Every year, there's a Christmas present that stands out, one I'm really proud of... I've either scored a great deal, or found something that's exactly *perfect* for someone, or something like that.

This year, I think The Gift is chartreuse maggots. We were in the sporting goods store, picking up handwarmers and whatnot for the hunters and fishermen in the family, and I was looking at the wide array of really weird baits. (Catfish baits don't count. They're *beyond* weird.) I'm not really sure why, but for some reason they feel compelled to put fluorescent dyes in stuff, as if trout are some deep-sea fish or something. I mean, the glitter I can see, it looks like fish scales, sort of, but I don't know why panfish are attracted to freaky colors. Apparently they are, or at least bait-buying fishermen are, so there they are. And I looked at all of them, and found... chartreuse maggots. I'M GIVING MY FATHER-IN-LAW CHARTREUSE MAGGOTS FOR CHRISTMAS!

No, I don't know why I'm so irrationally pleased about it. He's also getting a neato handmade pigsuede notebook, so it's not like he's *only* getting chartreuse maggots. (The suede is not, be it known, chartreuse. It's a dark, almost-black blue.)

While I've certainly programmed in a heck of a lot of languages, I haven't spent quite so much time doing heavy programming in two at the same time. Or really, four, since the MS flavor of SQL is substantially different from the MySQL version, though the Gamehawk use of MySQL is rather lite compared to the rather ugly nested subselects I'm doing in the office.

I think the problem is that Delphi is too similar to Perl in superficial details, so I can't keep it as distinct as, say, RPG and Perl. Tonight for the first time I started to type a line of Perl code and had to stop and think about a quite simple function.

Or maybe I'm just getting old.

Our church advisory council, of which I'm a member (actually, one of the few members, since it's been losing members to moves and whatnot and we've been too busy to find replacements), is having their annual Christmas dinner tonight. Five couples, and this year because of the church finances we're opting to have a semi-potluck at a member's house instead (read: I'm in charge of the budget and I'm not gonna spend big bux at a restaurant). Semi-potluck, because I'm assigning people to bring stuff, and only two of the other gals are helping. We're fondueing, because I own four fondue pots, two of which date from the 1970's.

So we just chopped up beef tenderloin, made reuben balls, breaded cheese, and we have cocktail franks (those are hard to find... there are eighty-leven varieties of "little smokies" but that's different) that'll be batter-dipped. Whee. Oh, and a goat-cheese snowman (three cheese balls rolled in sauteed garlic, fresh-ground black pepper, and sauteed rosemary, with rosemary arms and a carrot-and-peppercorn face).

And bagna cauda.

Like good self-respecting geeks with no Italian ancestry, we were of course introduced to it by way of Babylon 5. I just finished making it, and testing it with a Wheat Thin, being that one of the other gals is bringing the veggies for dipping, and the other the bread. Yum. I can feel my arteries hardening already...

Yay for my husband, who did a lot of the work because my back's still out, because I hauled laundry to and from the basement yesterday. I thought I was careful, but I guess not enough so.

Aside from actual "job" work (I hit the $1200 mark today, which is pretty cool), I haven't gotten anything done in the last few days, because I've managed to Do Something to my back. I'm not sure what, or how... aside from a bit of sciatica when I was pregnant (par for the course), I haven't had any back trouble to speak of. This has felt like the typical worked-too-hard lower back ache, except multiplied quite a bit. Very odd. I bought a fifty-pound bag of dog food Monday, but a clerk insisted on loading it for me and all I had to do was tip it out of the cart into the back of the van, so it's very unlikely that was it. I've been sitting goofy at work because I'm wedged in next to a desk, at a folding table, but aside from a too-high keyboard there's nothing *that* weird about it and I usually feel bad keyboarding in my shoulders and upper back. So I'm mystified, but it seems to be getting better, so I guess I just must have lifted something I shouldn't have, and that I don't remember.

So the Christmas tree still isn't up. Bah.

I guess I'm going to have to change my sig. It's looking more and more like I'm going to hire on permanently.

I've stubbornly put off learning JavaScript, though I picked up the O'Reilly rhino book (for a buck; it covers up to JS 1.2, and I have *no* idea what's current these days) awhile back figuring I'd add some bells and whistles once the core of Gamehawk's written. But this project involves web front-ends, and lots of hiding unnecessary selection boxes so as not to confuse the end user, and lots of form validation so that the Delphi program never re-presents the submission form with "fix this please"s (if the validation is inadequate, you get a simple warning or error and have to use the back button... they still don't do enough distrusting of the submission form, but I'll be teaching them otherwise). So I'm learning some of the useful bits of JavaScript, and getting paid for it. Sweet, even if I do have to use FrontPage. (Well, I don't *have* to. But everyone else does, and to appearances lives in the direct-HTML-editing tab as much as I do, so it's really more like "Notepad with some context highlighting and a GUI viewer" and that's fine with me.)

The house isn't getting any more organized, though. Not sure what to do about that.

Okay, so I haven't exactly *mastered* Delphi, but I compiled a program today, and I think I've assimilated all the basics. It's really, really similar to Visual Basic, assuming *that* hasn't changed in ten years, so it's not a great leap. After two days of voodoo programming (copy-and-paste from the nonweb version, into the web version of a different report), today I got to debug, so now I've figured out what's actually happening. The only really new stuff is the way declarations and dependencies happen, and today was all sorts of insights about that.

My husband, meanwhile, is waxing enthusiastic about the potential for quitting *his* job and writing the Great American Novel when our son goes back to school. A bit premature, but at least the extra money's going to come in handy for Christmas.

Actually, it's even worse than that. I'm addicted to WoW. Like, seriously, hardcore addicted already, like forgetting to eat dinner until the middle of the night and getting very little sleep for several nights in a row kind of addicted.

I know myself well, and I have never played MMORPGs before because I knew this would happen. But some very good friends of mine in Boulder are playing it, and I saw it as an excuse to do something with them.

It's fun. It's way too fun. I could quit any time, of course, I just don't want to. Yeah, that's the ticket...

Anyway, just in case anybody was wondering what happened to me -- well, that's what.

Also, in case any of you guys are playing too, let me know, I'd love to play with you. I'm Wolfthraine on Doomhammer and Eliduc on Suramar, and I'd be open to making another character to team up with a slashdot group of some kind. Maybe we could make a slashdot JE circle guild or something.

Seriously, kids, this game kicks ass...

Whoa, I'm having flashbacks, here.

I actually did very little Delphi work, and it was with pretty much the first version that came out. But I have a pretty strong background in VisualBasic (before I converted to Perl because I couldn't afford all the libraries for Internet tools; they're all integral now, I'm sure) and some Access, and various other Windows-based things. It's just been awhile.

So what they're doing, they're converting Delphi backoffice reports into Delphi web reports... tacking on an HTML front end with selection boxes, and a PDF-exporting caboose.

And now I'm in an XP/IIS/SQLServer/Delphi/Frontpage environment, and no, there's not the slightest chance of converting it to Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl/Pico, where I'd much rather be.

Eventually, I'm sure, I'll be re-addicted to all the happy shiny GUI development tools. Right now... whoa.

But the cleaning/remodeling project has had about as much progress as this journal. Sigh.

And as of today, I'm making it worse. I just took a contract programming job (I gotta relearn Delphi!) which will eat up probably 20 hours a week, maybe more.

But how could I refuse? They're buying me a laptop and all.

make way for the positive day!" -- Bob Marley

"To oppose a thing is to strengthen it." -- Frank Herbert

The Rastas say that Babylon must fall. And they are right. But I don't think this is intended as a call to action, a call for revolution. I think it's just a statement of historical inevitability. Any system which systematically destroys its support systems is doomed. It is only a matter of time.

So there is no point in trying to destroy the system, it's doing that perfectly well on its own. And, more importantly, destruction necessarily involves the destroyers in destructive karma. Who wants that? Bob Marley talked a lot about revolution, but if you look closely at his position, he was not advocating violence or destruction or even direct opposition.

"I believe in a spiritual war, you know. Some people think when we talk about war, them think we carry a knife or a gun -- no. We're dealing with a higher divinity, Rastaman Vibration which is pure light and Earth created, because Earth come back for what it want. Government is trying to be as powerful as God." -- Bob Marley

So what can we do, if we are not to fight, if opposition merely strengthens that which we oppose? What do we do, when confronted with such awesome power of destruction and negativity?

Build something better.

When I say to organize, I'm not talking about organizing to "fight the power." The power is way better organized and better funded than we will ever be. Don't play their game, they have the deck stacked and a full set of aces up their sleeves. Play something else.

The trick is to be positive. "Rastaman Vibration is Positive!" Bob said. This isn't easy, and I too fall into the trap of negative thinking, of focusing on the problem rather than the solution. It is hard because the problem is so big, it can be overwhelming. Don't be sucked into that trap.

Instead, we must work to define, to articulate, to express, to enact, and to instantiate, a new vision. We must build our own system of values, of ideas, and of physical and social infrastructure alongside the existing system. It can be done. It is not easy, but it is possible, and we must reach out to pluck from the possible the golden threads of the new tapestry of life.

To me, it seems we must begin at the beginning, where it all started in the first place, and build a new society from the ground up. So where did it start? Well, the events I described earlier as the Babylonian revolution are, of course, what they call in history the "agricultural revolution." I wanted to avoid this framing, because it implies that the revolution was a revolution in technology rather than ideology, and therefore, by our standards, a good, progressive step. But it is important to look at the technology of agriculture, and see how we can do it right.

The gorilla Ishmael, in the book by that name, did not suggest we return to a hunter-gatherer society. That would be foolish, as there is simply not enough land to support us all, and we would simply destroy what wilderness is left in the attempt. He said, "you consider yourselves an inventive people. Invent something."

Well, we have.

I said that the Earth was made for the glory of God, and humans were made to love and care for and protect it. So how does this ideal translate into agriculture? Well, obviously it means our agricultural technique must look very different from the one commonly practiced in our culture, that's for sure. But what would it look like? Clearly, it would put back as much or more into the soil and other resource sources as it takes out. Clearly it would encourage biodiversity and ecological health. It would produce abundant human food, but in all other ways it would resemble a natural ecosystem as closely as possible. It would employ the creativity and power of human beings in a manner protective of the Earth to create a greater abundance of life.

Such a system has been developed, and it is called permaculture. Those of you who know me well know that I've been on about it for some time. It was invented in the '70s by Bill Mollison and David Holmgren, a pair of paradigm-shifted former-takers. They reasoned that by studying and emulating natural patterns, agriculture could be made both more productive and more sustainable. In permaculture, the idea is to design a "food forest," a system very much like a natural forest which just happens to produce large amounts of human food and other human-usable resources.

Permaculture is not anti-technology. It can, in fact, be practiced at any technological level. It's not the level of technology, it's how you use it that counts. In permaculture, technology is used to nurture the Earth and encourage greater growth and health of food-producing ecosystems. Intelligent design is applied to create systems which are self-maintaining and sustainable and efficient and productive. These design principles apply to everything from architecture to energy technology to gardening to community design, and even extend into the social structural realm.

Permaculture is not destructive of existing wilderness. There is plenty of land out there which has already been devastated by taker agriculture. Permaculture replenishes and rejuvenates this land. It can even be practiced in cities. My best friend's father is turning Huston into a garden. It can be done anywhere.

Permaculture is not just an idea, it is also a movement, an organization. There are tens of thousands of people practicing it all over the world. They have institutes, they have communities, they have infrastructure and social networks and classes and books.

So if you are one of the many people I've talked to who understands what is wrong with the system, who can see how it is not sustainable and can never bring fulfillment and happiness to human beings and health to the Earth, but you don't know exactly what to do about it, my recommendation is this: take a permaculture course. Spend some time on a permaculture community. Buy a copy of the Permaculture Designer's Manual by Bill Mollison. It's expensive, but it contains just about everything you need to know to survive on this planet. Practice it where you live. Share it with your friends.

It's not just an agricultural movement, it's a cultural and political movement as well. To put it in political terms, it is an environmental initiative, a poverty and hunger initiative, an economic initiative, an energy initiative, and even a foreign policy initiative (people practicing permaculture don't use a lot of oil). Those who understand the principles of permaculture will naturally enact sustainable practices in their private and political lives. They will become involved in their communities, because permaculture is fundamentally community-oriented. They will work to preserve the environment, and to live in harmony with each other and with the world. Together, we can save the Earth, one square foot at a time.

You know, it's interesting, I've often heard conservatives say that "liberals hate America." I don't think I hate America. I think I love America very very much. But I define America as a continent, including all the land and plants and animals and people contained therein. Some Native Americans (the only Real Americans, regardless of what the new T-shirt says) call it "Great Turtle Island," and they lived in prosperity on it for thousands of years before we came and fucked it all up. I love that with all my heart. I don't think that's what conservatives mean when they say this. I think when they talk about "America," they are talking about what I mean when I say "the System." And I don't think I hate that either, because I don't think I hate anything, but if there is one thing I come close to hating, it's the System, which the Rastafarians call the Babylon System, and with good reason.

I just wish I could explain to them. It's just so hard. You can't really have it explained to you, you just have to see it. "Nobody can be told what the Matrix really is. You just have to see it for yourself." Doing acid helps, for some people, and I've done that. But I grew up knowing, at least to some extent, and I've learned much more since then.

Do you think fish know that water is wet? What color is air? Do you know what happened ten thousand years ago in Babylon? But of course you don't, if you don't even think Babylon existed ten thousand years ago. So how can I explain?

I'll try this. This approach is due to Daniel Quinn, from his excellent book "Ishmael," which explains all of this pretty well. It's a bit of an oversimplification, but it works well enough for illustrative purposes.

Imagine that Hitler won WWII. Imagine that he succeeded in wiping out all the Africans and the Jews and the Native Americans and the Asians, and established the Thousand Year Reich. And he burned all the books, and erased all the history, so that nobody ever knew that there was a time when everyone wasn't blonde and fair, or when there was anything other than a world fascist government. Imagine that, a thousand years in the future, a pair of tall blonde young men are strolling through the streets of what used to be Tokyo, and one of them turns to the other and says, "you know, I can't put my finger on it, but I just can't escape the feeling that we're being lied to about something."

Around ten thousand years ago in Babylon, there was a great revolution. We know this because we have archaeological evidence, assuming you believe in that sort of thing. And it's OK if you don't. It doesn't matter. Think of this as a myth. The revolutionaries were so incredibly successful that they wiped out everyone in the area who didn't agree with their radical revolutionary ideology. And it was truly radical, truly extreme, the most radical extremist ideology ever invented. They were so successful that they then proceeded to wipe out their neighbors, and then their neighbors' neighbors, and so on and so forth. And they kept on going, and every time they encountered a new people, they gave them a simple choice: join us or die. And many of them chose to fight and die, because the revolutionary ideology was so radical and extreme and, at least to them, odious, that they would rather die than accept it.

The revolutionaries won. In fact, they won so thoroughly, so completely, that there are almost none of their enemies left on the whole planet. Nearly everybody else has either joined them, or died, and their radical ideology is so incredibly pervasive that it rarely occurs to anyone to even think about questioning it, or for that matter, even noticing what it is. They have been called by many names, but the most common is simply "caucasians."

Their radical ideology is simply this: "the world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it."

The revolutionaries were afraid, you see. They lost their faith. They were terrified that God would not provide for them, that the world God made would not take care of them, would not give them what they needed to survive. So they decided to take it all, and make it give them what they wanted, and if it wouldn't, they would crush it mercilessly, because it was theirs to do with as they pleased.

Nobody else had ever thought that before. It changed everything. And, in my view, it is completely, utterly, horribly, tragically wrong. In my view, the world was made for the glory and love of God, and Humans were made to care for and love and protect it. This is what we always believed, for millions of years, in one form or another, before these insane ultraradicals came along and put us in chains. And now we're so used to the chains, we notice them no more than a fish notices water.

What does all this have to do with the election? Well, the paradigm shift I keep talking about, it's not really anything new. In a sense, it's the oldest idea there is. The new paradigm rejects the revolutionary ideology and returns to what I believe is the system of thought humans were meant to have. It has been growing for some time now. But there has been a backlash, the revolutionaries don't want to give up their power and control, and they are trying to crush the counterrevolution. To me, Bush and his crowd are the ultimate symbol of this backlash. I think they intend to destroy the counterrevolution utterly, if they can. I don't think they can. But it's kind of a trip, to know that the most powerful forces the planet has ever seen are arrayed against you, and are intent on the total destruction of everything you love and the erasure of all that could give our species hope for ever and ever.

OK, so that's a bit overdramatic, and a bit silly. I'm sorry. But that's the only way I can explain why I feel so strongly about it. I don't know if you will understand. But that's how it is...

Incidentally, I think Jesus tried to explain all of this to us. "Consider the lilies of the field," he said. "Love thy neighbor," he said. But did we listen? Oh no, not us, we went right on ripping the lilies up out of the fields and killing off our neighbors like there was no tomorrow. And if we keep it up much longer, there probably won't be.

The concept of a paradigm shift was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in 1962 in his landmark work "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions." During a paradigm shift, a very interesting phenomenon occurs. Some people adopt the new paradigm early and defend it vigorously. Others are gradually swayed as the evidence supporting the new paradigm mounts. But there are always some diehards who simply refuse to give up on the old paradigm no matter what. Regardless of what new evidence comes to light, they will make a series of increasingly unlikely assumptions in order to force the new data to fit into their obsolete worldview. This is of course completely permitted by the rules of logic, so the decision to abandon the old paradigm is inherently subjective -- at some point, you just have to decide that the logical contortions being undertaken by the fanatical adherents of the old theory are just plain silly.

Thus many people continued to believe that the Earth was flat, even long after people had actually circumnavigated it. They presumably thought it was all a vast conspiracy of cartographers. Thus many highly intelligent and skilled physicists, including Einstein, refused to accept Quantum Mechanics even while they were busy building it, because they could not abandon the idea of determinism. Thus many people still refuse to accept evolution, long after overwhelming scientific consensus and the vast preponderance of evidence clearly support it, because they simply cannot fit it into their worldview. The irony of this is that evolution isn't inconsistent with Christianity any more than a round Earth is -- if God wants to create a spherical planet, He can, and if He wants to create life by a process of evolution, He can do that too, He's God.

It's not that these people are stupid. Einstein was clearly one of the most intelligent people our species has ever produced. He just got stuck on something, and he couldn't get over it. He could not bring himself to accept that the universe contains a basic element of randomness, because "God does not play dice with the universe." Why not? If God wants to play dice with the universe, He can do that, He's God. But Einstein couldn't get over it, and he went to his grave trying to find some set of assumptions or "hidden variables" which would allow him to rescue determinism from the ravages of the Schrodinger's Cat "paradox." People are just like that. It happens to most of us, sooner or later.

It has been highly amusing to watch the contortions that pundits and the corporate media are going through to explain the recent theft of the erection. Exit polls are almost never wrong, and, as pointed out by Prof. Steven Freeman at the University of Pennsylvania, the odds that the exit polls were wrong in the same way in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania are 250 million to one. If this sort of thing were to happen in some two-bit banana republic, everyone would immediately draw the obvious conclusion, especially if the results happened to favor the deeply entrenched incumbents and the incumbents' supporters happened to be in a position to tamper with the ballots.

But let the same thing happen in the US, and they immediately begin inventing spooks and specters, positing a shadowy Democratic conspiracy to fix the exit polls. They have no evidence for this, of course, nor have they proposed a mechanism by which it could happen or even a plausible motivation for doing so, and the alleged conspirators immediately backed off from their conspiracy, disavowed the exit poll results, and actually modified the results to fit with the official election tally. But they have to make this assumption, because they cannot bring themselves to abandon the idea that the system works, that corporations and government and the Republican party are benevolent and trustworthy and serve the real interests of the American people.

Oh sure, they will admit that there are some problems with these institutions. But they cannot abandon their faith in the basic goodness of the system itself. So they have to continue, in the face of evidence which has been steadily mounting for decades if not centuries, to make an ever more ludicrous set of assumptions in order to protect their worldview from the ravages of reality.

You must understand, I'm not just talking about conservatives here, mainstream "liberals" do this too. Their first loyalty is to the system, however liberal they may allegedly be.

A paradigm shift is occurring in our culture, and has been for some time now. Any paradigm shift begins with the observation that the old paradigm is inadequate, though that is only the beginning, and a new paradigm must be developed to replace it, subsuming the old paradigm and explaining its successes while expanding into new territory. And indeed, the new paradigm taking shape does this, combining elements from such diverse fields as Quantum Mechanics, Eastern mysticism, Christianity, anthropology, psychology, and general weirdness to form something completely new and radically expansive. But it begins with the insight that the system is broken, that the old paradigm has failed, that the hard, cold, mechanistic social darwinism (which often takes on the guise of "fundamentalist" religion, oddly enough) that gave rise to the industrial revolution and the ascendance of corporate capitalism is destructive and dehumanizing and fundamentally flawed.

I had the good fortune to be raised in the new paradigm. I knew that the system was broken by the time I was five years old, so none of this comes as a shock to me. Indeed, the only thing I find surprising is the tenacity with which people hold on to the old paradigm in the face of all the available evidence. There has been a massive backlash (I highly recommend this article, it's incredibly insightful and a wonderful read) against the cultural revolution, one of the most bizarre cultural phenomena in history, "a working class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working class people." Did you know that the "heartland" of America was a hotbed of socialism 100 years ago? Now, of course, they have fallen for what may well be the biggest and most expensive con in history.

But this should not come as a surprise. This always happens. There are always those who will not accept the new paradigm no matter what, and will fight to the death to stop it. They will go to their graves clinging desperately to the tattered shreds of their archaic worldview. It doesn't matter. Eventually, the adherents of the old paradigm simply die off, and their beliefs die with them, making way for the dawning of a new day. And so it goes, and so it will go again and again. Provided, of course, that they don't take the rest of us with them this time around.

Hey Mad Poster, I just had to post this because it reminded me of you so much. I have no idea who wrote it, it was forwarded to me by a friend with no byline. It's very much in the spirit of Fuck the South, which also reminded me of you (you didn't write that one, did you?)

Anyway, for your amusement and enjoyment, I post this:

The Concession Speech Kerry Should Have Given

My fellow Americans, the people of this nation have spoken, and spoken with a clear voice. So I am here to offer my concession. I concede that I overestimated the intelligence of the American people. Though the true majority of people disagree with the President on almost every issue, you saw fit to vote for him. I never saw that coming. That's really special. And I mean "special" in the sense that we use it to describe those kids who ride the shorter school bus and find ways to injure themselves while eating pudding with rubber spoons. That kind of special.

I concede that I misjudged the power of hate. That's pretty powerful stuff, and I didn't see it. So let me take a moment to congratulate the President's strategists: Putting the gay marriage amendments on the ballot in various swing states like Ohio...well, that was just genius. Genius! It got people, a certain kind of fearful people, to the polls. The unprecedented number of folks who showed up and cited "moral values" as their biggest issue, those people actually changed history. These are the folks who consider same sex marriage a more important issue than war, or terrorism, or the economy! Who'd have thought the election would belong to them? Well, Karl Rove did. Gotta give it up to him for that.

I concede that I put too much faith in America's youth. With 8 out of 10 of you opposing the President, with your friends and classmates dying daily in a war you disapprove of, with your future being mortgaged to pay for rich, old peoples' tax breaks, you somehow managed to sit on your asses and watch the Cartoon Network while aging homophobic hillbillies carried the day. You voted with the exact same anemic percentage that you did in 2000. You suck! Seriously, you do!

There are some who would say that I sound bitter, that now is the time for healing, to bring the nation together. We in blue states produce the vast majority of the wealth in this country and pay the most taxes, and you in the red states receive the majority of the money from those taxes while complaining about 'em. We in the blue states are the only ones who've been attacked by foreign terrorists, yet you in the red states are gung ho to fight a war in our name. Blue state civilians are the actual victims and targets of the war on terror, while red state civilians are the ones standing behind us and yelling "Oh, yeah!? Bring it on!" As long as you can wave your high-powered guns and think you're actually free, you're pretty brave.

More than 50% of you Bush voters still believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. I'm impressed by that, truly I am. Your sons and daughters who might die in this war know it's not true, the people in the urban centers where al Qaeda wants to attack know it's not true, but those of you who are at practically no risk believe this easy lie because you can. As part of my concession speech, let me say that I really envy that luxury. I concede that. The President played on your fears, and you foolishly forgot that he was the one in charge when 9/11 actually happened. It was on his watch that al Qaeda struck, and not Saddam Hussein. I wonder if he told you that left-handed people were worshipers of the devil, if you'd actually believe that, too. Probably! How quickly history becomes distorted by those who shout their version the loudest.

Healing? We, the people at risk from terrorists, the people who subsidize you, the people who speak in glowing and respectful terms about the heartland of America while that heartland insults and excoriates us...we wanted some healing. We spoke loud and clear. And you refused to give it to us, largely because of your "high moral values". You thought you knew better: America doesn't need its allies, doesn't need to share the burden, doesn't need to unite the world, doesn't need to provide for its future. Hell no! Not when it's got a human shield of us pointy-headed, immoral, unconfrontational breadwinners who are willing to pay the bills and play nice in the vain hope of winning a vote that we can never have.

Because we're "morally inferior," I suppose, we are supposed to respect your values while you insult ours. And the big joke here is that for twenty years, we've done just that. It's not a "ha-ha" funny joke, I realize, but it's a joke all the same.

And, I make this pledge to you today: In the next election, there will be no pandering. Next time we will not pretend that the simple folk of America know just as much as the people who devote their lives to serving and studying the nation and the world. They don't! You've proved that by your foolish voting record. I'm talking to you, you ignorant, slack-jawed yokels, you bible-thumping, inbred drones, you redneck, racist, chest-thumping, perennially-duped grade school grads.

Thank you, and may God, and we always said He exists, bless each and every one of you and the rest of the world, even our enemies, in spite of your stupidity and hatred for the rest of His creation, which you're intent on letting Bush and his bully boys destroy.

OK, show of hands, how many people know that Corporations are legally considered to be people and are granted the same rights as all the rest of us under the constitution, including freedom of speech and equal protection under the law? Of course we've all heard this, but few realize that it's not actually true.

This utter nonsense has let to all sorts of problems. Walmart, for example, once stopped local communities from fighting its predatory business practices with laws designed to keep it from ruining local businesses, claiming these communities were illegally discriminating against it. Nike claimed it was allowed to lie to its customers because of freedom of speech, though the Supreme Court dismissed its appeal. This ludicrous fiction of corporate personhood has been used to justify all manner of blatant silliness.

In 1978, the Supreme Court ruled that campaign contributions by corporations, which ordinarily would be considered bribes or at least undue influence, count as freedom of speech and are therefore protected by the 1st Amendment. Oddly enough, Rehnquist wrote the dissenting opinion, in which he stated that the Court had made a mistake granting corporations the rights of people in the first place.

He was right, of course, except for one thing: the Court never did any such thing.

In 1886, in the case of Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad, the Supreme court supposedly issued a decision granting the rights of full personhood under the 14th amendment to corporations. This landmark "decision" has been used as legal precedent for all the foolishness which followed. However, if you read the actual text of the decision, the Court never actually ruled on the matter in a legally binding way. Apparently, before pronouncing the official ruling, one of the justices said something which the Court Clerk, who happened to be a former president of a railroad company, interpreted as meaning that corporations are persons, and refused to hear argument on the matter. The actual ruling doesn't even address the question.

So this incredibly important legal precedent was written into the not at all legally binding summary of the case by a clerk who was a former railroad president. We've been railroaded.

Thom Hartmann wrote about this in his book "Unequal Protection," in which he gives a detailed account of how corporations have hijacked our human rights and used them to justify all sorts of practices which are not equal at all.

So why bring this up now? Because if this interpretation is correct, it changes everything. We've just witnessed the blatant theft of the last shreds of what was left of our democracy (a fact so obvious at this point I won't bother to belabor it) by the corporatocracy. Corporations have obviously accrued far too much power. Nearly everyone, on all sides of the political arena, can clearly see that at this point. It might just be possible to get bipartisan support for a movement to strip these behemoths of their constitutional rights and start discriminating against them in earnest. There might just be a legal loophole which would allow this to happen.

Of course, it would depend on having a reasonable Supreme Court. This seems unlikely, but there is one chance. It is possible that the administration will appoint judges on the basis of religion rather than politics as such, judges who are so incredibly reactionary that they oppose granting rights to people, let alone corporations. This would be horrible news in every respect except one -- that they might possibly be convinced to overturn this insane "precedent" and declare corporations to be non-persons.

The wonderful thing about such a movement is that it need not be national in scope. Individual counties and towns can pass laws stripping corporations of their rights, as Porter Township in Pennsylvania did in 2002. The constitutionality of the law then has to be challenged by a corporation. I'm sure people in my area would get behind such a law, and a series of such cases would put the issue in the national spotlight.

One can hope, anyway...