April 10, 1970 – The Beatles broke up and now there are only two. 

The Braves have a 6-1 record.  I keep saying for them, at the beginning of the season – wow!

 

The Pink Flamingo’s Reading List  includes the book The Sociopath Next Door.  I’ve been mentioning it now for several days.  I don’t see how anyone can even consider voting for POTUS until they read this book.  In many ways it is chilling, absolutely chilling.  Don’t forget my Blog Critics piece about Peeps. FYI, your Peeps should just be starting to get good – and stale.  I’m one of the 20% who prefer them that way.  My rant for the day, well I have two of them, both related, on morality, the development of the conscience.  I am going to make some people angry, but I’ve reached the point where I really don’t’ care.  

 

The wind is obscene.  It will be this way until early May.  Jody, the guy doing some remodeling for me dropped by today and I now have the beginnings of a front step!  I still need something like 50 or so brackets to hold shelves.  I’m looking for 8” white ones.  I’ll probably be “blogging lite” the rest of the week.  I go with the parents to Las Cruces to my mother’s cardiologist in the morning.  On Thursday we work on shelving, moving my entire library, and painting.  Friday more of the same.  I may hire one of my best friends’ daughters to help me move books, restack shelves, and move into my new craft closet.

 

Perry Nelson has a fascinating post today about blog linking, etc.  I am very dissatisfied with my hit counters.  I cannot find one that accurately tracks my hits.  I’m also not too happy at Blog Harbor for completely dropping hit counts on Sunday and Monday.  I’m down about 8000 hits this month, simply because of those two days. I would also love to know what makes TLB tick.

 

I’ve been telling my mother this for years.  Diets cause you to gain weight.   And additional studies on Atkins.  I’d do it but I don’t like eating meat.  Then check out the top 10 good foods gone bad.  The worst part – my mother is right.  Blast!

 

The war on America’s Children. 

Cool, early Earth was purple!

 

Steven Zak has a, shall we say magnificent column today over at The American Thinker.  He wants to know who is next to help host The View – David Duke!

 

Sunspots hit a 1000 year high. The real cause of global warming – the Sun!   Coldest April in 113 years?    7th coldest in history?  Well, Algore, what now?   Now let’s be honest here, if it weren’t for all of Algore’s hot air, we would be in another ice age!

Bullwinkle Blog

Ace of Spaced HQ

Flopping Aces

IMMIGRATION

The latest Tanton backed immigration talking point is that anyone who is for the President’s plan is dooming illegals to what amounts to slavery.  I don’t hear anything about this on the conservative media, other than to promote the idea.  Too bad Imus had to go shoot off his foul mouth again or we could be having some serious debate. 

 Clueless conservatives on immigration:

Rich Lowery

James Pinkerton

Dumb Ox Daily News

Freedom Zone

MY MINI RANT FOR THE DAY

Mark Noonan over at Blogs for Bush wants to put an end to money transfers to Mexico. This kind of thing really upsets me.  Obviously Noonan knows nothing about the situation in Mexico and how impoverished people are over there.  If we refuse to allow people to send money back to their families….it is going to needy people not the government…these people in Mexico, who are barely living on the edge of survival, are going to sink into the abyss of starvation.  Great, good Christian thing to do.  The reason people are coming here to earn money is to support their WORKING – get that – WORKING relatives back in Mexico, who are basically living as surfs or peons.

 

The thing that angers me most about our good “Christian” and I use that word felicitously, Conservatives is the fact that they forget the Sermon on the Mount when it comes to dealing with Mexico and illegal Mexican immigrants.  Do you even know what poverty is?  Have you ever seen Juarez? I have.  I’ve fed starving children who have come across the border to beg.  I’ve helped feed an illegal family hiding, waiting for the husband to appear.  Guess what?  Starving children are starving children.

 

What would happen if Christ came back as an illegal Mexican immigrant to test our good Christian conservatives?  Remember when He said what we do to the very least of them we do unto Him.  These people, cowering, just wanting a better life (I’m not talking about the drug runners, gang bangers) are the very least of them.  As for me, I will follow the teachings of Christ.  

 

 We cut them off and Mexico is going to go same way as Venezuela.  Get that?  It’s coming, anyway.  If we are reasoned with our immigration reform we can hold the coming revolution off for a few more years.  If not, Chavez is going to be breathing right down my neck. I’ve already seen what Chavez does to people in Venezuela.  Want that to happen here.  Then, talk about a refugee problem?

 

How many people from Mexico does Mr. Noonan know, anyway?  I have a very dear friend who is from Mexico.  She and her husband, a CPA, are LEGAL American citizens.  She is a magnificent jewelry artist constantly doing business in Mexico, wiring money back and forth for her business.  Want to cut that off?  Want to cut off the legal flow of a legal business from a legal American citizen?  I have another friend who is a legal American citizen (Republican) who will periodically wire money to her family in Mexico.  Want to cut that off?

 

Then there’s Digger’s Realm, where anti Hispanic virtue runs rampant.  There’s this huge posting on how much anchor babies are costing.  What Digger fails to mention, or realize is the way the laws are now, anchor babies don’t matter.  It doesn’t matter if a child is born here, the parent gets shipped back to where-ever and they can take their AMERICAN CITIZEN (read:  No Mexicans need apply) with them, exiled from their own country, or they can leave the child in either foster care or with someone.  BUT the parents get deported.  It is called destroying families for political stupidity. 

 

MY RANT FOR THE DAY

An Adult Rationalization of Conscience

v. an Immature Mind-set

Freedom Zone perfectly illustrates my rant for the day.

“Some of this sounds reasonable, but the very idea of allowing an intruder that has broken into your house to take from you what doesn't belong to them - to move-in with you, is just plain nuts. People that have come into our country "illegally" have BROKEN OUR LAWS. They do not deserve to be here in the first place. Anything that allows them to stay here circumvents the rules and laws that all of us are expected to follow. Why, pray tell, should Mexican illegal aliens be given special privileges? President Bush still doesn't get it. Anything that allows the illegal aliens to stay is amnesty. A pig by any other name is still a pig…. ”

 

Psychologist Martha Stout has penned a brilliant book, The Sociopath Next Door. (I have a link to it on the top of the page at my Reading List) She describes the Heinz Dilemma, a tool used in morality and ethics classes.  It goes:

 

“The Heinz dilemma is a frequently used example in many ethics and morality classes. One well-known version of the dilemma, used in Lawrence Kohlberg's stages of moral development, is stated as follows:

 

A woman was near death from a special kind of cancer. There was one drug that the doctors thought might save her. It was a form of radium that a druggist in the same town had recently discovered. The drug was expensive to make, but the druggist was charging ten times what the drug cost him to produce. He paid $200 for the radium and charged $2,000 for a small dose of the drug. The sick woman's husband, Heinz, went to everyone he knew to borrow the money, but he could only get together about $ 1,000 which is half of what it cost. He told the druggist that his wife was dying and asked him to sell it cheaper or let him pay later. But the druggist said: "No, I discovered the drug and I'm going to make money from it." So Heinz got desperate and broke into the man's store to steal the drug for his wife.

 

Should Heinz have broken into the laboratory to steal the drug for his wife? Why or why not?

 

How would you solve this?  Your answer reveals how far your conscience has progressed and your ability to reason with morality and judgment.  (FYI – I said he should have stolen the drug, then exposed the whole scam to the media.  He would never do a day of jail time.   Yes, he was breaking the law.  But – the druggist was allowing people to die because he wanted to make a profit.  Yes, I know making a profit is the conservative way, but when does morality trump ideology and the law?)  Now, for those of you who say we must “round up” all illegals and ship them back to where-ever, especially Mexico, because it is the law of the land – well – when slavery was the law of the land and the law said you had to ship a runaway slave back to his vengeful master and most likely certain death or horrible punishment, well, that was the law.  Now, if you say that you would not have followed that law, but this, then, my friend, you need to do some very serious soul searching. 

 

Think about it.

 

These are the Stages of Moral Development:  

“…Stage one (obedience): Heinz should not steal the medicine because he will consequently be put in prison which means you are really terrible. Or: Heinz should steal the medicine because it only worth $200 and not how much the druggist wanted for it; Heinz had even offered to pay for it and was not stealing anything else besides.

 

Stage two (self-interest): Heinz should steal the medicine because he will be much happier if he saves his wife, even if he will have to serve a prison sentence. Or: Heinz should not steal the medicine because prison is an awful place, and he would probably languish over a jail cell more than his wife's death.

 

Stage three (conformity): Heinz should steal the medicine because his wife expects it; he wants to be a good husband. Or: Heinz should not steal the drug because stealing is bad and he is not a criminal; he tried to do everything he could without breaking the law, you cannot blame him.

 

Stage four (law-and-order): Heinz should not steal the medicine because the law prohibits stealing making it illegal. Or: Heinz should steal the drug for his wife but also take the prescribed punishment for the crime as well as paying the druggist what he is owed. Criminals cannot just run around without regard to the law; actions have consequences.

 

Stage five (human rights): Heinz should steal the medicine because everyone has a right to choose life, regardless of the law. Or: Heinz should not steal the medicine because the scientist has a right to fair compensation. Even if his wife is sick it does not make his actions right.

 

Stage six (universal human ethics): Heinz should steal the medicine, because saving a human life is a more fundamental value than the property rights of another person. Or: Heinz should not steal the medicine, because others may need the medicine just as badly, and their lives are equally significant….”

 

Think about it.  To be fair and balanced there are criticisms to this theory.  The main criticism is the fact that only men were queried and men have a tendency to be more dogmatic and more by the book laws than women who seem to wriggle around it.  Women have a tendency to think more creatively around the Heinz Dilemma.

 

“…Other psychologists have questioned the assumption that moral action is primarily reached by formal reasoning. One such group, the social intuitionists, state people often make moral judgments without weighing concerns such as fairness, law, human rights and abstract ethical values. Given this, the arguments that Kohlberg and other rationalist psychologists have analyzed could be considered post hoc rationalizations of intuitive decisions. This would mean that moral reasoning is less relevant to moral action than Kohlberg's theory suggests….”

 

The bottom line here is basically that the more advanced the conscience, the greater the ability to reason through an issue and realize that there are more important things that following the letter of the law.  So, I guess I would have been a great abolitionist!  Fact is, one of the very first abolitionists in the New World, Sarah Johnson, was one of my ancestors.

 

Kohlberg staging and civil disobedience.

“…Stage 5 subjects,- then, talk about "morality" and "rights" that take some priority over particular laws. Kohlberg insists, however, that we do not judge people to be at stage 5 merely from their verbal labels. We need to look at their social perspective and mode of reasoning. At stage 4, too, subjects frequently talk about the "right to life," but for them this right is legitimized by the authority of their social or religious group (e.g., by the Bible). Presumably, if their group valued property over life, they would too. At stage 5, in contrast, people are making more of an independent effort to think out what any society ought to value. They often reason, for example, that property has little meaning without life. They are trying to determine logically what a society ought to be like (Kohlberg, 1981, pp. 21-22; Gibbs et al., 1983, p. 83).

 

Stage 6: Universal Principles. Stage 5 respondents are working toward a conception of the good society. They suggest that we need to (a) protect certain individual rights and (b) settle disputes through democratic processes. However, democratic processes alone do not always result in outcomes that we intuitively sense are just. A majority, for example, may vote for a law that hinders a minority. Thus, Kohlberg believes that there must be a higher stage--stage 6--which defines the principles by which we achieve justice…”

 

The unsettling part is Kohlberg felt the average person never grew past stage 3 or 4.  Right now, our good “Christian” conservatives who cannot fathom a rational solution to our immigration problems and the problems with illegal immigrants prove his point.  If they are capable of advanced reasoning and conscience, they have been blinded by their own pre-existing racism against Hispanics.  If this were not the case, you would hear talk about “rounding up” all the illegal Irish immigrants.  You don’t, do you?  I am terribly afraid our good Tanton-brainwashed conservatives prove Stage 4 – maintaining social order.  Unfortunately they are more interested in maintaining the social order than doing what is morally right.

 

“Level 1. Preconventional Morality 

 

Stage 1 – Obedience and Punishment
The earliest stage of moral development is especially common in young children, but adults are capable of expressing this type of reasoning. At this stage, children see rules as fixed and absolute. Obeying the rules is important because it is a means to avoid punishment.

Stage 2 – Individualism and Exchange
At this stage, children account for individual points of view and judge actions based on how they serve individual needs. In the Heinz dilemma, children argued that the best course of action was whichever best-served Heinz’s needs. Reciprocity is possible, but only if it serves one's own interests.

 

Level 2. Conventional Morality

 

Stage 3 – Interpersonal Relationships
Often referred to as the “good boy-good girl” orientation, this stage is focused on living up to social expectations and roles. There is an emphasis on conformity, being ‘nice,’ and consideration of how choices influence relationships.

Stage 4 – Maintaining Social Order
At this stage of moral development, people begin to consider society as a whole when making judgments. The focus is on maintaining law and order by following the rules, doing one’s duty, and respecting authority.

 

Level 3. Postconventional Morality

 

Stage 5 – Social Contract and Individual Rights
At this stage, people begin to account for the differing values, opinions, and beliefs of other people. Rules of law are important for maintaining a society, but members of the society should agree upon these standards.

Stage 6 – Universal Principles
Kolhberg’s final level of moral reasoning is based upon universal ethical principles and abstract reasoning. At this stage, people follow these internalized principles of justice, even if they conflict with laws and rules.”

Minutescam Update

Okay, I’m enjoying this one. The Minutescam continues.  Chris Simcox is under fire for not accounting for at least $1 million.

 

A PINK FLAMINGO EXCLUSIVE

Information given to me on my last trip to Tombstone seems to confirm Simcox might have a problem handling money. I am still trying to set up an interview with a specific party.  I can tell you this, and it comes from an unimpeachable source, that there were financial issues there in Tombstone before Simcox moved out of town.  The current SPLC report on Simcox echoes what I’ve discovered to date. There are allegations and rumors that are quite fascinating and definitely serve to point out that something interesting could be afoot.

 “…Chris Simcox, founder and president of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC), is accustomed to defending himself against the constant barrage of criticism from human rights activists on his political left flank. But now he's under attack from the right as well, as prominent anti-immigration leaders across the country have blasted Simcox in recent weeks with accusations that he's a charlatan, a sellout, and a traitor to their cause.

 

"Simcox doesn't seem to know that his days on the Minuteman gravy train are ended," says California Coalition for Immigration Reform hate group leader Barbara Coe.

 

Other former allies lining up against Simcox include Jim Gilchrist, who co-founded the original Minuteman Project with Simcox last year; American Border Patrol hate group head Glenn Spencer; anti-Semite and former Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC) field team chief Joe McCutchen; Americans for Mass Deportation founder Liz DeMarco; and Save Our State hate group leader Joe Turner.

 

The pivot point on which Simcox's own kind turned against him is his refusal to account for the $1.6 to $1.8 million in private donations he estimates MCDC raised, including $600,000 for the "Minuteman Border Fence," -- a slick fundraising campaign with a stated goal of $55 million. Simcox pledged the money raised by the campaign would go to build a high-tech security barrier along 70 miles of private ranchland on the Arizona border. Mass-mailed MCDC solicitations and full-page color advertisements in The Washington Times since mid-April promoted the Minuteman Border Fence as an "Israeli-style" barrier "based on the fences used in Gaza and the West Bank." Fundraising illustrations depict a 6-foot trench and coils of concertina wire backed by a 15-foot steel-mesh fence crowned with bulletproof security cameras. Estimated cost: $150 per foot. …

 

 

…In the meantime, the financial records of Minuteman PAC, Inc., a political action committee formed this year and chaired by Simcox, offer some insight into Simcox's spending priorities. A separate entity from MCDC, Minuteman PAC, Inc. is registered with the Federal Elections Commission and is therefore required by federal law to file periodic financial reports, which are open to public inspection. The first of these reports was made public July 13. It shows that Minuteman PAC received $214,015 in donations at that point -- money above and beyond what MCDC raised -- and disbursed $97,076, leaving cash on hand of $116,939.

 

Although the publicized mission of Minuteman PAC is to raise money to support the campaigns of political candidates who support the Minuteman mission, it made only $5,000 in campaign donations at the time of the FEC filing. The vast majority of Minuteman PAC expenditures -- $87,432 -- went to pay direct-mail fundraising and advertising bills…”

 

As I mentioned last week, Simcox has been ‘shilling’ raising money for William Greene’s Congressional campaign down in Georgia.  Green is the mastermind behind the Terry Schiavo money campaign and all that television time.  Along the way, Green picked up Alan Keyes.  The three have formed their own little triumvirate.  I have stated repeatedly that someone is going to do some jail time before this is over.  I hate to see someone with Alan Keyes credentials pulled into this, but it is entirely possible much of the Minutescam money is going into Keyes coffers.

 

Unlike previous Minuteman Border Fence solicitations, it made no mention of any "Israeli-style" design, leaving its recipients to imagine for themselves the actual nature of the fence "our valiant Minutemen" are toiling to build, mile by excruciating mile. This omission of design specifics may have been the product of advice Simcox received from Diener Consultants, one of the country's largest right-wing political consulting and fundraising machines. At around the same time Simcox broke off from Gilchrist to form MCDC, he contracted with Diener, which is based in Chicago and led by Phillip Sheldon, son of Traditional Values Coalition founder and vitriolic gay-basher Rev. Louis Sheldon.

 

The younger Sheldon is known for brokering the ghoulish deal in which Response Unlimited, a direct-mail marketing firm, obtained a list of donors to Terry Schiavo's legal fund from the brain-dead woman's parents several days before her death in March 2005. Earlier this year, Response Unlimited -- "the nation's best and most comprehensive source of mailing lists for conservative and Christian mailers and telemarketers" -- began offering for sale a list of 61,000 Minuteman Civil Defense Corps donors at a price of $120 per thousand names...."

You never hear about the 70,000 illegal Irish immigrants. Why?  Blue eyes, green eyes, red hair, blond hair, peaches and cream complexion v. ….. you be the judge.

THOSE HILARIOUS LYIN’ DEMS

According to The Politico, liberals think HRM Nancy I favors moderates over them!?!  What planet do they live on?

Stuck on StupidHRM Nancy I, not the blog.

GWB’s # from CNN are around 42%, so why are the Dems so happy? The Dems are losing to GWB – but the MSM doesn’t mention it.

I like the way Mac’s Mind is calling Conyers, etc. imperial thugs.

Blog Lizards is just plain great today.  Basically, who died and elected the Dems God?

PRIMARIES 2008

John McCain, Patriot, no longer media darling.

 Say it ain’t so.  I don’t know about you but I am completely disgusted with Newt for going green.

Giuliani blows grocery prices.  Wadaya expect?

Giuliani is looking good.

Romney still pushing 6% on Gallup.

Goldberg warns conservatives not to ignore McCain.

I don’t know about you, but Edwards’ concern for the ‘common man’ impresses me. (note sarcasm)

Strata on Giuliani’s lead and character assassination by conservatives.

Obama (the messiah) is having a posh party for his daddy warbucks donors.

Giuliani is playing well out side NYC.  He isn’t blowing it.

Giuliani looking good with Gallup.