Back to the Blog! And Very Very Important Subjects!

Howdy, Radicals!  It’s been a long time since I posted here.  I took the end of my show pretty hard and every time I thought about posting here again it just made me sad.  Thank you so much for all the emails and comments expressing your love for the show and missing it.  I miss it, too.

Many people have asked if I am returning to the air anytime soon.  Probably not.

Here’s the deal: Not only was I the host of the show, but I also had to produce it, engineer it, record it, write it, sell it, promote it… basically aside from Stevie doing a fantastic job with answering phones and running the live engineering, everything about The Russ Belville Show was done by me.  I won the talk radio contest and they put me on XM with no budget, no staff, no advertising, and no promotions.  In fact, they were going to dump me six months into the deal when I rose a stink about being promised “a year-long contract” for winning the contest.  As it turned out, being on for twenty months was 14 months longer than they expected and 8 months longer than I expected.  Every show I put on the air actually ended up costing me $67 by the time you work through all the income vs. expenses.

(You want an idea why progressive talk radio is in the shitter?  Do you think it is the talent of the hosts, or… y’all discuss it; any speculation from me would be seen as ’sour grapes’.)

Now, if someone from a progressive talk radio network called up and said, “Hey, we found your old shows and thought you’d be a hit.  We’ve got a studio for you, a producer, and an engineer.  We’ll begin a big ad campaign and we can start you on five of our network’s stations right off the bat.  Interested?”, I’d be in the air faster than freeway chase in LA.  But doing it all myself?  No, never again.

So, what after three months has inspired me to return to the Radical Writ?  Is it Obama backing away from nearly every campaign pledge?  Is it the not closing Gitmo, not prosecuting torture, bringing in the insurance industry to ruin health care talks, giving money hand over fist to Wall Street thieves, snickering at the marijuana legalization question, not ending Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and tacitly endorsing every right-wing fraidy-cat terrists-gonna-kill-us FOX talking point?

Yeah, sure.  But first, I want to talk about something REALLY important: the embarrassment that was the selection of Kris Allen as the next American Idol.

Michael Glitz writes at HuffPo:

But for a theory about how Kris pulled an upset over the wildly popular Adam Lambert, the Christian vote is a pretty good one. It’s certainly one factor. (So is talent, Tiger Beat ready looks and viewers who get tired of being told someone is a lock when they haven’t even voted yet.) In fact, look at seasons past and where there’s a clear Christian vs secular showdown, the Christians have been winning handily. Take that, Charles Darwin! Sometimes the survival of the fittest goes to the person with the best telephone prayer chain. Check it out. (And please keep in mind I’m not talking about their personal faith, just our perception of it from what we told on the show at the time they were competing. Someone I describe as worldly might be exceptionally devout while the contestant prominently sporting a cross might be at the juke joint on Saturday and never even make it to church on Sunday.)

Season One featured wholesome Kelly Clarkson vs the worldly, media savvy Justin Guarini. Clarkson won big time and set the standard for Idols to come.

Season Two: Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard both held forth on their faith. Ruben had an edge perhaps from the tight-knit black churches that came out strong for him. But this was a Christian vs Christian finale so you can’t draw any conclusions from this one.

He continues on through the current season, pointing out how the contestant with the most “God cred” wins the Finals.  (However, for Season 2, while both Ruben and Clay had the God card, don’t forget that Clay was “teh gay” for those Christian viewers.)

But I think the true theory is the Southern AT&T Text Messaging theory, only with the Christian vote acting as tiebreaker. In Idol voting, you’re allowed to call or text in ten votes per line. However, calls get you busy signals and you have to keep redialing to get just two votes, much less ten.

Text messaging, though, gets no busy signal and you can send in ten of them in the time it would take to get through one Idol phone call. Now, understand that anyone can call, but only AT&T subscribers can text, and AT&T’s subscriber base is largest in the South.

So when watching Idol Season 9, ask yourself, “Who would a 13-year-old girl in Mobile vote for?”

Evidence?

Allen (Arkansas) vs. Lambert (California)
7) Cook (Missouri) vs. Archuleta (Utah)
6) Sparks (Arizona) vs. Lewis (Washington) (Religion wins tiebreaker)
5) Hicks (Alabama) vs. McPhee (California)
4) Underwood (Oklahoma) vs. Bice (Alabama) (Religion breaks tie)
3) Fantasia (North Carolina) vs. DeGarmo (Georgia) (Religion breaks tie)
2) Studdard (Alabama) vs. Aiken (North Carolina) (”Not gay” breaks tie)
1) Clarkson (Texas) vs. Guarini (Pennsylvania)

What are the chances you’d get three finalists from Alabama and only two from California? Or that ten of sixteen finalists would be from former Confederate States and zero from the Northeast?

First Female Four-Star General Promoted

So, I’m elated when I read this:

First Female Four-Star General Promoted

WASHINGTON — Call it breaking the brass ceiling. Ann E. Dunwoody, after 33 years in the Army, ascended Friday to a peak never before reached by a woman in the U.S. military: four-star general.

Later Friday, at Fort Belvoir, Va. _ her birthplace _ Dunwoody was being sworn in as commander of the Army Materiel Command, responsible for equipping, outfitting and arming all soldiers. Just five months ago, she became the first female deputy commander there.

There are 21 female general officers in the Army _ all but four at the one-star rank of brigadier. It was not until 1970 that the Army had its first one-star: Anna Mae Hays, chief of the Army Nurse Corps.

Until I get toward the end and read:

Women now make up about 14 percent of the active-duty Army and are allowed to serve in a wide variety of assignments. They are still excluded from units designed primarily to engage in direct combat, such as infantry and tank units, but their opportunities have expanded over the past two decades.

Why?  Why can’t a female soldier drive a tank?  Do boobs get in the way of the steering wheel?  Tanks are small places; I had a friend who was a “tanker” in the Guard – a short, squatty fellow.  You’d think female soldiers would be a natural for tank duty.  Have you seen a woman drive an SUV (bah-dum-bum!  Thank you, tip your waiter, I’ll be here all week…)

Why can’t a female soldier be in the infantry?  Trust me, BDUs (battle-dress uniforms) and camo face paint are hardly sexy.  Is that what we fear, that male soldiers wouldn’t be able to fight with all the hot babes around?  Is it the “no gay soldiers in the shower” argument from the straight angle?  Would macho he-males make stupid decisions to gallantly rescue fallen damsel privates in distress?  (I mean, Army soldiers of the rank of “private”.)  Because I know at least one female former soldier who I’d give an M-16 and fight from a foxhole with any day.  She’s far more vicious and a better shot than I am!  With an infantry full of women who all “get in sync”, we could time tactical operations around “cycles” and rain down hell on the enemy with The Fightin’ PMS Battalion!  (bah-dum-bum-spish!  Thank you, thank you, catch me next week at Mr. Yuks in Sheboygan…)

Sexist jokes aside, really, why do we still ban women from direct combat duty?  I’m all for strict physical standards – can you do the obstacle course, shoot a rifle, carry your fellow soldier, patch a wound, and so on – but I can’t understand why if a woman can be a firefighter, cop, or four-star general, she can’t also be an eleven-bravo grunt.

 

America is NOT “center-right”

The Progressive Majority

Why Sarah Palin has been so quiet lately

 

I decided to consult The Good Book, since that’s where she learned all about science, to see if I could figure out why she wasn’t on the tube last night spinning McCain’s dismal debate performance.  After all, isn’t she “prepping” for that big debate with Drug War Joe?

Fortunately, 1 Timothy 2:11-12 has all the answers: 

Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection.  But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.

And Proverbs 11:22:

As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman which is without discretion

Well, it’s not lipstick on a pig, just a gold ring…

 

A Jeebus Double-Shot – Cheetos and Kittens

Praise Cheesus! – Pontifications
Or rather, the Jesus Cheeto, as it’s being called. Yes, we’ve found Mother Teresa in a cinnamon bun (until it was stolen) and of course the Virgin Mary everywhere.

Now we have Jesus in a Cheeto, found by a Texas woman, and via the Dallas Morning News blog.

Check the link for the Jesus Cheeto, and then check this video from CNN on the Jesus Kitten.

Four Iowan’s Attempt Citizen’s Arrest On Karl Rove

Now THESE are my kind of Christians!

Four Iowan’s Attempt Citizen’s Arrest On Karl Rove | AHN | July 27, 2008
Des Moines, Iowa (AHN) — Four people were arrested Friday for attempting to make a citizen’s arrest on Karl Rove.

The group of three Catholic workers and a retired Methodist minister and Peace and Justice Advocate were cited for trespassing and released after trying to enter the Wakonda Country Club in Des Moines where Rove was scheduled to speak at a Republican Fundraiser.

The small group were acting under Iowa law that states private citizens have a responsibility to arrest someone if they believe a felony has been committed. That person is then turned over to police officials and a judge for formal indictment. Under the law a federal judge must evaluate the charges and decide if an indictment should be made.

This is the second attempt by two members of the group to arrest Rove, whom many believe should be held accountable, along with other members of the Bush administration, for war crimes, murder and lies to the public related to the Iraq war.

The retired minister, Rev. Chet Guinn, 80, told reporters who were on site for the pre-arranged arrest that everyone who remains silent when major crimes are being committed against all humanity becomes an accomplice.

CBS off the hook for Janet’s Boob

Court Tosses FCC “Wardrobe Malfunction” Fine Against CBS
PHILADELPHIA — A federal appeals court on Monday threw out a $550,000 indecency fine against CBS Corp. for the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show that ended with Janet Jackson’s breast-baring “wardrobe malfunction.”

“The Commission’s determination that CBS’s broadcast of a nine-sixteenths of one second glimpse of a bare female breast was actionably indecent evidenced the agency’s departure from its prior policy,” the court found. “Its orders constituted the announcement of a policy change _ that fleeting images would no longer be excluded from the scope of actionable indecency.”

But Tim Winter of the watchdog organization Parents Television Council said the court’s decision “borders on judicial stupidity.”

“If a striptease during the Super Bowl in front of 90 million people _ including millions of children _ doesn’t fit the parameters of broadcast indecency, then what does?” Winter said in a statement.

In throwing out this fine, these black-robed tyrants have thrown open the doors of Pandora’s Box and unleashed the demons of moral turpitude upon our society!

Now, with no threat of punishment, these filth-merchants will constantly push the envelope, exposing our children to increasing levels of debauchery.  Today it’s nine-sixteenths of one second of Janet Jackson’s right breast.  Tomorrow they’ll push it to nineteen-thirty-secondths of one second of Lisa Lisa’s left breast, and before you know it, our kids will be exposed to a full three-quarters of a second of The Fly Girls topless!

With such shocking and provocative halftime entertainment, our children will be too distracted to enjoy the wholesome beer, liquor, Cialis, Levitra, and Viagra ads.  Research shows that American children today are exposed to, on average, 1,648.6 naked breasts by the time they graduate high school.  When exposure to even six-tenths of a breast can lead to severe attention deficit in 90% of men, we can only imagine these thousands of unrestrained bosoms must be responsible for the severe declines in education  over the past three decades (see “Charlie’s Angels, Three’s Company, & The Rise in American Stupidity” by Dr. V. Boombatz, Dangerfield Institute of Pseudo-Scientific Heuristic Information Technologies, 2006).

I implore all the readers of this blog to protest the decision of this Third Circuit court.  If we don’t uphold the rule of law and severely punish those who would broadcast the naked flesh which God commands us to be ashamed of, then we cannot be surprised when this country descends into the kind of Sodom & Gommorah that would openly accept people of all shapes and sizes, clothed and unclothed, and feel no shame about nudity, sex, gender, or sexuality.

Yours in Jeebus,

Rev. Dr. Oral G. Moorehead
Parents Righteously United in Defiance of Excess

God-Blind Atheists or Reason-Allergic Religionists

My post on “Laminin: God’s Cross-Shaped Glue” elicited this comment:

I decided you are right I nor anyone else will ever convince you that God exists. I can’t explain how “I” know in any way or form that you would understand, just as you would never be able to explain to a person who has been blind from birth all the colors of a rainbow. Everything you could tell them about it would never make sense because they could never prove you right or wrong. They could never believe because they will always be blind except that they had a miracle and their vision restored . You see my friend you are that blind person and the only way I know that is because I once was blind until the miracle of salvation opened my eyes to know why I believe.

Oh, how many times have I heard that one.  The old “atheists are just blind to God” analogy.

Here’s the problem with that analogy.  You can prove to a blind man that rainbows exist.  Sure, he’ll never see the subtle shades that fade from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to indigo to violet… but mathematically and through physics you can prove the refraction of electromagnetic wavelengths in the visible spectrum.  He might not truly “get it”, but it can be proven to him that it exists.

Continue Reading…

Laminin: God’s Cross-Shaped Glue

[UPDATED: A reply from one of my offended family and my counter follow after the jump...]

My family keeps me in their mailing lists when they send out the various internet flotsam that hits their Inbox. I used to ask, please please please don’t spam me, but to no avail. Now I’ve taken to just reply-to-all-ing whenever I get these things. If you can’t beat ‘em, spam ‘em, I suppose.

Anyway, this was the latest religious spam I got, followed by my Radical Reply:

He (Louie) was talking about how inconceivably BIG our God is…how He spoke the universe into being…how He breathes stars out of His mouth that are huge raging balls of fire…etc. etc. Then He went on to speak of how this star-breathing, universe creating God ALSO knitted our human bodies together with amazing detail and wonder. At this point I am LOVING it (fascinating from a medical standpoint, you know.) …and I was remembering how I was constantly amazed during medical school as I learned more and more about God’s handiwork. I remember so many times thinking…’How can ANYONE deny that a Creator did all of this???’

Louie went on to talk about how we can trust that the God who created all this, also has the power to hold it all together when things seem to be falling apart…how our loving Creator is also our sustainer.

And then I lost my breath.

And it wasn’t because I was running on my treadmill, either.

It was because he started talking about laminin.

I knew about laminin. Here is how wikipedia describes them: ‘Laminins are a family of proteins that are an integral part of the structural scaffolding of basement membranes in almost every animal tissue.’ You see….laminins are what hold us together …LITERALLY. They are cell adhesion molecules. They are what holds one cell of our bodies to the next cell. Without them, we would literally fall apart. And I knew all this already. But what I didn’t know is what laminin LOOKED LIKE.

But now I do. And I have thought about it a thousand times since (already)…. Here is what the structure of laminin looks like…AND THIS IS NOT a ‘Christian portrayal’ of it….if you look up laminin in any scientific/medical piece of literature, this is what you will see…

Now tell me that our God is not the coolest!!!
Amazing.
The glue that holds us together….ALL of us…

Y’know, I looked at that laminin protein for a while and I think you’ve got the wrong god. The protein looks a whole lot more like the caduceus wielded by Hermes, God of Travelers, in the way that the serpent-like chains wrap around the staff. While laminin is important for cell structure, DNA is the code that makes us what we are, and its structure is another double-helix, like the caduceus. It really makes you marvel at how the Hermes, the God of Boundaries, extends to the very boundaries of our cells!

Then I spent a little more time and discovered the protein called porin. Porins are the proteins that allow for diffusion of molecules across cell membranes. They are the very mechanism by which our cells receive nourishment! Now wouldn’t you know it, but the porin looks just like the triquetta of Celtic paganism. Yet another expression in creation of how the power of three San Francisco witches feed all of us.

Now whatever you do, don’t let the Muslims know that the molecules in your silver crosses are shaped liked crescents! — “R”R

Continue Reading…

No Church in Public School, even if it is Islam!

Adam Graham sent this link along…

Recently, I wrote about Tarek ibn Ziyad Academy (TIZA), a K-8 charter school in Inver Grove Heights. Charter schools are public schools and by law must not endorse or promote religion.

Now, however, an eyewitness has stepped forward. Amanda Getz of Bloomington is a substitute teacher. She worked as a substitute in two fifth-grade classrooms at TIZA on Friday, March 14. Her experience suggests that school-sponsored religious activity plays an integral role at TIZA.

Arriving on a Friday, the Muslim holy day, she says she was told that the day’s schedule included a “school assembly” in the gym after lunch.

Before the assembly, she says she was told, her duties would include taking her fifth-grade students to the bathroom, four at a time, to perform “their ritual washing.”

Afterward, Getz said, “teachers led the kids into the gym, where a man dressed in white with a white cap, who had been at the school all day,” was preparing to lead prayer. Beside him, another man “was prostrating himself in prayer on a carpet as the students entered.”

“The prayer I saw was not voluntary,” Getz said. “The kids were corralled by adults and required to go to the assembly where prayer occurred.”

You can all the religion you want in your private school.  Stop using my tax money to promote religion!