Archives for July 2011

I don’t know of a better example of pure evil in the world today than the members of an insane religious cult in Kansas who claim to speak for God. For those of us who are Christians, though, it’s a warning that it’s easy to believe that our thoughts and judgments all come from God.

Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas, is widely known for picketing military funerals and protesting pretty much everything you can think of. Its members claim that “God hates fags.” (That’s even the name of the group’s website.) Every time something bad happens in this country, the group claims it’s evidence of God’s judgement of America. They picket funerals to bring attention to their claim that the deaths and disasters represent God’s hatred of a sinful America.

Today, this group announced that members would be picketing the funerals of the Teutenberg family (above), the members of which were killed in a plane crash last Saturday in rural Alabama. For the hate-filled details, see this press release (PDF) from the group. You really need to read it for yourself to get the full effect of how insane and how hateful these people are.

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When you’re a part of the political power structure, you lose perspective about what matters. Before you know it, the thing that’s most important is yourself, your group and your place in the power structure. Republican U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell provides the latest example of that.

For sane people who can do math, it looks probable that the federal government is heading inevitably toward defaulting on its debts one day. It’s just not possible to keep borrowing at this rate and still pay the money back at levels of taxation that people will put up with. For years, there’s been a need for a president and a Congress to face that reality and quit borrowing money and spending more, but it’s not political reality to expect that. And it hasn’t happened.

So now the two mainstream parties are locked in the latest deathmatch over control, each hoping that the other party will blink first. Republicans are demanding modest budget cuts before they’ll agree to let the government go on borrowing. Democrats are trying to avoid the cuts and offering insane plans of their own. Neither side offers any plan that deals with long-term reality.

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Christopher Brosius is apparently an olfactory genius. He’s known for a line of perfumes evoking scents of childhood. (Among his perfumes are Clean Baby Butt, Green Bean and Baseball Glove.) But Brosius was ready for the ultimate challenge. He wanted to develop a perfume that no one could smell.

He tried all sorts of chemical combinations to get the non-smell just right. He says that his early efforts smelled terrible. Just the fact that you smelled them meant he was failing, didn’t it?

New York magazine had a long and respectful article about this a few months back. My first thought was that I kept having to check and see whether I was reading the Onion. My second thought was that this guy should work for the state.

Remember the kids’ story, “The Emperor’s New Clothes“? It was my favorite. It’s about an emperor who gets conned by a couple of crafty tailors who tell him they’ve created fine new clothes that can’t be seen by stupid or incompetent people. The emperor doesn’t want to admit that he can’t see the clothes — and neither do his other subjects — so he walks around without clothes. Then one boy speaks up to point out that the guy isn’t wearing clothes.

To me, that’s what this is. Nobody wants to admit how absurd it is to create a scent that has no scent. (Give me a cup of really clean water and I’ll sell it to you as odorless perfume at a good price.) But this is what governments do to us regularly. They control us. They take our money. They create various rules to help others — and they claim it’s all for our own good. They say it’s with “the consent of the governed.” When something is absurd and irrational, we need to be willing to say so — whether it’s about lies from the state or absurdist claims from perfumers who want to sell you perfume that’s designed not to be smelled.