The team picture

My training team got together at the park this morning with our new t-shirts and had our picture taken.  I think I managed to close my eyes for every shot.  Being shortest and oldest, I was in the front line.  Well, it was fun, no matter what I looked like!  And TootSweet was outstanding; our only problem occurred when an idiot with two untrained beagles on long leashes went by.  The beagles barked and went slightly mad, but I couldn't swear in court that the owner didn't bark too.

An article came out in a news magazine about the new "Christian right"; I didn't read it, I must confess, since I've had enough of Christians on the right to choke a hog.  They don't seem to understand the most basic precepts of their own beliefs, poor devils.  Starting with the fact that "Christian right" is an oxymoron, and in fact many of the said individuals are also morons.

For those who believe in the figure of Jesus, it should occur to them that he was a rebel of the first order, not some fundamentalist jerk trying to get people to believe the earth is six thousand years old and man walked with the dinosaurs.  Jesus didn't give a hoot how old the earth is.  He was much more concerned about not judging people because of their gender or occupation (Mary Magdalene, for example).  He was incensed at the economical exploitation of others, and he had the poorest opinion of the hidebound, the prejudiced, and the excluders.  The things that Jesus are supposed to have said make up an infinitesimal portion of the writings in the Bible; everything else is editorializing, politicizing, and pure fantasy.  As far as actual history goes, the accuracy of what Jesus is supposed to have said is no more reliable than the flood of "pieces of the True Cross" that circulated among the royalty during the middle ages and later. 

But among people who take him seriously, they should realize that he was an enemy of orthodoxy, yet they have now turned his figure into an excuse for out-Poping the Pope.  They are a form of American jihad, willing to sacrifice anyone who doesn't believe as they do, willing to subordinate half of humankind to the category of slaves devoted to reproduction--since this half of mankind, according to these people, has no right to govern its bodies or determine how they are to be used.  These folks are willing to accord a collection of cells incapable of living outside the body of the mother more rights than the mother herself, who is not a potential human being, but is one already.  Jesus never said a word about reproductive rights, by the way.  This stuff has been invented since his time and to serve other interests.

To end on a positive note, the NYTimes had an article last week about how Cheney's heart treatments have more or less followed the entire history of heart health.  Funny, isn't it, how someone like Cheney doesn't seem to have any trouble at all getting a heart for transplant while others have to wait unto death?  But, as one perspicuous reader noted in the comments section, settling the issue once and for all, Cheney's heart transplant is to be celebrated since he didn't have one before.