The True Name of God

One problem our society has today is its religion. I'm not talking about Christianity, although I have a few problems with some precepts there, I'm talking about the real religion of the United States. Make no mistake about it, the U.S. is a theocracy, ruled, and ruled in close to an absolute sense, by a religious establishment.
No, again, I'm not talking about what's become known as the Religious Right, although that would be a more than fair description. I'm not talking about Evangelical or Fundamentalist Christians. They may wish they ran the country, and some people believe that they do, but, in reality, the U.S. is run by the religious establishment of another god altogether.

The true name of the god of the United States is Money.

Think about this: Doesn't it seem as if the railing against the Obama Administration's course on the economy has reached the tone of a religious war? It does, because a religious conflict is exactly what it is. Obama is violating the tenets of money-worship.

This violation stems from an understanding of what money used to be, and a misunderstanding of what it has become. In the not-too-distant past, money was, for want of a better term, a servant of society.
What money did was facilitate trade between people. Here's a simple example: Say you're a farmer, and you grow wheat. You need to buy a plow, but the person who sells plows doesn't want any wheat; he has no use for it. So you have this stuff that you both agree is worth something - you call it "money." You give him the right amount of money, and he gives you a plow. Now, he takes that money, and uses it to buy groceries, because he needs to eat, but plain wheat just doesn't cut it for him. The grocer uses some of that money to buy flour, which he can sell for money, and the miller, from whom he bought that flour, used money to buy your wheat. So, what money did was allow you to trade with somebody who didn't need or want your stock in trade. Same with everyone else in the chain.

Money, in this case, acts as a servant of society, and this action is good for all concerned. However, in today's society, money has assumed a different role. People who misunderstand this are in for trouble from a lot of different directions, some of which surprise them.
The desire for more of the things that money can buy became transformed into a desire for money itself, first, because of it's buying power, and later, because people started to want it for its own sake. Money became the god of our society. It became the holy object. It changed from a means to an end into the end itself. The quest for money has replaced the quest for righteousness, the quest for truth, and the quest for happiness. Money itself appears to have replaced all of those things in the eyes of our society.

Money is Truth. Money is Happiness. Money is Righteousness. Money is God. All things are justifiable if they lead to the acquisition of Money. Money, and only Money, is holy.

A warning, though:

Money is the cruelest of gods. Money brooks no other values. If a thing, an idea, or a desire cannot be meaured in Money, it has no value. There is no value but Money.
Some years ago, there was a local news anchorwoman in the New York area. Her name was Sara Lee Kessler, and she was an Orthodox Jew. Because she took her faith seriously, she would not work between sundown on Friday and sundown on Saturday. That is the time of the Jewish Sabbath, and the Orthodox perform no labor during that time. Her employer, however, determined that there was a need for her to work on Saturday, during the Sabbath. She refused to do so, and she was terminated. Now, those who deny that money-worship is a religion (and most of the more rabid money-worhippers will, in fact, deny that what they do is religion) will tell you that she was fired because she was insubordinate - she, after all, refused to work when she was told she must work. Don't be fooled by this. She was fired for religious reasons. Her Judaism came into direct conflict with her employer's worship of Money, and she was fired because of that.

No religion takes precedence over the worship of Money.

I am constantly amazed by the Christian Right's support of large corporate interests. Here are people who claim to take their Scripture literally, but they support the most brutal Money-worship, forgetting the words of Deuteronomy 12:31: "You shall not behave thus toward the LORD your God, for every abominable act which the LORD hates they have done for their gods; for they even burn their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods." You see, one of the things near the top of the Hebrew God's list of abhorrent practices is human sacrifice, yet Money demands, and receives, human sacrifice on a regular basis.

Industrial accidents that occur because the officers of companies just will not spend the money to fix dangerous situations in the workplace take the lives of scores of people every year. Lives are lost, people are disfigured, they lose limbs and other body parts, all as part of the continual sacrifice to Money. On April 24th of this year, McWane Inc., a manufacturer of iron pipe, was fined $8 million for workplace safety violations and environmental crimes at its Atlantic States foundry in Phillipsburg, NJ. Four managers were convicted in 2006 of "repeatedly conspiring to deceive regulators." The motive? Why, Money, of course. Federal prosecutors "described a Dickensian corporate culture that put production and profits ahead of all other considerations, including the well-being of its 6,000 employees, who toil in one of the nation’s most dangerous industries." People were killed. People lost fingers, eyes, hands, and arms. Those were human sacrifices to Money.

One of the better-known industrial accidents recently involved a fire at the Imperial Foods chicken processing plant in Hamlet, North Carolina. Twenty-five people were killed and fifty-four injured when they were trapped behind locked fire doors. Why were the doors locked? The explanation for locking the fire doors was that employees were suspected of stealing food through the fire doors, and the cheapest measure the company could take to prevent such theft was to lock the doors, which wer intended as a means of escape during a fire. Human sacrifice - to Money.

Many of us remember the story of the Ford Pinto. The Pinto was a smallish car that became infamous for the tendency of its fuel tank to explode into flames if the car were struck from behind. Ford determined that the cost to fix the problem would cost $6 per car.
Six dollars.
Ford refused to fix the problem, saying that the cost was too high.
Six dollars per car.
Did Ford really value the lives of its customers at under six dollars? Of course not. What happened was that somebody in their actuarial department figured out roughly how many lives would be lost in rear-end collisions where the tanks burst into flames. They then determined the average cost to settle each case, multiplied by the expected number of such cases, and compared that to the cost of fixing their cars at six bucks per car. They determined that it would be cheaper to settle all the cases than to fix all the cars. That, Dear Reader, is nothing less than human sacrifice - to Money.

No life is worth more than Money.

It might be argued that what people really worship is all the stuff they can get with money. It's just the desire for things that causes such behavior. That fails to explain the fact that the more money people have the more stuff they expect to get without paying any money for it. It fails to explain the obsessive hatred of taxes of any kind by people who live in the most lightly-taxed country in the industrialized world.
It's not the stuff, it's the money. Stuff is stuff. Money is holy. We don't just want it; we worship it. It is the object of all our desire. Money claims - and gets - priority over health, family, faith, truth, justice, environment - Money is preeminent.

Money is the true Name of God.

Pfrustrating Pfreakin' Pfaucets...

So, I have this kitchen faucet, by Price-Pfister. It began to drip, so I figured I'd run out to my local big-box "Home Improvement Center" and get the parts to fix it.
Not so fast.
These days, with every little thing being replaced by "NEW!! IMPROVED!!" versions, parts for items a couple of years old aren't always that easy to find. So, on to the second big-box "Home Improvement Center." I actually found a part, but by a maker of replacement parts, not Price-Pfister (now owned by Black and Decker, by the way). Took the handle off the faucet (pfaucet?). OK, now to remove the cartridge. Usually, this is done by unscrewing a cap that either holds the cartridge in, or is part of the cartridge. Well, off comes the cap. Top of valve stem is still in the fixture, so I pull it out (yes, I turned the water off first). The top of it comes out, leaving the bottom of the valve cartridge still in the fixture. It seems the way this particular valve is made involves several parts, and they are held together by the top of the stem, which is a snap-fit onto the bottom part. Trouble is, the friction holding the bottom into the fixture is more than enough to prevent it from being removed by pulling on the top. Pulling the top of the stem disassembles the valve, leaving the bottom part in the fixture. There are about three other tiny little bits floating around between them, one of which, at least, could have been made as part of the top piece, but wait, there's more! There's no way to remove the bottom piece without destroying it. Nice work. Well, I remove the bit from the fixture, destroying it as I do, and put in the new valve. unfortunately, the handle now doesn't come back to the correct position when the valve is shut off. It's just a bit shy. Or, moving it over a bit, it's a bit far. I think, maybe the valve is not in quite right. Lotsa luck, in order to change it, I have to destroy the bottom bit... remember that? Well, I do just that, and I replace both the hot and cold stems. Three valves bought to replace two. Guess what? Neither valve handle lines up correctly, and now the damn faucet drips way worse than before. Now, I've fixed a few faucets in my time, and never, I mean never have I had problems like this.
What's the deal, does no U.S.-based manufacturer see fit to make a decent product anymore? This is not the only product I've seen that's been a disappointment, but it's the straw that's making this camel's chiroprator bills go a little over the limit today. Remember when there were these companies in Detroit, Michingan, who used to make cars? It seems they got so carried away with making money that they forgot how to make cars, and manufacturers from Japan, Korea, Germany and Sweden started to take away their market share. The first thing they tried was to buy some of the competition, or make deals with them. So now, Detroit bought the Swedish car makers. Buying the Japanese didn't work out, though, because at least one of them got to be as big as any of the Detroit companies. Eventually, as we know, Detroit and it car makers fell on very hard times. They may or may not be around this time next year, but they should still serve as a warning to other companies in this country.
People don't care how much money you make when they're buying your products. What they care about is whether they're getting a product that's worth all the effort they put out to get the money they're turning over. Lately, the crap that U.S. manufacturers have been turning out hasn't been worth the effort. In fact, it seems that every new thing put out by a manufacturer here these days has been no more than a better effort to express contempt for the poor dope who's expected to buy the thing. Of course, while we're talking about contempt, we may as well mention the treatment these same companies dish out to people unfortunate enough to work for them. It seems these employees (who are also, incidentally, buyers of those products) cost too much to maintain. Not enough money going to stockholders after the managers skim off their "share." Of course, decreasing the payouts also increases the managers' "share," so there still isn't enough going to the stockholders. But, hey, if we can't pay the price for that kind of talent, we'd have to hire people who might, I don't know, try to run the business for the benefit of the stockholders (who, in many cases are those same employees and customers, because their pension funds or 401(k) accounts hold company stock), rather than treating the companies as their personal piggy banks (and I do mean "piggy").
Anyway, back to the trigger of this particular rant:
Hey, Price-Pfister! Your pfaucets are cheap pfieces of pfucking junk! Kiss my ass, Black and Decker! Your stuff has been just plain bad for years, now.
And let this be a warning to any other U.S. manufacturers:
If this is what I can expect from you, inferior products at inflated prices, bad service and support, and bad replacement parts you can't even bother to make yourselves, then I hope every one of you goes out of business. Will people be hurt? Probably, but they're the people who have gotten used to it - the people who have always paid for your mistakes. If you're gone, they will eventually get other jobs, because, stuff will still need doing, and there will be a place for people who can do it. There will, I hope, be no place for you, the people who run these scams we call industries in this country.
I hope you starve.
I hope your children and grandchildren starve.
I hope others learn from this and never dare to try what you have tried, to make a fortune doing as little as possible, and charging top dollar for it.
You are all reprehensible frauds, and we are better off without you and your progeny. The only thing useful you can leave behind is the memory of how business should not be done.