Jesus, save me from your followers!

Brian Fischer, blogger and radio host for the designated hate-group The American Family Association, has gone completely over the top by saying that Native Americans "never had any morals":

The native American tribes at the time of the European settlement and founding of the United States were, virtually without exception, steeped in the basest forms of superstition, had been guilty of savagery in warfare for hundreds of years, and practiced the most debased forms of sexuality.

...

Many of the tribal reservations today remain mired in poverty and alcoholism because many native Americans continue to cling to the darkness of indigenous superstition instead of coming into the light of Christianity and assimilating into Christian culture.

...

The continued presence of native American superstition was on full display at the memorial service for the victims of the Tucson shooter, when the "invocation" (such as it was) was offered by a native American who sought inspiration from the "Seven Directions," including "Father Sky" and "Mother Earth," rather than the God of the Bible.

Fischer continued his offensive against Native Americans today on his radio show. The AFA has pulled his blog entry from their website, but Fischer says that he is unrepentant. Instead, America isn't "mature" enough to handle the conversation he says he wants to have:

If Americans believe that the entire history of our nation rests on a horribly evil foundation, then there is nothing to be proud of in American history, and our president is correct to identify America as the source of all evil in the world and to make a career out of apologizing for her very existence.

If, however, there is a moral and ethical basis for our displacement of native American tribes, and if our westward expansion and settlement are in fact consistent with the laws of nature, nature’s God, and the law of nations, then Americans have much to be proud of.

America is not mature enough right now for that robust dialogue to occur.

Fischer seems to not understand that every nation has somewhere in its foundation conquest and bloodshed, and that it is our moral duty to to accept that, to whatever extent we can make amends as necessary, and finally to do everything in our power as humanity to prevent it from happening again. This isn't an "either/or" proposition, but black-and-white thinking is endemic in Fischer's brain. Yes, the founding of America has a lot of ugliness in it. Fischer's claim that "conquest is moral, as long as it's my tribe doing the conquest" lay the foundation for ongoing bloodshed that most of us would never countenance.

There's no moral distance between Fischer's attitude toward Native Americans and the belief that slavery was good for blacks.

Fischer's "maturity" isn't maturity at all-- it's allegiance to Fischer's tribe, and nothing but. Small wonder, then, that he believes that Obama "has made a career out of apologizing for America" (nevermind that at his Nobel Peace Prize he was staunchly unapologetic for sustaining the unconscionable, grinding wars in Iraq and Afghanistan).

Omaha's surgery...

If you've been following Omaha's Facebook or Twitter feed for the past few days, you'll probably be aware that she's had a nasty round of kidney stones, which as one wag put it is "one of the three most painful things that can happen to the human body, and the only one of which that doesn't kill you."

It started a trip to the emergency room, but she's been on a cocktail of drugs all week: a smooth muscle relaxer, counter-inflammatory steroids, and oxycodone. (Neither Omaha nor I understand how people get hooked on oxycodone. The stuff makes you sleepy, queasy, and stupid. Who the hell wants to go through life like that?) But after all that, the stone hadn't moved in days and more were visible on the CAT scan, so her doctor recommended surgery.

We arrived at Valley Medical Center at 1:30 and went through the intake procedure. lisakit, bless her heart, agreed to stay with us through intake and told Omaha what to expect, since she'd had stones herself once. Later, she left to make sure Kouryou-chan and Storm had an adult in the house.

Omaha was taken into a waiting room, where they undressed her, and checked her repeatedly to make sure they were doing the right procedure. Doctor Reed came in and wrote instructions on her skin over her right kidney with a marker. Other nurses triple-checked, although there was no checklist, just procedure. I'm becoming a big fan of checklists.

They put a shunt in one hand, and administered VerSed. Omaha said, "Woo! You know how hippies will reach out to touch something because they can't tell how far away it is? That's what I feel." The anaesthesiologist, a lanky man with a slow voice, gave us a list of all the things they'd be using to make sure she didn't move during procedure.

And then a big, bulky older nurse wheeled her off to ER.

I sat in the waiting room and broke my diet with a Pepsi. Dammit.

Later, Doctor Reed came out to tell me that all had gone well. They'd gotten four of the five stones, but there was one very tiny one he couldn't target accurately enough. Lots of people have stones, he said, and most don't know it because those stones don't get loose and don't cause pain. He described the focusing procedure for me:

In a water-bed like device filled with a dense liquid silione medium, there's a mobile cavitation chamber contained within a dense liquid silicone medium on top of which lies the patient, like on a water bed. The cavitation chamber is shaped like a half-ellipsiod, and at the contained focus of this ellipsoid is a powerful EMP-rammed sonic emitter. An ellipse has two foci, and any ray that intersects one focus and then reflects off the inside of the ellipse then intersects the other focus. So he positions the second focus inside the patient's body, at the stone, and presses the trigger. Boom.

They let me into her recovery room, where she looks tired. She's in a bit of pain, says the burning sensation is the worst of it, but she's got her iPad open and is reading through, so send her well-wishes through Facebook or Twitter if you feel so inclined. They're getting her more medication for the burning.

Signs of the times

• The Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies calls for a discussion about the rights of "non-human persons."
• The Japanese are researching how to build robot toddlers.
• North Carolina conservative David Gibbs warns that after gay marriage, human-robot marriages will be next!

Web Censorship Filters are st00pid.

While Omaha and I were at Valley Medical, we discovered that they had free wi-fi. Which was totally fine until a friend of mine posted a link to Sex Positive: Changing society's negative attitudes about sex, and I tried to follow it. Instead of the site, I got "Access Denied, Category: Sex Education."

Sex Education is a reason for blocking access? At a hospital?

Especially since there were no filters, none at all, on my reaching any Tumblr site, my own included.

The stupid, it burns!