Or, uh, Pro Nobis?

In case your teletype machine is on the fritz, this just in: prayer doesn't accomplish anything when it comes to sick people.

You see, those good folks with working knowledge of the scientific method - deduction, experiment, empiricism, repeatable results, test tubes and shit - have expended time, control groups, and $2.4 million dollars(!) demonstrating what you already knew: asking God to stop afflicting somebody with heart disease doesn't actually do anything except, it turns out, decrease the sufferer's chances at recovery.

So, to be fair, praying for sick people does do something: it makes them worse. To be even more fair, however, prayer only decreases their chances of recovery if they know you're praying for them. Yes, you'll be pleasd to know that ignorance is doubly helpful in these situations.

Longtime readers of the Swill are unsurprised to find their politico-theological suspicions confirmed by scientific experiment. What we find most interesting about the study, though, is the way that various media outlets chose to announce the fact.

For example, the sturdy, no-nonsense London Times forthrightly states that "Prayer Does Not Help the Sick." Turns out it's not just Tory papers, however, that tell it like it is (in this case, anyway): even the wackily irreverent and reliably Labour Guardian says "If You Want to Get Better, Don't Say a Little Prayer." Hell, even the Boston Globe weighed in with "No Benefit of Prayer Found After Surgery." The Aussies hit paydirt with "Secret to a Speedy Recovery: No Prayers, Please."

Over there at Reuters, however (no Knight-Ridder, they) we're told that "Study Fails to Show Healing Power of Prayer." That's right, attentive grammarians and rhetoricians, bask in it: the healing power of prayer exists, it's the study that has failed. The unrelentingly crappy New York Times / International Herald Tribune hedges its bets - remember, they've been burned before - with the open question "Can Science Measure Faith?" Missouri reliably chimes in with "After Large Study, Power of Prayer Still Up in the Air." You know, like up in the air in a pervasive kind of way...

Now that we know that the chances of complications are slightly increased by praying for a sick person, however, we have a rare chance to use the enemies' weapon against them. Following our pal JST's suggestion on the matter, we hereby call for a Swill Prayer Circle. We're taking nominations for the first target, ahem, beneficiary of our religious devotions.

Requiescat in Pace

Longtime readers of The Swill know that we believe in letting the dead bury the dead, and have no truck with nostalgic eulogies. Consistency has never been our strong suit, however, and it's somehow just too bad that Buck Owens has passed on.

Over the past decade, unrepentent fans of country music could converse amicably with even the most fashionably disenfranchised musical fascisto, so long as the topic remained Johnny Cash. It was Okay to like Cash, and maybe alright to dig some Hank Williams (Senior or III), but the young hipsters never really got the now-late, always-great Buck Owens.

Perhaps this was because Buck's persona didn't encourage flights of tough-guy fantasy on the part of the voluntary outsider. Perhaps he would have done well to sing more frequent tales of shooting people, or perhaps he should have been less of a business tycoon. Perhaps the bad hair and retro-hickdom of "Hee Haw" weighed him down publicly as much as the death of guitarist Don Rich slowed him down musically. Perhaps he didn't seem pre- or anti-commerical enough to make an attractive commodity.

Whatever. We wish people knew more than "Tiger by the Tail," we wish we could see him play live, and we wish we had the right words to salute his music. R.I.P.

Fuck You, Copper!

That's all we can say about the fact that Texas law enforcement are now engaged in a concerted crackdown on public intoxication. They've decided that the historic focus on preventing people from actually committing crimes that endanger others -- say, by driving while trashed -- is inefficient, and thus a problem.

The solution? Arrest people from being drunk in bars. 2200 Texans have been arrested thus far, and we're tempted to compose a long analysis about the diminishing sovereignty of the individual and the rise of state power to protect us from ourselves. But it's just too tiring and tiresome.

Wah Wah

You've no doubt seen the recently published study of a UC-Berkeley psychologist, who after forty years of following the development of 100 children has concluded that whiny, fearful, insecure, rigid toddlers are highly likely to turn into whiny, fearful, insecure, rigid adults. No big shock.

More interesting, if no more surprising, is the fact that these whiny, fearful, rigid children grow up to identify strongly as political conservatives. To anyone who has seen in Don Rumsfeld's eyes the paranoid anxiety of the schoolyard weenie who has rightly received multiple beatings for attempting to regulate the playground behavior of everybody else, this also comes as no surprise.

You may suspect that some toddling boobsucker will grow up and send money to Focus on the Family, send their own kids to Patrick Henry College, and send other people's kids to distant lands in order to fight unnecessary wars. If so, here are a few other telltale signs:

* Shits in play area of other kids. Claims trip to toilet would place undue burden on shit production and result in the loss of shit jobs.

* When snacks are distributed, tries to convince other children that comparatively large lunch given to him by his parents is evidence that he also deserves a proportionally greater share of snacks. Takes snacks by force if necessary.

* Enjoys breast feeding, but claims that other children's exposure to breasts is indecent, dirty, and immoral.

* Avoids science class.

You probably know more children than we do, and have probably seen other symptoms of impending conservatism. Please share in the comments section so that everybody may benefit from your experience.

Oh......

People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don't put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible. - Professor Jamie Raskin

Stop the Presses!

Holy Jesus! Two women have died after taking the abortifacient RU-486, and the grammar of the headlines leaves no doubt as to the causal relationship between the two events.


"Two More Women Die After Taking Abortion Pill," the headlines scream out, and anti-choice groups are quick to demand that the drug be pulled from the market. Why? Well, because in the six years that it's been available by prescription, SEVEN women have died after taking the drug (it's actually a combination of drugs, and actually none of the deaths were traced directly to the drugs themselves, but these are merely semantics).

SEVEN women in six years? Sweet Jesus, why even have an FDA? When will good moral people of faith put an end to this holocaust? (N.B. The last link is worth following, if for no other reason than you get to follow the post informing you "Italy Not Catholic!" Late breaking news, indeed.)

In the U.S. we'll have to wait a few more months for abortion to be made illegal. While you're waiting, and in case you missed this in the news lately, you might consider that 529,000 women die each year from from complications during pregnancy and childbirth.

If we did the math, we'd say that being pregnant and giving birth is roughly 453,428 times more likely to kill a woman than taking RU-486. Luckily, we believe that math is an invention of the liberal media.

Upon Mothers Eating Their Young

"I did not like the original version of Leninism, and was skeptical when the Bush administration turned Leninist.'' - Francis Fukuyama


If referring to Republicans' unnaturally erotic appetite for horse-flesh was an unfortunate libel on horses, FF's characterization scandalously abuses Leninism.

Coming Soon: The Swill to Power, Menshevik or Menshevik Internationalist?

No Business Like Shoah Business

If you hadn't noticed, Venezuelan Presidente Hugo Chavez has been taking some heavy hits in the U.S. media over the past several months, particularly on the subject of his alleged anti-Semitism. As less bombastic analysts than the Swill have pointed out, Chavez' comments were edited in the U.S. media to produce a rather different rhetorical effect than the one identified and understood by the Confederation of Jewish Associations of Venezuela, who decried efforts by the Wall Street Journal and the Simon Wiesenthal Center, among others, to dismiss Chavez as a cheap Jew-hating bullyboy. (Catch up on the important bits here.)

We here at the Swill resolutely take no position on Chavez, Venezuela, Semitism, anti-Semitism, oil revenues, Latin American politics, land reform, latifundists, or the subject of language more broadly. But we were intrigued enough by an interchange yesterday that we post it for your delectation and comment. The following took place at a rather low-profile meeting of some rather high-profile people. The Swill had unique access, and you - dearest Reader! - enjoy the benefits. Timely? Not really. Interesting? We'll let you judge. In any case, it's all we've got.

JWF: Stop being such a boob, MGS. How can any world leader not know that "[those who] crucified Christ" will evoke Jews for much of his audience? Not to mention that gold and silver were listed first among the riches (if you've ever listened to any of Farrakhan's comments against the Jewish money-hoarders, this language will ring bells).

Rhetorical stupidity thrives on both sides of the political divide, at the very least. What worries me more about this is growing alliance between fundamentalist Jewish interests and the radical and religious right in this country. This exposes one of the ways in which the neo-cons are playing both sides against the middle in the Middle-East (freedom and democracy my ass). But I'm not saying anything you guys don't know better than I.

MGS: One doesn't know; isn't the point of the article--and of the Venezuelan Jewish Community's letter protesting the Simon Wiesenthal Center's interference--that Chavez's language didn't resonate that way for his audience (at least until his audience became the Wall St. Journal, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, etc.)? Whether he should be attacked for not knowing that his audience now includes the WSJ -- or whether George Bush should be attacked in national newspapers for describing the Iraq war as a "crusade" -- is perhaps not unrelated to this issue.

JWF: I read Spanish well enough to make sense of it in the original, but what do I know about the tropes of anti-Semitism that circulate in the language or in South America generally? Nothing: that's what! So your point is well taken, though I do think Chavez's audience is more than his local audience(though to less an extent than Bush's is global) and thus he does bear the responsibility for the consequences of his utterances abroad (as we all do).

Certainly Bush should be condemned for using the word "crusade," but he or his cronies should be praised for "infinite justice." There's got to be a way to bring that one back, or something else pruned from the Theodicy of Leibniz.

JST: I agree with JWF, though in a somewhat elliptical way. I don't how much purchase the blood libel myth has across Latin America, but what I'm hearing here first is Oscar Romero here, not Farrakhan. I'd imagine that for a Chavista audience the image of gold- and silver-swiping crucifiers is most likely to evoke not the Jews but
the Spanish Empire -- and hence the caudillos and the contemporary neolib/con EurAmerican Empire -- by way of the Roman Empire, who actually crucified Jesus.

On the other hand, however, Chavez certainly sees himself as an actor on the global stage; he can hardly be unaware, as JWF points out, how his words are likely to be heard to the north and east -- not least because he's on friendly terms with Tehran. Quite a conundrum: what is an interpreter of good conscience to do? Clearly, our theories of rhetoric must be supplemented with a robust theory of schmetoric, but where is such a theory to be found?

O' Schmicero! -- why did you leave no written text behind?!

JWF: I think you've got it right, JST, and I certainly hadn't considered the weird reversal of the identity of the crucifiers you suggest among the Chavez revolutionaries (or whatever they are). But insofar as Chavez is undertaking a truly new democratic experiment against the neoliberalism of the West, he must be, as you say, an actor on the global stage (and I'm not sure what sort of theo/democratic, anti-globalist state he believes he's aligning himself with in Iran).

In any case, this will all be cleared up when I begin the First Schmophistic and institute my schmogymnasmata, through which we shall all learn the true arts of schmrammer, schmetoric, and schmialectic.

MGS: Thus endeth the lesson.

We Have Disagreed in the Past, but...

Russ Feingold for Fucking President.

The Race Is Won

In the contest to supplant "horsefuckers" as the noun most accurately describing neoconservative politicians, corporate titans, et alia, we are pleased to announce a winner: Phredward, aka Unclesiggy, has hit the figurative nail on the figurative head with "coprocrats."

Phredward is well known as the smartest motherfucker you're bound to meet, but we're still not precisely sure what is so darned appealing about his term. Simultaneously, it comehow suggests mimetic imitation of behavior (copycats) as much as it does shitheads (coprocaps), shitleaders as much as shiteaters (coprophages). All in all, we have here a truly grand term that nicely evokes the truly shitty job that the global leadership is doing. Or not doing, as the case may be.

Well done, Unclesiggy! You win a bottle of excellent Roman grappa, a heaping helping of penne alla amatriciana (to be named and delivered later), and a one-year subscription to Der Pferdficker magazine. Use them all wisely and separately.