messiestobjects

Conscientia Mereo in Choeung Ek

    I had my first International assignment last week, very exciting. A client had a branch in Dublin, so I used up all of my miles to bring Julie along and we got to spend a few days in Ireland. Unfortunately, it coincided with finals so I really had to scramble to keep up with all of my school work so that I could enjoy some free time over there; while I took a couple of pictures I haven't had time to go through them so the Ireland post will have to wait a week or three. I actually have my last final exam later today, for Astronomy. In the meantime, I wrote a poem and introductory essay for my final term paper in British Literature so I thought I'd post it along with some old pictures from a trip I took to Angkor Wat and the Killing Fields in Cambodia. I had a choice between just writing a seven page essay or the poem and intro essay in response to any of the works that we covered in class, and even though poetry is terrible I chose it for reasons I will explain in the essay itself.

    For anyone who hasn't read it, Paradise Lost by John Milton—the main subject of my attentions here—is a dramatic rendering of the fall of both Satan and Man based on the Bible in the style of the heroic poetry of Homer and Virgil. Milton opens several chapters in his saga by breaking the third wall and appealing to his muse, the holy ghost, for inspiration that his poem might be infused with skill and veracity. He was aping the greek poets when they would appeal to the Muses in their own epics.

On Paradise Lost and Knowledge Gained

    I trepidatiously chose to write a poem rather than an essay because I wanted to try my hand at a piece of Heroic poetry that did not rely on a moral foundation that I wholly disagree with. I decided on this course of action in response to the religious literature that we covered such as Doctor Faustus and Margery Kempe; however, the form and content of Conscientia Mereo, as I’ve called it, are linked most directly with John Milton’s Paradise Lost. I originally considered writing a lengthy diatribe about the problems with literature based on religious principles and how any moral content or heroic actions become corrupted by a dogmatic view of the Universe rather than a naturalistic or at least agnostic one. But I feared the arrogance of judging what is considered to be an important piece of historical literature based on more modern personal preferences and prejudices without adding anything creative to the conversation myself, and so I committed the arrogance of aping it and subverting the message instead!

    The title of my poem means ‘knowledge gained,’ a would-be clunky name which is why I chose to use the Latin rather than English and it is a rather obvious play on the title of the poem that inspired it. Interestingly, mereo means ‘to gain,’ but it also means to serve as a soldier, a connotation I like in the context of knowledge as antipathy to religion. Additionally, I like the idea that anyone who would want to know what the title meant would most likely have to look it up online. It both supports an idea in my poem and further serves as ironic subtext, as Latin is a dead language formerly used in church masses, alienating parishioners who didn’t speak it. This restriction or shrouding of knowledge is a major theme of my poem; an important part of religion is the idea that things must be taken on faith, which is detrimental to gaining knowledge about the cosmos. Now that we know that the universe is about 13.8 billion years old, that it started in a massive “explosion” of matter, and that humans evolved from apelike ancestors who in turn evolved from single-celled eukaryotes, scolds about original sin and the danger of knowledge are ill-suited to epic literature that would strive to inspire our imaginations and heroic yearnings rather than to keep us in our place.

    To wit, the hero [Adam] in Paradise Lost is admonished by the angel Raphael to avoid seeking knowledge when he says that “God to remove his ways from human sense, / Placed heav’n from earth so far, that earthly sight / If it presume, might err in things too high, / And no advantage gain” (Milton 8.120-122). Basically, he is saying that the quest for knowledge is far above human capabilities and even if we didn’t muck it up, any knowledge attained would gain no advantage for us anyway. Rather than fighting against this arbitrary restriction as a true hero might, Adam rather meekly accepts this condescending judgment. As we in modern times can attest, the successful quest for knowledge has actually led to quite a few advantages, and it has been a heroic, generational battle to overcome those who would have preferred to keep us in the dark. The play Doctor Faustus, for example, serves as a reminder of how someone living in darker ages viewed the acquisition of knowledge when the eponymous character trades his soul for it. We are led to interpret this as a petty lust for puerile power, which of course is not true knowledge at all and is nothing more than a cheap trick meant to instill the idea that knowledge can only come at the cost of one’s salvation.

    Another, more important detriment to the idea of a heroic epic is the way in which the underlying moral structure of Milton’s worldview corrupts the very concept of heroism. In book 12, the angel Michael says the son of god will come, “Proclaiming life to all who shall believe / in his redemption, and that his obedience / Imputed becomes theirs by faith, his merits / to save them, not their own, through legal works” (Milton 12.407-410). In other words, no man or woman can be a hero because Jesus is the only hero, he has used up all the heroism, and it doesn’t matter what good deeds or heroic acts that anyone else performs; we will only be judged on whether or not we believe in this man who we’ve never met from a book full of claims with no historical veracity. This hardly inspires the rest of us to live up to heroic qualities.

    To counter these problems, there were two main things I wanted to accomplish in Conscientia Mereo; I wanted to show that the search for knowledge was the true heroic stance, and I wanted to illustrate that what these Christian writers interpret as morality is actually quite immoral when presented in a slightly different context and is therefore problematic when proposing a heroic epic based on such a foundation. I chose a Luddite father-figure as the stand-in for God, a curious young daughter and her brother for Adam and Eve, and an estranged Uncle as Satan. My underlying idea was that God kicking Adam and Eve out of Eden for the crime of disobeying an arbitrary rule designed to keep them in their place would be a shocking abuse of power in any other framework. And this is without even taking into account the appalling idea that the entire future race of man are to be punished for this crime as well, shouldering the burden of the choice between irrational belief or infinite punishment for a finite crime.

    Whether or not I succeeded is definitely up for debate. Perhaps if I had years to perfect the language and more space to flesh out the story, it might approach something like a respectable attempt. However, in trying to adhere to pentameter and in getting quickly to the point in each “scene,” I believe that I have at the very least made a statement worthy of consideration regardless of my skills as a poet. I've chosen to begin with my own appeal to the Muses; it seemed important to carry on that particular epic tradition in my own humble way.

 

Conscientia Mereo

The Muses of old are now hard to find,

ancient spirits and ghosts, all lost their shrouds.

In the age of cause and effect, the Gods

and aether are replaced by the sciences.

Thus, should my fare fall short of the poets—

the bar that serves Homer, Virgil, Milton—

I’ve no one to thank and no one to blame;

the vision dies alone, unseen, my own.

And yet in such times, ever there are found

those who shun and loathe the light of the truth

and still prefer the comfort of leaving

their reason on some unnatural plane.

The brothers lived in a happier home

before the rift. Raised in a Luddite way,

taught to fear change and to hold to the old.

The elder learned well, the younger did not.

He’d questions and doubt, fire troubled his blood.

 

And when the manse passed on to the firstborn,

the new ruler of small places declared

an end to all inquiry. “In my stock

the book is the law, I’ll hear nothing else.”

Young Hob took this ill and started a plot,

shut up in his room, his spirits burned hot.

“His house it may be, yet also my home.

My preferred way in my life is my own.”

A battle ensued between wits and might,

and bad blood is e’er bitter with brothers.

It ended of course in the way it must;

the heir remained, and the contender shunned.

Hob left for a terrible place, alone

a job at McDonald’s, and his new home—

a two room apartment and five bunkmates.

Yet even in his anger and defeat

he thought to himself, “at least I am free.”

Time passed and things got better, as they do

Hob went to college, Summa Cum Laude.

 

Now in the meantime two children were born,

their names were not new but old as the Earth.

The father, still fearing all change, raised them

on a diet of old legends and tales.

He schooled them at home and kept them closed in—

“My garden is all you shall ever need.

Go out and play, but I warn you right now

wander not astray, great are the evils

for which you are prey, and all things but one

I can help you forget; the internet.

Ask me not what it is, and no one else

avoid it like fire, to touch it is death.”

He told them these things because knowledge burns

and births awful questions from which he’d turned.

This went on for years, they learned without peers

and all that he told was all that they knew.

Until came a time with her Pa away,

no longer a girl, a woman near grown

lovely to see, a travesty to hear

incomplete knowledge of all she held dear.

She raked in the yard and when she looked up,

A man in a car was watching her work.

He opened the door and gave a small wave:

“Hello there young lady, how do you do?”

“I’m feeling just fine, who the hell are you?”

“I once lived in this home, ages ago.

By any chance, is your father about?”

“He’s gone for the day, but just leave your name,

I’ll tell him you called, now please go away.”

“I’ll do you one better, here’s my email…”

Suffice it to say, one question hatched more,

by end of the day, her brain was aflame;

she knew that Pa's wrath would cause her some pain.

First she said nothing; she thought she’d combust,

'til one restless night, to brother she said:

“Did you know the Sun is really a star?

Our forebear’s not Adam, but a monkey?”

“What story is this? A children’s fancy?”

“No brother, it’s real, my eyes are opened.

I’m terrified, true, but Pa lied to us.

Here look at this, old Hob gave it to me.”

She showed him her phone and accessed the Net,

and taught him to use Wikipedia.

“Any question or thought, type it in here—

smaller in size but worth a thousand books.”

Horrified yet drawn, and fearing Pa’s wroth,

he asked her “just who the hell is old Hob?”

“He lived in this house, ’til Pa kicked him out.

He came to make peace, but something I said

made him quite angry and say we’re ill-used,

that no child should live in fear of the truth.”

Hesitant at first, but fear giving way

to a flame squelched down hard by years of shame.

Time lost in the night, an orgy became,

question and query turned into a game.

When Earth came around and greeted the Sun—

eyes blurred and minds buzzed—new day dawned within.

 

Caught by surprise when Pa opened the door:

“Oh my dear children, you’ve betrayed my love.

The day that I feared has finally come,

Just as I’d warned of, you’re banished from home.”

Cold, out on the street and shivering bright,

twinkle in her eye she said to him now,

“After Pa’s ‘love,’ there’s no fear in the night!”

It's All In The Interpretation

    I chose to write my final paper for American History about the first amendment. This is obvious if you know me at all. I thought it would be an easy topic to write about; it is a subject I feel strongly about and there is plenty of material available. And so it was... too easy. It was only supposed to be a six page paper and there is a plethora of material available, not to mention the superabundance of arguments to be made. Everytime I researched a facet or a tidbit, I came up with more and more material to pontificate about. Keeping it down to scale and deciding what should be focused on and what should be left out was the hardest part. My wife tells me that is what writing is always all about, or at least it is for someone such as myself who tends to overdescribe things. So I'll shut it and post it, with pictures from my visit to Mont Saint-Michel in France.

    The First Amendment guarantees that Congress will neither interfere with the free exercise nor make any laws respecting the establishment of religion. The wording of the Freedom of Religion clauses is perhaps a bit too concise, as its exact interpretation has been a constant source of dispute, even up to the modern day. The arguments surrounding any constitutional interpretation generally center on two talking points. What did the Founding Fathers intend? And given that the US Constitution was meant to be a malleable document subject to change as agreed upon by its constituents, why should it matter exactly what they intended? If the inherent and inalienable rights of modern people have been infringed upon by a devious interpretation of the Constitution, isn’t it our duty to clarify the wording to promote equality under the law? As Thomas Jefferson boldly states in the Declaration of Independence, “…whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it.” (US Declaration of Independence)

    On one extreme of the argument about the religious clauses of the First Amendment, certain religious fundamentalists believe that the antiestablishment clause means that government cannot interfere with their own particular religion or church, but believe that they have the right to politically enforce their own individual moral code, or even to enforce religious practices in a public sphere such as school-led prayer. This is because the founders did not explicitly state that the freedom from religion is a part of the constitutional guarantee, and yet on the other extreme this is exactly the way that many people believe it should be interpreted. It doesn’t help their cause that for most of the life of the United States, the former extreme is how the First Amendment was generally understood. It has only been relatively recently that—as a part of the fastest-growing “religious” affiliation in America—non-believers have felt secure enough to begin the conversation without fear of reprisal and with some certainty of being taken seriously. In order to discover whether the founding fathers meant for the religion clauses to imply that we have the right to be free from religiously derived moral legislation, we need to begin by going back to the complex figure of Roger Williams.

    There is a legend in my family that my great-great grandfather took Williams’ surname as our own when he first came to America. He arrived as a stowaway on a ship, and the story goes that when he got here he stole a horse and was promptly caught. Judge Hawkins Hart presided over his case and gave him leniency, choosing not to hang him. My great-grandfather had seen a plaque or a statue bearing the name of Rhode Island’s founder, Roger Williams, so when he was released from jail he changed his name to Hawkins Hart Williams both to honor the man who let him live and in hopes of pinching off some of Williams’ prestige for himself. Despite the shady nature of my family history and our legend—or perhaps due to it—I have thus an inherent fondness for and interest in Roger Williams. He was decidedly ahead of his time regarding the relationship between religion and politics. He was also a brave man as he dared to defy the Puritan authority, risking his reputation, livelihood, and safety in the defense of his beliefs, which included the then heretical notion that Church and State must be completely separate.

    Williams was staunch in that particular conviction, even though he himself was a devout Puritan. Perhaps even because of it. As Williams stated anonymously (fearing retribution) in a tract to British Parliament, “Religion was local, not national; the church was spiritual, not political… when persons are forced to conform to a mode of worship that their ‘hearts embrace not,’ then they have been violated in the very depths of their being.” (Gaustad pp. 86-88) When he came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, fleeing persecution in England for his religious beliefs along with many other colonists, he found himself ironically at odds with the other Puritans there when he tried discussing his ideas. They exiled him from Massachusetts for challenging their own religious authority, and he survived thanks to Native Americans with whom he was friendly. He went on to found Rhode Island in the hopes that he could put his ideas into practice there.

    At first look, it doesn’t seem as though Williams was promoting freedom from religion so much as the freedom to practice religion without interference from the State; a subtle difference, but one that a religious totalitarian might exploit if not examined too closely. If you happen to be an atheist, an anti-theist, a non-believer, or simply unaffiliated, how else can one interpret such sentiments? If Roger Williams believed that the State had no right to tell him how to worship, what if one decides not to worship at all? Would Williams have then said to the unbeliever: you can worship in any way you choose, so long as you worship? And make it law that one must do so? In taking a stand against interference with the individual’s right to worship as he or she sees fit, it would be absurd to then turn around and tell non-believers that they have to believe in something. Luckily, we don’t need to speculate on this matter too heavily as Williams made his opinion about religious rights quite clear in a letter he wrote to the town of Providence, in which he made an analogy comparing the relationship between church and state to a ship at sea:

    The passengers aboard that ship had full liberty to worship as they pleased, or not to worship at all. ‘Papists, Protestants, Jews, Turks’—whoever—all were free to worship in their own fashion, and none could be compelled to attend anyone else’s worship. But on the other hand, the captain of the ship had his own characteristic liberty too: ‘to command the ship’s course; yea, and also to command that justice, peace, and sobriety be kept and practiced, both among the seamen and all the passengers.’… Citizens had to pay taxes, they had to fulfill their obligations to serve in the militia, they had to obey—but in civil matters only. In religion, their liberty was complete. (Gaustad pp. 104-105)

    Roger Williams may not have been a founding father, but he was certainly an early inspiration with regards to the forming of the US Constitution. In 1689, a few years after Williams’ death, the philosopher John Locke published A Letter Concerning Toleration revealing the influence of Roger Williams. “I esteem it above all things necessary to distinguish exactly the business of civil government from that of religion and to settle the just bounds that lie between the one and the other…care of souls is not committed to the civil magistrate…it appears not that God has ever given any such authority to one man over another as to compel anyone to his religion.” (Locke 1689) Locke was in turn to be a heavy influence upon James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, the two greatest champions that religious liberty in the new world would ever have.

    I wish that I could simply quote Thomas Jefferson’s A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in full and be done with it. No argument that I am capable of making is more lucid or concise than that great document. But it shows the heavy influence of Locke in certain key points: “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers…who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men…hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time.” (Jefferson) Williams, Locke, Jefferson and Madison—who championed Jefferson’s Bill until it was finally adopted in Virginia on January 16, 1786—all show a deep distrust that any man on Earth is wise enough to assume authority over another man’s conscience in religious matters. Further, the act of forcing someone to subscribe to the moral cause of another is itself morally wrong: “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical: that even forcing him to support [a] teacher of his own religious persuasion, is depriving him of the comfortable liberty of giving his contributions to the particular pastor whose moral he would make his pattern.” (Jefferson)

    There are several interesting things in that passage. One is that Jefferson makes it clear that a State Religion—enforced belief—harms not only the non-believer, but the believer as well. This is a fine point that is often lost on those who would impress their religion into law. When a believer is made to practice a set of morals, he has lost the dignity of taking a personal stand on his own merits. “A state-created orthodoxy puts at grave risk that freedom of belief and conscience which are the sole assurance that religious faith is real, not imposed.” (Lee v. Weisman 1992)

    Another fascinating point is how Jefferson uses the word ‘disbelieves’: “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves.” If only this particular statement had carried over into the US Constitution, many ambiguities and arguments would be resolved. It is of course possible that Jefferson meant ‘disbelieves’ to be an interfaith qualification only, as in the way that someone who is Jewish disbelieves in the divinity of Christ, or a Christian disbelieves that Mohammed was a prophet. However, he made no such distinction between types of disbelief and, being a very careful man, it seems likely that—rather than an oversight—he intended it in every sense of the word. We know that he did indeed have a deep distrust of all religion: “Jefferson was a child of the eighteenth century enlightenment. He emphasized reason and was skeptical of religious dogmas. While he championed personal freedom of conscience and religious belief, Jefferson was suspicious of institutional religion and was fearful that it might have a corrupting influence on the body politic.” (Barron and Dienes pp. 422) After all, a Christian may disbelieve in Allah, Zeus, or Odin, but a non-believer simply goes just one God further. If this particular statement of Jefferson’s had been a clause in the constitution, the very idea of legislating against a group of people who don’t believe in the validity of the legislator’s religiously-derived morals would be a far shorter conversation in this country. In any case, whether it made it into the Constitution or not, we can easily deduce that his intent as a founding father was indeed to allow for the freedom from religion and its edicts.

    One of the most odious ways in which certain religious groups try to force their will on the populace is through devious interpretations of the free exercise clause. Recently, certain corporations—who should never have been given the same rights as the individual, but that is an entirely different subject—have attempted to deny certain rights to their employees by asserting the right of a corporation to coerce its employees into abiding by the morals of the CEO’s religious beliefs. The CEO of Hobby Lobby, David Green, believes that he has the right to deny his employees access to government mandated healthcare in the form of contraceptives, because of his so-called “Biblical Principles:”

    A new government health care mandate says that our family business must provide what I believe are abortion-causing drugs as part of our health insurance. Being Christians, we don't pay for drugs that might cause abortions. Which means that we don't cover emergency contraception, the morning-after pill or the week-after pill. We believe doing so might end a life after the moment of conception, something that is contrary to our most important beliefs. It goes against the biblical principles on which we have run this company since day one. (Green)

    Forgetting for a moment the fact that the Bible actually says nothing about abortion—not to mention that contraception is not abortion, no matter what you believe—the fact is that the right to freely exercise your religious rights and beliefs does not give you the right to deny those rights to other people because they believe differently.

    It is true that judicial interpretation of the free exercise clause has changed over the course of its lifetime. On the one extreme, judges have ruled that exemptions from civil laws are allowed when they infringe on certain religious practices; allowing certain faiths to utilize otherwise illegal drugs in their religious ceremonies, for example. On the other extreme, they have ruled that only the beliefs and opinions of men are exempt from legal coercion, but not practices that are otherwise unlawful. A case which I find particularly interesting in this regard is from 1878, when a Utah Mormon named Reynolds was charged with violating a federal law prohibiting polygamy. I agree whole-heartedly that civil laws must be adhered to for the good of society whether they go against someone’s religious beliefs or not… when those beliefs might cause harm to society. It would be absurd, for example, to allow an adherent of an ancient Aztec religion to perform a human sacrifice to appease his volcano god. No matter how strenuously his court-appointed lawyer might argue his client’s right to freely exercise his religion, there is simply no chance that any judge would allow this particular religious observance to proceed unchallenged. Cases involving a consensual crime such as polygamy, however, require more deliberation.

    In the case of the Utah Mormon, “Chief Justice Waite… drew a sharp distinction between protected belief/opinion and the conduct of polygamy. Reynolds’ defense that his conduct was protected by the free exercise clause was rejected…‘Laws are made for the government of actions, and while they cannot interfere with mere religious beliefs and opinions, they may with practices.” (Barron and Dienes pp. 505) I completely agree with the judge’s statement in principle, but disagree with his ruling, which was that Reynolds could not use religion as an excuse to break the law against polygamy. This may seem like a subject for another paper, but the law against polygamy is a morality-based law. It harms no one and picks no pockets so long as all parties in the marriage enter into it willingly and with full knowledge of the situation. Informed consent is a value that is too often ignored when writing such laws. I consider it ironic that the judge’s (and the federal law’s) distaste of polygamy is probably informed by the dictates of Judaic religious morality—whether he was aware of it or not—and yet he used civil authority as a shield with which to deny a member of an opposing religion the free expression of his beliefs, based on the prejudices of his own.

    This is getting into tricky territory, which shouldn’t be surprising given that the attempt to understand the First Amendment often leads to such places. As Peter McWilliams so eloquently puts it,

    In listening to the reasons why laws against consensual activities are enacted, or why laws against consensual activities should not be eliminated, one begins to peel away the layers of an onion, and at the core of that onion is almost invariably a religious belief. The progression usually goes something like this:

“It’s not right.”

“Why is it not right?”

“Because it’s not moral.”

“Why is it not moral?”

“Because God says so.”

And this is usually followed by some reference—sometimes specific but usually vague—to the Bible, a sermon, a televangelist, or a story remembered from Sunday School (or was it Cecil B. de Mille?)

    Knowing about that pesky separation of church and state rule… some politicians and commentators do the best they can to cloud the fact that criminalizing consensual activities is a religious issue. (McWilliams pp. 169)

    This is the danger of supposing that the First Amendment does not or should not guarantee freedom from religion. There is nothing intrinsically harmful to society about polygamy, homosexuality or the marriage thereof, personal drug use, prostitution, contraception, stem cell research, etc. and legislating against these activities or the groups that engage in them denies consenting adults the freedoms that the Constitution is meant to guarantee. As I have shown, it seems clear from the writings of Roger Williams and Thomas Jefferson that their intention at least was for the citizens of the United States—ALL of its citizens—to enjoy those freedoms and that the religious clauses of the First Amendment are meant to be interpreted in exactly that way. Furthermore I have also attempted to show that whatever the rest of the founding fathers of the U.S. Constitution intended, it doesn’t change the fact that certain morality based laws—so often derived from religious beliefs—constitute a threat to free expression and whether the words of the First Amendment explicitly declare it or not, it is in the best interests of freedom-loving Americans to make it explicit that the freedom from religion is a self-evident truth, an inherent and inalienable right.

Works Cited

Barron, Jerome A. and C. Thomas Dienes. First Amendment Law, 4th Ed. St. Paul, MN: West Publishing CO., 1993.

Gaustad, Edwin S. Roger Williams: Prophet of Liberty. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Green, David. "Column: Christian companies can't bow to sinful mandate." 09 September 2012. USA Today. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/story/2012-09-12/hhs-mandate-birth-control-sue-hobby-lobby/57759226/1. 30 April 2013.

Jefferson, Thomas. "A Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom." 1777.

Lee v. Weisman. No. 505 U.S. 577. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES. 1992.

Locke, John. "A Letter Concerning Toleration." 1689. http://www.constitution.org/jl/tolerati.htm. 24 April 2013.

McWilliams, Peter. Ain't Nobody's Business If You Do. Los Angeles: Prelude Press, 1993.

Reynolds v. United States. No. 98 U.S. 145. SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES. 1878.

US Declaration of Independence. 1776.

 

Czech Out My Book Report

    I had to write a book review of Frederick Douglass' autobiography for my American History class, and I have a few pictures from the Czech Republic left over. Since my professor really liked my paper, and I really liked the Czech Republic, enjoy yet another place-saving photojunk mash-up.

Frederick Douglass: Born Into Slavery but Never a Slave 

The narrative by Frederick Douglass of his life is suffocating and important. All slave literature from this dark period of American history that I have read feels that way to me. My reaction to Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of great consternation and produced my first epiphany regarding the true evils of our slave-owning past; Harriet Beecher Stowe illuminates quite well the actual consequences of slavery for black Americans, which—other than having a vague sense of the injustice of being owned and abused by another person—is something that I think most people in the modern day have trouble imagining. At least, I know that I certainly did. Django Unchained, the recent film by Quentin Tarrantino, affected me even more viscerally—trite as that may seem—in that after vicariously experiencing the depravity of slavery through the medium of two limited dimensions, I was then complicit in delicious vengeance, cheering for the titular character’s bloody and gratuitous retribution. It made me wish that, if it were possible, I could fully partake in the dark joy of whipping the white slavers into mewling submission.

The important difference between Douglass and these others—besides the very relevant fact that they are fictions written by white people sympathetic to the plight of slaves, while Douglass is someone who actually experienced slavery—is that to hear the voice of Douglass is not simply to hear the voice of a slave telling the story of his emancipation, or of his horrors, or of a base desire for vengeance. Rather, it is instead to hear the voice of a man who was born with freedom in his heart tell the story of how a repugnantly self-righteous, morally bankrupt and appallingly vicious society tried to convince him that he was never meant to be free, and thus how they failed.

One of the most striking things in this light is the significance that Douglass places on books, or to be more precise on the importance of literacy. When recalling the experience of the first time he was introduced to letters by Mrs. Auld, Douglass recounts Mr. Auld’s reaction and subsequently his own deep thoughts on the matter: “if you teach that nigger… how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become unmanageable, and of no value to his master.” Douglass’ reaction to this statement was lucid: “I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man.” In my mind, there has never been a better advocacy for literacy. It is far easier to enslave a man who has not been taught to read, and therefore lacks the most important tool with which to learn critical thought. Douglass’ insight—young, uneducated, and inexperienced as he was at the time—is profound on the level of genius. In one fell swoop he understood not only the underlying enabler of his enslavement, but the means by which he might ultimately escape it.

Though I mostly agree with the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison when he said that “Opponents of slavery should not talk about the evil influence of slavery on white society but rather the damage the system did to blacks,” I feel that it is extremely important to note in this case the damage that slavery did to Mrs. Auld. Douglass stresses the importance of it himself, describing how kind she was when he first met her, commencing to treat him “as she supposed one human being ought to treat another.” But in having been forbidden to teach him his letters by her husband, Douglass noted how she began to change.

Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me. When I went there, she was a pious, warm, and tender-hearted woman. There was no sorrow or suffering for which she had not a tear…Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of these heavenly qualities… The first step in her downward course was in her ceasing to instruct me. She now commenced to practice her husband’s precepts. She finally became even more violent in her opposition than her husband himself… a little experience soon demonstrated, to her satisfaction, that education and slavery were incompatible with each other.

Douglass thus manages to show us not only how the institution of slavery destroyed the spirits of the slaves—which seems obvious to the modern student—but how it less obviously helped to destroy the moral compasses of the masters and changed them from men and women into monsters who perpetuated the horrors of this national sin. Despite the strident language of Garrison, and even though his philosophy was very important to the abolitionist movement, Douglass’ observation is a very humanist position to take and as such is the most potent antidote to inhumanity.

One of the most important points that Douglass makes about slavery is that, despite apologist claims “which portrayed slavery as an essentially benign institution in which kindly masters looked after submissive and generally contented African Americans,” (Brinkley 276) utter degradation and cruelty towards slaves was not only the norm, but a vital component of the entire system. Slaves must be kept at a subsistence level, in a perpetual mode of survival, or else they might show unrest and have thoughts of escape or rebellion. As Douglass himself puts it (italics are mine):

I have observed this in my experience of slavery,—that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceases to be a man.

Slavery, in other words, was a system that forced people—master and slave—to become something less than human. What becomes clear from his observation of Mrs. Auld—that slavery was as injurious to her as to him—is that Frederick Douglass regarded the damage done to his psyche a far greater crime than any bodily harm he had to endure. He remarkably ascended through this world of despair and managed to retain his humanity. In doing so, he brought a message of clarity, introspection, and strength to a world in dire need of them, both for the abolitionists of his time and for future generations in need of greater understanding.

---

 

The Sheepdog Mentality

    Have you ever wondered what soldiers, cops, and other protectorly types really think of people who don't like guns? Several years ago, I found a transcript of a speech given by Dave Grossman at a military base while I was there for a job —I was not present for the speech itself. When I read it, my initial reaction was extreme indignation. I was going to post it then, but I decided to sit on it instead. The transcript fell behind my desk and escaped my memory for a few years until this past week when, during an intensive office spring cleaning, I rediscovered it. As I read it, I found that age hadn't changed my perspective very much. In it, he refers to the non-gun-toting 53% of Americans as "sheep," and tells any gun-owning citizen with a concealed weapons permit that if he leaves his home without his gun, he may as well say "baa."

    Now, by pulling that out of the context of his speech, I expect any non-gun-owner to be sufficiently outraged. It's insulting. But putting it into the context of his larger speech, it is slightly less insulting. Slightly. He actually makes some good points, and it's easy to see why he believes what he believes. But there are a couple of fundamental problems with his assertions, and there are some frightening implications, not least of which is that in my job I come into contact with a lot of people who are rabid gun-carriers, and who clearly have a sense of righteousness about the idea of carrying a concealed weapon. Many of those types of people that I talk to tend to be middle-aged overweight white men with average intelligence and an apparent sense of impotence. I don't mean sexual impotence; I'm talking about that feeling you get around someone who clearly thinks of himself as a hero, yet has never had the chance to be one. There are of course many heroes in the cop and soldier business, and I don't mean to denigrate noble action. But there are many, many more frustrated, unactualized, would-be John McClanes who yearn for the chance to use their weaponry and prove to everyone that they are worth something.

    At any rate, I get the feeling that Grossman and his views have had a large impact on the "responsible" gun-owning society that seems to exist largely behind the scenes to many people in America, particularly to liberals who don't have much contact with those types. So I'm going to post the transcript in full and discuss the issues I have with it in between in blue.

_______________________________________________________________

     Everyone has been given a gift in life. Some people have a gift for science and some have a flair for art. And warriors have been given the gift of aggression. They would no more misuse this gift than a doctor would misuse his healing arts, but they yearn for the opportunity to use their gift to help others. These people, the ones who have been blessed with the gift of aggression and a love for others, are our sheepdogs. These are our warriors.

     One career police officer wrote to me about this after attending one of my Bulletproof Mind training sessions:

     "I want to say thank you for finally shedding some light on why it is that I can do what I do. I always knew why I did it. I love my [citizens], even the bad ones, and had a talent that I could return to my community. I just couldn't put my finger on why I could wade through the chaos, the gore, the sadness, if given a chance try to make it all better, and walk right out the other side." -Even the bad ones. This is the first indicator that it is normal to label certain people as "bad." I'm not saying that there aren't bad people, I'm just saying that it's unwise to make such judgements without more qualification. What does he mean by "bad?" Gay? Muslim? Shoplifters? Welfare recipients? Or does he mean to suggest that he even loves terrorists? It's all very condescending.

     Let me expand on this old soldier's excellent model of the sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. We know that the sheep live in denial; that is what makes them sheep. They do not want to believe that there is evil in the world. They can accept the fact that fires can happen, which is why they want fire extinguishers, fire sprinklers, fire alarms and fire exits throughout their kids' schools. But many of them are outraged at the idea of putting an armed police officer in their kid’s school. Our children are dozens of times more likely to be killed, and thousands of times more likely to be seriously injured, by school violence than by school fires. -This is an interesting point, or would be if he compared school violence to something a bit less controlled than the school system's gigantic efforts related to fire prevention and emergency evacuation. How about prescription medication overdoses? I get that he's talking about just that, the need for preparedness in the case of school violence, but it's not clear that having armed guards in every school is actually a proven way to deter violence.

     But the sheep’s only response to the possibility of violence is denial. -So then the sheepdog's only response to the possibility of violence is more violence? Hmm. Did he steal that idea from the Bible?- The idea of someone coming to kill or harm their children is just too hard, so they choose the path of denial. I'd like to see some evidence for this claim besides a bold assertion. As near as I can tell, most parents worry themselves to crow's feet and grey hairs about their kids' safety. Grossman chooses to interpret a distaste for armed security guards in schools as denial rather than as a healthy skepticism of the effectiveness of such methods. Homes with guns in them are associated with an increased risk of firearm homicide and firearm suicide in the home itself. There is no reason to suspect that it would be any different in schools with guards, what with them leaving their guns laying all about for any depressed or homicidal student to pick up.

     The sheep generally do not like the sheepdog. He looks a lot like the wolf. He has fangs and the capacity for violence. The difference, though, is that the sheepdog must not, cannot and will not ever harm the sheep. Any sheepdog that intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed. The world cannot work any other way, at least not in a representative democracy or a republic such as ours. Ugh. This metaphor is perhaps meant well, but if Grossman really believes that all types of people have a place in society, that everyone has something to offer and that "sheepdogs" are merely another such type, I find it disingenuous that he would choose to use such denigrating language.

     Still, the sheepdog disturbs the sheep. He is a constant reminder that there are wolves in the land. They would prefer that he didn’t tell them where to go, or give them traffic tickets, or stand at the ready in our airports in camouflage fatigues holding an M-16. Or not search your adult diapers at the airport, nor make obnoxious comments about your private items, maybe even don't arrest journalists covering events that the government doesn't like, or not pepper spray students SITTING DURING A PEACEFUL PROTEST. The sheep would much rather have the sheepdog cash in his fangs, spray paint himself white, and go, "Baa." Yes, clearly our distrust for authoritative gun-toting security types is all about a sheep-like denial of the possibilty of violence. Grossman seems to be in denial about the fact that we are too often at the mercy of the idiocy of people given sheepdog-like authority.

     Until the wolf shows up. Then the entire flock tries desperately to hide behind one lonely sheepdog. As Kipling said in his poem about “Tommy" the British soldier:

While its Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Tommy, fall behind,”

But it’s “Please to walk in front, sir,” when there’s trouble in the wind,

There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,

O it’s “Please to walk in front, sir,” when there’s trouble in the wind.

     The students, the victims, at Columbine High School were big, tough high school students, and under ordinary circumstances they would not have had the time of day for a police officer. They were not bad kids; they just had nothing to say to a cop. When the school was under attack, however, and SWAT teams were clearing the rooms and hallways, the officers had to physically peel those clinging, sobbing kids off of them. This is how the little lambs feel about their sheepdog when the wolf is at the door. Look at w hat happened after September 11, 2001, when the wolf pounded hard on the door. Remember how America, more than ever before, felt differently about their law enforcement officers and military personnel? Remember how many times you heard the word hero? Here he makes his strongest point. Yes, absolutely, when bad things happen it is good to have a strong good-guy around. It is not denial, however, to recognize that the last time that Homeland Security created an entirely new nation-wide security team in response to a threat, we got the TSA, an amalgam of untrained security guards whose ineptitude has been a constant source of amusement, scandal, and ineffectiveness ever since. Yeah, let's do that again, but with children and inept guards with guns instead. I agree, it's a subject worth discussing, but I find it odd that the regulation of gun sales in a manner similar to the way we regulate driver's licensing is somehow more worthy of the sneering claim of "denial" than the idea that more guns won't solve the problem of violence.

     Understand that there is nothing morally superior about being a sheepdog; it is just what you choose to be. Also understand that a sheepdog is a funny critter: He is always sniffing around out on the perimeter, checking the breeze, barking at things that go bump in the night, and yearning for a righteous battle. That is, the young sheepdogs yearn for a righteous battle. The old sheepdogs are a little older and wiser, but they move to the sound of the guns when needed right along with the young ones. He's really stretching this metaphor. I wonder how he deals with the cognitive dissonance in stating that there is nothing morally superior about yearning for a righteous battle while the sheep go stick their heads in the sand. Perhaps he simply doesn't really mean what he says, and is just trying to downplay the aggravated sense of moral superiority that he actually seems to have a very difficult time hiding.

      Here is how the sheep and the sheepdog think differently. The sheep pretend the wolf will never come, but the sheepdog lives for that day. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, most of the sheep, that is, most citizens in America said, "Thank God I wasn’t on one of those planes." The sheepdogs, the warriors, said, "Dear God, I wish I could have been on one of those planes. Maybe I could have made a difference." When you are truly transformed into a warrior and have truly invested yourself into warriorhood, you want to be there. You want to be able to make a difference. Most of the Citizens of the US are sheep. Well, on that we can agree, though perhaps for different reasons. I'd like to know, though, why he thinks that most people pretend that the wolf will never come, or that bad things will never happen. I think he misunderstands the motivations of people who aren't crazy about guns and violence. For myself, I know that bad things will happen, that there are batshit lunatic jihadists out there who want to kill me for saying that Mohammed was a murderous pedophile, and more charlatan than prophet--as are all prophets. The difference is that I choose not to live my life in fear. I am glad that there are men out there who want to prevent crazy people from destroying the lives of normal people, but the problem is that they are not always the best types of people to perceive where the actual threats are. To hijack Grossman's metaphor, I once saw a sheepdog bark at a squirrell in a tree for ten minutes while a fox happily kept an ear on him from the safety of the henhouse.

     While there is nothing morally superior about the sheepdog, the warrior, he does have one real advantage. Only one. He is able to survive and thrive in an environment that destroys 98 percent of the population. Besides admitting that a sheepdog's only advantage doesn't necessarily have anything to do with critical thought, I think he again underestimates common people. I have been in some scary situations: I've had a gun pointed at me outside of Saddam's gigantic mosque, I was 100 yards away from an explosion in Iraq, and I walked weaponless down Karrada street, by myself, in Baghdad in broad daylight during the spring of 2004 to get some schwarma at a popular restaurant. I also used to drive a bus full of Iraqis every day down route Irish, the most dangerous road in the world at the time. I knew that something bad could happen, but I've always believed that if you live by the sword, you die by the sword. If I had had a gun when that Iraqi security guard caught me taking pictures of the mosque, he probably would not have stopped me to ask questions.

     There was research conducted a few years ago with individuals convicted of violent crimes. These cons were in prison for serious, predatory acts of violence: assaults, murders and killing law enforcement officers. The vast majority said that they specifically targeted victims by body language: slumped walk, passive behavior and lack of awareness.  They  chose their victims like big cats do in Africa, when  they select one out of the herd that is least able to protect itself.

     However, when there were cues given by potential victims that indicated they  would not go easily, the cons said that they would walk away. If the cons sensed that the target was a "counter-predator," that is, a sheepdog, they would leave him alone unless there was no other choice but to engage.

     One police officer told me that he rode a commuter train to work each day. One day, as was his usual, he was standing in the crowded car, dressed in blue jeans, T- shirt and jacket, holding onto a pole and reading a paperback. At one of the stops, two street toughs boarded, shouting and cursing and doing every obnoxious thing possible to intimidate the other riders. The officer continued to read  his book, though he kept  a watchful eye on the two punks as they strolled along the aisle making comments to female passengers, and banging shoulders with men as they passed.

     As they approached the officer, he lowered his novel and made eye contact with them. "You got a problem, man?" One of the IQ-challenged punks asked. "You think you're tough, or somethin'?" the other asked, obviously offended that this one was not shirking away from them.

     "As a matter of fact, I am tough," the officer said, calmly and with a steady gaze.

     The two looked at him for a long moment, and then without saying a word, turned and moved back down the aisle to continue their taunting of the other passengers, the sheep. I love this story. I've heard a hundred blowhards tell stories exactly like it. I'm not saying it's not possible, I'm just saying that 9 times out of 10, this is the way the guy imagines it will go down the next time, or if he had had his gun on him, or if New York street punks were still living in bad 1970's movies. I've also often noticed that stuffy authoritative types frequently mistake kids acting in a macho or overly confident manner--or who are simply having a noisy good time--as punks who are trying to throw their weight around. People who follow authority like sheep...dogs... don't like people who question and/or disrespect authority. Think I'm just making shit up? Hey, my anecdote is just as good as his.

     Some people may be destined to be sheep and others might be genetically primed to be wolves or sheepdogs. But I believe that most people can choose which one they want to be, and I'm proud to say that more and more Americans are choosing to become sheepdogs. Stats, please. Although, I don't disagree. There is a definite mindset in government offices that I see more and more of.

     Seven months after the attack on September 11, 2001, Todd Beamer was honored in his hometown of Cranbury, New Jersey. Todd, as you recall, was the man on Flight 93 over Pennsylvania who called on his cell phone to alert an operator from United Airline about the hijacking. When he learned of the other three passenger planes that had been used as weapons, Todd dropped his phone and uttered the words, "Let's roll," which authorities believe was a signal to the other passengers to confront the terrorist hijackers. In one hour, a transformation occurred among the passengers--athletes, business people and parents-- from sheep to sheepdogs and together they fought the wolves, ultimately saving an unknown number of lives on the ground. Grossman is kind of all over the place with his sheepdog stuff. But I want to draw attention to the way he claims Todd Beamer as a sheepdog here. Beamer was a Christian who graduated from Wheaton College. He was a field marketing rep for Oracle, and he was not in the military and as near as I can determine, he never carried a gun. Now, he does fit the sheepdog mold in that he was ready to go into action, but as we will see, he also fits the sheep mold according to Grossman.

 

"Do you have any idea how hard it would be to live with yourself after that?"

"There is no safety for honest men except by believing all possible evil of evil men."

- Edmund Burke

Reflections on the Revolution in France

     Here is the point I like to emphasize, especially to the thousands of police officers and soldiers I speak to each year. In nature the sheep, real sheep, are born as sheep. Sheepdogs are born that way, and so are wolves. They didn’t have a choice. But you are not a critter. As a human being, you can be whatever you want to be. It is a conscious, moral decision.

     If you want to be a sheep, then you can be a sheep and that is okay, but you must understand the price you pay. When the wolf comes, you and your loved ones are going to die if there is not a sheepdog there to protect you. If you want to be a wolf, you can be one, but the sheepdogs are going to hunt you down and you will never have rest, safety, trust or love. But if you want to be a sheepdog and walk the warrior 's path, then you must make a conscious and moral decision every day to dedicate, equip and prepare yourself to thrive in that toxic, corrosive moment when the wolf comes knocking at the door.

     For example, many officers carry their weapons in church. They are well concealed in ankle holsters, shoulder holsters or inside-the-belt holsters tucked into the small of their backs. Anytime you go to some form of religious service, there is a very good chance that a police officer in your congregation is carrying. You will never know if there is such an individual in your place of worship, until the wolf appears to slaughter you and your loved ones. I wonder if Jesus wished that he and his disciples were packing that day in Gethsemane?

     I was training a group of police officers in Texas, and during the break, one officer asked his friend if he carried his weapon in church. The other cop replied, "I will never be caught without my gun in church." I asked why he felt so strongly about this, and he told me about a police officer he knew who was at a church massacre in Ft. Worth, Texas, in 1999. In that incident, a mentally deranged individual came into the church and opened fire, gunning down 14 people. He said that officer believed he could have saved every life that day if he had been carrying his gun. His own son was shot, and all he could do was throw him on the boy’s body and wait to die. That cop looked me in the eye and said, "Do you have any idea how hard it would be to live with yourself after that?" Hey, that's a nice anecdote. I've got one too. One time this guy brought his gun to church, and he accidentally shot a young girl (the pastor's daughter, actually) in the head and killed her while showing it to a friend. He had a concealed weapons permit and everything, and being such a well-trained individual he was thus a guaranteed deterrent against church violence. I wonder how hard it was for him to live with himself after that?

     Some individuals would be horrified if they knew this police officer was carrying a weapon in church. They might call him paranoid and would probably scorn him. Weird. Yet these same individuals would be enraged and would call for "heads to roll" if they found out that the airbags in their cars were defective, or that the fire extinguisher and fire sprinklers in their kids' school did not work, or if some lunatic didn't have to pass a psych test before getting a concealed weapons permit. They can accept the fact that fires and traffic accidents can happen and that there must be safeguards against them. Their only response to the wolf, though, is denial, and all too often their response to the sheepdog is scorn and disdain. But the sheepdog quietly asks himself, "Do you have any idea how hard it would be to live with yourself if your loved ones were attacked and killed, and you had to stand there helplessly because you were unprepared for that day?" Or how hard it would be to live with yourself if, as a church pastor, you encouraged your "flock" to bring their concealed weapons to church and then some moron shot your daughter? "Shit," you'd say, "If only guns were better regulated."

     The warrior must cleanse denial from his thinking. Coach Bob Lindsey, a renowned law enforcement trainer, says that warriors must practice "when/then" thinking, not "if/when." Instead of saying, “If it happens then I will take action," the warrior says, "When it happens then I will be ready."

     It is denial that turns people into sheep. Sheep are psychologically destroyed by combat because their only defense is denial, which is counterproductive and destructive, resulting in fear, helplessness and horror when the wolf shows up. Yes but, there are many truths about life which one can deny. If you deny that more guns mean more death, period, are you really a sheepdog? This denial turns you into a sheep of another kind. If you deny that US policies have had a direct effect on the desire for terrorists to attack us in the first place, what kind of sheep are you then? (I don't like Ron Paul, but when even right wing nuts like him start accepting facts, gun nuts like Grossman ought to do some soul-searching.)

     Denial kills you twice. It kills you once, at your moment of truth when you are not physically prepared: You didn't bring your gun; you didn't train. Your only defense was wishful thinking. Hope is not a strategy. Denial kills you a second time because even if you do physically survive, you are psychologically shattered by fear, helplessness, horror and shame at your moment of truth. This is where he really begins equating sheepdog-ness with gun-carrying. If you don't know how to use a gun and you don't have it with you, you are a sheep. Granted, he appears to be addressing cops and soldiers and if he was talking only about cops and soldiers being prepared in the line of duty then he would be far more difficult to argue with. But Grossman goes on the circuit on a regular basis in favor of the second amendment and more guns more guns! Guns in schools! Guns in church! If everyone had a gun and was prepared to use it, what could go wrong?

     Chuck Yeager, the famous test pilot and first man to fly faster than the speed of sound, says that he knew he could die. There was no denial for him. He did not allow himself the luxury of denial. This acceptance of reality can cause fear, but it is a healthy, controlled fear that will keep you alive:

     "I was always afraid of dying. Always. It was my fear that made me learn everything I could about my airplane and my emergency equipment_ and kept me flying respectful of my  machine and always alert in the cockpit."

-Brigadier General Chuck Yeager

Yeager, An Autobiography

     Gavin de Becker puts it like this in Fear Less, his superb post-9/11 book, which should be required reading for anyone trying to come to terms with our current world situation:

".. Denial can be seductive, but it has an insidious side effect. For all the peace of mind deniers think they get by saying it isn't so, the fall they take when faced with new violence is all the more unsettling. Denial is a save-now-pay-later scheme, a contract written entirely in small print, for in the long run, the denying person knows the truth on some level."

     And so the warrior must strive to confront denial in all aspects of his life, and prepare himself for the day when evil comes. How about confronting the denial that the world is an extremely dangerous place in large part thanks to US policies? And that perhaps the best way to get terrorists to stop being terrorists is to stop terrorising them?

     If you are a warrior who is legally authorized to carry a weapon and you step outside without that weapon, then you become a sheep, pretending that the bad man will not come today. No one can be "on" 24/7 for a lifetime. Everyone needs down time. But if you are authorized to carry a weapon, and you walk outside without it, just take a deep breath, and say this to yourself... "Baa." Todd Beamer walked out without a gun, and so did Chuck Yeager, two men he held up as prime examples of sheepdogs. Apparently you don't need a gun in order to combat either fear or terrorists, after all. I get that he's making a larger point about readiness, which I actually agree with. But his point about weaponry is erratic and full of bullet holes, and he is trying to falsely equate the two things. Bad things will happen, yes. But be strong and face life with your chin up and your eyes open, not with your mind closed and hiding behind a gun. In any case, Grossman's attempt to claim every hero as a sheepdog and then to turn around and say that real sheepdogs all carry guns is schizophrenic.

     This business of being a sheep or a sheepdog is not a yes-no dichotomy. It is not an all-or-nothing, either-or choice. It is a matter of degrees, a continuum. On one end is an abject, head-in-the-grass sheep and on the other end is the ultimate warrior. Few people exist completely on one end or the other. Most of us live somewhere in between. Since 9-11 almost everyone in America took a step up that continuum, away from denial. The sheep took a few steps toward accepting and appreciating their warriors and the warriors started taking their job more seriously. The degree to which you move up that continuum, away from sheephood and denial, is the degree to which you and your loved ones will survive, physically and psychologically at your moment of truth. Ah, the halcyon days of post 9-11. If only people lived in fear like that every day, and more easily allowed the eroding of civil liberties and the ascention of authoritative fascists bent on manipulating us through those fears. It's true, if I don't have a gun I might be less safe from terrorists or mass-murderers. But with a gun, I've surrendered my confidence to a piece of metal. I choose to carry my manhood somewhere else. Speaking in terms that Grossman would understand, I'd rather die on my feet than live on my knees. In any case, there are no easy answers to Dave Grossman's deep and disturbing fears, but he is in a denial just as debilitating as that he envisions the rest of us are in when it comes to the reasoning of "wolves" and the best options for solving our problems of violence. He clearly holds a simple view of good and evil, cannot conceive that his "side" is not the Light Brigade, and thus can abide only a simple, aggressive solution and will deny that anyone who thinks differently is anything other than a sheep.

Vitamins B(ald) & E(agles) Are Recommended By Crying Chief

    Eagles! Four of us drove up to Lackawaxen, PA several weeks ago to hit a spot where the Lackawaxen River meets the Delaware River on the New York border and bald eagles like to congregate. For the fish. It wound up being pretty exciting because I was thinking about how, growing up in the 70s and early 80s, the word on the birds was that they were disappeared, very rare, nearly extinct. To actually see them around now is exciting and probably worthy of some sort of American Indian quote about soaring hearts or summ'at, but no. We saw about seven of them. My pictures are lame though, because I need a better telephoto lens. Mine is cheap-o. Also, that's all I have to report. So the rest of this blog will be other bad bald eagle pictures, and a response I had to write for English class last year on an article in the NY Times by Michael Pollan. Yup, I'm scraping up the dregs.

    Michael Pollan artfully defines “food” as anything your great-great-grandmother would recognize as such, and his point is that in modern times the industry has drastically altered our perception of what qualifies as real food. Pollan says that part of the reason people have a difficult time eating real food is that when you walk into a grocery store the “most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over, the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming about their newfound whole-grain goodness.” He has a decidedly sneering attitude about such health claims, and with good reason; in 1977, George McGovern “prepared what by all rights should have been an uncontroversial document called ‘Dietary Goals for the United States’… calling on Americans to cut down on red meat and dairy products.” The red-meat and dairy industry bellowed, and this very practical advice was drowned out. In Pollan’s view and in mine, the food industry has since waged a campaign of misinformation about American health.

    In 2007, at 35 years old, 5’ 11” and 220 lbs., my doctor told me my cholesterol was high and wrote a prescription for Lipitor. Concurrently I had seen a specialist about my arms frequently going numb during sleep and was told that I had pre-carpal tunnel syndrome, meaning that it wasn’t full-blown and not too late to fix it with arm braces and some other types of treatment. I had a brief conversation with myself at that point that went something like this: “Self, you’re 35. You’re falling apart. You’re too young for this shit.” I decided that I needed to get in better shape. I never filled the Lipitor prescription because of my personal conviction that it is a junk drug, meant to treat a symptom but not the actual problem. I never wore the arm braces because I couldn’t bear the idea of starting down that path towards riding a jazzy with a big-slurp in Wal-Mart. I got a gym membership and lost 35 pounds in about a year. I slowly began changing my diet to whole foods, which became easier the more I exercised because I didn’t want to ruin a good workout with empty calories. I also started getting into vitamins.

    Pollan believes that separating individual vitamins and nutrients from food is missing the forest for the trees. I agree with this to an extent in that I strongly believe that vitamins are not a substitute for healthy food. However, since I began taking natural, non-synthetic vitamins in addition to my healthier diet and exercise, I haven’t had a single cold. I have felt a bit run-down on occasion, which I strongly suspect were cases of my body fighting off what would normally be some such common sickness. I did get bronchitis once, but it only lasted about two days which is unusual for such a normally debilitating condition. While I could attribute this to exercise and healthy eating, and I’m sure that’s a part of it, I know plenty of people who eat well and exercise and yet still get regular illnesses.

    While my evidence for the health benefits of vitamins is anecdotal and hardly scientific, I am wary of ending my vitamin regimen as Pollan, while offering much sage wisdom, had little in the way of science in his opinions on individual vitamins to offer either. My own feeling from reading various sources is that today’s farming practices have reduced the amount of minerals and nutrients in our soil, therefore reducing the health benefits of even the most naturally grown whole foods, which is why I feel that supplementing a healthy diet with natural vitamins is still important.

    Pollan seems to fall into the same trap that he warns us of, asking that we take so-called scientific studies done by nutritionists with a grain of salt and yet at the same time citing a study that says “in the case of beta carotene ingested as a supplement, scientists have discovered that it actually increases the risk of certain cancers.” The error in this stance lies in what he leaves out; that many such negative vitamin studies are done using synthetic vitamins. Synthetic vitamins have been shown in fact to be very bad for you, however when the naturally occurring forms of these vitamins are used in more honest studies, no such negative health consequences are found. Therefore it seems obvious to me that the hype surrounding the supposed danger of vitamins is simply more misinformation from the industry.

Area 48... Area 49... Area 50... Area 51! Ready Or Not, Here I Come!

    So leapfrogging back over the last inexplicable post, remember when I said that we go to Europe for castles, history, sexy accents and beer, and that they come here for the amazing landscapes, New York City, sexy accents, and... um. Definitely not the beer? Well, Death Valley has a castle for those of us who can't go to Europe whenever we want, and in case Europeans get homecastlesick. On our way out the next morning (after a fabulous night in the 50s-fancy Furnace Creek Inn thanks to a room upgrade) we hit Scotty's Castle.

    Scotty was a con man who convinced some rich dude to invest in his non-producing gold mine, and the rich guy built the place so he could be near his investment. By the time that the gold mine fell through and Scotty had disappeared, Rich Dude had discovered that the desert was good for his health, so he stayed.

    Interesting place, but not so interesting that we wanted to pay $30 to take a tour. We left Death Valley and took the sceneic drive back to Las Vegas, revisiting a cool place I went to once before...

    Yup. That small outpost of humans just outside of Area 51, Rachel Nevada. In fact the long route from Death Valley goes north, east, and then south for about 300 miles and circumnavigates the gigantic military installation which houses Area 51 as well as the Tonopah Test Range where if you look at it from google maps, you can see the hundreds of gigantic craters left from the nuclear bomb tests they were doing all throughout the 50s.

    The road that travels along the north end of Nellis Air Force Base, State Route 375, is known as the Extraterrestrial Highway.

    Of course we stopped in at my favorite American diner, the Little A'Le'Inn, for lunch. Damn fine cuppa coke, alienburger, and shoestring fries.

    On the last occasion I visited Rachel, I was stopping in at the Inn when this crazy ass Donnie Darko-lookin' storm rolled in out of nowhere, and I got a cool shot similar to this of this tow truck and Inn sign out front.

    After lunch, I chatted up the employees and asked them if they'd mind if I published the shot, if I ever had the oportunity. There's this whole thing about property releases that the sign in the photo necessitates. So the owner, Pat Travis, was in and she came out and asked to see the picture. I pulled out my laptop and showed it off:

    And she said she'd sign a release on the condition that I send her a copy to hang in the diner! She may have simply been being polite, but she does have a lot of stuff hanging on her walls in there so there's a good chance that any future visitors will see my picture in there. And in any case she signed the back of a card for me so, it's a win-win.

    From there, Julie and I headed over to Area 51.

    The famous black mailbox. It's funny because lore had it that it was some sort of secret drop-off box for Area 51, when in fact it's just a mailbox for a local rancher named Steve Medlin. He has had to take extreme measures to make it secure because people keep vandalizing it; he's repainted it since the last time I was here.

    And then the 5 or 7 mile dirt road journey to the anti-climactic border of Area 51.

    I have this juvenile glee for taking pictures of signs that say photography prohibited, and then pulling out my zoom lens for close-ups of seeeeeecret things. Like this strange alien-shaped spy device looking down on us from a hilltop.

    Or these creepy guys in this creepy truck looking down at us through creepy binoculars from a creepy hilltop.

    Rumor has it that if you step one toe over the border into Area 51, these guys will rush down and arrest the fuck out of you and take you to a local county jail, where you have to pay a $500 fine. Kind of not so scary... If I had a bunch of money and I wanted to risk losing my job I'd seriously consider making a break for it, just for laughs. I've been cuffed by military types before; it's more funny than intimidating.

I Juxtapose The Salton Sea With A Depressed Mood I'm Having

It was hectic holidays this go-around, but I thought it might finally be time to get back to the Salton Sea. Behind Salvation Mountain lies Slab City, an RV community for nomadic hippies. That's my only picture; I liked the community bulletin board but I don't really feel comfortable just going around shooting people trying to go about their lives, no matter how weird it seems. I suppose I'll never make a good cultural photographer.

I headed over to the Salton Sea itself; a vast inland body of salt water which is drying up at an alarming rate, apparently, leaving behind salt caked beaches.

To be honest, after spending all morning at the massively fascinating Salvation Mountain, this was more of a rest stop for me. It was creepy enough to keep me shooting, but my mind was elsewhere.

And my mind is elsewhere now. A lot's happened in the month since I was here, and I'm posting these mostly just to get them off of my pending shelf.

I guess I'm feeling a bit out of it at the start of 2012 because I'll be taking a few months off of work, and I'm sad that I won't have any travels to post about in the meantime. I broke myself on Christmas Eve.

I was playing Manhunt Dodgeball with the niece and nephews, and I have no idea how it happened but I found myself writhing on the concrete basement floor in pain. I'd torn my acl and broken my hand.

So I may or may not be getting hand surgery today, depending on how the doctor thinks my hand is healing, and I'm getting surgery on my knee in a couple of weeks. They're going to put a cadaver tendon where my acl used to be. Zombie knee. I'm going to name it Ted. I'd introduce you, but Ted's dead baby, Ted's dead.

We were supposed to go to Thailand in February to hang out with my friend Scott, who teaches Scuba. We were going to sit on the beach, drink and tell our significant others funny and embarrassing stories about each other, and scuba dive.

So that's off now. Hopefully we can still go later this year, but we'll see. It'll be hard to take these two unplanned months off from work and then turn around and ask for more time off. Anyway, that taken with Obama signing an abhorrent document into law while everyone was partying on New Year's Eve which allows the military to detain any American citizen indefinitely on the suspicion of terrorism, evidence and trial be damned, and it's shaping up to be a depressing start to 2012.

I don't believe in all that Mayan prophecy jazz, because it would require a complete lack of critical thinking on my part to do so, (If the Mayans could predict the future, why did their entire culture disappear? Why do scientists who actually study Mayan writings keep saying "Duh, it's merely a cyclical calendar which is due to reset this year, but they weren't actually predicting the end of anything other than the calendar itself!"?) but some sort of world changing, eye-opening event this year sure would be nice. It's really astonishing how fast the American end-game is approaching.

While Shopping In El Paso For Weapons To Murder Your Enemies With, Why Not Stop In At P.F. Chang's?

Adverts at Airports in military towns for weapons contractors always give me the heebie jeebies. Huntsville, Alabama is actually worse, but I got bored waiting for my baggage in El Paso.

Happy Independence Day!

Ahh, the fat of the land.

Roswell Does NOT In Fact End Very Well, Futurama.

"The only thing that scares me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren't any space aliens. We can't be the best that creation has to offer. I pray we're not all there is. If so, we're in big trouble." - Ellen DeGeneres

Third trip to New Mexico is the charm! Roswell, baby. Actually it wasn't all that. I mean, it's cool to be able to say that I went, but other than the UFO Museum and Research center, there's not a lot going on there.

Not that, as a town, they don't embrace the hell out of their notoriety. Visitors are, after all, welcome.

The whole town has crap like that all over the place. Alien head lampposts and see the mailbox?

They need to take a little more pride in their place in history.

But what kills me is that the UFO crash didn't even happen at Roswell, rather 30 miles North closer to a town named Corona. But the military base where the investigation went out from was in Roswell, so there you go.

The museum was... well full of things like this. There is a LOT of reading material in the research room, but who has time for all of that when you're just using up some free time on a work assignment? Hell, who has time for that unless you're totally obsessed anyway?

Not that I'm not intensely curious. But I'm in the camp of people who don't really think that any information that is available to the public can point with any certainty to anything, well, for certain.

I've just finished reading that new book on Area 51 by Annie Jacobsen, and nothing in it made me feel any differently. It's an excellent book, well written and full of information about Area 51 that I didn't know before, including the U2 and OXCART spy plane dramas, but her conclusion about what the Roswell incident was about is a bit... well all she's doing is telling us what some guy who used to work there told her what he was told it was.

Which, if you've read anything about the book online, you'll know is that it was a technologically advanced hover saucer piloted by surgically altered retarded children (altered by none other than Joseph Mengele himself) sent by Joseph Stalin as both a psy-op to induce panic in America and to send a message to Eisenhower that he had wack Nazi technology at his disposal too, so what up?

She calls this a simpler, more Occam's Razor-like explanation than an extra-terrestrial crash landing, but I'm not so sure about that. This explanation leaves a lot of other questions; if Stalin had such advanced hover technology back in '47, and was able to penetrate American airspace with such ease, why wasn't this technology used again or since? I'm not sure that we could have won the cold war if they were that far ahead of us in stealth technology.

Anyway, I'm not saying I believe it was an alien crash. More likely it was something we were working on, and every bit of cover and disinformation ever released about it is just that, including very probably Annie's findings. One disturbing thing she says in the book is that the real reason Area 51 has been kept so secret all these years is because atrocities in the name of National Security have been going on there since the 50's, including human experimentation. I suppose the people involved would rather the public speculated endlessly about Aliens and/or Joseph Mengele than consider for a moment that a US Government-sanctioned continuation of Nazi experiments might be going on. In fact, I much prefer to believe that it is Extraterrestrial in nature.

Knowing what we know about how the corporate-controlled military-industrial complex of a government that we have operates in public, however, I shudder to think what the reality is about how they operate in private.

They're not the Aliens man, we're the Aliens.

Get Back On That Rocket And Make Me Some Trinitite, Boy!

"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. If we continue to develop our technology without wisdom or prudence, our servant may prove to be our executioner."

-Omar Bradley

So on my second work trip to New Mexico, I wanted to hit the outdoor missile museum at the White Sands Missile Range again because I hadn't taken the shot I really wanted to get the first time. So on my way in to work I gave it another shot. It's really striking how appropriate it is that the base of a giant rocket testing facility is situated right in front of the Organ mountain range. The missile display rather mirrors the mountains, don't you think?

I'm guessing that was intentional, but who knows. At any rate, it struck me ominous every time I drove by the mountains. It's as though they've been waiting all of their geologic lives for someone to come test big pointy phallic payloads of destruction at their feet.

So I keep getting really stuck thinking about the duality of the space rocket/ death missile theme going on all over New Mexico. The technology is mostly the same, but the application is as different as annihilation and salvation. And the birth of both aspects of the technology happened right here. (Actually, most of the original work happened over at Fort Bliss, but it's practically the same base as White Sands; they're adjoining) I guess there's not much to say about it, I just keep coming back to that fact in my circular thoughts.

"Hey son, check out this big ass gun. We killed a buncha commie nazi jerk-offs with this bad boy!" "Wow, Dad! Nazi jerk-offs!"

To be fair, I have no idea if that was the actual conversation. I just think it's weird to bring your kid to a museum dedicated to high tech killing machines. Maybe, like me, he's troubled by this aspect of technology and wants his son to see the park in a philosophical sense. Forgive me if my expectations for the typical American family are rather low in this regard. At any rate, they also have an inside museum which I didn't get to the first time. This next batch of photos are probably tedious, but I'm just a bit riveted here and I think they're interesting.

I like the fact that the sound effects guy from the original Star Wars flick donated a Darth Vader helmet for letting him record some sound effects there. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, but why not a light saber or a spaceship model? Was he subtly commenting on the evil of fetishising death machines? Actually a Death Star model may have been more appropriate in that case, but perhaps that would be too on-the-nosey. Or, most likely, it means nothing other than, "Hey, I got this extra helmet lying around. Here you go, thanks for helping me out." But I like the symbolism there whether it was intentional or not. I mean, look at this thing; it could be the model for a death star right?

That's a model of the original A-bomb tested at Trinity. Here's a closer up of the information on the wall above it.

Such a weird period in history. Did you know that the explosion of the Nuclear bomb created a new type of mineral? Trinitite. Hard to come by for your rock collection.

They also had this duck and cover display. I'm not sure if the museum was mocking its own historical propaganda here or if they're still trying to put a serious face on it, but I feel like mocking it. Mock mock mock.

And imagine being stuck in a bomb shelter for 20 years while waiting for the radiation levels go down to a safe level with these military provided sanitation kits. Bomb shelter crapping is a complicated business.

Well that's that for now. I did more stuff but once again I've taken so many photos that I'll save it for another post.

Rockets And Missiles; Salvation And Destruction In The New Mexican Desert

So picking up where I left off, after leaving the VLA I headed down to Las Cruces for work. Actually, I stayed in Las Cruces but my job was in the White Sands Missile Range, just over the mountain pass 20 miles or so. Inside the base, about 100 miles north of where I entered it, is the Trinity site where the first nuclear bomb was tested. It's open twice a year for the public to tour, unfortunately one of those times did not coincide with my visit. There is a museum on base though.

An open air display of many of the missiles they've tested there over the years. What about the Bomb you ask? Here's one. You might recognize it from it's stint on that long con of a TV show, LOST. It's called the Fat Man.

Sobering. I mean, it could have actually had a plot, and then it would have been a great show, but they made their cowardly writing choices, and all we were left with was that fat bloated sorry excuse of a bombed TV show. Bomb... right, sorry, got sidetracked. At any rate, as fascinating as a "museum"consisting of a yard full of devices designed solely to exterminate as much of the human race in one shot as possible is, I did run across something a little more interesting.

I don't know if you'll be able to read that so here it is, cropped.

I would guess that they were trying to insert this into the Roswell narrative somehow, but the "first firing date" of 1966-1967 is well after the alleged UFO Crash near there so it's a clumsy attempt in that case, especially since it also seems to have abandoned the "weather balloon" story but then why bother mentioning Roswell at all? I sort of suspect that it's a bit of a psi-op, or perhaps the military folk at White Sands actually simply have a sense of humor. We'll never know, because I'm sure a sense of humor in the military is classified information.

So out in the middle of the base, just off of the public highway that runs through it, is the White Sands National Monument. It's a vast sea of sand dunes composed of white gypsum crystals, where the military base took it's name from.

Got a picture. The sand really is very white, and because it's gypsum it stays cool to the touch even at midday in a very hot sun. I walked around barefoot for a while, it was nice.

But you know, sand is sand. I drove on to Alamogordo where they have the International Space Hall of Fame, which is not sand, and which is dedicated to the less destructive aspect of rocket technology. It's always fascinated me how the two aspects of rocket science so perfectly represent the potential destruction or salvation of the human species. The ones designed for killing are meant to fly only high enough to get over their target before crashing back down in fiery armageddon, while the ones designed for exploration are meant to keep going up and up until they escape the insanity of local politics. The other more interesting thing about this inherent symbolism of rocket science is that we humans are ourselves the architects of the instruments of our own destiny, whichever way it goes. If there is ever a day of Heavenly Judgment, raining fire on us from above, it will be of our own design.

Having said that, they all crash in the experimental phase. This is a crashed V-2 rocket, designed by Werner Von Braun for the Nazis before he came over to our side. They also had a moon rock at the museum, showing that sometimes rockets do get to where they're supposed to be going.

I got to hold it thanks to an amateurish bit of trick photography. I also hit on one of the pretty scientists that worked there. She was all wrapped up in her work though. "Hey baby, can I have a job?"

One of the other museum guides who worked there was a guy named Viggy who had worked on the Hawk missiles from their inception over at Fort Bliss in Texas. He was obviously proud of that so I asked him to pose with his rocket for me.

The only other interesting thing going on at the Space Hall of fame was that Ham, the first chimp in space, is buried there. I paid my respects.

After leaving the Alamogordo area, I headed back to White Sands for work, and from there I made my way back up to the VLA for some more shots before flying home. But I'll leave it here for now.

An Atheist Rant Which Those Whose Hands Are Over Their Ears May Wish To Avoid.

"Rational arguments don't usually work on religious people. Otherwise, there wouldn't be religious people."

-Doris Egan, House M.D., The Right Stuff, 2007

I haven't done a nice long insane rambly sea ranty in a while, and tonight I inexplicably find myself in the mood. Perhaps being stuck in Fort Bragg for three weeks in a row where there is nothing much to photograph has something to do with it, but perhaps also I can lay the cause on the doorstep of religion, my favorite whipping post.

For those of you who are facebook friends of mine, this is no surprise; other than my photo of the day, about all I've been doing over there is posting links to anti-religious videos, blogs, and news items. I've been feeling up for a fight lately. The problem is that my adversaries, those who put authoritarian belief in front of rational discourse ain't got much fight in 'em. You can't have a dialogue with those people because they haven't got a brain to stand on. Perhaps that is not fair; they do actually have brains but they've been quite thoroughly trained not to use them. I should know, I used to be a member.

In order to believe in the existence of God, any God, one must have faith. Faith is the belief in something for which there is no evidence. Fine. When I wipe my bottom after disposing of bodily waste, I use the first knuckle method. Since you will never witness this yourself, you'll have to trust me that it's true. You might not even know what the first knuckle method is, but what's important here is that it exists. I know, because I made it up. BELIEVE me when I tell you, I've felt it's presence. So you see, I have belief in certain things which can only be witnessed by an individual on a personal basis. However, if you choose to ignore my account of my VERY personal ass-cleaning method, I'll completely understand. In fact, if you want to pretend I never said it, so much the better. That's exactly how I feel about your god damned religion.

So, by expressing a belief in God, for whom there is no evidence, you've put yourself in an awkward position. More awkward than the first knuckle method in fact, difficult as that may be to imagine (don't imagine it!). You've aligned yourself with those who wish not to believe in reason. Reason, of course, is the primary tool of the mind. But this is the nature of faith, the very definition of it. "Set aside your reason, saith the lord, and believeth in this shit in this book right here. And do this not by your own impulse, but because these dudes who got that book from some other dudes, who are now dead, tell you it's the truth." Can you feel the presence of the lord in that logic? Amen!

I must say that my own progress towards rationality has been long and hard. I believed, and the illogic of the Lord did not sustain me. I searched for the Lord, and did not find him. Instead I found some used book store philosophy which slaked my thirst better than vitamin water for a time, until that too became as coca cola. Then, after discovering Carl Sagan and Joseph Campbell, I settled into a comfortable agnosticism where science was the only possible language of God, if he existed. I spent a while there, but all it took was a logical argument by a friend I've never met to convince me of the liberating joys of atheism.

If there is one thing I've learned from all of this, it's that one side will almost never convince the other. An atheist speaks the language of reasonable discourse and the religious speak the language of authoritarian "knowledge". An atheist can be convinced to change his mind on a subject through strongly reasoned logic and hard evidence, and a theist can be convinced by an impassioned emotional plea and hypnotic crowd techniques. Never the twain shall meet, as reason and faith go 'round and around and around.

One of the most overused and incorrect arguments against atheism is that one is simply switching a belief in God to a belief in no God. This is a false understanding of the situation. Atheism, in it's strongest sense, is a lack of belief. Were actual, hard evidence to come to light that God truly existed, atheists would still not become believers-in-God, they'd become knowers-of-God. In other words, we don't believe in an all-knowing deity for the same reasons we don't believe that thunder is really Thor going bowling. Because it's nonsense and there is far more evidence against religious dogma and a creator than there is evidence for it. In fact, there is NO evidence for it.

When I was a member of the Christian cult, there was a lot of talk about "knowing God" and "feeling his presence" and "answered prayers". I always wondered why, as fervently as I prayed to Jesus and as badly as I wanted to be on the side of Heaven, why did I never feel or sense those things? Why did Jesus talk to the crazy old cat lady, or the Pastor who had an affair with his daughter's best friend's Mom, or the self important and exceedingly boring old usher guy, but never to me? I was earnest, I was in need, ready to be called to battle in the old "Onward Christian Soldiers" sense.

Finally I figured it out, when I reached a certain age and began to fumblingly learn how to utilize the logical part of my brain. None of those people feel or sense those things. They want to, they try to, they convince themselves with certain self-hymnotic techniques that they do feel them, and then they go to church and Praise Jesus or Allah or David Koresh or Fred Phelps loudly in order to continue to convince themselves and those around them that they are one of God's chosen. It was the biggest scam in history, perpetuated mostly in ignorance by it's own victims; the true meaning behind my favorite fable, The Emperor's New Clothes.

The Scuba Diving Was Great, But I Didn't Get To Try The Water Boarding

So I lied about not using that joke again. Screw it, I needed a title.

Anyway I don't know if you knew this, but I spent ten days at Gitmo for work recently. :) This here is a painting of an American flag and a Cuban flag in friendship on Guantanamo Bay. I found this over by the Guantanamo Bay Windward Point lighthouse on Gitmo, a historical landmark. Boy times sure have changed.

Here is the lighthouse and what I presume are some of the boats which Cuban refugees made it to Gitmo in back in the day.

And here's the lighthouse barely seen from further down the coastline. There are big gangly cacti all over the place.

One of the guys who drives me back and forth from the airport whenever I leave home for a job was in the Navy in the 50s and was stationed at Gitmo for a little while. He told me they used to hop on a train into Havana when they had leave time. Damn. I would have loved to have hopped the fence and gone to Havana, but you know, we're not allowed to have any commercial business with Cuba any more. And there's this big fence, with landmines. Which makes the butt of this Cuban cigar I found on base quite mystifying.

Gitmo is not what I expected though. It's a small self-contained city, like most American bases I suppose, and could pass for any American suburb if you leave out the iguanas running around everywhere. The housing is very 50's suburb lookin', actually. They have a shopping center, a laundromat, a car rental, a hotel, a McDonald's, a Subway, a public library in which I overheard a conversation between the librarian and a little old lady librarian from the High School library about the dearth of quality books in the schools. They even have a Girl Scouts Camp!

They have a huge Gym Complex including a really nice weight room (embarrassing to go lift weights with a bunch of giant military men but I persevered), a football field and track, baseball diamond, batting cages, skate park, & bowling alley, they had an outdoor movie theater where they show first-run movies every night for free...

I watched 'Green Zone' and 'Hot Tub Time Machine' there. Both very interesting experiences. Hot Tub Time Machine was pretty dumb, but I found myself laughing and enjoying it quite a bit. It's hard to resist the enjoyment of a good fecal matter joke in a stadium full of raucous Navy guys. I'd forgotten what seeing a comedy in a crowded theater could be like. And Green Zone... well that night the theater was fairly quiet, but surprisingly there seemed to be quite a few people there who appreciated the message. I had seen it already of course, but I was very curious to see how people who lived on a base notorious for the controversial and legally shady detention of prisoners would take a film about the recent war built on lies. The more time I spend among the military, the more I get the sense that our government is at war with itself. There are factions and factions within factions. Watching that particular movie in that particular place probably has something to do with that sense, of course. But I'm not talking about partisan bickering or political sides. I tend to feel that the Republicans and the Democrats are actually on the same side, and everything else is just a show. I think it goes on on a deeper level, and that there are sides we don't even know about.

I just can't resist those big lizard shots. I loved watching them just lumber through the outdoor seating area at Starbuck's while people blithely ignored them. (Yes, they have a Starbuck's too.) I'd be all like, "Do you guys see that?! Huh? That's a big damn lizard, just walkin' here!" And they'd be all like, "Whatever." I was hoping that this guy would actually go in the ladies room so I could wait and get a shot of some poor woman running out and screaming. No such luck.

Gitmo also has wind power! There are four of these guys on top of the tallest hill on base, but apparently only one of them is working right now. I went and stood under the one that was working, and let me tell you I wasn't expecting to have an experience like that. There is nothing like having 100 foot tall metal fan blades of death whoooomp whoooomp whoooomping directly over your head.

But you know, there are a lot of places on Gitmo where you are not allowed to take pictures. Like this one.

I was told that I was welcome to take pictures anywhere on base unless I saw one of these signs. Hopefully, taking pictures of the sign won't get me in trouble. But they do a good job of helping the people who live and work there keep the darker side of Gitmo out of sight and out of mind with all these distractions. I couldn't even figure out where the prisons were until after I'd been there for like a week, although to be fair I suppose I wasn't going out of my way too much. But on my second Scuba dive, we went out to a beach where there was a prison up on the hill, and there weren't any signs posted there so... 

Yes, they have scuba diving there too. I got to go on a couple of dives in Guantanamo Bay. Boo-yah.

It was pretty nice diving but we didn't see too much that was very interesting. A moray eel, a stingray. Here's a Gitmo Starfish.

I also got to figure out what ever happened to the Scooby Gang. Guess they stuck their noses into one too many mysteries and got their vehicle confiscated.

Scuba dooba doo!

Anyway, forgive my bad joke. But that's about all I have from that trip. It was pretty cool to get to go and see it firsthand. Not an opportunity most people get and believe me I'm aware of how cool my job is. Hopefully I can get back there one day to get my Advanced Scuba Diver license.

I'm In Cuba, But Oddly Enough, It Feels A Bit Like Being On An American Base.

Hi! That's me there, in Cuba! There isn't much to look at here at GITMO, but here's what I have so far. This was my first photo op after landing, as I waited for the ferry to take me over to the main side of the base. 

I have an interesting tale about my flight to GITMO actually, but I want to wait until I can get the pictures off of my phone, which I won't be able to do until I get home. Well ok it's not that interesting; I flew in a really really small plane and got to sit in the co-pilot seat, therefore getting a spectacular night view of the super long bright fence around the base. No photos of that though, unfortunately. Phone cameras are limited. But here's a shot of downtown GITMO, with a McDonald's and a church and everything.

Well I told you there wasn't a whole lot that was picture-worthy around here. I will try harder in the next week or so, promise. Here's a picture of the bay though. In case you wanted to know what it looked like.

And here's a Coast Guard ship, in the Bay. Two for one! 

There are a whole bunch of Iguanas running around here. I saw two of them today alone. This guy was just hanging out in the back yard of my hotel.

And thank you telephoto lens.

Interesting fact: Here at GITMO, Iguanas have more rights than some humans. Iguanas are an endangered species, and under American law, anyone caught harming one can be charged, fined, imprisoned, yadda yadda. A base-wide speed limit of 25 mph is strictly enforced for this reason. But you know, there are those people in that prison somewhere around here who are harmed all the time, so I hear. There are no American Laws or speed limits in the prison cells, sadly. An odd dichotomy.

An Inevitable Post, Given That You Know I Had To Have My Say About Green Zone

  So Green Zone. I can't really speak to the larger events which this movie tries to condense into a cohesive plot-line, although I have read the book it was based on and even did a blog post on it a while back. But politics aside for the moment, I think that this movie nails it in the details.

My favorite scene is when Matt Damon, after some intense action out in the chaotic streets of Baghdad, walks out behind the Republican Palace which we were using as the US "Embassy" to meet his CIA contact by the swimming pool. The look on his face and on his men's faces is perfect. Utter confusion, as though they were wondering, "did we pass out and wake up back in the US somewhere?" That disconnect was spot on and is something I not only experienced in the Green Zone but witnessed on not a few members of the armed forces' faces in that very spot. Not that I was really ever "in the shit", but it was a pretty unreal place and having spent some time out in downtown Baghdad, the Green Zone (officially called The International Zone; Green Zone was "local" slang and I myself always preferred to call it the Interzone) was undeniably a real-life study in stark contrast. Employees of the DoD hanging out and sunbathing in speedos and bikinis, drinking beer and carrying on as though they were trying to really be in Key West, while a half mile away on the other side of mortar walls was a city in pain and disaster at every turn. That to me was what the film captures best all around, and specifically so in this scene.

The other thing the film did really well was the set detail. The embassy pool looked exactly right, as did the Saddam International Airport. The flyover shot of the Green Zone was perfect, from the Hands of Victory monument and the Iraqi Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to the Republican Palace itself.

I even thought I saw my old camps in that shot, though I could have mentally added them in myself. I wonder if they used real footage there or if it was a digital recreation... either way, it looked excellent.

Another detail which I felt was right on was the sort of haphazard occupation of the Palaces in the Interzone. People would just sort of make their sleeping areas wherever there was a corner, their belongings strewn on the sides of hallways, working and living areas side by side, neo-cons in suits and soldiers in uniform, contractors and DoD employees in pocketed cargo pants and shirts all rubbing shoulders. Incidentally, on certain later occasions there were also three very out-of-place Stroudsburg rejects walking those halls wearing their rock-n-roll T-shirts (I think Jeff had a Lou Reed and Scott had a White Stripes. I may have had a ripped Pixies T-shirt at the time) and feeling like we were surrounded by pod people. Especially at lunch time when we'd sit together reading the Stars and Stripes and made fun of the daily propagandist idiocy in a dining hall otherwise full of neo-cons. We really didn't fit in there.

As for the politics of the film; a lot of critics are saying that the film has a heavy liberal bias, is anti-conservative and anti-war. Well, I don't really know when being anti-war became a bad thing, but the film anyway isn't really anti-war. The Matt Damon character is a soldier, and understands why the war was necessary... until it becomes clear that the reasons for the war were lies. He's assigned to a unit that is to search for Saddam's WMDs, which of course we all know by now never existed. It is an anti-conservative film, if by anti-conservative you mean that it's against being lied to by the Neo-cons so that we'd get behind their war like so many patriotic parrot heads. So then also it has a liberal bias, if by liberal you mean a person who dislikes having been tricked into committing murderous devastation upon a city for the sake of the Bush-Cheney agenda. It makes no claims per se on what their real agenda may have been, other than a closing shot of an Iraqi oil refinery. I myself don't really believe that this war was about Iraq's oil, or at least not only about their oil. I think what they wanted was probably a bit more far reaching than that, but until we can put those crooks on a stand, we may never really know.

One of the dumbest criticisms I've seen about the film is that it's not a new message. That we all know by now, even the Republicans, that we were lied to and that there never were any weapons of mass destruction to be found, and that this film doesn't add anything to the story and is really unnecessary. That's stupid. It's a movie, and as such all it needed to accomplish was to put the viewer inside the story it's trying to tell. If you can still make a movie about WWII, you can certainly make a movie about the invasion of Iraq without having to justify yourself beyond that criteria. As for whether or not it accomplishes that agenda, it's hard for me to say. I certainly feel like it's a complete success of a film, but that's because it only had to remind me of what it was like to be there, whereas I can't say that it succeeded for people who have never been to Baghdad or the Green Zone. Maybe it was too confusing and fast. But speaking as someone who lived there for a few years, it's the best movie I've seen yet depicting that time, that place.

The book, Imperial Life in the Emerald City by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, does the job much better, factually and politically speaking. The film is supposedly based on this book, but I'd have to say only very loosely. The book spends a lot more time on the day to day life of the Green Zone's ruling class and their disastrously ignorant decision-making, whereas the movie is trying to condense everything that happened into a nice streamlined plot with a good guy and a bad guy. I feel like this really worked on a visceral level, but unfortunately left it open to the very valid criticism of "making it all up". We all know there was a great WMD lie, but it was probably not one single dickish neo-con general who hatched it up on his own, and I feel like the CIA was largely complicit in allowing the great lie to happen in the first place, even though the first major break in the ranks came from the CIA Chief Weapons Inspector David Kay when he announced that he'd seen no evidence of WMDs after being in theater for less than a year. If there were any good guys in the Green Zone attempting to expose the lie, (and the book does talk about a few of them) they were largely ignored, marginalized, and were not involved in many, if any, heroic action sequences. At least not that we're aware of. In fact, my favorite early whistle blower, Scott Ritter, was a UN Weapons Inspector in Iraq before the war who went on any news show that would have him in the run-up to the war and plead with America to listen to him because there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq! Unfortunately he dropped off the radar pretty quickly due to inappropriate sexual conduct on the internet, and that's what happens to people who dare to speak out. (Although apparently now there is some damning video of him out there, so perhaps it wasn't merely a politically motivated discrediting move after all. We'll see.)

In any case, If you're looking for a detailed description of the insanity of the Iraq Invasion and subsequent occupation, read the book. If you're looking for a good action flick with shaky-cam and more reality than a Bourne movie via a brief exposure to what it may have been like in the Green Zone in 2003, see the movie. It's very good.

My San Diego Mission Of Religious Decommission

San Diego. Eh. I don't see what all the fuss is about. I had a job there for 7 days the other week. Julie lived there for a short time after college, so I used some miles to bring her along to give me a tour of her old stomping grounds. The thing about San Diego that sucks is that it's ALL highway. Want to go a couple of blocks away for dinner? Get on the highway. Not because it's a shortcut, but because the only roads are highways. But one thing we found that was super cool in San Diego was the Geisel Library on the San Diego campus of the University of California.

Cool right? Because he once said that if he were to ever design a building that it would look like that, it is named in honor of this guy:

 

The human, not the cat. You know, that one there with the hat. We happened to be there on the good Dr.'s 106th Birthday, and they had a few of his sketches on Display.

Apparently they were also going to have their annual birthday party for him out in front of the library, with punch and pie, but they canceled that this year due to some racial incidents that have recently plagued the University. It apparently began with the Compton Cookout, a frat party where guests were supposed to come dressed as racial stereotypes, and then someone put a KKK hood over the Dr. Suess statue's head, and then someone hung a noose in the library. It's all very weird and I don't understand it. I thought that California was supposed to be a bastion of tolerance? For different types of people at least, as long as they drive a hybrid, are vegetarians, and recycle, etc etc... Well I guess I was myth-taken. Between their unusually deep economic troubles, their recent vote against equal rights for homosexuals, and now this, I'd have to say that things are going downhill over there, and that's a bad sign for the rest of us, shall we say, less plastic liberals in the country. (Not to mention what's happening to public education in Texas; not that it's a surprise as such, just that every day our once great nation gets weirder and weirder and more willfully ignorant, and it's happening at an alarming rate. Dollhouse.)

All I can say is, if you're going to cancel the birthday party of the man who wrote 'The Sneetches' and 'The Butter Battle Book', well, the terrorists win again. I mean the racists! The racists win again. Whatever. Same thing. Bad people scaring good people into reacting ineffectually. (Thanks for stealing my thunder by the way, Miss Luongo. :)

Well anyway. We took a drive up the Pacific highway, which is "one of the good ones"... highways, I mean. Obviously. We stopped on an oceanside cliff in La Jolla.

Paragliding is cool. My friend Dirk, when we lived in Germany, used to snowboard all day, then strap on his paraglider and fly down to the river where his VW Van (which he called his toybox) was waiting with his kayak, and he'd kayak down the river into town. One of his less insane friends of course usually had to help him out with the logistics of that of course.

The last adventure of ours of note, besides lunch on Laguna Beach and a corona in Tijuana, was our visit to San Juan Capistrano. There's some famous mission there. You know, a church built by missionaries back in the early days of westward expansion for the purpose of bringing God's word to those stupid heathen Native Americans.

And how best to make these savages understand that God means business?

 Why stand around and be all holier than they while making them do all the laundry, of course! And then make them build the building that honors your God through slave labor!

That will teach those stupid dumbbrain injuns to not have ever heard about Jesus. Everyone knows you can not teach an injun to be holy except by showing 'em how, with ancient European holy martial art; holy-shit-I'm-so-holy-stance!

I especially love how the present day mission museum was ashamed enough of these dioramas to shove them in a back corner that I was super lucky to find but not enough to, you know, get rid of them.

So what did I learn about the San Juan Capistrano Mission?

That priests love being in authority over children of ALL ethnicity. And are very holy fucking creepy about that fact. Isn't that right, Pope Friendly? Seriously! Look at this guy! He is the best Pope ever, because he gives the creepy shivers like no other! Hey Pope Child Molester! I have a funny religious joke for you: What do you call a pregnant virgin? A fucking liar!

Rockets Rockets Everywhere, And Not A Spot To Think

I went on a couple of jobs this month to places that were interestingly related. I was in Minot, ND a few weeks ago, giving a computer security exam on the Air Force base there to military personnel responsible for well, computer security, on the base there. Minot AFB is one of two bases in the US which apparently contain our largest stockpile of Nuclear Bombs. They proudly display an old Minuteman I Missile as you enter the base.

I didn't know that before I got there, that I was going to be aiding and abetting our Nuclear arsenal personnel, and I admit I felt a keen sense of ambivalence when I found out. (That sounds like nonsense, doesn't it? A keen sense of ambivalence?! Kind of an oxymoron; however if you've ever had that emotion you'll know what I mean.) I mean on the one hand, I will always feel the guilt of aiding and abetting our previous administration's dishonest and uber-destructive war reconstruction in Iraq. And so here I was again, in a position of compliance with the most immoral weapon yet conceived by humanity's spinal column thinkers. However I also feel that as long as nuclear weapons exist, well then by gum they oughtta be secured and if my small presence there as an exam proctor allows those with the crucial duty of keeping our warheads safe from being hacked to do their jobs better, then I suppose I feel good about it. Much as I hate nuclear weaponry and wish they'd go away, I don't want them getting lost or stolen!

Wait, what? Uh... do you guys remember that 2007 incident where some nuclear warheads went missing? Yeah, it happened at Minot. They were transporting some ICBM missiles (just the missiles, without the nuclear warheads attached) from Minot to the other big nuclear bomb site in Louisiana, so they loaded them up onto a B-52 for transport, and forgot to remove the warheads. A little bit later, someone was doing their, what, Bi-annual inventory checklist? And said "hey uh, where're those, um, y'know, nuclear warheads that are supposed to be on that shelf over there?"

Meanwhile, there were some very surprised cargo unloaders in Louisiana. "Hey uh, dude? Are we getting paid danger salary today? Do you know how to unscrew a nuclear warhead? Well, I'm sure we can figure it out."

Jesus. Here's a nice shot of some B-52s I got from the public highway.

I hope I don't get in trouble for posting that photo. I shouldn't; like I said I was on a public highway and it's public knowledge that they have bombs and B-52s there, and if they can't be bothered to hide their runway from view on the highway, then I can't see them being bothered to worry about the occasional photo showing up online.

ANYway, so my next job this month was to Huntsville, Alabama, also known as Rocket City. A different kind of missile history, home of Marshall Space Flight Center (itself the original home of NASA) and Space Camp. I had a job for a company that is involved in space and defense contracting, and that was a much better feeling. I think Space is really really cool. I don't know if you know that about me. I got to go to the Rocket museum there.

That was sweet. I did all the kid stuff; saw a 3D movie about Mars, an Imax about our moonwalk missions, and climbed around in old rockets and spacejunk. They obligingly placed some of their items in such a way that taking a wry picture was possible. Space rockets, War rockets, and a carnival ride; whee America!

"Officer! That Man Stole My Wallet!" "Don't Like It? Go Live In Cuba, Socialist!"

"The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments."
-William H. Borah

It's a lie, you know. Airport security. A shameless, bald-faced ridiculous lie. (What does it mean to say someone is a bald-faced liar? Does that phrase express a distrust of the beardless?) I travel a lot for work, as you may have noticed, and I've actually gotten to the point where I often momentarily forget what city I just arrived from when checking the baggage claim board. "Did I just come from Cleveland, or Los Angeles? Oh yeah, no, San Francisco, it was a direct flight this time."

My point only being that I'm pretty slow in the head when traveling, and it's taken me this long to catch on to the scam; I woke up thinking about it this morning. Part of my travel preparation ritual includes a few things, including wearing slip-on shoes, a plastic belt buckle, and bringing four packed bags; unfortunately I travel heavy due to all of the work items I have to bring, as well as a backpack for my camera and lenses... and my big tripod. I check two bags (don't worry, I'm a Silver Elite flier, no charge for check-ins) and carry on my camera bag and a small book bag with books to read, my mp3 player, my netbook, and sundry other items to keep myself occupied during the endless travel time. SO, my point being, I carry my camera bag on the plane with me, which has a large metal tri-pointy-ended-pod strapped to it, and the TSA security agents DON'T BAT AN EYE.

I've often wondered why that is, exactly. Especially considering that items you are not allowed to bring include, well, water. And you can bring liquids, but they have to be in 3oz bottles AND sealed up in a ziplock baggie. Why? What the hell difference does it make to ziplock them? If you are sneaking acid on a plane to dash in the face of an airline attendant, what the hell difference, security-wise, does it make to have to zip your liquids up in a baggie? A terrorist can train to hijack a plane and fly it into a building, but somehow a ziplocked baggie that he packed himself is going to give him trouble?

And then I realized; it's a smokescreen, a ziplockscreen. (I've often thought about how 90% of all security is mostly for appearance, especially after living in the IZ in Baghdad, to make you scared first and then to feel like you're being kept safe, not to actually make you safer) Anyway, in the aftermath of new and ridiculous airport "security" rules, they banned water. Water. To include all liquids, to make it look good. Then, when they realized that travelers were getting pissed because this meant they could no longer bring their toilet kits on board, especially now that they're charging all you non-elite fliers for baggage check in, they had to backtrack a little and allow toiletries with a few completely nonsensical security precautions, designed solely to save a little face and perpetuate the no water policy; I mean, you can bring 3oz of water on board, but that's not enough for a thirsty traveler. It's all about the water.

Because once I clear security, the first thing I do is head to a kiosk and buy a large bottle of water for my flight. For like $3.00 to $5.00. Because arriving for flights two hours early, layovers, and flight times can take all day, and you've got to have water. AND, airport water fountains are few and far between, and anyway the water always tastes rather rancid. And once you're on the plane, the flight attendants come by once, maybe twice if you're lucky or on a longer flight, with tiny little cups of water. Not enough. I wonder how much the rise in bottled water sales in airports has been since the implementation of, um, dangerous water rules at TSA checkpoints. I also wonder who is the biggest supplier of bottled water to airports across the country. I suspect Halliburton. But then, I suspect them for a lot of things, so take it with a grain of salt. Also, have you noticed lately how much tiny little travel bottles of liquid products cost lately? Sometimes, almost as much as the regular sized ones.

It seems unlikely, I know, to the untrained eye that TSA security is designed mostly to pick your pocket at the airport, especially when they're nominally there to protect you from terrorists. But little things like heavy pointed metal tripods Vs. bottles of water, the nectar of life, something everybody now has to BUY, make me suspicious. That, and everything in the news now is about the fight against greed in the health care industry. The more I read, the more obvious it is that corporate America is out there finding new and improved ways to pay off the US Government to legalize creative pickpocketing by targeting products which a human body can not live without. The fact that water and health care are now considered products is a God Damned tragedy, and disgusting. I honestly don't know which side Obama is really on, but in reality, it doesn't matter. Whether or not he wants to help, the cards are stacked against him, and he seems unable to break down the drug company lobbyists. Especially since, you know, he's dealing with them as though they were a legitimate part of the Government, and not tossing them out like the shills they are.

BlahBlahBlahddyShut Up + Read My Blog!BlahBlah... Did It Work? Are You Hypnotized?

This is freaking crazy. I can't believe that in the world of YouTube where anyone can record anything and slow it down, FOX was dumb enough to try and pull this 1984 crap. But it kind of shows their hand, which is nice.

Bizarre, right? Don't Deny what, exactly? Don't Deny all reality? That doesn't seem so crazy, unless they're trying to say not to deny the pleasures of watching their reality channel. The images don't make me feel better about it, that's for sure. It was fairly amusing until I saw this one:

Holy SCARY 1984, FoxMan! No You Shut up! No YOU! And what's with the teeth? I think seeing a skull in that noise is reaching a bit, but even so, there is definitely some weird shit going on there. I found this stuff over at What Is Hidden? Which is a weirdly incomplete site. What's even crazier over there is that in the forum, people are talking about how awesome one of the reality shows is! Don't they get it? They've been told to think it's awesome!

So if you're one of those crazy people who still think that the spin stops at FOX, clearly it's time to reevaluate. Not just your viewing choices, but probably your life. Because everything you think, all of your opinions and all of your beliefs may have been implanted into your brain by scary little blue men!

Now It's MY Turn To Indulge A Little, Pope Craphead!

"Repentance alone is of no help; grace cannot be bought with repentance; it cannot in any way be bought."

"If His churches and priests were like Christ Himself, there would be no need of poets."
-Hermann Hesse

So speaking of religion, here's a fascinating little fact that just came across my desk. Ever hear of indulgences, or Johann Tetzel? Well, in point of fact, Johann was a German Dominican preacher who in the year of our lordy lord lord 1517 was trying to raise money for the construction of St. Peter's Basilica; Yes that's correct, an integral part of that huge, garish, ostentatious monument to man's power and greed known as the Vatican.

 

In order to fund this little project, Johann travelled around to towns and villages. Rather than to say to them, "Hey poor people, we're trying to build this monstrous church in Rome that will display Catholic power to the world, how about giving us your milk money to, you know, help a Friar out?", he instead went around singing a little ditty that is now known (by me, anyway) as the Indulgence Rag. It goes: "As soon as a coin in the coffer rings / the soul from purgatory springs." Yes, in point of fact, he created one of Satan's moste potente minde controlle gimmicks, the very first Advertisement Jingle.

Basically the premise is that, if you've been less than good but not quite bad enough to go to hell, you can buy your way out of Purgatory, because the Pope had the authority to tell God who deserves to go to Heaven, and God had to listen. And the Pope would perform this small task for even the poorest meanest villiager out of the kindness of his cold black heart, and for a small, meaningless fee, of course. And not to forget, he would not have even offered the poor people this kindly ease of mind had he not needed cash to build his big crappity church. So there's Papal altruism for you.

I feel that there is something extremely poetic about the world's first ad jingle being composed and utilized by a Catholic priest trying to scam poor people into giving him their last copper in order to build the most gaudy, useless building in the world. On the one side, it's poetic because essentially, advertising in that respect hasn't changed; advertisers would love for people to still believe that buying stuff will save your soul, and in a sense they've continued to create this sense in people. The feeling that buying those shoes or my new Canon Xsi will make us happy, complete in some way. It's a gaping hole in every shoppers chest that can never be filled, and the only thing I'm not entirely sure of is how exactly it got there. My bet is that the Church created this need in people by selling them indulgences, and has continued to exploit it ever since, but even if it's always been there, an integral part of Man's nature, there is no denying that the Church first learned of it and exploited it through Johann Tetzel.

On the other side it's also poetic, because it helps to bathe the Pope and the Catholic Church in it's own ugly light. The questions that weren't thought about in 1517 by dirty uneducated villagers can be easily asked now. So, why does God, whose Son supposedly upended all of the money changer's tables in front of the Temple, give a rat's ass about 2 copper bits when it comes to men's souls? Of course he doesn't. This episode in the Church's history clearly shows what a corrupt, scamming pile of God Turd the Catholic Church really is. They thought they could get away with this because people were stupid and uneducated, but history didn't forget, and now we may still be stupid, but at least we're educated enough to recognize a hustle when we see one. This is what organized religion is really all about; Getting butts in seats by using the fear of eternal hell or purgatory and offering salvation through the application of a little magical formula, and don't forget to tithe on the way out, y'all.

Anyway, the wikipedia page on Johann Tetzel is here, and the article which turned me on to this very illuminating tidbit is here. I'm going to leave this rant with another picture I took during my visit to the Vatican a few years back. It's a shot of the escalator leading up to the Vatican Museum entrance, and it sure looks a lot like many Christain fantasist's idea of the stairway to heaven to me... wonder if that's what the Catholic church was going for? A little not-so-subliminal advertising? What do you think?

 

 

Soulless Meat Products Of War

I ran across this article on this guy because of email alerts I get from Google on any news out there relating to my imprisoned boss from Iraq. The article barely mentions my old boss, but this guy, Colonel Frank Wismer III, is a real piece of work. He's an Episcopalian Army Chaplain; you know, a believer in the Bible and Jesus and peace and love, and the article says this:

"Wismer, whose awards include the Bronze Star Medal and the Combat Action Badge, passes on to readers many lessons he learned while in Iraq. Here's one: "Going to war is an incredibly fantastic experience if one lives through it…One year in Iraq revealed things about community that the church was not able to reveal to me in 50-some years. I say that not as a criticism of the church, but to highlight the incredible bond that is established by individuals who survive the horrors of war."

Going to war is an incredibly fantastic experience? Because of the bond soldiers get while protecting each other and killing the other guy? I think he's missed the point of his religion. I mean, I get the bond thing, I really do. I've been in several situations which can never be understood by anyone who wasn't there with me, and this certainly creates a bond, so I can maybe imagine what being in the life or death struggles of combat can do for friendships, though I'm not sure what that has to do with religion. But this is a supposed man of God, talking about how great war is without any sense of irony. I'm not sure that "Onward Christian Soldiers" was meant as a literal call to literal bloody war, dude. My understanding, from having grown up in the church, was that we were being called to fight a purely spiritual war to convert human souls to God, and I'm not sure how you can justify turning people into soulless meat product in even a just war, let alone the atrocious moral and criminal mess that has been Bush's campaign in Iraq, as a so-called man of God.

"The big picture, he suggests, are the strategic objectives that led to the invasion of Iraq -- to fight the war on terror outside of America's borders, to plant democracy in a part of the world that spawns terror; to isolate neighboring Syria, influence a democratic movement in Iran and give notice Saudi Arabia that it cannot tolerate a strict, conservative brand of the Muslim faith practiced there and harbor Islamic militants."

He's agreeing with the sentiments in this paragraph, by the way, calling the lies and misinformation that led to our illegal and immoral war in Iraq "strategic objectives." And he feels that his God is okay with fighting the war on terror, America's war on terror, outside of America's borders. This, to me, is a most horrific sentiment. That a supposed Christian man thinks it is okay to take our battles and fight them in someone else's home. We've taken our war on terrorism, which now we all know had absolutely nothing to do with Saddam Hussein, Iraq or terrorism, and destroyed those innocent people's lives and homes, and he thinks this is what we as God's army had a right to do.

I don't know. I've never understood how any church can justify Army Chaplains who are also war mongers for the church. In my mind, if an Army Chaplain were to be living up to his beliefs, he should only be there to encourage moral behavior among the troops, (Hey guys, when you're out there today, please don't rape and kill any Iraqi women and their families. They're God's children too, you know) and to do everything in their power to help end conflicts, not promote them.

If you really want an extreme lefty belief here, I'm pretty sure that, were Jesus everything the Bible says he was, he'd vastly disapprove of the very concept of Army Chaplains. Men of God have no business in war, except perhaps to be there independently, (not on the military payroll) and being compassionate to all people involved while doing whatever possible to end it. However, he's actually against withdrawing our presence in Iraq, mostly because of how he thinks it would make us look.

"To pullout our troops out of Iraq now would be a colossal mistake and send that country to chaos," he says. "Strategically that would not be helpful. We would be seen as a people only in something for a short time, not for the long haul."

"I would like to see the Iranian government be able to manage, the military be able to protect the country from without and the police to protect it from within. Then there can be phased withdrawals, but that needs to be done over time."

Iranian Government? I hope that was just a misprint and not a telling slip of the tongue, dude.

Barock The Votebama!

Nothin'. I got nothin'. I just wanted to put my little play on words out there. You know, for happy election day. Which, by the way, is today if you're voting for Obama, and next Tuesday if you're voting for McCain. Yeah, it's a new rule. Like early voting and superdelegates. It's a new rule that's going to be used by the losing side to accuse the winning side of vote fraud. If Obama wins, you watch; FOX News will be making innuendos, (In your endos) if not outright accusations of electoral fraud related to early voting or perhaps, ironically, some sort of shady business at the polls in Ohio & Florida. That would be awesome. And if McCain wins, FOX News will be all like what? That was fair.

On the other hand, if McCain wins, that's exactly what me and Oliver Stone will be saying. Or perhaps not... I did go see W. last week, and it's disappointingly short of conspiracy theories. He didn't even try to cover the shady business in Ohio or Florida back in 2000, Ted Kennedy's accusations of fraud in 2004, or that day with those flying tin can thingies and the buildings that fell down and went boom. Maybe he's saving those subjects once the not-as-crazy-as-they-once-seemed conspiracy theorists get a chance to self-publish their investigative material.

But what was great about W. was the Rorschach Test that is Dubya. On the surface of the movie, Dubya came across as a pretty normal guy who constantly has more food in his mouth than a person normally should. Interesting depiction, by the way. Even while he was making the worst Presidential decisions imaginable, he seems pretty well meaning, even affable, if misguided perhaps. But hardly the demon he seems like from a distance. But if you look closer, after the credits roll and you've thought about it a bit, it's a more damning portrait than you might at first glance think.

I'm not going to say much about it though, because like I said, it's a Rorschach Test and the important thing is what you take away from it, if you ever see it, not what I think. I'm sure you can guess what my opinion of the man is. The one thing I do want to say though, is that even though it's a cliché, the road to hell is, in fact, paved with good intentions; Even Hitler believed he was doing what was right, all the while using his feelings and his guts as his guides, ignoring the evidence that was all around him that what he believed so strongly was only what he wanted to believe.

Of course, the movie is still merely an interpretation of the events. My gut tells me we shouldn't be so kind to ickle Georgie in the history books. I strongly believe, in the absence of any real evidence available to me, that he purposefully misled the nation and probably has nonconsensual sex with goats while feeding on aborted baby fetuses. But that's just an opinion, you know, don't take my word for it.

I guess the real point of this post is how different types of people interpret things, and how this election seems to have polarized people into two major groups of different interpretive capabilities. Is this an election which has polarized the Good from the Evil? The intelligent from the deeply stupid? The authoritative from the nonauthoritative? The butter side up from the butter side down? None of the above or all of the above? Humanity confuses me, and while I strongly believe that Obama is the right choice and that the McCain camp is only preying on one type of humanity's inability to deal with their inner conflict of Mind Vs. Fear, that's just my interpretation. I've been wrong before. Besides, it's also entirely possible that by even participating in this election, I have also succumbed to the fear by way of the terror that Palin inspires in me. I mean come on, do I really believe that she's Satan's goat-whore bride? That's just silly.

The brave thing to do might really be to sit it out, since what my actual leftist beliefs tell me is happening is that Obama and McCain are the left and right hands of the Military-industrial complex which murdered JFK, RFK, & MLK. After beating us with the stick in their right hand for eight years, they might let us rest up with a nice carrot from their left hand for a bit.

I know, I know, it's all a bit radical. But I'm feeling quite philosophical this morning, this election day. All my life I've been told that voting is the most sacred duty of every American, and to be fair I've never really believed that so my opinions are already coming out of left field. But I am voting today, for Obama, and it's not because I think Obama is going to save us, and it's mostly not because I think McCain and Palin are going to be another 4 to 8 years of happy-go-lucky skipping to Gomorrah, but because I'm simply tired of being beaten with a stick. Time for some Beta Carotene in my diet.

McCain Is A Liar Er Misspeaker!

I know, I know. You're sick of my political ranting already. But after seeing this YouTube video of a short clip of John McCain mentioning JFK and Goldwater on his way to criticizing Obama for not meeting with him anyplace anytime as previously agreed, I couldn't help myself. Partway through the video, McCain refers back to the Kennedy assassination as "The intervention er the tragedy in Dallas". Now.

As the word 'intervention' is escaping his lips, his hand is coming up to his mouth, his eyes widen, and then his hand takes a miss on his mouth and rubs his nose as he says "er tragedy". This gesture, the hand to mouth/nose and wide eyes, is a classic tell among those who read body language as a sign of someone who is lying. More specifically, to break it down, what happens with this gesture is that something has escaped your lips which you didn't mean to say, were trying to keep hidden. The hand coming up to the mouth is the involuntary and unconscious act of trying to keep your mouth closed; trying to force the words back in your mouth, and the wide eyes are the realization that you messed up. The quick switch from a mouth cover to a nose rub is the more conscious grown-up gesture of realizing that if you clap your hand over your mouth, it's a dead giveaway that you're lying, and so it turns into the nose rub in order to try and obscure the fact that you were just trying to clamp your mouth shut.

It's classic. Classic. There's no getting around it. That gesture means what it means. Many times when people are lying, we've trained ourselves not to give ourselves away by not being all shifty-eyed, not stuttering, not being all nervy with your hands, trying not to sweat. So that tell doesn't often happen. But when you've said something without thinking about it, without having thought in the seconds beforehand that you needed to not say what you're really thinking, that involuntary tell can happen before you've realized you've done it. When John McCain thinks of the Kennedy assassination, he considers it to be an intervention. Period. I have no doubt in my mind.

Now, is it possible he was just scratching his nose? Yes, of course. People get itchy noses all the time while they're speaking. But taken in combination with such an egregious misstatement... well, someone who studies body language would say that the odds are thin. Very thin. But I'll go further away from certainty and mention how McCain is prone to such unfortunate misstatements though. And his eyes are often all wide, blinky and twitchy anyway. Everybody slips up, right? But McCain's slips are painful. He's caught flack for saying he desires to be a dictator, calling citizens "prisoners," and saying how he wants the US to be energy independent so we won't have to go to war for oil anymore. [John, supporters of the war aren't calling it that.] So you know, he's already prone to saying the wrong thing. We shouldn't judge him too harshly since he does it often. The more a person makes the same mistake, the less it means anything, right? Right guys?

Does he personally know something about the Kennedy assassination? Who knows, but probably not. Paranoid as I am about McCain now, even I'm not prepared to go that far. McCain wasn't really anybody back then; he was busy being a young naval aviator, flying ground-attack aircraft from aircraft carriers at the time. Regardless, someone who likely thinks of one of the most tragic moments in American history, our loss of innocence, as an intervention, is to be handled with care. The fact of the matter is, I think a lot of people fear that the reason Kennedy was killed was because he was being made an example of by some powerful people who did not like his liberal policies, and a Republican Presidential hopeful putting a word to that fear over 45 years later is chilling.

EDIT: Just had to add in the "My fellow Prisoners" YouTube that Gary linked me to (the silence at the end of the video when he pauses for applause, seemingly unaware of his gaffe, is deafening) and then I saw the Colin Powell interview where he endorses Obama and I had to post that too. Clear, rational thinking turns me on, what can I say?

The Fact Of These People's Existence Makes Me Want To Be A Cutter

So okay, GoDrex posted this YouTube, and then Julie did, and I commented on it, and now I have to post the video, because I can't stop thinking about it and it inspires a constant state of weird otherworldly incredulity in me, because I think it accurately represents the thought processes of most people who actually think another Republican administration is a good idea, and because this was a convention in Bethlehem, PA, near where we live, and it's embarrassing and I can't wrap my head around the fact of these people's existence.

I'm re-posting my commentary from Julie's page on it here and expanding on it, because I need to get it off my brain before it freezes in this expression forever.

Does that first guy know that 25 out of the 43 American Presidents were lawyers? And that it's actually sort of an advantage to understand law if you're going to be in a political field? Abraham Lincoln was a lawyer. John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Monroe and John Quincy Adams. Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, John Tyler, James Polk and Millard Fillmore. Rutherford Hayes, James Garfield, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison and William McKinley. William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and William Clinton. (I know that's only 23, I can't find the other 2.)

European socialist is a buzzword with these people. (Instead of buzzwords, I’m going to start calling them FOXwords) Like Terrorist. Why is European Socialism bad, exactly? Because of all the free health care? I particularly find the “I think you’re stupid” guy quite illuminating.

Why am I stupid?
“… uh… because… that guy gets elected, he hangs around with terrorists.”

Who’re the terrorists?
“Obama”

So… Obama hangs out with himself?
No just kidding, I get it. I know what he means, it’s just that he doesn’t know how to speak properly, or form a logical or coherent thought. What he means is, Obama is a terrorist because some guy he sort of knows did some crazy shit when Obama was 8. And that's a more accurate understanding of the situation than even FOX news was able to tell him to think.

As cogent and insightful a point as this guy makes, I have to wonder, with all of the black men in prison, and all of the “suspected terrorists” at Guantanamo Bay, is it very likely that had any politician or policeman or spook at any time throughout Obama’s life even had the tiniest shred of real proof that Obama might have actual terror affiliations, isn’t it likely that he would never ever ever ever nerver never nev been allowed anywhere near any sort of elected office in the USA ever?

Or maybe FOX news and every dumb piece of crap that believes this Rhepublican Rhetoric has proof in a shoebox under their beds that Obama really is a terrorist that the guys over at the CIA doing his background check somehow missed.

“Get a Job!”

What does that even mean?! How do you know they don’t have jobs? Because they’re exercising their political right to protest? If you’re basing the fact that someone is at a political rally because they don’t have a job, then what are you doing there? Maybe you should get a job yourself? But oh wait, you can’t because Bush screwed up the economy so badly that the jobless rate is skyrocketing and competition for work is heavier, and you’re about to attend a rally for the guy who wants to continue the same policies.

“Go to Russia!”

Go to Russia? Because… people aren’t allowed to politically dissent in Russia (which isn’t exactly true anymore, but we’ll let that one slide because you obviously haven’t thought out your statement anyway) and you think that people who dare to dissent with your Republican knee-jerk non-views deserve to get shipped off to Siberia… which would kind of make you more like a Communist than an Obama supporter/McCain protester could ever dream to be? And as far as the whole "Commie/Faggott!" slur goes, I think we all know which political party has had more of those types outed from it. Plus, Joe McCarthy was a Republican Commie hunter, and I think it's probably widely agreed now that he was the biggest Commie of them all. I mean sure, not technically, but his tactics certainly were not American nor were they Democratic.

I think that by telling someone who disagrees with you at an American political rally to go to Russia, you’ve officially chased your own tail and deserve to be impounded for being dumb as a dog and not on a leash.

And ACORN? How the FRICK is ACORN, a community-based organization that advocates for low- and moderate-income families by working on neighborhood safety, health care and other social issues, responsible for our current economic crisis? Hey check out this picture and story of McCain with... that's right. ACORN.

And for God's sake people! Obama is NOT a Muslim, (not that being a Muslim is automatically terror-worthy) nor is he a terrorist, or affiliated with terrorists! Again, CIA background checks! They're pretty thorough. They'd have caught it by now, and Obama would be in Guantanamo. Palin, on the other hand, had the hands of a Witch hunter laid on her. Now, Olbermann is a tad histrionic, but if you're not one of those finger-in-your-ears Republicans, singing "God Bless America" to block out opposing viewpoints and spouting party FOXwords as substitutes for logical argument using fact and proof, this is something you need to watch. I mean, those types need to watch and understand it more than anybody, but they've got their fingers in their ears, you see.

 And I could go on and on, but the fact of the matter is, people like those in the YouTube video believe what they believe because they want FOX news to tell them what to think and say so that they don't have to hurt their little brains trying too hard to think about it themselves. No amount of logical argument or fact checking or proof is going to sway them. God, I hope America is smarter than I give it credit for this election day.

Ghouls & Goblins & Palin Oh My! It's Going To Be The Scariest Halloween Yet!

I haven't been around much lately, I know. My question is, have any of us? For myself, I've been consumed with fear and paranoia over the state of the economy. My 401k has less money in it now than what was put into it out of my original paychecks. My stocks... well, as I've said before; when in 2050 they are teaching schoolchildren in the most powerful Nation in the world (my prediction: Eurasia) about the great world stock market crash of '08, my picture will be in the book as the poster child for those who bought in at exactly the worst moment in history. Maybe. I'm sticking it out in case my fears are incorrect.

Also, I've been consumed with the fear that no matter how many nonsensical utterings of bullshit come out of Sarah Palin's mouth, we still might be forced to look at her pasty vapid psycho doll eyed face for the next four years. If that happens, it'll be the final nail in the coffin of our country. She's deeply stupid (yet thinks she's smarter than everyone and that no one can see through to her motivations) and masks it poorly with down-home stylings meant to fool the common man into thinking she's like one of them. She's playing on the irrational blue collar disdain of elitists, which is scary because apparently the present down-home version of an elitist is someone with an education who speaks with knowledge and authority on a given subject. Apparently, the people with whom Palin is trying to connect would rather the officials in charge of their government not understand how to answer basic questions and mask their ignorance with folksy exclamations which make no sense. I CAN NOT believe that people are being taken in by her and McCain, especially after realizing finally that they've been taken in by Bush for the last 8 years.

It's embarrassing to have these people on the world stage representing us, and if you're voting for Palin (to hell with McCain; he's irrelevant and will keel over soon) shame on you, dupe. Well, the polls do currently favor Obama of course, but not by a wide enough margin to quell my disbelief.

Another thing I'm afraid of lately is this Creation Museum in Kentucky. It's a museum. Dedicated to Creationism. And people are visiting it in droves. Creationism is the belief that the world was created by God around this time of the year on a Monday morning in 4004 BC. Dinosaur bones and all. Now, the belief in God, the Bible, and its literal truth, is a Faith. Faith, not Science. The line between the two concepts is under attack. Science is the search for truth, based on verifiable fact. Faith is the belief in something for which you have no proof. I have no problem with people of Faith going to Church and learning about what they believe in. I just wish they'd stop trying to force their beliefs into the schoolroom. It's dangerous and useless. Education in America is already severely limited these days. I met a Gas Station attendant in Germany who studied math for fun and spoke four languages. Most European students can talk intelligently and at great length about world politics, and know where Eritrea is on a map. There are people like that in the States, to be sure, but they get made fun of and called geeks. Something that modern day religious Americans seem to forget is that part of the reason why America is such a great place to live is that we once valued a secular education, and our prosperity comes from the application of our knowledge AND hard work. And on Sundays and at mealtimes, God was valued and thanked in many homes, sure, but at the end of the work day, God helps those who help themselves. Deceiving ourselves into thinking that faith needs to compete with science is not going to help anybody, because it's false. When it comes to science, religion tends to breed rather a hostile attitude of indifference because what difference does science make when Jesus is coming back to turn the Earth into blood soup and all the people who are looking forward to this disaster get to skip it and go to Heaven for candy and unicorns? They tend to forget that, even according to the Bible, we are Stewards of the Earth, and as such will be held responsible for it one day, one way or another.

Granted, science has caused a lot of problems on this Earth. Next to all the good things like medicine and movie theaters. But at this point, Science is also the only tool we have to save ourselves, and subverting it with Bible stories is NOT the way to go.

So now I come to the thing I'm actually afraid of this morning, the real reason behind this post. I get up and begin my routine as usual; perform the daily miracle of turning tap water into coffee. Eat breakfast. Drink some pre-miracled water, gulp down my daily plethora of vitamins with a big glass of more tap water, brush my teeth with tap water from the bathroom sink. I go sit down at my computer for my daily stock torture, notice I have a message on my phone. It's my landlord, Frank, telling me they put out a warning last night not to drink the tap water, not even after boiling it, and that it might not be safe to even bathe in until further notice; I listen to this as I'm taking another long sip of coffee. SO, I call Frank back to see if I need to go to the hospital, and he says he doesn't know; he's on his way up to the borough office to find out what's going on. Meanwhile, I wait here, typing out my ranty fears in this post, wondering how sick I can expect to be at any moment. I continue drinking my coffee because, what the hell, what's done is done.

I finally get a call back from Frank. Apparently, someone who lives next to the town Water Tower saw three guys hanging around the tower. Climbing it and other shady behavior. Neighbors called it in, water's being checked to see if terrorists poisoned it. I live in a very small town; that water tower probably supplies about 5 or 6 hundred people.

I make more coffee and drink a big fat glass of tap water. Laugh and shake my head. More disbelief, more wonderment at how afraid people are, and how much America is being ruled by their fears. I laugh as my stocks tumble. Screw it. It's only money. President Palin? Ha! Good joke! She'll only hasten the downfall of this abominable government we're stuck with! The terrorists have already won anyway. They've shown us how weak and vulnerable we've become, all on our own. Thank God I got to see Stereolab at the Fillmore in NYC before I died. Miss Luongo and I went up to see them last week with my friends Jeff and Steph. Pure aural pleasure.

Mount Rainier Is Often Much Rainier. And Don't Tell Me That Rainier Isn't A Word.

I spent a few more days in Seattle this past week. Sorry Jordan and Alison, for not calling this time around... I was stuck on Bainbridge Island for the whole two days I was there; no real free time this round. I did get to spend a morning in the town of Poulsbo... very proud of their supposed Viking heritage there. Cute town though. Bought some tea and used books. That's the thing about America... traveling and history here often don't really stand up very well next to other parts of the world. I mean sure, America has some exciting history, but it's rather few and far between. For instance in almost any small po-dink European town you go to, something cool happened there. Mozart was born there, or Franz Ferdinand was shot there, or a King was dethroned there, or the world's most famous physicist studied there, or dangerous idealistic crusades were crushed there, or fire was discovered there... well you know. But in the States... well okay, there is some cool stuff. We have loads of cool landscapes. The Devil's Tower, The Grand Canyon, Niagra Falls. There are some wicked cool landscapes in Europe, yet we've got them beat overall in that department. However, comparatively our sense of history is definitely a bit lacking; Whenever I'm in Paris, I visit the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. When I'm in Munich I visit the Glockenspiel and the Hofbrauhaus. When I'm in Venice, I hang out in San Marco Piazza or visit Murano, the glass blower's island. And whenever I'm in Seattle, I visit the very first Starbucks shop.

And you know, I'm not the only one. Both times I've been there, that little place was packed with people taking photos and oohing and ahhing. It would be really sad except that I'm one of those people. I even picked up three bags of the exclusive Pike Place special reserve blend, a blend only sold at the Pike Place original location. Wait, maybe it's still pretty sad. Heeey guys, look over here, it's another shot of Mount Rainier!

Yes, well. See? Landscapes. That's what we have in America. We may not have a political, economic, or health care system that anyone anywhere in the universe respects right now, and not much history to speak of, but we've got landscapes.

Speaking of our poor economy, today was a weird day. In a way I'm happy that the bailout package did not go through. It's not right that the crooks on Wall Street should be allowed to get away with all their dirty dealings, and then have the taxpayers give them 750 billion bucks when they hit a rough patch. But, you know, the fact that the bailout didn't happen is bad bad bad for our economy, it's true. We are approaching the Great Depression II, and I think that if that happens, we are all going to find out first hand why your Grandparents and Great-Grandparents were such bitter, cautious people when it came to money. (Not my Grandparents though. They're great. I'm talking about your Grandparents.) I myself have lost a ton of money in the market. A TON. But I kind of had a bad feeling today so I cashed most of my stocks out this morning before the really big crash hit. Should've done that weeks ago. I guess what I'm trying to say is, now is a good time to listen to your tight-fisted elder relatives. Because really, I feel that the only hope we have of avoiding breadlines and 100 dollar cans of peaches is that this is all some sort of master plan to initiate the New World Order. Either way, you know, bad bad bad. Of course this could be the bottom, as bad as it gets. Maybe they're really trying to fix things after they, you know, screwed it up so abominably. Maybe they'll come up with a bailout, and it will fix things. But they're either utterly incompetent or evil, and neither scenario bodes well for us. Aw hell, when you get depressed and think that the people on the following YouTube might possibly represent the subconscious of America, you realize that we're all doomed anyway, and maybe we deserve to be.

Anyway, sorry. I digress. Here's a nice photo taken of some photo takers with a fishmonger on Pike Place. I added some other Mt. Rainier and Pike Place photos from this trip over at the smugmug gallery.

Happy September 11th Day!

Be good kids, or Santa Cheney won't leave presents in your Iraqi Desert Storm boots! ... Ok I realize that many people won't find that to be funny, but I sure did. It was an Onion blurb last week about how Cheney was gleefully running out to do his last-minute September 11th Day shopping for family and friends. It may be insensitive to joke, but it's how I choose to remember this particular anniversary; the day when the Administration snoozed at the helm and helped to usher in a new era of death, destruction, economic downfall, and just plain evil. Because you know, if you can't laugh at that kind of stuff, what can you laugh at? I'd like to laugh with joy when the world goes back to normal and stops hating me because I'm an American, but pigs will fly first. Oops, shoot, sorry Sarah Palin, that was insensitive of me. I forgot for a second there that political commentary on any old subject can not in any way use any sayings that reference pigs, no matter how old the saying or how far off topic, because when you think of pigs you of course immediately think of Sarah Palin, and it's insensitive to say that out loud even if we're all thinking it.

Doctor, Will You Tell These Fools? I'm Not Crazy. Make Them Listen To Me Before It's Too Late!

Ambulance Driver: We had to dig him out from under the most peculiar things I ever saw.

Dr. Hill: What things?

Ambulance Driver: Well, I don't know what they are, I never saw them before. They looked like great big seed pods.

Dr. Hill: Where was the truck coming from?

Ambulance Driver: [King George, VA].

Dr. Hill: Get on your radios and sound an all points alarm. Block all highways, stop all traffic, and call every law enforcement agency in the state. [on phone] Operator, get me the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Yes, it's an emergency!

             -Invasion of the Body Snatchers

So I just got back from an overnight job down in Virginia. It was a job from hell too... definitely payback for all those more exotic locales where I usually get to play in for a week or two. I left on Thursday morning at around 9, drove for five hours and then went right to work when I got there. It turned out to be one of those times where Murphy's Law was pumping iron and needed the good steroids. So what should have been two, maybe three hours worth of work setting up the next day's exam turned into ten. I didn't get to my hotel room until 12 pm, and I still had my administrative duties to attend, so I didn't get to bed until around 3 am. I of course had to wake up three and a half hours later to go back in to work to administer the exam. I got done with that, packed up all the equipment and got on the road by 2:00pm, hitting Philadelphia rush hour on the turnpike right around 5pm. Meanwhile, it was 90 degrees outside and my car's A/C was broke.

Despite all of this travail, I have made it home to report that I don't believe that Virginia really exists. I don't mean that there is not a US State that goes by the name of Virginia; What I mean is that it's a made up place. Like that playground in the first X-Files movie; the one that the secret shadowy people put up really fast in order to cover their tracks and make the site of their latest machinations look like it was an ordinary place. I've been down there a couple of times now, and that's always my impression of it. As you first enter Virginia via route 301, you immediately pass a Naval Warfare base. Everything is covered by trees, even scrapyards and auto places. In fact, all you really see are signs for scrap yards and auto places, and dirt roads leading to these supposed places of business

And the people... I almost didn't notice it at first, as I'm somewhat dismissive of the general human populace, but especially the American human populace. However I had to deal with some of the locals, and they had this peculiar trait of being curious about people from other places, as though there were any difference between a Virginian and a Pennsylvanian general populatory. (I think I just made that word up, by the way. It's supposed to connotate a member of the general populace, leaving out any indicator of an individual nature) But when some of the people found out I wasn't from the area, they'd get all questiony, rather like drunk college girls do to young men with British or Italian accents. It was strange and unsettling and brought home to me the fact that Americans in general don't get out enough. Also, they all work for the Government in one capacity or another down there. My job, in fact, was at a government contractor's site; one of those civilian weapon systems designer companies. They all have Secret or Top Secret clearance, and they tend to walk around with shrewd looks in their eyes, whether or not any of them have any call to look that way. People who think they're shrewd tend to don that glance, (like that stupid woman in that commercial who suggests going to Chili's for lunch as though it were an idea on par with the Grand Unified Field Theory) and people who are tend to hide it. Also, a large percentage of them are overweight in that way that only "poor" Americans can pull off. On the whole, it's a very unsettling package.

So due to all of this, my gut feeling is that Virginia is a place where the government hides it's pod people, poorly disguised as typical Americans, and that if there are any Virginians who are not pod people they just don't notice it because they're used to it and are in fact becoming assimilated. I see this as the future for the rest of America. I mean, obviously it's a national trend that's well under way, but I think it's something that as a social construct which covers an entire area, it's actually already complete down there. Freaky.

I Haven't Done This In A While, But I Really Enjoyed This Special Comment

PART ONE

PART TWO

I Bring You The TEN [CRASH!] Um, FIFTEEN Commandments!

"There is in every village a torch and an extinguisher: the schoolteacher and the priest."
-Victor Hugo

The Athiest’s Commandments from ‘The God Delusion’ by Richard Dawkins. The first ten are from a website he found while researching his book, then XI through XIV are his own additions, and XV is mine, as well as the comments in brackets.

 I. Do not do to others what you would not want them to do to you.

 II. In all things, strive to cause no harm.

III. Treat your fellow human beings, your fellow living things, and the world in general with love, honesty, faithfulness and respect.

 IV. Do not overlook evil or shrink from administering justice, but always be ready to forgive wrongdoing freely admitted and honestly regretted.

 V. Live life with a sense of joy and wonder.

 VI. Always seek to be learning something new.

 VII. Test all things; always check your ideas against the facts, and be ready to discard even a cherished belief if it does not conform to them.

 VIII. Never seek to censor or cut yourself off from dissent; always respect the right of others to disagree with you. [But don’t let them get away with faulty reasoning without a fight. Besides, maybe they’ll prove you wrong and that’s good too.]

 IX. Form independent opinions on the basis of your own reason and experience; do not allow yourself to be led blindly by others.

 X. Question everything.

 XI. Enjoy your own sex life (so long as it damages nobody else) and leave others to enjoy theirs in private whatever their inclinations, which are none of your business.

 XII. Do not discriminate or oppress on the on the basis of sex, race or (as far as possible) species.

 XIII. Do not indoctrinate your children. Teach them how to think for themselves, how to evaluate evidence, and how to disagree with you.

 XIV. Value the future on a timescale longer than your own.

 XV.  Patriotism is a lie. Religion is a lie. God is an unknown. [Patriotism and Religion are not even compatible, and yet most Patriotic Americans are Religious too. Here, I’ll prove it:

 a) Patriotism = My country is #1, above and beyond all others, right or wrong.

  b) My Country is run by old rich cowards who want our young idealistic men to kill for their comforts

c) Religion says thou shall not kill. [even if that commandment is the only part of the Old Testament which actually says that, because otherwise God sanctioned quite a lot of killin’ and rapin’ in those days.]

  d) Therefore, Patriotism & Religion can not go hand in hand. Yet somehow, when combined in the mind of deeply uncritical people, they do.

I’m not saying I'm an atheist. But I am saying that I share a lot more in common with an atheist than with religious thinkers these days. And here's the reason. One time in Church, I remember my pastor doing that whole thing where he says that a lot of people out there in the world will try to tell good Christians that the Bible is full of lies and contradictions. His response to the congregation? "Well I'm here to tell you that the Bible is NOT full of lies!" Brilliant, carry on, Pastor. What? That's all you got? Huh. Anyway I think I related this story in somewhat more detail once before, here.

But the realization that I eventually came to is that belief in God is fundamentally, in the mind of religion at any rate, an insidious and lazy way of avoiding the issue of Life, The Universe, and Everything. What I mean is, one thing that many religious types use to try to convince people that evolution is bunk is the idea that the world is too complicated, too amazing, too wonderful to have all just happened by random chance, it must have been created. (Here's a YouTube I will NEVER get tired of, which is a prime example of that sort of reasoning. If, of all horrors, you find the banana argument compelling, please watch this one also. Thanks again, GoDrex! )

First off, anyone who has taken the time to attempt to understand evolution would never say that. Evolution is anything but random, which is part of its beauty and power. Secondly, all they've done by this argument is show a lack of logical thought. SO, you're saying that the Universe is too complicated and "well designed" to have just happened? So, there must be a Creator. Well then, logically, any possible Creator has to be larger and more well designed than the object of his creation. A hammer and anvil do not forge a blacksmith, for instance. Therefore essentially all that this argument has done is to push the question back a step and in reality, magnify it. Rather than believe in the apparent existence of a complicated and evolved Universe (based on verifiable fact), you'd rather believe in the apparent existence of an even larger and more complicated, magical Creator.

I'm not saying that definitively there's no God, which is why I'm not an atheist. (Although according to Dawkins' scale of atheism, I am a 5th or 6th degree atheist, with a 7th degree atheist believing absolutely %100 in the non-existence of God. I will always leave room for the possibility, if not the probability.) I'm just pointing out the weakness of logic in the Religious mind. And I AM saying that IF there's a God, he's not the God of that great work of fiction, the Bible. I think that IF there is a Creator, the only thing that he really gave us are our hearts and our minds, which are very effective tools when reason and logic are applied, and I think he'd be very disappointed in Religion.

For anybody who has read 'The God Delusion', it's apparent that I've used much of Dawkins' material here. In my own idiosyncratic way, of course. But I feel that it's a book which has provided me with a clear way of thinking about ideas which I've held for a while.

Basically what it all boils down to for me is this: Religious apologists have NEVER been able to prove the existence of God or the veracity of the Bible through either Science, logic, or reason. Which makes sense according to the Fundamental Religious version of "logic" anyway; it's all about faith, regardless of the facts. (Dinosaur bones were purposefully planted there to test our faith.) So why do they keep trying? Why do they want Creationism, sorry, Intelligent Design, taught in science classes? Science is about verifiable fact, religion is about faith. You don't see scientists banging on the doors of churches, trying to force Sunday school teachers to teach evolution. Although, the inevitable backlash has already begun with the likes of Dawkins. He's tired of Religion's interference in the world of reality, hence the book. It's time for the Religious to accept that faith is based on nothing verifiable, and that they are welcome to it. 

And his main points are good ones; You don't need Religion to be moral, brainwashing children with religion is immoral (Christians don't call it brainwashing when they do it, but what else would you call it when, in a different religion such as Islam for example, brainwashed children grow up to steer planes into buildings in the name of their faith?), and he (and I) would be the first one to believe in the existence of God should there ever be proof of his existence. In the meantime, people should stop fighting, brainwashing, and killing each other over minor differences in opinion as to his nature. Something tells me that should your particular version of God turn out to be the real one, he'd still be very pissed at you for adhering to such nonsense and calamity. Unless of course you're Jewish. The Old Testament God was an asshole.

On a final note, I want to reiterate what I believe to be Dawkins' most imperative point in his book: There is no such thing as a Christian child, a Muslim child, an atheist child, or a Buddhist child etc. There are only Children of Christian parents, Children of Muslim parents, Children of atheist parents, and Children of Buddhist parents etc. Until children are mature enough to have weighed all the facts and decide for themselves, they are only children. After all, no one says that their child is a Marxist, or a Democrat, or a Communist. It's ok to wait until the child is of age to decide for itself what its political leanings are, and the same needs to be true of religion.

Back To School: My Book Report & How I Spent Four Summers

Hey guess what? I'm having my Groundhog day. I'm in Virginia again, for the third week-long assignment in a row. Ick. If anybody ever wants to travel to Vienna, VA, I know all the good restaurants. I forgot my camera, so even if I wind up doing something interesting, I won't be able to share any images. I'm probably not going to do much though. I might go see another concert on Saturday; there's a band I really like named Louis XIV playing.

But I finally got around to reading a book which I'd touted here waaaay back in October aught 6. I'd been wanting to read it for a very long time, but I think I felt like I was still too close to my own experiences in Iraq, so I kept putting it off. I don't know exactly why I finally decided to pick it up, other than that I just needed something to bring to Virginia with me. At any rate, after I finished reading it, I went to the author's website and dropped him the following note:

I just finished your book... I lived in Baghdad (successively in a hotel in the Karradah district, the VVIP airport terminal, and in the Green Zone) for three years, from August 2003 through October 2006. Since I left, the level of both stupidity and insanity which I witnessed there slowly seeped away from my daily consciousness, until I was almost fit for normal human company again. Reading your book was an extremely engaging experience for me as it not only brought all of those old emotions back, but additionally shed some new light on the chaotic events that went on around me which I did not fully understand at the time.

Uh... thanks?

Which about sums it up. It's an excellent book in that I believe he really went out of his way to be as impartial and as nice as possible to the people he was writing about, which in the end only made their grand stupidities even more painful to read. Having lived there during the period about which he wrote, (The CPA's tenure in control of the reconstruction of Iraq led by Paul Bremer from 2003 to 2004) it added another layer of emotion which I find to be inexplicable. For instance, there was an incident near my company's compound in the Green Zone one time while I was covering for Rodney there while he was on his vacation. Rodney was the Irish scalawag friend of mine who'd had a friend working in Iraq who got us all jobs there in the first place back in August aught 3.

Anyway, one night the Green Zone incoming alarm went off, followed by a warning to all CPA employees to stay out of the streets of the Zone. Word came down to us that an American had been stabbed right out in the open inside the Green Zone and that the army was searching for the terrorist that had somehow snuck in and done it. We never heard anything else about it and, with so many other crazy things going on all the time, it was quickly forgotten about. Well, Rajiv wrote about that incident in his book. Apparently it had been quickly discovered that the stabbing was done by a fellow American; the two men had been having a drunken brawl or something. This news was hushed up, and that was that. It seems that the powers that be would rather have had us believe that an insurgent was loose in the Green Zone than admit the truth, and I'm not even really sure why. But I'll tell you one thing, when I read that, I laughed my ass off. I'd always kind of wondered about that stabbing, and it was an unexpected release of, something, when I read what had really happened, over four years later now.

That was one of just a few incidents that I was around for which he writes about from an insider's perspective. He wrote about the bombing of the United Nations building, which had happened just a week after my arrival in Baghdad. One funny incident that he wrote about was when the Iraqi Soccer team won an important match against Saudi Arabia. That night, the Americans inside the Green Zone freaked out when they heard an insane amount of gunfire coming from the city just outside their 12 foot high protective barriers; they all ran for bunkers and basements thinking that this was it, the Iraqis were storming the Green Zone. It was my second night in Baghdad and we were staying in a hotel downtown, NOT protected by the concrete blast walls of the Emerald City. We were inside, probably playing cards or eating strange and greasy local food or who knows what, when a CRAPLOAD of gunfire began right outside on our street. Dave, Scott and I were kind of like, aw hell, we're going to die on our second night here? Rip off. Ironically, my future boss-who-is-now-in-prison was there too; it's where I first met him. Dave tried to lock himself in the bathroom, Scott was standing in the hallway trying to figure out what good hiding was going to do, and I was under me bed. Phil (my future boss) was in his room, gesticulating at all of us urgently (and creepily) to come into his room while holding out a bottle of Jim Beam; I think that he was thinking that hell, if we're going to die we might as well party first. (That, incidentally, should have tipped me off about him right away.) We heard someone walking through the courtyard of our hotel, bullet shells dropping onto the tiles. Oh God oh God oh God, this is it. Phil's security guard walked in with a big grin, because he'd just been outside joining in with the celebratory gunfire over Iraq's victory in the soccer match. I wrote about that in less detail at the time here.

One that really got me was the bombing of the Green Zone Cafe and then the Market on October 14th 2004. I knew that date off the top of my head, and could have told anyone who asked when that happened without having to look it up. I'd quit my first job in Iraq and began working for Phil on October 12th, 2004. Rajiv called the market and cafe bombings the beginning of the end of the CPA staff's illusions in the Green Zone (I'm paraphrasing). I'd been to the cafe with Scott a few times, and we'd frequented the market during that summer. I think I also wrote about that in a mass email at the time, here. (This other page that I keep linking to by the way is a companion blogpage where I posted a bunch of mass emails I'd sent to friends and family from my early days in Iraq, before I had a blog) I was two blocks away from the market when a suicide bomber blew himself up, along with one of my favorite shops there; A tent where a nice old Iraqi man and a young Iraqi John Lennon lookalike sold songbirds and various other bric-a-brac.

It was a sobering omen of what was to come, and it certainly saddened me in ways that few other bombings which I was around for did. For the remaining two years that I was there, every time I drove by the area where the market used to be, I shook my head like an old man, and even indulged in a tut-tut occasionally.

But these are some of the moments I felt while reading his book because of how I experienced them, not what the book is really about. It's really about how the Bush Administration not only did NOT have a real plan for Iraq after his wrong-headed war, but how even more egregiously they sent people over to fix the country they'd just demolished who were chosen for their jobs because of their affiliation and loyalty to the Republican party. People who actually understood Iraq and what needed to be done were short-shrifted, shunted aside, even fired and removed in favor of Bush loyalists, most notably Jay Garner for Paul Bremer but also hundreds of others. Quoting from the book jacket:

...the case of the 24 year old who had never worked in finance put in charge of reestablishing Baghdad's stock exchange; a contractor with no previous experience paid millions to guard a closed airport; a State Department employee forced to bribe [other] Americans to enlist their help in preventing Iraqi weapons specialists from defecting to Iran! (that's my favorite one, by the way); Americans willing to serve in Iraq screened by White House officials for their views on Roe vs. Wade; people with prior expertise in the Middle East excluded in favor of lesser-qualified Republican Party loyalists. Finally, he describes Bremer's ignominious departure in 2004, fleeing secretly in a helicopter two days ahead of schedule.

Of course I wasn't even close to being directly involved in any of that stuff, but I was around for it and witnessed a lot of the side effects. I heard all the talk... the Green Zone was a small community in those days. I highly recommend 'Imperial Life In The Emerald City'  by Rajiv Chandrasekaran as a clear minded journal of one of the most embarrassing moments in American history. And yes, I was a part of it in my own small way. Yay.

On a final note, I want to say that one of my proudest moments in Iraq was when I got to be rude to Paul Bremer. Dave, George, Scott and I were eating dinner in the CPA building when who should walk right by our table, but Paul Bremer and Dan Rather, followed by a gaggle of reporters and suck-ups on their way to a quiet corner of the Republican Palace for an interview. As I saw him coming, I loudly whistled Darth Vader's theme. For my trouble I was rewarded with a sharp look from Bremer and some very frightening glares from his body guards. In retrospect, especially after reading this book, I realize that he was not so much a Dark Lord as an opportunistic incompetent, and it would have been more apropos to whistle the Animaniacs' theme.

Am I Alone In My Visceral Reaction To Bush's Monkeyface?

"Eating everything you want is not that much fun. When you live a life with no boundaries, there’s less joy. If you can eat anything you want to, what’s the fun in eating anything you want to?"
-Tom Hanks

I've recently lost about ten pounds. I've been going to the gym since September, not exactly regularly due to work travel, but whenever I'm home at least every other day if not every day. The first three months or so were kind of slow going... my stamina on the treadmill got incrementally better, but I maybe lost a pound or three during that time. Then, in the last month and a half or so, it began to drop rapidly. One time I weighed myself, right before I went to Fort Lauderdale, and I was at 204 lbs. When I got back from being down there for a week and not getting any real exercise, after my first workout I weighed myself again, and I was at 198. Then, once more due to work and other unforeseen drama in my life, it was two weeks before I was able to hit the gym again. So this past Monday I weighed myself and I was still at 198, and yesterday at 197 & ¾! It seems as though I've hit a certain mark in my exercise where my body has finally started to believe that I'm really serious about the whole thing, and has decided to pay attention. Sweet!

My diet probably also has something to do with it. I've been %90 faithful to my 2007 New Year's resolution to give up fast food, and I buy lots of whole wheat products and vegetables at the grocery nowadays. I still indulge in the occasional pizza of course, but I never buy chips or other junk food any more except for Tostitos (which they now have a whole wheat variety of!) and salsa. I use Olivio instead of butter, and buy organic milk. I've cut waaay back on my cheese intake also, mostly because I was paranoid about my cholesterol levels. I haven't eaten more than a pint or two of ice cream in the last six months. I take a bevy of vitamins in the morning and I drink Metamucil with dinner every night. And then I take some more vitamins.

This probably sounds annoying to you. I sincerely apologize. Before I got all health conscious, I hated people that exhibited this sort of behavior and then that's all they would talk about. But what I want to say about it is that I've learned some extremely valuable things by doing the gym thing, and they're not even all fitness related. But this first one is: Exercise and diet are mutually reinforcing.

When I first started going to the gym, I didn't really care too much to change my eating habits. I just wanted to get on the treadmill and work off those extra calories I'd eat the night before. I mean, I cared a little, because I'd just been told that my cholesterol was too high, but overall I still ate what I wanted. But once I'd been doing it for a few weeks, I found that when I went to the store, I'd pay more attention to those food content labels. I found that I actually wanted, for the most part, to avoid junk and high fat foods that I loved, because I'd been so good about working out that I wanted to control my calorie count in order not to undervalue all that hard work. The diet thing actually came very naturally... at no time did I ever feel that I was giving up food that I couldn't bear to give up. I never had to plan to diet... it just happened rather organically. Except for my Fast Food resolution. But even that made sense at the time because I'd just come back to the States and was indulging in all the bad stuff I'd missed while I'd been away, and I knew that if I didn't put the kibosh on it quick I'd be looking like the inbred lovechild of Mayor McCheese and the Grimace in no time.

I've learned loads of other things at the gym, but I'm sure they're all clichéd... More energy, better moods, blah blah blah. I mean, it's all true, but everybody's heard all that before. The only surprises in the whole enterprise for me have been that whole unforced desire to diet thing I just said and also the fact that losing weight happens quicker and more abruptly than one might have thought. Granted, it took me five months to get to that point, but once I finally did, cool. But there's one more thing, fairly unrelated to health but very interesting.

My gym has about 12 big TVs up on the wall in front of the cardio machines so that you can walk, run, bike, or do your elliptics while watching whatever mind-numbing crap is on whichever TV station. Each of the machines has a little channel box which you can plug your headphones into so that you can listen to whichever one you choose. Anyway, I always listen to my mp3 player, but I'll watch the TVs without sound anyway as it helps to distract from the pain of jogging. But yesterday they had CNN, FOX, and MSNBC news on at the same time, and I noticed that all three of them were running the same story at the same time; the one about Bush's latest bribe to us. You remember; he bribed us with a tax rebate when he first got into office, in the hopes we'd like him and not make too much noise when he later unveiled his diabolical plans to destroy the world, and now he's doing it again in the hopes that we'll all go "Oh see? He's not so bad." Jerk-off.

Anyway, that's not my point. My point was that I was watching these three major news networks broadcasting this story simultaneously, and not only the same story, but the same news blurbs under the talking heads, the same exact camera angles, and the same commercial breaks. Different commercials, though. At first I was kind of not too freaked out by it, because it's a big enough story that sure, they're all going to be there at the same time. But I'm on the treadmill for 35 minutes, and the stories continued to triplet each other, even the less important ones. Some news from Iraq, the Roger Clemens on steroids thing. For my entire 35 minutes on the treadmill, all three of those news networks parroted each other exactly, I swear to God. It was very upsetting. It's like they are so confident in their ability to slop feed us whatever nonsense someone is telling them to without anybody noticing or caring that they weren't even attempting to keep up the appearance of being different news sources anymore. They were all using the same camera guy, for God's sake! The guy typing up the word blurbs at the bottom of the screen is working for all three major news networks! I wonder how long before they convince everybody that they may as well conglomerate into one big news agency since their news is identical in importance, content, and spin, anyway. And how long before it's just el Presidente giving us his daily benediction, because if he doesn't say it, it's not worth knowing.

I do have to say though that seeing Bush's monkey face on the TV while jogging is really good for the heart rate. I instantly get angry and that adrenaline rush of hate really gets me going.

Oh, Happy Valentines day! I love you.

My Scientist Could Kick Your Scientist's Ass

"Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame."
-Lydia M. Child

So I've been reading this biography on Nikola Tesla. Wowzers. This guy was insane, and there is quite a bit of misinformation out there about him and his inventions. For instance, Thomas Edison was a royal tool. Edison is credited with inventing electricity, but actually, Tesla invented alternating current, which is the form of electricity we use today. Edison was a proponent of DC, and had a whole bunch of money invested in patents for it. Tesla came along and dreamed up AC, and a battle ensued as to which form of current would be adopted. Much like the Betamax / VHS war, or the other, more recent Blew-Ray / HD DVD battle. Grrr. Argh.

Anyway, Edison resorted to some extremely dirty tactics. He kidnapped dogs and cats off of the streets, even people's pets, and electrocuted them to death with AC current in a barrage of propaganda stunts intended to scare people off of using it, saying that Alternating Current was far too dangerous to be used safely. He even apparently filmed the electrocution of an elephant with AC. Tesla won out though, because AC is superior and people realized it eventually. Unlike with HD DVD. Grrr. Argh.

"Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration."
-Thomas A. Edison

"If Edison had a needle to find in a haystack, he would proceed at once with the diligence of the bee to examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search... I was a sorry witness of such doings, knowing that a little theory and calculation would have saved him ninety per cent of his labor."
-Nikola Tesla

Mark Twain was a close friend of Tesla's. Mark used to hang out in Tesla's lab, and one time Tesla was experimenting with electrical therapy, and Mark insisted on trying it out. So he got up on a special rubber platform and thoroughly enjoyed a sensation of electrical vibrations. When Tesla told him that it was time to stop, Mark refused, whooping, waving his arms, and saying that this was awesome, and he could take it! Tesla smiled and said that for Mark's own well-being, he really ought to let it go and get down; a person is only meant to take so much vibrating. Mark laughed and still refused, despite Tesla's repeated warnings. Suddenly, Mark got a look of consternation on his face and clenched a bit. He abruptly hobbled to the edge of the platform and begged Tesla for the direction to the bathroom, as Tesla and his assistant laughed uproariously, knowing full well the laxative effect of the electrical therapy.

"Barring that natural expression of villainy which we all have, the man looked honest enough."
-Mark Twain

"Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more."
-Nikola Tesla

Tesla demonstrated publicly many amazing feats of electricity, some of which engineers are still baffled by today as to how he did them.

There are some extremely sobering, and frankly rather quite scary things which he claimed to have invented and tested, but which we know nothing of today. He claimed to have invented a device which could fit in his pocket, and could knock down a building simply by attaching it to a metal girder. It worked by resonating vibrations, and there is proof that his theory was sound. He'd been experimenting with it in his lab in New York City, and it caused great rumblings and broken glass 15 blocks away. He claims that later, he put such a device in his pocket, sauntered down to a building that was under construction, attached it, and waited until the entire structure began to vibrate alarmingly. It made an unbelievable sound, construction workers began running, and he surreptitiously stopped the device, put it back in his pocket, and strolled off unnoticed.

By the way, after he died, the US government confiscated all of his papers and personal notes, and they have still yet to see the light of public scrutiny. Nobody knows what was in them. For those of you who are conspiracy-minded, chew on that.

Tesla claimed that with that same device he could collapse the Brooklyn Bridge in minutes, and with appropriate timing and a large enough such device, he could split the Earth like an apple.

For further conspiracy theorizing, here's a paragraph from his Wikipedia entry:

Another of Tesla's theorized inventions is commonly referred to as Tesla's Flying Machine, which appears to resemble an ion-propelled aircraft. Tesla claimed that one of his life goals was to create a flying machine that would run without the use of an airplane engine, wings, ailerons, propellers, or an onboard fuel source. Initially, Tesla pondered about the idea of a flying craft that would fly using an electric motor powered by grounded base stations. As time progressed, Tesla suggested that perhaps such an aircraft could be run entirely electro-mechanically. The theorized appearance would typically take the form of a cigar or saucer.

Hmmm... Sound like any UFOs you've heard of?

He also demonstrated claims that he could transmit electricity wirelessly, and believed in the possibility of "Free Energy"; Do you have any idea what wireless power and free energy would mean to the world? Of course you do. But it has never been developed. He tried building a tower at Wardenclyffe designed to transmit power in just such a manner, but he ran out of funds, everybody thought he was a nutter, and the tower was destroyed for scrap.

He is actually the unsung inventor of Radio. Marconi was originally credited with inventing it, but all he did was steal an idea of Tesla's from a lecture, and patented it before Tesla had a chance to. In a nutshell. Tesla was eventually awarded the patent and credit for inventing Radio, but the Marconi misconception persists to this day. Tesla was cheated out of credit for many many things in this manner... he did patent quite a few inventions, but he is one of those historical geniuses that had more ideas in a day than I've had in ten lifetimes. He was so far ahead of his time that many of the things he accomplished have yet to be rediscovered, and he is uncredited for many of the ones that have been because at the time people thought his ideas were loony, and other people followed in the footsteps of Marconi with Tesla's "crazy" notions.

"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane."
-Nikola Tesla

After reading this biography, I've had to rethink my opinion of The Prestige. I mean, I still think that it's a sloppy movie, and the denouement is still visible ten miles away, but part of what I thought was ridiculous about that movie was the portrayal of Tesla by David Bowie. I thought that the particular invention that he came up with in that film was utterly laughable, but now, I'm less sure. I mean, duplication of matter through the simple application of electricity is still extremely far fetched, but less so to me now that I've read about some of the things that he actually did experiment with.

 “Let the future tell the truth, and evaluate each one according to his work and accomplishments. The present is theirs; the future, for which I have really worked, is mine.”
-Nikola Tesla

I Know, There Are Bigger Problems Out There. It's Just One More Tiny Little Complaint.

"Unquestionably, there is progress. The average American now pays out twice as much in taxes as he formerly got in wages."
-H.L. Mencken

So I just received my Christmas bonus from work, and I have to say that there is a good indication there of something deeply schizophrenic in the USA. Don't get me wrong, I think it's lovely that companies give their employees Christmas bonuses. It's certainly not something that they really owe their employees.

Winter is a hard time of the year for people: heating costs go up, (It costs $1,000 to fill my oil tank. 5 years ago it probably would've only cost like $300.) Christmas means buying presents for lots of people if you're, you know, Christian, our country's official religion. But the Christmas bonus is a traditional way for your employer, who is cold and heartless the other 364 days of the year, to show that they're not such bad people and that they want to help defray your higher Christmas time expenses, even if only a little. So in my mind, $50 or $1,000, it's not something to be complained about, because it's not a law that they have to give you a bonus. It's just nice, and even helps the company a little by generating some extra good will.

My Christmas bonus this year is $500. Nice, right?

But here's the problem. I received my Christmas bonus by company check, or in modern parlance, by Direct Deposit. Know what that means? Yeah you do. It got taxed. So $500 now becomes just under $350. Still not too bad, really, considering that it's $350 I didn't really earn. But what kills me is that I would think that my employer would ideally prefer that I got that $150 rather than the government, because instead of being entirely grateful that I got a nice Christmas bonus, I'm slightly bitter that I got robbed. Not necessarily towards my employer because, assuming that my previous statement is true, I have to believe that it is illegal for a company to pay an employee any money that doesn't get taxed, otherwise someone at the head office could just withdraw a bunch of cash and hand it out in envelopes at the party, right?

So what this means is that someone in the IRS, at some point in the past, actually made the decision to tax Christmas bonuses. "No toys for the children!", he cackled. And not only that, our freedom loving, commercially insatiable, (especially at Christmas time) consumer mad culture went along with it. We agreed that the government should have nearly a third of our Christmas bonuses instead of say, Sears, Toys-R-Us, or Penn Oil.

That's kind of schizophrenic, isn't it? You would think that someone in big business would lobby against taxing Christmas bonuses, so that not only could they generate that extra good will among their own employees, but then the average consumer would also have that much more to spend at their stores.

Conclusion? Well, I really don't know what to make of it. General all-purpose evil. That's all I can come up with.

First I Steal From GoDrex, And Then I Steal From Mr. Altemeyer. Huh. Knowledge IS Like A Virus!

"In my experience, the worst enemy and corrupter of man is the tendency - resulting from mental laziness and the desire for peace of mind - to join groups and organizations with set dogmas, be they religious or political."
- Hermann Hesse

GoDrex, in a recent post, linked to a very interesting online book about a human phenomenon as old as time: The Authoritarian Follower. In other words, a book about the sheep, the army ants, that infest humanity and allow incredibly evil things to happen through their passive/aggressive stupidity.

There is a section at the end of the third chapter in which he uses his theory to explain the inexplicable events surrounding our invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. I've copied and pasted it here, because it's the best rundown of the key events I've come across yet. 

A Little Application
That said, let’s take what we have learned in this chapter about how
authoritarian followers think and see if it explains what otherwise might seem quite baffling. Beginning in late 2001, the Bush administration stated that Saddam Hussein was a source of terrorist activities around the world, and frequently implied he was involved in the attacks of September 11th, even though nearly all the attackers had come from Saudi Arabia, and none had come from Iraq. The administration also said Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, even though United Nations inspectors had never found any, so an invasion of Iraq was necessary. A choir of “theocons” seconded this “neocon” outlook with the argument, however implausible, that it was highly moral to start a war with Iraq. In fact, it was God’s will.

The polls showed most Americas supported the president, although a significant minority did not. Besides observing that no terrorist connections had been demonstrated, and no “WMDs” or facilities for making them had been discovered, critics said an invasion would make it easier for Muslim fanatics to launch suicide attacks on Americans, and would probably tie down America’s mobile armed forces for years to come because civil war was likely to develop after Saddam’s removal.

They also observed that the war would seem not only unjustified to most Muslims, but totally unfair given America’s greatly superior military forces. An American/British slam-dunk victory would probably create so much hatred for those countries in Islam that the number of zealots plotting terrorist attacks against them would probably increase rather than decrease as a result of the war. It would prove a monumental step in the war against terror--but backwards.

The critics were castigated by administration officials and their backers with a vehemence not seen since the anti-Vietnam war protests. Those who urged caution were denounced, even as late as the fall of 2006, as traitors, fools, and idiots by officials and supporters who will likely never admit that the critics were proved right. For after the successful military invasion of Iraq, no pre-existing ties to al-Qaida were discovered and no weapons of mass destruction were found. Some Americans then realized their country had invaded another country on false premises--which would seem to be very wrong morally, and which would have outraged many supporters of the war had certain other countries done such a thing. But several months after the administration itself conceded that no weapons of mass destruction had been discovered, pollsters found a lot of Americans believed such weapons had been found. And for these believers and others the new justification for the invasion, viz., to remove Saddam and bring freedom to Iraq, to make it a shining example in the Middle East of what democracy will bring, was good enough anyway.

But as American casualties steadily mounted after the war was declared over, and as chaos descended upon Iraq, and as the Bush administration had no response other than, “We know this is the right thing to do, no matter what,” and as the war helped drive the national debt to such unprecedented heights that the United States became the world’s largest debtor, most Americans finally saw the war had become a national disaster.

Still, nationwide polls for Newsweek, CNN, and USA Today revealed that in
October 2006, as the mid-term election drew near, 40 percent of the American people did not think the United States made a mistake in invading Iraq, 30 to 34 percent approved of President Bush’s handling of the situation in Iraq, 30 percent said the administration did not misinterpret or misanalyze the intelligence reports they said indicated Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and 36 percent said the administration had not purposely misled the public about this evidence to build support for the war.

Thirty-seven percent even thought the U.S. military effort was going “well” (either “fairly” or “very”) And 35 to 37 percent approved of how Bush was doing his job in general, while 35 percent also were satisfied with the way things were going in the country. In all cases, the solid majority of Americans saw it otherwise. But you have to wonder, who were all those people who thought everything was fine?

Well, what’s not to understand, if that hard-core of supporters mainly consists of authoritarian followers, given what the experiments described in this chapter show us about them? The justification for the war in the first place was largely irrelevant to high RWAs. [Right Wing Authoritarians] They liked the conclusion; the reasoning didn’t matter. If the United Nations refused to sanction the war, so what? There’s no contradiction, in a highly compartmentalized mind, between believing that America stands for international cooperation and the peaceful resolution of conflict on the one hand, while on the other hand insisting it has the “right” to attack whomever it wants, no matter how weak they are, whenever it wants for whatever reasons it decides are good enough. Those who protested were trouble-makers; everyone should support the government.

If no connections to al-Qaida and no weapons of mass destruction turned up after the invasion, just believe they had turned up. An aluminum tube that could have been designed to help enrich uranium was used to enrich uranium, proving Saddam was making atomic bombs! Trailers that could have been used to make biological weapons were used to make them. Besides, people whom the followers look to, such as the evangelist Franklin Graham (son of Billy Graham) said they still believed Saddam had such weapons, even if there was no evidence he had. And anyway, if the first reason for the war comes up lame, just invent a new one. Everybody knows Saddam is our biggest problem! And when later the president insisted he never said America would “stay the course” in Iraq, when actually he had said it over and over again, most people knew that was an outright, almost pathological lie. But it would not make much of a dent on an authoritarian follower’s mind, which is quite capable of believing white is black when his authority says so.

Authoritarian followers aren’t going to question, they’re going to parrot. After all, in the ethnocentric mind “We are the Good Guys and our opponents are abominations”--which is precisely the thinking of the Islamic authoritarian followers who become suicide bombers in Iraq. And if we turn out not to be such good guys, as news of massacres and the torture and murder of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers, by the CIA, and by the arms-length “companies” set up to torture prisoners becomes known, authoritarian followers simply don’t want to know. It was just a few, lower level “bad apples.” Didn’t the president say he was sickened by the revelations of torture, and all American wrong-doers would be punished?

However the policy came from the top, and the administration scrambled to make sure it could not be punished. When the White House said it would veto a bill because it prohibited cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners, you had to be nearly blind not to realize what was going on. When the White House also insisted, successfully, that Congress pass a bill allowing it to use torture, you had to be completely blind. But high RWAs are quite capable of such blindness.

And while most Americans came to realize what a mistake the war in Iraq has turned out to be, high RWAs lagged far behind. They listen to the news they want to hear. They surround themselves with people who think like they do. They believe the leaders who tell them what they want to be told. They make about as much effort to get both sides of an issue as the Bush administration does to foster different points of view within the White House. And if six high RWAs are sitting in a room talking about the war, and all six now have misgivings, it will still be hard for any of them to say so because the ethic of group solidarity is so strong in the authoritarian mind.

Is there any conceivable evidence or revelation that will lead them to admit the war was a mistake? I suspect some of them will eventually, begrudgingly reach that point, and others will rewrite their personal histories and say they had their doubts from the start. But others, petrified by their dogmatism, will never admit the undeniable. Did they ever about Viet-Nam? No. “We just didn’t use enough force!”-- which is exactly the argument those who proposed the invasion of Iraq are using now as they tried to shift the blame for the failure of their incredibly unsound policy.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about the phenomenon, although I suspect that the people who need to read it the most, the authoritarian followers, will never even touch it and even if they do, they'll misinterpret it. It's a book that is preaching to the converted, for sure, but it's still eye-opening. It's called The Authoritarians, by Bob Altemeyer. It's completely online, and completely free, and not even very long. So you have no excuse. Unless you're one of them, in which case I suggest you turn a blind eye, because we wouldn't want you to hurt yourself with self-recrimination, after all.

The Space Coast Is The Most

I just got back from Orlando and I think I have to eat some crow and say that it's not so bad a place as I may have thought after my first trip there. Actually, on this trip I had a really great time and the reason is because on this job, I had a lot more free time. On regular jobs, such as my aforementioned first trip to Orlando, you have to pretty much stay near the hotel where the students are staying because on top of being their computer test proctor, you're also their concierge during their week of intense computer training. But this last job was an Onsite, which means that a company has paid us to train their own employees at their own facilities, so all I have to do is show up on testing days, which gave me 3 full free days to find something fun to do. I really like the onsite jobs. My trip to Wyoming was an onsite.

Anyway, I hit the Kennedy Space Center, which was the awesomest place ever. I'd actually been there once before; when I was packing oranges at Vero Beach one year right after my first summer in Alaska, a couple of the guys I was working with and I took a ride up there. That was around 11 years ago though and my memories of it are fuzzy. Anyway I didn't have a camera then and this time I could afford to take the big tour, which is kind of expensive. I got to see the rockets from the Mercury and Gemini missions,

walk around one of the space shuttle launch pads up close,

and see a Saturn V rocket from the Apollo missions.

Awesome. The other really cool thing they had was a Shuttle launch simulator. It was basically a tube with seats that goes from horizontal to a vertical sitting position and shakes around a lot while making really loud noises while an astronaut yammers at you from the video screen in front of footage of the view from a real shuttle taking off into space, but if you suspend your disbelief sufficiently it's easy enough to imagine that you're on your way up there. It even does a passable job of simulating zero gravity when you're "in space" by tipping you on a forward angle so that you're slightly out of your seat and only being held in by your shoulder straps. The Zero-gravity I experienced on my flight in a Mig-25 to the edge of space was a bit better, though.

See? Even the pigeons want to go.

Anyway, I believe that the 60s NASA missions comprised one of the most exciting times in human history, and I really loved getting a sense of what it must have felt like to be a part of that. When I got home yesterday I immediately popped in that movie The Right Stuff. It's really fantastic. I can't believe there's no big movie about the first moonwalk; If you want to see something about the Apollo missions, you're pretty much stuck with Apollo 13, which is great, but it's no moonwalk. There are documentaries I suppose, of which I have several, but they don't really capture the excitement quite the same way a good NASA drama does. The Dish comes closest to that for the Neil Armstrong walk, but it's not actually about the mission itself.

Well I do carry on so. But Space is the Place, man.

On my second free day, I hit Cocoa Beach. It's kind of a famous beach because that's where a lot of the crowds would gather back in the day to watch the Rockets lift off, and I think that's where the astronaut bars were, but I'm not sure. Anyway, I didn't see any of that, but it's a fairly nice beach anyway. Good waves. The next day I had to work in the morning, but in the afternoon I went for an airboat ride on St. John's river and saw loads of alligators and birds and crazy cypress trees with Spanish moss. It was pretty damn cool. Those airboats are pretty zippy.

On that last photo you can see the head and back of an alligator kind of just peeking up from the water by the base of that tree.

On my third free day... well, I did it. I went to the Magic Kingdom. I'd never been there before... I always wanted to go as a child, of course, but when I got older I got cynical and realized how evil Disney is and sort of decided I didn't really want to go as all things Disney tend to be shallow and banal, and they destroy the stories they tell. BUT, I did have this extra day with nothing to do and I couldn't figure anything else out, and also my brother and sister were taken there by my family when they were kids and I never was, so, I figured it was something I had an opportunity to get out of my system. Believe me, that whole morning I was filled with a bizarre emotion consisting of dread, bittersweet, shamefaced excitement. The approach to that saccharine hell-hole did nothing to alleviate it, and neither did almost anything I did there.

The coolest part was Space Mountain. I'd been dying to do that ride all my childhood, when friends would come back from there and tell me about it. And you know what? It's still fairly cool. A roller coaster ride in the dark, only feebly lit up by stars, planets, and galaxies? Punctuated by terrified screams coming from all directions, some of them possibly but not definitely from my own mouth? What's not to like? The Haunted Mansion was also pretty wild, although not scary at all. But the special effects were sweet.

But the rest of it? Everything I ever hated and feared about that place. Every time I saw a parade of some Disney freaks grinning and dancing about, I wanted to smack them and ask them what the hell they thought they were doing, prancing about like happy little idiots. There was one ride that, while being horrendous, was nonetheless quite interesting. The so-named "Silly Jungle Cruise." It's a boat ride through a mock jungle river, filled with plastic animals. It's not a kiddie ride, either. It was all adults on my boat. It looks like, once upon a time, maybe back in the 50s or 60s, it was possibly a high class Disney ride. But I think that fake plastic jungle cruises likely don't have much staying power in this day and age, so what they've done is to turn it into a joke. The boat guide makes fun of everything you see for ten full minutes. A large orange fiber glass snake hangs from a tree, and pretending to be frightened, the tour guide asks what is large, orange, begins with a 'P' and can kill you? "Python!" shouts out one of the, um, adult, cruisers. "That's right," says the guide, "Plastic."

Oh, he had a ton of 'em. But what's interesting to me is that that ride is probably the most honest Disney has ever been with it's customers. A fake plastic safari is set up to give a cheap thrill, which is kind of Disney's over-all philosophy actually, and instead of trying to get you to go along with it, in this case they are forced to cop to how phony and silly it is, because it's really a horrendous ride and there's no hiding it as they do with everything else. Quite illuminating. It's like when Big Tobacco was finally forced to admit that smoking is unhealthy.

I even had a personal moment of clarity on that ride. As we were passing all the plastic, immobile animals, I was thinking to myself how I'd seen these kinds of animals for real in the semi-wild at South Africa Kruger national game park. And then: we came to a plastic temple and the guide announced that we were now passing a Cambodian jungle temple. My mind kind of froze because I've actually been to Angkor Wat and explored tens of actual Cambodian jungle temples, and here I was at Disney, the phoniest place on Earth, passing by a phony temple.

I love this:

Virtual Magic Kingdom? What, that's in case your mind is so jelly that you can't walk down the street here to the actual Magic Kingdom?

Well anyway.

The Kennedy Space Center. Wicked cool.

The Shock Doctrine by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein

Found this over on 3 Quarks Daily... Very thought provoking.

Alfonso Cuarón, by the by, is the director of Y tu mamá también, the third Harry Potter movie, and Children of Men. He's relatively mainstream, is what I'm saying.

He's Fishing For Your Soul

Is it just me, or is President Shithead beginning to sound a lot like Baghdad Bob?

An Impassioned Argument Using Not Only Logic, But Mixed Metaphors And Guts, Too.

I think I've got it aalllll figgered out, man.  I know why stupid people always seem to win out in this world, why logic has left the building. It's really quite simple. Say two people are having an argument about something. Anything. For instance, who can run faster, Superman or the Flash? Or who would win in a fight, a Caveman or an Astronaut? Or whether Ann Coulter is a mutant or not. Anything. Say one of the people involved in the argument is an intelligent, logical being. A Rational, as a sop to Miss Luongo's personality theory obsession. Convinced that conclusions ought to be reached with actual facts taken into consideration, each step of the argument followed by the next logical step, based on actual evidence. Say the other debator is... well, less rational. A Guardian type. Convinced that little niceties such as good conclusions based on logical thought are less important than following what your gut says is right, because we all know that following your gut is always such a good idea. Passionate argument is proof enough for them.
In the immortal words of Howard W. Campbell Jr.:

"The truth of your leader August Craptower, and those like him, will be with mankind forever, as long as there are men and women who listen to their guts instead of their minds."
                    -From Mother Night

August Craptower was a leader in the neo-nazi community in Kurt Vonnegut's little morality play there. August Craptower, George Bush, same thing.

Anyway, what I'm getting at is that say these two are having an argument. The logical one states his case. He won't usually be all impassioned and heartfelt and all up in people's guts because he feels that the logic of his case, the obvious rightness of what he's saying based on rational thought, will shine through and people will get it, and as long as the people listening aren't totally evil they'll agree with him because he's right. I'm not saying that the logical person is infallible here, only that when he's thought things through clearly, he tends to firmly believe he's on the side of right, and based on fact and evidence, or lack of actual evidence of nuclear weapons in Iraq thereof, feels that any other course of action is insane. The Flash can run faster than Superman, because DC comics has made a point of that many times. The Flash can go so fast he vibrates through walls. Superman can fly faster than the Flash can run, but that wasn't the question. Ok maybe there is no logic there, really, but you get where I'm coming from.

So, the logical guy makes his case, and steps back, knowing that after the evidence he's presented, there can be no argument, unless new facts are brought to light which he then will have to deal with. Then the less logical, yet more impassioned Guardian type steps up. He is also convinced of his rightness, but not because of any facts or evidence, excepting perhaps the tidbit that of course God created the world because look at the banana! (It was made to fit a Man's hand (or a monkey's...) and has a natural pull-tab, like a soda can! You can't evolve something like that! (Except that actually, man has cultivated the banana for centuries, making it what it is today, somewhat showing how evolution can work at an accelerated pace, but never mind that bit of fact.))

No, he's convinced of his rightness because he feels it can't be any other way. Of course Saddam is evil and has Weapons of Mass Destruction. He's all dark skin toned and has an evil laugh, and besides, G.W.B. wouldn't lie to us, not the President! He's more than a man, he's God's chosen leader for the greatest nation on Earth! Of course God is on America's side, otherwise we wouldn't be so powerful! He's on our side, just like he was on the side of history's other greatest empires, like Rome, and Egypt... oh wait, they don't usually take the logic that far, you know, because then they'd have to change their opinion. No, the illogical side of this argument will do whatever it takes to win the argument, because he feels right. He'll use facts that are perceived, he'll even make shit up, take things out of context and use them to prove his view of things. And the other guy, the logical one, will tend to sit back and laugh at the other guy's antics, because obviously he's an idiot, and nobody's going to buy that junk... Except of course, that they do.

Why? Well, my rather simple theory is that, since the greater part of the human population are these so-called Guardian types, sheep in other words, they will believe whoever talks longer and louder. Look at that guy, they say, he is so heartfelt and he won't shut up. Obviously he believes what he's saying. That whistleblower over there, who used to be a weapons inspector in Iraq, only offered a cold assesment that he found no WMD. But this guy, he knows that there are weapons over there, if only we keep looking! And he's never even been over there, so that shows you the strength of his conviction!

Logical people don't seem to believe what they're saying, because they offer things as cold fact and then stop talking once they've reached their conclusion, because once an actual case has been reached based on facts, there's really not much left to say. Illogical people seem to believe what they're saying because they never shut up and get louder and louder and more O'Reilly about it, and because they never seem to reach an actual logical conclusion, feel the need to make up for it with volume and heart. And the sucker that is the human race eats it up.

It's all very sad, but based on this fact alone, I'd say that the human race doesn't have a whole lot of time left. As races go, that is. The inevitable conclusion to a race gone with the Pied Piper is extinction. Unless lemmings learn to actually use their minds and not only their guts.

Anecdotal Evidence To Support My Claim Of Superior Knowledge... You'd Eat It Up If I Performed It Live To A Catchy Gospel, Rock Or Rap Tune!

While I'm waiting for inspiration on the eternally boring question of what to do next with my life to strike, as it has been so kind to do in the past, I am always on the lookout for new things to blog about. It helps keep my sanity, you see. In that rather pitiable spirit, here is something I woke up thinking about this morning; the why and wherefore of religion. So yes, if you are not in the mood for another rant on messiestobjects' tired, banal views on religion and why it's bad for you, feel free to bail now.

I often worry about publicly talking about my views on religion, because I know that my family, who are devout Christians, care about me and therefore worry that my soul is condemned to a fiery eternity for saying such brash things as I tend to do. The problem is that I know that no amount of discourse will ever bridge the gap between what they believe and what I believe, and so I tend to keep my mouth shut and avoid the topic. The fact of the matter is that people, once they reach a certain stage in their lives, and have given the matter serious thought and/or credence in their lives, are almost never capable of changing their minds. There's actually scientific evidence somewhere out there about the hardening of our minds as we get older, although don't look to me for details as it's something I read a long time ago. Something about our neural pathways being wide open when we're babies, gradually becoming more solidified or defined as we apply words to objects, and later becoming downright jungle elephant paths in our brains as we ascribe our beliefs to ideas. In other words, the more times you tread a path, the easier it is to follow that same path the next time you go that way. It's very hard for even the most open minded person keeping pre-set personal beliefs or perceived truths out of our rational observations as we get older. But that's really not the point of this.

I thought that this time, rather than expounding on why I think religion (Not God! I think I've been rather clear on the difference in my mind in the past.) is not only false but unhealthy, I would rather explain how I came to these ideas in the first place. Not that I'm special in regards to my beliefs; lots of people share them. I just feel I have a unique perspective, being a reformed religious type rather than the offspring of godless academics.

I was born and raised a Christian, and generally speaking I think that in some ways it did me good. Or at least, I believe I have a highly sensitive view of Good Vs. Evil, and I think that's a good thing. I also don't believe it's unhealthy to walk around with the constant feeling that somebody is looking over my shoulder, whether it's true or not. It can be a valuable mental trick. The first time I started doubting was at a Christian rock concert I went to with a church youth group. The performer was a guy that went by the name of Carmen, whose stuff I actually liked. I had a tape of his; I was probably 13 or 14 years old at the time. Anyway, we were at this concert and he had been singing his tunes, with no band... lip synching. But whatever; at the time I didn't know that was cheesy and nobody seemed to care anyway. But he would stop every once in a while and preach a little bit, and there were two things in particular that he said at one point that just kind of made me go, "ummm, really?"

The first was minor, as indicators often are, but it made me think a little bit. Apparently The Grateful Dead were playing that same night at another venue up the street, and Carmen was all like "Let me tell you, The Grateful Dead may be sinners who think it's cool to be dead, but tonight we here are grateful to be alive in Jesus!!" Much cheering ensued. But I was kind of like, and I didn't even know all that much about them, but I knew enough to know that they didn't actually want to be dead, at least not in the sense that Carmen was saying. He was saying it like they were willful emissaries of Satan or something. In their Wikipedia entry, it says that they chose the name in this manner:

The name "Grateful Dead" was chosen from a dictionary. Some claim it was a Funk & Wagnalls, others, the Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book Of the Dead), but according to Phil Lesh, in his biography (pp. 62), "...Jer (Garcia)  picked up an old Britannica World Language Dictionary...(and)...In that silvery elf-voice he said to me, 'Hey, man, how about the Grateful Dead?'" The definition there was "A song meant to show a lost soul to the other side."

So, it was really pure hippie bullshit, but hardly Satanic. This statement of Carmen's, when I thought about it later, made me begin paying attention to preachers and to begin the realization that most of what they say is off the cuff and full of assumptions. They often, especially at that time in the 80s, called things Satanic which they merely didn't understand or was associated with things which they found personally distasteful. It made me realize that they often didn't really know what they were talking about, which is a shattering blow to a religion that claims to have knowledge of the truth of the way of things. If you can't back up simple statements of fact, why should I take it on faith that you know what you're doing in other areas? Faith belongs to God anyway, supposedly, not preachers.

The second thing he said, later that night, was a larger issue for me. Towards the end of the show, when he'd just played his biggest hit to a crowd of young screaming christian rock idolators, (And I admit, I was one of them. I loved that song.) he bellowed out, "I can feel the spirit of Jesus here with us tonight! Can you feel the holy spirit in the room? He's speaking to all of us, can you feel his love, right here right now!!?" And, as my fist was in the air and everyone around me, tears of joy in their eyes and answering with a heartfelt "Yes! I feel him! I feel Jesus!", and I, about to join in and add my agreeing sentiment, had an odd sensation. I was still for a moment, and kind of quietly thought to myself, (and I'm paraphrasing, of course; it was a long time ago in a mindset far, far away. But I remember very well what was going through my head in spirit. Snicker.) "Jesus? Huh. Actually, what I'm feeling is awe for the rock star that just lip synched that awesome song and got my fist pumping and adrenaline rushing, and has even made me feel good about being a Christian since I'm in a large group of people that feels the same way and we're all cheering for Jesus, but one thing I don't feel, and have never felt, actually, is anything spiritual. It actually feels a lot like that time I got all excited and heart-full when Luke Skywalker blew up the Death Star. That made me SO happy, and that's the kind of elation I'm feeling right now, so, unless Jesus had something to do with the destruction of the Death Star, and said destruction was a spiritual event, I don't think that what I'm feeling right now is him in the room."

Now that I'm slightly wiser, I can add even more significance to that event. It was a rally, pure and simple. The theatrics and speeches that those guys use is no different than, say, Hitler's Nazi rallies. Or the Republican party rallies. It's a leader taking advantage of the psychology of mob mentality, and getting the crowd all worked up into a frenzy, and directing that energy in a desired direction. Jesus is not actually in the room, folks. The emperor is wearing no clothes. This doesn't in and of itself mean that what is being preached is bunk, (The Reverend Horton Heat, Martin Luther King Jr., John Lennon, The actual message of love preached by Jesus himself, (which you can hear if you you read closely between the lines) for some examples) but I think it's important to be aware when age-old crowd control techniques are being used on you. In other words, if the leader is being honest with his agenda in such a rally, he's trying to passionately convince you of the logic of his argument, not passionately trying to beat you over the head with a scary dogma.

Anyway, for some reason, that night my mind opened up a little bit to more rational thought and always afterwards I applied a much more critical eye to what was going on around me. It's not like all of a sudden I ceased being a Christian. In some ways I always will be; you can't really escape your roots, and anyway I have never confused the sins of men, even self-proclaimed spiritual men, with a failing on God's part. One of the facts of nature that I will always hold dear, in my slowly hardening neural pathways, is that men are quite capable of committing acts of good and decency without invoking God, and men are capable of choosing to commit the most heinous evils without needing Satan as a scapegoat. People make their own choices, plain and simple. Blaming Satan or thanking God, or vice versa, is a cheap and easy way of avoiding responsibility.

I remember, one time in church, I was listening to the pastor give his sunday sermon; He was addressing a germaine issue: "Some people say that the Bible contradicts itself. They say that the Bible was written by men, and is not the true word of God. Well folks, I'm here today to tell you that those people have been misled by Satan, and that they are liars! The Bible does not contradict itself! It is God's word, handed down to us by his prophets, and it is the truth!" I kept waiting for him to expand his argument, but that was all he had; a bald statement containing bold word stresses. I kept thinking to myself, That's it!? That's Christianity's argument for itself?! And for the record, there was no paraphrasing there. I remember very clearly that day, and what he said. It felt like an extremely disingenuous thing to say... basically he was saying, believe that the Bible is the literal truth and word of God, because I say so, AND so does the Bible itself. So there. Which struck me as rather circular and unproductive logic... That's pretty much what all the religious leaders are saying, all the time.

Another extremely revealing experience I had, I've already blogged about here.

Anyway, this is a conversation I've been having with myself for a very long time now, and I could go on and on, but those are a few of the more important moments which made me switch gears a little bit. Basically, I've come to the conclusion that in order to come to grips with God, the Universe, and Everything, one has to distance oneself from the religions of men, because they are a framework for misdirection, power, and corruption. If there is a God, then love and understanding come from him, not religion, and not men's inane preachings. If there is not a God, then love and understanding come from chemicals and neural pathways. If there is a God, then there is only one thing which he gave me in order to understand him. Not the Bible, not Pat Robertson, not even Jesus. Men took control of those things, and handed them down to me the way they wanted me to see them. No, what He gave me is my mind. We have this amazing tool which is capable of rational thought, and the application of that tool has yielded more knowledge about the nature of the Universe than any preacher or prophet ever has. If there is no God, well, thank evolution for my mind. If there is a God, He invented evolution. Either way, it's all good.

Now that I'm done preaching, for the moment, I'll leave you with a YouLube that I found of that Carmen song I used to love so much, as performed via Lipsynch by some church kids. I'm kind of cringing about the fact that I used to like this song... I remembered it as being much cooler. I can only offer extreme brainwashing as an excuse. Anyway, in this video, God is a bearded girl, so, enjoy! ... or not. I myself had to stop it just a few minutes in, or I was going to cringe myself into a fetal position.

Wal To Wal Bargains On Wal To Wal Damn Shoddy Workmanship

Growing up in a world where the minimum wage was $4.50 an hour, there are two things that I learned to buy the best quality of that I could afford: shoes, and a wristwatch. I learned this lesson by finding myself back at Payless Shoes every month to replace the pair I'd bought there the previous month which already had seams with holes and flappy soles. And also by that same day stopping at K-Mart for another Timex because the one I'd had for only a few weeks was telling me the time on the planet Crapwatch.. So, eventually I figured out that If I went to the Army/Navy store and spent my shoe budget for the next 4 months on a pair of Officer's shoes, I wouldn't have to replace them for two to five years. And if I bought a mid-priced Swatch (Their quality line, not those candy-colored vomit things they got famous for back in the day) for the price of 8 Timexes, I could count the dollars saved on the additional 20 Timexes I eventually didn't have to buy.

It's a lesson that really only needed to apply to those two items for most of my life. Other items that applied to my life in such an intimate way never seemed to be an issue. Clothing lasted a good long time, whatever you paid for it, books came only in hardcover or paperback, and Mom & Dad supplied the rest until I moved out, and then I was really happy I already had a good watch and good shoes because then I could barely afford food, but that's another story.

But I'm finding that, after my burning re-entry into the atmosphere of the planet United States, this is a lesson that needs to be re-learned about many other things, and after a few anecdotes and some preliminary research, I've discovered the cause to be Wal-Mart. Here's the thing; Like McDonald's and other fast food, Wal-Mart tastes great to me. I like going to one hugeongous warehouse store and getting everything I need at one go, and getting the hell out, because I actually hate shopping. My feet get tired and my brain begins to swim when I have to make choices between things like strawberry, or blueberry, or whitening, or breath-freshening, or anti-plaque toothpastes! So I say, get in, get out, and enjoy the extra time you've gained in your life from it by locking yourself in your room with your computer and  your bloodshot eyes.

But, also like fast food, there is shit in Wal-Mart's meat! The anecdote that I first heard was from my friend Stephanie; she related that she (or a friend of hers, I can't remember) had bought an HP laptop computer there for a couple of hundred dollars cheaper than the same model at Circuit City. In a matter of weeks, the hard drive crashed. She sent it back in for repairs, got it back, and a few weeks later, System Failure 2, at your local box office! So they brought it in and had it replaced with a new one, same model. System Failure 3: Joke's On You, Sucka! Intrigued as to why this should be, when HP is a respected manufacturer of fine computers, she did a little research and discovered that Wal-Mart, in their quest to bring loyal Wal-Mart shoppers lower prices, actually dictates to their manufacturers what prices they are willing to pay to stock their shelves with stuff. So, what companies like HP wind up having to do, in order to continue making any sort of a profit at all, is to manufacture a line of computers with their name on it, using inferior materials and cheaper production costs in Mexican child slave factories*, solely to be shipped to Wal-Mart stores!

If it's not obvious to you why this might be a bad thing, here's the breakdown: Johnny Dipshit wants to buy a computer. At Circuit City, he sees one for $1200, but at Wal-Mart, he sees the same one for $800. So, obviously he buys it at Wal-Mart. Well, there are 10,000 Johnny Dipshits in the world out there buying laptops right now. When Circuit City, or any other retailer, doesn't sell their $1200 model, they stop selling them and all that you can find, anywhere, is the crappy fall-apart in 3 weeks $800 model. Do the math, it's not good.

Well, I didn't really buy this anecdote, (seriously, I didn't. I'm not just saying that to sound like a reasonable crank with an educated conversion to Wal-Mart haters R us) but I started noticing little things. My Dad's wife Erin bought me a few car accessories at Wal-Mart for Christmas that I had asked for. The very solid-looking extendable snow brush and ice-scraper snapped in two the first time I tried to use it on my icy windshield. A pillow that I bought there for my room started off nice and fluffy but within two weeks you wouldn't have been blamed for mistaking it for a table place mat. ALL of the clothing I've purchased there has either shrunk, lost it's color, or frayed to an unacceptable degree after just a few washes.

Not everything I've bought there has caused me problems. Those blank DVD's for instance. The toothpaste seems to work just fine. So far my beanbag chair is ok... I'll keep you updated on that if anything happens there. But... it's all a part of the general degradation of US standards that I've been seeing everywhere. Mike Judge is a genius for his film Idiocracy, because the more I look around, the more prophetic it looks. It also reminds me of the bit in the novel 1984 by George Orwell about how everybody is eating substandard food and drinking crap Gin that makes your stomach into a big fat churning ulcer, because of the devolution of standards, or something. It's been a long time since I read it. Feel free to fill in the blank there, for me.

Anyway, I did some of my own internet based research, and with a preliminary article scan, here are two links that are quite troubling and eye-opening that I've found. The Wal-Mart You Don't Know, and The Man Who Said No To Wal-Mart. I'm sure some of you who like to comment when I talk about stuff you already know all about will have already looked into all this, or had your own experiences... send me anecdotes, send me links! I'd like to read further. I'm already considering boycotting Wal-Mart, as I have done with fast food; In both cases more for my own benefit than for any gung-ho anti-establishment reasons. I have already decided to limit at the very least the types of things I'll buy there. No electronics, no clothes, and no crap. Toothepaste, milk, other things that I don't see any degradation of the product on... for now. But you're in my crosshairs, Wal-Mart! Bow down before me and tremble! MUAHH HAHAHAHA!!!

Right. Anyway. The point of all this is, I think you'll find that in the long run, whatever your budget may be, that you're better off buying your laptops from quality retailers, and your clothing from the non-budget stores... granted, it's harder to find those sorts of things at decent prices outside of Wal-Mart these days because they've put so many lesser entities out of business, but it's still possible... FOR NOW!

 

*This was an attempt at humor, not a statement of fact. Although it's my opinion that Wal-Mart probably uses Mexican child slave labor as a bargaining tool with their manufacturers to make a cheaper product, I have no facts to back it up. It's also my opinion that they should not be allowed to dictate the manufacturer's pricing, but what do I know?

Time Wounds All Heals, And I May Be It This Time, So This Round To You But The Game Is Far From Over

I watched The US vs. John Lennon last night. Good flick. I admit I don't know that much about him, never having dove headfirst into Beatlemania, but it seems he had a bit of a Messiah Complex. Which, hey, good job, I say. If more people had Messiah Complexes, and weren't, you know, sociopathic, but went around getting millions of people to chant things like "All we are saying, is give peace a chance", I might have more hope for humanity. Anyway, the movie focused on the part of John's life where he evolves from a moptop into a political activist, and the US government's attempts, under Nixon and Hoover, to intimidate and have him deported.

As an aside, one thing that struck me in this movie were the bits of Government propaganda used to support the Vietnam War in those days, and how similar... no, how identical they were to our present day Nixonish regime's propaganda. Lord, we need another Messiah!

One thing that troubled me about the whole incident was something G. Gordon Liddy said in the film. John Lennon was a British citizen, living in New York under a visitor's visa. It galled G. that a foreigner, who loved living in the US and enjoying the freedoms that our National forefathers provided would dare to criticize the US war policy. "If you don't like it, go back to Britain", was the sentiment. And, as anti-US policy as I am, it sounds like a good point. As a US citizen, it would be supremely galling of me to go hang out in London and criticize the Blair administration for it's part in the Iraq war, wouldn't you agree?

Where it breaks down is here. The favorite Republican slogan, said off-camera, of "Shut up, or get out" is so twisted and unAmerican that anyone who says it and believes it, and even worse uses it as a policy making idea, ought to be the ones that get bitchslapped. I feel that, something that is often not thought about in those circles is that America was not a nation founded on religion, or borders, or policy. It was founded on ideas of equality and human rights, regardless of where you come from or who you worship or what kind of hat you hang on your coatrack in the evenings, and as such should be able to stand up to the critical eye of truth, or survive the attacks of lies, whichever Nation the mouthpiece hails from. Obviously, America failed that test in Vietnam, and we are woefully failing it again in Iraq. When the powers that be try to silence people, regardless of their citizenship, it means that they're scared. George Bush isn't scared, which means that Peace & Love and all that hippie malarky has no champion this time around.

Okay, getting off my high horse now, whom I've named Lennon.

Well, I've been "tagged" by Miss Luongo, and when such an august persona as she tells you to write something, you do not decline. I have been told that I must blog about my answers to the questions in the following category: Things I Know By Heart. Before I continue, I feel I must offer the disclaimer that although this rather feels like one of those emails you get with a list of half-questions such as: Favorite Color? Most Embarassing Moment? Second Favorite Movie? etc... and you answer them and reply to everyone on the mailing list, additionally sending it to five new friends, who in turn have to answer, it is not. One of those emails, I mean. First off, it's not an email. It's a "tag you're it!" blog game. Secondly, I was tagged under the geas of Buffy the Vampire Slayer metaphors, and seeing as I'm such a starstruck fanboy when it comes to Buffy, I must oblige. It's like when religious people invoke their deity. God told me to do it, amen! Well, Buffy has commanded me, via her latest acolyte Miss Luongo, and the power of the Slayer compels me.

Man, sometimes when I write things, I realize how lost a cause I really am. Anyway, moving on.

Things I Know By Heart:
Two Novels/Poems/Plays: What am I, Abraham Lincoln? When I was in the sixth grade I was in a play called Snow White and the Six Dwarves. There were only six because Smiley went to Hollywood to do toothpaste commercials. It was a stupid play. But I knew my lines by heart, does that count? I hate poetry. It seems to me that poetry is a cheap economical affected way of saying things in a misleading manner. Say what you mean, dammit! I understand that it's all supposed to be pretty, and in the old days a good way to make chicks weak in the knees. But, give me a good novel any day. I don't know any novels by heart though, that's ridiculous. So...

Love guppy

			You mean all the world to me.
			Without you I can't be free.
			You make me pant considerably.
			You're my love guppy.

			You have the finest rosebud's taste.
			Without you my life is waste,
			I'll stick to you like Elmer's paste.
			You're my love guppy.

			I'd break through a citadel.
			I'd fight with a raging bull, 
			Though winning would seem improbable.
			You're my love guppy.

			My love's as strong as the mid-ocean ridge.
			You shine like the rainbow bridge
			or like that light inside my fridge.
			You're my love guppy.

			For you I'd consume haggis,
			or lose the joys of Bacchus,
			or live in sin with Mike Dukakis.
			You're my love guppy.

			No time's too long for me to wait.
			For you, I'd fight against Fate,
			though maybe you could lose some weight,
			You're my love guppy.

			Without you, I'd be not whole,
			I would have to sell my soul,
			or gulp a quart of Tide-E-Bowl.
			You're my love guppy.

			My passion is always mounting.
			I'm like a geyser founting.
			Well, maybe not, but who's counting?
			You're my love guppy.

			The love that is the more intense
			always has the most silence,
			like quiet bursts of flatulence.
			You're my love guppy.

			I know that my love is true.
			I know that you'll love me too,
			or I'll hold my breath 'till I turn blue
			You're my love guppy.

			I'd not forget you if I tried.
			You make me all warm inside.
			My love's as pure as Naugahyde.
			You're my love guppy.

			Then I hear the words let slip
			From betwixt impatient lips,
			"I want to have a relationship.
			You're my love guppy."

So I don't actually have it memorized, but that's poetry!

Two Films/Television Shows You Can Quote From:  Well that's easy. The Kids in the Hall. The funniest show ever made, and I quote from it on a daily basis. If not out loud, then at least in my head, because if there isn't someone else around who knows the show as well as I do, it's not funny. For instance: "Well I think the great leader is some sort of twisted ass freak!" Or, "I'm crushing your head!" Or, "I'm not being sarcastic." And, not to be too obvious or anything, but you had to see it coming. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Cordelia: "So, does looking at guns really want to make you have sex?" Xander: "I'm 17. Looking at linoleum makes me want to have sex."

Two Songs To Which You Know Every Word: Actually, I have a real problem with this. I don't know any words to any songs... at least, you know, not if the song is not playing at the moment so I can kind of stumble along with it, and that's only if I am extremely familiar with the music already. It's a serious mental block. I'm sure it has something to do with my disdain of poetry. When there's music on, I don't actually really ever pay attention to the words, which shocks my friends to no end. But, like I tell them, it's the music I care about, not the wooing of women by post-pubescent songwriters. Even when I really like the lyrics to something, I never commit them to memory. But having said all that, Scott, being so distressed over my handicap, saw his solemn duty as my best friend to teach me a song, and after days of practicing, (I'm not joking. Days.) I got this one down:

Show me the way to go home. I'm tired and I want to go to bed. I had a little drink about an hour ago, and it went straight to my head! -From JAWS.

Two Dishes You Can Make Without A Recipe: My Mom's special cheesecake, and tacos. If I buy the kind that come in that little yellow box.

Two Cities You Can Navigate Without A Map: I'm going to take this opportunity to be snotty about how well-travelled I am. Munich, Germany. Because I lived within an hour of it for six years and it's actually one of my top 2 favorite cities in the world. I spent alot of time there. The Hauptbahnhof (main train station) is one of my favorite parts of the city and makes a great starting point.
And while it may seem boastful considering what a maze the place is, but Venice. Because it's also one of my top 2 favorite cities and I've been there about 7 times, and because I know all of the major points and I don't mind wandering around it's back alleys lost for a few hours until stumbling upon a place I know. Actually, that's one of the most pleasurable activities in Venice. The other is riding the vaporetti (boat buses) around all day. San Marco piazza is sublime, too.

By the way, if anybody needs a personal tour guide, you know, I am totally for hire. For those two cities, or any other place I've been. Or not been. I'm really good at travelling.

And An Extra Question–What’s A Date You Always Remember, and What’s A Date You Always Forget?: This is the silliest question and reminds me more of those emails I was talking about than the other questions. But, the power of the Slayer compels me regardless, so, I always remember Christmas, because even if for some reason I didn't want to, the retail community makes sure that I don't. And I don't know of any dates I've forgotten, otherwise they wouldn't count as answers to this question, would they then? That was a very British answer in honor of John Lennon. Peace out.

Here's a picture of me in Prague which I thought of posting here because of the inherent personality-typing implicit in the tag questions. It's supposed to be mildly snarky. Probably it's narcissitic. Damn you, Myers-Briggs!

I Know, I'm Sorry, I'm Behaving Like A Total Particle Accelerator. I'll Stop, Truly I Will, Please Don't Stay.

So one of the more vexing problems facing scientists who explore the quantum universe is that the very act of observing quantum phenomena (do dooo do do do) changes the thing observed. (Mah-nah-mah-nah.) That's why when looking at particles in a particle accelerator, they sometimes behave as a wave and other times behave as separate little bits. It just depends on what criteria you're observing by. That's where Schrodinger's Cat comes from, also, and why a quantum physicist can't tell you if the lab kitty is alive or dead for sure either way, until you poke it with a stick. Actually that's not quite right, it's weirder than that. If you put a cat in a box and point a laser at it, which is set off by a quantum trigger that goes off (or not) while the box is closed, the cat, until you actually open the box and observe it, is in a quantum simultaneous alive/dead state, being neither wholly one nor the other. I think. Dammit, it's been a while since I read any popular Quantum Physics books. That stuff is hard to keep in your head. Is my brain dead, or alive? I'd prefer a constant either/or state to actually knowing, thank you very much. Anyway, all this really goes to show is why people avoid scientists at parties, and especially avoid those of us who aren't scientists but try to explain scientific matters as if we had any clue about them whatsoever. But I had a point, really I did. Wait, it's coming back to me... oh there it is! So, quantum problem, the mere viewing of a quantum particle will alter it's behaviour, so you can never really know what it was up to or what it would have gotten up to until you came along and freaked it all out; you can only know what it did self-consciously under the lens of a quantum particle accelerator. And here's what I was trying to get at: Tourism, it's the same thing. But without the particle accelerator. The very act of tourism somewhat destroys what it is people were going to see in the first place. It's not as noticeable in places like Europe, except in small ways. The Vatican, for instance, since it was built, has always looked more or less the same, and remains unaffected physically by tourism, excepting minimal wear and tear. But the difference there is more aesthetic. There is a huge difference, I imagine, between being alone in the Sistine chapel and soaking in all that art at your leisure, and being one of 1000 people and fighting for space, with the whispers gradually reaching a level to where the priests in attendance have to go "SHHHHHHHHH!!", then the whispers die down for a time, gradually rising over the next five minutes until the priests do the dreaded "SHHHH!" again, this wave of whisperage going on constantly until, hot sweaty and tired of bumping into people, you leave.
But in places like Thailand, tourism does much worse. Think back to four score and seven years ago, maybe multiply that by 10 or so since I'm not actually entirely sure what quantity four score is. I think maybe I used to know. Anyway, back in those pristine days of yore, Thailand's beaches were, in all likelihood, serene, untouched places of indescribable beauty. Some intrepid hippie backpacker came across it one day, and pow, fast forward to four score and seven times ten years later, there are thousands and thousands of tourists (including me, I'm not judging) who all came in search of fabled beauty, but in the process tore it up and filled the place with dive shops and 7elevens, and lots of levelled jungle to make room for 5 star beach resorts. It's just not the same anymore. It's still really nice, but not the paradise it was, and I imagine it's only going to get worse. Ohh, maybe the particle accelerator could metaphorically be word-of-mouth and/or advertising about certain tourist hotspots! Well, no need to really run with metaphor, I suppose. The point is more or less made.
But where I was really going with all this, was that Cambodia is both more and less than Thailand, for me. So far. I really like Phnom Penh in some ways: There are a lot fewer white people around, so I can kind of feel like I'm treading new ground, (I know I'm not, it's just the feeling that modern tourists have to hope for the best for) and there is next to none of the usual tourist infrastructure, so you don't get cut off from the normal daily life of locals. I mean, there are hotels, even a few really big expensive ones, but the city itself is a thriving mass of streetlife, motorbikes, tuk tuks, people asking for money or begging you to take a ride on their cyclo, and there is no getting away from it! Not that you want to, when travelling. That's why you travel. But sometimes it's easy to avoid actually experiencing a country and just sit in cafes and go to museums and whatnot. Here, it's in your face and I kind of like that. I had a blast taking a 30 minute tuk tuk ride out to Choeung Ek today... dodging people, other vehicles, everybody waving hello because they're not entirely jaded on western tourists yet... it's a really poor country though, so that takes some of the fun out of it. Meaning that you wind up feeling bad about yourself alot for being able to afford to jaunt off to Cambodia, when alot of them make $20 a month... Choeung Ek, by the way, is the villiage where Pol Pot had his famous Killing Fields. That was also a downer, but interesting. I overheard one guide telling his group the grisly manner in which they killed children and babies, bashing them on trees and even worse. The S-21 prison, which is now a genocide museum dedicated to Pol Pot's victims, was sobering also. You know, most of his soldiers, the ones who did the majority of murdering, were little more than children themselves? That always seems to be the way, in murderous holocausts. Hitler had his Youth, Pol Pot brainwashed young Cambodians... beware of activist organizations breeding armies of children. Hmmm... we should all keep our eyes on this type of behaviour.
Anyway, things I don't like about Phnom Penh; ultimately, it's small and you can do everything in a day, and following the oft-quoted travelling rule of 1 day or 1 month (or is it 3 days or 3 months? Meh, in Phnom Penh, it's 1 day 1 month), I've been here a day too long. That's why I have so much time to blather. But tomorrow, Angkor Wat, for 5 days. I understand that that is a good amount of time there, so we'll see.

In Which I Am By Turns Arrogantly Condescending And Self-Pityingly Auto-Flagellant; Perhaps I'm Just Having Trouble Adjusting

So I got lost on the way to the Lehigh Valley Mall... Gahh! My life is officially boring. It may be time for someone to mercy 12 gauge me.
Alright then, I'll tell you what I've noticed about this insipidly dull country since I've been back. Toilets; they have too much water in them. Seriously, midgets can have a pool party in there. Why all the volume? It's not necessary, splashback is a real danger, and it's gross. I guess I got used to the European design, if not the middle eastern one. Just enough water not to cause a scandal, and not be wasteful. It has it's drawbacks, I suppose, but it wouldn't be polite to go into too much detail, and anyway after a while you get used to them and it's hardly noticable.
Another thing is cell phones; there is so much wrong with that set-up I get a nose bleed every time I dwell on it for too long. Your minutes get used up whether you are making the call or receiving it! Are you freaking kidding me?! That's double billing! That is the single hugest most obnoxious scam that phone companies have pulled yet, and America is eating it up! No other cell companies in the world do that, to my knowledge. Certainly not in the places I've been to, anyway. Another thing that Cingular did to me: When I signed up for my plan, I asked for International calling and was told that normally they don't allow you to do that for 90 days. Don't allow me? What is this, Kiddie Toy Phones R Us? Give me my f%$^&@# International calling, buttmunch! Sir, call this number and explain your situation and they can maybe turn it on. So okay I called the number and was told (after a suicide-inducing automated directory system, but I'll leave that aspect of American life (and it is an aspect of American life as I bet the average person spends on average a half a day per week navigating those bleepity bleep things, a substantial portion of life, if you ask me) alone as I believe that you are all very aware of that outrage) that if I faxed a copy of my driver's licence and a utility bill in my name, that I'd be good to go. I explained that I just returned to the US a few days ago after ten years of living abroad, and that I hadn't had a utility bill in my name since '96. I offered to send them a copy of my bank statement to prove that I could pay my bill, and they refused! They kept saying no, we need a utility bill, and I kept saying that that was not possible, but I have plenty of money and I can prove it to you, jerkoff, so help me out here. Nope.
There are so many things wrong with that that I barely know where to start. It's just stupid. I'm practically begging to give them my money, and they won't take it because of a bureaucratic nitpicky policy and they are so narrowly focused that they can't make an exception in a case that categorically merits it. No matter how much reason, proof, yelling, or begging I offered, or speaking to managers that I did, they would not allow me to get International calling, no way around it. Again, what the hell is Cingular, my babysitter? "We're concerned you won't be able to pay your bill, so rather than letting you try to prove that you can, we're just not going to let you have a basic service that most adults in today's world are qualified to have. No cookie! Bad consumer!" Ow see! My nose is bleeding all over... my... computer ink...  Ok that's stupid. Sorry.
And now I'm getting a little bit more philosophical, but having brought up the oft-maligned "C" word, I want to add my half-penny to the subject of Consumerism. I am a consumer, for sure. That had always struck me as a stupid label for people to get all riled up about because I'm sorry, but everybody in the world, from the Dalai Lama down to Joe Bacteria is a consumer. Of course when it's complained about, it usually refers to much more voracious consumerism than eating and drinking and clothing yourself and whatnot. Which, after not really having been here for so long, is really visible to me right now. Voracious consumerism, I mean. Yesterday when I finally found the Lehigh Valley Mall, which I hate but my brother got a gift card for some store there for Christmas so I took him, (and the gift card thing? Good God it's out of control!) I saw a little kiosk named "Bears in Chairs" and they were selling, holy crap, little stuffed bears sitting on little wood chairs. Lots of different shapes and sizes and whatnot. Everytime I see something like that, I'm that much closer to checking myself out. And shopping centers, my God! They're everywhere! I hate shopping centers, malls, all that, but you have to go to them all the time every time you go out because that's all there is! I guess what I'm saying is that I really don't blame Americans on a personal level for being voracious consumers, because America itself is set up so that most people don't have any other choice. America isn't so much a nation, or a place of Freedom and Democracy, as it is a huge consumer machine. This probably would sound extreme to most people, if they even understood what that meant, but believe me, after everything I've seen, I've never seen a system as strange and warped as my own home country. I mean, I've been here about ten days now, and I've already realized that if I want to do anything in this country, I have to establish credit, get a utility bill, and eat greasy food, regardless of all the other fine qualities I have going for me. There's almost no way around it. And then, once you ante up and get the stuff you need so that you can get done the things that you need to get done, you wind up having very little choice in where you go or what you do. Do I go to Friendly's or Applebee's? Do I shop at Sears, Big Lot, or Wal-Mart? What DVD are we watching tonight? By very little choice, I don't mean that you don't have a zillion sub-categories to choose from. I was in a Barnes & Noble the other day, and my head nearly exploded. I saw so many books that I wanted to read that I couldn't buy a single one of them and I had to run outside in abject terror. There is so much choice that you could spend all day deciding what book to buy, what breakfast cereal you like, which car defines you as a person, (not to get too Fight Club, but.) where to eat, what to watch, what porn website you like the best, etc etc and suddenly you are absorbed in these things so completely that that is what your life is about. What I was trying to get at was that the only decisions you wind up making are what to buy and where to keep your stuff, which is not a life. But it's seductive... I'm not above it. I bought a car, and I really want my own apartment so I can put my stuff in it and get an awesome home theatre set up. But you know what that means for me? It means that if I ever want to really travel again, I am trapped by that. Sure, I can go to Jamaica for a week or wherever, but it can never be the way it was, unless I check out completely. Sell everything, or throw or give it all away, and run like the wind, Forrest! Most people don't know what else life has to offer, and/or they have families and can't sell them, (ah! For the days of white slavery!) and so are stuck where they are, living the only life America has to offer.
I am a hypocrite. I am aware of this. I'm currently going through the process of buying in. I only hope that one day I will be able to check out, but if I can't, at least I've had the last ten years of actual freedom in my life. That's better than most.

The World Is Full Of Tools

So, what with the fact that I have uploaded all of my pictures from Istanbul, Cappadocia, and my tour of the South Aegean region, and typed in descriptions of each one, not to mention the other day's post and now this one, you might think I seem to have more time on my hands than a traveller should. Well, I'm back in Istanbul with a few days to kill, and while I'm still making it out there everyday, I have seen most of the city, and so I'm taking advantage of the good internet and downtime to catch up on a bunch of stuff.
One thing I've noticed online in the last few days is an upsurge in the scientific community against religion, starting with a really thoughtful post over at Cosmic Varience, and then today an article on NY Times which I just finished reading and is the cause of this out-of-travel rant.
Of course, we've been hearing alot of this noise from Richard Dawkins recently since the publiction of his book, but it seems to be stepping up a notch in the rest of science-land as well.
In the post on CV, Natalie Angier basically states her disatisfaction with scientists who wail about the whole Darwin/Creationism controversy, yet fail to step up to the plate against the scientifically ludricrous Virgin Birth. She feels that it's Science's duty to tackle all forms of such preposterous false beliefs. Have some balls, labcoats! Put Occam's Razor on Mary and see what theory you can dredge up there!
Then today, the NY Times article discussed a forum that occured earlier this month at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., where a bunch of scientists brought out the idea of spearheading a movement to Evangelize science against religion. There were differing views among the scientists attending, with Dawkins and like-minded god-haters basically wanting to have Christian Concentration Camps along with Bible, Koran, and Book of Mormon burnings laughing all the way, while other more even-keeled scientists wish to press forward with the age old technique of testing hypothesis, re-testing, then showing the world proof of the veracity of science with cool toys like paved roads, penicillin, rubber gloves, and home theatre systems, and eventually staging a remake of the 'ol Baal vs. God play, where Elijah (I think it's Elijah, someone else will have to fact check for me 'cause I'm on a roll!) mocks the Baal worshippers and says ok, if Baal is so great, tell him to make it rain! So they pray to Baal and weep and gnash and of course no rain comes. Then Elijah says, "Yo! Yahweh! Bring on the water!" And it dumps buckets of water and the Baal freaks freak out, only this time the scientists will be all like, okay God and Allah freaks, you guys pray to your grand high poo-bahs for a better video digital compression format than DVD, and we'll apply our science, and see who gets one first.
The reason behind all of this recent push for science to begin a more active fight against religion is, of course, due to the recent outbreak of the evils which religion has caused in the world, not to mention the very many evils caused by religion in the past. People like Dawkins think that if religion were done away with, the world would go all shiny and everybody would have spacecars and candy and live for a hundred years.
Here's my problem with all of that. Now, I am a great believer in science. I will agree with Dawkins insofar that if you're not, you're retarded because even the Amish need to churn butter, a very scientifically advanced dairy farm achievement. Well okay, it was advanced several hundred years ago or whatever, but it's still science. If you really believe that science is evil, go live in Cappadocia, but away from the main population of more advanced cave-dwellers, please.
The problem is, that in reality it is NOT religion which causes the larger of the world's evils. Oh sure, witch burnings, being afraid to sail off the edge of the flat Earth until thousands of years after the Greeks already knew the world was a ball, yeah. Totally religion. But the real problem isn't religion. Religions generally ask their followers to be nice to each other, it's just that their followers usually miss the point. "Each other" means, you know, everybody in the world, not this thing where it's taken as only your fellow Sunni muslims, and kill all the rest. The problem is people. People screw up religion, starting with people who only want to use religion as a means to power. The catholic church probably needs to be abolished. I despise the catholic church. Not because I hate god, but because the catholic church hates God; they've totally obliviated everything that Jesus had to say about real spirituality. They are the Pharisees reborn.
I'm afraid that getting rid of religion, much as Jesus abolished the old rules of Judaism, and Mohammed made a few addendums, and then so did Joseph Smith... well you see my point. There will rise up a science cult and people will still kill each other for scientific heresies. As long as there are people in the world who desire power over other people, there will be a way for them to get it, and if not religion, than something else. Religion is a tool, just like Science or Democracy or Communism. They all sound good at the beginning, but they can be used however the user wants. It's a baser human nature to be very very nasty to other humans in order to get to what they want.
I'm not saying that science shouldn't shed some light on some of mankind's fuzzier notions... Evolution is, I'm afraid, a fact, and I think it's important to teach it over Creationism... it's an old argument, but Evolution doesn't rule out God. I don't think that Science can or ever will. Science is the greatest, most effective tool we've ever come up with for understanding nature, but to a spiritual person, God is above and beyond the reach of nature. God's tool to make the universe could easily be Evolution.
But a war against religion is sort of self-defeating. What science really needs to concentrate on is George Bush's brain, and how it got that way. Also the Pope's. Rush Limbaugh's. Osama what's-his-face's. Michael Moore's. And Richard Dawkins'. And how to weed this us vs. them mentality out of the human race, you know? Make sure everybody gets up above that spinal cord thinking thing which Einstein pointed out as our main problem these days. Or at least make the Us, smart, creative, compassionate people, and the Them, power mad, intolerant, blind  freaks. Weed 'em out, yo.

Miscellania Minutiae Mania

It's another Keith Olbermann special comment... my favorite part about this one is the last paragraph; the idea that the next President can use Bush's own New World Order policies against him is wonderful. But in reality, with everything else our miserable excuse for a President has done, there's no reason to believe he won't vote himself in for a third term. Think that is a silly thing to be afraid of, do you? Don't forget, Franklin D. Roosevelt did it. He served for three full terms, and I believe was elected for a fourth! Think you that Bush won't try to claim that America needs him as much as we needed FDR? Well sure, it sounds like sci-fi, but so does having a monkey for a President. A sci-fi sitcom. As a reminder of what grape ape is capable of, here's a picture link of him effectively destroying our Constitution. He's signing that odious military tribunal piece of crap.
Moving on, because the more I think about it the more I want to slit my wrists; I was transferring all of my computer files from my work computer to my tablet PC yesterday in preparation for getting the hell out of Dodge; the screen on my tablet is differently shaped than my work screen, and when I went to my blog, my page was all crazy lookin'! The banner was way off center, html code was peeking out from behind it; it was all afright. Apparently I was using a fluid layout for the main column, and on wider screens that just jacks it all up! So for anybody who uses a widescreen, or any other differently shaped monitor, and were wondering why I seemed to be lacking in pattern recognition skills, well, that's why. It's all fixed now, I think, but you have to clear your web browser's cache to view my repaired layout in all it's glory.
Otherwise, things are moving along nicely. I'm packing up and getting pretty excited about leaving. There is a certain amount of tension in my shoulders and neck which won't go away until the plane takes off because I'm paranoid about more harassment from the Castle, and just want to get out of here before they get another chance. Scott and Jeff have quit their jobs, also, because they were staying at my camp due to the fact that their company had been unable to provide them with housing, other than a dilapidated caravan on a street with no security, no water, and broken windows, and so they are calling game and heading out within the next two weeks. We hung out with Steve and Darren one last time; they are planning on leaving Iraq for good in December. We also went over and said bye to Rodney and Barney, two other guys from Chiemsee who are still working over at the camp where I used to work before making the mistake of choosing employment with GBG. Rodney is the Irishman who actually hooked me up with my first job in Iraq, so I'm not sure whether to be grateful or hateful! Well, it is what it is, and I suppose he meant well. I thanked him, of course.

A Dream Of Injustice, My Moral Dilemma, And What It All Means

I read 'Almost Home' last night, which is the autobiography of Damien Echols, the most prominent of the West Memphis 3. He's not necessarily a great writer, although the closer he gets to the main event that has shaped his life, the more eloquent he gets. But man, his story and his attitude on death row are incredible. Obviously, the saga of the WM3 has left a lasting impression on me. I had a dream last night where I was accused of something, I can't really remember what, but something to do with my fat ex-boss (not Phil; he's too shark-like to ever be fat) which I hadn't actually been involved in. Anyway, there was a "trial" (In the woods?) which was more like a kegger and nobody would listen to me... the drunk judge at one point told me that all this didn't matter, it didn't matter what I or anyone said, I was going to prison for this crime, it was decided before the alleged crime was even committed and this was all for show, allbeit a rather poor show.... well it's obvious where that dream came from, having just finished that book. But what was really neat about that dream was how it really suffocated me. I mean, really. I woke up taking deep breaths, and with the realization that the right to a fair trial was more than just words... it's something you hear all your life as an American, but until you actually suffer the injustice of being falsely accused and railroaded... yes it was only a dream, but that is sometimes what is so great about them. If you are deep enough in it, you really feel what's happening, and it doesn't matter that it's not something you've ever experienced in actuality. You are watching a movie in which you are the principle protagonist, and you forget that you're in a cinema until the lights come on.
The range of your emotions in dreams can be quite surprising, also. Usually dreams are fluff; odd and interesting but ultimately very easy to slough off. But occasionally... I woke up from this one with an incredible amount of rage, which was I think the true cause of my breathlessness. It's hard to feel that kind of rage about anything in normal day to day life, even for someone like me who enjoys a good rant from time to time. It was the rage of personally feeling my right to exist taken from me... My first rational thoughts, after all the dream events and emotion began slowly sliding away, were of this: This dream wasn't so much about the WM3, although obviously inspired by them, but about the feeling of terror and helplessness that is going through the internal systems of mine and everyone else who understands what is going on as our rights and dignity are being slowly (or not-so-slowly, as it were) stripped away by the Red Administration. Granted, most of us may never be affected by the atrocity of a Senate-approved interrogation tactic, or a House-approved listening device in your overhead light. But they are still your rights that are being taken away, and as 3 extremely normal boys (even though they were not considered normal by their own hometown, they could have been dropped anywhere on either coast without making so much as a dribble) in West Memphis, Arakansas could tell you, you never know when it might be convenient for someone with more power than you and something to hide to use those stolen rights against you, or someone you know.
Anyway, as some would say, who am I to complain? Well, they'd be right. I've been thinking about my moral quandry quite a bit recently. An old friend of mine basically called me a baby-eater for being here, and while I could never see it that way, the very fact that someone could think that about me has given me pause... There are three main reasons why I have continued to stay in Baghdad. 1) The money, hence, baby-eater. I no longer view the money as a reason to stay... honestly. If that was the only thing I had, I would leave this week. I don't need more. 2) My Iraqi friends. I am paying them very decent salaries, and they were unlikely to find other work if I'd have left prematurely, given the overall situation in Baghdad, and I've come to care for them quite a bit. Scott picks on me and rather derisively says I have a false Great White Hope attitude, but I fail to see how caring about your friends merits that. Anyway, I was able to, through a contact, find employment for most of them with a US contract in Kurdistan! So, my friends are about to begin a very decent-paying job in a very safe place... many of them will be moving their families up there. So, very shortly, reason #2 will be out of date! That's 2 down, one to go.
The third reason is more personal and less easy to write about, but suffice it to say, with reasons #1 & #2 down, #3 will be much easier to handle, and I am going to start making preparations to leave this month, actual date of leaving to be determined, depending on some mundane logistical issues. Definitely by December. Will keep you posted, of course.

The Title Of This Post Is [That Song Bill Murray Woke Up To Every Morning In Groundhog Day]

Well, remember how I said it was going to be nice to finally know whether or not I'll be staying or going from here by the end of this month? And that one post where I said it was funny how I always seemed to be saying that I'll be leaving Iraq any time now, but somehow it never seems to happen? Well guess what? It happened again. sigh. We got an extension until July 27th on our eviction notice, due to some legal questions about GBG property... a technicality. So I'm here for at least one more month. How many times have I said that now? Anyway, it's actually a good thing because it gives us more time to try and work with the Iraqi Government to secure this property for long term use, so all this means is that we actually have a better chance of staying much more long-term now. Or I could be on a plane to Thailand on July 28th. Is it Groundhog Day? Actually I'm psyched, because it means I'm that much closer to being able to say "I lived in Baghdad for 3 years." No, don't try to understand, no one can but me.
Ok, just because I just came across it, and it's about as horrible as anything else I've come across relating to US Military behaviour in Iraq, I'm going to link you to a video about some illegal warfare tactics our fine military used while attacking Fallujah. My favorite parts are when the US soldier kills an unarmed injured civilian, and the whole thing where we bombed the city with White Phosphorous... an illegal chemical weapon which we had once upon a time signed international treaties not to ever use, and which, by the way, our government vehemently denied using. But watch the video for yourself, and then tell me that we're still the good guys.

Happy Antichristmas!

(P.S. - Go see the best sign yet of Satan's presence among us!)

Here's a picture comparison in honor of the day we all know and love as Antichristmas, which only comes along once in a hundred years. Is George Bush the one we've all been waiting for? Are we living in the lucky century? Here's a site with proof of his presence among us! Don't be a mensch with Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia! Embrace your inner Baphomet and give George a hug! Don't forget to hang your black stockings over your oiltank, as Santa Bushie will be driving his SUV by with tax refund checks for everyone! Hail Satan.