Atheist Meditations

Well, this weekend I hopped in the truck and took a road trip up to the great Minnesota north woods. Spent Saturday night buying drinks and having rounds bought for me at the Winton municipal liquor store / bar. Population 189, originally a lumber town - now a little island surrounded by an ocean of frozen swamps and lakes. I guess I just needed a little time for contemplation.

I wonder if many of the folks out there in the world realize how groovy Northern Minnesota is as a landscape. There can be something almost alien about the species of pine; the strangely geometric outcroppings of rock that materialize around the occassional turn in the road, the patches of leafless birch trees with skeletal limbs - layers of greys and whites.

I also needed to take a bit of a step back from the edge of madness this weekend as well. Something about all that reading up on the education system as a weapon to be inflicted on the children of the lower classes, cuz marketing used to have a problem getting adults to buy what they didn't need, so our population had to be dumbed down to either addicts or children. Seems to me that if, in the land of the free, this institution was deliberately created to retard the developement of consciousness and divide the masses - well that's just a bit too fucking much like the Matrix now isn't it?

As an atheist I've already got to shoulder the fact that a majority of the people I will meet and interact with operate in a world view that I feel is fanciful. I'm growing into an understanding of the power of media immersion, and try to encourage people to see participation in such a system as sinfully self-indulgent. My own mortality and that of those I love still haunts me. The erosion of history, the defamation of science, the advancement of the cult of the hero; it's a wonder I can function at all.

Somehow that education thing is just the straw that broke Joe Camel's back. If that's true, then we are totally engaged in a class war where there are no innocents, neutrality is suicide, and we fight desperately just to hold on to our own humanity. This is not the education that Sesame Street promised me, where everyone who took learning seriously in a multicultural environment could expect a life within a generally benevolent society. Sure our military and corportations will kill hundreds of thousands in the third world and our entire economic structure is based on irrational models where the population never stops increasing, but at least within the borders of Rome the citizens could expect some peace and respect.

It might just be the organic, dark roast talking, but at this moment I'm starting to feel that this knowledge (and I'm going to have to devote a fair amount of my time to further evaluate for myself regarding that) shatters my vision of America. It would invalidate my compact with this society.

In my soul I shall struggle to maintain the peace of the great north woods. And with the peace of the warrior, I shall continue to struggle with my duty as a citizen.

Just watched about five minutes of the O'Reilly Factor, where 'the bestselling author' discusses the topics of the day.

What a frightening crock of fucking shit.

I just spent a portion of my afternoon following up on some of the allegations I blogged about in my recent 'edjumacated' posting. This shit had me pondering some crazy thoughts. We all know that forces within the established power in our country were feeling the fear around the turn over to the 1900's. Anarchs and socialists were dragging down the structures of entrenched power and ordinary people were being enlightened to the question of 'why shouldn't our society try to benefit everyone, not just that small percentage born into wealth?' Dangerous times call for severe measures.

So folks like Dewey started to advocate a system based on the Prussian model of mass education, valued by the ruling class not for the quality of education it bestowed upon the individual, but the damage it inflicted upon the lower classes. I can't swear to this shit, I wasn't alive at the time, but this article by John Gatto makes some focused accusations. I'd need more free time than I possess to validate these out of print works, so I suppose some propagandist conjured all this up to motivate me against the establishment, but the gist of this arguement makes a lot of sense.

When I see Bill O'Reilly's patsy guest going on about how restorative justice advocates want to eliminate the notion of punishment as part of some misguided liberal plot to remake America according to their brain damaged delusions I think, holy fucking shit, people can't really believe this can they? But, curse the neurons that string together to give me personaility, the vast majority of folks don't understand that this entire network is owned by people who are determined to use the tactics of propaganda to advance their agenda. They can't play fair and win, the repeal of the fairness doctrine means they don't have to. When 20% of the population controls 80% of the wealth, democracy has to me 'managed', and shit like Fox News is a big part of that.

If one believes these crazy thoughts, the damage is not inflicted by Fox, the damage is inflicted by the education system that was devised over a hundred years ago to insure that us children of the lower classes never grew into adults - and try to deny that too damn many of the folks you know personally are really just immature children who have never had to grow up.

I myself have many foibles and addictions.

I can remember vividly many painful and isolating experiencing in my public school education. To think that those were not the valuable lessons of modern, urbane society, but a purposefully inflicted - purposefully damaging program to keep my generation and class in their place. I just don't know what to say or think.

We know that our enemies have killed the Robert Kennedys of the world. While we may never be able to prove it, the deaths of the Paul Wellstone's and Pat Tilman's leave too many questions to live with comfortably. This is class warfare, the entire dominance of a few family for many generations be at stake. That they would try to tear off our nuts before we knew what they were good for should not be a surprise. Fuck, Machievelli talked about the tricks of ruling the masses in the 1500's that are still shocking today, don't forget every one of our enemies has read him and a hundred other original sources.

Can we really live in a country where for the last hundred years the educational system has been designed to produced emotional retards who will buy whatever is displayed before them with the most pleasing combination of primary colors? Can we be trying to have a rational debate regarding politics and the direction of the world in a country where the majority of the population has been purposefully educated to the level of dim-witted twelve year olds? Perhaps that explains the postering of Kerry and Edwards; a society where rational, critical arguements have no value.

Are these crazy thoughts?

Towards the end of the eleventh century, Andreas Cappellanus wrote his treatise on Love and what it means for a man to serve in Cupid's Army. Our society has changed a bit since the 1100's. Also, discerning the lean wisdom from the fat of sarcasm can be almost impossible when the written word is seperated from us by so many years and different cultures. Yet Cappellanus did have wisdom, his insight into 'Courtly Love' can still inspire today. Much of what we consider to be 'Love' came out of the notions of this era - from the sappy love song to the romantic legitimization of jealously. Love became a prize that any man of 'good character' deserves, an emotional state where 'the heart palpitates' and 'the true lover turns pale' at the 'sight of his beloved.' 'A true lover considers nothing good except what he thinks will please his beloved.' 'Marriage is no real excuse for not loving.'

These snippets come from Book Two, where Cappellanus details his thirty-one Rules of Love. His fourth rule, 'It is well known that love is always increasing or decreasing,' has a fascinating sense of fatalism to it. For, in rule nineteen ,'If love diminishes, it quickly fails and rarely revives.' I believe Jack Nicholson said it best, as he often does, in one of his cheesier '80s flicks, 'don't tell me you are falling in love with me, people fall in and out of love all the time. . . '

Thus my romantic world view once again finds itself broadsides to the evangelikal. In their rhetoric, Love should be more than a feeling, it should be a committment. The greatest expression of that committment will be the Sacrament of Marriage, a bond strengthened by divine will to last throughout this life and the next. Your feelings of Love may ebb, but since you are obligated to this contract, a person of good character should ignore those feelings and remain faithful to those obligations.

I disagree. I live my life as an example of my disagreement.

Check this, young males inherit a considerable amount of instinctual drives towards risk taking behavior. We see this displayed every single day in such activities as weaving in and out of traffic in sports cars, violent bravado on and off the sporting fields, heroism in battle and dangerous ambition in gangers. As a portion of the species, we young males were the risk-takers. When something set off alarms in the troupe, a rustling in the brush, the young males would hoot and charge headlong. Successful older males, in examples seen in hundreds of mammal species today, have already staked out the valuable territory - young males often must make their claim in the unpredictable frontier. For damn near every generation going back to Cappellanus - and even much, much, further than that - young males of my social class were invariably conscripted to 'serve' the interests of the ruling class as soilders. Cowardice was quickly bred out of us; risk-takers saved their buddies lives, got promotions, came home and reproduced. Our species rules the planet, and spends billions of dollars a year in casinos, because we have an instinctual need to take risks.

Yet we live in a society that is being constantly sanitized. Every sharp cornor is being rounded down, every workplace altered by a safety code, every surface cleaned with anti-bacterial soap. Our lives are much safer and the prospect of surviving one's twenties to find stable breeding relationships are almost guaranteed to children of the evangelikal classes. For my entire youth I never had to worry about being drafted. I saw no friends crippled by childhood illness. One quondam pal died in a car crash. I think that childhood was great, and I heartily salute the progress of our society towards a falling mortality rate. The impetus for risk taking does not go away, however. Evag children, as well as so many others, are raised with the intention of protecting them from every possible risk. Private schools and parental oversight concerning their friends insulates them from many social risks. They are so far insulated from the risks of war, that combat to them is entertainment on the Xbox.

And now these 'protective nurturers' want to take Love and do the same thing to it. "I don't want my fragile little butterfly of a young man to suffer any pain at all", so we will turn dating into courting, and spend way more of our time glorifying the importance of marital vows than exploring the emotions of Love. They fill these poor kids with stories about STD's and how condoms break every damn time you try to use one, encouraging them to marry as virgins. Xenophobia so severe the Israelites would be proud. Date within your church, their approval is as important as the feelings you experience.

Set aside the fact that this be 2006. Thanks to a feminist atheist, we have contraception that allows for stable sexual relationships where the risk of pregnancy is minimized. Thanks to a multicultural society, we can find partners from the other side of the planet. Thanks to our casual views towards sex, lots of pleasurable experiences are out there waiting for ya. Thanks to modern medicine, women can wait until their early thirties to begin a family - you don't need to get married at nineteen.

Set all that aside, and just think about the emotional value of Love. A lot of romantic love is just made up by creative, emotional people. We sing songs about true love and watch powerful movies where Love conquers all. Sure one can lead a healthy life where committment overrules the emotions, but why? Why not have one area of one's life where risk taking is not constrained by 'better judgement'? Revel in the intoxication of passion and pursuit. Let the agony of rejection hollow out a cave inside your chest. Take risks with Love. For if one is to serve as a brave soilder in Cupid's army, one must follow the orders of one's heart without hesitation.

Indeed, if Love must always be either increasing or decreasing, than once one feels that thy Love for thy partner be deminishing, that is not the time for 'values' or 'committment' to step in. Nay, If something is wrong, fix it. If you cannot - continue seeking.

We all discover sometime in our emotional immaturity, that we have a golden ticket in our hands. Don't miss the rollercoaster.

"We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forego the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks."

Thus our President, Woodrow Wilson, declared in a speech to the business class of his day the purpose of public education. That fucking heretic Karl Marx's radical and dangerous writings where the working class began to see themselves as an important part of society and that said society should be structured to benefit them. Anarchists had been driven to homicidal insanity by generations of priviledge enjoyed, and beat-down administered by the ruling class. Kings and tyrants were being assassinated right and fucking left.

America's education system was fragmented, with all sorts of immigrent children being taught about the world in countless little schools around the land. That's no good. Got to have everyone singing from the same hymnal in youz want to rule the world.

Here's the memory hole link. I don't know how legit they are, but this 'reposting' just seems so . . .

I am consuming the most interesting beer from the Bell's logo, out of the Kalamzoo Brewing Co. in Comstock, Mi. Wheat Eight Ale. As black as my soul, with a smooth and hearty flavor - but before you ever get that pilsner glass to your maul, holy shit. This beer has the most un-beerlike and strongest aroma I've ever encountered. Wheaty. Wierd. I digress, but check it if you got the junk.

Some claim that irony is the highest level of wit. Others that irony holds the key to the deepest tragedy.

Today I was reading up on some of the changes that have taken place within the government agency that oversees the mining industry in our country since 2001. How the Bush administration, similar to how they fucked up FEMA in order to make it into little more than an avenue of profit for their financial supporters, appointed fuckers to head up this agency who came right from the owners of the industry - either former executives or lobbyists - and they fucked it up good.

Since their objectives were obviously to protect the money making potential of their investments, they began pulling the teeth out of this agency and getting hardcore lackidasical about enforcing fines and other penalties. A few years of operations without any oversight, accidents start to happen. Fuck, this one journalist I was listening to was detailing the rules which had been retracted in the last few years that, if they had still been in place, would have directly affected the types of accidents we've seen in the last few weeks.

This is just business as usual for Mr. Bush.

Like the nasty shit we heard about at the human rights violations hearings over the weekend. Our President going out and talking about how terrible Saddam be while one of our number one allies in the 'war on terror' is the horrific tyrant controlling Uzbekistan. 500 fucking million U.S. taxpayer dollars sent to that little patch of hell on earth just in 2002 alone. That fucker learned damn well from the soviets how to run a fucking terror state, you never know who to trust or when 'security' forces are going to pick you up - and when they do, you will be praying for a quick death. They boil human beings to death there. They hold teenager's hands in boiling liquid til the skin falls off. They rape men with broken bottles.

Yet all this bloody, soul blackening irony is lost on this nation like nutrients through a pissing drunk. You won't hear about this on 'religious radio.' I heard the 'AP Network News' that those bastards played yesterday. A clip of Mr. Bush defending his domestic spying program, a one liner about hearings in a few weeks, and then on to the religion desk where they gave up another twenty seconds to Mr. Bush encouraging the 'noble cause' of some anti-abortion rally somewhere (and reaffirming the connection between their beliefs and their image of Mr. Bush.)

I'm sure none of this shit makes it into the radar of those poor, sinful dumbfucks who listen to right wing radio. Yeah, I want to get my take on how the world works from fuckers who are paid
to spread the neo-con talking points. Hey motherfuckers, the revolution will not be televised. The revolution will not be on Clear Channel. The revolution will not be something you sit on your ass and hear about later.

Ah, to be young and blissfully fucking ignorant. "I know we get our clothes from sweatshops, but I prefer not to think about it." The veil of bullshit our media haphazardly throws up around youz has sundry loose threads - yet you choose not to pull on any of them. "I just want to be happy, I deserve to be happy." You don't deserve to be fucking happy. Most of our species has lead 'short, brutish lives.' By nothing other than the remarkable fortune of lottery did you escape a fate of subsistence farming and the plagues of poverty, war, and pestilence. But that good, indulge in the survival tactic of believing that you were 'blessed' or 'superior' and turn you back on those people. For fuck's sake, don't devote a fucking second of your blessed life to understanding how America's foreign policy, and your taxpayer dollars, makes damn shit sure that the balance of haves and have not stays that way.

"We want our country to have a strong defense" but your eyes glaze over at any mention of the Military Industrial Complex.

Way to go, you have something, a drug, that I refuse to let myself have. Focus on that job, focus on that family. When the shit gets too bad even for you to ignore, well, that will be the 'rapture' now won't it. You'll even look forward to that.

I like this beer, but maybe it's a little bitter.

More than once I have arranged the pixels upon my monitor, and your's perhaps, to enumerate all the areas whereupon the History Channel could improve the quality of their programming. Last night was not a night were the History Channel needed improvement.

'80 Acres of Hell', a program regarding the Union prison camp in Illinios was a frightening lesson. One that reinforced all those concepts that we should have learned as a people by now. I believe the value of this program can be outlined as follows:

• Insight into the fact that leadership and even the rank and file will often indulge in a 'punish the prisoners' mentality where the helpless prisoners are treated inhumanely as retribution for the hardship the war has caused in general.
• Documentation of the use of prisons as economic engines. With forced labor, reduced rations, and even dumping bodies in Lake Erie to pocket the burial allotment; prison camps become profitable to some.
• An example of how fear mongering justifies both the cruelty and the spread of further martial powers. By the election of 1864, the fort's commander had imposed martial law over much of the city of Chicago - rounding up dissidants and sowing fear - all in the name of 'defending' the fort from a rebel plot.
• Another lesson in how history is written by the victors. While Confederate leaders were tried and hung for the poor conditions of some prison camps in the South, no one ever had to pay a price for what happened at Fort Douglas. Indeed, most of us yanks have been blissfully unaware of it for all of our lives.
• It was a northern atrocity. As much of the movements which I oppose are based in the South, an example such as this one may engage my drawl laden brothers and sisters. It should also help us to avoid 'Northern Arrogance', which does not help anybody or anything.

I recommend this program to everyone as a helluva'n educational example. Set your DVR's.

I am just going to come right out and say that I've been pulled into the world of 'Project Runway.' I can see how those other reality shows are so successful, with such a straightforward concept and so much drama. Project Runway exceeds all others with the fascinating look into the world of fashion design (a world I've never had a single curious thought about before catching my first episode) along with such a curious combinations of designers. I've now seen four designers cry, only one of them was a female. Project Runway is the ultimate 'couple time' T.V. viewing, with your partner being pleased since it's on Bravo, and the guys only have to wait about forty minutes before half-naked eastern european models are having wardrobe malfunctions left and right.

This week, however, the wheels fell off the bus for me as I watched Emmit, the men's fashionwear designer, get the ax in what was obviously an elimination based more on the show's ratings than on fairness or his designs. In designing a skating outfit for an Olympic skater, the eliminaiton came down to either Emmit or Santigo, the wacky blowhard whose only characteristic that the editors have let onto the Bravo network that I dig being his groovy low voice. Santigo's red feathers project was hideous, now the second or third time he has faced elimination with a design that was shockingly awful. Emmit's black thingee, while I will admit did not seem to leap off the screen with a verve of creativity, still looked like something that a skater might actually wear. He was informed that the bottom area was too short and therefore vulgar, but he replied that his form was shaped differently, that that was not his intention to put the booty on display.

So Emmit made one technical error, while Santigo has overreached and found himself on the cutting block repeatedly in the time I've been consuming this show. Santigo has gotten second chance after second chance to get with the program, while Emmit took the hit on his first mis-step. Santigo has made himself a finalist by his immature antics and tendancy to insult the other designers with ruthless creativity. Emmit was a man's man, who held himself aloof from the bickering, dressed fucking well, and wore a hat with a species of style I can only describe as inspirational.

This sense of personal style makes Sir Emmit's tragic elimination all the more sardonic. As this challenge revolved around figure skating, each designer got dressed up in a costume typical of a figure skater. Emmit was a blob of over-saturated hot pink on our television screens for the entirety of his final episode. At the very least, a man of his stature should have been allowed to leave within the dignity of pin-striped suit.

Sir, in my memory your departure will be with manly grace. A tip of the hat, a casual glance down Heidi Klum's top, and a purposeful stride off to destiny.

So I've garnered a bit more of an optimistic angle on life in the last 48 hours. Democracy Now has had two guests in the last two days who each qualify as fucking heroic men, and the notion that some of these guys are still out there, or have existed in the past has helped me to find a bit more resolve in the Idealistic World.

The Story of Hugh Thompson, and how he intervened in the Muy Lai massacre; then remained steadfastly loyal to his military even as they shit on him. It's a helluva trip to think about someone in a situation like that who just decided to do what he thought was right.

Then today we've got the formor British Ambassador to Uzbekistan, who has been leaking his memos and raising awareness of just how shitty America's major 'ally' in the war on terror actually is. The stories coming out of Uzbekistan are worse than those stylized paintings by Herionimous Bosch (sic, I'm sure) describing the tortures of hell. I'm not happy to hear the details of the crimes of this terror state, but I appreciate a man who stands up for truth and speaks it to power.

This weekend, there will be an international tribunal looking into the war crimes of our current President. It's a fucking hell uv a thing.

I'm going to pay close attention and blog about this laters.

So I picked up the latest issue of Playboy, the one with the Al Franken interview. I'm only half-way through it, but I just had some pleasant thoughts about how swell it be to sit reading a Playboy (for the articles) while listening to the Beasties while your woman surfs on her lap top accross from you. How many evag men could get away with that? Nope, it would be some rediculously irrational display of insecurity and faux righteousness. Poor bastards, they are not even allowed to grow to a level of casual familiarity with their sexuality.

If I have any young readers who seek advice, today it would be this: Enjoy every minute of your unique and fleeting consciousness. Wait to find a woman who has at least fought the demons of oppression to a reasonable stand-off, which usually takes somewhere in the early thirties. Pair up with acceptable partners, but don't commit until you are comfortable. Don't get insecure and try to grab the first one you can get your hands on, wait for quality.

Date enough so that you are familiar with the products, or you won't know quality when you see it. (insert adequate sarcastic smirk here.)

Yesterday a major British scientist released a statement declaring that the world and the warming effects of human activity have already passed the point of no return. 'Within this century, billions of us will die, and the few human breeding pairs will be forced into the arctic where the climate is tolerable' - or something like that. Yep, children born today will get to see the end times. The Four Horsemen will return, and many of us will die in those predictable ways.

Sure, there will still be many other scientists who come out and urge us towards taking steps to save the planet, but we all know better than that. Like any realistic changes are going to take place in the next ten to fifteen years, and even then the population will have continued with its maddening momentum to reduce the Tree of Life into consumer products and yet more suburban homes. The 100 million sinful non-thinkers who make the choice every day to turn on Christian Radio and tune out reality will believe these calamities are part of Armageddon - in a tragic way they will be right.

I'm still going to try to fight the good fight, but I'm not going to beat myself up with too much guilt over the fate of life on this planet. Certainly, I'm an educated sentient being, and a citizen of the world's last, most powerful empire, but I am only 30 years old. Half of my conscious life has just been overcoming the self-esteem smashing effects of modern, institutionalized existence and a childhood of having bullshit images beamed directly into my skull for four plus hours a day. I had to find love, friendship, and read a mountain of books (plus try to write one. . .) Perhaps some are born with the fire of social change already burning bright at 18, I needed to stoke a few other fires, and maybe enjoy a bit of the smoke.

The battle over the fate of the planet was really lost before I got out of junior high. The Idealistic Inferno that raged during the sixties and early seventies was but a golden hue upon the horizon when I came of age. What happened to all that debate about 'Population Bomb' and 'Waldon II'? The bards of peace were killed, the great orators of equality were shot down, and a generation grew tired to standing up for something greater than themselves - so they elected the Marlboro Man to be President. A man who had spent his entire life reading off of cue cards, and pimping his cowboy good looks to an industry that has killed more Americans, in a slower and more degrading fashion, than died in Vietnam.

He was a man who only needed to see one side of an issue, the side that was paying him to speak. So, after decades of monied interests slowly eroding away at the Fairness Doctrine, within the media of our country, the FCC under Mark Fowler dissolved the rules regarding equal time to be given to those on the opposite side. Amazingly, both houses of congress passed a bill that would have re-instated this practice, but Reagan went against the majority of elected representatives and vetoed that in 1987.

No longer did a broadcaster have to portray both sides of an issue, or allow individuals who were personally attacked to have an opportunity to respond. Thus the door was opened wide for cancers like Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, and the Religious Regimes to begin their steady spread through the body of our nation's politic. So now 'fair and balanced' means repeating the statements of the pro-war lobby 400 times for every sentence a questioning skeptic manages to slip in. Now 'liberals' are craven, sexually disfunctional idiots, whose own self-hatred causes them to lash out at America and try to drag it down with them. Now the only christians you are going to hear on the radio are the ones with money - those who have not 'chosen to move beyond the phophesying of smooth patriotism' as Martin Luther King jr said (linked in previous posting).

Even when Neo wakes up from the Matrix, he can't save the world.

So we can try to fill our lives with truth. Cultivate the most meaning and value we can with the relationships we got. Try not to blame the Baby Boomers too much for failing, against such technological advancement perhaps they never did have a chance. We can try to live our lives to the fullest, and live by damn high moral standards, but we should accept that the Idealism we yearn for in our hearts is not realistic. Idealism can no longer be entertained as a notion of a utopia where racism is non-existent, and we all wear white cover-alls in a classless society. Idealism will now be laying down your life, meaninglessly, before the brutal train of an industrialized society out of control.

Pragmatists will do whatever they have to in order to survive. Idealists will make choices determined to have at least some Ideals in their life from which they will not waver.

May you live in interesting times, and bum a square off the Marlboro Man.

The steepest incline in attempting to argue with a conservative or enlighten an evagelikal must be the dire, gaping chasms {insert broad hand gesture here} of 'difference of opinion.' I say, 'difference of opinion', only because I've stewed almost my entire life in the bland culture of MinnesotaNice; what I really mean to say is appalling ignorance. Ignorant of our species' history. Ignorant of what Howard Zin would call the 'peoples history', ignorant of realpolitik, . . . When more than one in ten 18-34 year old Americans can't find this country on a globe, and an even larger percentage of college graduates lack the reading comprehension to extract a subtle point from five sentences -

To return to my own life and my own responsibilities, I seek to avoid these pitfalls of ignorance and help my fellow sentient beings do the same. Yet when I reach maturity in a society where a great deal of folks believe what happened to Native American's was an unavoidable result of two cultures meeting, rather than an endless litany of individual's choosing greed over compassion. I was born into a decade where John Wayne said in his Playboy interview, 'I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority . . . to irresponsible people.' Thrust into such confusion, surrounded by so many world-views, how does one choose wisesly? How can we know that we are in the right?

Sometimes I drink Jim Beam on the rocks and ponder some dark thoughts. Perhaps the Devil's Advocate be in the proper path, the only way to pragmatically move forward. Maybe militant islam can only be countered with violence and extermination. Maybe our society does require a majority to exist as little more than worker bees, and our public education system should have a clear purpose in training the children of these classes to aspire to little more than shift manager. Maybe I should just care about myself and figure that all those behind me in the race for more consumer goods are just on the wrong side of the 'bell curve.'

Then one encounters something from the internet or a voice on community radio and a spiritual event occurs in that mess of emotionals that I usually just ignore and call my soul. Thoughts and images are conveyed to me in such a way that my consciousness does more than merely comprehend, I feel. For a moment all the isolation of my sentience evaporates. I feel a connection with others, a connection to the spiritual world and to a movement that's working towards making this too often flawed world a bit more of the whole that we can see in our mind's eye.

Martin Luther King jr. was a man who possessed the gift of such communion. Even now, his words and speeches can inspire us and help us find the grit in our souls to continue to fight for a better world. 'Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence,' one of the reverend King's last speeches does it for me. When I first heard this speech several years back, I was driving through the night after a evening of tense conversation with a girl 'friend' I'd been flirting with off and on for a few years. I Listened to Dr. King's amazing rhetoric and realizing that his worldview was more than just the elevation of 'his people', he condemned the military industrial complex and described war in the fashion of an adult - the way we never hear it described. Here was a man who I've been conditioned to revere since my public school education first made a big deal over MLK day, and this guy is so much more than religion and bus boycotts (although one cannot seek to understand him without those elements.) This guy's moral compass forced him to try to take on the whole world's problems, not just his own. He sought to attack the tree of evil at the roots, not merely pruning a few branches. When I heard this speech I felt so relieved, so many of the concepts of liberalism, so many of the particulars of understanding history; I shared them with Martin Luther freaking King jr. I became a lot more confident that I was in the right at that moment. I was so entranced by his words that when my cell rang, and the girl's number came up - with all that implied - I turned it off and took the long way home.

"True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries and say: "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them in not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psycologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."

Please consider taking a quarter of an hour out of your day to read this speech - or find a audio version to download to your portable player - I believe this is an important step in nourishing one's soul and making the world a better place.

Honorable Senator,

Please take a hard stand against Mr. Alito's nomination to the Supreme Court and support your fellow democrats to do the same. His trackrecord of supporting corporate interests, granting more powers to the executive, and showing contempt for the honorable body that you serve by lying about his willingness to recuse himself on conflict of interest cases; all these things make him way too wacko to be granted such powers.

Of all the reasons to oppose him, however, my strongest inclination is simply because Mr. Bush appointed him. Since his questionable re-election (and the even more questionable one before that) his standard tactics of croneyism and secrecy have yielded a rediculously long list of failures. Has he ever appointed the right man (or woman) to the job?

Why can this nomination not be stalled while the nation resolves some of the other issues assailing us? With the Abramhoff scandal a fair percentage of those on the right may be removed from office in a another few months, not to mention the surge of democratic seats America is sure to reward your party as it lashes out against the indulgences of the GOP.

In my humble opinion, now is the time to lunge for the throat of the vulnerable neo-cons, not to play patty cake over a nomination that will only weaken the position of the real America over time. Lunge for more investigations, lunge for greater public outrage, and lunge towards impeachment.

I'm certain that from your perspective from within the Senate's hallowed halls, this situation is revealed to be much more complicated and nuanced. Yet, from the outside looking in, all I can say is that I'm bloody ticked off and tired seeing this happen in my beloved country.

Thankyou for your time,
Matthew Wolf

- aside - It's a piece of cake, my fellow bloggers. Writing a letter to your senator is just like firing one off on your blog. Sure it will probably only get read by one of his ignorant minions, fucked in the head from four years of political science, but at least one is doing something. I know a lot of feminists out there are in a depressive fugue-state while this nomination is going on. Write three letters and find out how to get involved in one rally somewhere. That alone is doing something. That's good for America and good for your soul. Give 'em hell!

Some days, when I listen to the headlines at DemocracyNow it just blows my fucking mind.

The Iraqi journalist, Ali Fadhil, who won the Foreign Press Association's award for young journalist of the year a few months back, was awoken in the middle of the night to U.S. troops firing rounds into his bedroom. Amazingly, he and his wife survived, so they took him and interogated him with a bag over his head for a few hours, then gave him 1500 for 'damages' and dropped him off alone in the middle of Bagh-fucking-dad at night (Which, in my humble opinion, would be attempt at 'accidentally' getting him killed number two.)

I don't know why they bother, since even if he had finished his documentary on how wasteful the U.S. and British agents of occupation have been with the reconstruction funds over there, nobody in our media driven country seems to give a shit.

I mean, we've been over there for several years now and I don't think there is one single event that we can take some pride in. Not one single thing that has gone according to plan. Not a fucking cache of WMD anywhere. No reckoning in this country regarding how our President could have had such a blank check to lead us into war, or a serious discussion into how the intelligence agencies that are supposedly protecting us could have been rediculously wrong.

Yeah, they had elections, but apparently the pony show of democracy ain't enough. Violence has been on the rise constantly.

Yeah, we got rid of Saddam Hussein, but so what. His secret prisons and torture chambers are still in full operation, just that now it's Shia fanatics or white, American soilders operation them. Every fucking group seems to have its own death squads, and every day there are reports about another stack of bodies found tortured to death with power drills or some nasty shit like that. Was it Fisk, who reported recently on the deaths per month in Baghdad alone? Like, just in this one city, there would be over a thousand deaths every month. Many young men, women, and children with hands tied behind their back and a single shell to the head. Even Hussein's trial is just a big fucking joke to amuse those few Americans who still get off on some rightie telling them how powerful our military machine is. The carefully timed and specific charges, to insure that he's brought to justice for a horrible crime that just happens to not drag any U.S. officials or important corporate interests into it.

Lets see. After an assassination attempt against him, Saddam brought the full horrors of his security apparatus against the people of those towns. After a murderous, bloody display of defiance involving the remains of four contractors, the U.S. military brought the full horrors of our military machine to level the city of Fallujah. The only distinction here is in the means. Both are attempts to crush a peoples' will to resist by making an example. This is the sociological beat down, where the dominate force attempts to make one thing clear. We are an unstoppable force. if you incur our wrath, nothing will protect you from the consequences - and the consequences will be fucking unbelievably bad. This ain't nothing new.

Oh, and it seems all you folks with the 'cost of the Iraq war' counters running are going to have to download an update. Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard lecturer Linda Bilmes have released a study that puts the cost of war are more like a trillion dollars. They add in the 25$ barrel increase in oil and all the medical costs of the soilders who have come back from Iraq with spinal cord and brain damage, yeah, I think we can admit that that's a legitimate part of the 'costs of war.'

So even if you take the cynical, machievellian arguement (that the downing street memo supports) that the Bush Administration chose to hype up low quality intel and ignore the experts for a war that was meant to secure oil access and show the world that this superpower stills got the cahones to throw some bombs and our soilder's lives around - even there it's a failure. Iraq's exporting less oil today then when Saddam left power. Our post invasion decision to guard the ministry of oil while ignoring the looting of Baghdad's museums, guess that didn't pay off.

Of course, maybe Bush incoporated is not so upset with a quarter increase in the value of crude. So what if that oil ain't getting pumped today? It'll sit there just fine while Kurds, Shia, and Sunni's terrorize and slaughter each other. Five, ten years down the road, when every sentient being who gave an honest fuck about the Iraqi people is either dead or has been driven, despondent, from her sands; there will be some fucking tyrant around to turn back on those pumps. I'd say it's a good bet he'll decided to make sure the black gold flows to the West, too.

This war makes me angry. I don't know what else to say.

So now we begin the pleasant process of repopulating this blog with all the good shit now that we have fixed the name to no longer be a remarkably eloquent expression of personal ignorance.

So with a bit of the ole cut & paste, we'll soon be back to our godless Jyhad. Thanks to everyone who has shown me the gift of tolerance in putting up with my dumb ass.