Atheist Meditations

Today we end the Love Her or Leave Her trilogy. My original Idea came from some stupid-ass rightwing blog, where there was a Norman Rockwell-esque little pic on the sidebar where a WWII era soilder with good genes was holding a coffee mug saying, 'hey liberals, how about supporting America for a change?' I thought (well, after I had navigated away, cuz sometimes I'm a bit slow on the uptake) 'Hey neoconned dipshit, how about pulling your head out of your ass and living in the real America.' When I was in school, the detention supervisor had this swell little one liner, 'either you are part of the problem, or part of the solution. Mr. Wolf, are you going to be part of the problem, or part of the solution.' That man had wisdom dispite the horrible trainwreck that was his career.

Recently in the news we have George's pet court ruling against whistleblowers. If you find that the government agency you we're once proud to be a part of is breaking the fucking law, and you decided that your morality cannot tolerate a fencepost up your ass any longer - tough fucking shit. Try to tell the people about it, the gov' can drop the hammer on ya. Speaking truth to power is now fucking illegal.

Or how about this fucking bullshit with the appointment of the same cock-knuckle who ran the NSA's phone banking operation to now head the CIA?!? What the fuck? How many mai-tai's did mom have to slug down nightly during pregnency for that to seem like a good Idea? 'Oh, but nobody has proved they were actually listening to anybody calls . . . if I did nothing wrong I have nothing to fear.' Fuck you. Fuck anybody who lives in a stupidity bubble that big. Obviously these fucks don't know a fucking thing about the civil rights movement and how the government used their secret services to lean on the leaders of said movement. If somebody wants to stand up for the rights of their people or anybody else, if somebody wants to raise awareness regarding an illegal war that's killing millions, if somebody wants to use religion for something other than merely cheerleading the fucking executive branch - those people get leaned on. Dozens of black leaders sit in prison on charges then contest, in some cases they have been killed. American Indian Movement leaders have felt the same pressure. John Lennon was dogged by the CIA from his first 'bed-in for peace.' Now, thanks to fucking worthless phone companies all too eager to hand over private information, the fucking government has the potential to draw up a flowchart of any adult American's social network. They will know who you call, and how long you talk to them. They will fucking know who you care about, when they want to put pressure on you, it will fucking hurt.

Of course, if you are a fucking mailbox skull, then your understanding of the Civil Rights Movement can be summarized as, 'things had gotten kinda bad, the blacks had some protests, we saw it on T.V. and then people changed.' When a person's understanding of history is similar to a children's bedtime story, they can't fucking interact with the present. Howard Zinn's famous quote, 'if a person does not understand history, they have no solid footing. A person can tell them anything and they will likely believe it.' (my paraphrase) Understanding the history of racism in this country fucking sucks. Read one fucking description of a lynching and you will be sick for weeks. Take a step back and comprehend how that individual violence was used systematically to keep an entire population down, and you have taken a step towards understanding Bush's crusade in Iraq.

Love her or fucking leave her. That's what they say. I say you don't have a right to open your fucking mouth until you have taken just a little bit of your precious time on this planet to read the other point of view. How stupid does somebody have to be to listen to Rush Limbaugh or one of his clones interpet current events for them? The fuckers all get the same talkingpoints handed to them along with their morning coffee and handful of pills. We don't exactly live in the Matrix (although sometimes I think that's a damn fine analogy.) Understanding the way the world works does not require a high I.Q. or a college degree. Take one of those 4.5 hours a night spent on primetime to start on the path. It's not easy. The difficulty does not lie in the elusiveness of the information - Wikipedia, Mother Jones, ect. - but in the shitty grind one's soul undergoes as too much of the comic-book Amercia is peeled away.

I feel deeply for the poor soul who's been blogging for Bush for the last five years. How bad must one feel when they finally realize how shallow their world was?

Yet it is satisfying to feel that you understand how the world works. Comic book America is great for kids, but insufficient for citizens. Our greatest and bravest generation didn't get turned into fucking hamburger on the beaches of France, or some worthless little island in the Pacific, so that this generation can feel about America the way Hitler Youth felt about Germany. Time to have an adults understanding of the world. Time to be a citizen.

If you truly love your country you would want to understand her, not blindly support whatever she does in the world. If you love a woman who has a chemical addiction or a problem with the credit cards, do you just blindly support her? Or do you seek to understand the problem and get her help?

This is not a 'liberal' vs. 'conservative' thing. It's not a 'republican' vs. a 'democratic' thing. The behavior of institutions of power has changed little since Machievelli wrote 'The Prince.' Just like that scene in Matrix II that didn't make any sense at the end, some debate and dissent in figured into the system to diffuse those who would seek real change.

Just look at the slave media and how they cover the Iraqi Crusade. To steal Chomsky's insight, the corporate media covers this war the way a high school newspaper covers the football team's season. There might be some debate as to who to put in as QB, or how to tighten up the defense, but the notion that the home team should be winning is just taken for granted. How many voices in the mainstream press ever ask if we should win in Iraq? Was the war legal? No. Was the information that advertising firms used to 'sell' the public on the war legitimate? No. Are we making Iraq a better place than it was under Saddam? Un-fucking-believably, the answer is no. Perhaps christians with guns on the streets of a holy muslim city can never make the world a better place.

We are citizens, not soldiers. The troops over there do not have access to the information that we do. That is why over 80% still think that Saddam was responsible for 9/11 and that's why we invaded his country. A soldier's duty is to follow orders and kill. A citizen's duty is to have some informed say in when and who those soldiers kill. A soldier's place is not to question why . . . a citizen's fucking job is!

The fact that 80% of our troops are still afflicted by a propaganda machine that 'motivates' them with mistruths is a fucking travesty of democracy and freedom.

I'm not always right, you don't have to always agree with me. But their is a greater understanding to how the world works than anybody is going to force you to memorize in highschool or even 95% of university experience. Why would they?

Yo neoconned bitch, the love of country is not blind love.

1. The My Lai massacre in Vietnam, in which a platoon leader in lead the killing of several hundred Vietnamese civilians, was originally reported by the Army as a successful battle against insurgents.

(T)rue , (F)alse , (D)on't know, (W)ho cares?

2. The public education system in America was purposefully designed to produce generations of workers who would lack the 'liberal education' of their betters. Elucidated in this statement by President Woodrow Wilson during a speech to 'business leaders' of the day: "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."

(T)rue , (F)alse , (D)on't know, (W)ho cares?

3. The 9/11 Commission, that investigated the attacks of September 11, 2001, completely omits the collapse of building 7 later that day. Many feel that the spontaneous collapse of a 47 story building in a manner that looked a lot like a controlled demolition requires plausible explanation.

(T)rue , (F)alse , (D)on't know, (W)ho cares?

4. The revolution will not be televised.

(T)rue , (F)alse , (D)on't know, (W)ho cares?

5. Since 1950, the manufacturing and the financial services sectors of the U.S. economy have swapped places in their total percentage share of the nation's GDP. From 29.3 and 10.9% respectively in 1950, to 12.7 for manufacturing and 20.4 from financial services in '03. During that same period, the average U.S. corporation was making almost 60% of its profits from manufacturing in the 50's, with less than ten percent of the bottom line provided by financial services. In 2003, those percentages had flip flopped, approximately 5% profits from manufacturing, and almost 50 percent from financial services (credit cards, financing schemes, ect.)

(T)rue , (F)alse , (D)on't know, (W)ho cares?

6. While our current deployment in Iraq does involve some of the most miraculous, life-saving, medical systems, keeping the fatalities amongst our soilders amazingly low - this also means that far more individuals are kept alive with major head trauma and other horrific injuries. The average American has never seen a single image of a wounded vet who gave multiple limbs or a scary portion of his grey matter in this war.

(T)rue , (F)alse , (D)on't know, (W)ho cares?

7. While most folks today think of Vietnam protestors as spitting in the faces of returning vets, the anti-war movement amongst U.S. conscripts was so powerful and well organized that military leaders feared 'revolution' and a loss of control. Over 300 underground newspapers were published by soilders during the war. According to the Pentagon, a half-million deserted.

(T)rue , (F)alse , (D)on't know, (W)ho cares?

8. 1 in 4 children in America is malnourished.

(T)rue , (F)alse , (D)on't know, (W)ho cares?

9. In the 50's Iran had a democratically elected president. He didn't know his place, and began interferring in the activities of the major multi-national oil extractors operating in his country. He was replaced by the Shah in a CIA orchestrated coup, which created the oppresive environment where radial religious fundamentalists were later able to pull off a revolution. The CIA and the U.S. Military have tried, most often successfully, to assassinate or replace over a dozen democratically elected leaders in Central and South America. Usually because their 'socialist' agendas involved putting the welfare of their people before the property rights of U.S. based corporations.

(T)rue , (F)alse , (D)on't know, (W)ho cares?

10. Iran-Contra, a scandal that should be the first thing anyone thinks of when Ronald Reagan's presidency is mentioned, involved the smuggling of cocaine into our country on CIA planes.

(T)rue , (F)alse , (D)on't know, (W)ho cares?




Tune in later this week for 'Love Her or Leave Her, the angry vulgar rant.'

With wise skull shining in the mind-day sun, a wandering mystic traveled along the dusty footpaths of life. One day, he encountered a young man standing at the crossroads, loudly proclaiming to the sun and the sky his love for a beautiful woman. Such emotional proclamations of true love are rare, even in the fabulous land of wandering bald mystics; he decided to stop and query the young gentleman.

"Young man, young man, who is this woman who you are so enraptured by?"

"Oh, how I love her," he responded, "I love her so much that I'd kill for her. If she told me to, I'd break your neck right here without a second's hesitation. That's how much I love her! I love this woman!"

Perhaps our wiseman stole a glace at the sturdy shoulders and callous hands of the strangly threatening young man. Perhaps he quickly noted his legs open stance, deciding upon the reliable 'kick 'em in the groin, poke em in the eye with the staff' maneuver should he get out of hand. Yet, such passion was still rare, so he pressed forward with their dialog.

"Young man, young man, I'm impressed with the intensity of thy inner invokations. But, please tell me who is the woman that can inspire such . . ."

"Oh, I love her," the young man interupted, "don't you try to say that I don't! I'll lay the beat down on anybody - even you old man - who tries to say that I don't love her!"

"I understand, I understand," our gentle philosopher continued, "I understand that you love her. I certainly am not trying to discount thy love."

"Damn right. I love her so much I'd do anything for her."

"And this wonderous woman, what is her name?"

"Amerilla!" The young lover proclaimed loudly, "my beloved's name is Amerilla!"

"What a beautiful name, what a beautiful name. I has such a ring to it. I feel like I have heard it before. Why is she so wonderful? What makes her so great?"

"Oh she just is. She is better than every other woman in the world. Amerilla is the greatest! I love her!"

The mystics forehead contorted with wrinkles as he concentrated on his investigation. "Such a wonderful woman must have had exceptional parents. Does she come from around here?"

"Maybe, I don't know."

"Well, how about her recent history? What does she like to do? Does she enjoy culture and art? Does she like to drink wine? Has she traveled the world? Does she worship the gods? Does she believe in justice, or in empathy?"

"Maybe, I don't know. Who cares?"

"Young man, young man. Please help me to understand. I would think that if you truly loved this woman you would want to know everything about her. The shape of her neck, the names of her cats, her favorite book, her thoughts on the meaning of life, what makes her laugh; if you truly love someone you want to know all about them. How do you know that you truly love her if you don't know anything about her? She could have a red 'A' tatooed on her breast, she could have spent the last five years in prison - you don't know anything about this girl, do you?"

"I. . . I. . .," the young man stammered, "I know that she's the greatest. . . and I know that I love her."

"Oh pshaw!," the old man scolded, "You don't know what love is. You are not in love with a woman, you are in love with ignorance. You disrespect the object of your affections with such a juvenille emotion. You disrespect the notion of love with such a misshapen take upon it. I thought I had came across a man of passion and love. Instead, it seems I have come across a fool. If Amerilla were here, she'd tell it to your face, man you're some kinda sinner."

So the situation called for that quick foot to the groin, and perhaps the old man's walking stick busted a nose when aiming for the eye poke. Same end result. The old mystic shook his head and continued on his journey. As his carefully shaved head eclipsed the setting sun, he was heard to mutter into the vaporless wind.

"Is there no hope for love? Is there no hope for Amerilla. . "

I lost another fucking book of stamps. I swear, I'm definately doing my part to insure that stamp prices don't get hiked again in the next few years. Every time I buy a book of stamps (and often, I'm so unprepared for the 'pay bill phase' of the month that I'm buying said stamps at an ATM for 15% markup) I never use more than five a month, then I loose the damn things. Cheese on Rice!

I should just accept that a highly forgetful mind be a highly developed, creative mind. In order to be able to grapple with the complex issues of modernity and the spiritual existence of a dissadent American, well, that requires a lot of free memory space to move those big blocks of information around. When my brain defragments every week (usually Thursday nights, as I watch UFC reality show on Spike) lots of little bits like where I put my stamps or my truck keys gets reallocated somewhere I can't immediately find Friday morn.

Been getting more than a few comments lately about my spelling errors. Thanks for the editing, most writers have to pay someone to do that. I'd just like to repeat part of my Mission Statement, however. When the Atheist Seeker gives it to ya, he gives it to ya raw. Rarely do I proof read or go back and edit my shit. Part of it be that I often compose my posts in a highly focused state, and when I go back to rewrite them, I feel my passion for the position waning. Waning passion always sucks; I try to avoid that feeling. Secondly, I already feel that I spend an amount of time blogging that many moogles in the 'real world' might consider an addiction. I bet I'm late for work at least twice a week cuz I'm on a rant. It's O.K. I'm borderline self-employed, and I find the spontaneous creation of plausible excuses an enjoyable use of my creative talents. Yet when one takes a big step back and realizes that, even though I do enjoy readership on four continents, the topical nature of blogging combined with the fact that only a few dozen folks are going to read a post . . . well a sic, sic, here, and a sic, sic there . . . I think my time is better spent on the creation of fresh content then the arduous task of spell checking.

Since I run Firefox, I usually have Dictionary.com hooked up in another tab. When a word don't quite look right to me I quick check it there. I'd say my spelling vocabulary has improved quite a bit since I started doing it this way. When I just run a spellchecker, I don't have to think as much. I now know for a fucking fact that 'across' be spelled with just one 'c'.

Finally, I'm pondering my frequent use of the pronoun 'you' when I get into a rant about evag thought. For example: 'You want to live in a world where everyone believes the same thing, where you can just do what you are told rather than have to struggle with the meaning of life as a man.' I wonder if it turns too many of my potential readers off, like I'm accusing them of holding opinions that they do not have. I've also got some feedback from a very valued critic who doesn't like the word 'evag' all that much. Like 'proddie' or 'papist' it ain't meant to be a nice term. I've been thinking about shortening it to just 'vag, since the 'e' in front reminds me too much of the sorry 'e-ification' that went on during the dot.com bubble. Email, ezines, eporn, . . .

I've decided to get back to my roots here at Atheist Seeker. A little less random thoughts and morose observations on the nature of introspection, a little more stick'n it to the gawd fearing man. After all, I'd say that next to voluntarily lowering our planet's human population, more people growing out of fundamentalist religion would be the best thing we could ever do for our subsequent generations.

It's like it is with any substance abusers. If some people still are willing to interact with them and make-believe that a case of beer per night is perfectly normal, the drunk will continue to repeat the behavior. The friends and family that turn a blind eye are known as 'enablers.' They're support structure probably keeps the booze hound alive, but until they withdraw that support he may never see the situation he's in for what it is.

I'm determined not to be an enabler for fundamenatalist, bullshit-based, emotionally perverse, evagelikalism.

Those poor fuckers are hurting themselves and hurting America. I'm not going to pretend they're christian. I'm not going to pretend they are rational. I'm not going to pretend that they are patriotic. I'm fucking sick and tired of having to hold my tongue when they indulge in the most disgusting acts of self-gratification in public. Think about the children!

Evags need to connect the dots between public 'prayer' and public masturbation. There is nothing wrong with masturbation, just like there is nothing inherently wrong with prayer; society just prefers that you do it privately and keep your JPD number (jackoffs per day) to yourself. We don't want to see it in public, we don't want our emotionally and sexually immature children exposed to it.

Masturbation and evag prayer have everything in common. The only fucking difference lies in the specific organs stimulated. Masturbation became a part of human existence as a by-product of a highly successful mammal trait: intense pleasure release upon . . . release. Evolution predicts that those who possess this trait to a strong degree are more motivated to bust a nut, thus more likely to carry on the trait to the next generation of players. Similarily, our evolutionary environment has rewarded groups with strong social bonds. The human trait whereby emotional pleasure can be released by group activities has been honed by the same conditions that fondle our nuts during orgasm. Groups that possessed this social/emotional trait were held together more strongly than others; in a harsh world the loners and the anti-social often fail to reproduce.

The fact that you can release endorphins and enhance your sense of community with the use of public displays of ritual does not impress me.

It is an obvious factor in human fucking existence. If one stimulates themselves with sexual material and manipulate the tubesnake, pleasure will result. If one stimulates themselves with emotional or 'spirtual' material and engages in behavior like chanting or appealing to a diety, pleasure and a sense of belonging will result. Prayer, just like banging the bishop, won't release endorphins unless you really put your whole heart into it.

I've never done a circle jerk, but I imagine that having multiple participants - if it didn't weird you out, but that's a differnt thing all together - would only enhance the release of pleasure.

I wonder if that many evags have ever thought about it in this way? There is nothing magical or divine about the pleasure one can feel either in the community of a singing congregation or the novelty and excitement of 'preaching the word' on a street cornor. We know that, aside from a tiny fraction of the human population over the last hundred years or so, life on this planet has been fucking hard for homo sapiens. That tightly knit groups tended to survive better should not fucking surprise anybody. That one can feel a sense of community and well being through various public rituals and displays should not amaze anybody. Indeed, what would be fucking amazing is if it did not.

From chanting African natives to kneeling Catholic nuns, all across this immense planet and throughout time, folks have been stimuating their emotional senses and enjoying their release. It is a perfectly understandable behavior, just as masturbation is a completely understandable behavior. What it doesn't require is a supernatural being to release that pleasure, and the fact that it makes you feel good does not prove a fucking thing regarding the 'truth' to your belief system.

I would think that members of the fucking 'just say no,' generation would understand that just because something feels good does not mean it leads to truth and understanding. Give me a collection of Christopher Reeve's DVDs, a vial of crack cocaine, and temporary leave of my morality, and I could convince any fucking evag that they were the son of Krypton. This realization would leave them feeling fucking great, like Tom Cruise jumping on a couch great, and they'd be filled with unstoppable might - right up to the edge of the skyscraper. Reality don't fucking care how good your beliefs make you feel.

So to conclude, I wish that evags would keep their private emotional masturbations private. I don't want to have to see guys going out on a date with Rosey Palm and her five sisters when I get on the train. I don't want to see folks engaging in pathetically simplified emotional rituals in a public park. If I want to see a sex show, I'll fucking go to Amsterdam. If I want to see a prayer show, I'll walk into one of those 'churches' that looks more like a warehouse.

Some of us want a world where our children grow up and use the behaviors of social pleasure release to form bonds accross religious and ethnic lines. Not some weak ass bullshit that reinforces religious bonds. Cuz what the dumb fucking theists never admit to themselves is this: everybody is not going to eventually come around and join your fucking take on religion. If it hasn't happened in five thousands years of war, genocide, and now mass media, it ain't gonna fucking happen. So stop pretending that jacking off with your fellow evags means something special, and start jacking off with the rest of us. Now there's a fucking concept with the ring of truth - if there is one thing that's true about all humans everywhere, we're all just a bunch of jack offs.

Gained some interesting insight into the inner world this weekend. Cindy was out of town for a wedding, and by some indecypherable combination of hotel rooms and family members - she was going to split a room with her sister who was also sans man. Thus the wolf had an entire weekend to recreate the bacholor lifestyle.

I lived on cold pizza. I drank milk right out of the carton. I ordered beer delivery.

There was something at the bottom of all that selfish indulgence that just began to creep into my conscious world late Saturday night. I needed some time to be alone.

Aurelius came into the version we see today by a long, lonely path. I was an atheist. I was a product of the television generation (so my social skills sucked.) I was an unrepentant addict of reading and my own imagination. I spent a good portion of my twenties as a single man. When I had a girlfriend, often she was just 'part time'; either deciding to hold onto her bets until I came around to loving jesus, or simply focusing more of her attention on school or a career at that phase of her life. Don't mean to depreciate anybody, I consider my emotional and sexual lives to have been very full and successful. Every one of those relationships had some real value that I'll retain for the rest of my life. But I'd grown accustom to being a man who walked alone.

Hermits have something that married men don't understand. If they be kick'n it down on Walden Pond, or they lurk in some mythological mountain range of the mind - they just come to know themselves in an honest, steady way. For couples, a vast amount of their understanding comes from being a part of something. Thoughts often enter into the mind that originated in her brain. Many responses are filtered by a system that has been conditioned to interact - when a squirrel runs accross your dirt floor, that might not require your mind to sidetrack and respond; when your woman remarks that you 'we are out of dishwasher detergent', that does require a response. Perhaps just a grunt.

After a day of solitude, one can glide back over one's mental landscape and find comfort. This is who I am. These are my thoughts that came from where ever into being in my head. I entertained and manipulated them for as long as I felt like. I reached my own conclusions.

Sometimes I can get caught up in the flurry of life. I'm hyperfocused on whatever the problems at work are, or I'm running all weekend to fulfil social obligations. My processor just stumbles from task to task, any gap between them filled with anxiety over running late or whatever. A weekend of solitude, of complete detachment from the world, and slowly a feeling of rightness creeps into the brain.

I'm a complex consciousness racing through the material world in a fragile package of human skin. Yet once in a while I can push my inner experience so far into the imaginative that I'm at as great of a distance from 'stimulus-response' as one can get.

Whatever. Perhaps I just needed a weekend to escape from the horrors being inflicted upon the people of America. I spent about two hours on Friday listening to public radio do their part to 'manufacture consent' around the notion that American's don't care about the NSA spying program. They'd rather be safe than have liberty, Ben Franklin can suck it, listen to us as we provide you with a truckload of voices expressing how unconcerned they are with the loss of their liberties. Public radio has generated a lot of emotions in me over the years, lately all it ever generates is shame.

Time's up.

These are a few things that I have learned lately, although in no particular order and not associated with any real life experience. I retain all plausible deniability.


When a friend gets married, there is a time to get totally trashed and act like a dumbass - that's the bachelor party. At the wedding, you should show respect and keep it under control.


The only way we can stop what is happening in America is civil action like we see in South America right now. If we don't go out by the hundreds of thousands and stop traffic, deliberately seeking to stop commerce; ruling elites don't give a damn how many peaceful protesters are in the streets.


Sometimes firefox just gets into this bug where everytime I key an apostrophe, the find box comes up and I loose my focus. My arrow keys don't work either. hmm.


In cultured parts of America, folks who like to drink take the time to do their preparations before they begin imbibing. Thus, if you are going to a wedding first, then back to the hotel later, one should stock the hotel with beer before one begins getting sloppy at the wedding. At 11 pm on a Saturday night, with a wet brain, is no time to attempt creative solutions for a no booze scenario.


Civilization 4 is just unbelievable addictive and fun. Each civ is so unique, and each strategy for victory so detailed. The game just fucking kicks ass.


A new rug from India can really pull a workroom together.

I realize that my posting trend of late has been a trifle dogmatic. Preaching to the choir, condeming a reader who would not have made it past the moderate vulgarometer rating. Or worse, indulging in the negative thinking. If my soul can only find drink in the stream of Melacholy, I don't hesistate to speak with the voice those waters refresh. It is an honest voice. These are depressing times. No one escapes this fact, 'cept the drug addicts and the ideologues. That simple transaction; if you want the beatings to stop, pick up a whip and join the oppressors. Well, that thinking is shit.

I've been throwing out a lot about fascists, liberals, anarchists, and all that lot. Accusing my opponents of ignorance without really taking the time to develop my own positions enough to be targetable. He's where I'm at when it comes to these labels:

I'm what you might call a 'Romantic Liberal.' In that I hold to the Ideals of Liberalism, but not necessarily to every attempt that has been made in the last two hundred years to achieve those goals. As a romantic, I believe it is important to have a passion for these Ideals; to be willing to interact with them both detatched/intellectually and impassioned/emotionally. The definition of Romantic whereby the intensity of feeling within the soul of the old religions is being now shifted to the realm of culture, art, and philosophy. The transfer of the spiritual passions to a more complicated and socially aware environment - a more complex relationship with the soul for a more complex society. What was good enough for nomadic desert wanderers and divine king worshippers just ain't gonna cut it in the age of gene splicing and stealth bombers.

As for my interpetation of 'Conservative', I don't think it is much of anything in the current milieu. At its nativity, the conservative movement was an effort to pull back on the reigns of a social reorganization program that perhaps was a bit out of control. Not gonna say for sure, wasn't alive at the time. Now, when 'conservative' is thrown around it is nothing but a obfuscation for the regime of a particularily well organized group of criminal elites. The 'good ole values of yesteryear' that these folks want to return to is a world of two classes, slaves and masters. They may talk the talk about compassion, but the walk they be walk'n is the god-damn goosestep.

I'm never prepared for the willful ignorance that most of my fellow citizens indulge in regarding fascism and perhaps the single greatest act of nationwide cruelty ever to take place on planet Earth. To far too many, the rise of fascism in Nazi Germany had everything to do with the demonic personae of Herr Hitler, and perhaps some latent leather fetish in the germanic peoples. No insight into the machinations of fascism are ever sought, and I'd hazard a guess that over fifty percent don't even realize that 'far-right' and 'right-wing' is where the National Socialists belonged.

I'd bet my sideburns over 70% haven't a clue how seemlessly fascism aborbed the dominate religion (Protestant) into their methods of social control. Much against the fantasies of my evag associates, they'd be the ones kicking down doors, not hiding the gays and the jews.

Here's my comparision between Liberalism and Fascism on a few of Liberalism's finer points. Which seems more like the America we dream about? Which seems more like the America we live in?

Freedom of Speech:

Liberalism: The cornorstone of the Liberal Ideal. Everyone is entitled by their inherit liberty to a right to express themselves. In the end, let the best arguement win the day and guide social and government actions.

Fascism: The powerful control the means of public expression. The major forms of mass communication: radio, newspapers, television are all owned by a small number of corporate elites with close ties to the ruling party. Public opinion is seen as something that needs to be moderated and manipulated for the good of the party. Public dissent is either marginalized or excluded.

Freedom of Religion:

Liberalism: Each man (and now woman) is entitled to worship the Almighty as they see fit. The belief that jews, christians, atheists, muslims, pagans, and anybody else can all work together without conflict has had some challenges in the past, but liberals believe it can be done and is worth fighting for.

Fascism: One State Religion that supports the ruling party in all ways. Major leaders within the state religion have close ties to the leaders of the ruling party. Serious criticism or dissent with the ruling party is no more tolerated here than it is within the group controlling mass media. Tax revenues are used to expand and support the state religion, other religions are slowly denigrated, outlawed, made into state enemies.

The Rule of Law:

Liberalism: No man, regardless of wealth, fame, or public office should be above the law. All citizens are equal, with the both the same rights and responsibilities to their society. This social contract is symbolized by a Constitution, and that scrap of parchment means something.

Fascism: The law is what the Leader and his ruling party say it is. As the leader is the absolute head of state, his will becomes the constitution. Often there are different laws for different classes of people, with some races or groups enjoying a great deal more freedom than others.



I'll be out of town for the next few days, I look to any comments or criticism upon my return.
Stay groovy. . .

No words describe the feelings within this seeker's soul tonight. Salon.com's been running a few decent articles for a change, several regarding the evags. Here's a quote I stole from the conclusion of Michelle Goldberg's latest article 'Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism' :

In his book "The Changing of the Guard: Biblical Principles for Political Action," George Grant, former executive director of D. James Kennedy's Coral Ridge Ministries, wrote:

"Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness.
But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice.
It is dominion we are after. Not just influence.
It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time.
It is dominion we are after.
World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish. We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less...
Thus, Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land -- of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ."

Well fuck me running, and it is so much worse than this. In the last 24 hours I've read articles on how pro sports in America have been infiltrated by 'volunteer chaplins' who encourage all of that praying on camera and that sort of shit. Those guys don't come from the mainstream religions, nope, every fucking one of them is provided by some organization that has a fundamentalist mission. Then we have this quote, concluding an article filled with ball-grinding insight into how Judge Roy Moore has used that fucking ten commandments display to rile up the 'faithful', or how some organization is out there recruiting christian ex-military with some fucking line about 'defending America from all threats, foreign and domestic. Top it all off, my supposedly spiritually uplifting process of Random Blogging has yielded nothing but shit tonight. Too many of the 'christian websites' are just obvious drag-nets for google ads (there are at least three on Blogmad that are cut and paste crap with the same layout and shit loads of ads) , or just a series of fucking blogs about American Idol.

I'm 31. That kinda puts me on the cusp between Generation X and Generation On An Anti-Depressant Cocktail Since I Was 6. Somebody has to do something for those poor kids! To steal from the Pink Floyd, we are watching them get led into a meat grinder. These kids know almost nothing. Knowledge of history and the world is the fucking steel spikes we use to drag ourselves out of the pit of apathy and depression. These kids are just wallowing in ignorance - fuck, our culture nurtures anti-intellectualism - and the evil forces of fundamentalist religion are preying upon them like lions on a wounded gazelle.

That's the fucking thing about Kirk Cameron and his worthless 'Serve the Master' website. They ain't making a frontal assault on those of us who are comfortable with the world. Their arguements wouldn't get two neurons 'gainst anyone who has read a book on atheism. No, those bitches are like weak bitches all over the world, they prey upon the weak. They target children from broken homes. They target alcoholics and drug addicts at the end of their rope. They target those who feel like they have been left behind.

Over lunch today I was having a discussion with my good friend R-. After a bit of the ole back and forth regarding liberals and republicans I just cut him short. 'In two or three sentences, define Liberalism. You keep talking about liberals, what is liberalism?' Now, he's a smart guy, so he quickly put it to me to define liberalism in two sentences (as well as conservatism, that was fun), but my point was made. The man just spent twenty grand to get an education at a christian collage that is all about opposing the baleful influence of liberalism, yet he didn't know enough about the enemy to summerize him.

The fucking Iraq war continues to grind on. The worst atrocity to take place in my lifetime, right in plain view of the entire fucking world. Bush don't give a shit, and neither do all these worthless citizens who relish the virtue the ignorance be bliss.

Neat little fucking fact I learned today. We all know that there are multiple deathsquads active in Iraq rounding up people in the middle of the night, torturing them, then shot to head, bodys found next day. We also all know that some of the same motherfuckers who were so helpful to the U.S. backed regimes operating deathsquads in South America are over in Iraq now. The fun fact was this ratio. 9:1. For every death you hear about in the mainstream press from a suicide bomber, nine more have been killed by a deathsquad.

Ah fuck all. What we are seeing in America today is the foundations of fascism. If you don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, get out for your comfort zone and utilize your internet more. Read up on the conditions in Germany prior to WWII. Everything is out there, it's not that complicated, but nobody is going to spoon feed it to ya.

Oh, and if any of you still want the short answer for what Liberalism is, I'll steal from Sid's latest Civilization game. Research Liberalism, and it unlocks two things: Freedom of Speech & Freedom of Religion.

The Way of the Master. No, this is not a link to some S & M website, this is the spooky website that C-Dawgz been posting in my comments section. The 'Master', I assume, is His Lord Jesus Christ, and his lackey appears to be Kirk Cameron. The gist of this particular episode deals with 'how to put any atheist on the defensive.'

In the words of Samual L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, "Allow me to retort."

Mr. Cameron begins his rhetoric by listing off all of the possible loved ones in your life that might not be 'saved.' This is a typical opening for this sort of work, the setting of the stage with some common ground. Without going into too much detail, here the effort is just to reinforce the view that being 'saved' is a good thing. Kirk Cameron knows it is a good thing and so do you.

From here his partner and him do a bit of a back and forth, revealing that they will disprove atheism with a twist on the old Creator/Creation argument. This amused me right away. In this feat of logical prestidigitation, the attempt is not prove theism to a skeptic, it is to disprove atheism to a believer. This leads right into attack on the thinking ability of an atheist.

'I don't need faith to believe in a creator. I just need eyes to see and a mind that works.'
'Indeed, Kirk, it takes more faith to not believe in God, than it does to believe in Him.'

I see this done all the time in the pamphlets that attack evolution. Actually, it is done all the time in public relations campaigns, advertising, you name it. The tactic is to take your weakest point, and turn in around and attack your opponent on it. That their belief in a diety requires faith - well that's just obvious. As soon as one see a tactic like this used, red flags should be going up. This is an attempt to assert that there is really no difference between atheism and evagism - each requires faith in something they cannot see or prove. In fact, this asserts that atheism actually takes more faith than the positions that he believes, positions that he has conveniently not mentioned. Suffice to say, atheism as I understand it does not require any leaps of faith.

Now on to Mr. Cameron's main exposition of the inverted 'God in the works' proof.

Evag rhetoric enjoys repetition and phrases that resonate with biblical verse. Thus, the line 'all I need to understand their is a creator is eyes that can see, and a mind that works.' (roughly paraphrased) This statement got repeated at least a half dozen times in the first ten minutes. Eyes that see, invokes the biblical line, 'They have eyes, yet they do not see. . .' Unfortunately, often a line that sounds biblical will find fertile soil in a believer's mind.

Mr. Cameron is suddenly in front of an shiny, new, black SUV. He points to the various parts of the machine, and explains how each of them serves a purpose, has a place in a design. It would be silly, he contends, to see a machine like this a believe that it did not have a creator. Each part of the design obviously has a purpose, and if something has an obvious design it must have had a designer. Images of complex and beautiful lifeforms follow, and this arguement gets extended to the immensity of creation. From a lovely, symmetrical flower, to a close up of a dragonfly's eye, the narrator continues, 'since I have eyes that see and a mind that works, I can see the inherit design in the world and understand that there must be a designer.'

Now first off. I don't buy that comparison. I may see a Ford Expedition and assume that it has a designer, but that deduction is not based only on the cleverness of the design. Having been on this planet for a while, I've seen that human beings have produced automobiles. I've watched programs on cable that show the insides of assembly lines; I understand that the creation of such a device is within the capabilities of modern man. Now if I lived in a stone-age society, if the greatest display of human ingenuity was a sharp piece of flint, then something like a Ford Expedition might challenge my assumptions that such a vehical had a human designer.

Indeed, human history is filled with examples of things that people could not comprehend being granted divine or supernatural origins. When the conquistidors began jacking the aztecs; the latter, having never seen iron, horses, or facial hair, believed that these mounted warriors were some sort of centaur-like beast. Is that not the short answer for why religions began in the first place, to answer questions that our human understanding could not yet decypher?

I have seen human's produce things similar to trucks and pocketwatches, so the logical step that the next truck or pocketwatch I see had a designer/creator does not require a leap of faith. I have never seen the production of a life supporting planet nor of a human being from dust, thus to assume such objects also had a designer/creator - this is saying that everything in the universe had a purposeful design and actual designer. That is a leap of faith.

Theist's will often point to Mt. Rushmore and argue that if you saw out of the blue, you would not assume that it had just happened naturally from erosion. Obviously, the design (the faces look like faces on your money) implies that it had a designer.

Again, to state that one example of human design, implies a universe filled 100% with objects of supernatural design is not good logic.

Here in Minnesota, we have a state park along the Mississippi. When climbing along the rocky, pine tree studded landscape, one come accross many of these near perfect cylinder straight down into the rock. About four to six inches accross, often three or more feet deep, these weird shafts will often contain a sphere of the same rock at the bottom. When Cindy and I were hiking out there last year I could not comprehend how these suckers were formed. They literally look like someone took a diamond tipped auger and went to town, and they are all over the place. I honestly thought that some human force must have made them for some purpose I couldn't think of. They seemed too mathamatically perfect to have natural causes. Yet when we got to the parks interpetive center, and watched a film on the effects of retreating glaciation, the natural forces at work seem plausible.

Mr. Cameron and those who advance this argument often do this. They draw such sweeping rhetorical strokes, from the interaction of a bee hive to the big bang, from the beauty of a flower to the intricisies of the eye that beholds it - each element can be plausibly explained, but that explanation might take a while. Instead of listening to this explanation, they instead throw out another dozen examples of complexity.

A great tale I heard in Catholic school involved a man who did not want to believe in God, he wanted to understand him. This wish drove him into depression, until one night God answered his prayers in a dream. He was a boy standing beside the ocean with a little red bucket. His white bearded companion instructed him to place all of the ocean into his one little bucket. 'But I can't', he replied, 'it just won't fit.' 'Ah,' replied his now Revealed Speaker, 'thus the enormity of the Kingdom of God will not fit into a single human brain.' Great story, and useful here.

No single human being is ever going to be able to learn enough about astronomy, biology, genetics, antropology, sociology, religion, chemistry, physics, and on to be able to explain every single one of Mr. Cameron's examples. It would be much easier to just believe that they were designed and created. What is easier is not always what is right.

I'll continue this later, in particular with some continued thoughts on the human eyeball as a natural developement and the notion that Charles Darwin was not a prophet - nobody's claiming the inerracy of 'Origins of Species.'

This will the sixty ninth posting on Atheist Seeker since I moved to Blogger and overcame my original miscalculations. That's a milestone of sorts. I should celebrate somehow. . .

I had a moment of clarity the other day, and as with most of my flashes of spiritual insight it occurred while I had my coffee cup in one hand, and was standing in the shower. The result, a diluted cup of fair trade coffee and a water stained note with these two words:

Promote Blogging.

I have come to the opinion that blogging be the greatest technique for the development of the soul and the mind. Blogging, I shit you not, can save America and the World. There is already an immense body of research that will tell you that the cultivation of a diary and daily writing exercises are good for your brain and your understanding of self. My opinion is that the reading of other sentient beings' blogs has an equally valuable effect upon the soul of the reader.

Of all the fucking things in the blogosphere that irritate/sadden me, the one that I feel has to be railed against with the greatest fury is the compartmentalization of the population. You have a certain set of beliefs, you are surrounded by friends and family that tell you those beliefs are true and you are good. You only listen to radio stations and watch television programs that are 'approved' by your belief structure - be it evag christian, 'fiscally' conservative, or even racist in nature. Other points of view are either demonized or ridiculed, but the important point is you would never actually interact with that 'other' point of view. The 'secular' world that the evags refer to is nothing but a collection of stories about drug addicts and the craziest tidbits from the ACLU that can be spoon fed to them. 'Conservatives' rant on and on at a straw-man depiction of 'liberal', they even have pencil-necked limp-dicks on their networks playing the role. Trust me - John Kerry in 2004 was not a fucking liberal.

Most Americans are not this partisan and not this set in their ways. Yet this compartmentalism skews the public discourse and allows those who truly are ideologs to feel that their world-view is both correct, and perhaps more importantly, not silly. By remaining closed off from the rest of the world, they insure that they will not have their positions challenged.

Many evag leaders fight against evolution with the 'argument of entropy.' If you take a bag of stuff and shake it up, it ain't ever gonna form a digital watch. Things tend to move into chaos and disorder, not naturally align themselves into more and more complex lifeforms. This is true, of course, in any fucking closed system. Unfortunately, the planet Earth is not a closed system. The Sun pours loads of energy into our ecosystem every day, thus energy is being added to our system from outside - the arguement of entropy is so foolish, it must be some sort of inside joke.

I bring this up because I believe the analogy ties my glorification of the Random Blog Experience into whatever I started this posting on (yeah, post 69.) When you exist in a ideological bubble, no outside energy is ever going to enter your system. The world has been defined, and all further contact you have with it be for the purposes of reinforcing those beliefs. The soul is starving to death, you are incomplete for the task of citizenship; it is just not enough to think you've learned enough already, time to focus on the routine and the almighty dolla'.

Contrast that with the experience that I feel I can have when I surf blogmad, just stumbling accross random blog after random blog. A while back, I read the blog of an overweight twentysomething describing the shittiness of public transit for his kind of guy, an insight into the prejudice and painful alienation that just these simple experiences often cause. Because he shared that with us, I felt something stir inside of myself. I'd never thought about that before, and my empathy and understanding of yet another aspect to life grew. I felt like some of my own prejudices had been identified, and it stung a little bit.

This is 'energy in.' I'm open to whatever I find on the blogosphere, and some of it does make me reconsider my positions. I feel that this experience, that feeling of growth as you learn something new about the world - that's outside energy being added to your spiritual ecosystem. That's an indicator that you are still on The Path.

Even when I read the blog of some raving evag mother who's gonna pull her boys out of the public school and start homeschoolen' if they don't stop talking about gay marraige. . . I'm don't think that her statements are every going to make me reconsider my Atheism (although I could, I think of that more as a 'perponderance of evidence' than a 'without a shadow of a doubt' thing) but her statements will give me insight into just how fervidly and deeply she feels these feelings. I can still be inspired by he defiance in the face of a society she honestly thinks is trying to bind their souls to Satan. (Hook them on tobacco, send them to die protecting an oil reserve, get them to buy into a system where they purchase cheaply made goods at inflated prices because of a powerful advertising campaign; that I can believe in, Mama Bear, just not the 'god hates fags' rhetoric.)

It has come to my attention, that a small segment of adult society finds particular combinations of syllabes to be offensive, dispite the fact that another combination of nouns and consonants that means the exact same thing is okey-dokey. This same group also feels that exposing children to this type of language is about on par with child abuse, the damage done to their sensitive little minds may never be completely healed.

While I personally could not disagree with a statement more, I'm curious if my occassional expeditions into the blue jungle might be the cause of my plummeting Varb rating. Den mothers and over-protective youth ministers read my blog, and decide to vote me down simply because they see this use of language as offensive or dangerous. Now, with the introduction of the Vulgarometer, this problem will be completely ameliorated!

Ladies and gentlemen, we here at Atheist Seeker care about children! When this potential for negligence came to our attention, the staff here leapt into action to find a technological solution to this dire situation. Just as you will never have to worry about Global Warming or declining energy supplies, because our President and his friends are working tirelessly to find new technology that will allow us to transition seemlessly into a new economy; concerns over the language here at Atheist Seeker need never haunt you again! We examined the faultless models found within the 'V-chip' and the 'Terror Alert' graphics, we took the content here at Atheist Seeker and examined it in a multitude of ways, we pushed our abilities with GIMP2 to the very limit. . .

Thus the Vulgarometer was born! Here's how it works:

Each of our postings here at Atheist Seeker, will now have a clearly indicated Vulgarometer Rating displayed at the beginning of the post! Thus if you are uncomfortable with that level of vulgarity, you can skip downwards to a milder flavor of atheist seeking. No longer will you have to worry about being drawn into Aurelius seductive prose only to find yourself betrayed and offended by a dick joke! Now you are in control of what you choose to read! Your obedient children can be instructed to look away from potentially harmful vulgarity!

The Vulgarometer has four settings.





 The sort of prose that could be read aloud on Public Radio without driving the
speaker into bankruptcy as the FCC does its part to take on the National Debt.





 This level indicates a familiarity with the vernacular on par with the average locker- room or huddle of smokers. Casual references to sex with unmarried partners may be found within, as well as multiple synonyms for body parts and every word that you can’t say on the radio. The occassional F-word will be used for emphasis, in a similar manner to the blogging tradition of typing in all caps.





 At the third level, the use of vulgarity has moved from a means of emphasis into the rhythmic drumbeat of a rant. Not only will the F-word be used in every applicable mode (noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, . . .) but multi-syllabic words may find it used to insert an extra two counts. Part of the purpose of this prose is to afflict the comfortable, if this frequency of swear words offends you - that was probably part of the point.





 They say the devil looks after his own, so perhaps Old Nick himself whispered these clever combinations of metaphor into the author's ear. This level of vulgarity shatters the glass ceiling of respectability and aspires to the high art of EZ-E, the bard of Compton. How Jesus might swear if he caught His balls in a car door.

Now that we have the Vulgarometer here at Atheist Seeker, we can all sleep a little sounder knowing that the children are safe.

I've got a heckuva weekend ahead of me. Tommorow night is the local Cinco de Mayo celebration, and nothing gets Aurelius out of the house on a Friday night like a low-rider parade. Saturday I'm going to watch a Twins game with some of the old pack (and all of their families, since that's the phase of life I'm in.) Sunday, down in Minneapolis we will be celebrating the pagan side of Mayday in Powderhorn Park. Good times, good times. . .

So I've got a brief air pocket here to pop up and observe the world in general.

First off, everybody has got to have seen Stephen Colbert's killer grilling at the Presidential Press Corp suck-up dinner. He even made Democracy Now! Some say he bombed, others try to turn a phrase and say he 'smart bombed.' Either way it is a performance worth watching. About a third of the way along, the members of the media decided that laughing at the decider was bad for the career. Whenever I've seen comics perform, most folks have a few drinks, and laughter is not hard to generate. Bush's icy stare meant that their balls retracted into their bellies (apologies to the Helen Thomas.) Just shows how domesticated the Washington Press corp is, and how rigidly Mr. Bush holds to the mold of a member of the prestiged class.

He must feel that jokes targetting his mockery of language or his pantomiming of dumberness are acceptable. Remember how much his father loved the impersonations done by Dana Carvy? I think they see their public persona as a role, so another's representation on it is a bit funny - almost flattering. When a sarcastic fucker like Colbert makes references to photo-ops and a 'glass 32% full, I wouldn't drink it - it's mostly backwash' that cuts a bit deeper. We see a bit more of the man behind the caricature.

Speaking of the humerously hypocritical, I guess Mr. Bush has come out and declared that he believes the Star Spangled Banner should be sung in English only. Too bad he took to singing it in Spanish on multiple occassions while trying to pander to the latinos during his 2000 election run. According to one source, he even had a mariachi band from Texas 'Viva la Bush' to accompany him as he would sing.

Does he just not remember six years ago? I think he just doesn't give a shit.

He really needs to be removed from power.

When discussing politics and the world as we know it, one can often find themselves caught in the drag trap of conspiracy theorists. 'They' don't want us to know the truth. 'They' benefit from dividing us against each other. 'They' like a good war, it's good for business.

Who be 'them', and how do we indentify them without implying an organization of secret societies and malicous alliances? Are the intoxicant dreams of Huxtable middle class too syrupy to pierce? I don't think that 'proletariat' and 'bourgoise' best define our evolving economy, so is it 'ruling class', 'business class', the 'elites'?

Here is a fascinating article by Public Citizen that I think helps illuminate the dark corridors of upper class indentity. In it, this public watchdog group provides evidence that eighteen of the country's wealthiest families, from the Waltons to the Kochs - 18 families with combined assests around 185 billion - have been actively running a campaign for the repeal of the estate tax for the last five years. This multi-million dollar campaign includes both a strong presence on K street, as well as a strong public relations campaign. The proliferation of the term 'Death Tax' has them to thank, as well as the myth that family farms are often lost in rural America to this unfair law.

Dispite everything that America has given these people: a system of laws that protect them and their wealth, a robust economy with both trained and desperate workers to stock their shelves and buy their wine, a lethal military to protect their international assets and 'assist' small governments having problems implementing policies that serve their interests, the chance to star on reality shows, dispite all this these people don't want to give anything back. American taxpayers provide the transportation infastructure that makes global trade possible. American taxpayers invest in research for drug companies and aeronautics, once the technology is moved to a marketable level, we just give it to a corporation to develop. These companies operate on public land for pennies on the dollar, and lets not even bother to go into how much of our nation's treasure is devoted to protecting the energy resources these industries require.

The fact is, none of these families could have become rich without the fertile economy and economic structure of America.

In the Old Testament, there is a jewish tradition called jubilee. Every so often in these rather rigid societies all debt would be forgiven. They realized that any economy/society would have winners and losers, and that it would get easier for the winners to keep on winning and winning. Such imbalances are not good for a society, so they incorporated a system to forgive debt every generation and allow everyone to start on level ground.

The estate tax is an attempt at a similar process. After a lifetime of accumulating wealth, when one dies a portion of that wealth is released back into the wild. Not really back into the wild, it's collected into the federal treasury, so chances are most of it will be spent on military contractors, prison operations, subsidies for energy companies. . .

I began this post hoping to shed some light on how class works in America. Solidarity amongst the working classes and all that. Hopefully, we can agree that these families, those who wish to shirk out of contributing to our tax base while utilizing a campaign of disinformation to lie to you about how this tax works can be agreed upon to be our enemies. I'm not saying that they are not Americans, but they have a sort of dual citizenship. They are loyal to a way of doing business that most of us would condemn if we were cognizant of it. They believe that public opinion should be driven by what is good for them, and that opinion should be 'managed' by the means of mass media. They believe that what is good for their companies' bottom line is what is good for America - support a brutal dictator whose main goals are protecting an oil pipeline and boiling political opponents alive, works for them. They have been moving their factories overseas for a generation now, getting away from organized labor and into bed with shitty little regimes that will murder union leaders at their behest.

These are our class enemies.

Before people blogged, they wrote letters. On September 14, 1887, Albert Parsons wrote the following letter to his wife. He had been condemned to death, along with several other leaders of the labor movement (also known as Anarchists - A.K.A. terrorists) for the May Day riots in Chicago earlier that year. He was not convicted for what he had done, he was convicted for what he had said.


"Our verdict this morning cheers the hearts of tyrants throughout the world, and the result will be celebrated by King Capital in its drunken feast of flowing wine from Chicago to St. Petersburg. Nevertheless, our doom to death is the handwriting on the wall, foretelling the downfall of hate, malice, hypocrisy, judicial murder, oppression, and the domination of man over his fellowman. The oppressed of earth are writhing in their legal chains. The giant Labor is awakening. The masses, aroused from their stupor, will snap their petty chains like reeds in the whirlwind.

We are all creatures of circumstance; we are what we have been made to be. This truth is becoming clearer day by day.

There was no evidence that any one of the eight doomed men knew of, or advised, or abetted the Haymarket tragedy. But what does that matter? The privileged class demands a victim, and we are offered a sacrifice to appease the hungry yells of an infuriated mob of millionaires who will be contented with nothing less than our lives. Monopoly triumphs! Labor in chains ascends the scaffold for having dared to cry out for liberty and right!

Well, my poor, dear wife, I, personally, feel sorry for you and the helpless little babes of our loins.

You I bequeath to the people, a woman of the people. I have one request to make of you: Commit no rash act to yourself when I am gone, but take up the great cause of Socialism where I am compelled to lay it down.

My children - well, their father had better die in the endeavor to secure their liberty and happiness than live contented in a society which condemns nine-tenths of its children to a life of wage slavery and poverty. Bless them; I love them unspeakably, my poor helpless little ones.

Ah, wife, living or dead, we are as one. For you my affection is everlasting. For the people. Humanity. I cry out again and again in the doomed victim's cell: Liberty! Justice! Equality!"


I'm more certain than ever regarding my previous post on 'Wag the Mexican.' The history of our society and our struggles is so cyclical. Indeed, there is nothing new under the sun. I cry out in the Liberal Wilderness my brothers and sisters! Understanding, History, Peace; these things are not hard. No one is going to force you to learn it, but it is not hard. You don't have to be smart. Dividing our population based on IQ be just another way to divide and conquer. Please try! I stand here on the other side and I say that it is worth it!

I feel for my brothers, sisters, and elders who feel that history is something that started 2006 years ago with the birth of Christ. Who devote the great majority of their intellectual time to reading and re-reading a single book.

Life takes work! I'll admit, I'd never fucking heard of Albert Parsons. But I should have! Our culture has recorded documentation for thousands of years. We are the children of the Internet Generation. Developing an understanding of history takes a lot of effort. You don't have to be a rocket scientist - anybody can grasp small parts - but it does take a fair amount of time. Best not to think of it like 'time I spent in college,' cuz a lot of that was shit, think of it more as in 'the time I set aside for exercise every week.' We are the children of the Internet Generation. Just as we budget time for physical exercise, we must also budget time for societal understanding. I'd say its somewhere on par with an hour a day. Citizenship takes work! We are the children of the Internet Generation, and the time will be upon us when we must grow up into adults.

Generations before us have been subjected to an incredible control over what they can learn, what they can read. Even during Albert Parson's life most men had to make decisions based on a handful of leaflets that had been published, along with a sparse access to books, and their own experience with the world. We can do anything. We can find content for any question, any time, any mood. This is both a priviledge and a burden. It is a priviledge to have access to such learning. It is a burden to be the generation that should make the most carefully chosen steps.

Our previous generations have often been in situations where there was no alternative. The path was set and they had to claw at it for all it was worth. WWII, or every season in the life of a subsistence farmer. When the papers told you the average japanese was a yellow rat, with thick coke glasses, about the time that Uncle Sam is rounding you up to storm island after shitty island. Pearl Harbor changed everything. It was not a time to question why. . .

We are burdened by the fact that we don't live in that world. We can learn all about the Japanese in a google search. We can learn what causes wars, and work to prevent those situations from arising. Not everything can be solved with talk, but most human beings would prefer to avoid another world war. We should be able to build off that.

MayDay is all about solidarity. Solidarity with my brother and sister Mexicans. Solidarity with my working class history. Solidarity with the simple belief that more people on this planet want to live in peace than want war.





To Cindy:
Art adds content. Schlock just moves content around, repetitively . . in a way you know feels good.

Report: Bush Claims Authority To Disobey Over 750 Laws
A major investigation by the Boston Globe has revealed President Bush has quietly claimed the authority to disobey more than 750 laws enacted since he took office. In each case the president has issued a so-called "signing statement" that asserts that he has the power to set aside any statute passed by Congress when it conflicts with his interpretation of the Constitution. According to the Globe, Bush has issued a signing statement to more than one of every 10 bills he has signed. Bush has said he can ignore Congress' ban on torture as well as Congressional oversight of the Patriot Act. Bush has also said he can ignore laws forbidding US troops from engaging in combat in Colombia and any attempt by Congress to oversee what happens in military prisons such as Abu Ghraib. NYU law professor David Golove has warned that Bush's actions threaten to overturn the existing structures of constitutional law. Golove said that having a president who ignores the court, backed by a Congress that is unwilling to challenge him can make the Constitution simply ''disappear."

This is a straight up cut/paste from DemocracyNow's headlines

Add this to the recent story by Seymor Hersch, where he outlines how our Secretary of War, Donald Rumsfeld, has re-organized the use of Special Forces into something he calls 'Black Recon.' Basically, America's most lethal and well-trained forces can now find themselves in teams that report directly to Mr. Rumsfeld with absolutely no oversight, with operations that are to be kept completely off the books forever.

For the occassional reader who may wallow in ignorance, this is being done to avoid the rules for covert action in foreign countries that the CIA had to follow after the whole 'pentagon papers' thing. Some of us don't like the notion that our democratically elected leaders were using assassins to remove other democratically elected leaders.

Just thought I'd mention, that on a day where most sentient beings are celebrating the solidarity of citizens against oppressive governments and corporate interests, our country's slid into fascism is picking up speed.