Atheist Meditations

My heart leapt this morning as I finished off my morning coffee and stumbled across this in the New York Times. The story hails from Maplewood, my close neighbor here in Minnesota, and that makes things all the more interesting. The recent history of an Evangelical Minister who has lost about 20% of his flock, but continues to preach against the Christianization of American Politics, saying things that have been on my lips for five years now.

Please go read the article. This is a big event.

In the last weeks we have seen some bad things happening in the Middle East. More than just about any 'debate' that our worthless talking heads have manufactured since the beginning of Mr. Bush's reign, the discussion of Israel's actions and place in this conflict is so skewed that it has great educational value for the less politically sophisticated.

Israel is probably the most complicated nation-state in the history of the world. Her demographic make-up, the position she holds in the international community, along with the sympathies and prejudices that we assign to her jewish population. Almost half of the American population sees the nation of Israel as a religious icon, and not as a country in the world with the same rights and responsibilities as any other nation. The Israeli lobby in Washington is easily the most powerful lobby in the country, and unlike most lobbyists who bought into the 'Republican Only' policy of the K-Street project, they continued to spread their monies accross the aisles of congress. Particularily East Coast Liberals, as we've been forced to bear witness too as these types scream and protest the 'Prime Minister' of Iraq since he has not condemned Hezbollah to hell for their actions.

20% of the Israeli military budget comes directly from us, the U.S. taxpayers. Of course, that money just come right back around to purchase weapons from Lockheed Martin and other U.S. weapons firms - who pocket all that profit from such sales, that's how the military industrial complex works. Thus the weapons that are being used to bomb Lebanon into a wasteland are all marked, 'Made with Pride in the U.S.A.'

We have a bunch of laws in this country that nobody cares about. It is suppose to be illegal for the U.S. public to be exposed to propaganda, yet we have seen countless confirmations from the Military and other sources that they aim said filth directly at the domestic audience - not to mention whatever FOX News is suppose to be. We also have laws on the books which makes it illegal to sell arms to any country that will not use them soley for defensive purposes.

Fun Fact for Conservatives: Back in '82, when Israel invaded Lebanon the last time, President Reagan put a halt on all weapons sales to Israel that lasted 10 weeks and certainly had an impact on Israeli foreign policy.

Consider him eligible for sainthood, or our first 'Spokesman for Big Business' President, one cannot argue that he was a strong President. He was strong enough to make things happen in the international arena with his words, and he was strong enough to stand up to the Israeli lobby and put pressure on them to conform.

Israel waited until Bush was this big of a failure to start this sort of operation. I highly doubt that he would have done anything to impede the Israeli war machine even at his heyday after 9/11, but he is a man - and at that point he could have done something.

Most analysists put the Israeli military at either the third or fourth most powerful in the world. That's a trip for such a little country, but they are a nuclear power equipped with the very best weapons we American taxpayers can give them. Every Arab country could unite against them and probably fail spectacuralily (i.e. Six Day War.) The United Nations, never a very powerful body, ain't gonna really do anything either.

Only one man in the world could have any sway over what the Israeli's choose to interpet as 'defending themselves' and that man was George W. Bush. The man who gets openly ridiculed at international press conferences ain't gonna sway nobody.

Sometimes I wonder if the persecution of the Jews in WWII has lead to some sort of paranoia complex in the national character of Israel. Something like the propaganda that the Russian state still uses 'we got hit and hurt because we were weak, I shall make us STRONG, and no one will be able to ever hurt us again.' Israel has a political system that favors that sort of strong language and rhetoric.

Other times I feel like the creation of the Jewish State was the greatest folly of the twentieth century; how much pain and suffering has been triggered by this Final Crusade? Multiple generations of violence, and it ain't gonna stop anytime soon.

Israeli children learn about their country from textbooks that have been selectively re-written to ensure that said children 'believe in their country enough to fight for it.' How different is that from an Islamic school that produces suicide bombers?

Too often, people tend to think of Israel as a special country surrounded by barely civilized murderous savages. Thus what is acceptable there is different from anywhere else. God wants them there.

If Israel is a nation, then it has the same rights and responsibilities as any other nation, regardless of how terrible the suffering that the chosen people endured over five decades ago. The whole point of international law, was to limit the actions of powerful nations against their weaker neighbors. If you invade a nation, you have a responsibility to the population that you now occupy. The ancient Romans could just keep decimating (that's killing one out of ten people) until the will to resist had been squelched, but hopefully the last few hundred years of liberty and civilization has raised the bar a bit.

The military of Lebanon has purposefully been kept rediculously weak, to satisfy the Israeli population. Thus they could never prevent an incursion of Hezbollah - like if the U.S. turned all border security over to a few hudred minutemen, they just ain't gonna be able to get 'er done. By destroying every bridge, factory, harbor, and anything else that qualifies as infrastructure the Israelis' are insuring that the Lebanese people will be devoting the next ten years to just trying to rebuild. With money from where? How much suffering will occur in that time?

Strategically, there is no way to stop Hezbollah from using southern Lebanon to lanch rockets, short of nuking the entire landscape.

What they are doing is punishing the Lebanese people, and that sort of collective punishmet yet another one of those laws that nobody seems to care about anymore.

In Minnesota the last three weeks it has been fucking hot! Not just the kind of wind oven temperatures that one in the South West grows accustom too, but the nasty ass 90 degrees and 90% humidity that leeches the calcium from your bones and chemically breaks down the testosterone in your sac. We are talking about some serious heat.

Aurelius be the terminus of a fascinating variety of European stock. German, Bohemian, Norwegian, Irish, and French - all regions with a deep, spiritual love of the drink, but not regions that traditionally tolerate intense heat. Give me 18" of snow and white out conditions, my Nordic blood revels in the conflict between man and nature. 101 degree heat index - I just want to sleep in front of the Air Conditioner.

This heat has put me into something of a Heat Coma. I just work, sleep and watch T.V. I'm intrigued by how much a person's habits can be changed by a slight change in temperature.


Also, I've decided to cut my relationship with Blog Mad.

I dig the notion of an association that garners more traffic for my blog, but someone needs to realize that the 1:1 ratio will fail once the community reaches a critical mass. With enough people surfing, you could never keep up with the hits that your site will accumulate. Plus, they just kept fucking up over there - I got locked out again a few weeks ago and that was just the end for me.

Almost all bloggers want to have a huge number of folks who read their stuff and leave comments about how great they are. I think I'm a fairly profiecient blogger, but I'll have to find new ways to promote myself that don't involve wading through hundreds of sites devoted to T.V. shows, teenage angst (nothing wrong with that, just been there - done that), and donation seeking devotionals. Anyways.


Hope everyone out here in Blogland has been having a good summer!

All the media coverage of Kim Jong Ill has got me thinking. . .

Seems to me that the gist of the reporting involving that fella centers on how fucked up he is in the head, how delusional the population of his nation be. From videos of marching schoolchildren singing songs about how they will stomp to death anyone who attempts to interfer with their progress towards school, to reports of brainwashed 'minders' who will bring up the details of Dear Leader's latest golf game - '19 under par with seven holes in one!' - without a trace of sarcasm. I doubt anyone could find a more perfect example of the horrible spiritual damage that can be inflicted upon a society with a combination of police state and mass media. Those who don't buy the pseudo-dogmatic propaganda are removed from society, those who can manage to self-hypnotize themselves into believing magical rainbows appeared at the moment of Mr. Ill's birth (on a magical mountian) are kept - and they devote the rest of their lives to insuring that their children buy into the same fables.

So add the poor fucks in North Korea to the long list of societies that have been mutilated by mass media. They can take their place next to the Germans' under the Nazi's, or the Red Commies under Mao, or those dumbass scientologists (who qualify for tax-free status, can you fucking believe it?)

I've been blogging for at least a year now, and while I'm content to try to save the souls of the evags and encourage them to get something out of their youth and their time on this planet, what really drives me to drink are the right-wing bloggers. Like, they have never taken the time to wonder how an educated society like '30's Germany could flip-flop into racist fanaticism in just under five years. Like, they don't have the fucking first impulse to understand how such things are inflicted upon a society, let's just trust that our own leaders are good. It's like interacting with members of Kim Jong Ill's society.

The parallels can lure a thinking man into ramming his cranium into his 17" monitor.

When I read so many of those types of blogs, this one negative thought keeps intruding into my consciousness again and again: Huzzah for our Glorious Leader! We invest our own ego into the Image of our Glorious Leader! While the complexity of the medium is superior, the tactic ain't much different from what was used in Nazi Germany or Goofy-Commie North Korea. The vast majority (if not the totality) of the media focuses on simple themes that glorify the leader - and a large percentage will indentify with him and participate in the 'game.'

I know that blogmad be down right now, so not many will read this. Aside from my tight pack, a good deal of the random/adversarial readers of this blog are probably thinking right now that they can find errors in my arguements - that I'm a moonbat or whatever the term being fed to you is this week. To you I can just say, fuck ya. If you are over twenty, and you have not read five or six books about how propaganda works, well, fuck ya. Obviously, you don't give a shit about your country or your liberty. You are just a little fascist bitch, who thinks that as long as you do what you are told you should be rewarded.

I mean that bitch statement, I really do, I could not have less respect for that sort of man. They never do anything for themselves. They get an 'education' cuz they hope to be rewarded by their class betters for it. They do what they are told and hope to be rewarded. The clues to reality are not that well hidden from ya, they just don't get written into the plot of 'Everybody fucking Loves Raymond.'

Civ4 players all over the world are tight with the Franklin quote about liberty; 'those who would give up liberty for a little security deserve neither and will loose both.'

Evag's have this one analogy that they love to envoke when defining how the 'material world' or the 'secular world' is going to shit. 'A frog thrown into a pot of boiling water will beat ass getting out, but if you put a frog in a pot of warm water and slowly increase the temp it'll sit in there until it cooks.' I don't know if that's true, and with an extinction event occuring in the class amphibians right now, I might never be able to determine personally, but the logic is engaging.

Only the stupidest of dumbfucks would argue with the fact that for the entire fucking history of modern man a small group has been in the ruling class, and 99.9% have been the serfs, slaves, soldiers, and concubines of the ruling class. The fucking ruling class made a sport of war, mainly cuz they wanted to rid themselves of a generation of twenty-something males who might otherwise threaten their monopoly on everything.

The brave revolutionaries of Liberalism gave fucking everything to bring down the age of kings and absolute rule. For a brief little spell in America, the son of a Wal-Mart greeter had the same rights to a jury before his peers that a member of the aristocracy had in feudal Europe.

Like the proverbial frog in the pot of water, in the last ten years we've lost so much ground. If you and a member of the Bush family want the same thing, well, too fucking bad for you, they can do anything to you - call you a 'terrorist' - and you have no rights whatsoever. They have proclaimed, and proven with the acts, that they can pick up anybody, anywhere in the world, drug them and put them in adult diapers, and ship them to their torturers de jour. At a nod from G.W.B, all of your rights and your possesions go out the fucking window.

Good thing the worthless dipshits who support Bush put so much trust in him, cuz that sort of trust is never betrayed by leaders who are above any law.

Earth to douchebags, there is a reason that those of us who can still get hard are so crazy about defending our liberties. Everyone who has ever criticized the ACLU deserves to have their balls cut off and dropped into a pool of salt water. What the fuck is your problem? Don't you understand how rare and fragile having Liberties is? You don't wait around for what you think might be a serious threat and then get around to defending your liberty, fuck that. You jump on every and all threats to the legal concepts of liberty and you fucking take it to 'em. An American's duties as a citizen are no less.

Oh, but I forgot, a worthless fuck like that doesn't give a shit about liberty or freedom. That's while they'll listen to a corporation explain the news to them. That's why they'll listen to a Sean Hannity, or a Bill O'Reilly, cuz they would rather be told what to do than let their balls' drop out of their abdomen.

Anyone who can read this has access to the internet. I'm not going to tell you what to read - get off your lazy ass and read some stuff you don't agree with and some stuff you do. Keep at it, and be willing to let you compass drift. - If you think that the liberties we died for in theRevolution, and then preserved in the World Wars are now set in stone, well you can get fucked. We live in a very interesting time right now, cuz the resources that made an American middle class viable are no longer exploding out of the ground.

I meet these people who have these little poodles and other dogs that can't even bark, and I feel sorry for the animals, cuz they have been modified so far from the evolutionary product that they could never survive more than a few generations in the wild. They are a dead end. Sucks to be them.

In the last twenty years so much entertainment and luxury have been permitted our class that too many of us have forgotten what reality was like. Now, after a generation and a half seperates us from the Great Depression, we are stumbling into a system that makes no sense and is not good for America. Too bad we have so many misbred fucks who can no longer bark.

Just because Ken Lay is dead does not mean their are not thousands out there eagar to sell you another variety of Enronomics. Quit buying that shit and start standing up for yourselves and your class.

I heard today that if you say 'fuck' on the radio, the FCC can impose fines of up to 12 million dollars, or may sentence you to death.

Got me thinking about vulgarity and how interesting it is in our hyper-puritanical society.

Some words offend some people. Why? I don't honestly know. If they didn't, I suppose they would not be as fun to use.

My co-worker believes that the ability to insert 'frigg'n' over the alternative, demostrates a level of self-control, but I think that is part of the evagelikal culture's obsession with fabricating a value out of self-denial.

So we find ourselves in this world with a moral delimma? The choice of who to offend and who to pander to their sensibilities. After all, a sizable percentage of the human beings we meet do not seem to care a whit about what might offend us. Are there situations and environments where one should be more concerned about offending others? Or should we remain true to the childish adage, 'I don't care what other people think' ?

I can't help but ponder the credo of the liberal journalist - 'To comfort the afflicted, and afflict the comfortable.'

I think some people deserve to be offended.

In the mythology of japanese buddhism, a monk might shout out a word at those who were slipping into folly, momentarily stunning them - and allowing them to wake up to a more enlightened understanding. Could vulgarity be used by a well-meaning seeker to agitate the cold clay of our poor opponnent's minds? To prime that one lone neural pathway into firing - 'fuck you I won't do what you tell me!' Like a sputtering car, a firing, a pause, a firing again. 'Fuck you I won't do what you tell me!' Each time the neural pathway fires, more chemicals accumulate along the path, increasing the odds that it fires again. 'Fuck you I won't do what you tell me!' Soon that path has been linked to many more. The head begins to bang, 'Fuck you I won't do what you tell me! Fuck you I won't do what you tell me!'

A radicalized revolutionary has been born!

Our human history is fucking full of 'comfortable' individuals who needed and deserved to be afflicted. Slave owners and the white 'service workers' who engaged with them economically had a fine, comfortable lifestyle, until some abolitionists from the North started getting down there are offending them. I don't care if you are comfortable, your system is bullshit. Uncountable generations of limp dick males had taken the easy way - supporting the patriarchal system that both kept them in bondage and made them feel superior to somebody - rather than accept the challenges to sacred ego that treating your woman as an equal might include; until some woman's sufferage advocates got in the streets and started offending them. Whistledicks in the KKK found the Freedom Riders 'offensive.'

Sometimes the people who are so easily offended are the fucks with the most invested in a shitty system.

All of this, it seems to me, is disharmonious with the Liberal Ideal of understanding others to a degree that allows one to be able to avoid offending someone by an ignorant misunderstanding. Like the great quote: ' a gentleman is someone who never offends anyone accidentally.' Like, I don't know any muslim's personally, but I know enough not to walk up to one and try to shake left hands. I believe in showing respect to others until they dis-respect me, then it's time for confrontation.

How about this? If a guy can't handle someone dropping the F-bomb, how can he handle a realistic description of war? How could he handle reading an analysis of children getting their hands chopped off by thug armies fighting over the mines that provided your wedding diamond? How could he handle the real politik of a country that will assassinate a leader of a South American country to benefit United Fruit?

Oh, please don't offend the little bitches. If someone can be offended by just a single word, think how indomidable their little minds are 'gainst Ideas that take over twenty words to convey. Don't even pretend you could introduce an Idea that takes several pages, or several books.

I'm considering a new career in stand-up comedy.

As I've mentioned earlier, the term evag is meant to be derogatory. Not every christian is an evag, and some christians actually do make the world better for having lived out their lives in it. But not the evags.

Are you an evagelikal . . .?

If you've ever enjoyed a positive reinforcement for actions that emphasized bonding with a large group . . . you might be evangelikal. . .

If 'working on our marraige' = avoiding pornography and hate'n on the gays, . . . you might be evangelikal. . .

If you have ever started a debate about the teaching of evolution, and then immediately starting bringing up the 'big bang.' . . . you might be evangelikal. . .

If you have a picture of Jesus hanging inside of your house, . . . you might be evangelikal. . .

If you see a starving child on the television, and you think 'the best thing I could ever do for that poor child is to help her accept Jesus as her personal savior' . . . you might be evangelikal. . .

If you think that the reason Heather has two mommies is because her father has multiple wives . . . you might be evangelikal. . .

If you hope your daughter never has sex before marraige, because doing so would lower her value as a commodity . . . you might be evangelikal. . .

If everytime you have sex with you wife, it is a threesome, cuz the lord Jesus is personally involved . . . you might be evangelikal. . .

If your uncle has ever asked for your hand in marraige, and everyone in your family thinks it's a great Idea. . . you might be evangelikal. . .

If you have ever received a letter thanking your for your prayers - signed by George W. Bush - . . . you might be evangelikal. . .

If the phrase 'but it's not Amway' gives you comfort . . . you might be evangelikal. . .

If you have ever ended an arguement with the phrase, 'cuz the bible says so.' . . . you might be evangelikal. . .

With Joe Mauer pushing .400 and pulling awsome shit every game; who has time to blog anymore? Did you see that two RBI hit against KC just now - like a fucking golf swing for a tight single.

Twins baseball is worth watching.