Atheist Meditations

Formations of Canadian Geese have been sighted overhead for the last few weeks. The sugar maple in our neighbor's yard is just beginning to glow with the autumnal neon around her edges. A hint of the dry cold lurks in our early mornings and stalks our twilights.

We native Minnesotan's know these signs well.

Soon the full fury of Winter will descend, covering our beautiful land with layers of snow more oppressive than Sharia Law: forbidding expressions of happiness and forcing our women to cover their bodies with the traditional ski jacket.

Into hibernation go'eth the casual erection, envoked with a smile by a jiggling, jogging beauty. . . too soon the only erect I'll be dreaming about will involve my lower back and the agony of shoveling out the garage before I can even go to work.

All this begs the question: have I gotten enough out of this Summer? Have I squeezed every ounce of life's zest from these too brief moments of thawed existence? One thing I certainly havn't been doing with my summer is blogg'n.

So today I seek to justify my lackadasical blogging habits this summer, and cross a line that has yet to occur on this blog. I will post some pictures to express the activity that has consumed my summer.





That's right, I've been painting our 100+ year old country farm house and doing all sorts of repairs and replacements. Unfortunately, the evening light in these photos does not do justice to the attractive luster of our yellow. Known as 'masculine banana' (mis-labled at Sherwin Williams as 'banana cream'), this tint of yellow is without a doubt the finest combination of eye catching intensity without a hint of the feminine. We have many yellow houses here in West Saint Paul, most are faded looking crap; 'masculine banana' is the vanguard for a whole new movement in house colors.

Please pay special attention to the detail in the trim.



That detail was once routed by hand by a craftsman who took some righteous damn pride in his daily work. Then it languished for many decades under layers of cheap-ass Dutch Boy paint. When I first started climbing the ladder and scraping, I realized that detail was there and mentioned it to Cindy (in retrospect, a dumb move.) This is a girl who mutters 'painted lady on Summit' in her sleep - my fate and the summer of 06 was sealed.

Each of those three peaks was an exercise in sanding, caulking and replacing rotten wood. After that they each got two layers of oil primer, two coats of white (inside the groves, where they still existed, in other places I just had to draw them by hand), then two coats of the green carefully cut around the white detail - all on top of a twenty four foot extension ladder.

I'm getting down to the final half-dozen tasks that need completion now, and winter's getting within realistic striking distance any day now. My promethian foresight insured that we used Sherwin William's Superpaint, that can be applied at any temperature above 35 degrees, but I'm so hoping that life does not ask that of me. I'm going to be done by labor day. I'm going to be done by Labor Day. I'm going to be done by Labor Day.

So there's some pics of what I accomplished in the Summer of 06. Since I've broken my taboo on filling a post with pictures, I'll end with a shot of one cornor of the inside of our groovy home:


Hope everyone be stay'n groovy.

When I first read a few years ago that the great Noam Chomsky had opposed the elimination of the draft I had to do a double take. Hunh?!? The draft, perhaps one of the greatest displays of the prerogative of the ruling class to treat us members of the working class a fucking tools - how can the abolition of such a nasty institution be a bad thing?

Tearing the innocent youth from the arms of their girlfriends (who are put'n out) so that they can get their balls blown off in a war that has goals only a small handful of the ruling class gives a shit about - securing access to a lucrative market, destroying the natives who are trying to organize and prevent the destruction of their homeland over the minerals beneath it - no, the draft is about something else. Like whipping a slave, the draft is something you subject your population to every once in a while to keep them in line. Learn Your Place, Boy! Me and my children do the fly'n, you and yours do the dye'n.



But Mr. Chomsky thinks about things with a focused brain.

He had already considered the trends of the technological age. Modern militaries (the kind that fucking totally kick ass) are backed up by the low hanging nuts of a motherfucker of an economy (that's you and me shopping at Sears) which produces weapons so un-fucking-believably powerful (we're talking nukes or the A-10 here.) One does not need trenches full of warm bodies anymore, what's needed is an technologically intensive miltary with a small number of highly trained soldiers to execute orders. It's been pretty fucking obvious for the last few decades that air superiority equals omnipotence. It all comes down to Top Gun - whoever has the best jet fighters will control the air. It will come down to a few hundred of the best trained (stimmed up) pilots flying the most expensive, technologically advanced machines ever to exist.

I've heard some damn good theories that slavery didn't end because a few too many Americans started 'really reading their bibles,' it had more to do with the industrial revolution - can't trust those damn monkeys around all the expensive machines. Same with the civil rights movement, American's didn't suddenly grow past racism - the commies were killing us with propaganda of our cops setting dogs on people; that was like castling, a defensive adjustment that had to be made.

I'd wager the elimination of the draft had more to do with those sort of forces than any bullshit about liberalism and a young man's rights.

So the military of today be a lot different from the days of Benedict Arnold. So are the fucking wars.

So just as we once decided not to stand in front of the redcoats, instead sniping at their officers in violation of all european military traditions; now many other cultures are devising tactics that attempt to minimize the usefulness of air superiority.

It's like a mick cop trying to clean up the streets of the godfather, he's going to make you fight for every single cornor - and he'll exploit racial violence to do it.

Without even considering the motivations of our foes in the Middle East, the tactics they use should be pretty fucking obvious. They will never challenge the air superiority of either Israel or the U.S. Whatever actions they attempt to take, they will be made with the primary goal of escaping sudden death from above.

Like obsessive compulsive middle age women are insuring the death of our species by constantly killing 99.99% of 'germs on any surface', so for sure that one freak mutant that can survive our primary bacteriacides will enjoy an awesome advantage and will surely lead to a new immune strain - so too with Israel. They've been just free-balling it for the last fifty years with the air-force of Yahweh. They can kill just about anybody at anytime and have been striving to drive that point home to the stupid arabs since the fucking six day war. Only the most resourceful of tactics and fanatical of motivating ideologies are going to survive.

For the slow on the uptake, that's Hezbollah and the insurgancy in Iraq. Not that they have anything in common, except the willingness to incorporate whatever tactics will not get them blown to fucking hell by a laser guided missile. Pretty slick how Hezbollah's similar to the mafia, they are a force to be reckon'd with, but they ain't got no capital to bomb, no clearly defined loved ones to kill in retribution. . .

The best stratagy for resisting the will of 'national interests' is the Hezbollah model. Israel's refusal to stop terrorizing the arabs has set the time table for the evolution of this model.

So this new model requires checkpoints and 'boots on the ground.' Regardless of why we went into Afganistan (oil pipeline) or Iraq (oil) , the new model for international conflict once again requires more than a few hundred fighter pilots and some rather bloodthirsty special ops teams.
The sorts of wars Bush is starting cost fucking human lives. I don't know what the fuck Clinton was doing in the Balkans, perhaps he really did want to 'prevent a genocide' - all I know is we didn't lose a single soldier's life. That's boring enought that I'm not curious about just who got bombed and why. Iraq seems pretty obvious - fuck up a country with lots of oil, and the oil in the rest of the world just got a lot more valuable - and it's a war that chews up lives.

I'm a liberal, so the deaths of Iraqi children also bothers me. But I ask you, 'how many American testicles have been blown into bits and lost in the fucking sands of Iraq?' These guys are giving up their sex organs because they want America to have a strong military. Under a large number of pragmatic analysis that's a noble motivation. Nations' that don't have young men willing to make such sacrifices often don't survive.

Now they think they're done after their third tour and Bush recalls their sorry old asses again?!?
Bring back the fucking draft! If this war is so worth fighting, let a few more of our 300 million population share the burden of this conflict.

Put your own nuts on the line. Our highly specialized military has given enough. For the stupidest fucking war ever - Christians with guns in the heart of the Holy Land, you couldn't play into Osama's hand any more if you tried -

I wonder how many Americans have promised themselves that they'd beat Tucker Carlson to death if they ever got the chance? Regardless of the consequences?

Today hundreds of thousands of Hezbollocks' flags are waving in celebration in the Southern Lebanon as the President of Syria declares a 'historic victory,' over 'Israeli terrorism.' On the far side of an immense ocean, President Bush comments on Israel's 'victory', and stammers on about Syria and Iran's growing weakness.

There all full of shit, the kind that fundamentalists treat as holy and eat as part of some sort of magikal ritual.

Over a thousand civilians died in Lebanon; dozens in Israel. Perhaps 300,000 lebanese have been displaced, and old segregation lines between Shia, Sunni, and Christian have been all muddied up as families in the north take in strangers as refugees. An oil slick the size of the Exxon Valdez has been created off Lebanon's shores. Billions of dollars in infrastructure - that means the parts of society that people need to live - has been destroyed: bridges, factories, schools, hospitals, refineries, broadcast towers . . .

The romantic age is long over people. War just means irreconcilable suffering for innocent civilians who are unfortuante enough to be born on top of valuable resources.

But the fundamentalists are all a bunch of hopeless romantics. War is so fucking glorious, and 'victory' - as however they choose to define it - is always such a worthwhile reward for their sacrifice and loyalty.

I'd say an impartial observer would call this conflict a total loss for Lebanon, the country that just happened to be too weak to enforce her will on Hezbollah's fighters; and a stalemate for the Big H and Israel. Each side has their own propaganda machines and legions of brainless followers, however, so a new generation of Israeli soldiers will learn about this as another 'necessary action' and their rocket launching counterparts will be revering this moment as the 'beginning of the end for Israel.'

Reality has nothing to do with this conflict, and thus it will continue until one side gets medival.

Yet this maddening conflict between cultures that simply cannot define the same reality in unison ain't nothing new. It ain't nothing rare either.

I believe that the founding fathers of our country were deists and pretty radical skeptics and liberals. Evags are completely convinced that the fathers' totally intended to create a 'christian nation.' Evags hold disdain for the 'theories' of evolution and those of antropology, I can't find a flaw in them (not a 'deal-breaker' by any means.) Some folks in this country see Ronald Reagan as one of the greatest Presidents of the modern age; I can't get past Iran-Contra, the betrayal of the air-traffic controllers, or that slutty S+L bailout - let alone get to anything good he might have accomplished.

This country currently has at least two distinct cultures and ways of understanding reality. This will not do.

I hate to sound like I'm not a good moral relativist here, but - 'two men think they're Jesus, one of the must be wrong.'

So every jackhole yahoo who gets irate on the cable news thinks that the defeat of Joe Lieberman be the crack in the foundation of the House of Democrats. The dems must be a party in the held hostage by the madness of a liberal fringe, so mindlessly self-destructive that they would throw the seniority of Senator Lieberman aside in a fit of ideologically motivated cleansing. The barely intelligible, Bush-hating, demogouges who rise to power in these liberal primaries will not have any traction with the 'mainstream voters.' Dispite the Clintons' and the entrenched Washington leaderships best efforts to pull in the rope of democracy - these fools are determined to hang themselves and force voters to favor the more moderate republicans ( oh, and to undermine the war on terror, and maybe our economy and moral values while they are at it.)

Ned Lamont in a millionaire who could be Joe Lieberman's clone except for the jew and the war thing. He is not some firebrand determined to breath life into the flat-lining democratic party. He's just a guy who say an opportunity to snag a job with a 98% retention rate, and dabble in some real power.

As a liberal and an independant, I think the weakness of Lieberman comes down to a simple stance:

We have sat incredulous for six years as a President has started multiple wars, bungled multiple catastrophes, and made a religious practice out of funneling our taxpayer dollars into the corporations of his friends and donors. During the rare moments anyone in the press confronts him on these acts, he stutters out some flat out bullshit - and they eat it right up and regurgitate it to us.

We're tired, and we are so disappointed in a Congress, particularily a Senate, which has done so little to stand up for Americans, or for the truth.

Joe Lieberman supported Bush publically on the war. He let himself be used as a prop when the Rove machine wanted to spin Iraq away from 'Bush's Crusade' and into 'America's Fight.'

We want to see a democratic majority so that come November we can finally begin to initiate the investigations (with subpeona power) that every informed citizen still can't believe are on hold. We want impeachment. We want someone to finally give media time to those who are risking everything to speak truth to power.

Joe Lieberman has proved that he is not that sort of man, so he has to go. I'd say about another thirty of them could be replaced for the party to get serious, but one at a time is the way it works. I don't feel sorry for him at all.

A worker in this country can lose his job, healthcare and pension all in one fell outsourcing swoop, at least Mr. Lieberman is being unemployed based on his performance.

I'm beginning to suspect that there be a connection between the place in the mental world that first caveman squatted in, and dealings with the young. Just as that neigh human beast sat there banging stones and trying desperately to duplicate the miracle of fire that would warm his children and be his only real protection against the lethal creatures of the night. So too is the act of delicately engaging the minds of our young people. Each time I engage them with an interrogative mental flint, I just so hope to in some way ignite their mindfire.

It's like we hope and hope that our hints and our allusions will draw them in. In truth we are just like a caveman invoking fire; as we do so we chant, 'Read, read, read. . .'

Sometimes I wish I could go back to being one of the numb sleepers. One of the many who listen to NPR with an ear for that 'liberal bias', and treat MSNBC as a more 'honest, corporate media.' Folks who have every image and story about the world carefully monitored so as to avoid the truly horrific sensation of grasping reality.

Yesterday I was fucking listening to Democracy Now, and Amy Goodman took the last quarter of the program to talk with guests about something other than the violence in the Middle East and the Bush Administration's rape of our environment and economy. The topic was the Congo, 'a vast land of mineral resources, with a bunch of black savages running around on top of it.' Turns out there are even more scare resources in the world than my civ's battle for in Sid's world. Coltan, a mineral which conducts heat excellently, and is found in all of our fucking cell phones, PS2s, remote controls, and laptops. Between this mineral, the diamond mines, and the uranium - the poor people in the Congo never had a chance to run their country without violent interference from the outside world.

Like one commentator once said, 'The people of Iraq are cursed by the vast stores of Oil underneath their feet. It's like a magnet for suffering.'

So the bad men from the Rawanda Genocide (genocidaires - they actually have a fucking name for these types) flee prosecution across the bordor into Congo, but when the Rawandan military follows them, they don't go after these genocidaires - nope, they actually work with them for the purposes of securing valuable mines and other resources. Armed groups spring up all over the place, all you need is an international corporation willing to deal for your access to a resource, and the willingness to force children to murder their own parents and force them into your fucking child army - and you're fucking in business. You've just become an international trading partner.

Any mature student of war knows that the creative drive for the sort of violence that will drive another man to suicide is a fundamental human trait. Our species has tried to use violence to cow others since we fell out of fucking trees, and there ain't no seperations between 'civilized' and 'barbarous.' What is happening in the Congo is not because they are a race of savages - the acts committed there are no worse than the one's committed countless times by White, Christian, American settlers every time they came across a group of squaws in the 'Untamed West.' No different from the vengence Russian soldiers took on German women when they came in from the East.

In the Congo right now, as groups fight over who gets to provide our multinationals with diamonds and metals, the atrocity de jour is to gang rape the competitions women and then shoot them in the vagina. You have entire hospitals right now filled with victims of such violence. In one province alone, there has been 45,000 rapes within a years time.

I swear, if you could somehow inject into the heart and mind of an American Hausfrau an understanding of the suffering our fasination with shiny stones has caused to other human beings - she would rip her own fucking finger off to get that diamond away from her body and her soul.

Assholes in the corporate media are always talking about 'consumers voting with their dollars.' They love that fucking goofy ass notion of this fusion of the mythical 'free-market' and democracy. That if consumers do not like the behavior of a particular market player, they will 'vote with their dolla's' and begin to choose another company for their material goods.

Too bad the magical 'free-market' requires participants who 'make rational choices in their own best interest.' Cuz we ain't got a culture that glorifies rationality, and our media has been presenting the 'consumeristic act' as a climactic moment of emotional gratification for generations. If the tobacco companies could game the system so effectively that 25% of our population still 'chooses' to spend almost five bucks for a fucking pack of reds - I'm not optimistic for the poor savages in Africa, or anywhere else in the world for that matter.

After all, we are the species that made an economy out of the enslavement of other human beings with just a few weak words of encouragement from our 'men of God.'

Give me that shiny new cell phone, the little girl whose hands were chopped off to terrorize those who might have gotten in the way of extracting the requisite minerals; she couldn't text messege all that well anyways.

Aurelius does not know Mel Gibson personally. Aurelius has not seen a movie with Mr. Gibson in it since 'Payback,' when his radical catholic views started to come to the fore. Aurelius loved the Mad Max movies, and remains rather fond of the Lethal Weapon series. Braveheart, "Freedom!" Oh, yeah.

Aurelius is no fan of Mel Gibson. Aurelius likes the drink, but he never drinks and drives. Aurelius struggles to keep his words and his writing above the occassional racist impulses that lurk within the heart of every man.

Aurelius will, however, take the side of Mr. Gibson in this current media feeding frenzy which has overtaken country.

Sure he may have been drinking and driving, but he was only a few miles from his house; I'm sure he lives in a rich neighborhood, any one he could have driven into probably had it coming anyways. Maybe it was a momentary lapse, maybe the elites have no concern for the life of their peers - either way I don't think I care.

So that just leaves the anti-semitic comments. As far as I know, his comments were 'Are you a Jew. The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.'

Not too long ago I lived in a townhome with a horrible pair of neighbors. Only paper thin walls seperated me from the sounds of domestic abuse and Jerry Springeresque antics on a daily basis. One night, I came home from work listening to a program on NPR about the memoirs of various Supreme Court Justices during the Brown vs. Board of Education case, and when this fellow started pounding on the walls I met him out back with the word 'Negro' first thing out of my lips. I had a pretty damn strong whisky water in my hand, we worked things out - at least for that night. That does not make me a racist. It made me a drunk in a confrontational situation who grabbed a word out of ready memory without thinking it through.

Anti-Semiticism is over diagnosed.

Right now Israel is involved in a war with Lebanon, and for a lot of us the details of this conflict are damn hard to live with.

I've seen the images, read the reports, and on a few nights in the last few weeks I've had Mama Alcohol rock the cradle, cuz we are in some pretty scary times right now.

If that's what was on Mr. Gibson's mind, and why would'nt it be? Atrocities like that should be on every informed citizen's mind. So maybe he slurred a bit of his statements about Israel.

Not every Jew lives in Israel. Not every Jew agrees with what Israel is doing. Israel may be a nation run by Jews, but it is still a nation (wow, even that word is overloaded when dealing with Israel.) Nations are actors in an international community, and in the fantasy world we wish could someday exist, are held to certain consequences for their conduct.

Obviously, to say that Jews are responsible for 'all wars,' is a bit of lame hyperbole, but certainly, in the context of a lot of what is going on right now, the nation of Israel plays a big part. Both in what they have done and what they have failed to do.

Osama Bin Laden has given the Israeli aggression in Lebanon during the 80's as the inspiration and motive force behind 9/11. In almost sixty years they have failed to make peace with their neighbors or find a just solution for the millions of Palestinian refugees whose land they now occupy. Israeli Prime Ministers have declared, 'We need to let the Palestinians know that we have no 'solution' for them. They will live like dogs, until they leave.' An Israeli man can marry a woman of any race, color or creed upon this earth - except a Palestinian woman - then he would have to leave.

With Israel bombing Lebanon into dust, and most of the world trying to pretend that this does not mean that international law excludes the a-rabs, one has to expect some criticism.

Thoughtful commentators need to be cautious before they start throwing around 'anti-semitic.' That has to be one of the worst labels that could ever be applied to a man, and one should be a bit more respectful of the term before applying it to everyone.

Let's see what Mr. Gibson has to say about Israel when he is sober, before we decide he's set on hate'n the Jews.

For posterity, my brain has been occupying itself with a definition of Liberalism. Like, the word is so thrown around all the time, with all the fucking haters and all.

When I was still developing one notion got its hooks into me good: 'The Liberal Education.' How many of the stories that I absorbed contained that magical phrase? It seemed every historical figure at some point, 'had access to a Liberal Education,' and thus had the resources necessary to accomplish his life mission. I think the term is well laid in the paperwork of historia. In particular the Founding Fathers, I know that their level of education is often seen as an elitest station. John Adams understood both latin and greek, in fact considered greek the 'most eloquent of language.' Jefferson rewrote the Bible! There's a guy with too much time on his hands.

So what is the Liberal Education? Does on need to understand Greek to grasp it? I don't think so, since the point of learning greek was to read thinkers who had written in greek. A few hundred years of English translation has withdrawn that prerequisite.

My pursuit of the Liberal Education involved a whole lot of reading, which lured me into a costly affair with an English Literature degree - there was no closure for either of us.

I'm confident that the key to a Liberal Education is the reading of the memoirs and biographies of the 'Great Men.' Well, that's part of it.

A few months ago I was having a discussion with a co-worker about genocide. I was explaining how genocide operated, how the operator would first rip out the tongue of the peoples - targetting and killing any member of the race with access to academia, politics, or the press, before moving on to - when he cut me off to correct me; he then provided the U.N. definition of genocide as a war crime. I was struck by the understanding of the thing.

Genocide is more than the definition. It is a deliberate act, and the perpetuators of said act do not just make shit up as the murder along. A genocide requires a level of organization, and that organization is implemented for a reason. This is part of what academia does, it preserves the dark science of genocide, so that the next generation can improve on the efficiency of it.

To be continued. . .