Atheist Meditations

I'm well aware that the masters of Major League Baseball control all the rights to their broadcasts, and that even written descriptions of the game can be a violation of their copyrights if I do not possess their written permission. I don't know why they would want to stop a lowly blogger from adding a small posting of kindling to the bonfire of Twins Mania in our culture, but their rights are their rights.

I am vulgar from time to time; that was nigh Bert Blyleven's downfall.

Suffice to say, a certain man with sideburns that would make Jesus jealous came through for his team with a two out, two strike homer in the eighth to keep the door open for the Twins to win the game! Our Twins have had an incredible season, with a great roster of surprisingly talented and highly motivated players.

Like two exhausted gladiators in the blistering sun of the city's arena, the Twins and the Tigers have three more games to struggle against each other (vicariously through the White Sox and the Royals) as they claw at the Division Title. There can be only one.

I just hope none of our players gets hurt in the run up to the post season.

Win or Lose, I'm a big fan of a team that plays the sort of baseball that you can't walk away from. Flip on the game, and soon I find myself standing in the living room with an empty beer - too engrossed in the game to take fifteen seconds to reload.

Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton:

"The President is not well served by his Secretary of Defense, a man history will not treat kindly. So what to do? Replace the Secretary of Defense with a proven leader who has a vision to get the country's defense establishment back on track. The army is in terrible shape, the marines are not much better. A Secretary who understands how to build alliances at home and abroad, who understands the operational art and understands the contemporary environment we live in."

President George W. Bush:

"Our nation is blessed to have young Americans like these -- and we will need them. Dangerous enemies have declared their intention to destroy our way of life. They're not the first to try, and their fate will be the same as those who tried before. Nine-Eleven showed us why. The attacks were meant to bring us to our knees, and they did, but not in the way the terrorists intended. Americans united in prayer, came to the aid of neighbors in need, and resolved that our enemies would not have the last word. The spirit of our people is the source of America's strength. And we go forward with trust in that spirit, confidence in our purpose, and faith in a loving God who made us to be free.

Thank you, and may God bless you."

So now there's a NIE being talked about where just about everybody with the slightest interest in reality agrees that placing a christian army in the middle east had to be about the stupidest fucking thing that could have possibly been done. I can just imagine Osama sitting around the war room with his terrorist underlings:

"But boss, even though Allah is great and righteous, if we attack the U.S. on September 11 . . . Allah save us from the most powerful military the world has ever seen."

"Oh, murderous grasshopper, indeed Allah is great and righteous, and Bush will only attack us for a few months before he will turn and smite Saddam Hussien."

"Um, boss, if we attack him, why would Bush turn around and start a war with Iraq for no reason? That would totally play into our hands in every possible way? ! ? That makes no sense."

"Once you understand the nature of a thing, you know what it is capable of."

I bounce back and forth between thinking that Bush and his crew are so fucking inept that they just fucked up left and right in Iraq and things just got worse by the day, by the month, by the year; or the notion that fucking up Iraq was the gameplan all along.

What do they care if Iraqi's live like dogs in slums with giant lakes of human waste? What do they care if various death squads are torturing star-bellied sneeches at an insane pace? George W. Fucking Bush don't care.

He got to fuck up our economy and go ape-shit with the deficeit spending (exactly what guys like Grover Norquist want)

He got to fork over billions in no-bid, guaranteed profit, contracts to his pals at Halliburton (exactly what Dick Cheney wanted)

He got to settle a personal score with Saddam (exactly what a spoiled prince would want)

He got to fuck up the oil flow in the middle east (exactly as our nation's long term planners have wanted since Carter. Anyone else remember that Dallas subplot where J.R. Ewing wanted to nuke Saudi Arabia to make his own texas tea more valuable?)

He don't even care what happens to our troops over there. Nope, those neo-cons are so looking forward into this 'new military.' Already we see the rise of 'security contractors', where tough motherfuckers from Navy Seals and other Special Forces just don't find themselves with too many marketable skills when they finally get out of the military in their thirties - rather than go work at Wal-Mart they get hired by a security contractor to do what they've been trained to do, just sans oversight, or a uniform code of conduct.

Fuck the army, what we're moving too is corporate forces. They'll have all the latest technology and intel - and it sure ain't none of our business where they go and what they're doing.

What's wrong with folks in this country? The Bush bullshit has gone from disturbing, to absurd, to laughable, into a maddening environment of fucking insanity. They are doing away with habeus corpus (but, only for the bad men, the evil men) for fucksake. The media plays out this retarded 'debate' about the issue, and it is just so insane. Either I am going insane or the world is or always has been.

I'm leaning toward the latter.

C- told me that my blog was down, and so I'm uncertain why I can still blog this here but I'm getting a 404 off blogger when I come at it from the other side.

Well, here goes.

I just read an article that C- recommended to me about the species of the evagelicals out in the Pacific Northwest on Salon. For those of you who are members; the link.

The article by Lauren Sandler summarizes the author's insight from his recent book, 'Righteous'; many illustrive anecdotes are laid out to clarify the situation. Here's one I cut out of the article:

During a community group evening, a couple of weeks before I visited, Dietz was hanging out with the men in the backyard, while the women were inside cooking and watching the kids. Scrutinizing the dilapidated fence that had come with the house, Dietz began talking about how he'd really like a new one, but wasn't sure how much the whole endeavor might cost.

A few days later, the men in the group pulled up in front of the house with a pickup truck full of lumber and set about building a new fence on the spot. Now whenever the Dietzes look out their kitchen window, they see a proud and solid reminder of the strength of their community, and the unity of their faith in God. Dietz recounts this story sitting squarely in his big chair in the living room, his eyes set on mine over the rim of his coffee cup. I tell him the truth: I have wonderful friends who I have considered close as family for many years now, and I can't imagine any of them helping me lug the wood, much less building me a fence. He pauses and sets down his coffee cup in a motion that is about to put a definitive end to a delightful evening. "Listen," he says. "We have a really nice rapport. But we believe different things. And let's face it, because of that, you're never going to feel like family to me. So, what I'm saying is, this is as far as it goes." Stung at first, upon reflection I can't blame him. I have nothing like his shared faith to connect me to other people. It's no wonder Dietz and Sarah glow when they talk about their group with the same tones of veneration in which they join hands and say grace before dinner.

End Quote

Now this strikes so many irritated chords with me that I can barely focus on just one to begin my rant with.

First is the manner of inclusion/exclusion that is used. This is a big step up from 'if you havn't felt the love of Jesus I pity you'; this is, 'If you don't believe what I believe than you don't mean shit to me.' See the cultiness here? That's definately a trend towards the Hard Right.

Secondly, why can't we just call a spade a spade and start to refer to these types with the same language we use for drug addicts? Earlier in the article the author describes what evags these days are calling 'agape' - the type of love that Jesus has for them, which effortlessly belittles the experiences of love that are psycologically paired with family, friends, or sexual partners. Agape can be used as the brand name for their group love drug. By exploiting the psychology of the herd, and also maximizing the mental fantasies of the group regarding safety and 'being special', the religious leader can generate incredible feelings of belonging and love. Like a version of Titanic adjusted on the fly by a skilled 'TV psychic' to generate as many shrieks out of that audience as possible - these freaks don't smoke nothing, they use group dynamics to get high.

And DAMN do they get high! 'Agape' is a the best trick their stale little culture has come up with yet to describe the experience to the rest of us. But even without possessing the religious underworkings which animate the word 'agape', we can still compare the imagry to that of drug culture and infer that they are talking about some religious Maui Woowie.

Group dynamics huffing works off the fact that our species is a very social animal (we have always found social bonds essential to survival and thus the continuation of our genetic material) yet too many of us are allowed to survive in this society dispite glaringly primitive social skills. Even me - a being that I like to think is very socially developed - can find myself sweating through my shirt and desperately hesitating when a novel situation requires me to interact with a stranger. Most Americans have some difficulty expressing themselves honestly and interacting comfortably with other human beings who are not a member of their family or close group.

What the evags do is use the power of group suggestion. Some members of the group claim to feel this incredible pleasure inside of their bodies, and they occassionally make unusual movements or noises to represent this transcendental pleasure. Other members of the group have a strong psychological instinct to relate to the other members of their group. So if one is claiming to have a groovy feeling of love right now, the others . . .

Anybody else have one of those early teen experiences where someone claimed to have some alcoholic beverage or a drug or something, and then everybody tried it and started acting goofy until finally the perpetrator admitted he was just playing you all for fools - it was just koolaid or granulated sugar? Evags have been taking that joke too far for about a hundred years now.

The first evags to initialize the group to a feeling of pleasure from this elaborate group dynamic are not lying to themselves. They honestly believe that the endorphins they are releasing are proof of a magical world. The process does release real chemicals in the brain, and those chemicals are very potent behavior modifiers.

The author of this article refers to Evagelicalism as 'gobbling up this entire generation.' The size of this locomotive of the damned is nightmarish.

Dietz is no different from a heroin addict that mocks your inability to score horse and 'feel the music.'

How many human beings are free of the slavery of the addicted mind? One percent? Two? Fuck us all.

The Path to 9/11, ABC Disney's latest attempt to cash in on the tragedy of 9/11 and please those in power has crossed the last motherfucking line.

The feed today at Counterspin has some killer insight into what's going on today.

I have to let all this soak before I can get a good rant going.

President of the United States of America, the honorable and majestic George W. Bush:

Despite these strategic setbacks, the enemy will continue to fight freedom's advance in Iraq, because they understand the stakes in this war. Again, hear the words of bin Laden, in a message to the American people earlier this year. He says: "The war is for you or for us to win. If we win it, it means your defeat and disgrace forever."

Now, I know some of our country hear the terrorists' words, and hope that they will not, or cannot, do what they say. History teaches that underestimating the words of evil and ambitious men is a terrible mistake. In the early 1900s, an exiled lawyer in Europe published a pamphlet called "What Is To Be Done?" -- in which he laid out his plan to launch a communist revolution in Russia. The world did not heed Lenin's words, and paid a terrible price. The Soviet Empire he established killed tens of millions, and brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war. In the 1920s, a failed Austrian painter published a book in which he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany and take revenge on Europe and eradicate the Jews. The world ignored Hitler's words, and paid a terrible price. His Nazi regime killed millions in the gas chambers, and set the world aflame in war, before it was finally defeated at a terrible cost in lives.

What a cock knocker.

First off, I'm enough of a socialist to be plenty pissed off by that statement. The communism that Lenin set out to fuel a revolution in Russia with was not the communism that killed 'tens of millions, and brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war.' The communism of Lenin and Trotsky was one of words and Ideas; men and women read those words, felt those Ideas and acted to bring down a fucking heriditary ruler and begin to change the fucking serfdom system. It was people rising up against a shitty autocrat, and the government they established was legitimate. . .

Then every country in the Western World (including the U.S.) declared war on them. Political systems in the West were too similar to the one that had Russian Armies convinced to lay down their arms rather than kill thier own people for an imbred Tsar. The example set by the October Revolution had to be wiped from the minds of the world. The European ruling class was going to get communism before it got them.

The nature of the communism in Russia changed as a result of the outside pressures, just as Islam has changed in the last sixty years. Soon communism became 'war communism' a series of centralizations of power that were necessary because enemy troops were on their soil. Violent times lead to the idolization of violent men; Stalin struck like a cobra. He implemented a horrifically effective police state, and those 'tens of millions' belong on his 'Stalinism' and not on the evaluations of the class war between Working Class and Ruling Class that Lenin and Trotsky operated under.

Mr. Bush's complete and deliberate mischaracterization of Lenin aside (and it is deliberate, too many Bush fans hold 'commies are evil' as a truth much more self-evident than 'all men are created equal') , what the fuck!?!

He does'nt feel that us citizens, the poor fuckers who actually think we have some duty as a member of American society to listen to his 'Presidential' speech, have the thinking capacity of children. His fucking market analysists have the whole fucking thing all figured out, with the same equations they use to sell toothpaste, about what phrases 'sell well' and they not him, determine the content of his speech. I doubt he even bothers to proof-read the thing before he performs it with radio coaching from backstage.

What the fuck kind of logic is he getting at here. Because Hitler wrote a book about his intentions before he got himself democratically elected to office in a free country, we are suppose to take the rantings of every single religious wacko as a absolutely fatal progrostication which can only be avoided by World War?

Hitler was not a threat to the world because he dreamed of exterminating the Jewish race. I bet there are thousands of bald headed white guys just within fifty miles of my computer here that have the same racist dreams. He was a threat to the world because he controlled a country where loyalty to the Leader was more important than anything else; the largest military on the planet and massive industrial and technological assets. That's what seperated Hitler from just another anti-semite, just that little detail about a huge fucking army, navy, and ruthless secret police.

Bin Laden should be evaluated as a threat on the same scale.

War is Peace! What the Fuck?

I read that speech and I just can't believe it. How can the President of the United States get off saying such pathologically illogical shit and not get called on it by the press? Are there really people in this country who listen to this sort of thing and not feel like they've just been kicked in the balls? The audacity of that man, to ridicule the office of President and use that podium as a means of spinning propaganda and fear-mongering.

Embrace Fascim to Fight 'Fascism'!

I'm amazed at how large of a world response the recent death of Animal Planet's Steve Erwin generated. Cindy's sister called her as soon as she heard about it. My Mother brought it up during Labor Day dinner; the news articles detailing his accident have been tops on Google News for the last 48 hours.

Evidently, he's being mourned all over the world.

Mass Media does not give us people, it gives us characters. The parts of Mr. Erwin's personality that made it past the editing table and into the character of 'The Croc Hunter,' all seemed cool to me.

He had an infectious enthusiam for nature and danger. He was a good man.

So by now I'm sure the blogosphere is awash with bloggers hammering keys in indignation over the recent comments by Secretary Rumsfeld. That old coot just don't give it up, does he? Like the taboo against openly ridiculing the religious, too many Americans still hold to this notion that the executive branch deserves a level of respect well above what they have earned.

Fortuanately, this does not filter down to the lower levels. At our state fair yesterday, a democrat running for office talked about a recent debate he had with his competitor. When the incumbent republican informed the crowd that 'this is the best economy we have ever seen,' the crowd gave out an audible groan. The same reaction when he sought to educate them on how the acts of 'environmental activists' were ultimately responsible for the spike in oil prices.

Tim Wahls (hope I spelled that right, no time to look it up now and risk distraction) stated that 'people are tired of being talked down to,' just given the talking points even when they are insulting to the intelligence of an average fifth grader. Politician are like car salesmen, sure there can and may be some with integrity out there, but the smart stance is to assume each one you deal with is content to hustle ya and move on - if you will let them.

We're 'making progress' in Iraq, or the 'economy is grrrreat!', are statements that require facts to support them. Facts are rarely considered important to the Bush Administration, when the leader speaks; what more do you think you deserve?

Thus I get to this Voice of America story.

For those few readers out there who are new to the ranting of this seeker, allow me to elucidate on VOA. This is not a news organization, it is a propaganda machine that the U.S. State Department has been running since the 40's, originally to counter the vile propaganda of the Soviet Bloc. I know that propaganda is an overloaded and heavily overused term (esp. in my little neck of the woods), but Voice of America is an interesting animal because no one denies that it is propaganda. That is why for most of us, we never hear about it, because U.S. law supposedly forbids the dissemination of propaganda in our free society. It is for broadcast at them not at us.

So we can safely assume that the VOA is one of the best specimins of political propaganda that we can observe and study. Their truthiness is high, it is in the selection of truth where the devil hides.

Still, I can't help but wonder if the cats in the State Department are a bit of their game,


Is this the image of Secretary Rumsfeld they want to reinforce? If I was listening to that speech and couldn't comprehend english, I'd be certain he was calling for the 'final solution' to gays, natives, and jews.

Oops, there I went and crossed the Nazi Line. . . Ever since Jon Stewart gave a hilarious opinion piece on the overuse of comparisons of political opponents to Hitler - '. . . and frankly, it's not fair to Hitler. . . that guy worked too hard, too many years at being evil' - I thought we all were going to lay off the penciling of narrow mustaches upon our most hated politicians.

But then, Mr. Rumsfeld did devote a fair portion of his speech to comparing those of us who criticize Bush's Crusade in the Middle East to Neville Chamberlain (who all of us Civ fans know was a really crappy leader.) Cuz refusing to support their 'War of Terror' is just like hoping Hitler wouldn't blitzkrieg your nation if you pretended to like him.

A few points:

• The list of folks in America who desperately wanted to support Hitler during the lead up to our entry in WWII was long. Here in Minnesota our rock star Charles 'Spirit of St. Lous' Lucky Lindy met with Hitler and was an outspoken fan of Germany's airforce.
• America has a fair history of appeasing great powers. The Louisiana Purchase, whereby we funded Napolean's War Machine is a prime example. He had the greatest army in the world, and the notion that he might take it across the Atlantic was more than mere speculation. If he had, maybe we'd all be speaking french today.
  
• Hitler had the most powerful military in the world, along with a terrifyingly efficient secret police force. The notion that he could destroy a civilization without hesitation was real. Germany was one the cutting edge of technological development, and had the industrial capacities to mass produce the weapons of war.
  
• Islamo-fascism is the stupidest term ever invented, and those who use it are either fascinatingly undereducated or purposefully speaking down to us. Fascism, by definition is more like how a corporation runs than an Al-Queida network. The powers at the top make decisions, and the components at the bottom follow orders. Bin Laden does not have secret police who oversee his every underling and made sure that their loyalty is 110%. Bin Laden runs a loose collection of cells that have very little contact with each other, most have similar goals, but they are not fascist. Fascism is bad, terrorism is bad - the comparison ends there.
• To state the obvious: the Bush Administration, with its dependency on controlling mass media and spin, their love of the 'glorification of the Great Leader', their continual over-identification of themselves with our military, the various programs that are spying on us right now, ect. ect. - is much more following the fascist model.

Appeasing the terrorists and treating the human beings in the Middle East and in other places justly and fairly may be the same thing. Perhaps it could be as simple as ceasing our shameful flow of taxpayer dollars into Israel and the corrupt regimes of Saudi Arabia and that ilk. Maybe if we just got our christian soldiers out of the Holy Land and stopped playing into their fantasies about Crusades and Jyhad.

Just a thought.