Atheist Meditations

Listening to 'Moon & Sand' channel on Rhapsody, West Coast jazz. Nice stuff. My neck itches. Haven't shaved in three days. My mind's been encumbered by a species of disquiet of late. No continuity of thoughts has blessed my day; novel observations, annoying obligations, and whatnots fire off from my brain in all sorts of directions. If thoughts be like a flock of birds, when one of mine takes off the rest do not follow.

Is that all that consciousness is? The following of one thought after another - or maybe a jazzy harmony of thoughts - that believes it understands where they are all going? Or, maybe it is the experience/expectation of being able to control your thoughts. That's an Idea with literary antecedent. The great man who sets his mind to seemingly impossible tasks and triumphs with
overwhelming determination. Perhaps a bit of true wisdom has been hidden away in the written word.

I suppose I'm not being nearly precise enough in my syntax. I suppose medically, consciousness is defined as being aware of one's surroundings and responsive to stimuli.

I still got that.

Within the Virtue of Full Disclosure, I have to admit the One Beer Covenant didn't fucking live up to the hype. Too bad, cuz I thought all that shit about Two Loves, One Beer was worthing of getting tatoo'd somewhere on me body. Just fell off that wagon. The groovy shackles of Mistress Addiction were clearly getting a bit too heavy. A bit too obvious.

This weekend I fell back on a technique I've had good success with in the past. Often we overindulge a hair during the glorious Gemuetlichkeit of Oktoberfest in Minnesota. Where the local liquor stores fill with rich, complex beers packaged in colors as bright and fine as our autumnal foliage. Good times, good friends. A man just has to sample them all.

So then I just quit drinking for the rest of the year. Advantage one: the cessation of boozation is finite. Rather than the flawed One Beer Covenant when I was forced to endure the chronic understanding that I would never again experience a Billy Joel-esque 'belly full a beer.' Here I just have to set my sights on New Years Eve, when I get to make the ironic resolution to start drinking again. I'd even reckon a short stint of irresponsible behavior should be permitted after such a display of will. Advantage two: I save a lot of money right before the Holidays which makes buying dinners and gifts much less of a strain. Also, with Cindy's family's notion that Thanksgiving means cramming every member of the family into the same house until nerves are rubbed raw - I'm just saying it don't hurt to have a little extra self-control in the hidden reserves.

So that's about it. We're nearing the end of day three, so I'm relatively sure hospitalization won't be necessary this time. More than anything I'm just a little bored.

Change is good. Altering the routines and experiencing new perspectives drives the creative and spiritual drives. Anything to avoid the zombification of obsessive compulsive behavior.

Peace out.

Labels: personal

Ever been in a situation where a hot chick totally wants to 'rastle with your tube-snake, but you realize you just don't have it in ya to cheat on your woman? Evidently some dudes can do it, but you have to accept you just ain't one. . .

With a flash of understanding that approaches the Kwisatz Haderach (sorry, been reading Brian Herbert & Kevin J. Anderson's 'House Atreides') I envisioned an act that would certainly earn one a place amongst those currently roasting alive in their fifteen minutes of mass media fame.

Here's the Idea, one that involves two of my major loves in this world: radical acts of artistic expression and the methodical torture of cats.

Anybody could do it. Just need a cat, a faucet and a digital camera (better yet a video camera); film and post the first ever web-documented water-boarding of a feline. Simply following the same credo of the water-board that we utilize as a nation, 'not to drown the suspect, only to make them believe they are drowning.' It wouldn't take but a few minutes and a pair of welding gloves to reduce a kitten to her most primal survival instincts.

I couldn't do it myself - at least not without disrupting a fairly stable personal relationship - but I can place an adorable kitten in a situation where even one with severe deficiencies in the are of imagination can still grasp the gist of what I'm talking about:









Then all the PETA members flame the shit out of your blog for being so cruel to animals, so you respond, 'So a housecat has more more rights in this country than a Prisoner of War?' Cuz you think a water-boarding looks nasty when inflicted upon a cute little kitty cat, imagine when it's done to a human being.

Bucket after bucket after bucket after fucking bucket of cold water poured into your gasping mouth until you are completely convinced that you are drowning. A rude gesture and six little syllables from Mr. Bush are all that separate any of us from that fate. Our security services have already done it to hundreds of people - some innocent, some not - not that such a little fact as that makes any difference . . .


Once he intones, 'enemy combatant,' you have far fewer rights than little Ellie here.

Welcome to fucking Amerika. If someone with media access mentions your name and 'terrorist' in the same sentence, youz be dehumanized far beneath a house pet. Unpacked, this blog has a lot to say.

I call upon everyone in the blogosphere! Waterboard your pets, waterboard your children, waterboard you drinking buddies! Lets show the world what it looks like! Lets revel in the sense of power over the helpless that so far we have only enjoyed vicariously through Keifer and 24. Ride the predictable wave of outrage and indignation that angry, wet kittens invoke. Experience the future.

Note: no cats were harmed in the making of this blog entry. Actually, I needed several band-aids, but the cats were O.K.

Every brick in the wall of my own masculinity is crumbling on faltering foundations. I am lost. I am lost.

http://www.chucknorris.com/


It all seem pretty normal until ya hit the "Christian Section".

Cindy tells me that this can't be The Man's real site. I can't shake the horrible feeling that it really is.

Grrr.

Labels: Grrr

A tank just drove down the middle of my street. I looked out the window - stupidly, I suppose - I was in shock. A soldier sitting on the tank pointed his weapon at me, I stopped looking out the window. The nice people in military uniforms are on my television instructing us not to leave our homes until further notice. That's the only T.V. station, and they cut off my internet last week.


Alright, that didn't happen to me yet this week, but it happened to somebody today in Burma.

I'm finding my melancholic humors a bit stirred from the contemplation required in that first paragrab. If I suddenly switched bodies with a similar Burmese soul . . . that's not very fun thoughts. Being an Idealistic sort I'm sure I would have been at those protests, cheering on the actions of those Buddhist monks. ( men of religion, it is true, but this atheist holds a special exemption for the intellectually complex variants of Buddhism; I perceive those Burmese monks
on a pedestal of awe and respect) Just like China after Tienanmen Square, they are going to round up just about everybody they think had something to do with the protests. Just having been active on the internet will surely be a flag for Burmese Security Services that have been tasked with gouging out the eyes, tongue, and heart of this Demonstration Movement.

As they take you into custody, that's when you have to come to grips with the fact that The Suck will not end until they say so. It may well last for the remainder of your life.

Perhaps I'm a tad preoccupied with imaginings of atrocity, since I spent the morning reading the Wikipedia entry for List of War Crimes. Surprising how many just involve a village and a few dozen men and boys. Rounded up by invading soldiers and executed. That's the sure way to crush a resistance or stifle an uprising.

I'd intended to base this post around Sovereignty. The underlying principle of much modern international law whose conceptualization dates at least as far back as 1513 when Niccolo Machiavelli wrote. The Ruling Class, whether it is a sociopathic dictator, a group of military leaders, or an infighting club of capitalist elites; they do what they like within their own borders. Hear anybody talking about invading Burma and charging those 'Generals' with crimes against humanity? Why not? Where is the George W. Bush who connived so relentlessly to get our nation to overthrow Saddam and give the Iraqi's a chance at peace and democracy? You want to talk about a people who would greet us with flowers as liberators: we should invade Burma.

The contrast between Iraq and Burma are dramatically salient.

From what I understand Burma actually does have exploitable oil resources. Yet that is China's backyard and we have learned from the Korean and Vietnam wars not to mess with China's backyard. The Middle East, however, is territory we have declared our long term interest in. I think you could argue that WWII was decided by who controlled the Middle East.

The first rationale for invading Iraq was the fantasy that Saddam possessed 'Weapons of Mass Destruction.' That meant that he could finish the Holocaust with the push of button, America had to preemptively act. That's how the Bush Administration hoped to dance around the war crime of 'war of aggression', which, not too long ago when we were trying war criminals at Nuremberg, our nation described as "essentially an evil thing...to initiate a war of aggression...is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." (Wikipedia, "War of Aggression")

Now it is completely obvious that the majority of international commentators, the U.N.A.E.C., and progressive news sources in America were saying all along was completely right. The notion that Iraq was producing 'WMD' during the U.N. inspection regime was absurd. Not only that, but we now have a shitload of evidence that Bush's marketing campaign to hype the threat of Saddam knew that the WMD case was phony and intended it merely as a means of 'selling' it to the public. They knew they were promoting bunk intelligence, and they combined that with a policy of devastating any skeptics (remember Valarie Plame?)

Now those same spinarbeiters want to tell us that the main motive in attacking Iraq was to liberate Iraq from the evil Saddam and 'provide an example of Arab Democracy that would soon bring about the reincarnation of civility to that backwards people.'

Saddam was a bad person, no doubt about that, but that couldn't have been the reason to invade. Or else we would have a carrier battle group in the in the Bay of Burma right now.

Labels: current events, Iraq War, Realpolitik

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Salon.com reports a powerful group of conservative Christian leaders decided Saturday at a private conclave in Salt Lake City to artlessly threaten to support a third-party candidate for president if an abortion-loving nominee like Rudy Giuliani wins the Republican nomination. The fucking Council for National Policy, which includes absolute fuckheads like James Dobson of Focus on the Family and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council have proven what Karl Rove and the rest of us have known for a long time: they are fucking wankers who are easily perceived as contemptible by all who have escaped the intellectual ravages of their brand of religion.

I've listened to a fair number of 'Dr.' Dobson's radio programs - and I should have put the title in bold, not mere air quotes. His guests are well trained to inject all sorts of disgusting awe and worshipful respect into the stress upon those two syllables - each program has been more spiritually deflating than the last. The fat boy's inadequacies of maturation are so revoltingly obvious one cannot help but politely look away. Of course, in the shadow of that social balking be where the fucking pedophiles and religious demagogues always prey upon the weak.

Just to be abso-fucking-lutely clear about this, pedophiles occupy a higher moral status than do bitch ass 'pastors' like Mr. Dobson. The most hyperactive predator of small children cannot harm the lives of more than a hundred or so kids, Mr. Dobson's vulgar projection of his own base needs infects the lives of tens of millions in this country alone. Fuckers with broadcasting power behind them are held to a different standard than the rest of us; once you become an Axis Sally or a Senator McCarthy you've trespassed against us in a way that forfeits most mercies.

Example? The easiest example would be to repeat any of the countless dumb ass shit statements he's made regarding homosexuality and the 'gay culture' that actively seeks to queerify every young christian boy in America. Or I could play it a little closer to home and detail how the obese fucker routinely insults those of us who have risen to the challenge of living a moral life without a silly, oversimplified, father-figure god to give us childish rules for our behavior. By demonizing every secular thinker, along with the science of evolution and such, he's working hard to remove so much of the Beauty and Understanding of our existence from his poor, ignorant followers. In our marvelous age all someone has to do is search the internet to find levels of understanding denied (oftentimes purposefully) every fucking previous generation. To try to preclude that just because you, Dr. Dobson, are too stupid or lazy to embrace it has got to be a crime/sin. My example will involve the fillies.

Listen to a thousand hours of Focus on the Family, until your dick falls right off and I challenge you to find one fucking example of a woman on that program who is ever treated as an intellectual equal. Nope, they are invariably introduced in a manner that praises and credits them for their submissiveness - i.e. acceptance of Gawd's will - then immediately go into a rapid-fire exhibition of trite thankyous and praisegods for Dr. Dobson, his ministry, and the huge, positive impact he's had on their lives. Most real men, in my humble fucking opinion, always feign discomfort and change the subject with an 'aw it was nothing.' The Jesus I learned about in school would quickly defuse that sort of speech with a self-less comment on 'just doing my Father's will.' Not Dr. Dobson, he's got a molochesque appetite for the stroking of his ego, and I've personally never seen the fucker show humility. What women struggled like hell to achieve for hundreds of years - and now can actually fucking possess in this brief historical period if they just reach out and take it - . . . not in Dr. Dobson's little world.

I need to transfer back to the fucking Council for Nation Policy and the title of this blog.

Do they understand that this bluff can only be a bluff, or are they really willing to take their poor sap followers back into forty more years of wandering in our political landscape's desert? If I thought that any of these fuckers were acting upon firmly held ideological motives, than maybe I'd buy their 'puritanical breakaway' to a third party. I think Dobson and Perkins are like the Jerry Falwell so eloquently eulogized by Christopher Hitchen's, "If you gave his corpse an enema he could be buried in a matchbook." I'm sure they believe the parts that make them special, not so sure they are ready to put their balls on the line for the finer points of dogma.

Perhaps they believe that this game of chicken will have an effect on the Republican party and their candidates. I've just had a horrific vision of Rudy Giuliani having a religious conversion, finding 'Jesus', and taking the reverend Dr. Dobson as his personal spiritual adviser. He gets the sins of his multiple marriages and 'rah, rah, abortion!' stance wiped cleaner than Gee Dub's three decades of women, booze and cocaine blow jobs. This line of thinking be too frightening to con-type-plate.

Most likely, Dobson and the other fucking cretins who occupy similar positions of power within the totalitarian hierarchy of his 'religious movement' suffer from the most characteristic malady of the evags: an apparently pathological inability to perceive themselves in a critical light. While most of us possess useful inhibitions that anticipate social disdain and avoid actions that will lead to such derision, evags seem to represent an social evolution where that inhibition/level of understanding has been lost. I think it grows out of the fact that they only care about the opinions of others who have also 'found Jeesus.' They perceive all the rest of us as 'proto-christians' waiting to be saved, and thus cement in their own status as a lesser group. . . this be tangential.

Most likely, Dobson and the other fucking cretins have misjudged their own importance. Since they cannot comprehend themselves in a self-critical way, they will continue to see the pandering of Karl Rove and Gee Dumb as some sort of actual proximity to power. The real 'powers that be' will select the Republican nominee and then they will find a way to sell him to their credulous flock of sub-humans. That is wherein their value lies, when they stop being valuable. . . well, this is a capitalistic society. . . (sort of)

Labels: current events, evags