Two Americas

America was founded by religious nuts looking to get away from the religious nuts in their original countries. This double whammy of religious nut-ism has led to there being functionally two different Americas today: the one that was founded by religious nuts; and the one that was founded as an escape from the influence of religious nuts. Today these two Americas are often called "conservative" and "liberal."

Love, and the Axe

Kids, I'm going to impart some wisdom to you that no one ever imparted to me and I had to figure it out for myself. Maybe I can pass it on to someone who can be saved the trouble.

Life is finite. Anyone, ANYONE, that is not willing or not able to love you for who you are, must be cut out of your life or have their impact on your life minimized to the greatest possible extent. Anyone. Your parents. Your children. Your wife or husband. The mother or father of your children. Your oldest childhood friends. Anyone. At. All. Must be cut out of your life if they cannot love you for who you are.

I'm not saying to be mean about it. I'm not saying to be melodramatic. You don't have to hate them, or be angry with them. You don't have to say horrible hurtful things to them. You don't even necessarily need to let them know they've been cut out. Just, cut them out. If it hurts them, that is not on you.

Life is short, and then it is over. Surround yourself with people that love you for who you are. More importantly, love yourself for who you are. Life is short, too short for anything else.

Astrology Made Sensible

It's real simple. Everything is cyclical, and 99% of free will is an illusion. The same patterns keep playing out, like a fractal on a treadmill. By and large, people born at THIS position in the cycle are more likely to have THESE traits and go through THESE events, as opposed to people born at OTHER positions in the cycle. Now, there's also a lot of random noise, and the 1% of free will that does exist is by nature unpredictable, so even the best and most accurate astrology can never be anything more than a series of guideposts. In ancient times, when things were less complicated and individual will had less power, the patterns were clearer, clear enough to mark off by the stars they saw in the sky. But like the story of the finger pointing at the moon, they confused the stars as INDICATORS of what position the cycle was in with the stars as the DETERMINATOR of what position the cycle was in. And most people are dumb and uneducated, and 99% of free will is an illusion. Which brings us to today. And so ends today's lesson.

personal sovereignty in scarequotes civilization

When you hand over your personal sovereignty to anyone, ANYONE, the risk is always there that your trust will be abused and the power they collect as millions all hand over their own personal sovereignties in turn will be utilized in things you personally would want no part with. It's virtually impossible to hold onto ALL of your personal sovereignty, and I wholeheartedly recommend rendering unto Caesar and all that, but no one should ever be surprised when human beings -- untrustworthy and awful -- turn around and do untrustworthy and awful things. At any level of what we might call scarequotes civilization.

Who was Jesus? Glad you asked! (an overly long response to a somewhat flippant question on Facebook)

Jesus was a revolutionary and visionary from thousands of years back who, despite growing up in a backwards time and among a more or less backwards people, looked out at the mass of injustice and hypocrisy in the world and how cruel people were to one another and assembled a different view of how things could be and how people should behave towards one another. The people who are on top today, he said, will be on the bottom when the reckoning comes. And those who have lost shall be comforted. He suggested letting go of an attachment to physical possessions, especially when in comparison to the worth of any human life. He strongly renounced self-righteous hypocrites.

No one at the time knew what to make of him. Some thought he must be some sort of god himself because he was so clearly ahead of his time. Others, threatened that someone so simple and poor and humble could yet be so vastly superior to them, had him executed in one of the most grisly and sadistic manners "humanity" has ever devised. Immediately afterwards, or soon enough as dammit, the same sort of status quo wealth-and-power assholes who had him killed latched on to his name and his movement, had him declared a god for reals, and have ever since done all sorts of terrible things in his name, becoming exactly the kind of self-righteous hypocrites the dude spent his life denouncing.

Meanwhile, there are those have still managed to pick up the greatest portion of his message, undiminished across centuries, and are still working steadily to make his dream of heaven on Earth a reality. Or so they say. In any case, he prophesied that one day the dead would rise again, and while the loopy superstitious cats who wear his torture device on their necks believe this will be some supernatural divine shit, I am pretty sure it will be good old fashioned human know-how that eventually makes this miracle a reality. Those with ears, let them hear.

A quick look back at Jay-Z's post-Black Album discography:

Kingdom Come? More like Kingdom Dumb.

American Gangster? More like American Wankster.

Blueprint 3? More like Doo-print 3.

Watch The Throne? More like Watch The Porcelain Throne.

Magna Carta Holy Grail? More like Massive Shart, Holy Fail.

Duck Anus and the Seven Woes of Matthew 23

So Phil Robertson from the show Duck Dynasty popped off his mouth and said a lot of ignorant illiterate inbred hillbilly shit in an interview and suddenly the world, which heretofore was inexplicably entranced by his ignorant illiterate inbred hillbilly antics and had elevated him to a television star and face on t-shirts, became shocked and dismayed by the revelation that an ignorant illiterate inbred hillbilly may hold views that are a bunch of ignorant illiterate inbred hillbilly shit, and the ignorant illiterate inbred hillbilly was suspended indefinitely from his ignorant illiterate inbred hillbilly TV show.

That should have been the end of the story. Another sign of the shifting of the times. But then, the people who are most terrified of the shifting of the times, because the times are going to make them and theirs irrelevant -- ie, the conservative wingnut faction that only SEEMS like they suddenly became a force to contend with in recent years when my own memory is these assholes have been around my whole lifetime -- decided to seize on the moment as a rallying point for their culture wars. I guess to take a break from all the War On Christmas crap.

(Here's the War On Christmas in a nutshell, future historians: This is, right here and now, literally the first time in the history of this society that the voice of the Other has been able to be heard above the roar of the smug and entitled majority, and to a certain subset of said smug and entitled majority it is TERRIFYING. The idea that there are people who celebrate their own different winter holidays or indeed celebrate none at all is threatening to people who believe it is their god-given right to shove Christmas down everyone else's throat. Any attempt at getting them to respect or even acknowledge the existence of other traditions or non-believers, is perceived as an attack. The War On Christmas. Now back to our program.)

So first the governor of Louisiana comes out and immediately demonstrates that the governor of a state in this Union, right now today, has no functional understanding of how the First Amendment works. Not to be undone in idiocy, the inexplicably still-relevant Sarah Palin comes out to show that she, who was once almost the Vice President of the United States, also has no clear or cogent comprehension of the concept. And then every idiot fucking Republican tea bag motherfucker has to swallow the party line and parrot this same lame line about freedom of speech, or even better, freedom of religion. Because Phil Robertson is a Christian. So obviously whatever dumb shit this dumb ass says about the undesirability of anuses or how black people were more godly before civil rights came along is clearly motivated by his faith in Jesus.

Cue a bunch of snarky articles defining the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and how it does not insure one continued employment if said free speech should become a threat to the employer's livelihood. And then a bunch of people wondering where Sarah Palin was when Martin Bashir got fired a few weeks ago for making the completely reasonable suggestion that someone should shit in Sarah Palin's mouth. Those with longer memories chuckle and remember when Bill Maher got fired after 9/11 and how no one said boo about free speech. Cue more snarky articles reminding Republicans that the right of an employer to fire an employee in a free marketplace is actually about as Republican as it gets. Some also draw parallels between the right wing rushing to defend the right of some duck fuck to express his Christian faith and values, and the recent condemnation of Pope Francis by many of these exact same people when he freely expressed HIS Christian faith and values. Meanwhile, on the comments pages of any article about this topic, ignorant and illiterate people of all kinds line up behind the inbred hillbilly and express views that can be charitably described as on the wrong side of history.

Somewhere, an array of computers has been keeping track of all of this. Bombs are dropped by remote control death planes, precipitation seeding and nourishing more terror and violence for years to come. The spaceships are nowhere in sight. And I'm going to bed.

The Bible Is Worse Than Grand Theft Auto

The Bible is, in terms of objectionable content, far far worse than any video game ever made to date. Within its pages there is incest, infanticide, rape, mass murder, animal sacrifice. A woman drives a tent peg into a sleeping man's ear. Actual murderers in the real world have directly cited passages from the Bible in justifying their actual murders committed in the real world. And yet, among all the cultural watchdogs, to my knowledge not one has made a movement to ban the Bible, or make it illegal to sell, or even to put some kind of rating on it to prevent children from having access to such horrible and clearly influential material. Rather, and in direct contradiction to their stated goals, many of these people look at the Bible like it some sort of moral guide. All I'm saying is, I'm hiding the tent pegs before I go to sleep.

I Am A Chinese Room

I am a Chinese room. Or, if you prefer more accuracy, an English room. Because, although not a single cell of my body understands the English language, somehow enough of them together in meaningful complexity can comprise a system that DOES understand the English language. My mouth and vocal cords call this system "me;" my fingers assert that it is "me" that types while my eyes watch letters appear on a screen. Not a single cell in my body understands English, understand. When I scraped cheek cells for middle school science class microscope labs, I did not accidentally murder poets and journalists. They're just cells. They're not very smart. And before cells even, they're just chains of molecules that describe the creation of the cell and the patterns they form in congregate. No ability to comprehend the difference between "hermetic" and "hermeneutic." But somehow, those cells and the patterns they form in congregate -- me -- does. My hands appear to understand English as they move across the keyboard, hastily backspacing over irrelevant digression; remove them from the system (i.e., chop them off) and suddenly they are useless.

I am a Chinese room. I have no idea where my thoughts come from. From my perspective they just... come to me. After they have come I can look back and sort of see where they came from, or guess where they come from, but when they come they come unannounced. Some thoughts I can hold on to and manipulate a little, some thoughts I shove away as swiftly as I can; but this is the description of someone experiencing thoughts, not thinking them. I have never seen my brain. I am only accepting as the most likely model that what I have been told is correct; that there is a brain inside my skull that thinks these thoughts that come to me. But I have never seen my brain. I have never seen my skull either but I can feel it. Never seen my brain. If it turned out that I was literally a Chinese room, that there was a tiny homunculus with a huge book and a filing cabinet and a pen and paper in my skull, and the sensory inputs from the outside world come to him to compute and process a response to, that would only be slightly weirder than the model I'm supposed to accept, the model I more or less do accept.

I am a Chinese room, and if you're not one too, you might just be a p-zombie.

Conservatives In America: A Continuing Exercise In Contradiction

Conservatives in America: It's completely unthinkable that any human activity could in, any way shape or form, impact the Earth's environment; but allowing same-sex couples to marry will have a direct, deep and negative impact on the lives of everyone.

Conservatives in America: Easy access to real guns and their ubiquity in public places in NO WAY increases the likelihood of gun violence, but easy access to virtual guns and their ubiquity in video games GREATLY increases the likelihood of gun violence.