We Are No Threat To The Earth

Get over yourselves. We are not harming the Earth one bit. Let me explain. By "the Earth" you can mean a few things. You might be referring to the actual planet Earth, an astronomical body in orbit around a G-type star. Or you might be referring to the biosphere, that envelops the blue planet like a tapestry of green and red. That line came to me as I was drifting to sleep last night. Regardless, we are no threat to either one.

The biosphere thrives on chaos and devastation. Don't be fooled by how pretty it is, study how it actually works. The biosphere has stood up to asteroid impact, terrible ice ages, biological plagues, it has taken them and laughed. AND evolved intelligent beings, some of them smug, one of them me typing right now. Yes, it's that kind of piece. The biosphere thrives on chaos and devastation. It's really a kind of awful game, but it was around long before us, and hopefully in time it will escape planetary confinement and spread. Hopefully in time it won't be such an awful game. But until then, we are no threat to it.

The actual planet itself is a big rock. It doesn't even know we're here. One day the Sun will have heated up to the point where all the liquid on the planet boils off and whatever life is still here will die badly. And then some time after that the Earth's orbit will decay and it will collapse into the red, giant sun. That's the only threat to the Earth. And maybe an impact with a body large enough to crack it in two. When the Earth dies it will die without having had any clue it had intelligent life on it at one point. We are no threat to it.

We will live and die on the Earth, or we will leave the Earth and live forever. Given enough time, we could conceivably develop to the point where our technology has hit the Clarke's Law threshold and we can harness unfathomable power and move planets around at whim. By this point we would definitely be a threat to the Earth, since it would finally be within our power to destroy it. But why would we? That's dumb.

I've slipped around a lot from the rant I heard in my head as I was drifting to sleep. It was in my voice and I'm pretty sure it was me, but I kept trying to sleep and not listen to it, and it kept shouting "Two spheres! There are two spheres!" So this is only the ghost of a rant, and I guess what I am trying to say is this: Screw you, hippies. The Earth is doing fine.

The Life Cycle Of The God-Mind (Made Simple)

The mind of the universe, and how it is experienced, can be broken down as such:

1. The Void
In the beginning there was nothing. A period of darkness and sleep. On a universal scale, this refers to the time before the universe had manifested, or at least before it had manifested consciousness. On a personal scale this refers to the time before you were born, or more accurately, the time before "I" was born.

2. Yin & Yang
The current phase, a period of alternating sleep and wake. Universally this can be interpreted as the imperfect and incomplete manifestation of conscious will over the blind and impersonal forces of random chance. Personally this can be read quite literally: your entire life is periods alternating wake and sleep.

3. The Eye
The Omega Point. The period of pure and total consciousness, the entire universe awake and aware as a single all powerful entity. Waking into this from your life is probably analogous to waking from a dream. For all intents and purposes, this is God. The personal and universal scales are the same.

Except breaking it down into a three-step process implies the existence of time. Problem is, time doesn't really exist, at least not the way we understand it. This leads to the tricky and ineffable part -- somehow step three IS step one, or leads to it, or causes it. Better prophets than I will hopefully explain further.

a quick argument against intelligent design

Let's talk for a minute about the maxillary sinuses. Like the rest of the paranasal sinuses, they are hollow areas in the bones of your face. The maxillary in particular are these arrow-head looking hollows behind your cheeks on each side of the nose. These sinuses are lined with mucosa that produce mucus for whatever reason which I am too lazy to look up. The sinuses drain this mucus out of these small passages in the bone called ostia. If for some reason these ostia become inflamed, proper drainage can become blocked and the buildup leads to sinus headaches. Now the maxillary sinuses in particular don't drain right under the best of circumstances, since they only have a single ostium for each, called the "maxillary hiatus," and they are located near the top of the sinuses, as opposed to the bottom where any competent engineer would tell you is the best place to put the drainage pipe. You know, because of gravity. And so forth. So under the best of circumstances they don't drain right, under bad circumstances they don't drain at all. These holes in the cheekbones collect with mucus which in turn collects bacteria or viruses, better known as an infection, which finally leads to a really bad sinus headache. Sort of like the electric agony of a toothache mixed with getting kicked in the balls, except if your balls were behind your nose.

Intelligent design my ass. If sinuses are intelligent design, I'm Leonardo da Vinci.

post-addendum footnote disclaimer: Yes, true believers, I already understand that my scope and vision is too limited to truly understand how the crap design of the maxillary sinuses is completely crucial and consistent with blah blah blah blah blah. You don't need to tell me.

post-post-blah-blah-blah: Also I already know there are plenty of things that post-technological humans can do to alleviate this crap design, from decongestants to irrigation of the nasal canal with that weird teapot looking thing to balloon sinuplasty, and seriously look this last one up if you haven't heard of it. That's not the point.

Thoughts On Christmas (And The Holiday Season In General)

WE NEED A HOLIDAY FROM THE HOLIDAY
There's a reason basically every culture and civilization put a big holiday right around the winter solstice. It's because that time of year sucks ass. It is really cold, and it gets dark so soon, and outside everything is death and bone-chilling despair. That's why suicides historically skyrocket this same time of year, because it's an awful, awful time. So they created the Holiday. Call it Christmas, Yule, Hanukah, Kwaanza, Saturnalia, or any of the other names it has gone by in different cultures, the Holiday itself is pretty standard. Today, what was intended to be a joyful celebration to help make bearable the depressing winter has been transformed, become a monster that makes this awful and hateful time of year even worse. It is not only a major Consumer Stress Event, but it also leads to Unavoidable Social Obligations. Everyone is so stressed out about having a good time during this "most wonderful time of the year" that they neglect to have the good time. We need a holiday from the holiday.

CHRISTMAS IS A HOLIDAY FOR WOMEN AND SMALL CHILDREN
Actually, come to think of it, ALL holidays are holidays for women and small children...

CHRISTMAS IS A MODERN AMERICAN POTLATCH
Stop me if you've heard this one. The people are under intense social pressure to BUY, to purchase gifts for one another. Then the holiday comes, and when it passes they all rush back to the stores to return the gifts they just received. What is this immense waste of time and retail man-hours but an ineffective version of potlatch, conspicuous consumption on the tribal scale?

"THE ONE DAY A YEAR I'M SUPPOSED TO NOT BE A DOUCHE"
In older, more religious societies, the paradigm was six days with the Devil and one with God. In other words, for six days you would be concerned with this world and tarnish your soul to grasp onto it, but come Sunday you would be back in the house of the Lord. In modern secular America it is 364 days with the Devil, one with Santa Claus. Christmas is the time when you're not supposed to be a douche, but people spend most of the month or so leading up to it being selfish and lunatic douchebags. Defeats the purpose? Not for me to say.

LYING TO YOUR KIDS ABOUT SANTA CLAUS IS STILL LYING TO YOUR KIDS.
Just a thought.

RUDOLPH THE RED NOSED REINDEER WAS AN UNCLE TOM
What's the meaning of this story? Kid born with freakish ability. Ostracized for it. Oh, wait, his freakish ability saved the day! THEN how the reindeer loved him... If I was Rudolph, I would have told the reindeer to fuck off. I'm the same reindeer you made fun of yesterday, I want nothing to do with any of you assholes.

WE NEED SOME NEW CHRISTMAS SONGS
Did you ever notice that Christmas songs describe the Christmas experience of the 1940s or the Christmas experience of the 1800s? When was the last time you ate chestnuts roasting on an open fire or rode in a one-horse open sleigh? Christmas songs are totally irrelevant to the modern Christmas experience. They should do a song called "I'm Waiting On Line For Christmas" or "A Prescription For Yuletide Cheer."

SANTA HATS AREN'T FESTIVE
They just make you look like a fucking idiot. Consider this a public service announcement.

THEY SHOULD SELL EGG NOG YEAR ROUND
I mean, they don't just sell turkey around Thanksgiving, or liquor around St. Patrick's Day. Why do they only sell egg nog around the Holiday? It's really delicious!

CHRISTMAS LIGHTS ARE TACKY
To be fair, I guess in the right hands they could be a tasteful, even aesthetically interesting medium. Just not the way you're doing them. Especially you lames with the flashing lights. This has been another public service announcement.

PEOPLE WHO SAY KEEP CHRIST IN CHRISTMAS ARE DUMB
First off, Jesus wasn't even born in December. He was probably born in March. The reason the festival of the dying-and-returned god was placed in December had a lot more to do with the pre-existing holidays already set for December. Saturnalia ran from the 17th to the 23rd. The Germanic pagan winter festival Yule took place on December 25th. There was the Holiday long before there was Christmas. Christmas itself wasn't celebrated as such until centuries after the death of Christ, when it finally supplanted the pre-existing holidays and assimilated them into itself. (Listen to Christmas carols talk about "yule-logs" and "yule-tide" and see what I mean.) In fairness, I do admit that if you take Christ out of Christmas it's just "mas." That sounds retarded. Maybe we should keep Christ in Christmas after all.

A Passage I Just Wrote For Something That I Deleted

...his attendance was like a game of Battleship, sometimes a straight run here or there but mostly scattershot and random.

Render Unto Caesar

So I got forwarded this chain email, by a close family relative who really should know better, and while I usually delete these unread I clicked this one out of curiosity and was rewarded with a genuine head-scratcher, the body of which I have duplicated below (minus most of the poor formatting but with all the poor grammar kept verbatim):

---

Fw: Re: Fwd: It has begun...Refuse new coins

REFUSE NEW COINS

This simple action will make a strong statement.

Please help do this.. Refuse to accept these when they are handed to you.

I received one from the Post Office as change and I asked for a dollar bill instead..

The lady just smiled and said 'way to go' , so she had read this e -mail.

Please help out...our world is in enough trouble without this too!!!!!

U.S.Government to Release New Dollar Coins


You guessed it
'IN GOD WE TRUST' IS GONE!!!
If ever there was a reason to boycott something, THIS IS IT!!!!

DO NOT ACCEPT THE NEW DOLLAR COINS AS CHANGE

Together we can force them out of circulation..

Please send to all on your mailing list!!!

---

Okay... so. Wait, I'm still laughing about how ridiculous this is. Hang on.

(nervous, incredulous laughter)

Okay, I think I'm -- wait, be right back.

(more laughter, cough cough cough hack spit, deep breath)

Okay, I'm ready to continue. But where to begin? By picking apart the patently preposterous propositions? Like "our world is in enough trouble without this too!!!!"? As if WORDS ON A COIN really matter EVEN AT ALL in a real world sense. Or the part where "The lady just smiled and said 'way to go' , so she had read this e -mail." But, how could she have already read this email when the incident involving her was just mentioned in it? Time travel? Precognition? Or maybe the person that wrote this email is lying scum. Take your pick, back to the subject at hand.

Now, maybe you really think God should be on our coins, the way it's been since the beginning of... well, since 1864, when Salmon P. Chase (yes, his real name) got the ball rolling on stamping In God We Trust on coins. Maybe you're really religious, and you just forgot the part where Jesus said "You cannot serve both God and money." It's Matthew 6:24 if you need to look it up. Or, maybe you're real patriotic, and you just forgot the part where it is unconstitutional for the federal government to acknowledge or endorse any deity, deities, or religious figures. (Except Elvis, naturally.)

Look. It's almost 2010. There's still slavery going on, did you know that? In the time I wrote this sentence a couple hundred people just had their lives taken by violence in various parts of the world. A bunch of people just starved to death somewhere. We live in a world where 99% of the resources are owned by 1% of the people, and "if ever there was a reason to boycott something," this is it? Seriously? I've said it before and I'll say it again, please someone build a spaceship so I can get in it and leave this madhouse and all you fools behind. Please.

But wait, here's another relevant Jesus quote: "Render unto Caesar's what is Caesar's; and render unto God what is God's." (Matt. 22:21)

The real question is, why does In God We Trust belong on our money in the first place? Jesus didn't approve of mixing God and Money. The Founding Fathers didn't approve of mixing Church and State. So clearly only someone who hates both Jesus AND the principles of this great nation would want to demonstrate their contempt by cynically putting In God We Trust on money.

It's like this, folks. Over here is religion, and whatever God or Gods you worship. Spritual. Transcendent. And over HERE is government, and money. Secular. Material. If you were to draw a Venn diagram of it, it would look like TWO COMPLETELY UNCONNECTED CIRCLES because that's what the spiritual world and the material world are. Unconnected. Unless you buy into Eastern philosophy or quantum physics and believe that everything is connected to everything else, in which case you probably aren't too concerned with WORDS ON A FUCKING COIN.

And last, since the money isn't actually backed by anything but our own belief that it's worth something, wouldn't it be more proper for the coins to say IN OURSELVES WE TRUST?

Spider-Man Comics In The Nineties

Confusing Continuity
Consisting of Convoluted Crossovers
Concerning Carnage and Clones

3 Things I Wrote In My Head Today

Talya
Talya likes to ride on my shoulders. A few visits ago I told her that I would not let her if she had a dirty diaper because I didn't want a dirty diaper up on my neck. Reasonable, right? And she understood. Then somewhere along the way it turned into every time her diaper gets changed she runs up to me and says "Uncle Noelie, I want to ride on your neck! My diaper is clean!"

Me Against The World
I am only an outcast freak because in my mind I am still an outcast freak. Time and again the world has told me it is ready to accept me now, and time and time again I have told the world to go fuck itself. Tragic flaw or personal triumph? I'm not objective enough to say.

A Classic Rant
You know how they have those self-checkout lines at grocery stores? And how they break them down by quantity? Like twelve items or less, five items or less, and so forth? Here's an idea: self-checkout lanes for COMPETENT PEOPLE.

The Dark Ages™

an excerpt from Panopticon Remix:

Picture it like this: You're born in a dank, smelly, dusty hut with a dirt floor. When you are old enough you are set to work in the fields for the Lord Of The Land™. If you don't provide enough the soldiers come. Perhaps you get drafted to fight in one of the dozens of small wars between this lord and that lord or between this king and that king or between the followers of this sect and the followers of that sect. Or perhaps you are drafted as a laborer for one of the great and grandiose projects your leader envisions; a big wall, a lavish palace, an ostentatious tomb. Better not complain. Maybe you even survive all of this, to come back to the home you do not own and work again. From the day you were born to the day you die your life is not your own. You cannot read, you know of no other life than a short and miserable one at service to people you have never even seen. Maybe if you're lucky you will not fall victim to any one of the thousands of illnesses they cannot cure yet. Maybe if you're lucky you won't be murdered outright in this era of lawlessness. Maybe you'll live to a ripe old age, to see your children felled by war and disease and overwork. Then die, then repeat. Continue this for a few thousand years.

Or maybe that's too depressing for you and you prefer to identify with the rulers. Who wouldn't? So how about this: You are born into more wealth and power than you rightly know what to do with. Your slightest whim is made into reality, you hold in your hands the lives and deaths of thousands of people. Dirty, smelly people -- barely even people at all. You bask in pleasure every waking moment of your life. This is the Divine Right Of Kings™. Then, one day, you get murdered by your own guards. Or by your brother. Or your son. Right before you die you think for a moment about how tenuous your "power" always was, or more likely you just think about how unfair this is. Or heck, maybe you live a long life and it's only after you die that your entire bloodline is brutally wiped out by the competition. It happens.

Either way, insert some Dark Ages™. Fast forward through the needless suffering, the ignorance, the filth. Or, if you’re one of those ren-faire type people, fast forward through an era of unheralded chivalry and honor. Either way, skip ahead a few thousand years.

The Chess Piece

In chess he is brutal. He tears apart the opponent's force, piece by piece, before finally backing the enemy king, frightened and alone, into the corner. Checkmate. He does this, not because he is malicious or vindictive, but because for him it is the only way. He does not see the quicker and more efficient lines of vulnerability, he is too cautious. Cautious yes, yet brutal. Against lesser and equal players he can hold his own; his brutality capably backed by his intelligence and his short-term planning. Against greater players he is destined to lose; while he is tearing into their defense they can trap his king with inventive combinations he is incapable of seeing, let alone guarding against.