YOU CAN TRUST SCIENTIFIC METHODOLOGY
From China. Came across a NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC article about the dinosaurs who evolved into birds. The photos were the best I've ever seen in that area. What's exciting about these findings is that they definitely pinpoint changes in body types which could be said to reveal what Christians call "missing links" as in when they challenge natural selection: "Where are the missing links?"
But the thing which most excited me was a recognition of how much scientists argue among themselves and debate the facts. I mean no claim goes without challenge, serious challenge. Scientists don't let anything pass which is questionable. Everything is open to debate. Nothing is sacred. It's a process I can trust. Scientists practice the truth that "When it comes to the truth, nothing can be sacred."
On the other hand, look at the evangelicals and Bible literalists! They begin with the sacred which goes unchallenged, and they circle around the Bible, facing outward and defend, defend, defend. No one challenges any of the Bible's outlandish claims. They are not scientists and have no method for arriving at the facts. That's how you know that their claims are without merit. Any outfit which doesn't first arrive at the bedrock facts of their case cannot be taken seriously, in fact, in the whole history of humankind, they are always proven wrong.
DEATH BY HEMINGWAY
I don't know what Hunter's motive was, but I know he tried to write and live like Hemingway, and now we hear that he died like Hemingway, eating a tasty bullet. Yes, Hunter S. Thompson is dead, poor "Hunt" is dead and lying in his grave, and all the Gonzoists in the world can't write Hunter back together again. His tale is told and it's the tale of an idiot, a sound and a fury signifying more signifying. Will we never leave off signifying since all our signifying is naught but excuse and justifying what it is we're bound to anyway? Goodnight sweat Hunter, goodnight.
GARLIC BREAD
My wife brought up garlic last night as a method to combat my climbing cholesterol count. High but not too bad yet and well within the range of diet and exercise changes. I brought it down last year by similar methods. But garlic reminds me of the old, wildly red-haired, bony woman who used to visit with my grandma when I lived with her. My grandmother would make me give Mrs. Smelly a big hug every time she visited grandmother's house. How I hated the ordeal. The woman reeked, stank of garlic. Then in reading Vidal's book, THE GOLDEN AGE, I discover that Eleanor Roosevelt also ate raw garlic every day for some reason or other. Now did this woman know that Eleanor used garlic? Is that why she used it? Was I connected by reeking air to the President's wife through the habits of an old, bony, red-haired woman?
MAY I RECOMMEND A MOVIE?
Watched a great Italian film this week called "The Embalmer", directed by Matteo Garron. An older male, a younger man and a woman are the three legs of this triangle of jealousy, and the triangle is revealed slowly, like a striptease dance, until the dirty underwear comes off only at the very end.
A relentless film about obsessions and passions. Dialogue is right on and seems as plebeian as the characters it reveals. Love, lust and passion are never mentioned as these three characters go about swinging their wrecking balls at one another in a worsening triangle of entanglement. Mood is unrelievedly somber. The tension never eases up though nothing seems too ominous until the very end of the movie, then, of course, as in all good creative work, the conclusion justifies the entire film. By being so right on, so inevitable, you are surprised you hadn't seen it coming. It's so obvious, isn't it, you think, as the final scene sinks in....
STILL MORE ITALIAN
Just watched for third time "La Strada" by Fellini and am forced to say, wow, it's still a powerful film about loneliness, isolation and yearning and lost hopes. Somewhere in the back of my mind I had imagined that "La Strada" would seem as old as black and white with emotionally unbelievable characters who do things out of romantic passions I no longer believe in. Then, as I watched it, for awhile, Masina's winsomeness was almost too much for me, but she was a little retarded, we must remember, and completely naive to the ways of the world. Finally, when the great Zamponi grovels with his lonely pain in the sand by the sea, it breaks on me that I am also that lonely man, selfish and feeling absolutely alone in my loveless state of selfishness, and that, indeed, if we are honest with ourselves, we are all as isolated as the brutal strongman or as the "yearning for the unattainable" Gelsomina. Honestly, life is like that, and no amount of gods are going to take that away if we are truly honest with ourselves, though that truth should set us free to take life in like a whole watermelon rather than shrink like seedy puddle in the sun.
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"Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and the best man winning than the man who inherited his father's store or farm." —C. Wright Mills
Monday, May 02, 2005
Friday, April 29, 2005
ANNE COULTER IS A DANGER TO AMERICA
I got a chance to glance through Anne Coulter's book, TREASON, today while I was volunteering at the Spokane Library book store, "Buy the Book", and her title's right on: her book IS treasonous in its intent to destroy trust in American government so as to make it an easier target for the wealthy, like Coulter, to control or to so devide us that the Chinese can run us easily into the ground.
Her book as far as I can see is without scholarly foundation. It's the rant of a political hack, full of generalizations and glib easy clichés. I see no real studious survey of the American condition with an intent to really inform the people about the troubles our government might be in. She is no deep intellect, yet, to our current batch of religiously political simpletons, she might pass as someone who has something to say.
One clear example of her distortions is how she brings in Kennedy's womanizing to tear him down and uses his womanizing to also attack the press. She claims that the "liberal" press was protecting Kennedy, thus belittling the press of the past, but she fails to mention that the press for years did not touch the sex life of any politicians, liberal or conservative. Her ommision of such an obvious detail is her standard practice, it seems, for the book goes on like that, falsifying by omissions and distortions and generalizations without detail. I was surprised to see that some reviewers gave her any credit at all.
YES—WHO DO WE RUN THE COUNTRY TO BENEFIT THE MOST?
"Do we run the country for the people, or do we run it for the nameless, faceless banks or international corporations?" asks Harvard Law School Prof. Elizabeth Warren. "That was the issue way back as far back as the Depression. The ultimate decision was we run it for the people. . . . And now we have made a complete turnabout: We not only don't invest in the middle class, we drain away from the middle class. We tax them harder; we leave them with bigger risks like never before in history. And we take away the last shred of a safety net—bankruptcy. It's war on the middle class." (from an essay by Lou Dobbs in U.S. News & World Report, May 2, 2005)
OF COURSE THE RICH GET RICHER IN REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATIONS: SEE HOW
"Eliminating the estate tax on the wealthiest Americans is both reckless fiscal policy and deeply unfair to the rest of the nation. Plus, it's based on specious logic." —Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief (U.S. News & World Report, May 2, 2005)
___________________________________________________________
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." —Albert Einstein [I didn't know Albert lived in this century during the current Bush administration with his fundamentalist voters.]
I got a chance to glance through Anne Coulter's book, TREASON, today while I was volunteering at the Spokane Library book store, "Buy the Book", and her title's right on: her book IS treasonous in its intent to destroy trust in American government so as to make it an easier target for the wealthy, like Coulter, to control or to so devide us that the Chinese can run us easily into the ground.
Her book as far as I can see is without scholarly foundation. It's the rant of a political hack, full of generalizations and glib easy clichés. I see no real studious survey of the American condition with an intent to really inform the people about the troubles our government might be in. She is no deep intellect, yet, to our current batch of religiously political simpletons, she might pass as someone who has something to say.
One clear example of her distortions is how she brings in Kennedy's womanizing to tear him down and uses his womanizing to also attack the press. She claims that the "liberal" press was protecting Kennedy, thus belittling the press of the past, but she fails to mention that the press for years did not touch the sex life of any politicians, liberal or conservative. Her ommision of such an obvious detail is her standard practice, it seems, for the book goes on like that, falsifying by omissions and distortions and generalizations without detail. I was surprised to see that some reviewers gave her any credit at all.
YES—WHO DO WE RUN THE COUNTRY TO BENEFIT THE MOST?
"Do we run the country for the people, or do we run it for the nameless, faceless banks or international corporations?" asks Harvard Law School Prof. Elizabeth Warren. "That was the issue way back as far back as the Depression. The ultimate decision was we run it for the people. . . . And now we have made a complete turnabout: We not only don't invest in the middle class, we drain away from the middle class. We tax them harder; we leave them with bigger risks like never before in history. And we take away the last shred of a safety net—bankruptcy. It's war on the middle class." (from an essay by Lou Dobbs in U.S. News & World Report, May 2, 2005)
OF COURSE THE RICH GET RICHER IN REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATIONS: SEE HOW
"Eliminating the estate tax on the wealthiest Americans is both reckless fiscal policy and deeply unfair to the rest of the nation. Plus, it's based on specious logic." —Mortimer B. Zuckerman, Editor-in-Chief (U.S. News & World Report, May 2, 2005)
___________________________________________________________
"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." —Albert Einstein [I didn't know Albert lived in this century during the current Bush administration with his fundamentalist voters.]
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
JAMES WOODS DOES GOOD STUFF OUT OF SIGHT
Mertie and I just watched a little James Wood’s movie with Melanie Griffith, Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson Wagner. It’s called “Another Day In Paradise” made in 1998. I never heard of it before I bought it 2 films for 5 bucks at Hollywood Videos, but for unrelieved intensity, it’s been awhile since I’ve come across such an impressive film. Maybe I’m just vulnerable, but the movie was so real to me that it depressed me. Usually I can be pretty detached from even the most powerful films now in my older age, but this one hooked me. The film’s director is Larry Clark of “Kids” infamy.
Two old love/hate crooks, Sid (Griffith) and Mel (Woods) adopt a pair of young lovers and take them into the heart of a crime spree—a series of false moves and gunplay which over and over again threatens their lives until Rosie dies from an overdose (okay, so I told you) and then the shit really hits the fan. I wouldn’t call the ending so much redemptive as a relief. Yes, I breathed a sigh of relief at the end. I was glad to be out of Wood’s increasing madness too. And nothing in the concluding moments is not foreshadowed so that each tick of the final clock, you can nod a yes to. A well put together piece of work. And James Wood’s ought to get his pockmarked face plastered onto an Oscar someday.
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA: BIBLE BELT HEARTS AND POWERS
Jay Reeves, in an Associated Press release in the Spokesman Review (March 27, 2005) reports that:
“Evidence in Richard Scrushy's fraud trial has made the goings-on at HealthSouth Corp. sound more like an episode of ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ than the operations of a Fortune 500 company.
After eight weeks of testimony, a picture has emerged of a Southern-fried culture at the rehabilitation and medical services chain.
According to testimony, Scrushy and another executive held a meeting in the middle of a sprawling Alabama lake known for floating beer bashes and bass fishing, and Scrushy once told a CFO they all needed to stay aboard ‘this pickup truck’— HealthSouth—despite its financial problems.
Meanwhile, a witness told of a bar brawl that broke out at a going-away party for a key executive who quit the company rather than get involved in the fraud, which prosecutors say amounted to $2.7 billion in inflated earnings over about seven years.
Prosecutors say Scrushy was at the heart of a conspiracy to overstate HealthSouth earnings from 1996 through 2002, directing subordinates to commit fraud so it would appear the company was meeting Wall Street estimates...............
Scrushy has recently been projecting a more church-going image, singing hymns with his third wife Leslie who is his former secretary at HealthSouth and the daughter of a Methodist preacher. Scrushy has preached in at least two churches during his trial and his wife has been seen praying with supporters around the courthouse.
The couple have taken a break during the trial from their daily TV show, which typically features Bible study.”
Yep, that’s right, the Scrushys, like almost all Southern crooks, practice the guitar picking, Bible studying, Bible thumping, praying in tongues, pickup running, deep South morality which currently runs our country top to bottom from the mightiest boardroom to the least pulpit, from the smallest office space to the loudest pulpit. Scrushy is just one bole weevil under the pickup floorboard of the South which is full of those morality weevils. Look at Lay of Enron and born again Ebbers at WorldCom. Look at Biblemouth Delay and all his Southern buddies. Southern corruption, religion coated, is everywhere. Even in Spokane the guy who ran Spokane’s Washington Water Power into financial trouble was an Enron Texan, that so and so. The guys who bilked California rate payers were Southern crooks. These Southern crooks are all psuedo-religious con men.
And still Southerner Bush holds onto a 45% favorable rating. How could that be? You got to study the South and live there and know the Bible belt mentality. These are not sophisticated people down there. They’ve been taken in by lying Bible thumpers all their lives. How can we expect them to see through the dishonesty lodged in their churches now? Bush and Rove and his crew are playing naive Southerners like a school of speckled trout. They’re pulling them out of the warm Gulf waters on their double hooked spec rigs as fast as they can hook ‘em horns. It’s not that everyone in the South is corrupt; it’s just that way too many of them are so Bible-sated that they can’t tell when they’re being conned by Bible cons, religious and commercial.
We just 40 years ago dragged the South kicking and screaming into the 20th century. How can we expect a bunch of people who only yesterday were knee deep in the cotton fields of segregation to even begin to develop a healthy, fairly honest democratic mentality, a mind sharp enough to tell a truth so deep as atheism, the root of the best democracy. This is the South where the dishonesty and corruption is founded on the lies taught in every fundamentalist church in the South.
Let me simplify. You go to church down there all your life and learn to love Jesus and that kind old preacher man who heads up your congregation. You’re told there is not one falsehood in that Bible book fully of historical inaccuracies, fictions and poetry, bad morality and invented characters. You don’t read a lot of other books that can show you the falsehoods because you’ve been taught that to be too well informed is in bad taste. It makes you a “smarty pants” and smarty pantses don’t have many friends. So you buckle down and swallow the lies. You stay naive. You start your life listening to someone lie to you who does not know he is lying. That’s the most effective liar—someone who believes his own lies. So you are being set up to believe lies of all kinds by the very best liars, liars you love and honor. Your kindly old pastor is an effective liar because he bought the lie too and now his lie to you is of the very best quality. So it goes generation to generation.
And, in the midst of those churches are the smarter guys who only half believe the Bible lies. So they learn they can con you by using your religion as a hook. They say all the right things and pull all the correct strings, and they con you and keep you poor and dumb and down. And you don’t like to think of yourself as being so dumb as to defeat yourself so you hang on ever more tightly to your Bible mentality and you “hate with all your might” any wiseass who attacks the faith of your babyhood because if you have to admit to that, then your whole faith system comes tumbling down, and you’d have to see just how badly you are being conned by these wonderful con men. You’d have to admit you’re a fool. You might even have to face that god is a con. Sad to say, that even a few of the kindly old gentlemen in the pulpits are also lying to you and knowing they lie. They are the worst of the Southern liars.
And that’s how you end up supporting a rogue like Bush, a con man who maybe half believes his own con. That’s the South I know and met when I lived there. Nice friendly people who’ll stab you in the back because they’ve been taught to be nice and swallow the lie pill with a smile and don’t dare call the preacher man a liar. They are gutted, breaded and skillet fried to a golden brown for devouring.
Mertie and I just watched a little James Wood’s movie with Melanie Griffith, Vincent Kartheiser and Natasha Gregson Wagner. It’s called “Another Day In Paradise” made in 1998. I never heard of it before I bought it 2 films for 5 bucks at Hollywood Videos, but for unrelieved intensity, it’s been awhile since I’ve come across such an impressive film. Maybe I’m just vulnerable, but the movie was so real to me that it depressed me. Usually I can be pretty detached from even the most powerful films now in my older age, but this one hooked me. The film’s director is Larry Clark of “Kids” infamy.
Two old love/hate crooks, Sid (Griffith) and Mel (Woods) adopt a pair of young lovers and take them into the heart of a crime spree—a series of false moves and gunplay which over and over again threatens their lives until Rosie dies from an overdose (okay, so I told you) and then the shit really hits the fan. I wouldn’t call the ending so much redemptive as a relief. Yes, I breathed a sigh of relief at the end. I was glad to be out of Wood’s increasing madness too. And nothing in the concluding moments is not foreshadowed so that each tick of the final clock, you can nod a yes to. A well put together piece of work. And James Wood’s ought to get his pockmarked face plastered onto an Oscar someday.
BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA: BIBLE BELT HEARTS AND POWERS
Jay Reeves, in an Associated Press release in the Spokesman Review (March 27, 2005) reports that:
“Evidence in Richard Scrushy's fraud trial has made the goings-on at HealthSouth Corp. sound more like an episode of ‘The Dukes of Hazzard’ than the operations of a Fortune 500 company.
After eight weeks of testimony, a picture has emerged of a Southern-fried culture at the rehabilitation and medical services chain.
According to testimony, Scrushy and another executive held a meeting in the middle of a sprawling Alabama lake known for floating beer bashes and bass fishing, and Scrushy once told a CFO they all needed to stay aboard ‘this pickup truck’— HealthSouth—despite its financial problems.
Meanwhile, a witness told of a bar brawl that broke out at a going-away party for a key executive who quit the company rather than get involved in the fraud, which prosecutors say amounted to $2.7 billion in inflated earnings over about seven years.
Prosecutors say Scrushy was at the heart of a conspiracy to overstate HealthSouth earnings from 1996 through 2002, directing subordinates to commit fraud so it would appear the company was meeting Wall Street estimates...............
Scrushy has recently been projecting a more church-going image, singing hymns with his third wife Leslie who is his former secretary at HealthSouth and the daughter of a Methodist preacher. Scrushy has preached in at least two churches during his trial and his wife has been seen praying with supporters around the courthouse.
The couple have taken a break during the trial from their daily TV show, which typically features Bible study.”
Yep, that’s right, the Scrushys, like almost all Southern crooks, practice the guitar picking, Bible studying, Bible thumping, praying in tongues, pickup running, deep South morality which currently runs our country top to bottom from the mightiest boardroom to the least pulpit, from the smallest office space to the loudest pulpit. Scrushy is just one bole weevil under the pickup floorboard of the South which is full of those morality weevils. Look at Lay of Enron and born again Ebbers at WorldCom. Look at Biblemouth Delay and all his Southern buddies. Southern corruption, religion coated, is everywhere. Even in Spokane the guy who ran Spokane’s Washington Water Power into financial trouble was an Enron Texan, that so and so. The guys who bilked California rate payers were Southern crooks. These Southern crooks are all psuedo-religious con men.
And still Southerner Bush holds onto a 45% favorable rating. How could that be? You got to study the South and live there and know the Bible belt mentality. These are not sophisticated people down there. They’ve been taken in by lying Bible thumpers all their lives. How can we expect them to see through the dishonesty lodged in their churches now? Bush and Rove and his crew are playing naive Southerners like a school of speckled trout. They’re pulling them out of the warm Gulf waters on their double hooked spec rigs as fast as they can hook ‘em horns. It’s not that everyone in the South is corrupt; it’s just that way too many of them are so Bible-sated that they can’t tell when they’re being conned by Bible cons, religious and commercial.
We just 40 years ago dragged the South kicking and screaming into the 20th century. How can we expect a bunch of people who only yesterday were knee deep in the cotton fields of segregation to even begin to develop a healthy, fairly honest democratic mentality, a mind sharp enough to tell a truth so deep as atheism, the root of the best democracy. This is the South where the dishonesty and corruption is founded on the lies taught in every fundamentalist church in the South.
Let me simplify. You go to church down there all your life and learn to love Jesus and that kind old preacher man who heads up your congregation. You’re told there is not one falsehood in that Bible book fully of historical inaccuracies, fictions and poetry, bad morality and invented characters. You don’t read a lot of other books that can show you the falsehoods because you’ve been taught that to be too well informed is in bad taste. It makes you a “smarty pants” and smarty pantses don’t have many friends. So you buckle down and swallow the lies. You stay naive. You start your life listening to someone lie to you who does not know he is lying. That’s the most effective liar—someone who believes his own lies. So you are being set up to believe lies of all kinds by the very best liars, liars you love and honor. Your kindly old pastor is an effective liar because he bought the lie too and now his lie to you is of the very best quality. So it goes generation to generation.
And, in the midst of those churches are the smarter guys who only half believe the Bible lies. So they learn they can con you by using your religion as a hook. They say all the right things and pull all the correct strings, and they con you and keep you poor and dumb and down. And you don’t like to think of yourself as being so dumb as to defeat yourself so you hang on ever more tightly to your Bible mentality and you “hate with all your might” any wiseass who attacks the faith of your babyhood because if you have to admit to that, then your whole faith system comes tumbling down, and you’d have to see just how badly you are being conned by these wonderful con men. You’d have to admit you’re a fool. You might even have to face that god is a con. Sad to say, that even a few of the kindly old gentlemen in the pulpits are also lying to you and knowing they lie. They are the worst of the Southern liars.
And that’s how you end up supporting a rogue like Bush, a con man who maybe half believes his own con. That’s the South I know and met when I lived there. Nice friendly people who’ll stab you in the back because they’ve been taught to be nice and swallow the lie pill with a smile and don’t dare call the preacher man a liar. They are gutted, breaded and skillet fried to a golden brown for devouring.
Friday, April 22, 2005
XTIAN FUNDIES CONTROLLING AMERICA
Last year, the fundamentalist Christian Talliban in American forced Federated Department Stores to remove a British brand name from its shelves: French Connection, United Kingdon (acronym FCUK). Today, they forced Microsoft to discontinue support for an anti-discrimination bill to protect gay employment and housing in the State of Washington. They are currently trying to force very radical judges on us by altering the rules of the Senate which have been in effect for 200 years. They've forced movies and books to delete negative references to their particular form of dictatorial religion in the last year.
If the fundamentalist Talliban in Christianity can force major commercial enterprises to back down, imagine what they can do (and do do in small southern towns) to the freedoms of those of us few free individuals who recognize no gods and no masters? Can it be long before some of us are fined for being witches or burned at the stake for being atheists? Look, don't laugh. These fundamentalists are undemocratic in their psychologies and disrespecting of basic human and governmental freedoms. They are misled into thinking that their truth is the only truth and, therefore, can justify any behavior to force their aims onto the rest of us. We have all of history to remind us of past Christian cruelty and terror.
Will the internet allow us to continue to keep freedom alive after religious McCarthyism comes to dominate American culture? Who knows? 'Cause right now bills are waddling on their little duck feet to control and censor the internet, and few of our current congresspeople are brave enough to stand up to fundamentalist power.
I recently came across a Christian minister who 25 years ago said that "Fascism in America will come wearing the face of Christianity." Right on, brother.
PS: For those of you too young to recall—this suppression of American institutions and beliefs by the rabid barking of a strong minority of "true believers" is "McCarthyism". You are in the middle of it. You are experiencing it right now if you will but look around and recogize it. You will be able to understand what your parents are talking about when they refer to McCarthyism.
A REAL ETERNITY IN REAL TIME
I’m absolutely certain in this modern age of ours that few of us can really believe any more in a hidden life of spiritual beings, of arisen gods and places in space where our immaterial selves live on, doing goodness knows what for eternity. That’s why fundamentalism is so desperate, so angry and violent. They know a truth which they cannot accept. It plagues them and they kick and scream like children being dragged to Saturday night bath.
Yet, look! On this other hand, on the material hand, perhaps man is about to achieve an eternal life of the material body. This life will not be so peaceful as a heaven where the sounds of harps go on all day long and one’s sandals scrape along golden streets. Eternity without god! Now that’s a volkswagen of another color! That’s what men and women of the future face. Think of all the changes which must happen within the human psyche before it will be able to accept such an ambivalent eternity as this? Yet, here we are, face to face with it, and the face in the mirror we see will be transcendent beyond anything we could have imagined in order to accept this bloody gift.
ETERNITY IN FLESH?
And yet we troubled humans exist in painful flesh! Now here’s a real quandary. Can we cast off this too too troubled coil and keep it too?
From HOUSE OF CARDS (P. 29): "For example, studies find that the incidence of alcoholism is related to the alcoholism of the biological parents of children who have been adopted and is unrelated to the alcoholism of the children’s adoptive parents. That does not mean that a child with an alcoholic biological parent, or even two, is more likely than not to become an alcoholic. Far from it—most children of alcoholic biological parents do not become alcoholics themselves. The study’s conclusions mean simply that there’s a trend, involving genetic constitution." —ROBYN DAWES
SPEAKING OF THE FLESH—DON'T SEX ME UP OR I'LL GO TO HELL!
Over the years, I keep rediscovering this idea in a thousand forms, from essays to short stories to novels. I'm sure it's deeply in the works of Tennessee Williams, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, to name just a few. So, passed on to me, I worked it into my psyche and even think it infects my own sex life with my past wives and even my current wife. Now, of course, the dastardly Robyn Dawes debunks the Catholic idea in his book, HOUSE OF CARDS. Any young person reading this—beware the ideas of your time because when you grow old you may find that all things you learned are balderdash. In fact, after you read this book, you'll question everything you believe. Should I even believe this book? Will a pendulum swing back the other way and knock Dawes off the desk too. Then what shall any of us believe. Indeed!
"The Catholic Church retained the hierarchical structure of the soul, so that the highest level consisted of the “pure” love of Christ and God, and the lowest level consisted of impure lust for the sensual and material things of the earth—to the point that celibacy (or “virginity”) and asceticism were common among devout Christians at a very early date." (House of Cards, Dawes, p. 207).
And, if any are looking, you'll see modern day Christians trying again, for the thousandth time in history, to put the genie back in the bottle again, and only shamed human beings can come out of making sex "wrong" again.
THE NAME OF GOD IS PROPAGANDA
Yet, given all the nice ideas expressed above, we are mired in this now of lies and deceit, and the fearful ones who can't look ahead hold us back with injections of their fear. Why are they so fearful if they, indeed, believe their mythology?
When I think of the Bush tactic of lying until others believe and when I think of he Christian lie repeated over and over and over, I see the propaganda is alive and well on the Christian right. No wonder Bush believes the lie of god and so easily lies to others. It's all part of the self-fulfilling myths. Even Joe Campbell was misguided enough to believe that we all needed "myths" to live by.
Why not live by the story of truth that science tells? Though some like to call science just another myth, at least that myth is based in fact and mathematics rather than stale old stories and the hierarchical tales that monkeys tell in their grimaces and leaping and squawking.
"(Goebbels maintained that the effects of propaganda depend less on a belief in the legitimacy of the source than on the repetition and intensity of the propaganda itself. Subsequent psychological experiments have borne out this contention; experimenters have condistantly found that people tend to judge that whatever has been repeated is true—even when the repetition is only of the words in the assertion. Are we, for example, immune to the effects of repetitive news that we know to be “managed” simply because we know that what we are being shown and told is what those managing it want us to see and hear? (I know I was not during the recent Gulf War.)" (HOUSE OF CARDS, p. 202)
Will we be able to overcome the Christian/Moslem/Jewish lies and ring in the new mythology of life eternal?
______________________________________________________
“She got her good looks from her father—he’s a plastic surgeon.” —Groucho Marx
Last year, the fundamentalist Christian Talliban in American forced Federated Department Stores to remove a British brand name from its shelves: French Connection, United Kingdon (acronym FCUK). Today, they forced Microsoft to discontinue support for an anti-discrimination bill to protect gay employment and housing in the State of Washington. They are currently trying to force very radical judges on us by altering the rules of the Senate which have been in effect for 200 years. They've forced movies and books to delete negative references to their particular form of dictatorial religion in the last year.
If the fundamentalist Talliban in Christianity can force major commercial enterprises to back down, imagine what they can do (and do do in small southern towns) to the freedoms of those of us few free individuals who recognize no gods and no masters? Can it be long before some of us are fined for being witches or burned at the stake for being atheists? Look, don't laugh. These fundamentalists are undemocratic in their psychologies and disrespecting of basic human and governmental freedoms. They are misled into thinking that their truth is the only truth and, therefore, can justify any behavior to force their aims onto the rest of us. We have all of history to remind us of past Christian cruelty and terror.
Will the internet allow us to continue to keep freedom alive after religious McCarthyism comes to dominate American culture? Who knows? 'Cause right now bills are waddling on their little duck feet to control and censor the internet, and few of our current congresspeople are brave enough to stand up to fundamentalist power.
I recently came across a Christian minister who 25 years ago said that "Fascism in America will come wearing the face of Christianity." Right on, brother.
PS: For those of you too young to recall—this suppression of American institutions and beliefs by the rabid barking of a strong minority of "true believers" is "McCarthyism". You are in the middle of it. You are experiencing it right now if you will but look around and recogize it. You will be able to understand what your parents are talking about when they refer to McCarthyism.
A REAL ETERNITY IN REAL TIME
I’m absolutely certain in this modern age of ours that few of us can really believe any more in a hidden life of spiritual beings, of arisen gods and places in space where our immaterial selves live on, doing goodness knows what for eternity. That’s why fundamentalism is so desperate, so angry and violent. They know a truth which they cannot accept. It plagues them and they kick and scream like children being dragged to Saturday night bath.
Yet, look! On this other hand, on the material hand, perhaps man is about to achieve an eternal life of the material body. This life will not be so peaceful as a heaven where the sounds of harps go on all day long and one’s sandals scrape along golden streets. Eternity without god! Now that’s a volkswagen of another color! That’s what men and women of the future face. Think of all the changes which must happen within the human psyche before it will be able to accept such an ambivalent eternity as this? Yet, here we are, face to face with it, and the face in the mirror we see will be transcendent beyond anything we could have imagined in order to accept this bloody gift.
ETERNITY IN FLESH?
And yet we troubled humans exist in painful flesh! Now here’s a real quandary. Can we cast off this too too troubled coil and keep it too?
From HOUSE OF CARDS (P. 29): "For example, studies find that the incidence of alcoholism is related to the alcoholism of the biological parents of children who have been adopted and is unrelated to the alcoholism of the children’s adoptive parents. That does not mean that a child with an alcoholic biological parent, or even two, is more likely than not to become an alcoholic. Far from it—most children of alcoholic biological parents do not become alcoholics themselves. The study’s conclusions mean simply that there’s a trend, involving genetic constitution." —ROBYN DAWES
SPEAKING OF THE FLESH—DON'T SEX ME UP OR I'LL GO TO HELL!
Over the years, I keep rediscovering this idea in a thousand forms, from essays to short stories to novels. I'm sure it's deeply in the works of Tennessee Williams, James Joyce, and D. H. Lawrence, to name just a few. So, passed on to me, I worked it into my psyche and even think it infects my own sex life with my past wives and even my current wife. Now, of course, the dastardly Robyn Dawes debunks the Catholic idea in his book, HOUSE OF CARDS. Any young person reading this—beware the ideas of your time because when you grow old you may find that all things you learned are balderdash. In fact, after you read this book, you'll question everything you believe. Should I even believe this book? Will a pendulum swing back the other way and knock Dawes off the desk too. Then what shall any of us believe. Indeed!
"The Catholic Church retained the hierarchical structure of the soul, so that the highest level consisted of the “pure” love of Christ and God, and the lowest level consisted of impure lust for the sensual and material things of the earth—to the point that celibacy (or “virginity”) and asceticism were common among devout Christians at a very early date." (House of Cards, Dawes, p. 207).
And, if any are looking, you'll see modern day Christians trying again, for the thousandth time in history, to put the genie back in the bottle again, and only shamed human beings can come out of making sex "wrong" again.
THE NAME OF GOD IS PROPAGANDA
Yet, given all the nice ideas expressed above, we are mired in this now of lies and deceit, and the fearful ones who can't look ahead hold us back with injections of their fear. Why are they so fearful if they, indeed, believe their mythology?
When I think of the Bush tactic of lying until others believe and when I think of he Christian lie repeated over and over and over, I see the propaganda is alive and well on the Christian right. No wonder Bush believes the lie of god and so easily lies to others. It's all part of the self-fulfilling myths. Even Joe Campbell was misguided enough to believe that we all needed "myths" to live by.
Why not live by the story of truth that science tells? Though some like to call science just another myth, at least that myth is based in fact and mathematics rather than stale old stories and the hierarchical tales that monkeys tell in their grimaces and leaping and squawking.
"(Goebbels maintained that the effects of propaganda depend less on a belief in the legitimacy of the source than on the repetition and intensity of the propaganda itself. Subsequent psychological experiments have borne out this contention; experimenters have condistantly found that people tend to judge that whatever has been repeated is true—even when the repetition is only of the words in the assertion. Are we, for example, immune to the effects of repetitive news that we know to be “managed” simply because we know that what we are being shown and told is what those managing it want us to see and hear? (I know I was not during the recent Gulf War.)" (HOUSE OF CARDS, p. 202)
Will we be able to overcome the Christian/Moslem/Jewish lies and ring in the new mythology of life eternal?
______________________________________________________
“She got her good looks from her father—he’s a plastic surgeon.” —Groucho Marx
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
FROM ONE BARBARIAN TO ANOTHER: THEY MAKE NO BONES ABOUT IT
“A Yale student named William H. Russell started the secret society [Skull and Bones, Bush’s bunch at Yale] organization in 1832 in an effort to create a new world order that would place the best and the brightest at the helm of society. A wealthy elitist, Russell believed that the most important decisions should only be made by those who are bred to make them, so he created an environment that would shape the world. He called his group the Brotherhood of Death or, more informally, the order of Skull and Bones, patterned after a secret society in Germany, also in 1832…. Within Skull and Bones, all Bonesmen are called ‘Knights’, and members refer to the rest of the world as barbarians.”
I’d say that Russell’s plan to place “the best and the brightest” in charge of the world has come down a notch or two with that intellectual dolt, Bush, now in the presidency. Also how adult can a group be which still plays at knights and kings in a college system and calls itself by the silly romantic name of “Brotherhood of Death”? Laird preserve us from such fools. Many of us knew back in the 1960s how immature and frivolous these fraternities were and they still are, but they’re back in these supposedly serious conservative times. Do the Skull-kers make you think of the storm and fury of the Nazi legions with their death’s heads and romantic obsessions with black and death and Teutonic knights? Do you get it, kiddos, these lunatics in charge of our nation are out of touch with reality.
MEANWHILE BACK IN THE REAL, WORKADAY WORLD
AFSCME APPEALS FOR WORKER SOLIDARITY AGAINST BUSH ATTACKS ON UNIONS AND ON SOCIAL SECURITY:
The following paragraphs are copied from an AFSCME mailing to its unionized workers around the country. They are taking seriously Bush’s neoconservative moves which, in my opinion, aim to return American workers and unionists to the impoverished and powerless conditions they suffered with long before Roosevelt made major changes which gave some power to the average American to control his and her destiny. Read and weep:
[Open Quote.]
Organizing and Bargaining Rights Targeted
Since the Bush administration took over in 2001, it has targeted the rights of workers, including our rights to organize and to bargain for fair wages.
The administration’s first act was to weaken the National Labor Relations Board. It blocked funding, stacked the group with anti-worker members and voted to allow union-busting campaigns to be subsidized by taxpayer dollars. All this has created an environment where employers can squash to organize and fire employees without just cause.
Now, with less than 8 percent of the private sector unionized and 36 percent of the public sector organized, the anti-worker forces have targeted the rights of public employees. That is why it was the first official act of the governors of Kentucky, Missouri and Indiana to revoke our collective bargaining rights. In fact, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Gov. Matt Blunt of Missouri repealed our rights on the same day, January 11, 2005.
None of us are safe, even if we have a collective bargaining law. That is why we have launched this campaign and why you need to get involved.
This is just the beginning if we don’t stop them…
While we battle the anti-worker movement at the state level, we also have a big fight on our hands in the nation’s capital.
President Bush wants to privatise Social Security. The Bush plan would replace a portion of Social Security with risky private accounts, leading to huge cuts in guaranteed benefits that workers have earned and are counting on.
The plan is bad even for public employees not covered by Social Security, because it could lead to the dismantling of our traditional pension plans, replacing them with risky private accounts.
Here is what is wrong with the Bush plan:
• No matter what you choose, you lose. Under Bush’s plan, all workers would see their future benefits cut by at least 30 percent — even if you don’t opt for a private account. If you do choose an account, your guaranteed benefits would be cut an additional 20 percent or more.
• You will give up $152,000 in benefits. According to estimates, an average retiree who lives 20 years past retirement and chooses a private account will lose $152,000. (Center for Economic and Policy Research)
• There is a hidden tax on your retirement fund. For every dollar workers have in their private accounts at retirement, the government will deduct 50 cents from the guaranteed benefits they have earned by paying into the Social Security system.
• You will not control your account. The private investment accounts will not be controlled by the people who put money into them. They will be controlled by large private companies on Wall Street that will be more concerned about their bottom lines than your retirement.
_________________________________________________________________
“The business of government is to keep the government out of business—that is, unless business needs government aid.” —Will Rogers
“A Yale student named William H. Russell started the secret society [Skull and Bones, Bush’s bunch at Yale] organization in 1832 in an effort to create a new world order that would place the best and the brightest at the helm of society. A wealthy elitist, Russell believed that the most important decisions should only be made by those who are bred to make them, so he created an environment that would shape the world. He called his group the Brotherhood of Death or, more informally, the order of Skull and Bones, patterned after a secret society in Germany, also in 1832…. Within Skull and Bones, all Bonesmen are called ‘Knights’, and members refer to the rest of the world as barbarians.”
I’d say that Russell’s plan to place “the best and the brightest” in charge of the world has come down a notch or two with that intellectual dolt, Bush, now in the presidency. Also how adult can a group be which still plays at knights and kings in a college system and calls itself by the silly romantic name of “Brotherhood of Death”? Laird preserve us from such fools. Many of us knew back in the 1960s how immature and frivolous these fraternities were and they still are, but they’re back in these supposedly serious conservative times. Do the Skull-kers make you think of the storm and fury of the Nazi legions with their death’s heads and romantic obsessions with black and death and Teutonic knights? Do you get it, kiddos, these lunatics in charge of our nation are out of touch with reality.
MEANWHILE BACK IN THE REAL, WORKADAY WORLD
AFSCME APPEALS FOR WORKER SOLIDARITY AGAINST BUSH ATTACKS ON UNIONS AND ON SOCIAL SECURITY:
The following paragraphs are copied from an AFSCME mailing to its unionized workers around the country. They are taking seriously Bush’s neoconservative moves which, in my opinion, aim to return American workers and unionists to the impoverished and powerless conditions they suffered with long before Roosevelt made major changes which gave some power to the average American to control his and her destiny. Read and weep:
[Open Quote.]
Organizing and Bargaining Rights Targeted
Since the Bush administration took over in 2001, it has targeted the rights of workers, including our rights to organize and to bargain for fair wages.
The administration’s first act was to weaken the National Labor Relations Board. It blocked funding, stacked the group with anti-worker members and voted to allow union-busting campaigns to be subsidized by taxpayer dollars. All this has created an environment where employers can squash to organize and fire employees without just cause.
Now, with less than 8 percent of the private sector unionized and 36 percent of the public sector organized, the anti-worker forces have targeted the rights of public employees. That is why it was the first official act of the governors of Kentucky, Missouri and Indiana to revoke our collective bargaining rights. In fact, Gov. Mitch Daniels of Indiana and Gov. Matt Blunt of Missouri repealed our rights on the same day, January 11, 2005.
None of us are safe, even if we have a collective bargaining law. That is why we have launched this campaign and why you need to get involved.
This is just the beginning if we don’t stop them…
While we battle the anti-worker movement at the state level, we also have a big fight on our hands in the nation’s capital.
President Bush wants to privatise Social Security. The Bush plan would replace a portion of Social Security with risky private accounts, leading to huge cuts in guaranteed benefits that workers have earned and are counting on.
The plan is bad even for public employees not covered by Social Security, because it could lead to the dismantling of our traditional pension plans, replacing them with risky private accounts.
Here is what is wrong with the Bush plan:
• No matter what you choose, you lose. Under Bush’s plan, all workers would see their future benefits cut by at least 30 percent — even if you don’t opt for a private account. If you do choose an account, your guaranteed benefits would be cut an additional 20 percent or more.
• You will give up $152,000 in benefits. According to estimates, an average retiree who lives 20 years past retirement and chooses a private account will lose $152,000. (Center for Economic and Policy Research)
• There is a hidden tax on your retirement fund. For every dollar workers have in their private accounts at retirement, the government will deduct 50 cents from the guaranteed benefits they have earned by paying into the Social Security system.
• You will not control your account. The private investment accounts will not be controlled by the people who put money into them. They will be controlled by large private companies on Wall Street that will be more concerned about their bottom lines than your retirement.
_________________________________________________________________
“The business of government is to keep the government out of business—that is, unless business needs government aid.” —Will Rogers
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
SAGAN'S "MARS JARS" PROVE BIBLE FALSE
I came across the following passages in COSMOS, (p. 113) about experiments which Sagan carried on years ago. Then in 1996 a meteorite made his case for life on Mars even stronger. Of course, this life isn't like H. G. Wells would create it, but it's microbial life outside of Bible life and so puts another nail in the coffin of Bible inerrancy. As if another nail needed to be driven in. Of course, Bible apologists will now try to expand vague and general terms to make them include these new findings as if Bible peoples knew of life on other planets or that other planets even existed. To make such a claim, these apologists make Bible study seem ever more like learning the art of palm reading sorcery.
"To test this question [can living organisms survive on Mars], many years ago my colleagues and I prepared chambers that simulated the Martian environment as it was then known, inoculated them with terrestrial microorganisms and waited to see if anybody survived. Such chambers are called, of course, Mars Jars. The Mars Jars cycled the temperatures within a typical Martian range from a little above the freezing point around noon to about -80°C just before dawn, in an anoxic atmosphere composed chiefly of CO2 and N2. Ultraviolet lamps reproduced the fierce solar flux. No liquid water was present except for very thin films wetting individual sand grains. Some microbes froze to death after the first night and were never heard from again. Others gasped and perished from lack of oxygen. Some died of thirst, and some were fried by the ultraviolet light. But there were always a fair number of varieties of terrestrial microbes that did not need oxygen; that temporarily closed up shop when the temperatures dropped too low; that hid from the ultraviolet light under pebbles or thin layers of sand. In other experiments, when small quantities of liquid water were present, the microbes actually grew. If terrestrial microbes can survive the Martian environment, how much better Martian microbes, if they exist, must do on Mars. But first we must get there."
Now we go to NASA stuff which supports Sagan's early and simple experiments:
"A group of scientists led by David McKay of NASA's Johnson Space Center has published an article in the August 16 issue of Science magazine announcing the discovery of evidence for primitive bacterial life on Mars. An examination of a meteorite found in Antarctica and believed to be from Mars shows: 1) hydrocarbons which are the same as breakdown products of dead micro-organisms on Earth, 2) mineral phases consistent with by-products of bacterial activity, and 3) tiny carbonate globules which may be microfossils of the primitive bacteria, all within a few hundred-thousandths of an inch of each other. Based on age dating of the meteorite, the following scenario has been proposed:
1. The original igneous rock solidified within Mars about 4.5 billion years ago, about 100 million years after the formation of the planet. (Based on isotope ages of the igneous component of the meteorite)
2. Between 3.6 and 4 billion years ago the rock was fractured, presumably by meteorite impacts. Water then permeated the cracks, depositing carbonate minerals and allowing primitive bacteria to live in the fractures.
3. About 3.6 billion years ago, the bacteria and their by-products became fossilized in the fractures. (Based on isotope ages of the minerals in the fractures)
4. 16 million years ago, a large meteorite struck Mars, dislodging a large chunk of this rock and ejecting it into space. (Based on the cosmic ray exposure age of the meteorite)
5. 13,000 years ago, the meteorite landed in Antarctica.
6. The meteorite, ALH84001, was discovered in 1984 in the Allan Hills region of Antarctica.
Read the whole NASA story here.
I came across the following passages in COSMOS, (p. 113) about experiments which Sagan carried on years ago. Then in 1996 a meteorite made his case for life on Mars even stronger. Of course, this life isn't like H. G. Wells would create it, but it's microbial life outside of Bible life and so puts another nail in the coffin of Bible inerrancy. As if another nail needed to be driven in. Of course, Bible apologists will now try to expand vague and general terms to make them include these new findings as if Bible peoples knew of life on other planets or that other planets even existed. To make such a claim, these apologists make Bible study seem ever more like learning the art of palm reading sorcery.
"To test this question [can living organisms survive on Mars], many years ago my colleagues and I prepared chambers that simulated the Martian environment as it was then known, inoculated them with terrestrial microorganisms and waited to see if anybody survived. Such chambers are called, of course, Mars Jars. The Mars Jars cycled the temperatures within a typical Martian range from a little above the freezing point around noon to about -80°C just before dawn, in an anoxic atmosphere composed chiefly of CO2 and N2. Ultraviolet lamps reproduced the fierce solar flux. No liquid water was present except for very thin films wetting individual sand grains. Some microbes froze to death after the first night and were never heard from again. Others gasped and perished from lack of oxygen. Some died of thirst, and some were fried by the ultraviolet light. But there were always a fair number of varieties of terrestrial microbes that did not need oxygen; that temporarily closed up shop when the temperatures dropped too low; that hid from the ultraviolet light under pebbles or thin layers of sand. In other experiments, when small quantities of liquid water were present, the microbes actually grew. If terrestrial microbes can survive the Martian environment, how much better Martian microbes, if they exist, must do on Mars. But first we must get there."
Now we go to NASA stuff which supports Sagan's early and simple experiments:
"A group of scientists led by David McKay of NASA's Johnson Space Center has published an article in the August 16 issue of Science magazine announcing the discovery of evidence for primitive bacterial life on Mars. An examination of a meteorite found in Antarctica and believed to be from Mars shows: 1) hydrocarbons which are the same as breakdown products of dead micro-organisms on Earth, 2) mineral phases consistent with by-products of bacterial activity, and 3) tiny carbonate globules which may be microfossils of the primitive bacteria, all within a few hundred-thousandths of an inch of each other. Based on age dating of the meteorite, the following scenario has been proposed:
1. The original igneous rock solidified within Mars about 4.5 billion years ago, about 100 million years after the formation of the planet. (Based on isotope ages of the igneous component of the meteorite)
2. Between 3.6 and 4 billion years ago the rock was fractured, presumably by meteorite impacts. Water then permeated the cracks, depositing carbonate minerals and allowing primitive bacteria to live in the fractures.
3. About 3.6 billion years ago, the bacteria and their by-products became fossilized in the fractures. (Based on isotope ages of the minerals in the fractures)
4. 16 million years ago, a large meteorite struck Mars, dislodging a large chunk of this rock and ejecting it into space. (Based on the cosmic ray exposure age of the meteorite)
5. 13,000 years ago, the meteorite landed in Antarctica.
6. The meteorite, ALH84001, was discovered in 1984 in the Allan Hills region of Antarctica.
Read the whole NASA story here.
Monday, April 18, 2005
I’M BACK!
Enough said. Good trip to the coast, a good morning in Paulsbo and one also on Harbor Island, good times with my younger son and his wife, drinking my cappuccinos and feeling one of the bright people of the modern world rather than one of those people who still want us to live in the musty past of war, religion and moral oppression.
A Visit To Paulsbo
On the road I’ve been from Banff to Paulsbo,
From Georgia’s coast to the chill in Fargo,
But like a Kerouac
To his mother drawn back,
I always return to my comforting sorrow.
Enough said. Good trip to the coast, a good morning in Paulsbo and one also on Harbor Island, good times with my younger son and his wife, drinking my cappuccinos and feeling one of the bright people of the modern world rather than one of those people who still want us to live in the musty past of war, religion and moral oppression.
A Visit To Paulsbo
On the road I’ve been from Banff to Paulsbo,
From Georgia’s coast to the chill in Fargo,
But like a Kerouac
To his mother drawn back,
I always return to my comforting sorrow.
Thursday, April 14, 2005
I'M GOING AWAY...
...for a few days, so the one or two of you who read this blogestimus effort on my part will have to go elsewhere for your ration of intelligent commentary, wit and humor. This is not like the month long trip driving around the United States when I made a few entries while on the road. I'm just gone and back like Jumping Jack Flash, and until I return silence will reign on this site.
Here's a parting word or two:
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
Fool me thrice, I must be a Republican.
My youth was like a visit to a clothing store. I tried on lots of costumes, hoping to find out which fitted me best in the mirror of your shifty eyes.
Atheism is a viewpoint for the mature of mind. Not many youths find it compatible.
When you group together any collection of vulnerable people, such as prisoners or children, you attract both the best and the worst of caregivers. To children you attract pedophiles and to prisoners the sadistic. These misfits, however, are the minority, but they will always be drawn to their potential victims.
WHAT WOULD THOMAS JEFFERSON BE?
These Jeffersonian opinions tell me that Thom would go for “intelligent design”.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that "the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."
Thomas Jefferson also wrote (concerning slavery), “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep forever.”
CONSERVATIVE’S WOULD CENSOR DOG SEX IF THEY COULD
“We're setting ourselves up as the butt of future jokes—
BY RICHARD ROEPER, SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST February 28, 2005
LOS ANGELES -- Unbelievable. The New York Times reported Sunday that ABC executives were so worried about offending Oscar telecast viewers and/or the FCC that Robin Williams had to kill a goofy, one-minute song lampooning the recent controversy about whether SpongeBob SquarePants is gay.”
Let me suggest that if a bunch of sex-crazed, frightened, neurotic Christians can cause a giant network to back down, American freedoms are in certain danger. “Neurotic,” you charge. “How can you say that?”
All I got to do is look into the smile-warped face of one of them, out through which glare completely humorless eyes to see it. I can recognize the smile of my stepmother in almost any crazy fundamentalist’s Christian face. If you can’t see the parallel between Rome silencing Galileo and Dobson silencing network TV, then your analogizer is broken.
Read it and weep the whole story here.
SPEAKING OF OTHER CONSERVATIVE SILLINESS
As I’ve often pointed out, reason, in some people, is only an excuse-making machine for irrational behavior. What follows has to be the dumbest ever, conservative thinking I’ve ever come across, but, hey, when a man ain’t rational, he can only sound dumbly Bush like and without nuance.
I was buying a few things at my local Sears/K-Mart recently. I’ve been a Sears man most all my life and no WalMart is going to change that piece of irrationality on my part, no how, but... the sales guy noticed my Nation Visa Card and wondered aloud about it. I told him that THE NATION is a long standing progressive magazine that’s been around since 1865.
He asks, “You mean, ‘progressive’, like in ‘liberal’?”
“Yeah,” I say, awaiting the attack. “I’m a liberal Democrat.”
So immediately the sale’s guy gets on his rant why we must censor this Professor Churchill fellow for having an opinion different from his, my sale’s person’s, opinion. I guess my sale’s fellow imagines that only his opinion must be taught in colleges. I don’t think he’d nuanced the idea that education is supposed to broaden one’s experience to ideas and not narrow them down to the majority’s narrow view. Typical conservative lockstep thinking approach.
But that’s not the worst of the man’s silliness (not to mention my wife’s observation that the man in his official position as salesman for Sears ought not be alienating Sears lifetime customers). Speaking of inappropriate interjection of opinion! Maybe Sears ought to be informed about this alienator so they can censor him. But, to return to my subject:
The next silliness out of the man’s mouth was a harangue about why no company would kill off its customer base so why should we be watching out for the environmental depredations by capitalistic businesses. It’s as if the man had never heard of W. (something) Grace company in Libby, Montana or Union Carbide in India or how coal companies cared not a whit about their worker customers in West Virginia or about Five Mile Island or about the million other care not a whit atrocities by careless and profit-driven companies.
It’s not the killing off of all its customers, stupid, it’s a business not caring if their business practices harms a few dozen children or, as in the case of Libby, Montana exposing perhaps a third of that city’s population to lifetimes of ill health. We are talking about written down, observed, undeniable cases, numbering in the thousands, of businesses not giving a damn about the people who work for them or live around them. I’m not even bringing in here the lives ruined in other ways than physically by bad businesses. Need I say “Enron” to get the lame-Os attention?
It was if the man were totally separated from the real world, which is why, sorry to say, I can almost conclude that he was a fundamentalist Christian, for who more than fundamentalists are so detached from reality? The guy was so incapable of putting together a couple of sentences of rational thought that I am almost certain he was a fundamentalist Christian. Or Moslem. I can’t tell much of a difference in the reasoning powers of either group. Boooooom!!!!!!!!!!!
WE’RE THE EYES, EARS AND MIND OF THE COMING ALL
The title to this section says it all. Joseph Campbell after spending a book, MYTHS TO LIVE BY, showing us the obvious, condenses it to a nutshell in the following brief passage (p. 257):
“The solar system and the atom, the two extremes of scientific exploration, recognized as identical, yet distinct! Analogous must be our own identity with the All, of which we are the ears and eyes and mind.”
___________________________________________________________
“The fundamentalist delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.” —Yasutani Roshi
...for a few days, so the one or two of you who read this blogestimus effort on my part will have to go elsewhere for your ration of intelligent commentary, wit and humor. This is not like the month long trip driving around the United States when I made a few entries while on the road. I'm just gone and back like Jumping Jack Flash, and until I return silence will reign on this site.
Here's a parting word or two:
Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
Fool me thrice, I must be a Republican.
My youth was like a visit to a clothing store. I tried on lots of costumes, hoping to find out which fitted me best in the mirror of your shifty eyes.
Atheism is a viewpoint for the mature of mind. Not many youths find it compatible.
When you group together any collection of vulnerable people, such as prisoners or children, you attract both the best and the worst of caregivers. To children you attract pedophiles and to prisoners the sadistic. These misfits, however, are the minority, but they will always be drawn to their potential victims.
WHAT WOULD THOMAS JEFFERSON BE?
These Jeffersonian opinions tell me that Thom would go for “intelligent design”.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that "the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the Supreme Being as His Father, in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter."
Thomas Jefferson also wrote (concerning slavery), “Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that His justice cannot sleep forever.”
CONSERVATIVE’S WOULD CENSOR DOG SEX IF THEY COULD
“We're setting ourselves up as the butt of future jokes—
BY RICHARD ROEPER, SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST February 28, 2005
LOS ANGELES -- Unbelievable. The New York Times reported Sunday that ABC executives were so worried about offending Oscar telecast viewers and/or the FCC that Robin Williams had to kill a goofy, one-minute song lampooning the recent controversy about whether SpongeBob SquarePants is gay.”
Let me suggest that if a bunch of sex-crazed, frightened, neurotic Christians can cause a giant network to back down, American freedoms are in certain danger. “Neurotic,” you charge. “How can you say that?”
All I got to do is look into the smile-warped face of one of them, out through which glare completely humorless eyes to see it. I can recognize the smile of my stepmother in almost any crazy fundamentalist’s Christian face. If you can’t see the parallel between Rome silencing Galileo and Dobson silencing network TV, then your analogizer is broken.
Read it and weep the whole story here.
SPEAKING OF OTHER CONSERVATIVE SILLINESS
As I’ve often pointed out, reason, in some people, is only an excuse-making machine for irrational behavior. What follows has to be the dumbest ever, conservative thinking I’ve ever come across, but, hey, when a man ain’t rational, he can only sound dumbly Bush like and without nuance.
I was buying a few things at my local Sears/K-Mart recently. I’ve been a Sears man most all my life and no WalMart is going to change that piece of irrationality on my part, no how, but... the sales guy noticed my Nation Visa Card and wondered aloud about it. I told him that THE NATION is a long standing progressive magazine that’s been around since 1865.
He asks, “You mean, ‘progressive’, like in ‘liberal’?”
“Yeah,” I say, awaiting the attack. “I’m a liberal Democrat.”
So immediately the sale’s guy gets on his rant why we must censor this Professor Churchill fellow for having an opinion different from his, my sale’s person’s, opinion. I guess my sale’s fellow imagines that only his opinion must be taught in colleges. I don’t think he’d nuanced the idea that education is supposed to broaden one’s experience to ideas and not narrow them down to the majority’s narrow view. Typical conservative lockstep thinking approach.
But that’s not the worst of the man’s silliness (not to mention my wife’s observation that the man in his official position as salesman for Sears ought not be alienating Sears lifetime customers). Speaking of inappropriate interjection of opinion! Maybe Sears ought to be informed about this alienator so they can censor him. But, to return to my subject:
The next silliness out of the man’s mouth was a harangue about why no company would kill off its customer base so why should we be watching out for the environmental depredations by capitalistic businesses. It’s as if the man had never heard of W. (something) Grace company in Libby, Montana or Union Carbide in India or how coal companies cared not a whit about their worker customers in West Virginia or about Five Mile Island or about the million other care not a whit atrocities by careless and profit-driven companies.
It’s not the killing off of all its customers, stupid, it’s a business not caring if their business practices harms a few dozen children or, as in the case of Libby, Montana exposing perhaps a third of that city’s population to lifetimes of ill health. We are talking about written down, observed, undeniable cases, numbering in the thousands, of businesses not giving a damn about the people who work for them or live around them. I’m not even bringing in here the lives ruined in other ways than physically by bad businesses. Need I say “Enron” to get the lame-Os attention?
It was if the man were totally separated from the real world, which is why, sorry to say, I can almost conclude that he was a fundamentalist Christian, for who more than fundamentalists are so detached from reality? The guy was so incapable of putting together a couple of sentences of rational thought that I am almost certain he was a fundamentalist Christian. Or Moslem. I can’t tell much of a difference in the reasoning powers of either group. Boooooom!!!!!!!!!!!
WE’RE THE EYES, EARS AND MIND OF THE COMING ALL
The title to this section says it all. Joseph Campbell after spending a book, MYTHS TO LIVE BY, showing us the obvious, condenses it to a nutshell in the following brief passage (p. 257):
“The solar system and the atom, the two extremes of scientific exploration, recognized as identical, yet distinct! Analogous must be our own identity with the All, of which we are the ears and eyes and mind.”
___________________________________________________________
“The fundamentalist delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there.” —Yasutani Roshi
Wednesday, April 13, 2005
READY OR NOT, IRAN, HERE WE COME!
Here’s some inside news from Scott Ritter on the Randi Rhodes show today (April 13, 2005). Scott Ritter is the Republican, Marine officer, weapons inspector who got it all right about Iraq long before our invasion. Now he’s laying the truth out about Iran.
Mark your calendars for June. The President has already signed off on military plans for a massive bombing attack on Iran.
Even though the Iranians do actually need nuclear power plants for energy purposes (so Pres. Ford and Shaw of Iran agreed many years ago) we will not let them have them. Bolton is in place at the U.N. because he has contempt for the U.N. and will not hesitate to do the nasty deeds Bush will require. Negroponti is in place to feed false intelligence information to Congress and to the American public. Prepare for massive lie bombing of American public to commence about June also.
Mark your calendars for June. Lie to us once, shame on you. Lie to us twice shame on us.
STEVEN PINKER GOT THE “EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES” AWARD
AT ANNUAL FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION CONVENTION….
Leave it to Steven to clearly state the psychological facts behind the discussion of morality. Religeophils have for too long claimed the high ground when it comes to human value systems, but as we can see, human values arise out of the animal itself and don’t need a supposedly higher power to create a code of ethics. Even a dog has values. He chooses constantly to go to the left or the right, to value one motion above the other. If he didn’t, he’d be frozen in inaction.
“So the bible, contrary to what a majority of Americans apparently be-lieve, is far from a source of higher moral values. Religions have given us stonings [sic], witch-burnings, crusades, in-quisitions, jihads, fatwas, suicide bombers, gay-bashers, abortion-clinic gunmen, and mothers who drown their sons so they can happily be unit-ed in heaven.
“To understand the source of moral values, we don’t have to look to reli-gion. Psychologists have identified uni-versal moral sentiments such as love, compassion, generosity, guilt, shame, and righteous indignation. A belief in spirits and angels need not have any-thing to do with it. And moral philoso-phers such as Peter Singer (one of to-morrow’s honorees) who scrutinize the concept of morality have shown that it [morality] is logically rooted in the inter-changeability of one’s own interests and others. The world’s enduring moral systems capture in some way the notion of the interchangeability of per-spectives and interests, the idea that ‘I am one guy among many’; the golden rule; the categorical imperative; Singer’s own notion of ‘the expanding circle’; John Rawls’s ‘veil of ignorance,’ and so on. A retributive, human-like deity meting out justice doesn’t have a role in our best explanations of the logic of morality.” —Steven Pinker
RECENT MOVIES
This past week (April 10 through 16) I watched “Two-lane Blacktop”, Brazil’s “Carandiru” (a prison movie reminiscent of Attica), “Journey To The Sun” from Turkey (about Kurdish troubles in Turkey) and an American film, “Scotland, PA”, with the ever effervescent, Christopher Walken playing the role of a detective out to solve the murder of the king (?)—a modern Macbeth. Lot’s of dark humor.
Surprise was the “Two-lane Blacktop” film of 1971 that starred singer/songwriter James Taylor. He plays a driver of a hot rod who with his mechanic partner (Dennis Wilson of “The Beach Boys”) scoots across the United States racing for money.
Most moving was “Journey To The Sun” which followed a disenfranchised Turkish youth in Turkey as things go from bad to worse for him within a government which doesn’t like non-conformity. The final passages that involve his taking the body of a Kurdish, rebel friend back to his hometown in Kurdistan for burial build to a wonderfully passionate finish. It’s a message for brotherhood in an unlikely setting.
ENTER CARL SAGAN, GHOSTING UP A PLANETARY VISION
Has anyone actually witnessed one of the planets of our solar system colliding with another planet? But could we come to any more reasonable conclusion than what follows? Although the obvious answers do not always prove true in scientific inquiry, how can we not love and delight in the kind of description that leads to the following conclusions about the nearly circular periods of all the planets of our solar system? This is the predictive power of science which supernatural thinking cannot match.
“Why are planetary orbits nearly circular and neatly separated one from the other? Because if planets had very elliptical orbits, so that their paths intersect, sooner or later there would be a collision. In the early history of the solar system, there were probably many planets in the process of formation. Those with elliptical crossing orbits tended to collide and destroy themselves. Those with circular orbits tended to grow and survive. The orbits of the present planets are the orbits of the survivors of this collisional natural selection, the stable middle age of a solar system dominated by early catastrophic impacts.” (from Sagan’s COSMOS, p. 81
STARDUST MEMORIES MAKES ME THINK OF WOODY AND CARL
"Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter are countless asteroids, tiny terrestrial planets. The largest are a few hundred kilometers across. Many have oblong shapes and are tumbling through space. In some cases there seem to be two or more asteroids in tight mutual orbits. Collisions among the asteroids happen frequently, and occasionally a piece is chipped off and accidentally intercepts the Earth, falling to the ground as a meteorite. In the exhibits, on the shelves of our museums are the fragments of distant worlds. The asteroid belt is a great grinding mill, producing, smaller and smaller pieces down to motes of dust." (Sagan's COSMOS, p. 87)
If this stellar dust has been falling on Earth since time immemorial, then we can understand why some have said we are all made of stardust.
____________________________________________________________
"It's not what we don't know that hurt's, it's what we know that ain't so." —Will Rogers
Here’s some inside news from Scott Ritter on the Randi Rhodes show today (April 13, 2005). Scott Ritter is the Republican, Marine officer, weapons inspector who got it all right about Iraq long before our invasion. Now he’s laying the truth out about Iran.
Mark your calendars for June. The President has already signed off on military plans for a massive bombing attack on Iran.
Even though the Iranians do actually need nuclear power plants for energy purposes (so Pres. Ford and Shaw of Iran agreed many years ago) we will not let them have them. Bolton is in place at the U.N. because he has contempt for the U.N. and will not hesitate to do the nasty deeds Bush will require. Negroponti is in place to feed false intelligence information to Congress and to the American public. Prepare for massive lie bombing of American public to commence about June also.
Mark your calendars for June. Lie to us once, shame on you. Lie to us twice shame on us.
STEVEN PINKER GOT THE “EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES” AWARD
AT ANNUAL FREEDOM FROM RELIGION FOUNDATION CONVENTION….
Leave it to Steven to clearly state the psychological facts behind the discussion of morality. Religeophils have for too long claimed the high ground when it comes to human value systems, but as we can see, human values arise out of the animal itself and don’t need a supposedly higher power to create a code of ethics. Even a dog has values. He chooses constantly to go to the left or the right, to value one motion above the other. If he didn’t, he’d be frozen in inaction.
“So the bible, contrary to what a majority of Americans apparently be-lieve, is far from a source of higher moral values. Religions have given us stonings [sic], witch-burnings, crusades, in-quisitions, jihads, fatwas, suicide bombers, gay-bashers, abortion-clinic gunmen, and mothers who drown their sons so they can happily be unit-ed in heaven.
“To understand the source of moral values, we don’t have to look to reli-gion. Psychologists have identified uni-versal moral sentiments such as love, compassion, generosity, guilt, shame, and righteous indignation. A belief in spirits and angels need not have any-thing to do with it. And moral philoso-phers such as Peter Singer (one of to-morrow’s honorees) who scrutinize the concept of morality have shown that it [morality] is logically rooted in the inter-changeability of one’s own interests and others. The world’s enduring moral systems capture in some way the notion of the interchangeability of per-spectives and interests, the idea that ‘I am one guy among many’; the golden rule; the categorical imperative; Singer’s own notion of ‘the expanding circle’; John Rawls’s ‘veil of ignorance,’ and so on. A retributive, human-like deity meting out justice doesn’t have a role in our best explanations of the logic of morality.” —Steven Pinker
RECENT MOVIES
This past week (April 10 through 16) I watched “Two-lane Blacktop”, Brazil’s “Carandiru” (a prison movie reminiscent of Attica), “Journey To The Sun” from Turkey (about Kurdish troubles in Turkey) and an American film, “Scotland, PA”, with the ever effervescent, Christopher Walken playing the role of a detective out to solve the murder of the king (?)—a modern Macbeth. Lot’s of dark humor.
Surprise was the “Two-lane Blacktop” film of 1971 that starred singer/songwriter James Taylor. He plays a driver of a hot rod who with his mechanic partner (Dennis Wilson of “The Beach Boys”) scoots across the United States racing for money.
Most moving was “Journey To The Sun” which followed a disenfranchised Turkish youth in Turkey as things go from bad to worse for him within a government which doesn’t like non-conformity. The final passages that involve his taking the body of a Kurdish, rebel friend back to his hometown in Kurdistan for burial build to a wonderfully passionate finish. It’s a message for brotherhood in an unlikely setting.
ENTER CARL SAGAN, GHOSTING UP A PLANETARY VISION
Has anyone actually witnessed one of the planets of our solar system colliding with another planet? But could we come to any more reasonable conclusion than what follows? Although the obvious answers do not always prove true in scientific inquiry, how can we not love and delight in the kind of description that leads to the following conclusions about the nearly circular periods of all the planets of our solar system? This is the predictive power of science which supernatural thinking cannot match.
“Why are planetary orbits nearly circular and neatly separated one from the other? Because if planets had very elliptical orbits, so that their paths intersect, sooner or later there would be a collision. In the early history of the solar system, there were probably many planets in the process of formation. Those with elliptical crossing orbits tended to collide and destroy themselves. Those with circular orbits tended to grow and survive. The orbits of the present planets are the orbits of the survivors of this collisional natural selection, the stable middle age of a solar system dominated by early catastrophic impacts.” (from Sagan’s COSMOS, p. 81
STARDUST MEMORIES MAKES ME THINK OF WOODY AND CARL
"Between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter are countless asteroids, tiny terrestrial planets. The largest are a few hundred kilometers across. Many have oblong shapes and are tumbling through space. In some cases there seem to be two or more asteroids in tight mutual orbits. Collisions among the asteroids happen frequently, and occasionally a piece is chipped off and accidentally intercepts the Earth, falling to the ground as a meteorite. In the exhibits, on the shelves of our museums are the fragments of distant worlds. The asteroid belt is a great grinding mill, producing, smaller and smaller pieces down to motes of dust." (Sagan's COSMOS, p. 87)
If this stellar dust has been falling on Earth since time immemorial, then we can understand why some have said we are all made of stardust.
____________________________________________________________
"It's not what we don't know that hurt's, it's what we know that ain't so." —Will Rogers
Monday, April 11, 2005
GOD’S TSUNAMI
 |
| Ehrenreich |
by Barbara Ehrenreich
God Owes Us an Apology
The tsunami of seawater was followed instantly by a tsunami of spittle as the religious sputtered to rationalize God's latest felony. Here we'd been placidly killing each other a few dozen at a time in Iraq, Darfur, Congo, Israel, and Palestine, when along comes the deity and whacks a quarter million in a couple of hours between breakfast and lunch. On CNN, NPR, Fox News, and in newspaper articles too numerous for Nexis to count, men and women of the cloth weighed in solemnly on His existence, His motives, and even His competence to continue as Ruler of Everything. Theodicy, in other words—the attempt to reconcile God's perfect goodness with the manifest evils of His world—has arisen from the waves. On the retro, fundamentalist, side, various men of the cloth announced that the tsunami was the rational act of a deity enraged by (take your pick): the suppression of Christianity in South Asia, pornography and child-trafficking in that same locale, or, in the view of some Muslim commentators, the bikini-clad tourists at Phuket.
On the more liberal end of the theological spectrum, God's spokespeople hastened to stuff their fingers in the dike even as the floodwaters of doubt washed over it. Of course, God exists, seems to be the general consensus. And, of course, He is perfectly good. It's just that his jurisdiction doesn't extend to tectonic plates. Or maybe it does and He tosses us an occasional grenade like this just to see how quickly we can mobilize to clean up the damage. Besides, as the Catholic priests like to remind us, "He's a 'mystery' "—though that's never stopped them from pronouncing His views on abortion with absolute certainty.
The clerics who are struggling to make sense of the tsunami must not have noticed that this is hardly the first display of God's penchant for wanton, homicidal mischief. Leaving out man-made genocide, war, and even those "natural" disasters, like drought and famine, to which "man" invariably contributes through his inept social arrangements, God has a lot to account for in the way of earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and plagues. Nor has He ever shown much discrimination in his choice of victims. A tsunami hit Lisbon in 1755, on All Saints Day, when the good Christians were all in church. The faithful perished, while the denizens of the red light district, which was built on strong stone, simply carried on sinning. Similarly, last fall's hurricanes flattened the God-fearing, Republican parts of Florida while sparing sin-soaked Key West and South Beach. The Christian-style "God of love" should be particularly vulnerable to post-tsunami doubts. What kind of "love" inspired Him to wrest babies from their parents' arms, the better to drown them in a hurry? If He so loves us that He gave his only son etc., why couldn't he have held those tectonic plates in place at least until the kids were off the beach? So much, too, for the current pop-Christian God, who can be found, at least on the Internet, micro-managing people's careers, resolving marital spats, and taking excess pounds off the faithful--this last being Pat Robertson's latest fixation.
If we are responsible for our actions, as most religions insist, then God should be too, and I would propose, post-tsunami, an immediate withdrawal of prayer and other forms of flattery directed at a supposedly moral deity—at least until an apology is issued, such as, for example: "I was so busy with Cindy-in-Omaha's weight-loss program that I wasn't paying attention to the Earth's crust."
It's not just Christianity. Any religion centered on a God who is both all-powerful and all good, including Islam and the more monotheistically inclined versions of Hinduism, should be subject to a thorough post-tsunami evaluation. As many have noted before me: If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is all-powerful, then clearly he doesn't give a damn. In fact, the best way for the religious to fend off the atheist threat might be to revive the old bad—or at least amoral and indifferent—gods. The tortured notion of a God who is both good and powerful is fairly recent, dating to roughly 1200 BC, after which Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam emerged. Before that, you had the feckless Greco-Roman Pantheon, whose members interfered in human events only when their considerable egos were at stake. Or you had monstrous, human-sacrifice-consuming, psycho-gods like Baal and his Central American counterparts. Even earlier, as I pointed out in my book Blood Rites, there were prehistoric god(desses) modeled on man-eating animals like lions, and requiring a steady diet of human or animal sacrificial flesh. The faithful will protest that they don't want to worship a bad—or amoral or indifferent—God, but obviously they already do.
Why not acknowledge what our prehistoric ancestors knew? If the Big Guy or Gal operates in any kind of moral framework, it has nothing to do with the rules we've come up with over the eons as primates attempting to live in groups-- rules like, for example, "no hitting."
Yes, 12/26 was a warning, though not about the hazards of wearing bikinis. What it comes down to is that we're up shit creek here on the planet Earth. We're wide open to asteroid hits, with the latest near-miss coming in October, when a city-sized one passed within a mere million miles of Earth, which is just four times the distance between the Earth and the moon. Then, too, it's only a matter of time before the constant shuffling of viral DNA results in a global pandemic. And 12/26 was a reminder that the planet itself is a jerry-rigged affair, likely to keep belching and lurching. Even leaving out global warming and the possibility of nuclear war, this is not a good situation, in case you hadn't noticed so far.
If there is a God, and He, She, or It had a message for us on 12/26, that message is: Get your act together, folks--your seismic detection systems, your first responders and global mobilization capacity--because no one, and I do mean no One, is coming to medivac us out.
Barbara Ehrenreich is a columnist for The Progressive.
She is the author of "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America" and "Blood Rites: Origins and History of the Passions of War."
___________________________________________________________
“The only paradise is paradise lost.” —Marcel Proust
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