United Nations – Swords into Plowshares

PLEASE DON FIREPROOF GOGGLES NOW 😉

… I’d end all the wars, recall all the military forces, and honorably discharge 50% of them. We don’t need citizen soldiers, we need citizens. The funds recovered from the waste of war would immediately fund the new National Health Service.

… Guantanamo Bay would close and everyone would get a trial by jury in the United States. The Department of Justice would have to step up, and if someone was incarcerated without proof they would be given $250,000 and an airplane ticket to their destination of choice.

… The Department of Homeland Security would be disbanded and the funds wasted on them re-routed to NHS.

… I would champion an amendment to the United States Constitution declaring that all human beings are equal in every way under the law. Therefore gay marriage would be a non-issue and any “Illegal Immigrants” would instantly become citizens. They would be rounded up, provided with proper US Identification, all of them would receive Social Security Numbers and they would become a on-the-books part of our workforce.

… Any company found guilty of damaging the climate, the environment, or any ecosystem would be dismantled and the parts sold to fund recovery programs. No cap-and-trade, no reparation payments, either you submit or you cease business in the United States.

… Massive funding of the Department of Education. Class sizes throughout the United States would be capped at 20 children per class and those schools that retain the best teachers and produce the best students get yearly bonuses to their general ledgers.
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This is going to go over like a fart in church. 🙂

S is for Superman

The world desperately needs Superman. Hell, we’d be happy if Iron Man could pinch hit while Supes was en route to Earth. Alas, none of them are real. The world is so full of problems, it would be so convenient to have a superhero to help sort them out.

But then again, is it a hero we’re looking for or is it a question of what we need versus what we think we want? I think we need some alien threat. Humanity really only gets together and resolves differences when there is a superordinate threat placed upon us. Anything could play this role, alien invasion, killer asteroid, or even Dr. Manhattan. I find the movie rendition of The Watchmen to be just as good a story as the book one was. That our race will only resolve our differences when we’ve got something bigger and grander than ourselves with which to fight. We can’t fight alongside each other because there is no villain to the piece. What we have are fogs. The fog of war, the fog of terrorism, the fog of bigotry. It’s next to impossible to fight a fog. The only way to dispatch these fogs is if we face some dire superordinate threat.

That would be all the superhero we’d need. We’d be our own.

They’ve Chained Nature, but They Will Never Make It Sing

I would have changed the ending to “I Am Number Four”. I would have, during the last struggle scene had the villain explain to the hero “It’s always like your kind, finding others to do your dirty work. You should have asked your parents about who and what we… ” leaving the audience wondering if the villains of the piece were simply slaves looking to avenge their servitude on the children of their owners. The movie could have been an examination of master/slave revolt sci-fi, but instead, it’s just your average breadbasket monsters vs. pretty hero.

Rotunda of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Va. (LOC)

I remember the worst teacher I ever had. It was at SUNY Buffalo. He was teaching Childhood Psychology. This professor was a conflagration of worsts. His ego was so puffed up by everyone telling him what a smart academic he was that he couldn’t see beyond the bridge of his glasses. His biggest transgression that set me off was that he refused to supply the class with a syllabus until the day after the Add/Remove Deadline had passed. He considered our presence in his class on the opening day to be a personal insult, that we were “shopping for courses” and that we weren’t serious about our majors. When it became very clear to me that he was not going to follow the rules about a timely release of the class syllabus I marched down to my department and issued a formal complaint and in that same meeting removed myself from this man’s class. I didn’t need his obnoxiousness to graduate. I was told that there was nothing that could be done about him, that he had tenure and that short of him committing a felony could get him dug out of his position.

I appreciated his position and understood the spirit of what he was trying to do, even while I railed against it. This particular point has come up before and I’ve blogged about it at length. That ever since the late 90’s, kids in college have been attending with a different structure of assumptions and a different approach to attending a college. This very old professors primary complaint was a quaint throwback to a culture that has come and gone. Higher education is less about the privilege of going to college and just another self-glorified service provider, with a contract and negotiated terms and conditions.

It was many years ago that I attended this professors class. He was already very old (one foot in the grave, the other on a banana peel) so I can only assume that he is firmly and soundly dead. C’est la vie.

TIME FLIES…………………*

I would rather be super-intelligent than extremely good looking. For me it comes down to a matter of depth. I respect depth and cultivating deep understanding, being regarded as intelligent is far more important a pursuit than simple vanity. In my experience the “Good Looking” people lead very vapid and dull lives. Vanity is fleeting, you’re young only for a short time and then you get old and it’s all ruined.

Perhaps it’s the acceptance of the flow of time. Time can only lead to deeper understandings, only lead to more intelligence while Time follows Vanity down a dark alley and then tears off it’s arms and beats it to death, leaving Vanity dead and stuffed in a rusting dumpster.

Since nobody can escape time, it seems the best bet to select that which will work to your best advantage.

LOST Auction – Hurley’s lottery balls and winning ticket

I wouldn’t want to be on any game show. First off, the camera adds weight, and in my case I would look like Jabba the Hutt. Very bad. Secondly, no matter what you win you will have to face a IRS agent right after you walk off the set and have to pay taxes on whatever you win. So, “Yay! I won a car!” “Hello, we’ll need $1700 now.” It’s just not worth it.

In addition to that, there is the general idea that nothing in life is truly free. If you win something, then you are the product being sold. It’s filthy business and I want to have nothing of it. Plus there is the law of found money. You go on “The Price Is Right” and win the entire showcase package, then someone in your family contracts creeping entropy rot, your house burns to the ground, your car’s engine cracks in half and suddenly you are facing an IRS audit going back 20 years. The price to get out from all of that? The exact money you “won” on the show. No matter what you do, life is a zero sum game.

The real winner is the one who does not play.

George Carlin

My sense of humor is one of my most beloved traits. Laughter is a shield that protects all the soft squishy bits inside from being hurt by the utter craziness of the world that surrounds us.

My comedy inspirations are first and foremost George Carlin, followed up by a motley crew of other standup comedians who all approach comedy in different ways. From Jeff Dunham’s comic ventriloquism to Bob Saget’s blue-as-blue-can-be rendition of The Aristocrats. Nothing is verboten, nothing is censored, and there is a reason why we laugh at what we do even if on the surface it could make us feel very ashamed if we were asked in as sober a way, why did you laugh at something.

Laughter lightens the mood, brightens a space. It also can help people cope with uncomfortable realities and when it comes to satire, it is a vital channel of real information that otherwise would not be allowed to spread. Everything from dead baby jokes, you your-momma jokes all the way up to challenger-disaster jokes and dahmer-cannibalism jokes are all a part of this. Whenever we are confronted with something beyond our immediate ability to cope, laughter can rush in and help relieve tension and help people climb the tall slope of coping to help them get over whatever it is that they have to get over. There are only a few things that usually don’t have any jokes that surround them, foremost on my mind is a dearth of Holocaust jokes. There are some things that you simply cannot comprehend and even humor is powerless to help you even scrabble at the rockface of that steep coping cliff. What laughter can’t heal, time has to bury.

As for Satire, it’s vital in any working democracy. I would argue that Satire is vital even in working monarchies as ancient courts would always have the King, a Queen, and the Jester (or Fool) who would make satirical comments to the King and help check himself. Here I have to tip my hat to the two biggest names in political satire currently in popular culture and media, that being Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It is important to be on top of world events and read the news, but I would argue that it’s even more important to listen to the Jester. Regard the satirist and listen to what he has to say. As Jon Stewart is fond of saying, The Daily Show isn’t a news program, it’s just a comedy show and he’s just a comedic monkey. If that’s how we sees himself, that’s his prerogative, however I for one regard The Daily Show as a true source of both entertainment and news. The Jester is so important to the health of the kingdom that it’s often wise to listen to him when you can get the chance. What makes you laugh, then makes you think.

Laughter is that one thing that can stave off a half-living banal death. We all carry around within ourselves a bundle of fireworks, or lightning bugs, or any number of other metaphors for the brightness and creativity of life. It’s when people stop laughing, stop seeking out the funny, that’s when they suffer that most unfortunate mini-death and then end up being cheerless machines trudging through the mechanics of life. Some people suffer this mean fate and all they have to rely on at that point is their weepy faith. At least in my opinion, it’s far better to retain as much brightness as you can and try to kindle it in others so that nobody has to end up having their faith as the only saving grace in their lives. Laughter is too important to allow it to be extinguished, even if you have to make people laugh at your expense – it’s worth it in the end.

Art: watercolour 2009:…light of a dream…or hope for a new love…

I’ve got very different ideas when it comes to consciousness, unconsciousness, and even leading into sentience itself. I see the brain being a part of the body, and because of that the brain is just another part of the machine. It’s responsibilities include survival and satisfaction of biological drives. Anything beyond those things, such as imagination, consciousness, sentience, and ontology are on the other side of the divide, a matter of the actual spirit itself.

It’s important to first state that I fully believe that the ‘spirit’ is actually a quantum-fluctuate-mediated expression of a universe-spanning holographic existence. Everything that people consider a part of the spirit or soul is actually the shine from this universe-sized hologram, we are in a way, actually and quite literally a function of the fabric of existence itself. Our souls have always been here, always done these things, and in this structural framework, God isn’t some father-figure in the clouds, he/she is instead all of us put together, I see God in terms such as “existence” or “Light”. God is all of us. The good, the bad, and the ugly, all summed up and even more. Our brains are complicated enough to ‘tune’ in on the quantum-fluctua that is a part of our spirits and when we are conscious the tuning is locked. We are occupied with living concerns, living, loving, eating, breeding, plotting, thinking. When we slip into unconsciousness we return to our spiritual holographic and quantum-fluctua based nativity. We in a way, each night, when we dream, return to a kind of spiritual collective, re-merge with the Godhead that we all ache to return to. This detachment from the biological allows us to access a greater existence than we possibly could if we had just a plain biologically based existence. That’s why time doesn’t exist in dreams, that’s why we can see the future, revisit the past, or have completely alien experiences while in the dream-state. Time only really exists for the material parts of us, the spiritual parts of us are timeless. That is why death holds no sway over us, because each night we taste it with our unconsciousness, we continue on after the body stops working. When we die, we see the Light, we see the glow from all the infinite existences on the other side of the tunnel. Dreaming allows us to day-trip to the Light without becoming lost within it.

It is the dream that gives us an advantage that we can haul back with us through the gates of unconsciousness as our experiences can color how we form memories in our biological existence. That’s why sometimes you feel that oddness of deja-vu, that somehow you are remembering the future. You are, you glimpsed it through your dreaming and carried it back with you. I also believe that it is in dreaming that we can get back in touch with our fate. Humanity is both fate-bound and blessed with free-will. But that is a whole different discussion that goes way beyond dreaming itself.

Red or blue?

I have two half-siblings. Whenever I describe my family and mention that I have a half-brother and a half-sister that always brings on the same odd head tilt that you usually see in dogs when they hear a high-pitched sound, in the faces of people I’m describing my family system to. Once we get beyond the baroo and explain how my siblings were first on the scene with one father and I with a different father the baroo naturally goes away on its own.

I love my siblings, whether they are aware of it or not. I often times think that the natural balance is off, my sister expresses her feelings much more easily than my brother does. Despite some technological hurdles I speak to my sister most of all in my entire family. She was born under the sign of Taurus and that stubbornness is absolutely implacable. Just try to ignore her phone calls! I don’t unless I’m driving or I’m otherwise preoccupied. Where my sister is very connected (and which I feel is a very good thing for her to be) my brother is just the opposite. I believe I last talked to him at the last funeral we all attended. Does this bother me? No. It used to, but then I grew up. Part of having family is being there even if they can’t or won’t, and in so many ways, being there despite their best efforts to encourage it any other way. I could of course saunter in and become a totally unbearable pain in the ass, but over time I’ve learned that if people are to change that it has to spring from within, it can’t be imposed from without.

Life goes on. Wether your siblings are totally absent or so present that they’ve got a lemonade stand in your head you can’t really ever escape them. Even if you are so upset that you want to hold a grudge, eventually instincts win out and you find yourself unable to escape these people. It’s as it should be. The only sorry part of any of this is the shame in missing out on how special and wonderful your family can be in the here and now. Assuming that they’ll always be there, seeing them as immortal is just a fantasy we use to chase away the fact that death will eventually come for all of us and all of them. It seems a squandering to not try to embrace them and all their obnoxious spiny-selfness.