Man booted from airplane for wearing anti-TSA shirt — RT

Posted on August 27, 2012 by bluedepth

Man booted from airplane for wearing anti-TSA shirt — RT.

What the TSA provides is twofold:

Security Theater
Technology Recycling

For the first part, the Security Theater, that’s exactly what it is. It’s a big show to make people feel safe. Not actually safe, but just the impression that someone seriously is quite serious and taking a serious look into serious things that seriously bother serious people. Seriously. But it’s a sham and we all know it. So we take off our shoes because they could be bombs and somehow in some world liquids smaller than three ounces couldn’t possibly be a hazard. Then we are invited to walk into a machine that is supposed to scan us for security threats on our body. A machine that uses radiation that has not been proven by the FDA to be safe for use. These machines are provided to the TSA by the minimum quoted provider. Who is to say what that machine actually does! Do you see an FDA seal on it? Do you know it’s safe? Do you really trust people who are putting on a show to actually know what the big plastic metal machine does? I always (and always will) elect for the enhanced pat-down. I understand it’s part of the security theater and I don’t want to get in the TSA’s face when it comes to rubbing their noses in it, but come on people! What it really comes down to is the ultimate failure of permanent vigilance. You can’t remain permanently vigilant. You can see it popping up left and right. Guns geting passed through X-Ray scanners, TSA agents falling asleep on the job, TSA agents leaving detectors unplugged for half the day. You can’t eliminate accidents or stupidity. No ruleset exists that people come into contact with that ensures 100% compliance all the time. Human beings aren’t built that way. We get bored, we get lazy, we get sleepy. After millions of old ladies, dudes, toddlers, and regular folk – it all tends to just blend together. You look down and notice the bright blue uniform and remember, oh yeah! You’re supposed to be serious!

Then we get to the second part. The technology recycling services the TSA provides. How many people have put expensive bits and pieces in their checked luggage, luggage that the airlines now charge you to carry no less, only to arrive at your destination finding your expensive bits and pieces are now gone? If you are lucky you get a length of TSA tape that indicates that some mystery bumpkin was pawing through your belongings. That’s why, when I fly, I fly with carry-ons only. Everything worth anything is in my backpack and that never leaves my sight, ever.

All of this is just security theater. I know it is so from direct experience. After recently flying and passing under the watchful always-vigilant eye of the TSA I have noted three discrete incidences where the TSA is just putting on a show. What have I done? Nothing dangerous or hazardous, so don’t get your knickers in a twist, but they did miss several key points which do concern me, in that it shows them for being about as vigilant as my cats are. Here’s what the TSA ignored twice, once at a little airport and once at a big airport:

4 ounce container of underarm deodorant. This is a gel and therefore falls under the three-ounce rule. Nobody is paying attention to this any longer. I decided I didn’t care if they threw a fit and tossed out my Old Spice deodorant, it was half-gone anyways and I’d be inconvenienced a whole $2.50. Alas, I wasn’t inconvenienced, beyond noting that the three ounce rule is hokum.
1 Liter Stainless Steel Hydroflask. It passes under X-Rays and it’s STAINLESS STEEL. Nobody has ever asked me to open my bag and show them the flask, or even open it to demonstrate that it’s empty. It is empty, but that’s not the point. The point is, that vigilance is taking a nap.
20 ounce convention flask. This also passed under X-ray without even a single notice. It too was empty, but what if it wasn’t? That’s 20 ounces of mystery fluid… vigilant, just like my cats.

So what this comes down to is that we are very sold on the notion of McSecurity provided by the TSA. It’s a huge government program that eats up huge government dollars and gets all these companies huge government contracts to build machines that nobody double-checks for efficacy or safety. They look at me, they measure me, they find me non-threatening. I’m just another schlub with a backpack, a roll-aboard, and worn-looking brown shoes. I approach with my United States Passport and I don’t make eye contact. I don’t say anything and my answers are affirmative grunts. All of this is theater. We have a role to play, to be pleasant, pliant, obedient schlubs just shuffling through the great machine being as plain, gray, and uninteresting as possible and their role is to pretend to run big complicated machines and seem strong, superior, and always exude an air of serious menace. That somehow being cold, officious, dour, and oh-so-serious somehow impresses on us all that when we get into a poorly-maintained aircraft with angry poorly paid stewardpeople and pilots that are overworked drunk bus-drivers-in-the-sky that somehow the TSA makes everything oh-so-right.

It’s all pretend. It’s all a big show. It’s nice that they behave the way they do, the way they are told to behave. But the bullshit is thick and smears everything. The fact that airplanes don’t just drop out of the sky all the time is more of a testament to luck than anything else.

When it gets right down to it, when we have to ultimately decide between war, food, and medicine then we’ll see what’s what. When the money runs out to fund this magic McSecurity theater program called the TSA, what then? Will these oh-so-serious, oh-so-dour, super-stalwart, always-vigilant (giggle) watchmen of the folken work for free?

They better work for free. Because Americans are fear-addled pussies who couldn’t possibly handle risk. So we sacrifice our dignity and our honor on the altar of McSecurity Theater. What a wimpy pussed-out lot we are. Seeing demons everywhere. Little brown-skinned demons wearing turbans. Yeah, that’s what it’s really all about. Anyone who says differently probably has stock in the company that builds those cancer scanners they say keeps us all “safe”.

HA HA HA.

Chick-fil-a

Posted on August 2, 2012 by bluedepth

I wrote this as a Facebook comment, but I think it’s good enough to be elevated all the way to a blog post. I would welcome engagement on this subject, feel free to leave comments.

******

I actually have a vested interest in this entire kerfuffle surrounding Chick-Fil-a. The president of the company declared that they do not accept marriage equality for people like me. At first I only patronized Chick-fil-a because I was under the erroneous impression that their inequality towards people like me was rooted in their patriarch who was more than 80 years old and that his children would correct the company when he passed on. As it turns out, that is not the case.

At first Chick-Fil-a was guilty of basic inequality, a kind of mild bigotry. But over time more information was revealed about just how much Chick-fil-a hates people like me. They have donated money to organizations that have as their central purpose to deny marriage equality to LGBT individuals. There has also been some talk about how Chick-fil-a has donated money to support the Ugandan “Kill The Gays” bill, which supports the active murder and disposal of people like me. Driving past a restaurant that makes food where the management has demonstrated hatred and bigotry against me makes me upset.

The president of Chick-fil-a has stated erroneously that God, through the Bible, has decreed that people like me should not marry. He is unaware that his very church that he loves and believes in did indeed marry same-sex individuals from the beginning until 1250AD. Just because the church changed their tune does not mean God has. It would be more accurate for Dan Cathy to describe his position as “We chose to hate gay people and we chose to be bigoted.” Because that is what he has done. For 1250 years God, through his Church has sanctified relationships like mine. Just because you are ignorant of the history of your faith does not mean you are innocent of being a mean vicious bigot. It just means your ignorant.

In the end, what does it mean to not go to Chick-fil-a? It means that your money, or the instruments that hold value, even coupons for “free” food, which just shift the value from currency to your patronage, end up benefiting these people who have actively chosen to be ignorant bigots bent on demonstrating their hatred for their fellow man. They pose as Christians and I question this assertion. Jesus Christ, the man the Christians claim to follow had absolutely NOTHING AT ALL to say about people like me. His teachings were centered on love, forgiveness, and how one could eliminate suffering through following the path he taught. I am unable to successfully connect the actions of Chick-fil-a, a noted Christian company with the teachings of their Messiah, Jesus Christ. I do not see the love, I do not see the forgiveness, and I do not see any elimination of suffering. They uphold the banner of inequality and in the case of Uganda, state-sanctioned murder of people like me.

I am not like the rest of you. I am less of a person than the rest of you. I am not able to get married, despite being in a loving relationship for 15 years. I am beset by Christians who hate me despite their Messiah only preaching love. I am afraid for my life, I am afraid for my rights, and I am afraid that the inequality demonstrated to me means that those that treat this entire conversation so cavalierly do not really respect me or understand just how important equality is.

As I have said to many Christians before when they exhort that Jesus only wants to love me: I don’t want love. I want equality.

And I don’t want Chick-fil-a. I don’t want to support hate. I am sad that others do. But there is nothing I can do, there is nothing I will do, other than write these words. Do as ye will. Pray it doesn’t harm someone you love.

Jindal Says He Won’t Implement Obamacare – ABC News

Posted on June 29, 2012 by bluedepth

Jindal Says He Won’t Implement Obamacare – ABC News.

The Governor of Louisiana has effectively declared that he is going to defy the Union!

That’s fine. Louisiana has really just declared their full intent to be considered in rebellion against the Union and this amounts to secession. The last time we saw this particular bluster it was 1861 and South Carolina.

So all that is old is new again. If Jindal is serious, he is going to take his state into open rebellion and this will initiate the Second Great American Civil War. This is such an outrage! To throw away the Union because you don’t want your poorest citizens to have health insurance coverage! It boggles the mind!

So, what is to be done? If Louisiana is in open rebellion it is time to establish a new border for the remaining states, establish trade tariffs, discontinue all federal services to the rebellious state of Louisiana, place barricades on their Interstates, militarize the border and eventually occupy the state, depose it’s state government and force it to submit to the will of the Union.

The last time states were in open rebellion the North burned Richmond Virginia to the ground to simply prove a point.

So, Governor Jindal, are you sure you want to do this? Are you sure you want to take your entire state down this path? Your political bluster HAS CONSEQUENCES Governor!

My advice to you and the people of Louisiana, tread very carefully. Very carefully. You are being watched and evaluated.

Eduardo Saverin is shameless and should be banished!

Posted on May 17, 2012 by bluedepth

Reading an article on Google Plus, about one of the Facebook executives, Eduardo Saverin who renounced his citizenship to dodge his fair tax burden. A burden that we all share so that our society can function!

This man, Eduardo Saverin is shameless. He is not alone and that is a huge problem in our modern world. Nobody feels shame any longer. They know they should, but they simply do not care. They are greedy for greeds sake and unwilling to take part in what it means to be an American, and a big part of that is to pay what your fair share of tax to pay for the basic services that we all take for granted.

There is a lot wrong with our world. We are plagued with the lazy, the criminal, and the shameless. They spend absolutely no time considering how their actions will affect anyone else. Contrary to popular opinion, every single American is interdependent and each one of us has an obligation to work and pay taxes for those services that we all take for granted.

I find people like Eduardo Saverin to be a clear example of what is horribly wrong with our society. People unwilling to act responsibly and be a proud citizen of our great country. So what is to be done with people who do this sort of thing? I’ve got a great idea, at least in this case, and that is a punishment befitting the crime: Banishment.

Mr. Eduardo Saverin should not be welcome in the United States. He should be banned from any future dealings, his entry should be rejected at whatever port he attempts to gain access through and if he is discovered here illegally he should be deported. If you have the temerity to make a distastefully large sum of money on the backs of your fellow countrymen and then turn around and flee to avoid your tax burden then you should never come back. If you flee, stay that way!

We really ought to bring banishment back. We should banish Mr. Eduardo Saverin.

Marco Polo plays Ping Pong

Posted on April 25, 2012 by bluedepth

There is always something. I recently had the irritated displeasure of attempting to raise a communications channel to a certain group of adults and found the process to be highly educational. Recently Apple had instituted a series of advanced security questions that get paired to an Apple ID when you make a purchase in the month of April. These questions ranged from “Where did your parents first meet?” to “What was the first concert you attended?”, those sorts of questions.

At work, I have an Apple ID that I use to manage our iOS devices here and there and one of the people I tried to contact had to be the one that set the security questions, as I had gotten an email stating that someone set the security questions on the account on April 14th. So I figured someone was just absent-minded, we all have that from time to time, so I texted everyone to please get back to me if they had answered any Apple security questions.

I did get just a handful out of 23 people reply to me in one fashion or another. I then shifted the request over to email and also sent another request “If you have answered any security questions, please let me know what they are.” and for about a week of waiting, just the handful out of 23 deigned to reply to me.

Right after that I started a request with iTunes support at Apple to petition them to wipe away the erroneous security questions on the account and they were busy working on that. Last night they sent me an email telling me that the security questions were reset and that I could login and re-answer them, which I did late last night. So the technical angle of this issue is now a solved non-issue.

But what does bother me, and it’s more vexatious then a real concern is how people replied, or didn’t to my inquiry. I had made the erroneous assumption that when I send out a text twice, and an email asking for information that there is a built-in component to that message which people should reply either way. It was for work, it was important, I used the word “please”. The response I received back after bringing this up was “I didn’t know what it was about so I didn’t reply.” and it was my fault I suppose for assuming that people would, by themselves, assume that a reply was expected. Out of 23 people, only five were not question marks, the rest were crickets. Nobody here but us crickets.

So in the future I vow that I will include “reply requested” to my communications. I hate to dumb it down so far as to treat them like children, but after this, I can’t help but think that’s going to be the only way I can establish a communications channel with these people. I have great fear for when I have to establish a technical communications channel with people, these specifically, but even people in general when there is an emergency. There is this sense of “deer in the headlights” that is deeply upsetting to me. If you get a message that you don’t understand – which is the better path? To actually communicate about it in hopes of resolving it or just sit in the dark, ignoring it, hoping it goes away?

It’s a lot like Marco Polo playing Ping Pong with himself. It’s not a game, it’s just a sad old man standing in front of a ping-pong table with a stiff little white ping pong ball bouncing on the table.

American Dining

Posted on April 13, 2012 by bluedepth

American dining has a cultural crisis looming on the horizon. Partially it is based on our weak-kneed economy which pushes many of these establishments to the edge of failure, so far away from profitability as to be sorrowfully laughable. Beyond the weak economy, American restaurants have a distinct series of problems that they really have to face.

The first issue with the American dining experience that strikes me immediately is that many restaurants that attempt to create a valuable dining atmosphere by dimming the house lights. The idea runs that if the lights are subdued then people will see it as romantic and attach those warm feelings to the place where they dine. In America, this is a problem because what is seen as good if you take it only so far is seen as much better if you take it way too far. Many restauranteurs have said time and time again that people eat first with their eyes. To see food is the first step in creating a lasting impression on your customers. In America the lights are so dim that it is nearly impossible for someone with 20/20 vision to clearly read 10-point text that is being held in their own hands. The lighting in these establishments is dimmed to the point of unpleasantness. You can’t really see who you are dining with, the food looks muddy and dull and the entire experience is one of tragedy. As an example of this, I just dined at an establishment, which shall remain nameless, in which the house lighting was so poor that I needed my smartphone’s illumination to read text on a card that I had in my own hands. When the food was delivered the lighting was barely enough to identify what was on my plate. It was the first step in a very unsatisfying evening. So, what’s the advice that I have for restaurant hosts? Turn up your house lights. If you are hiding in the dark then we can conclude one of these situations may be true:

The food is ugly, and so it’s dark to protect your mistakes.
The host is ugly, and so it’s dark to protect your feelings.
The guests are ugly, and so it’s dark to protect other guests feelings.
The decor in the establishment is ugly, and so it’s dark to cover the decorating transgressions.

The upshot is, when it’s too dark to read words on paper, when your guests are using their phones to find their food, then there is either something wrong with ugly or you are just trying too hard to amplify romance and have landed directly in the dimly lit antechamber of hell, a place that is referred to as heck. Many American restaurants have embraced heck to such passionate levels as to take the breath away. This is a shame, because in many of these establishments the only way you can navigate is with echolocation, so not having the sound of your breath bouncing off obstacles is a true peril for the diner.

The next issue has to do with communication. In this regard, there is way too much communication in the American dining experience. The procedure is always like running the gauntlet, the host is often nervous and like Mrs. Peacock they suffer from a pressure of speech. They arrive tableside and disgorge in an effluent of chatter. You cannot engage in a conversation because you are constantly being interrupted by a curious host who, wrapped up in good intentions is obsessed with making sure that everything is running smoothly. This has infantilized American diners. We can’t operate our dining experience without a chatty, clucking, obsessive hen buzzing the table every 2 minutes. Even here American restauranteurs make tragic mistakes, especially when it comes to effusive apologies. The protestations of sorrow from some hosts fly so fast and so thick that you often times wish they would just get a gun, load every chamber, point it at their heads and pull the trigger. If you are so sorry, then die for it. If you aren’t, then shut up. Some hosts just cannot leave well enough alone. That’s why in America dining is an olympic speed sport. How fast can you choke down the food? You have to because to endure dining is running a verbal gauntlet and since you cannot have a cogent conversation with a solid train of thought while you dine, it’s more advantageous to skip real conversation and switch to smalltalk which entertains nobody. All that is left is the food. In the dark. With perhaps an ugly host, you can’t be sure.

What is to be done about this problem? American restauranteurs need to take a page from the French way of dining. Collect the order, then silently orbit the dining room, spotting low beverages, spotting soiled napkins, that sort of thing. Be conscientious enough to spot silently and silently tend to what needs tending. If the diners wish to engage in an interruptive exchange they should be the ones to initiate contact. A fussing clucking chattery mother hen would have alienated every french diner in the restaurant. There is something here that bears to be understood. Keep your chattery teeth to yourself.

Then we get to the food, which begs the ancillary point of pricing. If you are going to cast yourself as destination dining, produce output that is worthy of your aim. Here’s an example – I just dined on a plate of chicken, green beans, and potatoes in a butter sauce for $18.00. There were three small strips of chicken, I would classify the cut as “chicken strips”. There was a small woman’s palmful of green beans and three 1-ounce scoops of potatoes. There was about two ounces of sauce. This was not a meal. This was 40% of a meal. To say I felt robbed was an understatement. Four diners, three with an appetizer course, 4 mains, and 1 dessert split three ways – I declined the appetizers as none of them suited me and I didn’t find the dessert choices appealing enough to partake. The table bill came to $128.00, we were two couples, split that bill in half and with tax and a standard tip of 15% my outlay for dinner was $76.00. What did I get for that money? I got very little. Scott got slightly more, but had to bark the cook into cooking his duck breast as the standard fare is apparently rare duck, which might as well be raw chicken for a health aspect to it. It boggles the mind. So, when you are busy charging your customers outrageous prices for fussy cuisine which does not match value for price, tread carefully when complaining to said customers about how little business you get to walk in the doors because of the prices.

What should restauranteurs do? I heartily suggest ripping a page out of the Gordon Ramsay playbook: Keep your food local, fresh, simply cooked, for fair prices and you will be a success. Deviate from that plan even in one spot, like obnoxious pricing for example, and you will alienate your customers.

So here I sit. I’ve paid a restaurant bill of $76 dollars and I’m going to go to bed hungry. I will never go back to that restaurant again, once bitten twice shy. As I was discussing it with Scott, this is the cost of the lesson to decline such dining experiences in the future. I just don’t have the wherewithal to financially support such endeavors. I can only hope that some people who run restaurants read this and take these bits of advice to heart. Turn on the lights, shut the hell up, and stop charging an arm and a leg for what amounts to being a pittance.

Abandoning Google Plus

Posted on April 12, 2012 by bluedepth

Yesterday I opened my Google Plus page and discovered to my surprise and initial pleasure that Google had brought a new interface to their social network system. As I started to explore this new interface I started to immediately notice that things had changed not for the better, but rather for the worse. Google had unilaterally included their chat system on the right side of my browser window, it’s something I rarely ever use so that system is all wasted space. I noticed that the stories in my circles, the things I really care about are now shuffled off to the left in a column that lost 10% of space on the leftmost and 50% on the rightmost, being moved over for some controls at the very top of the page that now occupy this dreaded whitespace region on my Google Plus page.

It’s this whitespace, and the meaningless chat talker system that I can’t stand. Facebook attempted a similar move by presenting me with a chat-talker screen on the left side as well months ago, when I still used Facebook. When they made the changes to their interface, along with privacy concerns and workplace issues with social networking I left Facebook. Now it just languishes as an identity marker, if content gets on my Facebook page it’s wholly accidental. Twitter’s web page also underwent this columnar approach, as they reconfigured the entire interface out from underneath their users. For Twitter, I stopped using that because it was more noisy than useful, the people I wanted to engage with were just human billboards, and the interface changes were really the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So what is there to do? Complaints about the interface changes are really the only channel you have to express how much you dislike when a service does this to you – but you have no real power. Just complaining is one easily ignored tiny little voice in the darkness and doesn’t amount to anything at all. The only real power that any single user has is the power of choice. In the end, the only choice I have to make is, do I want to still use the system? It’s actually a matter of abandonment. I abandoned Facebook. I abandoned Twitter. Because they changed the interface and made it less useful to me, I am facing the idea of abandoning Google Plus. I don’t need these social network systems to give my life meaning. They need me, or rather, they need aggregate me’s, lots of people, to give what they do meaning. The less people use a socially networked system the less appealing that system is to everyone else. Facebook is only compelling because everyone uses it. There is no real value inherent in Facebook itself. This is a lesson that the classic business models these companies use can’t take into account – that their popularity defines their success. If they make a grossly unpopular change to the interface, then people will flee and their success will go tits up.

I don’t care to encourage other people to abandon these systems if they like them. Each of us has to make these kinds of decisions on a wholly personal level. I find it obnoxious that Google, and Facebook, and Twitter for that matter all force interface changes on users without giving the user any control whatsoever. It would be more elegant if there were a batch of controls we could select from and build our own interface. Put the bits and pieces where we want, opt out of things we don’t care for and make the interface work best for us, as the users. None of these sites have done that, they all behave as if they have global fiat to make changes willy-nilly. The end user who has to contend with these changes can’t do anything really except make that singular choice surrounding the issue of abandonment.

So where do I go now? It’s comic, but in many ways I am looking forward to going backwards. There is one system that I’ve used, mostly as a category but the people behind what I currently use I regard as being the platonic form of that category, and that is WordPress. Going back to blogging. What does the WordPress infrastructure have that attracts me? It’s got stable themes, the site looks very much like it always has. There are changes, but they aren’t as gross in scope as these other systems have perpetrated. I can share links on WordPress, I can write long posts, short status updates, and WordPress has a competent comment system already in place.

So I will give Google Plus until May 1st to do something better with their interface, to recognize the value in the stream and give us users the choice of what systems we want to see on our Google Plus page. Google should give us the ability to turn off the whitespace region, we should be able to turn off the chat talker region, so that we can maximize the stream region. If they fail to correct these glaring human interface deficits I will do to Google Plus what I did to Facebook. I will abandon Google Plus. I will keep the account running but I will no longer actively use it. Things that end up on Google Plus will end up being the same sort of things that end up washing up on Twitter, specifically links to content on my WordPress blog. Google’s loss will be WordPress’ gain. WordPress has always done right by me, and I respect them. I do not respect Twitter, nor do I respect Facebook. My respect for Google is quixotic at best. I used to believe in their “Do No Evil” company mantra, but that has been shed as Google has done some very evil acts, they aren’t what they once were and this sullying of their image makes the pending abandonment easy.

Will my abandonment hurt Google? No, of course not. I’m not so full of myself as to think that me leaving will change anything about the service, that Google will even notice my absence. However if I can inspire other people to give another look at WordPress, maybe see that progress forward can be achieved by regressing to earlier systems may be a worthy pursuit if what you get in the trade is interface stability. That this single raindrop encourages others to fall. The raindrop doesn’t believe it is responsible for the flood. I can only hope that I help the flood along. These massive changes that these social network sites perpetrate on their usership should be punished! We want it all, we want to use the service and we want to control it as well. We want the interface to be regular, logical, useful and static. When we want to make a change, we want to be the ones making it. We do not want to be victims of someones good intentions, Google! I would say this for Facebook as well, but that’s a lost cause.

So time is ticking away. If Google does not act, then the stream on that service is terminal. If that comes to pass, I will be migrating to my WordPress blog.

I hope to see some of you there.

Easter Tidings

Posted on April 6, 2012 by bluedepth

It’s Easter time, which is one of the very-important-so-lets-go-to-Church Christian Holidays. Many Christians, well, the good ones, have been involved with some sort of lenten fast for the past forty days and it doesn’t end until Easter Sunday, which is in two days from today.

As a used-to-be-Christian who now regards himself as somewhere between a secular humanist, a buddhist, and a neo-pagan this holiday is much like all the other Christian holidays, which is to say, a giant batch of goof in order to facilitate cultural assimilation. The big holidays for Christians are Christmas and Easter. The birth and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Now, Christmas has it’s own special sort of silliness. We chop down trees and dress them with baubles and we have figures that occupy popular consciousness and the “Baby Jesus” only appears as a sideline player in that yearly conflagration of economic stimulus and material goodwill. The other holiday, the one we are adjacent to now, is Easter. Once again we have a cultural hodgepodge of really goofy things all colliding at the same time. At the core of it should be, but isn’t, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I’ll get to the silliness of that later on, but bear with me. The holiday is supposed to be solemn with a celebration of this one mans ability to somehow pop back to life after being dead and through resurrection cleansing our sins in the eyes of God. Except none of that matters. Children don’t give a flying rip about Jesus Christ, he’s just a suave white guy (usually) who appears in quickly flashed artistic impressions of historical events and kids just get a general sense about all the hocus-pocus behind it all and just shrug because for a child the notion of death and resurrection are meaningless concepts. To Children, summer lasts forever and nobody dies. What kids associate with the holiday is the exact core of what the Christians tried to subvert by laying their tripartite-dead-notdead-heavy_mystery_time-God on top of pagan rituals. Like Eostre. A pagan germanic tradition that occurs in April and involves candy, rabbits, brightly colored eggs, and a host of deities from faiths that Christians find distasteful, like Eostre herself, a goddess, or Freyja, a teutonic goddess. So, in order to culturally assimilate the unwashed barbaric hordes you don’t try to kill them off en-masse, instead you co-opt their rituals and you pretend that it’s always been this way. You get to their children and before you know it, after a few generations come and go, the entire backstory has been whitewashed and a new narrative has been put in it’s place. The problem with whitewashing an old narrative is that it quite often hangs around. People still do the same things even if they don’t really know why any longer. So Christians assemble (like the pagans), they celebrate Easter (the pagans celebrate Eostre! Wait, it’s so close!), people assemble Easter Baskets full of candy, dyed eggs, fake plastic grass and a host of rabbit icons… holy crap. We’ve fallen completely off the Christian wagon kids! This is all dirty no-good filthy pagan crap! Where did Jesus go, we misplaced him, oops. But at the end, after all the egg-hunts and eating of chocolate rabbits, which, I must say is about as pagan as you can get, turning an icon into something edible and sweet, BOGGLE… and then to eat an Easter Ham, which I think is a really mean thing that Christians do as Jesus was a Jew and !@#$ KOSHER and last I checked PIG WAS NOT KOSHER oh whatever. After Easter dinner then everyone gets in their finery and toddles off to Church. Then and only then do we get heaping helpings of the steaming pile of Jesus Christ narrative. It’s a lot like Jesus Christ the cannon, being packed with Jesus Christ grapeshot and aimed at the belching rabbit-icon-eating/pig-eating/non-kosher horde of barbarians and fired with magical Jesus Christ gunpowder of guilt.

Even the timing of the holiday is annoyingly pagan. The Christians really don’t get how to whitewash and properly murder and cannibalize mythic narratives. They establish that Easter is the Sunday closest to the first full moon after the vernal equinox! What the HELL does the vernal equinox or the !@#$ MOON have to do with Jesus Christ? Huh!?! Oh wake up! It’s got nothing to do at all, it’s just a bunch of confused old men trying to retain control on what amounts to being an uncontrollable herd of sweaty messy barbarians. When you go to Church next, look around. Now imagine what it looked like 1600 to 1800 years ago. Never mind, it’s the same thing, only now you all think it’s true and believe and that’s really all that matters. You’ve bought the Christians cart of goods that they have for sale, but you still do quintessentially pagan things! If belief gives godlings life, then Krampus, Santa Claus, and Eostre are very much alive and well. Keep being good, keep eating rabbit icons, and keep on futzing about with dyed eggs! Eostre needs all your belief energy to even stand up to Big Daddy, JC, and the Spook.

Speaking of dead things coming back to life, the resurrection itself. What a monumental pile of hocus-pocus if I’ve ever seen it. We have never seen anyone go from well and truly dead to alive all on their own, except for once, 2000 years ago. Sure. What’s more plausible? That Jesus Christ died, went through hell, and then was resurrected, OR that he was nailed to a cross as a form of capital punishment, where he lapsed into a coma from exposure, malnutrition, and poor hydration then when “dead” hauled off the cross and then laid in state. Then after recovering from being in a coma, got up and wandered off?!? What if that was really what happened?

So Christians elect to believe that a dead man suddenly popped back to life and then they see the miracle of that and then tacitly agree to suspend all rational thought thereafter. Accept it, it’s the word of God. Accept it, it’s in the scriptures. Accept it, you have to if you believe. Accept it, or you’ll be a sinner.

Get off the collective cross, we need the wood.

So, enjoy the Easter fantasy. The pagan rituals you still perform without knowing why. Still buy into the narrative sold to you by the Christians and never feel any hint of awkwardness that you’ve suspended your own rational thoughts and given control of your actions over to old men who don’t even notice your existence. It sounds so silly, but, there it is.

And people wonder why we haven’t been visited by aliens or have mastered space travel. If you were an advanced alien culture, and you saw the kind of hocus-pocus that we humans readily believe in, would you elect to just do nothing or would you watch us very carefully to make sure we never leave the third planet from this unremarkable star on the edge of a very unremarkable galaxy?

So embarrassing. We aren’t ready, at this rate we won’t ever be ready. Not really.

Childhood's End

Posted on March 29, 2012 by bluedepth

I saw this opinion article on the New York Times: Children’s Books… and I have the exact opposite opinion as the author that the New York Times published. He states that adults should not read kids books. That they are beneath adults and that there are better things that adults should read.

I don’t want to know anyone who has this opinion. Wadding up your childhood and locking it in the basement of your soul is the quickest way to become an autumn person. Courting the death of joy should be anathema to any vibrant living human being. There is more than enough room, and respect, for anyone wanting to read “The Lorax” at the tender age of 36! The ability to embrace childish things means you have not let your soul ossify with the banality of our cold and horrible world.

People who judge and then sniff imperiously when they see an adult reading “The Hunger Games” or “Harry Potter”, or even “Horton Hears A Who” are in my opinion spiritually bankrupt and repellent. They exude the ardent seriousness of stupid adults. Life is best led reading whatever it is that you want to read. Judging puts you in hell, with the pedants, grammar, and spelling nazis. This cold and desolate region is filled with angry bitter shades who refuse to axe anyone a question. They refuse to deal with anyone who ain’t like them. And they burn with rage when you express alot of affection for anyone who doesn’t toe the strict line that English doesn’t have.

Your childhood is a diamond. It has to be loved. It’s as much a part of every passionate living adult as rationality. It’s your inner child that powers your curiosity. He or she is the gatekeeper to your imagination and your creativity. Denying him or her damns you to a life lived in shadows of gray. In that state you might as well be dead for all the good you are to anyone else.

Everyone needs to keep doing things that are good for your inner child. Don’t turn into an autumn person. They are animated corpses who don’t know they are dead.

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