on gods we praise

  Sarah Palin recently made reference to the Statue of Liberty (see here). By doing so, Ms. Palin has given her tacit support to the notion of goddess Liberty, a deity from times of old whom the American people have adopted as our own. Fair and gracious Liberty is not the only deity whom we praise, however – the goddess of Justice, or Iusticia, graces our city seals (see the seal of the borough of Hanover, PA), and we etch her likeness into the stonework of our highest halls of justice (see here). Every time you wear running shoes with a certain swoosh on them, you are praising the Greek goddess of victory, Nike. Our connection to ancient gods runs so deep in this country that even our Declaration of Independence makes the right to Happiness unalienable, a right as often as not personified by goddess Felicitas (or Tyche), the goddess of joy and good fortune.

  To utter the name of a god is to give that god power in our minds and in our lives, such as in Jewish rituals, and in Muslim rituals. For example, every time we say the word Wednesday, we pay homage to the god (Wotan, deity of wisdom and poetry) for whom the day was named; on Thursday and Saturday we pay homage to Thor and Saturn (the gods of fertility and of the harvest respectively), deities hailing from separate realms and distant times, gods who still inspire us today.

  It is good to have as many gods as you can have on your side, so while you may go to a place of worship and pray to one god, remember that throughout your day you are also sending up praises to the other gods who shelter you under their wings (though you might not realize that you are praising them with your shoes or words, or even that they are sheltering you). Similar to the concept of polyamory (the capacity to be in love with multiple people), the capacity to love and worship many different gods is called polytheism. For an example of polytheism, see the practices of Roman Catholics, who pray to one god when traveling (Christopherus), to a different god when competing athletically (Sebastian), and to a third deity (Gabriel) when working in the postal trades.

  There is no limit to the number of gods you can have working for you, or looking out for you, just as there is no limit to the amount of goodness and virtuous action you can perform during your life. Maximize your coverage by increasing your spectrum of gods – you are sure to like the results.

no se permite vagabundos

  It is a good thing that Jack Kerouac lived when he did, for if he were alive today, he would likely be in jail for vagrancy. It was a subtle and unique culture that was lost when the day of the tramp and of the wanderer came to a close, when we Americans came to see those people who are perpetually on the move as threatening and dangerous, when we passed laws that made their existence all but untenable, and stamped out forever their culture, their language, and their way of life.
  We are lucky that Kerouac wrote his book On The Road when he did, in the heyday of the tramp, in that glorious period when hitch-hiking was not illegal, when strangers and transients were not viewed universally as outcasts, when it was still possible for the auto-less to make his way across our fine continent on conveyances other than corporate run bus, train, or airlines. For if he were to have attempted to live that life in our current era, he would likely be spat upon in the street and avoided like the plague by callous and uncaring people on their way to shell out five dollars for a medium coffee.
  The tramp lifestyle had its inconveniences and perils (dogs, weather, floods, robbers), but it was also in a way a deeply American condition, the tip of the spear of restlessness, the true embodiment of the notion that we can start a new life on the other side of this ridge, on the far bank of that river, on the shores of some distant ocean. The tramp had to rely on his wits; he had to trust in the chalkings of his fellow vagrants to alert him to a hostile town, or to one with generous inhabitants, or to one where a bit of labor was available for the eager but wanderlustig.
  It is unlikely that we will ever have another author like Keroak, another person able to simply perambulate across the land (like Herodotus and Pliny before him), absorbing and retelling the stories of those whom he meets, a person not necessarily pursuing a goal but one who has made the Way his Goal. We have adopted the notion in this country that raw ambition and unbridled egocentricity are virtuous states of being, when, in my opinion, they are the beginning of folly, cul-de-sacs that nearly always end in the mid-life-crisis, after which the individual will lay down her lust for money to pursue that which she knew intrinsically would make her Happy, thus rediscovering for herself the deep and abiding meaning of the Declaration of Independence.
  We are not a nation of clones, nor are we a nation founded on the notion of rigid conformity - we are a nation of Many who share a common binding purpose, to make of ourselves One, to pursue Happiness according to the myriad ways that each of Us must decide for ourselves. I fear, however, that we have over-legislated, that we have made so many things illegal in an effort to protect ourselves from potential yet only vaguely defined harm that we are now truly afraid of the transformative and perpetual process of upheaval, that we have made it all but impossible to wander the land in search of an undefined yet tremendously important goal, a goal found neither in the cubicles of the corporation nor in the folds of our wallets, a goal that eschews materialism for internal or spiritual tranquility.
  I fear also that there is no going back, that the child-like wonder and inherent purity exhibited by the characters in On The Road has been forever lost in the white noise of the television, in the vociferocity of the religious extremist, in the blind hatred that hides in an Us versus Them mentality. Woe be unto us, for we have strayed from the Path and become: calcified in our ways; blinded to the subtle wisdom of the vagabond; convinced that turban-wearing boogeymen are lurking in the shadows; and intolerant of anything we do not understand.
  Stand up. Speak out. Spread freedom.

"Fear is the mind-killer." Frank Herbert, Dune

JPR

on girls in movies

  Some time ago I was discussing,  with a close associate, the film Kick Ass. He had expressed his concern about the scene in which the character named Hitgirl is beaten unconscious by the movie's main antagonist. He had said something to the tune of, "If it's now ok to have little girls getting the shit kicked out of them, then, in films releasing in the future, it will be ok for all little girls to get the shit kicked out of them, and we will likely be seeing a lot more of it." At first, I found this comment funny, and made as if to laugh along with the joke. Soon, however, I realized that my counterpart was serious, that he had a problem seeing a fictional scene depicting a fictional young woman locked in choreographed combat with a fictional villain. I do not condone violence toward children; I have (and will in the future) personally intervened in situations in which I witnessed children at risk of physical harm so as to protect them (even if only briefly). (Side note: if you are smoking while children are in your car or in your home, or smoking anywhere near children, you are causing harm to those children, and you are an asshole.)
  Then, last night, I watched Leon the Professional, a film directed by Luc Besson, starring Jean Reno and Natalie Portman, in which in one scene the protagonist, a pubescent girl, holds a gun to her head and narrowly avoids blowing out her brains. After watching that scene, I realized that this scene was the origin of all the depictions in recent Hollywood blockbusters of young women holding guns to their heads and trying to blow out their brains. In nearly every movie since Leon the Professional came out, over the past couple of decades, at least one young actress has held a gun to her head and threatened to cap herself if not given the love or the attention or the breakfast cereal she felt she deserved. It has, as we all know, become a hallmark of modern cinema to depict young women playing Hanoi roulette, one chamber empty and the other five full, the metal flashing as they spun their pistols shut and thrust the business end dramatically to their temples.
  After having re-watched Leon, I now agree: we cannot allow the continued portrayal of young women who are willing to put their lives on the line for something in which they believe, or who have the courage to go up against great and tremendous odds in order to protect their friends or to avenge the murder of a loved one (for this might encourage our women-folk to take action, to challenge the strictures of our paternalistic society and win for themselves an equal station in the workplace and in the home). Also, we cannot trust that movie-makers or movie-goers will be able to differentiate between fact and fiction.
  For to allow one movie to show a young woman taking action in the face of adversity, to depict one girl demanding the swift and merciful execution of justice, is to invite chaos into our homes, into our hearts, and into our minds. We have already stamped out poverty on a global scale; we have already eradicated disease across the seven continents; we have already ensured that each and every human being has the means to lead a peaceful and hunger-free life devoid of suffering and deprivation; now, all we need to do, is to make sure no fake children are hurt in the movies we watch. The general public is sheep-like and utterly devoid of any inherent ability to think or to judge on its own, and must therefore not be exposed to any such violent portrayals lest it succumb immediately to the temptation to act out what was just shown on screen. Join us in our fight against this terrible scourge, and let us together ban these horrendous portrayals of strong young women putting it all on the line for their beliefs. Sign the petition at your local censor's bureau, and remember: we are watching you.

(postscriptum: Movies are make-believe, and worrying about their potential impact on future society is counter-productive and a waste of time. Keep expression, and the mind, open and free.)

declaration of corporate supremacy

When in the course of pursuing profits it becomes necessary to remind the People for whom it is they toil, and to formulate the rules by which they shall lead their lives, we, the assembled capitalists and corporations headquartered in these United States (but not necessarily operating here), only occasionally and perfunctorily respectful to the Opinions of Mankind, declare that the economic wellbeing of our executive boards and voting members by far outweighs the Right of the People to Safety and Happiness. The original Declaration of Independence, that document upon which the United States was founded, those words that might have given mankind the right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, is, and has for some time now been, a dead and forgotten document, its declaration of unalienable rights null and void, its formulation of the core principle of the role of government - to bring about the Safety and the Happiness of the People - ground to dust under the jack-boot of our Capitalistic Greed.

We hold these Lies to be enforceable through police action: that a small percentage of Americans should by rights reap the profits generated by the labor of all who work in this country; that we have the right to speculate with and to risk the invested monies of those Americans stupid enough to have entrusted us with their savings, and, when our speculations fail and millions of Americans lose their hard-won gains, to be safe and secure in our gated communities, our ill-begotten money protected by the federal government, our risky businesses kept from failing by the taxes paid by the very people whom we had hoodwinked originally; that we shall profit from the sale of drugs, such as alcohol and tobacco, that are legally available to the People, drugs that kill them by the hundreds of thousands and maim them by the millions, while supporting the persecution and the imprisonment of the People in for-profit penitentiaries owned and run by us, for the crime of consuming drugs not to our liking, such as marijuana, drugs that have no discernible negative affect on their health or on their Happiness; that the US government should wage un-winnable wars against faceless foes (see the "war on terror") so that we may continue to manufacture, develop, and sell arms and weaponry, wars that might be won only if every person on Earth were placed in concentration camps and forcibly lobotomized; that we have the Right, through unscrupulous and down-right false advertising, to convince the People that unbridled consumption and unchecked personal debt are the bedrock of the American Dream, that Happiness does not grow from within, that it is not a fragile state of mind that blossoms from patience and self-understanding, but that it is something we cram into our wallets and pocket-books, that we spend in our shopping plazas, that we waste on useless items that supposedly make life easier but that are little more than clutter; that it was our patriotic duty to abandon the American manufacturing sector for foreign shores, sacrificing the jobs of millions of our countrymen to boost our profit-margins, allowing children across the Pacific Rim to work as slave-laborers in free-economic zones so that unemployed Americans could buy cheap goods that break soon after use; that we have the Right, regardless of the complaints of tree-hugging hippies, to rape and destroy the land for short-term gain, to saturate the lands with chemicals to make plants grow instead of learning from the soil, to poison the streams with mine-tailings, to clear-cut the once-great forests for export, and to pump the animals we slaughter for food full of steroids and antibiotics instead of providing them with clean and open places in which to live out their short and pathetic lives; that we have willingly and to vast personal profit rejuvenated the methods of the ancient Romans for controlling the lower classes by providing them with bread (fast food) and circuses (television), methods that poison the body and the mind but that keep the rabble blessedly quiet and contented throughout their pitiful and mostly worthless lives; that we will run our corporate societies, not as democracies, but as quasi-totalitarian states, while convincing our workers that, through hard and dedicated labor, they might reach the highest rungs of our bogus organizations, while, in reality, they will, after infighting, backstabbing, and reckless self-promotion, find themselves flung out into the cold, the pathways to our fleeting and hollow ranks closed to all but a most rapacious and lustful few.

  At no point in the long yet subtle Process of making a mockery of this once great Nation did we pause to consider that our hoarding of the nation's wealth would violate the Constitutional directive of promoting the general Welfare, although we will, by funneling the collective wealth of all Americans into the pockets of our cronies and fellow oligarchs, secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and to our Posterity, not to all Americans equally, but to those who have, as we have, dutifully sacrificed their sacred Honor on the altar of Capitalisic Greed, who have shat, as we have shat, upon the once-grand notion of Liberty and Justice for All. We have stopped our ears to the Voice of Justice, preferring rather the Shreik of Lies, preferring rather to profit from spying on the People (through the sale and maintenance of the materials necessary to the surveilance society), under the falsely-titled and unpatiotic Patiot Act, rejoicing in the violation of the flimsy protections once, but no longer, afforded the People by the Constitution.

  All this we pledge, and more, for: we have the means to lobby the Legislature for our own gain; we have the money with which to live comfortably for ten lifetimes while millions of American children go to bed hungry each night; we have convinced the People that consumption is preferrable to ingenuity, that watching TV is preferrable to creative expression and the telling of stories, that there is a universal formula for Happiness, a formula that starts with a dollar sign. We, therefore, the capitalists and corporations headquartered in these United States, Assembled, appealing to none but our majority share-holders, by our own authority and the might of our wrongly appropriated wealth, brazenly Publish and Declare, that this Country belongs to Us now, that the dream of a more perfect Union has no place in the world of top-few-capitalism, that ninety-nine percent of all Americans shall toil ceaselessly to make us, those of the remaining One Percent, rich beyond reckoning, that governemnt is not instituted to secure the Rights of the People, and that they have neither the Right to alter nor to abolish their governemnt, even though it long ago abandoned them to satisfy the needs of the most monied few, as it is too late, and they waited too long to act.

  So suck it, you hard-working American fools, suck it good and hard.

wine & dine - limerick

I'll be in town, so if you're around
I certainly would like to meet.
But if not, that's fine,
I'll wine and I'll dine,
The next girl I pass on the street.

on political correctness

  Sometime in the 1990s, the practice of political correctness gained widespread traction in American society. According to the theory of political correctness, nothing should be said publicly that might offend someone who may be listening. Additionally, anyone who feels offended after hearing something someone else said has the right to complain about what was said, forcing the utterer of the offending remark to apologize publicly for her (perceived) transgressions and to make grand pronouncements regarding her steadfast and perpetual love and respect for the person or group that has decided to consider itself maligned. Political correctness at best forces people to be conscious of the feelings of others; at worst, it drives inherently racist and discriminatory opinions (which all but the most disciplined and enlightened among us have) below the surface, where they invariably fester, and grow. Allowing the free expression of racist and discriminatory opinions does two things: it makes racists easier to spot, and to thus avoid; and it grants the individual who harbors discriminatory opinions the ability to vent his or her feelings of hatred verbally, before the venting process turns physical.
  In my opinion, political correctness has hamstrung life in America. Instead of confronting our true feelings and voicing those feelings in public where they can be challenged and counter-acted, we now play nice, pretending to be best friends while making no progress on our stated mission (found on the back of every single dollar bill in circulation) of crafting One out of Many.
  Political correctness is counter-productive also because it implies that, as a speaker in public, I am somehow responsible for the emotional well-being of my audience. If I say something offensive, it is the choice of the listener to be offended by what I have said. The offended party can just as easily decide not to be offended by what I have said, and go on with her day. Too often, however, that person calls for my censorship because she has decided to be offended by what I have said. The theory of political correctness demands that a person complain if they have decided to be offended by someone else's comment; it reduces the likelihood that the offender will voice his true and honest opinion, thus encouraging him to lie, to practice deceit. (I consider the replacement of our desire for truthfulness with socially-acceptable deceitfulness a symptom of the greed and individualistic self-aggrandizement inherent to capitalism.)
  So, next time you are offended by what someone else has said or done, remember: you can always look away, leave the offender's vicinity, or simply consider, in your own mind, their opinion silly, false, or just plain stupid. No one is forcing you to be offended by the actions of another - your bruised feelings are your choice alone, your burden to bear. So please, keep your feelings honest, voice your discriminatory feelings loudly and proudly, and help stamp out the scourge of political correctness.
  Honesty will again prevail in this country, but only if we can first be honest with ourselves, voicing our feelings and opinions freely and in the knowledge that they will be greeted by those seeking, not their own self-satisfaction, but, through open and lively discourse, the betterment of those among us who have been blinded to the equality of all persons (as proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence).

(For a perfect example of the doctrine of political non-correctness, watch Clint Eastwood's movie, Gran Torino.)

Stand up. Speak out. Spread freedom.
JPR

on rational thinking - short

The cornerstone of rational thinking is the decision to assume everything is wrong before seeking the truth.

Piracy Raid in Idaho

  Officers of the Warren City police department (WCPD), a suburb outside Boise, today raided the house of a suspected piracy offender. The primary objects seized in the dawn operation were a significant number of pirated DVDs. A subsequent search of the premise turned up discarded NetFlix envelopes and stacks of blank DVDs that investigators consider evidence of premeditation. "Anyone who has watched a film at home has seen the FBI warning at the beginning of that movie," said Douglas Meyer, head of the FBI's Anti-Piracy Mobile Strike Force. "If we can prove that this copy of Little House on the Prairie is pirated, we will punish this perpetrator to the fullest extent of the law." The Warren City man who was taken into custody immediately following the raid could face three years in jail and a $250,000 fine for each item of pirated intellectual property.
  "I don't give a shit about the weed we found," Detective Rune Randolfe, WCPD, said before doughnuting out of the parking lot in response to a phoned-in tip, "we got his stash of burned VHS tapes, too. This guy is headed Rapeside."
  The residents of this sleepy community were shocked by the appearance of so many heavily-armed officers within their midst. "I heard shouting, then what sounded like a door splintering," Tara Hogarth, 38, who lives immediately adjacent to the scene of the crime, said. "Mr... our neighbor was always nice to me, and to my kids. He would have people over sometimes, and we could see a large TV flickering through the blinds in his living room, but to think he was committing piracy, right here, in Warren City? Wow."
  Investigators are fanning out across the United States to track down and punish the millions of Americans suspected of piracy. "The numbers are staggering," agent Meyer said. "We think that over half of the adult population in this country is guilty of at least one act of piracy. Good thing my wife got into corrections."
  Citizens are urged to report instances of piracy, even piracy without monetary gain performed in the privacy of the home, to the appropriate federal authorities. "We have been spending billions on a war against drugs that has had no discernible affect," a state official speaking on condition of anonymity, said, "now it's time to really bleed our coffers dry going after these pirates. They ain't safe nowhere."

(This non-news article is satirical. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. None of the statements attributed to the various federal agents are intended to be taken as factual statements. This is a joke, in more ways than one.)