| Guns |
[Nov. 29th, 2009|12:08 am] |
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Over at a site that will remain unnamed at which I used to frequently post but have not visited because it has gotten so stuffed to the gills with reactionary, undiplomatic, shallow, servile, base, vicious and vacuous whiners such that it has become impossible to tolerate further, the debate over gun ownership surfaces about once a month in earnest and it inevitably results in a multi-thread, slash-and-burn, knock-down, drag-out insult match the results of which are always far more damaging and depressing than they could ever have been informative and progressive. There are so many better ways I can think to use my time than witnessing a pack of rabid keyboard warrior "liberals" eviscerate one another over the issue of gun ownership.
I'm reminded of it because, as I have been doing frequently since George Carlin's passing, I have been pulling out some of my old favorites. Since I can pretty much recite most of them by heart they sometimes fade into the background but it's comforting for me just to hear his voice and every once in a while a joke that I forgot about jumps out and I laugh myself into a tizzy - a much-needed respite.
Recently, I was listening to "What am I Doing in New Jersey?" a classic album from the early 80's, one of the first one I was turned on to. In reflecting on the strangeness of American culture, he addresses the contemplation of a law banning toy guns concluding with the mind-boggling fact that "they're gonna keep the fuckin' real ones!!" This latter sentiment is yelled by Carlin, and, in his expert turn of phrase and sublime understanding of comedic timing, he pauses briefly before delivering. And, the line is yelled:
"...AND THEY'RE GONNA KEEP THE FUCKIN' REAL ONES!!"
I've heard him deliver this joke hundreds of times, as many times as I have sat and listened through "New Jersey." At this point in my life, it has never meant more to me because after visiting sites such as the one mentioned above and witnessing the modern "liberal gun advocate," there are few questions that have jogged through my consciousness more than how one simultaneously identifies oneself as a liberal or progressive and still advocates gun ownership.
[Insert rabid 2nd amendment scholarly constitutional fundamentalism here] I know quite well the argument that liberals, progressives and constitutional scholars (both the legitimate variety and the not so) proffer: it is so written in that hallowed document that hath bequeathed to us mortals all those modern comforts, conveniences and freedoms that we so cherish. Oh and also, it was originally put in there for the purpose of organizing militias with the intent of overthrowing tyrannical, over-arching and despotic executive powers, if that need ever became necessary.
I do submit that, since the republic has, in my lifetime (and possibly many times prior) faced such a threat and its citizenry were rendered totally and completely complacent and dumb and instead were whipped into a lethargic and Pavlov's dog-ish fever by its media ownership that the amendment affording protection of the ownership of such lethal weapons has been rendered totally ineffectual. So, what are we instead left with affording us the ownership of such deadly devices? Even if a good old fashioned militia had sprouted up and run the Bush cabal out of town and hung the top perpetrators from the highest tree in Washington, is there further evidence needed to illustrate the point that an armed citizenry is truly detrimental to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? We're not shooting despotic and tyrannical figure heads, we're fucking shooting up schools and churches and ghettos and museums and offices and shit. Look me in the eye, Mr. Constitutional Scholar and tell me this law doesn't deserve some kind of reconsideration in light of modern technical advances in weaponry combined with the complexities of modern life?!?! Is it a living document or not?
I just find it a very hard position to reconcile and leads me to thinking about liberal gun owners: are they members of the NRA? And, if so, how do they reconcile that relationship? Eh, whatever. I try not to get myself to worked up over it. After all, there are teens in Florida setting eachother on fire. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 29th, 2009|12:15 am] |
Evil headache made me miss a party today.
Bad headache. No stuffing. :( |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 29th, 2009|03:25 am] |
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Declaration that OP is a fictional superhero symbolized by a winged, cave-dwelling, nocturnal rodent. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 28th, 2009|09:51 pm] |
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... but the best artists steal copy. |
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| grep |
[Nov. 28th, 2009|06:40 pm] |
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| Nevada City Artisans Festival |
[Nov. 28th, 2009|05:48 pm] |
I had been waiting for a good excuse to burn a bunch of fossil fuels in order to check out the artsy, well preserved California Gold Rush town of Nevada City. Then I heard about an Artisans Festival there this weekend. It was the excuse I had been waiting for.
Nevada City is about 120 miles southeast of Chico, 2500 feet up into the Sierra Nevada foothills. It's off the beaten paths to San Francisco and the north coast which is why I've never been there. I took my camera, expecting to take a frenzy of photos in this historic town, but it was super windy and nippy which made me just want to get indoors. The whole town was having a power outage, but there were a lot of people out on foot, trying to get some Christmas shopping done in dark stores. Thanks to the sun shining brightly through the Miner's Foundry windows, I was able to check out most of the artwork at the festival.
I bought this piece by Liz Collins. She named it "To The Volcano II." It's oil pastel/oil stick on a wood panel, approx. 12" x 12". She told me it was inspired by a hike she took to a live volcano in Guatemala. She described a crusty, black layer of ground that cracked open periodically to reveal the hot orange lava flowing at a snail's pace below the surface. She even straddled one of these cracks. That's pretty damn brave in my book.
Another artist whose work I was drawn to is Lissa Herschleb. |
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| Good God |
[Nov. 28th, 2009|08:18 pm] |
Govt minister says Indonesian disasters caused by immorality
Some of our ministers - both kinds - say things like this too. There's no evidence that God judges people who say such things particularly harshly. The Pope promoted the priest best known for saying it, and of course Johnny Hagee is still doing pretty well.
Whenever someone says something like that, though, there is an outcry from the enlightened - mainline, bourgeois, liberal - religious. "That's not the God I know" is the usual sentiment. But it's a mistake. Christians - hell, not just Christians, anyone who believes in a benevolent God - have to believe that natural disasters are supernaturally justified. Otherwise the theodicy is broken.
There's a lively philosophical literature in the field of theodicy and natural disasters. Disasters come under the heading of "natural evil", evil not human-caused, and the question is whether they are "gratuitous" - that is, an evil which appears as unnecessary, without justification. If natural evil is gratuitous, there is a problem for belief, because it's a knock-down argument against the existence of an omniscient, omnipotent, omnibenevolent God. Such a God, to fulfill that definition, would have to produce a maximally good world, that is, a world in which no evil exists which is not justified by a further, greater good. Under this defense the category of human evil traditionally falls: in some way, a universe in which humans have free will to commit evil, even spectacular, monstrously depraved evil, is a better one than one in which no free will exists. (The thesis usually being that without free, responsible beings, the world is somehow amoral, a sort of ethical zero-point; God would not have done better to make us moral zombies or soma addicts.) Similarly, evil that strikes the wicked is understandable, because that is compatible with justice. But evil which is not human-caused and which injures the wicked and the good alike, is harder to explain. Even if a population is generally malefic, why is Gideon not spared?
There are only two alternatives. Either the punishment is deserved by all who suffer it, or the traditional concept of God has to go.
There is, of course, a cynical way out: to forbid the argument, to place an immense appeal to ignorance in its way. What's remarkable is that this fallacy is heard most from mainline liberals who want to believe in a good God but cannot reconcile that with what God does.
Whereas the fundamentalists, the ones who are supposed to be so irrational, are the ones able to reconcile God and God's world within a logical whole. They have the courage of their (appalling) convictions.
I took the other way out. I don't believe that God - whatever else God might or might not be - is good. God is therefore not worthy of worship. (Of course, understanding is harder anyway, and probably a better tribute.) Why was that good person mashed to a paste when his house fell down? Why is there no blue food? There are physical answers to these questions, but no moral ones. |
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| the bubble economy |
[Nov. 28th, 2009|07:03 pm] |
Who would have thought this was a bad idea?
What I didn't know was that this was being done on borrowed money. Silly me I thought it was coming out of oil revenue or something. Makes our property bubble look like the height of reason; at least ours mostly consisted of property, rather than open sea with nothing in it. |
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| I'm not inconveniencing someone! My eccentric demands are AWESOME. |
[Nov. 28th, 2009|06:14 pm] |
EDIT: OP's post screencapped for your viewing pleasure
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) everythingtold goes out for a meal at a restaurant. As soon as the waitress appears, she gives the waitress her demands -- bring the drink, meal, to-go boxes, and check at the same time and don't come back until then -- because "I really go out of my way to make life as easy as possible for people in customer service".
When the waitress gets annoyed with her, she points out that she's not being annoying. "I turned to the couple at the table next to me and asked if I was bothering them. They shook their heads 'no'. I asked the family at the table on the other side and asked the same thing."
Then, there's a lengthy diatribe about her theory on tipping: "servers get $3-something an hour and minimum wage is $7:30 [sic] per hour. Generally speaking, if I am going to spend an hour in a restaurant, I will be tipping $4."
Finally, after paying her check, the OP gets up for a cigarette break, leaving her music player & book behind. After her cigarette break, she's SHOCKED to discover her table has been bused!
Commentors repeatedly point out that requesting the waitress only visit your table twice -- once to take your order and once to drop everything from drink to bill off -- is very inconvenient for waitstaff, but OP doesn't care. "I guess a lot of people in here hate me for trying to make life easy, lol."
"I actually wasn't trying to come off as SpecialSnowflake/EntitlementBitch at all - just the opposite."
"I cn't [SIC] believe that many people think it's annoying to make sure server doesn't have to worry about me very much." |
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| Reply, reply |
[Nov. 28th, 2009|05:51 pm] |
I forgot my antidepressants last night and my brain is doing that thing it does where it feels less firmly moored than usual, like the yolk sloshing around in a raw egg. Sometimes when I skip a dose my emotions go haywire as well, making me hateful and prone to tears, which is the state, incidentally, in which I saw the movie The Darjeeling Limited, so that I still don't know if I really liked it or was merely in withdrawal, because I do not often cry at movies, though the fact that Attica was dying at the time may also have contributed to my emotional state, and really, where does the soul reside? Tell me where is fancy bred, or in the heart or in the head? What about when the head is undermedicated so that sudden movements make it feel as if the whole body is about to topple over? And Adrien Brody sure is an eyeful, isn't he? Speaking of fancy.
One of the major complaints about lobotomy, back when it was being performed, was that you couldn't turn it off. Once you were lobotomized, there it was, you were lobotomized forever, though the effects might diminish over time as severed neural connections reestablished themselves. (Meaning that your crazy could grow back too, assuming lobotomy had done anything to diminish it, whereupon some people got a second one -- repeat customers!) But Walter Freeman had a rebuttal for this as for every criticism ever launched against his pet procedure (often the maddening and not always inaccurate "You're just jealous because I'm a famous doctor and you're not"): that lobotomy was irrevocable, he said, was the whole point. The patient can decide not to show up for talk therapy, he can chuck his Thorazine out the window, but he can't fail to comply with having had a lobotomy.
FOLKS THE MOCKERY OF A DEAD PSYCHOSURGEON WAS NOT ON THE LIST OF POTENTIAL SIDE EFFECTS |
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| First time posting ^-^ |
[Nov. 28th, 2009|02:32 pm] |
I hope I did this right...
This is my collection of pictures at the same location, but different times.
( xo ) |
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| C |
[Nov. 28th, 2009|01:55 pm] |
Chloe and I laid on the huge bean bag where she sleeps. It was dark and quiet. The last moments before sleep can feel like sleep, as big eyes make out the contours of the room. We looked in each other's eyes for a minute or more. That never happened before. I saw her trust and hope and joy for living. I hoped it never leaves.
Some people can't or won't look into your eyes. I started asking her to do it when I knew she wasn't listening to something important. Sometimes she'd wiggle for a long time before agreeing to look in my eyes. She knows there's no more screwing around when you're face-to-face and listening.
Through the gaze I saw a few of her usual twitches, leaping off toward some distraction, drama, obsession. This is a large part of being 2. Maybe lost adults are lost in the same ways. But she came back mid-twitch each time.
In the morning she blocked me from exit and demanded that I confirm I'm her daddy. I told her a few times that I'm 'like a daddy'. This time I said I'm a friend. I met her at a young age when words were dripping from her mouth and now they're pouring out. I doubt her daddy would teach her to read, or look in her eyes and see what I saw.
I kept thinking about the lame things that crush hearts and jade people to the world. I imagined her as a teen, and wondered about her gaze then, deep in the crucibles of life. I hope they never jade this graceful gaze of wonder and hope. |
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