Religion as Sheeple Control

Now that the latest crapture scare has been postponed until October so Harold Camping can collect  millions of more dollars, it's time to focus on those he used his fear mongering tactics on to accumulate wealth. They are feeling betrayed, disappointed, scared, and left behind. They want to know why only their bank accounts got raptured. Others see a potential gold mine of fools that still have the potential to be milked even more for jesus.

We're not talking about ordinary people here. These are the dumbest of the dumb, the ones that religion prepared from an early age to be unquestioning, idiotic, cult-leader following morons. They're the first ones stepping up to be used whether it's by a church, a cult, a political party, or anyone with an agenda needing lots of unquestioning obedient bodies to create the illusion of grassroots.

It's about the Republicans, the Koch Brothers, The Chamber of Commerce, and Karl Rove spending millions and millions of dollars to create an illusion the Tea Party is a people movement instead of a backroom deal among rich assholes. It's like Farmville, only you populate it with idiots instead of cows.

None of this would work without a ready supply of less than intelligent sheeple who have already been programmed by their churches to never question authority, to follow each other obediently off a cliff because jesus told them to, and to empty their pockets in the name of salvation to make  saviors like Harold Camping, Dick Cheney,  and Karl Rove even wealthier than they already are.

For those who are shaking their heads as they read this and think religion is not that bad, especially their own,  show me a country that is formed and shaped by its religion and I'll show you a country that is going backwards instead of moving forward toward the next century.

Examine the history of your own church, the politics it promotes, and the money it collects from you to promote that political agenda, and then tell me your church is only about spiritual growth and belongingness. And I'll tell you again that the first thing that tyrants do when they want to control a country is to bring god and religion to the forefront of their politics and get people like you to pay for it all.

"In 1956, the nation was suffering through the height of the cold war, and the McCarthy communist witch hunt. Partly in reaction to these factors, the 84^th Congress passed a joint resolution to replace the existing motto with "In God we Trust." The president signed the resolution into law on 1956-JUL-30.  The change was partly motivated by a desire to differentiate between communism, which promotes Atheism, and Western capitalistic democracies, which were at least nominally Christian."

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For those who are unfamiliar with the McCarthy witch hunts (mostly those of you reading dumbed down history books forced on you by religion-infected schoolboards), it was about decent people who committed no crimes other than daring to think for themselves, who were labeled as ATHEIST Communists simply because they didn't belong to the correct church or promote the party line of a particular religion-based political party.

Setting aside the reality that most Atheists in America are not now nor have they ever been a large bloc of Communist Party members (even Atheists like to buy lots of cheap crap at Wal-Mart and eat crappy fast food), the painting of one with the brush of the other is yet another trick employed by those wishing to use religion as a noose around the necks of the idiotocracy.

I'll even go so far as to say it wasn't the fear of Communism that scared the power mongers, but the lack of religion. After all, Communism, like any ism, depends on groups of followers all believing the same thing and marching in unified brain and boot to destroy the unbelievers.

This is no different than religion which demands the same blind obedience, or Fascism which allows no dissenting opinions, or the current Republican party with its teahadist minions wanting to destroy everyone and anything that doesn't buy into their Randroid selfish cruelty and paranoia.

There is no difference between religion and Communism, religion and totalitarianism, religion and mental slavery, religion and Fascism, religion and mind control, religion and lemmings walking blindly off a cliff because their "leader" ordered them to do so.

Religion has been and always will be a tool used by the rich and powerful to control the weak and stupid, and scam artists like Harold Camping will be sipping Pina Coladas on some sunny beach with all the money he raptured from the dumb ass sheep as long as religion is so intertwined with politics they are no longer separate entities.

There's a reason our forefathers were so concerned that churches and government remain separate entities. They knew the potential for abuse and were trying to prevent it from happening to the new United States of America. But they forgot about the all-consuming greed of politicians and the wealthy who saw religion as a very useful tool for controlling the masses and making them do their bidding.

And never in their lives could they have imagined the kind of idiots that religion created in a couple short centuries, the kind of people who forgot the sacrifices made so its people could live in freedom from the oppressive yoke of religion.

If they came back to life and saw what this country has become in the name of imaginary playmates and evil puppet masters caring only about wealth and power, they'd abandon it to its own stupidity and look for more intelligent life elsewhere, because seriously, the lives they gave simply weren't worth the ignorance that grew from those sacrifices. In fact, it's a slap in their faces that will resound for centuries and will eventually destroy what they fought so hard to build.

One Night Stand Jesus by godless_heathen
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Religion as Sheeple Control

The death of Osama Bin Laden

Someone asked me today why I haven't written anything about Bin Laden's death. I've been thinking all day about what to say in return. As far as I know I haven't directly lost anyone he  killed. Yes, I experienced the horror and cried for days over 9/11.  I still tear up when I see the towers burning. I still feel anger and sadness over the senseless loss of life.

I have lived under the totalitarian fearmongering opportunistic politicians inflicted on this country, while they used Bin Laden as an excuse to do what they wanted to do all along. I have experienced the rage, the despair, the disgust over how brown-skinned Americans were made to pay for the crimes of someone they didn't even know, and more than likely didn't even agree with. For that alone, I am glad he is gone.

I share a similar sentiment with Jon Stewart who on last night's Daily Show said that while he was alive Osama Bin Laden was the face of Islam instead of the young people trying to make a better world for themselves in Egypt, Libya, Syria and other Middle East countries. As someone who had to live under the Bush regime, I know what it's like to finally be free of the world's perception that we are all like that dumb ass piece of jingoistic crap. For this reason alone, his death is important. It gives a new face to people who didn't wear the old one very well.

But I am a pacifist. I can't condone killing. And yet I know the world we live in. I know how desperate the Republicans are to make Obama fail, and so I celebrate that they have to eat at least a bit of their own shit as they are forced to congratulate their nemesis for taking out their symbolic reason for keeping this country under their oppressive thumbs. I'm not so pure that I don't enjoy that part of it immensely.

I suppose for me it all depends on what comes after. Now that Bin Laden is dead, will the fearmongers finally lose their talisman or will they find another one to take its place? As I told someone who expressed optimism that finally the Republicans/Teabaggers will accept Obama as their President now that he showed courage, determination and took the risk in spite of the political peril--not likely as he's still black, no matter how many Bin Ladens he kills. We can't change that about our country. It still has its racist snake pits in Dumbfuckistan and there's not much we can do about that other than live as opposite examples of what they believe.

Maybe that is my hope with this death, that maybe, just maybe we can come together as one people and realize the wedges between us were artificially created by the Karl Roves and Dick Cheneys whose definition of terrorism is a united America. Maybe we can realize our own best interest is to be found in coming together as one people and finally put those heartless and greedy political asshats behind us.

But it's hard to be optimistic when I see that the Republican/Teabagger trolls are still out there promoting their stupid sthit. They still earn their pennies by doing their masters' bidding. They still post their ridiculous talking points, mindlessly, stupidly, without thought of how they are the rot destroying the country from within for people who care nothing about them, who care only about power, about money, about using everyone for their own purposes.

In this sense, Bin Laden's death means nothing. It is just another dead body, another excuse to cover the airways with nonsense as filler in betweeen the real purpose of selling us more stuff we don't need but are told we must have. The mainstream news media went from covering a wedding between two figureheads that are meaningless to most Americans, to covering a symbol used to oppress us for the last ten years.

But if there is a good side of this it is that President Obama, who I perceive to be a decent man fighting against a machine fed on wealth and power, will rise a few points in the polls and will probably be elected because of it. When you consider the options on the Republican side, the mean-spirited, corporate-owned slime who want to destroy him so they can take over again, then Bin Laden's death is a very good thing.

And truly, in the end what it means to me is meaningless because to the people who lost loved ones on 9/11, to a country that was forever change by that event, his death is a long overdue symbolic act that gives us all a chance of moving forward.

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The death of Osama Bin Laden

The Religion Virus

As I was going through the bizarre offerings on YouTube to find a video to update my Atheist Blog, I once again was struck by the similarity of the religion-infected sheeple. They're all so certain there is only one way to wherever it is they think they're going, and if you aren't along for the ride, well...let's just say things like inquisitions and burnings at the stake seem like reasonable solutions to them.

But through the hilarity, disgust, and mind-boggling astonishment over what some people believe, there was also a sense of familiarity. I've seen that same glow of the true believer sense of rightness, that same fervor of my way or you suck attitude, that same we're going to get your ass for being different threat,  in people who don't believe the fairy tales the sheeple embrace in their pathetic ignorance, but they have adopted the same means to promote their own agendas. They just don't refer to it as "religion."

Let me be clear here. I'm not talking about Fascists or other moronic cults. I'm talking about so-called average people, those who even define themselves as alternative thinkers, as free spirits, as spiritual new age believers in rainbows and pretty ponies dancing with unicorns for the benefit of humankind. The kind of people who are appalled by religious propaganda and hate mongering, yet fail to recognize how it infected them and how they perpetuate their own version of it.

From several decades of interacting with different groups, populations, and classes, I can always tell when someone was raised in a "religious" household, no matter how adeptly they think they've managed to run from it. Throughout my life as an unwavering Atheist, I often explored what else was out there just to make sure I wasn't being just another sheeple embracing another cult called "Atheism." And also because I'm endlessly fascinated by the world I live in and I want to know as much as possible about it.

Due to this insatiable curiosity, I submitted myself to various groups in order to gain a better understanding of my place on the planet. For varying amounts of time and involvement, I was part of groups who embraced Shamanic rituals, New Age woo-hoo-ness,  Arteeste communities,  political movements, The Joy of Hippies, antisocial geekiness, both serious and tragically funny writers, hardcore and wannabe Scientists, spiritual seekers and lost souls who enjoyed not knowing where the hell they were going.

Unlike the religious sheeple, I subjected what I believed to input from other people's beliefs. In my life, I've read the Bible--both old and new testaments, the Book of Mormon, the Koran, and various Buddhist and Zen treatises. I talked to people about what they believed and why. I took part in their circles, their prayers, their dances, their spiritual endeavors. 

And I came through the other side still an Atheist, probably even more of one as a result of those experiences. I also came though the other side vastly disillusioned with these groups because it was rare for any of them to exhibit any curiosity, other than judgement or condemnation for what I believed or didn't believe. I was there to be converted, to embrace what they believed one hundred and ten percent or nothing. It didn't matter if they were Christians or New Age Hippies. The dogma smelled the same.

I also learned that no matter how one tries to run from their religious upbringing, it hangs on them for life. It's a deadly, infective virus nearly impossible to eradicate because most people don't know they are carriers. Here's some examples of how it infected some of the so-called escapees:

They made a religion out of everything. I'm talking about people who formed circles to worship nature and then made a whole list of rules on how to go about it and you didn't dare deviate from that list. They justified it by saying things like "rituals are important" and other things lifted straight from their early religious training. I knew my time around these kinds of  folks were at an end when I found myself moving rocks and sticks around on their altars just to fuck with them.

People who grow up with authority-based religions are easy prey for anyone with an agenda they wish to inflict upon others. All they have to do is frame it in updated terms that make it seem they can help "save" someone or something from an unspeakable--and defined by others, evil. They make someone or something the enemy and then everyone bonds around the idea of destroying the enemy (devil).

I've seen this most often in divorces where sides are formed and you're either for or against one or the other--and you'd better be for or against the 'right' side or you become the enemy, the other, the bad guy. It's religious wars reduced down to the personal. It's people believing the only way they can show loyalty to a friend is by trashing their soon to be ex partner, just like one religion does to the others. Who needs those kind of friends or cultish beliefs? I ran from them the same way I ran from the religious cultists as they felt and behaved the same.

The most frightening and disgusting thing I saw that was a direct result of infectious early religion were the "morality" gangs who were so convinced their point of view was the correct one, they were willing to destroy people, careers, friendships just to inflict it on everyone else.

But they never did the dirty deeds themselves. Priests, Gurus, and Political heroes always make sure their own hands remain clean so they recruit those willing to blindly believe and whisper scary words to them and call it truth. They then send these recruited minions to do the dirty work with disgustingly malicious gossip as their versions of  god's word, just like in the good old inquisition days when gossip was the rule of law used to sentence people to death.

And by assigning it to a whole like "morality," "the greater good," "justice," and other high and mighty sounding terms, they never had to blame their behavior on their own individual biases and issues. They never had to allow a  chance of rebuttal, an opportunity to interject facts and truths into the stream of endless shit coming from the holy center. There was no other side. It was their one way or not at all, just like any other inflexible religious cult.

Over and over again, these groups who thought they had left religion behind, created situations where you were either for or against, or you were ostracized by all sides.

And nothing was too repulsive to the Borg mind. In one situation I had a couple true believers pretend they were interested in my friendship just to gather ammunition against one of my acquaintances for someone else's personal vendetta. No matter what I said, what topic of conversation I brought up, they awkwardly and annoyingly steered the discussion back to that person, just like those crazed bible thumpers who keep quoting bible verses no matter what the subject. They were on a mission and the facts were inconvenient things that got in the way of their beliefs.

I think back on those people and others and I see something else they had in common with religious cultists: nothing was ever their fault and whatever they had to do was justified by the greater mission. They learned that from religion, that no matter what they did, no matter what evil they committed, it was justified by their version of god/deity/mentor/authority figure's teachings on what was good and what was evil. That made it okay to lie, to use, to spread horrible gossip, to destroy the infidels who weren't part of their cultish cliques.

And like good little religious cultists, they excelled at handing out punishment by shunning and ostracizing those who believed differently or who behaved in manners that didn't fit their rigid set of communally defined rules. They did this because at the heart of who they were, at the complete core of their beings was the ultimate truth: they were and are control freaks.

I'm convinced that is what makes people turn to religion and other clannish/cultish behavior. They're control freaks who suddenly find themselves with the ultimate weapon to inflct on others: dogmatic truth with not a speck of breathing room for any variations. And guess who's in charge of defining and handing out the punishment? Why, them of course, the true believers, the religiously tethered, the moralistic punishment squad, the judgement police.

And they never have to take a bit of responsibility for their actions, they never have to apologize, they never even have to consider the pathetic and pitiful excuse for human beings they are, because they always have their version of god/goddess/spirituality/religion to blame it on. Having religion means never having to say you're sorry for being a total asshat dickwad to another human being.

That's the gift of religion that keeps on giving long after most people thought they escaped from it, and that's why I will fight against it until the day I die and become ash on the wind. I consider it my obligation to helping make a healthy planet for future generations.

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The Religion Virus

When is enough ENOUGH!

If it wasn't for the mainstream media's obsessive need to make news entertaining and spectacular instead of informative and educational, a hate-filled whack job hiding under the cover of christian preacher  never would have had a world-wide audience for his Koran burning.

The talking heads and their handlers in the media that elevated him to a household name have the same amount of blood on their hands, if not more, than he does. Without them, he would simply not exist outside his own small, hate-filled little universe.

But then, neither would the equally despicable and hateful Westboro creeps. Without the media they'd cease to exist outside their weekly hate fests held in a double-wide church in some farmer's cow pasture.

And let's not forget more of the media-created cretins whose fifteen minutes are ticking down at a faster rate than they can spout radio-induced talking points: the teabaggers and their mind boggling stupidity that allows them to be used by unethical douche bags like the Koch Brothers.

They are a completely media-created phenomenon funded by the unethical and immoral greedy bottom feeders who figured out a long time ago that a person who hates is an easily controlled tool. So all they had to do was appeal to the lowest of the racists, bigots, christian crazies, and knuckle dragging jerks and before they knew it the Teabaggers were born.

But they're on minute 14 and one half. Less than 200 turned out for their latest rally, compared to nearly 100 thousand who turned out in a snowstorm to protest a teabagger governor in Wisconsin a couple weeks ago. Soon, the Republicans who used their stupid asses to get elected will tell them to sit down and shut the fuck up. Their fifteen minutes are over. Even the most idiotic of TV viewers eventually gets tired of badly spelled signs and grown men in three-quarter pants who want the guvmint to keep its hands off their Medicare.

And let us not forget the ultimate media created shallow excuse for a human being: Sarah Palin. Ever since her target over the state of Arizona got a bunch of people hurt and killed, the media is running from her like some one-night stand who keeps sending slutty, unwanted text messages they delete unread. OMG, they don't heart you anymore!

In spite of the short shelf-life of useful idiots like Palin and the baggers, they manage to do quite a bit of damage in their brief period of time. People die because of them and their hateful rhetoric. People get hurt because of their lack of awareness of their own stupidity. If you think there's only so far dumb asses like this can go, I have two words for you: President Bush.

One excellent way to minimize the damage is to quit giving them a stage. The big lie we are told is that Palin and the teabaggers represent a very large part of the country. They don't. They are a small sect that is amplified by those who have an interest in making them seem bigger than they are.

Palin is too stupid to realize how completely she was used and then discarded once she became embarrassing instead of merely a useful idiot. But it evens out because she was only in it for the money and she got what she wanted. It's too bad that some good people in Arizona paid the price for her shameless greed.

Anyone who has spent any time talking with the kind of people who have a We the People sign stuck in their front yard knows that logic and common sense will never work on them. That's the weak point of educated people. We tend to think if only people have enough facts they will come to their senses.

Guess what? Most of these people are still angry over losing the civil war and having to share public drinking fountains. They live in a world where ignorance is prized and intellect is suspect. You'd be afraid of smart, educated people too if you couldn't read or write beyond the third grade level. Someone could say or write nasty things about you and you'd never know it or be able to fight back against it. That's how ignorance breeds with itself and infects future generations.

And the lack of education leaves them ripe for using by those who know how easily they are programmed. It isn't that big a step from having religion slammed down your throat week after week, and being told over and over again that insurance companies and banks really do care about you and only dirty filthy liberals believe otherwise.

If the news media were truly interested in being the kind of respected journalistic outlet that exists in most of the world's countries, then they'd let the ignorant wallow in their ignorance and focus on reporting news that was geared toward adults instead of simple-minded cretins.

But they're not interested because the media exists only to sell us shit. They know that old white men watch the evening news so they advertise boner pills and adult diapers to them. And interviews with teabaggers. And Republican talking heads. And war criminals who have found Jeezus and a new scam to run and need to address the sheep directly to put it into effect.

And it all works because most of the country is more concerned with the sex lives of celebutantes, the  hidden peek into the homes of wealthy douche bags who would sic the dogs on them if they ever got within a mile of their compounds, and what the latest status symbol are to make up for the empty, meaningless existence they so desperately need to escape.

War On Women by godless_heathen
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When is enough ENOUGH!

The Softness of Being Human

It's been a rough week for a lot of the world. I tried to limit how much of the Japan catastrophe I let in, but there's that side of us humans, that side that feels its own mortality too keenly and so we are drawn to death and dying in a strange sort of relief that it wasn't our turn this time. But the scope of it is beyond us to take in all at once.

We can imagine it on a personal level when we see ourselves in the desperate faces hoping against all truth that a loved one survived. We grab our own loved ones tighter and try to look away, try not to see that it ends the same for us all, that the only difference is timing and how many of ourselves we leave behind to mourn.

I wasn't surprised to hear I wasn't the only one who was too numb to cry, too horrified by the magnitude of the triple disasters to let ourselves cry. I suspect it's  because there were simply too many dead to mourn them properly, to give them the tears they deserved. So we held it all back out of respect for the ones that would be missed if we cried for just a few.

But when this photograph appeared on numerous websites, I lost it completely. I cried for everyone I had ever lost because of a small, helpless dog who couldn't understand what had happened to his world. I knew, his human knew, everyone around him knew. But all that poor little dog knew was that something horrible had happened and now his human was there to love and comfort him, that it was going to be alright. It was the simplicity of it that got to me as it did to everyone who saw this photograph.

And then there's the horror of Libya. Like many people I have mixed feelings. I can't support war. I can't support killing. I'm the kind of person who picks up spiders and puts them outside. I don't want death anywhere near my hands. And yet, here's a cruel and ruthless dictator savagely murdering his own people. As horrible as that is, as much as I want there to be some other way to make him stop, as much as I want him to wake up and decide to be a decent human being, I know that's not going to happen.

I want to believe this is different somehow, these missiles are different than the ones that were launched in Iraq over oil, using the same language of justification, a dictator killing his own people. I'm jaded at the mercy missions of governments because I know there's oil in Libya too and the gluttony of the world for it makes killing more likely than if the country was nothing but olive trees and geckos.

Altruism always comes wrapped in bloody, oil-drenched rags and we wipe up our guilt by saying we're taking out a bad person instead of saying a lot of innocent people are dying too. How is our killing any different than his? Because it's for a better reason, a more noble cause? It is still death. It is still dying. It is still bombs and missiles and oil fields that mean much more than they should. Maybe a small dog caught in the rubble of a building brought down by a missile launched for "humanitarian" reasons would allow us to cry over the solution being as awful as the problem.

Anger is also a reprieve from the tears I'm sure would flow for days if I didn't have it as a valve to keep them in check. I'm angry at the photographs of elderly people fending for themselves in the rubble, the hardship they face simply because they are too old to get out and start over. I'm used to America not giving a shit about its old people. It's a selfish country and one obsessed with youth. All you have to do is listen to politicians talk about Social Security, Medicare, and other programs to know if a similar disaster hit here it would be the young and powerful first and the old could rot in the streets for all they would care.

But to see Japan inflicted with this lack of respect for its elderly is equally as devastating as the wreckage all around them. I want to yell at the TV loud enough that they will hear me: get out there and save the old people you selfish fucks! But I know the young are suffering too and so the old are expendable. Life is for those with years ahead of them, not behind them. It's another form of missiles being dropped to save lives.

My anger is also for nuclear reactors that were old and needed to be replaced, updated, modernized, but because Japan seems to have adopted the most disgusting of American greed, these ticking time bombs were left to decay so the shareholders, the investors, the powerful rich and wealthy could increase their profit margins.

It points out clearer than ever that if this could happen in Japan, a country devastated once before by the worst of nuclear power, then what hope have we in America of ever having a safe form of energy? What kind of safety considerations would the Enrons, the Exxons, the Koch Brothers, the Massey Mine owners, BP's and Halliburtons feel worth spending money on? I wouldn't trust them as far as I can spit, but here they are in charge of our energy sources, with nothing but their endless greed as a guarantee that money means more to them than human lives.

And today I received an email from Lydia. She wants to give her kids one more Christmas. She struggles through chemotherapy, radiation, all kinds of horrible medications just to drag out a few more months just so her children can have another Christmas.

Like I said, it's been a rough week.

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The Softness of Being Human

Flinging Poo at the Monkeys

Ever since the earthquake and tsunami hit I've been watching the coverage from various sources, both online and on television. I rarely watch TV, especially for news, and the crap that passes for coverage on American network and cable news is appalling when you compare it with international sources. Before I could find the cable station with straight from Japan coverage, I had to wade through an embarrassment of faux-journalism that was painful to watch.

First of all, it has never been more obvious that the talking heads on television are not journalists but merely actors paid to read lines written by someone else. They're so used to handing off the story of the day to whatever propaganda spouting figure the network has provided for them that they are helpless when it comes to any in depth reporting done on the fly.

They fumble, stumble, and end up repeating inane phrases over and over again, as they desperately try and pass the story off to the expert who isn't there because there's no party line to push when it's a tragedy that happens somewhere else.

Give them a few days. I'm sure the experts will show up soon to promote more oil drilling in our backyards and less regulations in order to free up the supplies. How can the Corporate Borg resist such a natural disaster opportunity to promote their slash, burn, and get stinking rich policies?

But until then there's always "the man/woman on the street" who is asked how they feel so they can blather on in mindless fashion like some idiot wind-up toy until they're mercifully cut off for yet another commercial. And when the talking heads return after a slew of totally inappropriate perky ads, there's always a near feeding frenzy over some poor unfortunate fool who claims a friend of a friend of a cousin three times removed who knows someone who may have been in Japan AT THE VERY MOMENT THE DISASTER HIT!

All this pales when measured against the bigger shame, and that is how the news actors, when they finally get their new scripts and no longer have to try and improvise, talk down to the viewers. They know that most of their audience probably consists of knuckle-draggers and geriatric viewers who haven't quite figured out that new-fangled internet thing so they're forced to watch TV News. They know their audience's knowledge of Science probably came from visiting the Creation Museum, and watching the Jesus was an Alien channel that ignores any history older than 6000 years.

They know they have to explain the simplest concepts such as what is an earthquake and did god do it or is it more of that global warming (snicker snicker) nonsense?  If they don't simplify it to barely breathing level, they know their audience will go back to watching Jesus's spaceship land on the pyramids, or some gossip station that talks breathlessly of people they've neve met but knos more about than members of their own families.

I joke but I was shocked at how simple the concepts were that they're forced to explain to what is probably the most uneducated and unsophisticaed audience on the planet. "There are two kinds of earthquakes; shallow ones and deep ones." It's obvious they're assuming their audience slept through the third grade, and they're probably right.

Meanwhile, online you can get live coverage with real experts who actually study earthquakes, who know something about tsunamis other than surfing jokes, who have no agenda to push other than letting you know the facts of what happened. You have journalists on the ground following leads such as nuclear plants that are about to explode, instead of American TV who uses the potential tragedy as an opportunity to promote coal mining and oil drilling and only covers the nuclear plant by saying horrid things like "the Japanese have a lot more reason than we do to fear nukes." Seriously. This came out of the mouth of an American news actor.

What is lost in all this simplistic reporting of monumental events is that when you have a news source such as Al-Jazeera English ,the Guardian, the BBC, and online blogs that carry live twitter feeds from people on the ground, you have an audience that expects a certain level of reporting. This expectation creates a literate and educated journalistic pool more interested in bringing you the story than creating or slanting it to fit a particular advertiser or network owner.

American news,  instead of reporting the facts, repeatedly slants the story to create the propaganda they're pushing. The talking heads are interchangeable and do little but act as set decorations with moving lips. Instead of in depth reporting, the American audience gets Joe Doofus on the street talking stupid shit that is supposed to be average, but instead comes off sounding totally idiotic and nonsensical.

 It beats having to cover the story and it sure beats educating the audience beyond the point where simple Scientific concepts are too difficult for them to grasp. Because if the viewers get too smart, then they won't buy the stupid, meaningless crap that takes up most of the half hour anyway. And that's what American TV really exists for: to sell stuff. They could care less about the news, about the audience, about the idiocy of the viewing public. All they care is that you buy enough of the advertised crap so they can keep their job reading propaganda written by their overlords to pass on to viewing morons.

The Daily Lies by orsobear
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Flinging Poo at the Monkeys

To the Next Generation

I had an interesting discussion with a woman close to my age today. She wrote to me after I posted a comment on a facebook discussion about needing to step up the fight against the Republican Party's War On Women. I said that while I would continue to actively play a role in the battle, it was no longer my generation's fight, and that it was up to each generation to choose their battles.

At the risk of sounding like one of those tedious old folks blathering on about young whippersnappers who just don't understand the sacrifices we made for them, I still feel it's important to do a bit of generational back slapping for what we did accomplish and explain how all of that is at risk now.

As archaic as it may sound, I grew up in a time when birth control was limited and not very affective. For women who don't even think twice about filling their prescriptions for the varieties of protection available out there, here's something to think about.

When the pill first came out, women couldn't just go and get a pack or two for themselves. They had to be married and in far too many cases, had to have their husband's permission to get a prescription. No, this wasn't the dark ages. This was the late 60's, early 70's. We wrote notes for each other pretending to be each other's husbands saying yes, we give our permission for our property to get something to put in their bodies.

Can any of you imagine doing that today? But we did and we also began to object, to protest, to demand the right to get our own prescriptions, to take charge of our own bodies. It wasn't easy and yes, some of us lost our jobs over it, were considered no better than prostitutes if discovered that we had a prescription without being married. And today, any woman has the right to get any kind of birth control she wants. It's so easy, most women just take it for granted and ignore there's politicians in office right now who consider birth control as a form of abortion.

And speaking of that topic that is guaranteed to stir up heat in any discussion, try this one on. Women of my generation and before either gave themselves abortions that often killed them or left them torn up so bad many of them never had to deal with an unwanted pregnancy again. Or they went to some backroom butcher that did the same thing, only he/she charged them lots of money to do so.

Or they did as my mother did and went to Mexico to some dirty little clinic just over the border that was a short bus ride there and what can only be described as an horrendous bus ride back. I was about nine or ten when a cab pulled up to the house (an unheard of luxury as they were expensive and rare) and the driver half carried my mother to the porch and left her there bleeding. She wouldn't let us call an ambulance because she'd probably end up in jail for having an illegal abortion. I became pro-choice that day and along with other women of my generation, fought hard for the right for women to have safe and legal abortions.

And now we live in a time when women can find a safe abortion, even though they may have to travel to another state. They really don't think about how they may not be able to get one, or that they can't afford it, or that it could kill them or leave them seriously infected or butchered.  Thanks to my generation they know they will not have their insides ripped up, infected, destroyed, and then left bleeding on a doorstep.

But we also live in a time when immoral bastards on Fox News and hate radio promote the active killing of Abortion doctors. If this doesn't get women's attention and compel them to action, then maybe it's time they woke up because those same crazy politicians that consider birth control as a form of abortion, want to classify  abortion as murder. So the next time you pop that pill in your mouth, remember that some vicious little tyrant is plotting on how to charge you with murder.

And even though racism and discrimination against women, gays, and minorities exists, it was our generation who took to the streets and demanded change, who protested and got ourselves arrested, and walked arm and arm with each other until equality for all people is the norm instead of the exception.

But we aren't there yet. There are still far too many people who use all kinds of blatantly transparent bullshit to cover up their racist hatred of Obama. There are still parts of this country where Gays and Lesbians get beat up and murdered just for being born homosexuals. There are still places in this country where women are second and third class citizens and who are routinely beat up, raped, and killed.

And far too many people look to their friends of color, their Gay and Lesbian friends, the women who hold public office and positions of authority and think not much has to be done anymore. This is where my new email friend said she felt like we did almost too good a job in changing the mindset of our culture away from racism and bigotry and toward tolerance. Because it's no longer so blatant, it no longer seems like such an important thing to fight.

But even as I write this there are people in power who are working to find ways to take away the equal rights we fought so hard to make ordinary. There are people fighting to roll back all the work we marched in the streets for, made phone calls to politicians for, wrote books for, composed music for, made art for so that equality and tolerance and acceptance of each other as human beings would seem ordinary.

Which brings me to my biggest complaint, my biggest whine as a 60 year old aging activist: how dare you not vote! I get really angry when people tell me there is no difference between the two parties, that they don't even bother voting anymore. To these people I say they need to go read up on the women who took to the streets, who got beat up, who got shunned and had their families destroyed so you unappreciative little shits could say voting was meaningless. And oh yeah, it wasn't exactly ancient history. Women in America got the right to vote in 1920. It's a good chance your grandmothers had baseball bats taken to their heads so you could stay home on election day.

And finally on that there's no difference between the parties crap...it's not the Democrats who are trying to take away the rights my generation fought so hard to make sure you could take for granted. Educate yourself and find out who the real dangerous party is right now in America and get off your ass and vote them out or everything my generation worked so hard for will disappear.

But as I told my friend, maybe that's the way the cycles move. Maybe you don't want those rights. Maybe they mean less to you than other things. Maybe the concern with the state of our planet is so dire that you can't afford to take time to fight any other battles. I have to admit I partly agree with you on this. It is a battle that must be fought.

You also have to continue the work we put into peace because it sure didn't work out too well. We still have stupid wars, stupid bought and paid for by defense contractors politicians, and too many ways the wealthy get even richer from war.

So yes, I can see there's a lot to choose from but I'd sure hate for all the work the women of my generation put in to go to waste. It's much more valuable than that and hopefully you will realize that and fight to keep it for the next generation to take for granted.

Fight For Rights by orsobear
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To the Next Generation

The Bozo Creed

In the 1970's a group of friends united by a common love of humor, philosophizing, alcohol, assorted drugs, and the college student lifestyle that enabled  them to camp out around wilderness campfires through most of their University years, got together and wrote down some principles to live by...or not.

For several decades this tract put together from various hallucinatory visions and most excellent conversations, was lost. It made a brief appearance in a student magazine sometime in the mid 80's at a college near the extreme border from which it first emerged.

Then it disappeared once more when the institution funding the publication decided they didn't want to pay for as much free speech as they ordered. So upon discovering their hunger was more easily satisfied with soft food and compliant and officially sanctioned "civil" disobedience,  said institution heaped the first shovel of invisible cloaking dirt over its much too honest carcass.

But like the lovable zombie of fond youthful memories, it rose up again at the celebration of one of its members officially entering the age of geezerhood, where it was shared to an audience appreciation of disobedience that wasn't civil.

In honor of that special occasion, please help spread its message far and wide in as many languages as possible to share the true meaning of its words. Or not.


The Bozo Creed

1. All bozos, by the very fact of the bozoness, have the option of creating our own creed.

2. A bozo is only one bozo, regardless of how many followers we profess to have. We can never be more or less than one bozo.

3. A bozo is only a bozo when we recognize we are a bozo. Before or after such a recognition, we are still only a bozo; only a bozo in this sense can be said to be in a state of bozo bozoness.

4. A bozo is no better and no worse than any other bozo. We have no labels, descriptions, or definitions, so we can only be a bozo like all other bozos. There are no superior or inferior bozos because the essence of bozoness does not take into consideration anything other than pure bozoness.

5. A bozo has no past or future as such things only serve as crutches on which others walk when they cannot accept what they see in front of their eyes. To give a bozo past or future is to label us with your own personal bozo biases. Every bozo has been born with the right to begin our life from whichever point we feel most comfortable with. If the point does not exist, so much the better, for each bozo is born with, and is proud of our madness.

6. Whatever a bozo has to say, no matter how outrageous it may seem, should be taken in the same manner as if it made perfect sense, for if we start to judge what is sane and what is not sane, we deny the essence of bozoness within ourselves.

7. Each bozo, by the fact of our bozoness, does not involve ourselves with debilitating manias such as: responsibility, common sense, maturity, or social obligations. By our bozoness, we are protected from having to become involved in status games or prestige occupations, as bozoness is all the assurance we need to survive authentically.

8. A bozo accepts that which touches the spirit and remains detached from that which does not. A bozo cannot, without betraying our bozoness, become involved in issues which do not touch the soul deeply and personally. A bozo cannot even become involved in those things which do touch us, as a bozo cannot place ourselves in the position of being judge to any action without expecting our actions to judge us in return.

9. As bozos, we accept our madness. If we cannot, we must leave it alone and not attempt to tamper with its absurdity, for the day will come when we must accept it or die.

10. A bozo laughs with life because we realize that as long as our own eyes are open, that is enough. We cannot expect more or less.

11. A bozo expects nothing and is prepared for everything.

Clown Motel by northwest_photograph
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The Bozo Creed

Creeping up on Sixty

In a few days I'll be sixty years old. I've never been shy about examining the inner stew that I am, but there's something about that milestone that seems to require not only a closer look, but also a categorizing of it. There's a bizarre necessity to write about it all as if it were something that can prepare others as they embark upon the same precipice, or maybe warn them that there be monsters beyond a certain age. So here's a few entertaining monsters I stumbled across in the last few months leading up to this point.

1. The past becomes endlessly more fascinating than when we lived it.

People I knew decades ago suddenly came back into my mental present time. It wasn't so much a desire to reconnect with them as it was curiousity. I wanted to know how closely or how far apart the different paths we took from the same point actually took us. So I used this internet tubes thing and googly googled a few of them. I didn't find the ones I was looking for (isn't that always the truth?), but I did stumble upon a few of them by accident while searching for something else.

For example, I found one of my old art professors while I was using an image search tool to find someone else's work. It was a brain cramp moment when I saw the similarities that probably neither of them would see because it's their art, after all, but I could see because I was the outside observer to both of them. So of course I wrote him an email and said hello.

The next one was even more bizarre. A friend who was going to visit the Los Angeles area wanted to find a Vegan restaurant to eat at while she was there. I offered to be the friendly neighborhood googler and come up with the perfect place. I found it, a few blocks from where her conference was going to be held and as I was reading the website, a very distinctive name leaped out at me. I had exactly three friends in High School and she was one of them. We weren't blood friends or even the kind of friends who swore to name each other's first born after them. But I was grateful to her, for the memory of her because I could say for the rest of my life that I knew three people in High School who didn't suck. That was worth at least an email.

2. Change is not always inevitable.

I also reconnected with a goodly amount of ghosts from the past who seemed happy to hear from me. We exchanged a few emails and then let the silence between us grow again as the same reasons we did so in the first place were still there.

The most disturbing in a holy calcification batman sort of way was someone I really admired when I was in my twenties. He was an amazing writer who seemed to have such a phenomenal and perceptive way of looking at and writing about life. He was easy to find as he had self-published enough books, pamphlets, treatises, and manuals to level a fairly large forest.

But in all that copious amount of self-flagellation there was barely anything new that reflected decades of life. He was writing about the same things, in the same language, with the same passion as he did forty years ago. It was as if nothing of life had touched him in any way. He was literally the same man he was then. I was sad for him.

And I knew I could write whatever I wanted to about him because  he would never read this blog.  He has a disdain for the internet, for the social aspect of it. He said it distracted him from real life and he only used it to take orders for his books and answer book related emails. It explained the time warp that claimed his soul in the late 70's and never gave it back.

But the saddest for me were some of the women. They're the kind of women who always bring me a sense of deep sorrow when I read their obituaries, the women who lived and died within a few miles of where they were born. The obituaries are always filled with the children they birthed, the gardens they grew, the things they did for others. And how they never left home, neither physically or metaphorically.

But for a few short years when we were in college together, they had dreams we shared over wine, weed, and eternal blooming hope. These same women were going to travel the world, they were going to write the great novel, paint the masterpiece, find the cure for cancer, become the first woman President. Instead, their obituaries will say they lived and died a few miles from where they were born, and will describe the children they birthed, the gardens they grew, the things they did for others. I wanted to ask them why they gave up so easily but I knew they would never see themselves as having given up so there was no point in asking, no point in trying to recreate a past that died the day they graduated and took the path right in front of them instead of venturing out a bit to see what else was out there.

In the end, all the searching and googling and writing ended up with the same result: the good people were still good, the bad people were still bad, the boring were still boring, and the interesting ones had all disappeared into a world where they couldn't be found so they could go on being interesting without others expectations of what interesting was supposed to mean.

3. Expectations are like assholes, no matter how much we deny it.

The most surprising thing I discovered was that some of the people I connected with had expectations I'd be a certain this or that and were disappointed that I went my own way. They weren't interested in what I had done with my life, in the new paths I had carved through resistant wildnernesses, in the way I had managed to live a life of honor, ethics, integrity and love, and still survive on my own terms, by my own wits, and with no one telling me what to do but me.

Yes, I'm surprised that I make my living with art created digitally with cameras, computers, and scanned hand-drawn and created images. Yes, I'm surprised that I make my living writing about what I do, that I've channeled my passion for words into something that gives me pleasure, that allows me to share some of what I believe and most of who I am with people all over the world. Yes, I'm surprised that I've sold things with my art in just about every country in the world, all the provinces in Canada, and every state in America. Yes, I'm surprised that I've written to and shared dreams, philosophies, world views, visions, hopes, despairs, sadness, joy, sorrow, and love with people all over the world.

So I'm surprised when people I connected with again always said they thought I'd be a writer or an artist or an activist, but they never thought I'd be doing what I'm doing. It makes me wonder why they expected me to limit myself to one thing when there were so many options. It makes me sad that they see me as unusual and different and an exception to how they thought I should live.

I want to say to them that all I really wanted was to make a difference. I didn't want to go through life without leaving my mark on it. I figured with so many options available to me that I had no choice but to exercise them all if I was truly going to make a difference by having lived. So far, I think I'm accomplishing what I set out to do.

4. Some wounds don't heal.

Of course there are people I think about, people I loved, people I trusted, people I let into my life too easily and by the time I noticed they were bad people it was too late to shut the door. They are me as much as any of my art or my words or my actions. But the deep wounds don't heal. I can still feel sad, angry, upset, afraid when I remember them. I can let myself love them even after they hurt me. But there are some paths you can't walk backwards on and the path of wounds is one of them. I leave them alone, let them remain as lessons, as reminders that no matter how many good and decent people you know in life and call friend, the biggest assholes will always be the ones whom you loved the most. Age and time doesn't seem to even that out any. I hoped it would, but it seems some wounds are timeless and are meant to be with us in that shape and form for life. Maybe in the next decade I'll figure that one out to where I can explain it better.

Winter Pond by northwest_photograph
Large format printing by Zazzle

Creeping up on Sixty

Legacy of Beauty

For the last few weeks my time has been spent writing emails back and forth, texting, and chatting with a woman I've known for about 15 years. On January first we started at the beginning of our lives and are now about mid-point, with multiple detours to explore issues that threw themselves on the path knowing we couldn't just step over them and pretend they weren't there.

Like her dying. Lydia is in her mid-40's and was diagnosed with Inflammatory Breast Cancer in late December. Time at that moment became compressed into something small enough to hold in her hand. We'd always shared a lively dialogue by email a couple times a month, but from that day it took on a new urgency and now it's a need, an obsession,  a daily practice that sometimes takes up several hours of the day.

We started at the beginning because it became important to remember, to go back over all the small details of first meeting. She was the youngest member of our writer's group that met once a month to camp out together in nature and write. We shared a common bond of either being immigrants or first generation, and Lydia was also the newest to the country. She married an American that she once thought she loved and realized that it was something far more complicated. By then it was too late to change her mind as there was nothing left to go back to, so she stayed with him.

Neither of us remember exactly how we started writing to each other after the group ended. The excuse was that she needed to practice her already perfect English, but it was actually that we understood something in each other, that we had some need to communicate ourselves through the written word that couldn't be expressed any other way.

We're both talkers when there's something to talk about, but with a keyboard, we've solved the world's problems hundreds of times over, we've created wonderful new worlds, filled them with people, formed governments for them, and used it all to define what perfection means to us when everything else is stripped away to the bare bones of idealism.

For Lydia it's beauty. Not the physical beauty of a human being,  but the beauty that is Nature. We're both Atheists and it would be a mistake to assume we've merely substituted the natural world for the mythical world. The truth is much simpler. We do not see ourselves as separate from Nature. We are as much a part of it as it is of us. Or as Lydia so aptly put it "You do not worship self unless you're a total, clueless asshat."

And that's just one of the reasons we're friends. When we hug a tree, we do so as equals. There's very few we could write those words to and be immediately understood. For both of us we've had to defend such a simple thing to people who refuse to accept its simplicity. They want us to believe in something as if believing in our own selves, our own ability to perceive the wonder and connectedness of nature is not enough. Lydia describes the religious as hungry people who are never full because they eat air. It makes perfect sense when you think about it.

Neither one of us are the delusional type. We're often pragmatic to a fault so we're not even remotely in denial as to how all this will end. Of course we went through the first few weeks of devouring every scrap of hope on the internet, of exploring every option, every possibility. And then she wrote me and said enough, that she wasn't going to waste one moment more on arguing with the inevitable. She wanted instead to spend the time she had left wallowing in beauty.

So I started sending her photographs. I'm by no means a professional photographer. I'm an amateur who has an ordinary camera and loves to take photographs primarily to share with others. I adore Facebook for this aspect of it. My page is a community of people from all over the world who sometimes don't speak each others languages very well, but we can all hold a camera and capture a moment to share. And in this way we make a village of the vastness of the world. We come to know each other in a way that language will only approximate. We share what we see with our eyes and gift it with our hearts to each other. "Oh the places we've been!"

And so I started sending even more photographs. I've taken thousands over the last three years. I live in a very photogenic part of the world. It is so beautiful that all you have to do is aim a camera at it and it returns itself as something awesome and special. They help her get through the hardest part of treatment, the treatment that won't save her life but will hopefully give her a few extra months.

 That's all she can hope for now, a few more weeks here, maybe a few more there. It's her tapestry of hope to weave those moments, those days, those weeks into more time. To get there, she travels into the images as her physical body is being treated and so for a few moments at a time, she has a bit of a reprieve, a break from the hardship and pain that is her life now.

But rather than succumb to the despair, the feeling of hopelessness, Lydia decided to live differently. She surrounds herself with beauty in being and thought. She has banished the negative, the mean, the judgemental from her life and lives only with the ultimate sense of honor and love and peace. She wrote me that everything has two sides and you can choose to focus on the positive or the negative side of it and she was choosing to look only at the positive. Let them laugh, she wrote to me. What can they do to me? I'm already dying.

So she has created a world for herself where there is music and art and beauty. It is a lovely and peaceful existence. She printed out many of my photographs and taped them to the walls of her tiny house. And she wrote me that the more she looked at them, the more she looked at the photographs of my friends on my Facebook page, the more she realized that they were a shared language.

We were brought together by words and so it makes sense that we have progressed toward photography as language. She wrote me at the beginning of February and said she wanted something from me, she wanted me to help her leave a living legacy of beauty. We endlessly discussed how this could be done, how it could be created and shared and finally came to a solution that works off what I already do.

In January of each year, after the holiday rush is over, I usually open a new store to fill yet another niche I saw that I wanted to create for. But this time the primary requirement that it be profitable did not enter into the picture. This time it was just to share beauty, to encourage others to share beauty, and to learn each other's languages in a new way.

So I opened up a photography store on Zazzle Northwest Photography. It's not the kind of store that will ever make a lot of money. Sure, I'll probably sell a couple cards or magnets or something now and then and that will be wonderful, but the main purpose of it is to serve as a role model for my friends who speak the same language of photography. Here's what you can do with all those pictures you take every day, those wondefful and awe-inspiring nature scenes that we all share with each other.

And think about it, you have an endless supply of cards to send for every occasion, swag for your businesses, gifts for everyone on your shopping lists and they all came from you. I realize this might seem like an overwhelming task for those of you who aren't that comfortable with the learning curve that opening an online store will require. So why not just print out some of your photographs yourself? Why buy some generic card when you can send beauty?

And as both Lydia and  I and many others believe, why support the corporate world of importing cheap impersonal gifts from some mega-factory when you can make your own and support each other too? After all, we speak the same language when we post our photographs on Facebook. This is just another way to pronounce the words you already know.

Golden Sunset by northwest_photograph
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Legacy of Beauty

What if...?

What if Sarah Palin were Muslim? Would we ignore her map with a rifle scope situated over Arizona? Would we dismiss her calls to overthrow our government to replace it with one she prefers? Would we brush aside her hateful and divisive comments as free speech?

What if Glenn Beck were black? Would we consider him a terrorist, a White Panther bent on destroying America from within? Would we denounce him, parade his image on television and refer to him as an enemy of America?

What if Rush Limbaugh were Hispanic? Would we accuse him of sedition, of Treason against the United States for refusing to accept the elected President of the United States as our country's leader?

What if Fox News was an Arab station? Would we demand it be taken off the air for perpetuating hatred and division? Would we label it a terrorist organization?

What if one day we woke up and realized the terrorists were not Arab, not Muslim, not Black, not Hispanic? What if we woke up and realized they were white racists bent on destroying America from within? What if we realized the terrorists were the very people we gave a pass to simply because they were white? What would that say about our intelligence as a species? What would it say about us as human beings? What would it say about our ability to be used, abused and manipulated by those who realized long ago the biggest rope we hang ourselves with is our own hatred?

Penguins Message To Sarah Palin by orsobear
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What if...?

James Tillich For President

World English Dictionary FASCISM (ˈfæʃɪzəm) — n


1. any ideology or movement inspired by Italian Fascism, such as German National Socialism; any right-wing nationalist ideology or movement with an authoritarian and hierarchical structure that is fundamentally opposed to democracy and liberalism
2. any ideology, movement, programme, tendency, etc, that may be characterized as right-wing, chauvinist, authoritarian, etc
3. prejudice in relation to the subject specified: body fascism
[C20: from Italian fascismo , from fascio political group, from Latin fascis bundle; see fasces ]

Fascism finds its useful idiots in every period of time and excels at getting the most ignorant of the population (Right Wingnut Christians) to support the puppet it holds up for them to salute.(Fox News, George Bush, Sarah Palin)

 In order to create the most perfect idiot, it has to first find someone who is poorly educated but not smart enough to realize it. (Texans, most of the Bible Belt)
 
The second step is to manipulate any inadequacies so they, and their favored corporate entities, benefit from the manipulation. (Mussolini and his desire to be accepted by the aristocracy who were disgusted by him, and the Teabaggers who publicly beg their corporate masters to beat them some more).

The third is to convince the  masses that they, the self-appointed elite who detest those who must work for a living, are their only friends in the corporate monolith called America. (Republicans, Astro-Turf Teabaggers, Glenn Beck) as they slowly strip away any protections our forefathers died to give us.

When you add all this together, one candidate squirms her way from the ooze of ignorance to claim her throne. In Sarah Palin, the Fascists have their perfect tool, their sublime puppet, their easily manipulated idiot child. I have no doubt she will be the Teahadist Queen of the Ball come nomination time as she fits all the requirements on their list. She's dumber than a bag of clubbed halibut. She's so greedy that she'll bite at shiny money the way a bear bites at salmon climbing a raging waterfall to spawn. And she's so easily manipulated, all you have to do is scream "Jesus" and she'll scream back "how much?"

In order to prevent the horrible atrocity of Bush III, the horrible sequel, those of us with still functioning brains that haven't been pulverized by fear into a quivering mass of ignorance via Fox News, must put up a viable candidate to run against her. It can't be someone as mundane as a Democrat because they are spineless Corporate tools-lite who will roll over for the promise of a group hug.

And it can't be Republicans because they've become too obvious in their servitude to their rich masters and are just embarrassing to anyone with a spine.

I propose a candidate who is new on the scene, who is beholden to no one, who has no masters, no corporate sponsorship, no PAC dollars to turn into political favors. He is James Tillich. And best of all, he is the perfect anti-Palin candidate without crossing into the minefields of Liberal, Democrat, Progressive, or bitter Nader-Squad of Punitive Asshattery.

Like Sarah Palin he exists as a viable Presidential candidate only in the minds of those who get up in the middle of the night to swat at things crawling on the walls. Some refer to these hallucinations as Jesus, others refer to them as silly mushrooms. But the mainstream media refers to the voices in their heads as President Palin.

And that's what makes James Tillich such a perfect candidate to run against Sarah Palin. Like her, he does not exist. Like her, he was and continues to be manufactured and created by those who have an ulterior motive in seeing her succeed. And like Sarah Palin, he is empty and lacking in substance enough that he can be manipulated, directed, re-created and elected by anyone who has an agenda they feel strongly enough about to devote time to campaigning for him as they champion him as a true man of the people.

Let today, the last day of 2010, be day one of the campaign to elect James Tillich to public office. It doesn't matter if it is mayor, city councilman, dogcatcher, or President. James Tillich--the man who doesn't exist, never existed, and never will exist is the perfect candidate to represent an America headed by idiot puppets controlled by corporate masters. Rather than the blatherings of Sarah Palin, let America regain some minimal status in the world again by having as President a man who stands for nothing, says nothing, and obeys no one and no thing. It beats being clubbed to death on public TV for the sake of entertainment.

James Tillich For President by godless_heathen
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James Tillich For President

Stupidity: America's Gross National Product

Stupid was once found only in what used to be called "pockets of ignorance." It was a a dark area that was seen as an aberration, a wart on the rising star that was America. Decent people occasionally went to these pockets and did charity work such as teaching the uneducated how to read, how to learn basic skills that would hopefully move them from ignorance to the next level which was preparing them to learn, to become educated, to become a contributing member of society. No one really thought of it as a permanent condition or as an affliction that couldn't be healed. People for the most part, believed it was something that a free and equal education could universally heal. It was also seen as character building for those who went and tried to help the less fortunate.

And for a long time it worked well. America was the land of promise where the promise was if you worked hard, educated yourself, and were a decent human being, than you would be rewarded for it. The reward was always tied in to self-determination, that the value of your worth would increase with how hard you were willing to work, how focused you were willing to remain to acheive your goals, how well you used your intelligence.

It was also a time when intelligence was actually valued, when an education was something important, when civil discourse meant those with opposing points of view could sit down at the same table and learn something from each other.

But somewhere along the way, the greedy power pigs realized that people who were free to think for themselves were also free to question the free ride the wealthy were hitching on the backs of the working class. The concept of a free education was too much of a threat to their entrenched way of life so universities grew more expensive. Only the wealthy could afford the "good" schools and eventually even they moved from a classic education that encouraged free thought and discourse,  to one where business models began to substitute for philosophical models.

This allowed the children of the wealthy to obtain a prestigious piece of paper without having to study very hard to obtain it. It allowed over-indulged idiot children like George Bush to make the necessary business connections without ever having to read a book, because the rich and powerful needed their useful tools to continue stealing and manipulating the wealth of the country for their own purposes, and the Dubyas of the world were plentiful among the children of the rich.

But in order to carry out their business as usual, they had to make sure only the idiots were educated. In order to do that, education had to first become too expensive for the average person. It was the first method of legal segregation that still exists today, and with the cutting of funds for grants and scholarships, the divide between the educated and the uneducated grew larger.

However, there were still those who managed to infiltrate their schools and obtain one of those pieces of paper through hard work and determination. But because they were there for an education and were denied the business connections, many of these students actually studied and learned something. As a result they went on to become thorns in the side of the rich.

A classic education teaches you to think outside of yourself. It shows you history as something that must be learned or it will be repeated with the same bad results. It gives you a depth of knowledge that is not threatened by someone who is different, who thinks differently, who comes from a different culture.

When you open up the world for someone, you open up their hearts and minds, and that's where the problem was for the power elite. Instead of business puppets, such purely educated people became activists for the poor, the unfortunate, the victimized. And to the horror of the wealthy, they also began to show others how to get educated, how to earn a scholarship, how to apply for grants, how to set up their own businesses with their own connections.

That's when the second part of the plan went into effect. The educated person began to be mocked, was demonized as an elitist, was portrayed as out of touch with the "ordinary man." Often those who did the mocking did so from their multi-million dollar offices as they drank and ate the best and most expensive of food and drink. They ordered their paid stooges to promote the idea of stupidity as something democratic while intelligence was mocked as elitist and foreign.

This did not happen overnight. It took creating a base who would buy the myth. In order to succeed at the dumbing down of America, the wealthy and the powerful had to do something besides make education expensive and intelligence something to be mocked. They had to make sure people didn't have time to question what they were told.

People began to work more for less money. Where a job once guaranteed a comfortable life for the wage earner and his or her family, now it meant barely surviving and coming home too exhausted for anything but collapsing in front to the television, where they were fed the myth of educated elitism straight from the mouths of  tools of the wealthy elitists.

It took a few years but eventually there was a large working class of people who were either poorly educated or who only attended a year or two of college, if they attended at all. Guidance Counselors in High School were there to steer the less "intelligent" to trade schools where they would learn a skill without having to think too much. The dumbing down of America  began to succeed quite well.

But no subjegation of a people is complete without the very useful tool of religion. But this wasn't the religion of a few decades ago where people went to church and listened to sermons drawn from the respective holy books. This was religion that was a political arm of the wealthy elite. It was religion that played upon fears, insecurities, bigotry, and anger over having to live like an underpaid mule in order to survive. It was a religion that created deep divisions among people in order to use them some more, because there is no one more easily controlled than someone who hates. All the wealthy had to do was wave the hate carrot under the noses of the church going religidiots and they did their complete and utter bidding, no matter how immoral or unethical it was. Hate has no conscience and that's what made it such a useful thing for the power elite.

Now that the rich and powerful had a nice pool of dumbed down, exhausted, and spiritually terrified sheep, they created the appropriate anti-heroes to enslave them even further.  Sarah Palin is the biggest chain around the neck of the dumbed down mules that ever existed. Everyone who wasn't smart enough for college or too lazy to educate themselves until they were, had their role model. She was the typical bad student, the quitter who was too lazy to focus on anything for too long, whether it was staying at one school long enough to actually get an education or finishing up her term as Governor of Alaska.

And she was the perfect tool of the rich because they recognized her greed and lack of ethics and morality as blood kin to their own empty souls. They knew all she cared about was the money and as long as she got rich she would spread as much hate and division as they wanted. Every time she said or did something completely stupid and idiotic, some paid talking head on TV or radio would portray it as a positive, as something that linked her to the "average" citizen.

And the dumb, fearful masses ate it up. No longer did they feel inadequate over their lack of education. It was now a positive to be stupid. No longer did they feel threatened by anyone who looked or believed differently. Bigotry and hate was back in style. And no longer did they realize how completely they were being used by the rich and powerful.

In a few decades Historians will look back on this time and shake their heads at people who took to the streets to demand insurance companies be allowed to abuse them and cheat them, who rose up as one voice to demand their air and water become filthy and unhealthy from lack of regulations, that their food risk poisoning them because corporations didn't believe they were worth spending money on for safety regulations to make sure it didn't.

They will look back in disgust at how easily they let the power elite gut Social Security and let the old and infirm die in the streets, how quickly America became a country filled with orphans begging on street corners, debtors prisons filled to capacity, and arms merchants who periodically lobbied for a new war to clear the streets of "rabble."

They will feel the nausea creeping into them as they study a culture that cared nothing for the less fortunate and worshipped the very masters who ended up destroying them. They will feel the same disgust any civilized person feels when they read about the Inquisition, about Hitler's death camps, about the collapse of the Roman Empire. They will feel this about the country that was once America and now was just another dead empire killed from the rot within.

And every time the Sarah Palins of the world, the Glenn Becks, the Rush Limbaughs, the Karl Roves open their mouths, they kick another clump of dirt over the greatness of a country that will continue to decline until it becomes just another example of what happens when the uneducated savages steal the keys and drive everyone into the ditch of ignorance and stupidty.

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What Wikileaks revealed about America

What the Wikileaks revealed about America and Americans:

1. The perception that most Americans are poorly educated morons was strengthened with the noise on hate radio and other propaganda media calling for treason charges against Assange. Let me explain this so even the dumbest teabagger can understand it. Only Americans can be tried for treason. The last time I checked, Assange was not an American, natural or otherwise. No matter what precedents were set by the CIA when they kidnapped and tortured citizens of other countries in secret prisons, Treason remains a crime committed by Americans against America.

2. Amazon.com will support the free speech rights of child-sex predators by continuing to sell their books even though they received all kinds of complaints. But let one whacked out loser by the name of Joe Lieberman whine about something he doesn't like, and all of a sudden Wikileaks' account gets cancelled. Cancelled, yeah. Same as my order with them got cancelled because I just didn't feel right buying books from a company that doesn't believe in free speech for anyone but child molestors. There's tons of book stores online selling the same books. I'm spending my money on them instead.

3. When you act like a goddamned banana republic and let the Supreme Court elect the President, you lose moral effectiveness in criticizing what other countries consider "Democracy." It was only a matter of time before Putin and others like him took a shot at that decision and used it as an example of why America is not free to choose its own leaders. And it won't be the last. That one biased, bought and paid for decision has come to symbolize to the rest of the world exactly why America no longer has any claims to a higher moral ground.

4. Spying on the UN. Oh Hillary, I'm so disappointed in you. I can think of a lot of reasons for wanting to steal someone's DNA but they all sound exactly like the reasons totalitarian governments want other people's DNA, such as setting them up for fake rape charges, planting evidence to incriminate innocent people, using undeclared children as blackmail. I could go on, but you get the picture. Someone was going to eventually get a nasty little cable in the mail explaining in great detail where such DNA would be planted if they refused to go along with the plan, weather it's to bomb Iran or find enough idiots who will sign on to fake WMD claims in countries like Iraq.

5. No matter how horrible the events revealed in the cables, no matter how much corruption and collusion and enrichment of petty demagogues they expose, American will care only about what they reveal about the Royal family. Yes, we ARE that shallow.

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What Wikileaks revealed about America

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All Hail The Poo-Flinging Masses

When Historians look back on this time, they will divide the causes and effects into neat little groups easily studied and defined. We can't see as well right now as they will because the flung poo is getting thick enough to affect our vision. And most of the time, we're too busy being useful idiots for our respective sides of the poo wars to take time to brush away some of the bigger chunks.

So we walk around half-blind and inflamed with some transitory passion that will one day die like a rotten fish beached on the shore. Think about it for a minute. All those personal obsessions in your life, those passions that brought you such painful bliss, are now stories you tell once too many times after a few drinks, as if to deny what once mattered so much is now drunken party mundaneness.

That will be us, our whole existence churned down to a bite of a tale too often told but never with the necessary insight to learn a damn thing from it. And future generations will consider themselves fortunate they didn't have to suffer through the Age Of Ignorance, as our time will be called, the time when entire populations allowed themselves to become a bunch of poo-flinging savages.

When I look at some of the people sharing my world, when I make the mistake of listening to them go on about what any sane person would consider voices in the head gone wild, I wonder if maybe there really isn't such a thing as evolution. After all, those who choose to believe in Creationism instead of Science have only to look in the mirror to see evolution does not exist in everyone. In their case, it definitely does not exist.

I really think sometimes we are going backwards instead of forward. Many of the craziest of the rightwingnuts want to take the country back to the 1950's or earlier because they think something was better then. They don't realize the only thing that was better then was their knees. And their teeth. They had real teeth then. Maybe that's what they really miss and think if they just move the country backwards a few decades, they could eat steak again without chopping it up into hamburger first.

But because they miss their teeth and because they see no proof of evolution when they look in the mirror, then they are useful tools for the greedy asshats of the world. The same people always show up in Congress after an election. They're like the uninvited wedding guests who sneak into the reception and eat all the shrimp before anyone else gets some on their plates, and then they grab the bride's butt on the way out the door clutching one of the good bottles of champagne.

This is who the American people elected this election, the shrimp-scarfing, champagne-chugging greedy asshats they threw out in the previous election. But they didn't recongize them for the same reason most people still see someone twenty years younger when they look in the mirror. They see what they want to see. They hear what they want to hear. Monkey see. Monkey do. Monkey fling poo at his/her own image in the mirror.

The same old asshats will kick the new ones to the curb soon. All that passion, all that enthusiasm, all that fervor, will become just plain old ordinary racist hate again when they go back to Dumbfuckistan with nothing but bitter drunken stories about the ultimate reality show called "Politics." They will avoid admitting they got fucked like a whole bunch of cheap, gullible whores who believed they really would get paid afterwards.

They'll get paid alright, just like the Fundie Christians got paid when they realized eight years later abortion was still legal, Gays and Liberals could still move in next door, and they couldn't burn people at the stake who refused to become Christians--no matter what they were promised for their vote.

They'll get paid just like the Teabaggers will get paid by being told to sit down and shut up as the corporately-owned Congress and their Lobbyist handlers explain to them that Wall Street and the Banksters are their new masters and they'd better bow deep if they want to come and play again next time.

And when they have to return home to their districts, they'll learn to duck when the poo comes flying at them from the angry mob stirred up by hate radio. But at the same time, they'll look at the rage, the anger, the outright hatred, the bigotry, the racism, the mean-spirited poo-flingers direct at them and wonder how they can channel it into something useful to get them elected once again.

And you know what? They'll find it because we're still earning our time in History as the Age of Ignorance, and each day we fill our lives with the finest poo we allow ourselves to swallow. They will have mountains of the crap to pick through.

Atheist Quote by godless_heathen
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All Hail The Poo-Flinging Masses