A lot of modern thinking as it relates to meditation is to sit somewhere and ohm until you reach a meditative state and can think about thinking about things.
I propose a new process: The Communion of Nestor Miranda.
The problem with thinking is the lower mind – the Monkey Mind (with apologies to Lon Milo DuQuette). The monkey mind sits there, chattering away. We mistake it for the actual mind. We think “My, I’m hungery” and we understand this thought comes from the highest level of consciousness. We form an idea in the abstract, hunger, and then we think about getting to the frige. We stand up, balance, walk over the kids gate, open the fridge, identify the colored container we use to code “week old cake” and decide we want cake.
We’ve done nothing important. The thought was purely from the monkey mind which overrules higher aspirations, we’ve raised it to our level and we pat ourselves on the back with the hand not holding the cake and think we’re solved a problem! We’ve done something!
I don’t advocate not eating, but maybe not cake. Not all the time anyway…
No, the trick to meditation is to satisfy the monkey mind so we can get some real thinking done.
How do I do it?
Have a cigar! The monkey mind will happily be satisfied with a token gesture, and sit quietly in the corner enjoying it’s treat. That’s when the real thinking can begin…
Now you know the secret of the Holy Communion of Nestor Miranda. Guard it well!
Filed under: android, books, DIY, technology | Tags: android, nook, Rooting, simpletouch, tablet
I have reloaded my nook simple touch about four times now. Some of it is very good, some of it isn’t so hot. The nook can be a $50 tablet in addition to being an e-reader, etc. If you combine it with a phone that supports tethering, it’s truly a neat piece to have. My one gripe is the android 2.1 OS on the device tends to seriously underperform. At first I thought it was the eink display and then I figured out it really is just that crashy. The nook was developed to be an e-reader and not much more.
So why root it? For one, it reads books really, really well. If you root it, you now have access to Google Books, Google Market, Amazon AppStore, Amazon Kindle Books, Kobo and just about anything else you could want. In addition to all that wonderful crap, you can install Google Reader, which weirdly enough doesn’t support offline reading, and whatever PDF viewer you want. The stock B&N one is pretty good, but I’ve found for older PDFs, Documents Easy Viewer is essential and also lets you view office documents in 16 shades of glorious gray.
Note that the process I used roughly followed the lifehacker article, except that I’ll link to the newest versions of things. You can follow the LH version, just keep in mind you’ll end up about one version behind everything. It was dated pretty much the moment it was written. You should seriously install dropbox first on your nook, it makes the rest of this much easier.
Before doing anything, sign in with your google account and register the device. You must also have a youtube account married to your google account. You will not be prompted after you root it to register and I haven’t figured out how to get to the java object controlling this process and this is why I reloaded my nook several times. You have been warned. Register the device first.
If you follow the lifehacker article, you have more customization with the nook because you’ll be using touchnooter. If you want to bang out this entire process in one flash but don’t mind having any customization, use SalichaNooter. Finally if you really want to hurt yourself, consider minimalnooter. You should read all three of those first posts to know what’s going to happen with each of those ROMs. They’re all fairly interrelated. I went the touchnooter route and that’s what this doc will cover but I ended up customizing it to SalichaNooter’s standard before even knowing about the other ROM. Oops. The big difference is Salicha’s ROM comes with the ADW theme out of box.
Before you do anything, update the firmware. (Current as of this writing). Throw the ZIP into the root directory of the nook when mounted to your PC and then unmount the nook and put it to sleep. It will reboot. You should be on 1.1.2. You will know if you got there because the display will be faster and wifi will actually work. You want wifi working first.
Step 1: Download the touchnooter rom. Use a high quality SD card (go buy one). If you’re using a mac or Linux do something like dd if=touchnooter of=/dev/sdb bs=1M and you windows guys are probably screwed.
The nook will derp around for about 10 minutes then it will turn off again. Remove the memory card.
Step 2: The nook will boot and prompt you to sign into google. You did configure wifi before you did this, right?
Step 3: Open up NookTouchTools. I map my right hand buttons to “options” and “back”. You can actually hit “options” from the menu bar up top but it tends to be glitchy and not display. I make my “n” button map to “home”. When you hit it, it will prompt you to use ADW Launcher or the B&N bar (I forget what it’s called). I set mine to the B&N bar. Observe the right hand side. You will very faintly see an arrow. This is ButtonSavior. Tapping it will always launch ADW from the “home” icon.
Step 4: Open NookColorTools, uncheck and recheck the “allow non market apps” checkbox. Not sure why but it gets screwy quickly if you don’t.
Step 5: Open YouTube, sign in (if prompted). For whatever reason until you sign in you can’t send apps to the nook from google play.
Step 6: Install the eink debug app from this thread. You have to register to see and download attachments. I prefer the regular one. This changes the screen to monochrome, which is really nice for reading text and scrolling it. This is important in google reader and opera.
Step 7: Install opera mobile. Not the one from the google market. Use that link, it goes to my dropbox. It will install Opera Mobile 12.0.2, which is the last version. Using the eink toggle gesture and opera you get that buttery smooth scrolling. The opera baked into the ROM is too old and does funky stuff. Alternative: Install Maxthon.
Step 8: Install vending.apk (google market) to enable updates. Again that’s the known-good version from my dropbox. You want updates.
That’s it. You now have a fully functioning nook tablet and ereader which will work with all the stock stuff (including in store lending) and also read email, read RSS feeds and view PDFs.
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Gamers are getting their panties in a bunch because of on disc DLC.
One word: Modchip.
This nominally goes back to the “protected content only screws legit consumers” vibe that the PC market has had since forever. In a lot of ways, the vibe has been PC only. The most recent example is the Diablo 3 news. Quite simply put: you can’t play diablo 3 except online. It’s not like it authenticates and disconnects, it wants you to always play online 100% of the time. Cracks are already out there to “fix” the game, but of course they’re illegal. More on the point the people who want to stay legit get screwed. I can’t play the game in the 45 minutes I’m on the train. I can’t play the game at the office when I’m in weird hours. I can’t play the game at the local burger joint while my kids terrorise the playground.
How does this relate to DLC?
Well it’s sort of an interesting thing, capcom is re-evaluating the on-disc DLC policy. Why?
Is it because they want to pay microsoft $10k to get a download posted? No…
Is it because they’re pulling a DICE and putting out their patches in DLC to avoid certification? No…
It’s because they realized if the pirates have the DLC on the disk, they can play the content. Yup, you read that article right. A fighting game with the content (key) not even released yet saw people using the content on xbox live.
It has nothing to do with consumer outrage and everything to do with squeezing every last dollar out of your wallet.
I had to update the About Page and put up contact information. I keep forgetting non-geeks don’t know about registration information.
I was doing my normal ride into work thing where I am reading the morning news or a book on my phone (soon to be replaced by a nook) and one of the pages I read is The Digital Ambler. I don’t know this guy personally and I forget where I got the link from. He’s got his head about where I have my head where he runs a blog (actually two if I remember correctly) where one side is mysticism and the other side is his personal life. I happen to only run one blog because at some point someone is going to link your blogs and it’s all for naught. I’m also fairly open about my thoughts on this stuff and love to naval gaze over beer.
Anyway, he mentions that he’s nominated for a versatile blogger award and my first thought was “Oh that’s cute” and I basked in the fond memory of the hotdog HTML editor and updating my blog by cat’ing a template to the index.html after I edited it. People would hand out little tags you’d put on your blogs and it was sort of a nice way of saying that someone approved of your work. This would later lead to trackback pings and web rings and such. Wonder who’s nominated?
- Camylleon’s Cave
- The Key to the Clavicula Solomonis
- The Grey Book of Runes
- CGA in a VGA World
- Beloved in Light
- skatologicalhumor
- The Difference Between Beauty and Fear
- Amaranthine
SAY WHUT?
I decided I better track down the nominee process quickly, and while poking around like an idiot I glanced into the spam folder on my phone and saw the The Digital Ambler himself (Polyphanes) did actually give me a heads up on the about page and the spam queue ate the request for approval.
I am officially a shithead, but you already knew that reading the blog.
That being said, I originally had mixed feelings on the issue. I’m sometimes a jerk, more often than not I overspeak my position on the blog just to get a reaction out of the internet, and my readership from Hogwarts thinks the politics and tech needs to be toned down, my Red Army followers think the magic and tech needs to go away, and my fellow Grey Beard UNIX Wizards think the magic and politics should go. Basically, no-one likes all of the blog which amuses me endlessly.
To further make this amusing to me personally, I don’t personally think I know that much. IT is all of standing on the shoulders of those who have gone before. Mystical thinking? Half the time I look back on my posts a month later and consider deleting them. Politics? When’s the last time anyone’s opinions mattered?
That being said, thanks for the nomination Polyphanes, I appreciate it.
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Filed under: DIY, E/N, Spirituality | Tags: cabalah, kabalah, lon milo duquette, MAgic, Naval Gazing
Yes recently the blog has been on what most people would call a jewish mysticism kick. I find as I get older I end up going through these periods where I think about things, then I think about how I think about things. What does the mirror see when it looks into itself? These rants are inspired by the format of The Whiskey Rant. It might not be right, but lets entertain the thought.
Eventually, we decide we need to understand the structure of how we think.
While I’ve played around quite a bit with philosophy, it’s lacking. There never has been any sort of thinking where man does not look at the universe and consider it’s parts. Eventually anyone who seriously puts any time into it comes to mysticism. I think it’s a travesty we don’t teach “The Mysteries” or even civics class. Somewhere, we ended up so politically correct that we couldn’t teach these things because of the fear of indoctrination. The worst part is, institutions of indoctrination (religious schools) don’t present things as mysteries anymore, they’re concerned with putting people onto the path of salvation or somesuch. Some people want the answers. Some people (me) want to learn modes of thinking to more clearly perceive things. This doesn’t say I’m right. This just means if you haven’t gone into any sort of classical thinking and ended up at occultism, give it a try.
People tend to take it too seriously, I think. The rabbis have been kibitzing about kabalah for literally ages and I think people have the right thinking for this problem: You can reduce the process of magical thinking down to “a very small shell script”. This is a particularly sticky wicket to the believer and a nail on the cross for people who would rather see spiritual thought written off entirely. The first google result will figure out any correlation you could possibly want. Want magic squares? We do that too! (Also CPAN whores – add internationalization to author names so you can credit this module).
But that’s not the point. We can literally rip out the values of entire languages in seconds now. In the case of that last CPAN module, we’re ripping out the values of languages which aren’t even formalized (Ethiopian). Why bother? It’s not about the numbers. It’s about the modes of thinking.
Modes of thinking? Yes. I recently read The Chicken Cabalah. It’s a typical DuQuette book where it’s written lightheartedly but more importantly the joke is occasionally on the reader. (Don’t worry, you’re let into the luls later). People talk about it being a useful introduction to cabalah. It’s not. What the book provides is a good introduction to the application of the modes of thought present in classical thinking. Specifically addressed are fundamental questions about identity. Identity? Identity is how we frame ourselves in reality. What is reality? Now we’re in the thick of it. (The dry, unentertaining version is the four worlds, but I suggest you read DuQuettes book for the humorous, playful version about reality being an armchair). They start out in a room full of chairs. They move up and they end up in a factory cutting out parts for a chair. They move up and they have the IKEA plans for a chair. They move up and they find… nothing. What does the notion of something to sit on look like?
This is really a neat model of thought, or I think it is at least.
More importantly, we have another interesting idea we can apply here – the physical world is going away. What does that mean? We’re losing the strong identity of things and we’re moving into a space where things don’t physically exist. The movies we watch are delivered digitally, “filmed” digitally in a computer, we watch them on screens we don’t own, and billions are fought over “rights” and “distribution” of something which doesn’t exist in terms of 1s and 0s. I don’t mean this to be an anti-capitolism rant. I strongly feel that artists should get paid something for their work. On the other hand, owning things keeps becoming more and more of an abstract concept. At what point do we get issued a food replicator and a laptop at birth? Probably around the time when Apple decides it makes more money selling you “media” than it does selling you hardware. The future looks amazing. It will be glorious, we return to the godhead. It will be our undoing as we indulge our fetishes. “Kurt Cobain, shotgun mouthwash, daily at 3pm ONLY ON FOXNEWS”.
We are forever parodies of ourselves – the mirror looks into the mirror. Science has been “finding the resolution of reality” with the large hadron collider for how long now but we still can’t put a number on the resolution of the spirit.
What do we do now? Today? Our torah is a blog. Our kabalah is ascii. Our holy script is whatever our default font is for the paragraph tag. Mine is courier new, 10 point. It was transmitted to our prophets at 9600N81.
Of course, this got me thinking about math, and what’s our new math? Maybe we are ready for new math. The old hebrew was written right to left, in one long line, which is pretty much the reason why people have been doing crosswords on pie plate liners ever since. What would the old rabbi have done? Would they have assigned a value to right to left? Every punctuation mark? Every space? Well, if we think yes, we find some interesting places to look for inspiration.
We think about the famous first verse in the bible: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth”. Running this through our electric rabbi, we have some real insights! “Kept in balance by the wisdom”, “Jesus Christ the Groom, I am that I am”, “The biggest douche in the universe” (not kidding). Well if we convert to ascii, and add up all the numbers, letters, whitespace and punctuation, we get 4808. What is 4808? In Hebrew notation: “And He Opened His Mouth In Blasphemy Against God, To Blaspheme His Name, And His Tabernacle, And Them That Dwell In Heaven”.
And that folks, is why I only use EBCDIC.
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Oh great all knowing powers of the internet…
I want an ebook reader, or a tablet. See, I find myself reading a lot on the 40 minute ride on the train to work. I don’t really want to whip out my laptop because I don’t really want someone to steal it and thus me being forced to shoot them several times. I have no doubt my MacBook Pro titanium will withstand bullets being titanium and all that but the Hackers style light up keyboard just wouldn’t look the same with all that blood in it. Plus I’m not sure you can hose them out.
Thusly I am left with the problem: I want an e-book reader, but I can’t find one I particularly like. I want something around 10″. I want something which reads PDF files well (this means none of these crap android 2.x devices with their retarded memory management). I would like to avoid the ipad thing since they’re hideously expensive and out of my price range. The ceiling is really the Kindle DX. For about the price of an XBOX, it’s a kindle with the e-ink display, but at $250 it’s too much to be spending on just a book reader and it should do tablet stuff like nicely check e-mail and render pages. I’m not into gaming, but I do watch videos on it. The HP TouchPad is probably the right pricepoint for this and I’m sorry I missed buying one.
Basically the problem is that I could have a laptop with a 13″ screen for the price of the kindle DX, and while the batteries wouldn’t last quite as long, it would do the job. I just want something that weighs less than a laptop and no keyboard.
Like this:
I quit ebay (GSI) last week. It was a tough decision. The whole problem was largely due to how they handled the merger. They reset everyone’s time off and basically screwed people who had been with the company far longer than me out of quite a bit of money by doing that. When the company (GSI) started, people were given guaranteed options and vesting. Ebay reset that when they bought us. They also rolled out a new policy where you don’t get paid for time off you don’t use. Basically, it looked like they were setting us up for layoffs. From a technical perspective, it started out with “We’ll make you our east coast datacenter!” Then it became “We’ll make you a colo with a back-haul!” Finally it turned into “We’ve given you a laughably small budget to do this, so just make sure your oracle stuff makes it over here”.
The writing was on the wall. It sucked. I loved the people, I thought the acquisition was going to be my ticket into ebay, and frankly after putting in a crapton of time over and above 40 hours a week, I really felt like we were getting dumped on. More on the point I had only been there a brief amount of time. What if I was one of the guys who was there eight years?
Well, turns out they quit too. In fact, everyone who really knew anything about the system quit. Theres still good people there, but the problem is they’re a scarce commodity. The bigger problem is that the backfill sucks. People know ebay didn’t give the remaining people a very good deal, so the talent isn’t coming along. Finally the worst problem is the customers themselves are packing up for greener pastures. Customers were with GSI because they weren’t ebay/amazon. I won’t go into details but suffice the say putting GSIs review on glassdoor.com on the front page of slashdot the day we were featured was the nail in the backfill coffin. For me personally, the nail came when – after working with the teams for several weeks to upgrade a core product failed – they announced “POP THE CORK, IT WORKS!”
We know it doesn’t work. I would have been happier if they just punched me in the dick. At some point you just have to say, “Help isn’t on the way”.
Needless to say I’m much happier at Comcast. They gave me a top end macbook pro (solid state 128GB drives are fucking fast) and while the commute sucks (although part of it is my inexperience in riding the trains), the facilities are much nicer and the people seem pretty solid. Have some highrez pics of philly from the cafeteria.
http://superuser.com/questions/35108/how-do-i-upgrade-to-snow-leopard-without-a-cd-drive
Mostly just notes. However, this is fantastic for upgrading the OS on any of the Macbooks where the owners either didn’t buy the DVD drive or it’s died forever ago.
On the other hand, I blame Apple for re-inventing the wheel. Why DMG?
Filed under: E/N, smoking, Spirituality | Tags: crowley, MAgic, Magick, theopasty
I’ve been taking notes on what I like and don’t like out of Michael Kraigs Modern Magick while at the same time reading Aaron Leich’s Secrets of Magical Grimoires. Aaron is an anthropologist and Michael Kraig speaks 10 different classical languages. Between the two of them it’s my favorite topics times 10. It’s a wonderful mix of psychology, classical thinking, mysticism and naval gazing. There’s literally enough material here to smoke all the cigars in hell and still have stuff to talk about.
I had written up the daily ritual (which I frankly get into and out of depending on how I feel) and mailed it out to a group of friends interested in this topic.
Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram & Kabbalistic Cross
KC:
Touch forehead – Ah-tah
Point down – Mahl-Koot
Right Shoulder – Vih-Gboo-Rah
Left Shoulder – Vih-Gdoo-lah
Fold Hands – Lih-oh-lahm Ah-menLBRP – this represents the wheel of the universe:
Face East – Pentagram – Yuh-Heh-Vavh-Heh
South – Pentagram – Ah-doh-nye
West – Pentagram – Eh-hah-yeh
North – Pentagram – Ah-Glah
Carry line into the east, completing the circle.Before Me: Rah-fay-el (God Heals)
Behind me: Gahb-Ray-El (Gods Stregnth)
Right hand: Mih-chai-el (Who is like God)
Left Hand: Ohr-Ree-El (God’s like or emination)
About me flames the pentagram, within the six rayed star
(About me flames the perfection of the elements, within me shines the light of the true god)KC…
Middle Pillar
Eh-heh-yah and see the light in the heavens (or crown)
Yud-heh-vahv-heh el-oh-heem – Neck
Yud-heh-vahv-heh el-oh-ah v’dah-aht – chest
Shah-dai El Chai – Genitals
Ah-doh-nye Ha-ahr-etz – feet
(middle piller riff – breathe while sending energy up and down one side of your body, front, back, right, left, wrapping around).KC, LBRP to close.
This of course generated more confusion than answers and I was asked to provide commentary. Where do we start? Commentary on this sort of thing is entirely personal and even things like godnames are hotly debated from blasphemy to objections on framework and entomology alone. The proof is in the pudding, so to speak. Literally. If it speaks to you and it works, then use it. To wit, you can’t move mountains, you can stack the die. Thusly, the commentary follows with the omission of the adressees:
We recently made prosperity candles. Someone was offered a full time position out of the blue. I got a six figure offer from Comcast which bought me out of ebay. Mostly this is commentary on the difference between Wiccian rituals and how I prefer to do things. This does not mean one way is right and the other way is wrong. The proper way to execute this is a hack – just do it.Step zero – YOU HAVE SOMETHING THAT WORKS. Wicca occupies low magic territory and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, I don’t feel like it’s the best screwdriver in the threads-of-fate drawer, so we make new screwdrivers as they suit us. I feel like the fundamentals of wicca are flat out wrong – “To the harm of none” simply refuses to acknowledge the zero sum universe. You got that full time position because someone else didn’t, etc.Alright so the question is “WTF is the daily ritual?” It’s a really long answer.
The problem I have with the wiccian version is you ask any of them the important questions and they have no idea. The important questions are “What is eko eko azarak?” and “who are the guardians of the quarters?” Basically questions about why they’re saying what they are saying – and they don’t know.If you read The Black Arts, eko eko azarak is flat out bullshit Gerald Gardener came up with:Sorcery has a tradition of “Barbarous names”. They’re traditionally riffs on godnames. So in most traditional magic which has the angelic name which rules the hour of the day, (http://www.renaissanceastrology.com/planetaryhoursarticle.html) and instead of mars, jupiter, etc you would have either the names of angels of the traditional greek/roman gods. Dee got the brilliant idea to mess around with the form of the name where an angel rules the day, but a variation of the angel name rules the hour (http://www.john007dee.com/1250tutor.html - ANGELORUM BONORUM 49). This is not entirely unheard of in grimiore magic and it serves two purposes – when should you do stuff and if you know which spirit you want to interact with you can chant the names until you’re in the appropriate mental state of focus and intent…So if you have no idea who you’re addressing with eko eko, you have no idea who rules what where for the quarters. So as not to spoil the ritual for you, it’s still all about intent. If you don’t feel strongly about it, it doesn’t matter.All of this sounds fucking gay, the bottom line is that we have a microscope which determines how much mystical crap we want to pack into the ritual. It’s not always useful to use an electron microscope to look for tadpoles, is the idea. Traditional heathenry only concerned itself with the phase of the moon. Wicca adds full and dark moons to that. Solomonic magic has the ruler of the day. Renascence magic adds the angel of the hour. If you’re saying “WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS” the answer is “yes”. The candle is green. Money is green. Basil is green. We made the candles on a day when Jupiter was in a waxing position (SEE WHAT I DID THAR?). The moon was waxing…What does this have ANYTHING to do with the reworked daily ritual? I wanted to come up with something extensible. Basically, idling the car in the driveway. You use the machines of magic without doing magic. Since magic is all about intent, WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE DOING? The idea is to do stuff and observe how we feel, then use the framework for spells, and use the observation about how we feel to validate the operation of the spell.The reading of the ritual is headers in italics, actions in font, names (or vibrations) in bold. To vibrate a name, you “sing” it per syllable and it’s written phonetically. To do it “correctly” it should feel like your head or heart is ringing. Pick a name and just say it while breathing out, or sing it, until you find a tone and breathing which seems to jive with you.The Kabbalistic Cross is therefor what we replace eko eko with. It’s the gateway to enter the mystical state and tell our brains ITS TIME FOR MAGIC. (If anyone wants to know, it’s Matthew 6:13 in Hebrew. Why Matthew 6:13? A better question is “Why did Jesus pray?”).The Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram is stolen out and out from Crowley (http://hermetic.com/crowley/libers/lib6.html). It does two things – it prepares the space as a “Clean” space and it serves to link us to the divine for part 1. The divine is the sum of the universe. If we subscribe to the idea of the Ain Soph, the unknowable god, the universe was created by his word and therefor we cannot understand him with names or concepts in this universe. To call the names of god in each corner is to acknowledge the sum of creation as the entire universe. The names: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Judaism The circle itself represents the zodiac and therefor you’re literally including or excluding forces from your universe when you stand in the circle.Don’t like it? The guys over at http://www.myoccultcircle.com/ are just sweeping the floor and breathing with each sweep of the broom. So long as the intent is “clean”, that’s about all that’s required.So then why the names of the angels? In short because the universe defines how we relate to god, the angels are how the universe relates to us. The traditional role of angels is to act as lawyers in the court of god, or the traditional role of spirits is to effect change in forces just out of your control. You could substitute names of familiar spirits, if you wanted, or names of different gods. Frankly this is the part of the ritual I am least comfortable with, and it’s a holdover of the idea that we can’t know god, but we have the authority to command spirits or fates, so what gives us the authority?Finally the kabbalistic cross again – we’re separating the cleaning from the operation itself.The middle pillar some people will probably recognize, it’s walking the chakras from yoga. It’s perfectly serviceable as either a prelude to magic or simply filling in the space the heart of the ritual would occupy. Me being an idiot lost where this came from and therefor what the hebrew expands to.From there, LBRP to close and go.
Filed under: culture, E/N, politics, Spirituality | Tags: Abotion, Democrats, Fox News, Gays, GOP, Huffington Post, Marriage, politics, Religion, Republicans, Rights
More and more I’ve been seeing posts about “The GOPs War on Women”. Which is sort of funny because gays have less rights than women at the moment and if you’re a gay woman, god help you. Generally it goes something like “Limbaugh said something, look at it!” and it’s a video of Rush or someone saying something inflammatory. I usually just post back the Bill Maher video.
But, something more recently dawned on me. People don’t get it. People, if they bother to respond at all to the Maher video, usually defend it with “oh but it’s humor”. On the face of it, Rush too hosts a program which is just humor, or just commentary. The issue goes a little bit deeper than this, it’s not that the GOP or the Republicans or the Democrats have a war on women, it’s that you wouldn’t say these things in the workplace. (I actually had someone yell at me for posting the Maher video to their page in response because they did watch it at work, with the volume up, completely ignoring the warning in the first 5 seconds). This isn’t particularly about a “war on women”, from any particular side, this is about the permissiveness and moral decrepitude of the average voter. I wouldn’t make a racist joke at work anymore than I would make a joke about a woman at work. If you wouldn’t make the joke at work, why is it then OK to make these jokes about women from either political party? Call misogyny as misogyny and realize these are two sides of the same coin. This means both parties engage in this sort of things.
On the issue of gay rights it actually is even more subtle. The Republicans are the traditional boogeymen of gay rights, but has a Democrat President actually made gay marriage legal? So much anger and noise is invested in making a boogeyman for people to direct their rage towards that no-one has noticed the Democrats have done absolutely nothing for the gay rights issue. The best we’ve come up with is moving it to a states rights issue. This is a band-aide at best because we’ve otherwise codified the idea of marriage at the federal level (tax code). Really the only politician who has carried the Gay Marriage idea to the logical conclusion as it stands today is Ron Paul. If we got rid of the tax code, it really would be a states rights issue. This is the point of the entire rant though – neither party has worked to actually affirm or deny gay rights at the federal level.
On the idea of religious freedom for those of us who roll our own theology, this is another great place to point out the Democrats doing nothing for us. The Democrats have taken the separation of church and state to the point where any showing of religion is treated poorly. By the same token, the Republicans have embraced religion, but it’s usually ascribed as “Christianity”. Funny thing is though, three decades ago it was Catholicism. Now it’s “Mainsteam Christianity”. Now they’re talking about running a Mormon, and the only people who seem to have noticed he’s a Mormon are the Democrats. In terms of progressive religion, the Republicans are more open about discussing theology than the Democrats. You would think the party who was offended by the G word (God) would have already helped out with the other G word (gays) but when it comes time to put their money where their mouth is, it hasn’t happened. Instead they’re happy to accuse other people of being religiously motivated, but then they can’t execute when they’re supposedly “free” from such hangups.
The biggest problem here – a government which doesn’t want to acknowledge the divine – is that laws become inherently secular. What secular states have we seen in the past? The south before the civil war. World War 2 Germany. Can we cite any examples of states which allow for religion without being religious? Sweden comes to mind. It’s possible to find a middle ground here, but it’s also possible to be too far right or left. To be too far right subscribes to religious dogma and things would probably look like the Middle East, and to be too liberal results in comments from politicians comparing women to animals. Of course they’re animals – if you work from a worldview that there’s nothing particularly special about humans then we’re just particularly bald apes. The middle ground is to acknowledge that people are religious without espousing a religion. We can’t do that if we vote for the party that doesn’t talk about religion at all. (Actually this is the paintbrush of the Democrat Smear Machine. Don’t talk about religion so that anyone who even listens to Dishwalla’s “Counting Blue Cars” can be questioned).
On that theme of acknowledging things for what they are, we must also seek to understand things completely. A frightening number of people simply didn’t read the recent Georgia abortion law proposal about transvaginal ultrasounds. Instead, they reacted to a soundbite or the hilariously bad Huffington Post op ed on an op ed. “This person said women are animals!” isn’t thinking about the path this person took to get there, it’s simply an animal reaction to a comment without realizing that the apex of subscribing to evolution and denying the divine is that people are ultimately just very clever animals. This is where we know where people are married with kids, or pregnant. The unmarried, reactionist people operating on an animal level say “I wouldn’t want that in me!” But this is really the point. This medical tool didn’t spring gestalt from the pages of the proposed bill, whirring and throbbing veins intact. This medical tool (a transvaginal ultrasound device) has a legitimate purpose in pregnancy and it’s used by doctors all the time for pregnancy situations which might require surgery. What is abortion if not surgery? Do you really want the doctor grabbing around in there blind?
This previous paragraph is mostly for naught. If anyone had actually read the proposal, they would have seen the text included an opt out for this particular part of the procedure provided there was not a medical necessity to use the device for the protection of the mother during the course of the procedure. You can read HB 954 here. Also included was the objection that anesthesia drove the cost of the abortion up out of reach of “low income unprivileged women”. Lets think about that for a moment – why anesthesia? Because doctors who perform fetal surgery during and after the 2nd trimester know the fetus feels pain and that it will abort if it’s not anesthetized. So think about that, we’re performing abortions on fetuses, who we know from the medical establishment feel pain. Just because you can’t hear or see the pain doesn’t make it any more right than it wouldn’t be murder if I taped your mouth shut and dumped gasoline all over you. Why didn’t anyone bring this up? Because to acknowledge that the fetus feels pain and should be anesthetized because it’s the decent thing to do also acknowledges that the fetus is a person who has rights and we should be decent to our fellow people. But you can’t say that. We would rather call it a child in surgery and a fetus in an abortion setting so we can save a few dollars.
How do we fix this?
The average American voter won’t read the bills. Why anyone would participate in the political process without actually reading the results of the process is beyond me. How do we assess the performance of the governance of the state without reading the laws and proposals? To fix this situation, people need to actually start reading house bills and proposals rather than reading Fox News and Huffington Post. It’s fine to use them as a jumping off point, but half the things posted to Huffpo, for instance, wouldn’t pass muster on Wikipedia. If your source is an “anonymous doctor” and the blog “deletes stupid comments”, not only are you not getting a balanced discussion, but you’re not getting an article anyone would take seriously. Why would you base your political opinions on that?
Read the house bills. Read the proposals. Finally, remember that politicians should be judged both on what they are doing but also on what they’re not doing.
