Good God!

Funny the things that inspire you or make you think. I was just sitting here watching Family Guy, the one where Brian meets an atheist girl, and he identifies himself as an atheist as well. My thoughts, elongated, came out to something like: oh, I appreciate that joke, because I can relate to it, because there just aren't many people out there who think the way I think. And then I thought, but is that the way I think? I'm not even sure sometimes.

Being an atheist has always struck me as kind of a hard-line position to take. Not that there's anything wrong with it, of course, but do I want to take that kind of stand? Then again, agnostics tend to strike me as wishy-washy (though not always--Bill Maher, for instance, is the first one to admit that he doesn't know if there is a God or not, but he is far from ambivalent on the matter). And then again, does it matter how anyone else perceives the matter, or what they believe? No, it doesn't, and it shouldn't, at least not in the universal sense. Ultimately, what matters to me is how I feel about it. Now, most people who know me at all know that I tend to have strong opinions about almost everything, and strong opinions are (for me, at least) representative of strong belief. This is one thing, though, that I don't feel strongly about one way or another, at least in some aspects.

I'm a big fan of Darwinism, social and otherwise, and I typically allow science to inform my beliefs, on account of the empirical evidence and all that stuff. Most science-type people tend towards atheism, but I for one am of the belief that and understanding of and agreement with science does not necessarily preclude the existence of God, or some sort of higher being. Frankly, though, I think I am in the same camp as Mr. Maher. I just don't know. I will say this, though. I think that there is some sort of power at work in the universe, one that dispenses karma with some degree of accuracy. More to the point, I very much do not care for the God of any belief system which espouses bigotry, intolerance, violence, and hate. If there is a God, and it is the God of such a religion, that is a God that I will cheerfully denounce. Of course, I can do without most religions anyway. Any good God would be more interested in people just being cool to each other than in all of those people dividing up into groups and fighting each other until they're all dead. Unfortunately, to look at the world as it exists today, it is difficult to conclude anything other than that there is no God, or if there is, he/she is either very incompetent or simply doesn't care (credit me not for that assessment, but I do buy the argument).

Interesting...

Coming Up Empty

I know, right? Two posts in one day...amazing. Or something. Well, I was just thinking...I was reading Ada's blog. She used to be Becky, my ex, in another life. We've been off-again, on-again friends in the couple years since then, and we really ought to be much more on-again. We don't see eye-to-eye per se, and we're not really the same kind of person, but we understand each other. That is to say, I think I understand her reasonably well, at least as much as she'll let me, and I know she understands me better than all but maybe one or two people, maybe even better than I understand myself.

Anyway, I was reading her blog, and I was noticing how different from mine her writing style is. We both fancy ourselves writers in some way, and we both have a knack, but that's about it for similarities. She writes in a disjointed sort of way, but it is poetic just the same. It's got kind of a stream-of-consciousness sort of feel to it at times. It has a certain understated quality to it, whatever that means anyway. Whatever she says, it's pretty, even if it's ugly. You get that?

My writing? It's not necessarily ugly, so to speak. It's just very utilitarian. It gets the job done. There is structure, maybe overly so. I don't know another way to write. There is no poetry to it. I suspect that, for all of my talents with the English language, I just lack the requisite tortured-soul aspect of your more artistic sorts of writers. Hm...perhaps that is the reason I don't often go into more personal territory when I write a blog? Someone like Ada, she has a legitimate and personal beef with the world, or with her maker, however she chooses to characterize it. Me? Well, I've had a pretty good and typical sort of life to this point, though I've largely chosen to live it atypically in my own ways. Nevertheless, I haven't really had any undue hardship or anything like that. Not saying that I want any of that, either, but I wonder if my reasonably good life has inhibited my writing in some way. Certainly, it limits what I can talk about here. If I complain about my life, it's just some guy whining. Not that I want to complain anyway...I'm happy with my life, and with the great majority of the things that have happened in it. I hope I don't just have low standards for what makes me happy. So, I talk about politics and current events and the media, a bit of philosophy and shots at religion and stupid people, with a fair mix of what I perceive to be humor intertwined throughout it all. That's fine, and it seems to work, but sometimes...I wonder if there's something I'm missing.

Just As Bad

I seem to keep losing large chunks of time here. I'm not intentionally trying to go entire weeks without posting a blog, things just kinda keep coming up, you know? Especially with the holidays...argh, I hate this time of year. But you already knew that, right?

You know something else? We are the worst generation, probably ever. I'm not saying every single one of us on a personal level, but the vast majority of us, when considered collectively. You know how I know this? Jon Stewart has a job, that's how I know. I mean, a lot of people in this generation like Jon Stewart. Even I like Jon Stewart, though I don't watch his show with any regularity. But I know what he stands for, and I like it. Much has already been said of the ironic truth that most people of this generation get their news from a "fake" news show (and I put fake in air quotations because it claims to be fake, yet is in fact much more real than any other news show out there), and it was much ballyhooed (wow, did I just use that word? How old am I?) when it was revealed that Mr. Stewart was the most trusted television news anchor in the country. So, because of this phenomenon of sorts, the previous generation has classified us as the worst generation. I mean, we get our news from a comedian, how serious can we be about anything? But that takes me to...no, you know what? Fuck that. The previous generation, now they ARE the worst generation, because they are the ones who created an environment in which we didn't trust anyone from their generation, be it a news anchor, a politician, a teacher, or our own fucking parents.

Look at the world they created. What a fucking mess. I'm not saying that our generation is going to do any better. Hell, we'll probably make it worse, since about all most of us can do is vacuously watch The Hills and download another app to our iPhone and make sweet, sweet love to Sarah Jessica Parker in our minds. Even at that, I'd like to believe that makes us better, or at least more harmless than the previous generations, who were better known for doing things like joining the KKK or beating brown people to death with a cross or whatever they did for fun back in the day. But does it make us better? If we were useless in a quiet way, then maybe I could buy that. Unfortunately, most of us are useless in the loudest and most obnoxious way we can come up with, and most of us have this bizarre and overwhelming desire to try to project our choice of lifestyle onto anybody within a four thousand mile radius. I wouldn't say that's better than anything...but maybe it's just as bad.

A Scary Reality

I hate winter. If you know me, I'm sure you know this already. I know, it's technically only been winter for like a day, but it's been cold for, what, a month now? And it is just too damn much. I would even be okay with the cold to a degree if it didn't decide also to snow just enough to be irritating for something like four straight days. For all the talk about global warming, we had an awfully mild summer, and last winter was colder than usual...just saying.

My thinking is, shouldn't we be able to control the weather by now? I mean, it's almost 2010. And if not control it, then at least block it somehow. Haven't you seen all those old science-fiction things from years and years ago? They all showed this century with flying cars and we've terraformed Mars and all that. Those are the big ones, that's not a new observation or anything. But doesn't the weather always seem to be perfect? I'm not counting ones that show this as a dystopian future, even though it kind of turned out that way. We're still functional enough that we should be living in bio-domes or something, at least. I really hope that's not too far off, because I don't know how many more winters I can take, and Audrey doesn't want to move south. Are any of our science-type-people even working on this? I really don't know, but if they're not, we need to be funding that shit.

Everyone hates bad drivers. Thing is, a lot of people who hate bad drivers don't realize that they are, in fact, bad drivers themselves. Another thing is, there are bad drivers in all places at all times, but they really come out of the woodwork this time of year. Which is great, because it allows people to meet other people like themselves! And by that I mean, it allows them to drive like crazy people and smash their cars into others who are also driving like crazy people. And by that I mean, it allows them to smash their cars into perfectly good drivers who are just doing exactly what they're supposed to be doing on the road and trying to avoid the terrible drivers, which is an effort in futility, because they're just everywhere.

Case in point: Saturday night, I was driving home from the flea market, and Rick was with me. We're in the left turn lane to pull out onto 63. The light turns green, the line of cars starts on through the intersection. To our right, a car with New York license plates is in the center lane, which is intended to go straight. Maybe straight means something different in New York, because this fellow decided he was going to turn left anyway and force his way into the left-turning lane IN THE MIDDLE OF THE INTERSECTION, whether there was somebody else already there or not. Now, I've never been to New York, and I have no desire to ever go there, and part of the reason for that is because I strongly suspect that, upon encountering a New Yorker, my initial reaction would be to KILL IT. But wait, it gets better! The New York driver successfully forced his way into our lane a couple cars in front of mine, and we proceeded without incident through the next light. But at the light after that, the New York driver did it again! He turned right from the center lane! Nevermind that there was traffic in that lane already, he was damn well gonna go wherever he wanted! I mean, c'mon, we're trying to have a civilization here, right? If we can't even manage to drive in the correct lane, then this society is just going to collapse in on itself.

That wasn't even the end of it! Not twenty minutes later, we're merging onto 275 from 71, only to encounter one of those big ol' trucks carrying eight or ten cars behind it. This genius is barreling down the highway at about 75 mph (mind you, the speed limit here is 65 for normal cars, and 55 for trucks carrying that much weight). Oh, but that's not all! He's swerving enough that once I've merged, I stay put in the right lane and slow down to let him get by me, because I do not want this guy driving behind me at all. And on top of all this, HE DOESN'T HAVE HIS LIGHTS ON. This is relevant because it's dark, it's snowing/raining, and visibility is for shit anyway. Are people really this stupid? Are people really this incompetent? I would say it's a scary thought, but it's not just a thought. It's a reality. Ostensibly, this is what natural selection is for, to weed out these genetic defectives so that they can no longer pollute the gene pool. But I can go on about that for days, and this is plenty long for now, so if I remember, I'll touch on that later. Damn.

Epic

Is anybody else here wondering why we can't get any real climate-change legislation in this country? Is anybody else wanting to know what the goddamn holdup is with the alleged health-care reform? Well, wonder no more, for I have the answer, and I'm just gonna come right out and say it. The culprit is religion.

What's that, you say? How can religion be to blame for these problems? Why, it's quite obvious, really. Religions all but explicitly tell their adherents to have faith. Faith, by definition, requires believing something with no evidence to back up that belief. Religious folk have faith in spades, so much so that it permeates their thinking in non-religious issues, to the detriment of us all. Faith is not necessary to believe that, say, Belgium exists. There is empirical evidence to back it up, in case you ever find yourself doubting it. No, you only need faith in order to believe something that is either not provable or not true in the first place. Faith might be in order if you wish to believe that we are not emitting greenhouse gases left and right, or that the polar icecaps are not shrinking, or that we won't all be underwater before our lifespan comes to an end. There is all sorts of evidence that these things are true, so if you wish not to believe it all, just have faith that it's all a lie perpetrated by Al Gore! Ignore all the facts and numbers and scientific mumbo-jumbo! You know it's wrong, that's what's important.

Sure, the statistics tell us that 18,000 people die every year in this country because they don't have health insurance. Sure the statistics tell us that untold thousands of people who do have health insurance still go bankrupt trying to pay for long-term health care that their insurance company makes up some bizarre reason not to pay for. Sure, we can see that every single other industrialized country in the world has socialized medicine and doesn't have these problems. But it's just not right for the people of this country. Why is health care of this sort not right for the people of the United States? We don't know, we just have faith that it's not right. It's everyone else who's got it wrong, not us.

You see what happens when you allow faith to poison your rationale? And that's not a slippery slope fallacy there, folks. That is exactly the way things work in this country. We let our media get away with pretending there are two sides to these issues: either we are experiencing global warming, or we're not. There aren't two sides to it. The facts say that the climate is changing. Either we need to reform the health care system or we don't. There aren't two sides to that, either. All evidence shows that it has to be fixed, and quickly. Faith is not a position in an argument, it is an obfuscation of the truth.

In today's world, we ridicule people like those who deny the Holocaust. Why? Because we have massive evidence that it took place. It's absurd to argue otherwise, yet some people do, through the strange bedfellows combination of manipulated "facts" and the faith part of the equation. Fifty years down the road, we'll be lumping those who deny climate change and the need for socialized medicine and these birther lunatics into the same category. But why wait for decades? These people are dragging down the civilization we are attempting to have right now! So...why wait?

Smack

I'm going the miscellaneous route again today, and I'll be starting with this piece that I happened across today:

http://rawstory.com/2009/12/fox-news-cutting-minimum-wage-better-workers/

The long and short of that is that someone on Fox News suggested that lowering or removing minimum wage restrictions would somehow be better for workers. The line of thinking there seems to be that lower wages would allow companies to hire more workers. Okay, yes, it would allow them to do this if they so chose. But no company actually would hire more workers if minimum wages were reduced or removed. They would simply continue to use the bare minimum number of people to run day-to-day operations, and it would cost them even less. I'm talking about your big retail companies, of course, your Wal-Mart's and your McDonald's and other such places. Minimum wages don't even exist in places where you have to wear a suit and tie to work, so it wouldn't make a lick of difference there. So you would have your Wal-Mart's and McDonald's paying their already dirt-poor employees even less, and bringing in no additional help to alleviate the strain these people work under because they are understaffed because those companies won't chop a few bucks off of their millionaire and billionaire executives' payrolls to make those folks just a little less miserable at their job. But wait, I've got more on this. People who make minimum wage can't exist on that kind of pay. If you work full-time and make the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, you alone can't pay for rent and groceries and electricity and a phone and a car and gas and car insurance, all of which are pretty well essential in today's world. You have to have at least one roommate, or a spouse, or someone to share the bills with. And even then, you won't exactly be living a luxurious life. Clearly, minimum wage is, if anything, too low. So, if you take away minimum wage, you theoretically could have a situation in which companies could hire more employees (they wouldn't), which would only result in more people making less than their already non-liveable wages. Now, what kind of sense does that make?

Next up, we've got this story coming from right here in the Cincinnati area that's got people all up-in-arms, as people are wont to get. It was discovered that some workers in a church-run daycare center had given small doses of melatonin to some children who were overly energetic during nap-time. Of course, the knee-jerk reaction of almost everyone to this news was to scream for the heads of those workers. Bullshit, I say. Sometimes, kids are little bastards who need to be calmed down. It's not as though the kids were given hard drugs or anything. Melatonin occurs naturally in the body anyway; it's just a damn supplement. Now yes, common sense says that the supervisors at the daycare should have maybe asked the parents of these kids if they would permit something like this to settle the kids down during nap-time. At the same time, though, let's be perfectly frank. This is not that big of a deal. This is not something worth getting pissed off about. You slap the daycare workers on the wrist, tell them to ask before they do something like that again, they apologize, apologies are accepted, end of story. Is that how it's going to go down? You better believe it's not! Because people like nothing better than to get all indignant about things that aren't worth getting indignant about.

Now, ain't that fun?

On An Unrelated Note

Apologies, dear readers (if there are any of you), for my somewhat extended absence from this blog. I make no excuses; I have been feeling lazy (more than usual), uninspired (more than usual), and I've been losing my train of thought (surprise, also more than usual). I don't know what the deal is, and I don't usually talk about what's going on in my daily or personal life here. I don't intend for it to be that kind of blog, at least generally speaking. That said, I've got a few things for this one, none of which pertain to each other. Mostly, they're just assorted ruminations whilst I try to get my head on straight.

Have you ever seen Ken Broo? He's the sports guy on channel 5 (in Cincinnati). Dude, that guy is creepy-looking! Just saying...

In the category of things that are in the news and shouldn't be: the girl on the damn box of raisins. What is it, SunMaid, something like that? Why is it news that the company changed its image by updating her appearance? Oh, right, I've got it! It isn't news! That's exactly why it's in the news! Yeah, we have the shittiest media ever in this country.

Also in the category of things that are in the news and shouldn't be: the Salahis. You know, the people who gate-crashed the White House during a party. That should have been news, yes, but only for about a day, and maybe a follow-up a few days later with the head of the Secret Service or whatever. But I've been hearing about this seemingly every day for something like three weeks now. That's overkill, folks.

In the category of things on TV that I actually like: surprise, it's the Food Network! That actually shouldn't be a surprise, since I love food. Seriously! Iron Chef and Chopped are super entertaining. Almost makes me want to learn to cook. Almost.

In the category of things that happen unexpectedly: today, I happened to run into an old teacher of mine from way back in elementary school, Mrs. Sebastian. Great freaking teacher, she ran the section for advanced kids, so she knew both Jesse and myself well. She had such an outside-the-box approach to teaching, and I give her massive amounts of credit for the appreciation I have had for learning ever since. The encounter got me thinking about what a difficult thing it is to be a great teacher, and how unappreciated the efforts often go. I made sure to let Mrs. Sebastian know that I, for one, was appreciative of all that she had contributed to her classrooms. On that note, I implore you, kind reader, to go and track down some teacher or professor you've had who really made a difference in your life, one who helped to make you a better and smarter person, and thank them. They deserve it, and it'll probably be the nicest thing they've heard all year. Teachers have such a thankless job, being stuck somewhere in the black hole between doing their best to teach their students the things that really matter, while trying to balance this with the ridiculous teach-to-the-test approach that the schools in this country have adopted. It's not a pleasant place to be, and too few can manage to do both in an effective way. So please, let one of them know that their efforts are not in vain.

And finally, in the category of things that piss me off: Christmas lights. Fuck Christmas lights. If you put up Christmas lights, congratulations, you are the victim of a conspiracy perpetrated by the light bulb manufacturers and the electric companies. Don't you know that these people invented Christmas lights and urged you to out-do your neighbors by putting them up sometime around Labor Day in order to line the pockets of the executives at Duke Energy and the like? Seriously, the lights are obnoxious and ugly and they waste electricity in the name of vanity (excuse me while I suppress a combination laugh/snort of disgust). Turn them off.

Thank you, that is all for now.

Words

Well, I'm certainly not going to shy away from commenting on President Obama's speech at West Point that was just completed regarding the war in Afghanistan, and for once I'm doing it in a timely manner, i.e. now.

First, the caveats. People aren't comparing this war to the war in Vietnam for any of the reasons Mr. Obama mentioned. The comparison there is primarily based on the (probably correct) belief that the war in Afghanistan, like the one in Vietnam, is not a winnable one, as well as it being one that seems likely to drag on far longer than it should. Mr. Obama's remarks there ought to be dismissed outright, as they are not valid.

It was a poor approach to attempt to placate both sides of this debate. Trying to appease both hawks and doves only results in nobody coming away from it happy. That's not to say that taking the middle ground is a bad idea, but taking a defensive stance as he did only serves to enhance the perception that both sides are attacking your position.

There were positives, of course. It continues to be refreshing to have a President who can speak intelligently and articulately, for one. However, the old axiom that public speaking is ten percent what you say and ninety percent how you say it does not hold true in all cases, and it does not here. There absolutely had to be considerable substance in Mr. Obama's words. His decision to cast himself as a reluctant warrior was a smart one, as it provides considerable evidence that he is doing what he truly feels needs to be done to resolve the situation favorably for everyone involved. I applaud his willingness to embrace a difficult position...but for his own good, he'd better be right about it. Mr. Obama repeatedly stated that he did not make the decision lightly to deploy a further thirty thousand troops to Afghanistan, and I'm sure he didn't. That's a damn lot of troops to send over there, though I understand the rationale. Mr. Obama wants to trade off more troops now in order to get all of them out sooner. On paper, that's okay, it makes a certain amount of sense, given the current situation in Afghanistan. Both Mr. Obama and the American people, however, need to realize that this war is not going to be won with thirty thousand more troops and eighteen more months. Whether we leave now or whether we leave in July 2011, Afghanistan is likely going to devolve back into some level of chaos once it happens. That's not cynicism, that's just reality. No nation has ever been stabilized by an invading force. Relative stability always comes from within, and it will take some time for Afghanistan to stabilize itself, and that stability might not take a form that we like. It might be militaristic, it might be repressive, it might fall under Sharia law. We're just going to have to deal with it, though. It's not our place to impose our will on other people. I hope we can all realize that.

In summation, it certainly was not the political suicide it could have been. Nobody is going to be thrilled with the approach Mr. Obama took right now. For my part, I'm largely reserving judgment on the matter. I'm not in favor of the United States having troops anywhere else in the world, and I'm not crazy about committing even more troops to what is essentially a losing battle. However, it at least comes with a timeline for getting them all out of there. If you're going to get them all out, I don't exactly see the upside to sending a lot more over there first, but I guess that's why he's the President and I am merely a humble blogger.