Yes, Journal,

it's been a while. If Future Self is reading this, then he might be asking, why? Why did you shut off the treadmill and park yr. keister on the couch for more than two months, eating delicious donuts and drinking expensive forms of coffee?

Part of it was the exasperating prospect of trying to keep up with all the bloggable news - it's a Shit Storm, allright, and only the most dedicated of reporters will venture out into it on camera, shouting futile weather-truisms into their microphones while expensive waterproof parkas slap and flutter around their jaws.

I return because my prof in Writing Seminar for Majors, and to a lesser degree my sister, reminded me that we learn by doing. A gross Tonne of writing will be required of me this semester, and I must get the juices flowing again. Time to plug the treadmill back in and start sweating. Ruri's desktop has been recast, I am living in a new abode (equipped with wireless Internets and 48-inch TeeVee, the techie equivalent of a split morphine/caffine IV drip), and mum supports my plan of moving to Ireland and working for Apple when all this school nonsense is over with.

Blammo! Back into the Life.

Extremely Strange ad

of the day: Microsoft's web based XP Media Version flash ad, which claims, among other things, that "It will make your teeth whiter."

's True.

I'm sure the transcript

will be available somewhere online, but I had to get this down before it left my head.

In a report on ABC News, Bob Woodruf is exploring the parts of North Korea that North Korea wants him to see. In the capital of Pyongyang there is a large school for young children which lavishes them with money and attention, what few fruits of Kim Jong-Il's retarded economy can be directed their way.

The kids put on a remarkable music and dance performance for visiting dignitaries, and Woodruf ends his broadcast with something along the lines of, "It's remarkable what children can learn when the state is willing to teach them."

This has some interesting implications, and they cut both ways. On the one hand, there is clear evidence that a well-funded state standardised educational system benefits children, adults, and society. If every citizen were able to read and write coherently, and were fluent in not only the language of math and science but of art and music as well, is there any doubt that all of America would be richer in ways money cannot count? On the other, only the most careful monitoring by it's populace can keep the government from teaching it's own revised history, as the abuses of the governmental monopoly on telecommunications that North Korea so adeptly demonstrates.

Fascinating bits like this are mainly found on ABC, although their coverage of Jesus is second only to the Cornerstone Network and tends to irritate me. I particularly liked the bit about hand-fishing being made legal again in rednecked bits of the nation if only for Charlie Gibson's deadpan one-word response after the peice ended: "Okay."

I find myself

pining for the end of our world. Particularly after a bad day on the bus, full of smelly noisy freaks who yell into their cell phones then yell at strangers about what they were yelling about before. The GODDAMN ENDLESS MINDLESS THUMPING of the downstair's neighboor's stereo. My German teacher asked us why we enjoy camping. "Nich so viele leben" was my reply- "Not so many people."

My inner Destroyer longs for a semi-lawless wasteland of abandoned cars and looted store fronts. I'm even fine with being lost to the Die Off that some have posited will by necessity come with the end of cheap fuel. Being aware of both the remarkable damage we're doing to our planet and the near-total apathy we feel towards it, my mind is peirced by a constant ache, and perhaps the only cure for such pain is for the cause - what we so pompusly call Western Civilisation - to be removed.

Right now that part of me is ascendant. Every day that passes I long intensely to stand amongst the rubble of America. Tyler Durden leaps to mind;

In the future I see, you're stalking elk through the deep forest canyon that surrounds the ruins of Rockefeller Center.

I feel a little

used now. The Fam and I had gone to see Star Bores Episode 3: Revenge of the Pith (-y Dialogue). It's the least sucky suck of the three sucks, but that still implies an unfortunate degree of suckage. Basicaly, mum fell asleep twice and we all laughed and cringed whenever a character talked. Every time they started talking, in fact, I found myself waiting for them to stop. And I kept hoping, against all evidence and past experience, that it wouldn't turn out to be a complete disaster.

It is. But the worst moment came when I caught a commercial for Burger King that featured new Star Wars merchandise in the kiddie meals. I realised then, as I suspected all along, that the new movies weren't really about the story - you could sum up the plot of all three in a fortune cookie - but about the Merch. The bulk of Lucas's profits won't come from theater tickets, but from cross promotions and plastic figurine sales, from an epic sort of exploitation. And I gave my money to the machine responsible, believing that I had to participate in this cultural phenomenon. It is a culture of Blind Consumption, and now I feel used.

I'm only through the

first installment, but this series in Harpers is fabulous for many reasons. Having grown up in Colorado Springs, and having many direct tussels with the Fundamental folk, I delight in reading that they've forsaken the center of the city - which is highly walkable and bikable - for the "exurbs" of the north and east. If NASCAR is the perfect sport for christianity (making simple and endless philisophical circles until The End of The Race) then their weird desire to make the exurbs the center of their revolution is also perfectly appropriate. Suburban development is by definition soulless, with every house and street mind-numbingly identical, across states and countries. Any calling to faith that demands unquestioning obiedience to one line of ideology seems to me as horribly conformist as those off-white Lego brick family boxes.

I'm disappointed that

Ken Salazar, from my own home state, has turned out to be a far more conservative sort of Dem than we were all hoping for. Although, given the general "redness" of Colorado - excepting spots like Boulder and Manitou Springs - getting anyone with a capital D after their names into national public office is a real challenge.

So I was greatly encouraged when I learned that he's been sparring with our good friends at Focus on the White Christian Family. I suspect that what stings Mr. Dobson is not that Salazar compared their desire for theocracy to a similar Saudi affliction, but that they really, truly desire an all-Christian government. In other words, it's not the comparison itself that stung, but the truth that underlies it.

Fabulous.

One of my favourite

fortune cookie fortunes, to date at least, is now my AIM away message.

"There can be no existance of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual."

Allow the profoundity of this statement to penetrate your forebrain and percolate for a time. You will recognise it as a Truth, one of those near-magical ideas that allows you to slice through the thicket of deceit we trudge through every day. I share it with you freely.

Now that I'm working

I have too much time to read stuff. Blogs, news wires, almost any form the english language takes upon my tiny screen.

Oh, tiny? Yes, Pallas has been sold and replaced with a delightfully lightweight 12 inch iBook named Ruri. I upgraded the memory and hard drive myself, which was fun and surprisingly exhausting the first time through.

Week Three of Super German Class began with our first test, and today I got it back graded - "B." That might be the best grade I've ever gotten on a German test in four years of trying to pass the first term. I told my current teacher that I'm a poor student in foreign languages because of my love affair with English, and I'd likely find something wrong with every language that isn't English. Still, to mind it seems as though there's a few things utterly perverse about the German language, which were hilariously summed up by Mark Twain in his essay, "The Awful German Language." Google it, then be like me - read it!

For the first time

in a long long time, words have failed me.

Actually, that's not true. They regularly fail me when it comes time to describe some new and exciting form of idiocy in human life. But in this case, all I'm trying to do is describe the weather in Pittsburgh.

It's so nice, so genuinely enjoyable, so picturesque that I just don't know how to describe it. Even when it rains, it rains solidly and with great assurance, so that you feel that your time is not wasted. Don't worry, says The Weather, I'm serious about getting you wet today. No light halting showers. Relax and enjoy. The sun, as it shines, heats you pleasantly, not oppressively, and when a breeze blows to cool you it feels like a fine light spray of moisture, like those little mister/fan combo things.

I want to burn these days into my limited memory, so that when conditions again become awful, when the air is thick enough to chew and hot enough to melt hip kids' hair gel, I can have a few positive thoughts to draw on.

The Barbarism of Certitude

Ooh, that's some catchy English. I happened upon a Tract, or small illustrated booklet by a man named Chick, which told the tale of an Olde West Gun Slinger. This Gun Slinger came to town to stir up trouble, for some mysterious reason attends church on Sunday morning, and gradually comes to accept the line that God loves all sinners and Jeebus can save him from going to Hell. In the meantime, the local sheriff has posted a reward for his capture and is gathering the forces of Decency, or perhaps Greed and Self-Interest, to capture this Nefarious Bad Guy.

The Gun Slinger emerges from church a converted man, but the locals have him surrounded and cart him off to jail to await his hanging. There is presumably a preponderance of evidence that this dude has done some Heinous Crimes, such that no trial was necessary to determine his guilt. The Sheriff watches his neck snap, the Reverend stands by and covers his eyes. The Nefarious Bad Guy, who may have burned down orphanages, shot countless innocent people, and otherwise engaged in the worst possible criminal behaviour in mid-19th century America, goes to Heaven because he clapped his hands together the night before and agreed to believe in a magical book and special Power Words.

After he's buried, the Sheriff is rejoined by the Reverend to accept Jeebus as well. The Sheriff declines, rides off into the sunset, get's bitten by a snake, dies, and is immediately sent to Hell. Apparently, no amount of Doing Good on Earth can get you into heaven, but no amount of Doing Evil can keep you out. It all hinges on whether or not you believe that a 2,000 year old dead dude can erase a lifetime of moral crapulence.

But Wait, There's More! Apparently a lot more, although I won't link directly to this man's website. I realise no one reads this journal, but I don't even want to take the chance that someone might increase his business. Let it be said that there are plenty of other Tracts on other subjects, including the absolute truth of the Bible in regards to the creation date of the Earth, roughly 6,000 years ago.



The light from distant stars that's been traveling for millions of years? The measurable radioactive half-life of the most common life-giving element on Earth? The less than 2% variation between higher ape and human DNA? The amount of evidence and provable fact that you must ignore in order to arrive at the conclusion that only an invisible Super Man could have built the universe is staggering. It's just not even worth conversing with these people. If that sounds horrible it, is, but I cannot believe that anyone who buys this crap whole could make any useful contribution to human society. It's just flabbergasting.

My sister discovered

an old word for me, one that apparently sums up Who and What I Am in This World.

She said I was a Navigator.

And the moment she said it, I felt a little tingle of certainty, as in yes, that describes "Me" perfectly. What does it mean? In the context of our conversation, it does not refer merely to an aptitude with maps and star charts, although I've demonstrated that as well. To make it through this world one must know how to Navigate the endless streams of desire and need, fact and fiction, possibility and apocalypse, Reality and Unreality that we are presented with minute by minute of our mediated existence. More than anything, I think, no matter what the circumstances a Navigator knows instinctively how to find their way, and aide others in finding theirs.

That is an immense gift, terrifying and humbling yet strangely comforting as well. It should not be confused with an ability to know the absolute truth, or to disseminate such truths to those who lack them. That's a bit egotistical. Finding your way, in the traditional Bhuddist sense, means coming to an understanding of your place in this world and making the care of others your highest charge after eliminating the root of selfishness, your Self.

Mystical gobbledygook, perhaps. The Bus Stop Prophet told me that I would be a Warrior, who would show "all the rest of us how to do things right." Who the fuck knows? I think I can do both.

The Awesome New Book

That Is Currently Occupying My Thought Processes For Most of the Day: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris. He makes some difficult points and some outrageous-sounding claims, but the logic of his central position seems solid. Here are some tastey bits -

"The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained... for there is no more evidence to justify a belief in the literal existance of Yaweh and Satan than there was to keep Zeus perched upon his mountain throne or Poseidon churning the seas."

"The belief that certain books were written by God... leaves us powerless to address the most potent source of human conflict, past and present. How is it that the absurdity of this idea does not bring us, hourly, to our knees? It is safe to say that few of us would have thought so many people could believe such a thing, if they did not actually believe it. Imagine a world in which generations of human beings come to believe that certain films were made by God or that specific software was coded by him. Imagine a future in which millions of our descendants murder each other over rival interpretations of Star Wars or Windows 98. Could anything - anything - be more ridiculous? And yet, this would be no more ridiculous than the world we are living in."

As I said, many rough points about the unsustainable influence of religious faith on what we think of as modern understanding. Somewhat perversely, I am now gripped by a real desire to read the Bible, or at least as much of it as I can manage to get through, just to confirm my own worst suspicions about this oddly powerful tome of myths and legends.

At the very absolute minimum, it will Get You Thinking.

My job is so much easier

when raving lunatics actually begin raving. Not in the hipster Party Scene sense, but in the jabbering foam-mouthed caveman oratory sense. And I hope that when I say Right Wing Religous Nuts are completely hypocritical, not to mention dangerously ignorant of many of the basic tenets of modern civilisation, more people will pay attention. Here's a juicy bit:

Conflating the right to participate with the right to evangelize, Mohler said, "We are not calling for people to be moral, we want them to be believers in the Lord Jesus Christ."

How are the two not connected? When did they teach that lesson in Sunday School? I sometimes feel like I'm missing something, but no, I understand completely. They are missing quite a bit more than just something, they're missing pretty much everything, which is a nice way of saying that they're Bat Shit Crazy.

The Weirdness Of

Selling Via Online Auction has become known to me. I set up a five-day auction for my beloved Pallas, with a reserve price of $1200 - far below what other 17-inch PowerBooks are selling for, but respectable considering the two-pixel defect of her otherwise beautiful screen. Four days and 22 hours later, there are two bids, one of them for the reserve price exactly. Plenty of people are watching the auction, I was just hoping for, ya know, a few more bids. A little bit more than the absolute minimum. A sliver of wiggle room for when I purchase Ruri, my lighter and slightly faster new sidekick. Ah well, we'll see. We'll see.

Allright. Calmed down and

started reading some more, mediating the impact of the Doomsday Article on my consciousness. I found myself walking by a car dealership that was busy promoting that "press a button and win a car" sweepstakes, and I wondered just what I'd do with the monetary windfall that selling that car would represent.

I did not, for more than one second, seriously consider keeping any vehicle obtained in such a manner. That's hardcore, or maybe just pessimistic. I have family in the upper ranks of a Major Car Manufacturer whom I will be visiting with this summer vacation time, and I will ask him just what he's planning to do about the coming of the Downward Slope of the Bell Curve, representing the end of cheap gas. He's a crypto-conservative, which is to say his wife is Conservative and he doesn't often disagree, but he's also smart like a bull-whip and eminently practical, so there's hope.

The theories put forth

in this blasted article are exherting an unhealthy grip on my latent Fascination Engine. The brain, in other words, cannot shake the idea that this man's predictions are founded on Logic and Reason and are thus deserving of serious consideration.

P'raps. Those who sound the alarm in time are often ignored as alarmists.

Just as an exercise, then, let us consider a few of the things that will END when oil/natural gas disappear from our nation:
Cars. American society for one hundred years has depended on universal access to this mode of transportation. Not just cars, but interstate trucks and airplanes hauling goods. When gasoline is too expensive for anyone to afford, interstate travel and trade will cease almost entirely, bringing an end to all things that depend on it. Fast food will end. Supermarkets and mall shopping will end. Commuting into town and back out from a suburban home will end. Wal-Mart, Kaufmanns, Journeys, GAP, Abercrombie, all of them will cease to exist.

Planes. If automobiles will be too expensive to run, forget airliners. It will cost more to fill the plane with fuel once that it would cost to build the plane in the first place, and so all these jaunts across the country to visit the relatives will end. The massive organisations that depend on air transport, including all freight shippers and government/conglomerate entities organised on a national or international level, will end. International travel will once again be limited to those forms of transport which require no fossile fuels, namely sailing ships.

Electricity. Or, the ability to produce it in anything like the amounts that we have become accustomed to using so blithely. All the massive buildings in massive cities that require constant ventilation and lighting will empty, being completely unsustainable. Television and the internet and the radio and cell phones will end. All these things rely on a power grid fueled mainly by natural gas and coal, which will run out or become unusable within our lifetimes, perhaps within twenty or so years. There will be no more Daily Show or The West Wing, which will be sad, but there will also be no more The Simple Life Interns or Entertainment Tonight or Fox News. I would trade all the best television of the past fifty years to expunge the influence of all the worst, but that deal has already been struck. When it comes to a choice between running the water pump from your biomass battery or watching twenty minutes of a national broadcast that will never again matter to your life, people will make the right and natural decision.

Celebrity Culture will vanish. All these daft neo-conservative Projects For a New American Hegemony Under GOD will collapse of their own weight, when the lines of communication and hatred that they rely on disappear like the oil that fueled them.

Our vast International Military will end. The ships and planes and tanks and Jeeps that place our troops overseas will no longer be operable, and so our ability to "project power" will disappear as well. Obviously, this will have some tremendous consequences, but in the long run it will largely be a reversion to our pre-WWII posture, that of an impregnable fortress-continent, isolated from the rest of the world by the oceans. Of course, given that our entire society will collapse to a pre-industrial local agrarian form, there won't be much incentive for anyone to try and pick a fight. India and China will be very very busy dealing with their own collapse. Russia has been collapsing for decades, but they've got the internal resources to maintain themselves for a while longer, at least. Africa will be largely unaffected, except that all outside aid in the form of either arms or food will cease. The only people that will survive will be those who have lived off the land since man evolved on those plains, although millions will continue to die from AIDS and starvation until the population stabilises itself at a sustainable level.

Europe will be an interesting case to watch, because the continent was built for horse and buggy, then later upgraded to handle cars (with varying success). To a degree they have immitated Western centralisation, but the rural landscape of Europe remains largely intact. Their transistion to an oil-less world will be far smoother, and much more of their civilisation will survive.

Yeah, and now I've got a book to read about how the media shapes our perceptions of everything. Seems kinda redundant, knowing that the media will shortly cease to exist.

This is literally the saddest

thing that I think I've ever seen, and it does much to confirm my opinion that there is absolutely nothing redeeming about organised religion.

"The American Dream

is that an individual in this country should have every opportunity to go from the guttermost to the uppermost."
-George W. Bush, March 2005

I cannot describe the physical sensation of Deep Hurting that this caused me. Every day, it seems, I am confronted with some jewel of Cross-Eyed Badger Spit Lunacy that confirms all my worst fears about the future of human kind. We're thoroughly doomed, kids, it ain't even funny, if this AWFUL JACKASS could wriggle into the Presidency for eight solid years of pain.

I dunno how long this article will be up, but it made me think a bit. Actually, it just sort of reaffirmed not a few of my own suspicions. I can't argue for the accuracy of some of the predictions that this man makes, but the underlying facts seem solid. So draw your own conclusions.

I was bored, so

last night I rented The Incredibles and Outfoxed, being respectibly curious about both. The first was a high-energy and heart felt action romp, entertaining on many levels and generally the kind of quality cinema that so rarely makes it's way from the California coast into national theaters.

The second, which had been shown here at Pitt in the past, was incredibly disappointing. As a documentary, the production values are so cheap and rediculous that I had a hard time sitting through it, possessed of the tingling knowledge that I could have put together a superior product with my PowerBook Pallas.

I am not even making that up. The cue-card cut scenes, "animated" graphics, and boorish use of splicing styles are painful for a man in 2005 who, six years ago, produced a video of similar, even slightly superior quality in a high school media class.

Having said that, the footage that the producer garnered from Fox News is absolutely chilling. As article after article demonstrates, these people literally inhabit a completely different world than the rest of us, which totally precludes rational argument. You cannot make a case against their world view because, simply put, the facts which govern your own are not present or so deeply twisted in theirs that they might as well not exist. Fact is wholly subordinant to ideology, and thus reality is subordinant to religious phant'sies.

It's not an isolated bastion, or even an occasional gathering of like-minded Bat Shit Crazies. It's an entire cable news channel, with the money and resources of the second richest man in the world, and it's on 24 hours of every one of your days. Sometimes, imbicillity really does seem like the only realm that happiness could be found in, for anyone ignorant of such monstrosities would be much happier.