Quotes of the day:

Wandering in a vast forest at night, I have only a faint light to guide me. A stranger appears and says to me: "My friend, you should blow out your candle in order to find your way more clearly." This stranger is a theologian.

Denis Diderot, Addition aux Pensees philosophiques, from John Daintith, et al, eds. The Macmillan Dictionary of Quotations (2000) p. 34

Mankind shall not be free until the last king is strangled in the entrails of the last priest.
Denis Diderot, Dithyrambe Sur La Fête Des Rois

It is raining bombs on the house of the Lord. I go in fear and trembling lest one of these terrible bombers gets into difficulties.
Denis Diderot (1768). Quoted from and citation quip by Jim Herrick, Against the Faith (1985), p. 85.

Source: Deni Diderot, Quotations

It's the holiday season. But let's get some shit corrected.

Jesus was not born on the 25th. Jesus freaks stole the date from the pagans, who needed to use the Winter Solstice traditions to sucker tribes of unsuspecting and happy humans into buying their single Father God in Heaven who kills babies and sends plagues and death when he's in the mood. His ways and will work in mysterious ways.

And I'm sorry to say it, but the fat guy in the red suit and beard isn't all that, either.

Santa Claus doesn't know when you're bad or good. He's a fucked up mix of myths and ad copy made up to sell shit.

And the Baby Jesus does not care if you're being bad or good, or he'd be kicking the living shit out of the Israelites right now for bombing the shit out of Gaza and killing innocents and beating the shit out of a million folks who were unlucky enough to not be born Israelis.

Planting a god baby size foot right in the ass of the guys sending the bombs tonight.

And Easter? The next big holiday coming up? Also stolen by Jesus's control freaks from the pagans. But instead of having it be a celebration of fertility and springtime, the thieves turned the holiday into a gory spectacle celebrating nailing some poor dude to a tree.

In the church of my youth they took it a step further and turned it into ritual cannibalism. When you point that out to your Catholic relatives they tell you you're nuts. But what the hell other meaning does "body of Christ" have after that alter boy loving unmarried Priest says it to you?

There's even a nice vampire touch where they turn crappy wine into the blood of Christ. Of course, that politician child molester in the funny black robes is the only one who gets to drink the blood wine.

Coming up: New Year's Day! You know what that means.

It means BushCo only has 20 days left to fuck shit up!

Happy good fucking riddance to him, and the whole year of 2008.

Oh, and Obama? Fuck you for putting Rick Warren in your lineup of speakers. You and your team of misguided and calculating idiots.

But what do I know,according to Rick Warren, I'm morally equal to a pedophile. A dirty hippie to be tossed aside after giving Obama and the Democrats my vote, as usual.

I need a beer. Happy New Year's everybody!

Quote of the Day: Bruce Sterling, GEEK!

Forget trying to pass for normal. Follow your geekdom. Embrace your nerditude. In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "Woo the muse of the odd." . . . You may be a geek. You may have geek written all over you. You should aim to be one geek they'll never forget. Don't aim to be civilized.

Don't hope that straight people will keep you on as some kind of pet. To hell with them. You should fully realize what society has made of you and take a terrible revenge.

Get weird. Get way weird. Get dangerously weird. Get sophisticatedly, thoroughly weird, and don't do it halfway. Put every ounce of horsepower you have behind it. . . .

Don't become a well rounded person. Well rounded people are smooth and dull. Become a thoroughly spiky person. Grow spikes from every angle. Stick in their throats like a pufferfish.

Bruce Sterling, speech on The Wonderful Power of Storystelling to the Computer Game Developers Conference, March 1991

Ho, Ho, Ho, Here's a Gallon of Snot

Things here at Hint of Dementia Research Labs have been rather bleeech. A rhinovirus of disturbing effectiveness has given Kori, Kate, and I a great deal of creeping crud, making our ears clogged and our heads woogly, turning our brains into semi-dyslex-ick muck and making our eyeballs feel like onions boiled in rancid corn oil.

Me anyway, that's how I feel. Sweetie's just coming down with it, and is descending into mushy brained mucus laden despairing human flesh for a few days.

It's a pretty virulent virus too, I know of at least a dozen other folks who have had this in the last two weeks. I know one of them gave it to me. But I try not to take viruses personally.

It does not make for much creative flow, these rivers of snot. And I've been cogitatin' on how freaky things are, not wanting to write about them, because it makes me feel like the priestess of gloom, thinking and blogging about the end of Bush and the end of things as we knew them.

But at our mostly godless pagan Solstice Party on Saturday, a few folks told me they liked what I had been writing, so I think I'll start cogitating on my keyboard here instead of just thinking and ranting at the coffee house.

There's something about this time of year that makes me want to crawl into a warm bed every night around eight pm and hibernate.

The short days, the often grey skies, and the frigid air all combine to make the remaining parts of my brain left over from our pre industrial days want to just shut down till the days get longer.

I'd like to find the guy who decided money and mass production were the only ways to measure and make things and shove a sharp stick in his eye.

And as long as I am searching for pointy stick in the eyeball candidates, how about adding the folks who made the idea of sharing things and having a life beyond buying and selling and putting a dollar value on everything from human heartbeats to nature itself, and give them another sharp stick lobotomy?

Then again, there are so many shallow thinkers and greedy shitheads out there we'd run out of sticks. Expecting a lot for no work is how we got into this big money mess.

Sweetie and Mikey were talking about socialism the other day, and how so many people have a knee jerk reaction that sharing things is bad when you're an adult, but what you're told to do when you're a kid.

Few folks ever question our "free market system" or capitalism, but god forbid any hint of socialism.

Funny how greed trumps love once you're an adult.

Bundle up folks, it's cold out there today. I wish you unbroken furnaces and hot tea as needed.

Clusterfu*k Nation: Kunstler on the future

He';s good today, go read him.

http://jameshowardkunstler.typepad.com/

The economy we're moving into will have to be one of real work, producing real things of value, at a scale consistent with energy resource reality. I'm convinced that farming will come much closer to the center of economic life, as the death of petro-agribusiness makes food production a matter of life and death in America -- as opposed to the disaster of metabolic entertainment it is now.

Reorganizing the landscape itself for this finer-scaled new type of farming is a task fraught with political peril (land ownership questions being historically one of the main reasons that societies fall into revolution). The public is completely unprepared for this kind of change.

We still think that "the path to success" is based on getting a college degree certifying people for a lifetime of sitting in an office cubicle. This is so far from the approaching reality that it will be eventually viewed as a sick joke -- like those old 1912 lithographs of mega-cities with Zeppelins plying the air between Everest-size skyscrapers.

Salt and Plastic

So, I drove out to Farm and Fleet today, with a stop at Woodman's. It's snowing like crazy and the salt trucks are out dumping tons of sodium into the local environment, all of which drains right into the aquifer over time.

This raises sodium in the water, which we then consume and it tends to add to overall high blood pressure problems as well as stressing out our local aquatic systems, which Madison is famous for.

So we salt the roads to be safe today, while poisoning the water table. Instead of just driving slower, using sand or not driving at all.

Then I went into the grocery store, where nearly everything is packaged in plastic, from the celery to the extra bag they stuck my lip gloss and bottle of ibuprofen in.

This happened when I wasn't looking, because I was busy loading my reusable bag, made from plastic garbage recycled into another use. For some reason that escapes me, grocery stores feel a need to put items in plastic into bags of plastic to keep them away from all the plastic wrapped items they feel they have to sell you.

Why the hell you need plastic wrap on celery or lettuce escapes me. I just peel off the outer layer and put it in the compost bin.

Of course, a huge amount of plastic washes into our rivers, then out to our oceans, which then degrades into toxic debris that attracts all the pesticides and chemical soup we make to make the plastic that covers everything.

There's an area full of plastic bigger than Texas in the Pacific, growing bigger every year, killing off a huge chunk of ocean that used to have organic debris in it that fed the aquatic life.

People demand salted roads, demand plastic coverings and obsess over safety for their kids. The same kids that will inherit a world with a toxic ecosystem that's teetering on the edge of system crashing climate change. The ones being born with defects and long term health problems due to exposure to plastic chemical residues.

Fuckin' up the future to make sure that your little bundle of DNA is safe today is pretty much how we do things.

Some days I am amazed at how short sighted we are, driving our way to extinction and making sure we're covering everything with plastics that mimic estrogenic compounds so our kids can grow up with serious health problems.

In the end, it won't matter, because we're already setting the stage for what comes after us. I wonder if there's a bigger scheme of things, if that's not our job, to bring on the changes that shift the world over to the next step for life on earth.

I find the whole idea that there's a higher power using us to fuck over the current ecosystem rather amusing.