Misplaced Faith

Faith is an unquestioned belief posited in the absence of fact and is the fertile soil for the institution of superstition.
When people ask me why it is that I don't believe in a god - any god - my stock answer is that I am not a superstitious person. Ironically, they are often defensive and further state that they are not superstitious either.
The definition escapes them.
Plainly put, if there was any sort a deity, there would be overt evidence of being and there would be no question of it's existence. No such evidence exists beyond the realm of faith.

What is God?

Religion is, by it's nature, subjective. No two people conceive the same doctrinal precepts in the exactly the same way.
The god is always, to all believers, what they want their god to be.

The Fulcrum of American Political Thought

Circa 2010....

Progressive: The idea is good, how do we implement it and promote change?
 
Conservative: The idea is bad, how do we obstruct it and maintain the status quo.

Thirty Reasons Why I Don't Ride A Harley

1. I’m not a good enough mechanic.
2. My ego does not require it.
3. Lean angle? What lean angle?
4. Over-priced, over-weight, underpowered, expensive antiques.
5. All show, no go.
6. I really don’t care to ride in parades.
7. I like to ride, not polish chrome and talk about riding.
8. It weighs how much???
9. I don’t own a pick-up truck to haul it around (required).
10. I don’t care what you say, it sounds like a gas powered Maytag washer!
11. Brakes? What brakes?
12. Yeah, it sounds fast…
13. They don’t sell body armor in Harley boutiques (see Item 14).
14. You have to dress the part.
15. If you drop it, you’ll need a crane.
16. I’m not old enough for a Barco-Lounger on wheels.
17. It just doesn’t feel right with my feet in front of my ass!
18. We won’t even talk about steering effort.
19. Popeye couldn’t pull in that clutch!
20. 80 hp, maybe, - 700 lbs., sure.
21. Riding a Harley is like making love to a fridged woman: You will probably get to where you want to be, but a more enthusiastic ride would have been a hell of a lot more fun!
22. Harleys are beautiful to look at and wonderful to listen to, so they are doing what they do best when on their kick-stands at idle throttle.
23. I don’t join clubs (required, it seems, for ownership).
24. To many lawyers own Harleys (see Item 25).
25. For the most part, the bad-assed outlaw biker mystique is bullshit (see Item 26).
26. The real outlaw rider is the 18 year-old squid - passing the gaggle of Harleys at 130 mph - on one wheel. (This tends to really piss off the Harley gaggle.)
27. You can’t wear a real and proper helmet if you own a Harley (see Items 13, 14 and 28).
28. Most Harley riders have never been down hard, so they think fingerless gloves, chaps and a vest constitute protective gear.
29. I have been down hard. And I don’t want a 700-plus pound bike down with me.
30. For the price of a Harley, you could almost own a Ducati!!

The Trouble With The "Tenther" Talkers

New Age states rights advocates have been beating this dead horse for some time now. No matter how much they may insist or how much they may wish, the Tenth Amendment does not carry their argument at law as shown by  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ableman_v._Booth, along with several other decisions related to the same point that can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_Supreme_Court_cases,_volume_62.
 
I understand, but do not sympathize, with the current desire of the Libertarians to return to 18th century governance - it appears so romantic and so simplistic to us now - but that ain't going to happen. The nation has, in to many ways - socially, politically and technologically - moved way beyond what any of the Founding Fathers could have possibly conceived, given the limited world view available to them at the time of the original writings. This is why they wisely allowed for the evolution of these documents through both amendment and the recognition of settled case law.
 
As I have said before, war is the ultimate exercise of both title and authority, and much, if not all, of the legally moot arguments put forth by the current proponents of the Tenth Amendment exception for the states was settled in 1865. (The states lost)
 

Fuck Dick Cheney

This guy is a real piece of work....

"To the very end of our administration, we kept al-Qaida terrorists busy with other problems. We focused on getting their secrets, instead of sharing ours with them. And on our watch, they never hit this country again," Cheney said.

By his own admission, this fucker has never accepted any responsibility for the ineptness and incompetence that led to the deaths of thousands of Americans on his watch in the first place. Instead, he insists on the convoluted argument that illegal torture and illegal domestic spying saved our asses. The one thing made clear by his address to this cloistered and faithful audience was who was really the acting president from 2001 to 2008.

This asshat is one step away from wearing a swastika on his arm and deserves to be jailed for the rest of his life along with his puppet George.

Did you listen to Obama's speech? No spin, no fear-mongering; just the straight shit. The light of day compared to a walk on the Dark Side.

Happy Birthday, Al

Happy Birthday Albert E.
by Harold Pollack
Albert Einstein’s 130th birthday shouldn’t go unnoticed. His range of achievement goes far beyond E=mc squared. If you used a GPS receiver today, a grocery store scanner, or a digital camera, he touched your life. He deciphered the mathematics of molecular motion, the photoelectric effect.

It just so happens that I performed all three of those tasks today, giving none of them a second thought. Thanks, Albert.

The Sausage Creature's Offspring

"Some people will tell you that slow is good - and it may be, on some days - but I am here to tell you that fast is better."

Hunter S. Thompson - Song of the Sausage Creature

Be careful what you wish for:

There are some things in this world that require - no- command, respect. My personal short list, taken from almost six decades of an indulgent and incautious life would be, in no particular order, firearms; explosives; airplanes; large, aggressive dogs and the RC51.

"It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it." - HST


Certain activities that create pleasure and fear excite the primitive, primal limbic part of the human brain. Most people thoughtfully shun engaging in exercises that pose a high statistical quotient for physical injury, pursuits often viewed by the whole of proper society as self-destructive, anti-social, devoid of common sense or downright insane.

Somewhere, in the sheltered, comfortable cradle that was my idyllic childhood, that program failed to load. I have in the past, and still do, take a differing view. Mind you now, I'm not suicidal and I harbor no adolescent delusions or romantic fantasies of a glorious demise - No, I just enjoy fast, well-handling motorbikes. Hence, the RC51.

"Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba.... " - HST

I have been fortunate enough to own a handful of motorcycles in my life and even more fortunate to have ridden many others owned by trusting souls who, for reasons I have yet to understand, have handed over their beloved mounts to the likes of me. Bless them all.

Some of these machines were the average, daily driver, garden variety motorcycles. Pleasant, docile and forgiving. Slow on the throttle, gentle into the curves, forgiving to a fault. Some of them were Death Machines, supplied from the factory with ill-handling chassis, terrible brakes and high power-to-weight ratios like my first motorcycle, a 1967 350cc Yamaha R1, that I, quite inelegantly, crashed into a school bus as a dumb-assed and inexperienced kid.

"I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them." - HST

But a few of these two-wheeled marvels could be described as Scalpels. Fine examples of high engineering acumen and the engine builder's art. Replica-racers, not designed for the city commuter or the soulless ribbon of concrete that is the American Interstate System: Bikes that demand the highest respect and chastise all who fail to do so. Some, by way of definition, call them Superbikes. Such is the RC51.

"The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations." - HST

Fast? Yes, deceptively, so very fast. But that is not really the point. The Scalpel is Quick. Quick on the throttle. Quick turning in on the curve. Quick on the brakes. Reostat Quick.

"The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body." - HST

Hunter S. Thompson composed the Song of the Sausage Creature as both a cautionary essay and an homage to the Scalpel.

To the Art and Fear of being Quick.

Faith v. Certainty

Faith is the expectation that certain actions or occurrences will, in fact, become reality. Certainty, on the other hand, is the sure knowledge that an action or an occurrence has or will become reality.


For example: We have absolute certainty that the sun will rise in the morning. We know this not only from our science classes, where (hopefully) we learned about the conservation of angular momentum as applied to the rotation of the Earth, but also from personally observed evidence that we see every day of our own lives. Faith could be expressed as the expectation that we would be alive to see that sunrise. We have no definitive proof that we will survive that long, but we have the hope (faith) that we will probably live long enough to witness that certainty.

Probably? Uh, What?

Faith, you see, really all rests upon the probability of an outcome. Most of us can rely upon the probability that we can get into our motorcar, hurtle ourselves along a narrow, twisty asphalt roadway at 90 feet per second, avoid the oncoming cars also traveling at the same speed, missing them by only a few feet, and arrive at our destination completely unscathed. We do it all of the time. Those probabilities, statistically, are really pretty good. We have the required faith to place ourselves in that situation. But, if you add alcohol consumption and an ice storm to that equation, those good probabilities will rapidly deteriorate, statistically making the planned outcome far less certain, and, perhaps, our faith would need some reasonable re-evaluation.

If, like many of us, you are an atheist, and have ever discussed with a believer your reasonable lack of faith in gods or deities, you have undoubtedly been questioned on how you can hold to the certainty of your convictions. Do you, the believer asks, have the absolute certainty that you are not wrong, and that your tormented soul will be not be condemned to spend all of eternity (what ever that really is) stoking the fires of Hell? Of course you don't. But what you do have is a reasonable degree of certainty that your views are correct.

In other words, you are certain enough.

Very few reasonable adults have faith that unicorns exist. Granted, there may be a faithful few, but if they talked much about it, most people would think that they were crazy. But, let us suppose that a lot of people believed in unicorns, and it was socially acceptable to discuss unicorns, extolling their many virtues and mysteries in a way that gave credence to the idea that they are real and yet unknowable. Would faith in these unproved claims validate the unicorn’s existence as certainty?

No, of course not, you are certain enough that there would be no such thing.

And that would be a reasonable degree of faith that you can believe in.

Fear and Loathing in ConservativeLand

Why are Conservatives so naturally paranoid? Is paranoia a circumstance of conservatism or, conversely, is conservatism a circumstance of paranoia? Why do these fearful, threatened, rightwing "patriots" loathe and ridicule anyone that is not as scared as shitless as they are?

I ask these questions only to enlighten myself, for I find the entire exercise of understanding the conservative mind perplexing and more than just a little disturbing, troubling even.

C-PAC has, predictably, been as loony as a Star Trek convention; Texas State Senator Dan Patrick goes on Fox to claim that Texas is in a virtual state of war with Mexico and that the National Guard is on "high alert"; Sean Hannity asks his faithful just which form of violent revolution (armed insurrection, secession, etc.) they would prefer - in a poll - on HIS website; and through it all, the establishment conservatives, supposedly the sane ones, nod knowingly, even appreciatively, agreeing with each other that they knew all along this would come to pass if that imposter, that elitist liberal, Obama, managed to wrest power from the wise and steady hand of the GOP.

And it's not like things aren't bad enough, what with two wars (of their own making) and a paralyzing recession (again, of their own making), Oh, Hell No! They also seem to have a compelling need to manufacture fears all on their own, for their own entertainment and self-validation. Like the non-existent reinstitution of the Fairness Doctrine (why do all conservatives listen to AM radio anyway? Because they believe FM is a commie front, or what?). Or the outrageous program to monitor volcanoes. Or the heresy of teaching science in science class. The list is goes on…

Maybe, just maybe, the paranoia is the fear of change in any form. Or maybe it’s what I questioned at the beginning of this post. Paranoia is a consequence of conservatism and conservatism requires paranoia to validate it’s own existence.

Damn, that is just a little disturbing, troubling even.