god’s creation
procreation
fornication
population
isolation
mass migration
and starvation
revelation
supplication
congregation
holy nation
manipulation
inquisition
forced conversion
religion
“The Way” of Technology
Well, my bold Westworld binge-watching bonanza proclamation turned out to be nothing more than a bunch of ballyhooed BS…
I only got through the fourth episode before running out of time.
Consequently, I can’t provide anything much in the way of a review. But I can provide a bit of feedback that might mean something about its watchability…
Which is… I kept falling asleep while watching it.
Now, full disclosure, I’ve taken some of my best naps during what turned out to be some of my favorite shows so my inability to stay awake while watching Westworld in and of itself doesn’t mean that much.
As for what I was able to stay awake for… I really like what it is trying to do in concept; however, its execution…
Military Uniforms versus Religious Uniforms
WARNING: This post attempts to make a bit of humor over various religions’ garb requirements
When I joined the US Navy in 1983, sailors were still allowed to wear beards. However, with the military, prompted by the dictates of its Cold War Warrior Commander-in-Chief and President Ronald Reagan, in a fast-paced process of snapping out of its ragtag and drug-laden Vietnam War Police Conflict low-standards hangover, the navy outlawed full beards in 1984.
After which, many o’ Old Salts requested to Go Ashore permanently, as they would rather quit or retire from service than retire their beards.
I was just a young “Boot Camp” of a wog at the time who could barely grow even a little patch of peach fuzz let alone a full beard, but I still remember how passionate my Senior Chief was about keeping his beard.
And this passion of his and other bearded Old Salts like him was stirred simply over a style choice and tradition, so I can only imagine how one must feel about the importance of keeping one’s beard as a religious requirement, which is exactly the passion three enlisted servicemembers who are of the Sikh religion must be feeling right now as they petition the military for exemptions to be allowed to wear their religion-required beards and turbans.
Sikh Army enlistees file lawsuit seeking beard, turban exemptions: https://t.co/NlJtdmXmDT
— Stars and Stripes (@starsandstripes) March 31, 2016
If I remember correctly, I believe the primary reason the Navy gave for no longer allowing full beards was that they did not allow for the proper donning of gas masks, which created a health and military readiness risk. Another, and probably a more driving reason, was that beards did not allow for the professional military appearance that the Top Brass was striving for.
My position on this has evolved over the years, as it has on many social issues.
Now I’m like, meh… the military makes many exceptions for many situations so why not these?
For example, many servicemembers are allowed to wear beards under a doctor’s order. This is common when, typically a male, is prone to get in-grown hairs from having to shave his face so often.
And as for turbans and other religious requirements…
Now, I’ll admit, all the various grooming and wardrobe requirements that all our various religions place upon us is, in my opinion…
Stoopid.
I mean, c’mon. All the goofy hats the Pope wears (hence the sarcastic saying in response to a obvious/stoopid question: Does the Pope wear a goofy hat?) is enough to outfit a circus show, not to mention all the goofy hats all the other religious leaders and religious wannabes insist on wearing.
CLICK THE IMAGE FOR ATTRIBUTION
Obviously I’m a bit skeptical about any religion that requires one to dress a certain way in order worship its god, so obviously I sympathize with the military and its position of restraint when allowing exemptions for, what I’m sure are way too many, all of the various religions’ various garb requirements and impositions.
Besides, the military, and especially the navy, is doing just fine with all its goofy hat requirements, as is evidenced by the hat that young “Boot Camp” of a wog who can barely grow even a patch of peach fuzz for a beard is wearing in that ancient picture on found on the sidebar…
However, as our nation is, and is quickly becoming much more, diverse, I can foresee it becoming harder and harder for the military to not allow for more and more exemptions in the future.
Besides, doesn’t this Royal Air Force officer look striking and professional in his militarily accommodating military garb?
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS?
A Meditation on an Introduction’s Opening Passage as found in “Nature” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?
Here we find Ralph Waldo Emerson, in the opening passage of his introduction to his seminal essay “Nature,” bemoaning the distance he and his generation are from anything Original and True as compared to preceding generations. As he sees it, only through the firsthand experiences and the tales of our forefathers and foremothers have we been able to learn our life’s lessons and traditions. The gleaming highest highs our civilizations are able to reach are only because of the solid foundations built from and with Nature’s sacred mud by the caring and calloused hands of those to whom have gone before us and who now uplift us still.
If the great Emerson, a transcendental man, perhaps the Transcendental Man as he was in possession of a most extraordinary ability to focus and perceive that which the eye of most mortals miss, is shocked by such a revelation, then it seems to this less-than-transcendental and exceedingly mortal man just how far we find our present selves from those God beholding foregoing generations would bring about the death of fright to such a perceptive and feeling man as he.
And it is not just a distance in generational time I am referring to, but also, mostly, a distance in understanding, as perhaps the same could be said of Emerson’s meaning; though as far as he felt his generation was from an understanding of the Original and True, just how much farther away from understanding we of the present are is too hard for me to imagine.
Just what does our generation know of Nature? of God? of the Universe? Just how many more countless sepulchres have we built and how many more countless biographies have we written? Surely we know greatly of nature and of god and of the universe through the words and misdeeds of our spawning and splintering sects and religious disorders, and through the kaleidoscopic lens and the equations of the material, the physical, carried out to the farthest nth of a degree, accessible to only but a few of our most scientific of brains. Yea, ours is but a weak and plastic generation with hardly one of us finding even a germ under the nail let alone a fleck of sacred earthen mud, so far removed from Nature and Her Elements are we.
Like the everlasting trees
Of the most symbolic
Our ancients bare green before us
Full in their lustrous branches
Roots firmed in their foundation
While with the passing breeze
Our limbs naked and thin
We waive
Lo! but look at me. Look at me, me with my naked, thin limbs waiving away my right of birth to ancient spirits more alive long dead than I whose blood still courses hot will every be. I whose blood still courses hot but whose heart has grown cold and without passion for the Original, the True. I lie content each night having yet let another day slip away without once baring my feet and stepping into the grass; without once feeling the raw moonglow on my rusty skin.
But it wasn’t always so. I wasn’t always so distant from the Original and the True. And neither were you, for we were all born of and from the Original and of the True. It is who, in essence, I am and who you are.
We just forgot, that’s all.
We just allowed each passing day to take us farther and farther from who we were born to be.
So much time has
passed since then,
since I last felt raw
moonglow on
my rusty skin,
that I have forgotten
how the breath of night
can upturn a sallow face.
Long ago,
when I could still remember
how to pause,
and how to listen,
and how to breathe,
for more reasons
than just to breathe,
I knew fields
and wood,
and calico aster;
I knew how to kneel,
and how to observe,
and how to bring myself to quiet.
And I knew,
without knowing,
that if I lay
on my back
beneath the reeds
and remained hushed,
as night clouds
floated by,
shadowed and silent,
that my Self
would simply fall
away.
Step Into the Grass, an excerpt
from Poems from the River
As romping youth we did not have to be told how to meditate, how to pray. We just knew. We had no need for such technical terms as spirituality or epiphany or satori, for it was in our unknowing that we were able to truly know them. And now that we know them, we know nothing.
I suppose the question is, then, can we return to our essence? Can we, in our knowledge and understanding, return to the bliss of ignorance, to the wisdom of youth, so that we can come back again, if even just a little closer, to the Original and True.
Are we able to do that, knowing what we know?
Tonight
I’ll bare my feet
and step old and aching
into the caliginous balm
of the cool redemptive night.
TOTAL WAR OR TOTAL PEACE – A Relating to Humans Political Issues Feature
I do not have much to say as an introduction to this powerful topical essay by Paul Xylinides, our IABS&R Volume 2 selectee, other than to compel you to go take a look at today’s headlines. There you will unfortunately witness once more what brutality we humans are willing to inflict upon other humans in an effort to further our own goals, be they political, religious, or whatever cause it may be that motivates us into a frenzy of fanaticism and murderous hate.
My prayers are with Pakistan as I mourn the lost lives of all the innocent children.
Paul will also be contributing a guest post for us tomorrow.
– 8:00pm (EST), Wednesday, December 17, 2014
TOTAL WAR OR TOTAL PEACE
by Paul Xylinides
The concept of total war has been especially widespread in execution in the twentieth century. It means just what it says, that is, the decision by one or both sides in a conflict to use all and every means in order to prevail. War crimes become unavoidable and are a matter of course under these scenarios. Moral and legal concerns are completely set aside. Intended to prevent or, at best, minimize carnage directed towards the innocent, the rules of war are effective only so long as one side enjoys vastly superior capacities and thus the luxury of choosing how to conduct itself in an engagement. Recent comments by Vladimir Putin as to his country’s continued possession of a nuclear arsenal illustrate what recourse a threatened nation feels justified to employ. Today, the United States is able to act militarily within the rules of war. Should the day come that a figure such as the present Russian leader were to carry out his veiled threat, it is not conceivable that the United States would not respond in kind.
No Sense, Whatsoever
Yeah, it’s another one of those piss and vinegar kind of days…
I mean, Come! On!
Without even mentioning my slowly deteriorating and dying lungs, it’s bad enough that I have lost most of the feeling in my lower extremities due to the neuropathy that was brought on by all the chemo I got juiced up with to treat my leukemia, or that I lost most of my ability to smell or to taste to only our tight-lipped God knows why (my doctors sure as hell don’t know), but, because of the reemergence of GVHD due to my decrease in prednisone dosage, do I really need to now start losing my ability to see, as well?
Jesus Holy Christ!
And Mohammad, too!
(I’ll leave it up to you to determine whether those pleas are requests for spiritual intervention and/or guidance or just blasphemously rude exasperated expletives.)
And it’s even worse than bad enough that not only am I slowly losing my vision to a deeper and deeper foggy blur, but is it really necessary to have to lose it in such a painfully annoying way?
I mean, come on! That’s just a bit beyond the boundaries of good taste, as one of my favorite former clients used to often say whenever things got really fucked up on the job. (I’m sorry if me saying “fucked up” offends you, but I only say “fucked up” simply to keep this little aside paragraph in the spirit of things that one of my favorite former clients used to often say.)
But I mean, Holy frikkin’ Buddha, come on! Can someone just please give me a goddamn break?
When I wake in the morning, my eyes, especially my right eye, feel as if they have a big chunk of jagged glass in them. Seriously. I’m not exaggerating. Well…maybe a little. But still, it takes several hours until the pain associated with the stuck in the eye feeling diminishes enough to where it only feels like there is a modest chunk of rock in them instead of a big chunk of jagged glass. But regardless of how it’s described, it always feels like there is something stuck in them and it drives me absolutely frikkin’ crazy.
And then, I guess my eyes figured since they aren’t needed to see so much anymore, they decided to stop producing tears. My eyes are now constantly dry as a brittle bone. As a result, they burn so badly it feels as if they are being, not bathed in their natural tears, but rubbed down and cured with salt each time I blink.
And then, the slightest amount of light or breeze feels as if someone is thinly slicing into them with razor blades.
Pure torture.
Pisses me off and depresses me so because, all my life the sun was always my most bestest buddy, but now it is my worstest enemy. Not only can I not stand to even catch the slightest glimpse of the sun anymore because it is just too painful, but ever since my bone marrow transplant I can no longer risk getting sunburned because, at a minimum it could screw up my graft, and at a maximum it could kill me.
Sorry sun. I used to love you, but now I must hate you.
Let’s see….what else do I have on my docket of “poor me” gripes and whines for today?
Oh yeah, the medicine.
The docs have me on four different types of meds to treat my eye gvhd:
1. Artificial tear drops.
2. Drops that are supposed to help my eyes produce tears.
3. Steroid drops that are supposed to help suppress and slow down the damage done by the gvhd.
4. And an ointment that I squeeze into the eyes at night to help keep them moist while I sleep.
I could not survive without the artificial tears. I am constantly dropping them into my eyes. It’s a pain in the ass to have to do it, what seems like, every five minutes or so, but it’s a vital pain in the ass. And the ointment feels pretty good. But if the drops to help me produce tears and the steroids drops are working, I sure as hell can’t tell. The only thing I am sure that they do do is make my eyes burn and my vision blur even more than normal.
Here are a couple of examples of exactly how much my eyes burn: 1) My nose is always runny because of the burn. I couldn’t figure it out at first. I thought maybe I was coming down with another infection. Very annoying. 2) The burn from the dryness must really warm up the surface of my eyes because after I drop the artificial tears into them and then put my glasses back on, the lenses fog up a little around the eyes. Seriously.
I dread it when it comes time to have to put the pain producing medicine drops in my eyes. It takes a good hour afterwards before my eyes return to “normal.” Unfortunately, the supposed tear producing drops go in twice a day and the steroid drops go in three time a day; so, for about five hours out of each of my day, I get to self-inflict even more pain on my painful eyes.
Fun.
And you know what scares me the most from all this? It’s that I am having a harder and harder time doing what I love to do so much, and that is this, what I am doing right now.
Writing.
Working on the computer.
As I wrote this pathetically whiny draft on a Word document in a completely darkened room, I literally could not see anything much more on the screen than a glowing blurry mass of white characters. The characters are white because even the light, especially the light, from the computer is torture, so I have to invert the colors of my documents so that the page is black and the characters I type are white.
You should see how ridiculous I look right now as I prepare this…all squinty-eyed and mouth opened, glasses pushed up on top of my thin and disheveled-haired head, face pressed up as close as possible against the screen in a near-failing effort to read the crap that I’m typing.
Expect to see, which I am sure you do, see things with your eyes that is, and expect to see with them even more annoying typos in my junk than normal.
Yeah, it’s all getting really hard.
And stressful.
To be honest, I don’t know how much longer I can do it.
Write, that is.
It is just hurting too much.
And I suppose, as I continue to reduce prednisone dosage, it’s only going to get worse.
And if I can no longer write…
especially after all my life wanting to have the time and ability to be able to write full-time like I have been able to do since all the cancer fun started…
I don’t know what I will do.
But I do know I will be very sad until I figure it out.
But as of now, I do not have it figured out.
Because all my lack of senses…
makes no sense to me, whatsoever.
I mean, come on.
The Extreme Costs of Extremities
Yes, as a nation, we love our freedom.
I love my freedom.
Freedom is so completely fundamental to the essence of who we are, of who I am, that I cannot even begin to imagine living in a country where I couldn’t speak my mind, or where I couldn’t dress the way I wanted to dress, or where I couldn’t love whomever I wanted to love regardless of his or her race, religion, sex, gender, height, blood type, shoe size, whatever, or where I couldn’t worship the God(s) I wanted to worship.
I simply cannot imagine living a life without the freedom to live exactly as who I want to be, not as just who I am born to be.
In my view, to maintain our freedom means we have to be able to tolerate a lot of ignorant bullshit, even if it’s as ignorant and disgusting as that of the Westboro Baptist Church.
The Supreme Court agrees with me.
If tolerating the non-violent, First Amendment-sanctioned views and expressions of the Westboro Baptist Church, or the KKK, or the Nation of Islam, or any other hate group is the price we have to pay for our uncompromised freedom, then it must be paid.
It’s worth every penny.
There are higher prices to pay.
People around the world are paying them on a daily basis.
Shahbaz Bhatti just paid the highest price anyone could pay.
Shahbaz Bhatti was the only Christian minister of parliament in Pakistan.
He recently was assasinated by muslim extremists because of his faith.
Muslim extremists hate freedom even more than Westboro Baptist Church extremists do.
As far as I know, no Westboro Baptist Church extremist has murdered over his or her extremist views.
They have stayed with the boundaries that our Rule of Law has set.
As messy and distasteful as the Rule of Law sometimes is, Americans should be ever so thankful to live in a country that abides by it.
Many countries don’t.
Pakistan is trying to but it’s a difficult and dangerous struggle for them.
MP Bhatti lost his life over this struggle.
He was a very courageous man.
He knew that his life was in constant danger because of his beliefs.
He testifies as such in this video.
It is a very powerful testimony of faith and courage.
Shahbaz Bhatti did not shy away from the struggle for freedom.
He embraced it.
He embraced it because he understood how rare and valuable freedom is.
He was even willing to pay the ultimate price for it.
And sadly, he ultimately did.
~~~~
RELATED: The 30 Best Anti-Westboro Baptist Church Protest Signs
Homosexuality and Our National Interest
Because of my personal interest in this important civil rights issue, I have been closely following the national debate regarding the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell for some time now. My view on whether homosexuals should be allowed to openly serve in the military has significantly evolved since I first joined the navy in 1983. I believe, and have for some time, that homosexuals should be allowed to serve openly. I came to this conclusion for many reasons but here are the primary ones:
1. It is in the best interest of our national security. Our country is engaged in two active military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan while still keeping all of the other national security concerns–terrorism, Iran, North Korea, and many others–in check. Our nation simply cannot afford to waste valuable resources in any form, particularly its military resources. Our most valuable national and military resource is our patriotic citizens who volunteer to serve and protect our nation. Denying our military the service of patriotic volunteers because of their sexual orientation is not only shortsighted and stupid, it is potentially damaging to military readiness and our national security.
2. It is in the best interest of our national psyche. We all know very well that we are a country founded on the truth that all men are created equal under the laws of nature and of God. This is deeply instilled into our national psyche. Yet, we have had a painfully psychological, and at times very physical, struggle trying to turn this national belief into a national reality. We have learned from our long history of attempting to reconcile our fundamental beliefs with our country’s original sin of slavery, that when we as a nation say that we all are to receive equal rights under our laws while at the same time denying these rights to a segment of our society based on the color of their skin, our national psyche suffered deeply from it. We became dysfunctional, self-hating, and even came close to committing national suicide over it. The cognitive dissonance that occurs when saying one thing–that all men are created equal and are guaranteed equal rights under our laws–and then doing another–denying these equal rights based on race, sex, religion, national origin, or sexual orientation–is not only detrimental to our national psyche, it is damning to our national soul.
Much more work still needs to be done to ensure homosexuals receive equal rights under our laws, but as a nation, we can go a long way to securing our national security and improving the health of our national psyche simply by allowing them to serve openly in the military.
So it was with much anticipation and high expectations that I watched today while Defense Secretary Robert Gates and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen briefed the findings of the “Report of the Comprehensive Review of the Issues Associated with a Repeal of “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and then answered reporters’s questions. After Gates and Mullen finished their brief, the Co-chairmen of the study, Defense Department General Counsel Jeh Johnson and Army General Carter Ham, provided a more comprehensive overview of the report and answered reporters’s questions.
I am still plowing through the 267-page report, but based on what I learned from today’s briefings on it and my read of its executive summary, I am very impressed with its thoroughness and its results.
Secretary Gates was asked how he would respond to Senator McCain’s claim that the report is the wrong report. McCain, although an initial supporter of the survey, quickly began rejecting the results once they had started leaking out earlier in the month, saying that the survey wrongly focused on how to implement the repeal of DADT instead of focusing on how the repeal would impact military readiness. Gates responded to the question simply by saying that while he respects Senator McCain, the senator is wrong about his assessment of the survey. And from what I learned from what was briefed by the military and from my read of the report’s executive summary, I agree with Secretary Gates.
By shifting away from his original position on the survey, Senator McCain has made it clear that is doing nothing more than engaging in the Republican strategy of blocking any political success for the president and Democrats, regardless of the political costs to himself and his party. Consequently, I have little hope that DADT will be repealed during this lame duck congressional session. Both our national security and our national psyche will suffer for it.