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Sunday 21 December 2008

A More Perfect Union,
Noumenonally Speaking

Brilliant theoretical inalienable rights adorn the texts of our times, whereas the phenomena emanating forth from said documents are not symbolic, albeit ranked as such when illumination precedes enlightenment.

If I understand Kant, "self-evident" equals evidently enigmatic.


How is this not a display of gay marriage?


So by way of a sort of admitted tit for tat, a typical Christian dick-wad has been chosen to deliver the inaugural invocation. The most bemusing thing about this is that there would have been an invocation with or without this Rick Warren guy - or, better yet, this "Rick Warren" guy.

A supreme Liberal pastor of some reformed Christian denomination could have been chosen, but he or she still would have been "invoking a god" of no basis in reality save for a script used to subjugate believer and non-believer alike. Having the prez-elect put his penis on a library copy of the I Ching, or dancing around a maypole would make just as much sense. But hey, we love our myths! You might say they're sacred. Just look around at the architecture in the city where this shit goes down.

Not that homosexuals don't have a legit beef, at least insofar as this is a slap in their face more than it is to your standard non-Christian who can ignore - or grin and bear this thing every four years. (Aren't the Olympics enough?)
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Meanwhile, the California attorney general has seen fit to challenge the constitutionality of recently passed Prop 8. I don't feel much like googling around enough to establish AG Brown's for- or against-ness of this crap when it was initiated in the first place, but seeing as I dedicated several weeks of my semi-employed life trying to get this guy elected over the last Commander o' Hope, I'll just assume that he thought it wouldn't pass.

But if it turned out that he was playing it safe, I'd have to say that it shouldn't surprise me at all. I mean, Democrats wouldn't even stand up to the murder of their most deified of presidents, almost as if they'd played a part in his sacrifice. At least the Republican's got a chance at a second inaugural address during the threatened dissolution of that Union.

Sure, Christian apologists try to make a reasoned argument against homosexuals having the right to the institution of marriage, going so far as to suggest that "people" wouldn't be opposed to civil unions.

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't marriages civil unions? Are those abominable gays demanding that any and all churches unwilling to sanction the sanctity of their marriages be forced by The State to do so?

What? Are they planning to go on a Tour of Churches, conducting elaborate ceremonies in each, complete with boas and drag lip-sync competitions, forcing every congregation to watch in horror? Maybe even the kids will be forced- or heaven forbid, want to participate!?

Wherever the phrase "the next thing they'll want" is uttered, the current want can't be all that bad.

I know, I know: it's about having the specialness taken out of the strictly man and woman arrangement. Separate but equal. To people with this point of view I feel like saying, "Go jerk off to an Abs of Steel video, you friggin' homo!"

It's as if they are saying, "You can exist for my amusement, but if I had t'marry the opposite sex..."

What this comes down to is that politicians of party-favor are either afraid of the electorate's rejection of their intelligence, or they are deathly afraid of death, and somehow images of sodomy make it worse for them. Now the sodomy itself...

Can one let go of his ego...
...when his soul is being captured?


Shadows on the Cave Wall
Revisiting the former NASDAQ chief's swindle: a discernible difference between a Ponzi scheme and a legal financial institution is that the interest to be paid on investments and loans is required by law in the latter case, whereas if there is no investment, as in the case of the former, there can be no legal oversight. Those turning over their capital to Madoff "trusted" him with their money, but how much did they care where their returns were coming from?

Likewise, citizens have a tendency to trust the promises of those in charge of making decisions on their behalf, assuming that brilliant financial machinery put in place long before the present time is more than just a scheme, because debtors are required by law to pay their debts; this, it's supposed, insures the free flow of the financial lifeblood.

So while it is correct that Madoff's chosen methodology was foreseeable and preventable in a legal sense, this doesn't mean that the collapse of the entire capitalist system has not been.

In another time this era might be known as the one during which we and our internationally interactive institutions functioned while amassing mountains of debt, going so far as to permanently engage a system of deficit spending while continuing to do business as if we were paying our interest lawfully, when, in fact, we were not.

Candle of Life by John Lodge and performed by Evan