What do you mean happy holidays?

Around 217 B.C. the Romans needed to cheer themselves up a bit, so they introduced a celebration to honor the god Cronus, and called it Saturnalia. They wore different clothes, they allowed gambling, they even exchanged gifts. But the thing they did which I find most interesting was that the slaves and masters would switch roles. The ruling class would serve the serfs, so to speak. A couple of hundred years go by, Jesus is born, and the celebration of the Roman god is absorbed into the catholic church.
Now most people would agree that the celebration of Christmas is far too commercialized, but the gift giving is clearly an enduring theme, so what else does Christmas mean. If the holiday cards are any indication, peace and love are supposed to be the central ideas. Ideas sorely lacking in society these days. Peace? When in the history of human existence has there been peace?
There is a famous story about the Christmas truce of 1914. Already dug into trenches in France, the Allies and the Germans, took a break from the war to sing songs and kick a soccer ball around. But the peace was local, and did not last long. But it helps to illustrate a point.
If you can find the humanness in someone, if you can find a commonality, it becomes less likely that you will try to kill them. A lesson which is essentially lost in America today. Just try to imagine what peace would really look like, or feeling love for a terrorist. We can't do it, because we do not try to put ourselves in the mind of our adversaries.
Reversing roles like the Romans did, shows you what life is like for other people. Understanding better who we are by experiencing whom we are not. Even in A Christmas Carol, Scrooge has to see life from a different perspective in order to understand himself. And he did not like what he saw, but he endeavored to change. So during the holiday season, we should try to examine how we would even go about achieving peace. I suspect it has to do with reducing the number of people who hate each other, by reflecting on how we and our actions appear to them.
Peace and love are very easy concepts, which are very difficult to practice. Especially in Bethlehem.

fractions speak louder than words

As the occupy movement readies itself for what looks to be a long cold winter, support and opposition seem to be taking form in strange and confounding ways. I know that the people who live and work in the Wall Street area, even those who support the action, are rapidly tiring of all the drum beating and saber rattling. And even without a well defined message coming from the movement, the rest of the country seems to be queueing up to either allign with or disassociate themselves from the protestors. And the media doesn't know what to do with a news story that lasts for more than a couple of cycles with very few updates on which to report. But the first step in any recovery program is admitting that there is a problem. The problem however, resides not in lower Manhattan, but in Washington. The President's approval rating is somewhere around fifty percent, which given the state of the state of the economy, is not surprising. Congress, on the other hand, is not so highly regarded, with approval at only about 10%. People seem to be displeased with the White House, but far more displeased with the House of Representatives. These are all people who work for us. They were all elected to serve the people of the United States, and the people who elected them are largely dis-satisfied with the job they are doing. Or not doing. With the global economy faltering, and public confidence dwindling even further, the Congress of the United States last week could find nothing more appropriate to do with it's inherent power, than call to a vote a re-affirmation of the motto IN GOD WE TRUST. With an array of important issues facing this nation, some of them dire and immediate, this is how Congress chooses to spend it's time. As irresponsibly as the financial sector has acted, the political system is doing far more damage. The message out of Washington seems to be; Trust in God, because we aren't to be trusted.

I'll have what she's having

My great-grandmother was born a full blood indian. Back in those days there was a lot of inter-tribal warfare. Raiding parties would regularly take women and children captives back to their tribe. To help combat these practices and sort out who belonged to whom, my ancestors took to tattooing the children. An indelible proof of lineage that would last a lifetime. My great-grandmother's tribal tattoo was a bird and three diamonds. She was not proud of it at all. In her later life she wore long button sleeves and gloves to hide it from view. At that time only prostitutes and sailors had tattoos, and she didn't want to be identified as either. So very few people ever saw the tattoo. Which is sad, becase if I was going to pick an image to be put onto my body, it would be that one. The tattoo my great-grandmother had. My tribal symbol, my family crest, my heritage. But hardly anybody ever saw it, and nobody seems very sure of what it looks like.

first in the nation

Today I responded to a comment on a friends facebook page. Somebody was all bent out of shape, saying basically that the Midwest was different from the rest of the country, and should secede from the Union, or something. And since this person felt misrepresented in Washington, they felt that at the very least their little area should be able to make new laws just for them. I thought that this was a perfect time to quote one of my favorite laws, the 14th amendment. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States. Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty or property, without due process of law, nor deny to any person within it's jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. It's so beautuful. It talks about States making fucked up laws, it talks about police power, it even covers immigration. A brilliantly conceived bit of legislation. And conservatives seem to hate it. This person did anyway, they said that nobody pays attention to the fourteenth amendment anyway, but at least they had God, and that at least they could still go pray. To which I replied that God is great. They took down all of their posts. I win.

sexy zombie santa

I went to the drug store this morning to get some last minute items. My girlfriend had previously purchased a bunch of candy that looked like it was made in Russia during the Stalin era, so I had to get some of the good stuff that they make in Pennsylvania. And more fake blood. I have long worked as a special effects designer for theatre and film, and let me be clear, you can never have enough fake blood. Now granted, 9:00 A.M. on Halloween day is close to the outside of the availability window for giant bags of candy and stage blood. If you wait till the last possible minute to do something, you can't really complain too much about dwindling supplies. Well the aisle where Halloween lives was easily identifiable, just look for stacks of hollow plastic pumpkins. But in the aisle where the vampire teeth should be, stood mechanized snowmen, and inflatable Santas. Giant blue plastic tubs full of Halloween sat out on the floor being hastily replaced by Christmas fare. Ornaments, lights, tinsel and Santa hats. Instead of the Halloween stuff I need. For Halloween. Tonight. Shouldn't you at least wait 'till the event is over before you start the new one? Are we planning to entirely forego Thanksgiving this year? It must be the snow. It makes people crazy.

fear itself costume

Going through the news this morning, there was a story about a lesbian couple from California. They have a four year old son who wants to dress-up as a princess for Haloween. The comment section below the piece was full of people spewing vitriol and hate. Hatred toward the boys choice of costume, hatred toward the parents, hatered toward their lifestyle. It was disturbing. In America you are allowed to be whomever you want to be. Liberty and the pursuit of happiness are guaranteed rights here. It is sad that because of so much ignorance and hate, someone has to explain to a four year old that people are going to hate him and make fun of him for being what he wants to be. In America, where freedom and liberty are our most sacred principles, people should remember that these are not just words on an aging piece of vellum. Defending freedom isn't only waging wars against our enemies in Mesopotamia, it is also about defending the right of someone whom you've never met, to marry whomever they want. And to raise children if they want. And here in America, little boys and girls are allowed to grow up to be whatever they want. Be the best princess you can be, kid. I'm cheering for you.

I am the water buffalo, you are the alligator

On October 29, 1929 the stock market went right into the toilet. President Hoover, reluctant to call the Wall Street crash a "panic", which is what it was, referred to it as a depression. The label stuck, and today politicians will go to great lengths to avoid using the word depression to describe the current state of the economy. Now the case has been made that the success or failure of our economy is related to people's perception of that economy. If investors feel positively about the future, they spend. If they are uneasy, they don't. Things are only bad if people think that they are bad. Beautifull simplicity in economics. If you can convince people that things are going well, they will go well. And vice versa.

how did you become king? I didn't vote for you

People seem uneasy with the occupy movements reluctance to have a stated objective. Beyond pointing a finger at the criminal behavior of the financial sector, and the duplicitous role of government, the movement has not embraced a common theme. I submit that this is deliberate.
If you ask 100 people if they think that Washington is broken, the majority will say yes. But if you ask them what to do about it, you will get 100 very different answers. The problem gets worse the more people you ask. Just try to get five people to agree on a pizza.
But I don't think it's the protestors job to find the solutions, that duty belongs to those in Washington who were elected because that's what they told people they wanted to do.
So don't get mad at the people who are trying to point out the problem to the people who caused the problem, and can't seem to admit that there is problem.
I never liked the financial district anyway.

the moment of singularity

The popular term for the actual beginning of the Universe has come to be the "big bang", which actually describes the moments afterwards.
The actual moment in time, umpteen Billion years ago, when literally everything in the Universe could fit into an oven is described as the event horizon, or the singularity.
A time when this small superdense object had so much mass, it would bend time like silly putty, so the concept of time is less easily applied. And the math tends to break down around then as well.
This singularity, this beautiful bundle of energy, probably wasn't around for very long, (again, the whole concept of time becomes an illusion) before it exploded more violently than we can imagine.
This is referred to as the expansion, or inflation. When the everything blew apart from itself, and began to grow very big, very quickly. (The math gets buggered up here as well.) This shining sphere of everything blew up much faster than it should have, and it is expanding faster than it should be.
There, as they say, is the rub. We know enough to know that there are unknowns. That even though we have figured out a great deal about how everything works, we still can't explain some very troubling questions about the Universe. Our brains aren't yet sophisticated enough, or some of the equations are flawed, or observation changes outcome more than we thought. We don't know.
That answer is difficult to accept for a species with such an inquisitive brain, so we will continue to search for answers. Contine re-working theories, and developing new ideas. We are aware of our ignorance, and we endeavor to learn.
This gives me hope that people will come to identify with each other as a species, and relate to their fellow man in a way that better reflects our interdependence and our ultimate commonality of purpose.
Then I like to think about the singularity.

everybody is everything

Politics has become who can scream the loudest at whoever is in power at the time. Anyone will tell you that washington is broken, but after identifying that there is a problem, they fall back into the time honored tradition of blaming someone else and denying any culpability. No one is immune. Republicans blame Democrats, the rich blame the poor, the whites blame everyone else. I submit that this current state of affairs is not working well for anyone (except the rich and white)

Web log year zero

So now everyone in the world has a blog. I want to see if this can go anywhere, writing for the ether, hoping that somebody somewhere is reading it. You can allow advertisers on here, to raise money, but since nobody is looking at it yet, I'm not gonna get ahead of myself. Maybe later BMW and Coke will jump on the cakewagon, but for now we're non profit.