Category Archives: Uncategorized

Before Les Misérables and its story of youthful, futile rebellion fades again into popular irrelevance, I thought I’d share this sweet digital painting.  This scene, with its striking red flag, was composed in response to yesterday’s police incursion into a peaceful demonstration outside a government summit on education, after protesters threw snowballs at them. Through all the chunky and kinetic faux-brushstrokes, it shows an invincible and imposing police on horseback, riding roughshod over students who can do little but wave their banners and retreat.

I highly recommend a browse through this gallery of digital paintings by the same anonymous artist (the blog is maintained by his wife) who gives full credit to Quebec’s militant underground for supplying the inspiration and subject matter for the work. They have the stated goal “of supporting, with images, the fight against neo-liberalism which is eroding Quebec society.”  The images and text are free for all to use, no copyrights, no licensing, no advertisements, no ‘Click to Subscribe.’  No linkbait.  No Kickstarter.

In an age when student activists in America turn out in droves to support a sitting US president who believes it within the power of his office to ignore his own secret intelligence courts regarding privacy and assassination orders, it’s good to know the Quebecois are keeping the (always popular and effective) black bloc alive with snowball fights and some creative commons agitprop. No physical media exists for these images, so don’t even think about co-opting this movement to decorate your corporate cafe wall and advance your profit-motive, pig. This art is for the people, by which we mean people with the internet and a computer, and electricity.

Sure I want educators running education.  Also, I sure don’t like compulsory edicts regarding thought and ‘correct’ historical cirricula. But as long as we have the internet, and it’s filled with free art and information, maybe it doesn’t matter? We’ll always have teachers, but will our kids need schools at all?  Are we all certain that the revolutionary spirit demands I take a baton to the face to protest standardized math testing for 3rd graders?  Am I really the enemy because I think there is a better way?

Educators: When technology empowers the individual so spectacularly, why obsess on industrial-age pedagogy and large-scale daycare, when the next generation will live and work entirely online? Neo-liberals: Why bother trying to bend the system to your will, when there are means to educate outside of public walls and property taxes and mandatory lesson plans? Anarchists: Why fight the state, when (if) you can work around it?

Our schools reflect our culture, and right now they are kid factories that short-track the privileged and enforce mediocrity on the rest.  Meanwhile, kids nowadays write as many words in a month than Thomas Jefferson wrote in his entire life. Popular literacy has a new domain: the air.  Teachers deserve our solidarity, because they do the hard work of educating our nation.  But they need to innovate, they need technology to do so, and they need to free students to learn efficiently and without staid biases and obsolete physical and disciplinary boundaries.  The June Rebellion was a failure.  So was Occupy.  They failed because the people as a whole cannot engage in large-scale bureaucratic reform through protest.  Only two things drive reliable, lasting revolutionary change: technology, and access to that technology for everyday people.  When art and information are free, humanity is free.

NO WIFI, NO PEACE.

Oh Ann, I’ll always remember you as my first true hate.

Remember how when Bush was President and there was a massive catastrophe orchestrated by Islamic terrorists? I remember most people saying it was because they hated our freedoms, and folks who said it was our foreign policy that led to public anger against the USA were called traitorous America-haters. I have to draw attention to how:

a) folks like Romney and Bachmann are not being called traitors by liberals like conservatives did to us from 2001-2008

b) how liberals aren’t making an argument that our policies (which include two wars) caused these uprisings the way we did in 2001

c) none of that matters.

These riots are caused by unemployment in the Arab world, and they were drummed up by religious and political leaders who, after the Arab Spring, are faced with actually solving the problems of their constitutencies instead of fomenting anger against the establishment. This will work for a while, but eventually the Arab world will need to look inward and figure out how to create a civil society.

And eventually Americans will stop expecting to automatically disagree with people who subscribe to different parties and fiscal persuasions, especially when clear enemies like religious extremists strike out against our principles and those who serve to advance our interests abroad.

The greatest thing ever courtesy of Dan Lacey

This painting is currently on auction at eBay. Current bid is $63.00. (Terms of service forbids me from admitting if that bid is mine.)

The latest chapter in the on-going preemptive eulogy of the great freethinker, essayist and contrarian (and unwitting hero of this very blog), Christopher Hitchens, is a video cut together by r/atheism frequenter gonzoblair.  Dozens of folks from all over the world toast the life and work of a singular intellectual, and drink to his honor a bit of his favorite liquor, Johnny Walker Black. (Accept no substitute.)

The diversity of the group is remarkable (although they almost all speak in Hitch’s tongue of English) and their sentiments are sincere.  That a man could attract such positive wishes mainly for pointing out the shortcomings of figures like Mother Theresa, Princess Diana, Pope John Paul II and the Hebrew God is a testament to how honesty is the king of virtues, and that truthfulness with one’s self is paramount.  I do wish that more mention was made of his journalistic pursuits, as my first encounter with his writing was in the inspirational Letters to a Young Contrarian.  That book made me unashamed to assert myself when I was sure I was unpopularly right, and to check myself when I had unpopular doubt.  I’ve never looked back.

Perhaps it is a feature of being such an outspoken atheist that people take the trouble to tell you how much they care before you die.  Just think about how nice this world would be if we made such an effort to everyone we loved.

Here’s to you, Hitch.  Cheers.

News broke today that the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation had a little disagreement about a transfer of assets between subsidiaries of Bank of America Corporation (BAC) which owns both Merrill Lynch and Bank of America (BofA, the retail bank you’re more familiar with.)  It seems that BAC is moving something on the order of $75 trillion dollars of derivatives risk from Merrill Lynch, which is not insured by American taxpayers, to Bank of America, which is.  This means that just as European banks are about to crumble in on themselves in an epic default, BAC has pushed their substantial share of the risk of those defaults from their shareholders to the FDIC, effectively putting taxpayers on the hook.

Here is another great piece on the transfer from former regulator William K. Black.

They did this without a peep from the Federal Reserve.  Through the FDIC, you and I now bear the risk of the screwed up European banking system without ever engaging in these risky and fraudulent debt obligations to begin with.  They ate the meal, now we clean the $75 trillion dishes.

This is why people do not, and probably should not, trust the financial sector and its narrow interests. People now associate ‘Wall Street’ with a threat to regular people with regular jobs and regular investments. The financial sector is the largest contributor to federal elections, including President Obama.  Mitt Romney is one and is surrounded by them.  And the media is literally owned by them, and are aligned according to a strict imaginary line that seperates D’s and R’s who both say ‘Wall Street is the best.’

Continue reading →

Intellectual honesty is an objective good.

One of my intellectual idols is, according to his own admission, near death.  This is a sad realization that only some of us are fortunate enough to come to before the end. Many people die without any chance for reflection, much less the opportunity to reflect publicly on the matter.  But I believe it a true blessing, a bonafide secular miracle, that Christopher Hitchens has that opportunity, because the perspective he has leant to all of us through his battle with cancer has provided an invaluable model for atheists and skeptics on how to face the end with grace and clarity.

As thousands take to the streets to demand a better future for themselves and others, we must be exceedingly aware of any calls for unfounded hope, rage-based panacea and all manner of totalitarian solutions to our troubles, whether personal or political.  We must not allow ourselves to be suckered in by would-be leaders who would have us follow blindly, requiring us to shut out reason or inquiry in order to stifle dissent or moral and intellectual confusion.  Any movement guided, or any life lived according to dogma is doomed to a diminished meaning to itself and others.  We have to think for ourselves.

As always, Hitch puts it best:

“In the meantime, we have the same job we always had.  To say as thinking people and as humans that there are no final solutions, there is no absolute truth, there is no Supreme Leader, there is no totalitarian solution that says ‘if you will just give up your freedom of inquiry, if you will simply abandon your critical faculties, the world of idiotic bliss will be yours.  You will certainly lose the faculties, and you may not know as a result, that the idiotic bliss is even more idiotic than it looks.  But we have to begin by repudiating all such claims, grand rabbis, chief ayatollahs, infallible popes, peddlers of a surrogate and mutant quasi-political religion and worship of the Dear Leader – we have no need of any of this.”

Blasphemy through the ages.

Indulge yourself in a little iconoclasm this weekend.  Read a book about the real world, ask questions, fuck, eat too much, enjoy yourself if you can.

You know, LIVE.

If you can’t, then tell God to go fuck himself:

More on International Blasphemy Rights Day at the Center for Inquiry.

He loves everyone EXCEPT OBAMA, idiot.

President Obama was interrupted during a speech at a very inconvenient Los Angeles fundraiser tonight, by an especially zealous heckler who insisted that “Jesus Christ is Lord and creator of the universe.”  As could be expected, the god-hating crowd of liberal Hollywood sodomy-lovers begin to boo the Savior, and subsequently beg Obama to finish his slow murder of God and liberty with another 4-year term.

(sorry for the ad…)

Obama soaks it nicely, as any secret atheist would, but then ruins the whole thing by saying he believes in Jesus too, which of course he’s always insisted, but that both sides of the aisle wish wasn’t actually true.  He then finishes off the missed opportunity to set the record straight by trying to redistribute some chick’s jacket as the cops pull the guy out and he calls Obama the Antichrist.

If only, brother.

Get ready for endless videos of Obama reveling in the Godless jeering for 13 1/2 months.

A few things to consider when mulling yesterday’s anniversary of one of the single worst crimes ever committed, and the heroic actions of thousands who responded to its perpetrators’ abject nihilism and hate, with courage, hope and self-sacrifice.

Composer Steve Reich has finished a composition that includes audio snippets from air-traffic controllers, fire department radio transmissions and interviews with witnesses to the attacks.  It is a jarring and piercing meditation on terror and how technology brought us that horror in real time.  You can listen to the piece as performed by the Kronos Quartet at NPR.

Here is BuzzFeed’s compilation of some of the most heinous mischaracterizations of President Obama and his own faith and his presence at the WTC ceremony yesterday.  The hatred and ignorance demonstarted by so-called god-fearing Christians illustrates the religious backlash that the terrorists inflicted on secular America, in addition to the thousands of murders and untold financial cost of the clean-up and subsequent wars.

Here is a list of lies told by former President George W. Bush and former Vice-President and possible war crimes defendant Dick Cheney connecting 9/11 to Iraq and using that as a justification for an unprovoked invasion of that country.

And a famously controversial quote from the aftermath that has served as the most evocative and clearest argument against unquestioned religious faith in the 21st century:

The men who committed the atrocities of September 11 were certainly not “cowards,” as they were repeatedly described in the Western media, nor were they lunatics in any ordinary sense.  They were men of faith –perfect faith, as it turns out – and this, it must finally be acknowledged, is a terrible thing to be.

- Sam Harris

The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals ruled today that videotaping police officers in the course of their normal public duties is an unassailable constitutional right protected by the First Amendment.  This is good news for lovers of the transparency that viral video and internet activism brings, as well as all citizens who prefer not to have the shit beaten out of them by the police.  It finally puts the rest of us on the same level as the government itself, which has had the right to videotape us in our regular duties since 2001.

The ruling pertained to the case of Simon Glik, who was arrested in 2007 after openly videotaping three officers with his cell phone as they performed an arrest in Boston Common.  He was charged with aiding the escape of a prisoner, disturbing the peace, and violating a wire tap law.  The charges were dismissed, but the secular terrorists at the ACLU helped him sue the police, and now we’re allowed to videotape cops.

Someone should tell that to the cops.