Last presidential debate is coming up in a couple days, with the last chance for Bush to take Kerry down. I mean that literally. Bush should punch Kerry's lights out before the senator gets to the podium, in front of a national audience. I'm surprised that the Prez didn't deck his opponent at the first debate. One haymaker and there would have been no post-debate bounce.
I am serious, really. A knuckle sandwich at the debates would be a natural and logical extension of Bush's pre-emptive use of force to quell viable and active threats to our beloved U.S. of A. John Kerry subscribes to backward and dangerous political ideology, Liberalism, which any good conservative, i.e. a true American, will tell you is an irrational belief system of a minority which could destroy what makes America great, if in power. Even worse, Kerry is an extremist, since he has been rated as the most liberal senator today, more that even Teddy Kennedy. Bush himself has called the senator from Massachusetts a serious threat to the continued security of America and a hindrance to the success of the War on Terror. Therefore, Kerry is an active threat, an agent of the Enemy of the true values of America. He could be an even greater viable threat if, by some freak of nature, Bush loses the election and Kerry becomes commander-in-chief, with control of WMDs including a massive nuclear arsenal.
So cock back that arm, Mr. President, and let loose your just and righteous fist to strike first with a show of clear pre-emptive force before the senator can push the Button. The fact that John Kerry may or may not be elected, the possibility of a Democratic White House is an implicit threat that could mean a mushroom cloud come January. You know that words mean nothing, Mr. President, action is everything. Words have failed twice to fully disarm John Kerry, so in Tucson, nut him for good measure.

from Merriam-Webster dictionary:
noosphere: the sphere of human consciousness and mental activity especially in regard to its influence on the biosphere and in relation to evolution

"We are, at this very moment, passing through an age of transition.
The Age of industry; the age of oil, electricity, and the atom; the age of the machine, of huge collectivities, and of science-the future will decide what is the best name to describe the era we are entering. The word matters little. What does matter is that we should be told that, at the cost of what we are enduring, life is taking a step, in us and in our environment. After the long maturation that has steadily going on during the apparent immobility of the agricultural studies, the hour has came at last, characterized by the birth pangs inevitable in another change of state. These were the first men - those who witnessed our origin. There are others who will witness the great scenes of the end. To us, falls the honor and good fortune of coinciding with a critical change in the noosphere.
In these confused and restless zones in which the present blends with the future in a world of upheaval, we must stand face to face with all the grandeur, the unprecendented grandeur, of the phenomenon of man. Here if anywhere, now if ever, have we, more legitimately than any of our philosophers, the right to think that we can measure the importance and detect the direction of the process of hominisation. Let us look carefully and try to understand. And to do so let us probe beneath the surface and try to decipher the particular form of mind which is coming to birth in the womb of the earth today.
Our earth of factory chimneys and offices, seething with work and business, our earth with a hundred new radiations - this great organism lives, in final analysis, because of and for the sake of, a new soul. Beneath the change of age lies a change of thought. Where we are to look at it, where we are to situate this renovating and subtle alteration which, without appreciably change our bodies, has made new creatures of us? In one place and one only - in the new intuition involving the total change in the physiognomy of the universe in which we move - in other words, in an awakening.
What has made us in four or five generations (in spite of all that may be said), so ambitious too, and so worried, is not merely that we have discovered and mastered other forces of nature. In final analysis it is, if I am not mistaken, that we have become conscious of the movement which is carrying us along, and have thereby realised the formidable problems set us by this reflective exercise of the human effort."

from The Phenomenon of Man by Teilhard de Chardin

I am deeply troubled everytime I see someone walking up an escalator. (I know its probably more troubling that I am even troubled by something like this. But I am.) It's not just how this action defeats the purpose of moving stairs, but this typifies the absurdity of convenience in modern life. Escalators were created to provide an alternative to climbing stairs, yet many people climb escalator. Simple technology providing an alternative to work transmogrifies into a definition of convenience as something that provides speedier work. Like cellular phones, palm computers, and other devices of modern convenience, escalators, those now venerable machines, are less about relief from work and more about the speed to fit more work into less time.

Relativism is the empowerment of perspective.

Chaos is just order that we don't like.

Heaven = Paradise
Paradise = Garden of Eden
Garden of Eden = Life without Knowledge
Life without Knowledge = Ignorance
so.....
Heaven = Ignorance?

"Ignorance is not bliss, it is oblivion." - Oscar Wilde

I've always had problems with the Biblical story of the Fall of Man. God makes man. Man eats fruit of knowledge. God gets pissed. Man gets tossed out on tuchis and loses eternal life. And this is so bad that every child of Adam henceforth gets smacked up with sin from birth.
Call me kooky for asking, but what was so great about the Garden of Eden? So, basically, Paradise is laying around naked, having no sex, and being a vegetarian. Little have we known, Adam and Eve were the first hippies. It was life of ignorance, without death, fear, or suffering. Again, what is so great about that?
If man knows nothing, how can we justify life as the precious gift of God? Adam and Eve walked with God in blissful joy. How blissful could man have been if he knew nothing, was challenged by nothing, and was untempered by mortality? Death and life are constant companions, which motivate mortals to express life and leave legacies. Not just by having children, man creates art, architecture, literature, and music. Knowledge drives man to want to know even more, and therefore experience the full complexity of God's creation, the universe. A sense of wonder is how we perceive the world and inquire how the hand of God moves in action....
(Note: this train of thought is not complete, as I ended up having to let some dumb shmuck into an office.)

How often has illumination been confused with transcendence?

When I was 18, I came up with my officially unofficial motto, "Comedy is Philosophy with Better Punchlines." I still want to get in translated into Latin, but I wonder more now that I've ever fully understood what it means.

In response to a profile on one of those online social boards, I wrote a guy with ADD that I was fed up with the acronyms ADD/ADHD so I had thought up a new acronym. I am IMBG: Invested with Madness By the Gods. It comes back to that idea about how ancient cultures treated the mad as holy, but also how historically the innovative and creative were often seen as mad. So with both ideas in mind, I ask, what is so wrong with being mad? Its better than being qualified by some soulless psychological term applied to those who think differently than others.
Now on lobby watch, I reflect on my new acronym and this quotation or axiom I picked up somewhere, "Whoever the Gods love, They also destroy." No idea where I got it, or if it is right. (I'm using Gods here very metaphorically here, of course. Least in the sense that the Gods reflect upon human purpose.) So if madness is holy, it could be considered a gift from the Gods, one which is a tough challenging endowment in which certainty and stasis hold no sway. Just because I like to drown this in profundity, I'm even going to call it the proverbial "gauntlet of fire," one that only a madman would pass though to find purpose.

okay, it's not like I didn't write anything in my little black notebook in the last couple weeks, I've just been that lazy shmuck who rather scratch his tuchis than transcribe. Well, I'm transcribing, already.. the next posts are all chronological leading up to a few days ago.