White American Thanksgiving

For my international readers, today, November 26th, is a national holiday here in the U.S. called Thanksgiving. It's a day during which we do what we can to further our national epidemic of obesity. We're also meant to think about what we're thankful for. I wrote down some of my thoughts about what I'm thankful for on this holiday.

I want to express my gratitude, on this day, that I was born White--that I am part of the powerful majority rather than an oppressed minority, and thus that I can enjoy all the benefits of that status, such as never having gotten arrested, or having learned to speak and read and write in such a way that I can get high paying jobs and can propogate this power structure on to my children and my children's children. I'm thankful for my White Pilgrim Fathers, who celebrated the First Thanksgiving with their Pokanoket friends back in 1621--Pokanoket friends who sought them out for military alliance because they needed some help after so many of them had died from the smallpox which my White Pilgrim Fathers had brought to North America. I'm thankful that my White Pilgrim fathers won so decisively, a mere 55 years later, when they went to war with their Pokanoket former friends over the lands which these savages claimed my White Pilgrim Fathers were stealing. I'm thankful that there were 4 times as many deaths among the Pokanoket savages (whose fathers had been there to help make the first Thanksgiving possible) than there were among my White Pilgrim Fathers, a war proportionality which would only grow in our favor in the 350 years to come. I'm thankful for the way in which this war and other early wars against the merciless Indian Savages* helped form our identity as a nation where White People like me hold and exercise the power. I'm thankful that the end result is that now we white Americans are able to spend more than the rest of the world combined, some $650 billion annually, on armaments and military, and that following from this I am in the top 10% of wage earners in the world, and have never experienced hunger or homelessness or much of anything really unpleasant at all for a single day of my entire life. I'm thankful to be white, to be male, and to be at the top of the pack in a world where 1 billion (mostly non-White) people have no access to fresh water and 2 billion (mostly non-White) people live on $2 a day or less. I feel like shouting with joy and gratitude! Wooooooohooooooooot!

*Note: "merciless Indian savages" is a phrase which I have borrowed from that brilliant document my White Pilgrim Fathers authored--the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

Veterans Day/Remembrance Day/Armistice Day tomorrow--Sigh--and a question

I went to hear my seven year old daughter sing with the rest of her class at the school assembly today. She, and they, sang "Brothers and sisters all patriots, ready to answer the call, in service of our country, of our country. Honor and courage and sacrifice" The principle spoke about honoring the veterans who die to keep us free and bring peace.

Sigh.

Apparently is costs us (the human race, that is) some 1.2 trillion dollars per year to purchase weapons to keep us free and bring peace. Not to mention the cost in trauma to human beings.

Here's my question. Is Veterans Day to the arms industry as Christmas is to the retail industry?

"Do you think they will thank you for teaching them that war is glorious?" --Dr. Who

Not to the strong is the battle

Did you know that the U.S. accounts for ~5 percent of the world's population, and ~21 percent of the world's GDP, but we account for ~57 percent of the world's arm's expenditures?

A metaphor for that:  If you imagine the world is a village of 100 people, then 5 of them are Americans, and those 5 own 20% of the village's wealth, and they manufacture more bullets, tanks, warheads, bombs, fighter jets, bombers, etc. than the other 95 people in the village put together.

Duel pursuit

Someone please tell me that Janet Hook and her editor allowed this "misspelling" in her very first sentence on purpose, as some sort of super lame play on words. The Chicago Tribune is the 6th largest newspaper in the U.S.

With the struggle over healthcare entering an even tougher phase, President Obama has hit both a milestone and a speed bump in his duel pursuit of a major overhaul of the nation's medical system and a rebirth of progressivism in America. 

There are reasons

why the president described today's shooting rampage as "a horrific outburst of violence", but he doesn't ongoingly describe this in similar terms.

(Think "How to boil a frog")
(Methinks perhaps we're boiled.)

My birthday wish list

Stuff I want for my birthday, which is on the 6th:

1. A space fountain (I don't want to own it, necessarily--just to be able to watch it in operation).
2. An easy/quick way to suddenly always be kind and gracious to my wife and children (and other people).
3. Better listening skills.
4. A deferred (or at least deferrable) acceptance to the Son-Rise child facilitator training program in Massachusetts.
5. For all these companies to quite suddenly go bankrupt (or correlationally, for the percent of the world's GDP spent on arms to drop quite suddenly from ~2% to ~0%). (Note: there are only ~4000 google results for "corellationally".  Can you think of a word that only returns ~4000 google results?)
6. For these folks to get what they want.
7. This one is a secret.
8. A copy of my brother in law's new novel, preferably electronic (not only so I can read it, but also so someday I can say I was among the very first to ever read or even see it, back in the day).
9. My dad to miraculously get much healthier.
10. For people with whom I converse around here to stop mispronouncing "Melbourne" "Mel boorrrrn" and start pronouncing it "MEL bin" as it's meant to be pronounced.

If I have to choose just one, I'm going with 3.

I'm still working on pi in Roman numerals.

Binary Pie and Binary Debt

In case you were wondering, it is my humble opinion that pi is easier to memorize in binary.  It starts out 11.0010010000111111

Of course you need way more digits to express the same accuracy.  Nevertheless, it's still easier.

I'm working on pi in Roman numerals (which is slightly more difficult to figure out than pi in base 2).

Also, pi in base pi is 10, which is *really* easy to remember, except that it doesn't really do you much good, because then you also have to memorize some other form of pi, or else you can't really tell anybody with much accuracy what base you are working in.

Also, here's the U.S. national debt (as of November 2, 2009 (or in binary November 10, 011111011001))

$10101100111001010110000100111101110111101111 wow looks even bigger in binary.

Fie

60 hours of misery is enough!  Fie on you, streptococcus pyogenes.  I defy you in the name of my immune system. Do your darnedest. I shall defeat you! Fie on you!

Noah's Ark: salvation, anthropocide, or xenocide?

My beautiful and super amazing Megsie came home today and informed me that it's her turn this week to tell the story at Sunday School at the relatively kewl Union Church this Sunday.  With her she brought a box with wooden models of Noah's Ark, including a gangway and lots of little pairs of animals.  Megsie (regretted to) inform me that this was the story which she had been assigned--the story of Noah's ark.

Here's the relevant Bible passage.

This is a story I grew up with, and felt pretty familiar with, which I haven't looked at in a while.  So I went back and glanced through it again today with my current eyes.

I think it's more interesting if you just toss out, to begin with, the question of whether it's factually true or not =).

I asked Megsie where are the models of all the dead people?  Is that a bit macabre?  Why is it we teach our children this story, where every living thing on the face of the entire planet is wiped out, but we don't teach them the other creepy stories from the old testament, like mere genocides, or prostitutes being hacked into pieces and fedex-ed all over the country and so forth? Maybe this story has a greater sense of redemption than those?

Actually, it seems to me that it does.  It feels like a story about a newish God learning, growing, and regretting.  First she regrets the existence of humanity, with all our evil.  But at the end, he/she regrets even more having come that close to wiping us right out, and vows never to do such again.  Which vow, so far anyway, it seems he/she has managed to keep.  Although a few times just barely.

Perhaps it means that there's hope!

Anyway--here's my question (and I think it's a rather interesting one):  Is God killing off the entire human race in Genesis 6-8 closer to anthropocide (by which I mean the killing of all of humanity), or xenocide (by which I mean the killing of an entire alien species)? Or maybe it works out to both?

(Now if I can just convince Megsie to introduce the story to the children as "Noah and the Xenocide by flood")

Non-anonymous, and (more or less) having a name

110,000 results on google for the specific (and perhaps excessively wordy) phrase "non anonymous"

They could have just said "onymous". By the way, apparently neither the adjective "onymous" nor the adjective "anonymous" have comparative or superlative forms (that is: "onymouser" and "onymousest"). Which is actually quite interesting. It seems one either has a name or one doesn't--there's no more or less having a name. Is there?

Well--why not? One could write a short story around the idea of "onymouser". I shall have to submit this idea to my author/goddess in residence.

I definitely feel onymouser than I did, say, five years ago.

Faster than even I imagined.

"As proof of the way that the Kindle has changed reader habits, [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos brings up an amazing statistic. Earlier this year, he startled people by revealing that of books available on both Kindle and paper versions, 35 percent of copies sold by Amazon were Kindle versions. Now, he says, the number is up to 48 percent. This means that a lot of people have bought Kindles (Amazon won’t reveal the figures) and that Kindle owners buy a lot of books."


  -From this article


(just sit, for three minutes, and ponder the implications.)


(for instance--maybe my grandkids are going to look at paper books the way I look at rotary dial phones.)


(and in October they're coming out with a kindle 1 which can access the web wirelessly in 100 nations, unlike the one I currently have, which only works that way in the U.S.  And here I am moving to Australia in December.  sigh.)


  

If you love me

I think this song brilliantly captures certain elements of the Son-Rise philosophy.  And Van Morrison .... ahhhhhhh.

Pam Hogeweide interviews William Paul Young on genderbending God the Father in his book The Shack

Pam, you rock for doing this interview.  I hope all my Christian friends read it.

I continue to like Paul Young more and more, after really disliking the book.

Paul says

If the reality of a relationship with a God who is Spirit is lost in gender referencing imagery, then we have indeed erred, whether we have turned to female goddess imagery or male Zeus/Gandalf imagery

Read the interview here: http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-25065-Portland-Progressive-Christian-Examiner~y2009m10d2-Interview-with-Paul-Young-of-The-Shack-gender-bending-God-the-father

I coined a phrase =)

Google currently returns zero results for "American style eschatological eisegesis".  That probably means that I coined it. Hooray!  =P

Changing our make believe.

Color perception is a learned behavior: that is, the way we see and experience the world is mostly make-believe. This means we can change our make-believe toward one which we prefer. But only as we become able to know/understand our current make-believe. H/T Joe Turner

The middle squares are the same color

Video of me on my LOPWMIPFMTIMAC

LOPWMIPFMTIMAC from Recycle Your Faith on Vimeo.

Discussion over at Recycleyourfaith.com

or here: Who's on your list?

What I'm learning latelyish, and make-believe

I can choose to be happy.

I can be present in my body.

I can be present in my current physical environment.

I can be present in my current social environment.

I can fully experience "bad" feelings.

I have an internal place to stand, from which I can observe myself.

I can be kind to myself.

I can be kind to my children.

I can be kind to my wife.

I can be creative, fun, and playful.

I don't have to believe what other people believe.

I don't have to feel what other people feel.

I can connect with other people.

My fears regarding what other people are thinking and feeling toward me are very often seriously out of sync with what they are actually thinking and feeling towards me.

I can be bold in asking genuinely curious, non judgmental questions.

Other people have have fascinating internal lives.

The way I see/experience the world is almost entirely make-believe, and therefore I can totally shift to a new make-believe which I prefer/choose. HOORAY!!

What make-believe do YOU prefer?

Itsy bity poo poo

The delightful little girl here is Sofi, with whom I have the grand privilege of playing for a number of hours each week in her playroom.

This last 10 days I've been with Sofi and the amazing Tracey and Saeid, her mom and dad, in Sheffield Massachusetts at the brilliant and beautiful Option Institute and Autism Treatment Center of America, where we've all been getting trained/helped with Sofi's Son Rise Program. I've cried or nearly cried this last 10 days more than I do during most 10 day periods, and laughed more too. I am so thankful for the opportunity. I've learned a ton, and hopefully changed a little as well in the direction which I desire to change.

Before and after

One of these people is happier than the other (hint: One of them feels "unworthy", by their own description)





For more from the happier one, see: Ray Boltz in concert at JesusMCCC
See also Carol Boltz' blog

LOPWMIDFMTIMAC and Mark Driscoll on Christians Fasting for Ramadan

Maybe I should start a List Of People Who Make It Difficult For Me To Imagine Myself A Christian, to go along with my LOPWMIPFMTIMAC.

In the news recently: Brian McLaren, Ries, and friends decided this year to fast during the month of Ramadan, in an act of peacemaking and solidarity between Christians and Muslims. Mark Driscoll was quoted in response as saying

"Christians observing a Ramadan fast is insane at best ... Sad, tragic, horrific, misguided, dangerous, wrong. If Christians want to pray during Ramadan, they should pray not with Muslims but for Muslims — that Muslims would come to know Jesus. To pray with Muslims absolutely dishonors Jesus."

I feel a bit sad for all the folks who sit under his teaching every week. Sigh.