Archive for the ‘Daily News Flow’ Category

Straight Females are Bi

November 8, 2015

That’s basically the title of this article on Female Sexuality.

It references a study which found that women who identify as straight apparently got aroused by looking at other women. I haven’t looked into the study but let’s assume that these findings are correct. I don’t think this is surprising, although the title is misleading.



Cultural Marxism – What it isn’t

July 4, 2015

In the early 20th century, people in different fields started questioning long-held truths. E.g. the group of philosophers known as the Frankfurt school developed something called critical theory, influenced by Marx’s questioning of economics. People started realizing that knowledge was subjective and reinterpreted established facts with a more sceptical mindset, in part placing more emphasis on how upbringing, that is environment and culture, influence our perspective on reality. However, the term Cultural Marxism is a more recent invention. Some people, probably coming to the debate from a variety of starting points, have banded together in reaction to this scepticism united by their opposition to what they have labelled Cultural Marxism. Judging from the list in the article on Cultural Marxism on Metapedia, they are concerned about criticism against whites, males, heterosexuals, Christians, Westerners and the nuclear family.

The people who use the term Cultural Marxism might not all be concerned with all six issues, but as any reactionary movement, they havn’t unified behind a common ideology, they only pick and choose among any research that can be utilized in their opposition. It might seem like the reactionaries should be the ones to carry a label, rather than those they have decided should be grouped together, but without a common ideology they remain reactionaries. Labelling them doesn’t work for the same reason that the label Cultural Marxism doesn’t work; “Cultural Marxists” and “anti-Cultural Marxists” are both equally ideologically heterogeneous groups.

The Status of Socialism in Europe 2015

April 1, 2015

Since I wrote a post on the status of capitalism, I thought this could be an informative extension. With Podemos in Spain, Syriza in Greece and conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle-East, it is interesting to speculate on what the future holds for the EU and its neighbourhood.


It was my Own Fault they Harassed Me

February 18, 2015

50,000 shares on facebook – an open letter about groups of boys harassing girls highlights the deep roots of social problems in Sweden, hiding under a veneer of perfection.

The first ones to be blamed are immigrants, mainly muslims, for having a degrading view of women. The strength of that voice is consistent with the 13 % who voted for the protectionists/isolationists/nationalists/social conservatives, the Sweden Democrats.

However, the phenomenon is the same as it has been for decades and even in this specific case ethnicity was not a factor. Some men and boys, regardless of age and ethnicity, whether drunk or not, whether alone or in groups, behave deplorably towards women when nobody is around.

Because that’s what it’s really about; what we do when nobody is looking, and that’s probably why nobody knows how to fix the problem, because they don’t understand what they don’t see.


Let’s try to reason in lack of direct experience. The parents have not instilled sensible values in their kids; this is part of it. The school and the teachers have failed on this point as well; sure. Hormones turn teenagers into lunatics; ok. Peer pressure; yes.

Society is also at fault on a more general scale. The streamlined neoliberalism has no time for kids, to the point where kids at day cares are always sick because the diseases are always present at the day cares because parents can’t just not show up at work when their kids are sick. The separation of parent and child is even more fundamental. Whereas e.g. the San people allow their kids to play amongst themselves, they are always in the vicinity of the parents and a division between parent and adult is prevented by repeatedly crossing over any border before it manifests. The quality time in our culture between parent and child, and don’t even mention other adults, is artificial and isolated from reality, the kids don’t take part in the parents’ everyday activities and the parents don’t take part in the kids’ everyday activities.

In this case, the city centre is peppered with private schools and when the kids leave the school grounds to hang out on the street corners, smoking cigarettes, looking cool, smacking girls on the ass, calling them whores if they fight back, the schools give away their responsibility, a responsibility already given away to the schools by the parents.

Should men (and other women) who pass by such a scene intervene? Yes. Would the scene even take place if an adult walked past? No. Is it any different from when an adult man spies a lone woman late at night in an empty public space with no witnesses around? No.

It is no different from peeing in the shower when nobody is looking either. Or spewing vile hatred over random strangers online from behind the anonymous safety of a computer screen. There is no empathy – the Other is reduced to an object in the Self’s own theatre play called My Life.


To solve the problem, it is not enough to blame one person. The solution is to tear down walls, the walls between me and others, the walls between the schools and the rest of society, between adults and children, between job and spare time; and all of these things can exist together.

Constantly keeping an eye on each other would be counterproductive, but there should be connecting points between all these actors and stages to allow for natural flows between the adult world and the teenagers’ world and the kids’ world, between the schools, day cares, corporate offices, factories, parks, warehouses, cafés, cinemas; to the point where these borders no longer seem like borders.

If you want to fix this problem, no matter where you’re starting from, you have to reach out, talk, listen, incorporate, communicate, share, involve; everyone, sure, but most importantly, the perpetrators.

The Philosophy and Politics of #gamergate

November 14, 2014


Let’s first quickly summarize this. Gamers want better ethics in journalism after corruption was discovered. Games developers and gaming media rejected this criticism as an attack on women. Both sides have made mistakes, both sides blame the whole of the enemy camp for these mistakes and both sides view their own mistakes as not representative of the whole.

I’m gonna attack this issue from my own perspective which means that I am not neutral in this matter, but I think of myself as a third party and not in favour of either of the two groups and I hope you will read the whole text before passing judgment. (more…)

What’s an SJW – Social Justice Warrior?

October 1, 2014

I discovered the term when reading about #gamergate. Although it did not originate with this, it seems to be the catch-all phrase for the enemy of the gamers. There is no definition of who is on either side of the gamergate war but it seems that people too often revert to “hardcore gamers” versus “SJWs”. But before we get to the definition, we must look at the anon culture which propagates the term, and, ultimately, maybe I’ll be able to tell what justice really means. I’m not gonna dwell on gamergate, but I’ll explain it in order to segway into anon culture and from there discuss the philosophical aspect of social justice within (more…)

Ukraine, Race States and WW3

March 9, 2014

This is a copy of a youtube comment I made on a video about the crisis in Ukraine. The comment section was, unsurprisingly, brimful with hatred.

“Look, everyone here has been told lies and all nations have done horrible things in the past, there’s no point in having a contest of who raped the most people, certainly not based on propaganda sources. Accept this as a starting point. Now, let’s think about this from a broader perspective. In the 1700s Europe was controlled by the British Empire, the Frankish Empire, the Russian Empire, the (more…)

Today is the 31st of July 2012. The Prophecy

July 31, 2012

The end of 25 years.

1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 <- All digits different. (1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012.) = 25 years consisting of numbers with at least one digit appearing twice in the Gregorian year.  All digits different -> 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019.

Today is the 212th day of 2012. In 212 days it will be 1/3 2013. 2/3 2013 had it been a leap year like 2012. This is the day the world ends. Because people will mistake May 1st, the socialist day, for March 1st, willfully misinterpreting this prophecy to suit their own ends. Also, the day ends, but the night too, they are connected, like you are connected, all worm-like skeletons walking around with molecular autophotoisomerization receivers plugged into their neuron nests. We’re all connected to the sun because it lights our vision, and the moon, and the candles and bakers and the bumblebeemakers. 2013 is the day of reckoning or begging, depending on the Mayan interpretation. “The moon will end today/the sun will end a night of reckoning (or begging)”. It is the unlucky year of Jesus, the 13th year of Pisces, the fisherman carpenter superman.  The halfgod will return, clad in iron masks, he will ride a serpent, long and hard, blasphemous, bejeweled, a silver bolt through dead woods, like a virgin, touched for the very first time, uuh la la la.

Today: Sweden in the News 250 Years Ago

May 22, 2012

May 22nd 1762

“Swedish ships can get armed”

“From next year Swedish ships are expected to be allowed to have armoured guards aboard to protect themselves from pirates.”

“Swedish ships have been attacked by pirates but never captured.”

Actually, this is from today 2012 and not from 1762 and humans still carry guns built by humans for humans to kill humans. It amazes me.

I met a guy who works with fighter jets and told him I find the word ‘enemies’ strange. I said it was like taking two dogs and making them superintelligent and the first thing they do is bite each other to death. I don’t know why I find it strange, but I think of humans as a collection of atoms, a sort of material constant that both is and is a part of a motion called the Big Bang. We’re like dogs, we look like dogs and are made of the same stuff as dogs, cells, bacteria, DNA, atoms fused in solar fusion, we eat what dogs eat, carbon; other life. And we perceive the world as they do, through two eyes and two nose holes.

We need to change the way we do things. We should not be at war with each other. It seems simple enough, doesn’t it?

But we got capitalism, a global system within which every humans is ranked from 1st to 7 billionth,  a race for who is the best human, a constant prison death match where everyone is in the fighting arena at the same time. You can only get ahead by taking from someone else, any positive thing you do results in a loss of value for someone else. That’s a parasite system. Why not live in symbiosis and say ‘everything belongs to everyone’? We don’t to fight over resources. It limits our potential to advance our technology and knowledge if we not only have to spend time trying to figure stuff out but also have to spend time fighting each other.

And we got religion, a glocal system within every human is judged. In Christianity, Islam and Judaism all people are divided into 2 types of people; evil and good. The good will live in a paradisical fantasy land with rainbow-coloured unicorns forever. The evil will be tortured forever. And this is because an invisible force wanted all this to happen. This force created a man and then decided to let the man duplicate himself by creating a feminine version of the man in which he could put a sample of his blueprint which this force has stored inside the leather body in the form of giant molecules so that the blueprint could be passed on and itself become a man that could itself duplicate itself into more duplicates able to duplicate themselves into dublicates able to duplicate themselves and so on. The man is seen as the creation of a perfect mind. The woman is seen as a pile of manure in which you can stick things and stuff grows out of it.

However, if it is possible to fix the problems of capitalism, religion and other misguided systems, it is possible for us 7 000 000 000 people to do amazing things.

What Is Peace?

February 20, 2012

In Iran, Cyrus the Great built a multicultural empire. His priests, who worshipped Marduk, wrote on a rugby ball-sized piece of clay in the then much popular* writing known as Akkadian cuneiform. This is what someone said today on another youtube video: “i love it plus the images makes me wanna time travel and experience ancient egypt or sumer or babylon. it seems wonderful.” This is a normal part of the Romantic Era that supposedly started like 500 years ago, but people have been nostalgic for a long time really. The poem Ozymandias comes to mind when I am told it is written of Cyrus as “King of the Universe” on the buried, shattered and forgotten piece of pottery. The priests and the jews both wrote their own versions of who’s God was responsible for the events that led to the Biblical account of the Babylonian captivity and the multicultural acceptance shown by Persia 2600 years ago in this baked clay. What is peace?

Peace is a passive fact, it is not protruding, it is the absence of war.

Like darkness is only absence of light.

Like throwing flowers and candle makers.

Like bouncing children on an airplane.

Like powder and shit.

And some tomatoes.

We live in peace most of the time. Sometimes people kill. We don’t have to be at war with each other. Humans can live in peace. We can stop being each other’s enemies. Capitalism is war. People are pitted against each other, you can only get rich by taking from others, we are enemies. We don’t need to be enemies, we can live in symbiosis, we can live in peace. What is peace?

Peace is being friends, who do things for each other even though symbiosis is both egalitarian and selfish.

They do things like scratch each other’s backs.

And hand out a cigarette knowing full well it’s not healthy.

And spend their time with you.

And pick stuff up.

And put stuff down.

And turn it all about.

And shake it like it’s hot.

And bake it if it’s not.

And then take a piece of pie into the living room. With certain skill.

And say things.

And listen to things that go “bzzzzzzz” and “wubwubwbu” and “343545943597”.

Then the fun begins, as all the sheep are laden with honey and stricken by the hand of a tortoise that, before the “I’m a Thunder God”-stuff, had been accidentally wedged in the coffee mug Sergeant Detritus drank molten minerals from each morning. In fact, he had so often listened to his own heart beat not thumping either faster or slower in proportion to the timing of the intake of the molten minerals, that the first day the tortoise winked at him from within the molten minerals he was quite shocked. In fact, he spilled the molten minerals onto the, unfortunately, wooden table, which made a sound as if a grinder had been ground into the ground with grinding grindness. After a few well-meant but firm** conversations with the proprietor of the establishment, in which the aforementioned troll coffee mug was being served next door to the Watch Headquarters, Detritus had to accept the presence of the green, little bugger as the tiny God would not leave.

The fun doesn’t stop there. It is everywhere. It is in the seven billion people laying down their weapons and meeting in Jerusalem, Babylon, Mecca, Ur, Rome, Istanbul and that’s just the Mediterranean/Middle-east, we can meet at any place on this planet. The Abrahamic tradition tells us this of Zion:

2 Many nations will come […]
They will beat their swords into plowshares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war anymore.
4 Everyone will sit under their own vine
and under their own fig tree,
and no one will make them afraid […]
5 All the nations may walk
in the name of their gods”

– Book of Micah, chapter 4

Peace is not being face to face with a gun but instead walking around calmly with a basket on your arm surrounded by people and food everywhere.


*Popular, people. At least the priests used it, at least once.

**Firm for a troll being a lot more intimidating to humans since the combined weight of all the arms and hands and feet et cetera made of the same material as mountains was multiple in relation to any given human’s mass.

The Raelians Debunked

December 21, 2011

Just found out about them and watched some stuff, then decided it was just too easy to debunk it to even bother with a proper blog post. Evolution is a fact that works fantasticly well with the idea that life is billions of years old and the solar system, including the earth, is 4.5 billion years old. There’s no reason to think life was designed in the last few years rather than evolved during this time and how do you explain all the fossils in hundred million year old rocks then or even all the comparatively recent neanderthal fossils. And there’s no proof of an explosion forming the oceans. Anecdotal evidence of aliens are just that, anecdotal evidence. Aliens if they exist are very far from here and therefore unlikely visitors. If they was as evolved as us 25,000 years ago they’d have to be really close to be able to travel here in that short time. Why would they create humans and monkeys and all other life exactly as if they were all parts of a continuous scale of evolutionary progress over time instead of make them all independent of other creatures DNA?

Lastly, if you think aliens created the pyramids you’re a very uneducated person. Considering that humans have been as intelligent as we are today for 100,000-200,000 years, you should be able to expect that humans 3,000 years ago would be able to pile a bunch of stones on top of each other. We’d had writing, trading, religion, military, cities, agriculture for thousands of years already. A pile of stones is not fucking rocket science.


December 4, 2011

I just watched the QI show on Intelligence wherein was mentioned the Dunning-Kruger effect. The effect is that someone who isn’t very good at something will assume to be quite good at it because they know so little about it they can’t estimate properly how little they know about it.

This applies to anyone who believes in God!

The 1 thing they all seem to have in common is that they take their information from very few sources. Like, if they want to know about geology, they don’t look to geologists, but to their holy book or their church’s home page. If they want to know about astronomy they look to their holy book or their pastors instead of in a telescope. If they want to know about the soul they don’t read a bunch of different philosophers, they look in their holy book. I could go on forever here. A creationist reading a creationist’s opinion on the theory of evolution will erroneously think he/she knows what the theory of evolution is, strengthening the false sense of confidence in knowing what it is all about and adding to the Dunning-Kruger effect. Intentional biased misinformation is strengthening the Dunning-Kruger effect as the biased misinformers will intentionally make it appear as if they are experts and make it appear as if their information is comprehensive. Not only will you think you’ve gotten a comprehensive understanding of the subject, but also the idea that the other side is deluded, which triples the strength of the effect.

The way to avoid this is to in general accept that you need to look for the one side’s best argumentation (best argument and best presentation of that argument) like a fair journalist should aim to do and weigh it against the other side’s best argumentation and compare them before making a judgement, as opposed to taking both sides’ arguments from a single, biased source (all sources are more or less biased).

One Battery for Each World Citizen

November 18, 2011

So, I was watching UR on Swedish State Television, about a monastery built 537 or something, with a burning bush in the monastery. Then followed a program of how to fix the climate problem/kick the green revolution into rolling. They talked a lot about the sun, carbon, nuclear power, reducing energy usage. I think we should only focus on the sun, it is big enough to satisfy our energy usage even if the poor countries use the same amount of energy as the rich countries do today and a lot more which is where we’re heading. In the future a lot more electronic devices will be used; in fact, the more electricity we have, the more new technical advances we’ll make. So, stop reducing energy usage, make the energy abundant instead.


Authority versus Multiculturalism

October 4, 2011

I watched a seminar on politics and religion on Swedish State Television today. Among other things, it was explained how the Bible was used to justify the transition from monarchy to republic in Europe in the 17th century. Then the question was raised “Where do we get our authority from in a multicultural society”. Everybody has their own ideals but where is the common ground? We can’t get it from God anymore since we don’t agree in theological matters. The values of a single culture aren’t a stable enough basis either with many cultures involved. So, how do we answer the question?

A lot of people feel democracy is threatened by multiculturalism. I’d say there are two problems with that sentence. Firstly, multiculturalism. Multiculturalism is a culture in itself. It’s very new to many people and therefore scary, but it’s basically not a new thing at all. People of different opinions have lived harmoniously in many different societies throughout history, we do it everyday in our families at home and in democracies with more than one party or even coalition governments it is already happening. It’s just a matter accepting multiculturalism, which requires accepting other people’s rights to have their own culture and making that acceptance part of the culture or (metaculture) of multiculturalism, making it one of basic principles of that new culture. This new culture is inevitable, the alternative is war and hopefully we’re approaching a point where we stop physically threatening and killing them for not agreeing with us, a point where we talk to each other instead of hitting each other.

Secondly, democracy. We have representative democracy. This is not the ideal form of government. Nobody should feel worried about this system being threatened. All change is scary, but we can’t not look at better alternatives and when the current system is challenged by new cultural movements we should welcome the criticism that helps us think outside the box and try to create a new system. I’m an anarchist, so the fear of not knowing whence to derive authority doesn’t apply to me. There are too many good examples from decentralizing power and the history of individualism to fundamentally fear the slow crumbling of current power structures.

2100 – Repair, Replace or Recycle?

September 9, 2011

A Swedish electronics repair company fired half its staff yesterday because people don’t want their stuff repaired anymore. This is a miniature example of a big trend.

Looking back in history, people repaired their stuff more often than buying new things. If you wanted a house, you didn’t build one from scratch, you tore down an old house. If you wanted a new shoe, you took two old halves and put them together. If you wanted a new axe, you took an old blade and fitted it to a new shaft. Of course, I’m generalizing, but there was a lot of repairing going on before.

Today, we’re in the replace phase. You can no longer fix your own car, you need to have someone build a new chip or reboot the software to get it to work, you can’t just weld it. If your food isn’t used in the first dish, you throw it away and buy new food instead of putting the food in a second dish. You can’t get a new battery for your electronic devices because it costs the same to throw away your old device and buy a new one that’s better. Today’s products don’t last as long as before and they’re designed not to last as it increases turn-over and turn-over is all that matters to coorporations.

In the future, we might recycle instead. You will throw away all the stuff you don’t need and it will be disassembled down to perhaps a molecular level and then reassembled as something new. It’s sort of a middle-way between repairing and replacing that needs efficient waste management systems but allows for a very fast redirection of society, meaning we can focus all our efforts on combating AIDS one day and cure it once and for all, and the next day we can reuse all the same resources for a new purpose.

Post Scriptum.

We can also switch to durability, but that doesn’t begin with re. Reuse and Durability. Sounds good.

Sveriges första coffee shop öppnade idag

August 18, 2011

I byn Gnalöv på landsbygden på Österlen finns femton hus. I ett av dem ligger caféet Gröna Äpplen som från och med idag har tillstånd att servera marijuana – därmed först i Sverige.

– Vi är så spända på det här. Det känns fantastiskt, det har aldrig hänt något liknande i Sverige, säger Emma Ljung som äger caféet.

Hon möter mig på uteserveringen. Vi sitter intill en vägkorsning, några bilar glider förbi men annars är det tyst över de soldränkta fälten. Emma Ljung berättar att hon köpte huset för fyra år sen med en dröm om ett eget bed&breakfast. Drömmen blev istället till ett sommaröppet café, men när hon hörde talas om att marijuana skulle legaliseras bestämde hon att hennes café skulle vara med från början.

– Naturligtvis ville jag vara bland de första. Det är ju självklart, även om andra inte ser det så. Ibland har man skrattat åt hela grejen. När regeringen  snackade om legalisering då kändes det som att det var på riktigt ändå. Det finns så många vansinniga fördomar och det trodde jag aldrig skulle hända så stelbent allting är – och människor är så tröga ibland.

Det är knappast rusning på öppningsdagen, men bredvid oss sitter två killar och lyssnar på diskussionen. De har ätit två chokladmuffins och det ligger en fimpad joint i deras askkopp.

– Det känns lite surrealistiskt att sitta här och röka på. Även om det är lagligt så har hjärnan inte hajat det än så det känns fortfarande olagligt. Det är skillnad mot alla gånger man gömt sig bakom gardiner och inte kunde ha fönstret öppet om grannen skulle lukta nånting.

Han heter Thorgeir Mamba och kallar sig själv stoner. Att vara en stoner är att vara del av en kultur som finns över hela världen, säger han. Det finns mycket musik inom vissa genrer och en del film som handlar om marijuana, men för att vara en stoner krävs bara att man gillar marijuana.

Haschet som fanns i deras muffins och gräset i jointen de delade har börjat verka och jag frågar hur det känns. Thorgeir Mamba ler stort.

– Det är grymt just nu. Fåglarna sjunger, solen värmer, tiden saktar ner och man hinner ändå inte smaka på alla sinnesintrycken så man kan bara luta sig tillbaka och le.

Emma Ljung visar menyn inne på bardisken. Det finns alla möjliga exotiska grässorter, antingen rullade i joints eller att använda i bong. Det finns en hel del magiska bakverk också. Det vanliga cafésortimentet finns också att tillgå. Själv tar hon aldrig en joint – hon säger att hon mår illa av det – men “det förändrar inte det faktum att det borde vara en självklarhet” att andra får göra det.

– Jag antar att systembolaget kommer få sälja gräs, men just nu är det bara vi som har tillstånd att odla och sälja mot visat leg. Men det är klart att det kommer bli mer allmänt accepterat även om det precis som med alkohol finns många som inte är intresserade. Det bådar i alla fall gott att vi tagit det här steget och inte lever kvar med gamla, korkade idéer längre. Det kanske finns hopp för nytänkande även inom andra områden i samhället.

Henrik Månsson

Fakta – Marijuana

  • Åldersgränsen i Sverige är numera 20 år.
  • Har använts i åtminstone 5000 år enligt ett fynd i Rumänien. (1)
  • Det mest kända psykoaktiva ämnet i växten är tetrahydrocannabiol (THC)
  • Även känt som cannabis, hasch, gräs, maja, holk, Mary Jane, spliff, reefer, bowl och så vidare.
  • Kändisar som använt marijuana inkluderar Beatles, Bob Dylan, Stephen King, Barack Obama, Carl Sagan och Shakespeare.
(1) Källa: Richard Rudgley “Lost Civilisations of the Stone Age”.

Today we Celebrate Pentecost

June 11, 2011

Until 2004, Swedes had a day off on Pentecost Monday (Annandag Pingst). Since Pentecost Sunday (Pingstdagen) and Saturday (Pingstafton) is always on the weekend, we are still free during this holiday. However, I’ve never heard of anyone doing anything special this holiday (except getting married), it seems like nobody really knows why it’s there. And to be frank, the majority of Swedes not believing in Christianity, why should we? Either way, here’s why.

Some days after Jesus had been crucified, disappeared from his grave, been witnessed as resurrected and finally ascended to heaven, the holy spirit came down to Earth. It came down looking as cloven tongues made of fire and possessed the apostles and  thus they could speak any language and everyone could understand every language. The descending of the holy spirit is what we celebrate on Pentecost. However, Pentecost means the “50th day”, referring to the Jewish tradition of Shavuot which occurred 50 days after Passover, the celebration of the Jews escaping to Israel  from Egyptian slavery. Christianity is a Jewish religion since Jesus was a Jew, but disregarding this, what the smoke is the holy spirit?

The holy spirit is God’s sperm. It contains half a DNA-strand of the Supreme Being. The God-half of DNA and the human half of DNA  joined to a complete DNA-molecule inside Mary’s egg cell in the womb. The demi-God cell duplicated itself until it became what looked like a human, but was also divine; a creature called Jesus, the Anointed Lamb. The purpose of the lamb was to be sacrificed, because God would only be pleased by a human sacrifice. I don’t know why this is, maybe God was in some kind of occult club and thought flesh sacrifice was the proper way of confirming contracts. Also, I wonder if the holy spirit came into Mary’s vagina as a cloven tongue of fire, because that’s an icon I’ve never seen.

Anyway, there’s a story behind this sacrifice. God created Adam (which means Earth*) and Eve (life**) and told them not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Everything. They did eat of it of course, and God, who knew this would happen, punished them with Original Sin. Original Sin means all humans forever are inherently evil, punished to live on Earth for a while and must believe in God to be brought back to Paradise. Then God changed his mind and arranged the killing of the lamb to undo the punishment of Original Sin. Although, I’m not sure how that helped, since you still need to live on Earth and ask forgiveness for your sins anyway to be brought to Paradise. (By the way, and this is off-topic, but why the hell did God create Hell? He’s omniscient and knows what everyone is gonna do and he’s benevolent, yet he knowingly and purposefully creates humans and situations that lead to them being tortured forever. Tortured forever for crimes like “not worshiping him” or thinking your neighbour is sexy or working on a Sunday. Committed by people whom he intentionally created to not know any better and created a world in which every piece of evidence points towards him not existing and therefore only a fool would worship him and consequently go to heaven. He’s the most evil being I’ve ever heard of. Scratch that, he’s mental!)

Of course, what really happened was different. A bunch of people invented a typical creation myth and a typical doomsday prophecy involving a guy called the Messiah. Then a preacher, named Jesus, performed the typical healing trick and was killed. Typically Elvis-style, people saw Jesus after his death and said he was special. Being special made them connect him to the Messiah and being the Messiah, they thought of his death as the counter to the banishment from Eden. Then power-greedy kings spread the religion all the way to Sweden.

*The generic usage in Genesis meaning “mankind” reflects the view that Adam was the ancestor of all men. Etymologically it is the masculine form of the word adamah meaning ground or earth and related to the words adom (red), admoni (ruddy) and dam (blood) -wikipedia

**Genesis 3:20: “And Adam called his wife’s name Ḥawwāh; because she was the mother of all living” (a title previously held by the Babylonian creatrix Tiamat). The name may actually be derived from that of the Hurrian Goddess Kheba, who was shown in the Amarna Letters to be worshipped in Jerusalem during the Late Bronze Age. -wikipedia

I think Joseph Campbell talks about creation myths like Tiamat’s, not sure if I’ve written about it before. Tiamat is “Mother Earth”, the symbol of being, of living, of reproduction, of stability, the circle of life. Then the male God, the symbol of action, change, motion, energy, power, leadership, initiation, creation, kills Tiamat and forms the world with her body and becomes the ruler. (Very patriarchal story.)  In Norse mythology there’s a parallel, slightly different though. There was nothing but fire, ice and a yawning gap between. Fire and ice created life, a cow and a giant. The female cow licked a salt stone and produced milk for the giant Ymer. His sweat became new giants. The stone became a god. The god Buri somehow became grandfather to three Gods, Odin, Vile and Ve, and they killed Ymer and formed the world from his body and Odin becomes the ruler. (Though Tyr was the god king in earlier versions of this religion.)

Fallujah Worse Than Hiroshima

May 4, 2011

“On July 6th, 2010, the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) released a study titled, “Cancer, Infant Mortality and Birth Sex-Ratio in Fallujah, Iraq 2005–2009.” The study implicates the US military’s use of depleted uranium munitions as causing similar but even worse damage to the people of Fallujah than fallout from the atomic bombing of Hiroshima did to the survivors of that bombing.” libcom.org

… and the lack of remorse over the deaths of Iraqis expressed by Obama.

200,000 in North Korean Concentration Camps

May 4, 2011

“It is estimated that 23,000 North Koreans are at this moment locked up in about 20 concentration camps scattered about the country, perhaps since the 1950s, when the elder Kim (Kim Il Sung) was in power.” The Huffington post, 2010

Amnesty estimates 200,000. amnesty.org, May 3rd, 2011

The general public was not aware of the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, but after the war, this was considered a good reason to wage war against Germany. Much like the Kuwait war led to the demise of Saddam Hussein and people rejoiced that the butcher of Baghdad had been slain afterwards, despite no WMDs. (WMDs: Look it up, it’s one of those funny U.S. Senate memes.)

The War on terror replaced the Cold war using common Orwellian rhetoric, however, now the king of terror Usama bin Ladin is dead, why don’t Team America: World Police do something about the house of Kim? Surely, there is no better candidate for invasion than a country led by a guy who thinks he’s the son of God. Oh, the historical irony of questioning divine authority!

Today is Earth Day

April 21, 2011

Today is a day of awareness. Every day should be a day of awareness, maybe not all day, there’s time to relax as well, but you can’t enjoy without being aware and you can’t change what you are not aware of and as long as there are problems you can fix, you need to be aware of them. Earth day is a day to be aware of the problems on Earth, which means being aware of all problems.

Because, really, every day is Earth day since all known lifeforms, except the astronauts and their bacteria, spends their entire life stuck like magnets to the surface of the Earth. But then again, how many thoughts are spent on this fact every year? How many minds think of the Earth and what percentage of the time do they think of it. Right now, as always when I write on my keyboard, I think of the symmetry of the complex of billions of cells ending in ten digits that rattle away at the strange coded symbols.

Sure, not everybody are aware in this sense and they have no need or desire to be either. There is always time for existential awareness later, for now we should make time for the pressing practical problems in the world; The injustice and the suffering of today and of the future.

This post will address the two problems I want you all to be aware of: injustice and energy.

What is the injustice and the suffering of today and of the future? It’s pretty simple even if it encompasses a multitude of complex matters. All life-forms should be given an equal systematic chance of happiness. An equal systematic chance meaning the system, or society in human context, should make room for any given individual to do whatever anyone else does, insofar as they’re striving for a gain, i.e. they shouldn’t be forced to accept equality, they can’t take someone else’s right, but they can give up their own.

Inequality is one of the problems on Earth and it takes many forms. In India people born in a low caste can’t advance to a higher salary or social status. In capitalist societies the children of the rich are given many benefits from their parents being able to pay for a better life in the form of private schools and high-end private products, business and services of all kinds. In monarchies children of the monarch or nobility are born with certain power and privileges. In state societies, people born in the richest states with the most social benefits are given a better life than in other states with less social wealth. That’s inequality.  Hierarchies, a pyramid-shaped world with the pharaoh on top erected on the corpses of the unfortunate.

Another problem is energy. In two forms. First, we all want machines and the best way to solve this problem is to used the materials of the Earth to capture the energy of the Sun. We do this with batteries, with plants, with wind power and solar power. Using plants is really smart, but it requires soil, which we don’t have enough of, but we can grow plants in water instead and there’s water on Earth. Of course, lack of water is another pressing matter, but we just have to clean salt water to fix that problem. Direct sunlight is also good, in the desert there is no soil or water so placing solar panels there is perfect. And the Earth is made up of rock and sand, silicon, which is what you make solar panels with, so that’s awesome. Just need to spend a lot more research on batteries and we will get rid of the bloody combustion engines.

The second form of energy need is food. Soil and water is precious, so we need to use it wisely. All food, soil and water are part of a cycle of life that goes in through the mouth and out the rear and then into a new mouth, out again and round and round forever. We are made of what we eat, we eat plants, plants eat soil, soil is worm poo, worms eat dead animals, and so it goes round and round. Today, we’re crapping all over the planet without realizing the consequences. We need to take care of our poo if we’re gonna have something to eat in the future.