Category — ‘pocalypse

NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no NO no 

STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID stupid STUPID STUPID *DUMB*

…And I imagine that that, in combination with what you're seeing everywhere else today, is Nuff Said, yeah?

(If not, poke me via any means and I'll happily elucidate the NO and the STUPID as much as you like.)

[[one last big FACEPALM for the government of the country that built the Internet, for being too bought-and-paid-for to bother even understanding the basics of how not to break it.  *SHEESH*]]

…Of course you do.  But just in case you don't, or haven't been motivated enough to do anything about it, here's a lovely little metaphor to hammer it home.

(You know why corporations have more freedoms than you do?  Because they're fighting for theirs.)

Mine is brief, because I felt weird sharing more of my story that that.  I also feel that the details of how we're different matter less than the many broad ways in which we're the same:  We are ALL suffering because our government, in spite of claiming status as the biggest and best democracy in the world, won't provide us decent health care, reasonable safety-nets, and protection from the people who, before we had a strong socialist* government, had no problem treating the 99% as straight-up slaves, including withholding access to education and weapons as a way to control us. 

The answer is not "less government" — but it's not surprising that the supporters of the 1% want it to be.  They've lamed the horse, and now they want us to let them shoot it, so they can go back to being lords and having serfs and never having to worry that "the rabble" will have any real influence.  These are people who want to use most of humanity as their own personal cattle, to buy and sell and work and kill as they see fit.  A government they don't own gets in their way.  So first they own it, then break it, then try to get people cheering for abolishing it altogether. 

But the 1% should fear the 99%, not the other way around.  Maybe it's been too long since we reminded them why.

*Socialist = with public works, public health, public schools, public emergency services and public courts that enforce the law evenly among everyone.  All things that level the playing field, and which the 1% are of course eager to do away with (except when they can work it so the public pays for those services, but the 1% benefit most from them).

Those complaining about the Occupy protests being Class Warfare are right.  Finally, it's turning to a war, with both sides aware that they're fighting it.

Thus far, it's been Class Genocide, with one side pooling their immense resources to safely corral and eradicate the 99% from afar.  By controlling the media, they've managed to keep the people they're attacking — depriving of food, shelter, education and rights — from ever realizing or acknowledging that they're under attack.  Like "safari hunters" who shoot caged lions, with enough money the 1% can make it cheap and easy to pick off their opponents like fish in a barrel.  It's been war-without-ever-leaving-your-mansion, winning without risking so much as a profit-margin. 

Until now.  Now the jig is up, and though they've been under attack for at least a decade already, the 99% are grabbing some weapons and getting ready to make this a real, honest fight.

Of course those who've been winning effortlessly for so long don't like it when their prey starts fighting back, turning the easy massacre into a real battle in which, oh yeah, they're massively outnumbered.  Now they might lose something; now, if they want their protected status and special privileges, they may actually have to pay for them.  It's not nearly as profitable to mug a person to their face as it is to sneak into their house while they're out working two jobs and swipe everything, is it?  When someone is facing you and the deal is open on the table, they might fight back, and they might even win. 

Cowards don't like warfare.  They prefer psyops.  They like missions that involve keeping people too scared and hungry to fight back, and "battles" where you can shoot everyone while they sleep.  But the cowards are in for it, if the 99% have woken up.

I'm not a fan of battles in general.  But Class Warfare beats the heck out of Class Massacre.

I put my picture on wearethe99percent.tumblr.com … because I feel like a refugee from a pocket third-world country in the US, created by the 1% and the government's insane/corrupt need to please them.  And I'm very aware, every day, what a lucky one of the 99% I am.  The luck is nice, but it's incredibly tough to be lucky when everyone you left at home isn't.

But you probably care more about all those updates I haven't been getting around to…I'm sorry; this week has just been horrendous, really.  And it isn't really slowing down, so this will be in the form of bullet-points for now…my hope/plan is to slow down this weekend and do some real substantive writing, here and elsewhere.  ::hope hope hope::

• Sleep goes well.  This week has been ridiculous so I've missed some naps, but overall I dropped right back into my Everyman Mixed (? Can I call it that?) schedule, where my goal is 3×3, but if I get shorted on naps I do 2×4.5 or 1×6.  As long as I get some 3×3 days every week, this seems to work without issue, but I've definitely noticed that if I get stuck in 2×4.5 / 1×6 for too long, I start to get tired.  (Specifically, a week of 2×4.5, or more than a few days of 1×6, will make me tired and I'll need catch-up sleep, after which I can go back to polyphase.)  I think this is evidence that 3×3 is the most stable one overall — which has been my long-term experience — and that, more generally, the more naps you get, the more stable and restful your polyphasic schedule.  But it remains nice that missing naps doesn't have to knock me completely off-schedule; as long as I keep trying for them, I'm OK even during the most insane weeks of work / practice / errands / etc.
   
• Exercise goes well too.  I'm sorry I didn't get to update as I made this transition, but what I did is try out Insanity and P90 as possible alternatives to P90X (which I did for 3.5 weeks — but it was too long and too intensive and thus making my sleep schedule impossible).  P90 won.  One of the things I really liked about P90X was the focus on form — as a martial artist and someone who picked up fitness as an adult, I care a lot about economy of motion and avoiding injuries — both short- and long-term.  Insanity is definitely named correctly, because it seems to me that unless you're already capable of doing the whole thing by muscle-memory, doing it at that speed is dangerous.  P90, on the other hand, is a nicely shorter version of P90X, keeping most of what I liked about the program without killing me to the point where I need to sleep for years.  ;)  It's still challenging:  Though I've been surprised at how I can "just do" most of it without petering out, and I finish all the workouts which I couldn't always do with X, I'm still out of breath and sweaty and feeling it in the right muscles, but I can take naps and my core and still have enough energy, including for things like taiji and hockey.  I'm nearing the end of week 1 of P90, and so far I like it a lot.  (Note:  It's just as cheesy as P90X, but I'm coming to the realization that all such programs are cheesy.  I can deal.  And it won't take me as long to memorize these so I can just tune them out and listen to music, either!)
   
• My new exercise clothes are AWESOME.  Icebreakers are expensive, but if you work out regularly and hate doing piles and piles of laundry, they're completely worth it.
   
• There's other stuff, but as I keep getting distracted by work and stuff and risk not posting this at all if I don't do it now, I'm stopping here!  ;) 

Have a good Thursday the 13th**, everyone!

*Title note:  One of the most awesome songs ever!  One day I will make someone play it in karaoke or something so I can yell those amazing lyrics at the whole world…Go forth ad infinitum!

**For some reason Thursday the 13ths have always gone worse for me than Fridays.  Thursday the 12ths can be pretty brutal too.  And of course October is a mandatorily creepy month for either. 

Farming Detroit

Detroit public school teacher and urban farmer Paul Weertz with his working 50 year-old Ford tractor in the back of his house on Farnsworth Street

Thus begins an article over at MAKE, titled MAKE | Farming Detroit.

I read the whole thing — it's a good article, and I recommend it.  But there's a slant on it, a slant familiar to me, that I'd like to take a second and highlight for everyone.  For background, I was not a "Farmer", but I volunteered with several of the groups working to green and farm Detroit's land — some of the people mentioned in this article I know tangentially, and one of these groups is one I worked with for a little while.

My main point here is that sustainable living and intra-community support networks are awesome things.  They are not, however, cures for the things that are wrong with Detroit.  Those things that are wrong may (on my pessimistic days I say "will probably") kill off any viable farming/greening efforts if not addressed — and articles like this get just a little too excited about The Hippy Revolution Again to pay enough attention to the real challenges and the lack of things being done to address them.

This article doesn't skip over those things entirely, but it does bury them in a long litany of (what feels to me like) naive utopianness.  And like many Midwesterners, I prefer honesty and level-headedness to excitement, even when it's a lot less fun.

I’ve seen terrible urban ghettos in my time, but nothing prepared me for the shock of driving through Detroit neighborhoods where so many houses were crumbling, boarded up or missing altogether. In the midst of that depressing landscape I met Paul Weertz, who lives alone in the Farnsworth neighborhood,

the author (one John Kalish) begins.  Problem One:  Detroit is way emptier than advertised.  It's not, as it's referred to later in the article, "[the only] city where this is possible" — because it's not, in many ways, a city anymore.  To outsiders who've lived in bustling cities before, it seems almost rural, or like it's all suburb except for the smallish downtown.  It has a bit more than half a million people spread out over a pretty huge area (138 square miles, for the city proper).  It has shrinking neighborhoods separated by hundreds of acres of empty (fallow, paved, or burned/polluted) land, and even downtown, abandoned skyscrapers separating clusters of buildings that seem to come alive at certain days and times (the casino districts being the most noticable), leaving the streets scary in their wake.  There are entire neighborhoods giving in to lush forest (which I completely admit is kind of awesome; I hope whoever rebuilds leaves some, or a lot, of it).  That doesn't mean that agriculture can't happen here, but it does mean that it's not quite urban agriculture.  There are, as one interviewee notes, no stores nearby "except liquor stores".  There is one major farmer's market, and it supplies more restaurants than people.  Gardening here requires a new definition and very different tactics from actual city gardening, and people trying to port their Urban Gardening knowledge over to Detroit are going, I think, to meet trouble.

“I farm about ten acres in the city,” Weertz tells me. “Alfalfa’s my thing. I bale about a thousand bales a year.” Some of that alfalfa is used to feed animals at the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a high school for pregnant and parenting young women. Weertz started an agriculture curriculum at the school and worked there for 20 years but now it’s a private charter school and this year he’s going to have to work elsewhere in Detroit’s public school system.

…

It’s hard to fathom, but apparently one of Leadley’s neighbors considers Rising Pheasant Farms an eyesore. “Culturally, I don’t understand that. There’s flowers!” the 28 year-old mom says in disbelief.

…

Rising Pheasant has applications in to purchase two of the lots it farms on. Leadley says it’s an eight-month process that “apparently has to be approved by everyone in Detroit.”

Advocates of urban agriculture in Detroit were dismayed by a recent decision to sell two city-owned lots to a doggy daycare operation known as Canine to Five so it can expand. The lots have been used as a community garden in Detroit’s Cass Corridor. The Birdtown garden is slated to be uprooted in September, having decided against relocating.

There are 60,000 vacant city-owned lots and a relatively small percentage of them have farms or gardens, some of which are in a precarious legal state. “The city could, literally, at any time come in and say, ‘We’re going to develop these lots and you’re going to have to move.’”

No, that's outdated info, and I'm going to break up my own article to address it:  The Catherine Ferguson Academy was shut down, and it's a heartbreaking and enraging story., The article linked there does a good job explaining all the reasons why closing this school was a vilely stupid thing to do, but I guess the short list is sexism, racism, classism, cruelty, anti-democratic methods, corruption, and in-any-good-society-this-would-be-illegal-ness. 

But putting that aside I guess, it leads us to Problem number two: The City is NOT in favor.  The government in Detroit considers these people basically squatters, and will absolutely give their land to a paying customer at the first opportunity.  Why?  Because "urban" farming is not part of Detroit's plans to save itself, except in the case that it generates the right kind of positive press, which it usually doesn't.  All of Detroit's ideas for fixing Detroit have to do with getting major manufacturers to come back, or barring that, other big-money investors who can do something about the dozens of couple-hundred-thousand-square-foot abandoned factories and oh yeah, hire the locals, who are over 80% black and mostly the products of the kind of institutionalized racism that settled Detroit in the first place and ran it for a century:  Give blacks cheap neighborhoods and put them to work in the factories.  Unemployment in the city is now over 50%, and it's probably only the low density of population left actually living there (and the care of the DPD, who've played this game before) that keeps it from turning into riots (so far).  Oh, and that one neighbor of Ms. Leadley's?  She's pretty typical — I met a ton of her when I was helping with similar farms and gardens.  She's stayed in this ungodly place because it's her home, and she wants it back — back to nice lawns and two cars per driveway and neighbors on the porches — not communes of dirty white kids selling food she's never heard of.  When the City comes in and bulldozes another of their gardens (and the Cass Corridor Co-Op's garden was epic; I was angry as hell to see it go too), she'll be right behind them, asking when one of the factories will open again.

“I take this whole growing food for my neighbors and friends and other people in the city very seriously. And I’m going to eat this stuff, too,” he says when asked if he has his soil tested for lead, arsenic and other contaminants. The EPA has a limit of 400 parts per million of lead in soil but the Greening of Detroit group suggests a 200 parts per million limit

Yikes, note that he didn't say "Yes, I am getting it tested."  This is the only mention of it in this article, and wow is that glossing over a major issue:  Problem number three:  Pollution.  Think about it:  Detroit has been the dirty industrial corner of the U.S. since the Industrial Revolution, and due to its dependency on major manufacturers and its generally powerless population, has gotten the smallest share of all the cleanup-projects too.  One of my favorite kinds of garden-projects in Detroit were the "decontamination gardens", which meant filling fields with sunflowers and different kinds of mushrooms and weeds that would, over time, leech the poison out of the dirt.  (Sadly no-one could use hemp, even the non-psychotropic kind.)  These projects often involved walling off large chunks of playgrounds that children were actively using, by the way — they were in neighborhoods, not at actual factory sites, where it's both not enough and too dangerous.  When I got pregnant, I had to quit helping at an elementary school garden, because just standing on soil with that kind of lead concentration was dangerous.

Don't get me wrong:  Michigan has some of the most beautiful and viable land in the country, if not the world; it's a paradisiacal peninsula on a stunningly large body of fresh water, and the amazingly diverse forests and bountiful groundwater should be the state's pride and joy, and certainly not overlooked.  But the fact that they have been overlooked, especially in the City, for a century, and that big corporations have been and are still allowed to run wild when it comes to polluting Detroit, cannot simply be erased by suddenly wanting to put all that great land to good use again.  The DNR issues warnings every year updating citizens on how many fish it's safe to eat per month out of the Great Lakes…those big, big lakes that, while they border Detroit, also border all the nice clean woodlands up north.  And this is food grown right in the ground in D-town?  No offense, gardener guy, but I wouldn't eat anything you handed me without seeing a soil test first.

There are also mentions in the article of some of the Fundies, which depending on your point of view are a problem in themselves — a lot of the attempts to "rejuvenate Detroit" are coming from missionary-types, who in my opinion are the ambulance-chasers of social decline…but I will go ahead and omit that rant from here.  ;)

It’s a welcome bit of cheer in a section of Detroit [Brightmoor] where good houses get stripped by metal scavengers if left unattended for three days.

Back in the Farnsworth neighborhood, where drug dealers and gangs are as resilient as weeds…

Uh, yeah.  Imprecisely stated on John's part (Brightmoor, which although it has next to no Arabic population got the nickname "Little Afghanistan" for other, apt, reasons; the houses-stripped-in-days thing, though, is true everywhere in Detroit, and even well into the suburbs now) — but definitely not on my list of things to gloss over:  Crime and violence was a problem in Detroit before everyone lost their jobs.  I've lived in Detroit twice…the first time I was a teenager and though I got mugged and harassed at times, it was worth the cheap rent and anyway, kind of exciting if you grew up in a boring dingy suburb like I did.  The second time was after I had my daughter, and we lasted there two months before making a calculated decision to give up the nice big house we'd rented and flee, broke, to a basement apartment where we weren't constantly fending off violence or thievery.  And this was not in a terrible part of town, and also in 2005. 

Sometimes people say, "Oh, but almost everybody has left, so it's safer!"  No, honey.  Everybody who could leave has left, and the ones who are still there are extremely (in degree as well as percentage of the total population) desperate.  Crime is not an urban phenomenon (it IS a poverty-driven one though), but arguably in Detroit you have the downsides of both urban and rural crime:  A thriving gang / drug-running culture, and no neighbors to hear you scream or notice when your house is being broken into or stripped.  If you sound white (or even better, tell them on the phone that you are — I wish I was kidding) the cops will eventually come in Detroit, but given the circumstances they're stuck in too, I wouldn't expect much help.  And while I admire everyone who's trying to make my hometown a better place, I also look at those babies in your arms and think, Hell no, not in a million years.  Let the fucking town burn if it has to, but get your kids somewhere safe.

Southeast Michigan will always be my home, and there's a ton that I love about it…but the City at the center of it has been sick for a long time, and I don't think I believe that any superficial cure is going to work anymore.  I would give a lot to see vibrant communities take hold in Detroit and turn it around…but most of the projects people are getting breathless over now, small farms and art co-ops, are too superficial to succeed on their own, without the support of the City and surrounding suburbs and State governments — who are unlikely to give it. 

Detroit's problems are infrastructure-level and serious; it has, in city terms, bone cancer.  It was built on racism and economic inequality and fed on pollution and corporate greed, and that diet for a hundred years has rotted it from the inside out; what we're seeing now are problems dating back decades, bleeding to the surface. 

I love the land–I love Michigan–and I love small businesses and earnest make-the-world-better projects, I really do.  But so far these are all happening in a place that's still corrupt as all hell, a now bedridden city being tube-fed by the same ruling class the same greed-and-inequality crap it's been eating since day one.  And maybe you can, in fact, garden your way out of such a situation — I would be 100% thrilled to find out that that's true.  I'm just irritated at the media (Internet included of course) for failing to give real airtime and credence to the deep and serious problems in Detroit, and sometimes it seems like the "Oo! People are FARMING there!" articles are, in a way, minimizing the bigger picture.

Detroit needs so much more than missionaries or bohemians or farmers.  It needs iconoclasts; it needs revolutionaries…sometimes I look at it and think that it may be too sick, already, to survive their surgeries.  But I really hope not.

"Hell hath no limits, nor is it circumscrib'd
by any selfe place; but where we are is Hell.
And where hell is there we must ever be.
And to be short, when the world dissolves,
And every creature shall be purify'd,
All places shall be Hell that are not Heaven."

-Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus

It's 5-21-2011!  I've been waiting years to celebrate this day!  *Wooo party!*

What do we celebrate on this day?  Well, I think it's unequivocally about the power of fiction. 

Today we marvel at humanity's ability to write powerful words that motivate each other across unthinkable miles and centuries of distance; and also at humanity's ability to convince themselves of outrageously stupid things that appease their psychology.

This particular Celebrate Fiction day is, I think, more about the latter.  I mean, this 'prediction' isn't exactly Nostradamus-level; it's just some crazy geezer wailing to himself on the radio … and yet, look how many people think it's credible!  Even people I know who aren't even Christian (nevermind the specifically batshit sects of Christianity that typically go for Rapture stories) have, in my presence, made "Hmm, well, you know…" noises when confronted with questions about their belief in the/this* Rapture. 

*because let's face it, there's a Rapture planned every couple years at this point.  And why wouldn't there be?  It's great publicity.

But if we expand this Celebration Fiction day to include the Bible itself — which isn't so out-of-line as it inspired not just Harold Camping, but literally countless other whackjobs — then we can truly appreciate the power of the combination of good writing and the twin human flaws of fear and desire.

A brilliant teacher I had once told me, "An honest man can't be tricked, because he doesn't want anything for free."  Simplified (and I was like sixteen, so simplifying made sense), but very true — and applicable to the Rapture as to anything else.  The whole idea of God Will Reset Everything is, at its base, just another desire to get something for free:  You get your faith vindicated**, your enemies proven wrong, and your life started over***, and you don't have to lift a finger or take any blame.  And even better, in sublimely passive-aggressive fashion, you get to gasp and bring the back of your hand to your forehead and say Oh no, oh my goodness, how just awful and aren't we all (say it with me now) such martyrs!

**which is, of course, antithetical to the whole point of faith — not vindication itself but wanting vindication.  Seeking vindication for your faith is like seeking a machine to do your pushups for you.  (Now simple little beliefs, yes; but the whole thing about the Mystery and the extranaturalness of God is that you can't get any vindication for it as a simple belief, so you're forced to have faith (which could be defined as a sort of meta-belief that needs no proof in order to exist) or nothing at all.  …Or you can invent a Rapture-any-day-now and bank on that, I guess.)

***I don't think I have to explain that getting the benefits of suicide without taking the moral hit for it is an attractive proposition to the ego ipso facto, but hey, I explained it anyway.  ;)

So let's address some of the questions this day is about celebrating — because if Rapture Theory has a light side and a dark side, the dark side is losing control and being an asshole/idiot, and the light side is looking honestly at what this all says about humans and their worlds; and I'm all about the questions, as you know.

1. Will the world end?  ABSOLUTELY.  We just don't get to know when or how, and hence the Ending becomes no different than our own physical mortality:  They hold exactly the same moral, spiritual and psychological lessons, and the important thing is that we learn those lessons before whatever's going to happen happens and we lose our chance.
2. Will my Faith be vindicated?  ABSOLUTELY.  See question 1.
3. Will my enemies pay the price for their crap?  ABSOLUTELY.  See question 1.
4. Will I find out if my beliefs about God(s) and the Afterlife are true?  ABSOLUTELY.  See question 1.
5. Why do all these answers disappoint me deeply?  Because the hardest thing about faith — maybe about living, period — is the patience it asks from us.  We are forced to admit that we didn't start this thing spinning and we don't get to stop it either.  We get to know that it will stop — we will definitely stop living, each of us individually and all of us collectively — but we don't get a say in when.  Could be 6pm today; could be thousands and thousands of years yet.  The lesson we're being asked to learn here is not "find the Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything", it's find how to live correctly without that answer.  The need for Faith, or the reality of Time if you like (I think they're the same, but I'll save it) forces us into an open-ended system; forces us to make decisions with much less data than our self-awareness makes us want.  Learning to do this, and do it well, and find happiness in it, is arguably The Whole Point*^.

*^Or if it's not, then the structure of our very existence is antithetical to the point.  Some people are willing to assume this; but I say it flies in the face of everything we know about how Nature, Physics, Cosmology, etc. is constructed.  Everything we know of in existence has an astonishing balance about it; a messiness (chaos) bounded by brilliant rules without which none of it could exist.  Lacking even allegorical evidence to the contrary (hell, every time we construct an allegory we show it), I prefer to assume that human life follows the same rules.  Ergo, we were put here the way we were put here — mortal, and without answers to questions 1-5 — for a reason.  Life is pushups.  ;)

…Don't get me wrong, I think dying in an actual Apocalypse would be a pretty cool way to go, as they're measured.  You get to say you played the game all the way to the end; you beat the last level and saw the final movie; and on top of that you don't have to think about all the cool stuff that you'll miss from being gone.  But again, the point isn't how or when you go; it's what you managed to figure out first.  And you have to figure out as much as you can first, because assuming that there's someone waiting to explain it all once it's over is silly.  All the evidence points to the experience of living itself being the teacher, not the prelude to a 101 class that you get to attend after you've died.

And on that note, I'll cease with the blather so you all can go enjoy Rapture Day.  Spend it marveling!

Marvel that people write and say shit so powerful that it can make zero sense and still gain thousands or millions of literal believers!

Marvel that people are so desperate to believe in certain answers that they'll pick human-produced fiction over all the facts the Universe places in front of their eyes!

Marvel that there may actually be God/s and that it/they may have resisted the urge to Smite us all silly for this long!

Marvel that the answer to all these conundra is probably just to relax and do the best you can, and marvel at how frothingly offensive people find that!

Then go celebrate some fiction.  That'll be a good day, and if it's your last you'll have done it right!  ;)

PD

Awesome author and thinker Cat Valente takes care of writing The Osama Is Dead Post for me.

The long-and-short-of-it:

Well, I don't know. Seems like one more corpse on the pile to me. Sorry, but this war, this decade of war has made me cynical. It's made me not believe in just government on any level, and made me wary and gunshy of my fellow citizens' glee. If we're dancing in the streets either the Lakers won or someone's dead. I was told immediately after posting that it felt like a Pyrrhic victory to me, and tasted like ash, that I was in the minority and that for ALL servicemen and their families, ALL 9/11 and rescue workers families this is joy and closure and relief.

(The rest of her post is totally worth reading too.  As are all the other ones.) 

Well, I'm in that minority too.  Yaaay, after killing thousands upon thousands of innocent civilians, torturing others on both sides, and shooting our civil rights in the face at sunrise, we've finally killed the one guy we were most publicly mad at.  Gee, good for us.  I'm also completely in agreement with my netfriend en_ki:

I would like to hear that we are a strong, free country again; that the nation of cowards who, in the face of this man and a tiny gang of thugs like him, threw out the rule of law and begged our secret police to save us, to snoop and grope and torture and murder with impunity, was some other people in some other time.

Politically, unless this deflates the crazy power-bubble our own government has used the war to build against its own people, I can't really see it doing much good…the people we're fighting in the Middle East haven't been followers of bin Laden for a long time; mostly they're just people who want us to put our guns away and go the eff home.  They'll probably calm down when we do so, and not really before.  (And would you, if there were tanks in your streets?)  I guess the American democrats might gain some bragging-rights, but considering who with and how awful they generally are at controlling messages, I bet that's a wash at the end of the day too.

…Also, just as a philosophical point, can I say that throwing parties because you killed someone is really creepy?

The End.  ;)

Don't miss the awesomely informative graphic at http://xkcd.com/radiation/. Fun takeaways include:

• Living within 50 miles of a coal-power plant for a year doses you with almost three times as much radiation as living within 50 miles of a nuclear-power plant for a year;
• A single mammogram gives 24 times the average total dose someone living within 10 miles of Three Mile Island received;
• Cell phones emit no ionizing radiation (I knew this, but it's great to see it included); and
• The worst known one-day dose from the Fukushima region in Japan is about 3.6% of the lowest one-year dose clearly linked to an increase of cancer risk.

So…Panic minus facts equals stupid, but facts plus colors equals pure awesome. I get it now! ;)