Ewww!

Eww. Ew.

Ew.

I read an article about a Chinese cosmetics firm using the flesh of executed prisoners in the formation of their makeup.

Ewwwww!

Habanero Pepper Oil Recipe

From Teresa Nielsen Hayden's infuriating (read: liberal) weblog. To all my reading public: do not read the rest of the website. Just this one post, with associated comments. I emailed most of you the recipe, but once I got to the comments, I realized those needed to be preserved, too, so here's your link.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006812.html#006812

Daniel...you're an exception. You're allowed to read the rest of her website. None of the rest of you! Seriously. On pain of I'm-not-going-to-listen-to-you-complaining-about-their-extremism.

That is all.

Government: America is NOT a Democracy

HaHA! I have fooled you all. You expect me to spend a page and a half talking about how, technically, it's a Republic. To that I say "Pshaw!"

America is a very polite, Practical Anarchy.

We are a nation so founded on hatred of tyranny that we established a non-government government. Our greatest political pride comes from our Bill of Rights -- protecting the citizens of the country from any actual government -- and our Checks and Balances -- protecting our government from the terrible responsibility of actually being able to accomplish anything.

Seriously, consider your education in the nature of our government. How much focus was given to checks and balances? You know what "checks" are, in this sense? They're things that stop forward motion. We have a system in place to prevent the government from going anywhere. We have "balances" to make sure that these checks are equally restrictive on all branches of our government.

We are the first nation (at least to my knowledge) to wholly gloat in the deliberate and successful construction of an impotent government.

We've done okay, though, haven't we? I'm not denying that. When I claim that the U.S. is an Anarchy, I do so in the terminology of political philosophy, not popular media. We have constructed a system that politely tells the American government to stay out of the lives of the American people, and everything will be fine.

What amuses me most is that our Founding Fathers recognized Government as an inevitable aspect of human society so, instead of trying to establish a nation free from Government entirely, they quarantined it.

We provide our government with just enough power, just enough resources, and just enough attention to keep them concentrated on their nonsense, while we go about our lives. Our corporations act, our entrepreneurs act, our charitable organizations and special interest groups and legal teams and community organizations all act, while our government blusters and talks.

We don't have a representative government at all -- instead we have direct representation, in that we have built a society to enable the citizens to express themselves without the interference of a Government.

No, it's not a perfect Anarchy, and I didn't claim it was. I called it polite Anarchy, and then I went on to acknowledge that we do have an established government structure. My point is that, practically, the main political concern of most Americans is to keep the government out of their lives. We're still the Colonialists, who built their own cities, who managed their own affairs, and who were willing to pay taxes to keep the king on the other side of the sea, but willing to fight a war when he actually tried to control their lives.

It's worked, because of the massive amount of resources available to everyone in our society. When our poor are better off than most of the world's middle class, we don't need government in the way so many nations do. We have, in Practical Anarchy, what most nations need rigorous Socialism to achieve.

We have Corporations so wealthy they don't need tarriffs. We have Charitable Organizations with sufficient volunteer funding to dwarf the public works projects of many developed countries. We have, in our individuals, what most societies only have through the organization and administration of a careful government.

In other words, we're spoiled. Furthermore, as all spoiled children do, we're squandering. Governments develop in order to help a society make the most of its resources. Governments organize and control independent elements so that the productivity of the whole can be greater than the sum of their parts. That's what Governments do.

It's also what we call tyranny. The importance of the individual must be placed below the importance of the society for the society to fully attain its potential. We as a nation dread that pragmatism, and so we designed a self-contained, cannibalistic system of Government, encased it in a fancy marble shell, and got on with our lives.

Listen to the outcry right now against the Federal government's response to the Katrina disaster. It's too slow, it's unproductive. When it should be rushing in to save people's lives, something has stopped its forward motion. When the Government should be acting, it is instead quibbling, attempting to assign blame to all of its balanced members.

Look: that's the way the system was designed to work. That's what we're so proud of, in our civics classes. We chose to hamstring our Government and that's why, right now, the volunteers and the aid organizations and the independent assitance groups have so much more to offer than the Federal response. It's not a matter of resources, but of structure, and the philosophy that designed our nation in the first place.

The Nature of Prescriptive Linguistics

Read this link, too. It's funny.
http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/050829ta_talk_alford

Instructions

http://www.endicott-studio.com/cofhs/cofinstr.html

Okay, perhaps I wasn't perfectly clear, but everyone needs to READ this link.

God: Christian "Science"

I got this passage from someone else's blog, which I clicked through to from a blog that makes me entirely furious, every time I glance at it. So, instead of following proper etiquette and linking you to the other blog, I'll just paste the relevant bit here:

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"Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he hold to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods and on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. [1 Timothy 1.7]''

-- Saint Augustine of Hippo, De Genesi ad Litteram Libri Duodecim (The Literal Meaning of Genesis), AD 401-415, translated by John Hammond Taylor
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See? That's a passage from some ancient dude. Credit goes to him, not the chick that brought him up in the first place. If you'd LIKE to read a bunch of people bash on Christians, though, here's the link to the source blog: http://www.livejournal.com/users/ajhalluk/145379.html

I like the points this Augustine makes, though. I strongly agree with what he's saying here. Then again, as a Social Constructionist, I'm more readily able to surrender discussions of the nature of reality than many Christians, because I'm basing my faith on something bigger, behind the scenes. Know what I mean?

God: The Lord's Supper

Quick question, for every single one of you who might possibly have an answer: in what way is What We Do as Communion (and by "We," there, I mean the group you belong to -- Catholic, Methodist, whatever) anything close to the circumstance of the Last Supper?

Consider this very carefully before you completely disregard it: How would our version be any different, if after each of the prayers we injected a single molecule of carbon?

Honestly, I see no other deviation (although a greater degree, but none fundamentally DIFFERENT) from the Biblical account in that extreme than in our own practice.

What is the point? More importantly, why hold up as a fundamental rite something that we have so completely alienated from its origin and stripped of all meaning?

I know those who take comfort from knowing that Christians, everywhere, are doing the same thing at the same time (for a given value of "Christians" and, of course, "same"). I understand that -- I understand the value of an inclusive ritual to the maintenance of a distinctive community -- however, for that purpose a secret handshake would be exactly as effective.

I suppose a huge portion of what bothers me is...not the name, but implicit in the name. Communion. I ALWAYS thought, growing up, that the name referred to the Communion of the Saints (that inclusivity I just mentioned). It's the thing that we, as a community, do together. Arguing the topic with friends in college, I discovered for the first time that a lot of people (most of 'em?) think of it as Communion with God. That makes a LOT more sense given our extremely antisocial, library-quiet performance of the rite. It reminds me of a thing we did at church camp one year, when I was younger. "Time Alone With God." We had fifteen minutes set aside every couple of hours for precisely that purpose. There were no refreshments, though....

Y'see, here's where it really gets to me. The origin of the ritual is a meal. A highly social meal, where a community forms its inclusive bonds, not through the simple fact of a shared ritual, but through the social experience created by the very acts of the ritual. We use the term "breaking of bread" today to refer to this proper, stylized event, but we get that very wording from a Greek phrase that was practically slang -- a very casual phrase meaning, "to get together to eat." The root of "breaking of bread" practically means "hanging out at Braums."

I mean, to start, to see the way God operates in his establishing of ritual (at least this particular vein), look at the Passover. It was a family's dinner. The ritual (that is, the maintenance of the experience beyond the first, actual event) was structured as a conversation the family would have over dinner. "Hey, papa, why are we eating unleavened bread and strangely-cooked lamb?" And his answer incorporated the whole history of the Passover, and God's redemption of the Israelite slaves.

That exchange became very ritual. The exact wording became important (as far as I understand it), and the whole dinner became something of a script. That's not a big surprise to me, given what we read in the New Testament of the legalization of the Israelite religion. What does surprise me is that, in our religion based significantly on Jesus' negative response to that legalization, we have turned our version of the Passover into a more strictly stylized rite than even the Pharisees had done with theirs.

Here are my arguing points: the Lord's Supper is meant to be a SUPPER. And I'm not focusing on the meal aspect necessarily (on the food, the nourishment), but on the social aspect of eating together. Think of the monthly (or semi-monthly or...occasional) fellowship meals at your church. Think of the socializing. Think of the sense of inclusivity THAT generates.

You're right. It's not as poignant as the practice of the rigorous ritual. That's no surprise to me. That's WHY we create legalistic rites. It's to capture as much of the feel of the thing as we can, without having to do the long-term work. We don't have to build RELATIONSHIPS with all these other Christians, we just have to know that we're taking the same brand of crackers and the same thimbleful of grape juice at the same time and, boy howdy, we are ONE.

There's another argument to it. You might point out that Jesus established the Lord's Supper as a memorial of what he did. He said, "This do in remembrance of me." You KNOW that's true, because it's carved on our...whatever-you-call-it-that's-not-exactly-an-altar-because-y'know-we're-protestants. Jesus ESTABLISHED the Lord's Supper as a ritual to remember him.

But even there.... First of all, in at least one version of that passage, his wording was, "As often as you do this," which, again, strikes me as more a redirecting of the sentiment of the Passover meal than as the establishment of a new Thing. That aside, he WAS clearly drawing on the basis of the Passover meal (as they were actively participating in the Passover meal when he established his procedure), and the Passover meal was, in the manner of a meal, a memorial. In other words, the memorial was there, within the social experience. It is NOT a private experience, taken concurrently with the rest of a community. It wasn't in Jewish practice, and there's no reason to imagine Jesus intended it to be one in Christian practice. We as a COMMUNITY are supposed to share this ritual together, socially, as a reminder of Christ's gift to us.

As a matter of fact, that's the whole POINT. The Passover meal, taken in silence, would be nothing other than...gross food. The ritual, the meaning, the POWER of the Passover meal was in the conversation. God established it in that way. It's the whole point.

Take note. I've been accused (and will be forever) of arguing theology toward my own comforts. Y'know, if I'm right about not having to go to church all the time then, hey, I can relax at home during those hours I would've had to spend in the grueling environs of a church building. I can't tell you how much accusations like that offend me, but I don't generally feel compelled to respond to them. I still won't.

But look at this one. Reread everything I wrote. The entire point of the Communion, I hold, is to bring us together socially, to bind us in INTERACTION (not observance of the one or two appointed men who speaks a short statement and a prayer). Any one of you who knows me well enough to be reading this, knows how incredibly uncomfortable such a thing would make me.

I'm shuddering at the thought, even now.

But I'm almost certain that's the whole point of the process. I'm not calling you all to make an ages-old religion more comfortable for me. I'm asking you to look at your Saltine and your Welches and tell me exactly how that process binds you to God. I'm asking you recognize the vast distance between the Communion as we practice it, and the Communion as Christ designed it, and dare to imagine what it COULD be.