Jayne Says

On the Road Again

Greetings, from the drizzly Bay Area. (Do non-Californians know the Bay Area refers to the San Francisco Bay Area? I understand you won't always know "the City" means San Fransisco. But do you know you must never, ever, say "San Fran" or, worse, "Frisco" (shudder) when discussing this fine city? Just trying to keep my readership cool, which is a thankless job but somebody has to do it.)

Busy week, lots of travel, briefs due, conference, etc. And I'm just scooting some of those earlier posts down the page a wee bit. Am I the only one who hates and regrets just about everything I write?

Anyway, I hope all is well and I can't wait to catch up on my favorite blogs when I catch my breath.

Support The Troops, Always?

I understand that questioning the collective blind, adoring support of our military troops is (to understate) a politically incorrect concept. I've seen so many, particularly those burdened with the heavy invisible backpacks of liberal guilt, including myself, quickly amend their anti-war sentiments with an automatic "of course, I support the troops, 100%."  Really? Always?

My husband, The Pilot, is ex-military, as are many of our friends. Loved ones have served in Iraq. I am hardly anti-military.

And I honor and support the human traits of courage, strength, loyalty and selflessness, in military and all other endeavors.

But really, are all soldiers, just by virtue of enlisting (or becoming officers) automatically entitled to my adoration?

My heart goes out to all of those caught in grievous situations, torn from their families, mired in a political, religious and cultural swamp. My heart breaks for all of our citizens who are injured or die in combat, on a foreign soil, far away from home.


But my heart equally breaks for the thousands of innocents we are killing on their own soil, in their own homes.

A former boyfriend of mine, in the National Guard (and probably in Iraq now, who knows?) kept telling me he wanted to "serve his country." I guess I was questioning him a bit about his military involvement. I asked him why he couldn't serve his country by becoming a teacher, or some other public servant. He felt called to military service, and I respected that.

Judging from the stories I have heard back from Iraq, our troops and civilian security and other forces are on the whole pretty miserable, and have found themselves in an exhausting, dangerous, confusing, surreal experience. I imagine there are thousands of Iraqi citizens feeling pretty similarly right about now.

Our citizens need the unconditional support (fiscal, intelligence, equipment, honesty) from the people who sent them there, not necessarily from me.

Again, my heart breaks. This war, most wars, make me think of lemmings, following each other off a cliff (do they really do that, or is it a myth?) But that's not the right metaphor. That metaphor is somewhat patronizing and reveals my arrogance; it assumes that the individuals don't fully realize what they are doing. That they have not made fully-informed choices. Otherwise, they wouldn't be killing people in a bogus occupation, right?

However, if our troops are not blindly obeying (as they are trained, as they must, to be unflinchingly combat-ready), and if they are wide awake and aware and thus have personal responsibility for their actions, for the killings that they are perpetuating, then I will not, and cannot, blindly support them all.

Not as some cozy, fuzzy, yellow-ribboned, ideal, anyway.

I support their pain and the fact that they must make impossible choices under questionable circumstances, and that they are away from home, and that's about the best I can do today.

Happy Veteran's Day.

Banner Week

Do you ever have weeks where so much goes wrong, the little and large frustrations cumulate so that you burst into tears a little? (If so, Jeez, suck it up already. Loser. That never happens to me. Really . . .)

I finally got my computer back. She's a little unsteady, like she's just awakened out of a coma. And she has amnesia. Hypnosis helped to recover some, though not all, of her lost memories.

I think I've been unnaturally attached to my laptop.

Attachment and desire lead to suffering, or so they say.

I won't bore you with how shitty this week has been for me, how my normally cheery (or at least stoic) outlook has been challenged.

BUT things are looking up. Yay, Dems. The Pilot thinks this is all a trap, and I am so proud of this rare burst of paranoia, but I hope he's wrong. And we're going to Utah for Thanksgiving ~ choosing friends over family this time.

I Think I Voted

I won't say anything bad about the man who has my laptop. Considering he may have all my files. He may be reading my blog, looking at my pictures (!), rocking out to my music in his double-wide at the trailer park across town. I will say nothing at all about his huge glasses, white hair, trembling hands, that thing on his lip. Or the trailer park (albeit a clean one) Mac service office where he lives.

Heck of a nice guy. And I have nothing but confidence in him and his ability to recover my data, music and picture (!) files and install my new hard drive and new OS. He's only had the bloody thing (my baby! my office!) for 4 days now.

I will go drop off my absentee ballot now. I don't like voting in person for some reason (lazy) and even though the Diebold machines haven't reached my rural neck of the woods yet, for some reason I trust paper more.

I don't know why, it's not like they can run a simple program to hack election results. Check out this video (I'd embed it, but my husband's browser, whine whine whine . . .)

It's short and it consists of a hacker testifying how he was paid to write such a program and tip any election result 51-49 for which ever side pays. Strongly suggesting this was done in Ohio a few years ago.

And don't forget, y'all, every time you vote Republican, God kills a kitten! (I know I've posted this picture before, but Shephard reminded me of it again and really, does it ever get old?)

Soft Drive

Please pray with me, Beloveds. Pray for the resurrection.

Of my laptop.

And the second coming.

Of my data. For they have been led astray.

Pray to God or that Mercury stops being in retrograde, to Jesus or whatever Saint presides over hard drives.

I take it all back. I'm not an atheist, promise. Please smote not my most precious!

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. For Thou art with me.

Are Thou? Am I being tested? How very Job.

Laptop's in ICU. All (except backed up legal files) is lost. Pictures, music, everything. We purchased some external drives over the weekend to back up future data, and T quickly backed up everything of his.

Let my foolish non-backing up ways serve as a parable. Save the ones you love, Beloveds! For they can be gone in an instant -- ashes to ashes, data to dust.

Atheists for Jesus

Religion has actually convinced people that there's an invisible man--living in the sky--who watches everything you do, every minute of every day. And the invisible man has a special list of ten things he does not want you to do. And if you do any of these ten things, he has a special place, full of fire and smoke and burning and torture and anguish, where he will send you to live and suffer and burn and choke and scream and cry forever and ever 'til the end of time . . ,. But He loves you!

- George Carlin

I just finished reading Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion. Although his tone (at times catty, self-indulgent and smug) and style (shotgun, meandering, allowing his steed Tangent a far too liberal rein*) put me off, I quite enjoyed the content. And I like a man who wears an "Atheists for Jesus" t-shirt (I want one.) One can admire ethically principled teachers and teachings while shunning the religions and myths built around such teachers.

Stephen Colbert interviewed Dawkins recently, which was amusing:

If you wanted to ride the pulse of modern atheism and arm yourself with good arguments about the dangers of all religions, I'd recommend Sam Harris's The End of Faith. I wrote a little post about that book a while ago here.

However, Dawkins's book is a nice companion to The End of Faith, that contains some excellent quotes, arguments and (for a lay science geek like me) lots of fascinating (and accessible) information and studies, from evolutionary biology to the origin of life, to insect vision, social evolution and quantum mechanics.

A nice literary trinity (har, har) would be The God Delusion, The End of Faith and God Without Religion, if you didn't want to abandon your spiritual life altogether and believe we have much to learn about states of expanded consciousness, but you embrace reason and humanism and recognize that our clinging to ancient myths is destructive to all of humankind and hampers our inevitable progression.

Here's a little sampling from The God Delusion:

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries. This may explain some of the sheer strangeness of the Bible. But unfortunately it is this same weird volume that religious zealots hold up to us as the inerrant source of our morals and rules for living.

* * *

I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent. We should also dismiss it as barking mad, but for its ubiquitous familiarity which has dulled our objectivity. If God wanted to forgive our sins, why not just forgive them, without having himself tortured and executed in payment--thereby, incidentally, condemning remote future generations of Jews to pogroms and persecution as 'Christ-killers': did that hereditary sin pass down in the semen too?

* * *

Our Western politicians avoid mentioning the R word (religion), and instead characterize their battle as a war against 'terror', as though terror were a kind of spirit or force, with a will and a mind of its own. Or they characterize terrorists as motivated by pure 'evil'. but they are not motivated by evil. However misguided we may think them, they are motivated, like the Christian murderers of abortion doctors, by what they perceive to be righteousness, faithfully pursuing what their religion tells them. They are not psychotic; they are religious idealists who, by their own lights, are rational. They perceive their acts to be good, not because of some warped personal idiosyncrasy, and not because they have been possessed by Satan, but because they have been brought up, from the cradle, to have total and unquestioning faith.

*With lots of distracting footnotes, such as remembering his time whilst at school scrumping apples, or an amusing Douglas Adams (dedicatee of the book) quote, or a Monty Python bit about every sperm being sacred.