Toadfish Monastery

I agree that ritual should be appropriate to the situation, which means changing it.

Since I am not an atheist, but believe that most gods exist, I could not, in good faith, ever invoke a deity (even in name only) I didn't have a relationship with.

I only mention that, because I can't imagine how others do.

I am reading The Event.
http://www.micklasalle.com/

One of the things that makes the US great is the belief that leadership capacity is not in the blood-thus no kings.

Therefore, we can't say lack of it is in the blood either.

I, for one, advocate a return to America's core values.
In this case, no taxation without representation.
Them so-called "Blue states" support the so-called red states with their taxes. We should be able to call an end to it. Alabama and Arkansas want blue state money, they enact blue state legal reforms.

Meanwhile, in other news....
if our great big lake here were properly frozen over (can we really call them lakes, they do sequester 1/5 of the world's nonbrackish water...geologists don't.) it would now be officially too cold to snow, as it is -15C.

When it is far below freezing and the lakes are frozen over, the movement of water vapour into the air is very limited, and we get, at most, "dust cloud snow" which never piles up or accumulates in any amount.

However, as the Lake is at 36F degrees with a thin film of slush, it is happily being sucked into the air and sprinkled on our neighbors.

During the Renaissance(s), both in Italy and France, people were allowed to pretty bitterly verbally attack the government unmolested. (Now, attack the RELIGIOUS hierarchy, and things were different, and some powerful families had potent thugs.)

The attacks resulted, on many occassions, in early forms of the social discourses (pun intended) which became the foundations of modern democracy. These dictatorships caused the creation of schools and social systems that led to reformists.

Please note that I don't advocate returning to dictatorships, I just can say, pragmatically, that many of the really good things we have today came from the freedoms found in beneficient dictatorships.
(including the ideas modern democracy is founded on.)

If beneficient monarchies always passed to competant and beneficient leaders, for example, you can bet the French would still be monarchists as would the non-existant USA.

In my experience, people in Europe specifically tend to not understand that the US is very very big and is, essentially, 20-30 different countries with distinct cultures and governments united by an ubergovernment. Having lived there, I can say the difference between, oh, Glasow and London, for example, is nonexistant compared to, oh, Miami and Buffalo.

Which is why I had to move back to New York State, from the Philadelphia area, a move in my case of some 403 miles, which to many people in the US isn't a lot of space. Even the dialect is different! (Close, in some ways, to a different language, and if national TV hadn't come to be, it would probably be a different language in a couple of hundred years.)

Because where *I* am, Bush's approval rating tops out in the single digits.   

These people would be surprised, I'm sure, to find that as a (state) government employee, my wife is considered my wife and gets the same benefits a husband would, for example. They would be surprised to find out my Pagan religion opens, not closes, doors for me locally.

The reason I feel this so strongly is that government theory says that the culture of an area is essentially that of a city state- within about 75 miles of every megopolis, you have the people who are culturally pretty damn similar. That 150 mile diameter circle will cross state lines, country lines, and will degrade when it crosses language lines, but still cross them.

I've gotta tell you, being from an area not within 75 miles of any megopolis, that culturally, the differences between the people of say, London (ON) and Tonawanda, NY are diddly. I can't tell them apart until they tell me who they root for in hockey. These people 120 miles from where I grew up are completely different from the people 120 miles in the other direction, and REGULARLY, someone in a country smaller than the size of the Greater Toronto Area will tell me about the US culture, and I roll my eyes.

I think that's why, by the way, Australians tend to get it....you've got great big nothing spaces, too.

So you're got that, on one hand, and we're supposed to think that the US is some monolithic culture on the other. People think lines on maps make cultures, not countries, and they rarely do.

What most people see as American culture is just Americans with money. Americans with money tend to be from where the oil is and the breadbasket is. The oil in the US put the Bushies in power just like the oil in Saudi Arabia put the house of Saud there. These ultracapitalist slime will use religion, government, crime and anything within their power to maintain power. Ask the people of the Northeast or the far West, or the Northwest, or on Tribal lands if they'd like UN observers at the next US election and most of them will say YES! The problem is where the elections are stolen (and they are, few people will actually deny that, but instead will insult the person saying it) the people with money (who are the thieves) are also the people controlling the media, and therefore controlling the election.
Last election, we had people being called at home and told their polling place was moved, for crying out loud.

On the verge of sounding nationalist, however, I will say that if we can be considered radically religious and crazy theocrats out to export our religion by some countries and areligious theocracy-busters out to destroy religion by others we're doing something dead right.

Remember that the volcanoes erupting change our climate differently depending on the type of eruption, too.

A few huge slow eruptions would do different things than the giant plume eruptions.

Meanwhile, outside the US, we still hear that everyone loves Bush, especially in Texas.

A truely great government keeps people very safe and allows for a lot of growth in science, literature and religion.

Parallel with that, historically, is brutal and swift execution of those opposed to the government if and when they become a threat and a bunch of other naughtiness on the part of the dictator. For example, if I was Augustus, I probably would've had Judea given the old Carthage or Troy treatment. You see that, as a modern person, as terrible, but if he'd done it, we would not have the current middle east issues.

In terms of the health and wellbeing of its citizens, it is a great government to live in when viewed over history and probably for the majority, but it is 100% temporary and dependant upon the existance of a pretty awesome dictator.

The problem with the really good dictator is not the dictator, but that dictatorship must be established and eventually will pass to someone who is really sucky.

Democracy is not immune from this. Sucky people can get elected.

These beneficient dictatorships have been wonderful in history, but are never run by the first dictator to establish the dictatorship and rarely last past one great dictator's lifespan.

Since a great dictatorship can never be established from anything but a dictatorship, and most dictatorships are terrible, it makes it too limited to establish.

Democracy, on the other hand, will always be mediocre at the least.

On a scale of best governments to live in, with 10 being the best and 0 the worst, with dictatorships  you will get a lot in the 4-7 range, with the occassional 10 and the occassional zero. The number is going to last 1-80 years and stay similar through most of the dictator's life.

With democracy, you're at 5 most of the time, and occassionally a great leader gets you up to 8 or a Bush gets you down to 3. You never get up to a 10, but you also never get down to a zero and rarely will the  number be the same for long.

Zeros are very bad. We'd rather not risk being a zero even if a 10 might come of it, so we hedge our bets and stay with the evil we know.

This Chastain lady is aparently a powerless wackjob, so I don't fret.

QuoteApproval rating in the thirties still mean about 100.000.000 people.

Not really. Excluding the under 18, which are about 25% of the people, you get about 75 million, then on top of that you get the fact that about 100million telephones are on the national do not call registry and that those on said registry tend to be the literate and the educated, so you're kicking off a huge chunk of phones. Add to that the stuff about phone polling not getting a representative sample and folks like me who don't answer unknown numbers and that 30% is worthy of skepticism.

Quote from: beagle on January 21, 2007, 06:47:50 PM
Despite it being read by the Queen my loyalty to it is hanging by a thread since it had articles about Big Brother, (the TV program not Blair's manifesto), this week. I thought it was the one part of the British media free from such drivel.

Bless your heart, you're a British version of me!
I've never seen an episode of Survivor, nor more than 5 minutes of American Idol. I have admitted to stopping to watch the screaming god warrior lady on that wife switching show, though, but only because I was going "what the @#$%$#@ is this?!?!?"

The only truely great government is a dictatorship run by a brilliant, benficient and ruthless individual. Once the individual dies, however, the government plunges into chaos and the people are worse off for it.

Democracy creates consistantly mediocre government. We lose the opportunity for long term high points in democratic cultures, but we also lose the likelihood of dark ages.

It wins by mediocrity.

Quote from: Sibling Zono (anon1mat0) on January 17, 2007, 03:39:35 AM
Granted, they are a minority, a very vocal minority, and I don't hear that many reactions against them every time an @$$h0l3 like that makes such proposals.

Last time I was off of the North American Continent for more than 4 days, I heard this same sentiment and it startled me...so weird to hear it from someone here.

It surprises me, as pretty much everyone on this continent who actually hears stuff like this Jane Chastain's views reacts with either a gasp or a guffaw, and it gets pretty widely spread as the view of a nutter if spread at all.

We know who the nutters are. When Fred Phelps speaks we go "Look a nutter!" and when World Net Daily speaks we go "Look, another nutter."

When you have at least 301,013,317 people in your country, some of them are nutters, and the 99.99% of us who think they are nutters just don't have the time to refute the 30,000 of us who are total wackjobs, who the world wide web makes look like a lot of people but really isn't.

Basically, if The Weekly World News says something ridiculous, we don't all set about to refute it because it's the bloody Weekly World News!
http://www.weeklyworldnews.com/

World Net Daily, from whence the Right Wing Article came, is the Right Wing Equivalent of Weekly World News. No one sets about refuting it because it's bloody WND, and anyone who'd take it seriously deserves what they get!

That doesn't mean people don't disagree with it, but it's like disagreeing with the Weekly World News or your local paper's horoscope page...since no one takes it seriously, no one bothers to say nuts come from it....

I heard, last time we were off this continent, how Americans like and stand behind George W. Bush, too. I think his approval rating at the time I heard how much we liked him was in the mid thirties. He's got more positive support #s in several countries OUTSIDE the US than he does here.

(Now, this might not be 100% true in Texas, but Texas is very proud to call itself "A Whole Other Country" and the rest of us in the US pretty much agree, but I think anyone scoffing at the WND doesn't rate an FBI file.)

To go back to the initial comment, I say this with the deepest respect, but why should people go out of their way to voice their dissent from wackjobs with no power to enact their wackiness? When people take them seriously, we DO react, and we should, and certainly when we're in the presence of such wackjobs we should dissent, but why would we be expected to respond to every nutter who starts blogging?

(and WND is just blogging, for Pete's sake.)

I *love* the world fundamentalist.

-alist generally is used to refer to someone with expertise or experience in the thing it follows.

Now, look up fundament in a dictionary.

That'd be the freak "German Hurricane," eh?

It actually made our news.

Our whole city is under 2cm of ice since the day before yesterday. It's finally starting the melt.

It was beautiful.

Schools, of course, were not closed.