Nukes and Love

Hello beautiful wonderful humans! :-)

I love you.

Yes, you.  Specifically.  You reading this.  Unequivocally and without pretense and without judgment I love you.  No matter what you've done in that past.  No matter what I think you might think about what I have done in the past.

I love you and assert it bluntly and frequently in this manner for my own sake, more than for yours.  I love you because I can see the danger of not loving you.  I see the danger of exclusion.  I see that excluding you from my life is inherently to find something inside of me that is worse than you or better than you.  To love, at some deep level, is to simply see that I am no better than you.  No worse than you.  To love is the greatest equality.  And it is the greatest catharsis.  Because love is confessional.  Love is vulnerable.  Love is belly-up honest.  To be brutally honest is love.  To say what I am most afraid to say first is love.  To show you my hand, not expecting you to show me yours, is love.

Everything seems so distinctly connected for me these days.  The blogs seem connected to school.  School seems connected to my personal writings.  My personal writings feel connected to my childhood which feels connected to my family which feels connected to you all, and you all feel connected to the population of the entire globe.

My ability to surrender to you, and to love you, seems connected distinctly, then, to the fate of the world, if only in the sense that my experience with vulnerability and surrender parallel what I can now see is probably humanity's best shot at coming out on top of things.

I'll warn you: this blog post meanders and wanders a little.  Those interested in my philosophical musings or in global politics and the like will find this interesting, perhaps.  Others may be bored or confused.  But please: give this a shot? And forgive any typos or research errors while simultaneously and discreetly bringing them to my attention? Thanks.

We live in this world:

Click the image to see it enlarged.  These are children (and a few adults) wearing gas masks circa World War I

This is a world of fear, prepared for war.  Expecting war and death.  A world of intense loneliness and dishonesty and apprehension and violence.

I know that, statistically, the point could be made that the world is much more peaceful now than it has been in the past.  Perhaps the ratio of combat deaths world-wide today versus the total population of the globe paints a rosy picture.  Perhaps, as some purport, this is the most peaceful era mankind has ever existed in.

I believe that, in a way. 

I also believe this: to a great extent, we may have traded a lot of the image above (children in gasmasks, preparing themselves for hypothetical violent deaths in which their lungs would be choked and wrenched and wrung out in labored wheezing bleeding coughs by mustard gas) for a lot of this:

Click image to enlarge

That's a photo of the Minuteman III, an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) that America uses.  Or plans on using, anyhow.  The Minuteman III missile has a confirmed test range of, like, 5,300 miles.  There is some discrepency, it would seem, as to how many of these things are prepared to launch at all times from American soil at launch sites in North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming, but from what I can discern, it is around 500.  These estimates are based on conflicting reports given out by the Air Force and other parts of the American Military-Industrial bureaucracy.  

Forgive me for wondering if it possible that the government might not be telling us, and thus the rest of the world, the truth about how many Minutemen III are operational at any given time.  Seems to me that, in terms of game theory, one key to surviving a hypothetical nuclear exchange would be lying to all other possible enemies about the size and power of one's nuclear arsenal.  Perhaps I'm reading game theory wrong though.  Anyhow, these bad boys are in range of a lot of people.  Their flight time from silo to target would look like the following video:

Three solid stages of fuel break off this thing in-flight.  Reminds me of the videos of the Apollo missions and such.  This video shows the missile, which is in and of itself rather innocuous, delivering a single W78 thermonuclear warhead, which is not innocuous.  That's a hydrogen bomb, to the layman.  The bomb's yield (or destructive capacity) is (as announced by the government) upwards of 350 kilotons.

350 kilotons.  

Tricky thing about the Minuteman III is that it is designed to hold and deliver simultaneously three W78 thermonuclear warheads.  So if fitted properly, which I would guess some of them are, one Minuteman Missile launching from North Dakota could contain 1050 kilotons of destructive power.  The missile, if armed with more than one warhead, is designed to deploy all three warheads at the peak of it's travel over Earth, from which point the three warheads then operate independent of one another, capable of striking their own independent targets.  Separate cities or military installations.

The bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan (which, contrary to what they taught me in school, was done to impress the Russians and to pound the American chest, not to end the war with Japan) did the following:

Before

After

I hope I'm not being over dramatic here, but those pictures should indicate the truth: a city was used as a test site for death, literally selected by the administration at the time because it, unlike other major Japanese cities, had been structurally un-touched by war, and would thus display more accurately the power of the weapon.  In a few minutes, it went from being a city to being a death trap of poisonous fire.  It was leveled in many places.  

The bomb that did that had a yield of at most 18 kilotons.  18.  Compare that number to the potential 1050 kilotons onboard the Minuteman III.  Of which the government admits to having around 500 operational.

That's a lot of potential death, and that's not even the full arsenal.  And America's arsenal isn't even the biggest one! 

And what does "operational" mean?  

I think it means that there's "no assembly required."  I think that it means that they are prepped and ready to go. And I know that they are already aimed.  Each missile, and indeed each individual warhead, already knows where it will go if some terrible mistake or madness allows it to fly forth from it's earthly tomb.  It knows exactly which children it is going to kill.  

The USA maintains an arsenal of over 5000 nuclear warheads, not all of which are active.  Or the government admits to that number anyway.  It's estimated that Russia maintains an active inventory of around 4600 warheads.

To be sure, not all of these are warheads that are mounted on, or even could be mounted on, intercontinental ballistic missiles like the Minuteman III.  Many of these are on tactical medium range missiles that can be launched from their metallic tunnels of death aboard the nuclear submarines that float them quietly around the oceans of the globe.  

There are not, even at the highest, most dramatic estimates out there, enough nuclear weapons to literally kill every human being in one single exchange of missile-propelled hell.  I'm not exactly sure how our atmosphere would hold up to the abuse, but it seems like it might survive.  To put things in perspective, here's a video visually representing each known and recorded nuclear test performed between 1945 and 1998. 

So over that fifty year period, there were over 2000 detonations!  The sky is still the sky.  But I wonder: what would the sky be like if there was a full nuclear exchange and well over 10,0000 nuclear weapons were detonated in a matter of days?

This is unlikely, as many nuclear warheads are in fact aimed at other nuclear facilities, guaranteeing that some of the bombs would never be able to make it off of the ground.  

But let's say that the unthinkable happened and North Korea was finally able to strike a deal with Iran in which it felt comfortable relinquishing some of it's nuclear fuel (highly enriched uranium).

Click to enlarge.

Then let's assume that relations between the US and Iran get worse, as they are wont to do.

I swear... didn't this exact conversation happen about a week ago?

The purpose of Iran attempting to develop nuclear weapons is not to use them.  Iran wants nuclear capabilities so that they can trade away their nukes to the UN in exchange for concessions, mostly economic.  But if Iran got a bomb, and conditions deteriorated, and they lost faith in their ability to get what they wanted by trading their bomb to us as a token, I have little doubt in my mind that elements within the Iranian government and military complex would be willing to launch upon Tel Aviv, or to sell the weaponry to someone who would.

This would be a tragic day.

I believe that there are elements within the Israeli military, and certainly elements in the American populace (see: AIPAC) that want nothing more than for Israel to have an excuse to press "fire" on their missile launchers.  It is my belief that elements of the super-right across the world are salivating over the "fire buttons" in Israel.  Iran could, without even being fully aware of its actions due to broken chains of command, give Israel and the salivating-super-right the perfect excuse to unleash a nuclear cluster-headache upon the entire region.  I think that would only be the start.

At this point, in order to assert themselves over a suddenly much more important and always vulnerable Pakistan, India might see the opportunity of nuclear exchanges in the region as a good reason to launch.  Pakistan might feel the same, and could possibly launch.  This exchange would, we can only assume, draw enough attention from China that it would throw itself into the game, probably attacking strategic spots in Russia to ensure safety later down the road, and attempting to destroy India, their new biggest economic competition in the region.  Japan would be fucked, too.

The exchange between Russia and China would draw the rest of the nuclear powers in, I think.  I believe that in a few short days there would be full deployment, and my little statue would be bumpin beats like this:

This seriously took forever for me to make.

Click to enlarge, and peep Jera's cool 

new headphones (the red ones.)

In the event of full deployment, the statue is going to listen to some dubstep type shit.  I'm going to listen to the Counting Crows.  Monica is watching "Ok Go" videos and Jera picked Conjure One's first album, but admitted she might need to switch to some Pink Floyd.  ANYWAY.....

I don't think this would have to play out this way.  Let's say Iran finally gets their enrichment machines to work well enough and for long enough to produce some of their own HEU (highly enriched uranium, the stuff you have to have to make a nuclear bomb.)  Then lets say a revolution occurs in Iran, as they have in the past.  (A revolution, in fact, becomes increasingly likely there, with the advent of the internet and the connection of people with liberal social ideals and the like.  We can look at the Arab Spring as a blueprint for that.)  So... they get some HEU, there's a revolt, and a militant band of kids or clerics or jihadists steals the HEU in the ensuing confusion.  Totally possible.  Then we're in trouble.

Al Queda and groups like it would like to be able to buy some HEU.  It would be easy, at that point, to finally sell them some, from the point of view of the revolutionary in Iran.  Al Queda may have a dwindling network of leaders, but they still have a stated goal of killing a lot of humans, and they still, I'm certain, have the backing of a lot of Saudi money.

Al Queda gets the HEU and prepares a rudimentary bomb.  What would I do with it if I were Al Queda, looking to mess things up for America and the West?  I would make an attempt to detonate the device in Russia, and to try to manufacture a little doubt about America's innocence in the matter.  Or better yet, to sneak it into China and leave questions about Russian or American involvement.  That seems easier, and I believe would accomplish the same effect.  Millions of people would die as all the world's nuclear powers got pulled into a total deployment situation.  Or they could just sneak the bastard into New York City.  They'd have to assemble much of the weapon in the corresponding cities, but that is more easily done than attaining the HEU itself.

These are scenarios I guess to be possible.  I'm not a nuclear strategist.  I'm not Henry Kissinger.

And thank God I'm not, right?  I mean, to be this ugly AND a baby killing war-criminal?  I'll pass on that poor soul's existence and keep mine any day of the week.

I'm not the guy with all the knowledge here.  But these scenarios seem possible to me in my limited knowledge of the world.

What do you think though? 

How about the idea that if you live in a major city in an industrialized nation, there is likely at least one missile with a thermonuclear payload ready to launch at a moments notice aimed to a spot close enough to you that it's deployment would certainly spell your own demise?

They don't have to take a moment to type "Chicago" into the computer and then wait for the missile to recalibrate for a trip to Chicago.  It is already programmed.  They would have to type "something else" into the computer in order to aim it away from Chicago.  Or DC.  Or London.  Or Sydney.  Or Beijing.

Who can tell what would actually happen?  It would just seem likely to me that, because of the way the warring human mind works, some nuclear war leads to total deployment of the world's nuclear assets.  Nuclear war is the zero sum game, at least philosophically speaking.  To the nuclear mind, there is only one winner, and if there is only one winner, then you had better launch all of your assets now.  

I said a bit ago that total deployment wouldn't likely kill every human being.  There would be many human beings left, and the world would be reduced to a stone-age type scenario in many ways.

I'm warning you: nuclear war will land us in a REAL stone-age.  Even worse than the one pictured above.  Devolution happens FAST, eh?

Power, food supply, phones and internet, money, transportation, all of that would be fucked.  On the ground, people would resort to their baser instincts, I believe, and begin to pull one another apart in a desperate attempt to survive.  At a higher level, I believe that the world's governments would attempt to consolidate their resources for military purposes, quickly trying to gain as much ground wherever they could as fast as they could.  I believe that nuclear war would lead to the most vicious cycle of conventional war the world has ever seen.  World leaders, for the sake of their own families and their very own lives, would be willing to use all of the vicious chemical and biological weapons (even the secret viral ones that are likely to exist) which would, probably, in the end, do a pretty good job of wiping out the remaining population of the world.  

There would be few humans left.  And the humans that would be left would not be living in good times.

So we can say we live in, statistically, the most peaceful time in the history of the world.

Sure.

But I believe that this has happened because we have traded the potential deaths of combatants for the potential deaths of millions and maybe billions of innocent non-combatants.  That deal seems a bit unfair.

The number of combat deaths are down because all of the major players capable of waging large-scale war are in a delicate nuclear deadlock and dare not attack one another.  The biggest wars that aren't happening right now aren't happening because we have put the potential energy of World War III and World War IV and World War V into thousands of nuclear warheads.  

In this sense, the major powers of the world have exported conventional war to the non-nuclear powers.  And we help them with it, for money and strategic privilege.  We produce the arms the less industrialized nations need to keeping destroying themselves.  And we all sit and wait, numb. 

And the whole world suffers and children die by American bullets and by Palestinian bullets and by Israeli bullets and by the knives of madmen in the Congo and we sit and wait.  The poor of the world exterminate themselves with guns and the rich of the world (for my American audience, even my Wall Street #occupiers: yes I mean you, and we, when I say "the rich") wait with their nuclear weapons.

Confident that some mistake won't happen.

Confident that a missile wont just accidentally fire by itself.

Confident that Al Queda or a group like it might never get a reasonable amount of HEU.

What is the spiritual cost of living in a world such as this?  I don't care if you are atheist or Catholic of Hindu or Muslim or Mormon or anything else.  I want to know what you think the spiritual (or for atheists, collective quantum) effect of this potential destruction is on the world.

We don't think about it all the time.  But I feel as though it is known at a deep level.  There is a tension to the world.  A grotesque underpinning.  A platform of fear.  We are all walking around, every minute, pulling a little red wagon behind us in which sits a nuclear warhead.

Until we rise up as a species and turn off our bombs... junior's gonna have to just avoid hitting any big bumps or rolling the thing over.

We are all carrying around our own demise at all times.  Our potential death in a nuclear holocaust is always our potential death in a nuclear holocaust and if there is a collective spirit to the world, then I have to think that it is being sickened and weakened by all of this future-potential-destruction.

I love every one of you because I believe that to not love another human being is to exclude that human being.  I believe that excluding human beings means creating factions and groups.  I believe that creating factions and groups leads to the need to form government, and that need is initially, always, to create a mechanism of war by which the faction or group can make itself safe from physical aggression.

I'll say that again: governments (all governments) are set up, first and formost, to create a war machine.  The primary role then, of any government, is to create an increasingly efficient capacity for murder.  

Government begets more government.
Hate begets hate.
Fear begets fear.

A war machine is not self-sustaining.  It must be fed, and in order to be fed, it must have the appearance of being used.  A machine of death can't just be "made to appear" to be in use, though.  The economy demands that bullets enter bodies.  True.

If it's not Afghanistan or Iraq or Libya, it will be somewhere else.  

Boys don't buy firecrackers just to store them safely.  Boys buy firecrackers to blow them up.  The military doesn't develop guns and drones and bombs just to store them away.  They develop them for use.

I love everyone because I believe that not loving everyone is to create the very basic justification for the nuclear-potentiality.  

When I talk about love, I am talking about a big thing.  A lot of things.

I am talking about being vulnerable with others.

I am talking about being honest with others.

I am talking about not being afraid of others because of what they "might think of me, if only they knew me."

I am talking about a relinquishing of vengefulness.

I am talking about letting go of past injustices done to me.

I am talking about doing everything I can to right any injustices I may have imposed on anyone else.

I am talking about taking the time to really get to know another person and to really let them get to know me.

Love, in that sense of the word, seems to be the only healing force that can stop humans from needing to factionalize and to group themselves.  Factionalization may have been necessary, in some odd way, when we were evolving and living as apes.  But I don't believe factionalization to be imperative to a species that has developed what we quaintly refer to as "free will."

I have found that where I sow the seeds of love, love grows.  I have found that it grows fast.  Faster than I could have ever imagined.  And I believe that love, starting with just a small group of people willing to look at the world and themselves and others differently than perhaps most humans have throughout history, can change the world and eliminate our need for all of this madness.  

The coercive government apparatus is only a war machine.  It puts on the trappings of the welfare state or the patriotic military state in order to appear palatable to the public.  But it is just a war machine and it has the blood of children on its hands.

Love, coupled with the power of the internet, which allows love and ideas to flow in all directions and to all places, is about to heal the world.  And it is going to start with us.

Us.

With forgiveness and open-mindedness and patience and kindness.

The world has the capacity to destroy itself, and I believe, edges closer and closer to that on a daily basis.

It is time for something to happen.

There is so much cause to be optimistic.

I have discovered the nature of love to be that of honesty.  All of the love I was incapable of giving or receiving in my adult life has been the result of my hiding myself from the world shamefully.  I have realized now that to get love (which is what I think that each individual human wants more than anything, whether they can or cannot articulate it to be so) all I must do is stand figuratively naked before another human and bare my soul.  When I do this, I am giving them all the ammunition they need to snap back at me with vitriole and judgment.  That is why I never did it before.  Because I thought human relationships were like game theory.  Like the nukes.  A zero sum game.

Human relationships are like the nukes.  But we have misunderstood human relationships and the nukes.  When I lay down my arms by casting aside my secrets and my insecurities, people don't take advantage of them and twist them against me.  Rather, they seem to open up themselves.  Their insecurities seem to slip away before my eyes and, to a greater extent than I ever thought possible, I find myself able to see them.  And it's the humans that I can see that end up showering me with a love that is beyond what I used to think love could be.

Honesty.  Vulnerability.  Disarmament.  I drop my social weaponry.  My secrets and my prejudices and my bigotry.  And when they see that I have dropped my weaponry and that I look at them as "one of the team," they put down their social weaponry without even flinching or seeming to give it any thought.

This has been happening to me in situation after situation for months on end now.  My life has grown tremendously as a result.  

When I disarm, humans disarm.

If America disarmed (her nukes) the effect would be the same.  Other countries would find themselves closer to being able to disarm.  There would be a cascading effect and the world would eventually find itself, at the very least, free of nuclear weapons.  I fucking believe this.

I love all of you because I feel the best when I am loving and being loved.  I feel the safest when I am not being coerced.  When I am seen for what I am.  When I am not hiding myself in shame and thus admitting to myself the greatest faslehood: I am better than or worse than those around me.

I am no better.

I am no worse.

I have a plan to change the world.  It involves connecting the human race with the internet and then having the human race collectively and unflinchingly looking into its own eyes and, for the first time, globally, being able to truly see its singular nature.  No judgment.  Just understanding.

I am idealistic, yes, but also pragmatic in the sense that this love thing seems to be a real working solution in my own life.  Love was the solution that trumped all the other "solutions."  

I can't see how it wouldn't extrapolate out to have the same effect on all people, because it is so simple.  It calls for a lack of judgement and pretense.  It calls for empathizing with all humans, because all humans are after the same thing at the end of the day: to carry on with their lives and to procreate or defend their genetic lineage, both of which happen within the conscious construct of love, which is a meta for the sub-conscious drive to carry on one's genetic line.

Love is the purest healer and the purest representation of the little thing in our blood that makes us all the same.

We are, like it or not, all right here.  Simple.

Tell me what you think.  And, please, someone, tell me what to talk about!  This "coming up with my own topics" is killin' me.

Love.

Let's Talk About Sex, Baby

HA!

Gotcha.

We're not talkin' about sex today.  I totally just took advantage of your baser natural instincts.  :-)  Please forgive me, I mean no harm.  I love you.  Yes... YOU.

You are thinking, maybe, "Charles means that he loves the followers of his blog, or his friends, or his family, but not me, because I am none of those things..."

...or "not me, because Charles doesn't believe in government and I work for a government institution or believe 100% in government,"

...or "not me, because I believe that 'world peace' is a pipe dream and an exercise in mental masturbation, while Charles resolutely believes that it is almost immediately within our grasp,"

...or "not me, because Charles is a dick hole and I hate him and he hates me."

You may even be thinking I might not love you, specifically, because I have previously been such a jerk about stuff like the tight pants you may or may not be wearing, the "Ugg" brand boots you may or may not be wearing, the homeopathic medicine you may or may not be taking, or the shitty John Travolta movies you may or may not be watching.

Allow me to re-explain: I have dropped the hate, and I LOVE YOU!  If we had beef in the past and you have wronged me, I love you.  If we had beef and I wronged you, I love you.  If you believe in things I don't, like homeopathy, or catastrophic anthropogenic global climate change, or "Snooki," that is OKAY!  I love you and have no energy on any of that stuff.  At least not any energy that would keep me from talking to you about your life.  Or my life.  Or whatever.  :-)

Anyway, enough of that long and ramblingly incoherent intro.  I'm sure you're about ready to click back to your Facebook or Twitter tab.  Stay for just a second?

I have a surprise to share with y'all!

I got "Blog Of Noted!"  AGAIN!

For those unfamiliar, a "Blog of Note" is like a public nod of the head by the staff who work at Blogger to blogs that they find interesting or cute or cool or whatever.  Hopefully I am all of those. ;-)

The new Blog of Note site looks all cool and stuff.... here's what it looked like:

I guess I should have anticipated that this is the goofy picture that would come to represent me on this "Blog of Note."

I got "Blog of Noted," or "BONed," as we used to say, on October 12.  I didn't realize it until last night when a trusted internet buddy tweeted the news.  Here's what that looked like:

Justin's keepin' an eye on the internet for all of us. :-)

So first off I wanna plug Justin and his blog.  It can be found here.  I confess that I haven't been to his blog in a while.  It looks totally different now (and way cooler, IMHO) than it did the last time I was there.  Also, in the obligatory confessional fashion, I will say that my dorky avatar did not appear on his "followers" list at the time of this writing.  I had been following him for some time. Then I un-followed a bunch of folks at one point 'cause my blog feed was becoming overwhelming, and he may have fallen prey to an accidental un-follow in the midst of my frenzied clicking.  Luckily, I've stayed in contact with him on Twitter, where he is a staple of my tweet stream.  I once indicated to him that it was comforting to know that he was always just "out there," and that he had a kind of calming omnipresence online.  I re-assert that firmly now.  You guys should check him out.

As far as my blog feed: I rarely look at it now because I'm so distracted by direct interaction with people online.  But, again, if you are blogging and want me looking directly at what you blog, mention it to me via twitter, e-mail or Facebook.  

I felt bad that the post that people have been seeing since I got "BONed" again was a long, text-heavy post that was spiritual and philosophical in nature (bordering on boring).  I kinda wish that all those new people who clicked over to my blog that day would have seen something a little sillier.  So I'm gonna attempt to lay some silliness on you now. I am focused on the nukes and on peace and love.  But I still get my silly on.  Regularly.  Take the following for example:

HAT! (and scarf):

I have a friend in Cali (she is one of my best friends EVER) and she took the time to make me the coolest thing.  A matching scarf and hat.  In bright fun colors.  With fun stars on the front.  The scarf is of a perfect scarf length (I hate when scarves are too short) and the hat is perfectly in proportion with my watermelon-sized-dome.  Here are some pics, displaying awesome craftswomanship and me being... well... me.

I'm a serious fuckin' man.

Serious men need serious hats. And scarves.

Thank you Sarah for this awesome gift.  I still can hardly believe you made these yourself.  I couldn't make something like this in a million years... not even with a trained army of knitting monkeys.

Nails!:

Ok, another silly thing: I have been saving my toe and finger nail clippings for a long time.  Here's the pile so far:

This is just a few years worth.  I wish I had all of the ones I threw out from my whole life.  I feel like I wasted so many!

Some of you may find this to be disgusting.  If you find this gross, than you are going to hate the day I finish my self made "pube-fur-coat."  That is going to be a weird post.  Anyway, the pile of nail clippings smells like death.  I offered them to my sister for her birthday.  She said I could make a Zen Rock Garden using them as the sand.  That sounds like a pretty good idea.  Do you all have any ideas?

Testicles and Underwear!:

Onto the next thing: a little something about my testes.  You see, friends, I have not been wearing underwear for several years.  I don't know if I have mentioned that on the blog before.  But it's absolutely true: I don't wear underwear.  I think I have a pair or two of boxers in my dresser drawer, but those boxers no longer fit me properly.  They are super old and probably full of moths and whatnot.  

I stopped wearing undies because I had a sponsor in the 12-Step-Fellowship that didn't wear them and recommended that I give it a try.  I tried it and loved it and never went back.  I didn't just learn spiritual stuff from my time in the 12-Step rooms!  Actually... maybe the non-underwear thing is kinda spiritual. You tell me?

Anyway, I have run into a problem: I have been riding my bike around a lot lately, and this bike riding has given rise to the following issue:

I keep wrenching and twisting and pinching the hell out of my nuts because they both sag to the sides of the bike seat like a couple of eggs hanging onto a wall by a nail!  It HURTS! >:-(

It's about like this...

So I'm considering, with a heavy heart, getting a pair of underwear of some kind.  Not sure what kind to get, but the idea in my head is that I will go from the above drawing, which indicates a nightmarish hell-pain that I previously only thought existed in fantasy, to something like this:

You see how nicely those bastards are cradled there? Just as two perfect, unbroken ostrich eggs cupped in, and held aloft gently by, the soft hands of Lady Gaga herself (which would be my TRUE ideal...)

So I need y'all to help me pick.

Which undies should I get?

Option 1

These look comfy and minimalist....

 Option 2

I really like the print on these ones. *Grooowwwwllll*

Option 3

These are a little conservative for my taste... but some ladies are into that, right? Also, I look RIPPED in this photo.

Option 4

I ate McDonalds on the day I tried these ones out.  I wore them onto the soccer field to burn off those Double Quarter Pounders.  These work well...

So you must all vote.  I need your help on this.  I can't solve my crushed-nut-bike-problem without you!

Vote in the comments section.  Then Facebook friend me, tweet @alkalibloo to get in touch with me instantly, or e-mail me at alkalibloo@gmail.com.  I want to talk to you!  About underwear or philosophy or world peace or any other thing!  Thank you to "brett" at Google or Blogger or wherever he works for selecting me as a Blog of Note again! You rule, sir!  And so does everyone else reading this.  If you are interested in more serious matters, peep my last few blog posts.  You will find me discussing things that are very personal and very serious.  There will be more silliness and more seriousness to come.  I wish peace and prosperity and health upon you all.  

LOVE!

Judgment Call

Hello beautiful people! (Yes, that means you.)


To anyone wondering where I've been for the last few days, I opted to go on a kind of "radio silence" on the interwebs for a period of time.  I called it "cocooning."  I needed to consider some things about what has been going on in my life.  I've received some relatively cruel, if not incredibly ambiguous, criticism from a few folks about the nature of my life as it stands.  I cocooned because I wanted to try to discern whether or not I was indeed taking improper action.

I'm not completely certain how to articulate what I discovered.  I can say this: I feel like pushing forward into this thing with greater force now than I ever did before.  And I feel compelled to rework some of the other "older" parts of my behavior and mode of living quickly because I have found more destruction and more ineffectiveness.  Life is nothing if not a process.

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I would like to just briefly extend myself out to anyone out there reading this, as always: I want to talk to you.  Directly.  In any way you would like.  About anything you would like.  I am available in these ways:

E-mail      Twitter      Facebook

I am also willing to give my digits to anyone out there who would want to have a phone conversation with me.  As mention in my previous blog, I have done this a couple of times so far and it has been REALLY rewarding.  :-)

One more thing on this: if you have contacted me and I haven't replied in a timely manner, contact me again more forcefully, please!  I get a little flighty and forgetful but I do not want to miss the opportunity to hear you and know you because of that.  Along the same lines: if you blog or create online, and you want me at your blog commenting and reading, please bring it to my attention and I will unequivocally do that.  Due to flightiness, again, I miss out on a lot of cool blog posts done by dear friends.  But if you bring something to my direct attention, I promise to give it my full attention at my earliest possible opportunity.

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Also, I started a new "blog."  It's a "micro-blog" (I guess).  It's a "Tumblr" to be exact.  You all should check it out.  It will be dedicated to more serene and poetic stuff and I will be posting there at least once daily.  The nature of a Tumblr is to kind of force the blogger into making shorter blog posts.  Which I am desperately in need of.  This may be right up your alley, if you find yourself struggling to get to the end of my torturously long blogs.  I call the new blog:

LoveSolution

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Anywho, this blog post is going to consist of a piece of writing I did recently.  I did it after having a long conversation with a friend of mine (a friend I met as a direct result of the goofy sunglasses).  I'm going to post the body of the text here, for your review.  Anyone willing to read the whole thing should.  I'm looking for logical or spiritual inconsistencies in my own reasoning first and foremost.  I am also interested in hearing people's personal experience on the subject matter, which I guess would be "harsh judgment."  I think that's a pretty common portion of the human experience... so don't leave me hanging.  Tell me what you think! Also, if there are typos, tell me about them too! 

I'm posting the file as PDF here as well.  So if you are a slow reader, like me, or want to read in bed or whatever, you can whip this bastard over to your phone or iPad or Kindle of other device quick, fast and in a hurry.  Also, it makes it easier for you to send it to friends *wink wink*.

Special thanks to John, Sarah and Jera (that shit rhymed well) for looking over this for me like they did on short notice.  

Okay... here we go.

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Thoughts on Judgment

I stand accused by some of being too “idealistic” of late.  I stand accused of being narrow minded, hateful, and just plain wrong in the ways that I have been thinking and in the ways in which I have been asserting myself of late.

            I have been searching out people on the internet and in real life to the greatest extent possible.  I have been searching for people relatively indiscriminately.  I have been looking for a human connection of sorts and I have not been able to fully articulate the nature of the connection I seek.  The connection, I suppose, is self-defining in the sense that it is indiscriminate.  I wish to connect with humans.  Period.  My newfound sense of love for humanity has translated into a seemingly insatiable longing to simply be near humans and to know them.  I care much less about imposing my own thoughts or ideas upon the humans I meet than having them impose themselves upon me.  I wish to have them graft new ideas onto my worldview.

All of what I write here is an appeal to you, the reader, for dialogue.  I state things as hard and true only as a linguistic mechanism, and want to convey to you one thing before anything else: I don’t know what I am talking about, and I have a profound respect for my own vast ignorance and capacity to misunderstand.  This and any writing I do is my appeal to be shown any error that may exist in my thought process.  Also, please keep in mind that I endorse no church or religion or particular philosophy or ideology.  This writing is simply a synopsis of my own experience to date.

            I had a lengthy discussion with a 19-year-old girl via text today about the nature of “judgment” in life.  The conversation was about the nature of “judgment” in a particular aspect of her life.  Also, on more than one occasion recently, I have had people explain to me why judgment is an effective tool in their lives.  When pressed for answers as to exactly how judging others benefitted them, they were unable to produce an answer.  I want to talk a little bit about how judgment has behaved and lived in my life and what I have learned about it. 

           

            The 19-year-old girl belongs to a church that she claims to “hate.”  I asked her why she hates her church.  I know many people that adore their faith and derive an awesome amount of utility from their religion.  It seems odd to me that people go to churches that they don’t get anything out of. 

When I asked her why she hated going to church, she indicated that the people at the church seem to be judging her very harshly for some of her real life behavior.  Knowing her a little bit, I knew that she was referring to the fact that the people at her church tend to look down upon certain things about the way that she dresses and carries herself, and that they look down upon her experimenting with things like alcohol and sex in her real life.

            I want to make it clear here that I do not feel a need to say one way or another whether I think there is some basic moral shade to the action of living a life of abstinence from pre-marital or recreational sex, nor do I think there is a definite moral quality to living a life of abstinence from alcohol or from certain styles of dress/piercings/makeup, etc.  These things seem to me simply to be “modes of living.”  An example from my own life is the fact that I do not drink.  I do not think there is a moral “goodness” to my not drinking.  I believe that I simply don’t drink for personal reasons.  The acting of imbibing is, in and of itself, innocuous to me.

            I asked her why she thought that the people at her church judged her harshly or treated her sub-optimally.  She responded that the people treating her badly are “self-righteous.”  I believe that “self-righteousness” is probably an innate human quality that we all have, though.  I don’t find “self-righteousness” to be “wrong.”  I have discussed in a few spots, here and there, that I believe that we all, every human, behave only in ways that we feel to be right, despite the real world efficacy of our actions.  I used to drink and drive because, at some level, I felt that it was “right.”  If I had thought it was definitively wrong, I would not have done it.  That is not to say that I couldn’t see that other people thought it was wrong, nor is it to say that I didn’t know that each and every time I did it that I was putting myself and others at a level of risk for catastrophe.  The truth is, though, that at the time, given my understanding of myself and the world around me, the “rightness” of drinking and driving somehow outweighed the “wrongness” of it, even if only marginally.

           

            I told her that I thought there might be a different way to look at the situation, and that people may only appear overly self-righteous through sub-optimal action.  I suggested that perhaps their “harsh judgment of her” was not motivated by their “self-righteousness.” 

I asked her, as a thought experiment, to fill in the blank: “I am going to behave judgmentally because _______”

           

            Her blank was filled with something to the effect of “…because I am better than others.  Because others sin more and worse than I do.  Because people know what is right and they do the wrong thing anyway.”

            I thought about it for a second.  My friend is an open minded person who enjoys good conversation, so I proposed my own “blank-filler.”  My blank-filler looked like this: “I should be harsh and judgmental with people about their life choices because I believe that there is a Hell, and I care so much about certain people that I am willing to, up to a certain point, be cruel to those people now in order to help them avoid the pain of Hell later,” or alternatively, and perhaps marginally more selfishly, “I should be harsh and judgmental with certain people in my church so that they may realize the error in their ways and hopefully not become so secularized by culture at large that they leave the church forever, which would leave me with fewer people with whom to share my beliefs and on whom I can depend on for support in my own time of need.”

            This was revelatory for me.  I grew up belonging to a church that I always felt judged me too harshly.  I recall feeling precisely how this girl feels.  Perhaps even to a greater extent.  I recall the dread of having to face the people who I thought hated me because I was not as devout as they were.  I recall the dread of being at church.

            I wish I had been able to see, as a child, what I tried to explain to my friend during our conversation: that the people I went to church with never had any personal vendetta against me.  Their motivation was never to harm me and was certainly not, at the basic level, to elevate themselves above me and to cause me to feel small.  I can see clearly now that their motivation was only ever to A) save me from damnation and B) have me by their side on their journey of life, because people enjoy being able to walk their path with others alongside them.

            These are the things I perceive about the motivation behind that kind of “judgment.”  My friend responded to me, and rightly so, that the people at her church were only pushing her away, and that, if I was correct about how they were motivated, then they were going about getting what they wanted all wrong.  I agreed with her that, from what I knew of the situation, it sounded as though their behavior was sub-optimal based on the outcome they wished to see.

            This seems to me to be a point of contention with some people.  I believe now that this “taking ineffective and harmful action for a good motivation” seems to be the very nature of human suffering in a nutshell.

            Some people (dare I say many people?) seem to disagree with me here. 

While I don’t have any way of telling absolute truth from any untruth, I will say that, looking back on all of my experience and knowledge, I now see this to be true: every time I took ineffective action or harmful action or even abhorrent action (all of which I have done many many times, sadly), I believe that at the core I had a correct motivation.  The disconnect, for me, was that I was mentally confused and spiritually bankrupt and was therefore unable to identify optimal actions, and even unable to listen to other humans when they offered me different ways of thinking and acting. 

I was offered optimal actions and ways of thinking since the day I was very young.  I just couldn’t wrap my head around them.  So I spent 26 years acting for the right reason (to sooth my suffering, to connect with people, and to increase my longevity and happiness) in the wrong way (drinking and driving, bad-drugging, stealing, imposing verbal violence and occasionally physical violence onto others, being generally hateful and reclusive, and a long list of other things.)

I believe that my friend’s church members act for the right reason, which I think can be somewhat subjective.  She explained again that their behavior was “wrong” to her and that they were hurting her and pushing her away.  While I don’t necessarily feel adequately equipped to weigh in on how “right” or “wrong” their actions may or may not be in a definitive universal sense, I told her that, certainly, she seemed to be correct.  I’ll reiterate: their behavior was sub-optimal when taking into account the outcome that they wished to see.  They seemed to be doing themselves wrong just as they did her wrong.

I indicated to her that her church fellows were very likely confused as to what action to take, in the same sense that I was confused when I thought that drinking copious amounts of alcohol was a way to fix my world and my life.

She asked me about the nature of their confusion.  I indicated to her that my best guess about their confusion was that it was based on this illusion that humans seem to have that other humans can be forced or coerced into changing.  The illusion, I told her, seems to be a global illusion under which most humans suffer.  The illusion that people can be willed to change by force of any kind seems to be at the root of her situation, at the root of the most painful circumstances in my own life, and at the root of war, bigotry, the prison-industrial-complex and most other terrible human experiences.  I told her that I don’t think guilt-tripping or judging or maiming or killing or incarcerating another human being was ever a reasonable way to change that person at a fundamental level.

Now, my friend stands at a precarious threshold.  She can move forward with this church the way she is and continue to feel abused.  She can conform to their wishes.  She can leave the church for another church.  She can let the experience sour her on religion all together and take up the cause of militant atheism.  She has many options. 

To me it does not seem right, necessarily, for her to just “conform” to the wishes of her church blindly.  I think that action into which one has been coerced through force (even if just by the force of harsh judgment) is false action and leads to feelings of guilt, self-hate, confusion, and eventually spiritual and mental shutdown.  I have seen this many times in my life and in others.

            It doesn’t seem right for her to continue on suffering as she suffers, either.  So I struggled to find a course of action that I myself would feel comfortable taking were I in her position.  I offered up my two best solutions, from a first person perspective, putting myself in her shoes.  Before either of the two solutions though, I (optimally) would take the following requisite action:

I ought to do some soul searching and find out how much I feel that I need the judgmental person in question in my life.  To be frank, there are some humans I can love from afar, and to whom I don’t require any particular proximity.  Conversely, there are some humans (good friends and family) which I feel much more compelled to have in my life.  Simply put: there are some humans for whom I am willing to go to great lengths to have in my life, and others whom I am only willing to exert a minimal amount of effort on.  I believe I would ascertain this inner-knowledge through quiet contemplation, mediation, talking to a trusted and unbiased friend about the situation, and perhaps prayer (although obviously I wouldn’t recommend that portion to people who dislike prayer or are atheist.)    

Solution 1:  If I find that the judgmental person in question is one of the group that I am willing to exert a lot of effort and emotion on, then the choice is clear: I must, through patience and understanding, deeply internalize what I have intellectually asserted: that the judging-human is not, by nature of her judgment, a malicious human.  To the contrary, the judging-human is a loving-human and is likely merely confused as to how to assert herself in my life.  Knowing this, I must then internally and fundamentally accept the judging-human exactly the way she is.  I must accept judgment and all else.  I must be willing to suffer their judgment indefinitely.  I have to relinquish my need or compulsion to coerce them into changing their behavior. 

           

            Having done this, I will find myself in an optimal place from which to love the individual in question.  Solution 1 is to count on the power of love, acceptance and compassion to make life bearable, if not enjoyable, for myself and others.  In Solution 1, once I have come to a quiet spot of inner-acceptance, I show the judging-human love and compassion by offering them all that I am willing to.  Primarily, and ideally, I would offer them my love (verbally and otherwise), my time, my space and my understanding.  Solution 1 is to make myself small in the presence of the judging-person and to simply love them because they are “that important to me.”

            Solution 2: If, after some soul searching, I find that the judging person is not a person for whom I am willing to exert a lot of spiritual or emotional energy, then I must simply extricate myself from their life as much as possible.  I cannot ever expect them to change.  To place expectations on another human being seems fundamentally wrong for me.  I cannot coerce them into changing, as I am frustrated with their very attempt to do the same to me.  If the spiritual-cost-benefit-analysis of the individual comes up heavy on the “cost” side, then I am obligated simply to move away and love that person without imposing my presence on them anymore. 

Solution 2 is simply to walk away, and to walk away in a loving manner.  It is to depart in a non-judgmental manner.  Simply: to understand that the judging-human is not a malicious one, and is likely confused.  It would be important for me to leave the situation with a kind word, or at least a neutral energy, if possible, as opposed to an angry or spiteful energy.

            So what’s the “take away?”  My friend found me to be too “idealistic.” Our conversation was via text, though, and my message may have been diluted.  She indicated to me that what I said logically made sense to her but that people are selfish and do not change.  That they will always fight.  I guess the problem I’ve had the hardest time getting over is wanting people to change too.  

            I understand the mentality that tells us that humans are of poor quality.  I understand the thinking that goes into a statement like “people suck and will never change and will always hurt one another.” 

            I thought that way for 26 years.  I still find those thought patterns creeping up occasionally.  I have recently acquired a huge stick with which to bludgeon those thoughts, though: love.  I don’t have to change people or convince people anymore.  Every single time I tried, I got hurt, and so did they.  I have seen that a humble, loving word, though, affects even the hardest spirit in ways I never thought possible.

            My life was simply of very, very low quality when I was walking around excluding people from my life because I thought that they were judging me.  My life was of poor quality when I was constantly judging others.  And I can see now that, really, if I wish to live a life in which I am not judged by other humans, I must first get clear within myself with the fact that I myself have no moral high ground from which to judge anyone.  Once all my desire and emotion and thought are boiled down to their purest form, I can see that my judgment of others has been one of the most destructive poisons in my life.  And the further I look at it, the more I can see that all of the times I was judging others, I was in “the wrong.” 

            For me, this lesson is not about whether or not there is an inherent nature of right or wrong to any particular action.  I find a few things to be basically morally wrong and will likely never be convinced otherwise.  Murder and rape, for example, are two things that are never right, I believe.  But my knowing that an action is wrong does not give me the right to “judge” the killer.  I have, again and again, taken actions myself that I now believe also fall under that “absolutely wrong” label.  I took those actions based on all of the best knowledge and training the world had afforded me to date, and based on my own insecurities and self-hateful hang-ups, which were, to a certain point, inescapable outside of certain experiences.  I took those actions because I was confused.  My friend’s church fellows take sub-optimal action, from what I can tell, out of confusion.  Not out of any malicious nature.  I take sub-optimal action out of confusion.  I judge others only as a result of my own ignorance and confusion.

            What do you think?  While you decide, I’ll recall some words on the matter that are not my own:

From The Gospel of St. Matthew, Chapter 7 (a report of Jesus Christ’s much publicized “Sermon on the Mount”):

           

            “(1)Judge not, that you may not be judged.  (2)For with what judgment you judge, you shall be judged: and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again.  (3) And why seest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye; and seest not the beam that is thy own eye?  (4) Or how sayest thou to thy brother: let me cast the mote out of thy eye; and behold, a beam is in thy own eye?  (5) Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thy own eye, and then shalt thou see to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.”

           

From the Qur’an, XXII, 17:

            “Surely those who believe and those who are Jews and the Sabeans and the Christians and the Magians and those who associate (others with Allah) – surely Allah will decide between them on the day of resurrection; surely Allah is a witness over all things.”

            (My understanding of this quote is to say that since no man is omnipotent and no man can know the inner workings of another’s heart, that judgment must be left for some other omnipotent power.)

In the words of Mother Theresa:

            “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”

Native American Proverb:

           

            “Don’t judge any man until you have walked two moons in his moccasins.”

Friedrich Nietzsche:

            “Judgments, value judgments concerning life, for or against, can in the last resort never be true: they possess value only as symptoms, they come into consideration only as symptoms – in themselves such judgments are stupidities.”

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Okay.  That's it.  I get nervous posting this much writing in one shot.  I feel a little out of control doing it.  But, please, tell me what you think.  :-)

Love.