Fuck Catholics

Now in the news: backlash and protests, as Obama has agreed to speak at the mightiest of Catholic Institutions in America.

Thank God that Notre Dame has their storied football program, or they would be as much of a detriment to civilization as the rest of the Catholic system. Unfortunately, a couple of bible-thumping quarterbacks isn't enough if you still belong to the first anti-Christian sacreligious cult, the largest in the world, the one that didn't even wait for the Christian Church to establish before flat out discarding half the teachings that Jesus devoted (and sacrificed) his life to get out into the world.

Now the institution has invited the Baptist President of our country to speak at their commencement, as well as offer him an honorary J.D., and in exchange he will provide an intellectual debate over his controversial decision to allow federal funding for abortion and stem-cell research.

However, the student bodies of this alleged "house of higher learning" have come out strongly against education. Instead, they are pushing for the Catholic tradition set by the Apostle Luke and which reigned free in the 17th century, directly leading to the darkest time in our history and more deaths and suffering than Christianity as a whole has been able to prevent. That tradition is oppression of dissent and abolishment of thought. They have spoken, and spoken loudly, in their belief that anyone who doesn't blindly agree with their perscribed belief system, someone who considers matters of life, death, and soul to be a little complicated, even someone whose own belief system doesn't allow for the more rational position of pointing out that their own beliefs have long been disproved beyond any shadow of a doubt—someone who proposes even that minimal level of thought, as is dictated in Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Shintoism, Christianity, and every other philosphical system that isn't Catholicism or Islam, should be considered, is to be banned from their institution, and should not be allowed to speak to them.

The only thing Catholics have ever gotten right is that they're not going to Hell. As the world progresses forward without them, as the percentage of people who prefer reason over mythology creeps toward the majority, as the history books start to shift Dogmatic Christianity into the same category as all the other ridiculous religions of primitive humans, this superminority of our kind continue to serve as the single greatest obstacle to the survival of humankind. There are more of us who consider the Catholic Church a tragedy of history than they realize. And as their leaders become more aware of that fact, they press harder to hide their denizens from the collective thought of the rest of us, and in time, they will become so separated from the voices of reason that they will break off and shrivel away as another failed experiment in the forward progress of our kind. Homo Erectus, Habilis, Neanderthals, Catholics. Yet another addition to the list of people we'll look back at and wonder how humans could ever believe something which falls apart before their very eyes.

Believing what they want to believe.

To begin with, people have to get over this preposterous notion that anything that comes from the mouth of a child has to be true. On the contrary—children spend most of their lives playing pretend. They will lie if it will get them attention. They will experiment to see what the reaction is.

Then you have extreme examples, like the one above. This is a group of hundreds of people listening to the "gospel" of a very young child. As a trained linguist, the fact that this kid has no fucking clue what he's saying is blindly obvious for more reasons than I can list, but let's start with the obvious: his body language shows that he is flat-out imitating people he has seen before. Children do not have the psychological capacity to be as passionate as this kid is about his message. No knock against the kid, it's not his fault, he doesn't have a chance.

On top of that, what twisted fucking world has a mass of adults taking cues from a young child on where we came from? How in holy hell would he know? He hasn't even hit puberty yet. He doesn't even know where he came from. For all he knows, he was born from unicorns. When I was his age, I was open to the possibility that I did come from monkeys, as in my actual parents were monkeys, and those people in the living room were just looking after me. I wasn't detached from reality; I was a normal five year old. What difference did it make to me where I actually came from?

Whoever made this video made the statement that this was child abuse. I disagree. I think that kid's having the time of his life. I'm 29 years old, and I still fantasize about preaching to a huge group of people. As far as what the kid thinks, I'm not worried... yet. Kids can believe anything when they're young, that's why we have the saying "grew out of it." Human psyche is very malleable at that age, and any "damage" done can fairly easily be undone, so long as it is within the threshold of what a child's mind can handle.

I'm more worried about the adults who are watching him. Their minds aren't as malleable. They are, in fact, beyond hope. They have been irreparably indoctrinated into this ridiculous cult, and if they were convinced tomorrow that all of this were untrue, they wouldn't be able to adjust. Their bodies and souls would be forever breached by a grey void, and they would lose purpose for anything they do. That's how the cult is designed; once you join, you're detached from the enemy for life.

Don't feel sorry for this kid. Feel sorry for the adult he will become.

Losing My Edge

You know, I started this blog so that I'd have an outlet to say all the subversive, offensive shit that pops up in my head, shit that I can't say when my name's attached to it, so I can spew anonymous vile into the internet. Sadly, I don't appear to have been expelling my demons properly as of late, and there's plenty to expel.

Rather than taking out this rage right now, however, I leave you with this simple thought: if a Pro-life Hebrew has a vasectomy, doesn't he have to forgive Hitler? I mean, he's killing a hell of a lot more Jews (no pun intended) than Genocide ever did.

Spring Cleaning

I could clean out my desk in five minutes, and nobody would even know I was ever here. And I'd forget, too. —Ryan "the temp" Howard

A resolution was made, by me, recently, that I would grind down and really start getting things done at work. No more piles of things that "need to be done eventually" sitting in the recesses of my desk. Whereas I would spend much of my time sitting around trying to explain to my bosses why so-and-so wanted such-and-such completed, I'd just get it done. Instead of going back and forth with my colleagues asking why they won't file the contract amendment I put in their mailbox, I would stand in their cubicles and say "what do you need for this to get completed and I will get it for you.
In one case, a client had asked to do some work for us in a state where he wasn't authorized to work. In another case, a colleague of mine didn't understand what needed to be done so she didn't do it (that was November). In another case, I never really pursued the needs of a particular client because that client had never brought in any work for us. But this was the time that they got their needs addressed. I helped client 1 get authorized to do business. I restarted the case where my colleague was sitting on it and reasssigned it to someone else. I got client 3 rolling, and put him out on the road so he could do some work for us.
Suddenly, management was all over me. Why was work being done that came in four months ago? Why aren't there any records of client 2 being addressed? Why is a processor making decisions that authorize a case that management has been discussing for a week and hasn't come to any conclusions on? Suddenly, the boss is in my space telling me I'm a "problem employee," that when one of these things come up it's just an isolated event, but they're starting to see a pattern of me making things happen. "Making things happen," the crime of all crimes.
Then, my computer starts to break.
Now, I use a significant amount of technology that my collagues don't understand. IE5 takes five minutes to load, so I download Safari, which loads instantly. Outlook doesn't index emails, so I use Desktop Search, which is instantaneous. Instead of printing everything and keeping it on my desk where it can't be searched, indexed, or trigger reminders, I save everything as PDFs and attach them to tasks (they all have to be scanned back into the computer anyway). So my boss is fuming now, and starts demanding to know why I feel I have to load up my computer with all this extra stuff and make it break.
Here's what happened: Adobe Reader poses a security risk to our computers. This affects 95% of employees, as they use Adobe Reader. I don't; I use Adobe Acrobat. Well, when they put in a patch to block this security risk, it blocked Acrobat entirely. That confused Outlook 2003 since the patch was too new, which would send panic messages to Internet Explorer, but since IE5 was rendered obsolete 3 years ago, it can't pull the patch from Microsoft Help, because Microsoft no longer supports IE5. For everyone else's computer, the computer doesn't check to see if anything's wrong. But all of my new apps suddenly started asking "what the hell are all these old apps doing here?" and the whole thing crashes.
IT can't easily fix the computer, and here's why: it's a tier 5 problem. They have to exhaust all tier 1 possibilities before they troubleshoot tier 2. They have to exhaust all tier 2 possibilities before troubleshooting tier 3. And so on. Three days I sat at my desk, my computer on the fritz, getting all the work done that I can on the new, functional applications while the 6 year-old apps fall like dominoes.
Finally, today, the whole thing crashed. My boss sternly advises me that management is going to start discussing me; if their discussion moves as fast as their talks about all my clients, that won't affect me for months. But I needed some sort of catharsis. So, while IT sits at my computer, gradually escalating my issue, I started cleaning. First, it was organizing all the letters clients have sent me. Then, I started cleaning coffee mugs. Then I started shredding old documents from resolved issues. Then I started putting my paper clips in the supply cabinet. Then I started removing my desk accessories—pen holders, staplers—and at last I take down all the decorations, from posters and calendars to cheat sheets that I've since saved as excel spreadsheets on my computer, until all that's left is a pile of work to be done and my Dell.
At 3:00 PDT, my computer was finally fixed. I sat down and started closing out the existing issues. It's pretty slow these days, so I think I can have everything done on my desk by Monday. Then, the second an issue lands on my desk, I'll use the same panicked "have to get it off my desk" strategy that I used when I was behind. When my work is caught up, I'll finally get around to indexing the department's old excel spreadsheets into one easy-to-use database.
And I'll be happy. Not because my work is done, or because I'm moving forward, or because the boss is off my back. I'll be happy because of that clean desk. It's a psychological reminder that at any time, however hard things get, I could be gone in five minutes, and everyone would forget I was ever there. And I'll forget, too.

They said Obama would turn this country into a liberal haven.

They were right.

Over the weekend, on the heels of talk about nationalizing AIG and Obama's announcement that his top priority this year would be establishing a federal healthcare system, AG Holder indicated that the federal government would be decriminalizing marijuana, leaving enforcement purely to state decision, and Obama made strong statements today that the government would not only lift the ban on stem cell research, but vigorously support any new efforts to utilize the resource.


You heard 'em, America, it's free reign on morality, just like the cons warned us. We'll be stuffing zygotes in our bongs before you know it.