WHY CAN'T WE RETIRE FIRST?

Remember those bumper stickers that say people would have had grand children first if they'd known how much fun they were? Well, I feel about the same way about retirement.

Forgetting all the downsides of age and it's debilities, my life now is a lark compared to twenty or thirty years ago. Got up at 9:30 am and all I've done is make coffee for both of us and sit here at the computer. I can sound off online and not worry about a boss or, in my case, customer seeing it and getting mad enough to fire me. Anybody who gets mad can have the old one finger salute (you guess which finger)!

There are all kinds of things needing doing around here, and maybe I'll get to one or two. Then again, maybe not. Just depends on what "spirit" moves me.

I know those rethugs really hate what I'm writing. How dare I be one of those awful "takers." If I'm not like them, gambling with other people's money on stock options, etc. and making tons of money off wiping out companies and absconding with the pirated wealth, including workers pension funds and the underpaid labor of millions of serfs so I can vacation anywhere I like at any time, eat caviar and drink champagne to my bloated hearts content, etc., I should just crawl off somewhere and have the decency to die. How dare I think that since I worked my ass off all those years, I deserve a little leisure paid for by the money our taxes set aside for that very purpose, and which those same assholes appropriated to pay for things like their ill-conceived wars of power and aggression.

Now, I gotta go make myself a little breakfast for my "entitled" old ass to survive a few more days, weeks or years. If I were one of those wonderful "job creators" an underpaid household servant would have already done that for me.

That's my sarcasm for the morning!

TO LURKERS AND TROLLS

People of faith, believers -- whatever appelation you want to bestow on them -- are such a big pain in the ass!

I know, to my shame, I used to be one of the worst of them. In my defense, I was shanghaied by culture, accident of birth and the blatherings of one of the most egregious criminal con artists of the twentieth century. I was a stupid dupe!

In my defense, I did cast it off. I rose above it and did the hard work of proving it was all a tremendous, smelly crock of s++t. As an aside, I just listened to Lawrence Welk on PBS and had to mute the TV to not listen to his effeminant-sounding eminence (can't remember his name right now) sing "The Old Rugged Cross." Such a stupid song glorifying fictional human sacrifice! I can't stand it even though it was my deceived mother's favorite hymn.

Ghastly message!

Ghastly doctrine!

I mean, don't we condemn people like the Aztecs because they sacrificed human beings while we worship a god we believe did that very thing? To save us? The Aztecs had the same kind of motivation -- killing someone to obtain favor from their gods!

A couple of troll lurkers recently invaded the Unbeliever website (http://ironwolf.dangerousgames.com/exwcg/) to heckle and harass those of us who have progressed beyond the juvenile bumblings and mumblings of belief. I guess they fancy themselves some kind of theological experts. Mark Manning and I tried to cut through the inane nonsense and present the true picture.

What a fiasco that turned out to be. I pointed out the obvious idiocies of the Bible, like the seven day creation, the ridiculousness of a worldwide flood, that the Israelites were never enslaved in Egypt and there was no exodus. Plus a few other things. Put it on Facebook also.

What Mark and I got in return was the usual juvenile playground "nyanyah, nyanyah, nyanyah, nyanyah" approach. They demand we publish whole books of historical and archaelogical proofs of our statements while they take the usual bucktoothed ignorant backwoods approach that the bible says it and that's good enough for me.

We know by demonstrable scientific fact that the universe is nearly fourteen billion years old, that the earth has been around for somewhere in the neighborhood of four billion of those years, that modern man developed slowly for the last few hundred thousand years and Adam and Eve are fictional constructs with no basis in reality.

Archaeologists have scoured the Sinai looking for the evidence of all those millions of "Israelites" camping there for about forty years and they've found absolutely nothing! Plus, we have the historical proof that when they supposedly invaded Canaan, Canaan was a well defended part of the Egyptian Empire sporting several powerful Egyptian garrisons. Funny how no battles with those Egyptian troops are to be found anywhere in the concocted book of Joshua.

And that Noah's Ark crap! Even a modern naval task force would have had to make port long before a year went by just to get provisions, and I certainly don't see any account of supply ships being sent out from any part of that supposedly submerged planet! I have to conclude that I was partially retarded to ever believe that nonsense!

Don't anyone tell me I have to produce encyclopdias-worth of proof in a blog comment to back up my objections to your juvenile protestations. The proof is out there in literally dozens of internet sources and books. I've taken time to look into those things and they haven't.

The burden of proof for extraordinary claims lies with the claimer. I'm not going to waste anymore time on naysayers who want to invade one of my favorite websites with their imbecilic nonsense.

IT'S MADDENING

I'm sure there are some people out there who wish old Al would just shut the hell up.

Sorry, aint gonna happen.

The longer I live, the more I observe, the more of an ass kicking mood I have to deal with. Can't help it. I just care too much.

i can't stand knowing something is a lie without doing something to combat it. I hate injustice, and don't give me any self-righteous diatribes about how awful it is to say you hate something. There is a time to hate, just as there is a time to love, and I'm not going to just look the other way and live in la la land.

This world, most especially this nation which should be leading and setting an example to the rest of the world is frankly all fucked up!
For three decades now, we've been retrogressing into a shadow of what we once were. Disaster lies ahead if something doesn't change! Hell, it's already here!

Now we have a Supreme Court so loaded with right wing extremists that all semblance of sanity is disappearing from even that august body.
The House of Representatives has been a lost cause for some time now.

Nothing that needs doing has a chance of being done under present conditions.

It's very maddeningly discouraging.

SICK OF THE SLANT!

Fill people's heads with cliches and appeal to their prejudices and hatreds and you have them by the balls and can squeeze as often and as hard as it pleases your malevolence. It sure helps to expand out of all reason the real threat of any opposing group. That worked with the soviet union and it's working now with the muslim threat. Shades of Orwell's 1984!

Nobody worried about an exponentialy growing national debt while the rethugs were in power and feeding themselves and their cohorts billions in manufactured money. Just let the opposition win a few elections and, WOW! All of a sudden, we're on the edge of apocalypse. The twin towers horror is pushed into the background and a little blip like Benghazi gets blown all out of proprotion as one of the nation's greatest disasters.

What gets me is, people eat it up and regurgitate the putrid crap.

I guess that's enough said this morning. I have useful things to do and this isn't all that good for my blood pressure, except that getting it said helps a bit.

MY GIFT

I do have one gift I'm very thankful for. It came to me through the magic of genetics from ancestors who had the same gift and was developed through education and job experience over many years.

I'm referring to the ability to take thoughts one could be very wordy about and condense them down into succinct, hard-hitting statements. It came to the fore when our freethought group was seeking a concise name. I came up with Sedona Verde Valley Secular Freethinkers, and it was adopted. When we needed a concise statement of what we were to give to another organization, they turned to me and I gave them a short and sweet summary that fit into the word limit perfectly.

I appreciate that gift. I often sit in the background, absorbing what is being said and discussed and give a short summary of my own that encompasses the gist of it all. I don't think I'm being vain to recognize what I can do and do do. It makes me a blogger, which is really an unpaid syndicated author. To say it's fulfilling to me would be a gross understatment. It's one of my greatest joys and fulfillments.

I hope that gift lives on in my descendants and that they will utilize it to the full before their lives come to that inevitable end.

Keep writing, Nancy. You do it so well. Cultivate it and practice. Get in the habit of doing it, in a journal or whatever appeals to you. Facebook your heart out.

Jaime, Eugene, the talent must be there somewhere in the background. The longer you live, the more you will have to say, and if you try, you'll be able to say it.

I know Michael has the urge even though he has chosen to cut himself off from all of us. Hopefully, that situation will end and he will have something to say in what remains of his life.

I hope my grandchildren will do the same. None of us will necessarily change the world all that much, but it is so fulfilling that I can only hope you will carry on in your own ways as much as you possibly can.

MY STAND

(From Facebook.)

I just posted a comment on the Non Believer site and I have to post it here:

"Maybe I’m being foolish to kick this “hornet’s nest,” but I just have to counter the idea that we who are now atheists suddenly had some “hissy fit” and just threw away faith overnight. Nothing could be farther from the truth in my case.

It’s been a long slow process of study and reflection that, in my case, led me through things like divine science, new age, reincarnation and other eastern philosophies, agnosticism and finally full blown atheism. I had to realize and accept a great number of things in that almost forty-year journey.

First of all, I had to come to realize that the Bible itself is a fictional concoction of myth, fable and outright superstitious and baseless lies.

There was never a seven-day creation or worldwide flood. No israelites were enslaved in Egypt and the exodus never happened. Most of the Bible history found in Kings and Chronicles was manufactured out of whole cloth after the Babylonian captivity by some very chauvinistic and inventive scribes and priests with an agenda. In short, the entire Old Testament is very junior grade historical fiction.

The New Testament is no better. It was contrived at the behest of Roman emperors who were sick and tired of all the conflicting claims of innumerable savior cults and by force of military power made them come up with an almalgamated concoction they could impose on the empire through edict. It slams all the miraculous nonsense from Horus to Mithra and dozens of others into one concise and often contradictory tale and the hodgepodge of a bunch of guys to whom the name “Paul” was appended. And, Revelation, that bad dream abortion by some zealot really got things all screwed up and is the source of endless theological nonsense.

I believe today in whatever the “singularity” that gave rise to the universe or multiverses was. If it can’t be established through carefully regulated study and investigation, I’m going to take it with a very large grain of salt. No bronze age camel jockey with mental problems is going to be my source of truth."

MORE ON FEAR

Just gotta say more about fear. It's such an insidious thing and the media plays us like violins with sensationalism meant to engender fear so we'll keep on listening and being paranoid.

I'm referring to this fear about vacinations as my prime example. Yeah, once in a blue moon someone will have an alergic reaction, or more likely, they'll come down with some ornery virus right after they get a flu shot and conclude it was the shot that made them sick. It would never occur to them to have their conclusion medically evaluated. They have to be right because they're oh so wise -- not one of those "egicated fools" they feel they are so superior to because they aint dumb enough to believe that evulushon shit, etc.

It's the same mindset that kept me enslaved to armstrongism for over twenty long years. He constantly called us dumb sheep but assured us we were the elect of god because we were smart enough to believe the crap he poured in our heads constantly. Go figure how dumb we were to keep letting him get away with it for so long -- absolutely convinced we'd "proved it" because we were such good bible readers and proof texters who would have been laughed out of any competent theological seminary.

We not only get our flu shots every year, but about four years ago, we both spent $40 to get shingles shots. My mother suffered through that malady and neither of us want anything to do with it. Nothing to it. My arm itched for a few days from the workings of the sublimated virus, but that was what built up the new immunity. Oh, and we've had pneumonia immunization too. I know I'm going to check out sometime in the future, but hopefully not from pneumonia.

So, be paranoid if you must, but do everyone a favor and quit spreading this unscientific bullshit that gets people tied up in fearful knots to their own danger and peril. Before you blast me with your nonsense, I want to see the detailed conclusions of your carefully controlled, peer reviewed scientific studies.

Anecdotes don't cut it!