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Our teetering economy is completely based on an ongoing imperial campaign to dominate resources around the globe. Our country’s primary contribution to the rest of the world is death. We export death, that we may import gadgets and trinkets and nonsense. So says Joe Rogan.
I don’t have any problem with making a choice to believe in God. That is your own business. However, if you’re a Pascal’s Wagerer who believes in God because it’s some sort of theological safety net, you are participating in some serious ontological laziness. It seems fitting then, that I’m about to provide you with an internet video that will simply and eloquently rend that safety net into bits. That’ll teach you to forgo thinking for yourself.
I’ve always felt the turning point in the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign was the moment when the sight of then-candidate Barack Obama after wrapping up the Democratic nomination was almost immediately contrasted with now-failed-candidate and angry man John McCain, in front of a sickening green background and performing to an audience which sounded more like a canned laugh track, giving a nasty, pitiful screed about the man who would trounce him in the election only a few months later. One man represented the best of what America would like to imagine itself as–intelligent, broad-minded, appealing to the better angels of our nature–and the other represented the impossibly tired bitterness of a rapidly disappearing part of our society. The choice, and thus result, was never more stark.
The following piece features the voices of Joe Rogan, Bill Hicks, and the Bizarro Reagans. In posting this, I do not wish to convey that drugs are necessary to transcending the narrowness of your daily perceptions. They can help, if used properly. The real point is that it is your responsibility as a human to remain curious, to absorb more of the world than your traditional senses can impart, to access deeper parts of yourself. And, for the love of everything, you need to start doing this now.
I’m not usually one for New Year’s resolutions. But, if I could offer one to you Meppers, by way of suggestion: spend the year tempering your use of facebook. Let’s face it, facebook is 98% nonsense and 2% usefulness. You could take up professional lawn bowling this year and have a much more productive life in the outside world.
Greg Gets a Mortgage (and Becomes an Adult), Russ Gets a Bear (and Becomes a Psychic), Storey Gets a Twin (and Becomes a Skeptic), Kobe Bryant and Jimmy Kimmel Destroy Society One Video Game at a Time, The Meppers Get Immersed, and Everything is Awesome In Sloooooowwww-Moooooo.
Listen Now!
Here’s some needed Monday fare. It’s an Alan Watts lecture snippet about nothingness. I’ve read a fair amount of Watts since college, and I find him to be the most effective philosopher at temporarily separating the reader from his or her daily routine, and allowing for some metaphysical reflection. Of course, just as nothingness exists in balance with existence, Alan Watts readings should exist in balance with more concrete studies, applicable to the real world. But, for a rainy, Christmas Angst-filled, consumerist Monday, a little Wattsian etherealism may be in order.
I’ve just discovered this young commentator who hilariously calls himself Hennessey Youngman. And I dig his work.
While our nutty country is forgetting its troubles with some good old capitalist ecstasy, let’s take a moment and remember some of the core ‘values’ that brought us to our current desperate station…
Presuming that you’re an American reading this, the odds are fairly strong that you heard this juicy tidbit in the internet/sports rumor mill today. The story is about a woman who is adored for her ability to play pretend, who filed for divorce from her husband, who is adored for his ability to throw a sphere into a standardized hoop.
Unless you are a facebook friend of mine, or happen to follow CERN’s twitter stream, you almost certainly weren’t appraised of this story today. That one told of the most complicated device ever constructed by your species, spawned something that, until fairly recently, was thought to be a purely theoretical type of stuff and sustained it for longer than it had ever been sustained.
I would love to say it was a good day for the human race. I’m not so sure.
