While reading the “20 New Worst Foods in America” a number of things popped out at me.

1)    The Blimpie Special Vegetarian (12”) found to be the worst vegetarian sandwich, has the same amount of sodium as 2 1/2 bags of Fritos, more than a plate of fried chicken.

2)    T.G.I. Friday’s BBQ Chicken Wrap, the worst wrap, has more calories than three Big Macs (1,720).

3)    On the Border Dos XX Fish Tacos, has more calories than 10 Taco Bell crunchy tacos and a gordita supreme (2,240).

4)    IHOP’s Top Sirloin Steak Dinner has more than 6 Milky Ways’ worth of saturated fat, and more sodium than 5 cans of Pringles, without even including the actual steak.

5)    Cheesecake Factory’s Grilled Shrimp and Bacon Club, the worst sandwich, has the same amount of calories as 7 Wendy’s Junior Cheeseburgers.

There were a lot more, you could probably guess 15, and I highly recommend

7?

reading it for yourself, or you could just take my word for it.  The funniest/saddest thing for me is that this list makes fast food seem like a diet option, 7 cheeseburgers?  3 Big Macs?  I never eat that much when I go to eat fast food, but I definitely finish my meal when I get an entree at a restaurant.  This makes it seem as if fast food’s been getting all the bad press while restaurants have been let off easy, only Wendy’s had something on the list (Wendy’s Triple Baconator) which I’ve never even heard of let alone seen anyone actually ordering it.

I actually kind of want one now.

Essentially, people place moral judgments based off of characteristics that have nothing to do with moral character.  When the Immokalee workers were protesting about how companies were not paying tomato pickers, pretty much treating them like slaves, they had more trouble getting Chipotle to reform than they did with Taco Bell.  Why?  Because, it was easy for people to believe that a fast food restaurant like Taco Bell would resort to cutthroat cost cutting measures, but not the clean stylish Chipotle; forgetting that it’s owned by McDonalds.  Another company they had trouble with?  Whole Foods, a grocery selling high priced organic produce.  A company doesn’t sell organic, fresh, naturally grown produce because they value health and environmentalism, they do so because they know certain consumers value those things.  Chipotle, Whole Foods, Fresh Market, etc don’t offer higher quality goods because they are more ethical, just good at marketing.

Subway’s 9-grain wheat bread?  Not much different from the others, each loaf “contains 2% or less” of each grain they claim to have, other than wheat.  The primary ingredient is white flour, and there is more high-fructose corn syrup than there are whole grains.  Even the color of the bread is artificial, coming from ammonium sulfate and caramel coloring.  Essentially, Subway used a clever marketing ploy and a wholesome image to convince consumers they were selling a healthy meal.

The Coke Company has ordered the deaths of countless workers in their bottling factories in South America, and used physical threats and intimidation to curb any attempts at unionization.  All this while the World of Coca Cola is still one of the frequent answers when someone asks where they should go if they visit Atlanta.

It's so pretty...

I don’t think its necessarily apathy, people are easily riled up about natural disasters and the evils of politicians, I just think that people make value judgments from face value, and are unwilling to change their views.  Coke has some of the most memorable commercials spanning decades, and is synonymous with American culture and globalization.

But I don’t care about Coke, what I do care about is the reliance on superficial expressions in determining deep-set beliefs and characteristics.  Where I see that the most is when it comes to the Holy Spirit.  The thing I ask myself whenever I see someone “speaking in tongues” is what are the chances that they would ever do a thing like that when praying in private?  Am I saying that those who do, or have very intense spiritual experiences are being insincere?  No, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they were being influenced more by the people they were around, probably more unconsciously than not, but still influenced nonetheless.  Another form would be in the creation of an image with the intention of projecting one’s faith.  Can’t get into any schools?  I’m sure Jesus meant for me to go to this Bible College, it is the will of God.  Getting horrible grades?  God must want me to be a youth pastor, since He’s telling me not to pursue academics and I’m so good with kids.  Youth or College group not going well?  God must want me to go to another church, better yet that’s what I’ll tell the congregation, might as well leave with a lesson on God directing one’s path.  Is it wrong to go to Bible College?  No.  Is it wrong to be a pastor?  No.  Is it wrong to leave a church for another when the time is right?  No.  But it is wrong to use God in order to cover up mediocrity and to deceive oneself and others.

Originally for the most part Protestant America didn’t consider demons and spirits to be legitimate entities.  One of my professors pinpointed the exact year that Protestant congregations made spirits and demons a part of their theology again.  The year was 1971, the same year that The Exorcist was published.  He believed that it was due to the popularity of The Exorcist that Protestants actually wanted to believe in spirits and demons.  Actually I dropped his class because that book was required reading, and I didn’t think I could handle it, but whether he’s right or not the emergence of spirits and demons is a recent phenomena that has come to be widely accepted within contemporary beliefs.  In my opinion Satan, the Devil, demons, etc are just another example of people wanting to shift responsibility away from the self.  My professor calls it “agency,” who is making the actual choice and who holds responsibility?  Eve or the serpent?  Mankind or Satan?  Myself or the steak for being so juicy?  Obviously it’s the steak’s fault for tempting me in the first place.

Sorry for the poor quality, I had to scan this.

Basically my point is that people look at the sleek and exciting surfaces while ignoring the boring, dirty, liar underneath.  I feel as if there are two main groups of people in church communities.  Idealists who look for the good in people, and skeptics who look for the bad.  I am definitely a skeptic, an extreme one at that.  I look for the bad in people sometimes at the sake of denying the good, but the other end looks only at the good while ignoring the bad altogether.  Both have their pros and cons but in this situation I consider a false negative to be better than a false positive.  I would even argue that it is better to be a skeptic for if all people are good than really no one is.

Am I biased?  Definitely.  Am I being heavy handed?  Yeah.  Am I being level-headed?  Don’t want to be.  Am I justified in making these accusations? Probably not.  What I do know is that there seems to be a much larger number of extreme conservatives than there are liberals, probably because I live in the Deep South, so I’m just balancing it out a little bit.

According to spell-check gordita isn’t even a word, and Holy Spirit is supposed to be capitalized.  Which seems pretty prejudice to me, as if the only spirit that can be holy is the Christian one, also I say “my professor” a lot but I’m not referring to the same one every time, just wanted to clarify.

So I was in Barnes and Nobles near Gwinnett Mall trying to get some work done, obviously that didn’t work out too well.  I started wandering around when I noticed something interesting about the layout of the store’s layout.  There are currently: 4 shelves marked “Bibles,” 2 shelves marked “Christianity,” 6 “Christian Inspiration,” 1 “Christian Gift Books and Devotionals,” and 1 “Inspirational Gifts.”  “Christian Inspiration” equaled both “Bibles” and “Christianity” combined, which to me says something about the confidence society has in people making up their own opinions.  For the most part “Christian Inspiration” is made up of the works of Joel Osteen, TD Jakes and other famous pastors, with a few random celebrities thrown in for good measure.

Joel Osteen and his pearly whites

They also had 2 shelves marked “Religious Fiction,” I just skimmed the titles, but I was wondering what Barnes and Noble’s criteria was when deteriming the differences between normal and “religious” fiction.  I would guess that a huge majority of fictional works deal with the concept of religion in one form or another, the only difference I felt with the books in those shelves were that they seemed to use religion, more specifically Christianity, in order to sell books in a shelf marked “Religious Fiction.”  Either that or Christians are careful to point out to their children what types of fiction they should be reading, namely those that are intentionally written to reinforce beliefs rather than have them possibly think any other way.  I’m probably being a little too heavy-handed or conspiracy theorist on that point, but the simple differentiation between Christian fiction and other types of fiction gets to me.  So I got two things from those shelves: one, Christians consider other Christians reading the Bible to be problematic unless they provide their own commentary; and two Christianity is the only religion out there worth reading about since the one shelf marked “Religion” had books that should’ve been in previously mentioned shelves or were books with Western writers that conceptualized religion through an approach similar to anthropological studies.  If I were an alien that just landed in a Barnes and Nobles, and had to send a report to my superiors defining the dominant world religions, I would probably have to devote most of my time to Joel Olsteen rather than to trivial matters such as say the Bible or Jesus.  Apparently humans can’t agree on what version of the Bible to read, but they can agree on who they want to interpret it for them.

There were about three shelves marked “Spirituality,” and “New Age,” but those were jokes.  They had more to do with Tarot Cards and Horoscopes than anything else.  Unless you went to “World History” (2), European History (1), “Cultural Studies” (1), or “Social Sciences” (1) you would be hard put to find anything mentioning a religion other than Christianity.  In a way though, I didn’t care that much about the lack of diversity in the books they offer, technically we are in the Bible Belt, and the inventory probably reflects the community more than the store.  I was more concerned with the image that they projected.  Christianity, according to Barnes and Nobles, has more to do with what greased up, wealthy celebrities with perfect smiles consider important above all else.  It reduces Christianity to a poorly written sitcom or a teddy bear; although I rag on it all the time I think it deserves better than that.

...

About the time when I was about to punch Joel Osteen in the face I went to the “Current Affairs” section (2 shelves) to stare at Glen Beck’s and get my daily dose of rage.  The book with the most prominent position was Glenn Beck’s An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World’s Biggest Problems, which came out November of 2007.  He also had about four others that pretty much dominated the shelf:

1)    America’s March to Socialism: Why we’re one step closer to giant missile parades (May 2009)

2)    Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine  (June 2009)

3)    Arguing with Idiots: How to Stop Small Minds and Big Government  (September 2009)

4)    Idiots Unplugged  (February 2010)

Now two of those are audio books (Idiots Unplugged and America’s March to Socialism), but still that’s an insane output of 5 books in the span of 3 years, with the last four coming out in a year’s time.  One of my professors when asked told us that it took him over 6 years to complete his doctoral thesis, and that it takes an average of 5 years to write and publish a book.  So I was staring at this insane output and set out to find out how he could squeeze about 20 years of work into one.

So the average person types at a speed of 50 words per minute, and given that Beck must be above average given that millions of people listen to what he has to say everyday, we can mark him up to a safe 75.  Now assuming that there are 500 – 700 words per page, we’ll just take the average of 600.  That comes out to 8 minutes per page.  Now the Inconvenient Book ended up at 320 pages, requiring 1.77 days; Common Sense only 174 so that’s 0.966 days, Arguing with Idiots 1.8.  I guess with that sort of speed you can come out with 4 books in less than a year.  So if I get moving I should be out with my first book by the end of the week.  You see what I did though?  This is pretty much what I consider to be Beck’s defining strategy; the math is right, there is no way you can refute that it takes 1.77 days to write 320 pages with a typing speed of 75 WPM, but the conclusion is derived from made up numbers.  I don’t actually know the average typing speed of the population, or how many words per page there are, and this assumes that he is typing non-stop without fail, which leads to why he’s so fast, he never cites his sources (at least in Arguing with Idiots he doesn’t).  The thing that scares me most about Glenn Beck is that he’s a smart man; he does all of his math right.  He balances humility and confidence in a way that is very appealing to conservatives, but the thing is he never says where he’s getting his numbers from.  I would agree with him that the country needs to expel illegal workers given the hundreds of thousands of stolen jobs, and an estimated increase of only $8 spent on produce a year.  But where in the hell did the $8 or the hundreds of thousands come from?  I could make a convincing argument for anything if I was allowed to make up the evidence supporting it.  That’s why 85% of high school science fair projects are made up, at least mine were.

Beck along with the number of other faces up on the shelves:  Dick Morris’ “2010 Take Back America,” Hannity’s “Conservative Victory,” Gingrich’s “Real Change,” and a number of others take some pretty serious shots at Obama.  It’s funny that Gingrich mentions change when the last time I heard his name on TV was from SNL, when I was still in elementary school.  However, the thing that baffled me the most was that the dude’s been in office less than two years how is there so much stuff out there already?  Now I might be idealistic but I feel as if books are supposed to be more credible than say newspaper articles when it comes to forming opinions, but apparently if they’re coming out at practically the same speed you can’t expect much more.

Side note:  I was taking pictures of the books with my phone because I was too lazy to write them down when some guy next to me, reaching for one of the books I was taking a picture of said: “I guess great minds like the same great books.”  I didn’t know what to say, so I just nodded numbly and smiled like I always do.

My favorite teacher in High School was the one who first taught us to stop thinking of textbooks as a factual account of the world, textbooks like all others are written by people with specific agendas and perspectives.  I think Dave Chappelle said it best:

I’m not saying Beck is a celebrity for the same reasons as Ja Rule, and I’m sure he worked hard to get where he is; but at the same time why are millions of Americans looking to a radio broadcaster for answers to the country’s problems? Beck can say whatever he wants, he has no stake in whether the economy bottoms up or not, he’s pretty safe at this point.

instead of milk and honey it should be gold and oil

For those of you who still have not experienced the greatness that is South Park indulge me.  I would say 95% of what I know in life has come from South Park, the remaining 5% I guess I would have to say everything else, but really that too is probably from South Park as well.  Those guys are geniuses, I guess attributing my knowledge of current affairs and politics to the Daily Show and South Park makes me a stereotypical liberal yuppie college student but Stan, Kyle, and Cartman seem much more grounded in common sense than Beck.

http://www.southparkstudios.com/episodes/251890

I couldn’t embed it…

I understand that I make very broad statements from a limited amount of information, but I’m not making millions and stirring up fear and hatred in the process, so hopefully that gives me more credibility than Beck.

In my Jewish Studies class “Suffering, Healing and Redemption,” we were talking about Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower, the story of a Nazi soldier who had shot and killed a young child trying to jump out of a building set on fire by the Nazis.  On his deathbed in an infirmary he calls for Simon Wiesenthal as “a Jew” in order to ask for his forgiveness.  The story ends without Wiesenthal’s answer intentionally so that the question will remain open ended for the reader’s response.

This in itself was not that interesting to me, this story is pretty popular and the glorification of forgiveness is pretty common nowadays.  There are many stories about prisoners forgiving their guards that people seem to love, however my Professor’s response surprised me.  Now before, I go on I want to stress that this professor is one of the best I have ever had, and this class is probably my all time favorite.  He is able to lecture for three hours straight to a class without a single student falling asleep or pulling out a laptop, which is pretty huge.  He is also the most human in a way that I have never encountered before, not in that he is nice and compassionate, but in a way that I hope will be made clear later.

My professor was saying that he himself would forgive the Nazi soldier, right before sending him before a firing squad.  This statement ripped me from my preconceived understanding of forgiveness, and the rest of the lecture served to redefine the infatuation of society towards forgiveness.  I was uncomfortable with the idea of someone going to his death without being forgiven, especially when he was asking for it.  We as people hate to think of having complete responsibility for our actions and decisions.  Although this goes totally against my beliefs concerning nature vs. nurture, liberalism, and systematic oppression, it became more and more attractive to me.  We do have a death penalty, which I despise, and a penal system; however what I’m talking about more is mainstream’s society’s obsession with being forgiven.  Within Christianity “ask and you shall be forgiven” is very prevalent to my knowledge, and the whole concept of Jesus is one intensely concerned with forgiveness.  But why do we ask God for forgiveness when the person we hurt is still around?  Within Judaism you are not allowed to forgive someone for something that was not done to you.  That’s why for a lot of Jewish people the response to Wiesenthal’s story was a simple one.  He didn’t kill me so what right do I have to forgive him?  That should be up to the child who was murdered, not me.  Christians on the other hand are totally comfortable with forgiveness as an abstract entity that can come from anywhere.  It seems as if Christianity is the easiest religion out there, if I steal something from a store all I have to do is ask God for forgiveness and go on my way.  The intense emphasis upon faith and inner beliefs has largely ignored what many other world religions consider to be of primary importance, the body.

Within the West its “I think therefore I am,” in the East its “I do therefore I become.”  For me its when I’m asking for forgiveness for shoplifting and then going on with a clear conscience while the storekeeper is standing behind me with a perplexed look on his face.  We’re always looking upwards for redemption and forgiveness, when we should be looking around us.  We throw words around without thinking of what it actually implies or reveals about our faiths, whatever they may be; while theoretically the beliefs should manifest within the body.

The most important test for a worldview explaining suffering, according to my professor, is its ability to incorporate the vast diversity of human experience.  I believe that this test can and should apply to all facets of any faith, philosophy, or creed; that’s why I put so much importance within the theoretical, because if its possible than it must be taken into account.  When we say, “we can do all things through God who strengthens us,” does that mean when we fail that God is no longer with us?  The question of suffering has been an uncomfortable one for many mainstream religions, because the explanations are hugely ineffective in the face of the craziness of our world.  For me it took a ten year old kid, I love Modern Family, to debunk “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger;” a Holocaust to destroy “divine punishment,” genocide in Rwanda to dismantle “tough love.”  In essence every explanation for the existence of suffering only works within the narrow confines of the community that believes in it.  God is only fair, when you’re the one with all the resources.  God is only loving and compassionate when you’ve grown up in a stable family.  God only expresses faithfulness and steadfastness when you haven’t experienced complete failure.  For every description of God you can find someone who when told of such a divine creator would ask, “where has he been all my life?”  I’ve heard the story of the tapestry a number of times: how from the back a tapestry is a jumble of knots and colors, and only the divine creator in the front can see the image it creates, and it would be abnormally arrogant of me to claim wisdom equal to God’s, but honestly that doesn’t fly any more for me.

The story of the Holocaust was of inconceivable evil and suffering that could not be understood by those in it’s midst, and requires a legitimate response.  Now I definitely have not suffered, or experienced any of these things, nor do I really believe that all of these attributes are truly incompatible within an understanding of God; what I am saying is that there is a huge disconnect between belief and experience that results in a superficial immature faith.  I am also not attacking Christianity over any other; it is simply easier to do since that’s the context from which I am coming from.

I get the sense of true humanness [didn’t know that was a word until spell-check told me I could use it] [I also just found out that spellcheck is not a word, it’s spell-check] from my professor in that in everything he teaches is with an intensely open mind towards the variety of human experience.

I forgot who said this, but your pain becomes suffering when someone else comes along and tries to define your pain for you.  I am the only one who can truly understand what it is I am going through, which goes just as much for others.  For me organized religion is the business of defining other people’s experiences for them.  “You don’t understand your own life, so I will explain it for you.”  I could go on for hours, but I have 10 minutes left in class.  My professor ended the lecture by saying “the soldier may have been going through extenuating circumstances, but we all go through extenuating circumstances; is it wrong to expect people to rise above them?”  [I think I’m butchering his words but that’s the gist of what he said]  Throughout Germany, Poland and Austria the police were charged with rounding up Jews throughout the community, taking them out, forcing them to dig their own graves, and then shooting them in the head.  Now these were normal everyday people, not members of the SS trained to be hardened soldiers.  They had to get drunk everyday before going out to do their work, because they couldn’t handle their heavy consciences.   But at the same time there was not a single case of any individual who refused to do what they were assigned, of which there were a good number, being prosecuted or punished for their decisions.  The world in which I live cannot handle the thought of that soldier going to his death knowing he was not forgiven.  Death bed conversions are totally legitimate in my book probably because I know there’s a possibility that I might try one of my own someday “just in case.”

This has been the longest one yet, but I have to add my disclaimer:  I know I say Christians say this and that, and Jews (Sorry if that’s offensive but it sounds better than saying Jewish people) believe this, but I don’t mean to generalize for all Christians and Jews, it just makes for faster writing.  And what I’m talking about aren’t really hard and fast rules of my life, just something that interested me; I’m not actually that mad or worried about the state of the world I just waste a lot of time at my computer.  My anger/frustration is more a product of my own laziness and unwillingness to work than it is reflection and analysis.

So to continue my tradition of procrastinating I want to talk about the “Snowmaggeddon” a couple of weeks ago, and what was the response of a number of news anchors from Fox and a couple of other networks.  Basically, a few anchors, which I will use to make a blanket statement just out of convenience, while reporting on the weather conditions of Washington, DC were implying pretty explicitly that Global Warming has been debunked.  They were joking about how Al Gore will probably be afraid to come out again, or all the scientists didn’t know what they were talking about.  I think John Stuart and Steven Colbert do a good job of saying that is the stupidest piece of shit that I have ever heard.  Pardon my language, I almost put !@#% but than decided that if I think censorship is wrong, it would be hypocritical to censor myself.  The conclusion of networks like Fox, are based on the same misguided trust people place into the world around them.  Their perception of reality is limited to their immediate surroundings.  But I want to throw some numbers from the rest of the world out there.  I had to read the UN Human Development Report on climate change two summers ago to make a report for the organization I was interning for (Jubilee USA), and the numbers I found were pretty surprising.

This chart is from the 2007/2008 UN Human Development Report on climate change (page 75 if you want to check if I’m making this up).  So in the past 25 years the world has gone from close to 40 million people to a little over 250 million people affected every year by natural disasters.  When I read this I figured that maybe the natural growth of the global population would explain some of the increase, but I checked that too.  So from the 2004 UN statistics in 1980 the global population was around 4.5 billion and in 2000 it rose to 6, now it’s around 6.5.  So in the 80s about 1.8% of the world’s population was affected by a natural disaster, in 2000 it was about 4.3%.  That’s more than a 100% increase in 20 years.  I know these percentages seem small, but 4.3% of 6 billion represents millions of lives, and the vast majority of those lives are within developing countries.  Essentially, we don’t see the effects of climate change, because we control the climate around us.  If it gets colder we turn the heat up, if it gets warmer we turn it down.  We have infrastructure, we have the snow plows (maybe not used as effectively in DC), we have the dams and levees (sorry New Orleans you just lucked out), we have running water whenever we want it.

My point is it’s all in who you ask.  Climate change for a middle-class American is having to adjust the thermostat.  Climate change for a Nigerian farmer is a dried up riverbed, for an Indonesian fisherman it’s a monsoon so large that the effects are still seen today (it was only 5 years ago).  So to hear these dumbass news anchors making statements that millions around the US actually listen to concerning a topic they know nothing about pisses me off.  Read the report, its only 198 pages with a whole bunch of charts and pictures, and is not as boring as you would expect.  People criticize the UN all of the time without actually knowing anything about the UN, but that’s for another day.  Yo Fox 15 minutes and a calculator, that’s all it took.

Another thing I researched that summer was Haiti.  I’ll talk about that later too, because my class is ending in ten minutes, but pretty much before the earthquake Haiti was the poorest country in the Western hemisphere.  People were making cakes out of mud and eating it just to have something in their stomachs.  It’s ironic that it takes an earthquake of that magnitude to get the world’s attention, especially when it’s the Western world’s (especially the US) fault that Haiti was so impoverished in the first place.  Because of international financial institutions headed by the US, Haiti went from a self sufficient nation in terms of rice production, to the extent that they were exporting a surplus, to being completely dependent upon US imports of food within a matter of decades, but that’s for another day.

I realized that I said “but that’s for another day” twice I think, which is probably the reason why my topics are weeks or months behind.

So my last depressing note of the day, my sister sent me this link, which is a documentary about Liberia.  It’s pretty disturbing but I guess that’s why you should watch it.  Another “Hell on Earth” brought about by the United States.

God Bless US.

Anybody not heard about the Jersey Shore?  I hated this show when I heard about it, I figured it was just another piece of MTV trash that taps into some superficial characteristic of pop culture and squeezes out as much money as it possibly can while yet again bastardizing and dumbing down the mainstream United States.  But I have to admit that when the first episode was over I started watching the next one without even realizing what I was doing.  Jersey Shore involves intensely one-dimensional characters, and I’m not saying that as an attack against the cast itself.  I understand the practice of reality TV shows of manufacturing identities and constantly reinforce such identities for its entire cast.  Therefore, although I definitely would agree that the cast doesn’t consist of the most brilliant individuals in the world, I don’t want to seem like I’m bashing them too much, it seems they’re getting enough of that already.  So why is it so addicting watching a group of tanned, juiced up, greased up people get drunk, fight and hookup other than for the obvious just mentioned reasons of course.

For me Jersey Shore is a breath of fresh air from life.  We live in a shady confusing world where every single human interaction brings layers upon layers of underlying tension, ulterior motives, communicative disconnect.  The person who smiles and laughs the most, probably cries the most at night.  Card often writes of how you can never truly know another person and why they do what they do.  You can conjecture, but it ultimately falls short, since most people don’t even know themselves enough to determine motive and intention.  My Buddhism professor once told us about acrasia, which is when someone behaves directly against their own judgment.  In an extreme case it is when someone looks at a line of cocaine and says this will ruin my life, and than lowering their head.  It represents a disconnect between the part of the brain that contains the intellect and the part that determines behavior.  It’s the difference between knowing and understanding.  I know that if I turned the computer off and just read all of my work I’ll probably get all A’s, but while I’m telling this to myself my fingers are typing in y-o-u-t-u-b-e without even realizing it.  It’s why even though I know there are no such things as ghosts, monsters or demons I can’t sleep without my back to the wall because I feel something rising up behind me.  Even though I know I’m the only one in my room I still run to the bed right after turning off the light.  We live in a world of masks and lies.  Whether it be person to person or to oneself.

Not so with the Jersey Shore.  While everyone else has hundreds of dimensions to them, the manufactured characters have only one.  Everyone knows what the Situation’s looking for when his head starts turning on a swivel.  I assume that at one point every person has wished that they could read another person’s mind.  When you watch the Jersey Shore you can do that.  They are so simple that every action or decision becomes reinforcement for the audience’s preconceived determination of their identity.  So when Sam gets mad at Ronnie for something idiotic, like a toe, it becomes reinforcement rather than annoyance.  It reaches a point where I no longer believe that they are lying to me, as so much of the rest of TV is, but rather they are simply lying to themselves.  People love having their opinions reinforces.  Instead of Snookie’s little whine annoying the crap out of me, it becomes endearing, when Mike makes an ass of himself it enthralls me, when Ronnie gets riled up, it riles me up too.  Jersey Shore exists as the antithesis to the Heroes, the Grey’s Anatomies, the Losts of our TV generation that capitalizes on the complexity of its characters in a very cerebral way.

On another level, the Jersey Shore is the manifestation of all of our desires that we understand are immature and superficial, but we still hold inside.  I’m not that different from them: I use the strongest gel I’m willing to pay for (level 10), freshmen year of college when I was working out and running every day I wore the smallest shirts I could find.  Actually let me rephrase that, I am very different from them, but not as much as I would like to believe.

Ultimately, you won’t learn any universal truths or profound philosophies of life by watching the Jersey Shore.  You can however, allow yourself to enjoy yourself a bit and let go for a little while of all the crap that comes with living as a part of society.

So about a year ago there was a minor upheaval about a biologist telling conservationists to give up on attempting to save the pandas.  Pretty much his argument was that the immense difficulty and expense within the conservation efforts are futile and would be better spend on other species.  The anger that arose revolved largely around pandas being so “cute” and “lovable,” that they have a cultural and humanistic impact on our world, more so than for example insects, rodents, etc.  He was being pragmatic, by criticizing public sentiments for placing value based upon abstract concepts rather than their importance to an ecosystem.

For me, I was wondering what the point of conservation was at all.  There are many cases where the abuse by human populations has clear effects on the ecosystem and could lead to massive problems.  Things like overhunting/fishing, deforestation, mining, drilling for oil, etc.  Those are clearly human problems that need to be stopped in order to preserve our resources, but that’s more for our benefit than for the sake of the animals in and of themselves.  I wonder whether we should be going any further.  Species have been faced with extinction for the entirety of their short-lived existence.  Even before humans were around species became extinct with regularity, and people forget that unless something changes we will as well.  There comes a point where natural selection has to come into play to ensure the strength of the Earthlings of the future.  If pandas aren’t able to compete and are bound for extinction than we would be remiss to devote critical resources to prevent it.  The priority of the human race should be the welfare of the human race; every dollar spent by organizations such as PETA could be better spent in Haiti.

Why am I saying this, when it seems ultraconservative when I’m clearly not?  Watch Home the depressing brother to Planet Earth.  The world is changing in ways that we don’t even realize.  Natural landmarks won’t exist with mountains getting shorter every year and seas drying up.  The world’s history has been marked by the rise and fall of its mountains.  When Everest becomes a hill there’ll be another Everest somewhere else, the world is constantly changing.  I guess we don’t need to learn how to embrace change since realistically we won’t see much of them for a few decades in some extreme cases, and this is a language of centuries rather than years, but maybe we need to learn to let go of the inherency of the Earth.  I’m not saying we can pollute all we want and completely disregard our impact on the ecosystem, but whether we like it or not the world is in constant motion, and maybe its time we let the pandas rest in our memories rather than in a pen forced to mate.  Brad Pitt said that the God’s envy our mortality, that our flashes of existence are ultimately more beautiful in its brevity.  Unless the Buggers attack and we acquire their advanced technology and harness the speed of light we’re not going to last forever.  We don’t have an ansible, we have reality, and I’ll admit that saddens me more than pandas do.  Space travel would be sweet.

Anyways, today I want to write about two laws that I don’t think should exist, sort of.

So about a year ago I was getting a haircut at a barbershop that I’ve been going to since junior year in high school.  Mid-cut this heavyset Caucasian woman walks through the door and asks to see a license; apparently she’s a government official and was checking to see if the barbers were licensed to cut hair.  Now the owner of the shop had a license, he has it framed next to his mirror, but I could tell from the start that the one cutting my hair, let’s call him Jack, didn’t have one from the way that he looked at the owner.  So while the store-owner was distracting the government official with a stream of broken English, Jack was slowly inching his way to the door mumbling something about having to go to his car.  Throughout all of this I’m sitting in a chair with half my hair cut, and I have to admit I cared more about what was going to happen to my head than Mr. Jack.  Long story short Jack did not have a license, and I’m pretty sure he wasn’t here legally, but the white lady let him finish cutting my hair before taking him away.  Honestly, I’m sure he wasn’t really punished since he was back a few months later, but that’s not the point of my story.

The point of my story is that you need a license to cut hair.

Now I’m pretty sure there are thousands of reasons for why this is necessary, but it still boggles my mind that you are required to obtain a license and that there is an agency actively enforcing that you do.  He’s cutting hair, the most damage he could inflict upon a client would be ruining his week.  Even if he went AWOL I doubt he could have seriously injured me, especially since now a days most salons and barbershops don’t use actual razors.

The reason I get so riled up about this is that every time I’m in that same barbershop I watch some Korean channel on the TV.  It seems that 95% of all Korean commercials have to do with some supplement or pill that claims to cure any ailment.  It also seems that 100% of Korean commercials feature non FDA approved products.  So with some simple math that I am totally making up there is a stream of substances that are not government regulated available for purchase, and it’s not just Koreans since there are thousands of weight-loss drugs that are not FDA approved either.  So while barbers need a license to prove their abilities at wielding an electric razor, there is a multi-billion dollar industry based upon false promises and placebos.

Conclusion: whenever I see a product that is not FDA approved I assume it does nothing, but then again I don’t know anything about the FDA either.  Also, before buying anything look it up online, just type in “acai berry scam,” and you’ll see what I mean.

Second thing I want to talk about is Michael Vick, which gives you a good measure of how much I procrastinate.  All in all I think it was wrong for him to be sent to jail, I don’t think he should’ve even been punished or suspended for that matter.  I love dogs and I think animal cruelty is a horrible thing, but can I honestly say that I’m innocent of the same crimes as Vick?  Now I haven’t gone Peter Wiggin on any squirrels but I did pay for someone else to bludgeon a cow over the head with a sledgehammer.  It seems ludicrous for a country to publicly ridicule a man for dog fighting while eating more meat per capita than any other, not really sure if that’s true but I would be surprised if we weren’t.  Now for all you vegetarians out there don’t get all uppity either.  Anyone who owns a house or a car has displaced thousands of animals and permanently altered the ecosystem.  In essence our very existence is a symbol of animal cruelty, because although we may be animals too I’m pretty sure we’d fall into the parasite category (Agent Smith).  I don’t know if it was PETA or some other organization that had that campaign saying “animals are people too,” but that was the biggest load of crap I ever heard.  If you really wanted the government to consider the rights of animals equally with those of humans we’d all be screwed.  Environmentalism and animal advocacy are two different things.

Conclusion: I love meat, and I can’t see myself abstaining from it, even for pseudo-moral reasons, and I hate vegetarians who look down their noses at those who don’t follow their insane way of life while ignoring how they have benefitted from the exploitation of animals.  I see it as justified if Michael Vick be punished only if the rest of the nation was punished as well, and since I doubt I could last long in prison, definitely the big fish, I’d rather go with no punishment at all (Heywood).

Next time: Pandas

I’ll probably write more regularly now that school’s started and I’ll have something to do.  Usually I do most of my writing when I have something else due within the next 12 hours; so basically when I shouldn’t be writing stuff like this.

This first part is more for my benefit and not something I really care if people read or not so feel free to skip this part.

Speaking about blogging, or writing for that matter, there was about a month period this past summer when I was big on the Flesch-Kincaid test.  Essentially, the Flesch-Kincaid test is something you can do on most word processors that reports the level of writing of the piece that is opened.  The test gives two values: the first being the reading ease (the higher the more difficult to read), and the second being the grade level of your writing (the higher the better); using some formula involving the average syllables per word and the average number of words per sentence, in some vague fashion.  So, being the conceited arrogant prick I love being, I went back and ran the test on all of my old papers.  I found out that the papers I received the highest-grade level for I also received the highest readability level; but the thing that surprised me was that they were also the most boring.  What determines the effectiveness of a piece of writing?  It reminded me of the greatness graph in The Dead Poet’s Society that determines the greatness of any work of poetry.  For me the ideal results in the Flesch-Kincaid test would be to have a high grade level, but also a low readability score.  If you write something with the purpose of raising your grade level at the cost of readability and style, than you lose the integrity and essence of communication.  All of the writing I’ve done for blogs has had a very low grade level, but also a low readability level.  The reason being is that blogging is conversational, whereas papers are expository in nature.  Blogs engage heavily with the perceived audience, namely because feedback is immediate relative to that of papers.  Right when a blog is posted it is open for all to see and criticize; there is a certain drama to the writing of blogs, especially when involving sensitive topics, because it opens up a chess match of sorts.   What I mean by that is for every sentence that is written a reaction has to be considered.  If I say this, than what will the reader think of me?  How will they feel?  Will this hurt his or her feelings?  Should I give a rat’s ass about their feelings?  When writing about political or religious issues, which tend to be more sensitive, and therefore volatile, for every point possible counterarguments need to be accounted for.  Blogging for me is argument or debate that is in some ways more intense and dramatic and in others less so.  Intense and dramatic in that my words can literally be read back in my face, if I end up revealing how stupid I am it would be visible to everyone (even if it is only an audience of 1); however less so in that if I wanted to I could ignore any feedback and ultimately have the power in any possible future discourse.  Pretty much, what I’m getting at is that although there’s a billion things that I disagree with and dislike concerning the internet driven generation, I forgot the letter, blogging surprisingly warms my stone heart a few degrees, as it becomes more legitimate I see it possibly bringing writing back to a more communicative form.

Wow, that was probably the most boring thing I’ve written, but I feel it’s important so tough beans.  And just for your information, this has received a lower grade level that any paper I’ve written for school, just to reiterate my point.

Unless you went to Oxford you probably didn’t hear about how this past Sunday Marial Yak died in a car accident: http://www.ajc.com/news/marial-yak-130733.html.  Honestly speaking I wasn’t his friend, and I say it like that because it’s different than saying we weren’t friends.  I had two or three classes with him and he ate lunch with me twice.  I wasn’t his friend and he ate lunch with me, because frankly speaking he initiated contact and I didn’t respond, he sat down next to me and I couldn’t muster up anything further than a mumbled “hey.”  Way back in my head I probably felt that his struggle with English was too much of a hassle for me to attempt some form of meaningful conversation.  All I know about him came from the article posted online, and the general consensus from other people from Oxford was that they had no idea about his story either.  As a religion major, or practically any other major in the humanities, stories are the lifeblood of scholarship.  Religion is not a set of rules that a group of old men wrote down a thousand years back; religion is the storied lives of humankind.  That’s one of the most important things that was inscribed in my head throughout the admittedly minimal amount of courses I have taken, that struggling to develop a sophisticated theology has no meaning, purpose or reason if not done with people in mind.  Not people as a generalized group, but faces and names, and most importantly their stories.  Regardless of major, exchanging stories is one of the most universal, invaluable and meaningful interactions between any number of individuals.  I sat across the table from a Lost boy of Sudan, and I never learned out how he was found because I was clinging to the shell I had pulled around me too tightly.  I have always thought that living in the suburbs, going to a university in the United States, that I was born in a bubble; but I have realized that the bubble I reside in is one of my creation.  I considered the plate of food in front of me to be a higher priority.  Rest in Peace Marial Yak, the world missed out on an amazing story.

Anyway, if people think not even daily but constant updates on their lives are necessary, and others are actually reading ‘em, than maybe me posting once a week more or less won’t be too much.  If you do have a twitter account or you’ve posted a one word status and I’ve offended you I’m not sorry and I don’t apologize; and you know what?  I am a little pretentious and arrogant, but I think I’m good at hiding it , so deal with it.

Right now I want to talk about a hypothetical I thought of a couple of weeks ago, which I’ve been playing around with:

For the sake of argument and the hypothetical let’s assume that everyone believes that premarital sex is a sin or immoral, I don’t care what you believe that’s between you and your god, but just bear with me.  Well, Jack and Jill, two unrelated individuals, are stranded on an island with no hope of rescue.  They have everything that they need to survive on the island and it looks as if they will be there for the rest of their lives.  Luckily, for their sanity, the two fall deeply in love and develop a deep and strong relationship.  At what point would it be OK for them to start having sex? Technically speaking what determines if they are married or not?  If you think that they can never officially be married and therefore can never have sex without it being immoral or sinful than you need to worry about something other than this hypothetical because you’ve probably got a whole different set of issues.

Who determines their marital status?  Can it just be an agreement between two individuals?  Therefore religiously speaking, are all the ceremonies and intermediaries even necessary?  I’m not saying that everyone go have premarital sex and forget about the consequences, what I’m asking is if marriage is even a religious issue.  I guess this technically isn’t a hypothetical because for me there is a clear answer.  Marriage is defined by society, on that island society consisted of Jack and Jill, so therefore the definition of marriage could not involve more than two people or else it would be impossible.  So applied to our society, what is really necessary?

If you’re talking about marriage as a legal issue, then I feel all religious sentiments need to be thrown out the window.  Do you think God actually cares about a piece of paper or what a court thinks?  When you throw in marriages for convenience, arranged marriages, etc, who’s to say which one God would approve of.  A lot of people who are against gay marriage, I guess you could tell that’s where I was headed the whole time, bring up the sanctity of marriage as an argument.  Since when was sanctity or morality handed out by the government?  If you believe that religion has to play a role in marriage as a legal issue, than you are basically making a pope out of the government.

Whether homosexuality is a sin or not, marriage is a social construct.  I’m not married so I can’t say for sure how I will feel, but I’m confident that those who are in a healthy and meaningful marriage draw the “sacredness” of their marriage from things and places other than what the government tells them.  Also, I know I assume a lot, and I don’t know as much as I think, but I do know that it is better for the Church that it is separate from the State.  I love the US and I believe in the possibilities of the system, but I also believe that the government has done way too many things that Christians would not want to be associated with.

All in all, I’m not against marriage, I do believe there is a sanctity within each marriage, but that it is drawn not from the sake of their marriage but the relationship between two people brought before their god, with their own faith.  And, believe it or not, I’m not against the Church but for those who keep pushing for the US to be a Christian nation, or to bring prayer back into schools, etc etc; I don’t think you know what you’re asking for.

Fshoo, I didn’t plan on the first one being so heavy, the next ones should be lighter.

I guess I’ll let you guys in on a little secret to lighten up the mood.  I’ll tell you guys the recipe for me and Eddie’s special hotdog, we don’t have a name for it yet it’s still being debated upon.

Ingredients:

1 baguette, don’t spend more than $2 at Publix/Kroger, if you are you’re spending too much.

1 Summer Sausage, the ones that come in the plastic wrap and it’s shaped like a horseshoe, i guess you could try the other varieties b/ the generic one works fine.

1 Microwave

Directions:  Cut the baguette down the middle longways, but don’t cut all the way through, it’s a hotdog, not a sandwich.  Cut the sausage longways too, like the baguette, and put it into the bread.  Microwave for I’d say 1:30.  Cheese optional but greatly appreciated.  It shouldn’t cost you more than $5.  Don’t use any sauce, i.e. ketchup, etc.  That’s what all the juices from the sausage are for.

And that’s how we pass the time when we’re bored.