My Union Jack Car

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHFXG3r_0B8

Disco Inferno

Bought an Epsoon Stylus Pro 7800 printer on eBay today for my business use.  Hoping to be able to go and pick it up on Sunday.

Just Eat It!

It’s (Not) The End Of The World As We Know It

The world forgot to end today.

Again.

Crown Victoria

End of the WORLD: June 24 the ‘beginning of the APOCALYPSE’

THE end of the world will come on June 24 of this year, according to Christians who believe that we have entered the end times.

By Sean Martin

PUBLISHED: 16:02, Wed, Apr 18, 2018 | UPDATED: 16:35, Wed, Apr 18, 2018

By analysing passages in the Bible, many believe they have been able to pinpoint the world will end – and that is June 24, 2018.

Christian conspiracy theorist Mathieu Jean-Marc Joseph Rodrigue examines a passage in the Book of Revelations which reads: "And a mouth was given to [the Beast], speaking great things and blasphemy, and it was given authority to act forty and two months.”

Mr Rodrigue then says: “I heard a voice in the middle of the four living beings.

“This is wisdom. He who has intelligence can interpret the figure of the beast.

“It represents the name of a man. His figure is 666.”

Mr Rodrigue then performs a series of complex calculations and when combining 666 with the number 42, concluding with the date June 24.

However, the conspiracy theorist was unable to detail how he reached this figure or how exactly the world will end.

Mr Rodrigue’s predictions conflict other end of the world forecasts, including that of serial end of the world predictor David Meade – who says April 23 will mark the apocalypse.

Mr Meade predicts a mythological planetary system known as Planet X or Nibiru will appear in the sky on April 23.

He claims it will then pass the Earth in October, causing the start of the Rapture with huge volcanoes and volcanic eruptions due to its gravitational force.

He said: “During this time frame, on April 23, 2018 the moon appears under the feet of the Constellation Virgo.

“The Sun appears to precisely clothe Virgo… Jupiter is birthed on April 08, 2018.

“The 12 stars at that date include the nine stars of Leo, and the three planetary alignments of Mercury, Venus and Mars – which combine to make a count of 12 stars on the head of Virgo.

“Thus the constellations Virgo, Leo and Serpens-Ophiuchus represent a unique once-in-a-century sign exactly as depicted in the 12th chapter of Revelation. This is our time marker.”

Bring It On Home

The Poison’s In My Heart And In My Mind

Kirk makes one too many anti-Klingon comments to Worf. Sisko and Rom discover the value of knocking before entering Worf’s Holosuite…

And We Proceeded To Tell That Hotel Down

Got the reading list back online and started updating it.

I forgot how many audiobooks I have that haven’t been added to it yet.

Flying Graceful And Free

Today feels weird.

Yesterday I scheduled a job interview for Wednesday morning, so that probably is affecting my mood and and general outlook on this day.

Today feels sort of like the start of my farewell tour.  It sounds odd, I know, but after 11 years I feel like it is time to go. It feels like the start of a month of last things...

I feel like I have sort of already checked out.

I wonder if I have had my last conversations with so and so?

Fixed my last problem at such and such store?

Am I preparing to visit each of these stores that I have worked in since 2007 for the last time today?

I'll know more on Wednesday, I guess.

I Believe I’ve Got The Perfect Tool

An SEP is something we can't see, or don't see, or our brain doesn't let us see, because we think that it's somebody else's problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it's like a blind spot.

The narration then explains:

The Somebody Else's Problem field... relies on people's natural predisposition not to see anything they don't want to, weren't expecting, or can't explain. If Effrafax had painted the mountain pink and erected a cheap and simple Somebody Else’s Problem field on it, then people would have walked past the mountain, round it, even over it, and simply never have noticed that the thing was there.

Hey, I Made The Big Time At Last

So the Kroger that I shop at that is known for having things…

Here is 50% of their latest. I may stop in this evening to grab a picture of the other side…

It Was Incredible

I have very much enjoyed watching the movie The Incredibles over the years.  I knew that the creators always wanted to do a sequel, but that they wanted to wait until they had a good story, not just do it entirely for the money.

Well, ten years later here we are…

Makes me a little sad that I cannot go see the double feature when it becomes a thing.

The Best Part Of Waking Up

So the condition of the roads in Indiana has been a major point of stress for me so far in 2018.  Back in January I hit a pothole that ripped the strut mount off of my car and broke a ball joint as well.

I have read about people taking matters into their own hands and filling them in themselves, but this is a completely different approach to the matter.

Domino's Pizza has apparently taken to filling in potholes...For the pizzas!

The bit in the article about it feeling like a William Gibson novel is somewhat inaccurate.  It is more likely that this is the sort of thing that Uncle Enzo would take care of in Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson.

But I strongly agree that it is embarrassing that a pizza delivery chain has taken to road repair on their own dime.

Everything Sucks

This evening, after having a very busy day we went to Steak ‘n Shake for dinner.

Except they did not have shakes, onion rings, chicken tenders, cheese sauce, ranch or toilet paper.  There was also a Dr. Pepper scare.

According to the waitress we actually had dinner at Steak ‘n Failure.

Behind The Clock Back There You Know

Went to Ikea…Got super lost.

Here are some pictures of crap.

And They Call Him The Working Man

Finished the first Takeshi Kovacs novel Altered Carbon this morning.

I must say, it was interesting and entertaining.  I'll probably give it another listen a few months after I finish the other two.

It's not often that a sci-fi novel actually makes me think about things.

For instance: It made me wonder how our actual society would (d?)evolve if death had very little actual meaning.  Seriously. Make a digital copy of the person with the ability to download that into a different body? The possibilities for good or ill are endless.

Anyway, food for thought is all.

Put Our Service To The Test

The yellow was deemed too cherry for a show that is as dark as this one can be, here is the approved version of this particular poster:

I'll Tell You What I Want

How does that Spice Girls song go?

 Something about "If you want to eat my waffles, first you've got to something something?"

Willy And The Poor Boys Are Playin’

Original article

What Religion Gives Us (That Science Can’t)

By Stephen T. Asma

Mr. Asma is a professor of philosophy.

• June 3, 2018

It’s a tough time to defend religion. Respect for it has diminished in almost every corner of modern life — not just among atheists and intellectuals, but among the wider public, too. And the next generation of young people looks likely to be the most religiously unaffiliated demographic in recent memory.

There are good reasons for this discontent: continued revelations of abuse by priests and clerics, jihad campaigns against “infidels” and homegrown Christian hostility toward diversity and secular culture. This convergence of bad behavior and bad press has led many to echo the evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson’s claim that “for the sake of human progress, the best thing we could possibly do would be to diminish, to the point of eliminating, religious faiths.”

Despite the very real problems with religion — and my own historical skepticism toward it — I don’t subscribe to that view. I would like to argue here, in fact, that we still need religion. Perhaps a story is a good way to begin.

One day, after pompously lecturing a class of undergraduates about the incoherence of monotheism, I was approached by a shy student. He nervously stuttered through a heartbreaking story, one that slowly unraveled my own convictions and assumptions about religion.

Five years ago, he explained, his older teenage brother had been brutally stabbed to death, viciously attacked and mutilated by a perpetrator who was never caught. My student, his mother and his sister were shattered. His mother suffered a mental breakdown soon afterward and would have been institutionalized if not for the fact that she expected to see her slain son again, to be reunited with him in the afterlife where she was certain his body would be made whole. These bolstering beliefs, along with the church rituals she engaged in after her son’s murder, dragged her back from the brink of debilitating sorrow, and gave her the strength to continue raising her other two children — my student and his sister.

To the typical atheist, all this looks irrational, and therefore unacceptable. Beliefs, we are told, must be aligned with evidence, not mere yearning. Without rational standards, like those entrenched in science, we will all slouch toward chaos and end up in pre-Enlightenment darkness.

I do not intend to try to rescue religion as reasonable. It isn’t terribly reasonable. But I do want to argue that its irrationality does not render it unacceptable, valueless or cowardly. Its irrationality may even be the source of its power.

The human brain is a kludge of different operating systems: the ancient reptilian brain (motor functions, fight-or-flight instincts), the limbic or mammalian brain (emotions) and the more recently evolved neocortex (rationality). Religion irritates the rational brain because it trades in magical thinking and no proof, but it nourishes the emotional brain because it calms fears, answers to yearnings and strengthens feelings of loyalty.

According to prominent neuroscientists like Jaak Panksepp, Antonio Damasio and Kent Berridge, as well as neuropsychoanalysts like Mark Solms, our minds are motivated primarily by ancient emotional systems, like fear, rage, lust, love and grief. These forces are adaptive and help us survive if they are managed properly — that is if they are made strong enough to accomplish goals of survival, but not so strong as to overpower us and lead to neuroses and maladaptive behavior.

My claim is that religion can provide direct access to this emotional life in ways that science does not. Yes, science can give us emotional feelings of wonder at the majesty of nature, but there are many forms of human suffering that are beyond the reach of any scientific alleviation. Different emotional stresses require different kinds of rescue. Unlike previous secular tributes to religion that praise its ethical and civilizing function, I think we need religion because it is a road-tested form of emotional management.

Of course, there is a well-documented dark side to spiritual emotions. Religious emotional life tilts toward the melodramatic. Religion still trades readily in good-and-evil narratives, and it gives purchase to testosterone-fueled revenge fantasies and aggression. While this sort of zealotry is undeniably dangerous, most religion is actually helpful to the average family struggling to eke out a living in trying times.

Religious rituals, for example, surround the bereaved person with our most important resource — other people. Even more than other mammals, humans are extremely dependent on others — not just for acquiring resources and skills, but for feeling well. And feeling well is more important than thinking well for my survival.

Religious practice is a form of social interaction that can improve psychological health. When you’ve lost a loved one, religion provides a therapeutic framework of rituals and beliefs that produce the oxytocin, internal opioids, dopamine and other positive affects that can help with coping and surviving. Beliefs play a role, but they are not the primary mechanisms for delivering such therapeutic power. Instead, religious practice (rituals, devotional activities, songs, prayer and story) manage our emotions, giving us opportunities to express care for each other in grief, providing us with the alleviation of stress and anxiety, or giving us direction and an outlet for rage.

Atheists like Richard Dawkins, E. O. Wilson and Sam Harris, are evaluating religion at the neocortical level — their criteria for assessing it is the rational scientific method. I agree with them that religion fails miserably at the bar of rational validity, but we’re at the wrong bar. The older reptilian brain, built by natural selection for solving survival challenges, was not built for rationality. Emotions like fear, love, rage — even hope or anticipation — were selected for because they helped early mammals flourish. In many cases, emotions offer quicker ways to solve problems than deliberative cognition.

For us humans, the interesting issue is how the old animal operating system interacts with the new operating system of cognition. How do our feelings and our thoughts blend together to compose our mental lives and our behaviors? The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio has shown that emotions saturate even the seemingly pure information-processing aspects of rational deliberation. So something complicated is happening when my student’s mother remembers and projects her deceased son, and embeds him in a religious narrative that helps her soldier on.

No amount of scientific explanation or sociopolitical theorizing is going to console the mother of the stabbed boy. Bill Nye the Science Guy and Neil deGrasse Tyson will not be much help, should they decide to drop over and explain the physiology of suffering and the sociology of crime. But the magical thinking that she is going to see her murdered son again, along with the hugs from and songs with fellow parishioners, can sustain her. If this emotionally grounded hope gives her the energy and vitality to continue caring for her other children, it can do the same for others. And we can see why religion persists.

Those of us in the secular world who critique such emotional responses and strategies with the refrain, “But is it true?” are missing the point. Most religious beliefs are not true. But here’s the crux. The emotional brain doesn’t care. It doesn’t operate on the grounds of true and false. Emotions are not true or false. Even a terrible fear inside a dream is still a terrible fear. This means that the criteria for measuring a healthy theory are not the criteria for measuring a healthy emotion. Unlike a healthy theory, which must correspond with empirical facts, a healthy emotion is one that contributes to neurochemical homeostasis or other affective states that promote biological flourishing.

Finally, we need a word or two about opiates. The modern condemnation of religion has followed the Marxian rebuke that religion is an opiate administered indirectly by state power in order to secure a docile populace — one that accepts poverty and political powerlessness, in hopes of posthumous supernatural rewards. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature,” Marx claimed, “the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”

Marx, Mao and even Malcolm X leveled this critique against traditional religion, and the critique lives on as a disdainful last insult to be hurled at the believer. I hurled it myself many times, thinking that it was a decisive weapon. In recent years, however, I’ve changed my mind about this criticism.

First, religion is energizing as often as it is anesthetizing. As often as it numbs or sedates, religion also riles up and invigorates the believer. This animating quality of religion can make it more hazardous to the state than it is tranquilizing, and it also inspires a lot of altruistic philanthropy.

Second, what’s so bad about pain relief anyway? If my view of religion is primarily therapeutic, I can hardly despair when some of that therapy takes the form of palliative pain management. If atheists think it’s enough to dismiss the believer on the grounds that he should never buffer the pains of life, then I’ll assume the atheist has no recourse to any pain management in his own life. In which case, I envy his remarkably good fortune.

For the rest of us, there is aspirin, alcohol, religion, hobbies, work, love, friendship. After all, opioids — like endorphins — are innate chemical ingredients in the human brain and body, and they evolved, in part, to occasionally relieve the organism from misery. To quote the well-known phrase by the German humorist Wilhelm Busch, “He who has cares has brandy, too.”

We need a more clear-eyed appreciation of the role of cultural analgesics. It is not enough to dismiss religion on the grounds of some puritanical moral judgment about the weakness of the devotee. Religion is the most powerful cultural response to the universal emotional life that connects us all.

Correction: June 4, 2018

An earlier version of this article incorrectly described a use of the quotation “He who has cares has brandy, too,” attributed to the German writer Wilhelm Busch. The quotation was included in a footnote added to “Civilization and Its Discontents” in “The Freud Reader” by that book’s editor, Peter Gay; it was not cited by Freud in the original work.

Stephen Asma is a professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, and the author of the forthcoming, “Why We Need Religion.”

Under My Umbrella

The personal, as everyone’s so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here—it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft-. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide out from under with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way you stand a far better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous, marks the difference—the only difference in their eyes—between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it’s just business, it’s politics, it’s the way of the world, it’s a tough life, and that it’s nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.

QUELLCRIST FALCONER
Things I Should Have Learned by Now
Volume II

Be Our Guest

Current project:

Everything Is Awesome!

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