Hellbound Alleee of Mondo Diablo fame gets it right on the nose.  There is no rhyme nor reason to the world and this life.  There doesn’t have to be.  But that is not the subject of this post.   I am responding to her episode number 195 of Mondo Diablo where a believer says that the number one question of non-believers is “Why is there evil if there is a god?”.  Of course it’s the number one question that non-believers asks because the answer, that normally involves how god gave us free will to test our faith, is incomprehensible. It simply does not answer the question.   This whole business of free will and its relationship to evil begs the question of god,  as Alleee points out in Mondo Diablo #195 :    “What, indeed, do we need god for if we have free will”, she asks.  What exactly would be the point?

The whole question of a free will and the fallen world is very foreign to all other non-christian religions because no other religion has this concept of original sin.   Why bother to create an Adam and Eve if they’re going to disappoint you and once they’ve disappointed you why not just destroy the world and all its sinners and start over?  Oh sorry.  Is that what is supposed to happen with the coming of the apocalypse and Armageddon?  One might argue that the ways of the superior being are not understandable to us.   Then why bother at all believing?  If his ways are not penetrable, then why should I waste one moment on it?  I’ll tell you why:  because there are only about 1.5 billion of us in the world who are self described non-believers in a god and the rest believe in one (or many), much to the  puzzlement of non-believers, who spend a considerable amount of time defending ourselves against this offense to our sensibilities called “belief in a god and all that it means.”

Alleee hits another one right on the sweet spot in that episode.  I have to say it again because I love it:  “The search for comfort is not the same as the search for god.”   These are indeed and importantly two very different things.  A god is a very terrible thing to believe in.  A “bubba meisis” as my mother would say, “an old wive’s tale”, a scary monster thing to tell your children to keep them in line.   And then we tell them that it’s ok to believe in the scary monster because they’ll be rewarded when they die by some other fabrication called heaven or resurrection or rebirth as a brahmin, or with virgins in an afterlife that they can rape with abandon.

On the other hand I would like very much to remind Alleee how she got here -  Her wonderful show Mondo Diablo, that I have been enjoying for 4 years wouldn’t even exist if it were not for someone’s belief in god.  How’s that for a slap in the face?

I just need to understand what has happened to people’s social skills.

On Friday night Special K and I went to see a film and were amazed to be sitting beside a rather large-ish fellow who pulled out a deli-tub of corn nuts before the movie started and began to eat them. He dug his hand into the tub each time, scooping out a handful of nuts and using his fist as a funnel, closed his eyes and poured them into his upturned mouth.  This prelude was followed by fierce crunching noises as he chewed  while the rest of the audience around him looked on in a mixture of amusement, fascination, horror and derision.

Do you have any idea how a corn nut crunch sounds in a darkened quiet theatre?  He proceeded to eat the entire tub without regard for any of the other members of the audience.  Several people moved away in disgust, others were looking back at him or over at him and yet, the fellow remained oblivious and non-plussed. When he finally finished The Tub, Special K said, “Thank god it’s over”. “Oh it’s not over. Not by a long shot. I think that bag there with him is full of food.”  I don’t know if he got the message, but he was fairly silent throughout the film except that he shifted around noisily and pulled out several plastic bottles of water which he held above his head and drizzled into his throat.

I think these people believe it is actually ok to behave as though they are alone in their living rooms.

Mashed Potatoes (No Gravy)

Billy Bob Thorton acted like a petulant, spoiled child on April 8 during a CBC interview with Jian Ghomeshi to promote his new band and musical venture the Boxmasters. Or is that the Mixmasters?   Boxmatches?  Boxcutters? I don’t know.  In any case,   for whatever reason,  Thorton seemed to be overestimating his importance and talent in the matter.  I think that he fancied that he was punishing someone by checking out of the interview.  It has been a long time since I have had the misfortune to witness such arrogant self-importance.  If you haven’t seen or listened to this insulting train wreck of unfathomable immaturity, you can catch it on at this youtube link: Jian Ghomeshi interview with Billy Bob Thorton.   Special K and I deconstruct his behaviour and then move on to discuss two movies about political figures.   It’s been 30 years since the White Night Riots after the city politican and gay activist Harvey Milk was murdered by Dan White.  We talk about the movie and how we feel about what happened during that time in gay history.  We move on to explore our reaction to a movie very difficult to make since it focused completely and solely on a conversation and a very difficult one at that.  We discuss the portrayal of David Frost and Richard Nixon in Frost/Nixon.

And finally I give you my first and original mashup of Billy Bob Thorton’s most annoying utterances from his April 8th excuse of an interview on CBC radio.

Harvey Milk - Gay Pride 1978 - Photo by Terry Schmitt

Listen to the show

• HotFRM 169 Mashed Potatoes Without the Gravy (24.7 mb)

On Sunday Morning the weekly CBC televsion newsmagazine, a Montreal actor and dubbing director, Michael Rudder, was interviewed from his hospital bed in Bombay.  He’d been shot at least four times last week in the Mumbai attacks.  He was shot in the arm, the leg, the buttocks and as of this writing, there is still a bullet lodged in his stomach.  Eating in the Oberoi hotel restaurant, he had heard shots and asked about them.  He was told by restaurant employees, that it was only gangsters.  A strange remark indeed.   (As strange as the remarks made during a Mexican murder aftermath in 2006.  Then, Mexican officials publically declared that an Italian couple killed in a resort near Playa del Carmen was the work of Canadian mobster hit women from Thunder Bay. That murder is another act of violence that outrages me.) Rudder doesn’t understand why, but assumed he and his party were not in danger.   Moments later he and the patrons found themselves in a hailstorm of bullets. He believes that extremism is on the rise. I think that this is nonsense. Extremism just is and sometimes it causes loss of life.

With innocence still and perhaps naivety Rudder continues in the interview, ” ...as long as people think that their hatred is more powerful than the wisdom that their mothers’ would have taught them…they will respond in such ways.“  This sentiment, of course, assumes that their mothers have a wisdom that prevents hatred. In my skepticism, I am not so sure that is true.   I could exercise a generosity of interpretation and suppose that “mothers’ wisdom” is a symbol for an attitude of peace, love and nuturance. In that case his statement is very much worth thinking about. But who is teaching the attitude?   I am not sure that human nature has changed in all of recorded history and I fear that the chance of that happening is very slim.  Every second a new baby on this planet is born, a stranger in a hostile land, a tabula rasa that his or her culture and economic position will imprint itself on, forever repeating the same patterns be they for good or ill.

Einstein said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. That’s humanity.  That’s what we do generation after generation. We hate and fear the other and seeking vengence for real or perceived affronts is very human.   The philosopher, Judith Butler, discusses revenge in a 2003 interview in The Believer Magazine.  She says that when choosing non-retaliation: “Many people consider that refusing to strike back is a masochistic way of handling oneself when one is in a condition of injury, or that such a refusal is tantamount to political paralysis, but I actually think it is an adamant and vigilant stand, a difficult stand against violence itself.“  She reminds us that:

“War begets war. It produces outraged and humiliated and furious people…it is precisely because we’re constituted with aggression, it’s precisely because we are capable of waging war, and of striking back, and of doing massive injury, that peace becomes a necessity…[Peace] is a commitment to living with a certain kind of vulnerability to others and susceptibility to being wounded that actually gives our individual lives meaning. And I think this way of viewing things is a much harder place to go, so to speak. One can’t just do it alone, either. I think it needs to be institutionalized. It needs to be part of a community ethos. I think in fact it needs to be part of an entire foreign policy.“

I think these are the things we should be teaching our children.

From the website saveournet.ca

Put simply, net neutrality means non-discriminatory treatment of traffic. That is, outside of limited exceptions such as spam and known viruses, the companies that deliver information over the internet have treated all information the same, delivering each package of information as quickly and efficiently as possible (often referred to as the “best efforts” internet). Under this regime an internet user is free to use any equipment, content, application or service on a non-discriminatory basis without interference from the network provider. Network neutrality means that the network provider’s only job is to move data – not to choose which data to privilege with higher quality service.

Legislation against net neutrality is not as simple as censorship if governments get their way.  Censorship is just an evil by-product.  It’s all about making a buck.  The less net neutrality we have, the more ways to charge me for use of the web.  But since there is more than one way to solve a problem, I shall just wait for the hackers to get around it.  And get around it they will.   In the meantime – please help save our net.

I give Proust was a Neuroscientist an 8 out of 10 for its ability to provoke thought in me and allow me to contemplate on my own assumptions about creativity, genius and the mind/body split.    If I ask you to visualize someone who is creative and/or brilliant what sort of person do you think about?  Special K thinks of Leonardo Da Vinci.   I think of some young mathematician.  Often I think of some young person who burns out his or her flame brilliantly and quickly – like Rimbaud, Michael Jackson, or Boy George.  Athletes often fall into this category.  Their talents are external.  They are so obviously dependent on the ability of their bodies to perform according to a range of activity that is almost never available to our aging shells.

In Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks writes about a forty-two year old man who after he was struck by lightening, becomes a musical prodigy.  Sacks loves to write about people who, at various points in their lives, because of neurological changes, develop talents previously unknown to them.  In Proust was a Neuroscientist, Lehrer instead focuses on established artists who reveal neuroscience through their art.  He explores where the body ends and mind begins and vice versa.  He asks what it means to be aware and conscious as human beings.   Personally, I tend to think that we are just a random collection of protein.  And that there is no distinction between the mind and the body.  My mind is in my toes and heart as much as it is in my brain. My brain is simply where the electronics gather to interpret.    About our experience inside ourselves, Virgina Woolf said: “We are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself “.   And in reponse to this process, Leher is comfortable asserting that “…only the artist [is] able to describe reality as it [is] actually experienced”. Here are some of the other ways that Lehrer describes that same experience:

…the mind is not a place: it’s a process.

The self is simply…the story we tell ourselves about our experiences.

Reality is not out there waiting to be witnessed; reality is made by the mind.

When it comes to the drama of feelings, our flesh is its stage.

Marcel Proust

• 154hotfrm_restrenewalandthemusicofautumn · 16.88 MB

There seems to be a lot of criticism leveled against the passengers of the Greybound bus traveling en route from Brandon, Manitoba to Winnipeg last Wednesday night during which a man was brutally murdered and his body defiled. The criticism seems to be that they did not do enough; did not try hard enough to stop Li.  I cannot imagine in my wildest dreams, or perhaps nightmares, how I would have reacted had I been one of the passengers. But I do know one thing: Garnet Caton, the bus driver, and the truck driver who stopped to help them, are heroes. Caton, it seems, acted according to what his instinct dictated in the moment. He and likely several others did what they could only do as a reaction – get off the bus and ensure the safety of all the remaining passengers, including themselves. Then once off the bus, and when the truck driver stopped to help them, a regrouping and reassessment seemed to have been done. Caton, the bus driver, and the truck driver reboarded the bus. By this time, Li was already in the process of decapitating the victim. What else could Caton’s party then do? It was too late for Tim, a horror beyond tragic. The three had to exit and ensure the safety of everyone else, until the RCMP arrived, by securing the door.

There is a tendency to compare this situation with other events where a more positive result may have occured, but even as one blogger says,

“…the way that people will behave in these situations is, well, situational. The choices that are possible depend on where you are and what is happening. There’s no overall story of civilization to be told here. In both cases, the victims and witnesses did the best they could in the circumstances in which they found themselves. They all acted remarkably bravely; but the differences in the situations permitted them a different set of split-second decisions. It’s really, I think, as simple as that.”

It would not surprise me if Caton is consumed with guilt that he could have done more and that his thoughts are filled right now with “What ifs” and “If onlys”.   The circumstances and development of this situation, dictated the ethics assocated with this one: Do what can be done to ensure the safety of the rest.

There is not one of us, who, when imagining this event, can say for sure what we would have done in any of those passengers’ places.

Over the coming weeks, Caton may be inclined to share more of what he saw, heard, and did – if he can.

I left a comment on Leesa Barnes blog : http://www.leesabarnes.com/happiness-is-a-choice-not-an-emotion/ after she called for all of us to write about happiness.  Happiness is completely overrated.  Don’t you think?  It’s a scam – it’s something the priests and rabbis and American revolutionaries say you should pursue at all costs. Why?  Why can’t I be miserable?  I love my misery. I love my pain. 

Yeah well this is what I wrote:

“Three percent of the world’s population (check snopes and wikipedia – do not trust ninja) are naturally happy. Money or good health apparently have nothing to do with it. Just gobs and gobs of serotonin jumping from neuron to neuron I imagine. For the rest of us happiness is choice. And for everything else – of course – there’s mastercard.

Not to diminish any of the other comments, but we women are famous for believing that doing for others makes us happy – that going within and finding our inner strength and loving ourselves are the keys. The men of the species don’t have to bother with all that because, at any age, a red sports car and a looker on their arm is sufficient to make them happy. They really know how to live in the moment don’t they? (at least 3% of them anyway). I kind of like being a curmudgeon – that’s what makes me happy.”

Leesa made me happy tonight because she gave me this opportunity to gush about my despair.