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I found my son's Dr Ruth book in his bed, hidden in the covers.  I asked if he was looking at the naked people and he laughed and said yeah.  

"all the people that you made in your image,
See them fighting in the street,
,Äôcause they can,Äôt make opinions meet,
About god,
I can,Äôt believe in you."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4750320.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4753348.stm

It's effin sweet. I was just working on some written creative stuffs and it came on.
I love it.

This is not a rant, just an effin cool song from XTC

Dear god,
Hope you got the letter,
And I pray you can make it better down here.
I don,Äôt mean a big reduction in the price of beer,
But all the people that you made in your image,
See them starving on their feet,
,Äôcause they don,Äôt get enough to eat
From god,

I can,Äôt believe in you.

Dear god,
Sorry to disturb you,
But I feel that I should be heard loud and clear.
We all need a big reduction in amount of tears,
And all the people that you made in your image,
See them fighting in the street,
,Äôcause they can,Äôt make opinions meet,
About god,

I can,Äôt believe in you.

Did you make disease, and the diamond blue?
Did you make mankind after we made you?
And the devil too.

Dear god,
Don,Äôt know if you noticed,
But your name is on a lot of quotes in this book.
Us crazy humans wrote it, you should take a look,
And all the people that you made in your image,
Still believing that junk is true.
Well I know it ain,Äôt and so do you,
Dear god,

I can,Äôt believe in,
I don,Äôt believe in,

I won,Äôt believe in heaven and hell.
No saints, no sinners,
No devil as well.
No pearly gates, no thorny crown.
You,Äôre always letting us humans down.
The wars you bring, the babes you drown.
Those lost at sea and never found,
And it,Äôs the same the whole world ,Äôround.
The hurt I see helps to compound,
That the father, son and holy ghost,
Is just somebody,Äôs unholy hoax,
And if you,Äôre up there you,Äôll perceive,
That my heart,Äôs here upon my sleeve.

If there,Äôs one thing I don,Äôt believe in...

It,Äôs you,
Dear god.

Toots,

I am with you.  I will continue to do my part to fight what I believe to be wrong, no matter what.  I fuck with my place of work in small ways every single day, and try to fuck with the minds of the people in my city in some small way which might break the tedium just long enough for them to think.

I don't care if its hopeless; I will continue.

You just made my day Baron. I knew I continued talking to you for some reason, despite you know--those pics you have with the sheep and the...uh...amorous activities.  

And I refuse to admitt defeat until the very last trace of the fight goes out of the great beast that is homo sapiens.

You had me until there.  Just remember, dinosaurs were considered "great beasts" too but couldn't hack it forever.  Of course Atomic War and an Overpopulation-fed negative feedback cycle will be our cataclysmic comet.

Ok, but Rev, look at it from my point of view. Even if we go extinct, what's the worst thing that could happen if we try to fix things? The whole place might still do the big kaboom but at least we'll know we tried to do something.

And yet people are still dying all over the world from perfectly curable diseases, not to mention global war that makes you long for the good old days of MAD!

Just means we need to be doing more than we are currently doing.

We need to grab bigger chisels.

People are dying because we are not putting enough pressure on our governments to mandate pharmaceutical companies to provide them with meds. We're also letting our politicians walk away from the responsibility Europe and the US has over the state of the place where most of those people are dying-Africa. Our ancestors fucked it up. Unfortunately they left it for us to fix. We're dooing a piss-poor job of that so far.

We've come a long way. Still, we could lose it all tomorrow. And the problem stills exists. It's just no longer spoken
out loud. It's just "understood."

We just need to keep going. The balance does swing eventually towards the side that has the most momentum, and I really think it will be the good guys. Eventually shit HAS to change or we go extinct along with everything else around us.

And I know it looks like we're well on the way to the big fade out, but I'm not so sure.There is a World Peace Summit happening in my city this year. People are living in eco-villages, Monsanto got shamed into backing away from its Terminator seed...There is still some fight in 'er I think as long as we keep talking and thinking about it.

<--chipping away at the stone

But when I got higher up in the anti-war organizations, I realize that
the people at the top were just expoliting the people below for their own
political gain, be it recruiting for their socialist cabal, or building a base
from which to run for office as a Democrat.

I'm not surprised a bit.

When I started working I was a journalist. I even thought for a while about being a foreign correspondent. Of course the longer I worked in the media the more unpalatable it became. I learned more and more about the politics of newspapers from colleagues who work there and thought that there was no way in hell I would be willing to get my head chopped off for one of those papers.

But you brought up the 60s. Activism didn't get us everything it should have maybe, but we got a LOT anyway. Where would race relations be without the stuff you guys did in the 60s? Where would women be?

We're stupid animals, it takes knocking us over the head over and over before we finally get something.

I'm not expecting total victory. I'm just expecting not to give up.

This is why I am trying to convince a local marketing company that promotes ethical products and NGOs to start a PR arm.

I think things can only change by using the very system to fuck itself over.

The business lobby has the ear of the govnmt? We need a BETTER lobby group.

Spin doctors covering up truth and skewing media reporting? We need better spin doctors to skew media reporting right back the other way.

I don't think the only way to promote beliefs and ideals is through chaining yourself to a tree.

There is something Michael Moore says in "The Corporation" that puts it well.

He says:
"The reason major studios are willing to put out my movies even though those movies are trying to take down the corporations that support the studios is that there is a market for my films. Capitalism doesn't have any beliefs at all, you can exploit that." (not 100 % exact wording I'm writing it from memory)

ECH I hope my answer didn't come off snarky cause that's not how it was meant.

I really have been thinking a lot about this lately though. I think our problem is that whatever shit is going on in the world that's wrong seems totally huge and we seem pretty tiny in comparison. Then most of us throw in the question of how do I know if what I think is right is right. And I think that's how people who think some things should not be happening get stuck doing nothing.

That plus laziness.

And I totally accept that some of us, most of us actually, are content doing nothing and thinking about nothing but their own comfort. But I find so many people who know better, who are aware and still don't do anything because a) they are too jaded by now to try b) they'd rather talk than have to do.  

But I think we all know that the "wrong" things/people/ideas are so. Just like the CEO of a farm concern dumping pig piss and shit into the river and poisoning it knows that it's wrong to do it. They might still do it anyway, but I'm pretty sure they know.

Know what I mean?

you're making bold assumption there, Toots.

how do you know that your "side" is the "right" one?

I don't see this as a hard thing to figure out in most instances.

Big corporations poisoning the planet, running sweat shops, supporting dictatorships = wrong IMO.

Government killing millions of people because they refuse to subscribe to the current establishment = same.

I don't buy that "nothing is true and everything is permissable" btw. Some things are true. Some things are not permissable.

Common sense helps pick them out most of the time.

I do it because it gives me great pleasure to fuck shit up.  And I like to be able to do what I want.  Thats not really political.

Troof.  I just like to knock stuff over.

As long as you're knocking the right stuff over who cares what the motivation is anyway?

I think this is essentially the biggest problem with people who are idealistic. They get hung up on one idea and spend all of their energy trying to convince everyone else to think just like them.

IMO as long as we're working towards the same end what drives us to do it is unimportant.

<--is an idealist but not a militant fool

I refuse to put on a suit, paint my face on and shut my brain off.

Give it time.  EVERYBODY has their price.

Not me. For realz.
I am now on an active track to give up a very lucrative job to work for peanuts doing what I believe in.

Fuck that noise. My happiness is worth more to me than my kids being able to spend my money after I die.

I do it because it gives me great pleasure to fuck shit up.  And I like to be able to do what I want.  Thats not really political.

Fair enough.

As long as the outcome is the same I guess it doesn't matter much why you do it.

I like to fuck shit up too. My motivation is just slightly different I guess. I just get pissed off and refuse to listen to reason. Why should I?

Reason says I should just sit down and be quiet because nothing we do matters anyway. That's a boring and depressing way to live and the world is depressing enough as it is.

It makes me feel better to know that I'll at least be fighting on the right side, even though it may be the losing side. And I refuse to admitt defeat until the very last trace of the fight goes out of the great beast that is homo sapiens.