Seamoremonster's Open Salon Blog

God Blames Mankind for Climate Change.

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 23:04:10 -0400

And God said let us make man in our image, after our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the foul of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.

Genesis, chapter 1, verse 26.

The King James Bible

TRANSLATED OUT OF THE ORGINAL TONGUES AND WITH THE FORMER TRANSLATIONS DILIGENTLY COMPARED AND REVISED BY HIS MAJISTY’S SPECIAL COMMAND.

APPOINTED TO BE READ IN CHURCHES

dominion (noun) 1. sovereignty; control

The English Oxford Dictionary

I remember a quote from a campy old episode of Adventures of Hercules: “Denial is more than a river in Egypt.”

I love that quote.

But I’m damned sick and tired of your denial.

“Que sera sera” my sorry arse. I’m sick of the out right laziness and mental lassitude. I’m sick of the lethargy and the indolence. I’m sick of your excuses.

And you see, it’s not in God’s hands. It’s in yours. Your Bible tells you so.

And I’m sure your God isn’t all that happy with you rejecting responsibility and putting it back on Him.

Most of you hate Al Gore more than you do Exxon-Mobile, Shell, Chevron, BP, et al. Seriously! Do you understand that? Because I sure as hell don’t.

Is there anything more irritating than reasoning that isn’t reasonable? Is there anything more irritating than adults who refuse to take responsibility for their actions? Is there anything more irritating than taking it out on the messenger and the message rather than the cause?

And you have children for Christ’s sakes.

Nice. What kind of world are you leaving for them?

What happened to you? And who in the hell are you people and where in the hell did you come from? Who raised you?

Remember the Great Generation who endured the Great Depression, sacrificed their own comforts, went on rations and fought to free us from Fascism to make the world a better place for their children? Remember the Baby Boomers who protested an unjust war and fought for civil rights and the hippies who turned their back on gratuitous consumerism because they recognised the damage it was doing to the planet and our souls?

Look at the quote above. It’s the same chapter from Genesis you love to quote about creating the world in six days and the earth being only six thousand years old. So you prefer mythology to science…but you lack the ability to understand the metaphorical significance rather than the literal. Sad. You’ve read the Bible? Garbage! It doesn’t appear to me you’ve even read past the first chapter of the first book in Bible.

So take a literal interpretation of the Genesis, chapter 1, verse 26 as above. It’s clear. According to the Bible, God gave man “dominion” over the earth. According to Oxford English Dictionary…dominion means “control”. God gave it up. He gave ‘control’ to mankind. He gave control to you. There it is in the King James Version of the Bible in black and white in the King’s English.

So seriously. You can’t have it both ways. You want to put it in God’s hands? Well, the way it reads in the Bible, God doesn’t want any part of it. He gave you one job to do and you’re blowing it.

Purely and simply, in your denial you are sitting back and allowing the desecration of your God’s creation. Shameful and Stupid and Sinful.

So if the words of God from the Bible say that man has control over the earth then why aren’t you doing something? Are you so lazy and irresponsible that you simply listen to the likes of Pat Robinson, Fred Phelps or some pro corporate whore on some low level cable news program…or whatever crazy razzle dazzle limousine driving con artist you’re listening to without thinking for yourself?

You’re quite happy to listen to some evangelical huckster tell you that it’s because of gays, or minorities, or women, or abortion, or liberals, or socialists or whatever sillier than hell blunt edged bigoted load of ignorant crap. Come on! You have to know it’s just ducking responsibility and scapegoating to others .

I am in the Winter of my years. I don’t know what happens after that. No one does. But I do know this. One of the first and most important tenets of all religions from the old Pagan beliefs of our ancestors to Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Islam is to look after our earth. I’m not afraid to meet my maker because if nothing else I’ve tried my best to follow that tenet.

You on the other hand have betrayed your maker and your beliefs.

So stop picking on the weak and the poor. Stop picking on minorities, homosexuals, abortion clinics and women. They are not the enemy and they are for your God to judge not you…and that’s from the Bible too.

Be like David. Take on Goliath. Take on the Giants. Take on the real enemies, take on big oil, take on coal and take on logging. Take on those greedy bastards that are destroying your God’s creation and undermining your custodianship of His Creation. Stop being so lazy. Make some sacrifices. Hey, Jesus did. Grow some backbone. It’s the least you can do.

Sure you’re frightened of them. They are powerful. They control our politicians. The lead us into war. They lead us unto burnt pastures, crumbled mountains, scorched skies and dark fetid waters.

They are the real enemy and you know who they are.

Book Review--"Say You're Sorry"--by Michael Robotham

Sun, 30 Dec 2012 20:12:50 -0500

The Predators Beneath

A few years ago I spent a couple of weeks exploring in the Daintree National Park in Far North Queensland. A crocodile expert told me that victims of crocodile attacks were more often than not locals. Locals get used to their neighbours and get a bit casual with what lies beneath. They forget the reptilian brain lying in wait…the opportunistic hunter. They forget the crocodile just wiling away invisible beneath the surface of the still water, saving its energy, its body on idle and its senses on alert. Waiting.

In our civilised communities, the reptile brain hides beneath the surface too. It lies beneath the surface of the man on the bus sitting across from you. He’s friendly, chatty and unassuming, such a nice man, the reptilian predator just wiling away beneath the surface. Waiting.

This is the wilderness Robotham explores in “Say You’re Sorry”. This is the wilderness of the mind, of the injured soul, of the sociopath, the serial killer, the child molester, the thrill killer. He doesn’t appear dressed in a dark cloak, black hat looking weird and scary. He looks like your chubby Uncle Charlie or your chatty Aunt May. He looks like you. Hell, he might even be you.

The novel is set in Oxford during the Christmas Season. Robotham makes it a familiar place. Oxford becomes the metaphor for our own communities. Whether we live in Australia or the U.S. or Britain…we recognize the characters. They are our neighbours, our friends. They are people we like, people we fear and people we despise…we know who they are. Here, Oxford is not some exotic locale. It’s everyplace. This is verisimilitude. It’s an honesty and truth that sings to us. We believe it. We know this place even though we may have never been there. And we believe it because it is so well done. And this is no mean feat. It takes skill to craft such a thing and do this well.

Two narrative lines run in this book and the voices are pitch perfect. If Robotham were a singer he’d be a bloody Opera star. Their pitch and tone are so perfect they could shatter champagne flutes at a hundred paces.

One is the voice of young Piper told through the pages of her diary and the other is the voice of criminal psychologist, Joe O’Loughlin.

Piper’s diary makes us laugh, makes us care and at times breaks our hearts. Like many teenagers, she is full of doubt about herself and her place in the world. She is a whisper from our own adolescence no matter how long ago we were there and her voice rings true.

O’Loughlin is a regular in Robotham novels. He’s not wise cracking tough guy. He’s not a two fisted avenger or a fast draw shoot ‘em up. There is something universal about Joe. When he looks into the mirror and faces the palsied reminder of his own mortality…there is something familiar and something frightening. Joe is a constant reminder that the world isn’t right yet and there’s so much to do before we leave it to protect those we love. With Joe salvation doesn’t come from the end of a gun barrel or with two fists…it comes from learning, it comes from knowing his fellow man…even the sick the bastards that do sick things.

We live in a jungle, whether it be the asphalt and cement of big city means streets, the manicured lawns of suburbia or the bucolic peace of the country. They all have their predators, those who have adapted as we have adapted and those who use their jungle… to hide in wait. Robotham reminds us that our salvation lies not only in how we survive that jungle but how we retain our humanity.

Rant on Guns, Speech and the Sikh Temple Shootings

Sun, 5 Aug 2012 20:08:56 -0400

Guns and Hate Speech.

When are the civilised going to hold the uncivilised to account?

Any kind of debate on controlling and limiting access to assault weapons leads to irrational, misinformed and inaccurate parroting of the Second Amendment and irrational and paranoid fear of Government.

Why are we letting the irrational, the misinformed and the paranoid dictate legislation on gun reform? Why are we letting the vested interests of the NRA and Arms Industry dictate legislation on gun reform? Why are we allowing either of these groups to influence and inhibit actions that will protect the safety of innocent Americans?

And why aren’t we more active in pointing out the fact that the NRA and the Gun Lobby continue to target and incite the lowest common denominator, the irrational, the paranoid and the misinformed?

And why are we allowing those who spew hate, intolerance and ignorance to hide behind the First Amendment? Recently, Congresswoman Michelle Bachman and Congressman Louis Gohmert beat the drums of hysteria and panic about an Islamic threat. Is it any wonder that their audience is more susceptible to a visceral reaction than a rational one when they themselves are so irrational and uninformed? Is it any wonder that someone with clouded reason would simply interpret anyone with a turban as Islamic and walk into a Sikh Temple and spray the congregation with bullets? Is anyone really surprised that this would eventually take place when we have such loose and careless interpretations for both the First and Second Amendment.

When Bill O’Reilly and Glenn Beck continued their rants against Dr Tiller is it any wonder that some mentally challenged wingnut eventually murdered Dr Tiller? When are we going to hold Hate Speech accountable? When are people who incite violence and terror in our society going to be held accountable for hate speech, incitement and accessory to murder?

When are the shock jocks and fear merchants going to be held accountable for their paranoia, for their bigotry, for their lies, for their hate? This is not what Free Speech is about.

When Bush and Cheney ranted on about the non-existent Weapon of Mass Destruction, we launched a pre-emptive illegal strike on the Sovereign Nation of Iraq. I would suggest that automatic assault weapons are also Weapons of Mass Destruction…maybe it’s about time we cleaned house at home before we go marching off to war again. Seriously, it has been proven time and time again that our own WOMD are far more dangerous to our population than those fantasy ones of Saddam Hussein. And I would strongly suggest that a rapid fire automatic weapon holding a hundred rounds of ammunition is pretty much capable of mass murder and mass destruction.

I have always felt that the most important rights provided under our Constitution were those of Equality and Tolerance…not hate speech and paranoia…and unlimited access to Weapons of Mass Destruction. If the Constitution is not ensuring equality and tolerance than it’s not doing its job. The tools are there…we simply need to enforce them.

Gabriel Giffords warned about the consequences of the violent rhetoric employed by the likes of Sarah Palin. No one listened. Even after the attack on Giffords, the murder of six others and wounding of thirteen, no one listened.

James Holmes accessed a whole cache of weaponry and ammunition and murdered 12 people wounding fifty-eight others. James Holmes is now yesterday's news and there is a new massacre to read about and shake our heads over and in a few days it too will be pushed aside while we await the next horror of guns, paranoia, lunacy and hate speech.

The Batman Massacre...Shit Happens...God's Plan?

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 00:07:19 -0400

There is a slow rising anger here. The lines are drawn and the hysteria is about to begin. The Gun lobby will be screaming the ad hominem rants about Second Amendment Rights guaranteed to us by our Founding Fathers in the Bill of Rights. The NRA will currently be in damage control and their advertising dollars will hit the airwaves before we can blink.

The Anti-gun lobby will push their liberal leaders to make a stand. The liberal leaders will remember the fate of Idaho’s Frank Church and nothing will be done. The President will duck and weave and his challenger will beat his chest and say that we cannot be influenced by a lone gunman who lost his crackers and went to pieces.

I don’t want to go into the fact that the gunman dressed up like a Trick or Treating kid knocking on doors on Halloween but I will. I was at a shooting once on a high school campus in Australia. It was at a sports carnival. A young boy did the shooting. He was about thirteen at the time. He went home grabbed his father’s gun and returned to school and shot one student and a teacher before he was overwhelmed. Before he returned to school with the gun...he changed into a long overcoat, just like James Eagan Jones I guess he felt the need to dress up. I believe the same sort of dress up fantasy took place at Columbine High School...where Harris and Klebold dressed up in combat pants. Jared Lee Loughner shaved his head before showing up at a shopping centre near Tucson and shooting eighteen people, six of them died. Andres Brevik dressed up like a policeman before massacring 69 children in Norway. In Port Arthur Tasmania Martin Bryant went on a rampage killing 35 and wounding 23 in 1996. I don’t remember whether he dressed up or not but I do remember he was batshit crazy.

The fact is that none of these people went into their local gun store dressed up for Trick or Treat and looking batshit crazy when they purchased their guns.

The gun lobby argument is that guns don’t shoot people. People with guns shoot people.

My argument is that people without guns don’t shoot people they just think about it. Maybe we should think about it.

After the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996, the Conservative Australian Government of the day and the Labor Opposition faced the threat of an overwhelming backlash by the pro gun lobby and did the necessary thing. They legislated strong gun reform laws. Weapons that were designed to kill large numbers of people were outlawed. 640,000 weapons were turned in and destroyed and rules applying to firearms in general were tightened. It worked. Australia has had no gun massacres since 1996, compared with 13 such tragedies during the previous 18 years. (A massacre is defined as the killing of four or more people.) Total gun deaths have been reduced: gun homicides and gun suicides had been falling gradually before Port Arthur, but the reforms in 1996 caused that decline to accelerate dramatically. In the early 1990s, about 600 Australians were killed each year by gunfire; that figure is now fewer than 250.

The gun lobby will scream about protection from crime and yet per capita America has the highest incarceration rate of any developed country on earth. It could lead some to suggest that guns don’t prevent crime they assist it.

The Second Amendment was written more than two hundred years ago when the Founding Fathers travelled by foot, by carriage or by horseback. There were no trains, cars or airplanes. Guns were flintlocks...muzzle-loaded affairs that took time to load and carried a single shot. A lone loony with such a firearm might manage to kill one or two people before being overtaken by an unarmed crowd.

We were an agrarian frontier society. We sometimes needed to protect ourselves from varmints, bears and cougars and many used their guns to supplement their dietary needs by hunting.

Reason tells us that hand guns are not made for hunting and automatic weapons are not exactly sporting. These aren’t hunting guns…they are people killers.

Will there be any action in the US like there was in Australia? No. There won’t be and most of us know it. Why? Because we are not really a free people. We are a frightened people. We are imprisoned by our own paranoia. And our paranoia is fed by the vested interests of the gun lobby and an industry that continues to stoke the fire of that unreasonable fear. How frightened was George Zimmerman when he shot unarmed 17 year old Trayvon Martin? George Zimmerman says it was God's plan. Was James Eagan Jones, Andres Brevik and Jared Lee Loughner part of God's plan too?

I can’t blame the President. To take on gun control would be the kiss of death to his political career. But I can blame us. We are as helpless as we let ourselves be. People can shrug and say bad shit happens and nothing can be done. I don’t believe that.

There is that old saw…that bad men do bad things because good men do nothing.

Let’s get rid of the gender bias.

Bad people do bad things because good people do nothing.

Why in the hell does a modern civilized society feel the need to be armed with assault weapons? What kind of society lives in fear of their neighbors, their government, themselves? A civilized society protects the innocent. It doesn't shrug its collective shoulders and say "Shit happens" or "It was God's plan".

On Friday about 300 people went to a cinema for a night out to see a Batman movie. Many had been waiting expectantly. They were excited. At least twelve of them are now dead, others were severely wounded. They were innocent and our gun laws did nothing to protect them. A person with a gun did nothing to protect them. A person with a gun killed them.

So please don’t tell me nothing can be done and no one is to blame. It will happen again and again and just like Tucson and just like Columbine we will blame computer games, madness, parenting, cinema, Peter Pan and the Lost Boys and God's plan...but we won't blame our own paranoia...our own apathy...our own indifference and we won't blame guns enough to do anything about them.

Open Letter to Senator Feinstein re: Julian Assange

Sun, 1 Jul 2012 20:07:45 -0400

Dear Senator Feinstein,

I am a registered voter of San Francisco.

I am now retired and reside in a small community in New South Wales, Australia. I have always been a strong supporter of the Democrat Party and I continue to exercise my right to vote as an American Citizen.

I cannot tell you how disappointed I am after having read your statements regarding the extradition of Mr Assange today in the Sydney Morning Herald. Yes the information released by Mr Assange is embarrassing to the USA and so it should be. We have witnessed horrors that raise serious questions about the behaviour of our troops and our government. Is it not the key role of the Fourth Estate to provide the truth to the American public and indeed, the world? Is not transparency essential to the maintenance of a healthy democracy? We cannot excuse or condone the cover up of a helicopter gunship chopping down innocent civilians on the streets of Iraq by sweeping it under the carpet of classified information.

How can the American people address the shortcomings of our military's and government's actions if we are not aware of them? We become a better nation, a better people and a better society by addressing our mistakes not by ignoring them and pretending they never happened.

Government rightly expects our citizens to pay their fair share in taxes, abide by the laws and support their country. Government expects our citizens to be accountable and government holds them to account when they are not. But as citizens we are also accountable for holding our government and our military to account. The government and the military are not held to account when they hide their mistakes and wrong doings behind a Wall of Secrecy and punish those who expose them. This is a dangerous practice much more akin to the actions of a Despotic Dictatorship than a free and accountable Democracy.

The U.S.A's current stand on this issue aligns itself with the horrors of the Patriot Act, Detention without Due Process, Water Boarding and phone tapping. As a Democrat I voted for a change from these draconian policies and practises implemented under the Bush Administration. Ms Feinstein I am disappointed in your words and your actions on the Assange issue. I am disappointed by the role assumed by the Intelligence Oversight Committee as a watchdog of cover ups.

We are becoming an embarrassment to the rest of the world and a free and open democracy in word but not in action. Transparency, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, become little more than empty rhetorical terms if we are not prepared to defend them even when they embarrass us.

Sincerely Yours,