26 May 2010

The one where this little piggy went to market

Almost everything seems to be left up to the professional teachers in Korea.  Today HomePlus was busy with children as adults (that I assume were teachers) escorted them through the store.  All the children had little baskets, though the adults chose the items for them to put in their baskets.  I wanted to ask what was going on, but I knew better.  Whoever I asked would simply stare at me in horror, collect him/herself, then smile and scurry away.  It's the usual response I get when I ask questions here.
Was it a shopping lesson?  A PR moment for the store?  I will probably never know.

It's probably good to be taught how to shop.  My learning came with the money I pilfered from the usual locations of loose change in the average home: sofas, end tables, mother's purse, loose change spent frivolously at the dime store on plastic cars and dart pistols. I'm not a good shopper.  Usually, it's in and out a single store to be done with the burdensome deed.  Maybe I should have tagged along with the children today and learned just how shopping should be done.

17 May 2010

The one where some Aussie uses a naughty word


I grew up in a home where only one person was allowed to be outspoken, and that one was defiantly religious. Any questioning or opposition to the evangelical cause was met with ridicule, scorn, screeching hatred, a flat hand to the side of the face, or a combination of any or all of these.

Religion cannot stand criticism for obvious reasons. It has no foundation. It has no solid composition. It exists only in the minds of people who simply choose to believe things that someone else has presented to them, whether they be presented face to face or presented in some medium like literature or a broadcast. To criticize religion then is to criticize the very minds of the religious. Nobody likes his intelligence questioned or her logical fallacies pointed out, but since religion is not intelligently defensible and it is fundamentally illogical, there really is no choice in the matter.

We have witnessed with our own eyes how religion can make people deranged. It can lead to the murder of physicians in women's clinics because some religion believes that a zygote is a human being. It can lead to the spread of incurable diseases because some religion believes that sex for pleasure, even with one's own wife, is a sin. It can convince uneducated men to commit murder-suicide because some religion believes killing non-believers is a virtue. And the religious always respond with, "But those are the extremists!" No, they aren't. These are the people who simply believe what their religion tells them and act upon it in good faith. They are not wild-eyed crazies; they are the faithful.

The so-called "new" atheists are speaking plainly and adamantly in the uphill struggle to help lift the world from the dark ages of religion. We ought not be children afraid of the terrors of life. We have no business reaching our arms to the sky hoping that some superman might intervene in our distress great or small. The evils of earth are our own doing, not superman's. That knowledge alone should compel each of us to awake from the slumber of religion's mind-numbing narcotic and lend our hands to the work of repair that lies before us.



09 May 2010

The one where I hang my hat

Here is the longing to "go", whatever that means to the one who yearns.  Pepper just wants to go outside.  I just want to go home, though men like me really have no home beyond the proverbial hat rack.  The life each person lives reflects his philosophy.  My life, like yours, grew from an understanding of the nature of the world, the nature of life, and what I perceive to be my place in it. 

The animal Man seems torn between what He came from and what He will become, and this struggle plays itself out in each human being on every day as we make our life choices.   I don't believe Man has a "destiny" that is prescribed by a god or even by Nature itself.  To think that Man as He is now is the epitome of life's evolution is too arrogant for even me to believe.  Life on Earth should continue for many millions of years more, and what is to come we will never know.  Life arising out of inanimate matter may or may not be common in the universe, but we do know it can happen, because here we are.  Life is, therefore, a naturally occurring event in this universe that is tied inexorably to the fabric of the universe. 

Life, all life, everywhere, arises from the matter of the universe, which means that all life is one life no matter where it appears or in what form.  I cannot make the separation between my life and your life, because you and I are the same life.  That doesn't mean I can make no distinctions between the many examples of life around me, but it does lay on me a weighty responsibility to be fully aware that all life is part of me just as much as I am part of it.  That responsibility is to see the consequences of my actions on others, to discern the greater good, to acknowledge in my actions that 'self' is not a real concept despite the convenience of the terminology. 

01 May 2010

The one where it sticks in my craw

When you live and work in a foreign country whether long time or short, after a while, the paranoia eases, and you stop carrying your passport everywhere you go.  Given enough time further and you eventually stop worrying about having your "green card" on you all the time as well.  Yes, it is a law that foreigners must carry their official ID at all times, but in the 13 years I have lived in Korea, the only people that have ever asked for it are the banks when I'm wiring money to the States and the immigration people when I'm coming and going from the country.  I just came back from a jog in the park, and it occurred to me that I hadn't had any ID on me at all that whole time.  My first thought was, "What if I had had a heart attack and nobody knew who I am?" Then I thought about what if I was a brownskin in Arizona.  Here in Korea, the police would probably just take me home where I can produce my ID, and everyone's happy.  Would the cops give a brownskin me the same benefit of the doubt in Arizona and escort me home where I could prove that I am legal?  My guess is I'd have to sit humiliated in a precinct hall, get fingerprinted and charged with the crime of having no ID on my person while jogging.  A crime for not carrying ID-- who would have ever thought such a thing could happen in the United States?

The new Arizona law is not going to stop the flow of slaves and criminals into the State.  It might catch someone here and there, but if the cops don't catch "enough", when will the organized raids start on factories and farms to catch the illegals who are working and contributing to the Arizona economy?  Illegals who are doing jobs that you and I would never do are not the problem.  The law makes no distinction between a hard-working illegal and the others, the slavers, the smugglers, the common criminals.   The law that Governor Brewer signed will not make any resident in Arizona safer or his job more secure.   Security can only come when the international border is attended to by the only body in the land that has the authority to do something, the United States Congress.  Enter the hypocrite Republicans who rant and rave about "reform" in front of the TV cameras and yet vote in Congress against measures toward that very reform.  Maybe there is a bright side to Governor Brewers decidedly illegal behavior, and that is those cockroach Republicans are seen scurrying around now that the light of public attention is upon them.