War on Christmas? About Damn Time.

                                                            War on Christmas? I'm in.
                                                               Christmas is Killing Us

   So earlier this week, the venerable John Stewart of The Daily Show called FOX News out on their latest crusade like 'story' 'The War on Christmas'.  There 'Cover Story' was of a Nativity Scene no longer being allowed to be displayed in a public park in California, as it was secular.  Therefore, Christmas is under assault. Stewart's main point was that FOX News has rolled out this dead horse so often over the past five years' Christmas seasons, that not only has it been beaten to an unnecessary red, white and gangrene pulp, but who the hell are they kidding?  Stewart goes on to point out how lengthy and in your face the entire season has become, so much so that even Thanksgiving is no longer safe from the rampant materialism Christmas instills, so that Americans are actually limiting their Thanksgiving plans, working around them to shop more.
     Despite that stores start putting up Christmas decorations the day after Halloween, that Santa Claus is emblazoned on everything from soda cans to fast food packaging for two months, or that Christmas music is shoved at us in every elevator, waiting room and department store for six weeks, we are supposed to imagine that Christmas is under threat?  When was the last time you couldn't get a shopping bag that wasn't covered in Kwanza colors?
    As Mr. Stewart said 'Christmas has become so big that it's eating other holidays!'
    During what has since become known as 'Black Friday Weekend' as opposed to 'Thanksgiving Weekend', there were numerous displays of the type of behavior that unabashed consumerism brings out in people.  Men and women trampling each other for twenty dollars off video games, threatening murder on each other to get to the marked down televisions, outright brawls over who was in line first.  Often times these incidents occurred in front of the children that many of these shoppers use an excuse to buy things during these smorgasbords of crass materialism.
     Which brings me to my main point about Christmas and this supposed 'War':  FOX News has the right idea.
     We need a war on Christmas.  Or at least, a revolution, because Christmas is fucking evil.  An insidious, methodical, horrifyingly real evil that would have any Death Metal fan quaking in fear if they realized the truth.  A truth that is all wrapped up in pretty packaging with a big bow to distract everyone.
      Before I go into greater depth, I feel it is important to state that at one point in my life I was one of the season's biggest supporters.  In fact, between the ages of 13 and 17 I would enter a host of Christmas story contests each year and use the money to buy presents for friends and family.  Christmas at Edaville Railroad are some of my fondest memories.  Also, Christmas is my mother's birthday, so the season holds special significance for her, and I always make an effort to do something for her, just for her, on that day.  For that reason, December the 25th will always have a fondness for me, as day to celebrate and be grateful for my Mum.
      But the rest of it needs to be burnt to the ground.  Seriously, this shit needs to GO.
      First off, Christmas is the earliest lesson in hypocrisy Americans instill into their children.  You tell them it's to celebrate Christ's birth, and if not directly for that, then many non-religious parents often tell their children 'it's a nice tradition.  Then there's the 'Casual Christians' who do Christmas and Easter, maybe go to the local Christian church for a baptism, christening or whatever, they also will invest just as heavily into decorations and present buying as more devout Christians.  And even if you are a devoted Christian, you go along with it all, despite that there is no basis for Christmas in the Bible, no Santa Claus, that the holiday was usurped from the pagan ritual Saturnalia, where the Tree represents Male Virility and the Phalus, all as a means of attracting Pagans to Christianity, since obedient Christians were far easier to control through fear and promise of reward than unruly, nature worshiping Pagans.  So the first hypocrisy is that children observe their parents putting all this effort towards a religion that at all other times isn't that important, or their devout Christian family eagerly hijacking a hodgepodge of other cultures' and religions' aspects and claiming them as their own in the name of Christ's birth.
      Then there's Santa Claus.  The most common lie American parents tell their children.  Now, just think about this for moment:  Santa Claus isn't an imaginary friend that children come up with on their own as they explore their developing creativity.  It's not some healthy exercise in imagination.  Parents tell their children the myth as a way of getting them to behave through the process of reward or punishment.  As side notes there are sentiments like 'tis better to give than recieve' and 'its the thought that counts' but those are mere drops of charity and selflessness against an ocean of greed and materialism.  Christmas is not about the act of caring for one another that Christ stressed above all else, it's about getting stuff.  Don't believe me?  Give your 8 year old a bunch of receipts for all the donations to starving children in Africa.  See how well that goes over.  Try it on your spouse or significant other if you want to see the same reaction diffused through more complex, adult prisms of psychology.  With few exceptions, the more someone claims to love Christmas, the more pissed off they are when you don't give them what they want.  That's the second hypocrisy, we tell our kids as they're being raised that money and possessions don't matter while we devote six weeks of the year towards the complete opposite.  
     Christmas in America is about buying stuff for other people, expecting to get stuff from other people in return.  This is not charity or spirituality.  This is commerce.
      So by the time kids are old enough to figure out that Santa isn't real, they're so used to all the presents and food and celebration associated with Christmas, they don't really care they've been lied to and indoctrinated into a system that will turn them into the same thing as their parents:  People so obsessed with vicariously reviving their own Christmas memories that they eagerly instill and inflict them on their own children.  So the cycle continues, growing rapaciously as each generation tries to make Christmas even  more fabulous for their kids than they remember ever having.  That's the third and most insidious hypocrisy:  Even after you realize what a scam it is, you're so addicted to your memories of it, you feel like you're denying your kids of something if you don't reproduce and or exceed your own Christmases. 
       Then there's all the trimmings.  Christmas music starts earlier and earlier on radio stations every year, and do you know why?  Because the mega corporations that own them don't have to pay for as many (if any) DJs on the air.  Machines just blare out what used to be special songs (because you only heard them for a little while around Christmas when I was a child, Christmas music played in stores and on the radio for maybe two weeks before the holiday) so that by the time December even arrives, most of us ready to slice up Frosty's Magic Hat, skin Rudolph for venison burgers and burn down Winter Wonderland.  We are inundated with this shit not out of festivity, but because it saves Clear Channel and their ilk a shit ton of money.
       Oh, and all that pretty paper?  An environmental travesty.  In Germany, where the tradition of wrapping presents began, wrapping paper is now all but illegal.  To offer a gift wrapped present at Christmas is a major faux pax, due to the insane amount of waste all the plastic and mylar bows, ribbons and chemical laden paper produces.  Factor in all the old electronics and outdated products getting tossed along with the materials going into the new models, and Christmas racks up a carbon footprint every year that dwarfs the worst environmental disaster in history:
       The BP oil spill resulted in a roughly 4.6 million pound carbon footprint.
       Christmas 2011 left a 69.7 million METRIC TON footprint.
      All the traffic to buy stuff, all the electricity for lights and displays, all the food that we don't need to eat, all of that adds up, fast.  And it gets bigger every year.  
       Many people have fond memories of Christmas, myself included.  Many of us think of our Grandparents and spending time with family, snowmen and bright starry nights with crisp snow and smoke rising invitingly from chimneys.  Charlie Brown and Linus telling us the true meaning of Christmas while the Whos sing and the Grinch grows a heart and Rudolph finds homes for the Misfit Toys.
        That's what we want to believe Christmas is.  But I'm sorry.  It's not.
        Christmas got taken over.  The twentieth century saw it bought and sold, then repackaged and resold to 1st World families as something so precious and important, that other holidays had to take a back seat. Forget about Thanksgiving, go shopping.
        Because if you don't buy that hunk of plastic and metal assembled by a near slave in a distant country, wrap it up in expensively dyed carcinogenic paper, and then throw all of that excess away afterwards while you get fatter on the couch, well then... you've robbed your family or kids of something precious.
        Christmas is the sort of thing that renders all the good you might do, all the recycling, all the low energy appliances, all the donations you make to feed the hungry (pointless when you make a glutton of yourself) or even the ones you make during the holidays (The Salvation Army is a faith based organization that seeks to make gay marriage and abortion illegal, in case you didn't know) utterly insignificant.  Christmas is justifying strangling the planet and programming your children to do the same because society and the media have sold you the idea that it's all okay if done in the name of Christmas.
         So okay FOX News, I wasn't going to, but if you want to declare a 'War on Christmas' I'm all for it.  I still like the idea of Revolution better though.  Make it more about seeing and being with your loved ones than buying them shit.  Truly think of others, make the effort to donate to the Charities you believe in, not the ones hanging out in front of Best Buy.  Wrap your presents in paper from around the house, a gift wrapped in a paper bag that you can even decorate yourself, tied with a reusable and gorgeous cloth ribbon and a sprig of holy will be far more memorable than that 3D Santa paper with the disposable bow.  Maybe help out a shelter to remind you of how much you already have.  Make Christmas mean something again.  Something that the guy who it's supposed to be about would approve of: caring about other people, the planet, not just instant gratification for you and your kids.
        Happy Holidays.
   
         LTJHP, out.

     Welcome to Mens Pulsus, I Give You Fair Warning That You Probably Don't Want To Be Here
                                                                                &
                                                   The Only Reason I Enter The Lottery

          Welcome to Mens Pulsus, latin for 'Mind Blow'.  I'm going to start off with a warning to any who aren't familiar with my brain and its workings that you almost certainly don't want to read or think about anything I have to say here.  If you have or want children, if you believe in the power of positive thinking, if you have faith in humanity... this is not the place for you.  Leave now.  Unless you actually want to undo your attachment to any of the above.
            I'm serious.  This is a blog for bitter, angry and outraged intelligent people who have no illusions about what's going on in the world.  If American Idol makes you want to shoot the television, if Christmas songs inspire daydreams of going on shooting sprees in malls, if  the concept of The War on Terror makes you slap your head hard enough to leave a bruise (It's insane, when you think about it, what halfway decent nation needs to actually declare that?!  Isn't that a fucking given?  Declaring a War on Terror is like making a huge announcement that 'We Are Not For Bad'), this is a good place for you to be.
           This blog will chronicle a variety of things, ranging from politics, socioeconomics, environmentalism, cultural observation and other worthy intellectual pursuits... to over analyzation of the most trivial, fanboy obsessive aspects of dorkdom regarding movies, video games and comic books.  Overall, it will primarily be things that piss me off, occasionally interspersed by events and people that actually make me think twice about the doomed lot of the human race.
           And that's something else to keep in mind before you check in here now and then:
           The human race is doomed.  Within my lifetime, I expect to witness if not the actual downfall of the species, then at least its beginnings.  This will be a central theme in almost everything I write here.  Occasionally, the human race surprises me and I ponder if maybe there is hope...
           Then I remember that more Americans know who Honey Boo Boo is than Nicola Tesla.
           I should also make it clear, that I am not well versed in the workings of the Interweb.  I imagine that this blog thing looks pretty piss poor to start, and in fact, I'm not even sure how to get back to this little digital corner of cyberspace, so bear with me if this thing isn't up to anyone's visual standards.  But what the hell, it's a free blog service supplied by Google, designed in mind with the ultimate goal of collating market data on myself and whoever reads this while shoving advertisements at us every chance they get.  Maybe if this thing takes off, it'll look better and seem less like an angry rant of a bitter loner and more like an intelligent and entertaining web periodical.
          Which brings me to my final points of information:  Why and when?  The why of this thing comes from the fact that I often comment on a variety of online sites, from facebook to funnyjunk, and quite often, those comments get an enormous amount of 'likes' or 'thumbs up' and spark whole new levels of debate and discourse.  So I figured that I might as well try striking out on my own, why the fuck not?  As to the when/how often I will post on this thing, I'm not really sure.  I have no plan vis a vis that regard, for now I'm just gonna do it when I feel like ranting...(anyone who knows me just rolled their eyes and thought '...so every fucking day, asshole?').
           So we'll see how this goes.  If you read all of this, thanks, and below is some actual food for thought that is an example of the sort of thing I'll be posting on a regular basis.
           Pax Vobiscum,
           Larken Tucker James Harpin Philbin.



                                                 The Only Reason I Enter The Lottery


         A long time ago, when I was a freshman in college a friend of mine described entering the lottery as 'paying the stupid tax', and that has always stuck with me.  It's a brilliant analogy, because believing that you will ever win the sort of money that 'winning the lottery' implies is incredibly stupid.
         It is in fact more likely for you to harness telepathic powers of levitation than it is for you to win millions and millions of dollars.  I'm serious.  Look it up.  According to statistics and the theorems of probability, you literally are more likely to make a small object hover in the air with your mental prowess than choose the winning numbers in a large stakes lottery.
        And yet... it happens.  It has to. Eventually, the numbers involved get so ridiculous that it becomes impossible for some lucky twit somewhere not to have the digits of those free falling balls selected at random on their chit.  (What is the deal with that word, by the way?  It sounds like some horrific parasite that reproduces in your body hair.  As in: 'Did you see that guys' fucking forearms, all those bumps?  He's got a fucking chit infestation, for sure.')
         In fact, I have a good friend who won the lottery (We'll call him Brian... shit.  That really is his name.  Sorry, Brian.  But it's not like anyone's reading this thing yet anyways) .  He won I believe, two (2) million dollars paid out over a fifteen year period or so.  After taxes it came to I think just over a million, and he's been enjoying payments of around $48,000 or so every few months for the past decade and a half.
         Brian will be the first to tell you it ruined his life.  He'll also be the first to tell you that he was idiot about it too.  In addition to his ambition partaking of a Chlorox cocktail, he was overly generous with his friends and women, spending most of the money on becoming one of the most dedicated Allman Brothers fans in existence.  He has followed them for years, spending gobs of money on backstage passes, travel expenses and partying.  His skills on the guitar are quite impressive, as is his guitar collection, but other than that, his winnings have afforded him little more than years and years of regret.
         Now, many will argue that Brian didn't win that much money, and by comparison to some of the mega jackpots spawned by inter-state drawings like Powerball, he won just enough to have a good time, that if he had won hundreds of millions of dollars he'd be all set no matter what he did with it.  Others would say that even a relatively modest regular cash inflow like that should have been used to start a successful business, and he's an idiot.  Brian would simply say he wished he never won it all.
        I offer a different outcome of winning a massive amount of money, and the only reason why I bought a Powerball ticket in today's huge drawing of three hundred plus million dollars:
        Give it all away.  All of it.  Do not spend a single cent on yourself.
         Help your friends and family.  Make sure the ones you care about are taken care of.  The rest?  Give it all away to a charity of your choice.
        Why?  Is it some altruistic sentiment that money is the root of all evil, and that it will only make you as unhappy as Brian often finds himself?  
        Of fucking course not.  This is reality, not a fucking Disney movie.  Suddenly having a shit ton of cash to do whatever you wanted to on this planet would be amazing.
        That mentality is also what's killing this amazing planet.
        You pretty much already can do whatever you want, at least within legal constraints.  You just have to put more effort into it than shelling out your dough for something so improbable that it might as well be impossible.  But you, and we as a culture also have to examine the fantasy of being rich, of having all that money, and what exactly is wrong with it.
       The stagnant economy that still bogs down America and the rest of the world is due to the greed of people who place all value in being rich.  A handful of men and women used the greed of the rest of the populace to make themselves even more rich.  And that's all that comes of this obsession 1st world nations have with wealth and spread to other socioeconomic spheres of our world.
       We tell our children that money isn't what's really important, then heap humongous pressure on them to excel in school or sports, not because we value intelligence or ability, but because we want them to be rich.  Parents say 'I just want my kids to have opportunity', and that's fucking bullshit.  You want your kid to be as successful as possible so you A) Look good to other people, B)Tell yourself that you raised them right, C)Don't have to worry about them being poor themselves and possibly living off you more than you'd like.  
       In every single aspect of life, 1st world nations and cultures subtly emphasis the importance of wealth while pretending they aren't.  That hypocrisy ends up as a psychological discordance that haunts and hounds people throughout their life.  It's why the rich always want more.  Because all of their wealth hasn't made them happy, so clearly they have to get more.  And anything that gets in the way, whether it's oppressing workers, devastating the environment or ripping off huge amounts of people, its all justifiable.
        The mentality that making money is what matters the most is what is killing this planet and the human race.
         When the lottery builds up to some ridiculous level, I do buy a ticket, I am guilty of feeding the machine.  But I tell you here and now, that I only do it in the hopes that I could give every last cent away and hopefully get the chance to go one some talk or news show and repeat what I've said above.
         And given what I said earlier about probability, and the likelihood of actually winning?  By the those same mathematics, I'm not the only one hoping to win for those same reasons.
          Pax Vobiscum,    
          LTJHP, out.