Sep 072007
 

*originally printed in Red Shtick Magazine – September, 2007 (pdf)
As we go about our daily lives, we are given to forget the things that make our daily lives possible. Part of the reason that we live in peace and comfort is the fact that billions before us died, so they take up less space and generally cause less trouble. Many of them died from natural causes, but others died from supernatural causes, like being killed by some a–hole.

Human life and civilization depend on the death of human beings, so as civilized people, we must cultivate a balanced and moral understanding of the value of human life and death. We must strive to be enlightened humanitarians while still satisfying the need for some people to be dead. Nature will certainly satisfy some of this need, but we are industrious creatures, and to grow and expand, we must provide for ourselves.

Our needs as human beings are only met when we have power over the life and death of other human beings. To protect our right to fulfill this need, we protect our right to bear arms with passion and ambition. In a technologically advanced society, the only way for a population to protect itself is with inexpensive and readily available weaponry. To maintain social equality, the ignorant and lazy must have the right to easily purchase powerful firearms to protect themselves from the hyper-educated intelligentsia and their homemade electro-laser cannons.

Handguns are a simple and efficient equalizer. Handguns give power to the weak and weak-minded: real power, not like the pen, voting, knowledge, or any of that crap. Small, light, concealable, and fun, handguns allow any man, woman, or child to intimidate, maim, or kill as nature intended.

With total equality achieved through mass armament, we must still protect human life and encourage people not to kill each other unnecessarily. Modern civilization has created a mechanism to protect human life from rampant cycles of violence and retribution. The solution is as simple as the problem: Kill people that kill other people. We do not apply this solution indiscriminately; we reserve capital punishment for the most heinous offenders and people we need to kill to prove a point.

Capital punishment should be considered analogous to antimurder or unmurder. It is as antimatter is to matter. The two are tangible and real but annihilate one another, releasing extreme forces. Capital punishment acts as unmurder by discouraging murder while effectively canceling its overall effect on society.

Because of strong unmurder legislation, we have a much lower net murder rate, if we calculate murder and unmurder together. If we include those killed in police raids or by prison rape, we have mathematically eliminated murder in our society.

This mathematical balance is threatened by the growing popularity of suicide. It is especially attractive to those enduring extreme suffering who are so very close to a natural, moral, and legal death.

Suicide is analogous to double murder. It counts as the deaths of both a victim and killer, but it cannot be reconciled by retributive unmurder. The only way to discourage suicide is to legislate its immorality and severely punish those who assist in the process. State-mandated punitive death should be the only legally permissible form of death available to those who aren’t already dead or going to be.

We have the tools to kill each other and the laws to kill each other for doing that. If we apply them wisely, we can maintain a civilized and moral understanding of life and death.

Compassion for all human life is the true measure of our moral values. We are a great people, and the way we run our society today will teach our grandchildren’s grandchildren the value of human life and show them the path to the future. When they arrive at that future, they will appreciate that we are dead and take up less space and generally cause less trouble.

Sep 072007
 

*originally printed in Red Shtick Magazine – September, 2007 (pdf)

Science solves problems and gives us the answers to questions. We ask questions when we want answers. When nobody asks a question or has a problem, science should keep its pi hole shut.

Science has lots of legitimate work to do. AIDS and cancer need cures. We need renewable energy sources, such as more coal and oil. Science still has to figure out if the chicken came before the egg and why the hell that bird is still jaywalking for laughs. By all rights, science should have provided us a teleporter by now, and probably a holodeck, or at least that brain plug from The Matrix.

The study of fundamental science is losing its way and needs guidance. There are already countless books of physics research that nobody reads or cares about, and yet, every year, more are published. Some of this research has cost us billions upon billions of dollars and has achieved little more than becoming boring NOVA series. Physics is beginning to pull at strings that aren’t just theoretical; they have real purses attached to them – men’s purses.

The Superconducting Super Collider, or SSC, was a big-ass potato gun some physicists thought up and tried to build in Texas in the late ‘80s. They claimed their device might uncover some secrets of the universe. The concept was premature, and technical difficulties prevailed. The price tag was initially $4.4 billion, but jumped to $12 billion before the project was well under construction. The whole thing was scrubbed in 1993.

The initial cost was approved by Congress for the purpose of  showing the USSR how much smarter we are than they. After the pinko commies (note: “pinko” and “commies” both passed the Word spell-check) had their little breakup, we didn’t need to flex our brain-cocks anymore, so we put our junk back in our pants and went back to Los Alamos to build some wicked nukes.

Though the SSC had an initial goal that included a clear national security interest, the concept of the “big-ass potato gun of secrets” lives on in a more malevolent form. Like most malevolent things, it’s living in France.

An international consortium of mad scientists chose France to build a lair for their evil doings. Together they are building what has come to be known as the Large Hadron Collider. When completed in 2008, this massive crack pipe will smoke particles at a blinding 14 TeV. That energy level is sufficient to make an electron crap its pants. This theoretical electron-pants-crapping may lead us down a slippery brown slope of knowledge and understanding which could threaten our faith and beliefs.

Scientists blaspheme regularly. From Galileo to Hawking, they have said and done things that don’t jive with what we believe, and that’s not the way science is supposed to work. Science is magical, and it can be anything we want it to be, so long as we believe it in our hearts. Analysis and logic are our weapons in a war of faith, but today, science stands ready to fire on ignorant civilians.

The mad scientists in France claim that their big-ass potato gun may finally reveal the Higgs boson. This wacky little critter is said to be the carrier of the mechanism which gives all particles mass. For this function, it has been called the “God Particle.”

I am not a Catholic, but I went to a Mass once, and nobody there claimed to be God. I’m already boycotting the French, so I’m not buying it.

Science is in great need of direction. Nobody asked science anything about God, yet science is trying to explain the very act of creation itself.

We need science to do our bidding and only do stuff we say to do. We need teleporters, and lots of them. We don’t need a scientific community which thinks its intelligence and diligence gives them the right to do stuff we didn’t specifically tell them to do. We need a scientific community whose members know what’s good for them, or we’ll take their lunch money and flush their heads down the toilet. Make my teleporter already, you stupid nerds!