Wednesday, August 5, 2009

First Steps

So I've made it- either honestly or willingly - and after a dew days of reflection and a handful of tears, I think I've fallen in love with this lifetime all over again.

For those of you who aren't aware, I am currently living alongside 60 souls who've really got something to boast about (but they dont, because they're humble). Together in San Diego, we're educating ourselves on every aspect of a terrible war raging in Africa as a pre-requisite for the 3 months we will spend on the road, relaying what we've learned to anyone with ears to listen.

It's remarkable, as is the various facts and statistics that are being pumped into my brain during 13 hour days, but right now i'm trying to adhere to the humility of this all: how a single strand of compassion is threading us together and igniting an unforseeable change within. Today the filmmakers told us to "Fucking DREAM IT!" through a heap of laughter, but then reminded us to be humble in our steps. The magnitude of what we're about to do is exciting and deserves applause, but we're not to seek it or even acknowledge it. We've a job to do.

On more specific notes, so far I've:

- Routinely woke up at 4:30am without awaking my 8 roommates
- Realized that dudes in plaid = yumtown
- Learned that Americans are fat for legitimate reasons
- Discovered that there exists a brand of food called 'Krusteaz'
- Gone to In N Out and realized that it ISS as fantastic as everyone says
- Enjoyed the San Diego sunsets and deemed them the best and cheapest visual stimuli around
- Reminded myself that as surely as the sun rises, I will miss the comforts of home

Here's a little something for all of you to feast on for now:



Monday, July 20, 2009

So It Goes

It pays (in more ways than one) to have sweet friends, and I’m definitely not lacking. However there is one in particular who comes up strong when she’s not bullying me or leading me into forests largely occupied by swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitoes. Her name is Nada Alic.

After the Northern Exposure roadies skipped town on Saturday night Nada and I navigated our way to Oakville in a beast-of-a-pickup-truck and entertained several big ideas that very well could come to light over the next year or so. Then we slept in her haunted house and woke the next morning to go to a church that wasn’t a church.

…Let me clarify. This place is a massive auditorium called The Meeting House and the premise of it is that it is a place of worship for people who have a hard time going to a church where the congregation is half dead or waaaaay too upitty (see also, Pentecostal). The worship itself is about 15 minutes long, the sermon about 45 minutes, which is then topped and finished by a group QA period. And although I didn’t necessarily find the flesh of this particular sermon to speak to me, the guts of it certainly did and an interesting idea was tossed out:

Be willing to be the answer to your own prayers
.

It seems obvious, but I think when we acknowledge the sovereignty of God we sometimes get lazy in assuming that He will take care of all. I certainly do, and even when I feel like I’m being proactive there has got to be bigger strides I can take…

It was a neat weekend. I made the unfortunate decision to watch Twilight for the first time, and unfortunately I am now one of approx. 4, 567, 897 women who want to maul Edward Cullen to death. Rage.

Monday, July 13, 2009

All or Nothing

Exegetical : To read the Bible for what it says and to extract truth from it no matter what it says

Eisegetical : To take your presupposed ideas and read the Bible through that lens and conform the words to fit what it is you already believe

I Went, And I Stayed

Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve an incredibly unimportant announcement to make: I went to Warped tour for the first time this year, and it very well may be the last time I ever go. Tragic? Perhaps. But moreso than my lack of attendance for all these future golden years is the lack of talent being demonstrated at such a large-scale tour as this, this year. I mean seriously, who the hell deemed this (left, oh the irony) miss-ter as talented enough to play alongside such acts as Alexisonfire, Flogging Molly and Anti Flag? Even the Millionaires are more deserving, despite having botched their lip synching job during soundcheck. And I dare you to ask Frank Carter to disagree with me.

Anyway it wasn’t all bad: I got to catch up with a few pals that I haven’t seen for entirely too long and somehow managed to (fleetingly) weasel the attention of a fresh-faced Toronto boy who – even if only for a moment – put a little slice of a smile on my face. And there ain’t no harm in that. I also had the most pleasurable experience of seeing Bryanne drunk – like, realllly drunk – which included the awe inspiring sight of her having beer dribbled into her mouth via a canoed piece of cardboard off the floor. First time? Who knows.

I’m leaving soon, and the more I say that phrase the more apprehensive I get. I want this, and there’s a direction in my legs that’s coming from the certainty coursing through my veins. And yet it’s there: the promise that things will never be the same for me but exactly as they were when I left.

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Environmentalists are Racist

When racists – real racists – go off on a tirade, it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. They’re just so shameless and oblivious, you’re thinking, can this guy hear himself?

And when environmentalists go on about Al Gore and ‘going green’, and how there are ‘way too many cars out there’ and there are ‘too many of us’, I find myself cringing and praying there are no Mexicans in the room. I mean surely those bourgeois hippies know it’s primarily Mexicans who are behind the population surge in the U.S. They know you cannot have too many cars without too many people but they won’t say, “Stop breeding you fucking wetbacks!” so they just get mad at cars. When the greeners take it to a global community level, the ethnic bashing gets even worse.

“We should supply contraceptives to all those people in the developing world,” says Norman Myers of the World Wildlife Fund. “Population growth is directly involved in the pollution and the degradation of our environment,” adds Sierra Club head Carl Pope. “Well excu-u-u-u-ussse me for living,” says the Third World…

Environmentalists pretend they only hate gas guzzling SUV’s and other rich American white-people cars, but these only account for a tiny fraction of the cars out there. The mathematical truth is impossible to deny: To say there is too many cars in America is the same as saying, “there’s too many Mexicans in America.” And to say there’s too many cars in the world is to say there is too many non-whites in the world. Sounds like most tree-huggers would like to sink Africa, Asia and South America into the sea.

They kinda already tried. After reading a poorly researched book called Silent Spring that said bug spray DDT kills birds (it doesn’t), environmentalists decided the chemical must be eradicated. Eventually this ban became a worldwide phenomenon, and the Third World was prevented from using the greatest mosquito killer ever made. This lead to millions of deaths.

The tiny South African province of KwaZulu Natal, for example, saw about 50 deaths per year before the DDT ban – a number that shot up to almost 500 the following year. The director general of health services for Uganda called the DDT ban “contemporary colonialism” after watching 50, 000 Ugandan children die of Malaria in 2005. It is an epidemic that has spread across the entire continent, and the dead have the Green movement to thank.

Environmentalists were called out for this a few years ago, but instead of letting the relatively harmless DDT go free and save African lives, they came up with a new plan: nets. That’s right, nets. “Nothing But Nets” is an organization whose ironic mantra ‘Send a net, Save a life’ seems to laugh in the face of numbers – their Bandaid solution can’t even come close to saving the lives that DDT would.

Environmentalists enjoy killing Africans with a lot more than bugs. They also enjoy murdering them with that weird prank where you leave a paper bag of burning excrement in front of someone’s house and anonymously ring the doorbell. The British Department of International Development is pushing a program called ‘Development By Dung’ wherein Africans are encouraged to “not follow the same failed patterns of energy use” and use manure instead of diesel to power their communities. With all due respect to dung, it sucks shit. Lung damage is now second only to diarrhea as a child killer in Africa and it comes from inhaling poo.

Ashesi University’s Kofi Bentil has begged the First World elites to take it easy on all this emission fascism and let the African countries use real fuel. “Please, Europe and America, spare us!” he recently pleaded. “You can cut your own emissions if you want, but don’t tell us what to do. We really have much more serious and urgent threats to deal with.” All Africa wants is the luxury to use a coal-fired power plant to give them one fucking light bulb, and, possibly, a microwave in their homes. Start them with that and they could get healthy, then educated, then organized, then wealthy, then independent, and then maybe worry about solar panels and organic soy. “Nope,” say the environmentalists. “Stick to shit.”

Hardcore environmentalists don’t even want Africans to eat. In 1970 Norman Borlog won the Nobel Peace Prize for inventing genetically engineered food. He has lived in the Third World for decades and his work has saved an estimate one billion lives. However, white upper-middle-class American health nuts in organic cotton pants call his corn ‘frankenfood’ and insist we all go back to the chemical free farming. All of us. Even Africa. Borlog did the math and tried to explain to the greenies:

a) Genetically engineered food is not bad for you
b) We do not inject animal genes into corn. We look at, say, fish genes, and try to figure out how they work – but you can’t make fishcorn. Stop calling it Frankenfood. Especially when you’re talking to Third World politicians who want to make you happy.
c) Organic farming sounds great if you live on Venice Beach and only eat raw food (what a luxury!) but even if your ‘all organic’ plan could be executed, it would only feed four billion of us. That’s 2.6 billion short of the world’s population.

The environmentalists responded, “Fuck you Borlog.” Subsequently, in October of 2002, Zambia had a huge donation of genetically engineered food slapped out of their hands when the president was told it was poison. The country responded by starving. Hippies must have danced with glee when they saw the numbers of bodies pile up to the sky. But hey, this is only the beginning – Latin America has a good 40 million poor people that could do with some suffering!

Not only does the enviro-dogma of “Stop using so much stuff” equal “Enough with the immigrant babies in America,” but environmentalists’ love of bio-fuels says, “Fuck the Mexicans and Mexico, too”. By pushing everyone from gas to ethanol, they have jacked up the price of corn so high Mexicans can’t afford their own tortillas.

In 2005 a kilo of tortillas in Mexico cost sixty-three cents per pound. Today, thanks to the demand for corn now doubling as fuel, the price is over two dollars. Try telling a poor person their grocery bills are going to triple overnight. Sucks right? Look! They’re crying! For the first time in Latin American history, Ramen noodles are overtaking tortillas as the region’s most popular food. (This sounds like a joke but I am serious)

Ethanol is a great way for actors in California to feel better about driving their cars, but it makes poor people starve and it increases global warming and it destroys forests and it inflates food prices globally. Only an elitist racist would tell the Third World that the best way to power an engine is to burn food. Even in America this new demand has raised the price of everything – fifty per cent in some cases. Livestock eat corn, and it all trickles down from there.

When customers at Whole Foods on 14th St. in Manhattan were confronted with this huge hike in food costs, most responded with, "I can take it." These are the same people, by the way, who insist on banning trans fats and have forced the Third World to switch from supplying them partially hydrogenated vegetable oil to the much less cholesterol-y palm oil. This meant dedicating the rain forests in places like Borneo to trans fat-free farms that displace all the aboriginals there, as well as the wild orangutans, and the Sumatran rhinoceroses, and the pygmy elephants. It's a move that the World Bank recently described as "a species extinction spasm of planetary proportions." You would think these hippies would be satisfied with fucking all blacks and browns in the ass. But that still leaves a billion Asians who are just asking for it!

Though Bush is blamed for leaving China out of the Kyoto treaty, the truth is Gore and Clinton just sat on it until their term was up and it was George's problem. This still hasn't prevented environmentalists from taking out a few million Asians. Chinese people love pork more than Mexicans love tortillas. Shit, they love it more than starving Africans love eating genetically engineered food. Unfortunately, ethanol fanaticism has jacked the world price of corn so high that not even pigs can eat. That means in 2007 the price for live pigs went up a whopping seventy-one per cent. And that means poor Chinese starve.

All of Asia is feeling this pinch. Even Indonesians, who are way too Muslim to give a shit about pork, had a riot in Jakarta back in January because bio-diesel had jacked the prices of soybeans through the roof and nobody could afford to eat shit. (Actually, that's the one thing they could afford to eat but Africa had used it all to heat their mud huts).

So environmentalists want Africans to starve, they want Mexicans to stop breeding, and they want all of Asia to do both.

Now, it's possible that Al Gore's fans are just naive kids with their hearts in the right place. But I don't know, I planted about 150,000 trees from 1990 to 1995 and the only people I remember in the forest working sixty hours a week were African exchange students, Native Americans, working class locals, and a few broke students who never talked about the environment once. Once again, the ones screaming, "Keep it real" the loudest are the ones the most full of shit (metaphorically of course -- the ones literally the most full of shit here would be the Africans, unfortunately).

- Gavin McInnes
Death + Taxes Magazine

Descrimination Is Important

(Click photo for larger view)


Thursday, July 9, 2009

Listen

I am never going to have a twitter account. I will never ‘tweet’ my way through the day, and I simply do not care what you’ve been up to and what everyone else thinks about what you’ve been up to. Seriously, what happened to IRL conversations and the benefits of getting on the blower? Aside from last night, I can’t remember the last time someone called merely to talk, and more outrageously, I can’t remember the last time a dude flirted with me outside the confines of this computer screen and or my blackberry.

Grooooaaaannn. But anyway, I didn’t waste my “valuable” time at work to complain about these shenanigans, I came to tell you all about a specific musician who I think is absolutely brilliant.

*Disclaimer*: Yes, I would do questionable things to m/o with this young buck and perhaps that contributes to the reason I’m writing. However, I’m only 30% serious about that, and 70% serious about my recommendation that you make yourself an acquaintance.

He is none other than The Boogie Man Jordon Daniel. He used to front for a hardcore band from the West Coast called The Gorgeous but now he’s flying solo and doing it well: aka, independently, without being pigeonholed by the music industry, and for free. Who doesn’t like free stuff? Anyway, you can download his album HERE. I don’t support drug use at all, nor do I adhere to idolization, but whatever this man has going on…it works.

On another note and mainly due to the fact that I obviously spend most of my work day doing the precise opposite, I have stumbled across several IC Roadie blogs and now feel a solid mix of apprehension and excitement stirring up my belly. The excitement is for obvious reasons while the apprehension actually brings me back to my pubescent high school days: what if people don’t think I’m sweet in San Diego?

I mean, I’m pretty confident in myself and I know where my heart is, but I feel like there are aspects of my personality that might not jive well amongst certain people. For one, I DO have a bit of a tongue and I lay the sarcasm on thick, but furthermore, I’m not above making suggestive jokes and I’m keen on being a goofball more often than I am about being serious. And what of my identity? I’ve heard overeducated TV therapists say that teenagers are the most lost, but it’s in my twenties that I’ve found most of my most significant trials and tribulations…

I guess there’s always God. And as the days go by I’m finding more strength in my otherwise wobbly knees through Him. I only hope that I can feed off the good word others bring with them enough to gain ground because it seems everyday the devil and God are raging inside of me (thanks Brand New).

Phillipians 4: 6-7
Keep it brazen.