i need to ask the question, though.

if you could go back in time and kill jesus before he got famous, would you do it?

i'm going to get my ass kicked by a gang of angry bronies if i don't shut up, now.

it's worse than i feared.

it was a simpson's episode, making fun of twin peaks.

actually, i think that was twin peaks.

actually, i've had a lot of sugar and a lot of caffeine.

my silliness is proportional to my alertness.

this is why i must avoid cocaine.

i was looking for the video of henry the horse dancing the waltz. i've seen it. it exists.

but, instead, let us take a second to enjoy this absolute classic, before i move on:

but, then, if we can genetically engineer the unicorn, can we genetically engineer a god, too?

might we reverse and correct hume's fallacy, and derive is from ought?

or, are we just demonstrating the hard truth that so many of us don't want to come to terms with - that the concept of god is just a reflection of our innate desires and fears.

i've mused about this before, actually. why can't we create a bureaucracy that plays god and answers prayers? it would be dystopic in a sense, for sure. but, if i could write a letter to the ministry of wishful thinking and get a unicorn in return, i'd do it in a second.

could we genetically engineer a unicorn?

one that prances, in an idiosyncratically lovely, particularly unicorn-y way?

one that instinctively reacts to prokofiev, without the need to be taught?

well, step one would probably be to save the rhinos. we need the horns.

but, humans are known to grow horns from time to time, so there's nothing particularly implausible about splicing some rhino dna into a magnificent stallion, and calling that a unicorn.

justin, you better be looking out your window.

i'd half him expect him to show up to work on his first day with a basketball, though.

"i didn't show up to sit on the bench. you said you were putting me on the court."

language you'd be careful with if you overhead a judge say it:

i'm hitting the courts with a new set of rackets. wanna come? we'll meet in the ford lobby downstairs.

probably harmless.

and, yet.

i'm leaning towards tennis.

'cause, you know, the court system is really just a racket.

they should bring back merrick garland, instead.

or, is that his latest plan as a secret republican operative?

if he can get on the court, and declare a conflict of interest on everything, he'll effectively give the republicans an extra vote.

sneaky. as always....

it's daft. forget about it.

they're actually talking about putting obama on the supreme court.

if he declares a conflict of interest, does he get to go golfing?

or, do judges play tennis?

stated tersely: there's lots of things i think ought to be true.

but, none of those opinions have much of an effect on what actually is true.

so, yeah.

i'd fucking love to live in a world with unicorns in it.

but that's too fucking bad, isn't it?

actually, fuck parking the unicorn in the ceo's spot.

i'm going to ride my goddamned unicorn to ottawa, and we're going to storm the gates on parliament hill, and take the elevator up to the pmo's office, and we're going to have that unicorn take a shit in the exact chair that piere fucking elliot trudeau sat in when he wrote the goddamned constitution.

i will presume that unicorn shit is multicoloured, and consequently multicultural.

so, we can have the pastel worked into the upholstery.

and, we'll let margaret legitimately wonder whether she's having a flashback or not.

it's not a question of "wanting to live in a world without god".

frankly, it might be kind of useful if a god existed. maybe we could get her to fix the fucking infrastructure.

but, there isn't one. so, that's not in the list of options.

i mean, it's not like i have some hate-on against unicorns, either. i don't want to destroy the unicorns; i don't have a longing to live in a world without unicorns.

i'd love to ride a fucking unicorn to work, and park it in the ceo's spot.

but there aren't any unicorns. really. there just aren't.

it's all for the love of the flame.

so, yes, i do it for the sake of the troll.

but, i really do it for the kids. they need guidance.

do i sound like a conservative to you?

that's laughable.

but, i'm not a bourgeois liberal, either.

i'm a socialist - a communist, an anarchist. i'd argue i'm a real liberal. but, we can have that debate over beers.

that doesn't negate the reality that religion exists, and that a community may need to defend itself against it should it attempt to enforce itself on it; it's not an argument for pacifism, or a suggestion that we should look the other way.

what it is is a tactical consideration.

and a request to be proportionate and reasonable.

you have to bomb isis, because they're indistinguishable from nazis, and they'll kill you if you don't kill them first. you can't reason with a hungry lion, you have to defend yourself.

but, that's the exception, and, most of the time, the better approach is to try to convince them that their god doesn't exist and that their rules are stupid and not worth following.

i'm not apologetic about this.

it's a good question - can we just kill them all? would that actually work?

but, we need to learn from history. we've tried that. repeatedly. and, no - it doesn't work.

the lesson from history is that the best ways to get rid of religion are through education and wealth redistribution, not through violence and coercion.

and, that's a lesson any anarchist should see value in teaching.

if i thought it was possible to actually end religion with police state brutality, i might consider being pragmatic about it, much the same way that some people consider being pragmatic about stamping out certain political views they disagree with, while paying lip service to free speech. i'd be a hypocrite, and i'd accept it, but i might wonder if the outcome justifies it.

i know better.

it doesn't work.

i am aware of counter-examples where hateful religious groups have moved into neighbourhoods and targeted sexual minorities in such a way that warrants self-defense against the religious community, but, broadly speaking, attacks on religious people are not a productive way to move society away from conservative religious ideas and towards a post-religious secular liberalism.

i tend to have a hard time denouncing people that destroy religious property, under a "diversity of tactics" argument. i'm probably not going to criticize you too loudly for burning a church down, if that church is promoting an anti-queer ideology, which they essentially all do.

but, violence against people does nothing to advance the causes of anarchism or atheism. it's counter-productive. and, while i know that most of the violence occurring right now is intra-religious, it is something for those that oppose religion to always keep in mind and be clear about.

as a species, we've tried rooting out religion by force repeatedly, and, whatever you think of the approach, the fact is that it doesn't work. you have to convince them...

these periodic word errors. i wish i understood what the deal with them was.

i notice every once in a while that the size of the document has shrunk, and the reason is that the formatting has changed, and i don't know why that happens. but, i went through and tried to reconstruct it today, and the parts that came out of sync were the parts related to the conversations i had with the activists, like ESA, that i'm absolutely certain were cops.

i decided to try to rebuild the damaged file from scratch to see what would happen and i ended up getting a series of ram errors that shut the program down, which led me to reboot - which clears my ram. i still don't see any signs of infiltration.

but, what's going on?

is it just a hardware issue?

listen. i have everything backed up in several different places, and i take regular backups of these files. further, i have the document set to autosave every couple of minutes. so, all i had to do to undo the corruption, whatever it was, was find a recent backup and run a compare in notepad++ to a recent autosave. at the least, there's nothing missing. but, i'll have to verify that i didn't lose any additions, before i finish this up.

the level of data redundancy makes the premise of tampering with evidence in this manner highly improbable. 

i'm going to take the opportunity to stop to eat, but i should be done with the master document for december before i sleep, and would be done already if i didn't have to spend time making sure i didn't lose anything. i have everything updated except for some random html documents, which shouldn't be nearly as time consuming as before because there's only a few files.

as is broadly the case, this kind of bullshit is just a waste of time.

i can't keep you off my network, i know that. but, i assure you that you won't succeed in doing much that i can't undo, once you get in. so, we'll make this sisyphean, and hope you give up.

don't misunderstand me.

if there was a concert somewhere, i'd go, in spite of the date, rather than because of it.

but, i'm not going to get drunk because it's new years. that's fucking bourgeois.

actually, i hope you all get so fucked up tonight that you fall down the stairs and break your respective necks

happy new years.

just keep it out of my air supply, please. i've got shit to do.