squidbag

Thank You, Paris Hilton

And not just because every time I drop your name on my blog my hits for the day shatter shingles, but that's nice, too.

No, it's because of this: on a newsday that could easily have been dominated by wall-to-wall coverage of Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and the crowd of genetic backwater fuckheaded morons who call themselves a "culture" and who are, in fact similar to something one could grow in a petri dish, Paris Hilton is the trending news item getting all the hits.  And why?  Just for being Paris Hilton.

She got stopped in Vegas, tooling around with her latest dick attached to money, because weed smoke was coming out of the windows of the Escalade they were in.  Wait, it gets better.  When she whipped out her lip balm - because her lips were chapped; we've all seen the video - a baggie of coke fell out of her purse in front of the assembled lawmen.  She was arrested, handcuffed to a table for awhile, printed and booked, and like a character in a soap opera, turned loose to go home and watch Family Guy - possibly the worst punishment of the evening.

So this is what we know about America: Paris Hilton( who's famous for nothing) gets arrested and attention for being herself, and is still more interesting to Americans than Sarah Palin (who's famous for almost nothing) and Glenn Beck (who's infamous and ADHD enough to think that's cool) being themselves in front of a huge crowd of shithooks.  What does this mean for America?  It means I could give two-fifths of a fuck about the vast, overwhelming majority of people I see.  On the other hand, I finally know what Paris Hilton is for.

Glad that's settled.

Villains are Stupid

This is awesome. The only thing wrong with it is the reference to making time go backwards by flying really fast, which is what's wrong with the 1st Superman movie in total. That and Ned Beatty. It's from How It Should Have Ended, which has a lot more great stuff than just this.

Apparently, it has a 25 second sponsor message in front of it, which is less than awesome.  Sorry about that.

Disney Princesses

I have a small awesome girl living in my house.  She showed up a little over four years ago now, and she only likes this princess stuff tangentially, preferring instead to play mostly with  - today? Her doctor's dress up kit, some bowls and spoons in the kitchen, the swings at the park, the old school Barrel of Monkeys toy, some Connect Four, her Fisher Price Fun2Learn computer, Kisses the Bear and one of my tape measures, with which she's currently measuring my bed.  And also my leg.  She's sort of at a disadvantage for girly options since she lives with two guys who like Japanese game shows and comic books and a mom who has zero tolerance for the pink and frilly.  Because of mom, Disney Princesses aren't even on the radar.  Not because of me - I have no right to stand in the way of anyone's desire for character toys, having grown up in the era of comic books, He-Man, Star Wars, and most importantly for hours of strategic play laced with battlefield drama - G.I. Joe.

I don't particularly like the Disney Princess phenomenon, for three very important reasons - 1. it's a marketing gimmick, designed to make money, and nothing more.  So there's no natural outgrowth of support or desire for these characters, taken altogether; it's wholly manufactured.  2. it has to be abbreviated DP, which is not kid-friendly in any way, and finally, 3. it misrepresents the characters.  Instead of taking them each as part of a narrative, it throws them all in a pot and boils everything down to PRINCESS, the most mayonnaise message you can get from any of these characters.  So I refuse to take them as a group, choosing instead to pick apart the argument.  Like the Women in Refrigerators people (who I can go after later, if there's demand for that sort of thing), or lots of others: I want to agree with you, but if your argument allows interpretation, I get in there with my team of interpreters.  Who live inside my head.  Figuratively.  Whatever, I didn't need credibility, anyway.

In short, I will make decisions for my daughter about these princesses based on the messages I get out of these movies - and yes, I've seen this, and also this.  While amusing, (and almost certainly more to the point than my current endeavor) they don't tell the story like someone who has actually seen these movies.  With a child.  So here goes:

Jasmine (from Aladdin): I like Jasmine.  She's a product of a male-dominated culture who convinces her dad to change the rules after breaking many of them.  She has no use for tradition.  She forgives Aladdin for being a short-con artist because she loves him and thinks he has a good heart - and this is after he gets her into major trouble and then back out again.  Girlfriend's got a tiger for a pet, and holds her own without goofy screaming during the final confrontation.  I have no problems with Jasmine.

Ariel (from the Little Mermaid): I hate Ariel.  Fuck Ariel.  Ariel rejects her whole upbringing, culture, and species for lust and greed.  Ariel's a worse role model than Gordon fucking Gekko.  At least he doesn't sing pretty and act like something he's not.  Ariel's supporting cast are way more interesting than she is.  We do not own The Little Mermaid.

Belle (from Beauty & the Beast): Belle gets a bad rap.  She's a smart, bookish young woman living in a crappy little French burg surrounded by idiots and people who sing first thing in the morning.  You'd want out, too.  Belle sacrifices her freedom for her crackpot father, and is essentially kidnapped into a cult of monsters and furniture, where she gives a guy a chance even though he's hideous and intemperate.  He never actually abuses her, so she's not a "He-don't-mean-to-hit-me" person, she's someone who sees past appearances.  Belle's one of the good ones.

Mulan (from Mulan): I love Mulan.  Mulan is pure bravery.  Mulan's a cross-dressing, self-sacrificing warrior badass who hangs out with a dragon and a cricket and who saves the most populous nation on the planet by reinterpreting things her father says about "knowing one's place."  She knows her place: in battle.  Saving fucking China.  Mulan represents, and brings people around by her example.  I don't know why she's on this list, though. She's not a princess at any point during the movie, so I assume it's all about marketing.

Aurora (from Sleeping Beauty):  Sort of the archetypal princess to my mind - kind of a tool, a pawn to be manipulated by fairies and evil enchantresses, royal by luck, but not haughty because of it, due mostly to her life kind of sucking up to a point.  I don't remember Aurora having much of a personality, but she's kind of patsy - I don't approve.  Question your elders.  Like Mulan.

Cinderella (from Cinderella): There's some ambiguity here, depending on how you choose to read this film.  My read?  Cindy's tough under pressure, her life is fucked by the death of her father and the fact that all of her remaining relatives treat her like shit.  They wreck her stuff and treat her like dog mess on their shoes, and her only friends are barn animals.  She just wants to win the fucking lottery, man.  You have to be pretty lucky to have a Fairy Godmother in the first place, and also to live in a place where all the women apparently have monster feet.  She wants a break, just to get out.  And so she does, and marries the original Prince Charming.  What's his motive, that's what I want to know.  And why the hell doesn't that discarded slipper vanish when everything else does?

Snow White (from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs): Tool.  But makes the best of a bad situation, by becoming an indentured servant to a bunch of dwarf miners.  So that's a mixed bag.  Eventually, she's killed because she trusts a stranger with fruit (good lesson there - don't take shit from forest women, kids) and resurrected by a passing Prince.  Snow White's a plot device to make it so we get to see dwarfs.  That work song is awesome.

Pocahontas (from Pocahontas): Pros: Does NOT go off with the man at the end, is a noble life-saver and broker of peace between wildly disparate peoples.  Does not want the arranged marriage to the asshole.  Cons: Is victimized by her culture and talks to trees.  Meh.

Tiana (from Princess and the Frog):  While I have no wish to dis the first African American princess, I didn't see this movie, as I was informed by a friend that it contains a gratuitous good guy death, and I see plenty of that shit in real life without signing up to have it foisted upon me by Disney whilst I sit enjoying time with my kids.  Fuck that noise, I will be skipping P&tF.

I hope the breakdown helps, and I will happy to entertain any further opinions on this topic that fall directly into line with mine.

Cee-Lo Green

This is my new favorite video. This song's only been out for less than a week, and I know that eventually there will be some overproduced thing with people in it, and I won't want to know about it when it happens, because this video is too awesome.  Every now and again a song comes along that makes you happy, and this is, for me, one of those songs.

As a consequence, I have become obsessed with the works of Cee-Lo Green, and subsequently realized that I've been hearing him for years as part of Goodie Mob, Gnarls Barkley, and in the Kung Fu Panda soundtrack.  He's on a Pussycat Dolls track or two, some Common tracks, and seems to have worked with everyone at one time or another.

So now I spread the gospel of Cee-Lo.  And if you don't like it, well...

Bear Stupidity

I'm sure by now you've all heard the headline making account of the bear in Ohio who mauled a guy to death while he was out for his Thursday feeding.  Which I suppose he got, in a way.  This tale is rife with stupidity, with many stupid things being done or said by many, if not all, of the parties involved.  Here's a quick breakdown:

Sam Mazzola, pictured at left and exhaustively recorded by Wildlifepimps.com here, is stupid.  Opportunistic, estranged from the human race, lacking perspective and greedy, too, but definitely stupid.  Here is a man who claims to love the wolves, big cats, foxes, wolves, lemurs and yes, bears that he keeps in cages, but then also makes them wrestle drunken fucks for money, & exhibits them in their own filth.  Keeping wild animals at all is stupid, as anyone else with facial scarring and 2000 stitches would have learned on their own by now.  This moron is someone who does not take any more proper care of his charges than the law insists upon, and has been fined not only for improper care, but for allowing other doubtlessly stupid people into the enclosures with his wild, caged animals.  Sam had to force the bear back into its pen with a fire extinguisher, folks.  I don't know a lot, but I'm going to say that this is not standard wild animal handling equipment.  It seems that the greatest tragedy here was that the bear did not maul Sam Mazzola to death, going instead for Brent Kandra, who was feeding it at the time.

I'm not going to trash the dead.  But.  Brent is dead because he worked for Sam, which can be characterized, at bare minimum, as poor decision making, and because he chose to treat a wild fucking bear like a playmate and a friend, which is delusional.  It's a BEAR.  It probably was playing, at least at first.

Apparently, the Cleveland Office of the Coroner also has some stupidity issues, since its ruling on the cause of death is tentatively described as "sharp and blunt injuries to the body consistent with a bear attack."  Tentatively?  The teeth and claw marks & crushed tissue added to the nationwide media coverage of the act aren't enough for you?  What about the cops and first responders, or the shithead who owns the fucking thing confessing?  Wow.  Don't go out on a limb or anything.  Might be a bear attack.  You think?

Possibly, the coroner knows that Sam's got a bunch of shit he ought not to and doesn't want to limit himself on suspect animals.  I'll allow that possibility.  But watch your step, Cleveland coroner!

The State of Ohio's fucking stupid.  After taking Sam's licenses to show the animals away due to one or more of the above listed violations, they still allowed him to own the animals, presumably as pets.  In a residential neighborhood.  He has convictions in courts of law for illegal transportation and sale of wild animals, but he got to keep a bunch.  Imagine a coke dealer getting to keep all the illegally bought and sold coke after he got out.  Or fenced stolen goods. Bullshit.  And keeping these things, allowing it under the law, is really stupid.  A law that belongs in Texas or somewhere.

I don't approve of hunting for sport, but Sam's neighbors who are bitching about him in all the news stories were stupid not to have hunted him for sport years ago.  They could have fed his dead, dumbass carcass to the bears and wolves and headed this whole thing off at the pass.

And finally, Lisa Cornwell and Andrew Welsh-Huggins are stupid, too.  As the contributing reporters to the AP story, they are both responsible for the final lines therein: "Bear attacks in the wild have already killed at least two people this year. Federal wildlife officials in June tracked down and killed a grizzly bear suspected of fatally mauling a man in Wyoming. A grizzly bear mauled three campers in Montana in late July, leaving one man dead and two people with serious injuries."  How's this even remotely relevant to the story?  Those are bears out in the wild, doing what bears do, and this one's in a guy's backyard, in a cage, under a completely different set of circumstances, and a minimum of four states away.  I suspect we're trying to whip up some anti-bear frenzy amongst the readership, when really, we should be going with the "its inappropriate and stupid to keep certain kinds of animals in your yard" angle.  If you're not onboard with me, I would remind you of Travis the Chimp, and show you this.

A Question.

I'm going to address this primarily to American Evangelical Fundamentalist Christians, because they're the ones I see the most perpetuating the addressed behavior.

I realize, as does anyone else with ears and/or eyes in this country, that you have a number of things you object to, and think are sins.  You are lucky, and effective propagandists, to have many people agree with you.  I additionally realize that you do not acknowledge that your philosophy is limited in any way, choosing instead to think of it as truth, and due to this thinking, therefore assume that everyone is subject to your understanding (and any explicit or inherent consequences therein) of that conclusion.  Keeping these things in mind, it is logical to say that you are obligated to object to things that you think are wrong in your society, based upon your religious beliefs, and no right-thinking person would ever seek to abrogate your right to do so.  In short, I fully understand why it is that I see so much protesting of things you don't agree with, both in person and otherwise.

Here's my question, though.  Where do you get off being such dicks about it?  Is there a "Go and be dickhead God Warriors" passage in the Bible?  What chapter and verse do you quote to justify screaming at a pregnant woman on her way into a clinic?  How do you justify what can only be called hate language on your signs and placards?  Are you thinking that you can shame others into agreeing with you?  Aren't you supposed to hate sins without hating sinners?  More and more, over and over again, I see not just Christians I don't agree with, but ones who are, based on my understanding of Christ and his book, really bad Christians.  Hypocrites, being pissed, shouting epithets, being intolerant, and making fun of others.  Christ himself is often short with people, loses his temper, and even calls people names.  But I really don't recall him being a completely mean-spirited asshole at any point in your gospels.  And he would have the right: by your reckoning, he died for you, a cluster of pricks.  I mean, I guess you get more flies with honey, and all that, right?  That must be why he was so chill, for the most part.  Aren't you fucks supposed to lead by (his) example, and find a way to rail against that which you see is wrong in your opinion, fight for change without degrading others, screaming and yelling, and perpetuating outright acts of vandalism and violence?

And I realize it isn't all of you - any group of protesters is only representative, not all-encompassing.  And I'm not including people like the Westboro Baptist Assholes, either - just the standard, angry, regular-Joe mainstream Christers I keep seeing outside and in the news.

I can be nasty and mean, sure.  But I don't go around pretending to be something else.

The Kids of Summer

Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

As summer draws to a close, (Max's schoolyear started on the 6th) allow me to give you this little Animoto video of my kids over the Summer.

The Crossing Guard Lady

 The crossing guard lady: resolute, fortified

against the misty, morning rain, flat-palmed 

shows her red glove triangle of STOP to me.

A squat, squinting bulwark against traffic chaos,

a neon chartreuse beacon of order,

astride the intersection, all-seeing, beneath a flashing light.

With focused frown on face - determination,

she controls the speed and danger, reducing risk

her face a mask of concentration.

A duly vested agent of ordered change, 

the crossing guard lady (in her special gloves)

owns the crossroads every morning of the year.

(image from the Juneau Empire story archive)

Hairventure II

Yes, this is my second haircut post in less than four months.  You have to take your excitement where you fucking find it.  You watch your step, or I'll start blogging every haircut I get.  Shaddup.  Bitches.

I woke up last Monday with stupid hair.  Like 70's album cover interior stupid.  Between the tiredness of beginning "Back to School" all over again, figuring out the logistics of my freelance stuff, a somewhat ridiculous morning argument, jobhunting for something at night or on weekends, and a constant plan which runs on an infinite loop inside my skull for paying our outstanding IRS nonsense in September, stupid hair was really just one more thing than I could easily handle, so I stopped at Strip Mall Chain Haircuts so they could butcher my hair into manageable shortness before I went to the Post Office.  Seriously - all I wanted to be able to do was wear hats again.

After a 20 minute wait - during which my daughter assiduously avoided the older woman next to us who had plucked off all her eyebrow hair and drawn in eyebrows with one thinly curved parabola over each eye, producing the look of someone constantly startled - I was led to a chair, given the backwards dress, and had my hair competently chopped off into a squarish thing that works well with late August weather and hats.  As it turned out though, my stylist was some kind of zealot for the chop.  My hairstylist was Elie Wiesel, and every hair on my head had changed its name and moved to Argentina.  She scoured the globe, offering an eyebrow pluck - No, thanks - and beard trim - I'll get to it - before finally aurally raping my left ear with a pair of clippers.

First off - I'm not 90 fucking years old, and I'm not George "The Animal" Steele.  I don't have a unibrow, and the hair in my ears stops neither sound nor the approach of delicate souls, people with tracts, women or children.  I am not offensive.  Looking.  My beard gets scraggly, but piss off.  Second - and I'm adamant about this - before someone sticks a loud bladed appliance into a cavity on your head?  Well, they should ask before they do that shit.  I'm lucky Abby was occupied with toys.

"What the hell was that?!?"

"Just trimming ear hair."

"Did you SEE any f- ear hair?"

"No, we just do that.  Some people - "

"You know, I usually look to see if the grass is long before I cut my lawn.  I don't just swing a machete through the jungle with my eyes closed.  Why don't you just stick to the agreed-upon surfaces of my head that we discussed and wrap it up, please."

Thoughts?  Is that part of the thing now, she goes on a Search and Destroy for any hairs, anywhere, napalming them out of their 'villes with her clippers screaming "Ride of the Valkyries" and mowing down the bristles on my head in an orgy of follicular mayhem?  Or is this slightly out of the ordinary.  I do not mix well with others, and so may have missed a meeting somewhere along the way.

Crazy People

Most of the people I hear from have a brain disease where they blame what goes on around them on aspects of their religion; "must have been God's will," "it was the will of God," "if God were alive, He would have wanted it that way." Stuff like that, all the time.  They're everywhere, and often make the news.  Instead of choosing to consciously regard the happenings around them through the laboriously framed lens of an ideology that they have decided to impose, and acknowledging the influence of their own subjective filter before speaking, the "OPEN MOUTH/SPEW DOGMA" gear is heartily engaged; instead of thinking, reacting happens, and it really wouldn't matter a flaccid airborne intercoursal engagement except for the following facts numbered one and also two: ONE, people's basic human rights are infringed upon every time your faith is more important than they are, and TWO, people die because of this.  These are facts, and they are incontrovertible.  People die, all the time, because other people think it's more important to cleave to an internal emotional decision they made, namely, to suspend logic, instead choosing to believe in an invisible best friend who will kill you if you break his rules and don't love him enough.  Like playing a game with an armed, mean six year old who's drunk on grape cough syrup and who starts the game by handing you a three inch thick rule book, tells you to read it, then goes on and starts the game, that he made up, whilst you're on Chapter One, page one.  Of that thing he wrote.  

This is completely unacceptable, and yet.  And yet, I'm meant to accept it.  All the time.  I rankle.  I am expected to respect your beliefs.  I find this to be an unreasonable expectation.  It's simply not realistic for you to expect me to adapt and roll with the fairy story you yanked out of some ancient (or otherwise) scroll, book, pamphlet or website and "had faith" in.  Absolute drivel that you just chose to decide to believe in, based on no proof or facts, and then bring out into the world and use against others.  Un-fucking-fair.  Not all playing by the same rules.  Not by a long shot.  If I woke up one day with an unimpeachable belief that every sixth person I saw needed a smack in the mouth, It'd be a Wednesday.  How fair is that?  While you hesitate, I'll tell you that it's not fair at all, but it might give me a large amount of satisfaction.  Smells like religion, don't it?

It is now, I say unto you, brothers and sisters, time for us to rise up and start one of those "war on ____________" type campaigns, with ribbons and telethons and celebrities and shit, and stamp out religion wherever it may lurk.  Faith is okay, I guess, as long as you can keep it to yourself and don't use it on anyone else. And not to evaluate any real world situations, no using it for that.  And not use it too often, because it causes atrophy in the parts of your brain you'll later be needing for real actual decision-making about real world things.  Religion certainly served a function once upon a time, spurring certain aspects of civilization (like all the music and art, ooh, and credit-based remote banking - that's handy) but it's done, and now it just fucks with people relentlessly, beginning with the folks who submit themselves to be voluntarily fucked with, and who then turn around and fuck with everyone else.  And don't even get me started on the kids, people.  Raising a child in a religious environment in this day and age is a strictly non-intellectual exercise, and that's without invoking the child abuse inarguably tied up in Ashura, Mormonism, or being a Catholic.  Also irrational is arguing that your dogmatic rituals are good because they spur people to treat others decently and do good things.  Has it occurred to you what a sick, sad fucking commentary it is upon the human condition (there's that disease again) that fuckers have to be given the invisible pretend carrots of heaven and sticks of hell instead of being able to respond to the tangible, but orgasmically brief shot of joy that just being fucking decent brings?  I may be ill.

Don't believe religion is outmoded and making us sick as a people?  What about the ongoing conversation about whether a mosque should be allowed near Ground Zero?  Who could possibly give two-fifths of a shit what they build there, except that the city misses out on a bunch of tax dollars when the edifice is for religious purposes?  It wasn't ALL MUSLIMS who knocked down the towers.  The planes weren't nearly big enough to fit them all.  It was 19 guys and a fundamentalist organization of zealots, and if you want to outlaw those, I'm all over it.  I mean, granted - I'd also be all for restricting the construction of all mosques, everywhere in perpetuity if that meant, by extension, an eternal blanket moratorium on religious buildings of all kinds.  But stop, ye morons, the measuring of the God-Cock, and quiet down.  It's not a memorial to terrorists, and I bet if you scanned the list of 3000 9/11 dead, there's some Muslims in there.  This is not an all-or-nothing.  Fuck, what is the argument here, even?  Debra Burlingame, the sister of one of the pilots killed on 9/11 sez that building the mosque there "is a deliberately provocative act that will precipitate more bloodshed in the name of Allah."  How, exactly?  Major problem with statements of faith: She doesn't back this up, because she doesn't have to, inside her head.  She just believes it, and because her beliefs have eaten her ability to self-analyze, or see the beliefs of others, she abso-fucking-lutely CANNOT SEE how you don't see it, too.  Then it just spews out.  GOP Representative Peter King from the Great State of New York adds: "President Obama is wrong. It is insensitive and uncaring for the Muslim community to build a mosque in the shadow of ground zero."  I get digging at Obama during an election year, but I think we all have to ask: Just how big is that shadow, Peter? 

Apparently it's cast also over Murfreesboro, TN, where we're under threat of Sharia Law when the Muslimists come in and take over after building their compound.  What are you worried about, folks?  Holy war?  Well, I'm all for that - let me charge my camera batteries and stock up on popcorn.  Seriously, though - this is Tennessee.  Really?  "Oh, I'm all worked up 'cause group belief of those 'others' might stomp on my xenophobia and trample the trappings of my faith."  Is that too complex a summation?  I could probably dumb that down a little more.  If you need it.  And lest you begin to think that's she's just a crazy wingnut at the fringes?  She lost her primary by one percent.  Granted, these were huge, hotly contested races here and all of them were at the margins, but still...one percent.

"Yeah," you say, "but that's America, where we're all caught up in our religion, and use it to try and keep gay people from getting married."  Yay, moral judgments.  Okay, what about the roughly 200 women in India who die every year because they're "witches?"  200 people out of all the Indians there are may not seem like a lot to you, but it's pissing me off.  Not good enough, you say, since that seems mostly to reflect that people are sadistic greedy fucks, and not off their nut due to faith - though it's the institutionalized fucked-up belief slowly being erased from the law books that allows the persecution.  An excellent rejoinder, imaginary voice in my head, so I give you the Kenyan Witch Burnings, where they drag you outside and fucking kill you for being a witch, then burn your fucking house down.  Every year, I see one story about this still going on.  And there's video, if you hate your eyes and want to hate the human race even more.  At the cancerous core of this thing is this quote from the BBC story, "Residents have been ambivalent about condemning the attacks because belief in witchcraft is widespread in the area." Makes me want to get in a good session of field screaming.

More crazy?  Russian Cannibal Satanists?  We've got them.  And don't start with the "fringe belief" thing with me; I don't care how many Satanists there are, who they've eaten, or how active they are.  There could be a grand total of fucking five, and it would still be the fault of institutionally holy motherfuckers.  There's no devils without gods, so all this shit is the fault of belief in invisible powerful things, and apparently, shaved heads and pointy eyebrows are no longer enough - you have to kill and eat your way to acceptance with the dark lord.  It's a tough system, but if you buy into transubstantiation, not the only one with some people-eating.  The Russian Cannibal Satanists are just more equal opportunity than others.  You don't have to be the messiah to be tasty.

Along the lines of the purely silly, the Raelians are hosting a global guided meditation tomorrow if you're interested.  Also - because I've recently seen some of this on teh InterTubes - if you see organized groups of atheists around spreading ideology, I would encourage you to throw things at them you find on the street.  Groupthink is part of the disease, people.  Fighting tyranny is one thing, projecting ideology is quite another.  Apparently, Tom Cruise's daughter is trying to escape from Scientology, and we're also having troubles counting all the religious people around.  Which is important, I suppose, since it's from pure numbers that we can calculate whether someone deserves something or not.  Even all of this ridiculousness is too much to digest, a waste of time and energy; like reading a whole blog entry about how bad religion is.  Think about it this way: Every time I listen to news, or go on the web, or step outside - there this shit is.  Everywhere, all the time, never getting anywhere, never dealing with the roots of problems, just poking away at symptoms with no facts in hand and deciding to trust everything to faith.  Faith is overrated.  This is not cynicism - it's anger, but I think you feel that.  

Try thinking, and encouraging others to do likewise, or we're all stuck here, forever.