At 14 we were acting out some pretty horrible stuff in RPGs. It was okay if you were playing Chaotic Evil; but that got old and I think there was a strong gravitational pull toward Lawful Neutral after all. Most of our best characters ended up there while most of the CE ones never got much past 5^th level before they were boring, stuck, or dead.

One of the most memorable time wasters was throwing gold coins to peasants and enjoying the spectacle as they tore each other to pieces fighting for them. Man, what fun! What a great way to experience something dangerous and awful that could never happen in real life.

Today in Saint Petersburg, Florida some crazy bastard threw $10,000 to the peasants at a mall. At least twelve got hurt tearing into each other and six went to the hospital.

If I’d only known that being rich could have such great perks I would’ve worked harder all these years.

Almost exactly five years ago I was writing apologies for Amazon.com 10-12 hours a day. Each week I was doing about 300 high quality ones for the real problems and up to 2,000 completely canned for those that were either PEBKAC or marketing related.

At that time it was the best job I could ever imagine having. Though the systems were spotty and some parts of it were a savage grind, the staff and atmosphere were fantastic; truly. It’s why the subject still comes up. I really miss those days and so does most everyone who was there then. Few of them are there anymore.

One man wrote a polite request to have book recommendation mail for his wife cease. I remember it as reading, “You can cancel the mail. My wife passed away on Tuesday.”

She died on Tuesday. I read somewhere that that’s the day the most people die. I don’t know if it’s true but it should be. Tuesdays are just depressing. You know the ones I mean. When it’s windy and all.

I looked up her account to see about discontinuing her book recommendations. She had only ever bought one book from Amazon.com. It was a Hemlock Society publication; a suicide manual. She bought a book to help her kill herself, comfortably, and she, presumably, did so on Tuesday. We sent her recommendation mail on that Wednesday. Since she’d only purchased the one book, it was the basis for our software to suggest further reading.

That her husband wrote calmly and politely is a testament to human dignity in the face of the some tacky fucking bullshit.

The guy who runs the software group at Amazon responsible for repeatedly sending gay porn to naïve wives of the closeted and pregnancy book recommendations to women who had their miscarriages and moved on to not being pregnant a year or two earlier, well, he’s highly regarded there for being a contributor to Amazon.com’s success. His wife was a pushy, unpleasant, dimwit though, so I always sort of had my doubts.

I’ve got another one of those obscene points to make. Turned off the brain or you would’ve noticed already. Accept whatever you hear or you would be considering it without being told.

Last year, today, I told you to let it go. I wasn’t explicit enough. I’ll be your perspective you myopic bastard.

April 19^th, 1995, with a year of planning, little money, and less help, Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people—men, women, and a daycare center of children—in misguided response to the deaths of 25 children and 50 adults at Waco, TX at the hands of the incompetent and brutish FBI and ATF on the same day in 1993. McVeigh was wrong to do it and he paid with his life. The government agencies were wrong to do what they did; none of them personally paid anything worth mentioning. You already know what they ended up making the capital of OK pay.

In 2001, on this same day, 19 useless wastes of human tissue, mostly Saudis—with lots of help, years of planning, and the cash resources of one of the richest families in the world—killed right around 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, DC.

Someone broke in the other night. Middle of the night. Mysteriously, I didn’t fumble getting my Hi-Power out of the gunsafe.

The silhouette in the hall advanced on me. I said, “Don’t move,” and aimed. He took a step, still 15 feet away. I fired a shot into the wall to the right of his head. He froze.

I said, “I will kill you.”

He said, “Oh, I believe you,” but he started walking toward me again.

You may feel as cheated as a viewer of the ’85 season of “Dallas” to learn that it was just a dream. It was just a dream.

Even so. I wouldn’t kill him. Strange man in house. Dog gone or gone quiet. Baby sleeping 20 feet away, I hope. Knowing, whether this is a dream or not, you’d better kill this man if you care for your family and your own life.

Couldn’t do it.

Three times had the chance and motivation to kill someone here in Kashia. Twice had the desire.

Couldn’t.

Wouldn’t.

Couldn’t. Wouldn’t. Couldn’t. Wouldn’t I like to know which it really has been.

In the Fall of 1986, I think, I was in the Candyman in Santa Fe or maybe it was some shop in ’Burque. Anyway, a fellow noticed whatever teen affectation of Zeppelin I had managed to incorporate into my dress and asked me if I knew much about Robert Plant songs.

“Yes I do,” I said.

“The lyric is, ’She’s so professional.' I can’t find the song or album anywhere.”

“I know every word Robert Plant ever wrote,” I said, “and he never wrote or sang that.”

The man was crestfallen. He’d only heard it once perhaps but he was in love with the song. He had been so sure it was Robert Plant. But my surety trumped his. He could tell. He knew that I knew every word Robert wrote. And he knew he’d never find the song now that he didn’t even know who wrote it.

An hour later, driving back to Taos, I realized it was a line from Easily Lead, off Robert’s most recent release, “Shaken ’N’ Stirred.” The only song, off a difficult album, which I never found a taste for but knew the lyrics, in the remaining year or two before the Age of the Track Skip Button, nonetheless.

I wake up at night sometimes. Wrong. No business being wrong about it. No way to apologize to that man to tell him how I suffered these 16 years of being wrong. Wrong. I can’t take it anymore.

So I post this. This plea. In the hope that perhaps he will find this page and write to me. So I can grovel. So I can apologize for my tragic hubris. Tell him that I’ve been in pain whenever the exchange comes to mind. That I was wrong.

And maybe most importantly to tell him what I should have said to him that Autumn day, “How could you possibly like that song? It’s the worst piece of crap Plant ever put to tape.”

I couldn’t verify the quote but someone is quoting Noam Chomsky as saying, “Violence is to dictatorship as propaganda is to democracy.” It sounds enough like him that I don’t feel we need to dig up the radio program, whatnot, it came from. It sounds exactly like his type of reasoning. More of the brilliance that is MIT and modern philosophy.

Only the biggest asshole in the world could possibly attempt to equate dragging you out of your bed at 3am to beat, starve, and electrocute you for months culminated by shooting you in the face, with telling you that you aren’t happy if you don’t have an SUV and a color TV.

Fuck!

[Ed: a fact finding reader verified the gist but reports the real quote is worded differently: “Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism.”]

North Korea vs US. In games of chicken the psycho wins. It’s that simple. Whoever is crazier will win or, best case, both get hurt badly.

Why 9/11? William such-and-such Clinton, in the hopes of a Peace prize so his miserable tenure might amount to something in the history books (Cleveland who?), tries to break up a bar fight between Israel and Palestine. But they really wanted to fight. America gets a big fat shiner for getting between them.

A kid who used to thrash me at chess can’t, as an adult, seem to count to 255 and the world is paying for it this week.

I should probably seek legal counsel over the recent million dollar flap that I shouldn’t talk about but I told them not to do it and they insisted on doing it and now they’re getting sued. Listen to me. That’s my advice. I’m wrong now and then but you’re wrong every damn day.

There are 18 registered sex offenders in my zip code.

1. Do you feel bad when you disobey God? Why or why not?

2. The Bible says, “If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads.” (Leviticus 20:13) Do you know anyone who is gay? Do you think they are detestable? Do you think they should die?

3. The New Testament says, “also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompense of their error which was meet. … Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death… (Romans 2:27-32) Do you still think gays are worthy of death? Would you forgive them? Should Jesus?

4. If Jesus was really a man, why didn’t he carry the burden of original sin?

5. Deuteronomy 22:28-29: “If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found; then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel’s father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days.” For the girls: Do you feel humbled after being raped? For the guys: Do you think marriage is too severe a punishment for rape?

6. When the Bible suggests, “You must kill those who worship another god,” (Exodus 22:20), do you have more sympathy for Islamic extremists and their tactics?

1. When Jesus says he will kill children in Revelation 2:23, whose children is he talking about?

2. Why did God kill all the non-Jewish first-born children in Egypt?

3. What do you think God’s reaction would have been if Abraham had refused to slaughter his son Isaac when God asked him to do so?

4. What kind of fruit did Eve damn mankind by eating? (Trick question! Hint: it wasn’t an apple.)

5. How many sons do you think Mary had (Acts 1:14, John 2:12)?

6. There are hundreds of jobs today that didn’t exist 2,000 years ago. Do you think Jesus would be a carpenter today? How would you rate the likelihood of the following alternatives: cabbie, janitor, programmer, plumber, sanitation engineer, telemarketer? What would it be like if Jesus worked in your office?

7. The New Testament glosses Jesus’ young adult years without any real description. Do you think Jesus ever had a girl-friend? Would you have liked to date Jesus? What kind of difficulties might arise from dating the son of God?

1. Do you truly deserve whatever educational credentials you hold (from a highschool diploma on up to degrees and certifications)?

2. Have you ever lied because someone else asked you to do so?

3. If you could pick one celebrity to erase from existence, so he or she was never even born, who would it be and why?

4. Has anyone ever threatened to kill you, fully meaning it? If so, did he or she attempt it? Elaborate.

I admit it. I’m evil. Or right. Whatever. I can never keep the distinction.

Test-tube babies

Not test-tube baby

My thesis is: One should never take an IQ test.

My supporting points are as follows.

1) They are culturally biased. After all, in some societies a diagonally bisected square doesn’t make two isosceles triangles but a diagram of the social dichotomy wherein the three unified sides of the upper-class hold down the empty ray of the under-privileged.

2) One never thinks that one will have a low or even average IQ. So if you find out that you have a low or average IQ, you will probably be disappointed and perhaps lose an edge of confidence that would otherwise serve you well. No matter how stupid you are, confidence is a good trait. Plenty of marginal minds have made excellent businessmen and world leaders and they couldn’t have if they’d know they had IQs of 92. Confidence, honesty, and a work ethic go farther than 200 IQ points any given weekday.

3) If you find out you have a high IQ, say 130 which some say is genius level, well mostly Mensa says that, others say 140, but their aim is a bit low, don’t you agree? One gets the distinct the impression the organization’s founders had a little trouble doing harmonic means without paper. Let’s call it 150 or better still, 160! Anyway, if you find out you have a high IQ, you are not any better off. Sure you’re smarter, but that doesn’t teach you anything, it just makes it easier to learn. When things come easily, one gets lazy, overconfident, smug, and superior. Which leads to fallibility, arrogance, stagnation, emotional regression, friendlessness, drinking, foul language, insomnia, trying to act clever when you have no material and no one to pick on, the use of pretentious abbreviations, &c.

It’s a no win situation. So, in conclusion, never take an IQ test and by no means ever admit to having done it if you already have.

My training class lasted one month. During which we were temp-to-hires. Presumably if we made the cut, we’d be permanent at-will employees.

How I was hired by a 7-foot goofy Swede, un-hired by a bald prick who didn’t like my cover-letter, and re-hired because a gay programmer knew a painter friend of mine is another story. This is a story about being supportive.

Amazon.com was growing frantically at the time. The Spring of 1998. Faster than any corporation in history, by internal accounting. Nowhere else in the world could you or will you likely ever find a customer service department with as many holders of PhDs and Masters degrees, Bachelors minimum, and, What have you done lately?

Just so we’re clear, and I can’t go into it yet, but that degree of excellence was then, 1998.

We each had 30 days to show merit or get back on the job hunter-gatherer trail.

I did my first computer program when I was 10. This might seem normal today but I’m not 25 and when I was 10 there was probably only one personal computer in the contiguous 25,000 square miles where I lived. So I figured I’d be the star pupil of the class. Not really. Third at best, I’d say. Summer, Melinda, Jesse, Robin all bested me plenty of times in class exercises.

After a couple weeks we got up to speed on Unix and the tools therein to serve Amazon’s hoard of customers we got desks and supervisors. Time to see how well we’d float.

The girl I was seated by, K, didn’t type well. Well, she didn’t type. I do 70wpm hung-over and 90wpm from prepared copy and that was a B+ for the class. K couldn’t type… I don’t even think 10wpm. The Unix wasn’t sinking in for her either. This was the first time she’d ever been around computers, let alone raw, system level terminal windows into computers.

She was upset that she wasn’t doing well.

I’ve been teaching since I was 15 and the first red-belt in the studio. So, I tried to help her with tips. It was all coming pretty easily so I spent the extra time giving her mnemonics or sensible reasons for counter-intuitive commands and procedures.

She had one or two kids and needed the money. Really needed the work.

I made other acquaintances on the floor. Seniority and self-propagated training through experience were super important so it was inevitable. I’m an inveterate question asker. I learned quickly that trainees were pretty much ushered in. They needed the help badly and 4 weeks wasn’t really enough to tell anyway if you’d be good at the job or not. I myself was worried about getting canned for reasons broached above in the stay-tuned-for-episode. So I was grateful to learn that I was probably in. That we pretty much all were.

K was worried that day. I was so eager to share my good mood and be supportive that I said, “Don’t worry. You’ll get hired. You have to be a real retard not to get hired.” She felt much better.

When the cut came down a week later, hers was the only head that rolled. We were at our desks right after she found out. Gathering her stuff to go, she turned to me with tears streaming down her face and reminded me of how supportive I’d been, “But you said…”

I think you need to know something a bit more about writers than you do now. Good writers sell out everyone they know eventually.

Screaming in the kitchen about who did what to whom, an iron pan goes out the patio window. Your writer-lover may appear to be in the moment, to really feel the epithets being roared, but in fact is thinking only of how delicious the scene will read. Subconsciously doing the calculus to know if antes can safely enough continue toward their limit. Being struck might cement the story with the credibility that only a police report and sticky red can.

A highschool semi-sweetheart of mine got a real book deal with a real book publisher. I found out about it after reading some of our more modern correspondence, as you know, got me wondering what the last 5 years had been to her.

It’s a book she’s worked doggedly on. Back when we were corresponding — and she thought me mad — she was after it in the way that you need to be. I can only respect that. You should buy the book when you can; she’s a terrific writer and it’s important material. It’s called Assembling My Father — A Daughter’s Detective Story. He killed himself when she was 5, I believe.

It’s been awhile since I’ve been in the moment and I’ve been terribly worried that I myself would go so far as to put a straw in my lovely hammerless S&W .357 so as to decorate the blank pages with anything at all just so they would stop saying I had nothing else left to record. Worried that I’d lost it.

I know now I haven’t because when I saw the extremely happy news that a friend had a book on Houghton Mifflin’s Autumn aught-four list, my first thought was of the subject matter life had laid at her feet. I thought aloud, “Some people have all the luck.”

I had dreams last night that I liked very much. Angels and Samurai—Seraphim and Ninja. “…How long has it been since we’ve eaten together? Had rice and mice…”

I’ve been watching more executions on teevee. Today it was the Chinese. I looked away, knowing full well what I was about to see, and then some part of me made me look. Was it pain or pleasure? Where does knowledge fall in that canyon? What drove me to need to see that row of people on their knees shot in the backs of the heads; bilging rivers of their lives out of their mouths as they fell? Of the two ways humans murder I’m not sure which I find more disturbing but this kind is more frightening. Because it is so casual that it could be lurking anywhere. A passionate murder is seen coming; usually even participated in. An execution like this is not seen coming. A border shifts somewhere and suddenly you are undesirable.

…Ah, I was supposed to be manufacturing something besides small talk. What is it I can say?

The desire for a girl without skin. The desire for an evil that is so natural it doesn’t seem it. To be submerged into a lacking. A cardinal lack of pain. With an automatic return ticket lest the drug be overpowering. Would you trade albatrosses? I think not. Even our secret pains make us special.

Some historians recently re-analyzed the battle of the Little Bighorn, usually known as Custer’s Last Stand. They decided to go about it from a forensic angle with a focus on ballistic analysis. This makes the most sense of any possible approach of course because the main evidence, even when it happened in 1872, is bullets and shells.

It’s long been painted as a brave and hard-fought battle. Only lost because of the overwhelming numbers of Sioux involved.

Back up: it’s the 1870s. The Civil War is just over. The Government is all but bankrupt. Lincoln’s dead, replaced by an impeachable puppet and a genocidal incompetent in turn. The California gold rush is not such a rush anymore. Manifest destiny as a term is already 30 years old. The children who grew up with it know it as truth. Debate is dead and buried. Imperialism without seas blocking is somehow more palatable, righteous.

The US government of the day made treaty after treaty with the Natives. They had to be continually remade because white America spent all its money killing each other over the economics of slavery and was growing westward where more gold kept turning up in the craptastic lands the Indians were relegated to starving in. No one batted an eyelash at giving the Black Hills to the Indians because they were so desolate and apparently worthless.

In 1874, one of those treaties was broken again by a survey party entering the Black Hills under George A. Custer. This violation into the Sioux lands would not have amounted to anything if the party hadn’t discovered gold lying around like spilled popcorn. But they did.

Now it was just a race to circumvent the treaty in question completely. It didn’t take long.

Ugly, brutal, illegal, immoral. Everything about it was wrong but the American people and their duly appointed representatives wanted it. It was patriotic, for the Fatherland.

In the Dakota hillside the ballistics show, quite clearly, that the battle was short, decisive, and one-sided. The Sioux were completely in charge from the jump. They out-generalled the General easily. They slaughtered the soldiers like dogs while said jaundiced canids ran about like decapitated barnery.

The shells of individual soldiers show they abandoned any discipline early in the battle and gathered together in a frantic ball on a hilltop, like so many terrified mackerel hiding their heads in each other’s asses, hoping nothing, just fighting to be the last to die. They were easily destroyed. Those who saw the end coming early ran from the hill and were caught in the nearby ravine and literally butchered.

The Sioux believe that enmity survives into the next life. To cripple their antagonists in the next world they would do a great deal of postmortem rearrangement to fallen soldiers. Decapitation, severed limbs, disembowelment, you know, Justice.

Custer had a “wife” among the Cheyenne and much contact with all the tribes. The legend about Custer goes that he had personally promised the tribes not to attack. It is probably apocryphal but they say when Custer fell at Little Bighorn his body was the one that was not butchered. The women however punctured his eardrums with a bone sewing awl. They hoped that this might help him to hear better in the next world so he would remember his promises.

When I heard how it really happened, that it wasn’t just a win for the Sioux and Cheyenne but a humbling, emasculating, fair-and-square military slaughter of US soldiers, I was ecstatic.

If I’d expressed this opinion at the time of the events, I might have been put to death or at very least fined 5 years pay and put in prison for a deuce, the standard fair for sedition of the day.

Soon after I changed jobs for the last time at the ’Zon my new manager walked up to my desk and the first thing out of his mouth, in a quiet self-deprecating tone, was, “I’m an asshole.”

Though unsure of the context, I replied as any good Samaritan would: “That’s not true.”

It was before I knew him well, and I had no business interfering with such an important epiphany.

I have lapsed into the sloppiest style of essay. Practiced by most everyone who writes for the New York Times and of course one Ms-scratching-all-the-way-down Coulter. I have neglected that all points, no matter how reasonable or obvious, have rebuttals and they must be addressed for one to be right as well as maintain the appearance of being in the right.

While firmly against genocide I must admit to a healthy emotional enjoyment for the mainstay of it: the macheté. I’d have to look up the figures to be sure but I think I’m within reason to say that the most common method of genocide after forced starvation and Zyklon B is the macheté. It makes sense when you think about it. All three methods are extremely cost effective. Guns, bombs, and even bullets aren’t cheap. Several million in Africa in the last 20 years alone were chopped down. Hell, there was a period of just a few weeks where 100,000 men, women, and children in Rwanda were hacked to pieces.

I just spent an hour in the rain clearing a half acre of creekside of invasive species. I did it with a macheté, mostly right handed but I’m quite good with the left too. Swinging the whole time, leaving the fallen blackberry and knotweed where it landed. Rarely have I so enjoyed physical labor. Wrists aching. Boots soaking from within and without. Brow steaming in mild spring weather. Feels fantastic.

A common theme in literature and film is that it is actually difficult to kill someone with one’s hands. As opposed to one’s fingers, the American method, with a joystick and a dizzying array of death-dealing buttons. I think it might be hard to kill someone who bravely, calmly, without anger looks you in the eyes while you raise your arm to swing your blade for the first of several necessary blows to the neck. But come on! That means murder is difficult once in 10,000 strokes. Within the predatory mammal nothing incites ire, and the urge to strike, more quickly than begging and frenzied scraping for escape.

Genocide must be the easiest thing in the world. I recommend finding a still, beautiful center of self-respect to at least make yourself a few degrees harder to chop down.

I used my drop slip yesterday. When my contractually obligated silence
expires in a few months I may have some stories to tell about
Amazon.com’s vaunted service.

Hope things are great now that you’re a dad, just like me. Here’s some money even though you and your wife each make more than I did at your age. I especially hope that the boundless dread and anger I gave you for your 11^th birthday is coming in handy now that you have a child in your arms! Bet you didn’t think it would all come back to you with such facility after 10 years of peace. :) It’s like a bicycle!

I have had the same job for exactly five years. That’s not true, strictly. I have been employed at the same company for five years where I have held 6 jobs and a coven’s dozen hats. I never had the same job in my life for more than a year and a half before this and I’ve never been fired from a job.

Five years ago a clean sheet of paper couldn’t stare me down and make me embarrassed that my name had to go on a thing before I was allowed to leave the fucking room.

From: such-and-such <so-and-so@monkeys-r-us.org>
Date: Fri May 23, 2003 18:30:48 US/Pacific
To: “Guy, That” <you-know-the-one@corporate-america.com>
Subject: Re: RE:

commie!?!?!? why i turned my own grandmother in to the mccarthy re-review committee just days ago for having a suspiciously toned cadillac and not supporting our troops with baked goods.

should see you at least once next week. maybe twice. three times a lady.

i half made up my mind last night to quit. but i think i’d like to see one more christmas at the ’zon and see what it might mean to me fiscally.

i miss being amusing more often. veri doesn’t get my Fractured Take™ on the hizbollah style of child rearing. she simply refuses to keep her ordnance ship-shape.

oh, dear. just when i decided to come back i start writing email that could get me canned again. or caned. singapore is very nice this time of year when the temperature and humidity stay in perfect tandem in the mid 90s. much like unscrupulous securities agents and the republican party. ouch!

i haven’t even had coffee for two days.

I graduated from highschool when I was a junior, sort of. That is to say, I had all the requirements and then some to graduate but no one bothered to let me know or give me the info to figure it out myself till I was half through my senior year. I found out at almost the same time I had this encounter:

Her: You will sell tickets for the theater and debate group.

Me: I’m not in that group this year. I’m not going to sell tickets for it.

Her: You will or I’ll fail you in Humanities.

Me: You do and I’ll take you to the school board and get you fired.

Classroom: «gasp» [mumbling and staring at shoes commences for rest of period.]

I went and got a drop-slip for all my classes the next day. I had well over the credits I needed so I could quit school anytime I wanted. I carried that thing every day in my pocket waiting for another such episode, or just a whim, to take it out, slap it down, and say, “So long, suckers.”

I never did that. The slip was enough. And being there was better than being at home. Never told anyone at school about it either. It was my private peace.

In two days I’m scheduled to return to work after a nice long break. My stock options finally are in the black and nowhere near the houseboat money they were at before but still at nice car money, or year off from all work money.

I thought that was my new drop-slip. The way I could go back to work and take it for another year or two. Two meaning the options would probably be back up to houseboat money. Now I’m not sure at all.

I used to be a big fan of omens in those drop-slip days. This is the one I was greeted with today.

You shot the biggest, most amazing looking grizzly that’s probably walked the earth in 2,000 years. For a photo and bragging rights. You would have had a lot more to brag about if you’d let that thing mosey on so the rest of us could see it animated and not propped up on a rock in a crappy picture you took home to have masturbation material on those nights your mom is indisposed.

Retraction [07/30/2003]

I was totally wrong and I owe Mr Winnen an apology and a beer. As one of the only decent Presidents in the last 100 years said, to justify criticism of his own proclivity to hunt (roughly paraphrased): Being shot and killed is a tremendously speedier and more humane end than most animals meet in the wild — where they either die of starvation or being eaten alive, as a rule.

He was right, even for trophy hunting, if it’s not a threatened or endangered animal. However, this same President is responsible for the “Teddy Bear” specifically because he once refused to shoot one as a stunt.

The theory of evolution is not. It is fact. Gaps in the fossil record are no more relevant to its veracity than gaps in the Periodic table meaning fusion and elements don’t exist. Jesus!

And since it’s impossible to discuss something constructive with those who are unable to understand that evidence is required for making points, let’s just go back to name-calling. Refer to the title as a pop-quiz on your religion: Who am I?

And if you think name-calling is all we’ve got, refer to evidence. Homophobic: Leviticus 18:22, Romans 1:26 — Baby killing: Exodus 12:12, Revelation 2:23 — Suicidal: Matthew 26:21, 27:46 — Jew: 5:17, 27:37. Ad nauseam.

You can thank George aWol Bush’s latest venture into anti-science for this rational venom.