Our Terrorist Cell

I'm sitting here in the evening, it's raining outside in Bremerton, Washington. I'm watching Netflix, a show called, Peaky Blinders. Great show. About 19th century England. Gangs. Reminiscent of  The Wind in That Shakes the Barley, Perhaps, especially because of actor Cillian Murphy and his being Irish and all, being born in County Cork (I rather liked visiting Cork). and all that.

It's no secret I'm rather partial to the Irish. Being half myself, all on my dad's side of the family. Having had a rather, albeit confused, understanding as a youth of my ethnic responsibilities and well... I do understand enjoying a good conspiracy. Especially for a good reason and all. A good... guerilla fight against greater odds, can be inspiring. Even, addicting. Especially to the disaffected and those who have little control over their lives, or who simply feel that way.

Early in high school I had learned about the troubles from a documentary. I'd long known I was half Irish, that my dad was Irish. I grew up with my mother, after they divorced when I was three. She always celebrated St. Patrick's Day. I remember a banner of cut out, green, "Erin Go Bragh" (or, Éirinn go Brách, Meaning "Ireland forever" in Gaelic) every year hanging in the house.

I hardly ever saw my dad after that and never did after I was sixteen, until he died in 1988. I doubt he ever had a thought himself about Ireland. But I did. I even tried to talk friends, fellow students in tenth grade into going with me to Ireland to fight in the Troubles. Well, it didn't happen. I had no money to get there. I doubt they'd have even wanted me. But that, is a story for another time. Or not.

Anyway, that's how I was at that time. I even wrote a screenplay about what I was like back then. The Teenage Bodyguard, is about a situation I got myself into just after graduating high school. Over the course of a week in 1974, I protected a murder witness from the local mafia.

Great story and a screenplay that is being liked every time it's seen or evaluated. "So why isn't it on the screen already somewhere", one reviewer asked in their review from BlueCat screenplay contest. Another from The Blacklist coverage said it was "a viable project that should be pursued". And so I am.

I kept finding myself in interesting situation back then. I don't know why. Mainly, because people kept asking me to act as a bodyguard for them. First was that frightened woman who asked me to protect her for a week when I was eighteen from some murderers she had worked with at Tacoma's first topless bar, The Tiki, run by the Carbone crime family.

A year later at nineteen, my own mother asked me to be my little brother's bodyguard in Manhattan. She was afraid if he got roughed up during a robbery, he could die inbeing so thin and fragile with liver cancer at the time. There had also been a rash of apartment break ins at that time. So I slept in our small studio apartment on the floor, with my .357 magnum next to me just in case someone tried to break in at 2AM or something.

I had also protected a variety of others off and on over the years. Gamblers wit cash coming to town, a big construction magnate's horse farm at the end of a road where I lived for a while, and so on.

My point being, I do get it. This whole, desire to go to battle, take on great odds, test yourself and live the life of excitement and adventure. it's kind of dumb for most, but I get the attraction.

As I watch this great show (Peaky Blinders), and sip some red wine (yes, there's Guinness in the fridge, but it's wine tonight, forgive me St. Guinness), I understand the feeling that there is no downtown here to go to, to meet locally with other frustrated or angry conspirators in some shady bar, to have talks, to sneak to covert meetings, to talk about how the government is abusing us unfairly and unjustly. How our enemies really have to go. At all costs. Or any. All of that. Not unlike our Founding Fathers did in local Freemason lodges, mostly held at or above local public (drinking) houses (pubs?).

I do get all of that. I understand that feeling. That focus. The mystery. The excitement. The addictive fear. The call to a cause greater than oneself. The ability to be something, right now, immediately. To evoke change when nothing else is happening in one's life. To achieve something now with power when no one else will give you that kind of responsibility or command over other human beings. Even to the point of taking their lives. Even if they are innocent.

I get all that.Well, not so much the taking of innocent lives. I really don't get that. Especially when they are your own. But I get it for a young testosterone filled young man, or woman. Or for one whose family and loved ones are indeed being abused if not murdered by the state as others in other countries have had to suffer through. I get that. I really do.

I doubt it's much different for terrorists in other countries, even in our own country in how some can misguidedly perceive our own reality in America as deserving of terrorism..The home of their ancestry. Maybe. But then, not a lot of Native Americans are terrorists. Some who are not even of that abused ancestry but who understand, empathize, with them. Who feel compassion for their seemingly just cause. Like non Muslims who go to fight with them.

I get all that.

The trouble is... it's nonsense. Mostly. For the most part. 99% of it anyway.

Those are the rumblings of a young man high on testosterone so much of the time. Give them a call to arms... oh my God. They will be there!

But there is another side. There will be those they harm. The innocent. Those they blind themselves about but who do matter, and greatly so. They become blinded by the fog of war and idealism. But not of conscience. And so innocents die. For no good reason.

Not until their hacked minds, hacked by disingenuous ones who put not themselves into danger but those of a younger cohort. Where justice turns into criminal actions and heroes become terrorists. There is brainwashing going on. Media is part of the problem. those manipulating it are more so. Be they Russian hackers joyriding or actually paid by Putin. Or Islamic terrorist leaders or simply... Facebook.

I'm glad I lived through those cold war years. I'm also glad I didn't have to grow up in Belfast or an Ireland under British rule where my ancestors were so abused and genocide wasn't a ridiculous word to banter about. When some Irish tried to eat grass due to starvation during the potato famine, where the dead and emaciated were found in fields with mouths stained green.

My terrorist cell is based in words, not guns, in political actions, not bombs.

 It is civilized, not barbaric. I'll kill no innocents. My terrorist cell, does not exist. Because I do not believe in terrorizing human beings. Or anyone. Or anything. It's a bully behavior, that of an immature mind, or mindset.

There is a time for violence. To be sure. But it is far less often than many would like to admit.

And that includes our American born terrorists. Those Christian misguided fools who have killed too many in our country already and should never again. And then there is simply mental illness, and social illness.

Do Act. But at some point we have to see as a race of intelligent beings that death simply isn't always the answer. While in some countries it may be necessary, at certain times, in ours it simply is not.

We have a disease in this country. It is conservatism. It is binary thinking. It is in authoritarian attitudes, having them, or adoring them. It is poor priorities. It is extremists. It is the far right politically motivated. It is the ignorant, the poorly educated, the incorrectly educated, those who believe in alternate facts, alternate realities, alternate morality, alternator mental health.

We need instead to seek out our best nature in life, not our worst.

We need to bring down our worst, and simply refuse to be a part of it.


#terrorism #peace #isis #racism

Cowardly Islamic Terrorist's Final Religion War

Yet another attack this past weekend by yet more alleged religious mental defects, murderers and criminals in London. Wishing all the best to those in London who have been killed, harmed, frightened or who have to repeatedly put up with the assholes who think their victim mentality, their need for relevancy through foolish banal religious mindsets, through the sick theistic belief system of fools, cretins and underachievers gives them any kind of license whatsoever to do harm to others.

First off, Islamic terrorists are cowards, pure and simple. Sort of, Not so much perhaps in many of their physical actions in combat or even suicidal actions, but most assuredly in their inability to be a part of human society and achieve change through means that do not harm or destroy others. Especially those innocents and members of their own religion.

However, suicide murder can also be considered a cowardly act in that once one disregard one's death in the event, there is clearly then no need, no strife, no efforts, no thoughts needed in achieving the difficult issues of evoking a movement through slower and more acceptable forms of political and social changes.

In that, they are pure cowards, lazy, stupid even and all those other things Republicans tend to label the poor and non Republican types with.

Is this going to be how the final global Religion War to end all religious wars begins? It may not start today, or next week, next year, or even ten years from now. But someone will one day have to ask, is today where it all started?

Will it end religions around the planet finally evolving us into the future? Finally? Actually one could call this the Reality Wars, except it's not a war against reality, it's a war against unreality. We have to start seeing the real world how it really is and not through a filter of unreality in religious thought and those who have taken that to their secular way of thinking. Yes, it's a hot mess.

Not these vastly silly Middle Eastern desert religions eschatological end of times crap. But the actual end to the childish religious beliefs that have infected this planet since we first pulled ourselves out of the muck and the slime, looked up at the sun in the sky and began to worship it's power and majesty out of fear. Because religion was indeed bread from fear of an ignorant and ancient people. One that I would submit, began before we could think clearly, through out ignorance and fear of things like darkness and being within the food chain, and not at the top of it for a very, very long time.

After all, how could religions not evolve in that environment?

Religious Wars that begin from what will start merely as a lash out at religiously spawned murderers? Then when all religious and religious, especially Islamic followers and leader do not stand up and take action in order to support their reasons to exist outside of realms of science, of facts, of objective reality, then finally the rest of the world in all it's rationalist and atheists, then in one religion against another, those who can finally simply no longer take it anymore, attack the fantasy cults of Islamic terrorists and other religions not their own, as we then all devolve into utter and murderous insanity?

Before that happens w all need Islam, as well as all religious believers and leaders in general to express an ever viral allergic reaction to their way of thinking in any of those cultures who might be leaning in the directions of fantasy beliefs systems and especially the death oriented religions such as the Middle Eastern Death cults of Judaism, Catholicism and Christianity and Islam.

Is this the beginning of the end of all religions worldwide? Do we really want to take these immature belief systems into the stars with us? Is this why no extraterrestrials want to visit this planet because religion in their minds is simply too childish, too dangerous a belief system to allow contact with or to allow to expand into the cosmos?

Getting back to the hard facts, do we allow religions to continue, to allow these sick cults like Islamic terrorism to continue to fester and grow like a mold on our minds around the world? Are we seeing the beginning of how religion on planet Earth, ends?

Humans have a basic sense of OCD, of Obsessive Compulsivity which when it gets out of control turns into a disorder. We see it time and against in systems and processes that break down in human culture and business. In believing things like religion, we give a nod and a smile to the potential for some very bad things to happen.

Humans will turn anything into a religion, merely by their OCD leanings of turning anything into a religion, into a ridiculous belief system that goes beyond rationality to the ethereal. Our desire to believe that if a little of something is good or great, then much much more is fantastic when in reality is is typically death, pure and simple.

Even one of our greatest forms of thought like Buddhism, which is not and should never have been a religion has, by those raised in many of those Buddhist cultures, striven to turn it too into a religion. We have done this with sex, with money and economies. With just about anything if you give us a chance.

Even calling it in the western sense, Buddhism, rather than Dharma, is in a sense trying to turn it into something it's not, merely out of our ignorance of what it was originally meant to be. And even some of that original thought on it from the first Buddha was out of some degree of ignorance which with time and knowledge we could have honed to a sharp basis of reality and betterment and yet, has been turned into a religion.

Question
What is Buddhism?

Answer
The name Buddhism comes from the word 'budhi' which means 'to wake up' and thus Buddhism is the philosophy of awakening. This philosophy has its origins in the experience of the man Siddhata Gotama, known as the Buddha, who was himself awakened at the age of 35. Buddhism is now 2,500 years old and has about 300 million followers world-wide. Until a hundred years ago, Buddhism was mainly an Asian philosophy but increasingly it is gaining adherents in Europe and America.

Question
So Buddhism is just a philosophy?

Answer
The word philosophy comes from two words 'philo' which means 'love' and 'sophia' which means 'wisdom'. So philosophy is the love of wisdom or love and wisdom, both meanings describing Buddhism perfectly. Buddhism teaches that we should try to develop our intellectual capacity to the fullest so that we can understand clearly. It also teaches us to develop love and kindness so that we can be like a true friend to all beings. Thus Buddhism is a philosophy but not just a philosophy. It is the supreme philosophy.
From Buddhanet

The argument about how great religions are, have been countered by how horrifying they have at times been. It's not just all about finding the disaffected, but in finding the veins of cancer in these communities, in their advocates and religions, in the religious and the criminal leaders overall, and in religions themselves.

How do you justify the criminals who run mega churches and do not do what their religions teach? How do you justify the slut shaming , gender shaming, and other types of shaming by religions and their religious against their own for merely having a human nature? One their are taught to hate, to hate the basics of being human.

Eliminating these religious terrorists is not just about eliminating these terrorists, but in eliminating the hold religions have in a growing force of unreality and in eliminating these religions themselves. We have to divest ourselves of religions before we can grow beyond this nonsense.

As we have seen the only way religions are any good is when they are diluted, when much of what their tenets teach are ignored, when humans, pick and choose what is best to believe in what their religion has taught since the beginning. The basis, the foundation, the history of which is so typically ridiculous.

When are we going to grow up and see clearly what the problem is here, and it is not just that of those who take the worst of their religion and run with it, leading to death and destruction. And as in Muslim terrorists, typically the death and destruction of there own?

Wake up and smell the religious mayhem, the theistic sadism, the fantasy idiocy.

We can do so much better. But we need a massive change and real understanding of our nature of that of our universe. But religion certainly is not IT.

Should writers respect or fear all of society's feelings in their writings?

Someone on Linkedin.com recently asked a question that I responded to:

Should a writer respect the feelings of all sections of society while expressing their views? As a writer can they enjoy unfettered freedom in the light of recent developments?

My reply...and then some:

It depends on what you are writing about, or what your intention is in what you are writing about. Some writers may not want to offend anyone (which is nearly impossible these days). Or a writer may want to inflame a certain portion of a readership, or wish to inflame or move, everyone. It depends on what the intention of the piece is.

Writers now a days have to be aware of backlash from certain elements to the point even of the writer's death. But we cannot let that dissuade us from our job. I am at times very vocal in my writings about what I think the ills of the world are to the point of calling out terrorists as the misled, the demented, the childish, and as cowards even in the face of brave situations, if one calls it that while blowing yourself up or being gunned down in the process of killing their own, the innocents, women, the old and infirm and, children.

It is good to consider, even if you are not a well read writer, how do you want your writings to be viewed after you have died? Either from natural causes or through the efforts and intentions of someone who has reacted violently to you because of something you have written?

Remember it's not about confrontation, it's about dialog on your side as a writer. That means on the side of enlightenment and change it needs to be about compromise and dialog. But also, on the other side, in that of a radical mind, it needs to be about dialog, but also about compromise in an individual with a mindset where that simply may not be an option. Well? It needs to be an option.

For some of us who are not fighters as I once was, though now I prefer to be more a lover, they or we can "fight" through our words for what is good and right in the world as we see it. Everyone should be welcome to speak their mind, as that helps to temper beliefs. But one must listen as well as speak.

Sometimes I publish things that are intentionally inflammatory in order to get people to see the error of their ways in beliefs and actions. If someone reads something I wrote on my blog and finds me a distasteful human being, but what they have read changes their mind to a better way of being, if they they then hate me for my efforts but go out in the world and do more good than they had been, what care is it of mine if I have offended them?

George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the United Kingdom, said:

"We shouldn't tolerate the intolerance." 

As writers and authors we produce art and words strung together in such a way as to evoke emotion. Is it only to be for entertainment? Or should we have an underlying and important message to convey to support or change things for the better? Further, should we at times overtly try to change people's minds away from their beliefs to what we understand to be the better good?

How does one do that?

By keying into someone's beliefs and gently changing their attitudes? Or at times by jarring them into reality and out of their delusions? There have been times when writers have spoken out and been killed for their efforts. Through their death change has been evoked, change greater than they could ever have achieved through their words while they lived. That is not a good thing for them, but it's something.

What should be your own legacy as a writer? To make a buck and no one ever knows of you or after you die your writings die with you? Or to change even one person to go out to do more, or better, or at least stop doing ill of others? Because for every one who stops doing ill, others see that and may follow suit or temper their choices.

Certainly it is your choice. I have made mine.

This all brings to mind... terrorism.

After 9/11, from that next day to December 31, 2013 there were on American soil, the following number of deaths:
Terrorism: 41
Firearms in 2011 alone: 32,351
Car/Truck Accidents in 2011 alone: 33,783

So "keep calm and carry on."

Terrorists in America  have blatantly failed. Overall worldwide, these are disaffected young Arab Muslim men. Muslims are not our enemies, religion is, if you want to entertain that kind of logic. But even then it is a disaffected and propagandized mindset by a minuscule hard core, radicalized group who propel and recruit through their pathetic agenda.

These people are lost in the modern world and not unlike those American conspiracy theorists who fear a "New World Order" when one is only going to happen regardless since we live on a planet together with limited resources. It is much in the same mental virus that involves fear and hatred of others who they do not understand or refuse to join with.

They are our failures in America.

Mostly these terrorists are poor individuals, poor in livelihood or poor in moral logic focusing only on what makes them feel good with no concern for either those they consider their enemies or their own people they claim to be fighting for and where those they claim to be fighting for en masse, have claimed that these terrorists are not fighting for them.

Be concerned in a relative and reasonable way.

Do not fear those who are of broken ideologies, mind, spirit, logic, reason, or religion. Consider that the late Saudi King Abdullah has been putting change into place in his seminal Islamic country for years that has been quietly bringing about change.

There are now more women in that country in universities than men. That alone is amazing and in years to come it will change the face of Saudi Arabia and their version of Islam, which is a part and heart of the over all world of Islam.

Change is coming. But it takes time. We need to help get Islam and those mentally deranged versions of Islam past this sad point in its history and on into the future.

Those backward types who find terrorism as a positive force of change will eventually fade away with time and proper action and be seen in hindsight as a cancer in the state of Islam during this period. Bringing all Arabs and Muslims into modern times mentally and economically is what they need, not the ill will of the entire world.

It will take time, but they are on the way out and this age of attempted terror is their death knell.

#Terrorism