Thank God I'm an athiest: the Warrior Cop edition

After finishing Neil Degrass Tyson's collection of essays on space, amid the fears of an upcoming race war and a hunger games style rebellion, it almost felt natural to pick up and plow through investigative journalist Radley Balko's book "Rise of the Warrior Cop" next.

It may not take 342 pages to understand that the killings of Eric Gardner, Jordan Davis, and Trayvon Martin are anything but stand-alone cases of Police misconduct. Yet Balko's book convincingly unfolds and illuminates the process and  context in which we've reached such a historical point: where armor clad SWAT teams raid people's houses in the middle of the night and treat innocent civilians as if they were insurgents wearing a suicide vest; how police stations of towns with populations smaller than 10,000 people are buying RPGs and anti-landmine Bearcat vehicles with federal grant money; or how police officers who are supposed to protect free societies are assaulting nonviolent protesters with tear gas, snipers and flash-bang grenades while dressing and acting like Robocops conducting a full-out raid on Taliban HQ.

As I plow through countless stories of SWAT teams raiding wrong houses with impunity and of cops getting high on the rush of going SEAL team 6 on civilians however, after a certain point in the book I couldn't help but be thankful of my atheism. Because looking at how he militarization of American cops have unfolded in the last half century, I can't help but think that if all the police brutality and systematic racism we face today was all according to a divine plan, God must be looking down on Ferguson MO or Staten Island with a smile on his face and with pop corn in his mouth. Perhaps he's even jamming to heavy metal as he watches a SWAT team raid the wrong house and still shoot the family dog dead.
 
To believe that there is a higher power that intervenes in your daily life and in Superbowl games may be personally comforting in the short term, but once you apply this thought process to socio-political developments such as police militarization, it takes a lot of brain twisting and circular logic to argue that a god who lets trigger happy cops shoot unarmed black people with impunity is loving and merciful. Considering the headache I'm having from trying to imagine all the brain twisting that I'll have to do if I was a believer, I can't help but think what Ricky Gervais said in closing the 2011 Golden Globes: Thank god I'm an atheist.

While Balko's highly recommended book does not make any arguments regarding religion, the historical developments illustrated in it is making me heavily suspicious of his alleged love and tolerance. This suspicion began to unfold after reading the following story of a certain Charles Whitman, as described in the reporting of the book.

As a white clean cut ex-Marine who had a wife and enjoyed playing the piano, at a glance it may not make sense to associate Whitman with the one of the most famous mass shootings in recent American history. Yet on the morning of August 11th, 1968, Whitman carried himself to the top of the clock tower at the University of Austin, Texas. Packing a footlocker with "sandwiches, gasoline, three rifles, a sawed off shotgun, two handguns, water, and enough ammunition to last a day in the shooting range." By the time he stationed himself at the top of the clock tower he had already taken the lives of five people, which included his own wife and mother. After murdering his immediate family, Whitman left a note saying that he did it out of love, so that they would be spared from the embarrassment of what he was about to do later that day.

At about ten minutes before noon, Whitman completed his transformation from Eagle Scout, ex-marine and former alter boy to become the now infamous Texas Tower Sniper. While he picked his targets at random, his precision allowed him to use only one bullet per victim as he carried out a ninety minute shooting spree. By the time Whitman was himself shot, to quote Balko's book, "he had killed thirteen people and wounded more than thirty, all from a position 230 feet from the ground."

But what set apart Whitman's killing spree from the run of the mill mass shooting was what they found out about Whitman afterwords. It turns out that months before the shooting, Whitman began experiencing violent impulses more and more frequently. Dr. Maurice Dean Heatly, the psychiatrist who had attended Whitman's therapy sessions, describes in his notes on how Whitman relayed his fantasy of "going up on the clock tower with a deer rifle and start shooting people." From one of the notes left in the clock tower, Whitman requested that his brain be studied in order to find an explanation to the violent urges he was experiencing. To quote again from Balko's book, what the doctors found was "an aggressive brain tumor growing in Whitman's hypothalamus. The tumor was compressing an area of the brain in the hypothalamus known as the amygdala, which regulates primal emotions like fear and anger."

Now, reinsert the theory of an intervening deity who has a plan for all of us like an omnipotent chess master into the equation. If god has a purpose for all of us, what did he try to accomplish when he planted that tumor in Whitman's head? Of all the people to have a murderous tumor, why did god pick an ex-marine who only needs one bullet to take down his kill? And what kind of a divine plan involves a heavily armed sniper who is controlled by a tumor induced homicidal rage? If you take god out of the equation, the tale of Charles Whitman is simply a tragedy. But when you look at the incident through the lens of a divine plan in action, the Whitman incident starts look more and more sinister than it already should.


However, the true horror of the clock tower massacre lies in its historical timing, where Whitman's shooting spree served as a catalyst for the march towards the Warrior Cops era in which we live under today.

Before the Texas Tower Sniper, the gradually rising racial tensions between the black population and the LAPD reached a boiling point with the Watts riots of 1965, which culminated into a 6 day riot where rioters clashed with 13,500 California National Guard troops under the LAPD's command. Inspector Darryl Gates, who acted as the "LAPD's point man during the riots", began to feel that his men were grossly unprepared for the chaos that the riots presented. Likening the Watts riots to the guerrilla warfare conducted in Vietnam at the time, Gates started to look to the military in order to remedy this unpreparedness.

And a month after the riots, 50 police officers exchanged gunfire with a random shooter called Jack Ray Hoxsie, in what came to be known as the Surrey Street shootout. Such incidents did not just heat up the racial tensions of the country, but it also convinced Gates to start unofficially consulting the local marines along with select members from his department. Other members included Jeff Rogers (who became leader of the first ever SWAT team) and Sgt. John Nelson, a "self taught expert in guerrilla warfare". The meetings and Gates' vision of policing that was fostered through it became the foundation of the Robocop SWAT teams of today. Effectively making Gates and his team the founding fathers of modern day SWAT teams. A vision that was further solidified as Gates started to ponder how to best respond to situations like the Texas clock tower shooting.

And as racial tensions and fears "of a black criminal class" among the public began to rise with the Watts riots and the Surrey Street shootout, the Whitman shootings served to erase the sense of safety that still lingered in white suburbia. The threat and fear of violent crime became much more real in the American psyche, where victims "were no longer urban toughs fighting among themselves."

Amid a political climate fostered by racial tensions, the rise of a counter culture, and a surge in crime rates, the timing could not have been more perfect for presidential candidate Richard Nixon to capitalize on this political climate with his tough on crime law-and-order campaign. To borrow the words of journalist Dan Baum quoted in Balko's book, Nixon wrote to his mentor Dwight Eisenhower that people don't need to experience crime itself to feel threatened by it . Nixon goes on to write that "I have found great audience response to this [law-and-order] theme in all parts of the country, including areas like New Hampshire where there is no race problem and relatively little crime."

Through his rhetorical genius, Nixon managed to pull off his campaign by uniting the protesters, the hippies, the activists and the blacks under a single banner: drugs. While the initiation of the War on Drugs would begin a few years later, the framework and the rhetoric for it was already in place. While various incidents and changes in public perception contributed to these developments, the Whitman shootings perhaps served as the biggest nudge towards of the disproportional arrests and mass incarceration for nonviolent drug offenders. Disproportionally targeting the blacks and other minorities for the next half century, as you may already know.


Now, if the clock tower shooting and the historical significance of its timing, along with Whitman's brain tumor was all according to design, what would that say about the designer? Does he have a SWAT fetish? Is he a gun nut? Does he have a traumatic experience with pot or is he just a racist on a galactic scale? And most importantly - on the off chance that god has a zealous hatred towards racial minorities - if you're a person of a racial minority who believes in god, is it really in your interest to blindly believe a designer of a shooting spree and a racist system as your lord and savior?

 
Whether all of this is by design or not, all I can say is that I don't know. But in order to believe that a god that plans everything in the world exists, you'll also have to believe that the same god planted an aggressive tumor in a sniper's head so that he can move the country towards the War on Drugs, militarized police brutality, and the disproportionate harm that has been inflicted on racial minorities as a result. If I was a omnipotent deity with a racist agenda, I couldn't think of a more psychopathic yet ingenious way to systematically subjugate racial minorities to violence.

I know that I wouldn't be changing anyone's beliefs anytime soon - although it would be awesome if I could - with this post, but I'd still like to warn the often non-white victims of police brutality in anticipation of the upcoming race war. If you're planning to protest against the injustice done to Michael Brown, Eric Gardner or Tamir Rice, please be careful. Because I have this feeling that your god is not on your side.

P.S. Thank god I'm an atheist.

Squareness, experience, and some Tony Soprano swag

Not everyone can still have their career intact when they shoot a 78-year-old man in the face. Sure, the geezer might have been nagging you about everything for the last 4 hours, but when your 78 you're pretty much licensed to be cranky all the time. Whether your Steve-O from Jackass, 50 Cent, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Malcom X, getting away with shooting a 78-year-old man in the face would be last shot you'll possibly ever get in life. That is, of course, unless your name is Dick Cheney.

I hate everything Dick Cheney stands for, and I probably can't stand 5 seconds of anyone endorsed by Dick Cheney. But regardless of all that, I can't help having this odd kind of respect for this man. (Who may or may not be a baby eating space lizard along with his mentor Donald Rumsfeld.) Perhaps the same kind of respect you would give to someone like Tony Soprano or Pablo Escobar.

Because when you shoot a 78-year-old man in the face, and the same 78-year-old man ends up apologizing to you, say what you want but that's the ultimate hallmark of a real gangster. Although actually not having a heart doesn't hurt your notoriety either.

Born in Casper Wyoming (yes, the town is as pale and white as it sounds), the early life of Richard Bruce Cheney is as all American as it can get. He played football in high school, he's still married to his high school sweetheart Lynn, he soaked himself in beer when his life hit rock bottom and he got arrested for DUI twice. His favorite food is Spaghetti and he loves nothing more than to get on a boat and fly fish. While others in his age group were rioting and getting high for love and peace in the 1960s, he was the guy working away in the library while looking down on the hippies with his oh-so-Cheney scorn.

He was, and perhaps still is, the square among squares that whitey has to offer. And his squareness was a key factor shaping his imperial vice presidency we have come to know and despise.

By the time he became VP of the United States, Cheney had already assumed the position of White House chief of staff, deputy chief of staff, House Minority whip, and Secretary of Defense in the administration of Nixon, Ford, Reagan and H.W. Bush. Since Lil Bush had no experience or intention to read up and learn the details of policy, all the details and policy briefs were passed to and soaked up by Cheney, along with the authority of the most powerful man on the planet. His long career gave him a mass network of important people from politics, business and the Pentagon, and it allowed him to rearrange the power structure of the White House to his liking. Intimidating, silencing and hustling anyone who disagreed or asked questions.

On 9/11, as not-so-curious George was reading My Pet Goat in Florida, Cheney was ordering the military to shoot down the unidentified plane - possibly loaded with civilians - heading to D.C. as he assumed the authority of emergency operations. His response time in accepting this historic role of authority, according to his former #2 man "Scooter" Libby, was as fast as it takes "a batter to decide to swing."

He was also the man who out-bullied and out-intimidated the CIA over WMDs in Iraq. I repeat, he out-intimidated the CIA: arguably the most dangerous covert organization in the world. And even after he was proved wrong across the board, he has yet to change one iota of his opinions or his mannerism of absolute certainty as he criticizes Obama and U.S. foreign policy on Fox news. Making the historical achievement of being the conservative who was rebutted by non other than Fox New's Megyn Kelley.




As I've mentioned earlier, I hate everything that Dick Cheney stands for. He pretty much designed  the surveillance state that led to the Snowden revelations; he was a key player and architect in the rise of Private Military Contractors like Blackwater and Halliburton subsidiary Kellog, Brown, and Root; and it is his company Haliburton that has patented and is currently expanding fracking, killing the Eco system faster than you can say enhanced interrogation.

But non-the-less, Dick Cheney still doesn't fail to fascinate me. And my fascination with this Dick among Dick's - who has definitely out-dicked tricky dick Nixon in my view - boils down to this: he didn't and still doesn't give a friendly ghost's ass what the entire world thinks about him, as demonstrated in the clip below.

To borrow the words of the author Barton Gellman, Cheney was "the nearest thing there was to an anti-politician in elected office." He never expressed any desire to be president, he didn't give a flying frack about polls and public opinion, and he read briefs and full intelligence reports every morning while other politicians were cold calling for checks and donations. He was a man with unwavering conviction, which was both his biggest weapon and liability. While this rigidness and inflexibility of his opinions led him to be alienated in the latter days of the Bush administration, it also made him the all time behind the scenes hustler that he was.

With his squareness, political experience and his Tony Soprano swagger combined, he shaped and hustled history unlike any other. And we have to admit that saying "so?" the way he did on national TV takes massive (and possibly reptilian) cojones of steel. For better or for worse we might never again see the likes of Cheney, but when you're in need of courage and conviction, remember that there once was a man who received an apology from a 78-year-old lawyer who he shot in the face. His name was Dick Cheney, the biggest gangster to ever shape history.

P.S. Did I tell you that he literally doesn't have a heart? Like, literally?

Why on earth

In our day and age where any ideology goes, maybe there's nothing extraordinary in having friends who believe in aliens. Lot's of people believe in the star-crossed visitors, from the multi-tattooed millennial with an alien inked on her finger to the former defense minister of Canada.

 

Now, I would be totally convinced if I saw Beyonce getting abducted during Superbowl halftime by a UFO, but since there's no definitive proof that neither confirms nor denies the existence of aliens on earth, such claims aren't as easy to dismiss as you would think. Like many scientists I do think that there are other forms of life out there, but this one question makes me skeptical about living in a men-in-black-esc world where aliens are hiding among us.

My one question is this. If I were an intelligent alien from the other side of the galaxy, why on earth would I travel across the galaxy just to visit this dirt ball we call earth?

To give some terrestrial perspective to the answer to this question, imagine the map of the world as if it were a map of the universe, where each region is its own galaxy that is a few flights away. Your going on board a starship enterprise like expedition that is departing from, say the galactic region of New York City.

Now ask yourself this. If you were going to lead a galactic expedition to discover new frontiers of the universe, would you pick the galactic equivalent of Topica, Kansas, Thunder Bay, Ontario, or Abbottobad, Pakistan of the universe as your destination? Or even for a vacation?

We humans can take ourselves too seriously, and believing in the idea that somehow we're naturally worthy of being studied by an advanced race from the stars seems to be a classic symptom of our own hubris. So let's be honest about our status in the galaxy. We live in a cosmic backwater, which likely puts us in the running to be the Mississippi of intelligent life in the universe. (You know why Mississippi, you know why.) We only just succeeded in landing a satellite on a comet; we have no supply bases, colonies, or defense mechanisms built on the Moon or Mars, and to paraphrase the words of venture capitalist Peter Thiel, we're the species that gave up flying cars for the sake of 140 characters. While there's no denying that we have indeed make progress, but does the direction of our progress make any sense from an extraterrestrial point of view?

Now, so far I have put words together under the assumption that the ET's we have yet to meet are comfortably able to travel through space. But does this assumption hold up at all to begin with?

To be able to travel across the cosmos, you need some advanced technology to build a capable spaceship. To have such technologies in your hand, you need an advanced civilization. And letting any civilization develop and prosper is a messy and ugly business, just like it is with ours. And to even get to the historical point where we're flying through space on hyper drive, a great number of competition will inevitably be wiped out in the process. Now, there's no way to determine how many galactic societies would make it out of all the war and mayhem in one piece, but looking back on how our species is faring so far I'll just say that personally the prospects look slim.

Now that we're done with the easy part of space travel, before we get back to talking aliens we need to talk about space.

While we have sent a satellite only as far as Jupiter, thanks to our modern day mega telescopes and the scientists that wield it, we have a much better idea of what space is actually like. And it is chaos out there, to say the least. To illustrate the galactic hazards that a space traveler has to endure, here's a list of the lethal space hazards of space according to everyone's favorite astrophysicist, Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

• Monstrous gamma ray bursts (which would fry any electricity based machine)
• Deadly pulsars
• Matter-crushing gravitational fields
• Matter-hungry black holes that flay their bloated stellar neighbors
• Newborn starts igniting within pockets of collapsing gas
• Galaxies that collide and cannibalize each other 
• Explosions of supermassive stars, chaotic stellar and planetary orbits
• The shooting gallery full of rouge asteroids and planet colliding comets that is our inner solar system

To further quote Tyson "the evidence points to the fact that we occupy not a well-mannered clockwork universe, but a destructive, violent, and hostile zoo." Now add the red light shift discovered by Edwin Hubble, who found that as the universe continues to expands, each galaxy is moving away from each other on an ongoing basis. Space is a crazy place, and you might need to be crazier than space itself to even think about making it across, let alone booking a return flight.

Now consider all the listed risks that space travel entails along with the fact that there may be no going back to your home world. Imagine how the aliens must feel when they travel all those light years and survive all the galactic mayhem and barley make it to earth, only to see us obsessing over cat videos, hashtags and Candy Crush, without any actual candy or any actual crushing to be seen. We're not even interested in our friends sitting across the table at a bar on a Friday night, yet we can't stop crushing all those virtual sweets with our phones. And we think intelligent life from a galaxy far far away would be more interested in humans than ourselves?

To be frank we look ridiculous, even to our own species. So why should any intelligent alien think otherwise? Let alone abduct or study us? If any alien ethnologists, slave traders, conquers or oil companies are traveling through space as we speak, couldn't they easily find other planets that are more interesting, advanced, or in better ecological shape? Do we really have anything to offer a species that's much more advanced than us? Will aliens even notice earth when they pass through our galaxy?

Really, who on earth do we think we are?

Sheep envy and the weight of the world

Maybe it's time to say it out loud at last. Being smart sucks.

I don't know how many times I wished I could sit down and enjoy an episode of the Kardashians or Jersey Shore without a neurochemical Chernobyl wiping out my brain cells. I have also wished at times that my brain doesn't link sexiness with smartness, especially when you're part of the generation of Jackass, fake Italians and witch hunts on social media.

I never asked for how I feel disgust for the companies like Goldman Sachs, Gawker, or Walmart either. While our obsession with fat checks and our Gordon Gekko is here to stay, for those of us who keep up with how these corporations are bringing our species one step closer to Armageddon, the wishful thinking and propaganda pumped by their PR machines still makes them sexy, hip, or attractive. I wish that I don't have think of the conflict minerals or the poverty that the big time companies propagate every time people are setting their tents up to line up for the new iphone. Being smart sucks.

I can think of a few other reasons why being smart can suck, but in the end, it comes down to the fact that intelligence is like an unwanted Christmas present from your Dad. You never asked for it, but you still have to deal with all the consequences that come with it.

You didn't ask for how your brain is wired or what satisfies your intellectual curiosity. You never had a say on how many or what kind of books were on your parents bookshelf. Consequentially, you never had a say on the anxiety you get from the bloodshed, dogmatism and stupidity simultaneously happening on a local and global scale. And when the people around you are obsessed with TMZ, Benedict Cumberbatch or their fantasy football teams, you can't help but think how the grass of ignorance looks greener compared to where you stand. 

Being smart is merely a skill, like making bubbles out of your spit, nailing a Christopher Walken impression, or fitting your body into a suitcase. Among such herculean tasks however smartness is perhaps the hardest skill to handle, since its about diving into your mind and your thoughts. And we all more or less know how unpleasant our own thoughts can be.

Its a skill that doesn't automatically make you respectable or immune to cults or conspiracy theories.  In fact, it definitely makes you more susceptible to become an asshole, and by the time you notice that fact it can be too late for your social life. It gives you no claim to any moral high-ground, yet it inevitably shapes your personality and your world view. Add evil with smart and you get people like Henry Kissinger or Carl Rove, shaping history to their preference at whatever (or whoever's) cost. It is perhaps the hardest skill to handle, and your chance of drawing it out of the genetic lottery is simply out of your control. 

Being smart is just a trait, but that trait itself can be something to be hated for. I assume that this is because for most people, talking with a smart person probably sounds like this. (Especially the part from 4:45 - 5:15)

Project Gorilla aside, I mean no disrespect when I say I agree with Sheldon on the topic of stupidity. It's no reason to cry. Really, its not. For anyone smart and compassionate enough to give some thought on the wider world however, other people's stupidity is plenty of reason to cry. It makes people vote against their own interests, it can make you participate in acts of systematic violence without you even knowing it, or it can make you send your loved ones to war with a smile on your face.

The kindest people can be caught up in fevers of war and hysteria, and keeping you common sense in tact can become the hardest act of courage. And not everyone with a strain of skepticism can muster the courage to stand up against the tide, but at the same time you can't unknow what you already know. 

If you want to get a better idea of how smart people have it hard, look no further than Barack Obama. He brought his country out of a recession, brought down the unemployment rate and made the stock market rain. You know, some serious tyrant business; possibly imported from Kenya. (i.e. Hawaii) Or ask Michelle. She can't even tell kids to drink more water and exercise without being an enemy of freedom. Because free hydration for all? That's socialism!

While its becoming harder and harder to be a advocate for common sense, the climate deniers and the mini-Reagans are rolling in lobbyist money. With the influx of money, materials and political correctness, its hard to hang on to common sense. Being ignorant is easy, stress free, and financially rewarding on many occasions. No one has a say on what they think or what they see, but the weight of the world always seems to fall down to those who were born with this particular set of mental skills.

Being smart can be lethal, especially for yourself. Throughout history being smart was plenty of reason to die or threatened to be killed. From Socrates to Galileo, Darwin and all the way up to Salman Rushdie and Malala. Fredrick Niche went crazy - I mean running around town naked type of crazy - in the end of his life and possibly died a virgin. Isaac Newton locked himself up in his room in the summer with the furnace on full blast for the sake of alchemy, and he was well known for his horrible personality.

Even in the realm of creative talent, people like Heath Ledger, Phillip Seymour Hoffman or Robin Williams suffered for their genius. I don't think that they regretted the career choices that they made, but without a doubt they were a few steps closer to the abyss compared to the rest of us or even the rest of the actors. Their talent and their suffering came as a package, making them a ticking time bomb of brilliance without them ever having a say on how their brain functions.

Being smart sucks because you never asked for it. While ignorance is also something that you never asked for either, chance is that it'll make you happier to believe in things like God, country or your entitlement to fame. For those of us who think of things like God and country as mere words, how everyone else is attached to these fluid words drives us crazy. And it's no ones fault that people think how they think, but the weight of the world and the weight of your own thoughts always cripples those on the smarter end of the spectrum. These are my honest thoughts, but these thoughts alone are more than enough for me to be labeled as an asshole at best. It is perhaps harder than ever to have an honest conversation on big issues, and under such circumstances, boy does it suck to be smart.