Into the Void

Homeland Stupidity Threat Advisory System

Homeland stupidity threat:

Note: The site moved. This one is too good to let get away.

My take on the sixties:

I was born in 1957, 12 years after WWII The Big One ended. The Korean conflict came between the two events. As far as I can tell, I’m being labeled “Baby Boomer” only so that folks my age will fund the real boomers greedy retirement plans. Even as we speak, they are quietly moving their funds are from investments that have become UNSAFE due to their profit-taking. They don’t leave their money in the stock market as they get older. My group still does, and it will be disastrous. Stock Market “adjustments” are seen as inevitable, but when there is an adjustment it means that somebody is taking somebody else’s money. Who do you suppose it is? The poor? Not bloody likely. I used to think the stock market was a gamble. Now I realize that the game is fixed.

Many of these boomers were, as young adults, the hippies about which my friends speak so glowingly. The hippies headed for the hills when things got tough. Most of what you read about the culture of the ’60s was invented by students at Ivy League colleges who never knew the difficulties of living off handouts in the city. Free love was a farce - it wasn’t anything near free for the women - or girls - who got pregnant.

The Beatles brought a small vision of the world to public view, but they weren’t at the forefront. Not EVEN. They were Pop Icons at the tail end of the whole mess. The whole hippie thing had become a farce by the time the Beatles rolled out Sergeant Pepper’s.

So as a kid I heard many Great Ideas from my friends’ older, college-age siblings. Age of Aquarius, be-ins, freedom, evolution, revolution. But I watched the body counts in Viet Nam rise night after night on TV. I saw minorities fighting to be recognized not even as equals but as human beings. I saw the cops beating Blacks and college students and pretty much anyone they didn’t like the looks of to a pulp out in the streets. I lived in the aftermath of three assassinations. The Great Ideas vanished into thin air, leaving my generation with an intellectual wasteland.

The media doesn’t let that kind of information interfere with big business these days. There was even a ban on showing the rows of coffins from the Afghanistan and Iraq dead. I would watch that. Someone has to bear witness.

I suppose I should get more proactive. I’m too easy to silence, I’m mentally ill. I can be taken against my will into a hospital, drugged, zapped, whatever. Just say the word “anosognosia.” There are no political prisoners, no prisoners of conscience, only mental patients. My only recourse is to donate to the charities that are doing the real work. I don’t fool myself into thinking that throwing money at the problems will fix them. Money only generates more money - if the problems were solved, the charities would be out of business. I can only hope that they help a little bit.

Duck and cover, they told us as children. There was the constant threat of nuclear annihilation brought on by the hatred of my elders for folks just like us on the other side of the world. In the ’80s they told us to dig a hole in the backyard, lie down in it and cover yourself over if there’s a nuclear strike - dig your own goddam grave. “With enough shovels” was the slogan. This stupidity was successfully imitated in the aftermath of 9-11 Homeland Security told us to seal off a room with plastic and duct tape to protect ourselves from terrorists. I don’t think it will protect you, but it will definitely keep the smell down. Fear is a great strategy for controlling the populace.

I sat at work one night at 12 or 14 years old with a gun on the desk in front of me and the simple instructions: “If any <n -words> try to break in, shoot ‘em.” Camden was burning just a few blocks away. It was happening in cities across the country, the black people were looking for a better life. The owner left me to mind the store. The only <n -word> who showed up was a business associate that I’d known since I was a baby. He sat with me until the boss got back then ripped him a new asshole for leaving me there alone.

“Backlash, Backlash, Who do you think I am? You raise my taxes, freeze my wages, And send my son to Viet Nam. You gimme Second-class houses, And second-class schools, Do you think all colored people are just Second-class fools? Mr. Backlash, I’m gonna leave you with the blues, yes I am.” – Langston Hughes, Nina Simone “Backlash Blues”

Backlash Blues didn’t get much airplay when it would have mattered. Now it’s used in a Lexus commercial to sell luxury automobiles. Langston Hughes would have seen the irony of it. A better life, indeed. I’m not sure whether a commercial with a good-looking African-American man grooving on the blues is supposed to be targeted for African-Americans. It motivated me to run out and get some Nina Simone CDs. I don’t want an SUV, thankyouverymuch.

So when I was a kid the air was bad, the rivers were full of poisons, raw sewage, and rotting fish. The Potomac river, backdrop to so many National Monuments, was so polluted that if you fell in the cops would take you off to the hospital. Rivers caught fire, the bald eagle was in danger of extinction. Our food was full of pesticides. The drug companies gave pregnant women Diethylstilbestrol (DES) and Thalidomide. Every species was manifesting serious anomalies from teratogens in the environment. EVERY species. Much later, William S. Burroughs drew attention to the nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl with typical brutal honesty in an interview in 1986 in which he said, “Let me ask you one question, Doctor: You want your daughter born with two cunts?” He was referring to a condition known as “uterus didelphys.” Being born with two vaginas is also a side effect of maternal DES use.

The erstwhile hippies didn’t notice. If they did, they didn’t give a rat’s ass.

The Space Program, it turned out, wasn’t about our destiny among the stars. It was a non-war strategy for beating the Russians by outdoing them technologically. Reagan continued the strategy with space weapons programs in the ’80s. “Star Wars” was all about bankrupting “The Evil Empire” as he called the U.S.S.R..

Reagan also invented “trickle-down economics” which, as far as I can tell, involved giving all the money to the wealthy and the large corporations so that they can piss on the workers.

My generation lost hope long before Reagan came along. We smoked pot and listened to music. At the tail end of the boom, we were overcrowded everywhere we went and there were few jobs. On top of that, periodically there were gas crises with far-reaching economic effects, including stagflation. Stagflation is the situation I quoted above, where prices increase but salary doesn’t. More and more, we either lived at home until we were 30, in roachtraps in the city, or in group houses with four or more people. We were occasionally chased out of town with new zoning laws by the former hippies, but that’s another story for another day.

The American Dream has always been about taking care of the kids born right after WWII The Big One. It was used, along with religion, for keeping us quiet and obedient, at least until we figured out that it was all a big scam.

Suddenly the ’60s have become this Utopia. They are being totally rewritten. It’s very hip these days to pine for a Golden Age that never was, whether you pine for the ’60’s or for the post-war enthusiasm of our grandparents generation or for a mythical pre-industrial garden.

Maya, the world of illusion. Insanity is being able to see through the illusion. Insanity is rejecting the false values of your elders. So they tell us. It’s up to us to keep looking for the truth no matter how much they tell us to turn back to a glorious past that never was.

Technorati: politics music Nina+Simone The+Sixties baby+boomers hippies

Huffington Post: John Neffinger, Glynnis MacNicol, and Drew Westen| Dem Iowa Debate LiveBlog!

Debate? Not much of a debate, just a bunch of Dems comparing their talking points. Really, business as usual. The Democratic Party slinked off with their collective tails between their legs because they couldn’t come up with a response to the “soft on terrorism” card, and they’ve never really come back from that. I am almost ashamed to be a Democrat, but there is no better choice.
Biden was able to joke about saying stupid things, a reference to his “articulate and bright and clean” comment about Obama. Obama is good, he’d still be “articulate and bright and clean” by comparison if he were white. Compare him to our current Prex!
A Clinton-Obama ticket is not going to lure over any middle-of-the-road Republicans. Unfortunately, to win 2008 that’s what the Dems have to do. I hope they don’t forget.
I think Biden’s wife is going to get fired from her teaching job after his comment on school administrators.
Teachers are probably the only professionals who don’t get pay incentives for competence and effectiveness. Apparently the folks in the debate have no insight into punishment and reward. Throw all the money in the world at our schools, but if there is no incentive for teachers to further their own educations and to improve their job performance, they aren’t going to bother to improve, not for any amount of collective bargaining. I don’t think the teachers should get more money and benefits than engineers, no matter what the folks in the debate seem to think.
Throw money into a school system and you’ll see that it doesn’t go into computers and books. I’m not sure where it goes. New lights for the football field maybe?
No Child Left Behind? Hasn’t the major result of that been an increase in the dropout rate? “Get out, kid, you’re screwing up the numbers.”
The question about honesty was good. The Dems have to issue a blanket statement that they all voted to go into Iraq because the folks in the White House are evil. That way individual Democratic politicians won’t have to waste time explaining their vote when they should have been saying, “If I’m dishonest and I get caught, I’ll be in deep doo-doo. So I have to be honest.” Face it, the occasional transgression is forgivable. Lying about it is perjury.
As for honesty, with his Grecian Formula hair how can Kucinich pretend to be honest?
Did anyone else notice the fly in Dodd’s hair during his last answer?
Edward’s hair was perfect as always.
Hillary has porked out a bit. She could use some time away from the desk. A darker suit would hide it better until she’s president and has her own private gym.
Ok, ok, that was catty. I think Clinton would have done better to say, “What he said” when she spoke after Obama instead of taking time to paraphrase him. That way maybe she could have told us something we don’t already know. I think Clinton has some great ideas. If only she’d tell us how she can make them work. Maybe she doesn’t want the Republicans to steal her recipes?
The one thing these folks have to remember is that anything they say about one another now will be played as soundbites by the Republicans when Judgement Day, errrr, the Presidential Elections are at hand.
I feel as if the future of the world depends on the Dems playing this right.

YouTube - Did You Know; Shift Happens - Globalization; Information Age

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Arthur C. Clarke, “Profiles of The Future”, 1961 (Clarke’s third law)

A friend sent me this wondrous piece of junk mail this morning. I have to share it.

—–Original Message—–
From: <deleted>
Sent: Wednesday, August 01, 2007 9:20 AM
To: <deleted>
Subject: Watch this Video…

Very interesting video.
Technology is a big, big thing. Globalization is happening. Fast!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljbI-363A2Q

Now you know why China frightens me…and why “I, Robot” may not be so far off…

It’s mind boggling — almost incomprehensible for me.

Hugs…

Mind-boggling? Robots? What is this fellow yammering about?

Technology isn’t the Latest Big Thing. Technology is what we have been using for millennia to enhance our senses and increase our capabilities. Technology is a fancy way of saying “tools.” Any sufficiently advanced human can distinguish technology from witchcraft. Witchcraft? Burn the Witch! (Damn, burning witches again… apologies to my Wiccan friends.)

Globalization happened already. It’s done, it’s over. We’re now in the phase where we carefully adjust Americans’ salaries to match Chinese and Indian salaries - and lifestyles. If they do it right - well, you know, like boiling a frog slowly from cold water. Maybe they’ll find new career paths for everyone whose job description is now outsourced to India. Maybe we’ll learn to downsize our lifestyles to accommodate our globalized pay rates. Maybe the U.S. economy won’t collapse. We have to get all this done before China gets into full production.

You can get off your high horse and join the rest of the world, or you can outfit your army with bibles, flags and guns and send them out to stop human evolution. I’m more afraid of one ignorant, neurologically stagnant American politician than I am of all of Asia.

The US is very backward technologically. To put new technologies in place requires the regulatory equivalent of an Act of God. The people themselves are psychologically and neurologically resistant to change, so much so that a large percentage of Americans deny that something as basic as evolution can occur. At the personal level, this means most Americans believe that self-improvement is a fallacy. Well, I don’t accept that adults can’t learn.

The recent movie “I, Robot” is an abomination, intended only to reinforce the average American’s fear of innovation. Please read the book by Isaac Asimov, a prolific writer of the 20th century. The hard-wired personalities of the robots in it started with three laws that prevented them from harming a human or even, through inaction, allowing us to be harmed. Any attempt to break those laws resulted in a mechanical breakdown. I wish humans were wired this way.

Innovation… in parts of Asia you can walk up to a vending machine and call its number on your cell phone to get a soda or an instant-heating boxed meal. I can’t even get cellphone service at my sister’s house on the Delmarva peninsula, much less dial up a soda.

People have been talking about Zero Population Growth (ZPG) since I was a kid in the ’60s. China’s draconian One-child policy was absolutely necessary. I don’t happen to like the way it was implemented.

China is going to need about 10 times the oil we need when they get up to speed. That’s 10 times the pollution, 10 times the greenhouse gases. No, more than 10 times the pollution, as they don’t have strict air quality standards. The cloud of pollution over China is clearly visible on NASA satellite photos. We’ve know about Global Warming since the ’50s.

As larger purchasers, India and China will shape what products are available in the entire world. An example of this economic inevitability, the state of Texas is the largest textbook purchaser in the U.S and for that reason Texas creationists influence public education by asking for textbooks promoting their point of view. Every bookseller wants Texas as a customer - you stock what your best customer wants. These are then made available to all American schools. You can find a number of links on this topic on Constitution.org. I hope y’all can use chopsticks.

Why do we ignore problems instead of dealing with them? I bet you’ve heard at least one person say, “Don’t bring that into my universe” or “ERASE ERASE ERASE” - with a cute little crossing and recrossing the arms - to avoid talking about Global issues. Like a little kid putting his hands over his ears so that he can’t hear you asking him to take out the trash.

The video mentioned new books - how many books have you read this month? Not magazines, not graphic novels, but real paper and ink books? How about this year? Were any of them non-fiction?

I’m interested in what you really thought about the video. I thought it was trite. It’s rather startling to me that any citizen of the world could respond with anything other than “tell me something I don’t already know.”

Information age technology magic Arthur C. Clarke Globalization China I, Robot tools witchcraft global economy evolution politician Asia self-improvement Isaac Asimov Innovation Delmarva peninsula Zero Population Growth ZPG One-child Policy greenhouse gases Global Warming creationists public education

College’s foot bath plans spark backlash

I agree that public funds shouldn’t be used to create foot baths for the Muslims to use before their five-times-a-day prayers. I’m also against the use of public funds to install sexist urinals for males who are perfectly capable of peeing in the general vicinity of the toilet. :-/ We could kill two birds with one stone by installing troughs with running water like they have in some parts of the world. =:-o And where are the bidets?

That was humor, in case any stereotypically humor-challenged schizoaffectives or lesbians are reading this. (You dykes all know I’m bi, right?)

I’m also against the policy of the colleges and universities that I personally have attended of having a small chapel on campus for the Christians. If you have to pray every day, you know where it is. If you don’t, then a) you probably don’t worship with the other Christians who stop into the chapel every day, and b) you probably think you are somehow *entitled* to use publicly-funded college facilities for the purpose.

Have I failed to offend anyone yet? Ok, then, I’ll keep going.

The ACLU hasn’t gotten involved because the university, after public hearings on the topic, decided to use the student-funded college maintenance fund to include the foot baths in new construction, NOT public funding. We’re talking about new construction that includes urinals, baby-changing stations, and other accommodations in the unisex bathrooms, I might add. The Moslems were accidentally pulling the sinks away from the wall and splashing water on the floor, so the foot baths are about safety and saving money, NOT about encouraging heresy.

The students on campus are mostly ok with this, so why are a bunch of conservative think-tanks getting all huffy about it? I don’t feel that it is my business. You don’t like it, don’t wash your feet in the sink. The other Christians have to pee in there!

This was brought to my attention by a Catholic, of all people. A good Catholic education includes a lot of reading about other religions, unlike that of the Fundamentalists. Some of these people wouldn’t read at all if they weren’t pressured by their friends and family to read the bible. Simplistic.

I don’t see the Christians being prevented from praying. What I do see is the flat-earth Fundamentalists demanding that the rest of us learn their simplistic, literal interpretation of a text that was originally intended to simplify the facts of cosmology, geology and evolution for a Semitic tribe of uneducated wandering goat-herders. Simplistic.

There were great civilizations in nearby parts of the world at that time, civilizations whose religions quickly incorporated new discoveries in the temporal world, things like the ptolemiac model of the solar system - you know, that the earth rotates around the sun? Maybe you don’t…

You’d know more about it if the Christians didn’t burn down the library at Alexandria in the 4th century A.D., *pretending* it was a pagan temple. A millennium-long Dark Ages followed. Millenia later, in the 17th century A.D., Galileo was threatened with death if he didn’t recant similar heretic theories about the motion of the earth.

They’re up to their same old tricks in the U.S., apparently trying to create another thousand-year Dark Ages. Next they’ll be burning books.

Why Does the Christian Right Hate Harry Potter? [with picture of book burning featuring harry potter books!] (reddit.com)

They’re Burning Books Again

Church group burns Potter books

Burning Sensations: How would-be censors promote free speech.

And the canonical (so to speak) list of Harry Potter information

Personally I think it’s time for every world religion to start policing its extremists. Extremists balance out their hate by cashing in on the good works of the majority of their fellow worshippers, using threats of damnation or worse. Now there’s a sin for you.

I have no problem if the student body at UMich wants to fund foot baths themselves. The alternative is to ban them from washing their feet before engaging in private prayer, and that’s xenophobic nonsense.

Harry Potter Muslims prayer in school Christian Dark Ages publicly funded book burning conservative think-tanks urinals Fundamentalists

Cheney/Satan 2008 Bumper Sticker

It’s here, the first must-have bumper sticker of the election cycle. Get ‘em while they’re hot.

Thanks to Max for the excellent photoshop work.

presidential election Cheney political humor satan Dick Cheney religion bumper sticker

Girl’s death stirs debate over psychiatric meds:
Parents of 4-year-old accused of intentionally overmedicating daughter

What is particularly heinous about this crime is that the parents were using psych meds as punishment instead of teaching their 4-year-old how to behave. The end came when the little girl was physically ill and the parents drugged her to shut her up.

I think they both deserve to get the needle themselves.

the needle psych meds

Inside the Hotdog Factory: 39 Years Ago Today: Anniversary of the Death of Lenny Bruce

An insight into neurolinguistics from an unexpected source. Lenny Bruce had died over 10 years before I first heard this on a vinyl LP back in the late ’70s.

“Believe me, I’m not profound, this is something that I assume someone must have laid on me, because I do not have an original thought. I am screwed. I speak English. That’s it. I was not born in a vacuum. Every thought I have belongs to somebody else. Then I must just take, ding ding ding, somewhere.”
– Lenny Bruce

neurolinguistics Lenny Bruce

Surfing the ‘net again. The Christians have created a new fear - that a gay baby may have taken up residence in your uterus. Horrors! We liked it much better when Mia Farrow was infested with the Spawn of Satan in the movie “Rosemary’s Baby.”

Is Your Baby Gay? Pretty soon, a DNA test could tell you

In a culture that encourages us to customize everything from our Nikes to our venti skinny lattes, perhaps it is only a matter of time before baby-making becomes just another consumer transaction. Already have a girl? Make this one a boy! Want to impress your boho friends? Make a real statement with lesbian twins!

Christians must be very careful not to claim that science can never prove a biological basis for sexual orientation. We can and must insist that no scientific finding can change the basic sinfulness of all homosexual behavior. The general trend of the research points to at least some biological factors behind sexual attraction, gender identity, and sexual orientation. This does not alter God’s moral verdict on homosexual sin (or heterosexual sin, for that matter), but it does hold some promise that a deeper knowledge of homosexuality and its cause will allow for more effective ministries to those who struggle with this particular pattern of temptation. If such knowledge should ever be discovered, we should embrace it and use it for the greater good of humanity and for the greater glory of God.

The Christian Century: Mohler would favor altering ‘gay’ fetus

A prominent Southern Baptist said he would support medical treatment, if it were available, to change the sexual orientation of a fetus inside its mother’s womb from homosexual to heterosexual.

The idea of a hormonal patch for pregnant women was discussed by R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, on his blog, www.almohler.com, on March 2.

“If a biological basis is found, and if a prenatal test is then developed, and if a successful treatment to reverse the sexual orientation to heterosexual is ever developed, we would support its use as we should unapologetically support the use of any appropriate means to avoid sexual temptation and the inevitable effects of sin,” Mohler wrote.

At some point you have to just STOP and think. An embryo isn’t gay. It *can’t* be gay. It doesn’t have gonads or sex hormones or even the basis of a central nervous system, much less the desire to use these things in potentially offensive ways. What an embryo is, say the anti-women groups, is the potential to be a full-grown god-fearing Crown of Creation.

A fetus gradually develops gonads and a nervous system, but sex hormones don’t kick in for years. There’s no cause to start “altering” gay fetuses. You know, if you don’t spend a lot of time agonizing over exactly what kind of fun other people are having in their bedrooms, homosexuality becomes a complete non-issue.

You know, I hear they have therapy for phobias these days. Can we put homophobia in the DSM-V?

homosexual DNA test gender identity Albert Mohler gay biological basis sexual orientation homosexual gay babies sterilization abortion Spawn of Satan Mia Farrow religion

Excellent Bush Quote generator script from The Bush Quote Generator.

Technorati: political humor, dubya, wetbrain, bush