Into the Void

NORAD tracks Santa 2007

The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) is a joint U.S.-Canada military organization based at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. With help from our neighbor to the North, NORAD systems scan the skies for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBM) flying over the poles with deadly gifts from our friends in the USSR (Ob Russky: CCCP).

The goal of NORAD is to warn us in time for us to take cover. We might get 15 minutes warning. “With enough shovels…”

To accomplish the aerospace warning mission, the commander of NORAD provides an integrated tactical warning and attack assessment to the governments of Canada and the United States. To accomplish the aerospace control mission, NORAD uses a network of satellites, ground-based radar, airborne radar and fighters to detect, intercept and, if necessary, engage any air-breathing threat to North America. As a part of its aerospace control mission, NORAD assists in the detection and monitoring of aircraft suspected of illegal drug trafficking. This information is passed to civilian law enforcement agencies to help combat the flow of illegal drugs into North America. The command is currently developing a concept for implementing the new maritime warning mission.

Uh, “air-breathing?” What does that mean? They can’t protect us from flying fish?

Anyway, as vigilent as the fine people in NORAD are in protecting us from Cold War nuclear incidents, any unidentified aircraft will be assumed to be hostile and shot down.

Artist’s rendering of NORAD engaging Santa during his Christmas night rounds with toys for all the good boys and girls. Click the thumbnail picture above to download a larger image for your desktop.

Santa’s annual trip is a logistical nightmare for the folks at NORAD. His sleigh has no transponder. The only light is Rudoph’s nose. NORAD has responded with a special-purpose, one-night-a-year Santa Tracker. Santa-Cam images will be available at the site linked above on Christmas Eve.

As long as NORAD knows where Santa is at any time, there will be no mistakes.

Thanks to Max for the excellent artist’s representation.

Police expect no charges in youth group diaper skit

According to the article above, the Christian youth organization Young Life promotes paraphilias as an “icebreaker” at teen gatherings.

A skit at a local Christian youth group meeting had teenage boys taking off some of their clothes, wearing adult diapers, bibs and bonnets and being spoon-fed by girls as they sat in their laps.

I can’t imagine what was going through the boys’ minds during the skit, but I have a pretty good idea what was going on in the diapers. The adult group leader can’t possibly see the Young Life diaper skits as doing anything but corrupting the morals of the good Christian children in their charge.

Acccording to this article on the FBI web page, many pedophiles are “persons in positions of trust or which provide them ready access to children such as youth ministers, camp counselors, public servants and employees of law enforcement agencies.”

One can only hope that the other parents are as upset by this as Ms. Metz is. I would want the group leader’s head on a platter.

By way of SLOG.

Technorati: Young+Life paraphilia adult+diapers scat Christian religion

moar lolcatz

I’ve been thinking about parasites.

Not the “earworm” sort of thing where you hear a bit of a song and can’t get it out of your head for the rest of the day. Not even the everyday suck-on-your-intestines nasties. I’m thinking about the kind of parasites that get into your mind and control your thoughts and actions.

For the record, I know *of* these parasites but I’m looking up the names online as I go along. Damn it, Jim, I’m an engineer not a biologist.

The sensitive and the squeamish may want to stop reading this now.

Really.

Ok, now that we’ve shaken off the fleas…

There’s a parasite that infects rodents, Toxoplasm gondii. It makes them all hyper and weird and THAT makes them easier for cats to catch. Where it
gets interesting is that the life cycle of this parasite requires that it pass through the stomach and intestinal tract of… wait for it… a cat! How convenient!

I have occasionally wondered whether the active phase of the infestation makes humans more attractive to cats. Something like 40% of the population has antibodies to T. gondii. Maybe “the rat race” isn’t so far off, eh?

The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey - whose sister is or was schizophrenic and is probably somewhat affected himself - is promoting the paranoid delusion that cat shit causes schizophrenia. He always hated the family pets, so when his sister got sick he blamed Fluffy. This, my friends, is a major researcher into bipolar disorder at the prestigious Stanley Foundation. We are SO f*cked.

Oh. In other countries with the same rate of antibodies to T. gondii in the population, there is less schizophrenia and the prognosis is better. Personally I think schizophrenia is a product of industrialization and I wish Dr. Torrey would quit wasting valuable time digging in the cat box.

There are many other parasites that affect the behavior of the host. Three
more follow:

Sacculina infects crabs. If by “infects” you mean “castrates and takes over the mind and body.” This is the stuff of nightmares. Succulina injects itself into a crack in the exoskeleton and quickly grows out through the entire nervous system. Crabs that are infected can’t breed, can’t regenerate limbs, and spend the rest of their lives doing nothing but feeding and caring for the parasite. They even stroke and clean the monster, which in the female crab lives in the compartment where she usually holds her unhatched eggs.

Can you imagine having some THING living inside you, changing your brain so that the thing becomes the focus of your entire life? This is the stuff of nightmares.

The lancet fluke has a fairly complicated life cycle, but the interesting part is where it infects an ant. An infected ant acts like a regular ant by day, but at night she climbs up a blade of grass and waits at the top. The next stage of the parasite’s life cycle is to become a liver fluke in a cow. How better to be eaten by a cow than to have your host sit on the top of a blade of grass at dawn!

Another fluke infects fish - the young flukes migrate to the fish’s brain and crowd around it like pigs at a trough. Fish who are infected periodically stop what they’re doing and flail about at the surface of the water. Shorebirds find the flailing fish easy to catch, and yep, the birds are part of the life cycle too. The parasites boost the bird population by making more food available, but the fact that they kill their fish hosts puts limits on how much of the fish population can be infested. Again, a very convenient situation.

Hopefully you all are getting where I’m going with this - that parasites can make you do things you might not have done if it didn’t benefit the parasite. A parasite that flat out ate us alive would be found and eradicated like the screwfly was. Most of them are merely a nuisance.

Humans are, for the most part, repulsed by parasites. I’m sure there are some parasites somewhere that are status symbols, but I sure can’t think of
any. Usually we want to avoid parasites if we can, and expel or exterminate them when we can’t.

It would be more adaptive if the parasite made humans enjoy being infested. I’ve read sci-fi stories about this sort of thing, and I remember at least one Star Trek episode where the infested feel **enriched** by the parasite and are absolutely delighted to forcefully spread it to others.

If you believe the writer William S. Bourroughs, language itself is a virus. Certainly memes, often called “mind viruses,” have some quality that helps them spread. Does anyone remember Laurie Anderson’s “Language is a Virus” from the “Home of the Brave” video?

Oh, he did a really nice book about the co-evolution of cats and people called “The Cat Inside” or something similar. I highly recommend it for the cat-infested.

Next section of this article will be on how *ideas* influence our thinking and behavior in the same way that parasites do.

Technorati: parasites medicine medical mind schizophreniam T+gondii cat+shit William+S+Bourroughs memes

State senator sues God - Peculiar Postings - MSNBC.com

Nebraska State Senator Ernie Chambers has had it up to here with the terroristic threats God makes against His creations, not to mention 5000-plus years of floods, famine, plague and pestilence.

Since God is everywhere, He can be sued in Douglas County, Nebraska for the untold psychological damage His irrational actions have done to Senator Chambers’ constituents. Chambers is seeking a permanent injunction forbidding God to engage in further terroristic activities.

The common dogma [of fundamentalists] is fear of modern knowledge, inability to cope with the fast change in a scientific-technological society, and the real breakdown in apparent moral order in recent years…. That is why hate is the major fuel, fear is the cement of the movement, and superstitious ignorance is the best defense against the dangerous new knowledge. … When you bring up arguments that cast serious doubts on their cherished beliefs you are not simply making a rhetorical point, you are threatening their whole Universe and their immortality. That provokes anger and quite frequently violence. … Unfortunately you cannot reason with them and you even risk violence in confronting them. Their numbers will decline only when society stabilizes, and adapts to modernity.
G Gaia, AOL Member
Quoted on Wisdomquotes.com

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

Snakes on a Plane [2006] [R] - 8.9.6

I was poking around in the access log trying to figure out why recycled canvas isn’t talking to its server and found the following entry:

80.4.10.129 - - [23/Aug/2007:05:32:37 -0700] “GET /~void/category/snakes-on-a-plane/ HTTP/1.1″ 200 15854 “http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=snakes+on+a+plane+sex+bit&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a&safe=active” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-GB; rv:1.8.1.6) Gecko/20070725 Firefox/2.0.0.6″

It seems that my Snakes on a Plane category is the number one search result on google.co.uk for the phrase “snakes on a plane sex bit.” Rather odd, since this person had Firefox’s safe search feature active.

While I was marvelling at my search ranking I checked out the next result, a movie review on a site called, “Kids in Mind.” It was pretty funny. This creepy web site’s review of Snakes on a Plane consisted of a list of the profanity, violence and sex in the movie, followed by descriptions of the movie scene where the profanity, violence or sex occurred.

PROFANITY 6 - 18 F-words and its derivatives, 13 sexual references, 17 scatological terms, 11 anatomical terms, 15 mild obscenities, name-calling (punk), 5 religious profanities, 12 religious exclamations.

Hmmm, I only counted 15 F-words. I’ll have to watch the DVD again.

I can just imagine some sex-obsessed freak watching Snakes on a Plane over and over to count the snake bites AND, incidentally, to see a woman’s actual naked breast in the uhhhh sex bit. Horrors! Anything to promote Family Values, eh? I find it rather sick to post a list like that on a site called “Kids in Mind.” Anyone looking for kids’ movies with their kids might stumble upon it. Sheesh.

Snakes on a Plane Family Values F-word recycled canvas

Proof of Creationism

Well, why didn’t you guys just say so! Billions of cans and jars, billions of scientific experiments a year. Life does NOT evolve from peanut butter!

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