Into the Void

“…Look, without humor we would all have committed suicide. We made fun of everything. What I’m actually saying is that that helped us remain human, even under hard conditions.”
– Holocaust survivor, quoted by Dr. Chaya Ostrower, PhD of Beit Berl College, Israel
in Humor as a defense mechanism in the Holocaust

The article above is about the victims of the death camps using humor to stay sane in an inhuman, insane situation. Humor is a great coping mechanism. If it worked for people who lived in the shadow of a crematorium, it can certainly work for us.

I came across the above quote this morning while checking the Pendulum listing on dmoz.org. Holocaust humor? WHAT????

No, there was nothing funny about the Holocaust. There is nothing funny about genocide. There is nothing funny about a thing that goes beyond hate, that stigmatizes, dehumanizes, and then brings formerly rational human beings to methodically exterminate their next-door neighbors.

“Holocaust” means “complete burning.” The word Holocaust is technically used to refer to the six million Jewish victims. The goal was to exterminate an entire race just because they weren’t Christian. Ok, well, there were other factors, but nobody had to wear an “successful” badge. They had to wear a Judenfleck.

I am misusing the word to include three million other victims. Feel free to comment.

My personal interest in the Holocaust focuses on the “Aktion T 4,” the Nazi euthanasia program to eliminate “life unworthy of life”. The Nazis tuned up the Death Machine on mental patients before grinding through the other 9,000,000 victims.

Nine Million. Can you even get your brain around such a number? That is like murdering the inhabitants of SIX Philadelphia, PAs. (Philadelphia population is from the Census Bureau’s State & County QuickFacts.)

“The murder of the lunatics contains the key to the Pogrom of the Jews…”
– Max Horkheimer (1895-1973)
quoted in The Cynical Republic, “Haus des Eigensinns – House of maddening beauty”

I’ll be talking about this some more.

Technorati: suicide Nazi holocaust T+4+Aktion mental+illness Judenfleck

The Hindu Goddess Sita made her animated film debut in a wonderful movie called Sita Sings the Blues. Sita premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival a few days ago.

“Pushpakha”
by Nina Paley

Sita Sings the Blues was created by animator Nina Paley, who you might remember from her animated IMAX feature, Pandorama. All I’ve seen of Sita is the preview on archive.org, embedded later in this post, and it really captured my imagination.

Sita is great, like those wild Bollywood movies they show on Namaste America. Singing, dancing, love lost, singing and dancing, love regained, and more singing and dancing. It’s delightfully melodramatic. The Goddess’ story is interspersed with an autobiographical storyline from Ms. Paley’s own life. The movie is narrated by three sock puppets. Errr, that should say shadow puppets.

The music in the preview sounds like a cross between Timothy Leary’s White Birds Sing (Beyond Life) and Led Zeppelin’s Four Sticks (Led Zeppelin IV), however Sita Sings the Blues uses the music of Roaring 20’s era songstress Annette Hanshaw to express Sita’s (and Nina’s) feelings.

Edit:
That didn’t sound quite right. I like White Birds Sing and Four Sticks, but I realized later that other folks might not. The music was raucous and fun. Unlike the Indian engineers and professors I’ve met… What, do they only let the boring people come here? Maybe the US is a kind of exile.

Here’s the trailer from archive.org.

By way of Idol Chatter.

Another edit:
When I wrote this article WikiPedia had nothing about the movie Sita Sings the Blues. After I added an item to the Sita disabiguation page, an article on Sita Sings the Blues showed up. Magically. How did we live without the interNets?

Today I learned that the Arabic word for mental illness has the same etymology as the Arabic word for evil spirits. This has an unfortunate effect on how the mentally ill are perceived in the Middle East.

Language is an odd thing. It enables you to express your innermost thoughts and feelings. BUT it almost guarantees that the thoughts and feelings you express have been totally shaped by the language itself. In the words of comedian Lenny Bruce,

“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.”
– Lenny Bruce, quoted on Rakes Progress: Lenny Bruce is not afraid

So what’s happening is that as long as the doctors use that old-fashioned
word to describe mental illness, demon-possessed the mentally ill will remain.

Arabs don’t have a monopoly on superstition though. The following TinyUrl will take you to a google search for “mental illness exorcism.”
http://tinyurl.com/5gwe4p

Does the word “uncompromising” mean “having strong values” or does it mean “selfish, stubborn, and uncooperative?” Mostly I hear the word uncompromising in advertisements for large gas-guzzling SUVs. Stand your ground, you deserve as much gasoline as you can get!

Ok, let me parse that word that is so proudly used in advertisements, and worse, by our leaders.

Main Entry: un·com·pro·mis·ing
Pronunciation: \-?m?-zi?\
Function: adjective
Date: 1800
: not making or accepting a compromise : making no concessions : inflexible, unyielding
- Merriam-Webster Dictionary: uncompromising

Ah, inflexible. Are we talking about a lack of neuroplasticity again? I submit, then, that if a person is uncompromising then they have a mental deficiency that renders them incapable of making the compromises that smooth interpersonal and even international relationships. That explains a thing or two.

Main Entry: in·flex·i·ble
Pronunciation: \(?)in-?flek-s?-b?l\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin inflexibilis, from in- + flexibilis flexible
Date: 14th century
1 : rigidly firm in will or purpose : unyielding
2 : not readily bent : lacking or deficient in suppleness
3 : incapable of change : unalterable
— in·flex·i·bil·i·ty \-?flek-s?-?bi-l?-t?\ noun
— in·flex·i·ble·ness \-?flek-s?-b?l-n?s\ noun
— in·flex·i·bly \-bl?\ adverb
synonyms inflexible, obdurate, adamant mean unwilling to alter a predetermined course or purpose. inflexible implies rigid adherence or even slavish conformity to principle <inflexible in their demands>. obdurate stresses hardness of heart and insensitivity to appeals for mercy or the influence of divine grace <obdurate in his refusal to grant clemency>. adamant implies utter immovability in the face of all temptation or entreaty <adamant that the work should continue>.
synonyms see in addition stiff
- Merriam-Webster Dictionary: inflexible

HA! Merriam-Webster doesn’t have an entry for neuroplasticity. I guess they’re Republicans too.

http://www.laptop.org/

It’s here, the ideal gift for early adopters.

We’ve been hearing about the $100 Laptop for months now. It seemed like a pipe dream. A laptop for children in third world countries? It would have to be an engineering marvel. The kids often live in houses with dirt floors. They often don’t have electricity. Internet infrastructure - or even telephone service - is non-existent in rural towns. They’ve probably never seen a computer before. They’ll have to learn the OS and the software without the a priori assumptions of a Westerner. Getting computer teachers trained has to be a logistical nightmare! How can this possibly work?

The answer is one that wouldn’t occur to most of us… Cooperation on a global scale!

It’s the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program. This program attempted to design, build and distribute laptops for under $100 to children in third world countries.

In December OLPC had a promotion where if you donated a laptop you could buy a second laptop. PLUS you get a year of free Sprint wifi access at places like Barnes & Noble, St*rbucks, etc. that you can also use with any other wifi devices you may own - laptops and PDAs. The Sprint access alone is worth the price of the laptop.

The XO has totally new hardware with VERY low power consumption. The XO has a very cool GUI called “Sugar” that’s usuable even by kids who can’t read yet, much less read English. Sugar is based on a trimmed down Linux OS with programs written just for it. Programs like a music synthesizer, Turtle Graphics, word processing, a web browser and that’s just the START of it!

Since The XO is intended for third world countries, it has wifi - no ethernet infrastructure is necessary. They’ll automatically connect at power up to other XOs that they find. This enables the kids to work on collaborative projects. Not just chatrooms, but writing music together in the music workspace! Collaboration is the key to the future.

The XO has two antennas and uses them to triangulate and display a 2D map of surrounding XOs and wireless access points. It took a while and I had to change some of my router settings, but I was able to connect to the Internet with my XO.

There is an available hand crank to charge the XO if you don’t have electricity in your village. I think they said there’s a solar battery charger available too. They also have wireless teacher access points that enable the kids to get on the Internet and see what’s going on in the rest of the world. This is a really ambitious project. I did what I could.

I’ll post an update if the Give One - Get One program runs again. Your donation is partly tax deductible. And you’re doing something good for less fortunate kids. It’s a win-win game.

In WWII the Germans ran into Russia killing everyone they found. They destroyed entire villages, an entire way of life. In some parts of Russia 1 in 4 people died. Every family was affected.

However, the Germans awakened a sleeping giant. And when U.S. General George Patton realized just how big Russia was, he wanted our army to march right through Germany and into Russia to get at them while they were still recovering from Germany’s predations. There was a big antisemitic component to this that I don’t wish to go into at this time.

Remember that at the same time we were taking back Europe, we were also fighting in the Pacific theater. Japan was throwing Mitsubishi Zeros at us - yup, made by the same company that makes cars and Three Diamonds tuna. The kamakazi pilots literally committed suicide by ramming our ships with planes. They had already been at war with China for years before Pearl Harbor and they were pretty much tapped out.

Kamakazi means “divine wind” after a Chinese attack that was thwarted by high winds in the Sea of Japan.

Despite the fact that we had pretty much won against Japan, in 1949 we dropped atomic bombs on two important cities. Not on the Mitsubishi plant where Zeros were manufactured but a few miles away on a city full of civilians.

Why???

To impress the Russians that we were technologically superior.

The Russians hurried up to create their own atomic bomb. We upgraded to hydrogen bombs, which use an atomic bomb as an igniter. Russia upgraded.

The government created a big Communism scare to get the American people to fund this massive effort. We used smaller nations as proxies to test our technology against other countries that acted as Russia’s proxies.

We engaged in a “space race” that started with Russia’s Sputnik satellite in 1957 and culminated in our first steps on the moon in 1969.

Both of us developed Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Systems (ICBMs) to deliver nukes. We both developed sophisticated anti-nuke systems to shoot down ICBMs. We had enough missiles to destroy each other 30 times over - this is called “overkill.”

In 1962, JFK had a standoff with Russia’s Khrushchev over missile sites in Cuba, just 90 miles away from the US. The Cuban Missile Crisis was the closest we ever came to Thermonuclear Armageddon.

In the 1980’s President Reagan wanted to fill the sky with killer satellites. My favorite idea was “Rods of God,” in which satellites would carry up huge titanium rods that they could drop out of the sky on our enemies. These people were so wrapped up in it that they’d destroy the world if they had to.

Needless to say, we had a worldwide spy network to keep tabs on all this.

Fortunately for us, and devastatingly for the citizens of the USSR, they ran out of money before we did. I guess that means we won, but winning put the US so far in debt to foreign investors that we’ll still be paying it for another generation.

War, even a Cold War, is expensive.

That’s the cold war, the technological rivalry. We never actually fired a shot at each other, but we spent 40 years trying to prove our cajones were bigger than theirs.

Putin seems to trying to reconstitute the old Soviet Union. This time around, we’ve already thrown billions of dollars at the non-war in the Middle East and it is crumbling our economy. I don’t know where it will go.

Technorati: Kamakazi divine+wind Mitsubishi+Zero Three+Diamonds WWI atomic+bomb cold+war Nazi General+Patton Hiroshima Nagasaki sputnik Intercontinental+Ballistic+Missile ICBM communism+scare space+race Soviet+Union

My XO Laptop is almost here. Watch this space for a
technical writeup and demo video.

—– Original Message —–
From: OLPC Customer Care
To: banth@…..
Sent: Thursday, January 24, 2008 2:30 AM
Subject: Your XO Laptop

Dear Donor,
We wrote you several days ago to let you know that your donation is in our
shipping queue for the shipment of your XO laptop.
We are awaiting the arrival of new inventory so that we may ship your laptop
to you. We will send you another update in the next few days when we have
specific shipping information.
We appreciate your generosity and patience.
Sincerely,
OLPC Donor Services

“My mother always said democracy is the best revenge.”
– Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, son of assassinated Pakistani politician Benazir Bhutto, quoted in Time Magazine, January 14, 2008

2008 handsome priests calendar - Calendario Romano

Not just for kids any more - now you too can have your own hunky priest… calendar.

Piero Pazzi’s Calendario Romano features handsome Roman priests and beautiful Vatican churches. The calendar helps raise funds for London HIV charity The Food Chain.

No hope for help… | Oddly Enough | Reuters

“I have a message for every homeowner worried about rising mortgage payments: The best you can do for your family is to call 1-800-995-HOPE,”

… Bush said after a White House meeting with administration officials and lenders on a new plan to help.

Unfortunately he was a couple digits off, it is actually 1-888-995-HOPE(4673) . That gets you through to the Homeownership Preservation Foundation, a nonprofit group which offers free housing counseling for homeowners.

The article above gave me a giggle.

The “subprime mortgage” problem is being beaten to death on the news, and I have no intention of beating it to death here. If you can’t afford a house, look for a cheaper one. When determining whether you can afford a house, you don’t count future increases in income or expected appreciation of the property into the equation. And if you’re a bank buying mortgage notes from mortgage brokers, please check the financials of every single mortgagee before you use my savings to buy it.

Simple.

It’s the American dream, again. Anyone can be a homeowner.

Never mind the incalculably bad political decisions that have led to this situation. Let’s see: unemployment is up, salaries aren’t increasing, making it difficult to adjust to balloon payments. The value of houses is dropping, evaporating home equity.

And now, foreign investors are pulling their money out of the whole industry. The public debt? That’s owned by foreign investors. It increases every time a bank forecloses on a mortgage - the bank can only get pennies on the dollar in a sheriff’s sale. The investors are pulling their money out, destabilizing the stock market. Our money is worth much less in the world market, giving many Americans the mistaken impression that everyone in the world is greedily charging us more for things like oil and clothes. It’s not greed, folks. It’s called the “Exchange Rate.”

We are so screwed, even those of us who aren’t on the verge of losing a house we shouldn’t have been allowed to buy in the first place.