From theory to reality to myth can be a bumpy road. Along with the rest of rational mankind, I've dismissed all kinds of crap; from magicians sawing women in half to Thor throwing thunderbolts, everyone seems to be constantly trying to put one over on us, as though we were all gullible idiots desperate to believe anything flung our way. Just as there was no evidence Dubya could have possibly been shown that would have stopped his march to war, so there is no evidence I could possibly be shown that would cause me to dismiss the following theories which, despite their improbability, just might be true.
THE EXPANDING UNIVERSE
There is no such thing as gravity. Everything is constantly expanding at the same rate so you don't notice, literally doubling in size every second, which keeps us pressed back into the earth expanding beneath us. This is a theory that contradicts Sir Isaac Newton. Some people can expand faster than others, gaining a perspective on the past. Some people can expand slower than others, gaining a perspective on the future. Socks don't disappear, they just stop expanding till you can't see them. In this expansion, everything inevitably falls back towards thataway and there's nothing you can do about it except expand your own reality faster than reality is expanding itself.
ANTITHESIS: Nothing's doing anything.
EVERYTHING THAT HAS HAPPENED TO ME SINCE CENTRAL PARK, 1970, IS AN ACID FLASH-FORWARD, AND SOMEDAY I'LL WAKE UP FROM THIS MADNESS TO FIND MYSELF NINETEEN, IN NEW YORK AT THE VERY FIRST EARTH DAY CELEBRATION, IN PERFECT HEALTH, SKINNY, LYING IN THE GRASS, LOOKING AT THE CLOUDS AND SEEING THINGS
Only you can disprove this theory by proving your own existence, but since I can only verify your existence through my own senses, and since one of my overactive senses is imagination, who's to say I'm not making you up as I go along, or that you're not making me up as you go along. If you are, stop, I can take over from here.
ANTITHESIS: This is reality.
FIGHT CHAOS
Entropy is how you tell time is running forward. Since entropy is the tendency for reality to dissipate, if you saw a film showing dispersal, from order into chaos, you'd know it was running forward. If you saw a film in which all the blue in a glass of water coalesced into a pill that flew out of the glass into someone's hand, you'd know the film was running backwards because chaos doesn't naturally turn into order.
Members of mankind must spend their lives fighting entropy because if we don't do it, who will? Can't depend on any other species on earth to get the job done. Have any chimpanzees or kangaroos ever turned chaos into order? I don't think so. The pyramids were mankind's first great monument to anti-entropy. It's up to us to stem the tide of order into chaos, to create order and more order, order in the diner, order in the court, there's no such thing as too much order because that's what differentiates humans from everything else. Fight the chaos. Vote.
ANTITHESIS: Chaos is a good thing. Species need chaos to grow into something new and improved. The more chaos the better if improvement' s the game. Fuck order. Celebrate the random. Let it flow naturally. Trust the entropy to carry you to a distant shore of peace and enlightenment, where everyone's in love and sentences write themselves.
OIL ISN'T A FOSSIL FUEL
Let us celebrate the impossibility of proving a negative. When diving into the ginormous task of proving a negative, one finds one can only cast doubt. Proving you did something is a snap. Proving you didn't can't be done. Everything we do leaves residue. Proving you didn't do something demands searching for lack of residue. Been there. Done that. Your search will never end if what you're looking for is lack of anything.
So let's stop being so negative and imagine a science fiction world in which oil was not rare at all, just hard to get to. Let's say oil was a plentiful and naturally occurring substance bubbling up from the center of the earth like magma, in constant and infinite supply.
The only alternative is that oil is made from old organic matter, every plant and animal that ever lived that somehow got buried and squished millions of years ago, turning into sticky black goo that we all need for transportation. Who came up with THAT story?
Might I point out that no DNA has ever turned up in a barrel of oil?
Might I also point out that I made that up?
We get most of our oil from deposits above the fossil layer, but lately deep drilling has found deposits below the fossil layer. Geologically, below means before. If oil bubbles up, the fossils found in oil got there when the oil worked its way through the fossil layer.
Doesn't prove anything, but what better way to drive the price up on ANYTHING than promote a story that nature is stingy instead of bountiful.
ANTITHESIS: Who gives a fuck? We'll always need oil. Gasoline isn't the only thing its good for. I'm typing on oil right now. Oil companies have cornered the market in plastic, making them successful beyond imagination. Why do they need the transportation market too? Gasoline should be considered an unfortunate byproduct in the production of plastic, something you sell off cheap while getting on with the serious task of putting paper bags out of business.
THE OIL STANDARD
The United States made a deal with OPEC that they would always announce the global worth of a barrel of oil in American dollars, thus creating the petrodollar to replace the gold standard. When they say the global price of a barrel of oil is going up, what they're really saying is the worth of the American dollar is going down.
ANTITHESIS: What will the dollar be worth when the oil's all gone? Nothing. Why did they make this deal? Because they know there's plenty of oil. The same people who tell you oil's scarce told you Saddam had a nuke aimed at your head.
THE OPIUM STANDARD
In its own little version of OPEC, for more than 500 years the drug world has universally decreed that one ounce of gold is worth one kilo of unprocessed poppies, forever tying the global price of street heroin to the price of gold. When they say the worth of gold is going up, what they're really saying is the worth of opiates is going down. When there's a glut, like now, gold goes up.
ANTITHESIS: The CIA doesn't control the black market.
THE OIL AND PHARMACEUTICAL COMPANIES ARE SATAN
The oil magnates know the day is coming and they're preparing for the revolution when the oil's all gone and who needs them. They're building concentration camps masquerading as FEMA relocation centers as we speak. They're trying to take our guns away because they know the revolution's coming, so they're spraying us from the skies with contrails full of new chemicals that are supposed to turn us docile. The minions of Satan have got the technology to do anything, houses heated by the sun and cars that run on farts, but they've got to squeeze every last penny out of the oil that may or may not be running out.
The American drug companies don't want to cut into profits, which would seriously be the case if people could get the same effects from simply growing a flower and smoking it. Whether it's from a hemp or poppy, gardening cuts out the middleman. You can medicate yourself and who needs a pharmaceutical company. The best pot requires no processing other than horticultural. You just pick the flowers, dry them, and smoke them. The best opium requires no processing other than horticultural. You just pick the flowering bulbs of the California Poppy (The state flower!), dry them, and smoke them. The minions of Satan want to sell you their chemical services but no one needs Vicodin or even morphine if they can just grow a flower, which also includes the byproduct of ending international drug smuggling. Given a choice between going downtown and trying to score some heroin or growing a flower, what would most people do, especially those simply seeking a painkiller. Pot and the poppy are the primary plants for the pharmaceutically self-regulating, and all people have to know is to garden.
ANTITHESIS: Big corporations are only there to help.
MICHAEL BAY IS SATAN
All right, I'm not saying he's not a minion, but Satan himself? C'mon now.
ANTITHESIS: Oprah is Satan.
WE CREATE OUR OWN REALITY
Anybody who thinks we create our own reality isn't me. There's no way I would have created this reality. I'm not that creative. The reality I would have created involves a house in the Hollywood Hills with a swimming pool, Jacuzzi, and lots of bikinis, you know, standard stuff, not a vacant house in the middle of the desert with no running water. I understand why the rich and successful need to blame it on themselves, they have to convince themselves they deserve it, but that doesn't mean the rest of us have to blame our poverty on ourselves. Not that there aren't people who deserve exactly what they've got. Mazel Tov to all who got what they deserve. But nobody deserves the random bad things that constantly happen. We didn't create this reality, thank you very much, it was all imposed from outside sources.
ANTITHESIS: Nobody knows anything.
EVERYTHING IS GOOD FOR YOU IN MODERATION AND EVERYTHING IS BAD FOR YOU IN EXCESS
Go ahead, smoke, but not two packs a day, two cigarettes a day. Go ahead drink, but not two quarts a day, two glasses a day. Go ahead, eat a pie, but not every day, just once in a while. McDonald's double cheeseburger? Go ahead. One a month. The internet? Aw, what the hell, every day. Some things are good for you because they're bad for you.
ANTITHESIS: Gorge yourself till you die. Being called down to this earthly plane is all about sensual pleasure, experiencing things only humans can experience, like physical ecstasy and Spiderman 3.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." - Carl Sagan -
Calling All Satirists
When the presidential debates are aired by CNN on June 3rd and 5th, the public will be able to edit, remix, parody and publish the footage - without worrying about copyright violation. CNN has pledged to make debate footage available to the public without restriction.
Go here, type in anyone's cell phone number, and find out where they are.
100 Years Ago in Disinfotainment Today
On this day in 1907,
Martha Disin married George Fotainment
Answers to Last Week's Stupid Questions
In what movie did this happen? A guy walks up to another guy in a car and says "Do you remember your birth?" The guy in the car says "No, why?" The other guy says "Because you're going to relive it," then reaches in, grabs the guy by the lapels and pulls him out the window of his car.
Thank you Bruce Shoemaker: "Joe Bologna in My Favorite Year playing a Sid Caesar like character. The original story is credited to Mel Brooks who was a writer for Sid's Your Show of Shows."
Have you ever seen someone go mad right in front of your eyes?
This would be my wife. I was on the telephone to a friend at the time when she literally attacked me ... I did a quick retreat from the phone and attempted to deal with the problem. Couldn't and my best course of action was to vacate the premises as quickly as possible. A quick call to the police took the problem out of my hands. My wife spent about six weeks in the hospital and is now on meds to control bi-polar manic depression. A very scary experience.
- anonymous by request
Michael,
I was a freshman in college in an all-male freshman dorm, at a time when the legal age to drink was 18 (mid-seventies) . Two to a room, 16 rooms in a rectangle surrounding a central bathroom with 4 stalls, 6 sinks and 4 showers.
Joel was just another guy, across the rectangle, 4 doors away. Except as the first few weeks went on, Joel stopped taking showers or going to class. He started popping up in socially strange places, asking increasingly unacceptable "favors." For me it started when I was peacefully taking a crap, and Joel's by now scrubbled face popped over the top of the stall door. "What ya doing?" "Taking a shit Joel." "Oh, want to go for a walk?" "Ah, no thanks." And then off he went.
Soon it took physical restraint by two, then three, of us to keep Joel from sneaking into the bathroom when someone's girlfriend needed to use the toilet. He'd beg, on his knees, "Be a pal, I won't tell anyone." By the end of the second week, Joel was barely sleeping al all, and his roommate was looking for other rooms to sleep in at night.
Sometime in the third week of the semester the van pulled up outside the dorm, and several rather burly men in white uniforms grabbed Joel and hauled him downstairs to the van, and then off to the mental 'hospital'. Joel fought all the way out, and screamed "I'll get you all, I'll come back and kill you all."
We found out Joel was on some anti-psychotic drug, which he'd quit taking almost immediately upon arrival at school. There was no news after that for a few days when the local radio put out a bulletin that Joel had smacked a cook over the head with a fry pan. He'd then jumped out the kitchen window and was on the loose. Lots of nervous freshman that night as we all went to bed with baseball bats, tennis rackets, etc. next to the bed. Joel was caught the next day trying to get into his mother's house and taken back to the mental 'hospital'. He tried to escape one more time, only this time when he jumped out the window he was unfortunately on the second floor, and broke his back in the jump.
I didn't hear any more of Joel for two years. One night at a University-sponsore d party downtown, I was watching a band play and thinking about getting another free beer when someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Joel. Out of the 'hospital' and back on his medications. He apologized for all that had happened. We talked for nearly an hour, exchanged well-wishes for the future, and Joel walked out into the crowd.
I never saw, heard of, or from Joel again. I think of him when mental health/illness is brought up, and always wonder just where the line should be drawn.
Thanks for the opportunity to write about that Michael. I always enjoy Dareland.
- Kurt Ferguson
Go mad? Yes.
In front of my eyes? Not exactly. Actually, it was me.
Me and the pain killer Lortab don't play well together and I've known this for several years. Last year, I caught pneumonia and I went to a minor emergency clinic. The doctor prescribed Notuss for my cough. I asked her, does this have Lortab in it, and she said no.
So I started taking it. It was good. Very good. Very mild. No cough. Day two, some feelings of anxiety, but nothing serious. Night three - I woke up with no sense of self identity at all. None. I didn't know who I was, where I was, or what I was doing there. Instead, my entire world consisted of a series of thirteen numbers, which I compulsively began to add together. When I added the thirteenth number to the equation, suddenly I was me again, but with a nice unbroken memory of when I was not me at all - when I was a series of 13 numbers to be added together. It scared me so bad I sat up the rest of the night afraid to go to sleep, afraid of losing myself again.
The next day, I Googled Notuss and found that it contains hydrocodone, which also goes under the prescription name Lortab. Useful information, that.
Anyway, I included a variation of this experience in a short story, called "The Sum of Man," which is going to be published in Nature Physics later this year.
Hey, Michael: I'm really kind of reluctant to answer this because it's intensely personal and embarrassing, not something I want plastered all over the internet, but true. In 1984, my sister (a huge LSD/Timothy Leary fan) convinced me to take a hit of LSD. A single hit, not multiple, and it was apparently perfectly fine stuff, she took more than one of the same stuff...no harm, no foul. I on the other hand, didn't fare so well! That night, as I tripped alone in my apt., I began to hear "voices", that told me I was basically the most horrible person that ever lived, that I didn't deserve to live, and called me every bad name in the book. Unfortunately, when the trippin' ended, the voices didn't...all summer long I heard the same thing and my brain devised an elaborate explanation as to what must be going on (neighbors crawling into the crawl space above my apt. and watching me through pinholes in the ceiling and talking badly to me in order to make me horribly depressed and kill myself). Indeed, after an entire summer of that living hell, I eventually did give in to the voices urging me to commit suicide. I was about to run out of weed and had quit my job, I had no money left and would probably be homeless, so I gave in and took a bottle of sleeping pills with my last bowl of smoke. In the 3 months that I'd been hearing these voices, my 2 cats had gotten to the point where they wouldn't come anywhere near me, and they had been very sweet, loving cats before. After taking the pills I went to bed and went to sleep, only to become conscious an hour later with both cats on my chest, with their faces right up in my face, meowing really loudly. It scared the hell out of me, so I lumbered up and went and told my sister what I'd done (she lived in the same building). I had to do the whole ER/stomach pump thing. Long story short, I was put on an anti-schizophrenic med and within a week the voices were gone. I only had to be on those meds for about a few months, and never had a problem with schizophrenia, in any form, again. I know that this sounds unbelievable but, trust me, you can't make this stuff up! Most people don't find the LSD/crazy part so unbelievable, but that it was healed so quickly and efficiently by the Navane or that I'm not still crazy at some level. Maybe I am...maybe we all are! I think people have always thought I was a little "off" because, like you, my I.Q. is quite a bit higher than normal and I just don't think like the average person! But I'm here to tell you that "crazy" truly IS a matter of brain chemistry!!! - anonymous by request
I think the only time that happened was when I was about age seven, one day when my mother was angry at me for something. Based on something from a cartoon I had seen, I guess, I put a book inside the back of my underwear to protect me from the blows. Instead, this made her go off even worse and she really beat us bad.
That was the only time she ever hit me, though.
What bothers me more is your idea about "mad." Most people believe that when a person goes "mad," there's no relief. You either lock them in an asylum for the rest of their lives, or you do the humane thing and kill them.
There's a role playing game called "Call of Cthulu" which says there are gods far more powerful than Jesus or anyone you've ever heard of, they're evil, and even knowing anything about them drives you mad. In the game, when you lose all your "sanity," you become one of the minions of these monster gods. A good, honest family man will pick up a knife and slaughter them, and anyone he runs across. Why not? He's mad.
Mind you, I've been to two shrinks in my life. Neither of them did any good. I believe psychiatry is a three-card-Monte game, that you have to solve your own problems, and shrinks take your money and provide absolutely no help. But to say that there is absolutely no help for anyone who has mental problems, that "mad" might as well mean "dead," is scary. Unfortunately, it's also the most accepted belief in this country.
So, understand how I'm reacting to this question you're asking. I think you're opening a can of black mambas. And, by the way, the short story you opened this particular DT column was profoundly depressing to me.
Well, since you asked: Years ago, a friend of mine had a urinary tract infection - a pretty rare thing for men, but he hit the jackpot. He saw the doctor, got antibiotics for it. The side effects listed "psychosis". Nobody ever gets the side effects. He hit the jackpot again. He still lived with his parents at the time. When his reality went off the tracks, he was simply lost. He was fucked in the head and a part of him knew it; we talked on the phone. He told me weird shit. I was concerned and asked him for more detail, trying to wrap my head around it.
He said he'd write it all up for me, there was too much of it to go into it on the phone. I said okay. The next day he sent me a long, long document by e-mail. It was detailed and hopelessly fragmented at the same time. In it, he told me things: When he was six or seven years old, he went out in the nearby woods with a girl of his own age. He said he had a surprise for her - it was a plastic bag full of glass bottles they could break. He broke some. She got scared -- of him. The next day, he woke up and the cops were there. They asked what had happened to her. Nothing, he told them. He admitted to breaking the bottles and said he was sorry. The cops thought that was significant. They _knew_ something, but my friend didn't understand what it was. A few years later, he met with a shrink a number of times. The shrink gave him bottles and asked him to give them names. He did so. She said, no, no -- give them female names. They talked about breaking bottles. He liked to do it. He showed her where he'd done it, but there was nothing there -- someone had cleaned the shards up. While they were looking at the spot, other people were combing the area for signs of rape... I got the creeps. He told me I later lived with the girl - now an adult, of course - who went to the woods with him. When he came to visit us, she accused him of raping her. In his memories, on the pages he sent me, this girl was ubiquitous; she was everywhere -- she hung out with us, she went out with a friend of ours, she seemed to know everyone and everyone knew her, and especially what she was saying about him.. and everyone kept it in mind when they looked at him. She conveniently only had a presence in his memories when she could accuse him; at other times, he seemed to forget about her. He was constantly being accused of sexual assault by his friends and family, but nothing ever came of it. He was constantly defending himself against charges of largely unspecified perversion. Another constant element was one of seeing a psychiatrist and being medicated in various ways. Most importantly, there was a strong element of shame and ostracism, brought on by things he couldn't remember and couldn't understand, and by seeing a psychiatrist; in these memories, he was always an outsider, always manipulated by others who disdained him and suspected him of perversion. A lot of this happened in secret - his psychiatrist was called a speech therapist, drugs were administered to him clandestinely, he was constantly in a situation where he was asked to keep something that had to do with his treatment or incidents that involved him a secret. Misunderstandings were also a constant presence in his memories; people kept hearing him wrong and always interpreting everything he said or did in the worst possible way. When he said "yes", they thought he was admitting to being a pervert. But that went both ways; when they called him "sick", he'd reply, "yeah, I have a cold", for example - in these memories, he never seemed to understand why everyone misunderstood him, and he never seemed aware of the subtext - or even the obvious content - of what people are saying to him. It was only after it was said that he understood what had occurred, and then he was always shamed by it. He told me his aunt tried to poison him. She brought him cake. She had laced it with Depo-Provera. I looked Depo-Provera up online -- it's an American contraceptive for women, not available here in Finland. It's also used in the chemical castration of male sex offenders in the States. I got the creeps again. They were also feeding him progesterone, which is, among other things, used in the hormone therapy for transsexual women. He told me that he remembered a number of times when I'd made fun of the size of his penis. He remembered when I, his father, his uncle and his cousin gathered around and did the same. I didn't remember any of this. He told me it happened a few summers ago, when we were on a holiday together with his family. On the phone again, I pointed out that although it was true that we'd spent summers together, that was when we were much younger. His chronology was all over the place. This obviously confused him for a moment, but then he just moved on. They brought in lawyers to press him and hackers to go through his files. A hacker installed a back door on his computer. His password was "no more pain", written backwards... It went on and on, for 23 pages. As far as I know, none of this really happened. I asked his parents about some of these things, just to see if they were based on real events, but I don't think there was an incident with bottles and cops, for example - but then, I'm not at all sure they'd tell me if there had been; his mother had a morbid fear of embarrassment of all kind, and sometimes it seemed like most human activities short of sitting down or cooking dinner were embarrassing to her. My friend's memories had changed retroactively, and even though it was a terrible and jumbled mess, he couldn't see the inconsistencies and impossibilities -- as if an eight-year old could be a serial rapist, for starters. But this was a temporary thing; it was induced by the medication, and it abated. Once things started to go back to normal and his psychosis became weaker, he could understand that what he was thinking was insane -- but if he thought too much of it, then it all made sense again, he told me; any argument against these things being true got instantly and retroactively rationalized away, as if the argument had never existed... It was strange and beautiful and scary to understand that this wasn't just depression or obsession or some other, reasonably commonplace mental problem; this was a case of a man literally losing all touch with reality, and in his mind, suddenly none of the old rules of causality or logic or relativity no longer worked. You couldn't reason with him because his world operated on an entirely different principle; anything you said to him, or anything he thought about, became a building block in his psychosis. And though it seemed impossible at the time, eventually, things simply went back to normal. His reality fragmented, and then it put itself back together, and that was that. It was a strange and creepy ride for everyone concerned, and while I admit that a part of me finds it utterly fascinating, I don't envy him the experience.
- MR
Stupid Questions of the Week
What's an eleven-letter word for "inevitable DC fruit?"
Am I the only one who hates Vicodin? Why is this shithole of a painkiller being rammed down our throats? It doesn't kill pain, it knocks you out. Take enough Vicodin to kill serious pain and you become unfunctional. It just puts you to sleep. A painkiller, a real painkiller, HELPS you to function, like aspirin or Tylenol. They kill the pain but allow you to keep going, specifically because you're no longer in pain. Morphine lollypops anyone?
By now everybody knows The Beatles wrote Got To Get You Into My Life about marijuana ("I took a ride I didn't know what I would find there, Another road where maybe I could see some other kind of mind there")and Elvis Costello's Pump it up is about jerking off ("There's nothing underhand she wouldn't understand") . What other popular songs are actually about something other than they seem?
If the minimum wage had risen at the same rate as the average CEO's pay, it would have been $22.61 per hour in 2006.
Don't Take My Word For It
"It's like someone slipped into my room in the middle of the night to viciously sodomize me and now they've returned to the scene of the crime to pour bleach in my eyes."
"On Tuesday, without note in the U.S. media, more than half of the members of Iraq's parliament rejected the continuing occupation of their country. 144 lawmakers signed onto a legislative petition calling on the United States to set a timetable for withdrawal, according to Nassar Al-Rubaie, a spokesman for the Al Sadr movement, the nationalist Shia group that sponsored the petition.
"It's a hugely significant development. Lawmakers demanding an end to the occupation now have the upper hand in the Iraqi legislature for the first time."
"George Bush is trying to save Paul Wolfowitz' job as President of the World Bank even after the vulpine neo-con was caught slipping a load of World Bank loot to his love interest, Shaha Ali Riza. Big deal. Yes, Wolfowitz shouldn't have been greasing his cookie sheet with government funds, but there are bigger reasons to toss The Wolf out the door.
"Like, say, perjury and homicide? I haven't forgotten, Mr. Wolfowitz, that on March 27, 2003 you testified before the US Congress that the occupation of Iraq wouldn't cost the American taxpayer a penny. You said, 'There's a lot of money to pay for this that doesn't have to be U.S. taxpayer money.' Oh, really?
"When Wolfowitz laid down that line of jive, he and the Bushes knew that Americans just can't pass up a bargain, and here The Wolf was offering the sale of the century, a 'free Iraq.' Not 'free' as in 'self-governing' but 'free' as in, we'll get their oil and their allegiance for nothing! We can bomb Iraq and the Iraqis will pay for the bombs!
"And where will the Iraqis, holding nothing but bushel-bags of Saddam dinars, get these billions of US dollars to pay for the Occupation?
"Wolfowitz testified, 'The oil revenues of that country could bring between $50 and $100 billion over the next two or three years.'
"Is that so?
"Wolfie's claim was no small matter. It's hard to remember, but lots of the Congressional debate was not about Saddam's Weapons of Mass Destruction - the New York Times had already found those for us. Senators were asking, What's this little war going to cost us? There was no way in hell Congress would have authorized Bush's big adventure if it cost $100 billion.
"Indeed, $100 billion was the price projected by the President's chief economist, Larry Lindsey. The President corrected Lindsey's math: Bush fired him.
"You know the punchline: The war has so far cost the U.S. taxpayer over half a trillion dollars - and counting."
"Dick Cheney is on the list of clients of the DC Madame, which explains a lot. Obviously Republicans resented Clinton because he didn't have to pay for it."
- Xarvon, Alien Investigator: Why Nobody Quotes Me -
"Nobody has done more to disrespect and exploit the innocent people who died on Sept. 11th and piss on their graves than George Bush."
"Why is it that our memory is good enough to retain the least triviality that happens to us, and yet not good enough to recollect how often we have told it to the same person?" - Francois de La Rochefoucauld -
"The very purpose of existence is to reconcile the glowing opinion we have of ourselves with the appalling things that other people think about us." - Quentin Crisp -
"Ron Paul won the debate hands down - all the polls show it - but the establishment media are loathe to report it, because if a tree falls in the forest and the corporate press choose not to report on it then it doesn't make a sound.
"After several days of voting, the online MSNBC poll has Ron Paul leading in every single positive category, proving that the vast majority think he won the debate. In an ABC News poll, well over 7,000 voted for the Congressman with Giuliani and Romney receiving a paltry 100 votes each. In a CSPAN poll, 69% voted for Ron Paul, with his nearest contender garnering just 9% of the vote...
"This tells us that the American people are crying out for a real conservative and Ron Paul would be a serious contender for the White House if the media afforded him equal coverage with the likes of Romney, McCain and Giuliani.
"However, as Alex Wallenwein points out in his OpEdNews.com article, the establishment media completely ignored public sentiment and handed the victory to either McCain or Romney, barely even mentioning Ron Paul's sterling performance and popular approval."
"France will be at the sides of the Libyan nurses locked up for eight years; France will not abandon Ingrid Betancourt; France will not abandon the women who are condemned to the burqa; France will not abandon the women who do not have liberty. France will be on the side of the oppressed of the world. This is the message of France; this is the identity of France; this is the history of France."
"From outta nowhere the tiny ones came, while humanity was busy trembling and sweating in the face of major global cataclysm, of global warming and nuclear war and rainforest devastation and melting ice caps and E. coli outbreaks and Ashlee Simpson and lethal hurricanes and the Apocalypse-hungry Christian right and a simply stupendously vile Bush juggernaut that has threatened all intelligent life everywhere. Onward they came, buzzy and calm and happy to be our very own adorable, unexpected harbinger of doom.
"Yes, now we can see it clearly. Now we can be appropriately alarmed and now maybe we can even say, Oh holy hell, maybe we should have seen it coming all along: Of course the end of mankind should come from something as sweet and commonplace and unforeseen as the honeybees...
"It's true. It's all because of the honeybees, those minuscule, absolutely essential, beautifully pollinating creatures that play such a vital role in our food supply, help nearly all flowering crops grow and therefore provide a simply enormous portion of the global diet including all citrus and many vegetables but excluding that goopy liquefied toxic meat crap they inject into McNuggets, these incredibly designed workhorse creatures that also make the world's sweetest stickiest natural substance next to Jessica Alba and maybe Shiva's own bubble bath, these lovely honeybees might, just might be a sign of our ultimate downfall."
"I grew up watching my father stand on his head every morning. He was doing sirsasana, a yoga pose that accounts for his youthful looks well into his 60s. Now he might have to pay a royalty to an American patent holder if he teaches the secrets of his good health to others.
"The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued 150 yoga-related copyrights, 134 patents on yoga accessories, and 2,315 yoga trademarks. There's big money in those pretzel twists and contortions - $3 billion a year in America alone. It's a mystery to most Indians that anybody can make that much money from the teaching of a knowledge that is not supposed to be bought or sold like sausages...
"It is worth noting that the people in the forefront of the patenting of traditional Indian wisdom are Indians, mostly overseas. We know a business opportunity when we see one and have exported generations of gurus skilled in peddling enlightenment for a buck. But as Indians, they ought to know that the very idea of patenting knowledge is a gross violation of the tradition of yoga...
"Western pharmaceutical companies make billions on drugs that are often first discovered in developing countries. But herbal remedies like bitter gourd or turmeric, which are known to be effective against everything from diabetes to piles, earn nothing for the country whose sages first isolated their virtues. The Indian government estimates that worldwide, 2,000 patents are issued a year based on traditional Indian medicines.
"Drugs and hatha yoga have the same aim: to help us lead healthier lives. India has given the world yoga for free...
"There's more at stake than just the money. There is also the perception that the world trading system is unfair, that the deck is stacked against developing countries. If the copying of Western drugs is illegal, so should be the patenting of yoga. It is also intellectual piracy, stood on its head."
"Those who condemn these operations [9-11] have viewed the event in isolation and have failed to connect it to previous events or to the reasons behind it. Their view is blinkered and lacks either a legitimate or a rational basis. They merely saw others in America and the media decrying these operations, so they did the same themselves. These people remind me of the wolf who, seeing a lamb, said to it: 'You were the one who polluted my water last year.' The lamb replied: 'It wasn't me,' but the wolf insisted: 'Yes it was.' The lamb said: 'I was only born this year.' The wolf replied: 'Then it was your mother who polluted my water,' and he ate the lamb. When the poor ewe saw her son being torn by the wolfs teeth, her maternal feelings drove her to give the wolf a hard butt. The wolf cried out: 'Look at this terrorism!' And all the parrots repeated what he said, saying 'Yes, we condemn the ewe's butting of the wolf.' What do you think about the wolf eating the ewes lamb?"
"The men the American public admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth." - H. L. Mencken -
"The attempt to ban liquor led to a vast increase in liquor distribution and consumption through black-market means. The campaign to wage a war on poverty resulted in more poverty. The war on literacy has created generations of illiterates. The wars on cigarettes and drugs have been spectacularly unsuccessful, and for proof you need look no further than prison, an environment that government fully controls and which is predictably swimming in cigarettes and drugs of all sorts.
"There are some things that a state just cannot do, no matter how much power it accumulates or employs. I'm sorry to tell this to the American Left, but the war on warm weather is not going to be any more successful than any other of these wars. And I'm sorry to tell this to the American Right, but there is no way that the American government can kill every person on the planet who resents US imperialism. The attempt to do so will generate more, not less, terrorism...
"Now they can't get away with hiding the numbers but you still have to look very hard to find them. The bottom line is that since the war on terror began, the incidents that qualify as terrorism have increased by an incredible 26 times. For every one incident in 2001, there are now 26 incidents. For every person killed by terrorism in 2002, 23 people were killed in 2006. Meanwhile, the polls reflect the perception that the world is more, not less, dangerous since the war on terror began. Indeed, among those polled, 81% now believe that the world is becoming more dangerous.
"Are we going to call this a job well done? It depends on what you call a good job. It fits precisely with what we might expect government to do: its wars always and everywhere make the problem worse, and not better."
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?"
"After the video clerk's tip, investigators said they infiltrated the group with two informants and bided their time while they secretly recorded the defendants. The six were arrested Monday night trying to buy AK-47 assault weapons, M-16s and other weapons from an FBI informant, authorities said. It was not clear when the alleged attack was to take place."
"Heartthrob Leonardo DiCaprio, TV personality Rosie O'Donnell and comic actor Sacha Baron Cohen are among the entertainment newsmakers on Time magazine's list of 100 people who shape the world. The list of the 100 most influential, on newsstands today, also includes Queen Elizabeth II, presidential hopefuls Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, YouTube founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, movie director Martin Scorsese and model Kate Moss. It does not include President George W. Bush."
"Ignorance is preferable to error, and he is less remote from the truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong." - Thomas Jefferson -
"Jeb Bush, the president's brother and former governor of Florida, is up for election Thursday as a director of troubled hospital chain Tenet Healthcare. Assuming he's waved through, his pay in his first year would come to nearly $37,000 a day. This is the same Tenet that had to pay $900 million to Uncle Sam last summer to settle charges that it had overbilled Medicare and Medicaid over many years. Nine hundred million dollars... It's also the same Tenet that just paid $80 million to the IRS after an audit found it owed back taxes going back as far as 1995... And this is just the big stuff. Tenet's recent public filings read like a police blotter. One of its clinics in South Carolina performed 436 open heart operations without certification. The company is being sued in California by staff claiming they were systematically short-changed on pay and overtime, in breach of the state's labor code."
"The higher type of man clings to virtue, the lower type of man clings to material comfort. The higher type of man cherishes justice, the lower type of man cherishes the hope of favors to be received."
- Confucius -
"All paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind." - Aristotle -
"Sometimes you gotta create what you want to be a part of." - Geri Weitzman -
"Now is the time for all good men to come to." - Walt Kelly: Pogo -
"You need chaos in your soul to give birth to a dancing star." - Friedrich Nietzsche -
Disinfotainment Today wants to merge. Disinfotainment Today likes long walks on the beach and unexpected turns of phrase. Disinfotainment Today wishes to insert its point of view in another newsletter and move it around a little. Disinfotainment Today is SWJM, DTE, needs TLC, digs PNP, is ISO a LTR with NSA. No CDs or BBCs need apply. On the other hand, Disinfotainment Today admits that fair use is a problem. Disinfotainment Today also admits it doesn't know what it's talking about, it stole that chocolate bar, and if you want to know what those acronyms mean, look here.
Jim Hightower: WHO'S JOINING BUSH'S WAR? (jimhightower.com)
Bush insists that his war is an urgent matter for the very survival of our nation - but not so urgent that he's willing to point at affluent young Americans and ask them to enlist and, you know, risk their lives... or make any sacrifice whatsoever.
Filthy habit (guardian.co.uk)
Once, everyone smoked on screen. Now, you have to be evil, hard-bitten, feckless or - worst of all - working class, says Zoe Williams.
Suzanne Corson: "On the Rise With Carlease Burke (afterellen.com)
You've seen her everywhere - from NYPD Blue to ER to Without a Trace to movies such as The Terminal and commercials for Verizon and Pfizer (you might have spotted her recently in the "My Time to Quit" commercials) - but you may not know her name. She's Carlease Burke, and for the past two decades, she's been one of the few out women of color working in Hollywood.
Beth Quinn: Abstinence-only delusion means ignorance-only (recordonline.com)
And now a word from the Bureau of Common Sense, where we leave the Right Wing Nuts in the hallway, sitting out there on the Group W bench. We need straight talk here, and that's because we've got trouble. That's right. Trouble right here in River City - and that starts with S and that rhymes with Hex and that means a lot of pregnant teenagers. And what are we doing about that trouble? I'll tell you what. We're telling our kids a pack of lies about sex, lies required - required! - by the White House.
Roger Ebert: A bouquet arrives...
A beautiful bouquet of flowers was delivered to the house the other day. A handwritten note paid compliments to my work and wished me a speedy recovery. Who was it from? A friend? A colleague? An old classmate? The card was signed, "Your Least Favorite Movie Star, Rob Schneider."
CBS fills the night with the LIVE on the East Coast (tape-delayed on the left coast) 'The 42nd Annual Academy Of Country Music'.
Scheduled on a FRESHDave are Don Rickles, Michael Imperioli, Wilco, and a Top Ten List presented by Masi Oka.
Scheduled on a FRESHCraig are Garry Shandling, Malachy McCourt, and Ruben Paul.
NBC begins the night with 'Dateline', followed by a FRESH'Law & Order: Criminal Intent', then a FRESH'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit'.
Scheduled on a FRESHLeno are Orlando Bloom, 9-year-old actress Maria Lark, and Gym Class Heroes.
Scheduled on a FRESHConan are Tom Selleck and Jenna Fischer.
Scheduled on a FRESHCarson Daly are Dave Foley, Ying Yang Twins.
ABC starts the night with a FRESH 2-hour 'Dancing With The Stars', followed by a FRESH'Boston Legal'.
Scheduled on a FRESHJimmy Kimmel are Jimmy hosts an entire show direct from a Santa Monica Big Blue Bus, picking up guests along the bus route, including Paula Abdul, Flavor Flav, and Feist.
The CW offers the SERIES FINALE'Gilmore Girls', followed by a FRESH'Veronica Mars'.
Faux has a FRESH'American Idol', followed by a FRESH'House'.
MY fills the night with the movie 'Chain Reaction'.
A&E has 'CSI: The 2nd One', another 'CSI: The 2nd One', 'Dog The Bounty Hunter', another 'Dog The Bounty Hunter', 'Driving Force', and another 'Driving Force'.
AMC offers the movie 'Red Dawn', followed by the movie 'Patriot Games', then the movie 'Commando'.
BBC -
[12:00 PM] Gordon Ramsay's F Word - Episode 6;
[1:00 PM] What Not To Wear - Ep. 3 Meeta;
[1:30 PM] What Not To Wear - Ep. 4 Hayley;
[2:00 PM] The Weakest Link - Episode 46;
[3:00 PM] How Clean Is Your House? - Episode 6;
[3:30 PM] How Clean Is Your House? - Episode 7;
[4:00 PM] Changing Rooms - Ep. 3 Thame;
[4:30 PM] Changing Rooms - Ep. 4 Shoreham;
[5:00 PM] Footballers Wive$ - Episode 4;
[6:00 PM] The Weakest Link - Episode 47;
[7:00 PM] BBC World News - BBC World News;
[7:30 PM] How Clean Is Your House? - Episode 4;
[8:00 PM] Robin Hood - Ep 10 Peace? Off!;
[9:00 PM] Robin Hood - Ep 11 Dead Man Walking;
[10:00 PM] Footballers Wive$ - Episode 5;
[11:00 PM] Robin Hood - Ep 10 Peace? Off!;
[12:00 AM] Robin Hood - Ep 11 Dead Man Walking;
[1:00 AM] Footballers Wive$ - Episode 5;
[2:00 AM] The Weakest Link - Episode 46;
[3:00 AM] Tough Love - Episode 1;
[4:30 AM] Tough Love - Episode 2;
[6:00 AM] BBC World News - BBC World News. (ALL TIMES EDT)
Comedy Central has 'Scrubs', another 'Scrubs', last night's 'Jon Stewart', last night's 'Colbert Report', 'Reno 911!', 'South Park', 'Mind Of Mencia', and another 'Mind Of Mencia'.
Scheduled on a FRESHJon Stewart is Tim Russert.
Scheduled on a FRESHColbert Report is Walter Isaacson.
FX has the movie 'Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story', followed by the movie 'The Transporter', then a FRESH'The Shield'.
History has 'Modern Marvels', 'Ku Klux Klan: A Secret History', and another 'Modern Marvels'.
IFC -
[07:40 AM] Fall Time;
[09:15 AM] The F Word;
[10:35 AM] A Slipping-Down Life;
[12:30 PM] Fall Time;
[02:00 PM] The F Word;
[03:20 PM] Media Lab Shorts Uploaded;
[03:50 PM] A Slipping-Down Life;
[05:45 PM] Fall Time;
[07:20 PM] Kingdom Come;
[09:00 PM] I Am David;
[10:40 PM] The Grandfather;
[01:10 AM] Love! Valour! Compassion!;
[03:10 AM] I Am David;
[04:50 AM] Dancer in the Dark. (ALL TIMES EDT)
SciFi has 'Special Unit 2', another 'Special Unit 2', still another 'Special Unit 2', and 'ECW'.
Sundance -
[06:00 AM] Santiago Calatrava's Travels;
[07:00 AM] Childstar;
[08:00 AM] Sabah;
[10:00 AM] Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus;
[11:00 AM] Mitchellville;
[01:00 PM] Dallas 362;
[03:00 PM] Childstar;
[04:00 PM] Mickybo and Me;
[06:00 PM] Episode 5;
[07:00 PM] Aruba;
[07:00 PM] Very Annie Mary;
[09:00 PM] Eat;
[09:00 PM] Our Daily Bread;
[11:00 PM] Eat;
[11:00 PM] Clean;
[01:00 AM] Godly Boyish;
[02:00 AM] Episode 5;
[02:00 AM] Episode 1: Opening Night;
[03:00 AM] New Jersey Drive;
[04:00 AM] Sir! No Sir!. (ALL TIMES EDT)
Star of the NBC show "Heroes" Hayden Panettiere (L) is tickled by co-star Adrian Pasdar, while co-star Masi Oka (R) looks on, as they arrive to attend the NBC Network upfronts in New York May 14, 2007.
Photo by Lucas Jackson
An American soldier's graphic account of his deployment in Iraq, detailing the firefights and frustrations of frontline life, has won a prize for books based on blogs, organisers said Monday.
Colby Buzzell's "My War: Killing Time In Iraq", the winner of this year's Lulu Blooker Prize, grew out of an online journal which he started in 2004 while serving as a machine-gunner based in Mosul, northern Iraq.
The blog ran for just eight weeks before being shut down by the US military, but by then it had been widely picked up by the media and publishers offered Buzzell a book deal when he left the army in 2005.
He started out as a gifted improv comic at Toronto's Second City. From there, Tony Rosato took his zany writing and performing style to the small screen, winning fame on SCTV and later on Saturday Night Live.
His off-the-wall characters ranged from fictional TV chef Marcello Sebastiano to Lou Costello, Captain Kangaroo and Yasser Arafat. Industry buzz pegged him as the next John Belushi.
Then suddenly, two years ago, Rosato disappeared.
Since then, the actor has been behind bars, with no trial, at the maximum-security Quinte Detention Centre in Napanee, 30 kilometres west of Kingston, on charges of criminally harassing his wife during their marriage. It's alleged that his "reckless" behaviour led his spouse, Leah, with whom he has a now-2-year-old daughter, to be afraid for her own safety or others'.
Actor Mike Myers, right, and Jeffrey "Sparky" Katzenberg, left, CEO of Dreamworks Animation SKG, and film producer, pose together as they arrive to the special screening of the Dreamworks animation movie Shrek the Third in New York, Monday, May, 14, 2007. Myers lends his voice to the film's main character, a green ogre named Shrek.
Photo by Stuart Ramson
America Ferrera, star of the US television show "Ugly Betty", has had her smile insured for 10 million dollars (five million pounds, 7.4 million euros), insurance market Lloyds of London said.
The policy was taken out by Aquafresh White Trays, a teeth whitening product manufacturer which is working with the actress for a US charity that campaigns for free dental campaign for jobless women.
Lloyds has a record of providing unusual cover for celebrities. In the past, it has insured Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards' fingers and screen siren Marlene Dietrich's legs.
The influential Sunday news talk shows aired by U.S. television networks are overwhelmingly dominated by white men, with women, blacks and Latinos having little presence, a liberal media watchdog said on Monday.
About one in five guests on the programs were women, said the group, Media Matters for America, which studied four network Sunday news talk shows over a two-year period.
Blacks made up about 7 percent of those appearing on most of the programs, while Latinos made up about 1 percent, Media Matters said. In all, about seven out of every eight guests in 2005 and 2006 was white, the group said.
An Internet parody of "The Simpsons" has drawn the ire of 20th Century Fox.
The studio is pressuring online video hub Broadcaster.com to remove "The O.J. Simpsons," three animated clips that reimagine the Fox series starring the former football star. After receiving notices from Fox lawyers, Broadcaster Inc. is reviewing their demand but noted Friday that fair-use doctrine protects parodies.
The three "O.J. Simpsons" clips are titled "Black and White Christmas," "Warzone" and "If I Did It," which directly references Fox and its decision to withdraw publication of O.J. Simpson's proposed book about the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and Ron Goldman.
Performer Aretha Franklin receives a honorary degree during the University of Pennsylvania Commencement ceremony in Philadelphia, Monday, May 14, 2007.
Photo by Matt Rourke
A 40-second rant by a British Broadcasting Corp. reporter, shouting angrily at Church of Scientology official while researching a documentary, has become fodder for a simmering dispute now playing itself out in Internet video clips.
John Sweeney's outburst came as he was interviewing Tommy Davis, a Scientology spokesman who had objected to Sweeney's use of the word "cult." Sweeney's rant was captured by BBC's Panorama program, to air Monday, and Scientology video cameras.
Sweeney said his outburst came while he was touring a Scientology exhibition in Los Angeles, "Psychiatry: Industry of Death." The exhibit included a mock-up of a Nazi torture chamber, he said, adding that he lost it in the "Mind Control" section of the exhibition.
"I have been shouted at, spied on, had my hotel invaded at midnight, denounced as a 'bigot' by star Scientologists, brainwashed - that is how it felt to me - in a mock-up of a Nazi-style torture chamber and chased round the streets of Los Angeles by sinister strangers."
Best-selling crime writer Patricia Cornwell has filed a libel lawsuit against another author and is asking a federal judge to bar him from posting defamatory messages about her on the Internet.
Cornwell wants the court to enforce an injunction issued in 2000 against Leslie R. Sachs and seeks a broader ban to prevent Sachs from further writing negatively about Cornwell on Web sites or allowing such statements to remain on those sites.
In an e-mail response to Cornwell's attorneys, Sachs called the lawsuit "hilarious." Sachs, whose last known U.S. residence is listed in court documents as Woodbridge, Va., called himself a "political refugee" who moved to Europe in 2004 to escape Cornwell's legal actions.
Stars of the NBC show "30 Rock", Tina Fey (L) and Jane Krakowski, arrive to attend the NBC Network upfronts in New York May 14, 2007.
Photo by Lucas Jackson
No more using the military's computer system to socialize and trade videos on MySpace, YouTube and nine other Web sites, the Pentagon says.
Citing security concerns and technological limits, the Pentagon has cut off access to those sites for personnel using the Defense Department's computer network. The change limits use of the popular outlets for service members on the front lines, who regularly post videos and journals.
Memos about the change went out in February, and it took effect last week. It does not affect the Internet cafes that soldiers in Iraq use that are not connected to the Defense Department's network. The cafe sites are run by a private vendor, FUBI (For US By Iraqis).
The sites covered by the ban are the video-sharing sites YouTube, Metacafe, IFilm, StupidVideos and FileCabi; social networking sites MySpace, BlackPlanet and Hi5; music sites Pandora, MTV, 1.fm and live365, and the photo-sharing site Photobucket.
Outraged Indian leaders in Brazil said on Monday they were offended by Pope Benedict's "arrogant and disrespectful" comments that the Roman Catholic Church had purified them and a revival of their religions would be a backward step.
In a speech to Latin American and Caribbean bishops at the end of a visit to Brazil, the Pope said the Church had not imposed itself on the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
They had welcomed the arrival of European priests at the time of the conquest as they were "silently longing" for Christianity, he said.
Travelers look at a star dedicated to entertainer Bobby Darin on the Las Vegas Walk of Stars in Las Vegas, Monday, May 14, 2007. Darin is the 19th person to be honored with a star on the Las Vegas Walk of Stars, a group that includes Liberace, Rich Little, Siegfried & Roy, Sammy Davis Jr. and Newton, who received the first star.
Photo by Jae C. Hong
Thousands of convicted sex offenders have registered for profiles on social networking Web site MySpace, posing a risk to children who are among the site's most avid users, eight U.S. attorneys general said on Monday.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal and counterparts in seven states called on the company, owned by media tycoon republican propagandist Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., to hand over the offenders' names and addresses.
The attorneys general of Georgia, Idaho, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Mississippi and New Hampshire joined Connecticut in signing a letter to the company asking it to turn over information.
A new blue-and-green- throated hummingbird species has been discovered in a cloud forest in Colombia, and already needs protection from human encroachment, the experts who found the bird said on Sunday.
Called the gorgeted puffleg, the new species is easily twice as big as the thumb-sized hummingbirds found in the eastern United States, measuring between 3.5 inches and 4 inches (90 and 100 mm) in length, its discoverers said in answer to e-mailed questions.
The name comes from the iridescent emerald green and electric blue patch on the throat -- the gorge -- on males, and from tufts of white feathers at the top of the legs, a characteristic of so-called puffleg hummers.
Thirteen year old lioness Stella watches over her six week old cub at the al Maglio zoo in Magliaso in southern Switzerland May 14, 2007. A litter of two, both males, were born at the privately owned zoo on April 2, 2007.
Photo by Remy Steinegger
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