Everything is Shit

I checked google today and did an ego search for “everything is shit” (without quotes) and sure enough, it was gone again. From page one to limbo in 24 hours. I checked as far back as page 30 and only found one link leading to this blog, nothing to the domain site itself. How can a service this fickle be relied upon for anything? Everything is shit .COM was right up front as the number one search result, as always, despite the fact that my site has been up longer, changes regularly, etc. (again, I wish them no ill will, I’m just perplexed.) Google is capricious at best — and is quickly becoming unusable (spent a half hour trying to find something on google yesterday, went to Yahoo and got it on the first try.)

All is not lost, however: the comment spammers who bizerked this blog after google put it on page one have not abandoned me, if anything they have redoubled their efforts to make sure I never feel unnoticed again. Kinda makes ya feel warm and fuzzy, eh?

Its not just the vile dishonesty that I despise, its the banal stupidity I encounter everywhere. It’s as if I live in a medieval global village filled with illiterate knaves who know nothing. Nothing! Nothing at all!

Within the last two years I have been challenged by no less than three people who objected to my “theory” that the Earth goes around the Sun. Two of these geocentric advocates were certain I had been led astray by my odd views and would therefore burn in Hell. The other simply didn’t know where the Sun went after dark. I encountered these people in America, where each had spent at least eight years of their lives in a “school”, ostensibly receiving an “education”.

Any institution that takes your parents money and eight to twelve years of your life — at gunpoint — and then releases you to the world fit only to be feasted upon by the corrupt, the cruel and the criminal, is an institution that needs to come to an end. Yet all people can talk about is school reform. Fix this, fix that — NO! END IT! End school, bring it down and stop this mass stupidity machine now. How anyone can think an institution this destructive needs to fixed, bolstered, reconstructed and otherwise assisted is beyond me. Its wicked, so stop doing this to our children.

The only thing I ever learned in school was how to roll a, ah, cigarette, and how to respond like a Pavlovian automaton when a bell rang. I also learned the most important lesson school is intended to teach: that stupid, artificial status structures that exclude most people are normal and natural — and that we are expected to defend them, and to be grateful for the privilege.

I say this as someone who got to share in the benefits of being part of the included group, so I’m not just bitching about what I couldn’t have. So why am I not more grateful for the pleasant experience high school admittedly was? Because popularity is a trap. To fit in, you shape yourself to someone else’s mold, you must become someone else’s idea of a life well lived, you must become something alien to what you were meant to be. School is a soul eater, as much for those who loved it as those who didn’t.

Worse, after all the years of your life that they take from you, they leave you helpless, ripe to fall victim to everything from simple con men, to murderous ideologies, to churches that have whored themselves and teach their flock to be unthinking, unknowledgeable, and downright vicious.

My Mom made me skip school to take care of my grandmother, and in turn I got to learn history at the knee of a master — and how to care for the weak. My friends wound up skipping school to help. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything (and most of us went to college and turned out fine.)

One of those friends was a cheerleader I admired from afar. One day when she left my Grandmother said, “You like her, don’t you?” When I blushed she started telling me how to wage a virtual campaign of romance on the girl of my dreams — and it worked!

When my little brother got out of school he and his friends took over and I went to work. My mom would fix up her house (my mom knew plumbing — go figure.) None of this has much to do with convenience or go getting, but it was a much richer life, in my opinion, than watching “different strokes” or football on tv — or making money.

As long as I’m bitching about the shitty state of the American mind, lets not let the press get a free pass, eh?

Ever heard of Mars Direct? Mars Direct is a plan that NASA put together in the early 1990s which could have not only sent people to Mars, but would have built a permanent settlement as well, and could have been accomplished for the same amount of money NASA is already getting (0.5% of the total government budget.) It was the safest plan ever devised for getting to Mars, it would have allowed the longest visits of any mission plan proposed to date, and it could have been done with a combination of 1960s and 1840s technology. It could have been put together and flown in six years. Nothing had to be invented.

The press refused to talk about it. The questions that were asked by the press ignored Mars Direct (or for that matter any plan that cost less than 700 billion.)

Its as if every discussion on the news was a measured, scholarly, informed and respectable debate about whether or not the Moon is made of blue, rather than green cheese. In this environment a suggestion of lunar regolith made of silica and aluminum oxides would earn you an embarrassed silence. You could spend hours — no weeks — explaining the chemical composition of the lunar regolith, its geological origin, the role the solar wind plays as a depositor of helium 3 . . . the list of fascinating topics on this one subject is endless. When you were done the person you spent precious moments of your life trying to persuade would look at you as if you were mad and say, “No bro, its not green cheese, its blue, I saw it on TV!”

The most highly paid broadcasters are no better. I watched Chris Matthews of MSNBC sneeringly ask whether or not there were any “useful minerals” on Mars — nobody mentioned helium3 — only to watch the question get dodged by a female commentator, who said that the whole thing was a silly male fantasy and that today’s young people had no real interest in non-terrestrial matters (I’m pretty sure limitless clean energy might qualify as a “terrestrial matter”, but hey, that’s just me.)

I could almost subscribe to conspiracy theories were not for the question asked at one of the Mars “Spirit” conferences by a reporter from KTLA: “Sir, are the radio signals you uploaded to your rover traveling at the speed of light, or some other speed?”

Why do we allow ourselves to be informed by anyone this uninformed? Why do we tolerate this level of stupidity in our opinion makers? What the hell is wrong with us? Why don’t we just ignore these overpaid parasites and leave them to rot? How long will we allow these no nothings to fill our minds with shit?

Here is what Bertrand Russell had to say on the subject:

Many people would sooner die than think. In fact they do.

I think the subject which will be of most importance politically is mass psychology…. Its importance has been enormously increased by the growth of modern methods of propaganda. Of these the most influential is what is called ‘education.’ Religion plays a part, though a diminishing one; the press, the cinema, and the radio play an increasing part…. It may be hoped that in time anybody will be able to persuade anybody of anything if he can catch the patient young and is provided by the State with money and equipment.

Although this science will be diligently studied, it will be rigidly confined to the governing class. The populace will not be allowed to know how its convictions were generated. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for a generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.

- Bertrand Russell, ”The Impact of Science on Society”, 1953

A decade ago I was pulling my big rig out of Long Island, headed for San Francisco, while listening to a local radio talk show. The hosts of the show had a good schtick, they were calling their elementary school teachers and acting as if they were old friends. Eventually the perplexed, long retired teacher would be asked if they remembered their student from long ago. When the teacher said “No” the host would act as if his world crumbled, weeping bitterly at being forgotten by the one person who had molded his entire life, while being comforted by a befuddled ex teacher who wasn’t sure what to do.

The comedy in this gag is obvious: what teacher could be expected to remember every student over the course of a twenty year career, when each year they very likely had to teach hundreds? Yet the assumption of the government (and most people) is that this teacher, this person, who could not remember and would not have noticed if one of her former students ceased breathing, is better suited to raise your children than you, the parents, the very people who would be devastated — forever — were something horrible to happen to that same child. In short, the assumption is that people who don’t care about children are better suited to raise them than people who do.

If a child spends most of its life with you, you raise it. If a child spends most of its life with a teacher, they raise it. If you conceive a child, bring it to term, provide for its needs, are responsible for its welfare (and to some degree for its actions), love it, dream about its future, and are willing to die to keep it safe, how on earth can anyone say they care as much for that child and are more qualified to raise it?

Notice I say “raise” the child, not “educate” it. Children are not being educated in school today, and though you, dear reader, may object viscerally to that assertion, deep down you know its true (more on that in another post); however, in this post I’m not so much interested in education as upbringing. What values are  being taught in school, and by whom?

I just brought up values, and I’ll wager a fair number of people recoiled. The liberals reading my words probably cursed the right wing Christian wackos, and the conservatives swore at the commie pinkos. My question to all of you is, if you think teaching values to your children is so important, why are you letting someone who does not love your child mold your child’s character? Is it so important that you win control of the debate that you are willing to sacrifice your child’s future to that victory?

Why are we having this debate? Because you want something for nothing. You think you can get a free education for your kids and a free babysitter — and then tell the providers how you want those services served to you, like a steak. I’ve got news for you: beggars can’t be choosers. Either suck it up — all of you — and quit your bitching, or pay for a decent education, either with your own money (or for home schoolers, with your time.)

Take the time to raise your own kids, and give them a real education while you are at it. After all, you do love them more than some state appointed educator, don’t you?

Don’t you?

Ever heard of Oregon S. R. 742? It was a bill that would have redefined almost every crime as an act of terrorism. Some of these crimes  – like child pornography — are truly horrible, deserving of some pretty severe punishment; however, not a single offense listed in 742 is terrorism if you define terrorism as an act of random violence intended to cause political change. Why would such a technicality matter? Well, is prostitution an act of terrorism? How about burglary? Gambling? Fake ID?

Liberals have been tossing around the words fascist and Nazi for so long they not only have lost their impact, but worse, no longer have meaning to the average person. What is really tragic is that someday we will need words like fascist and Nazi to describe someone who has power and is a real threat. We may already need these words, if you take the words of one Bush administration senior official seriously:

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

The official is widely believed to be Karl Rove — surely the Goebbels of our time — but I can’t find any verification of that claim.

————–

Lunch Democracy

A good friend of ours (Noam Chomsky) said that if the same laws were applied to U.S. presidents as were applied to the Nazis after World War II that every single one of them, every last rich white one of them from Truman on would have been hung to death and shot - and this current administration is no exception. They should be hung, and tried, and shot. As any war criminal should be. But the challenges that we face, they go way beyond administrations, way beyond elections, way beyond every four years of pulling levers, way beyond that. Because this whole rotten system has become so vicious and cruel that in order to sustain itself, it needs to destroy entire countries and profit from their reconstruction in order to survive - and that’s not a system that changes every four years, it’s a system that we have to break down, generation after generation after generation after generation after generation… Wake up. 

— Zack de la Rocha 

Zack De la Rocha is well-known as the frontman for the band Rage Against the Machine, as well as for his vigilance as a political advocate, and for inciting fundamental change against the status quo. He is one of the most popular, visible champions of human rights and political causes around the world, most notably his public protest of Leonard Peltier, the Native American activist and member of the American Indian Movement, and Mumia Abu-Jamal, a Black Panther Party activist, and for supporting the Zapatista revolutionary movement in Chiapas, Mexico.

Zack de La Rocha first captured my attention at a 2000 concert, where he spoke the following words:

So who went out and joined us for the Democratic National Convention? I’ve never seen so many fucking cops in my life. It’s like everybody knows that everybody went out there; the only thing we were out there to do is express how much we hate both the Democrats and Republicans because they sold this fucking country out. And by expressing our rights to resist, what do they do? They open fire on the crowd. I don’t care what fucking television station said the violence was caused by the people at the concert; those motherfuckers unloaded on this crowd. And I think it’s ridiculous considering, you know, none of us had rubber bullets; none of us hadM16s; none of us had billy clubs; none of us had face shields. All we had was our fists, our voices, our microphones, our guitars, our drums, our timbales and whatnot. And anytime we get beaten in the streets for protesting, we take it to the court system, and the court system don’t wanna hear it. Look what happened to Amadou Diallo in New York. They shot that brother 41 times and let all four officers go. It’s time for a new type of action in this country.

 From his website, I found this statement:

Without just cause or reason, without legal or moral justification, and without a thread of proof that Iraq directly threatens the security of the United States, the Bush administration has headed to war. As I am writing this, bombs are raining upon the defenseless civilians of Baghdad in a continuation of a policy that has already claimed the lives of over 1 million innocent Iraqi people. People just like us who want  democracy but find themselves cornered by a dictator on one side, naked U.S. aggression on another, and the oil beneath their country; for which it appears they are to be massacred.

Lies, sanctions, and cruise missiles have never created a free and just society. Only everyday people can do that, which is why I’m joining the millions world wide who have stood up to oppose the Bush administration’s attempt to expand the U.S. empire at the expense of human rights at home and abroad… I hope it not only makes us think, but also inspires us to act and raise our voices.

So I call on you as fellow American citizens to uphold and exercise your most impressive attribute – free-thought. If you get one person to start thinking, to do their own research, to expose the truth behind the status quo, they can take that discovered truth and share it with their friends and family, who can spread it from there to their friends and family, and so on to all our friends and families. Prove the strength of Americans as free-thinkers by your actions, by starting the train of free thought yourself.

One day all Americans will wake up, and not have to worry about what the future holds. We can live our lives as we deserve to live them – FREE, free from tyranny, free from oppression.

Let’s spread that around the world, instead of some petroleum-driven, total devastation, oppressive, run-away war machine, raping and pillaging the earth, disguised as “democratic-freedom fighters”. 

I clearly remember the days of my youth when people were proud to be Americans. How could we let that slip away? Look around you, at the current loss of our freedoms — our rights. Read the Patriot Act. We call this democracy? Read the Military Commissions Act. You call this conservatism? Look at the photos of Abu Ghraib. You call this – humanity?

Is it possible, just possible, that my countrymen will stop doing an incompetent impersonation of the SS and allow me to have pride in my nation again? Is that possibility only a dream?

Sorry if I’m being negative — or as Americans used to say, blunt. On the other hand, there’s no hidden agenda here.