"Because the dude loves him some witches with big tits."

Man this is hilarious. And true.

An inspiring tale of following your dreams, no matter what.

Even if your dreams are witches with large, bodacious ta-ta's.

Dave's Long Box: Let Fly The Freak Flag!:

"There’s something admirable about a guy so committed to his dreams, so immersed in his life’s work that he risks everything. There’s a thin line between that level of commitment and lunacy, and I don’t know where it is. But how many of us get bogged down in our day-to-day existence, letting the dictates and requirements of society weigh us down while our childhood (or childlike) dreams slip away? “I can’t quit my job and go hunt for the yeti in Bhutan – I’d lose out on my stock options!”

...As a less extreme example, take Jim Balent, creator of the witchy T&A book Tarot, Witch of the Black Rose. This guy had a pretty good gig drawing comics for the major publishers and is probably most known for his lengthy run on Catwoman. Balent turned his back on work-for-hire art and took the plunge, self-publishing his own small line of Broadsword Comics built around the Tarot title.

Why?
Because the dude loves him some witches with big tits.

Setting aside any value judgment about the merits of Tarot, you have to admire the guy’s commitment. Jim Balent is 100% geek, and brother, he is letting it all hang out. Have you seen pictures of his Star Wars wedding? Holy shit. That’s hardcore. The guy is living the dream – he’s found a way to make a living out of doing what he loves most. He just happens to really dig supernatural shit, geek stuff, and heaving bosoms... And he found a woman who digs on all the same stuff and I mean, come on. Look at that wedding photo. It’s kinda sweet. Living the dream, baby.


...Living the dream involves living honestly and not giving a shit what other people think of you, and that can be hard. Because let’s face it, people like to make fun of weirdos. Mea culpa."

Grant Morrison is Brilliant.

In many senses of the word.

geniusboyfiremelon: Deleted Scenes: The Grant Morrison Interview:

"Grant: No, JLA [Justice League of America] was done...the whole psychedelic period lasted for all of the 90s, basically. All those JLAs were written on drugs [laughter]. You can see the crossover with themes from The Invisibles. So that was the period--because it was a real psychedelic period--it was my Sgt. Pepper time, you know?"

See, if you smoke marijuana, you'll be lazy and never accomplish anything.*

Like say, defeating the #1 fighter in your weight class in your Pride Fighting debut.

Unless, of course, you actually do just that.

Breaking News: Diaz Tests Positive for Marijuana:

"Nick Diaz (Pictures) has tested positive for marijuana following his stunning submission win over Takanori Gomi on Feb. 24, Sherdog.com learned Monday afternoon."

*From "Drugs Make You Lazy and Other Lies Taught to me by the D.A.R.E. Program in the 1980's," my forthcoming book** from Harper Collins.

**Not a real book. I'm making this crap up as I go.

But as for D.A.R.E., that annoying tripe I was forced to sit through in high school, and whose bumper stickers still abound and haunt my nightmares, here some interesting info for you:

The U.S. Department of Education concluded in 2003 that the DARE program is ineffective and now prohibits its funds from being used to support it... Studies by Dr. Dennis Rosenbaum, and by the California Legislative Analyst's office found that DARE graduates were more likely than others to drink alcohol, smoke tobacco and use illegal drugs.

Administrators of the DARE program have tried to suppress unfavorable research by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance and the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) that found that "DARE simply didn't work". A Federal judge ruled that DARE had sought to "suppress scientific research" critical of its program and had "attempted to silence researchers at the Research Triangle Institute," according to editors at the American Journal of Public Health and producers at Dateline NBC.

Shocking!!!

Joe Rogan is funny. And wise.

If I left you alone in the woods with a hatchet...

Sneak Peak of "Joe Rogan: Live"

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The meaning of life... and DMT.

Joe Rogan explains life

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The Federal Government "malicious"?

Noooooo. Couldn't be.

Disclaimer - I also believe in the Easter Bunny and Santa Claus.

Reason Magazine - Hit & Run > Ed Rosenthal Blowback:

"Rosenthal, you may remember, is that pot activist convicted by a federal jury of growing marijuana, even though he was growing the plant for the city of Oakland, legally under state law. The federal jury wasn't allowed to hear any evidence about how Rosenthal was a grower licensed by Oakland, only that he broke federal law. The jury convicted him, then several jurors expressed their outrage when they realized what they had done. The sympathetic judge sentenced Rosenthal to one day in prison.

Rosenthal appealed, entirely out of principle. A federal judge overturned the verdict on the grounds of jury misconduct. Now, federal prosecutors are bringing the entire case again, with added charges against Rosenthal. He's clearly being targeted because he's a political supporter of reforming marijuana laws and because he stood up to the federal government in 2003, and won.

The good news is, the federal judge in the case is at least entertaining the idea that Rosenthal is being maliciously prosecuted..."

Nationalism. Always bringing out the best in people.

Soldier confirms wartime sex slavery | The Japan Times Online:

"Yasuji Kaneko, 87, still remembers the screams of the countless women he raped in China as a foot soldier in the Imperial Japanese Army in World War II.

Some were teenagers from the Korean Peninsula serving as sex slaves in military-run brothels. Others were women in villages he and his comrades pillaged as they battled in eastern China.

"They cried out, but it didn't matter to us whether the women lived or died," Kaneko said in an interview at his Tokyo home. "We were the Emperor's soldiers. Whether in military brothels or in the villages, we raped without reluctance."

Japan's forced prostitution of some 200,000 women in military brothels in the 1930s and '40s has long constituted one of the most horrifying chapters of its wartime rampage across Asia. The top government spokesman was finally forced to acknowledge wrongdoing in 1993.

Now the government is questioning whether the apology was needed.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe on Thursday publicly denied women were forced into the military brothels in conquered lands, boosting renewed efforts by rightwing politicians who claim the women involved were professional prostitutes rather than victims of abuse.

...After decades of denial, incriminating defense documents discovered in 1992 forced the government to acknowledge that the military government ran brothels populated by women forcibly taken from their homes, and to offer an apology the following year.

...For rightists, however, Japan's apology went too far. Just hours before Abe spoke, a group of ruling Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers met to prepare a proposal that urges the government to water down parts of the 1993 apology and deny direct military involvement.

"Some say it is useful to compare the brothels to college cafeterias [Are you fucking kidding me? - Rob] run by private companies, who recruit their own staff, procure foodstuffs, and set prices," said Nariaki Nakayama, chairman of the group of 120 lawmakers, of which Abe is a member.

"And where there's demand, businesses crop up . . . but to say women were forced by the Japanese military into service is off the mark," he said. "This issue must be reconsidered, based on truth . . . for the sake of Japanese honor."

Though rightwingers are unapologetic, actual participants say the assertions are far from the truth.

"The brothels were run by the military. There's no question about that," Kaneko said, adding that he was once ordered to guard sex slaves being circulated around military posts.

"There were so many soldiers, and so few comfort women. Sometimes, four or five women had to serve several hundred soldiers," he said."

Acquitted after 5 years in Gitmo.

I'm sure they, and their fellow Middle Easterners, won't be pissed at all, and they'll just love them some America forever and ever. Amen.

Kuwaiti court acquits 2 ex-Gitmo inmates - USATODAY.com:

"A criminal court on Saturday acquitted two former Guantanamo Bay prisoners of joining al-Qaeda or the Taliban.

Omar Rajab Amin and Abdullah Kamel al-Kundari denied any terror connections at the start of their trial. Their lawyers argued there was no evidence against them and the case was "political." Defense attorneys said the accused were in Afghanistan for charity work — not to fight.

...Amin, 41, and al-Kundari, 32, were released from the U.S. detention camp in September after spending nearly five years there. They were detained by authorities for questioning upon their return to Kuwait.

...Six other Kuwaitis formerly held in Guantanamo have been acquitted here of terror charges. Another four are still imprisoned there.

"We call on the United States to either give our four sons a fair trial in America or any other place in the world, or to hand them to Kuwait so that they can be ... given their legal right to defend themselves," said Khaled al-Odah, who heads a private group that lobbies for the release of the Kuwaiti prisoners — including his son — from the U.S. naval base in Cuba."

A trial? Someplace? Anyplace? How very unAmerican that request is these days...

From Texas cell, Canadian, 9, pleads for help

I swear, sometimes I hate the world so fucking much it hurts. Feel safer? I mean, we're using threats of separating 9 year olds from their family, and sending them back to Iran so they can get tortured some more, so we must be safer, right? Cause otherwise it's just retarded, pointless, evil, bureaucratic bullshit. So we must be safer.


From Texas cell, Canadian, 9, pleads for help:

"“We can't go home because I am Canadian but my parents are not,”Kevin said in a telephone interview with The Globe and Mail — no personal interviews have been granted.

Majid and Masomeh — they prefer their last name not be used — initially fled Iran for Canada in January, 1995, to seek political asylum. Majid did odd jobs, eventually becoming manager of an east Toronto pizza parlour, paying the rent for their one-bedroom apartment.

In 1997, their only son, Kevin, was born. “For the first time, I was happy,” Majid said from the Hutto detention facility.

“I had my family with me — it's the only family I have — we didn't have any problems and we lived happy in Toronto.”

Kevin attended a Toronto school until Grade 3. Meanwhile, his parents were seeking refugee status, based on fear of persecution in Iran, but their application was denied and, in December, 2005, the family of three was deported.

Upon their arrival in Tehran, Majid said he was taken away from his family to a prison cell. For three months, he was detained, beaten and tortured, he said. When he was released, the three were reunited, and, with the help of friends and relatives, they connected with a people smuggler in Tehran.

...Carrying Greek passports — which do not require visas for entry into Canada — they travelled to Guyana, where they eventually boarded a Toronto-bound plane.

...It was that belief that got Kevin and his parents onto a Zoom Airlines chartered, non-stop flight from Georgetown to Toronto.

No one could have anticipated what happened next.

“The woman sitting two seats behind me, she kept running to the washroom for vomiting. They put oxygen on her, and tell us to stay in our seats. They just said we have to divert to another city because of an emergency landing.”

A woman had suffered a heart attack and died on board. After landing in Puerto Rico, everyone was told to disembark while emergency crew removed the body.

“They say we have to pass immigration, and they say because we have Greek passport, you need to get a visa for United States. I said no, our ticket is to Toronto, we have no plan to come here.”

...Now, the three of them are locked inside the centre that, U.S. refugee advocates recently alleged, features inadequate medical care, lack of privacy and abusive behaviour by staff toward the green-uniformed detainees.

Everyone must wake up by 5:30 a.m. to take showers. They get 15 minutes to eat each meal. Everyone must be in bed by 9:30 p.m., when laser-triggered alarms are set to detect if anyone gets up.

“The day is very regimented,” said Barbara Hines, a law professor at the University of Texas who runs an immigration clinic with her students — the only way many of the detainees get representation.

“This is a prison. They have a head count three times a day where they have to be in their cells for an hour to be counted down.”

At one point, Majid walked into the room where Kevin and his mother sleep to help them fix a broken bed.

“They were told that if he violated rules, because the father's not allowed into that room, the family would be separated,” Ms. Hines said. “One of the things the detainees have reported to us is the threat of separation as a means of discipline.”

The only other detention facility that holds families is in Pennsylvania, she said — but that used to be a nursing home, not a prison. “No amount of softening it [Hutto] up, as the government says, is going to change the fact that this is a secure prison facility, not a family residential centre,” she said.

...Kevin, meanwhile, has lost six pounds in the past two weeks because he hasn't been eating, his father said. Nearly all of the meals come from cans, Kevin complained.

“Beans, beef, sometimes they give rice. But it's all garbage.”

Kevin goes to school for four hours a day, of which only one is instructional. He said that since he left Toronto, he hasn't gone to a real school.

“My biggest wish is to go to Canada and be free, to go to my school, go for my books,” Kevin said, his father's voice audible in the background.

“I want to be safe with me and my parents, and see my teachers and my friends again.”

...If they were allowed back into Canada, Prof. Macklin said, they could seek what is called a pre-risk removal assessment based on “new facts about what happened in Iran when they were deported.”

Above all else, Kevin, Majid and Masomeh say they want to live in Canada.

“We want to be free and safe,” Majid said. “Our plan was to go to Toronto, Canada, because it's my son's home and our home for the past few years. We have nothing there, but we were there for 10 years and it was good.""

Randy Couture Versus a Bear? Go with Randy.

Versus Mirko Cro-Cop? Couture. Couture Versus a Goddamned Shark, and the Shark has already eaten one of Couture's arms and both of his legs? Gotta go with Couture.

Because whenever the odds are against the man, he up and totally kicks somebody's ass.

43 years old. He gives up 13 years, 40lbs, and 6 inches in height to Tim Sylvia. Everybody expects him to get totally wrecked. Instead he absolutely DOMINATES for five rounds to become the new UFC Heavyweight Champion.

Just awesome.


High Five: Couture Pitches Shutout for Fifth UFC Title:

"COLUMBUS, Ohio, March 3 — Randy Couture had heard the critics writing him off as the hype for his return to the Octagon ramped up over the past couple months.

He wasn't given much of a chance against the gigantic heavyweight champion Tim Sylvia. But before a record crowd for MMA in North America of 19,049, Couture emphatically answered any and all doubters with his domineering performance en route to a unanimous decision victory, locking up his fifth UFC title in the process.

...After two rounds it was apparent the champion was completely frustrated as he headed back to his stool. A visibly disgruntled Sylvia could be seen shaking his head as he looked to his corner for instruction.

The third and fourth frames were more of the same.

Couture kept up the staggering pace, throwing the more meaningful punches and taking the fight to the mat whenever he got close enough to clinch or shoot. Sylvia had no answer for the venerable Couture, be it on the feet or ground. Couture kept up the head movement and when the fighters exchanged he consistently beat Sylvia to the punch. The right hand found its mark on more than a couple occasions and Sylvia's left eye showed the cumulative effects as it ballooned throughout the fight.

..."I didn't really realize what I had done until there were 10 seconds left," Couture commented after the bout. "At that moment, I sort of looked up and looked around and realized that I actually did it and I was able to enjoy it. But not until then.""

Feeling like a man outta time and outta place.

Me too. Me too.


Fred On Everything:

"...in this I am at odds with the times. I do not care about gross national product or the terrible need to manufacture things that could not be sold without force-feed advertising. Everywhere I read that we must have economic growth. Why, I wonder? Do we not have enough? I don’t belong here.

...Yes, I understand that we must keep the population growing so that the economy may expand. We must breed lest the housing industry suffer, and we must build roads so that the highway industry may prosper. Without roads there would be no new suburbs and no malls and no people to buy things. If the population falls we must import Mexicans or North Africans or somebody because the purpose of a country is to build suburbs. We must breed so that the white race will not go extinct under the onrushing Chinese tide. I know.

No doubt something is wrong with me. I do not greatly care whether the white race continues, though I suspect it will, and I would like to see the economy shrink. I do not belong here.

One night years ago I dove off Belize on coral luxuriant with sleeping fish and things hunting. The sea at night is a magnificent place. An otherworldly silence reigns in the depths, sometimes broken by the click of shrimp. To hang almost motionless in warm water, rising and falling with your breath, with nothing but blackness all around except in the beam of a dive light, watching an arrow crab stalking redly about in the hollow of a barrel sponge—this always seems to me a sort of privilege, and something to be preserved. The things that live in the ocean lead their own strange lives. It is their ocean, not mine. They were here before we were.

...I have never seen a fish that did not seem more worthy than a developer of real-estate. Quite truet: I am wrong-headed, and a wretched Green, and against America and progress and freedom. So be it.

Recently I drove with friends from Washington up through rural Maryland, if so it any longer can be called, and into Pennsylvania. I hadn’t been there for a few years. The trip was disheartening. In pretty countryside the subdivisions grew, stamped-out plots of pricey and shoddily built boxes for the shelter of televisions. From these people will commute long distances to Washington. Perhaps they deserve it.

...Something is wrong with me. I cannot understand why people don’t keep their numbers down and live in delightful towns like Boiling Springs. I do not understand economic growth. I for one, and I sometimes think I am the only one, am content with books, music, horses, dogs, fishing, the internet, and broad countryside where one may enjoy the wind and rain. I do not want more of what I don’t want any of at all.

...I might have preferred Greek times, when humanity was a small speck in a large world. Or perhaps Rome of the first century, with more order but man still not a spreading uncontrolled blight. Those horrible mid-eastern religions had not yet raised their grim and censorious heads, and one might still worship a sacred grove, or the statue of a goddess, or the moon. Capri was yet a lovely place, with misted peaks on a blue bay, not yet carpeted in tour buses and fat people from Rhode Island.

Meanwhile for a few hours in the night I listen to the wind and still see stars, though soon progress will come and they will dim in the smoke."

How life works.

And if it doesn't, it should. And if it still doesn't, just pretend that's how it works. You'll fool yourself after a bit.

Beyond Marketing by Dr. Joe Vitale: The Missing Secret:

"1. The Universe -- call that huge superpower God, Divinty, Life, or whatever works for you -- is sending and receiving all the time. It's sending inspiration to you. It's receiving requests from you.

2. This 'dialogue' is being filtered through your belief system.

3. The results you get are what happens from the above two steps. How you read those results is also based on your belief system.

My point is that to change your results, you have to change your beliefs.

...to change beliefs in my presentation. In short, they are:

1. Question your beliefs. I offered two ways to do this at the event. One is with the work of Byron Katie.

2. Erase all memories of limitations. I offered the ho'oponopono method explained in Zero Limits as a tool to clean the slate."

The Internet, privacy and living online.

Deal with it. Learn from it. Welcome to the new world.

It's funny, but if I didn't know for a fact that Sandy's parents read this with some regularity, and that she'd divorce me if I shamed her, I'd probably be much more inclined to post a lot more egregious stuff. Or the stuff I think about that's really f&#*d up. Sadly, all this crazy, just the tip of the iceberg...

Huge seven page article... worth clicking over to read in full.

My favorite bits...

Kids, the Internet, and the End of Privacy: The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll -- New York Magazine:

"...As younger people reveal their private lives on the Internet, the older generation looks on with alarm and misapprehension not seen since the early days of rock and roll. The future belongs to the uninhibited.

...the older generation has responded with a disgusted, dismissive squawk. It goes something like this: Kids today. They have no sense of shame. They have no sense of privacy. They are show-offs, fame whores, pornographic little loons who post their diaries, their phone numbers, their stupid poetry—for God’s sake, their dirty photos!—online. They have virtual friends instead of real ones. They talk in illiterate instant messages. They are interested only in attention—and yet they have zero attention span, flitting like hummingbirds from one virtual stage to another.

...Clay Shirky, a 42-year-old professor of new media at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, who has studied these phenomena since 1993, has a theory about that response. “Whenever young people are allowed to indulge in something old people are not allowed to, it makes us bitter. What did we have? The mall and the parking lot of the 7-Eleven? It sucked to grow up when we did! And we’re mad about it now.” People are always eager to believe that their behavior is a matter of morality, not chronology, Shirky argues. “You didn’t behave like that because nobody gave you the option.”

...More young people are putting more personal information out in public than any older person ever would—and yet they seem mysteriously healthy and normal, save for an entirely different definition of privacy. From their perspective, it’s the extreme caution of the earlier generation that's the narcissistic thing. Or, as Kitty put it to me, “Why not? What’s the worst that’s going to happen? Twenty years down the road, someone’s gonna find your picture? Just make sure it’s a great picture.”

And after all, there is another way to look at this shift. Younger people, one could point out, are the only ones for whom it seems to have sunk in that the idea of a truly private life is already an illusion. Every street in New York has a surveillance camera. Each time you swipe your debit card at Duane Reade or use your MetroCard, that transaction is tracked. Your employer owns your e-mails. The NSA owns your phone calls. Your life is being lived in public whether you choose to acknowledge it or not.

So it may be time to consider the possibility that young people who behave as if privacy doesn’t exist are actually the sane people, not the insane ones. For someone like me, who grew up sealing my diary with a literal lock, this may be tough to accept. But under current circumstances, a defiant belief in holding things close to your chest might not be high-minded. It might be an artifact—quaint and naïve, like a determined faith that virginity keeps ladies pure. Or at least that might be true for someone who has grown up “putting themselves out there” and found that the benefits of being transparent make the risks worth it.

...At 17, Oppermann is conversant with the conventional wisdom about the online world—that it’s a sketchy bus station packed with pedophiles. (In fact, that’s pretty much the standard response I’ve gotten when I’ve spoken about this piece with anyone over 39: “But what about the perverts?” For teenagers, who have grown up laughing at porn pop-ups and the occasional instant message from a skeezy stranger, this is about as logical as the question “How can you move to New York? You’ll get mugged!”) She argues that when it comes to online relationships, “you’re getting what you’re being.” All last summer, as she bopped around downtown Manhattan, Oppermann met dozens of people she already knew, or who knew her, from online...

[talking about a girl who's ex put their sex tape online]

"If that girl’s video got published, if she did it in the first place, she should be thick-skinned enough to just brush it off,” Xiyin muses. “I understand that it’s really humiliating and everything. But if something like that happened to me, I hope I’d just say, well, that was a terrible thing for a guy to do, to put it online. But I did it and that’s me. So I am a sexual person and I shouldn’t have to hide my sexuality. I did this for my boyfriend just like you probably do this for your boyfriend, just that yours is not published. But to me, it’s all the same. It’s either documented online for other people to see or it’s not, but either way you’re still doing it. So my philosophy is, why hide it?”"

...Right now the big question for anyone of my generation seems to be, endlessly, “Why would anyone do that?” This is not a meaningful question for a 16-year-old. The benefits are obvious: The public life is fun. It’s creative. It’s where their friends are. It’s theater, but it’s also community: In this linked, logged world, you have a place to think out loud and be listened to, to meet strangers and go deeper with friends. And, yes, there are all sorts of crappy side effects: the passive-aggressive drama (“you know who you are!”), the shaming outbursts, the chill a person can feel in cyberspace on a particularly bad day. There are lousy side effects of most social changes (see feminism, democracy, the creation of the interstate highway system). But the real question is, as with any revolution, which side are you on?

Out of the whole article, the bit that resonated the most with me was where they talked about the fact that whether or not it's online, or other people are aware of it, it's you. It's who you are. Why live your life as if you're ashamed to let other people see you? Scary, I'll admit, but better than a quiet life of reserve and stunted, quashed expression. Honestly, who cares what others think of you or about you? Do you live for them, or for you?

"Live never to be ashamed if anything you say or do is published around the world, even if what is said is not true." - Richard Bach

Those wacky Brits.

Too little, too late... but at least they're showing some spine. Plus, 72 year olds leading revolts against the government? Brilliant. You almost hope he signed off "I am Spartacus."

Reason Magazine - No Pictures, Please:

The United Kingdom is one of the most surveilled societies in the West, its 60 million citizens monitored by 4 million cameras, including 6,000 traffic cameras. The latter have touched off a wave of protests that are making politicians and traffic cops nervous.

Since the first speed cameras went up in 1992, the government has ticketed Brits to the tune of $210 million a year, with 58 percent of British drivers forking over fines. More recently, angry drivers have destroyed or damaged more than 1,000 of the machines with fire, baseball bats, explosives, and other techniques that drive traffic cops to use words like terrorism. Much of the vandalism has been carried out by a secretive group called Motorists Against Detection.

Britons angry over trash bin tracking:

"The British tolerate millions of surveillance cameras watching their every public move... But when they discovered that their garbage is being bugged, they howled that Big Brother had gone too far.

...In the coastal city of Bournemouth, 72-year-old Cyril Baker ripped the chip off his new bin the day he discovered it, then went on national television to show how he did it. Thousands of his neighbors followed his example. "It was a very emotional issue. The whole town was in an uproar," he said."

How did I miss this?

Awesomitude.

Jimmy Kimmel and George Takei on Tim Hardaway's homophobic rant.

Why Japanese animation kicks the hell outta America's obsession with talking animals.

This is a thing of beauty.

YouTube - Paprika official trailer:

"29 year old Dr. Atsuko Chiba is an attractive but modest Japanese research psychotherapist whose work is on the cutting edge of her field. Her alter-ego is a stunning and fearless 18 year old 'dream detective,' code named PAPRIKA, who can enter into people's dreams and synchronize with their unconscious to help uncover the source of their anxiety or neurosis."

The "national character" of America.

Curmudgeonly, but true.

Strikes me as ironic that those I think that would protest the most against this definition of how people are these days, would be the same folks first in line to show their obedience to the state.

Except me, of course. I'm special. I'm different. [Sigh.....]

Fred On Everything:

"One hears much admiration from politicians of the American “national character,” by which seems to be meant the aggregate of prevailing values of the majority of the population. I gather that Americans tend to regard their national character as comprising such things as freedom, independence, individualism, and self-reliance. One thinks of Daniel Boone or Marlboro Man.

In fact we no longer have these qualities and probably never will again. Generally we now embody their opposites. Modern society has become a hive of largely conformist, closely regulated and generally helpless employees who depend on others for nearly everything.

...Freedom has given way to an infinite array of laws, rules, regulations, licenses, forms, requirements. Many make sense, may even be desirable in a complex world, don’t necessarily make for a bad life, but they cannot be called freedom. Various governments determine what our children learn, whether we can paint the shutters, who we must sell our houses to, who we can hire, what we can say if we want to keep our jobs, where we can park, and whether and how we can build an outbuilding.

People who live infinitely controlled lives become accustomed to such control. Obedience becomes natural. And so it has.

...Most poignantly, we are become a nation of employees, fearful of losing our jobs. Prisoners of the retirement system, afraid of transgressing against the various governing bodies before whom we are helpless, unable to feed ourselves, we are at least comfortable. We are not masters of our lives.

Dense populations and the complexity of machines and institutions lead inevitably to regulation, which leads to acceptance of regulation and therefore of authority, which becomes part of the national character. This we see. In my lifetime the change has been great. In rural Virginia in the Sixties, you could walk down the road with your rifle to shoot beer cans, swim in the creeks without supervision and life guards and “flotation devices” approved by the Coast Guard, and generally be left alone. Now, no. Regimentation has grown like kudzu. We obey. The new generation knows nothing else..

...I suspect that the concern about terrorism is just a particular manifestation of a growing obsession with safety. Not too long ago, Americans were a hardy breed—foolhardy at times, but the one comes with the other. Now we see attempts to eliminate all risk everywhere. Cities fill in the deep ends of swimming pools and remove diving boards. We require that bicyclists wear helmets, fear second-hand smoke and the violence that is dodge ball. Warnings abound against going outside without sun block. To anyone who grew up in the Sixties or before, the new fearfulness is incomprehensible.

The explanation I think is the feminization of society, which seems to be inseparable from modernity. The nature of masculinity is to prize freedom over security; of femininity, security over freedom. Add that the American character of today powerfully favors regulation by the group in preference to individual choice. Note that we do not require that cars be equipped with seat belts and then let individuals decide whether to use them; we enforce their use. The result is compulsory Mommyism, very much a part of today’s America.

...What then is the national character today? I think we are first an obedient people. We submit. We are comfortable with authority, and seem to be most comfortable when we are told what to do. We prize security, safety, and predictability. Increasingly we accept being treated like convicts at airports and elsewhere. We want to be taken care of. We can do few things for ourselves. We expect government to decide much that was once regarded as outside of government’s ambit. And we are to the marrow of our bones incapable of rising against the creeping tyranny. So much for Marlboro Man."

You had to kind of figure.

Still, it's not what you think it is, you refugee from Christian theology, you.

You are The Devil

Materiality. Material Force. Material temptation; sometimes obsession

The Devil is often a great card for business success; hard work and ambition.

Perhaps the most misunderstood of all the major arcana, the Devil is not really "Satan" at all, but Pan the half-goat nature god and/or Dionysius. These are gods of pleasure and abandon, of wild behavior and unbridled desires. This is a card about ambitions; it is also synonymous with temptation and addiction. On the flip side, however, the card can be a warning to someone who is too restrained, someone who never allows themselves to get passionate or messy or wild - or ambitious. This, too, is a form of enslavement. As a person, the Devil can stand for a man of money or erotic power, aggressive, controlling, or just persuasive. This is not to say a bad man, but certainly a powerful man who is hard to resist. The important thing is to remember that any chain is freely worn. In most cases, you are enslaved only because you allow it.

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"A robot? Not me!" said the moron.

More and more I'm beginning to get a clue as to how many of my response are simply imprinted in me without much conscious thought. All you really need to figure that out is one good fight with your significant other, as you both manage to push all the same buttons and watch the responses you know were coming. Always easier to see in others, of course...

I, Robot:

"...there is nothing new about the robot theory of biology. The Sufis and yogis knew about it centuries before Pavlov, or even before Mark Twain wrote his stunningly prescient essay 'Man, A Machine.' Nonetheless, it is so patently offensive to human narcissism that almost everybody recoils from it 'as the devil would from holy water.'

(Incidentally, you can get a quick estimate of a person's intelligence by asking them how much of themselves is robotic. Those who say "not at all" or "less than 50%" are hopeless imbeciles, always. The few who say "about 99%" are worth talking to; they are quite intelligent. Dr. Leary, who is the freest human being I have ever known, estimates that he is 99.9999% robot.)

...In short, the process of acculturalization is itself a brainwashing process.

Thus, the Samoan lives inside an imprinted Samoan reality; the German inside a German reality; an American inside an American reality. That's why a crowd of Americans are immediately recognizable in a street full of Turks or Hindus or even in a street of Englishmen or Irish. The naive chauvinism of the traveler who says "all foreigners are crazy" is actually quite valid; indeed, foreigners are crazy; the chauvinist merely lacks the insight to realize that his imprint group is crazy, too."

God I love some Robert Anton Wilson.

RIP Bob.

Neurological Relativism:

"As the result of the yogic and alchemical disciplines I have practiced during the last 15 years, I know that the solipsist position is the minimal truth, i.e., that all we really know is a stream of sensation. The common sense hypothesis that there is an Ego ("me") observing/experiencing this stream, are unprovable, but denying them seems to lead to worse confusion than (tentatively) accepting them.

But I also know that everything I think I know about the Ego ("me") and the External World ("it") is woefully little, and very misleading (more "untrue" than "true") because it is such a microscopic fragment of what the total Me and the total Universe must be. Blake said, wisely, that "Every thing Capable of being Believed is an Image of the Truth;" but it is also true, as Blake no doubt realized, that Every thing Capable of being Believed is Self-Hypnosis.

It is emperically known to me, through neurological experiment, that every time I manage to change to focus of my nervous system, a new Me appears, and a new External Reality, and that these mingle in curious ways, and each grows steadily bigger, weirder, more mysterious and more humorous as my researches proceed.

Artemus Ward put it this way: "The trouble with most folks is not that they don't know enough but that they know so much that ain't true." Or, in the more slashing style of Neitzsche's soaring sarcasm, "We are all much greater artists than we realize." Whatever we know of Me and The Universe through the filter of our nervous system is much more of a record of the structural functioning of the nervous system itself than it is of the enormous mysteries of the real Me and real Universe.

...All around one the True Believers trudge by, mouths grim, brows furrowed, ulcers and worse eating at their innards. This 'desperate company of oddfellows' (Thoreau) live in what psychologists call 'cognitive dissonance.' Because their reality-maps are, one and all, too small to cover the vast, eerie, amusing world in which we live, they are perpetually frustrated: the world does not live up to their fixed beliefs. They are all convinced that there is something radically wrong with the universe itself, or with the rest of humanity, and they never suspect that the real trouble is in their own rigid and robotic nervous systems.

Thus I 'believe' in libertarianism, in strict scientific method (the objective yoga of the West), in yoga (the neuroscience of the East), in Space Migration, in Life Extension, and in dozens of other things. But I can suspend any of these beliefs at will, or all of them, and look impassively into the Buddhist void, or switch around to other beliefs temporarily, to check out how the world looks to those who hold those beliefs."

"Normal" probably isn't.

I remember reading about Fortuny's Craiglist experiment when it first happened and remember thinking "That's what folks get for thinking privacy actually exists online," but this makes a really good point. These folks were trying to live in a subculture safely and ethically, hurting nobody, and got screwed pretty hard over it in some cases.

PopMatters Culture Feature | The Kink Continuum:

"You may have heard of Seattle web developer Jason Fortuny’s September 2006 “Craigslist experiment” in which he posed as a submissive woman and solicited responses from kinky, dominant men. Citing safety, he requested real names, phone numbers, pictures, and other contact information—and then took all the personal information these men gave him and posted it on a website. Some responded to this with a shrug: Too bad about the privacy violation, but that’s what happens when you’re a disgusting pervert. Presumably as a kinky person, you just don’t have the same rights as anyone else.

But what Jason Fortuny did was extremely unethical, not because he was a man posing as a woman—as vice squad detectives can tell you, 17-year-old virgin Jennifer in your chat room may likely be 40-year-old PTA member Steve—but because he took advantage of people who were taking care to be ethical themselves. As sex columnist Dan Savage has pointed out, those responding to Fortuny’s ad were trying to provide a nervous woman attracted to a murky subculture with the security that their personal information could afford, assuring her that if she did end up getting hurt, she’d know how to find them.

Instead, they got blamed for being kinky, “outed” to their families and communities, and had their professional and private lives compromised; one couple in an open marriage begged that their information be removed from Fortuny’s website, as their religious friends and family were unaware of their lifestyle. Someone else recognized a coworker from a Microsoft-based email address; another email came from a usar.army.mil address, not an organization famous for tolerance of alternative sexualities. Fortuny’s considerate response to the experiment’s “subjects” who asked him to remove their information from his website? “Sorry. Try not to freak out. Take deep breaths. Recognize that your friends will laugh at you for a little bit, and you’ll get some prank phone calls. Maybe a feminist will write you a nastygram. If this is making you cry then grow the fuck up. Be the real man you claimed you were on your response, faggot. You should be able to take a hit in the solar plexus without flinching.”

Why the hostility? Our culture is happy to grapple with sex-fetish imagery in the mainstream, where an ad for Altoids features a corset-clad honey bun and the tagline “Pleasure in Pain”, and Justin Timberlake moans suggestively about shackles and slaves at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show. It’s a vocabulary we all recognize: chains, whips, ropes, Chinese nurses, rubber. We have some generic cultural connotations for kink: It can suggest, for example, that folks are more adventurous, more interesting, possibly even cooler than nonkinksters. How often does Cosmopolitan tell couples to spice up their relationship with some light bondage, handcuffs or a silk scarf blindfold? So how do we get from thinking kink is a fun and exciting way to add a little zest to your sex life to finding it disgusting on the Internet and persecuting those who sought to practice it privately and safely?

Kinsey’s sex studies in 1948 and 1953 revealed that we’re all a lot weirder than we think. Gay, straight, kinky, or vanilla, we’re all blips on a continuum that is wider than we typically imagine. While Kinsey didn’t specifically study kinky behavior, his studies did reveal that approximately 12 percent of females and 22 percent of males had an aroused response to a sadomasochistic story and more than half of both sexes responded erotically to being bitten. And the prominence of kinky images in the media—such as TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s cavalier inclusion of handcuffs, collars, and safe words, the recurring dominatrix character in CSI, fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier’s use of stilettos, rubber, and leather straps and even the video game Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, which has players disguise themselves in bondage gear to gain access to a casino, suggest a vast population with at least some interest in kink.

...Fortuny was able to create scandal because privacy laws imply that only shame provokes us to choose to keep certain things to ourselves. But if our supposedly taboo activities are increasingly being revealed with the help of the Internet as more and more commonplace, they will not remain potently taboo for long. How can you shame someone for being “other” when there is more and more proof that this otherness is in fact the norm?"