conspiracy

Sports Desk: You’re ALL Dumbasses, Sport

“Those who fail to learn from the brutal stompings visited on them in the past are doomed to be brutally stomped in the future.”
– Raoul Duke, Christmas Eve 1972

Late last night, while I was engaged in my regular sacrifices and oblations the Great White Porcelain God Whose Name Is Ralph came a pounding on the door at the damnedest moment imaginable. They broke in, and my feeble gestures of resistance notwithstanding, they did their evil deeds and left. Imagine my shock when I recovered myself enough to stagger into the living room only to discover six cases of beer, an IBM Selectric, a recently reconnected Mojo Wire, and enough speed to charge a rhino. The Editorial Enforcement Division had visited again and caught me at a weak moment. I might have said with my pants down, but that would be an abuse of the metaphor. I’m the one being abused and I don’t want to detract from that point, so I’ll avoid the figure of speech and just get right to it.

(more…)

They’re Gone Now

Not far from the Georgia-South Carolina border, surrounded by chicken barns and overgrown fields, stood a monument to hope, a set of granite guidestones commissioned at the height of the Cold War with a message to humanity’s survivors should they wish to rebuild.

It’s gone now.

(more…)

Conspiracy Theories And 9/11: World Trade Center

Many remember 9/11, but some of us view the events in a different light.  In order to discuss it, I’d like to start with some baseline information and move on from there.

PM-911-lead

The official story:  On 11 September, 2001, two commercial airliners impacted the main towers of the World Trade Center on the island of Manhattan in New York City.  Thousands of people (more…)

Conspiracy Theories And 9/11: The Pentagon

Not too long ago, a good friend of mine was looking at Facebook when he suddenly exclaimed, “Good God!  Don’t tell me people still believe that $#!+!”

Because we’re talking Facebook, I had to ask for a bit of clarification.  I mean, really — there’s a lot of $#!+ out there, after all.  And so I asked, “To which particular bit of $#!+ do you refer?” (more…)

Bread And Circuses: Why We Need Them

We all know the quote “Religion is the opiate of the masses.” It’s a paraphrase from a work by Karl Marx. Most of us have no idea of the context or his intended meaning.

“…Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion (more…)

Healthcare: In Order To Fix A Problem…

The first step toward a solution is to know what the problem is.

Healthcare in this country has been the subject of widespread and highly politicized debate in recent years.  Most of us agree that there’s something wrong, but we tend to disagree on what, exactly, that might be.  It’s little wonder that the solutions that we try are subject to controversy — and that controversy includes widespread civil disobedience, of a type and breadth not seen since the civil rights era of the 1960s and 70s.

The trouble is, we don’t know what precisely is wrong.  We haven’t diagnosed it.  So… (more…)

On Literacy

“Words! Words when spoken out loud for the sake of performance are music. They have rhythm and pitch and timbre and volume. These are the properties of music – and music has the ability to find us and move us and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can’t.”
– President Josiah Bartlet
(The West Wing sn. 3 ep. 5 “War Crimes“)

The above quote was meant to be read aloud.

Try it. Pretend, just for a moment, that you are in fact that famed oratorical snob, President Jed Bartlet, and read this aloud. Be persuasive; be passionate. Convince me. (more…)