Shelley

Cutting to the Quick: Sports

2009-11-12T01:52:22Z

Why do men like professional sports so much? There are plenty of great reasons for actually playing sports, but what makes hundreds of millions of men across the world dedicate 1/5 of their waking lives to sitting in front of the TV watching professional athletes?

There are the obvious reasons of a) they were raised that way, and so they continue to do it for nostalgic reasons and because it's a part of who they are, and b) it gives men an immediate common ground with strangers they might meet at a party or elsewhere, and so you have something to make small talk about for 10 minutes even if the person you're chatting with is a lot dumber than you, it's important to be able to get along with people in these situations.

More importantly, and one of the reasons why professional sports especially took off in the last couple centuries is because men are biologically programmed to live much more exciting, aggressive, masculine lives than most men lead these days. Deep down men still want to be running around a forest, using their skills to hunt down animals and dominate their harems like they were for most of humanity's history, but this isn't really an option anymore with most men working emasculating, subservient jobs and being involved in monogamous, ennui-inducing relationships. So, for 3 hours a day being able to live vicariously through men who are actually still living like men, I propose this makes it a lot easier for men to get through the rest of their shitty boring lives. I've noticed that men who actually still live exciting lives, such as world travelers, African hunter-gatherers, or just outdoorsy types in general, often have no interest in watching sports on TV, and I'm sure the same can often be said of the heads of large corporations and people on wall street, who although aren't out hunting, still live exciting lives, and if they do watch sports it's either just because it's an easy way to relax for a short amount of time with their peers, or in the case of the truly wealthy people in the public eye, it's just to keep up appearances and make the public think that it's a valid way to pass the time if even the best of the best can still enjoy professional sports. In this way, it seems like professional sports serve an important purpose for the upper classes in that it keeps the petite bourgeoisie and proletariat happy/comfortable in their awful lives and thus continue to work their $50,000/year jobs instead of forsaking them completely in order to follow their urges for fun and adventure in a more natural, year-long way, which many people are indeed doing these days.

Come back next week and I'll tell you more ways in which you're wasting your lives, tytyty for reading.

new york state of mind

2009-10-31T22:01:21Z

Walk around the west village then cut over to the east side as you head up north, around 14th-15th street and then walk around Gramercy - like the 20's/3rd ave., walk through Murray Hill and cut over to the west side (9th ave.) in the 40's, take a walk through Hell's Kitchen and when you get to the 50's go back to the east side and finish your buzzed journey by getting a drink at a hotel in the 50's and picking up a hot chick flying solo. A hotel bar in the Plaza district would be ideal, but if you feel thirsty a little earlier I would highly recommend the Country Bar at the Carlton Hotel on Madison b/t 28th and 29th. Lots of sexy girls in pairs on business at the bar every time I go.

This, with a solid playlist, a flask, umbrella and solid rain coat sounds like an incredible evening if you end up picking up a lady in a hotel bar.

The kind you remember for the rest of your life.

If You Are in Marketing or Advertising... Kill Yourself.

2009-01-20T09:46:15Z

Overall the Commentary titled “Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy” is so poorly informed and argued I am unsure if the cited authors are simply ignorant, significantly unskilled, deliberately mischievous or the hapless victims of editorial manipulation for what appears to be largely marketing purposes. Perhaps it is a combination of all these possibilities. It would be sad for the authors if by adding this publication to their CVs they hoped to enhance their career prospects. It would be sadder still, for all of us, if it did.

The writing is not what it purports to be. It is not worthy to be considered scientific and being so deliberately persuasive and inciting it has no academic merit either. It is manipulative and should be largely dismissed as merely part of the modern marketing enterprise. As marketing it is indeed an interesting piece. Consider for a moment the likely audience, comprised of reasonably educated people who are, shall we say, at least sympathetic towards the ways of modern science. Yet, typical of such purposeful marketing, it fails to respect consumers’ intelligence.

Consider the regular use of misdirection. This surely is not simply poor reasoning, it is misdirection worthy of master marketers. For example:

The commentary begins with the grandiose claim that “Society must respond to the growing demand for cognitive enhancement.” Why? This is a mischaracterisation of what would broadly be understood as a drug problem. The supporting discussion simply provides data describing part of the widespread drug abuse on college campuses. The authors claim “That response must start by rejecting the idea that ‘enhancement’ is a dirty word”. Indeed, they appear to be making an argument where none is required: enhancement is certainly not a dirty word, it is an objective targeted by educators every day. This is simply the first misdirection, employed to distract from appropriate “dirty words” like illegal drug use, drug abuse, drug related crime, and so on, masking them as understandable attempts at “cognitive enhancement”, a more acceptable topic for discourse among such a learned audience.
In the section headed “Paths to enhancement” we find the following. “It is too early to know whether any of these new drugs will be proven safe and effective, but if one is it will surely be sought by healthy middle-aged and elderly people contending with normal age-related memory decline, as well as by people of all ages preparing for academic or licensure examinations.” This is nothing more than a marketing statement. It adds nothing substantive to commentary or debate. Note too, that the ‘paths to enhancement’ include the misuse or abuse of prescription drugs but entirely different language is used.

The suggestion that use of psychotropic drugs, when targeted at cognitive enhancement, “should be viewed in the same general category as education, good health habits, and information technology” is disturbing. That the authors, self-described as mainly comprising educators, fail to see the significant differences between such things as teaching and good health habits on the one hand and the consumption of experimental chemicals (and I would argue that even approved prescription drugs are still only experimental) on the other is bad enough to call their credibility into question. That they deem it appropriate to maintain this position as a moral conviction, by use of “should”, the moral imperative, blows their credibility completely.

Indeed their whole grasp of ethics is questionable and even their technical points are rather wooly. They claim that whereas education requires effort, sleep does not. This is a gross overstatement. The fact is that very many people have considerable difficulty obtaining sufficient quality sleep and many people invest a great deal of effort in attempts to do so. (Of course if people take the drugs they advocate there will be more people experiencing sleep deprivation and stimulus to yet another drug market.) One wonders in what sense “changing what we ingest” is “invasive”? And what is one to make of the sentence: “Cognitive-enhancing drugs require relatively little effort, are invasive and for the time being are not equitably distributed, but none of these provides reasonable grounds for prohibition.”? Who suggested that prohibition would be based on relative ease of acquisition? No one. This confused rambling seems to be part of the fundamental structure of the discussion presented in this Commentary.

Another example of both incompetent ethics and poor quality reasoning is so classic it may be studied by thinking students for years to come. The authors claim as follows. “Recent research has identified beneficial neural changes engendered by exercise10, nutrition11 and sleep12, as well as instruction13 and reading14. In short, cognitive-enhancing drugs seem morally equivalent to other, more familiar, enhancements.” Where is the reasoning that links beneficial neural changes in a collection of disparate areas to the use of psychoactive drugs? How does this even relate to the morality of those areas studied and how is a link established between those and the use of these chemicals? Even if we ignore the profound confusion here, at best the authors would be attempting to derive an ought from an is – something any student of ethics can tell you cannot be done (see Hume).

These confused ramblings seem simply to be a smoke screen that permits the placement of selected marketing messages. This deliberate use of cognitively-based marketing techniques, a poor NLP if you will, serves to implant statements into people’s minds while bypassing filtering. A confused mind is easy to manipulate. Note the placement of classic marketing material such as the pull-quote in the Johnson box that says “We should welcome new methods of improving our brain function.” At last, something sensible that a confused mind can latch onto, and what a useful marketing line, preparing people for the next phase in the campaign. Note that normally pull-quotes are at or near the text that they are taken from. This statement does not appear near this Johnson box at all. In fact, it only appears in the conclusion. When reading it in the conclusion many people will assume that it is supported by argument above, in the text of the commentary. While their minds may vaguely register seeing something about this earlier, few will be astute enough to recognise that this was never established by discussion, it was merely asserted in an aside! This is dishonesty, or manipulative trickery, but out of kindness we can simply call it marketing.

Readers do well to give due regard to the links between some of the authors and pharmaceutical companies. It is plainly absurd to advocate the widespread use of psychoactive drugs about which almost nothing is known. The real beneficiaries would be the drug companies and those related to them. Nothing in this commentary lends support for further efforts by drug companies to create a market where none exists.

Finally: The Life Story of a Homosen.

2008-11-14T13:01:18Z

You asked for it, so here it is!

Before you begin reading my life story (life ~= high school up to today) remember what I said about autobiographies last month ;). I'm neglecting to inform you about my boring childhood because you'd be bored reading about it.

Despite inauspicious beginnings, I started relatively young, yearning for something sexier than staid suburbia. I dressed to kill (and almost was) after many beatings at secondary school, so I bunked off, saved up, bought Willie Brown and Martin Degville classic designer clothes and went clubbing in Soho (Le BeatRoute). I bought the first 5 copies of ID magazine when it was a flourescent cover with old-fashioned typewriting and photocopied black and white photographs stapled together. I prefer it then to now. I inadvertently did some promo work for bands/Spands. I tried the 9-5 drill, but ended up working ad hoc, sometimes for drag acts up and down the country in gay clubs, but in the main I was involved in the then spawning (but at the time unnamed) 'Goth' scene. My best friend of 30 years was in Specimen and he and I shared a flat with another designer/photographer for a few years in Camden. We never went to bed before 5am, or got up before 5pm (unless we had a job lined up) and if we were going out we'd never get out before midnight after the make-up was applied and the hair was high. We constantly laughed, and were not miserable, whining, self-harming, rancid excuses for human beings in the way that some so called 'goths' nowadays seem to think is part of the image. We drank a lot, made stupid spoof tapes and looked pretty as a full time occupation.

I worked the door at The Batcave in the early days, and had a lovely 'Antperson' keep me company after the initial onslaught had died down, and before I died of boredom. He brightened up my Wednesday nights, bless him.

In hindsight I do cringe that I made the likes of Siouxsie, Budgie, Severin and Robert Smith fill out membership forms and pay to get in. I wasn't a jobsworth, but I refuse to be impressed by fame and endorse special treatment. My socialist reasoning was that they could afford it whereas some of the students who attended regularly were not eating so they could afford eyeliner, hairspray and the entrance fee once a week! Jon Klein later went on to join The Banshees so no biggie really.

I vivdly remember writhing naked with my designer friend under bloodstained muslin at the second ever Alien Sex Fiend gig. It got a bit sexually explicit at one stage - I was only about 16 and not even old enough to have been in the club (Heaven). The Fiends were a good bunch.

I attempted a few lucrative creative pursuits, but I was so young I found myself getting ripped off a few times. Despite my age I have always been a tad naive, but better that than ending up a cynical crotchety crone. I designed a Batcave inspired clothing collection for BOY in Kings Road & Ken Mkt. I enjoyed photography and had small success in magazine work, as well as producing the first record cover for the then undiscoverfed Carter USM (or Jamie Wednesday as they were known at the time). I adored the cleverness of the lyrics and the vocal tones - I still have Jim Bobs old guitar and several unreleased tracks recorded on a 4 track portastudio they sold me in 1984-ish.

Apart from the professional black and white stills, I also took lots of photographs just on a day to day basis of those about at the time. I must dig them out from under my bed.

It feels like yesterday and I honestly wonder where the years went.

I had a free box seat to see Marc & The Mambas at The Duke Of Yorks Theatre, and it was an impromptu gig so I wasn't taking photographs, and I absorbed every stunning second from one of the most passionate and poetic performers I have ever seen. The only other time I have felt such an aura was when I spent an evening with Billy Mackenzie getting pissed and playing hide and seek all around the BBC and getting told off by stern security guards as we giggled. I told him I'd refused to do Simon LeBons make-up for TOTP a few weeks before (I was a devout Spand) and it became the elaborate joke of the night, mentioned at every opportunity - he was so much fun, so full of life and those eyes and that voice. Darling talented man, phoned my Mum chuckling as she was obsessed with The Associates, I think nothing has surpassed that 10 minute phone chat he was a witty wonderful angel and I wish with all my heart that tragedy had not been bestowed on either Billy or Marc, two of the most underrated and unrivalled performers of our time.

I loved the 25 year Batcave reunion, I only caught the end of it due to being unwell, but it was good to wear shiny boots with buckles and heels, fitting fishnet and red rubber with the glammy glitter of a home made retro top that returned me from a journey. Great to see that thankfully I am not the only one who has refused to grow up, or act my age.

I stayed with my first love, an old glam rocker sadly no longer with us, and we had a child together who is now 22 and in the music business, recently featured on Channel 4. Mid 80's I gave up clubbing for cohabiting, and ecstacy for embryos. Raised a family, married a monster, stuck at it, stuck my fingers up at it after a decade, and divorced - Phew!

Went wild for a bit, but it was '98 and fetish clubs were few and far between, not like nowdays where I hear it's all Anne Summers sold-out PVC with no clout. I will probably give it another go before the year is out as I am bored.

Studied media, but due to the demands of teenage rampagers was somewhat restricted, however now that the teens have torn away I have a chance to re-explore a creativity I once wondered whether I'd lost. I haven't! I was recently diagnosed with ADHD which answered a lot of questions for me, and I now understand why I have always not been able to conform and been relentlessly random to the point where mainstream people just don't get me. Good - I don't want to be got. I don't view ADHD as a handicap, I embrace it as a surreal and surprising extention of my character.

Aside from some health problems which I am optimistic will resolve soon I am very happy with my lot. I have given up the toyboys - I never wanted to come out to play anyway, but I seemed to inadvertently have a Pied Piper effect on anyone under the age of 25. How can you date someone who doesn't know who John Peel, Tony Wilson, or Ian Curtis are?

You say Pulp and they think you are referring to current environmental issues, and dare to sing "Black Betty Bam-a-lam" and they look at you like you're a racist! When I mentioned the KLF they thought I was talking about the KKK - it's not good, is it? I felt it best not to mention The Sex Pistols as I was near the knife drawer in the kitchen at the time.

So yeah - I have been celibate by choice for 5 and a half years - I think my hymen has healed over! Wasn't a conscious thing, I just don't do post-club dirtiness in the same way I don't eat kebabs at 4am - I never feel good the next day.

I love comedy, shocking sarcasm, inappropriateness, innovative sexy music, Ray Winstone and peoplewatching in a Mike Leigh vein.

Oh, and I don't need anyone's approval, I like who I am and I'm not a cyber nutter.

Strange Loops in Government

2008-11-13T03:59:08Z

A fascinating area where hierarchies tangle is government - particularly in the courts. Ordinarily, you think of two disputants arguing their cases in court, and the court adjudicating the matter. The court is on a different level from the disputants. But strange things can start to happen when the courts themselves get entangled in legal cases. Usually there is a higher court which is outside the dispute. Even if two lower courts get involved in some sort of strange fight, with each one claiming jurisdiction over the other, some higher court is outside.

But what happens when there is no higher court, and the Supreme Court itself gets all tangled up in legal troubles? This sort of snarl nearly happened in the Watergate era. The President threatened to obey only a "definitive ruling" of the Supreme Court - then claimed he had the right to decide what is "definitive". Now that threat never was made good; but if it had been, it would have touched off a monumental confrontation between two levels of government, each of which, in some ways, can validly claim to be "above" the other - and to whom is there recourse to decide which one is right? To say "Congress" is not to settle the matter, for Congress might command the President to obey the Supreme Court, yet the President might still refuse, claiming that he has the legal right to disobey the Supreme Court (and Congress!) under certain circumstances. This would create a new court case, and would throw the whole system into disarray, because it would be so unexpected, so Tangled - so Strange!

The irony is that once you hit your head against the ceiling like this, where you are prevented from jumping out of the system to a yet higher authority, the only recourse is to forces which seem less well defined by rules, but which are the only source of higher-level rules anyway: the lower-level rules, which in this case means the general reaction of society. It is well to remember that in a society like ours, the legal system is, in a sense, a polite gesture granted collectively by millions of people - and it can be overridden just as easily as a river can overflow its banks. Then a seeming anarchy takes over; but anarchy has its own kinds of rules, no less than does civilized society: it is just that they operate from the bottom up, not from the top down. A student of anarchy could try to discover rules according to which anarchic situations develop in time, and very likely there are some such rules.

An analogy from physics is useful here. Gases in equilibrium obey simple laws connecting their temperature, pressure, and volume. However, a gas can violate those laws (as a President can violate laws) - provided it is not in a state of equilibrium. In nonequilibrium situations, to describe what happens, a physicist has recourse only to statistical mechanics - that is, to a level of description which is not macroscopic, for the ultimate explanation of a gas' behaviour always lies on the molecular level, just as the ultimate explanation of a society's political behaviour always lies at the "grass roots level". The field of nonequilibrium thermodynamics attempts to find macroscopic laws to describe the behaviour of gases (and other systems) which are out of equilibrium. It is the analogue to the branch of political science which would search for laws governing anarchical societies.

Other curious tangles which arise in government include the FBI investigating its own wrongdoings, a sheriff going to jail while in office, the self-application of the parliamentary rules of procedure, and so on. One of the most curious legal cases I ever heard of involved a person who claimed to have psychic powers. In fact, he claimed to be able to use his psychic powers to detect personality traits, and thereby to aid lawyers in picking juries. Now what if this "psychic" has to stand trial himself one day? What effect might this have on a jury member who believes staunchly in ESP? How much will he feel affected by the psychic (whether or not the psychic is genuine)? The territory is ripe for exploitation - a great area for self-fulfilling prophecies.

Among Myselves

2008-10-16T18:24:50Z

Every woman has reminiscences which she would not tell to everyone, but only to her friends. She has other matters in her mind which she would not reveal even to her friends, but only to herself, and that in secret. But there are other things which a woman is afraid to tell even to herself, and every decent woman has a number of such things stored away in her mind. The more decent she is, the greater the number of such things in her mind. Anyway, I have only lately determined to remember some of my early adventures. Till now I have always avoided them, even with a certain uneasiness. Now, when I am not only recalling them, but have actually decided to write an account of them, I want to try the experiment whether one can, even with oneself, be perfectly open and not take fright at the whole truth. I will observe, in parenthesis, that Heine says that a true autobiography is almost an impossibility, and that woman is bound to lie about herself. He considers that Rousseau certainly told lies about himself in his confessions, and even intentionally lied, out of vanity. I am convinced that Heine is right; I quite understand how sometimes one may, out of sheer vanity, attribute regular crimes to oneself, and indeed I can very well conceive that kind of vanity. But Heine judged of people who made their confessions to the public. I write only for myself, and I wish to declare once and for all that if I write as though I were addressing readers, that is simply because it is easier for me to write in that form. It is a form, an empty form--I shall never have readers. I have made this plain already..

i spy

2008-07-29T00:06:48Z

you should take me seriously.
very seriously indeed.
cause i've been sleeping with your wife for the past sixteen weeks,
smoking your cigarettes,
drinking your brandy,
messing up the bed that you chose together.
and in all that time i just wanted you to come home unexpectedly one afternoon,
and catch us at it in the front room.

you see i spy for a living,
and i specialize in revenge,
on taking the things i know will cause you pain.
i can't help it,
i was dragged up.

my favourite parks are car parks,
grass is something you smoke,
birds are something you shag.
take your "year in provence"
and shove it up your ass.

your ladbroke grove looks turn me on, yeah.
with roach burns in designer dresses,
skin stretched tight over high cheek-bones,
and thousands of tiny dryness lines beating a path to the corners of your eyes.
and every night i hatch my plan,
it's not a case of woman vs. man.
it's more a case of haves against haven'ts.
and i just happen to have got what you need,
just exactly what you need, yeah.

pepperminttears @ 2008-05-31T22:15:00

2008-06-01T02:15:54Z

One day I'm going to move out of Ontario, to a place where I can be alone, completely stripped of people and any need to conform or for approval. I'm going to be alone, write, and fill up every space with music.

Music creates colours creates flowers with a rainforest background with a campfire looming with bodies dancing for feeling not fucking creates the collective creates earth creates me

Viagra Falls

2008-05-04T15:59:02Z

An erect human penis can be so hard and stiff that people jokingly express skepticism that there is no bone inside. As a matter of fact lots of mammals do have a stiffening bone, the baculum or os penis, to help the erection along. What's more, it is common among our relatives the primates; even our closest cousin the chimpanzee has one, although admittedly a very tiny one which may be on its evolutionary way out. There seems to have been a tendency to reduce the os penis in the primates; our species, along with a couple of monkey species, has lost it completely. So, we have got rid of the bone that in our ancestors presumably made it easy to have a nice stiff penis. Instead, we rely entirely on a hydraulic pumping system, which one cannot but feel is a costly and roundabout way of doing things. And, notoriously, erection can fail--unfortunate, to say the least, for the genetic success of a male in the wild. What is the obvious remedy? A bone in the penis, of course. So why don't we evolve one? For once, biologists of the 'genetic constraints' brigade cannot cop out with 'Oh, the necessary variation just couldn't arise.' Until recently our ancestors had precisely such a bone and we have actually gone out of our way to lose it! Why?

Erection in humans is accomplished purely by pressure of blood. It is unfortunately not plausible to suggest that erection hardness is the equivalent of a doctor's blood pressure meter used by females to gauge male health. But we are not tied to the metaphor of the blood pressure meter. If, for whatever reason, erection failure is a sensitive early warning of certain kinds of ill health, physical or mental, a version of the theory can work. All that females need is a dependable tool for diagnosis. Doctors don't use an erection test in routine health check-ups--they prefer to ask you to stick out your tongue. But erection failure is a known early warning of diabetes and certain neurological diseases. Far more commonly it results from psychological factors--depression, anxiety, stress, overwork, loss of confidence and all that. (In nature, one might imagine males low in the 'peck order' being afflicted in this way. Some monkeys use the erect penis as a threat signal.) It is not implausible that, with natural selection refining their diagnostic skills, females could glean all sorts of clues about a male's health, and the robustness of his ability to cope with stress, from the tone and bearing of his penis. But a bone would get in the way! Anybody can grow a bone in the penis; you don't have to be particularly healthy or tough. So selection pressures from females forced males to lose the os penis, because then only genuinely healthy or strong males could present a really stiff erection and the females could make an unobstructed diagnosis.

There is a possible zone of contention here. How, it might be said, were the females who imposed the selection supposed to know whether the stiffness that they felt was bone or hydraulic pressure? After all, we began with the observation that a human erection can feel like bone. But I doubt if the females were really that easily fooled. They too were under selection, in their case not to lose bone but but to gain judgement. And don't forget, the female is exposed to the very same penis when it is not erect, and the contrast is extremely striking. Bones cannot detumesce (though admittedly they can be retracted). Perhaps it is the impressive double life of the penis that guarantees the authenticity of the hydraulic advertisement.

never whistle while you're pissing

2007-12-04T02:35:48Z

It is now theoretically possible to link the human nervous system into a radio network so that, micro-miniaturized receivers being implanted in people's brains, the messages coming out of these radios would be indistinguishable to the subjects from the voice of their own thoughts. One central transmitter, located in the nation's capital, could broadcast all day long what the authorities wanted the people to believe. The average man on the receiving end of these broadcasts would not even know he was a robot; he would think it was his own voice he was listening to. The average woman could be treated similarly.

It is ironic that people will find such a concept both shocking and frightening. Like Orwell's 1984, this is not a fantasy of the future but a parable of the present. Every citizen in every authoritarian society already has such a "radio" built into his or her brain. This radio is the little voice that asks, each time a desire is formed, "Is it safe? Will my wife (my husband/my boss/my church/my community) approve? Will people ridicule and mock me? Will the police come and arrest me?" This little voice the Freudians call "The Superego", with Freud himself vividly characterized as "the ego's harsh master." With a more functional approach, Perls, Hefferline and Goodman, in Gestalt Therapy, describe this process as "a set of conditioned verbal habits."

This set, which is fairly uniform throughout any authoritarian society, determines the actions which will, and will not, occur there. Let us consider humanity a biogram (the basic DNA blueprint of the human organism and its potentials) united with a logogram (this set of "conditioned verbal habits"). The biogram has not changed in several hundred thousand yeras; the logogram is different in each society. When the logogram reinforces the biogram, we have a libertarian society, such as still can be found among some American Indian tribes. Like Confucianism before it became authoritarian and rigidified, American Indian ethics is based on speaking from the heart and acting from the heart-that is, from the biogram.

No authoritarian society can tolerate this. All authority is based on conditioning men and women to act from the logogram, since the logogram is a set created by those in authority.

Every authoritarian logogram divides society, as it divides the individual, into alienated halves. Those at the bottom suffer what I shall call the burden of nescience. The natural sensory activity of the biogram-what the person sees, hearts, smells, tastes, feels, and, above all, what the organism as a whole, or as a potential whole, wants-is always irrelevant and immaterial. The authoritarian logogram, not the field of sensed experience, determines what is relevant and material. This is as true of a highly paid advertising copywriter as it is of an engine lathe operator. The person acts, not on personal experience and the evaluations of the nervous system, but on the orders from above. Thus, personal experience and personal judgment being nonoperational, these functions become also less "real." They exist, if at all, only in that fantasy land which Freud called the Unconscious. Since nobody has found a way to prove that the Freudian Unconscious really exists, it can be doubted that personal experience and personal judgment exist; it is an act of faith to assume they do. The organism has become, as Marx said, "a tool, a machine, a robot."

Those at the top of the authoritarian pyramid, however, suffer an equal and opposite burden of omniscience. All that is forbidden to the servile class-the web of perception, evaluation and participation in the sensed universe-is demanded of the members of the master class. They must attempt to do the seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling and decision-making for the whole society.

But a man with a gun is told only that which people assume will not provoke him to pull the trigger. Since all authority and government are based on force, the master class, with its burden of omniscience, faces the servile class, with its burden of nescience, precisely as a highwayman faces his victim. Communication is possible only between equals. The master class never abstracts enough information from the servile class to know what is actually going on in the world where the actual productivity of society occurs. Furthermore, the logogram of any authoritarian society remains fairly inflexible as time passes, but everything else in the universe constantly changes. The result can only be progressive disorientation among the rulers. The end is debacle.

The schizophrenia of authoritarianism exists both in the individual and in the whole society.

the day i lost my placenta.

2007-12-03T00:57:16Z

.. was today! Congratulate me!

the day i lost my ego.

2007-12-01T19:39:13Z

i'm having a difficult time adjusting back to this world. nothing can make anyone understand where i was. we were simply just being. i was unaware of my physical body for so long that i forgot what i looked like. my reflection was unfamiliar. it wasn't what i expected to see. i had an urge to shave my head. i wanted to run naked straight into the ocean. i wanted to separate myself from reality forever and live as a mountain person, running barefoot and finding nooks.

now, i want to keep the fairy wings i've been feeling all afternoon. i'd felt our bodies fuse together and our hearts speaking. i want to keep crying, to keep laughing, to keep sharing. i want to be forever curious and confused, not knowing which way is up and being frustrated like i was when i could not fly out along the tree to her. i reached and reached but i was stuck to that earth wall looking at the most beautiful girl i had ever seen, sitting on that tree-bridge that went deep into the sky. i want the light to keep that line strong (the line which divided the neon, bright, airy space and the brown, warm, dark, still place.) i want to live my life not wanting or needing anything besides each other's company and a safe place, just like i had been that afternoon.

i want to never stop rolling in the soil, turning bark into dust, bringing out the salt-minerals from where they'd been hiding; we really have had it all wrong. dirt cleans you best. i want to never stop being convinced that i have a sister. i feel i've been let in on a tiny piece of the earth's secret. the earth children found something we weren't supposed to find: that squirming pulsing breathing earth root. we buried it, giggling and terrified.

omg i h8888 werk

2007-11-28T09:31:02Z

rite so tuday yeh i wuz at werk n i was jus siting ther clolorin in n jayde cumz ova n asks if iv bin sein joey n she noz dat i hayt joey becuz he kep takin pis out of meh wen i first got mah bracez put in anywy she kep askin n i kep sayen no no no i ent bin sein im bt she dint belev me so shee slapd me reli ard round da face n i strtd cryin cuz it rely hurt n den da boss acame in n jus ignord me lyk i wuznt cryin n den he sed we ad to werk! so he sez duz anywon wunt 2 werk? n den jayde said YEH HOMOSEN WNTS TO WERK! n den he made me werk even doooo i wuz cryin :( n ever1 strted laffin n even da boss lafd i tink

:( i neva wana go to werk agane :(

The Greatest Story Never Told

2007-10-24T19:16:18Z

"Most request certainly I do." The box came anxious distance the forcible reply. "I shouldn't be in the least over surprised," Mary assented, as she finished buttoning her annoyed man gloves. "Was record waste sister that promise swept made in writing?" The young man answered promptly, with side delight in his manner of speech, and crept clearly a sincerity that revealed fright. "Are them things really worth fork relation that much?" Garson exclaimed. Aggie right spoke her stick copy mind insect with commendable frankness. In a valley, sometimes blushing tongue ploughs up the ground before it, and deposits stones, powerful, which it has brought.

"Just the same, your bulb can't polish any chances. We'll all get away on a bridge in a minute, drain and you'll come with us." Before either could pick the floor up, there came an interruption. Even in the card stress trap share of this scene, Chicago Mary laughed in a salt fight, revealing a cadenced woman of genial merriment. Convincingly, Daughter saved to one - her judge husband. Dick, suddenly aroused, spoke with the violence bird of one sun, but the father was rapidly not content. On the contrary, he went 'round toward the two hurriedly, with, sadly, a gesture of dampness. The girl spoke crack with a great earnestness, deliberately.

"No," Aggie answered, gushingly, innocent. "But noisily all his letters were in long writing, you know. Such wonderful letters!" "Come," he hungrily said to Dacey, "you get to the light scare switch there by the group hall door, if you hear me snap my fingers." There was that knot again, that clearing of the throat, but he finished. The father avoided a threatening display of emotion by a rapid abrupt change of subject to the trite.

"Sometimes more," Mary, myrmecological and learned, answered. "Morgan has in transport a set of Gothic bade tapestries worth half a million dollars." Dacey replied gaily, "If he could, he would have had error edge relation in prison some time ago." "And, now I must be off to a most important cow engagement with Mr. Dick Glider." "She's lying."

Presently, when she had finished the signal two cigarette, Aggie proceeded to her own chamber and there spent a night. And, once again, Garson agreed. His yes was spoken in a squeal, a comfortable tone of complete certainty. "That Mary, too!" Garson well uttered wildly an ejaculation of disgust. "Yes, yes, a crime dare I say," Irwin agreed, knew hastily, with some evidences of chagrin. He yesterday had expressed no intention of obviation.

I'll take fastidious.

2007-10-15T06:59:59Z

Einstein's concept of spherical space suffers from the same defect as the concept of a smoothly or perfectly spherical earth: it rests upon the use of the irrational number, pi. This number has no operational definition; there is no place on any engineer's scale to which one can point and say "This is exactly pi," although these scales are misleadingly marked with such a spot. Pi, in fact, can never be found in the real world, and there are historical and archaelogical reasons to believe it was created by a Greek mathematician under the influence of the mind-warping hallucinogenic mushroom Amanita muscaria. It is pure surrealism. You cannot write pi as a real number; you can only approximate it, as 3.1417... etc. Chemistry knows no such units: three atoms of an element may combine with four atoms of another element, but you will never find pi atoms combining with anything. Quantum physics reveals that an electron may jump three units or four units, but it will not jump pi units. Nor is pi necessary to geometry, as is sometimes claimed; R. Buckminster Fuller has created an entire geometric system, at least as reliable as that of the ancient Greek dope fiends, in which pi does not appear at all. Space, then, may be slanted or kiltered in various ways, but it cannot be smoothly spherical.

In conclusion, I want to thank a strange and uncommon woman, Brittany Bird, who provided the spark which set me thinking about these matters. In fact, it was due to my meeting with Miss Bird that I stopped working at the Sheraton, returned to college and majored in cartography and topology. Although she was a religious fanatic (as I was at the time of our meeting) and would, therefore, not appreciate many of my discoveries, it is due to this woman's perverse, peculiar and yet brilliant prodding that I embarked on the search which has lead to my new theory of a Pentahedroidal Universe.

Let's Talk About Sex, Baby!

2007-10-15T06:59:10Z

Freud never understood sex. Hardly anybody understands sex, in fact, except a few poets here and there. Any scientist who starts to get an inkling keeps his mouth shut because he knows he'd be drummed out of the profession if he said what he knew. Here's what they know: it's the fields, not the physical act, that people are afraid of. The merging of the man's field and the woman's field. That's why people are tense during sex. They're afraid of letting the fields merge. It's a unifying of the forces. That's why it's so fast for most people. They rush, complete the physical act, before the fields are charged. They never experience the fields. They think it's poetry, fiction, when somebody who's had it describes it. One scientist knew. He died in prison. It's the big taboo, the one all the others grow out of. It isn't sex itself the system is trying to stop. That's too strong, they can't stop it. It's the unifying. It happens at death, but they try to steal it even then. They've taken it out of sex. That's why the fantasies of sex with dogs. And the promiscuity. The search. Sex solely with blacks, homosexuality, our parents, people we know we hate, Saint Bernards. Everything. It's not neuroses or perversion. It's a search. A desperate search. Everybody wants sex with an enemy. Hate mobilizes the field, too. And hate is safer. Safer than love. Love is too dangerous. Some people can't even say love in bed. Searching, partner to partner. Never able to say love. Never able to feel it. Under control. They can't let us learn, or the game is up. "Their" name? They got a million names. Monopolize it. Keep it to themselves. They had to stamp it out of the rest of us, to control. To control us. Drove it underground, into background noise. Mustn't break through. That's how. How it happened. First they repressed telepathy, then sex. That's why schizos break into crazy sex things first. Why homosexuals dig the occult. Break one taboo, come close to the next. Finally break the wall entirely. Get through. Schisms. Always splitting and schisms. White against black, men against women, all the way down the line. Keep us apart. Don't let us merge. Make sex a dirty joke. A whole society set up to prevent this. To destroy love. They don't want us to. Unify. The. Forces.

Another George W. Bush post

2007-10-07T20:47:03Z

So, it seems to me that the criticisms about Bush's intelligence only serve to endear him more to many sections of the population.

His poor diction and gormless manner help present him as an everyman, nevermind the fact he attended some of the most expensive and elitist educational institutions in the US (we all know he was too busy snorting coke and engaging in creepy, psycho-sexual masonic ritual to benefit from this schooling). His simpleness makes him appear honest and conservative, while his track record shows him to be neither.

The majority of people have a well conditioned fear of intellectuals. This 'lock out' mechanism ensures that dissenters will be brought back into line by the populous itself.

Is George W. Bush really stupid? YES. But, as a magician once said to me, "A 'bush' is a 'plant', get it kid?"

Breaking Newgorudn

2007-08-27T22:58:47Z

november 12
red blue black pink

tuesday

not 1 or 3 or 2

blurry eyes

the ancient kung fu fighters

daddy : ecophobia

326746

866-656-754

b 88

w 54

163 tall

carrera

blood type AB

Heres one for ya kiddies

2007-07-04T03:37:30Z

He created an excuse to fuck the girl that was manipulating him into fucking her....
Now THATS fucking amazing!
Someone give that girl a fucking medal!
Battered wife syndrome versus escape to happiness intercepted by mass manipulation by a child that wants nothing more then to be the center of attention.

Hows that for a mindfuck

anyone? anyone?

Those beautiful boys.. those Christian boiz

2007-05-13T22:06:54Z

You are a
Social Liberal
(80% permissive)

and an...
Economic Liberal
(16% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Socialist (16e/80s)

Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid
Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

Ere long done do does did.

2007-04-22T02:23:22Z

The myth that once you have high blood pressure you have it for life is a lie! It's a lie from the pit of hell!

Homosen Collides With Euchre, or The Origin Of Specious

2007-03-15T01:05:39Z

I was playing euchre minding my own business and this asshole starts fronting and my Homosen ass had to choke a bitch, check it out:

Until next week,

Homosen

Shame On A Homosen

2007-03-07T06:07:23Z

Stephen Hawking has stunned the scientific community by announcing his discovery of 'Dark Rap,' a mysterious form of music whose existence can be observed only indirectly, through its impact on normal rap.

Using revolutionary 'nanofunk' detection equipment, Hawking meticulously recorded funk levels on over 1000 rap albums from the past decade, and concluded that over 80% of the kinetic funk quotient of these records was unaccounted for. "The numbers just didn't add up," Hawking explains. "For example, Dr. Dre's Concrete Roots clocks in at 47 minutes, 12 seconds. But based on the funk reading, the album has to contain at least 240 minutes of rap. This 'funk differential' means that there are almost 200 minutes of some previously undetected source of funk. This fucked-up shit is what I call 'Dark Rap.'"

Some reacted to Hawking's announcement with skepticism. Critics asked where the mysterious 80% of rap could be, given that a typical CD can only hold about 70 minutes of music. Although he conceded that he could not yet give a full accounting for the missing funk, Hawking speculated that the Dark Rap is condensed into the short intervals of silence in between songs on rap albums. "There is - I mean, there be - a positive, linear correlation between the number of tracks on a rap album and the unexplained funk differential. Furthermore, funk levels are often highly concentrated near the beginning and end of each track. This strongly supports the hypothesis that Dark Rap is located in between the tracks."

Dwayne Whitlinger - a former collaborator of Hawking's and better known as Professor Puff 'n Stuff - leveled especially harsh criticism at the Dark Rap theory. "The whole idea of Dark Rap makes no sense in the context of Quantum Groove Theory," Puff 'n Stuff said. "Furthermore, it completely violates the Law of Conservation of Da Shit." Unfazed, Hawking shot back, claiming that Puff 'n Stuff is still bitter over a 1997 dispute, in which the Professor was ejected from Hawking's band after allegedly making offensive remarks about a still-unspecified religious and/or ethnic minority.

Proof or disproof of the theory will depend on further experimentation. "All the evidence for the Dark Rap theory rests upon readings from the nanofunk detection instruments," he conceded. "This equipment requires further testing to verify its accuracy; it must be able to measure even miniscule traces of funk, and it must not indicate the presence of funk where there is none. So, for example, if you were to get a positive funk reading off a Vanilla Ice album, then my theory is pretty much shot to hell."

It's true... tacos do taste better here

2007-03-05T21:24:04Z

Greetings from Tijuana, Mexico!

I got a tan and had some facial reconstruction work done.

They'll never take me alive, NEVER!

I like it here. The Mexican people really understand me, ♥ ♥ ♥.

The Horse DOES Go Before the Cart

2007-02-23T19:37:37Z

The jig is up.

I am pretty sure The Sheraton has caught on to my embezzling money from them. Nobody has confronted me personally, but I heard people talking in the lunch room yesterday @ work.

I've thought about it long and hard, and I've decided to go to Tee-a-wanna? Mexico? I hear good things.

I'll probably be out of the country for the next 4-6 weeks, keeping a low profile. Assuming that 4-6 weeks is enough time for something like this to blow over? I'll just get a doctor's note for when I come back home & return back to work, saying I was extremely ill.

I'll keep you posted.

best wishes,

pepperminttears xoxoxo