EVOLUTION SIGNS; YES, WAY

[DON’T FORGET TO CLICK PIX FOR MORE ]

OH, SPONGEBOB!

Jellyfish are eating all [sic] the other marine life, destroying human fishing resources, and creating dead spots around the world, which are growing in alarming number and speed. Irish experience doesn’t bode well for American Pacific Coast salmon. As this author says, Damn.
OH, SPONGEBOB!

DE-VOLUTION:

Some examples of why the human race has probably evolved as far as possible.  These are actual instruction labels on consumer goods:

On Sears hairdryer:  Do not use while sleeping.

On a bag of Fritos:  You could be a winner! No purchase necessary. Details inside.

On a bar of Dial soap:  Directions: Use like regular soap.

On some Swanson frozen dinners:  Serving suggestion: Defrost.

On a hotel provided shower cap in a box:  Fits one head.

On Tesco’s Tiramisu dessert (printed on bottom of the box):  Do not turn upside down.

On Marks & Spencer Bread Pudding:  Product will be hot after heating.

On packaging for a Rowenta iron:  Do not iron clothes on body.

On Boot’s Children’s cough medicine:  Do not drive car or operate machinery.  (We could reduce construction accidents if we kept 5 year olds off fork lifts.)

On Nytol sleep aid:  Warning: May cause drowsiness.

On a Korean kitchen knife:  Warning: Keep out of children.

On a string of Chinese-made Christmas lights:  For indoor or outdoor use only.

On a Japanese food processor:  Not to be used for the other use.

On Sainsbury’s peanuts:  Warning: Contains nuts.

On an American Airlines packet of nuts:  Instructions: Open packet, eat nuts.

On a Swedish chainsaw:  Do not attempt to stop chain with your hands or genitals.

On a child’s Superman costume:  Wearing of this garment does not enable you to fly.

STRAINED EVOLUTION:

Some questions I should have asked about King Kong.

1.      Why did the natives build a door so big that Kong could walk right through it?

2.      Why did the natives bother with the wall at all since Kong lived high on a cliff in a cave, and spent his last few moments scaling the Empire State Building?  He could hop that wall in a beat.

3.      Fay Ray was obviously not the first maiden tied to the posts.  The post assembly was a regular fixture – little stone step-up, solid uprights (didn’t tip over when Kong pulled her off the ropes; didn’t pull her arms out of the sockets, either; how did that go down?) – and the natives were goofing up one of their own maidens before they spotted Fay.  Ergo, what did Kong do with all the previous sacrifices?  This was a Giant Gorilla Feeding Station from Eddie Bauer? Did he eat them and not eat Fay because she was a  blonde?  Pheromones?  Not fun.

4.      That wall wouldn’t keep pterodactyls out either.  Those dudes would swoop down and snatch a native snack every so often, don’t you think?

5.     What the heck happened to all of the other giant gorillas? Where did they go? Where were Kong’s mom and dad? In Son of Kong, we of course discover that Kong had a son, but we never see Mrs. Kong. Mrs. Kong is never even mentioned. The gang goes, “Hey, there’s a baby Kong!” And they are off like the Scooby Gang, chasing Mr. Jensen the asocial gardener from the old condemned Henshaw Mansion.

6.      At the end, Robert Armstrong stares at Kong’s gigantic corpse and says, “’Twas Beauty killed the beast.”  Why didn’t someone point out that he was the s.o.b. who captured Kong and brought him back to ravage New York City?  Oh sure, in the sequel, Armstrong got sued for all the damages and cleanup, but he never did any jail time for bringing to town a huge rampaging ape that killed a lot of people .  Go figure.  He must have been working for Goldman Sachs.

7.    Why did they remake it with JACK BLACK? Why?

So, that’s what I should have asked about King Kong.

Eve of Extinction

EVER SINCE TIME BEGAN:

Whenever your kids are out of control, you can take comfort from the thought that even God‘s omnipotence did not extend to God’s kids. After creating heaven and earth, God created Adam and Eve.

And the first thing he said was: “Don’t.”

“Don’t what?” Adam replied.

“Don’t eat the forbidden fruit,” God said.

“Forbidden fruit? We got forbidden fruit? Hey, Eve…we got forbidden fruit!”

“No way!”

“Yes way!”

“Don’t eat that fruit!” said God.

“Why?”

“Because I am your Father and I said so!” said God (wondering why he hadn’t stopped after making the elephants).  A few minutes later God saw his kids having an apple break and was angry.

“Didn’t I tell you not to eat that fruit?” God asked.

“Uh huh,” Adam and Eve replied.

“Then why did you do it?”

“I dunno” Eve answered.

“She started it!” Adam said.

“Did not!”

“Did too!”

“DID NOT!”

Having had it with the two of them, God’s punishment was that Adam and Eve should have children of their own.  Thus the pattern was set and it has never changed.  If God had trouble handling children, what makes you think it would be a piece of cake for you?

Advice for the day:

If you have a lot of tension and you get a headache, do what it says on the aspirin bottle: Take two and keep away from children.

INDIVIDUAL SELF-ESTEEM:

“If I knock him out, his’ory wi’ be made!” — Evander Holyfield, boxer, television interview.

“I’m a people person.  I love people!” — Ibid, same interview, one minute later.

Don’t Ask Polar Bears and Fools About Free Speech

Five in the Stones

DON’T ASK, DON’T TELL

When I was in active military service, 1966-70, I did not care about the sexuality of the person beside me, I cared about his professionalism.

 The military’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy is discrimination pure and simple. It is an unnecessary, non-job related issue, and a blatant labor and civil rights disgrace. 

 It not only destroys the lives of the men and women directly affected, but also the military’s organizational unity.  It is a morale downer, a Salem Witch Hunt mentality introduced into the ranks. 

 The largely fundamentalist religiously inspired objection to gays is based upon misinformation (an actual and purposeful misreading of their own texts), a scapegoat us vs. them mindset, and an absolutist morality used generally as one more self-terrorizing control over the fearful toiling faithful. 

 If America is to ever achieve equality, freedom, and justice, we must strike down “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.”  Strike a blow for human rights and humanity.  We are either all Americans working in defense of our country and its ideals, or we are a nation of strangers, fighting for the barest survival. 7-02-09

POLAR BEARS AND CUB SCOUTS

 Woe is me!  Everything is going to hell in a hand basket!  We can’t do anything about it!  Wring hands!  Cry despair!  Weep!  Moan!  Thrash!  Have you gotten out of your SUVs?  Moved closer to work?  Convinced others of the need to ACT and quit bitching?  Is it the price of gas that bothers you, or the lack of it?  Would you quit hitting yourself over the head with the hammer, or go get another one if someone took yours away?  The time to ACT is now, and to hell with the system.  Do you need a leader to tell you not to put your damned finger in the light socket?  Too bad revelation comes so late to this benighted species.  Is it the wall of water rushing at you that scares you, or the fact that you were too dumb to notice it until the rising tide was at your doorstep?  Our over-consuming must stop at once.  Each of us has a part in that, regardless of what leadership, or the imbecile next door is doing.  Get off your butts and MOVE.  Or, don’t.  The future belongs – collectively – to all of us, if we all work for it.  It doesn’t exist for polar bears, or cub scouts, if we don’t. 6-22-08

FOOLS AND CORPORATIONS

 Today’s privately monopolized television serves rightwing corporatists by dumbing down the American people.  There is no choice, just program packages arranged like blood diamonds.  In television, the garbage includes:

•  Religious programming – Christians only need apply.  They’re getting ready for Armageddon, 24-7.  Why do we have to pay to watch them?
• “Ain’t corporations great?” propaganda, not one cloud on the big rig’s sky.  Not one word about how they changed the weather.
• “Reality” shows, which are evidently scripted.  One can get just as excited at a professional wrestling match or roller derby – for as little cause.
• “Beauty and fitness” programming – Americans care so very much about hair and blemishes.  Coach looks fifty years younger, hey?  Just a dab.
• Right wing filtered news, commentary and opinion, which screams down the truth in favor of dogma and self-interest.  To hell with integrity.
• Sports, improbably including auto/truck/motorcycle noise-making and gas-fuming circle-go-rounds – another loophole in EPA emission standards?  For those of us who left games at adolescence, it’s a real drag.
• Shopping channels and infomercials feeding the callous over-consuming malaise destroying our planet.  There are addicts of all kinds.
• Commercials – non-stop and multiplying.  Why do we have to pay for these?  The damned television people should be paying us to watch them!

Real history, especially recent U.S. history, is slighted, under-reported, and often misrepresented, or ideologically slanted.  We discuss firefights on entering Baghdad, but not the illegal policy and the criminal lies that drove them.  We see Troy and Rome, and incessant searches for objects of pseudo-history and outright myth – lost arks (boat-sized and box), spears of Longinus, grails and virgins, “true” crosses, and “god-ravaged” city ruins.  We don’t see labor history, women’s history, or civil and human rights history.  We don’t review Iran-Contra and the early days of the present administration’s emergence from the Reaganite distortion of our national progress.  Everything from Carter to Bush Jr., except for Clinton’s tacky sex life, is a black hole of non-accountability.

 This is all part of the Great Privatization of America.  “Do good and be rewarded” is Christian and Rightist hypocrisy.  They don’t do the right thing selflessly, but for a substantial bribe.  We are fools to allow corporations to determine our national information policy, control our public airways, own our means of communications.  We are fools to allow them to continue to distort our national consciousness, or to interfere with our right to meet and discuss and decide as a unified national community.  We are fools to allow them to keep us ignorant and apart.  3-09-08

FREE SCHOOLS, FREE LIBRARIES, FREE SPEECH

  Radio and television station owners should be held accountable in their charge to serve the public interest.  Instead, the right wing has been systematic in its suppression of the progressive voice and we ignore their censorship at our peril.

 The right wing has overwhelmed any residual of the “Fairness Doctrine.”  They have done so with free licenses granted by the American government on behalf of the American public that are worth millions of dollars to licensees.  The only requirement imposed upon them is to serve the public interest.

 A free and democratic society cannot survive without a free and fair flow of information.  All ideas should take their chances in the sea of democratic pluralistic debate.  It is an abomination to a free and equal society to tolerate any, most definitely including private, abridgement, censorship, or exclusion of fair and balanced opposing views.

 Right-wingers have taken over radio and television resources and foreclosed progressive voices on a systematic and pervasive level throughout the United States.  No progressive voices can now be heard in Boston, Baltimore, Atlanta, Washington D.C., or Philadelphia – in the heart of revolutionary America the cracked pots have replaced the cracked bell.  It is a deliberate creeping plague designed to manipulate American public opinion to undemocratic ends; it must be treated or it will kill free speech.

 President Obama’s inspired effort to reinvigorate American democracy will amount to a pimple on the butt of national history if the right wing is allowed to continue its assault on our democratic institutions. We can bear no more “fixed” news, no more right wing press dominance!  Let progressives fairly compete for the public interest. 

 There is no more important infrastructure repair for us to make than to preserve, defend and advance the democratic institutions that make America great: free schools, free libraries, free press, and freedom of speech.  3-08-09

 More PROGRESSIVE THOUGHT: sidebar links