As an observer to the American state, living for most of my life in England and for the last several years in Australia, I am deeply confused about the sort of mass hysteria that seems to be endemic to the conservative collective.

Australian politics confuse the hell out of me, but England certainly has conservatives and politicians on the right - some sensible and others depraved - but the United Kingdom Independence Party and the British National Party are on the Goddamned fringe. BNP are oftentimes called fascists, UKIP are singled out for their purely nationalistic desire for European secession.

In the recent elections, the mid-right Conservative party formed a coalition with the leftist Liberal Democrats, with a good deal of compromise in both parties' manifestos and policies.

From what I've seen, this could never happen in modern America; genuine co-operation between differing parties, combining their efforts for the good of the nation. The "tea party" movement is an example of an American-conservative lunacy that has somehow spread itself through the country like a Goddamned plague. Why the vitriol? Why the pointless rage? Why the lies and deception, and why is it necessary for Republicans to act like the little bitch party? Here's a bill! Oh, the democrats like it? Fuck that bill! Democrats hate America!

Surely everyone who regards themself as a nationalist, as these people obviously do, should commit themselves to the benefit of the nation, not the inconvenience and demonization of the "other side".

Glenn Beck, among others, invokes Godwin's Law at every opportunity, drawing direct and deliberate comparisons between Obama and Hitler, the ruling administration and Nazi Germany, and then continue to accuse the government of propagandism, fascism and socialism.

The only faction I can see Goebbels patting on the back is Fox News and the Republican right. Facts and reality do not conform to your notion of what the world should be, regardless of how hard you try to warp the truth. Fuck Iran and fuck North Korea, the Republicans are the ones I'm REALLY scared of having nukes.

Seriously though, if I'm allowed one more paragraph, could someone explain why the conservatives and their groupies are so oftentimes retarded? Did the Civil War never end, with a psychological/social continuation of that greatest of rifts creeping its way into the modern day? Why are Liberals bad, why is the truth never enough, and exactly why are they so fanatical that America is the greatest country in the world?

But people who employ tactics like him just make the world worse.

Why are you lumping all atheists into the same.. oh nevermind. You werent. And he wasnt.

I'm so sick of this "dont use the broad brush" nonsense. He is clearly talking about those specific protesters and the muslims all over the world handing out deaththreats and getting offended left and right, and not everyone else, muslim or non-muslim.

What is he supposed to say?
"these muslims people-who-happen-to-be-muslim-but-is-completely-unrelated-to-islam-but-seems-to-care-a-hell-of-a-lot-about-it really suck at burning flags"

I think we all understand the difference between individual nutters (or small isolated fringe groups) and a symptomatic problem on the other hand. And while any idiot understands that you dont need to be a child rapist to be a catholic, or even to be a priest, we can still see that the abuse scandal in that particular case goes far beyond a few rouge priests misusing the church's trust in them.

When the followers of that church then flock in the thousands to show support for the people covering up and facilitating these crimes, you know that something is wrong, not just with a few catholics, but LOTS of catholics, and even with Catholicism itself. Again, that does not implicate every catholic in pedo-scandals, but is an honest assessment of a larger problem.

The same thing can be said of Islam and muslims. Something is deeply wrong when large groups go mental over a couple of fucking cartoons. And no, we are not talking about a small, isolated band of islamists here, we are talking about state-level paranoia and hysteria. Millions of Muslims were FURIOUS at Denmark (and other countries) over this nonsense, islamic countries and companies theatened boycotts and expressed outrage left and right and people rioted en-masse. Over a fucking cartoon. It even went so far that some of our more spineless politicians basically caved to demands of apologies to the Muslim haters who were issuing deaththreats.

Whenever Saudi-Arabia, or any other largely islamic country is ready to come out and condemn, (with strong support from their muslim population) the deathtreats, violence and intolerance (of presumably a few borderline, non-representative islamists), and explain that its perfectly within our rights to draw whoever we want, whenever we want and depict them attempting fornication with a farm animal of our choosing, I'll be right here listening.

That upbeat J-pop tune is the only thing keeping us from mass hysteria.
Picture this video with the theme from Halloween playing in the background, and you'll recognize the truth:
As soon as this guy can operate a can opener, humans are history.

I have very mixed feelings about it.

First of all, I do not intend to criticize the OP(s) for being "members" of alcor.

It is a VERY cool idea and I would do it in a HEARTBEAT if I was a bit more confident in their science.

The way I understand it is that yes, there are organisms that can survive being frozen and then reanimated in either simple or complex ways. That said, I do not believe that human beings are built to make this probable.

The questions are ones of time, money, and science. Science right now CANNOT do this. The methods by which Alcor (and the other place) are "preserving" bodies has not been proven to encourage a non-existent procedure of reanimation.

This technology will not be available for a LONG time, if ever. I don't believe it is impossible, but I believe it is the sort of thing which would come FAR in advance of where our medical science is now. I believe that the science involved would have to not only have to unfreeze but reverse certain aspects of decomposition that happen WAY too fast for this to be possible. Unless you are being frozen almost instantly while still alive, which I do not believe is legal since it would be tantamount to euthanasia. So in my mind, we are talking about advanced techniques of cell manipulation and reconstruction which don't remotely exist. This brings me to

Will Alcor still exist in 300-1000 years? What provisions are being made for this?

I hate to say it, but I think the partial answer lies in Alcor's profits. I doubt they would ever release their financial statements, but you can probably tell a LOT by what their financial situation is.

If Alcor is actually legit, and not just to separate the future-minded person with expendable income from their money, they won't exist for long. The money involved in keeping these bodies in suspended animation for hundreds of years will not allow them to stay in business forever and eventually the plug will be pulled on these tubes and that will be that.

That's the best case scenario.

The worse case scenario is that this is a scam. They probably know damned well that they are banking on solutions that don't (and probably won't) exist in their own lifetimes. Therefore they charge money to people who like the idea, enjoy their Ferraris and dump the bodies in about 50 years when there are no living relatives so the inheritors of Alcor can continue the business. Another clue: their staff is volunteer based with little to no medical background... yeah.

I know I'm being a bit pessimistic, but it is very much akin to UFOs... there are lots of people that believe in UFOs and there are lots of people who make product for those who believe in UFOs. Some of them also believe in UFOs, but I suspect a vast majority see a market that is booming and money to be made. Whenever someone is trying to sell you something, you know that they know it is bullshit.

It is like all the 2012 hysteria. Why am I seeing commercials for SUVs and McDonald's tie-ins for a movie about the end of the world? Why do we have major corporations sponsoring shows on the Discovery channel "analyzing" the Mayan predictions about the last few years we have left? Money... it's always about selling me something.

But seriously, I really don't mean to be a debbie downer about this, but it is just a flash in the pan. I just really hope that you aren't spending money that could be better spent elsewhere.

Finally, I REALLY question the idea of preserving just the head. All I can think of is this scene:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-oL7XP0ROvk

Skip to 2:12

Diagnosing Benny Morris
The Mind of a European Settler
by Gabriel Ash


Israeli historian Benny Morris crossed a new line of shame when he put his academic credentials and respectability in the service of outlining the "moral" justification for a future genocide against Palestinians.

Benny Morris is the Israeli historian most responsible for the vindication of the Palestinian narrative of 1948. The lives of about 700,000 people were shattered as they were driven from their homes by the Jewish militia (and, later, the Israeli army) between December 1947 and early 1950. Morris went through Israeli archives and wrote the day by day account of this expulsion, documenting every "ethnically cleansed" village and every recorded act of violence, and placing each in the context of the military goals and perceptions of the cleansers.

Israel's apologists tried in vain to attack Morris' professional credibility. From the opposite direction, since he maintained that the expulsion was not "by design," he was also accused of drawing excessively narrow conclusions from the documents and of being too naive a reader of dissimulating statements. Despite these limitations, Morris' The Birth of the Palestinian Refugees Problem, 1947-1949 is an authoritative record of the expulsion.

In anticipation of the publication of the revised edition, Morris was interviewed in Ha'aretz. The major new findings in the revised book, based on fresh documents, further darken the picture.

The new archival material, Morris reveals, records routine execution of civilians, twenty-four massacres, including one in Jaffa, and at least twelve cases of rape by military units, which Morris acknowledges are probably "the tip of the iceberg." Morris also says he found documents confirming the broader conclusions favored by his critics: the expulsion was pre-meditated; concrete expulsion orders were given in writing, some traceable directly to Ben Gurion.

Morris also found documentations for Arab High Command calls for evacuating women and children from certain villages, evidence he oddly claims strengthen the Zionist propaganda claim that Palestinians left because they were told to leave by the invading Arab states. Morris had already documented two dozen such cases in the first edition. It is hard to see how attempts by Arab commanders to protect civilians from anticipated rape and murder strengthen the Zionist fairy tale. But that failed attempt at evenhandedness is the least of Morris' problems. As the interview progresses, it emerges with growing clarity that, while Morris the historian is a professional and cautious presenter of facts, Morris the intellectual is a very sick person.

His sickness is of the mental-political kind. He lives in a world populated not by fellow human beings, but by racist abstractions and stereotypes. There is an over-abundance of quasi-poetic images in the interview, as if the mind is haunted by the task of grasping what ails it: "The Palestinian citizens of Israel are a time bomb," not fellow citizens. Islam is "a world in which human lives don't have the same value as in the West." Arabs are "barbarians" at the gate of the Roman Empire. Palestinian society is "a serial killer" that ought to be executed, and "a wild animal" that must be caged.

Morris' disease was diagnosed over forty years ago, by Frantz Fanon. Based on his experience in subjugated Africa, Fanon observed that "the colonial world is a Manichean world. It is not enough for the settler to delimit physically, that is to say, with the help of the army and the police, the place of the native. As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation, the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil � The native is declared insensitive to ethics � the enemy of values. � He is a corrosive element, destroying all that comes near it � the unconscious and irretrievable instrument of blind forces" (from The Wretched of the Earth). And further down, "the terms the settler uses when he mentions the native are zoological terms" (let's not forget to place Morris' metaphors in the context of so many other Israeli appellations for Palestinians: Begin's "two-legged beasts", Eitan's "drugged cockroaches" and Barak's ultra-delicate "salmon"). Morris is a case history in the psychopathology of colonialism.

Bad Genocide, Good Genocide

When the settler encounters natives who refuse to cast down their eyes, his disease advances to the next stage -- murderous sociopathy.

Morris, who knows the exact scale of the terror unleashed against Palestinians in 1948, considers it justified. First he suggests that the terror was justified because the alternative would have been a genocide of Jews by Palestinians. Raising the idea of genocide in this context is pure, and cheap, hysteria. Indeed, Morris moves immediately to a more plausible explanation: the expulsion was a precondition for creating a Jewish state, i.e. the establishment of a specific political preference, not self-defense.

This political explanation, namely that the expulsion was necessary to create the demographic conditions, a large Jewish majority, favored by the Zionist leadership, is the consensus of historians. But as affirmative defense, it is unsatisfactory. So the idea that Jews were in danger of genocide is repeated later, in a more honest way, as merely another racist, baseless generalization: "if it can, [Islamic society] will commit genocide."

But Morris sees no evil. Accusing Ben Gurion of failing to achieve an Arabian Palestine, he recommends further ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, including those who are Israeli citizens. Not now, but soon, "within five or ten years," under "apocalyptic conditions" such as a regional war with unconventional weapons, a potentially nuclear war, which "is likely to happen within twenty years." For Morris, and it is difficult to overstate his madness at this point, the likelihood of a nuclear war within the foreseeable future is not the sorry end of a road better not taken, but merely a milestone, whose aftermath is still imaginable, and imaginable within the banal continuity of Zionist centennial policies: he foresees the exchange of unconventional missiles between Israel and unidentified regional states as a legitimate excuse for "finishing the job" of 1948.

Morris speaks explicitly of another expulsion, but, in groping for a moral apology for the past and the future expulsion of Palestinians, he presents a more general argument, one that justifies not only expulsion but also genocide. That statement ought to be repeated, for here is a crossing of a terrible and shameful line.

Morris, a respectable, Jewish, Israeli academic, is out in print in the respectable daily, Haaretz, justifying genocide as a legitimate tool of statecraft. It should be shocking. Yet anybody who interacts with American and Israeli Zionists knows that Morris is merely saying for the record what many think and even say unofficially. Morris, like most of Israel, lives in a temporality apart, an intellectual Galapagos Islands, a political Jurassic Park, where bizarre cousins of ideas elsewhere shamed into extinction still roam the mindscape proudly.

Nor should one think the slippage between expulsion, "transfer," and genocide without practical consequences. It is not difficult to imagine a planned expulsion turn into genocide under the stress of circumstances: The genocides of both European Jews and Armenians began as an expulsion. The expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 was the product of decades of thinking and imagining "transfer." We ought to pay attention: with Morris's statement, Zionist thinking crossed another threshold; what is now discussed has the potential to be actualized, if "apocalyptic conditions" materialize.

The march of civilization and the corpses of the uncivilized

It is instructive to look closer at the manner in which Morris uses racist thinking to justify genocide. Morris' interview, precisely because of its shamelessness, is a particularly good introductory text to Zionist thought.

Morris' racism isn't limited to Arabs. Genocide, according to Morris, is justified as long as it is done for "the final good." But what kind of good is worth the "forced extinction" of a whole people? Certainly, not the good of the latter. (Morris uses the word "Haqkhada," a Hebrew word usually associated with the extinction of animal species. Someone ought to inform Morris about the fact that Native Americans aren't extinct.)

According to Morris, the establishment of a more advanced society justifies genocide: "Yes, even the great American democracy couldn't come to be without the forced extinction of Native Americans. There are times the overall, final good justifies terrible, cruel deeds." Such hopeful comparisons between the future awaiting Palestinians and the fate of Native Americans are common to Israeli apologists. One delegation of American students was shocked and disgusted when it heard this analogy made by a spokesperson at the Israeli embassy in Washington.

Morris's supremacist view of "Western Civilization," that civilization values human life more than Islam, has its basis in the moral acceptance of genocide for the sake of "progress." Morris establishes the superiority of the West on both the universal respect for human life and the readiness to exterminate inferior races. The illogicalness of the cohabitation of a right to commit genocide together with a higher level of respect for human lives escapes him, and baffles us, at least until we grasp that the full weight of the concept of "human" is restricted, in the classic manner of Eurocentric racism, to dwellers of civilized (i.e. Western) nations.

This is the same logic that allowed early Zionists to describe Palestine as an empty land, despite the presence of a million inhabitants. In the end, it comes down to this: killing Arabs -- one dozen Arabs or one million Arabs, the difference is merely technical -- is acceptable if it is necessary in order to defend the political preferences of Jews because Jews belong to the superior West and Arabs are inferior. We must be thankful to Professor Morris for clarifying the core logic of Zionism so well.

The color of Jews

Morris assures us that his values are those of the civilized West, the values of universal morality, progress, etc. But then he also claims to hold the primacy of particular loyalties, a position for which he draws on Albert Camus. But to reconcile Morris' double loyalty to both Western universalism and to Jewish particularism, one must forget that these two identities were not always on the best of terms.

How can one explain Morris' knowledge that the ethnic Darwinism that was used to justify the murder of millions of non-whites, including Black African slaves, Native Americans, Arabs, and others, was also used to justify the attempt to exterminate Jews? How can Morris endorse the "civilizational" justification of genocide, which includes the genocide of Jews, even as he claims the holocaust as another justification for Zionism? Perhaps Morris' disjointed mind doesn't see the connection. Perhaps he thinks that there are "right" assertions of racist supremacy and "wrong" assertions of racist supremacy. Or perhaps Morris displays another facet of the psychopathologies of oppression, the victim's identification with the oppressor.

Perhaps in Morris' mind, one half tribalist and one half universalist, the Jews were murdered to make way for a superior, more purely Aryan, European civilization, and the Jews who are today serving in the Israeli army, both belong and do not belong to the same group. They belong when Morris invokes the totems of the tribe to justify loyalty. But when his attention turns to the universal principle of "superior civilization," these Jews are effaced, like poor relations one is ashamed to be associated with, sent back to the limbo they share with the great non-white mass of the dehumanized. In contrast, the Jews of Israel, self-identified as European, have turned white, dry-cleaned and bleached by Zionism, and with their whiteness they claim the privilege that Whites always had, the privilege to massacre members of "less advanced" races.

False testimony

It would be marvelous if Morris the historian could preserve his objective detachment while Morris the Zionist dances with the demons of Eurocentric racism. But the wall of professionalism -- and it is a very thick and impressive wall in Morris' case -- cannot hold against the torrent of hate.

For example, Morris lies about his understanding of the 2000 Camp David summit. In Ha'aretz, Morris says that, "when the Palestinians rejected Barak's proposal of July 2000 and Clinton's proposal of December 2000, I understood that they were not ready to accept a two state solution. They wanted everything. Lydda, and Akka and Jaffa."

But in his book Righteous Victims, Morris explains the failure of the negotiations thus: "the PLO leadership had gradually accepted, or seemed to�Israel...keeping 78 percent of historical Palestine. But the PLO wanted the remaining 22 percent. � At Camp David, Barak had endorsed the establishment of a Palestinian state�[on only] 84-90 percent of that 22 percent. � Israel was also to control the territory between a greatly enlarged Jerusalem and Jericho, effectively cutting the core of the future Palestinian state into two�" Morris' chapter of "Righteous Victims" that deals with the '90s leaves a lot to be desired, but it still strives for some detached analysis. In contrast, in Ha'aretz Morris offers baseless claims he knows to be false.

If Morris lies about recent history, and even grossly misrepresents the danger Jews faced in Palestine in 1948, a period he is an expert on, his treatment of more general historical matters is all but ridiculous, an astounding mix of insinuations and clich�s. For example, Morris reminds us that "the Arab nation won a big chunk of the Earth, not because of its intrinsic virtues and skills, but by conquering and murdering and forcing the conquered to convert." (What is Morris' point? Is the cleansing of Palestine attributable to Jewish virtues and skills, rather than to conquering and murdering?)

This is racist slander, not history. As an example, take Spain, which was conquered in essentially one battle in 711 A.D. by a small band of North African Berbers who had just converted to Islam. Spain was completely Islamized and Arabized within two centuries with very little religious coercion, and certainly no ethnic cleansing. But after the last Islamic rulers were kicked out of Spain by the Christian army of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1492, a large section of the very same Spanish population that willingly adopted Islam centuries earlier refused to accept Christianity despite a century of persecution by the Spanish Inquisition. 600,000 Spanish Muslims were eventually expelled in 1608.

Obviously, Islamic civilization had its share of war and violence. But, as the above example hints, compared to the West, compared to the religious killing frenzy of sixteenth century Europe, compared to the serial genocides in Africa and America, and finally to the flesh-churning wars of the twentieth century, Islamic civilization looks positively benign. So why all this hatred? Where is all this fire and brimstone Islamophobia coming from?

Being elsewhere

From Europe, of course, but with a twist. Europe has always looked upon the East with condescension. In periods of tension, that condescension would escalate to fear and hate. But it was also mixed and tempered with a large dose of fascination and curiosity. The settler, however, does not have the luxury to be curious. The settler leaves the metropolis hoping to overcome his own marginal, often oppressed, status in metropolitan society. He goes to the colony motivated by the desire to recreate the metropolis with himself at the top.

For the settler, going to the colony is not a rejection of the metropolis, but a way to claim his due as a member. Therefore, the settler is always trying to be more metropolitan than the metropolis. When the people of the metropolis baulk at the bloodbath the settler wants to usher in the name of their values, the settler accuses them of "growing soft," and declares himself "the true metropolis." That is also why there is one crime of which the settler can never forgive the land he colonized -- its alien climate and geography, its recalcitrant otherness, the oddness of its inhabitants, in sum, the harsh truth of its being elsewhere. In the consciousness of the settler, condescension thus turns into loathing.

Israeli settler society, especially its European, Ashkenazi part, especially that Israel which calls itself "the peace camp," "the Zionist Left," etc., is predicated on the loathing of all things Eastern and Arab. (Now, of course, we have in addition the religious, post-1967 settlers who relate to the Zionist Left the way the Zionist Left stands in relation to Europe, i.e. as settlers.) "Arab" is a term of abuse, one that can be applied to everything and everyone, including Jews. This loathing is a unifying theme. It connects Morris' latest interview in Ha'aretz with Ben Gurion's first impression of Jaffa in 1905; he found it filthy and depressing.

In another article, published in Tikkun Magazine, Morris blames the "ultra-nationalism, provincialism, fundamentalism and obscurantism" of Arab Jews in Israel for the sorry state of the country (although Begin, Shamir, Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak, Sharon, and most of Israel's generals, leaders, and opinion makers of the last two decades are European Jews). For Morris, everything Eastern is corrupt and every corruption has an Eastern origin.

One shouldn't, therefore, doubt Morris when he proclaims himself a traditional Left Zionist. There is hardly anything he says that hasn't been said already by David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan. Loathing of the East and the decision to subdue it by unlimited force is the essence of Zionism.

Understanding the psycho-political sources of this loathing leads to some interesting observations about truisms that recur in Morris' (and much of Israel's) discourse. Morris blames Arafat for thinking that Israel is a "crusader state," a foreign element that will eventually be sent back to its port of departure. This is a common refrain of Israeli propaganda. It is also probably true. But it isn't Arafat's fault that Morris is a foreigner in the Middle East. Why shouldn't Arafat believe Israel is a crusader state when Morris himself says so? "We are the vulnerable extension of Europe in this place, exactly as the crusaders."

It is Morris -- like the greater part of Israel's elite -- who insists on being a foreigner, on loathing the Middle East and dreaming about mist-covered Europe, purified and deified by distance. If Israel is a crusader state, and therefore a state with shallow roots, likely to pack up and disappear, it is not the fault of those who make that observation. It is the fault of those Israelis, like Morris, who want to have nothing to do with the Middle East.

Morris is deeply pessimistic about Israel's future; this feeling is very attractive in Israel. The end of Israel is always felt to be one step away, hiding beneath every development, from the birthrate of Bedouins to the establishment of the International Court of Justice.

Naturally, every Palestinian demand is such a doomsday threat. This sense of existential precariousness can be traced back to 1948; it was encouraged by Israel's successive governments because it justified the continuous violence of the state and the hegemony of the military complex. It may eventually become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

But this existential fear goes deeper. It is rooted in the repressed understanding (which Morris both articulates and tries to displace) of the inherent illegitimacy of the Israeli political system and identity. "Israel" is brute force. In Morris' words: "The bottom line is that force is the only thing that will make them accept us." But brute force is precarious. Time gnaws at it. Fatigue corrodes it. And the more it is used, the more it destroys the very acceptance and legitimacy it seeks.

For Israel, the fundamental question of the future is, therefore, whether Israelis can transcend colonialism. The prognosis is far from positive. In a related article in The Guardian, Morris explains that accepting the right of return of the Palestinian refugees would mean forcing Israeli Jews into exile. But why would Jews have to leave Israel if Israel becomes a bi-national, democratic state? One cannot understand this without attention to the colonial loathing of the Middle East which Morris so eloquently expresses.

But taking that into account, I'm afraid Morris is right. Many Israeli Jews, especially European Jews who tend to possess alternative passports, would rather emigrate than live on equal terms with Palestine's natives in a bi-national state. It is to Frantz Fanon again that we turn for observing this first. "The settler, from the moment the colonial context disappears, has no longer an interest in remaining or in co-existing."

Related Articles:

* The Education of Benny the Barbarian by Ahmed Amr
* Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion by Adi Ophir

Gabriel Ash was born in Romania and grew up in Israel. He is a regular contributor to Yellow Times.org, where this article first appeared (www.yellowtimes.org). Gabriel encourages your comments: gash@YellowTimes.org

*reason > hysteria

Wow, lots of out of context numbers.

So if 30% of illegal guns are "connected" to gun shows...that tells me nothing...how about telling me what percentage of legal guns are "connected" to gun shows, that way I have a baseline.

These are legal transactions with a legal loophole, it's apparently easy enough to find blatantly illegal gun trafficers. I remember a TV news station in Los Angeles a couple of decades ago doing a story where it only took them a couple of days to find someone who would be willing to sell them fully auto submachine guns( illegal to own in that state) cash and carry out of the back of a van.

This country is saturated with guns, if a petty thief wanted one, a simple burglary could turn up a few, so I don't really see any point in this "oh no criminals have guns" hysteria. I would be seriously surprised if closing the legal loophole solved anything.

Post Sachsgate this sort of hysteria is becoming more and more common. As has been said it's a totally fine joke and most soldiers will say alot worse.

Of course the reporting of such a story is also a sign of how lazy most news organisations are becoming. Witness the nonsense about Stephen Fry a few days ago because someone caught him while he was in a depressive state. Ridiculous.

It took me a while to figure out they were talking about ACORN. Here's my take on the ACORN thing. I have no idea what everyone is complaining about. Usually people just refer to it as "the ACORN controversy" without giving any clue as to what they're complaining about. So far, this is all that I'm aware of:

1. ACORN paid their employees to register voters. Some people defrauded ACORN and turned it fake voter registration cards.
2. Republicans dressed up in funny outfits and played the part of a hooker and a pimp and received tax advice from ACORN. They employees were fired.
3. Republicans dressed up in funny outfits and got one ACORN employee to tell them a fake story about killing her husband (who is still alive).
4. ACORN is going to be Obama's citizen army or something?

The only thing that I think deserves any consideration at all is that fake pimp that got tax advice from ACORN. A fake pimp getting tax advice from ACORN doesn't seem to warrant all of this hysteria about ACORN. If anyone can explain it to me, please do so.

Put them in prison for a week or two. Fine them immensely. Do _something_. If we don't then I think sooner or later someone like this might cause some kind of public hysteria. We already have enough sources of anxiety in the media.

I love how it begins with 'athiest evolution' and 'Darwin's undeniable connection to Hitler' and ends with 'Now.. send us some money.'


Anyone else suspect they passed these books, that look like the 'real' book, without a word about the additions and modifications?

Like a Jahova's Witness' passing out magazines with fighter jets on the cover and absolutely no clue that it's Christian's pushing their God drug.



Frankly I think a lot of even the obama hysteria is that people know Christianity is slowly dying out as the overwhelmingly majority religion in this country, and I for one couldn't be more happy. USA as a secular nation outside the cities? One could only wish.

>> ^ponceleon:
Cats and dogs, living together... MASS HYSTERIA!


Bill Murray is the best.

Cats and dogs, living together... MASS HYSTERIA!

Cats and dogs, living together... MASS HYSTERIA!

Hysteria still hasn't reached my part of Earth, no fang bangers here.