Black Friday

Dear Hank,

November 26, 2010

The Day after Thanksgiving

Black Friday

We were driving to Richmond for dinner with the relatives (and then on today to Blacksburg for the game Saturday.)

While looking for something on the radio I heard, "We were sitting there on the Group W bench."

Now for those of you who do not know this line it comes from the recording Alice’s Restaurant. It was recorded in the late 60’s by Woodie Gutherie’s son, Arlo, and was released just before he went to Woodstock.

It tells the tale of an event on a Thanksgiving day when Arlo was in Stockbridge, Massachusetts and had a Thanksgiving dinner at his friend’s Alice place. Before dinner he took a truckload of trash to the dump. The dump was closed so he threw it over the side of the road and was arrested for littering. This gets you halfway through the recording because at this point Arlo tells us that what he really wanted to tell us about was the draft. At the time of his making this recording the war in Vietnam was in full bloom. The United States had instituted a conscripting of young men to join the armed forces; “The Draft” as it was called. He recounted his going to the draft board where they determined if he was suitable for military service.

There are many lines from the recording that are memorable and repeated by those of us who have come to love the recording.

“Father rapers”, “color glossy 8 by 10 photographs with circles and arrows on the front”, “you want to know if I’m moral enough to burn villages and kill people after being arrested for littering?”, “Kid, we don’t like your kind”, “I want to kill. Kill. Kill. Kill…”

Arlo’s timing is exquisite.

I heard the recording from Group W bench to the end. The DJ said this was his 24th year (maybe longer) of playing Alice's Restaurant on the radio on Thanksgiving. The DJ also said that Arlo purchased the old church where the event took place and they do various charitable works from out of there, including a Thanksgiving dinner. All proceeds go to research into Huntington’s Corea, a terrible genetic disease that killed his father.

Peace,

B

Ps The Rant will continue next time.

Blood in the Streets

Dear Hank,

November 24, 2010

Blood in the Streets

I hate to speak ill of anyone so I’m not going to do it. But I have to wonder, “The people who are calling for massive cuts in government spending during a time of recession did they fail Econ 101?” One senator is looking forward to the upcoming vote on raising the debt ceiling that Congress will have to do in April. He’s looking forward to it not passing and says, “There will be blood in the streets.”o And indeed there will be. I’m just not sure whose or how much. He’s under the impression that we will cut government spending massively so the debt ceiling won’t have to be raised.

Likewise, the folks who say the current screening by TSA is a bad idea and why don’t we just follow the Israeli example for airport security?

I happened to hear a fellow on the radio today. He’s very popular with what are now called conservative and right wing in this country. I was astounded that he said in less than two minutes that the housing crisis was caused by the big banks not the little banks and that the solution to that was to have your local bank lend to you, a bank where they know you. Likewise, he said the solution to airport security was the same. You go to an airport where they know you. Then all this pat down nonsense wouldn’t be needed.

Okay there are three issues I’ve brought up. The first one about econ 101 and cutting government spending; if you run a business or a home when you don’t have any money, or very little, you cut back, you don’t spend. This makes sense so why not apply this to the government? Well, one of the roles of government is the welfare of the people, trying to create conditions that help people to survive and make a better life. One can argue how much or what kind but I think most people would want a government that helps them or at the very least doesn’t hurt them. Part of the government’s role is to watch over what is called the economy. The study of the economy and how to do this is called economics or as it used to be called political economics. A simple example of an economy is someone buys something from someone. In this transaction one person spends money and one person earns money. The person who earns the money calls it income. If no one spends then there is no income. Simple enough. If you look at a whole country there are three broad categories of who spends money: people, companies, and the government, if all three categories cutback on spending money the total size of the economy shrinks.

If people have jobs they get paid. If they get paid they spend. If they spend the economy increases by the amount they spend. Conversely, if people don’t have jobs, they don’t have money, they don’t spend money and the economy gets smaller.

In the United States the current size of the economy is such that a 1% drop in the size of the overall economy means a loss of one million jobs. This can be a quick downward spiral. The faster the economy sheds jobs the faster it shrinks, the faster it shrinks, the more jobs it sheds.

If the government wants to keep the economy going at the level it currently is at and if neither businesses nor individuals are spending money than the government needs to spend money. If it doesn’t the economy gets smaller, people loose their jobs and the downward spiral begins.

The last Republican proposal about how they want to trim government spending would cut the size of the economy by 1.1 percent – that’s 1,100,000 jobs.

But that was their modest proposal.

If the debt ceiling doesn’t get raised then government stops spending money period. Everything stops in 20-30 days: social security, medicare, defense, everything.

Then there will be blood in the streets.

I’ll deal with the other issues later. I gotta go.

B

Prepare for the End of the World

November 8th 2010

Dear Hank,

As you can see from this picture I’ve been preparing for the end of time. If you’ve been doing your liturgical reading be it Mayan, Christian, or other - you know that the end of the world is near; or, at least, a nuclear and or spam holocaust is close at hand. In preparation I’ve taken to wearing these glasses that will prevent my eyes from burning out from a sudden flash of atomic chain reaction converting matter into energy - also referred to as an atomic bomb. Naturally, if you don’t get them on in time you will become one of the children of the damned and your eyes will turn bright red. This will allow you, of course, to star in Carly Fiorino ad as sheep in wolf’s clothing (or was it the other way around?) It does appear that in the case of my young nephew Tyler that he didn’t get them whipped on in time.

Now some of you may be thinking that this is all bunk and that my young neph’ was caught in the camera’s flash and somebody forgot to set the red-eye flash thinking that while sitting in the movie theater waiting for MegaMind in 3D with IMAX to start and asked someone to take our picture like we were in one of those stock photos about the original 3D movies, but you would be wrong. (go to paragraph 1.) ...

Or continue reading here, yikes, the effects were great and the story was good with lots of neat little asides for the older generations (The good guy just happens to have a cape that looks like the ones Elvis used to wear in Las Vegas, etc.) But it ain’t cheap. The marque said tickets were $16.50 each for the four of us it was $60.00. How they did their math I don’t know. (“We need popcorn.” “No.” “We need a snack.” “NO.”)

And another thing any metal box that has a slot to put quarters in immediately demands that the kids run over to it while yelling, “Can I have a quarter?” It’s amazing.

Well, back to the preparations. Take care, I’ll be in the bunker while the Republicans and The Tea Party save the nation.

B

NeuroWeapons

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/11/air-force-looks-to-artificially-overwhelm-enemy-cognitive-capabilities/

Air Force Wants Neuroweapons to Overwhelm Enemy Minds

How our military innovation is like a bedside alarm clock

Dear Hank,

I’m sorry I haven’t written much but I’ve been busy. Your last message to me about the airforce using neurowepons to, as they say, “overwhelm enemy minds” has given me pause for concern about your welfare.

I think you need to re-evaluate your position. You seem to be fearful about what will happen if we allow some kind of death ray to be shot at our opponents or perhaps use some mind altering techniques to keep our military personnel, as their report suggests, focused on the task at hand.

Let me break this down for you in simple easy to understand terms - many of our military personnel have been fucked up for a long time, those in charge are just now getting behind the effort to make it mandatory.

This off course only deals with one side of the equation – our soldiers. What about their soldiers? Wouldn’t it be great if they were as screwed up as ours, or even more so? And maybe there’s a way that we can make ours better and theirs worse, wouldn’t that be useful?

Okay, let’s take a longer view of this. Of course there are going to be those non-believers who will point most recently to “The Men Who Stare at Goats” and all that, but how would we have know how useful it would be without trying it? Then there’s the LSD experiments – that didn’t do what we thought it would but it did give us the hippies and free-love, which led to acid rock, which led to heavy metal, which we now play before battle and football games to get pumped up. So, it wasn’t all bad. And lets not forget the various sexually transmitted disease experiments like to our own black population and to the poor people of Guatemala.

All those experiments are on the biological, psychological side of things there’s also the mechanical side to consider and that comes in two flavors. I’ll call them Terminator and Star Wars. Remember that idea of Reagan’s to create a shield to shoot down incoming missiles. Hasn’t worked out yet, but we bought an old oil platform from the Russians loaded it up with missiles and technology and dragged it out somewhere in the Pacific Ocean up near Alaska so that when Sarah saw those Russkie missiles flying over she could push the button and send up other missiles to shoot them down. Didn’t work, hadn’t been tested, not part of any branch of the armed forces but part of the military budget, deployed anyway by W – but he kept it kinda quiet, didn’t want anyone to know what we were up to. I’m sure the Russian satellites wouldn’t pick up their old oil platform floating in the ocean.

Okay so here’s where the bedroom alarm clock comes in and where we, as the people in this country watching have to adjust our thinking because we got it, not all wrong, but not all correct either. Remember years and years ago you used to have an alarm clock on your night stand and every night you had to wind it up and set it? No? Young puppy. Well, it’s true. There use to be clocks that you wound up at night. There were no electric wires to them. Well, then we got electric clocks so we didn’t have to wind them. Then we got a radio and we kept that by the bed. Then the clock and radio melted into one unit. Then the whole progression took off and got crazy. We got radio alarm clocks built into coffee pots and cd players. We added remote controls and had them talk to us. All kinds of mashing together of things that used to be stand alone items.

Now here’s another part to the puzzle. Humans will not be the most intelligent beings on the planet by the end of this century. You might argue with this but so says the guy who developed speech to text – Ray Kurtzweiller. He ought to know a thing or two about mechanical and biological interfaces, he developed the synthesizer. What Ray is saying is that we will add little things to our bodies to make them better, an artificial arm, a new hip, etc. So that we will become big better stronger faster that what we currently are. No one seems to have a problem with that, until he points out that we our doing things to our brains to make them work better. Things like putting shunts in the brain to stop seizures. Again, no one has a problem with that. How about putting an interface to a unit that can hold lots of information? Certainly someone is working on that. Then we’ll be able to learn the vocabulary of a language in the time it takes to make the data transfer.

Let’s not forget that we are now developing ways to grow human organs. Remember the human ear on the back of a mouse? How long will it be before we clone or grow a human being? Let’s put aside the messy question of whether they are human and have rights and all that “soft” stuff. Let’s think about modifying and engineering these things to what we need them to do, like housework and weed pulling. Let’s keep their brains small so they don’t wonder why they are doing this shit.

So what’s the military doing? Well, as you probably know either NASA or the military has led the way in innovation for decades. NASA gave us Tang and Velcro; the military funded the development of radar and the internet. We also have spy satellites and drones so we can find, target, and destroy things like wedding parties and family reunions in remote areas.

So now we’ve got something that I think will be the blending together of much of what we as a nation have learned over the years, much like the alarm clock/radio/cd player/coffee pot we will develop whole new ways to wage war, kill people and destroy things. Heck, we’ll be able to destroy things we haven’t even thought of like the cloned human/alarm clock/AM-FM/cd/dvd-player/coffee-pot. Imagine our soldiers grown in our own farms raised on cat food and fish waste genetically engineered to kill the bad guys locked in battle with a bunch of rag heads from wherever with drones raining death from above. We can program these fellows to follow simple rules. Maybe, we can get Bill O’Reilly to give us the “pin head” evaluation in some easy to follow heuristics that can be programmed into our biological bots and they can destroy anyone or anything that meets the pinhead criteria.

Okay, so the goats, the VD, the LSD, and the rocket shield didn’t work out. This is progress and I’m for it.

Onward. Upward.