The Menagerie of Social Media. Voyeurism of the Sick and the Damned.

It is interesting that many recovering addicts I know are also the most eager to convict and judge the addicts posted in the media. It is as if they rationalize that because they are not using, that somehow that makes them different or "better", that if those still out there just "got it", then somehow they will change. No one ever "got it". You were kicked in the teeth repeatedly by family, friends, neighbors, courts, counselors, P.O.'s mental health professionals and your pets until it finally penetrated past the sincere delusion and you became aware that you might have a problem. For those of you with under ten years who think you are special, you are still at about a 50% probability of dying using. The next time you see a picture of some addict, usually ridiculed or posted for shock value, ask the questions "Do we do that to other illnesses?" Do we make them objects? Do we post pictures of lepers? Treat other illnesses as some sort of chamber of horrors menagerie? The odd thing is most of the crimes are petty. Theft. Some kind of low level fraud. Nothing even in remote comparison to what the bankers did in 2007-2008, or what the politicians did in starting the Irag War and torturing, maiming and killing people all to control oil for profits. We don't post pictures of Rumsfeld or the psychologist cum-psychopathic-monster James Elmer Mitchell, now retired on your tax dime, who designed the torture "program" and now lives in a Florida mansion. But you do post pictures of some poor addict looking disease ridden who's been busted for shoplifting a bag of potato chips, a truly dangerous crime against humanity. It is as if the surviving victims of the plague beat the ill for being sick screaming "devil be gone". It is an odd relationship.

Culture.....

The Full Throttle Saloon in Sturgis burns to the ground. And of course, truly reflecting the intelligence and depth of U.S. culture, the comments of grief rival those as if the Hermitage in St. Petersburg has burned, Stonehenge was destroyed by a meteor and Monk's Mound at Cahokia was swallowed by an earthquake. It was a tavern. In a small town. On land from the Treaty of Fort Laramie long since stolen. Named after a General whose central claim to fame was leading a modern, well equipped military column on a half continent wide chase of Natives defending the women and children they had with them. Popular because culture-less descendants of colonist Americans who can be sold anything, convinced to play dress up like extra's from the Al Pacino movie Cruising,revving 1930's technology motorcycles like 15 year olds, go there to drink crappy beer in overpriced costumes designed to extract as much of their earnings as possible and give an identity to their empty, meaningless lives by wearing a giant corporate advertisement and yelling "freedom".

Back to School Specials

NRA School Shooting Prevention Back to School Specials
1: “Little Kitty Kevlar” Backpack. Providing both great carrying capacity and triple layered kevlar protection system, your little angel can hold this up the next time a psychotic maniac with a semi-automatic weapon and 500 rounds of ammo shows up. Comes in pink and purple.
2: “Little Toy Soldier” Armored Hat: Yes, your little man can stay warm, be fashionable and not have his head blown off with this NRA “Top TBI Prevention Fashion Accessory of the Year”.
3: “My Big Girl Is Growing Up” Armored Training Bra and Panties. Protect those all important private places from injury. In Multiple colors and patterns including urban camouflage.
4: “I'm Invisible” Crowd Camouflage Schoolwear. Don't just protect your baby with body armor, but allow them to disappear into the crowd of victims with this computer generated pattern camouflage. They'll simply 'disappear” into the fleeing crowd or pile of squirming, wounded bodies.
5: “Wayne Lapierre Talking Teddy”. Yes, nothing will soothe your child's fears during a mass shooting like that voice of the 2nd Amendment. His recorded voice will calm the fears and emotional over-reactions like no one else: “Remember, that gun isn't shooting you, that maniac I allowed to have the gun did. Too bad he doesn't just have a small knife rather than a 30 round clip. God Bless America”.

Family Values

http://www.startribune.com/sheriff-lawmaker-cited-for-ma…/…/
Things I learned from the Republican family values education forum:
If your "basement is flooded", find an older, married fellow Republican legislator with talented hands to help remove your pants.

When you're "exchanging documents," do it in the same places other people go to to have anonymous hookups. And find better euphemisms.
Marriage is apparently between a man and a woman, a man, another man and a woman, a woman, a man and a legislator, or a man and two publicly stated lying hypocrites who hide out and fondle each other.
Apparently God saves us from uncomfortable situations by sending Park Rangers?

Katrina

This morning, there are the many articles about the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, and all the various evils and errors that came from it. Blame, of course, is put on the various government administrations with some people more or less burned in journalistic effigy. None of them, however, mention that New Orleans was a textbook example of warnings on what not to do and where not live in undergraduate Natural Hazards and Water Resource management classed for decades before Katrina. This was not buried in obscure Academic journals,this was in undergraduate textbooks. There were plans, studies and two generations of scholars, scientists and engineers screaming " It is a disaster waiting to happen, not if, but when". But, because partytown with a bunch of horn players and some decent food has been there for a couple hundred years, the rest of the country is forced to pour in resources to protect and pump the water from a place that is below sea level and subsiding, while industry destroys the coastal wetlands. And when the disaster does happen, and the governor and the typically useless mayor of a city and state so dysfunctional that bribery is considered normal business, sit on their thumbs like halfwits terrified of the fact that what they had been warned of was actually going to happen, they then sat there blaming a small federal agency with no police powers and no authority. I have no sympathy. You built a house on an island and complained about getting flooded out in the spring. You were warned. A thousand times. And now, for ten years since, we have been told of the evils of redevelopment, how people have not returned, how there has been no funding for ordinary people. That is all typical, for the connected and powerful circle government funding and contracts like vultures. Here is the problem...No one should live there. No one. We should simply have resettled people elsewhere, rather than pouring money into a place that does not belong there. We should have cleaned up and bulldozed and let the water reclaim much of the place. Let it wither and die.

The Great Bwana and Cecil the Lion.

The Great Bwana and Cecil the Lion.

The recent shooting of a well known African lion by a Minnesota dentist has started a campaign against him, causing him to close his dental practice for a day. Lost in the storm is the long existing  underbelly of the rich, hunters and colonial culture  in treating the world as an object, Safari Club International. A world of canned hunts in private places where the privileged shoot an animal of their choice, much like royalty of old. It is best expressed by the “art” of taxidermy, where the once living being becomes a mere decoration, often a symbol of accomplishment. This has been true since colonization, whether poor Tasmanians, Native American or African. Both people and Thylacine are object  for collection, proving one’s man or womanhood via scalps and stuffed heads. Thus we have the numerous pictures of rich white people posing with the very inedible species of the world, for as any real hunter knows, carnivores do not taste good. Mr. Palmer is not unique, but is the very symbol of the great white hunter: despite the condemnation from any hunter or sportsmen group, he symbolizes the culture best. The world is for me and it’s beings are for my amusement and collection. The argument  put forth, as empty as anything, is always a bizarre mix of honoring the animal and self justification.  But, if one runs a simple thought experiment and uses human bodies as taxidermy, the consequences become a macabre moral maelstrom of horrific memory, with holocaust memorials and hidden pictures of colonists with the dead indigenous as result.  What has happened, is a newer way of thinking, part old and part new, now runs through the culture. It sees animals as having value unto themselves, a value very old and within many cultures, and another, that acts like this are immoral. Displaying such things is often now the butt of small penis jokes, something much closer  to the truth than most white men would dare to admit. It is all about empty manhood and the need for validation, and any subsistence hunter  knows that. You cannot eat the horns, a truism not needing mention. I have very little sympathy for Dentist Palmer,  as he has used his profits from overcharging patients and society to travel the world shooting animals he didn’t eat or need. Frankly, looking closely, the man, like many in our world, simply has acted psychopathically all his life and got away with it, for industrial society is that at its very core, a place for the wealthy to enjoy the soylent green of the natural world and other’s  labor. Thinking of the many doing hard time for selling bags of an innocuous weed, it is hard to feel any pity. He is still nothing more than a wealthy Cabela customer, however. His strain is as deep within our culture as is the myth Of George Washington’s honesty. The west was built on killing things for fun, whether King or colonist. It is all King  Leopold’s land.