Posted 7:54 PM by Psycho

From Gipper to God

With Reagan now dead, the right wing media blitz, that will attempt to elevate the gipper to godhood, has begun. Already, one-sided and glowing tributes to him are popping up on TV, cable, and sattelite networks. They barely mention Iran Contra, and seem to suggest that Reagan had no knowledge of it. They also covered his role in outing alleged communists from Hollywood, without mentioning that he gave a list of names to McCarthy's goons, and essentially sold out a bunch of actors, writers and directors who were persecuted for decades to come.

We will no doubt, see some of the more conservative fucks in our government push for his birthday to become a national holiday, and GW will no doubt champion it at some point. Think I'm joking? It gets even worse. There's an organization called the Ronald Reagan Legacy Project which seeks to have something named after Reagan in every state in the nation, and they even talk about adding his face to Mt. Rushmore. I'm not making this up! They are serious!

Just remember the following things when considering if Reagan was good for America or not:

(1) The October surprise -- Reagan had Casey negotiate with the Iranians to keep the hostages until after the election (just as Nixon had Kissinger convince north and south Vietnam to hold off on a peace deal that Lyndon Johnson was on the verge of accomplishing) , just to make Carter look like a poor negotiator, and as a result, lose votes. The october surprise, and it's author, Pierre Salinger, were villified by the media, and his book was edited to exclude the story, but since then, the story has panned out, and Saliger's facts stand tall -- and the fact that the arms delivered to Iran shortly after the election, which the president denied, seem to confirm it. Despite the fact that he got caught sending arms to Iran (which means that he lied to the American public when he said "We did not trade arms for hostages"), his supporters just say "that's okay, he's RONNY! He can do no wrong!"

(2) Saddam Hussein -- Hussein came to power about the time Reagan did, and wasted no time striking an alliance. Hussein offered to go to war with Iran (at the same time arms were being sent to Iran to pay for hostages) in exchange for American technology. When Hussein gassed the Kurds using poison gasses and shells that were developed with American technology, and the world condemned him for it, The white house refused to condemn him. Reagan spent the next 10 years helping Saddam and building him up. It was Reagan's support for Saddam that made Saddam the monster that he became. If it were not for Reagan, Saddam may have been overthrown by his own people back in the 80's, never being the problem for us that he became.

(3) 10,000 dead Grenadians -- Reagan invaded Grenada after it's dictator president was overthrown in a coup, and a socialist government took over. The government was not hostile to the US (In fact, they wanted our tourism), and made the mistake of trying to get along with it's Carribean neighbor, Cuba. Rather than be over-charged by US contractors for an international airport project, the Grenadians decided to have Cubans built it for them at a fraction of the U.S. asking price. This apparently was as bad as planting Soviet nukes on the island, so Reagan held a press conference where he told us that they were building a soviet military airbase, and that the cubans were in control of the island. So he bombed the crap out of Grenada, killing about 10,000 civilians. When the US invaded, there was no resistance at all, and the only cubans to be found were bulldozer operators and construction workers. The few dozen or so US casualties were all due to friendly fire (and that was never reported in the U.S. Media). The whole operation was a big lie, and the media ate up all the lies, uncritically.

(4) Nicaragua -- Daniel Ortega was a communist but he was elected democratically. He never said anything to threaten the USA, and in fact, was doing a good job turning around Nicaragua's ailing economy. But that wasn't good enough. Ronald Reagan wanted to invade the country and plant a puppet-dictator, as usual. But the senate and congress said no -- Nicaragua was NO THREAT to the USA, and did not even have anything bad to say about us. So they passed the Boland Amendment, which forbid the president from invading Nicaragua, or sending any US troops or equipment. So Reagan had his cronies Poindexter and Ollie North create the contras, whom Reagan lovingly referred to as "Freedom Fighters", and compared them to America's founding fathers. They were in no way comparable to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, not by a long shot. The Contras were an army of paid thugs, most of whom were not even current or former Nicaraguans. The CIA had them harrass civilians and butcher villages with US arms and money, secretly taken from President Reagan's special project fund. To make the money go farther, Marijuana was allowed to come into the USA from the Contras to pay for more weapons (Remember Eugene Hassenfuss?). Remember -- this was during Reagan's proclaimed "war on drugs" -- yet here was Reagan's administration deliberately smuggling marijuana into the country to sell on the streets to get money for the contras! The Iran-contra-arms scandal was the biggest lie perpetrated on America since Watergate, and all it did was kill innocent nicaraguans, but Ronnie didn't know anything about it, allegedly. Blame was passed around, and around, and fell on Ollie North.

(5) Ferdinand Marcos -- Reagan helped Phillipine dictator Ferdinand Marcos escape, and gave him a nice palatial estate to stay ay ON OUR TAX DOLLARS! Reagan supported many dictators, and Marcos was one of the worst! Marcos ruled the Phillipines with an iron fist, and on the eve of an election that was being watched by UN observers, Marcos had Benigno Aquino assassinated. Aquino's wife led a crusade to oust the dictator, but Reagan supported Marcos instead. Marcos fled the island, and Reagan rescued him and gave him a ritzy place in Hawaii.

(6) Support for Dictators -- Ronald Reagan supported people like Augusto Pinochet, Bautista, Somoza, Noriega, the Shah of Iran, Josiah Savimbi, Mobuto Sesi Seko, and the leaders of South Africa's Apartheid regime. His support came mostly in the form of lip service, but for many, it came in the form of financial and military aid. As long as these people said they were "fighting communists", Reagan gave them money. He even condemned South African civil rights activist and Nobel Lauriat Nelson Mandella, calling him a communist agitator!

(7) Bitburg -- When Reagan went to France to commemorate the invasion of Normandy, he went to Germany, to place a wreath on the tomb of SS soldiers. He commented that "these men were victims of Hitler, just as much as the millions of Jews who were killed". Of course, the SS soldiers buried in Bitburg never had to deal with being stuffed into cattle-cars, taken to concentration camps, forced to work with little food, and eventually gassed and burned in a crematorium. Nobel Lauriat Ellie Wiesel couldn't stop Reagan from his stupidity, and Jews the world over felt like they were slapped in the face.

(8) Reaganomics -- Reagan's idea of improving the economy was simple. You refuse to raise taxes, then you spend millions of dollars of taxpayers' money on your rich friends in the defense industry, start a few wars to increase the need for military weapons and technology, which generates job -- as long as you have fresh ars to fight that the American public want... Reagan completely ignored the 3 trillion dollar deficit he created. Reaganomics made a lot of jobs for Americans, but the cost was that our deficit and national debt went through the roof, and we had to pay for it all in the 1990s. Perhaps if we kept finding new wars to throw weapons and industry at, the Reagan revolution would have kept going till today, but the problem is that people want peace. Reagan increased the gap between rich and poor to a ridiculous extreme.

(9) The Homeless -- We have Reagan to thank for America's homeless problem, which was barely noticable before he took office. This was because there were very few actual homeless people then. Reagan essentially abandoned the entire public mental healthcare system, leaving only a fraction of hospitals open. All the mental patients were let loose on the streets, unsupervised by any mental health physicians, and told to fend for themselves. Most of them ended up homeless, whom republicans still ignore to this day. Reagan's idea was that because mental healthcare is expensive, and because there was abuse inherent in the system, that the whole thing should just be scrapped. Apparently, it's better to have homeless lunatics living on the streets than to try to help them get cured or at least treated.

(10) The AIDS Epidemic -- When AIDS first became publicly known, Reagan and many conservatives DID NOTHING, and brushed it off as a "gay disease" since the first victims came from gay populations. But as it rapidly became epidemic, Reagan ignored the advice of C. Everett Koop and doctors worldwide, who recommended action and funding for research, and did nothing. As more and more and more children and non-gay people became victims of AIDS, Reagan continued to deny funding for research. The "Just say no to gay sex" attitude didn't work. By the time any funding for research was made available, millions had died.

There are a lot of other bad legacies of the Reagan years -- all of which will be casually forgotten by the republicans who wish to worship the man as a god. We must remember the evil that Reagan and his henchmen did to the world, so that future (and our current) leaders can avoid them, and try at least to make America a good place for all, rather than just for a few.

Posted 6:03 AM by Psycho

More on my Dittohead-Mom

Remember last year, when I wrote about my Jekyl-Hyde mom, who was so nice and warm one minute, then would transform into a frothing-at-the-mouth, Limbaugh-quoting, neo-con? Well, I was over my parents for a visit recently, and just when I thought things were going to end on a positive note (I.E. No heated political discussion), I inadvertently said something that set her off again. We were discussing various home improvement projects we've either done, or had witnessed. I live in a shithole apartment which I am constantly trying to upgrade to make it more tolerable. So we were discussing our various histories of home improvements. I mentioned that my sister-in-law had her hardwood floors recently done over by a nice Vietnamese family who did it not just quickly, but beautifully, which is outstanding considering that most of the home-improvement contractors we've known have been scam artists who do only adequate work and charge far too much.

The minute I mentioned that they were Vietnamese, Mom's eye started twitching, and I almost thought I saw hair starting to grow, along with the canine fangs of a lycanthopic transformation. "Those Goddamn immigrants coming here to steal jobs and suck up welfare," she muttered. From there on, it got worse. See, like most of the neo-cons I know, Welfare is argued against as though this is 30 years ago. Stories about the welfare mom who had several welfare checks under various aliases and owned a brand new Caddilac (which, by the way was a fictional person invented for rhetoric's sake by Ronald Reagan's speech writer)are the staple. But this is the 21st century. 8 years ago, when Bill Clinton was President, Welfare was pretty much ended as we knew it. No longer could people stay on it for a lifetime if they were able-bodied. No longer would it be possible for a fictitious person to concievably get several checks and buy a Caddilac with them. But somehow, arguing about welfare as though things are the way they were 30 years ago doesn't matter. No matter how you try to explain all the changes, the mind of neo-cons still argue like it never changed.

But what irritates me is how race gets into it. According to my Mom, "foreigners are stealing American Jobs and sucking up Welfare." First of all, my mom could not be convinced that the jobs being "stolen" nearly always boil down to below-minimum-wage toilet-scrubbers, and that we never gave welfare to just any immigrant who decided to move here -- we only give it to immigrants who come in as refugees, and most of them never stay on it for more than a few months, because they find work and start businesses. The US Department of labor explains it that way. Are they lying?

Then she makes a crack about "Those tax-and-spend-liberals". That really gets me. Bill Clinton took on a 3 trillion dollar deficit, left over by Ronald Reagan, and cut Federal spending by several billion dollars to reduce it to nothing, leaving a surplus (which GW wasted no time in spending away). If you look at the history of conservative and liberal presidents, you will note that it is actually the conservatives who have traditionally been the big spenders, and the raisers of taxes on middle class people. Nixon won the presidency on a promise that he'd end the war in Vietnam, but instead blew billions of dollars escalating the war, leaving a trillion dollar deficit for Carter. Carter didn't do much of a job reducing the deficit, and Reagan won the election promising that he'd reduce the trillion dollar deficit that was Carter's fault (when in fact, it was Nixon's fault the got dumped on Carter) . But did Reagan reduce the deficit? No, he blew 2 trillion more before he left office, and ended up giving a lot of our tax dollars away to his industrialist and military contractor friends, while making sure we had plenty of wars to keep those companies in business. Reagan was the biggest spender in history at the time. No liberal president matched how big a spender he was, nor how much he raised taxes.

Clinton, as I mentioned before, eliminated the deficit, cut federal spending by billions of dollars through the elimination of federal programs. Now GW Bush has outdone Reagan as a big spender. His deficit at this time trumps Reagan's, So how can anyone say it's liberals who tax and spend, when it's pretty clear that the opposite it true? Easy -- The people accusing liberals of being big spenders are propagandists for the far right, who use lies to manipulate us. My mom is just another hapless victiim of their bullshit.

But if that wasn't bad enough, mom then said "liberals are responsible for everything that's bad!" What an over-generalized and simplistic statement to make. imagine the following dialog exchange between my mom and myself:

Dave: "Do you like your Social Security check? Would you ever give it up for anything?"

Mom: "They better not change it as long as I can vote!"

Dave: "Do you like the fact that your employer can not force you to work more than 40 hours a week without overtime?"

Mom: "Yes."

Dave:"Do you like Civil Rights, Women having the right to vote, and the fact that by law, women have to get paid the same as their male counterparts?"

Mom: "Yes, of course."

Dave: "Do you like having Medicare, and the fact that your employers always gave you health insurance?"

Mom: "Yes."

Dave: "well, THANK LIBERALS FOR ALL OF THOSE THINGS! You wouldn't have any of those things if liberals hadn't lobbied against corporate-sponsored conservative politicians to get them."

Of course, My mother wouldn't believe any of it, despite the fact that it's recorded in history. It cuts against the propaganda Brainwashing of Rush Limbaugh and other conservative media pundits. It's people like my mom that give power to the right -- people who are not very bright, believe everything they hear on the radio, and who have hidden HATE and racism in them that's just waiting to be tapped. As long as there are angry white rednecks running away from the suburbs into the boondocks, buying guns to protect themselves from the mythical dark-skinned robbers who may invade their homes, the neo-cons will have a guaranteed voting block.

Posted 7:03 AM by Psycho

Saudi Arabian PR Commercials

I got a big kick out of those Saudi Arabian PR commercials that have suddenly been broadcast daily on American Television. They are so hilarious in the context of the reasons for their existence. One commercial says "Saudi Arabia is a fully modern, metropolitan nation..." Yeah, sure, they've got modern buildings, cell phones, and they dont' let women drive cars or travel freely outside the country. Very modern. You probably thought that all those rumors about female drivers was just modern mythology made up by male chauvanists sitting at bars, having drunken conversations about their wives. No. The Saudis figured it out -- Women cannot drive cars, and are a menace behind the wheel, hence their forward thinking and fully modern law.

And we all know that if women were allowed to travel freely in and out of the country, they might get seduced by foreign men, and come back pregnant with the impure seed of foreign devils in them. They might be seduced by western culture and start dressing like whores, listening to the devil's music, and worst of all, DRIVING CARS! Yes, the Saudis are very ahead of us, culturally, in their wisdom and insight to realize that women cannot be trusted to do anything without male supervision... well, anything other than breast-feeding babies, cooking, and changing diapers.

Yes, Saudi Arabia is a fully modern, metropolitan country. The commercial goes on "The people of Saudi Arabia now enjoy a high standard of living based on an increasingly diversified economy and have access to the most modern amenities and services." Yes, they enjoy air conditioning, limousines, SUVs, cell-phones, sattelite dishes, and daily beheadings in the streets. Yes, the Saudis, in their infinite wisdom, know that perfect justice requires dismemberment. If you steal, the only way to stop you from stealing ever again is to chop your hand off. If you commit blasphemy or defame the Saudi King, the only way to keep you from doing it again is to behead you. Besides, it costs an awful lot less to chop off body parts following a trial than it does to imprison a person. the Saudis are just saving their taxpayers some money.

One thing that is interesting to note about these commercials, as well as the website advertised at the end of them, http://www.saudiembassy.net/, is that nowhere are the words "free" or "freedom" found. Yes, the infinitely wise kings and princes of Saudi Arabia know that freedom is an illusion. They know that the only way to keep your country safe, pure, and free of western devils' influence, is to make your country a kind of prison, which only allows those of wealth and priviledge to leave the country, because only people with money and power invested in the nation can be trusted to return.

Saudi Arabia is a modern, metropolitan country. It's people have a high standard of living. They look to the future with confidence. They are also barbaric, sexist, misogynistic, their madrassa schools fund and train terrorism worldwide, and their people are not free. These are our friends. These are our allies. Are you still wondering why the USA has so many problems in the middle east? Could our problems be those who we call our friends and allies?

Posted 5:30 PM by Psycho
Project Censored: New that you weren't allowed to hear...

The communications act of 1994 changed a lot of things about media, and worst of all, changed your freedom of speech forever. With the passing of one bill, all of the former rules and regulations that stopped gigantic media comglomerates from monopolizing the various forms of media we read, hear, and see, were removed. Apparently, nobody remembered why those rules were written into law in the first place. See, back about 100 years ago, a guy named William Randolph Hearst owned most of the newspapers in the country, and had a monopoly on the news, literally. He invented phoney news stories to manipulate the public, and gave us the Spanish-American war.

See, a bunch of rich fat bastard capitalist pigs thought that America was lacking the history, royalty, and prestige of the nations of Europe, and one way to gain it was to defeat one of them in a war. It was sort of agreed that Spain was the easiest target to beat, because they were in a slump. Their economy was failing, they were short of cash, and they were at their weakest point in decades. they were obviously the nation we needed to defeat in a war. So Hearst sent reporters to Cuba to take pictures of attrocities at the hands of the Spanish. The problem was that there were no attrocities being committed... at all. The reporter contacted Hearst, and told him "there's no story happening here." Hearst's reply was "Just supply the pictures, and we'll supply the story." After weeks of phoney newspaper stories about Spanish soldiers killing babies and molesting women, the American public was outraged, and the pressure was on Congress to go to war with Spain. The rest is history.

That lesson is the best example of the wost case scenario, where too many media outlets are allowed to be owned by a single owner. Fast forward to the communications act of 1994, and almost immediately after it's passing by the government, media outlets around the country were being bought up left and right by the media giants like Viacom and Time Warner. Just a few short years after the act was passed, all of the media outlets in te USA were owned by just 6 mega-corporate conglomerates. What the supporters of the bill promised us was that it would be good for "competition", and create "more options for consumers". What we got were fewer choices, and less and less competition.

Part of the problem created by the communications act was that the news we now see, hear, and read, is CONTROLLED and CENSORED by the conglomerates. When Coca Cola performed a little Union Busting in Columbia, ratting out unionists so that the right wing death squads of the Columbian Government (with tacit approval from the US government) could then kidnap and execute them, the mainstream press never reported it. Coca Cola is owned by Disney, which owns ABC, an assortment of radio stations and news magazines like U.S. New & World Report. It is also is one of the biggest advertisers in the nation, and the world, spending billions on advertising to many media outlets. It has strategic partnerships with Time-Warner, which owns CNN, Viacom (owner of CBS) and General Electric (owner of NBC). The story was literally ignored by the mainstream media.

How do I know about this story, and others that never make the corporate news? Say hello to Project Censored. For over 10 years, Project Censored has been keeping tabs on the most ignored new stories. They don't just keep tabs on them, they follow up on them, too, and publish a book each year of the most censored news stories for the previous year. This year's book, Censored 2003, is no less exceptional a read than it's predicessors. In it, you can learn all about how our government is supporting right wing death squads in Columbia, how the US destroyed the Iraqi water supply and kept sanctions on them which prevented them from repairing it, and how the Bush administration hired a bunch of former felons to be Bush's cabinet members. All of these stories are shocking, and should really piss you off.

Behind all of the stories in the book, however, is a story of growing concern - the story of how the news media is reporting important stories that affect us all, less and less, while handing us fluff and commercials disguised as reporting. Many important things are willingly being ignored by corporate-owned media outlets, while manipulative stories cover the true intentions of the corporations which hand us our news. We are being manipulated by spin-doctors and pundits pushing corporate party-lines, getting Americans to think that life would be better if we all earned minimum wage at Walmart, had to pay for our own education and health care, and had no real freedom of speech. The public is being told that patriotism means never questioing authority. McCarthyism is back in full swing, but nobody will report it, except Project Censored. I only wonder how long it will be able to carry out it's mission.

Posted 8:05 AM by Psycho
My Suggestions for Reality TV Shows

I have a few suggestions for future Reality shows. My ideas set new standards, break down barriers, and go where Television has never gone before. If ever let onto television, my concepts would possibly be the most watched shows in television history...

• How Low Will You Go? -- In this show, contestants will compete for a million dollars through a series of ever-increasingly degrading challenges. Unlike the popular fear factor, this show would be adults-only, and would be on pay-per-view cable. Challenges would involve an "anything goes" atmosphere, so we don't know if women contestants will be asked to do a porno, if someone would have to eat doggie-doo, or if anything could possibly be more degrading than either of the above. Tune in next week to see if contestant Jill submits to being raped by a great dane!
  
• Half-way House -- Hidden cameras will catch all the action that goes on, as 3 normal people compete to see who can last the longest in a house full of mentally-ill and potentially violent people, who have stopped taking their meds. Everyone will be locked up in the house, and the mental patients will be manipulated by "voices" they hear (actually, hidden speakers, which broadcast paranoid messages to them in an attempt to trigger psychotic episodes), which may make them more dangerous and unpredictable.
  
• Who wants to be President? -- Contestants compete in an no-holds-barred contest of will, where any challenges imaginable will be thrown at them, in a format similar to "How Low Will You Go?". The winner will get to be President of the United States of America -- for real. After all, could it possibly be worse than the way our Current president got his job?
  
• Michael Jackson's Place -- Contestants, who are all under-15, compete to see if they can survive several months at Michael Jackson's Neverland estate. Kids would have to avoid being alone with Jackson, and hidden cameras, especially in Michael's bedroom, would capture all the intimate moments and strange behavior of Jackson. If it seems too easy, contestants would then be asked to do degrading challenges, such as a lap-dance for Jackson.
  
• American Porn Star -- Male and Female contestants ply their porno film talents to see who can put on the best performances in porno videos. The porno videos of each contestant will be judged by a panel of Porn Star legends like Ron Jeremy, Traci Lords and Paisley Adams. The winner gets 50% of the profits from their porno video (an unprecidented deal for any porno star, since most get paid a one-time fee of less than $1000), which will be released for public sales and video rentals as part of the prize.
  
• Who Wants To Marry A Serial Killer -- See 12 women square off to charm a convicted serial killer into selecting one of them for a TV marriage. A small escape-proof compound would be the playing field, and America would tune in each week to see how far these women would go to make the serial killer select them over the other women for marriage... and possibly to see if any of them get killed.
  
• Who Wants to BE a serial Killer? -- Contestants, selected for their timidness and shyness, compete to see who will commit the ultimate act of killing all the other contestants, and winning the prize of having Johnny Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, and Robert Shapiro be their lawyers for the murder trial that follows the show in an amazing sequel...
  
• American Murder Trial -- Would-be lawyers and juries face off against OJ's dream team in an attempt to convince the audience and jury that the winner of the above show, "Who wants to be a serial killer", is guilty and deserves the death sentence. Contestants would have to deal with back-room deals with the DA, Judge, and rigged juries. Whose strategy and clever skills can beat the dream team?
  
  

Posted 1:39 PM by Psycho
Tech Support!

I have two suggestions for computer technicians. Never build a computer for a close relative, and never build a computer for a friend. No, let me clarify that... Never build a computer for X and Y if they're not experienced users yet! I can't get over how a simple, charitable act like helping a friend or relative buy a computer can balloon into my worst tech support nightmare. When a relative of mine wanted a computer to help him with his business, and I happened to have a fairly recent PC clone built that had everything he needed, I let him buy it off of me at cost. I set him up with all the software he needed to get things done, and set it up in his home for him. Everything was fine until I got the inevitable phone call. Apparently, one of the kids invited some friends up to play some games, which they installed. The games were old DOS apps, and they screwed up. The kids lef the computer in DOS mode, and whenever you booted, it went right to DOS, and not into Windows. Unfortunately, my relative didn't call me about this problem. He just suffered with it, not turning the computer on for months and months, until I happened to be in the area. The fix was really simple. i edited out the offending lines from the Autoexec.bat file, and he was in business again. I asked why he didn't tell me earlier, or worse -- how come he never took it to a shop to have it fixed? He had no answer. Eventually, he asked me about upgrading his computer. I dreaded the prospect, and convinced him that Dell offered better deals than I could. So he had a Dell shipped, and it works great.

Friends can be worse customers than strangers and close relatives. I had a friend once who wanted a new computer, but had no idea why. He wanted me to load it up with all sorts of software, because he wanted to play around and see which kind of things he wanted to do with it. Of course, every day he'd call me to change what he wanted in the computer. It went from a simple desktop publishing system to a gamer system, back down to a programming/web development system. Each time he called me, he had different ideas on what he wanted to do. When he told me he wanted to do video editing, and burn his own DVD movies, I almost had a heart attack. I finally convinced him to settle for the gamer system, because no matter what he wanted to do, it would be able to handle it.

I got a call a few days later, and he had a problem that he couldn't explain. He just said that his whole screen was grey, and that he couldn't do anything but move the mouse and shut down. I immediately thought "he must have a virus or something". So I went over, and what did I find? He had expanded his taskbar (the grey bar at the bottom of the Windows desktop, with the "Start" button on it) to be as big as the screen. This can be done by clicking on the taskbar's edge, after the cursor turns into a double-headed arrow, and dragging it up. He didn't know how he did it, or how to fix it.

Another time he called, he said that he couldn't play a CD on his system. He said that he popped the CD into the drive, and heard no music. I asked him if he heard any sounds at all, like his startup sounds, or the toilet noise his recycle bin made when it was emptied. He said yes. So I went over. As it turned out, he had the CD volume turned down in the control panel. It was embarrasing, and he sort of shrunk when he saw his error. I keep asking him why he doesn't read a book on Windows or take a free course at the Public Library. His response was a shrug, and a sigh that sounded like "I don't know..."

Another friend of mine, who got a computer and wanted me to be his tech support, used to call me all the time to ask the simplest how-to questions. I finally figured out the relationship. I was his manual. He couldn't be bothered with clicking on the help button, or reading the manual, so he'd call me up and spend much more time thanit would take to read it himself.

The next time a friend or close relative wants a computer, I know I'll give in like I always do, and help them. I know I'll be their tech support and get phoned all the time about the simplest questions. It's my weakness. I'm a sucker. I'm too nice to people. But I guess that's not so bad. After all, they're still my friends, and I still get invited over for family dinners. I guess it's the price I have to pay for friends and relatives, but it's worth it. Sort of. Maybe...

Posted 9:20 AM by Psycho
My Jekyl-and-Hyde Mom
With Mothers day, 2003 approaching, I started thinking about my mom. My mom has always been special, as all moms are to all of their children. Always supportive, loving, funny, and willing to do favors when nobody else was available, I'll always treasure her. My mom has a sort of dark side, though. No -- she's not abusive or suffers from insanity, or went to prison, or anything like that. My mom's dark side is externally induced by certain auditory cues. The auditory cues in question come from that demonic box in the kitchen -- the radio.

Despite the plethora of information and music programming on the radio today, my mom insists on sticking to the one station that she has listened to for over 40 years now. WRKO radio, in Boston, Massachusetts, went from being a good all-around news and information station, to being one of the many conservative radio stations that broadcasts right-wing politics 24 hours a day. All day long, you can hear Rush Limbaugh, Doctor Laura, and other pundits tell people how outraged we need to be at so-called "liberals". Angry diatribes and pronoucements from self-absorbed conservative pundits, designed to provoke reactions from listeners, substitute for substance and thoughtful journalism.

My mom's "Jekyl-Hyde" transformation takes effect shortly after the Rush Limbaugh show starts. Prior to the start of each program, mom is bubbly, congenial, friendly, and bright, like a sunflower soaking up the sun's rays and giving pleasure to those who watch it swaying in the wind. But as soon as the first strains of that Midnight Oil tune start to play, and Fat Bastard Limbaugh's corn-hole starts vomiting his words of wisdom, which flow from his lips like many an intellectual bowel movement, mom starts transforming into something evil -- a right wing ditto-head.

Immediately, the bright smile on her face turns stern -- brow lowered, mouth straight. As each factoid is spun by the devil in the radio, Mom's expression gets angrier and angrier, and then, as though she were under remote control, mom will start barking back at the radio. "Those goddamn liberals... that goddamn Clinton... that goddamn [John] Kerry," she mutters under her breath. Occaisionally, I'll try to tell her "It's just bullshit, Mom! Limbaugh isn't a journalist or a reporter. His job is to slander the democrats and spin the news to make listeners hate anyone he takes aim at." It does no good. She usually just barks back more factoids at me, and says something about Bill Clinton, as though my displeasure with Limbaugh automatically makes me part of the Bill Clinton fan-club. We usually go our separate ways, and forget about it until the next time I'm over my parent's house when Rush comes on.

On occaision, mom has said some pretty questionable things. In true right-wing fashion, and sometimes for no apparent reason, she'll start muttering about how "those darn Puerto Ricans" come to America to get on welfare and live for free, something which has been impossible for nearly 10 years now. When I point out that the welfare reform act passed during the Clinton administration made it manditory that they find work or take work that is available, and that there are no more free rides on welfare, she'll just ignore it and change the subject to how those "darn black people" (my mom NEVER says the N-word, and is actually friendly to black issues) are always trying to get priviledges (in reference to affirmative action), and so on. She rants the stuff out like someone is jabbing her in the behind with a pointed stick. I look, and imagine, and almost see a tiny Rush Limbaugh demon jabbing his pitchfork into her. When Doctor Laura comes on, she's almost as bad, but instead of politics, she just rants about all those stupid people that Dr. Laura puts down. "Stupid, stupid, stupid..." she'll say, as Dr. Laura tears into someone for suggesting that there's nothing wrong with premarital sex. Occaisionally, during commerials, mom will expound on people she knew growing up who were as stupid as Dr. Laura's examples, usually people who did or said similar things as the people whom Dr. Laura puts down. All the while, I should add, mom's face is angered, and her tone is ranting and barking.

Eventually, the programs get over, and ordinary news and music returns to the radio as mom starts preparing dinner or cleaning. The look on her face gets bright again, and she becomes my mom again, making jokes, laughing, talking baby-talk to the pets, and singing. The transformation from evil mom to good mom is much more sudden than the earlier transformation into the evil mom. The Rush Limbaugh demons go "poof" into little clouds of smoke, and their pitchforks fall away,and disappear into dust on the floor. Mom is herself again, and isn't mad anymore. I often wondered if this is part of some bipolar disorder, and ponder whether I'll inherit it when I become her age. But then I think about the fact that my mom is only temporarily possessed by Limbaugh's demonic powers. As soon as the radio is off, She's my mom again, and I can talk to her like a regular person again.

Posted 6:25 PM by Psycho
This is sort of a diary, but it's more of a collection of my musings on daily events. I'm not going to give a setup or anything. I'll just start with today, and fill in the necesary histories as needed. Here goes...

Lying for Christ
I'm really fascinated by people who would rather believe lies than the truth. In the past, I've argued with religious nuts who tried to tell me that creationism was true, and that evolution was false. I dug deep into creationism years ago, and I even subscribed to "The Bible-Science Newsletter" and "Acts & Facts", two creatioist publications which represent the bulk of what creationists believe in. Nonetheless, I immediately started seeing deception and lies being promoted as truth. Quotes from Scientists were more often edited way out of context, or even altered to say exactly the opposite of what they meant. Creationists also engage in slandering scientists, and have been caught with their pants down on many occaisions. Duaine Gish and Kent Hovind, who are the most easily recognized names in the creationism field, are some of the most prolific liars in the field, if you call it a field.

Anyway, after the Creationists are not the only ones. Anti-gay activists have built up a similar mythology about how the "sodomite political establishment" plans to "rape your children... sodomize your sons...", and how gays are lobbying for special priviledges from the government. When I researched the claims, I discovered a lot of lying. Articles that were clearly fiction were paraded before congress and put onto websites, represented falsely as non-fiction.

Then I got to Margaret Sanger. The anti-abortion activists have built up a giant littany of myths about Sanger and Planned Parenthood, presented as fact, and it fills so many web pages that it's incredibly difficult to wade through the facts. The basic "factoids" that Christians tell about Sanger are the following:

(1) She believed in the extermination of blacks
(2) She was a nazi
(3) She was a racist
(4) She promoted forced sterilization of mentally defective


So prevalent are these myths spread, that when you do a Google search, you will literally get thousands upon thousands of hits, all promoting the identical myths. To find the truth, you have to go to great lengths, even to the point of reading through old books, to see that all of the claims are lies.

Essentially, it goes like this:

(1) Sanger was a racist who wanted to exterminate blacks

Usually cited is this quote:

"We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population," she said, "if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, by Linda Gordon

When we actually look up the source material, we see clearly that Christians engage in cleverly editing the quote from it's original paragraph, and remove all context. here is the whole paragraph:

"It seems to me from my experience . . . in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Texas, that while the colored Negroes have great respect for white doctors, they can get closer to their own members and more or less lay their cards on the table. . . . They do not do this with the white people, and if we can train the Negro doctor at the clinic, he can go among them with enthusiasm and with knowledge, which, I believe, will have far-reaching results. . . . His work, in my opinion, should be entirely with the Negro profession and the nurses, hospital, social workers, as well as the County's white doctors. His success will depend upon his personality and his training by us. The minister's work is also important, and also he should be trained, perhaps by the Federation, as to our ideals and the goal that we hope to reach. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs (1939)."

So basically, instead of being a racist who wanted to exterminate blacks, Sanger was actually trying to empower them by educating and training black physicians and gynecologists to help educate the black community about birth control. She wanted to allay their fears of the white gentry trying to use birth control to exterminate them, and try to sell the idea of birth control as a means of extricating people from poverty by allowing them to keep their families smaller and less expensive to feed -- which is nothing like what Chrisitans say about her. The fact that the quote is usually heavily edited to the point of stating the opposite of what Sanger actually said is too much to be a simple mistake. It is a deliberate attempt at distortion.

(2) Sanger was a Nazi Eugenicist.

Often, the Christians claim that she wrote a book called "The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy". This is a total lie and a complete distortion. The book was actually written by Lothrop Stoddard. A review of the book appeared in the October 1920 issue of The Birth Control Review. Its general topic, the international politics of race relations in the first decades of the century, is one in which Sanger was not involved. Her interest, insofar as she allowed a review of Stoddard's book to be published in The Birth Control Review, was in the overall health and quality of life of all races and not in tensions between them. Ellis's review was CRITICAL of the Stoddard book and of distinctions based on race or ethnicity alone.

Sanger is often linked with Stoddard, as though the two shared views on eugenics with each other. The fact is that before Hitler's rise to power, Stoddard was just another Doctor working on heredity and genetics. When Hitler rose to power, and the Nazis began mistreating Jews, Sanger actually wrote AGAINST them, and criticized Eugenics as a distortion of science.

(3) Sanger was a Racist

The third lie i've uncovered (and not the last, by any means, as I am looking up a whole list as a challenge put to me by a Christian who hates Sanger) is the lie about how she refered to 3rd world people as "Human Weeds", and generally wrote that "mud races" needed to be "weeded out". Most often, the Christians will say that she wrote these things in a book called "The Pivot Of Civilization". There is an online text of the book, located here: http://www.swiss.ai.mit.edu/~rauch/abortion_eugenics/sanger/

Interestingly, the phrase "human weed" does not appear at all in the book. The only words related to "weed" that you will find are "weeder", and "weed", but none are used to describe what she wants to do to "mud races" (Mud races is not found in the book, either). The following two paragraphs are the only places where "weed" occurs:

Reports on child labor published by the National Child Labor Committee only incidentally reveal the correlation of this evil with that of large families. Yet this is evident throughout. The investigators are more bent upon regarding child labor as a cause of illiteracy. But it is no less a consequence of irresponsibility in breeding. A sinister aspect of this is revealed by Theresa Wolfson's study of child-labor in the beet-fields of Michigan.[2] As one weeder put it: ``Poor man make no money, make plenty children--plenty children good for sugar-beet business.'' Further illuminating details are given by Miss Wolfson:

(From CHAPTER III: ``Children Troop Down From Heaven....'' )

But so long as Bishops and well meaning philanthropists in England and America continue to praise and encourage `the glorious fertility of the East' there can be but little hope of minimizing the penalties of the ruthless struggle for existence in China, and Nature's law will therefore continue to work out its own pitiless solution, weeding out every year millions of predestined weaklings.'' (quoting J. O. P. Bland on the plight of Chinese)

(from CHAPTER V: "The Cruelty of Charity")

(4) Sanger Promoted the forced sterilization of the mentally defective

Again, the usual evidence is a quote from her "Pivot of Civilization" book.

"Modern studies indicate that insanity, epilepsy, criminality, prostitution, pauperism [i.e., poverty -- my addition], and mental defect, are all organically bound up together and that the least intelligent and the thoroughly degenerate classes in every community are the most prolific."
(p 83 "The Feeble Minded)

"We now have state commissions for controlling the gipsy-moth and the boll weevil, the foot-and-mouth disease, and for protecting the shell-fish and wild game, but we have no commission which even attempts to modify or to control the vast moral and economic forces represented by the feeble-minded persons at large in the community."
(Pivot, p. 25 "A New Truth Emerges")

Many people seem to think that because she brought the topic up about mentally ill people, and how some governments sterilize them, that this is somehow PROMOTING the idea of forced sterilization. Sanger examined many government's plans to control mental illness and attempts at sterlization -- and spoke out against forced sterilization. The fact that she mentions it doesn't make her a promoter of it.

As you can see, from these two, and only appearances of the word "weed" in her book, Sanger speaks out AGAINST CHILD LABOR, CHILD
MARRIAGE, and missionaries encouraging people to have more children without increasing their food supply to make up for the new mouths to
feed. As is usually the case with the EXTREME RIGHT, a few myths and rumors form an urban legend. The Legend becomes Gospel, and the Gospel against Margaret Sanger, just like the Gospel against "the homosexual agenda", gains it's strength not from actual facts, but by being
repeated by so many activists (who never bother to question the validity of the claims) , that it becomes accepted as truth, merely because it is shouted loud and frequently. When you actually look to the sources cited by the extremist antiabortion crowd, you see, as usual and predictable, that they are not above lying to promote their cause.

I spent a lot of time today researcing and reading Sanger's books and papers online, and taking note of the utter bullshit that is promoted about her. I'm glad we have the web, and the ability to search through large volumes of text (and the Gutenburg project, too!) instantly. I was able to read the books that quotes were taken from, and see for myself how quotes were edited to say what the critics wanted them to say. Religion and deception are great bedfellows. The more extreme the religion, the more extrme the ability to lie and not see anything wrong with it.