Tag Archives: ignorance

Reality sucks for the right… Right Michael?

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Now, our resident Provocateur, Slivka, has been talking (or writing) much smack lately about Walter Reed and comparing it to one of the Right Wingnut talking points, publicly funded health care.

On the other other hand,

Now this is a link to an Army newspaper, The Army Times. As everybody knows, a hotbed of Socialists and Liberals.

What it essentially means, (the story is about an Army General being silenced, by the Pentagon, but subpoenaed anyway to testify in Congress)
is that there seems to have been a little teeny small wee itsy bitsy thing Michael Slivka and his right wing Keyboard Kommando buddies didn’t want us to know. If Michael pleads ignorance, I for one am almost prepared to believe him.

You see, the health care at Walter Reed was privatized. To people with strong links to our old friend, Ali Burton, the Thief of Baghdad.

The righties got all wound up that it was a clear case of socialized medicine, and the failure thereof, and how a private health care scam ooops i mean “plan” would have made all better…

And then that bad ol’ wicked reality jumped up and bit them squarely on their right buttcheeks.

Just how stupid is the American public?

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A recent Washington Post poll reports that over half the US public believes that in the last 4 years of war waged by the US against Iraq, that only 10,000 or less Iraqi civilians have lost their lives!

True, polls often claim to be accurate opinion takers when they are not, but this one seems to ring true. The poll goes on to report, that now, still less than 6 out of 10 believe that the US made a mistake by assaulting Iraq with its troops, which would make sense if over half of Americans also believe that less than 13,000 people (Iraqi civilians and American military personnel combined) have lost their lives, in 4 years of a war that has blown away more than a trillion dollars of US and Iraqi money when combined resources are put together. Or maybe they think that there have been ten to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi combatants killed, while all the civilians got off relatively Scot free? This illogic is not ignorance, but stupidity.

This is more than willful ignorance, too, but actually is just pure gross stupidity. Actually willful ignorance as Americans practice it routinely, over the long run will produce pure stupidity over time. How on earth would any rational person believe that so much money for war making could produce so little civilian casualties? It’s not like the money was going towards Iraqi reconstruction, because it is widely known that nothing works there. Not the oil lines, not the potable water, not the hospitals, not the electrical power grid, not the sewage systems. It takes pure stupidity to believe that all that Pentagon power only killed less than 10,000 civilians in 4 years. Not even Bush and Cheney would state that! So we are left with a population where over 1/2 of the people are even stupider than are the lies they receive from the charlatan liars in the highest offices.

What can we ever do with such a stupid population at hand? It’s not as if we can give half the US population brain transplants. to remedy the situation. It’s not mathematical ignorance that leads so many to add up 2+2 and not get 4, but rather it is lack of any brain power at all. And how many in the US believe the world is only 10,000 or so years old? How many believe in ghosts? Just how stupid is the US public? PLENTY.

Rand McNally’s mapped stupidities

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I have one of those big map atlases that Rand McNally puts out each year, and have begun to use it some to home school my kid in geography. Since the District 11 school she attends is so busy constantly testing kids about the 3 Rs, they don’t seem to have time to teach geography, history, science, nor much really about anything. As it is, if I don’t teach her where Kansas is, she’ll probably be graduating down the road, with the herd of American kids that will be unable to locate their asses from a hole in the ground.

What gets me about Rand McNally is the, shall we say, subtle racism they practice. Where the fuck is Mexico, you idiots? It’s not like Mexicans and Americans don’t drive in each other’s countries. So what happened here? Let’s see? there are detailed maps of Canada’s provinces on 12 pages, plus semi-detailed maps of most of the big cities of that country. But Tijuana? Where is it? Where are the major Mexican cities, the Mexican states? Why might they not be shown? Instead, there is one page with a poorly detailed map of the country of Mexico as a whole. The idea here is a racist one. It is that Mexico is unimportant, and just does not rate being mapped by such a prestigious outfit as Rand McNally. Oh brother. And what idiots!

I wouldn’t mention this map thing, except that it seems so prototypical of the American racist mindset of the world. Dear Mr. McNally Inc., how many Mexicans do you think are in the US as compared to Canadians? When they drive back and forth from the US to Mexico, and Mexico to the US, don’t you think it would be nice of your ‘service’ to provide folks with directions? After all, that is the service your business supposedly is engaged in. Canada gets mapped, so why not Mexico?

Why not provide Texans, for example, with detailed maps of the North of Mexico? It would be nice to have city maps of Monterrey/ Saltillo, Guadalajara, and the DF. And certainly if Newfoundland can get its own detailed provincial mapping, then why not Nuevo Leon, Baja California, Chihuahua, etc.? And why not, other than the racism involved?

This is not just an unthought about error neither. The passage between Tijuana and San Diego is perhaps the busiest international crossing in the world. So why leave a blank space on that map for where Tijuana should be? Duh… Rand McNally is clearly a business that is ready to shoot itself in the foot by totally ignoring Hispanic buyers of their product. Racism seems to be more important to keep intact, than sales of their product or integrity of the service they provide. There are far more people traveling between Mexico and The US, than between the US and Canada, yet Canada gets mapped in detail, while Mexico gets only the barest of outlines of a national map.

The lesson here for my kid, is that neither her Colorado public school nor our big American Rand Mcnally book of maps will educate her well about geography, nor about other cultures. That, she will have to pick up on her own with my help, or she won’t learn much about these things at all. Why? It is simply that we live in a culture that prizes ignorance and stupidity much more than education. America the Free has become America We don’t know Our Asses from a Hole in the Ground. Keep fighting the rot. That’s all we can do.

Nancy Pelosi’s new dog, Silvestre, fails IQ test

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Democratic Party exINS police dog, Silvestre Reyes, flunked his IQ test this week. The new head of the House Intelligence Committee was given a series of basic questions about the Middle East by the journal Congressional Quarterly Today, and scored ZERO on their IQ test for him. Yes, truth is stranger than fiction, it seems. But Pelosi’s pick for the spot didn’t seem to even know the difference between the Sunnis and the Shia! Unbelievable! Maybe they should rename it the House Ignorance Committee instead?

Even the CQ interviewer didn’t quite believe what he was hearing when he sat down with Reyes to talk about this newest advance in his career as Democratic Party top hack. Hint hint. Now go and give this test to Obama, too. We want some more fun. This is much better than watching Sasha Cohen play Borat. And even much more fun than a vactaion to Tehran to do a philosophy conference, even! Can we get Cheney tested now? Pleaseeeee….

Doesn’t it boggle the mind to think that this bipartisan DP-RP insane asylum trying to run another culture without a clue to what’s going on, could possibly succeed? Nobody speaks Arabic or Pashto, nobody in the country other than Pat Robertson, Billy Graham Baby, and Glenn Beck know anything about Islam (just kidding), and 99% of the US public that supports this fiasco overseas can’t locate their asses from a hole in the ground on a map! Yes, our leaders are all as stupid as rocks. Good going Democrats with picking Reyes for his post. He might be even stupider than Dubya? No mean feet. duh.

Look, to be fair, the liberal voters even to the Left of the Democratic Party politician hacks try to play Risk with other people’s lives while being totally clueless. How many of these nitwits want to go rushing in with US troops from Djibouti (I guess?) into Sudan, Chad, and the Central African Republic? Give these good hearted fools an IQ test about the region, and they would be out of their Risk game within secs due to brain infarcts.. Most of these liberal wannabe admirals so ready to Trotsky into areas like that, probably have already forgotten their Kosovan Albanian. It is sad, this US desire to control the world. When will it stop?

We all know that Bush’s attack on Iran is going to come

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We all know that Bush’s attack on Iran is going to come. In fact, the bombing of civilians at night in Pakistan and Afghanistan is just the opening act for the bombing of Iranian civilians that is being planned. It will most certainly also be done at night, too, simply because it lights up the night sky so bright. This imagery will show how tough Bush really is against ‘Arab terrorists’. Not afraid to bomb them babies is he. So don’t tickle us with details, now, y’all hear? ‘Mericans going to pour out another trillion dollars in support of their ignorance after this bad boy bombing comes down. It’ll be the best patriotic American light show since Belgrade!

Has anybody heard any of those cowardly Democratic Party politicians speaking out against the official program? What about them Democratic Party voting peaceniks? Shoot, the Lebanon ‘affair’ just passed them by entirely, didn’t it. Hey, they didn’t even get time to pray on it, and even though they were demonstrating against Iraq at a very few anemic rallies, and were making sweet speeches, too. Well shucks, it was troo complicated to bring up the war-making by Israel that the Democratic Party was supporting. Shut our eyes and it just went away. Few cluster bombs left around, that’s all. Oil slick.

Bush saying that the Democrats got it all wrong! There never was an October Surprise at all. It’s a November Surprise instead! Couldn’t see it could y’all? All the time it was hanging right in front of your eyes, too. You wimps sure are just so lame.

And the Democrats? Gee! You sure pulled one on us, Dubya. Got to hand it to you, you sure are tricky. If we had known it was coming, we would have opposed you. But now that you’re doing something to stop those terrorists, we got to support our troops. We support you, Mr. President, all the way. Let’s get the job done right, and then let’s discuss time tables, giving our troops the equipment they need, and how to more efficiently dispense our government’s militaristic propaganda in the future. Go, team Go!

Is this Iran war going to be a surprise, or what? Going to catch us all off guard. We didn’t know that a constant war would be constant, you know? It’s supposed to go on for an eternity, but we just didn’t forsee. We don’t mind footing the bill. We’re Americans. At least nobody much got hurt. We’re Americans.

Real partisan lines

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Many people who I’ve tried to enlist in this or that effort talk about not wanting to appear “political.” This is such a regretful argument because it reflects I think their ignorance of what all of us are up against. Anyone who is seeking to tackle societal problems at the source has to recognize that the causes are certainly political.
 
As opposed to “partisan.” Political activism has nothing to do with partisanship. Trying to improve our representation in government is not a liberal issue, nor progressive. Those who consider themselves conservative have the same need for representation and voice than anyone, especially it seems if you are a fiscal conservative!

And partisan lines drawn as between Democrats and Republicans are also hardly applicable. As the divide between have and have nots increases, both major parties have proven themselves champions of a single side: the tax-break class.

Not until we have congress people who are not multimillionaires, who have relatives facing employment and health insurance woes, who have children in the public school system, who do not owe their reelection to corporate lobbyists, will our interests have a chance in Washington.

Is this the old harang about class warfare? It most certainly is. People think perhaps that the different between the haves and have-nots is largely academic. It is not.

Do you have enough money that you can live off the interest without having to do a lick of work? No? Then you have not.

Is your neighborhood and family protected from the rising incidence of crime and drugs addiction? Then you have not.

Are you secure that you will always have a job, health insurance, retirement, education, leasure? Then you have not.

If you have twenty, fifty, one hunded, one thousand, one million times the annual income of your fellow man, then you are a have.

And you didn’t get it by robbing it from someone else who had too much. You took it from those twenty, fifty, hundred, thousand, or million persons who now have to make do with less.

King’s missing dong, episode 1

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Time Magazine characterizes King Kong’s enthousiasmOkay, I admit that’s my own headline. There was indeed no trace of a King dong, but neither was there lust, nor anything more than a communication barrier overcome by physical clowning. A young white lass with Vaudeville chops was able to cajole the mighty Kong where scores of unfortunate black maidens had failed.
 
But really the special effects in the latest King Kong were amazing.

With special effects the filmmakers were able to create a giant gorilla who went ape at the sound of tom-toms summoning him to dine on a mouse-sized snack.

Special effects recreated superstitious black peoples who subsisted on the craggy coast of Skull Island, separating themselves from the island’s vegetation to live behind great fortifications and beneath countless pointy sticks on which were impaled human sacrificees.

Special effects produced dinosaurs also very keen to fight over what would be a tiny human morsel, willing to discard bigger kill for the smaller bird in the bush, even gnash away at a rocky surface trying to snatch said bony morsel.

To another extreme, special effects created bats which prey on animals larger than insects, and they stalk their target, hanging upside down each time a bit closer.

Convenient for the slow shutter rate of film projectors, these bats fly with the awkwardness of pterodactyls, the beating of their wings visible to human eyes. Lucky for our heroes who escape by holding on to the wing of a bat, while he flies with the other. A feat clearly accomplished only through special effects.

Special effects depict a world plainly ignorant of what some know as the food chain. The filmmakers can adhere to the laws of gravity, sort of, and whichever laws of physics can be illustrated, but they can’t grasp the food chain or that animals kill to eat, they do not maraud mercilessly.

By depicting nature as malevolent, we are expressing the highest disrespect for what really have become our wards. Like depicting Jesus with a machine gun for example. It might be funny, but it would be pretty undeserved.

But there’s more. Special effects produced stampedes both human and Jurassic, from which few casualties are seen. Men are able to keep pace beneath Brontosaurus legs to make the Spaniards who run with the bulls every year in Pamplona look like wusses.

And in the end you have Kong flinging blond lasses left and right, you have an entire opera house audience stampede to the exits with nary a body left behind.

In fact, given Peter Jackson’s fondness for gross-out scenes like the close-up of the carnivorous worm devouring a man head first, it seems strange that they cranked back the special effects for Kong’s final splat unto street level from the Empire State building. Kong’s body at rest on the street is shown not one bit like a sack empty of its potatoes, the usual sudden end to a 100 story fall.

David Letterman fans might have hoped to see Kong burst like a watermelon fallen from a great height, but special effects intervened.

And so the special effects try to approximate mechanical consequences, but ignore the organic, what used to be the common knowledge of life.

While this might suit the lower educated of today’s movie audience, Peter Jackson certainly does not limit himself to that denominator. In an early scene he risks boring that crowd with three interminable inside jokes: the actress they had wanted to cast for this adventure, “Fay,” was already doing an “RKO” picture for that damned “Cooper.” Rocky Horror Picture Show fans would get those references, but so what? Why not throw some bones to zoology majors and enlighten everyone.

The special effects in King Kong trade not merely in the currency of the implausible or improbable or impossible, they perpetuate the currency of ignorance with which people do great evil to nature and the environment and other cultures, particularly indigenous ones.

This film plays with lots of movie land conventions, but to an audience that is less privy to the inside references and more prone to base human reactions to the demonized stereotypes.