a book and a play that help shed light on the subgenius phenomenon

i found out about this story listening to all things considered on npr today, and it just does a perfect job of explaining the purpose of the church of the subgenius. a 1989 book called the araboolies of liberty street came out, and there is a new play of the same name debuting in a theatre (yes, i use british spelling because it has more flavour) in maryland. just read the story at npr.org and then come back here and read the rest of this post. now the whole point of the chuch of the subgenius is to celebrate being different and weird, and to make that something to be proud of, rather than something to feel inferior because of. the point is to not feel like you are inferior because of your oddities that people may pick on you about or insult you for. in the church of the subgenius, there is nothing worse than a normal person. normals are the scum of the universe. and why is that? their slavish conformity takes away all individuality, all creativity, and turns them into cogs in the machine, mindlessly acting out the will of the “hive-mind” of society and popular culture. people become “wage slaves”, making money and wasting it on things they don’t need, working hard but to get ahead so they are more “successful”, but never actually being satisfied or being happy. in fact, the harder people try to get to a situation in life where they are happy, the less successful they are at reaching happiness. that is the whole point of “slack”. the point of “slack” is to not be brainwashed by advertising into becoming a shopaholic, not to spend yourself into debt and be enslaved by the system, not to spend years working hard in a company that gives you hardly any reward for all your hard work, but to be liberated from all that, by thinking for yourself, and indulging in pleasure rather than abstaining from it. the point of “slack” is to stop fighting against everything and to just go with the flow and enjoy things. the point is to find inner peace and happiness by removing all obstructions to this happening. the point is not to care if people think you are weird or different, because in your mind, our unique qualities make us special in a good way, and people who are not weird at all, who are completely normal, are quite boring and uninteresting and no fun to be around or to be. and the point of the church of the subgenius is to spread ridiculous bullshit and have people pretend to believe it, in order to help people realize how prevalent bullshit is and how much bullshit most people actually believe in, because the more obvious bullshit you are exposed to, the more you can notice patterns and start to realize that other less-obvious things are also bullshit too. the point is to give abnormal people that society looks down upon a group to belong to and a place they feel welcome, where they can express their individuality. the point is to use absurdity to help people deal with the fact that reality itself is often absurd, and to see the humor in it and stop taking everything so seriously. and this play that npr discusses is about a family of liberated people who are, in effect, subgenii, and discuss how the normal people try to oppress them with a fascist state that does not allow anyone to be different. because you know how children like to pick on anyone who is different. and adults are just the same. like nowadays, germany is refusing to let tom cruise be filmed there for a movie about a planned coup against adolf hitler back during nazi germany. why? because tom cruise has an unpopular belief system, scientology. the irrational and morally questionable belief system of tom cruse, scientology, is pretty much illegal in germany, whereas germany taxes everyone in order to pay money out for free to churches that advocate another irrational and morally questionable belief system, christianity. the difference is, christianity is popular and scientology is unpopular. besides that, they are basically the same thing. i listened to the local christian radio station at work the day before yesterday. it was such mindless nonsense. there was a preacher talking about how the apocalypse was coming and how 2/3 of the jews would be killed in a great war by the evil arabs against the holy land of israel, and how only those who have accepted jesus christ as their personal savior get eternal salvation in heaven, and how everyone else burns in hell for all eternity. the preacher is some mexican guy in california named roll reace or something like that. he is probably an illegal immigrant, but they still put him on the radio every night at 7:30 for half an hour, because he is a born again christian. and he mentioned some things from the theory of dispensationalism he adheres to, and of course the rapture, and he talked about other various bullshit. in fact most of the doctrines of born-again protestant evangelists were false doctrines developed in the 1800s that totally go against traditional christianity, but that is another story. traditional christianity is catholicism, and by revolting against it, the protestants were in a sense revolting against jesus by revolting against the church that the disciple paul established in jesus’s name. in the pre-catholic days, there were several different competing schools of thought in christianity, such as the gnostics, and christians were much more nonviolent and courageous, but that is another story. suffice it to say, christianity has devolved into a pathetic mockery of what it once was, and now its most ardent supporters preach hate instead of love. the church of the subgenius, however, has not lost its way, at least not yet, because the original founder, who calls himself ivan stang, is still in charge of everything. he is very adamant about the way things must be done, and he is much more tolerant of other belief systems than most members of the church of the subgenius. ivan stang believes in being tolerant of those who are different, especially if they are in the minority, and he believes that the cult he founded is the best way to promote the values he holds dear, by disguising it as one big joke, when really, they really do have a message. now a lot of other subgenii hold completely different belief systems from ivan stang, and subgenii are really all over the map when it comes to what they believe in, although generally we believe in individual freedom and are opposed to governmental or corporate intrusions into our freedoms. another thing about the church of the subgenius is, by mocking evangelical christians, subgenii are helping to fulfill biblical prophecies, so that if the crazy mexican dude is right and the rapture is coming, it will be in part because of postmodern humor cults that insult christianity during the end times. by the way, the church of the subgenius has a whole lot of doctrine in common with evangelical christianity, like how we are living in the end times, and how the fightin’ jesus is coming back and this time he is gonna be pissed off and kill people. yeah, i used to think the “fightin’ jesus” doctrine was just a subgenius one, but the other day when i was listening to roll reace, the crazy mexican preacher, he was talking from a christian fundamentalist point of view about how jesus is coming back, and how jesus will be quite angry and will be coming to punish sinners by killing them and sending them to eternal hellfire. of course, jesus will be coming to protect the jews of israel from the arabs who try to destroy israel, and he will only succeed in saving 1/3 of them. but that is just the christian doctrine. anyway, the church of the subgenius also has a lot of doctrines in common with real cults like scientology, the raelians, and the ones who killed themselves about 10 years ago, heaven’s gate. all of those 4 religions are ufo cults focused on space aliens in their doctrine. i especially like the raelian doctrines about aliens and ufos and all of that. the raelian doctrines are even funnier than the subgenius ones, even though the raelians are serious! the subgenius ones are less funny because they are told as jokes and not as things people actually believe in. anyway, lately all the cults, including the subgenii, have developed stylized symbols for them that look like the symbols for other religions. subgenii and scientologists based their symbols on the christian cross. the raelians based theirs on the star of david. if you look closely, the symbol for raelianism is actually a star of david with a nazi swastika inside of it. and the funniest part is, i think the raelians are so stupid, they do not even realize that is what it looks like! the raelians are somewhat obsessed with the nuclear bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki and think they were very immoral, which has helped them get a lot of followers in japan. the raelians are most notable for pretending to clone human beings, of course. and the scientologists are most notable for hollywood stars like tom cruise who are members. now you know what cult is really awful? the unification church of sun myung moon. the unification church owns the washington times, which was ronald reagan’s favorite newspaper, and they have close ties to the republican party and to the religious right in the united states. they also now own united press international, a wire service that they bought a few years ago. they are bad news. they perform mass marriage ceremonies. their leader, rev. sun myung moon, claims to be the reincarnation of jesus christ, and several republican congressmen were found at a ceremony crowning him messiah. sun myung moon is famous for escaping the north korean death camps and crossing the border into south korea to freedom in a miraculous story of survival. but he is much more dangerous than the leader of raelianism, rael, who is a harmless kook. and as for ivan stang? he usually pretends not to even be a cult leader, instead pretending that the fictional character j.r. “bob” dobbs is the cult leader. ivan stang is very modest and does not like people looking up to him too much. what he really wants is for everyone to think for themselves, and to not look down on those who are different. so should germany be punishing tom cruise just because he is a scientologist? of course not. scientology may be an evil cult, but the german government immorally subsidizes christianity using the hard-earned money of german taxpayers. now, other churches can be subsidized too, if they are recognized by the german government, and this includes major ones like judaism and islam. but if there is one thing islamic religious leaders do not need, it is more money to spread their ideology of killing people even further. islam celebrates murder of innocent people, and suicide bombing. yet the german government subsidizes it. now it is true that christianity celebrated the murder of innocents during the crusades and the inquisitions. but at least christianity has reformed itself somewhat since then, and is no longer an ideology of mass murder, at least not pre-armageddon mass murder. and the jewish old testament celebrates mass murder several times in the book of exodus, the 2nd book of the bible. not something to be proud of. all 3 major abrahamic religions believe in the old testament and support the genocide in the book of exodus, the genocide the jews carried out against the people of canaan after returning from their slavery in egypt. so is it any wonder there is an israeli-palestinian conflict? i am not saying that an evil cult like scientology is any better; they are smaller and less influential, however, which means they are less dangerous than a more popular religion. and the church of the subgenius is least dangerous of all. some subgenii, the holocaustals whose leader is named papa joe mama, advocate killing all non-subgenii, but this does not take place until after x-day, the day when a gigantic alien armada of flying saucers surrounds the earth to conquer our planet and enslave the humans. and x-day does not happen until july 5, 1998, according to subgenius doctrine, which holds that there is a gigantic conspiracy that has been changing our calendars and that the date july 5, 1998 is still in the future. and so the subgenius religion is harmless. but it is a genuine bona fide religion; let there be no doubt about that. it may not make any supernatural claims, but that is not the point of religion. that is the point of spirituality. anyway, one of the subgenius doctrines is called time control, and it really does work. in order to understand how to use time control, first you need to know its limitations, and that it is not time travel. but you can speed up or slow down the passage of time. it is very simple. chemicals known as stimulants can be used to slow down the passage of time, and chemicals known as depressants speed up the passage of time. it really works. for example, a cigarette is a type of stimulant. if you smoke a cigarette, this makes time go by slower. alcohol is a depressant. if you drink a bottle of wine, this speeds up time. there are more advanced levels of time control than this simple chemical type, but this basic type of time control works best. another type of time control involves changing clocks to read different times. this is more like time travel. if you change a clock to read 2:30, then it really is 2:30. all the other clocks might say it is 7:25, but all the other clocks are wrong and the one that says 2:30 is right. why do we tend to accept what the majority of clocks say? it is merely a social convention. by rejecting the social convention and granting yourself authority to decide what time it is, you have the official power to change what time it is, and what date it is too. now, probably nobody else will recognize this authority, but this does not matter, because they are normal and you are abnormal, and therefore you are right and they are wrong. anyway, there are even more advanced forms of time control, but these are the basics and they always work. well, usually. if someone is addicted to cigarettes and is calmed down by smoking, cigarettes may actually have the reverse effect on time. and if alcohol causes you to have a panic attack, its effects on time are reversed, too. but the exception proves the rule. and anyway, there are plenty more ways to do time control, like simply following the theory of relativity by albert einstein and using it to speed up or slow down time through acceleration of matter. through relaxing meditation, people can make time go by faster. and professional athletes can slow time down to a crawl. this is all possible through the miracle of subjective reality, where reality is simply a subjective experience that is different for each person, rather than an objective thing that simply exists only 1 way. subgenii hold that reality is subjective and not objective, because that is the postmodern view, and it is also in keeping with the theory of relativity and frames of reference. and through extreme subjectivity, we can return to a geocentric model of the universe, where the sun rises and sets, rather than the earth spinning on its axis. in fact, the earth can even be flat! why not join the flat earth society? if it looks flat, it is flat. that’s common sense, which is pretty uncommon nowadays. anyway, abnormal people are superior to normal people, because everyone is inherently abnormal, but the normals repress their abnormality and try to all be the same, and this slavish devotion to normality makes them inferior to people who are radical individualists. ideologies where people all believe the same thing are a form of mind enslavement and group-enforced normality that takes away individuality, freedom of thought, and the ability of people to be truly rational. that is why all ideologies must be rejected, including the ideology that all ideologies must be rejected, which is a paradox and therefore it must be true.

what is with these conspiracy theories?

ok, so it seems some people who are, like me, on the left, have a problem with conspiracy theories. check out this discussion of dick cheney. now, don’t get me wrong... dick cheney is untrustworthy and evil, as evidenced by the fact that he picked himself to be vice president, how he is so obsessed with secrecy, how he likes to have our nation’s enemies tortured despite evidence that torture does not work, how he cooked the books on the intelligence about iraqi weapons of mass destruction through his office of special plans, and how he is corrupt and thinks he is above the law. and the elections of 2000 and 2004 may both have very well been stolen, the first one stolen in florida and the second in ohio. who knows if the elections were really stolen? not me. maybe the perpetrators would know, or maybe there are no perpetrators. but anyway, dick cheney is not behind 9/11, our country is not a fascist dictatorship, we are still a democracy, president bush is actually in charge, and it is not the end of the world. we are having a presidential election in 2008 and bush and cheney are not up for re-election! democrats control both houses of congress after winning them in last year’s elections! it is sooooooooo not the end of the world. and we are probably not going to nuke iran, although politicians continue to say that “all options are on the table”, which presumably includes the option of us doing a preemptive nuclear strike. anyway, yes it is true that neoconservatives like dick cheney are bloodthirsty warmongers who want to kill as many people as possible by fighting as many wars as possible. but i think dick cheney has become somewhat sidelined and less influential as more and more people within the government realize he is a tyrannical madman. our democratic system works, and soon we will be rid of bush and cheney. and i think people really need to stop buying into crazy conspiracy theories with regard to evil tyrants like dick cheney. just because someone is evil, insane, obsessed with secrecy, loves torture, loves war, and hates being held accountable, that does not mean that person is actually involved in any secret conspiracies. the neocons are certainly not a conspiracy. everybody knows about the project for a new american century! and everyone knows about dick cheney’s secret energy policy meetings with the leaders of big oil companies and ken lay from enron, and how dick cheney tried to keep everything secret. and now we are finding out about how dick cheney was behind pressuring john ashcroft to sign off on something evil (torture, or something) when john ashcroft was sick in the hospital; alberto gonzales was the one actually sent to the hospital to do the deed of pressuring a bedridden ashcroft. but that is actually good news! it means ashcroft was not the evil guy everyone thought! and there is more evidence coming out about how colin powell and condoleezza rice have both acted as obstructionists towards cheney’s all-consuming lust for power and domination. but dick cheney is no genius. he is probably not even that much smarter than the president. and the president is not as stupid as some people say, although he is a little stupid. the truth is, dick cheney’s idiocy is plainly apparent because dick cheney is so bad at public relations and his approval rating is so low. if he had half a brain, he would try harder to manage the media and have them cover him positively. but instead, he is an utter failure at preventing the media from publishing stories that damage his reputation. in other words, dick cheney is incompetent, and could never pull off a major conspiracy because he is such an unapologetic bloodthirsty tyrannical dumbass. al qaeda was behind 9/11 and lee harvey oswald acted alone when he killed john f. kennedy. i can see why people would be inclined to believe conspiracy theories about dick cheney, but in reality, if i were starting an evil conspiracy, i would not want to include an idiotic nutball like dick cheney. someone like him would ruin the whole conspiracy with his incompetence and the press would find out. you see, nobody likes dick cheney. now his chief of staff, lewis “scooter” libby, is going to jail for a crime dick cheney committed, and libby was just the fall guy. but that is because libby is a submissive idiot who is dumb enough to obey whatever his tyrannical boss tells him to do. scooter libby deserves to rot in jail. it is his fault he lied under oath, not dick cheney’s. dick cheney was behind the whole campaign to make joseph wilson look bad by revealing that valerie plame was a cia agent, and, predictably, the whole plan backfired and made dick cheney look bad instead, and started a criminal investigation. that incident reveals the stupidity of vice president cheney, and why he could never pull off an actual conspiracy. these people could never turn our country into a totalitarian dictatorship. nobody would support them! if they tried something like that, our own military would rise up and overthrow them, and then we would transition back to democracy again. and the bitter american expatriates overseas who post online about how horrible our country has become are just sad and pathetic human beings who are too closed-minded to see all the good things about the united states of america. just because we have bad “leaders” does not mean the whole country is rotten to the core! but it bothers me that sometimes we leftists allow conspiracy theorists to claim irrational things, and rather than correct these inaccuracies, we just debate the right-wingers. i mean, sure, conspiracy theories may sometimes be beneficial politically, if they make the other side look bad. but they are not a logical and rational way to discuss current events, and we should try not to have opinions that are so strong, they overpower facts and the truth and cloud our judgment. i still believe the threat posed by dick cheney to our nation has been contained and he is being monitored closely by other forces in our government who realize he poses a threat to our democracy. and thus, our great democracy is protected from these fools! the central intelligence agency, for instance, has consistently been an enemy of dick cheney, and they have often fought each other with leaks to the press. if he tries anything funny, i am sure someone will be watching him and will leak it to the media, and it will be all over the newspapers and the television and the news on the radio and on the internet. for dick cheney, there is no escape from bad press! everyone hates him, including most of the government and most of the media. so i do not think he poses any threat to us anymore. people should stop with the hyperbolic paranoia about how our country is turning into a totalitarian nightmare. that is just not true. i watch c-span, and politicians in both political parties are quite similar. i think anybody who gets involved in politics has to act like they do in order to be successful. but that is how democracy works. congress caved in to the president on the funding for the iraq war a while back. there will be another fight over that in september, supposedly. this does not mean our democracy has failed. democracy works slowly, and sometimes it takes years for politicians to catch up to the will of the people, because the system has so many checks and balances to slow things down and obstruct anything controversial. it is hard to end a war, because most people in congress don’t have the balls, guts, or whatever you wish to call it, to just do it and end the war. this does not mean we are an empire and that the imperial presidency can do whatever it wants and that congress is just a rubber stamp regardless of which party is in control. i know some people say that type of rhetoric but it is just untrue. there is a real difference between both parties, but it is in the policies they try to enact, not in the human behavior of individual politicians. people are just too cynical and do not believe politicians actually mean what they say and believe what they are saying to the public. it is quite sad how cynical and jaded we have all become towards our democratic process, and how much distrust we have of politicians, most of whom are dedicated public servants. yes, their human failings and subjective understandings of reality prevent them from enacting real change most of the time. but that does not show corruption. it just shows that they are fallible humans like everyone else, and most of them are not original enough thinkers to come up with great new ideas for how to do things. and as for whether dick cheney is evil... he believes he is a good person, and so do some of those close to him. he believes his actions are justified. but you know who else believed that about himself? adolf hitler. and stalin too. you see, people always try to justify their own actions to themselves, and this clouds their judgment. just because someone believes they are good and tries to do what they believe is good does not mean they are actually good. if that were true, adolf hitler would be considered saintly. we judge people by what we think is good and evil, and what society thinks is good and evil, not by what the people who are doing the things we are judging think about their own actions. so that is why dick cheney is evil. it is because we live in a society where his actions are considered morally reprehensible. in some other society, he might be considered a good person, if they had a different value system and different morals. but here in our democracy, we consider dick cheney evil, because that is a subjective value judgment, not objective reality. in objective reality, there is no such thing as good or evil. morality is all an invention of human society. but it is a good invention, and one we should believe in and use accordingly. dick cheney is pure dagnasty evil. it’s just a fact. what kind of fact, you ask? well, the kind that is actually just an opinion because morality is subjective and not objective, because it is based on arbitrary rules and standards devised by human society, and not universal laws of science. but we would have no society, no civilization, no science or technology, if it were not for morality. it is necessary for humanity to function cohesively as a whole and not have us all divided into egocentric amoral individuals who only care about themselves. if only dick cheney were smart enough to understand all of that, and not so obsessed with power and domination and secrecy. and did i mention halliburton and its no-bid contracts where it rips off the government for billions of dollars? yes, in that last sentence, for the first time. is dick cheney behind halliburton getting these contracts? who knows. the whole bush administration is run by former oil executives. there is probably just a general consensus in the administration in favor of oil companies, one that needs no discussion because everyone already understands it and nobody wants to be caught saying things that could be damaging to the administration and their own careers. i think it might be a good idea for the legislative branch to have more authority over the executive departments, and for the presidential administrations to have less authority over the rest of the executive branch. we should limit presidential power as much as possible without damaging national security. there is too much power in the hands of one person (the president). and why is there too much power in the hands of our current vice president? because the president lets him get away with it. in the end, everything is bush’s fault. even hurricane katrina. president bush controls the weather and caused a hurricane to hit new orleans. okay, now i am joking, and i hope you recognized that was not serious. anyway, conspiracy theorists have no regard for the truth or for being accurate. they just want to make as many unsupported accusations as possible. so please ignore people like the infamous alex jones (a very popular conspiracy theorist nowadays). they do not add to the discussion, they only throw it off track with bullshit. there are only a few conspiracies, and 90% of the conspiracy theories are wrong. i just wish conspiracy theorists could focus on the 10% of conspiracy theories that are true, and when one of their conspiracy theories is proven false, if they could just stop repeating their falsehoods, it would be great. they should just focus on the conspiracy theories that are actually true, but always be open to accepting it when one of their conspiracy theories is debunked. and why do we have to call the vice president names? calling someone “dick cheney” is the biggest insult in the world. dick cheney has already earned such a bad reputation, there is no reason to call him anything but the name that has earned such a horrible reputation. like why do people call him darth cheney and a sith lord? are they star wars fans or something? or why do they call him dr. evil and call dubya mini-me? that is all stupid. let us just call him dick cheney and then insult the hell out of him and call him evil and insane and everything else we can think of that we can make stick and become a part of his reputation. that is the solution.

i posted 8 videos to youtube

well, i have posted 8 videos to youtube. they are all a part of my gigantic “subgenius video tape barrage sequence”, a long sequence of 58 mind-melting videos that totally numb your skull. now, do not be confused by my user account name on youtube.com. the name “mcgrewrich” is based on the name of one of my family members. my name, on the other hand, is numinous ubiquity. please do not confuse the 2 of us. he wants nothing to do with me, or so he tells me. he has voiced his disapproval of how i am tarnishing his good name, but i reminded him that we both share the same youtube account name. i didn’t want to have to get a new one once i found out he already had one, so yeah, we just share it. he told me to get my own user account, but that’s no fun. what is the point of doing something that makes sense when you can do something that makes no sense? and that is the whole reason i posted those 8 videos on youtube. there was a 9th video i wanted to post but i knew it violated youtube’s rules because of brief clips of less than a second where you see things that are kind of against the rules. that raunchy video is on google video where it has been since july 5, 2003. anyway, all 8 videos were posted on google video by the subgenius foundation, inc., but nobody had bothered to put any of them on youtube. so i posted them all to youtube, and luckily, all 8 videos are in the flash video flv format that youtube uses internally for everything, since that is also what google video uses to display videos if it detects that you have the flash plugin. so the videos are all the same high quality as the originals on google video. so now all the official subgenius videos from google video except the one i was too afraid to post are on youtube, where anybody can see them (and probably will)! this will help more people find out the good news about “bob” before july 5, 1998, which is still in the future, according to official church doctrine. save the humans! or should we save the humans? according to savethehumans.com, ayn rand’s philosophy of objectivism is the only way to save the humans, and the sites exists to mock non-objectivists. well, subgenii aren’t humans, and the church of the subgenius exists to mock humans, who also happen to be non-subgenii. so, in a way, we are like the objectivists, except, unlike them, we are rational enough to embrace irrationality instead of being obsessed with it. the objectivists are just another one of these cults we all keep hearing about, based on the teachings of ayn rand... much like how the scientologists are based on the teachings of l. ron hubbard. both groups have a similar amount of grasp of reality: none whatsoever. but at least the objectivists want to save the humans. good luck, once july 5, 1998 rolls around! that is the date of the end of the world, the date that all of the end times prophecies point to, and that date is not in question. our calendars are all wrong. it is all a gigantic conspiracy which goes all the way back to ancient atlantis. but that is another story. suffice it to say, the earth is actually hollow and inhabited by nazi hell creatures, and aliens from planet x are coming to destroy all humans on planet earth. the only way to escape this fate is to slack off, and then eventually participate in “the rupture”, which is like the rapture only more realistic. anyway, these doktrines are all found through the forbidden sciences pioneered by j.r. “bob” dobbs, noted scientician. he is the great prophet whose vision came when he electrocuted himself inside a television set that he tried to build from scratch despite not knowing how televisions work. are the objectivists any more rational or logical than this? no, they just pretend they are. objectivism is really just one big joke, since ayn rand was supposedly a philosopher yet her philosophical teachings have always been widely ridiculed in university philosophy departments, by real philosophers. objectivists are just closed-minded know-it-alls who think that greed is good and who worship capitalism as a religion. they have less grasp of reality than subgenii because at least subgenii know all their teachings are a bunch of bullshit (or “bulldada”, as subgenii prefer to call their form of bullshit). objectivists are so stupid, they actually believe their ridiculous teachings! and they believe in an extremist point of view in the field of economics, a ridiculously pro-capitalist school of thought based on the teachings of an austrian guy named ludwig von mises, something that even alan greenspan acknowledged was a bunch of bullshit, despite his involvement with the objectivists and ayn rand. he knew enough economics to know that the objectivists belive in a bunch of lies, and that is despite the fact that greenspan himself is somewhat of a pro-capitalist “neoclassical” extremist himself. the neoclassical school of thought in economics is the predominant one in economics departments nowadays, and it too is ridiculously pro-capitalist, but not to the same extremes as ludwig von mises. the irrationality of the neoclassicals is more hidden and less overt than with followers of von mises. anyone who claims they are more rational than everyone else, like the objectivists all do, is probably full of it and wouldn’t know the truth if it hit them over the head. i’m glad i’m not such a peabrained closed-minded hypocrite who is unable to see their own irrationality or question a set of ridiculous assumptions that somebody else told them to make. the objectivists all believe in the same assumptions because they are sheeple following the herd instinct who never question what they are told if they think the source is credible. and, shamefully, the libertarians are based on the same faulty reasoning as the objectivists, and the libertarians, like the objectivists, do not believe in market failure even though it happens every day. libertarians are also pro-capitalist extremists, just like objectivists, and a lot of people fall into both categories. i, of course, belong to neither, because i want to find a middle ground between capitalism and socialism, one that leverages the benefits of capitalism but also helps poor people instead of just letting them die because they are judged to be “inferior”. extreme pro-capitalism leads to a belief in social darwinism, and that rich people are superior to poor people. and i guess that means paris hilton is a genius and we should repeal the “death tax”. what a joke! anyway, i posted 8 videos to youtube, and they all came from google video. now more people will see them.

forget about “american interests” in iraq

nowadays some people say that we should not pull out of iraq completely because there are certain “american interests” in iraq that need to be protected. if you allow them to make their argument fully, they often come right out and say that blood for oil is a good idea and they support it. that’s right, they actually say that our troops should be fighting and dying so that american consumers have access to cheap oil from iraq. that is one of several “american interests” in iraq that supposedly needs to be protected. well, pardon me for being so blunt, but why the hell should anyone give a damn about american interests in iraq? there are like 200 countries in the fricken world. do we have young people fight and die to protect american interests in all 200 of them? no. apparently, only one country is that important, and it is iraq. ok, so maybe it is 2, and we can add afghanistan to the mix. but those are the only 2 where we actually put our own troops on the line to fight and die for our supposed interests. but which american interests are these? are these the best interests of america? or are they simply the lowest common denominator? are they simply the lust for greed and power? is it simply the fact that we americans want something for nothing, and we want to buy stuff at a cheap price and sell stuff at an expensive price? see, hillary clinton and probably half the other democratic presidential candidates, along with probably all the republican ones except ron paul, are all proponents of this theory that the united states has vital national security interests that can only be protected by having troops fighting and dying in iraq. sure, that may be the case right now, because that is where we are doing the fighting right now. but look at it this way. it is really expensive for us to pay for sending people all the way around the world to iraq from here in america, and to have them learn all about the culture and try to learn how to fight a war there, and ship them equipment and try and rebuild a country at the same time as destroying it. now imagine if the terrorists had to fight us here in the united states. they would be the ones who had to spend all the money to come here and learn about our culture so they can fit in and not be suspicious and find out the weak points in our security before we do. that would make it much, much more difficult for them to kill americans. right now the terrorists are killing us on the cheap and it is working, because we are doing it in their backyard and they know the lay of the land and they speak the language and practice the religion of the locals. but if we trick the terrorists into having to come all the way to the united states, imagine how much money they will be wasting! now, we will probably be able to catch them, because they are all poor, uneducated, stupid people. even if they can avoid being caught, they will probably be too stupid to pull anything off successfully. the truth is, the terrorists got lucky on 9/11. that plan could have easily failed, many different ways. the odds were probably very much against the plot of 9/11 succeeding. it required too many terrorists to do too much suspicious activity and it had to all go undetected, and norad and the air force had to fail to defend our sky against hijacked planes, and the terrorists had to actually have good enough flying skills to fly planes into buildings. if you really multiply out the probabilities, the probability of everything going right was very low, but it still happened. why? simply because there were many other terrorist plots that failed. this just happened to be the one that succeeded. if the terrorists keep having one plot after another against us, eventually one of the plots is bound to be successful. it is like the old saying about even a stopped clock being right twice a day. if we prepare our nation for being attacked by terrorists, we can probably foil most plots, but we can never be completely foolproof, because most terrorists are quite stupid individuals, or else they would not be dumb enough to volunteer for a suicide mission. stupid people have a way of finding the kinks in a system that smart people would be unable to find due to overthinking the situation and less of a willingness to take irrational risks. the irrational risk-taking of stupid terrorists, in a way, makes them more dangerous than highly intelligent terrorists might be. but then again, it might be fairly easy for the terrorists to attack america. all they have to do is come here, and because of the lax gun control laws, they can buy automatic machine guns and then go to public areas and use them. and why do we have such a big, obvious hole in our national security? why are people like the virginia tech killer able to get guns? it is because of the corrupting influence of lobbyists in washington, who have been able to prevent any sensible gun control legislation from coming to effect to prevent senseless tragedies of mass murderers going on shooting sprees. lobbyists do all sorts of awful things. and they are never held accountable like politicians are. you know who else is not held accountable? journalists. people who do shoddy reporting are all too often not punished for it. the news media completely failed during the months leading up to the united states invasion of iraq, and this invasion would probably not have happened if the news media had been covering things critically since the invasion talk started in august 2002 with the psychotic ramblings of dick cheney about saddam hussein being hell-bent on developing nuclear bombs. now, to be fair, saddam hussein did want to develop nuclear bombs, but his nuclear program was stalled and not going anywhere, and everyone close to saddam hussein lied to him all the time and only told him good things, because saddam hussein was a shoot-the-messenger type who hated to hear bad news. saddam hussein’s own insanity prevented his nuclear program from developing any further. but anyway, it is obvious that the best way to fight this war on terrorism is on the defensive, not the offensive. terrorists in iraq can plant improvised explosive devices in the roads at night to blow up our tanks, and live to fight another day. in iraq, terrorists do not have to pay with their lives every time they attack us. if we make them come here to attack us, then terrorists will have to die every time they try to kill. so they will never get to be repeat offenders. then, who will want to be a terrorist, if they know that all it will earn them is ending up dead? only people with severe mental problems, who are both suicidal and homicidal as well as devoutly muslim, will be willing to sign up. and those mental problems will have to last long and be fairly stable, which means very strong fanaticism. if we focused more on propaganda efforts in the middle east and less on military efforts, things might be going better. the more we spend on propaganda in the middle east, the better. i think it would practically be impossible to spend too much on propaganda in the middle east, unless we started getting into the range of over 90% of arab muslims loving and greatly admiring both the united states and israel. if we got to that point, it would be safe to say that maybe we spent a little too much on the propaganda. but up until that point, i say, increase the funding for propaganda, and diversify our propaganda offerings. iraq has like, hundreds of different newspapers. bribe as many newspaper owners as possible and get as many as possible to print nothing but pro-american propaganda. and do the same for all the arab satellite tv channels, like al jazeera. if we throw enough money at this problem, we can bribe everyone, and then nobody will be printing anti-american stories in newspapers or having anti-american propaganda on the tv. and the same thing goes for hugo chavez and venezuela. with enough money, we can simply buy hugo chavez and get him to be our buddy and run venezuela the way we like. why do you think hugo chavez has so many allies in latin america? they were all bribed! he paid them all off, with the money he made off venezuelan petroleum sales. nobody understands the business of bribing better than hugo chavez, and every man has his price. now where, you ask, will we get the money for all of this bribery? very simple: we steal the money back from them after bribing their politicians and media outlets, using our corporations to do all the fancy business dealings to get the money back. we can end up making a profit off the whole venture. making the muslims of the world like us again could prove to be an extremely profitable business venture, and it would put an end to terrorism too. think of all the savings, all of the money we waste fighting terrorism that we could save by eliminating the terrorism before we have to even spend any money fighting against it in the first place! once the muslims of the world are on our side, they will turn the terrorists in, and rat them out for a reward! we just need to perfect our propaganda technique. we need actual imams preaching from the koran that are saying how wonderful the united states is. we need to be bribing the islamic fundamentalist preachers to preach pro-american islamic bullshit. bribe as many people as possible! instead of democratizing the middle east, we ought to make it as corrupt as possible through widespread bribery. and then we can bribe our way into controlling opec and getting the price of oil to be as low as we want it. and instead of letting the terrorists make money off opium poppies, we can be corrupt and sell licenses to grow opium poppies freely in afghanistan without being bothered by any law enforcement. we can be the ones who take bribes as well as the ones who give them! through this type of corruption, we could become true masters of the middle east. and that would all cost far less than having our troops over there fighting and dying. in fact, if our government took enough bribes, we could make more money than we spend on the whole deal, and come out ahead. that is the best way to protect any so-called “american interests” in iraq. but fighting a war over there? no thanks. the longer we fight, the worse it gets. when you find yourself in a hole you dug, maybe it is time to stop digging. we got into this problem through too much war-fighting. we certainly cannot solve it through war-fighting, because the more of that we do, the worse we make the problem. we are trying to use military troops to win the hearts and minds of a civilian population that is under military occupation, an occupation that is supposedly necessary only because the civilian population is offering such unusually strong resistance, but the more we fight against the resistance, the stronger the resistance gets, and it has gotten to the point where there is a civil war between different factions of the resistance at the same time they are fighting us, and still, they are winning and we are losing. it is insanity to think the best way to win over a civilian population in the opinion polls is through an aggressive military occupation. but, that is still our strategy in iraq, and why we are losing. in reality, we do not need to have anything to do with the nation of iraq if we do not want to. we could cut off all ties to iraq and withdraw everyone we have there, and just abandon our embassy and the green zone and everything, and we would probably be better off afterwards, having done that, than if we desperately try to hold onto everything we still have over there. iraq does not belong to us and we should stop acting like it does. it is its own nation and it is time for us to learn to leave iraq alone and stop interfering in iraq’s internal affairs. i mean, we accuse iran of interfering in iraq’s internal affairs. what is wrong with that? we do far more of it than iran does, so if there is something wrong with it, then both the united states and iran should stop. and that is exactly the position that i take on that issue, that all external nations should stop interfering in internal iraqi affairs, including the united states, and that we should do this regardless of what any iraqis tell us. we cannot let them grow dependent on us. we are the ones making them dependent on us, and we have to just stop doing it. disagreements between sunnis and shiites are not our problem. let the crazy muslims solve their own problems, without our troublesome meddling that only makes things worse. if the sunnis and shiites are all so crazy that they can’t stop themselves from killing each other, then what can we do to stop them? nothing. let them find sanity on their own. we cannot give them brains. they would have to be undead zombies for that to work. and everyone knows that in the middle east, the undead are made into mummies, not zombies, or at least that is what they do in egypt. zombies are primarily made in haiti and other caribbean islands. that is why we cannot stop the fighting between sunnis and shiites, and why we should leave iraq. now, if zombies were made in egypt, it would be a different story. and don’t even get me started on vampires made in transylvania. we in the united states need to develop our own type of undead, in order to stay globally competitive with transylvania, haiti, and egypt. but that is a whole ’nother story.

this just in: something is happening in palestine

ok, so it appears that the palestinian authority has collapsed. the coalition government between hamas and fatah has fallen apart, and hamas militants have taken over the entire gaza strip. why, you ask? well, someone from aipac blames american and israel right-wingers, which is ironic because those are exactly the 2 groups that aipac helped bring together in a neoconservative alliance against islam, ever since 9/11 changed everything. maybe aipac does not have as much orthodoxy as i and others have thought, and is more of a heterodox zionist organization. who knows? the israelis, at least, make a hell of a lot more sense than the palestinians, at least on some level. they are a wealthy nation like us, and just like us, they have to fight islamic terrorists all the time, terrorists who are out to destroy their nation. and just like us, they are occupying arab muslim lands with their military, and antagonizing the local population in these occupied territories. except we occupied iraq in 2003 following the invasion of afghanistan back in 2001. israel occupied the west bank, the gaza strip, the golan heights, the sinai peninsula, and lebanon in the past. out of those 5 areas, israel remains occupiers of 2 territories: the west bank and the golan heights. 2 of the other areas, lebanon and the gaza strip, are areas israel has had major military conflicts or occupations in within the last few years. anyway, both lebanon and the gaza strip were under israeli occupation until recently, and now both places are really fucked up because israel left and left a power vacuum behind and then used military force again after leaving, making things even worse.

ok, so what is going on here? well, the palestinians, that is, the people who live in the west bank and the gaza strip who are not israeli citizens, are a people with no national citizenship, who live in land under military occupation that is not part of any nation. or at least, that was the case until recently... but now the gaza strip is free of israeli occupation. this was not too much of a problem until a civil war broke out between hamas and fatah, which were ironically in a coalition government together, running the palestinian authority, in a coalition that took over a year to put together and had not been going for too long. all of these events would not have happened if it were not for the death of yasser arafat several years ago, because when he was alive, all of the palestinian militant groups answered to him, some more reluctantly than others. israel would have never left the gaza strip with yasser arafat in charge of the palestinians. when israel withdrew from gaza, they knew the most powerful, well-equipped armed group in the gaza strip was hamas. but, they did it anyway. in retrospect, it is amazing that hamas did not take over gaza earlier, given the fact that they could have done it so easily. now, the leader of fatah and the president of the palestinian authority, mahmoud abbas, the pro-american stooge we had installed as yasser arafat’s #2, has declared hamas illegal, and disbanded the coalition government with hamas, installing in its place a government that does not have any hamas members in it. this is despite the fact that hamas overwhelmingly won the most recent elections that swept it into power in the palestinian parliament. so the president of the palestinian authority, mahmoud abbas, has had to resort to undemocratic methods to stay in power and keep the palestinian authority from falling apart. in reality, all he is doing is making the palestinian authority simply be permanently controlled by the fatah movement and by the president of palestine, just like when yasser arafat was the president of the palestinian authority and the leader of the fatah movement. it is well known that mahmoud abbas is willing to do or say pretty much anything in order to win over the americans, the israelis, and the international community. he is a weak, spineless american puppet whose house of cards is crumbling. now he will have to consolidate his base of power in the west bank, get international aid to his government restored, and become a more autocratic type of ruler in the mold of yasser arafat. he will probably have the support of the bush administration, but will that be enough for him to hold onto power? or will hamas take over the west bank too? will everything just collapse into anarchy? the palestinian-controlled parts of the west bank are fragmented and separate from one another, so there could be different armed groups in control of each part, theoretically. but it is more likely that there will be 1 or 2 armed groups that rule everyone as the official government. will that government be recognized by the international community as a real government governing a real independent nation called palestine? no chance. there is a little bit of good news in all of this. the good news is, israel benefits from the palestinians fighting among themselves, because when palestinians fight other palestinians, they are not fighting israelis. but the bad news for israel? things will only get worse once the palestinians are done fighting each other, and if demographic trends continue as projected, someday jews will be a minority and muslims the majority in the nation of israel. then, who will win free and fair democratic elections, if those are ever held? muslims, since they will be the majority. of course, that assumes that new people who are born will practice the same religion as their parents. if instead we assume that each new person miraculously learns to think for themselves, the majority of people, not just in israel but in all other nations, will someday be atheists. but, that is unlikely, and besides, most people are so stupid that if they thought for themselves, they would do even worse than if they just believe whatever they are told. i have seen time and time again examples of the universal stupidity that almost all if not all human beings share, to different degrees of severity. i do not know a single person who has not shown some level of stupidity with their words and/or actions. most people show plenty of stupidity with both their words and their actions. the stupidest thing of all is to deny being stupid, because denial is just plain dumb. the neoconservatives are still in denial over the issue of iraq, and this demonstrates clearly to everyone the degree of stupidity these so-called “intellectuals” have. but i do not think that there is such a thing as a “neoconservative intellectual”, although other people have written on the subject as if such people exist. i think it is an oxymoron. most neoconservatives are actually anti-intellectual. anyway, the palestinians are in quite a pickle now. we’ll see how they deal with this problem. i think, more and more, the west bank and the gaza strip will be viewed as completely separate and distinct in the future, and people will give up on the idea of a unified “palestine”. or, then again, demographic trends could make israel obsolete, and perhaps everyone would rally to the cause of creating a unified palestine, just as people rallied to the zionist cause of creating the nation of israel in 1948. but, do not forget that the problems in lebanon are also closely tied to the fact that israel occupied southern lebanon for many years and fought a war against lebanon last summer. israel will be able to survive in the short term because of military superiority that they owe in a large part to aid from the united states. but in the long run, israel could still be destroyed, given how much they are hated by the muslims of the world, and how they have many more enemies than friends. both israel and palestine seem to be doomed to destruction, but in different ways, and over different time frames. the syrians may someday get their wish of having the golan heights back; perhaps they could annex lebanon as well, one of these days. once israel is dead and gone, like over 1 billion muslims would probably like to see happen, who knows what will happen? now do those same billion muslims want to destroy the united states. no... only a fraction would want that. although we are a lot more hated than before, we are still nowhere near as hated as israel. now israel does have nuclear weapons, but do you expect them to use nuclear weapons if an overwhelming force of a human army invades and is about to destroy their nation? the whole justification for founding israel was because of the holocaust being bad and the victims needing a land they can call home and feel safe in. unleashing a new nuclear holocaust would not be a good way for such a nation to come to an end. it would be more proper to simply dismantle the weapons of mass destruction so nobody can use them. but the time for that has not yet come. anyway, these recent events in the middle east probably fit the end times prophecies of the book of revelations perfectly. it seems that no matter what happens in the world, it always fits perfectly with biblical prophecy, at least when listening to people who make a career out of saying that all the time regardless of the circumstances. who knows? maybe they are right. who would jesus bomb? someday we may know the answer, when the fightin’ jesus comes back to kick some ass for his daddy. perhaps jesus will carry a machine gun, and go around blasting people to smithereens. one can only pray. now, whether you pray for that to happen or for that not to happen, hey, it depends on whether that kind of stuff is your taste. but if you don’t pray, well then, don’t complain when god goes and does something you have a problem with, because guess what? somebody else ordered, and it got delivered. the only problem is, you ended up having to pay the delivery guy the bill, and the delivery guy for god happens to be jesus. what do you end up having to pay jesus? faith. and what if you don’t have any? you will have to pay on credit, and go into faith debt. and don’t even get me started on how hard it is to come out of faith debt. i am trying to come out of faith debt right now, as a matter of fact. this guy “bob” runs a nonprofit corporation that makes money off showing people for free how to transform their debt into wealth, in what it calls “the transforming debt into wealth system”. according to the system, you make money in exchange for doing nothing, and this is called “slack”. i wonder if it works. hopefully it can help me pay off my faith debt to jesus. jesus is not going to collect on my debt until after i die, so hopefully i have a lot of time. i wonder how much indulgences cost? maybe the people in palestine have some answers. after all, these are the end times, and they live in the holy land.