I have to confess,I’ve always loved psychiatry movies like The Snake Pit and Sigmund Freud, to name a couple. Never did I realize that the sickies were the ones running the institutions.
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Yes, Harvey says it all.
Remember, the bigger question is: do psychiatrists belong in mental institutions?
Er, yes, and it’s been like that for a long time. Take a recent example of that sleazy used car sales format known as student loans.
“Natalie Hickey left her small hometown in Ohio six years ago and aimed her beat-up Dodge Intrepid for the West Coast. Four years later, she realized a long-held dream and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in photography from Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara. She also picked up $140,000 in student debt, some of it at interest rates as high as 18%. Her monthly payments are roughly $1,700, more than her rent and car payment combined. “I don’t have all this debt because I was buying stuff,” said Hickey, who now lives in Texas. “I was just trying to pay tuition, living on ramen noodles and doing everything as cheaply as I could.” Hickey got caught in an increasingly common trap in the nation’s $85-billion student loan market. She borrowed heavily, presuming that all her debt was part of the federal student loan program. But most of the money she borrowed was actually in private loans, the fastest-growing segment of the student loan market. Private loans have no relation to the federal loan program, with one exception: In many cases, they are offered by the same for-profit companies that provide federally funded student loans. Read more here.
It’s not just student loans. Financial fascism permeates American society. It’s no wonder that fat slob known as Santa Claus was invented by Coca Cola. The black hole must be fed, by hook or crook. Look at your credit card finance charges (and I’m sure you have). Look at you mortgage finance charges. Look at the hidden bank charges. Welcome to the black hole of the consumer society, where banks and credit institutions rule in the depths of finance fascism. Those who still believe that anything goes capitalism, whether it’s the Republicans and Democrats in the US or the Conservatives or Labourites in Britain, is in society’s best interest remind me of the lemmings in Apple’s famous 1984 Orwellian Mac commercial.
Marching toward the black hole… Will they be saved in time by the fair maiden of rationality?
While many naive Westerners continue to see Che Guevara as some kind of noble revolutionary hero, as, for example, depicted in Steven Soderbergh’s (Ocean’s Eleven, etc) recent and disgraceful pro-Che films, there is, as the Sun’s Grant Rollings points out, ” a very different side to the story….What most of the Guevara T-shirt-wearing brigade do not realise, he writes, ” is that he was known to be a brutal military commander who shot his 
unarmed enemies and even his own fighters in cold blood…After Guevara helped Fidel Castro to overthrow Cuban military dictator General Batista in 1959, he took on the role of one of the revolution’s chief executioners…”
Guevara is reported to have been responsible for the deaths of between 180 and “thousands” of prisoners. While the exact figures might be disputed, there is no doubt about his involvement. He admitted he did not feel a need for a fair trial for anyone who opposed Castro’s Cuban revolution. Guevara wrote: “To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail.
Any fairly objective person (and there must be at least a couple of dozen in the world) familiar with even a modicum of modern history’s ideological experiments will immediately recognize the same symptom of delusional self-justification in Hitler, Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, to name just a few of the really big ones. Though Che or even Castro might not register on their level of mass execution numbers the ideological intent is no less apparent.
Here’s another account of the cult figure behind the movie.
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Note: the above pic depicts a lowpoint in Che’s revolutionary career: his own execution in Bolivia by those who essentially thought as he did–that the political end justifies the means. For a rundown on Che’s death read this account.
Note: Yeah, there are all kinds of chic Che items to buy. T-shirts, berets, posters, handbags blazoned with the Bearded One…There are even tattoos. But why no dance yet? Why hasn’t there been a dance called, for example, the Che-Che, popularly performed in clubs around New York and London? Can’t you see Paris Hilton doing the Che-Che? How about Lindsay Lohan working up a rhythmic kissing sweat on her beloved’s mouth–to the tune of Che-Che?
Update: Directorof Che has hard time explaining it all to the press.
“…Lots of people love this movie of course. But I’m convinced it’s for the wrong reasons. Because to me “It’s a Wonderful Life” is anything but a cheery holiday tale. Sitting in that dark public high school classroom, I shuddered as the projector whirred and George Bailey’s life unspooled…It’s a Wonderful Life” is a terrifying, asphyxiating story about growing up and relinquishing your dreams, of seeing your father driven to the grave before his time, of living among bitter, small-minded people. It is a story of being trapped, of compromising, of watching others move ahead and away, of becoming so filled with rage that you verbally abuse your children, their teacher and your oppressively perfect wife. It is also a nightmare account of an endless home renovation…Read story here.
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And don’t forget: In Bedford Falls’s dark side alternative universe of George Baily’s post suicide dimension, namely Pottersville, you can dance till your feet hurt (and drink too). “Here’s the thing about Pottersville that struck me when I was 15: It looks like much more fun than stultifying Bedford Falls — the women are hot, the music swings, and the fun times go on all night. If anything, Pottersville captures just the type of excitement George had long been seeking.”
I have to admit there is a difference between stupidity and ignornace. Ignorant people may not in fact be actually stupid, and stupid people may not always be ignorant. That said, when people exhibit incredibly, really incredulous ignorance, I tend to call them stupid. If nothing else it’s viscerally fun using the more provocative word. Take the latest ire-inducing Gallup/Harris poll: 37% of Americans can’t identify America when looking at a map of America. So welcome to Stupidoville. “Of the 1,400 residents surveyed, the most common incorrect responses placed the more than 230-year-old territory in the Atlantic or Pacific Oceans (19 percent), the space where Mexico would appear were it in fact included on the map (10 percent), and inside the word “America” written just above the northernmost states (6 percent).”
You see, evidently the thinking process went something like this: ” ‘That thing [map of U.S] definitely looked familiar,’ ” said autoworker and father of three Ed McConnell. ” ‘And my gut told me there were probably a whole bunch of Americans there. So I had to go with ‘Iraq’ (yeah, Ed may indeed be stupid). Others thought the land mass to be “Hollywood,” “Palestine,” “The Shire,” and “Club Med Punta Cana.”
But perhaps the stupidist of all is Homeland Security (believe me, this is embarrassing): The Department of Homeland Security “sees the Gallup/Harris poll results as a blessing in disguise. According to Secretary Michael Chertoff, the nation would be better off if these numbers skewed even higher. ‘Personally, I believe if fewer people in this world could spot America on a map, we’d have a much better chance of avoiding national tragedies like 9/11,’ “said Chertoff. ” ‘You can’t attack a country you can’t find.’ “
Welcome to Stupidoville.
Read more here.
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Note: I believe that at sometime in the not too distant future adult Americans will give up keyboards and pens in favor of crayons and coloring books. The government will pay them to go to their jobs to sit at a desk all day to color pictures of flowers and zoo animals, broken only by milk and cookie breaks.
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Note: Is there a definite line where stupidity ascends above ignorance? Yes, well, for starters I think this could be considered a recent example: Two men are facing armed burglary charges after they entered a home in Plant City [S. Florida] and demanded the victim turn over his metal egg beater. Hopefully they will be Darwin Award winners. Story here.
Life in BarneyFifedom…Police abuse in America: the continuing saga:
“When does a snapshot of a mother breast-feeding her child become kiddie porn? Ask the Richardson [Texas] police… The service was fast, the judgments even hastier. Never did Jacqueline Mercado imagine that four rolls
of film dropped off at an Eckerd Drugs one-hour photo lab near her home would turn her life inside out, threaten to send her to jail and prompt the state to take away her kids…” Read story here.
“…Mumbai is all about dhandha, or transaction. From the street food vendor squatting on a sidewalk, fiercely guarding his little business, to the tycoons and their dreams of acquiring Hollywood, this city understands money and has no guilt about the getting and spending of it. I once asked a Muslim man living in a shack without indoor plumbing what kept him in the city. “Mumbai is a golden songbird,” he said. It flies quick and sly, and you’ll have to work hard to catch it, but if you do, a fabulous fortune will open up for you. The executives who congregated in the Taj Mahal hotel were chasing this golden songbird. The terrorists want to kill the songbird. Just as cinema is a mass dream of the audience, Mumbai is a mass dream of the peoples of South Asia. Bollywood movies are the most popular form of entertainment across the subcontinent. Through them, every Pakistani and Bangladeshi is familiar with the wedding-cake architecture of the Taj and the arc of the Gateway of India, symbols of the city that gives the industry its name. It is no wonder that one of the first things the Taliban did upon entering Kabul was to shut down the Bollywood video rental stores. The Taliban also banned, wouldn’t you know it, the keeping of songbirds…: Read rest of Why they hate Mumbai here.
This confirms what I always suspected: there is nothing easy about being on the cutting edge of physics even though a theory–in this case the tenth dimension–is contained in an eleven minute video. It’s based on a book by Rob Bryanton called Imagining the Tenth Dimension. He also has a blog by the same name.
This book The Numerati: How they’ll get my number and yours, will, according to a review in New Scientist, “send a shiver down your spine and leave you glancing over your shoulder. But it is no ghost story. You really are being watched. Journalist Stephen Baker takes us to meet the spooks who are watching us, a group he calls the Numerati. They are a growing band of mathematicians and computer scientists tasked with processing the flood of electronic traces we leave behind, to reveal and ultimately influence the way we shop, vote or even fall in love…”
Actually, I don’t know what good books like this do. It doesn’t matter how many people gradually become informed about the increasing lack of privacy and big brother manipulations, there is nothing you can do about it, I mean short of diverting Halley’s Comet to slam into our atmosphere.
