State of the human condition (cont.’)

Here and here.

State of the human condition (cont.’)

“…Laquita Mattox rubbed a finger along the victim’s butt crack, prompting her to clench her buttocks…” And we all know that clenching can cause the bed you’re sitting on to break…” We further know that clenching can lead to a terrible  knife fight: “Are you ready to die?”. Here.

Change of heart syndrome

The Maldives island republic in the Indian Ocean where it is illegal NOT to be Muslim…so when a Maldivian named Mohamed Nazim renounced Islam during a lecture, he “was attacked by members of the audience, then led off under arrest by police. A few days later it was reported that he’d had a change of heart while in police custody and publicly apologized for his atheistic apostasy…” Of course we can only guess why he had a change of heart (but I think we get the picture). Here.

See, there hasn’t been a new idea in over 2000 years (nor 2000 before that)

Roman army knife: 200 AD

Deluxe Swiss army knife of today

You’ll need a big and deep pocket though for this one: it’s almost  9″ wide and weighs 2 lbs and costs 1400 bucks.

__________________________________________________________________

Related: “That’s what she said” did not originate with Michael Scott of The Office. Here.

State of the human condition (cont.’)

“…People walking out of the train saw the pinned man immediately to the left of the subway car I was riding in. Within thirty seconds a crowd had formed, both inside and outside of the car the man was trapped by, and every other person whipped out their cellphones and started taking pictures and video while the guy writhed around. The injuries looked far worse at the time than they turned out to be, and the impact was strong enough to knock me out of my seat on the train. A woman started yelling at the crowd to put their camera away because of how garish the scene was, and a few people snapped out of it and slinked away, but most did not, and more people came up and jockeyed for position around the injured man every second. People were lined up the stairs for a better viewing angle…” Here.

State of the human condition (cont’)

American war crimes during WW2

American war crimes are nothing new, from the so-called revolutionary war to the Indian wars to the civil war up through WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq American forces have shown their “unpleasant” side (though this certainly does not indict every American soldier by any means)…in other words, Americans are really no different than any other nation at war. The grotesque sadism and emotionalism intrinsic to human nature has no bounds of nationality, religion, or race. Below is just a short rundown on some of this controversy.

Here is an example: The Allied practice of collecting Japanese body parts occurred on “a scale large enough to concern the Allied military authorities throughout the conflict and was widely reported and commented on in the American and Japanese wartime press.” The collection of Japanese body parts began quite early in the war, prompting a September 1942 order for disciplinary action against such souvenir taking. Harrison concludes that, since this was the first real opportunity to take such items (the Battle of Guadalcanal), “[c]learly, the collection of body parts on a scale large enough to concern the military authorities had started as soon as the first living or dead Japanese bodies were encountered.” When Japanese remains were repatriated from the Mariana Islands after the war, roughly 60 percent were missing their skulls. In a memorandum dated June 13, 1944, the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) asserted that “such atrocious and brutal policies,” in addition to being repugnant, were violations of the laws of war, and recommended the distribution to all commanders of a directive pointing out that “the maltreatment of enemy war dead was a blatant violation of the 1929 Geneva Convention on the sick and wounded, which provided that: After every engagement, the belligerent who remains in possession of the field shall take measures to search for wounded and the dead and to protect them from robbery and ill treatment.” These practises were in addition also in violation of the unwritten customary rules of land warfare and could lead to the death penalty. The U.S. Navy JAG mirrored that opinion one week later, and also added that “the atrocious conduct of which some US personnel were guilty could lead to retaliation by the Japanese which would be justified under international law”. Here.

Here’s another example (from the European theater): General Eisenhower’s death camps: “When they caught me throwing C- Rations over the fence, they threatened me with imprisonment. One Captain told me that he would shoot me if he saw me again tossing food to the Germans … Some of the men were really only boys 13 years of age…Some of the prisoners were old men drafted by Hitler in his last ditch stand … I understand that average weight of the prisoners at Andernach was 90 pounds…I have received threats … Nevertheless, this…has liberated me, for I may now be heard when I relate the horrible atrocity I witnessed as a prison guard for one of ‘Ike’s death camps’ along the Rhine.” (Betty Lou Smith Hanson)

Also see Other Losses.

____________________________

Related: How much of Band of Brothers was bullshit? Here.

State of the human condition…

Workers at an American dairy farm  beat cows with crowbars, stab them with pitchforks and punch them in their heads. Here.

“Broken heart” syndrome and its fix

How do you go about fixing a broken heat exactly? Caution: this borders on the cynical approach. “…Find the stressful and painful thoughts that you have about your relationship, write them down, and challenge them one by one. Anyone can do this and, with effort and diligence, see a real change. It’s as if you are going to the source of stress in your mind and flipping a switch from on to off, so the pain is no longer produced, even though the external circumstances appear the same. That’s the power of seeing your situation more clearly…” (read more here).

A very good year…

1938: “Wild parties, lesbianism, and premarital sex…” Yes, They Must Be Told.

The “necessary psychology” of battle

“…In recent days, many veterans have made the point that fighters cannot do their jobs without creating psychological distance from the enemy. One reason that the soldiers seemed as if they were playing a video game [the recent and now infamous Wikileaks video] is that, in a morbid but necessary sense, they were…” Here.

“Frau, komm”

Red Army in Berlin 1945 (May- June): “When the soldiers came to the building, asking for girls, the older women called out: ‘Where’s little Gabi?’ and pulled her out from underneath the table…” Here.

Also on this subject of the horrors of the Red Army there is of course the  diary A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in a Conquered City by Anonymous. There is also a movie version.

Excerpt from the book*: “No sooner was I back upstairs then the concierge’s girl…came running in for the second time. More men in the basement. Now they’re after the baker’s wife…”

“Woman in Berlin” trailer

____________________________

*This book was originally published in 1953 in Germany but the country was in no mood for war memoirs, especially of this kind so it fell into obscurity. It was over a half century later that it was republished, this time in its entirety), to international acclaim.

“1 volume encyclopedia…”

From across the digital divide comes–Youtube comment  pleasantries for your humble enjoyment…

“…you’re the fag 4 hiding behind a queer username dozydoodles 2 attack people w/ fighting words like a coward! U lucky I just won $10,000 or I’d hunt u down & shove a 1 volume encyclopedia up yur throat–u r a fuck thing whatever U are male female she/he..fuc off if u know what’s good for U & dont contact me…I wish I could foc yur mom, yur aunt, & your grandma on the beach while you’re tied up-Older babes like your mom & aunt need the sand pounded off their hairy pussies, right, dozydick?…”

___________________________________

Comment analysis with the intention of indicating possible suggestions of improvement for communication purposes.

“up yur throat” ??? Isn’t that supposed to be down…?

What’s a fuck thing? Isn’t that a blowup doll?

Reduncancy: “male female she/he”…

“don’t contact me” (?) Don’t worry about that.

“tied up-Older babes” You mean tied up cougars?  Then say cougars.

“sand pounded off their hairy…” Evidently this is synonymous with the term “intense copulation on the beach.”

Titanic VS Lusitania

“…When the Titanic sank, the safety of women and children came first. But when the Lusitania went down three years later, it was a case of survival of the fittest. A painstaking analysis of passenger data from the two vessels revealed that captain’s orders to allow women and children off first were adhered to when the Titanic hit an iceberg on her maiden voyage on April 14, 1912.  But when the Lusitania was torpedoed by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland three years later, it was a case of every man for himself.  More precisely, men and women aged between 16 and 35 were most likely to push their way to safety, the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reports. The difference in behaviour, the researchers believe, lies not in who was on the ships, but how quickly they went down…” Story here.

The way of the world since 4 billion BC

You see, Henry Fonda does not like harmonica music and what makes matters worse, well Charles Bronson only knows one tune on his little mouth organ.

A Dawkins/McEwan interview

This is an uncut version of a Brit Chan. 4 interview with McEwan by Richard Dawkins.

I first came across Ian McEwan about ten years ago when I read his novel The Cement Garden.

________________________________

Dawkins Youtube channel.

Dawkins main site.

Dawkins Amazon page

Ian McEwan webpage

McEwan’s Amazon page

Sad story: today’s uber women now passionless in the age of uber sex

First there was centuries of patriarchal religious and social subjugation of women, then they didn’t have the right to vote or curse in public or spit on the sidewalk and then there’s been all those breast cancer scares and now—this:  “persistently or recurrently deficient (or absent) sexual fantasies and desire for sexual activity” among eliteist women.”

Oh sweet lord. What to do what to do they ask hungrily.

These are women, as a “NY Times Magazine” article spells out,  who want to want…Want to want what? Women who want to want desire. And when do they want to want it? Soon. Very soon.

“At her group therapy sessions for women despairing of low sexual desire, therapist Lori Brotto likes to pass around a plastic tub of raisins. The women, usually six to a group, sit around two pushed-together beige tables in a fluorescently lighted conference room at the British Columbia Center for Sexual Medicine in Vancouver. A little potted tree is jammed randomly in one corner. Ragged holes scar one wall where a painting used to hang. The décor doesn’t speak of sensuality. That is the job of the raisin.”

Raisins? Yes. Pure Genius. This is therapy at it most sublime. Raisins. It’s so simple its beautiful “I’d like you to start by examining your raisin…Study its shape, its contours, its folds. Touch the raisin with a finger. Look into the valleys and peaks, the highlights and dark crevasses. Lift the raisin to your lips.”

Oh sweet lord I just got an erection. And over raisins for chrissakes. But the rasin of course must be intently symbolic (if these girls could just, you know, adaquately visualize the it as symbol). There’s more. Remember, with a rasin you can’t eat just one (which is a line I believe from a potato chip company).

So here they are, a room of passionless women who want to want.  Raisin-as-libido-fruit consciousness raising. Do they get the message? Do they feel now the raisin bursting. Can they feel the love. The self  love. Raisin as symbol? I wonder if the Beatles are playing in the background (if not, it’s a good gooey idea).  I Want to Hold Your Hand…I Saw Her Standing There (although in that song “she was just seventeen if you know what I mean”—and these babes I presume are older).

Here comes more symbolic intent… “ they are instructed… to place the raisins in their mouths, to ‘notice where the tongue is, notice the saliva building up in your mouth [wow it sure is doing it for me]. . . notice the trajectory of the flavor as it bursts forth [oh yeah], the flood of saliva [I'm drooling I'm droolin], how the flavor changes from your body’s chemistry.’ ”

As a guy what guilt I feel.  I just got off with merely reading this raisin part of the therpay and these hungry wanting wives of the elite or women who are the elite are still hungry, groping through the webs of mental sexual dysfunction therapy: “I want to feel horny. I want to want.” They shout it. They cry it out loud: We want to want–Desire.

Raisin therapy is merely the intro. It will not in itself produce the end result of the wanting to want syndrome. Psych doesn’t work that fast. There’s more goodies to come.  We want to feel IT… Alas, the terapist must make an attempt to go beyond raisin babble into that old standbye—yoga:

“She went through her usual yoga poses, but with ‘a cognitive reframe,’…She told herself, ‘over and over like a mantra,’ that she was an especially sexual woman, ‘capable of a high level of desire, a high level of response.’ And, she recalled, “there was a deliberate intent not only to listen to my body even more than I normally would in yoga but also to interpret the signs from my body as signs of my sexual identity. So my breathing was not just breathing…it was breathing because I was highly sexual.”

Beautifully put (it also gave me another erection).

Porn movies follow. They’re boring.

They still want to want. The women still want to want Desire.

As they work through the hierarchy of inner-self sexual self-discovery what is the key to success, the one super electrifying synaptic charge that will unfold the body like a flower? Think shudders, violent uncontrollable shaking; think  with sexual desire like the killer purr of a big cat.

Where are we headed girls? Right here. To a truth, the, er, the simple E=MC2 formula of lust. Here it is—“desire follows arousal.” Get aroused and you got what? Desire. Ladies, write it down quick in your little notebook. And remember, it all started with a rasin. Yes, of course. Arousal. But then again these women could’ve found that out by spitting those rasins out in the early session and going outside and asking  just about anybody on the street: Pardon me a moment please, would you mind telling me what follows arousal? Certainly you poor passionless sexual knave: Desire follows arousal.

The wanting part is really wanting arousal because why? Because arousal will lead to desire. See? It’s downright mathematically logical. And to think it started with raisins.  And so we can assume now at the end of the therapy sessions they found a modicum of arousal technique. The big question is: What comes after desire? Desire requires an object.  Problem is, the object of their aroused desire may not be aroused to desire them in return.

Arousal. Desire. Object. But isn’t there a little pill for all this nowadays you can take with a glass of water, something, say the size of a rasin?

Note: I’m trying not to laugh but did you know theres a book out there called “The Other Side of Desire: Four Journeys Into the Far Realms of Lust and Longing.” Sounds like its from someone who’d write that “NY Times” article linked above.

The art of lying

Lying  through inference. In this article/interview, replete with many examples, Errol Morris tells us about Seven Lies About Lying. …You see, he says, taking an example from the Bible, “They take his coat, rip it, smear it with blood, and show it to Jacob. They don’t tell Jacob that Joseph was eaten by a wild beast; Jacob makes the false inference himself. My theory is that deceit does not require language. To lie, you have to make a statement. You have to say something in words for it to be a lie. But deceit only requires misdirection. All it requires is the intent to have someone think something that is different from what you believe…”

The human experience…

The bad: “Angry neighbors claim Fersedy bathes in a stairwell using a hose, relieves himself in the yard, plays his radio all night and walks around half-nude…” Here.

The good: It’s clear that we still hold a fellow human being to a higher hygienic standard than a dog; after all, dogs urinate (among other things) in the yard all the time and we say nothing.

______________________________

“The newest moniker to join this happy parade is “cougar”. Cougars aren’t new — the term was first coined in America in the 1990s, but it’s now everywhere thanks to a US television series called Cougar Town, starring Courteney Cox Arquette, formerly the anally retentive one in Friends. As a result of its screening on ABC, women, it seems, are queuing up to call themselves cougars, although “total dingbat” might be more appropriate….What bothers me, though, is the way in which women are no longer allowed (by anyone, themselves included) to be anything other than sexual. If you’re not up for it, you might as well be dead: get with it, nanna, flash us some cleavage….” Here.

______________________________

Bitch! “Hey, Miley Cyrus, you made $25 million last year – toss a dollar in the tip cup [bitch]. The “Hannah Montana” star got $70 worth of steak and mac and cheese for herself and sister Brandi [bitches] at the Outback Steakhouse in Burbank last Sunday. Our spy says she [bitch] pulled an envelope of Benjamins out of her purse and handed one over, “but she [bitch] kept all the change.” Here. Advice to Outback guys: put all you Hannah Montana stuff in a big pile outside the building and hire a steamroller to run over it (that’s what I’m doing).

______________________________

Case of the all to0 itchy trigger finger. Now this is funny: Florida man gets up in the middle of the night after hearing an intruder in the hallway– right, you already know the rest of the story. Anyway here’s the really funny part:  ” ‘I thought I had an intruder in the house. Honest to God, she looks dead,’  he told the operator between sobs. ‘We were supposed to get married this Saturday.’ “

______________________________

And Dlisted says (direct quote)…”Here’s a little tale that will tickle your tonsils and make your genitals pass out. Some source (*cough*Tommy’s dildo cleaner*cough*) told OK! Magazine (via Showbiz Spy) that Stepford Katie is helping her alien master lose some chunk in his titties by giving sex to him any chance she gets. I tried picturing these two assholes rubbing on each other, but all I got was a 404 error…”

True tales…

“[My husband] saw a large 3-foot stick in the gutter and moved it up to the curb so it wouldn’t damage anyone’s tires. He didn’t change which house it was in front of — the fourth house — just moved it up 3 inches from the gutter to the curb. He was being considerate. Imagine our surprise when we went to dinner later to see the stick artfully placed in the middle of our yard! The people in the fourth house put the yard litter in our yard! My husband said it was the last time he ever did a good deed and I had him show me where the stick was before he moved it and I put it back there. I don’t need to tell you it was back in my yard when I got home tonight.  It is really upsetting to think I’m supposed to take the high road, put the stick in the trash can and let this arrogant woman continue to Mean Girl anyone she wants…. I feel so wrong letting that stick stay in my yard and telling the woman by my inaction that she can vandalize other people’s yards. It is clear the stick fell from the large tree in front of her house and fell down to the gutter below. There is no large tree in front of my house or any beside me. All one has to do is look at the evidence to know what happened. I LOVE my neighborhood. I worked hard to buy my house, I have roots here and my mother lived here when she was a child. This nasty neighbor has ruined my sense of community, but doing nothing is making me feel like a victim. My heart races and I feel sick to my stomach thinking this shrew can make the rules and make me suffer and I have to do it because I shouldn’t make it an issue…” Read all about this raw true life tale here.

Mall instinct…

“…Gatherers [cave women--think Raquel Welch in 'One Million BC'] sifted the useful from things that offered them no sustenance, warmth or comfort with a skill that would eventually lead to comfortable shopping malls and credit cards…” Article here.

___________________________________

Related: let’s not forget the shopping cart: [Such a]  trivial device as a shopping cart may surprisingly contribute to shaping exchanges in supermarkets… from ‘Calculation, qualculation, calqulation: shopping cart arithmetic, equipped cognition and the clustered consumer’– Tell it like it is…Yeah!

Resolved: NOT all women are totally and completely and absolutely evil

“…Women: do you have a man? If you do, better beware. Chances are that some lone female has her eye on him. A new study provides evidence for what many have long suspected: that single women are much keener on pursuing a man who’s already taken than a singleton. “The single women really, really liked the guy when he was taken,” says Melissa Burkley of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, who conducted the “mate-poaching” study with her colleague Jessica Parker…” Article here in “New Scientist.”

That strange misfiring orb in our heads (aka, the human mind)

“One day, after years of agony, an Australian man took a large quantity of dry ice and intentionally damaged his left leg, so that a surgeon would have to amputate it. The action was intentional and the man, Robert Vickers, described the feeling of waking up in the hospital without his leg as “absolute ecstasy.” He’s one of a small number of people who have what psychiatrists have come to call body integrity identity disorder in which patients report the desire to have one or more of their limbs amputated because the extremities don’t feel like they “belong” to their bodies…” Article here.

MySpace goes ghetto

Whites flee Myspace for Facebook.: “The people there [on My Space]  are more likely to be brown or black and to have a set of values that terrifies white society…”

Hey, anyone see the gov on Craiglist?

Hey, just curious, have any women out there been stalked by Christian  Gov Sanford on Craiglist? By the way, I’d at least like to squelch one rumor going around now: Despite the fact that his wife has thrown him out there is no truth to the ruomr that the gov has been reduced to camping out on the Appalachian Trail.

Yes, mere photo scenarios can mirror real married life

In setting up a wedding photo could that temporary phenomenon known as infatuation ever warrant these scenarios? Yes it could.

“Groom sitting at a faux witness stand, on trial for cadaver trafficking. Someone from wedding part wearing a black robe, holding a gavel, and sitting on a dais. Ethnically diverse guests in the jury box. Bride sitting on jury trading lustful glances with the defendant.”

Of course there is this scenario too, albeit during the honeymoon perhaps (which is about the time the infatuation begins to wear thin and there just ain’t much left):

“Bride is crying. Groom is sitting at a table. In front of him on the table are lines of pure Columbian cocaine, s razorblade, and a tightly rolled $20 bill. Groom is wearing only an undershirt, boxer shorts, and socks, which have holes in them. Wedding rings are off–everything was sold a long time ago to buy blow…Bride is a broken shell of a woman and is tugging on groom’s arm, begging him to stop.”

These two scenarios  are from Frank Ferri (“My Ideas for Staged Photos That Set Me Apart From Other Wedding Photographers”)  at this site.

Scanning “mourning and melancholia” with an fMRI machine

Now it’s medically official: “The dead never quite leave us; they return in dreams and reveries, they inhabit the pictures on our walls and lurk in our cell phones and disk drives…Every day you’re experiencing yearning for the deceased, looking for them in a crowd, or expecting them to come home.” Continue reading article.

The inventive human mind

And you thought waterboarding was nasty…Read here at the Contaminated.

We congratulate (posthumously) Prince Dafydd Gruffydd of Wales

Of course we’re talking of this day back in the all too human year of 1283. Back then on this very day Prince Gruffydd became the very first person to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Yes, “he was hanged, revived and disemboweled. His entrails were thrown into the fire as he watched, symbolic penance for ‘his sacrilege in committing his crimes in the week of Christ’s passion.’* Then he was beheaded and his body cut into quarters ‘for plotting the king’s death.’ ” The event is also notable for its punishment for a secular and a religious crime. We should never underestimate the creativity of human beings who lived centuries ago–or for that matter now.

Hey, no concession stand for refreshments? How you supposed to watch this without popcorn and ale?

Note: see previous post.

* I’m sure Jesus really appreciates the honor.

Man urinates on dying woman for you tube immortality

“Shouting, ‘This is YouTube material!’ a 27-year-old British man urinated on a dying woman who had collapsed on the street, the BBC and local Hartepool Mail and Northern Echo tell us. He also doused her with a bucket of water and covered her with shaving cream. The woman, 50-year-old Christine Lakinski, died at the scene of pancreatic failure. In a sad sign of the times, it was all recorded on a mobile phone. Read more.

The banality of lounging (at Camp Auschwitz)

SS guards relaxing at the camp’s recreation lodge (evidently they had a busy day)

Read the article here in the NY Times (along with slide show).