Potpourri

ODDS & ENDS

The following are seven items I’m not able to treat in depth (probably to your relief), so here's my quick take on these bits of Americana.

iPods & American Concentration Camps: Time Magazine (September 19, 2005) reports admiringly: Steve Jobs is a techie-business genius for making the tiniest, thinnest, most powerful device yet, due to hit Wal-Mart in time for Christmas shopping. Why is this one on the left better than the one shown on an old Newsweek cover? Answer: You can now store up to 1,000 songs and various photos on the one on the left. Therefore, Time predicts it's going to sweep the iPod market (I guess that means teenagers and wastrel young adults who use these things). Someone actually asked me a couple weeks ago why I didn’t have an iPod (until then, I hadn’t the vaguest idea what it is). Although I'd like to think I’m the kind of guy who tries to stay on top of the "tech curve," here’s one gadget I can’t imagine I’d ever be interested in paying for! You've gotta wonder at the emotional level of an average adult over the age of 35 (or a serious adult over age 21) who needs the continual din of noise blotting out the brain waves 24/7. But, struggling to be "cool," I tried hard to imagine under what circumstances I might possibly use a collection of up to 1,000 songs and photographs on a credit-card sized device. The only thing I could come up with is after the Black Helicopters (see my earlier post on conspiracies) have relocated me to a concentration camp--it might be a way to while away the hours after periodic torture sessions by Blackwater Security forces! You do know, don’t you, that the Loony Left has pinpointed these secret camps, authorized by the president and established by ex-Attorney General John Ashcroft? Except for a few camps that contain Muslim and profiled Muslims being held incommunicado and who are daily still being swept off America's streets in the aftermath of 9/11, the others are being maintained in mothball status--ready for action at the drop of an Executive Order (or something). Oh? You didn’t know all this? Well, check it out yourself on American Concentration Camps where you’ll also find lots of other links, in case you want to become the complete expert on the subject.

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Long Overdue. Finally! Dr. Laura Schlesinger, the tough-love, radio therapist shock-jock, announced it yesterday (9/22/05). In a steady, pitched rant, she revealed how the Association of American Psychologists has finally and officially debunked the two-decades-long scam that gave false comfort to thousands of stressed, wannabe-liberated females, while terrorizing thousands of parents and growing into a huge industry. During sessions in the shrinks' offices, women were coaxed to “recall” how someone in the past had sexually abused them--usually someone in the family. Then when these unfortunate patients begin to recall, under increasingly intense coaxing--usually over a period of time (naturally, it typically takes a number of high-priced sessions to achieve full results)--the ladies were instructed by their therapists to accept the fact that all their present problems stemmed from this deep repression (requiring more hourly therapy sessions, naturally).

Even more evil was the related industry of psycho-terrorism that was shaped and wielded by zealous psychologists who "discovered" yet another facet of the human mind which they called the "repressive sexual abuse" syndrome (or some similar mumbo-jumbo). Left to practitioners to experiment with this invention among the inner circles of their university laboratories would have been one thing. But before this hypothesis had been thoroughly tested and rejected as "high art of ridiculousness," the zealots rushed their "discoveries" to the public where they were promoted to the level of modern Salem witch trials, abetted by prosecutors who lost all sense of judicial objectivity and prudence. Hastily trained in this newly discovered syndrome, psychologists wrote manuals on how to coax innocent toddlers to “recall” how their caretakers, teachers, and parents engaged in wild sexual abuse--typically involving bizarre and physically unlikely instruments such as egg beaters, toys, knives and so on. Thank God, this insanity finally has been roundly debunked, although this comes as scant comfort to the citizens wrongly humiliated and imprisoned.

Now, if only someone would also take a shot at the hopelessly distorted and confused field of “Applied Psychology”—to examine how average, normal citizens are being harmed with a lot of Freudian and post-Freudian mumbo-jumbo instead of exposing them to a few basic concepts such as “ethics,” “honesty,” “personal accountability,” and the difference between “good” and “bad.” But then that would mean the rapid demise of a very large industry, including the most recent evolutionary monster that was spawned by the massive failure of Applied Psychology: Pharmo-Psychology: (Definition: "If you can't make 'em conform with psycho-babble, then give 'em a mind-altering chemical --works every time.") A middle-aged psychiatrist I talked to a couple years ago could scarcely contain his excitement over the success he was having with the Orwellian techniques. He outlined how frustrating his career had been for 15 years using applied clinical psychology. "So when I took up the 'pharma' route, I was astounded! I began having a response rate of 90 percent almost immediately." When I asked him (innocently) whether "response rate" meant "cure rate," he lectured: "That's not the point. The fact that a nearly comatose patient, after a few doses of lithium, may actually begin to respond to his environment--now that's exciting." I had the feeling my psychiatrist friend had not leveled with me about some important issues involved in his mind-alteration experiments. When I asked him if he knew the chemo-biological reasons for the reactions, he was incredulous: "What difference would it make if I knew why?" Well, O.K., doc, whatever! What I do know is that the nasty tentacles of this "exciting" new industry already have reached down into classrooms where its practitioners are doping our tots with Ritalin and other new compounds-- whenever teachers complain that their charges display "attention deficit disorder-like symptoms"-- turning them into compliant little zombies, and incredibly--with the complicity of parents! I'm sure glad my kids finished school before this Brave New World descended on them.

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Dr. Laura scores again! Until yesterday, I hadn’t heard much of or about this hard-hitting radio talk-show therapist . But what I heard yesterday raised my hopes for America's eventual restoration. That would mean the discrediting and discarding of a scam that has been perpetrated on American womanhood the past 30-plus years: The liberated woman, as preached by the School of American Feminism. Besides having irretrievably damaged a full generation of women, it is now completing the “demasculinization” of the country's male species. Ever since my own wife became infected with this new gospel and even after trying to understand and accommodate her quest to “find herself” (a slogan later modified by U.S. Army recruiters: “Be all you can be!”--recently morphed into "An Army of One"), I had been trying to figure out what I had done to deserve this treatment. I soon encountered the second stage of a fully liberated feminist-in-progress: Her demand that I surrender my manhood by asking me to compromise the traditional family environment and rearing of my two sons (10 and 15 years old). That was it! I would brook no compromise. Our negotiations came abruptly to an end--divorce was the only option, even though taking custody of children meant the significant redrawing of my ambitious mid-level military career, and considerable disruption and disorientation of the kids. Until now I’ve often been judged as a rigid and an unsympathetic person who, for everyone's better interests, should have found a way to compromise my sons' needs to accommodate my wife's experimental path onto which she had been lured by the surging Feminist Movement. Dr. Laura is now signaling that, in the long painful haul, I am being vindicated in my decision, and that one day, in the not-too-distant-future, the damage that the “Women’s Liberation Movement" has done to an entire generation of men, women, and children will have run its course. Thereafter, we will be able to reconstruct ourselves by nurturing wholesome, uncomplicated relationships between men and women that constitute a healthy family unit--thus returning us to the natural order of things.

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Ohmigod! Ted Turner turned diplomat??!! Sometime this week Ted returned from an unofficial trip (hopefully) to North Korea. Reportedly, he made the trip in order to personally bless initial successful multi-nation efforts in negotiating North Korea’s nuclear program into some sort of suspended animation (in return for promises of lots of critically required things like food and development of the country’s infrastructure).* These days, Ted is increasingly incoherent to my ears. This time, as incredible as it sounded at first hearing, he reported the following: He saw no evidence of hostility toward Americans, even on his tour of the DMZ (hosted, of course, by North Korea). He also saw lots of happy, smiling children—not the thousands who are reported in the Western press as starving. In summary, he allowed as how America can now turn to solving other problems, because the half-century long problem between the U.S., South Korea, and North Korea had finally been solved. Sounding a slightly “radical Left” note, Ted added, “North Korea was never really ever a threat.” Well, the only note I should probably add is that Ted’s slurred speech suggested that he was probably thoroughly soused the entire time he was on tour with Club North Korea and still hadn’t sobered up when he gave his report to journalists as he debarked in LAX. He didn’t say, but I trust he was going to call on and relate details of his diplomatic efforts to his ex--his nutty “flower child” soul mate, Jane “Hanoi” Fonda.

*Don't anyone hold your breath. This sounds suspiciously like the "deal" the Clinton-era Secretary of State, Madame Albright (who also gushed about how "sophisticated" and "charming" Kim Jong-il was) arranged in 1997: Korea promises (wink-wink) to shut off its nuclear weapons enrichment program in turn for American billions in wheat and other grants and subsidies. Remember what happened after Bush took over? The tin-horned, fine cognac-swigging dictator-clone of his deity father, reneged on the bargain with a hissy fit. Simultaneously, he made great public theater out of reopening the country's nuclear facilities, declaring he would resume his weapons production. The motive, of course, was to pressure the new American president who correctly tagged the rotten throw-back to Atilla the Hun a member of the "Axis of Evil." How is it that we Americans seem to fall for anyone who grins nicely, doesn't show the blood of his victims on his dinner jacket, and is able to charm the likes of the doddering fool, CNN's mogul Ted Turner?

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Why do I feel safer? Honestly, I’m not making this up (although I will confess that the thought passed by me briefly after Governor Kathleen Blanco fell apart when Katrina stared her down). I caught the following quip while pounding my keyboard—it came from our blaring TV set in the living room (I keep it on—occasionally the other half of my brain catches significant tidbits). It was a feminine voice responding to one of the endless inane finger-pointing questions from TV interviewers about the New Orleans disaster. She said: “I can’t put my finger on it, but is it wrong that I feel safer knowing a man is heading emergency planning efforts?”

This lady evidently hasn't heard about Mayor Nagin of New Orleans.

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Louis Farrakhan--his latest outrageous statements: White supremacists blew up the levee nearest the black section of New Orleans (I’ve a certain amount of tolerance for conspiracy theories—see my blog post “Is that helicopter overhead coming for me?”—but this goes well beyond my capacity). Speaking of helicopters, Louis has taken it another step--evidently, he's contacted the same spaceship in orbit that was supposed to pick up the California bunch who thought it was waiting behind the Hale-Bopp Comet a couple years back. Louis announced that Allah willed this vehicle and its purpose will be soon known by all of us. And then there’s his pronouncement that Katrina and approaching Rita are instruments of Allah's revenge on the corrupt infidel country, the United States. He called the hurricanes “righteous winds of Allah” (this metaphor reportedly was issued in a recent fatwah by Iran’s chief Shi’ite Iman). If there weren’t so many loonies running loose in the country and ready to believe this and any other nut with a slick conspiracy line, I’d say let’s color ol’ Louis as a vaudeville clown. However . . . .

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Fascism. I’ve had it with those misguided, under-informed people who are misusing this word these days. On C-Span this morning Jonah Goldberg, a politico-comedic writer online reminded me how this word is being so widely and innocently misused by the “sheeple” (sheep-people) who mimic loud political orators using it maliciously. Worse than that, it’s being misused by the Loony Left as a terrible sword to wound political opponents. This latter group also includes academic progressives on many American campuses, as well as the salon-set embedded in various fashionable propaganda organizations--such as the Dr. Howard Dean's Democratic National Committee, down the line to Michael Moore's moveon.org and his patsy, Cindy Sheehan (who today, if you didn't catch it, was spanked by Big Momma herself, Hillary--yes, that Hillary, who is trying to nudge to the political center, and you can't do that by letting "fringies" take your spotlight).

If people had an inkling of what fascism was and how it was employed from 1920 through 1945 by National Socialist regimes in Europe by functionaries of the sickest regime in mankind’s history, then they would be ashamed to use the word "fascism" to characterize an American president or the people in his administration. Because the Leftie Loons have been reading and using his books today, it was unfortunate that all Josef Goebbel's books on how to manipulate "sheeple" weren't also destroyed the day he and his Fuehrer destroyed themselves, their wives and children while cornered like rats in the Berlin "Fuehrer Bunker."