(Gosh, do you sense an ongoing theme here in the Duck Pond lately? Maybe I should change it to the Dove Pond? Hey, works for me. Any of you got a prob with that? Why not leave a comment? Oh, that's right, you can't anymore. Why? Because I gave yas ample opportunity to do so and only one of you seized it, and only wrote 2 lame-ass words at that. So the comment sections are toast. Gone. Toodle-oo. Plus the voting on Best Post: Year 1 has been cancelled. Same reason. Congrats. You have cast your vote by your silence. I'm driving. Get in the back seat where you belong. Wanna make your voice heard? Get your own damn blog. Meanwhile, since you're here, sit back and relax and ride the waves of my mind...)
MORE EXCERPTS FROM THE NWOPC NEWSLETTER
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Earth (the dot in the middle) as seen from 3.7 billion miles away by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, on 6/6/1990.
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
--Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994
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I see the corporate media and the government as a covert oppressor, like Iago, who comes in the guise of a friend, but secretly covets what you have. The government pretends to be our friend and protector when they are really our oppressor. Clear Channel is Iago, playing anthems and providing chants and posters on the one hand, then perpetuating the ignorance of the masses on the other by controlling the (right agenda) message, not providing any answers or solutions and playing on people's fears and hopelessness.--Mitch Balonek
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Alaska Says No to Patriot Act
Alaska has joined a growing national rebellion against the USA Patriot Act, voting to oppose the massive federal anti-terrorism law passed by Congress soon after Sept. 11, 2001. Alaska's measure goes further than most, advising police and other state agencies not to "initiate, participate in, or assist or cooperate with an inquiry, investigation, surveillance or detention" if there is not "reasonable suspicion of criminal activity under Alaska State law."
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/us/DailyNews/alaska_patriot030523.html
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AT LAST, WMD'S FOUND... ER, IN MARYLAND
- musta been destroyed before the War started, eh?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,965319,00.html
'US finds evidence of WMD at last - buried in a field near Maryland'
Julian Borger in Washington, Wednesday May 28, 2003, The Guardian
The good news for the Pentagon yesterday was that its investigators had finally unearthed evidence of weapons of mass destruction, including 100 vials of anthrax and other dangerous bacteria. The bad news was that the stash was found, not in Iraq, but fewer than 50 miles from Washington, near Fort Detrick in the Maryland countryside.
The anthrax was a non-virulent strain, and the discoveries are apparently remnants of an abandoned germ warfare programme. They merited only a local news item in the Washington Post.
But suspicious finds in Iraq have made front-page news (before later being cleared), given the failure of US military inspection teams to find evidence of the weapons that were the justification for the March invasion.
Even more embarrassing for the Pentagon, there was no documentation about the various biological agents disposed of at the US bio-defence centre at Fort Detrick. Iraq's failure to come up with paperwork proving the destruction of its biological arsenal was portrayed by the US as evidence of deception in the run-up to the war.
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LAST BUT NOT LEAST, JUST IN CASE YOU'RE TOO LAZY TO CLICK THE PICK TO CLICK, HERE'S THE LATEST FROM MARK MORFORD...
The Great Teen Sex Conundrum: Should American teens actually be encouraged to have really good, healthy sex?
By Mark Morford
Don't look now because oh my goodness it's about sex, and teens, and it turns out that more teens are having sex at younger and younger ages and until now no one really knew just how dire and/or fascinating and/or calamitous it all was and who pray who will save the children?
Turns out, this new Kaiser Family Foundation survey says, that boys in particular are feeling the peer pressure to have sex even more than girls, and sometimes gasp horror alcohol and even oh my God say it isn't so drugs are lubricating factors in the divine clumsy groping interactions, can you believe it and isn't that shocking.
Also: Four in 10 sexually active teens have found it necessary to use pregnancy tests, and more than half (!) of 15- to 17-year-olds say they've been with someone sexually, and two in three have gone the full sexual distance by high school graduation. Oh dear.
These are the latest findings. This is the latest study, more comprehensive than most regarding the sexual behavior of the young, because it's apparently some sort of social barometer, like gas prices or economic forecasts or bikini styles, something very telling and something about which we should all be very concerned as we guzzle our cocktails and smoke our pot and have our sex even when we don't really want to.
Always fascinating and strange and weirdly uninformative, these teen-sex surveys are, as frowning family-planning/Bible/gov't groups across the board take it all to mean either the apocalypse is nigh or juvenile debauchery is rampant and those extraterrestrial teens are outta control and dangerous and sometimes drunk and condomless and Something Must Be Done, though no one has any idea exactly what.
Teen sex is that often unstable, panicky, unapproachable cultural subject most lawmakers -- and many parents -- seem loathe to really want to acknowledge in any real way, no one really wanting to think of the young as the new and explosively sexual creatures they so obviously are, what with all those taints of abuse and groping priests and screeching pedophilia headlines swirling in the cultural miasma.
So, tentative laws get passed. Hugely ineffectual scare-tactic programs with names like "Get Real About AIDS" and "Reducing the Risk" get launched, utterly limp multimillion-dollar GOP-funded anti-sex campaigns like "Sex Can Wait" splash all over schools promoting the joys of abstinence or the joys of waiting until marriage or the joys of praying to Jesus to stop those vile delicious pictures in your dad's Hustler or your mom's erotica collection from slipping like hot silk into your every thought, when not a single one of those things contains a single iota of anything resembling joy.
Meanwhile, the hormonally fire-breathing teens get utterly pummeled. Media is insanely saturated with sexed-up images, TV shows and magazines and videos and movies and whatshername from that odious little Lizzie McGuire movie stuck on billboards across America in a skintight tank top and a Spandex butt-hugging miniskirt looking all flirty and nubile and coyly edible. God, but we are invidious hypocrites.
This is the vicious double standard. This is the insane mixed message, worse than it ever was, hammering into these sexually mal-educated kids the idea that sex is, of course, the greatest goddamn thing in the entire history of the known universe ever and is the only thing really worth living for, and is concomitantly also the ickiest most disease-riddled guilt-packed disgustingly wrong and blasphemous and abusive and victimizing act you can ever do with another person with the notable exception of convincing them to turn Republican.
Want to know what's really to blame for the vast majority of sad teen pregnancies and drunken backseat gropings and really unpleasant de-virginizing experiences in this country?
Want to know the root cause of nearly every crude high school lug thinking sex means pumping like a jackhammer for two grunting minutes and every beautiful girl thinking sexual pleasure means lying there frozen and pretending to moan for those two same minutes? You got it -- it's that very same mixed message.
This is the problem. There is no survey that addresses true teen sex. There is no data, no stats, no one really celebrating the idea that, because teens are, have always been and will continue to be, absolutely and insanely sexually demonically possessed, that maybe, just maybe they should be, gasp oh my God don't say it, encouraged to enjoy sex as the raw and real and consensual and mutually beneficial and sticky and wonderful and tricky and deeply mindful but ultimately glorious act it so bafflingly is. Wow what a radical notion.
Here is what will never happen in your lifetime but really, really should: Raw and wide-open and casually explicit and non-insultingly dumbed-down sex ed for every teen, beginning in junior high and continuing every year until graduation, in every school in every town and every city and every teen.
Not just indifferent medical diagrams and color charts and awful educational films about reproduction and hormones and the horrors of STDs, but actual raw and real and human and humorous and dirty discussion, full of swear words and slang and laughter and notions of love and respect and orgasm and true information.
I advocate, in a nutshell, nothing short of a revolution in sex ed in this nation. Possible? Absolutely. Probable? No way.
And it's tragic, really. Because perhaps more than anything else, what we need right now in this country (and, yes, on this planet), is a fresh population of deeply sexually attuned and comfortable and nonabusive citizens. Oh what a difference that would make.
We need more orgasms and less whining. More lubrication, less ignorance. More sensual body awareness, less stiff flabby awkward pain. More deep sticky joy, less cold bitter fear. Go ahead, try and refute.
There exists this very correct theory: Nearly every war and every despot and every uptight sneering power-mad leader and every warmongering culture is a direct result of that culture's or that leader's deep-seated sexual frustration and sexual unfulfillment and sexual angst.
Let's put it another way: A sexually aware planet is a soothed planet. An informed and open-minded and ecstatically satisfied nation is a peaceful nation. A sexually open and healthy and sticky and respectful citizen is a happy and productive citizen. Clear enough?
And it starts, of course, with teenagers. Don't we want to help our children? Give them a better life, more happiness, leave them a more openly and divinely orgasmic world? Of course we do. After all, what could be more patriotic than that?
