Sunday, January 05, 2025
Tuesday, December 31, 2024
Apple Roller Of The Year, 2024
Yep, it's none other than Jimmy Carter, the U.S. president from 1977 to 1981.
Think about it. He was an outstanding type of Libra, ruled by the planet Eris YEARS before she was discovered but acting on her orders daily, in every situation. He was an incredibly Discordian world leader.
>> He served on battleships in the U.S. Navy but harmed a fly in his life, in blatant contradiction of what the military wants its sailors to do.
>> As Commander-in-Chief, he busied himself brokering peace in the Middle East, something nobody else had ever really made much progress on.
>> In an incredibly hateful, violent, bitterly divided country, he's cheerfully worked building houses for Habitat for Humanity and raising funds for whoever might need them.
>> He held out in this lifestyle past his 100th birthday, voted in the 2024 election to show people who he wanted in the Oval Office, and then mercifully EXITED STAGE LEFT before Donald Trump came back into the White House, in an epic snub.
This is the essence of discord, peeps. Where he saw war, he made peace, even if it looked completely impossible. He disagreed even with disagreement itself. He ignored unimportant twiddles like race and class and treated everyone as the most important and deserving person he'd ever met, right in the teeth of the way we do things in this species.
He even sneaked across the border to pretty much eradicate the dreaded Guinea Worm, bringing infections down from 3.5 million per year when he started to only 14 last year. Just because he wanted to, and because nobody else did.
In this world, that's purely Discordian.
I don't want to say there will never be another one like him. I wish I could run him through a copier because this is the kind of discord we need more of.
Tuesday, December 10, 2024
Monday, December 02, 2024
Thursday, October 03, 2024
One Of Those Special Moments of Bureaucracy...
So there was this moment of mayhem in a local health establishment. Not one, but three different people reported the situation to Child Protective Services. This is how it came out:
The first person who made a report learned about the other reports at the same time he was instructed to call not one, but 2 different people at Protective Services to provide more information. One of the people he was told to call said she'd been assigned to investigate the situation. More emails were flying about it the next day, and he learned about yet another report filed when the child in question reported more mayhem at home.
That second day -- less than 24 hours from the time he filed the report -- that same guy who filed the first report got a letter from Protective Services saying that his report was screened out because it didn't meet criteria to warrant an investigation. Huh?
And one of the emails he'd received an hour before that said the investigator was filing to have the child removed from home. Double huh?
This is our government at work.
Friday, August 16, 2024
FALSEHOOD IN WARTIME
WE ALL HAVE TO LIVE WITH OURSELVES SOMEHOW.
Having collected the lies, the author then helpfully debunks them for us. For example: the very first thing I learned in this book is that a "fact" I learned in history class is untrue. Ponsonby explained that NO Holocaust victims were ever boiled down into soap. The rumor started, he says, during the PREVIOUS WAR, when someone said the Germans were melting down their own dead to make glycerine for military use. It made the papers and everything. You can see the ancestry here: glycerine is usually a by-product of soapmaking, and it's used to make TNT. Somehow that rumor waited until the Holocaust became common knowledge in a later war, and here we are today, still breathing fire at the Nazis for what they did. It makes everything we did to them, and the Axis powers, seem way beyond justified.
THANK YOU, MR. PONSONBY. THIS MAKES SO MUCH SENSE. I remember wondering, decades ago, how much soap you could really make out of Holocaust victims because they were essentially walking skeletons. Soap is made of rendered fat. If you're starting from Holocaust victims, you're going to end up with NO SOAP. But at the time, I didn't really think it through. MAYBE NOBODY DID.
What I find striking is that apparently the real Holocaust WASN'T BAD ENOUGH for the rumor-mongers. Or anyone else. We have an ENDLESS APPETITE for rage and indignation, but we also need to feel like NICE PEOPLE who wouldn't do anything nasty without a good reason. The lies that spring from this desire to be NICE AND ANGRY are almost immortal, like a magic glob of used chewing gum passed from mouth to mouth, getting MORE FLAVORFUL the farther it travels. It may finally be stuck under the edge of the kitchen table, but you can always put it back in your mouth and start chewing again. What flavor is that gum? APPLES OF DISCORD, I'll wager.
The book's author quoted one of his colleagues as saying that wartime disinformation will change when human nature does.
Fat chance.
Can I offer you an apple?