Oklahoma: Filling in the Blank

So why am I even here in Oklahoma? Why do I continue to live in a state that can’t even kill people on purpose cleanly, accept federal dollars to improve the health care provided to its citizens, resist electing the most extreme kind of dumb-asses the country has to offer, etc?

It’s simple: I was born here, my kids live here and if I were to just write the state off… well, the terrorists would win.

It wasn’t but a year or two ago when a co-worker came to me to ask if it wasn’t true that “Obamacare” required that children be injected with a microchip (“the Mark of the Beast”). 70+ percent of the voters approved a statewide referendum to prohibit ‘Sharia Law’ here. As many people that claim, nationally, their belief that the Hebrew God created the world less than 10,000 years ago, I’d bet that almost twice as many Oklahomans believe the same. If a plurality of my statesmen aren’t home-schoolers that are ‘hooked on phonics’, they wish they had the patience/resources to be.

Oklahoma’s people are largely an ignorant and fearful folk: they fear negroes (especially the President), non-European immigrants, change, secular anything,  books, the commie United Nations, most new ideas and the Big Scary World.  Believe me, I know about Oklahoma. I was born here, grew up here and stayed here.

Believe me: it was not always this FUCKING STUPID A PLACE TO LIVE.   No, the Dark Flame of Ignorance has been carefully tended and stoked to make Oklahoma a Beacon of Idiocy:

• Governor Mary Frick’n Fallin, the adulterous darling of the Tea Party, has been paid to oppose damned near everything that could make things better for this state while her spoiled brat daughter openly mocks Native Americans
• Senator James Mountain Inhofe, who has for years been a global laughing-stock over his conspiratorial thinking on human sexuality, climate change and the dang-nabbed 20th Century in general
• The numb-skull state representative that put a 10 Commandments monument on the grounds of the capitol but couldn’t get the spelling right
• Another cretin on the state payroll that campaigned against using human fetuses in food products
• The list goes on and on!

So why am I still living in Oklahoma?

Some amazing things have happened here.
I have fond memories of ‘liquor by the wink’.
Once upon a time, we had the highest per capita membership in the Communist Party in the nation.
Cannabis was once the number one cash crop.
The musicians are amazing here.
The state bird, the scissor-tail flycatcher, is cool.
Gas prices are low.
Maybe I’m too lazy to move and if I did only the Crazies would be left!

Fuck Governor Fallin and all her kind.
Fuck the followers of Oral Roberts and his fellow travellers.
Fuck the Koch Brothers and their veinal scheming.
Fuck all the manipulators of well-meaning Okies! Their hearts are pure, but —

I’m staying here to fill in the blank, the blank that they told me to erase and write something else in (but I won’t!).
I’m staying here to remind them of every time they are so terribly wrong that they pretend like they weren’t.
I’m the fly that stays clear of their patent medicine ointment.
I’m no Tom Joad, but for crying out loud, if people like me left this state, what would be left besides the easily led?
I am an Oklahoman, and I’m  staying here whether they like it or not: I want to rub them the wrong way.

Maybe I’m staying just to annoy the rest of ‘us’… because ‘we’ need to be annoyed.
What they’ve done to us shouldn’t be forgiven or forgotten or excused.
Those bastards did it for money and power and greed, straight up.
I wanna be here to watch the payback, if it ever comes.

 

 

We’ll miss Lou Reed. Simonson, not so much.

http://youtu.be/Fr8CszsqLGk

Pioneering rocker and songwriter Lou Reed died Sunday at the age of 71.  He is survived by spouse Laurie Anderson, and will be mourned by his peers and millions of fans. His influence was by no means limited to music.

The more information we have about what governments and corporations are up to the less we seem to trust them. Will conspiracy theories eventually destroy democracy? My money is on saving it, actually.

If you lived here you’d be home by now: Earthships, the post-apocalyptic housing of tomorrow, today!

Something big and mysterious is rising from a floating barge at a former Navy base in the middle of San Francisco Bay. Google’s fingerprints are all over it.

Why it sucks to be a chicken anywhere, and why Western Imperialist chickens are no good for fortune-telling in Mali.

The NSA is concerned bummed that teenagers are sexting less.

From the “All Politics is Local and Personal” Department

Mayor Dewey Bartlett’s former chief of staff on Tulsa’s disproportionate murder rate:

“It’s hard for the community to be concerned about the number of homicides when it’s gang members killing gang members. When you think about it, who’s really complaining about that?“

Double dittos! Those stray bullets are a lifestyle choice ‘those people’ made by being poor and ‘ethnic’! No skin off your self-entitled, lily-white, gated-community ass, eh, Terry? They need to just pull themselves up by their zip-codes, amIright?

Yes, I rather think that Mr. Simonson is what thinking people call an “irredeemable cocksucker”, in case I was being too subtle.

Simonson was Dewey’s go-to guy before a very petty little corruption scandal finally forced him out. Who needs any other reason to change mayors?

DARPA’s Space Cannibals and Superman vs. the KKK

How Superman single-handedly thwarted the KKK. For realsies!

The bogus home page for Mankato, Minnesota may be one of the oldest running jokes on the ‘net. Created by Prof. Don Descy as a lesson on the inherent quality of information on the Web, it describes points of interest that include Mankato’s hot springs, underwater city, pyramid, nuclear submarine manufacturing plant and whale-watching areas. Unwitting tourists still get sucked in.

Help save the endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus! There may be only a few left in the wild, and the captive breeding program can’t keep up with habitat destruction!

These tiny marsupials have so much sex they just fall apart and die, That’s a party animal!

DNA from ancient skeletons has revealed how a complex patchwork of prehistoric migrations fashioned the modern European gene pool.

Miguel Ordeñana is a biologist with Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and an expert on wildlife camera traps. You’ll never guess how he lures jaguars in for their close-ups.

One way to cut costs and improve resiliency of critical orbital infrastructure would be to recycle/cannibalize defunct satellites in orbit using robots. DARPA expects a demonstration of this orbital Frankensteinery by 2016.

The tea party group FreedomWorks has fallen into dire financial straits, and was forced to take out a $1 million line of credit earlier this year, sources close to the organization told BuzzFeed.

The Council for National Policy is the most powerful conservative group you’ve never heard of. They back the government shutdown, the  “Ground Zero Mosque” bullshit, blocking  a number of judicial nominees, and just generally acting like a bunch of Visigoths.

A Message To House Republicans From Guy Fawkes. He’s been there, gang. Listen to him.

In an escalation of the stalemate gripping Washington, House Republicans voted today to shut down the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that controls reasoning and impulses.

Forbes suggests The Tea Party’s Demands Are Not Unreasonable. They Are Impossible.

The National Alliance of Hostage-Takers and Blackmailers, a watchdog group that monitors negative images of extortionists in the media, today blasted President Obama for his repeated comparisons between them and the Tea Party Republicans, calling his remarks “degrading and hurtful.

Psychiatrists Deeply Concerned For 5% Of Americans Who Approve Of Congress (TheOnion).

“Food is the First Thing, Morals Follow On!”

“Food Will Win the War” –  an awesome 1942 propaganda cartoon from Walt Disney. Tom Waits gives us a rougher taker on ‘food security’ (what a screwed-up euphemism)!

While  the US government is shut down, the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) Food and Nutrition program will not be receiving its regular federal funding. Feminist Hulk is building a list of alternative sources of infants and children nutrition aid sources… while the Teahadi terrorists inflict their childish tantrums (at full pay) on the vulnerable.

Fox News host Elisabeth Hasselbeck on Thursday suggested that welfare recipients who had air conditioning and cell phones were part of the “ugly side of entitlements”. Then Jesus threw His beer at the TV and damned her and all those like her to Eternal Torment.

Have they been huffing starter fluid, or what? “Truckers Ride For The Constitution” (a Tea Party group formerly known as “Truckers To Shutdown America” before their original Facebook page was killed) plans to clog the Interstate 495 inner loop from Oct. 11 to Oct. 13. Apparently they wish to emulate French farmers, who regularly pull this kind of stunt!

Get Out Your Calculators, It’s Time To Go To Crazyland, TX for a look at Louie “Louie” Gohmert’s FEC filing. “Why does his staff get pizza but he dines at The Capitol Hill Club for $1,500 a month? Do you think the staff will try to poison him when they find this out?“. And where does he get a $10 plane ticket?

Death is permanent in Ohio, lurking everywhere in Florida… and debatably redundant in Oklahoma.

It’s that time of year again! New Pumpkin Spice Channel To Offer Fall-Themed Hardcore Pornography (TheOnion).

The Smell of Peanut Butter Could Diagnose Alzheimer’s, because your olfactory is one of the first things affected.

Noted holy man Pat Robertson cranksplains AIDS: “I think the World Health Organization was doing some experiment in the Congo on a monkey virus, a monkey injection to fight polio and it wasn’t an injection, they put it in sugar cubes and they gave it to these Africans, a couple hundred thousand in the test.”

The Wurst is Yet to Come

Have you tried crossing the beams?

Republican Debt-Ceiling ‘Truthers’ Are Risking a Financial Disaster: “Like the insane, nuclear bomb-worshipping mutants who live beneath the Planet of the Apes, the debt-limit truthers and denialists are willing to risk disaster in a last-ditch attack on Obamacare”. Here Are Three Debt-Ceiling Lies You’ll Hear From the GOP This Week.

The Big Lie that the Affordable Care Act was “rammed through in the middle of the night without a single Republican vote” doesn’t align well with the years of debate and negotiations Senate records show. Look out for that “memory hole”!

Ohh, burn! Taliban mock ‘selfish and empty-minded American leaders’ over government shutdown. ‘Even a stopped clock’, as the saying goes.

On the origins of “goo goo ga joob”.

How to Spot a Narcissist… just Google “Ted Cruz”?

How much energy does it take to vaporize a human? We have the technology.

According to a new documentary, the quantity of cow intestines required to manufacture Zeppelins for WWI was so enormous that the making of sausages was temporarily outlawed in Germany and allied or occupied parts of Austria, Poland and northern France.

Neuro-enhancement in the military: far-fetched or an inevitable future? I’d settle for a Legislative Branch that wasn’t brain-dead.

Eighty to 90 percent of people who use crack and methamphetamine don’t get addicted, and the small number who do become addicted are nothing like the popular caricatures.

Robotic Snakes Slither Their Way Into Ancient Archaeology. First the Congress, now the Pyramids.

An extinct Judean date palm has been grown from a 2,000 year old seed found in the ruins of Herod’s palace. Still no progress rekindling patriotism or honor among the Tea Party zombies, though.

This bizarre lizard bleeds green poison that can kill you. Sort of like the Koch Brothers.

(TheOnion) Shutdown breakthrough! “According to Congressional aides, if the White House agrees to deliver Malia, as well as a pint of Michelle Obama’s blood, a ram’s horn, and a shard of obsidian to the basement of the Cannon House Office Building by this evening, a House vote on the bill could take place as early as Saturday“.

Electronic cigarettes could save the lives of millions of smokers, or they could set millions of non-smokers on the path to nicotine addiction. The pressure to regulate them piles up… without a speck of science.

Dutch authorities using ‘scratch and sniff’ cannabis cards to bust pot growers. This brings up a funny-but-true story. A good friend of mine, a graphic artist, wanted to do a cannabis-scented scratch’n’sniff  thing for a local “head shop” in the ’70s. 3M was the sole provider of the technology at the time, so he ordered some samples, but none of them smelled anything close to right. After some back and forth with 3M, he finally got someone on the phone who told him “Look, 3M is a pretty conservative company. Even if one our fragrance engineers knew what pot smelled like they could never admit it.” And thus the project was dropped. Apparently it’s not a problem for the Netherlanders today.

Something surreal from Banksy:

Nature Plays Her Little Jokes

From the “You Know Nature Hates You When Department”! Absurd Creature of the Week: This Prehistoric Elephant Had a Huge Spork for a Mouth.

Breaking News! Kid Not Getting In Strange Van For Anything Less Than King-Size Bar (TheOnion)

A new ‘shape memory’ metal  is reported in the journal Nature.

Five ways to rob a bank using the internet.

In which Vitriol is put to the Test -or- how perverse is that incentive, anyway? All hail Wondermark!

A neato permaculture site: Permies (Thanks, Terry!) and here’s how to make acorn flour.

A whacko conspiracy site: Presscore. It’s Canadian but completely uncivil! Maybe they want us to think they’re Canadian, hmmmm….

Insights into the Personalities of Conspiracy Theorists: distrust of authority and low agreeableness are among factors underlying the willingness to believe.

Goblinbooks is always a favorite with me. The quote is from Carpenter’s Halloween, in case you didn’t recognize it, and the face is from under some mossy rock I guess.. Scary!

“I’m Just a Law”

Thanks, BoingBoing!

(Pre) History speaks in tongues!

“Ya-bando-ba-ba-basoya!”. Speaking in tongues was mentioned in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, but it died out until the 20th century.

In 1971 a book hit the shelves suggesting human evolution was driven by cannibalism. The book is The Beginning Was the End by Oscar Kiss Maerth. Yes, Virginia, we’re all DEVO.

A team of scientists say they have uncovered evidence of early humans in China dating back at least 1.6 million years, the oldest signs of early humans in North China.

The megalithic enclosures of Gobekli Tepe (Urfa, Turkey) are the most ancient sacred structures of stone known so far, dating back to the 10 millennium BC. It turns out that they may have been originally constructed to celebrate the appearance of a new, extremely brilliant star in the southern skies: Sirius.

The earliest known iron artifacts, 5000 year old funeral beads from Egypt, were made with meteorite iron!

The Hall of Ma’at has many papers debunking “alternative archaeology”, but I’m not giving up on the Solutrean Hypothesis just yet!

Could a blood test predict whether a person is at risk of committing suicide? For the first time, a set of proteins in the blood have been linked to suicidal behavior.

Serious People said that budget deficits hurt the economy. So we increased taxes so deficits are wayyyyy down. Now the Serious People are saying that taxes hurt the economy. Maybe the Serious People don’t know what they are talking about?

Officials in Tennessee say that a father and his 12-year-old son died over the weekend after an AR-15 rifle accidentally discharged, causing a fire and a series of explosions in a room full of ammunition in their home. If only they’d had more guns!!!

Guns don’t kill people, boredom does: Oklahoma teens charged in Australian baseball player’s killing. Slap an NRA sticker on that coffin, why don’t you? Oh, right: that would require some perspective on things, yeah!

Peanuts meets The Smiths, shotgun vs. drone

I just applied for a one-way ticket to Mars…. I can think of worse fates. What’s that? Global property values just jumped? Sell! SELL, DAMMIT!

Some members of Congress want to put a national park on the Moon. A bill introduced last week in the House of Representatives, the Apollo Lunar Landing Legacy Act, would establish historic preservation sites where the Apollo 11 through 17 astronauts touched down and walked on the lunar surface.

Two Russian cosmonauts did a spacewalk which lasted for seven hours and 29 minutes outside the International Space Station on Friday to set up cables for the arrival of new space lab on December. No leak has happened but the story is remarkable as it surpassed longest Russian spacewalk record in 2000 by 13 minutes.

Not even Silicon Valley can escape history. A revolution began there,  and this is what is left over.

Spoons united against forced marriage!

Mark Twain, Father of the Internet. He saw it all clearly through his ‘telelectroscope.’

The public may imagine hacking to be a modern phenomenon, and a nefarious one at that, but hacking is a mindset that dates back four centuries!

Here is Cracked’s list of 7 Modern Conveniences That Are Way Older Than You Think.

The World Ends with a Handshake: Unraveling the Apocalypse of ‘Southland Tales’.

Former presidential candidate and ‘social troglodyte conservative’ Rick Santorum thinks that the term “middle class” is “Marxism talk”. What the hell does he know?

Shotgun vs. drone!

We are ‘GO’ for the Tulsa Mini Maker Faire!

(Update: This Saturday, 28 September is the big day. I’ve been nervously watching the weather forecasts and trying to optimize my load-out for the possibility of clouds and/or rain. Since my original plans were for solar, electrical and chemical manipulations of matter, rain is decidedly counter to my plans, so I’m hoping it won’t be happening.  If it’s overcast, maybe I won’t be able to cook hot dogs with the Fresnel spiral solar concentrator, but the electro-etching and stove-top brass making demo can still happen. A full downpour will put a damper on pretty much everything. Keep your fingers crossed!)  

My theme is “Make It: Cheap and Dirty” – or – How to do stuff you shouldn’t be able to do… for next to nothing!”  I’m placing a heavy emphasis on re-use, re-purposing and the “it isn’t junk unless you don’t use it” principle.

I’m going with more an “open play” format than a fixed spiel. Sure, I’ll have some handouts of the how-tos that ran in Steampunk Magazine, some basic “Ohm’s Law” level electronics theory, some link-lists of fun/educational stuff and I’ll have some of my cheap/dirty projects on hand to show how little refinement is required to get usable results. Mostly I’ll be demonstrating simple methods of making-tweaking-hacking things and generally trying to get people used to the idea that tinkering is rewarding! 

My updated agenda:

• Fire up the ‘Eurosealer’ and clothes iron to illustrate plastic fusing techniques to improvise a rain-shelter from plastic grocery bags and drop-cloths (and possibly floatation devices, as required)
• Turn dull, everyday bronze pennies into golden BRASS pennies for the kids (and others), just to break the ice
• Talk about the cheap tools I just can’t live without, the beauty of pawn shops, garage sales and why “cheap” can be “best”
• Give a quick rundown of some of my favorite household chemicals and the amazing things you can do with them (with demos), applied dumpster-diving, constructive cannibalism, why you should never throw away a “wall-wart”, general Q&A and other cheap-simple-dirty topics, tips and tricks
• Etch some printed circuit boards with cheap, simple and surprisingly “green” chemicals, demonstrate electro-cleaning and galvanic etching
• Provide a hands-on soldering tutorial and demo ‘surface mount’ soldering without special tools (you got a hot air gun, toaster oven or electric skillet?)
• Share a couple of really cheap/simple solar concentrator designs (Update: no sun, no point- information only)
• Assure you that you can take on that ‘Wild Blue Project’ you’ve been putting off, extoll on the value of creative failure and the benefits of a ‘Stop Planning and Just Do It, Already!‘ attitude

More than this I cannot say at this time.  If you’ve got any ‘idears’ to add (I’ve got eight hours, 8!) let me know early so I can be prepared!

I’m certain that this will be a whole lot of fun and I hope you’ll all come by to say howdy, and be sure to visit Dana Swift@Swift Science (he explained digital electronics to me the only time it ever stuck, back when I still fit my Star Trek uniform), the Tulsa Garden Railroad Club (my very oldest friends!) and all the other fine presenters at this, the very first Tulsa Mini Maker Faire!