SRF Heavy Industries

A culturally sensitive name for a Brazilian ocelot born at the Louisville Zoo, eh? Naming a purebred entity of South American stock after the phenomenon that wiped out nearly all native culture with violence and forced religious conversion, destroying and melting down irreplaceable artifacts in the name of pillage and greed?

Who the fuck cares! Ocelots aren’t culturally sensitive pussies, man! BITE THE POWER!

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I just need to mention this:

If the motivation behind your “community standards” legislation, like your zoning regs or your “what days of the week you can’t buy beer” blue laws or whether or not you are allowed to own, sell, or purchase “adult novelites” or “role-playing aids” or posters that look funky in ultraviolet light or various and sundry non-approved forms of harmless recreational chemistry or food items or whether you are allowed to undergo some dreadful but necessary medical procedure or what willing adult can enter into what kind of partnership with whatever other willing adult(s)—if the motivation behind those regulations is the deep-seated fear that if the morals in the area slip too much then God will destroy your dinky little know-nothing podunk rural hamlet like He destroyed Sodom (not to be confused with Saddam) and Gomorrah (not to be confused with Gamera) and, according to Pat Robertson, Nawlins (not to be confused with New Orleans), then your dinky little know-nothing podunk rural hamlet (not to be confused with the Entire State of Georgia, USA) has laws that are in clear violation of the “establishment” clause of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which states, “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion”; because if the fear of eradication by some clumsy and fat-fingered Hand of God is not a religious motivation, then I don’t know what is.

For extra points: diagram that sentence.

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PS:

Feel free to quote the above freely in its entirety (Creative Commons Copyright–Commercial Okay–Derivatives Okay–Attribution Required) in any relevant amicus curiae brief you might feel the need to file.

[.]

I located a pirated/scanned PDF of the book online—with at least one page duplicated/one page missing—but it’s nothing like holding an 11″ x 15″ bound copy in your hands. Something I’ve never done.

It’s time to see what the next generation of one of these would look like.

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My fellow members of the Order of the Science Scouts of Exceptional Repute and Above Average Physique:

This is worth watching. For those of you who still watch television in a more traditional fashion, you might still be able to catch it on a somewhat bigger screen on whatever local public broadcasting station carries NOVA. For those of you for whom video is too damned slow, there are transcripts that seem to cover all the bases.

For that matter, this is a good read, too. Keep reminding yourself that it was written by a Santorum nominee confirmed personally by GWB. Sometimes it’s tough to tell.

Yes, it’s been two years since the ruling. But it’s only been a week or so since the release of this documentary. For that matter, it’s been twenty years since the ruling that said creationism isn’t science and has no business being taught in science classes. Except—and this is an important except—as an example of what science isn’t. Because obviously some people still don’t get it. Like the Discovery Institute. And the Thomas More Law Center. And just over fifty percent of your fellow voters, at minimum.

In any case, two years is not a lot of time. Apparently TWENTY years is not a lot of time.

The show is very heartening to those of us who worry about what religious fundamentalists want to have taught as science. The show is very discouraging because it reveals that certain things we hope can’t happen in the USA can happen. And probably will happen, eventually. And did happen, two years ago. Briefly.

The fact that science is this vulnerable makes me wonder what happens when the next subject under fire for not presenting the “Christian Alternative Viewpoint” is world history. or US history.

Do you think there can’t be a time when our children’s classes have a political officer or a party official approving textbooks or sitting in to make sure what’s being taught is in alignment with the views of the party? Think again.

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Cranking on something with more substance. Stay tuned.

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There’s nothing more tiresome than a manifesto, a wordy diatribe from some upstart or other who claims his or her reportedly unique–yet more likely to be closer to ubiquitous–experiences and circumstances have finally delivered to him or her Ultimate Wisdom of why the world sucks and has now left him or her with no other, better task than passionately attempting to pin the blame on everyone else. Usually he or she also considers himself or herself, often quite amusingly, some kind of politically or socially aware artist. Of one kind or another. Someone concerned with Morality and Ethics and Aesthetics and Justice. A self-proclaimed expert on all of the above.

This is, guardedly and against all better judgment, a manifesto.

I’m announcing a new socio-political-artistic movement, making a violent and clean break with all previously established social, political, and artistic orders. This movement is called _______________.

First the denunciations. There is no manifesto without denunciations.

We–it sounds better if I say we, even though it’s more literally I, unless I’m merely being hopeful that others agree with me and will espouse these beliefs without equivocation and embrace me as the new Karl Marx–we say we abhor violence, but really we only abhor unjust violence. We’re really quite prepared to accept any and all violence the world allows us to administer on our own collective behalf, which automatically makes it just. For example, the current violent war in Iraq, while brazenly based on ludicrous lies, pathetic deceptions and banal manipulations of the credulous masses–typically something we, as future masters of the world, can get behind as ballsy and clever–does not benefit us directly, as we’re not in power yet and none of us are heavily invested in bloated military contracting or in the oil industry. Therefore people are dying for no good reason and we, as taxpayers instead of corporate investors, are paying for it instead of profiting by it. Cut it out.

Likewise we abhor poverty and disease. Sick people are icky and ugly. We need less of that. Poor people are too poor to buy our works of art or our designer clothing or our books or our DVDs or tickets to see our movies. It’s your fault they’re poor because you don’t give them money. Give them money. And either treat those sick foreign people or stop showing them to us on television. That’s nasty.

The state of education on this planet also sucks rocks, and not particularly tasty rocks at that. We choose to write only in English because we are pompous Americans who wonder why we should bother to learn lesser languages when this one works so well and everyone else on earth seems to be content to learn English so they can do business with us. So. As I say, we write only in English, and half the people who can read English–and ought to be memorizing this manifesto in order to properly indoctrinate their children–would have to look up the world banal, a short word of only five letters, providing they remembered how dictionaries work and could find one. The optimal situation is one in which everyone in the world is capable of reading these words and recognizing the wisdom therein. Math is important too. It would be nice if everyone on the other side of the counter knew how to make correct change when we buy stuff, at bare minimum. We also need more scientists to discover how to make clever and useful toys for us, and more cheaply, too.

We’re in favor of ourselves, of course. We only have so much material and talent in us, so we choose to concentrate on how it’s presented so as to convince others, even by the use of ludicrous lies, pathetic deceptions and banal manipulations of the credulous masses, that our works are ground-breaking and valuable and worthwhile. Selling ourselves to the public is an art in and of itself and, in our undeniably accurate opinion, the only real art.

Oh. I forgot to go back and fill in that blank above. This movement is called … oh, wait.

Nevermind. We’re already in charge after all. As you were.

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