No Touch Monkey!

There were plotters, there was no doubt about it. Some had been ordinary people who'd had enough. Some were young people with no money who objected to the fact that the world was run by old people who were rich. Some were in it to get girls. And some had been idiots as mad as Swing [a character], with a view of the world just as rigid and unreal, who were on the side of what they called "The People." Vimes had spent his life on the streets and had met decent men and fools, and people who'd steal a penny from a blind beggar, and people who performed silent miracles or desperate crimes every day behind the grubby windows of little houses, but he'd never met The People.

People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed in any case. The found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people.

As soon as you saw people as things to be measured, they didn't measure up.

What would run through the streets soon enough wouldn't be a revolution or a riot. It'd be people who were frightened and panicking. It was what happened when all the machinery of a city faltered, the wheels stopped turning, and all the little rules broke down. And when that happened, humans were worse than sheep. Sheep just ran; they didn't try to bite the sheep next to them.

Labels: cool, Only Human, Story Telling, stupid-people

Despite four decades of feverishly anti-establishment rocking by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, fans are showing up at concerts and booing the rock veterans for performing anti-war tunes. They've even been marching out en masse in protest against songs like "Ohio" and "Military Madness." "The forthcoming documentary 'CSNY: Deja Vu' charts that friction, portraying fans who saluted the group's efforts and those who felt betrayed by them, while introducing viewers to Iraqi War vets who are now protesting the war as musicians, politicians and social workers. Directed by Young and due in theaters July 25, the film blends concert and behind-the-scenes footage with short news features created by CNN correspondent Mike Cerre."

Q: One of the film's most powerful scenes shows Atlanta fans angrily filing out of the venue, not before telling you to go to hell, and that's putting it kindly. When you look back on the tour, are there faces and middle fingers in particular that stick out?

Neil Young: "I remember some faces. There's one guy I remember for sure, and he's not in the movie. This was a harrowing experience at times, and it's not an experience that I would like to repeat. I think it was a one-off. I think if I did this kind of thing for the rest of my life, I'd become like CNN, and I don't really respect that very much. It's like the same thing on a loop. I don't see the need for that. I like to be a full-length program, not a repeating segment."

Q: Besides Atlanta, the reaction in Orange County, California, was particularly bad, and even spurred fights. Did the negative reactions cause you to second-guess yourself at all?

Young: "There was never any sense of giving up or anything. We went from July 4 to September 10 on the tour, and I remember feeling glad that we weren't playing on September 11. There were moments throughout it where you just shook your head and said, 'God, what are we doing?' But the songs were there, the feeling was there, the audience was there, and we were doing it."

Labels: Fuck The Man, Rock On, stupid-people

Labels: Holy Shit, Insanity, stupid-people

Labels: Nothing to see here folks-move along, Only Human, personal, Stuff, stupid-people

Oprah's ugly secret | Salon Life: "By continuing to hawk 'The Secret,' a mishmash of offensive self-help cliches, Oprah Winfrey is squandering her goodwill and influence, and preaching to the world that mammon is queen."

If you put that routine between hard covers, you'd have "The Secret," the self-help manifesto and bottle of minty-fresh snake oil currently topping the bestseller lists. "The Secret" espouses a "philosophy" patched together by an Australian talk-show producer named Rhonda Byrne. Though "The Secret" unabashedly appropriates and mishmashes familiar self-help clichés, it was still the subject of two recent episodes of "The Oprah Winfrey Show" featuring a dream team of self-help gurus, all of whom contributed to the project.

The main idea of "The Secret" is that people need only visualize what they want in order to get it -- and the book certainly has created instant wealth, at least for Rhonda Byrne and her partners-in-con. And the marketing idea behind it -- the enlisting of that dream team, in what is essentially a massive, cross-promotional pyramid scheme -- is brilliant. But what really makes "The Secret" more than a variation on an old theme is the involvement of Oprah Winfrey, who lends the whole enterprise more prestige, and, because of that prestige, more venality, than any previous self-help scam. Oprah hasn't just endorsed "The Secret"; she's championed it, put herself at the apex of its pyramid, and helped create a symbiotic economy of New Age quacks that almost puts OPEC to shame.

Why "venality"? Because, with survivors of Auschwitz still alive, Oprah writes this about "The Secret" on her Web site, "the energy you put into the world -- both good and bad -- is exactly what comes back to you. This means you create the circumstances of your life with the choices you make every day." "Venality," because Oprah, in the age of AIDS, is advertising a book that says, "You cannot 'catch' anything unless you think you can, and thinking you can is inviting it to you with your thought." "Venality," because Oprah, from a studio within walking distance of Chicago's notorious Cabrini Green Projects, pitches a book that says, "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts." More

Labels: balloon popping, bullshit, stupid-people, The Man

The Kearny, New Jersey school district has banned the secret recording of teachers after a student taped his history teacher preaching in class months ago.

District officials say all teachers there will get mandatory training on the separation of church and state.

This all stems from Kearny High School junior Matthew LaClair secretly recorded his teacher David Paszkiewicz preaching to students that they belonged in hell if they rejected Jesus.

The history teacher, according to officials, also told students that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs and that evolution and Big Bang theories were not scientific.

School officials say they took "corrective action" against Paszkiewicz, but further details haven't been released.

Labels: bullshit, stupid-people, The Man

"The devices displayed a "Mooninite" -- an outer-space delinquent who makes frequent appearances on the cartoon -- greeting passersby with an upraised middle finger. But the discovery of nine of the light boards around Boston and its suburbs sent bomb squads scrambling throughout the day, snarling traffic and mass transit in one of the largest U.S. cities.

"It had a very sinister appearance," Coakley told reporters. "It had a battery behind it, and wires."

But Coakley, Boston Mayor Thomas Menino and others said the statement offering an apology was not enough, and did not rule out criminal charges or a civil suit to recover the estimated hundreds of thousands of dollars it cost the city to respond to the bomb scares.

"I just think this is outrageous, what they've done ... It's all about corporate greed." Jesus. It's advertising, trying to get people into see a movie. That's not corporate greed. Honestly, you are all being completely ridiculous

...Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis called it "unconscionable" that the marketing campaign was executed in a post 9/11 era. "It's a foolish prank on the part of Turner Broadcasting," he said. "In the environment nowadays ... we really have to look at the motivation of the company here and why this happened."

...Rep. Ed Markey, a Boston-area congressman, said, "Whoever thought this up needs to find another job."

..."Scaring an entire region, tying up the T and major roadways, and forcing first responders to spend 12 hours chasing down trinkets instead of terrorists is marketing run amok," Markey, a Democrat, said in a written statement. "It would be hard to dream up a more appalling publicity stunt."

Labels: bullshit, pranks, stupid-people