Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

Morning

Tuesday, July 22, 2003

Looked over all the docs for BMEshop's new payment system. All of the current stuff (mail in money order and call-in [talk about secure!] credit card) will still work, but in about three weeks you can also expect a fully integrated online billing system. Also, expect our new toll-free number to be up within a day or two at most.

Other than that, I've been doing more research into my “school rules on piercing as social control” article… like I said, the goal is to illustrate that the age restrictions on piercings along with the rules against piercings at school are singularly related to one goal and no others: social control.

Came agross this quote from the Senate Committee on Education, who in 1888 (as the US school system was being instituted), wrote,

We believe that education is one of the principal causes of discontent of late years manifesting itself among the laboring classes.

At that point in history, schools were local and decentralized, and in many ways still built on the guild-concept of education (ie. learn by doing), versus our “modern” method of learning by “memorization”. In addition, because the US had rejected international copyright law, classic literature and European literature was inexpensively available, so even the lower class children tended to be better educated by the time they were 12 than an 18 year old produced by the current education system.

(And when the lower classes become educated, they don't want to be the lower classes any more!)

How many times have you heard that the school system is there to mold? The governments who run the school systems realized that they needed to slow down the education process to create individuals that could be controlled by the state, and wouldn't redefine it as they saw fit. William Harris, the US Commissioner of Education, wrote,

Ninety-nine out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.

Anyway, I don't want to give away too much, but Eminem notes something very important in White America. To quote,

Surely hip hop is never a problem In Harlem only In Boston ...See the problem is I speak to suburban kids Who otherwise Woulda never knew these words exist

When I was in public school it was no big deal to have a mohawk and stretched ears and whatever else I wanted. I was the “one kid out of a hundred” — just like the education system wasn't created until the lower classes started to rise up, and punk wasn't attacked till it went mainstream, and rap wasn't attacked until it went white, piercing wasn't attacked until it started to challenge the mold-making process of education.

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Misinformation

Monday, July 21, 2003

Some strange developments in the David Kelly murder… For those of you who don't know (how is that possible?), David Kelly was a UN weapons inspector who came under enormous media and government pressure after helping show that the UK had "sexed up" its "dodgy dossier". So to be very clear, he was working against the warmongers, and had been for a long time. Middle East Online has a short overview of him here, and you can find lots more on Google News of course.

After the pressure on him built to unbearable levels, he sent an email to a whack of friends and reporters saying that he was ready to reveal information by the end of the week that could "take down" the UK (and US) governments. He then went for a walk, and disappeared. He was later found surrounded by painkillers and seemed to have died from blood loss from a gash in his arm. It's been labelled a "suspicious suicide", although the less allied countries are already convinced it was a murder.*

The reaction from the US mainstream media is the one that disgusts me. In discussions here, I've said that if anyone has motivation to kill him, it's the US (not the UK), because they know that the whole "evidence" scam is falling apart — by moving that blame solely to the UK, they avoid taking the fall themselves and the corporations that profitted from this can stay in power. For example, from yesterday's CBS news,

A British weapons expert apparently killed himself, sending the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair deeper into crisis. David Kelly had been put uncomfortably in the spotlight as British officials have been trying to find someone to blame for accusations they hyped intelligence about Iraq's weapons threat.

While “technically true”, this clearly implies that David Kelly was responsible for the intelligence, and had killed himself because he had produced a fake report for the British. Which is of course pretty much the opposite of the truth. But the unfortunate reality is that while I know that 99% of people reading this can see through these lies without me mentioning them, there's still that enormous 80% of the US public that will gladly shift the blame to the UK on the flimsiest of excuses.

Well, I'm off to the gym in a moment. Cool stuff to post (on BME) when I return.

* As a subnote, convincing the Middle East that there's a conspiracy against them and that “Saddam was innocent” is very much in the interests of the US corporations — it greatly increases the chances of more terrorist attacks on US targets, and will ensure wars last longer, thus increasing profit. It's a “smart business move” if human life is not a factor (and we clearly know it is not).

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In case of emergency…

Sunday, July 20, 2003

From a friend in Singapore…

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Fight the power!

Sunday, July 20, 2003

My plans for the day are seeing if I can convince a bank machine to give me some money off my credit card so I can get cowardly George some food. Otherwise he's going to have to eat pisspants Leeta's food which will give him the runs… Plus I want to get some more flowers. I can't begin to say how much I enjoy planting flowers. Dunno why, but it really makes me happy. I think it's in part because it's Rachel's garden…

Other than that I'll be working on an image update which will likely be posted tomorrow some time, and fiddling with my new article for later in the week. The working title is “Body Piercing for Young People as a Form of Empowerment and Social Protest” and it surely promises to be yet another nail in my coffin as far as the assholes that oppose freedom are concerned. The opening paragraph (which will surely be revised) currently reads,

More and more laws are being passed around the world restricting the rights of young people to legally obtain body piercings. Even in areas where it is legal, schoolboards enact secondary laws restricting access to the [mandatory] school system to those with body piercings in order to ensure that these young people are not able to express themselves on this level, and the corporate owned workplace also does everything it can to prevent those with piercings from obtaining employment. The establishment presents a series of deceitful justifications for this in an attempt to mask their true purpose: social control. In this article I will show that these laws and regulations are nothing but system sustaining safeguards to ensure that the education process continues to do its government defined role — the production of a uniform social product — and that it is essential for young people to defy these laws en masse.

People have been asking me lately — and even “pushing me” — whether I will start eating seafood once I'm relocated. Last night I watched — or started to watch — Iron Chef, which I haven't done in a long time (mostly because I don't really watch TV much these days). It was a segment on crabs, which were of course being cooked live. In gruesome detail they showed the living crabs being cooked alive in woks, straining in agony against the ropes holding them there; other shots showed them being steamed alive, and in the final shot before I shut the television off in disgust they showed the shell being torn off a crab and zoomed in with lurid detail on its still beating heart, and kept the camera there as it spent its last moments in agony and terror.

And the whole while the commentators were cracking jokes… “Well, he doesn't seem to happy” and “oh, look at him squirming, let's wait until he's dead to cut the ropes” or “oh, look his heart is still beating — zoom in on that — that means it's fresh! Sashimi anyone?”

I have to at least respect the Japanese for being willing to accept and embrace the true horror of eating animals — here in the West we hide it all behind layer after layer of corporate obfuscation… Few people who didn't grow up on a farm have experienced what it's like to watch the thousands of animals we consume writhe in pain as their lives are stolen. I'm not telling people they can't eat meat. Of all my friends, I think only one or two others actually refuse all carcass eating…

I stopped eating meat for environmental concerns, but I think the reason I've kept up on it (after all, now that I'm living in the country it's pretty easy to obtain “ethical” organic meat from farms that do little to no environmental damage) has become that I simply don't feel comfortable finding my nourishment in murderous agony.

NOTE: I write this not to start an argument or debate or to judge; simply answering a question I've been asked a lot lately, and trying to explain how I feel… and how watching it made me feel. If you disagree with me and engage in these activities, it's your demon to fight, not mine. I have enough battles already.

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