Aaron Russo’s documentary, America: Freedom to Fascism is now available on DVD at his website: FreedomToFascism.com. You can also watch it for free on Google video.
While the first half, having to do with the income tax law, is debateable, the second half has very important info about the national ID card and RFID tags.
TerraPass is an organization which balances out the pollution you cause when you drive a car or fly in a plane. For example, tell them how much you drive and they will calculate how much eco-friendly energy needs to be sponsored somewhere else in order to balance it out. You buy a pass that covers you for a year. The pass is really cheap. I got one for my car and for each time I get on a plane.
Go to www.terrapass.com/friends and use the word FRIENDS at checkout to get 10% off.
After three attempts, I think I have perfected the recipe.
Banana Bread
1/2 cup sugar
1/3 cup + 1 tbs softened butter
1 tsp vanilla
2 eggs
3 large overripe bananas
1 3/4 cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt
1. Combine sugar, butter and vanilla
2. Beat eggs into sugar mixture
3. Mash bananas, leaving some small chunks, and combine with sugar mixture
4. Mix dry ingredients together
5. Combine ingredients and pour into greased 9×9″ glass baking dish
6. Bake at 350 degrees for 50 minutes
The lifepod is unmoored once again. I’m not certain of what it is I am seeing when I look out the window. A trackless scrub dotted with discarded dog dishes, a bent antenna and a tomato plant that didn’t ever happen. Most of the comm channels are thick with static, though someone has taken to playing the Van Morrison cover of Comfortably Numb. I send out guarded queries, hoping for another mission, however lean. Received a map. Islands and a volcano. Migration patterns of tropical pigs.
As my interest with the mainland wanes, I spend more and more time hacking the Hanso frequency and scanning the transmissions from New Caprica. It is never good news, but it helps pass the time. A distraction from the food dilemma. Every meat has grown strangely repulsive as I slide towards vegequarianism and the perfection of banana bread recipes. This time I will use 3 bananas instead of 2.
I am tempted to begin a conspiracy. A viral marketing campaign, complete with carefully seeded jpeg images encrypted with vague riddles. There would be no ultimate product, just the stroking of some reptilian breed of hope.
The pneumatic tube coughs. LA, Montana and Phoenix on the line.
Had to do a little bit of laundry today. I make several trips to and from the laundromat as part of my laundry cycle: drop it in the washer, switch it to the dryer, and then take it home. Today, as I pulled out onto the road near the laundromat, I kept hitting some kind of rut in the road. On the last trip, I couldn’t turn onto the road because it was shut down, cordoned off by the police. This was to protect drivers from the massive crater that had suddenly appeared where that rut used to be. It looked like a meteor had smashed into the street. I must have missed driving over this thing by a few minutes.
Last night I went to see “An Inconvenient Truth” with some friends. We were about 10 minutes into it when the movie stopped, alarms went off and lights started to flash. We scurried outside, back into the rain. It had been raining for quite some time. I’ve lived here for around 8 years and I have never seen it rain so much. We huddled under the awning with the other theater goers, wondering what was happening. Some fire trucks had blocked off Central and 1st. TV news crews buzzed around.
John went to investigate. “Guys, you have *got* to come check this out!” We followed him out to the intersection. At first I didn’t know what I was looking for. My eyes tracked down from the train on the bridge down to Central, which seemed oddly level. Then I realized that there used to be a dip in the road where Central went under the bridge. That part of the street was completely under water. The tip of a truck’s roof could be seen poking above the water line. The firemen broke out a raft to paddle down Central River to investigate. Albuquerque isn’t set up to handle this much rainfall and the storm drains were erupting.
We got a refund and went to grab something to eat. The streets were flooded everywhere I drove and emergency vehicles splashed red and white light across the drowned landscape. It continued to rain most of the night.
My back yard is overgrown with plants. The entire city is becoming greener and the sky is often saturated with clouds. Eventually I’ll get to finish watching “An Inconvenient Truth,” but Al Gore is already preaching to the converted.
Was it as simple as that?
I called and you answered?
My heart spins with reckless hopes, as though it had never attended this school
Where are you?
I can’t find you.
I’m going to start calling to you, but I don’t know if you can hear me where you are.
I don’t even know your name.
I call you Elysia in the stories because I think you are wonderful.
I’m starting to recognize your face because I mistake other people for you.
Where are you?
I’m not sure where to look anymore; all the spaces have grown so thin.
So I will let you know where I am.
I will say your name and you will know me when you hear it.
Please hear me.
So I get home and there is another anonymous comment that just about made me want to slit my wrists it made me so mad. So no more comments.
For whatever stupid reason, I opened myself up here and some people feel the need to be hateful and self-righteous in response, all the while hiding in the shadows. They’ll have to go bother someone else’s blog now.
At the end of the day, “sanity” just means that you agree with everyone else, you approve of the arbitrary status quo. But I don’t. It’s like being on a rollercoaster, that weird thrill of having the ground just fall away, the whole world drop like a spinning plate and you realize you’ve never been standing on it. The rational machine is whirring away, doing its job to make sense of the data. It churns out rational explanations, perfect bricks of logic coming off a conveyor belt. It will happily slit its wrists with Occam’s razor.
A few years ago a scar mysteriously appeared on my right arm. It was the rune Raidho, backwards. I showed this to people and they immediately began weaving incredible theories which they defended as a logical explanation. One friend explained that I must have gotten drunk some time back in college and as a gag one of my friends decided to carve the rune into my arm. I somehow forgot about it until I saw the scar almost a decade later. His mind recoiled at the thought of something just appearing from nowhere, which it had.
My therapist studied the scar very intently. I presented my theory about a demon leaving my body and he suggested that it left the scar as a mark of its passage. This seemed a more reasonable explanation than the drunk college night scenario.
The scar has been fading gradually over the years. Only the long back of the R is visible. What, don’t *your* scars disappear too?
So I don’t really have a use for your status quo. I shouldn’t have to apologize for the things I have witnessed, for the damage done to me. There should have been real help. Not the doctors trying to sell me some drug.