Ideas for bumper stickers

"Solidarity is gay."

"I'm having a bad half-life."

"I'd rather be working."

"Bumper sticker for president."

"I'm the proud parent of a statistic."

"Read this."

I am the night

http://brandonbird.com/i_am_the_night.html

This guy has amazing technique, to say the least. Some elements look like cut-and-paste photos, but the grabber is his technique and attention to all the things that made being a kid in one of those shitty knock-off costumes great: shameless television/movie title plug, a representation of the character worn (normally much better than the mask), and those fucking die-in-a-suffocating-fire-of-melted-plastic pants. The composition of that painting is very much as we remember, from the plastic camera lens of mom's or dad's camera. With his thumb pressing down on his forefinger, the kid is mildly inconvenienced by the deferral of his candy gathering, while the parent is just as certain to select a flattering element of the house. The door bears the mark of the culture: mass production, mass identification, consumption, and an attendant fear of lack. The address is the unique identifying feature of the house that is just as certain to conjure a childhood ritual of reciting vital information in the event the child is lost as it is to function as placeholder in a vast databases of households and demographic metrics used to calculate property value, to determine the mass mail that is sent, or to plan the kinds of entertainment programs it--and others like it--will watch.

A couple more notables:

http://brandonbird.com/battle_of_the_heroes.html


And this is how I remember my childhood, time spent in soft-focus.

http://brandonbird.com/sears.html

Because he's feeding old icons back through the lens of nostalgic memory each cuts a heroic profile among the mise en scene of childhood play with manufactured goods. I am going to tentatively call his art the syndicated sublime.

wargame, please insert quarter

Not really a wargame but footage of the current Israel-Palestine conflict. The bird's eye view and false color infrared vision of the video provides a rather serene and somewhat video-game like quality for the viewer. The Hebrew translation indicates that the superior training of the Israeli soldier wins the day.

The imagery, the perspective, and the commentary all contribute to a genre one might call war porn. It's cool. It's exciting. You want to take sides.

But...

Those who rise up suck at aiming. Those who rise up suck at tossing grenades. Out skilled, out-gunned, out-supplied, those who rise up can never play this war game on a level playing field with those of a world power or an elite fighting force. So let's go back to playing our video game in god's eye view mode.

Wal-mart worker killed in sales rush

Pithy quips aside, this story is a gem in that the news of her crushing is literally crushed itself by the trample of economic news.

US stores lure hard-up shoppers

US stores have opened early and offered steep discounts to encourage consumers to part with their cash as the Christmas shopping season kicks off.

Crowds of shoppers turned up at dawn to snare the best deals.

A worker died and at least three people were injured after being trampled by a crowd of shoppers at a Wal-Mart in the New York suburbs.

The day after the Thanksgiving holiday is viewed as an important test of how willing consumers are to spend.

Police said a throng of shoppers broke down the doors to the Wal-Mart store in Valley Stream, Long Island shortly after 5am, knocking the 34-year-old worker to the ground.

Electronics retailer Best Buy and department stores Kohl's and Macy's also opened their doors at dawn.

Toys R Us offered up to 60% discounts from 5am to 10am.

Initial reports from several major retailers indicated that crowds were at least as large as last year's, but deep discounts are likely to hurt retailers' profit margins.

Bargain hunters

Some shoppers queued up to bag the best bargains.

"The recession is kicking in," Tammy Williams, 36, told the Reuters news agency as she waited for a Kohl's store in New Jersey to open at 4am.

"I'm just looking for a bargain, anything to save a couple of dollars. I'll save the rest for food shopping."

Analysts said that retailers will closely monitor store traffic and the amount of time spent in stores.

Many retailers have suffered as the US economy nosedives although value chains like Wal-Mart have fared better.

US retail sales recorded the biggest monthly decline since 1992 in October as consumers cut back on spending.

When a discriminating organization wishes away it's discriminating past

From the article:

Dunwoody becomes first female four-star general

"The recognition makes her a little bit uncomfortable from the standpoint of the gender aspect — that we're making a big deal (that) she is the first female general officer," Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday in announcing that Defense Secretary Robert Gates would attend her promotion ceremony."

This language baffles me - 'makes her a little bit uncomfortable from the stanpoint of the gender aspect...' Even Whitman is having difficulty discussing the fact that she's a woman and that that makes her appointment newsworthy; the Pentagon doesn't talk about women on the staff that often.

"I grew up in a family that didn't know what glass ceilings were," she said. "This nomination only reaffirms what I have known to be true about the military throughout my career — that the doors continue to open for men and women in uniform."

Another example of the person who succeeds pretending that systematic forms of discrimination just don't exist. I guess being the daugther of a former four-star does help her wish things like discrimination away. And just look at her rough features.



That woman couldn't ask to look more like .


Marshall Murdock.

Quoth Rambo: "Colonel, you're the only one I trust ..."


[Queue the chopper and arm sweat.]

File under 'post colonial'

The guy leading the horses lacks a dental plan.

Purity ritual

Quotable:

When Kylie was 13, her parents took her on a hike in Lake Tahoe, Calif. "We discussed what it means to be a teenager in today's world," she says. They gave her a charm for her bracelet--a lock in the shape of a heart. Her father has the key. "On my wedding day, he'll give it to my husband," she explains. "It's a symbol of my father giving up the covering of my heart, protecting me, since it means my husband is now the protector. He becomes like the shield to my heart, to love me as I'm supposed to be loved."

Toss this salad with psychoanalytic vinaigrette.

Something looks amiss in this picture. A father's love pushed to violent self-ownership. That's the point. While they call themselves the promise keepers, these fathers are the ones who get to decide when and where their daughters get fucked for the first time. That's symbolic rape to me.

War story

A public makes heroes in the theatre of war, while the hero struggles off the stage with a performance that just won't end.

Soldier in famous photo never defeated 'demons'

By ALLEN G. BREED and KEVIN MAURER, Associated Press Writers 57 minutes ago

Officers had been to the white ranch house at 560 W. Longleaf many times before over the past year to respond to a "barricade situation." Each had ended uneventfully, with Joseph Dwyer coming out or telling police in a calm voice through the window that he was OK.

But this time was different.

The Iraq War veteran had called a taxi service to take him to the emergency room. But when the driver arrived, Dwyer shouted that he was too weak to get up and open the door.

The officers asked Dwyer for permission to kick it in.

"Go ahead!" he yelled.

They found Dwyer lying on his back, his clothes soiled with urine and feces. Scattered on the floor around him were dozens of spent cans of Dust-Off, a refrigerant-based aerosol normally used to clean electrical equipment.

Dwyer told police Lt. Mike Wilson he'd been "huffing" the aerosol.

"Help me, please!" the former Army medic begged Wilson. "I'm dying. Help me. I can't breathe."

Unable to stand or even sit up, Dwyer was hoisted onto a stretcher. As paramedics prepared to load him into an ambulance, an officer noticed Dwyer's eyes had glassed over and were fixed.

A half hour later, he was dead.

When Dionne Knapp learned of her friend's June 28 death, her first reaction was to be angry at Dwyer. How could he leave his wife and daughter like this? Didn't he know he had friends who cared about him, who wanted to help?

But as time passed, Knapp's anger turned toward the Army.

A photograph taken in the first days of the war had made the medic from New York's Long Island a symbol of the United States' good intentions in the Middle East. When he returned home, he was hailed as a hero.

But for most of the past five years, the 31-year-old soldier had writhed in a private hell, shooting at imaginary enemies and dodging nonexistent roadside bombs, sleeping in a closet bunker and trying desperately to huff away the "demons" in his head. When his personal problems became public, efforts were made to help him, but nothing seemed to work.

This broken, frightened man had once been the embodiment of American might and compassion. If the military couldn't save him, Knapp thought, what hope was there for the thousands suffering in anonymity?

___

Like many, Dwyer joined the military in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.

His father and three brothers are all cops. One brother, who worked in Lower Manhattan, happened to miss his train that morning and so hadn't been there when the World Trade Center towers collapsed.

Joseph, the second-youngest of six, decided that he wanted to get the people who'd "knocked my towers down."

And he wanted to be a medic. (Dwyer's first real job was as a transporter for a hospital in the golf resort town of Pinehurst, where his parents had moved after retirement.)

In 2002, Dwyer was sent to Fort Bliss, Texas. The jokester immediately fell in with three colleagues — Angela Minor, Sgt. Jose Salazar, and Knapp. They spent so much time together after work that comrades referred to them as "The Four Musketeers."

Knapp had two young children and was going through a messy divorce. Dwyer stepped in as a surrogate dad, showing up in uniform at her son Justin's kindergarten and coming by the house to assemble toys that Knapp couldn't figure out.

When it became clear that the U.S. would invade Iraq, Knapp became distraught, confiding to Dwyer that she would rather disobey her deployment orders than leave her kids.

Dwyer asked to go in her place. When she protested, he insisted: "Trust me, this is what I want to do. I want to go." After a week of nagging, his superiors relented.

Dwyer assured his parents, Maureen and Patrick — and his new wife, Matina, whom he'd married in August 2002 — that he was being sent to Kuwait and would likely stay in the rear, far from the action.

But it wasn't true. Unbeknownst to his family, Dwyer had been attached to the 3rd Infantry's 7th Cavalry Regiment. He was at "the tip of the tip of the spear," in one officer's phrase.

During the push into Baghdad, Dwyer's unit came under heavy fire. An airstrike called in to suppress ambush fire rocked the convoy.

As the sun rose along the Euphrates River on March 25, 2003, Army Times photographer Warren Zinn watched as a man ran toward the soldiers carrying a white flag and his injured 4-year-old son. Zinn clicked away as Dwyer darted out to meet the man, then returned, cradling the boy in his arms.

The photo — of a half-naked boy, a kaffiyeh scarf tied around his shrapnel-injured leg and his mouth set in a grimace of pain, and of a bespectacled Dwyer dressed in full battle gear, his M-16 rifle dangling by his side — appeared on front pages and magazine covers around the world.

Suddenly, everyone wanted to interview the soldier in "the photo." Dwyer was given a "Hometown Hero" award by child-safety advocate John Walsh; the Army awarded him the Combat Medical Badge for service under enemy fire.

The attention embarrassed him.

"Really, I was just one of a group of guys," he told a military publication. "I wasn't standing out more than anyone else."

___

Returning to the U.S. in June 2003, after 91 days in Iraq, Dwyer seemed a shell to friends.

When he deployed, he was pudgy at 6-foot-1 and 220 pounds. Now he weighed around 165, and the other Musketeers immediately thought of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Dwyer attributed his skeletal appearance to long days and a diet of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat). He showed signs of his jolly old self, so his friends accepted his explanation.

But they soon noticed changes that were more than cosmetic.

At restaurants, Dwyer insisted on sitting with his back to the wall so no one could sneak up on him. He turned down invitations to the movies, saying the theaters were too crowded. He said the desert landscape around El Paso, and the dark-skinned Hispanic population, reminded him of Iraq.

Dwyer, raised Roman Catholic but never particularly religious before, now would spend lunchtime by himself, poring over his Bible.

When people would teasingly call him "war hero" and ask him to tell about his experiences, or about the famous photo, he would steer the conversation toward the others he'd served with. But Dwyer once confided that another image, also involving a child, disturbed him.

He was standing next to a soldier during a firefight when a boy rode up on a bicycle and stopped beside a weapon lying in the dirt. Under his breath, the soldier beside Dwyer whispered, "Don't pick it up, kid. Don't pick it up."

The boy reached for the weapon and was blasted off his bike.

In late 2004, Dwyer sent e-mails to Zinn, wondering if the photographer had "heard anything else about the kid" from the photo, and claiming he was "doing fine out here in Fort Bliss, Texas."

But Dwyer wasn't doing fine. Earlier that year, he'd been prescribed antidepressants and referred for counseling by a doctor. Still, his behavior went from merely odd to dangerous.

One day, he swerved to avoid what he thought was a roadside bomb and crashed into a convenience store sign. He began answering his apartment door with a pistol in his hand and would call friends from his car in the middle of the night, babbling and disoriented from sniffing inhalants.

Matina told friends that he was seeing imaginary Iraqis all around him. Despite all this, the Army had not taken his weapons.

In the summer of 2005, he was removed to the barracks for 72 hours after trashing the apartment looking for an enemy infiltrator. He was admitted to Bliss' William Beaumont Army Medical Center for treatment of his inhalant addiction.

But things continued to worsen. That October, the Musketeers decided it was time for an "intervention."

Minor, who had moved to New York, overdrew her bank account and flew down. She, Knapp and Salazar went to the apartment and pleaded with Dwyer to give up his guns, or at least his ammunition.

"I'm sorry, guys," he told them. "But there's no way I'm giving up my weapons."

After talking for about an hour and a half, Dwyer agreed to let Matina lock the weapons up. The group went for a walk in a nearby park, and Dwyer seemed happier than he'd been in months.

But Dwyer's paranoia soon returned — and worsened.

On Oct. 6, 2005, when superiors went to the couple's off-base apartment to persuade Dwyer to return to the hospital, Dwyer barricaded himself in. Imagining Iraqis swarming up the sides and across the roof, he fired his pistol through the door, windows and ceiling.

After a three-hour standoff, Dwyer's eldest brother, Brian, also a police officer, managed to talk him down over the phone. Dwyer was admitted for psychiatric treatment.

In a telephone interview later that month from what he called the "nut hut" at Beaumont, Dwyer told Newsday that he'd lied on a post-deployment questionnaire that asked whether he'd been disturbed by what he'd seen and done in Iraq. The reason: A PTSD diagnosis could interfere with his plans to seek a police job. Besides, he'd been conditioned to see it as a sign of weakness.

"I'm a soldier," he said. "I suck it up. That's our job."

Dwyer told the newspaper that he'd blown off counseling before but was committed to embracing his treatment this time. He said he hoped to become an envoy to others who avoided treatment for fear of damaging their careers.

"There's a lot of soldiers suffering in silence," he said.

In January 2006, Joseph and Matina Dwyer moved back to North Carolina, away from the place that reminded him so much of the battlefield. But his shadow enemy followed him here.

___

Dwyer was discharged from the Army in March 2006 and living off disability. That May, Matina Dwyer gave birth to a daughter, Meagan Kaleigh.

He seemed to be getting by, but setbacks would occur without warning.

On the Fourth of July, he and family were fishing off the back deck when the fireworks display began. Dwyer bolted inside and hid under a bed.

In June 2007, police responded to a call that Dwyer was "having some mental problems related to PTSD." A captain talked him into going to the emergency room.

Later that month, Matina Dwyer moved in with her parents and obtained a protective order. In the complaint, she said Dwyer had purchased an AR-15 assault rifle and become angry when she refused to return it.

"He said that he was coming to my residence to get his gun back," she wrote in the June 25, 2007, complaint. "He was coming packed with guns and someone was going to die tonight." She declined to be interviewed for this story.

In July 2007, Dwyer checked into an inpatient program at New York's Northport Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He stayed for six months.

He came home in March with more than a dozen prescriptions. He was so medicated that his feet flopped when he walked, as if he were wearing oversized clown shoes.

The VA's solution was a "pharmaceutical lobotomy," his father thought.

But within five days of his discharge, Dwyer's symptoms had returned with such ferocity that the family decided it was time to get Matina and 2-year-old Meagan out. While Dwyer was off buying inhalants, his parents helped spirit them away.

On April 10, weary and fearful, Matina Dwyer filed for custody and division of property.

Without his wife and daughter to anchor him, Dwyer's grip on reality loosened further. He reverted to Iraq time, sleeping during the day and "patrolling" all night. Unable to possess a handgun, he placed knives around the house for protection.

In those last months, Dwyer opened up a little to his parents.

What bothered him most, he said, was the sheer volume of the gunfire. He talked about the grisly wounds he'd treated and dwelled on the people he was unable to save. His nasal membranes seemed indelibly stained with the scents of the battlefield — the sickeningly sweet odor of rotting flesh and the metallic smell of blood.

Yet despite all that, Dwyer continued to talk about going back to Iraq. He told his parents that if he could just get back with his comrades and do his job, things would right themselves.

When Maureen Dwyer first saw Zinn's famous photo, she'd had a premonition that it might be the last picture she'd ever see of Joseph.

"I just didn't think he was going to come home," she said. "And he never did."

___

An autopsy is pending, but police are treating Dwyer's death as an accidental overdose.

His friends and family see it differently.

The day of the 2005 standoff, Knapp spent hours on the telephone trying to get help for Dwyer. She was frustrated by a military bureaucracy that would not act unless his petrified wife complained, and with a civilian system that insisted Dwyer was the military's problem.

In a letter to post commander Maj. Gen. Robert Lennox, Knapp expressed anger that Army officials who were "proud to display him as a hero ... now had turned their back on him..."

"Joseph Dwyer who had left to Iraq one of the nicest, kindest, caring, self-sacrificing and patriotic people I have ever known," she wrote, "was forced to witness and commit acts completely contrary to his nature and returned a tormented, confused disillusioned shadow of his former self that was not being given the help he needed."

While Dwyer was in the service, Minor said, the Army controlled every aspect of his life.

"So someone should have taken him by the hand and said, `We're putting you in the hospital, and you're staying there until you get fixed — until you're back to normal."

But Dr. Antonette Zeiss, deputy chief of the VA's Office of Mental Health, said it's not that simple.

"Veterans are civilians, and VA is guided by state law about involuntary commitment," she told the AP. "There are civil liberties, and VA respects that those civil liberties are important."

The family would not authorize the VA to release Dwyer's medical records. But it appears that Dwyer was sometimes unwilling — or unable — to make the best use of the programs available. In an e-mail to The Associated Press, Lennox, the former Bliss post commander, wrote that Dwyer "had a great (in my opinion) care giver."

Zeiss said the best treatment for PTSD is exposure-based psychotherapy, in which the patient is made "to engage in thoughts, feelings and conversations about the trauma." While caregivers must be 100 percent committed to creating an environment in which the veteran feels comfortable confronting those demons, she said the patient must be equally committed to following through.

"And so it's a dance between the clinicians and the patient."

Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, feels the VA is a lousy dance partner.

Rieckhoff said the VA's is a "passive system" whose arcane rules and regulations make it hard for veterans to find help. And when they do get help, he said, it is often inadequate.

"I consider (Dwyer) a battlefield casualty," he said, "because he was still fighting the war in his head."

___

The Sunday after the Fourth of July, Knapp attended services at Scotsdale Baptist, the El Paso church where she and Dwyer had been baptized together in 2004.

On the way out of the sanctuary, Knapp checked her phone and noticed an e-mail.

"I didn't know if you had heard or not," a friend wrote, "but I got an email from Matina this morning saying that Joseph had died on Saturday and that the funeral was today."

Knapp maintained her composure long enough to get herself and the children to the car. Then she lost it.

The children asked what was wrong.

"Joseph is dead," she told them.

"You said he wasn't sick any more," Justin said.

"I know, Justin," his mother replied. "But I guess maybe the help wasn't working like we thought it was."

The kids were too young to understand acronyms like PTSD or to hear a lecture about how Knapp thought the system had failed Dwyer. So she told them that, just as they sometimes have nightmares, "sometimes people get those nightmares in their head and they just can't get them out, no matter what."

Despite the efforts she made to get help for Dwyer, Knapp is trying to cope with a deep-seated guilt. She knows that Dwyer shielded her from the images that had haunted him.

"I think about all the torture that he went through when he came back, and I think that all of that stuff could have happened to me," she said, stifling a sob. "I just owe him so much for that."

Since Dwyer's death, Justin, now 9, has taken to carrying a newspaper clipping of the Zinn photo around with him. Occasionally, Knapp will catch him huddled with a playmate, showing the photo and telling him about the soldier who used to come to his school and assemble his toys.

Justin wants them to know all about Spc. Joseph Dwyer. His hero.

Thoughts on digital photography

Reminds me of an early childhood dream. I'm in my neighborhood, and I'm riding my tricycle down the sidewalk and it's dark, like before a storm. Up in the sky, one of the clouds is a big benevolently smiling man's face. I ride and it stares down at me. Perhaps that's when the surveiller took residence in my inner life. The rest has been one long monkey hand on the train tracks. Then again there was that wetdream about sex with a robot, a very square and only faintly anthropomorphic robot ...

Desire, I think, can be reduced to a surface, a shape, a pattern, mere geometry. I recall being aroused by images of bucking horses from a Zoobooks magazine. I would see a similar profile on a pornstar in one of those 2-min clip compilation tapes. Just as I climaxed, I stood there watching the screen and the image faintly bobbing between the screen noise of the paused video tape. I pulled myself back from a deeply penetrative and transfixed gaze and realized then that desire, for me at least, was completely disembodied, fragmentary, impersonal, potentially destructive. At that moment the paths to bodily mutilation, skin suits, dismemberd feet strapped into stilettos opened up to me. I could understand just how perverted, corrupt, or powerful desire could be, and I resigned myself to a private life spent in the company of silence, a silence that the ears fill with ringing.

ring

Then I bought a digital camera and began collecting body parts.

Soon I can create a franken-human:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRxiVyI4BlM&feature=related

One possible future is very literally a utopia; it will be a no-place, created from a non-collaborative collection of imagery.

Levitttown: Response to a marriage invitation

named individuals

Nothing like some tick picking before an identification ritual commences. As much as I'd love to visit the birthplace of suburbia I think I'm going to be tuckpointing the walls of my new urban bunker on the 2nd. I'll send you pictures of my new digs when I get re-situated. I'm happy that the two of you have found a welcoming place within the bosom of mediocrity, matrimony, and mortgage payments. I'm glad that our paths met because the longer we stay apart the stranger your lives have become. It's as if you're on Stairway to Heaven and my record is skipping endlessly on the first guitar riff in Black Dog. That's fine by me; it's a damn fine riff. James Page belongs to the pantheon of lesser gods.

over the river and through the woods ....

I leave you with an inspiring picture of Levittown, PA and a quote from its architect. William J. Levitt:

"No man who owns his own home and lot can be a Communist. He has too much to do."

Fighting one materialism with another.

The Faygo drinking set

The internet has brought us all together, and it has granted me access to the most deformed fanbases in the world, that of Insane Clown Possee. The funeral is for a child of 2 ICP fans. I'm abolutely amazed that 2 human beings who worship at the altar of ICP were capable of producing offspring. In this case God did the right thing by removing that child from their possession. God:1; ICP-fan:0.

The funeral invitation gives us a glimpse into the mindset of the mother and father, who clearly cannot support a child let alone decorum or diction.

__

R * I * P

*Anabelle Lotus Krawczyk*
05 - 11 - 2008

Mother ~ Julie aka Juggalo Julz
Father ~ Joe aka Druggalo JK47

BORN ~ Mothers Day, Sun.

May 11, 2008 10:39am

DIED ~ Mothers Day, Sun.

May 11, 2008 10:52

FROM MOMMA, JUGGALO JULZ::

MY LITTLE NINJETTE DIED 1 IN A MILLION MEDICAL ERROR..FOR NO REASON. THE DOCTORS SHOOK THERE HEADS AT ME AND SAID WERE DONT KNOW WHY OR HOW. WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT? MY DAUGHTER SHOULD BE IN MY ARMS RIGHT NOW AND SHES GONE AND THATS PRICELESS TO ME!!! I PROMISED MY LOTUS I WOULD GET JUSTICE FOR HER DEATH TO MY VERY LAST BREATH! PLEASE HELP A JUGGALO FAMILY OUT.....

EVERY & ANY JUGGALO & JUGGALETTE IS INVITED TO MY BABY NINJETTE ANABELLE LOTUS KRAWCZYK FUNERAL..WERE ALL A FUCK’N FAMILY AND OUR LITTLE LOTUS IS GONE TO SHANGRI-LA...
PLEASE WRITE ME BACK HERE OR EMAIL IF U WILL COME. IM STILL MAKING ARRANGEMENTS. ON DATE OR TIME YET..

BEST WISHES ~

PLEASE WEAR ANYTHING DARK LOTUS OR IF U FONT HAVE LOTUS ANYTHING PSYCHOPATHIC GEAR TO HER FUNERAL

PLEASE JUGGALOS IF U CAN DONATE ANYTHING EVEN .

$0.01 OR $1. OO WILL HELP US TO GET A HEADSTONE FOR OUR DAUGHTER.

YOU CAN DONATE AT THE FUNERAL
OR IF U CANT ATTEND PLEASE FEEL FREE TO STILL DONATE ANYTHING TO OUR HOME AND EMAIL ME ON HERE AND I WILL SEND U MY ADDRESS...

PLEASE BRING A LOTUS FLOWER THEY ARE SO RARE TO FIND. OR PLEASE TELL ME WHERE I CAN FIND ONE.. IM HAVING A LOT TROUBLE FINDING IT...

PLEASE FAMILY COME AND SUPPORT US IN OUR DARKEST HOUR...NINJA DOWN

MCL JULIE & JOE

WHERE ~ MALEC & SONS FUNERAL HOME

ADDRESS ~ 6000 N. MILWAUKEE AVE.
CHICAGO IL 60646

FUNERAL HOME PHONE ~ 773 - 774 - 4100

DATE ~ FRIDAY MAY 23 2008

TIME ~ 9:00AM - 1:00PM (Service starts at !:00pm then we go to the cemetery)

*REMEMBER AT A FUNERAL WE ALL FOLLOW TOGETHER TO THE CEMETERY AFTER THE SERVICE.....

LAYED TO REST AT ~ EDEN CEMETERY

ADDRESS ~ 9851 W. IRVING PARK ROAD
SCHILLER PARK IL 60176

CEMETERY PHONE ~ 847 - 678 - 1631

*WE PRAY TO SEE ALL JUGGALOS THERE FOR ANABELLE LOTUS....

THANK YOU FOR YOUR LOVE AND SUPPORT,
A GRIEVING JUGGALO MOTHER & FATHER

Aside from a morbid fascination with the reflexive appropriation of insanity as a cultural form or even a political position I think it's heyday was that of boxing: the late 19th to early 20th c. Now, its rotting scraps have been tossed to the unwashed masses who end up wearing as much of it on their faces as ends up in their bellies in their ravenous consumptive appropriation of insanity as mere freedom from social mores.

As a nod to our always-on internet society, the pictures and invitation were gotten from the now-private myspace page of the mother.

This case truly challenges my commitment to retain a level gaze upon all forms of human difference that I encounter.

As one of my friends responded: "I wear my psychopathic gear on the inside."

Justice perverted

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday overturned the $2.5 billion in punitive damages that Exxon Mobil Corp (XOM.N) had been ordered to pay for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off Alaska.

The nation's high court ruled that the punitive damages should be limited to an amount equal to the compensatory damages of $507.5 million.

In the court's opinion, Justice David Souter concluded that the $2.5 billion in punitive damages was excessive under federal maritime law, and should be cut to the amount of actual harm.

The case involved about 32,000 commercial fishermen, Alaska natives, property owners and others harmed by the nation's worst tanker spill.

Soaring oil prices have propelled Exxon Mobil to previously unforeseen levels of profitability in recent years, posting earnings of $40.6 billion in 2007.

It took the company just under two days to bring in $2.5 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2007.

The Exxon Valdez supertanker ran aground in Alaska's Prince William Sound in March 1989, spilling about 11 million gallons of crude oil.

The spill spread oil to more than 1,200 miles of coastline, closed fisheries and killed thousands of marine mammals and hundreds of thousands of sea birds.

A federal jury in Alaska awarded $5 billion in punitive damages in 1994. A federal judge later reduced the punitive damages to $4.5 billion, and the appeals court further cut it to $2.5 billion.

I think companies like this maim the judicial process just for sport.

Pigeon, not pidgin

From the Seattle Sun Times:

This pigeon was photographed in downtown Seattle. The bird is still alive because the dart did not hit any of its vital organs.

~Steve Martin, eat your heart out.

Starvation

This picture best fits humanity into the circle. Starvation, sorrow, resignation, carrion.

Post-modern superhero

Looks like the guy from King of Queens.

He has exzema on his right arm.

His nunchaku look like a pair of seasonal candles from the Yarn Barn.

He's sporting Superman's away jersey.

His mask is a clear indication that America's children are getting fatter.

His digital watch is blinking "12:00"

He has a fresh hair-cut, meaning that it's nearing Christmas or it has just passed.

The Christmas tree lacks any record of school art projects from his childhood.

He will have those nunchaku confiscated by his parents and they will put a lock on the outside of his bedroom door in the coming months.

This guy is clearly the unwashed mass that supports the magic bullet theory of media effects.

He represented the edenic state; I want to uneat the apple and remain blissfully tied to a snackcakes, kool-aid, and syndicated cartoon routine.


"that's all folks..."

Strange vivid ray of light dream

The morning of Easter Sunday I had perhaps one of the most vivid and strange dreams in a long time. No monkeys, monkey hands, or railroad tracks this time. This one started with an encounter between me, in my human form, and a yokel, a country boy, and his horse and his mule. I recall being taken aback by these creatures at first, but the mule was especially endearing in how it cautionsly approached me and then ran backward away soon after. Then I entered the man's house. The layout was very familiar but, for a yokel, this guy had a nice place: big screen TV, and lots of cabinets, lots of cabinets. They covered nearly every inch of wall space. The strangest part was we started watching TV, I grabbed a beer from the fridge at some point, and on TV were the cripple awards. The emcee was a black girl, who I think was deaf, and she said that she gave her grandmother a Holocaust Bible, and for some reason that was a very endearing thing to say as the crowd applauded and the deaf emcee smiled with all the composure of a professional emcee. Then the awards began; it was mostly a parade of freaks, and I recall telling myself that this was the most amazing program I had ever seen. I don't recall the specifics of the parade of freaks other than it was a series of introductory vignettes of each mutant, freak, etc. his/her infirmity and talent. the production quality of each vignette and the show gave this awards show a Star Search-like sheen. But for whatever reason, I have this emotional investment in the mule. As I think back on the mule, I remember our meeting as me extending my heart (metaphoric) to the creature and was touched by its curiosity. Did I have a Buberian 'the horse touched me back' moment? Maybe it's just a barnyard porn phase in my life.

being, dwelling, nazism

The swastika is a sound architectural motif is it not? Look at how it maximizes exposure by Jews in light aircraft.

Muncie in the news

From an online news source:

MUNCIE, Ind. - A man was jailed Thursday on charges he forced his 7-year-old daughter to kill the family cat by holding a knife in her hand and making her stab the pet.

Danield J. Collins, 39, told his children during a visit to his home on Sunday that he wanted them to "learn how to kill" and gave his 11-year-old son a knife to do it, according to an affidavit filed in the case.

The boy tried to save the cat by hiding it under a sofa bed and putting ketchup on a knife when Collins went to the bathroom. But when the father realized the cat was not dead, he forced his daughter to hold the knife and then held her hand tightly as he drove the knife into the animal, Muncie police Detective Jami Brown said.

Police said Collins stabbed and strangled the cat himself, and told his son to throw the dead pet in the trash. Officers retrieved the carcass to be used as evidence.

The children told family members on Monday, the day after the alleged killing, according to the affidavit. The children told police their father was drunk when they arrived at his home and that he's a different person when he's drunk, it said. The siblings live with their grandparents.

Collins was being held in the Delaware County Jail on $40,000 bond. He's charged with one count each of animal cruelty and battery and two counts of neglect of a dependent. The battery charge alleges the girl was injured because Collins held her hand so hard that her hand ached.

The jail had no record of an attorney representing Collins and there were no published phone listings for him in Muncie.

Muncie police Detective Jami Brown said the case was particularly troubling because Collins involved his children in killing the cat, an 8-month-old tuxedo type-cat named Boots.

"I've been doing investigations for 10 years and this is really bothering me," the detective said.

The brown aura around this place comes from the way the people dwell upon the landscape. Muddy ravines cut through the roads, the faint smell of dog shit hangs in the air, and a long-forgotten plastic wrapper for some processed food product dances in the breeze. All the houses bear the signs of a long-abandoned remodeling project. The blue tarp in the yard is covered in leaves and children's toys. They aesthetic-principle for manicuring the natural landscape turns the naturally occuring creek into a shaved vagina. It insipires my inner-Blake.

The anomie of the crowd

Alone together forever and again.

Verisimilitude

This guy probably choked his wife to death in a crime of passion.

File under 'interface'

"Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who broke my heirloom candy dish?"

The bald eagle, a true symbol of America

From the news:

KODIAK, Alaska - At least 19 bald eagles died Friday after gorging themselves on a truck full of fish waste outside a processing plant.

Fifty or more eagles swarmed into the truck, whose retractable fabric cover was open, after the truck was moved outside the plant, said Brandon Saito, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who coordinated the recovery operation.

The birds became too soiled to fly or clean themselves, and with temperatures in the mid-teens, began to succumb to the cold. Some birds became so weak they sank into the fish slime and were crushed.

The truck's contents had to be dumped onto the floor of the Ocean Beauty Seafoods plant so the birds could be retrieved. Some tried to scatter, but since they couldn't fly, wildlife officers soon retrieved them. The eagles were then cleaned with dish soap in tubs of warm water to remove the oily slime and warm them.

Given social security the North American Bald Eagle would lampoon as an incestuous redneck on Jerry Springer ... gorged on processed food.

Reflections on Sin City

After watching the movie twice I came to the following conclusion. Upon its surface the viewer sees many heroic male gestures at protecting women from misogynistic men. At its core, the film is misogynistic. Yes, I think Frank Miller, like many of the consumers of the comic industry's pulp, face the same problem toward women. Female sexuality is potent. They have a failure to cope with this potency by the very fact they can't dialogue with it. They must protect it in a gesture of self-effacing heroism. By doing so, they keep feminine sexuality at arm's length. This gesture and the feminine affirms their gesture and manhood by offering a sexual proposition as favor for delivering them from a more superficially misogynistic character. This occurs in at least two narratives in the movie, that with Mickey Rourke's character and Bruce Willis' character. Both become projections for the male fantasy of the comic pulp consumer and that of Miller's: recipients of sexual overtures without expending the hard labour of any masterful interaction (via the usual trans-gender communication ritual of flirting, flowers, candy, and the power plays of oscillating betwen interest and indifference). Rather, Miller realizes his fantasy in these characters by being the hero. The feminine becomes a scenic condition for male heroic agency and the goal of that agency. The women, in both narratives, become sexually aroused by the saving actions of their heroes and so offer themselves sexually to these men.


The translation reads thus: Frank Miller and his fan club are the prototypical 20-sided dice wielder who'd rather live in the somewhat antiseptic environment of neo-medieval fantasy where some semblance of chivalry exists and gender is as stable and clearly differentiated as the seasons. Instead of occupying the hurdy gurdy reality of their lives, each retreats to his respective basement, flanked by Rush, Iron Maiden, and Boris posters jerking off to the symbolic fantasy and passing on the absent fleshy reality that inspires it.

These men groom a fantasy that raises the status of their plastic copulating objects to that of love interest. This object is more real than real, more human than human. Because its reactions conform to the universe that this dice-roller has cast. They fear real women, seeing their capricious nature as unjust. And in seeing this caprice as a very bitter and smarting scar on their fragile ego, they cast out the real woman. That, my friends, is the misogynistic core that these role players roll over with dice, demons, knights, knaves, classic rock, cola, zits, and undone zippers. They'd rather live in their unkempt, musty subterranean dwellings than to occupy a world that they must share with others, where they must clean up and compromise in order to dwell. Meeting half way means a decapitation of that fantasy. That is a proposition that sacrifices too much because it hurts them too much.


As I said, this is utter nonsense. Pass me the dice bro.

Arnold Toynbee's "A Study of History"

I wanted to comment on Toynbee's history book for a number of reasons. I will first comment on the general outline of the reading, and then move into some specific passages that I think are important. This might be a longer than ususal blog for that matter. We'll see.


Toynbee's history I would consider to be dialectical. I chose that term given my familiarity with Jean Paul Sarte's dialectical philosophy, which one contrasts from analytical social philosophy. The basis of this dialectic is praxis, which he defines as "the negation of negation." That usually takes the form of some action, by a reflexive individual to correct some environmental condition that one finds unpleasant. The unpleasant condition (e.g., cold room) in some way negates the desire to maintain comfort, and in that way, it is a negating condition. The individual then acts to correct this condition, which in effect negates this negating condition. Hence, praxis is the negation of negation. Moreso, human society is held together by some ritual observance of this praxis, the initial conditions that set it in motion are often misunderstood by the very nature of its memorialization in this ritual. Therefore, Sarte's social theory seems to pine for the revolutionary moment when a new praxis is enacted for forming new social bonds and organization. But the key is that the newness wears off, genuine connections between each other become mired in the greasy patina of old and forgotten habit and these social relations become more technical. In fact, the momentum of that praxis, which sets some kernel of society in motion in fact turns those who carry it out into merely reacting agents who maintain often impersonal connections to others in a long chain of serial relations. This is the basis for human organizing and impersonality the constitutive conditions of which are forgotten by its practitioners. The energy of praxis to form relations is inversely related to the inevitable force of decay. This changes the character of praxis from genuine relations (I-Thou) to more technical serial relations (I-It). Technology and technique are key components of social praxis and mark some of the very forces of its undoing.

Therefore, there are stimuli in the environment that force us to act. In forcing us to act, we move some form of human endeavor forward. For Toynbee, society progresses by being constantly challenged by the environment, either physicial or social. Therefore, war can be the stimulus, enslavement can be the stimulus, or fear of starvation, and lack of resources for living in general can be the stimulus to progress society forward. He cites numerous examples where the stimulus, such as the poor farmland of the Rhineland, the challenging weather of Scandanavia, or other such conditions which give rise to great invention and flourishing of the human spirit. The challenge can also break us, and he cites the case of the Appalachians to prove it. But the challenge can and will be the very thing that moves us to act and in ways that better us. This establishes a kind of algorithm, a boolean statement, from which software programmers like Sid Meier created the growth and interaction engines that underly his game "Civilization." That much became very clear to me as I read Toynbee's development of the basic elements of civilization: internal and external proletariats, universal church, creative minorities, uncreative majorities, the radiating effect of civilization through mimesis, etc. All of these point to some underlying functional criteria for how human society forms, develops, and eventually perishes. Toynbee is a great systems thinker who charted a complex map of human civilization based upon a complex network of relations between individuals operating within the undeniable cycles and patterns that occur in the historical record.

Now let me get to the elements that I wanted to address:

Democracy, mass education and total war:
Here Toynbee sees the seeds of totalitarianism. When education is used to standardized the masses to a national history, one sprinkled with pride in achievements and reasons to join in identifying with the nation's origins, it becomes a tool for training the masses. It will ultimately prepare them for waging total war on other national history adopters. He sees this pearl often put to poor use. Here is an example:

"The bread of universal education is no sooner cast upon the waters than a shoal of sharks arises from the depths and devours the children's bread under the educator's very eyes.. In the educational history of England the dates speak for themselves. The edifice of universal elementary education was, roughly speaking, completed by Forster's Act in 1880; and the Yellow Press was invented some twenty years later--as soon, that is, as the first generation of children from the national schools had scquired sufficient purchasing-power--by a stroke of irresponsible genius which had divined that the educational philanthropist's labour of love could be made to yield a royal profit to a press-lord." (pp. 339-340)

The uses of education for totalitarian ends seems fairly evident from this example. It's just a matter of educating the masses to the ends of the politician. Therefore, instilling political ideology in the form of some facts that must be accurately reproduced on a test is where the ideological rubber hits the popular road. The lesson, education is not a panacea; it is neutral but gains its valence with regard to the ends it is employed. The extensions to democracy follow.

Toynbee sees democracy through a similar light, in that it brings about total war, whereby the whole populace of a country is arranged to have a stake in that country's destiny while that country's leaders are the one's who actually have some control and choice in that stake. Democracy paves the path toward total war by first attacking the parochialism that comes natural to a country not wired through communications, where what happens in one's immediate town and countryside constitute worldly matters. What happens in a city hundreds of miles away is of no consequence. By dissolving this association democracy gives countries a larger resource, a national population, which brings with it certain responsibilities. Therefore, education, health care, decent working hours, and other such forms of welfare should be ensured by the nation in order that it has a ready resource for equipping with guns and training for waging war at its whims.

Machines "The triumph of matter over life"
We find this in a number of places in his study. One case is in the arrested civilization. Here, the human and the auxilliary, be it an animal or some technique (e.g., marksmanship) or technology (e.g., the kayak) become fused where the auxilliary is half humanized through its partnership. Consequently, the human is half dehumanized through the human's trained incapacity to be more flexible. By training in horse riding and giving this technique a central place in the life of the society or by learning how to build and row a kayak and conferring this a central place in the life of the society that society forfeits its human capacity to cultivate the depthless variety of human nature for the purposes of integrating singularly important technique into the very fabric of the individual and the society that is maintained through this technique. Therefore, by insinuating itself into a particular niche, this society and the individuals who exemplify it doom themselves to obsolescence given the dynamic nature of the environment and the various challenges its poses. Therefore, the arrested civilization has invested too much in its technique and has lost something uniquely human in the process. It's fate is sealed for this commitment to its technique will be its very undoing.

The preoccupation with technique and conferring them into machines for translating power into some effect reveals the paradox of growth. If we consider that these machines and techniques are the mode and means of reproducing civilization in the banality of its many operations then those very components have a number of consequences: the loss of free will and the loss of individual diversity. The loss of individual diversity is noted above. When the individual member commits to a specific set of techniques and invests them with the survival of self and people, the individual loses the foresight to flexibly adapt. This loss is equated as a loss of humanity. The loss of free will is another consequence of the mechanization of techniques. The outcome societies organized in this way leads, as Toynbee notes in the case of Sparta, to 'war robots.'

The current condition, what Toynbee calls the traffic problem par excellence is the fear of annihilating each other with the machines we have put to use for travelling places. The automobile has annihilated space, but the problem of killing each other through the very means of travel, the fast propelling engine, enters into the system. With speed comes the need to train one's body to react and react fast. Therefore, we mechanize ourselves for the purposes of saving life, driving defensively, and surviving the transit. And the investment in the automobile has transformed society around that thing. Kids can't play in the street, pedestrians need separate spaces for walking, a vast network of roads and traffic regulation technology must be employed. This becomes the face of a society completely mechanized. Government is not realized in this regulatory mechanism; free will is not realized in it either. It's the mechanization of human conduct for observing stop, go, green, red, and yellow that allow organization to be the product of the smooth operation of millions of people employing potentially dangerous technology to carry out some activity. While the goal might be to then carry out one's free will, all the time spent there challenges any use of free will. Because that causes error to creep into the system, which carries dire consequences: death, traffic jams, chemical spills, and the disruption of millions of lives who rely upon the smooth operation of this traffic system. Our investment in this traffic system gives rise to suburbia; it introduces inefficiencies into urban areas, swallows up countless acres of land suitable for commerce, industry, and residence. The character of a nation is changed, and that very character is often denied a place in the action of the population when it considers its political choices. Society stands in denial of this very thing, considering it outside the scope of one's personal life. Perhaps because one is in mechanized mode while one is operating here, and regardless of the time spent navigating the mechanized space, life begins after leaving and ends before entering it. It's a big dark spot on the society's consciousness.

And finally the consideration of the war on terrorism:
Toynbee considers one of the challenges of civilization to be that of the external proletariat. As long as the fruits of the creative minority are copied, via mimesis, by the uncreative masses, the internal structure of that civilization is intact. As these wonders radiate out, those members of the external proletariat, the non-member barbarian groups who employ some of the civilization's techniques, in effect, extend the scope of the civilization. They are, in effect, charmed by the culture of the civilization's creative minority. Toybnbee notes that the growth of the culture of the civilization ceases while its economic and political elements can still grow even faster than ever. But the economic and political components of the civlization are only trivial, and without the cultural element, these two are perceived as threatening. At this point, the external proletariat uses these very techniques it adopted in its charmed mimesis of the civilization to defend themselves against that civilization. Now we are in a stage of warfare with the frontiers.

At this stage, the civilization wins over its neighbors through force, and it does perhaps a good job owing to its technical superiority. But it will reach a point, "where the dominant minority's qualitative superiority in military power is counterbalanced by the length of its communications" (p. 465). Toynbee continues:

"When this stage is reached it brings with it the completion of a change in the nature of the contact between the civilization in question and its barbarian neighbours. So long as the civilization is in growth, its home territory, where it prevails in full force, is screened, as we have seen, from the impact of unreclaimed savagery by a broad threshold or buffer zone across which civilization shades into savagery in a long series of fine gradations. On the other hand, when a civilization has broken down and fallen into schism and when the consequent hostilities between the dominant minority and the external proletariat have ceased to be a running fight and have settled down into trench warfare, we find that the buffer zone has disappeared. The geographical transition from civilization to barbarism is now no longer gradual but is abrupt. To use the appropriate Latin words, which bring out both the kinship and the contrast between the two types of contact, a limen or threshold, which was a zone, has been replaced by a limes or military frontier, which is a line that has length without breadth. Across this line a baffled dominant minority and an unconquered external proletariat now face one another under arms; and this military front is a bar to the passage of all social radiation except that of military technique--an article of social exchange which makes for war and not for peace between those who give and take it.

The social phenomena which follows when this warfare becomes stationary along a limes will occupy our attention later (in a proceeding volume). Here it is sufficient to mention the cardinal fact that this temporary and precarious balance of forces inevitably tilts, with the passage of time, in favour of the barbarians."

I'm going to avoid any discussion of the parallels that this passage has to the current war on terror, but the lesson is clear. No measure of force will break the will of the barbarians aside from total annihilation, something that is only theoretically possible. We've already lost this war.

Some notables:
Alberti bass - Examples of this musical accompaniment are found in Mozart's Piano Sonata number 16. Toynbee uses this as a metaphor for what remains in a dying civiliation as those two opposing movements that define the civilization's rhythm. Alberti bass is the left-hand accompaniment to 18th c. keyboard music. I can recall it in classic children's tunes none of which come to mind. So, like our friend Sartre, there remains in the decaying civilization something practiced by rote until its meaning is lost as well as the very thing that it accompanied, the society. The original movement to organize a people becomes the mere mechanical set of relations that sustain the group.

My apologies

Pedantic - adjective - Marked by a narrow focus on or display of learning especially its trivial aspects.

I don't post much, and I'm here mostly talking to myself, which is probably more self-absorbed than making this public and making it a node in a larger network of 'friends' or 'contacts.' Alas, as long as Internet is mediated through a television+keyboard interface, we will probably continue perpetuating the interactive television aspect well into its future.

Long live the mobile app.?

I was reading about web 2.0 and grew very bored and lost interest. Technology Review devoted a whole issue to the topic, its commercial viability, the interest and investment bubble propelling it, its pundits, its innovators. A man made a joke about computers once. He was the spouse of a co-worker at my first 'real' job.

"These computer things are just a fad. They'll die off, just like the hula-hoop."

It was a rather entertaining idea, especially considering how wired we are, how ensconced in the computing and networking apparatus that swept the globe in full force with the release of Windows 95.

I was then running a computer from a DOS prompt. Windows was a novelty that my computer lacked the resources to run. My, how things have changed.

I digress.

I apologize for waxing pedantically about things. I re-read my few posts because I'm the only one reading them. And as I come to realize that I'm writing for an audience of none, I'm apologizing to no one for my discombobulated sentences weighed down by an oft-awkward use of terminology.

I want to be a plain-speaking person. I desire to reach others, turn received views on their side, and generally maintain a meta-position above a mix of cultural forms, phrases, fads et cetera (or as you crazy kids call it, 'ect').

Alas, I'm not immune to the fads, and shunning too many of the cultural forms has the sum of effect of making one a little bit crazy. Then again, when I first saw a person talking on a hand's free it resembled the people who talked to themselves before cellular phones. We labeled them loonies, perhaps for good reason.

Let's continue speaking into the air.

Air? Are you there?

myspace isn't mine

Myspace--a line in the media holdings portfolio of media magnate Rupert Murdoch--is a hellish collection of animated advertisements that hail you through such common slogans as "would you like to meet her?" I don't like writing amid a massive scrawl of advertising space that virtually crowds out mine. So who's space is this? It surely isn't mine.

When I'm greeted with numerous options to 'personalize' my space with skins from popular movies, drinks, and the like I'm only adding to the advertising environment that IS myspace. I understand that people like to stay in contact and use these social networking environments to stay 'present' while remaining afar. At what a cost it comes. They become the avatars for some consumer paradise that hails all who use said product as "happy" and "satisfied." No object could come close to fulfilling desire. A person cannot fulfill desire. Death fulfills desire because it ends the lack that motivates desire.

Rupert Murdoch was featured on a Time magazine front page in the late 1970s as a caricature of Godzilla. His head was grafted to the monster's body as he stood amid the high-rises of New York. The article and the premonition that the picture posed suggested just what we've come to believe: here's a guy who's swallowing up small media outlets, storming their viewership, crushing the locale, breathing fire, and inspiring fear in the denizens.

Rupert Murdoch is old and he will die some day. But his dream will live on in the Fox News Corporation. Myspace and other sites like it serve his agenda to take over the modes of communication. With the help of the sponsors to whom he sells his ad space, our very words will soon become the very stuff of advertisement.

As if it hasn't. Oh, but it will.

From the head, to the mouth, to the throat. That's how one professor I had described the process of automation outlined in George Orwell's "1984." The localization and co-optation of the mechanism for speaking is central to the mechanization of individual consciousness. As speaking is a component in the process of cultural reproduction, gaining access to that co-opts the process of cultural reproduction.