World Domination Update
“Land of the free, home of depraved”
vol. V, iss. iii
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness”
—Matthew 3:3
Secret Word of the Day:
Site of the Week: Why Wiccans Suck
Barbecue Sauce of the Month: Cactus Jack’s extra chunky stuffed jabañero
Now Playing: Megadeth — “Peace Sells... but who’s buying?”
In this issue:
· $10,000 Salmon
· The Ranch Rant
· Pearl Harbor-Gate
· Philo’s Time Theorem
· Ask Evil Matt
· Hedgehog Laws Revisited
Hi, Kids!
Well
folks, if you were expecting a long rage against or about Tim McVeigh, you’d best look
elsewhere. I say that largely
because the last time I ranted on this topic, I got a nasty email (with a una.bom
attachment) from Uncle Istivan, whose Ford Prefect-like inability to detect sarcasm seemingly made him take my sniping
seriously.
T’was not my intent,
but then again this is Uncle Istivan we’re talking about.
O McVeigh was a moron who got caught because of a
busted tail light, fer chris’sake! It’s bad enough he agrees with the political agenda of The Turner Diaries,
but to actually think that rancid rag is good prose gives us true
insight into the psyche of this psycho. shade said he tried to read it a
few years ago, just to say he read it, but after a few chapters he gave up:
between the inflammatory ideology and (more especially) the awkward, immature
writing style, he said “why bother” and decided to stop torturing
himself. If McVeigh’s love for The Turner
Diaries as good literature is any indication, then he would surely have
loved Ayn Rand, if only he could make sense out of all those
big words she uses.
Anyway, any
further discussion of McVeigh runs the risk of actually validating his dastardly
deed, which is certainly not my intent. After all,
.
So enough’s enough; and besides, this is just too easy to nitpick.
So I hereby retire the topic.
In other news...
All
Branch Floridians should give a hardy, heart-warming ‘wekkum’ to our
latest family member,
(aka Fire’n’Ice.) MonkeyMan is our in-house Okie and Tulsa liaison,
so hopefully sometime in the near future will
be providing us with an exposé on what’s really going on at
Oral Roberts University. Just don’t ask him where he was when the Murrah
building went boom...
The Latest from Waco The lawsuit by surviving Branch
Davidians is still in limbo, trying to get restored on appeal, but a new piece
of information has arisen about last year’s field test to simulate the suspicious flickering
on the FLIR tape taken right before the fire. For those who
have forgotten, most firearms experts agreed that the flashes on the film were
government gunfire, but the FBI said it was sunlight reflecting off of broken
glass. A test conducted by a highly biased defense contractor sided with
the government. The following is an excerpt from a recent Associated Press release on the matter:
The simulation last year used a standard M-16 military rifle
with a 20-inch barrel, said Robert Stewart, a U.S. Postal Service
inspector who helped coordinate the simulation.
[NOTE: why am I not
surprised the a post office employee would be involved in a heavy-duty firearms
test?] but I digress...
The FBI does not use standard M-16s, and members of its
Hostage Rescue Team who were at Waco, Texas in 1993 carried a version with
just a 14-inch barrel, an FBI spokeswoman said.
In other words, they tested
the wrong weapons. The different guns have
different muzzle flashes, with a longer barrel almost always having a shorter,
less-noticeable flash. Chief Davidian attorney Michael Caddell says
“I think it completely undermines the test results,” though
Senator Danforth, who originally requested the test, says that this does not
change his mind about the overall conclusion that the government is not
responsible for any wrongdoing at Waco.
Caddell said he repeatedly insisted that the test include
the smaller M-16, and said that Danforth’s office kept him from inspecting
the weapons used in the simulation. Caddell said the test protocol called
for using the shorter assault rifle.
Reader Feedback
I was wondering how long it would be before you got around to
bashing the Fed. The Federal Reserve is
neither Federal nor a Reserve. Since our own government is in debt to this privately run Leviathan,
it needs closer scrutiny. Greenspan is just a figurehead anyway-- most of the fed
is owned by Chase Manhattan Bank, and it's no accident that founder Salmon P. Chase is
on the $10,000 bill. (I'm surprised Rockefeller doesn't have a bill
too)
— saint’s
peshar The comment about the $10,000
bill intrigued me, so I asked Evil Matt about it.
New Recruit
“We were either suckered by the Office of Special Counsel or we were
suckered by the FBI, or both,” Caddell said.
Salmon Portland Chase (1808-1873) was Secretary of the Treasury under Lincoln, and later became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. An hardcore Episcopalian, he is responsible for the 1st Amendment-violating “In God We Trust” disclaimer on all currency, as well as the last seven words of the . Chase, an ardent anti-slavery advocate, insisted Lincoln add the line when he noticed the Proclamation contained no reference to the Deity; apparently the fanatically phundamentalist Chase chose to ignore and other pro-slavery parts of the Bible.
The Chase National Bank was created on September 12th, 1877. Salmon Chase’s only connection to it is that the Bank was named after him by the real founder, John Thompson. Otherwise Chase actually had nothing to do with it. Chase National Bank merged with The Bank of the Manhattan Company on March 31st, 1955 to become Chase Manhattan Bank.
One interesting note about Salmon Chase that gets us back on track of the original subject, the illegality of the Federal Reserve. As you’ll remember, Article 1, Section 10 of the Constitution specifically prohibits the minting of money in any form other than gold or silver. When Chase was Secretary of Treasury, he successfully lobbied Congress to pass the Legal Tender Acts of 1862 and 1863. This allowed the unregulated printing of paper money, thus making it easier to bankroll the Army of the Potomac. However, when Chase became Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, one of his first acts was to repeal his own Legal Tender Acts as unConstitutional!
Although the Federal Reserve Act of 1913 did much to reverse this reversal, the economic death knell came on March 9th, 1933 when the Senate passed, and President Roosevelt signed into law, the Banking Relief Act. This made gold illegal to own for American citizens for a number of years(!) and also illegally seized the gold that was in Fort Knox. The government then used that gold to bail out the banks which were failing due to the Great Depression. The gold which was being held by the government to back its paper money with real legal tender (the Constitutionally defined gold and silver) now no longer backed that currency.
As a result, paper money effectively became worthless.
reader feedback
Updating the Seen shade? conundrum...
Sad to say there were no official shade sightings by anyone here in the southern chapter of BF (though there was one drunk idiot at the Shannakee Irish Pub who claimed to have it "made in the shade" - he was wearing a black cowboy hat and John Lennon sunglasses). Even on the lamb, it is doubtful that hsade would venture this far into the Bible Belt. However, I have always been a firm believer that shade CAN be in more than one place at a time, so I personally would not discount the Arizona St. Patty's Day sightings right away. Saint is only in one place at a time. It is rumored, though, that he has the same ability shade does but chooses not to use it for personal reasons. Evil Matt is, of course, still buried under the stairs. — |
A Gumby’s
Rebuttal
(of sorts)
Here’s the latest in our war with Gumby’s Pizza. We’ve already established the Gumby’s/Ranch Peninsular connection; now Trigger, one of the heretical Ranch Maniacs, has deigned to write in, daring to defend the Dairy Gestapo! I reprint his rant here:
|
Matthew, you're a dumbass. If you
don't like the pizza they sent you from Gumby's just take matters into your own
hands and do what we do: get roaring drunk, go in there and make the pizza
yourself (just tell them you know Shaggy and then get them high They usually
have no problems with your obnoxious behavior after that). If you're really
lucky and just happen to be drunk enough they might even let you deliver one
(Ben and I took an hour to deliver to some poor bastard the coldest, nastiest
pizza this side of Scottsdale. The "customer" was a little confused as
to why his pizza was being delivered by two guys who were all dressed up for the
bar and even more confused as to why we had chosen to park the car in his front
yard. He asked me if I was drunk, I said, "of course I'm drunk, it is
Tuesday you know").
|
Typical of Ranch tactics, Trigger was too cowardly to allow me to post his email with this for fear of getting flooded with Branch Floridian hate mail. However, I know that fellow soldiers in the Crusade for Extra Cheese will not stand for this shit, so by agreement I have created a mailbox airlock for him. Rebuttals can be addressed to and I will see that he gets it (as soon as the rat bastard comes out of hiding; in Spain last I knew.)
All your Flax are belong to us!
FlaxFest was an enormous success, and I’d like to thank everyone who participated in or spectated on this historic event.
Unfortunately, our ploy to lure testosterock staples such as Flax Leppard, Mötley Fläx, Flaxerella, Flaxter Pussycats, and Flax ’n Roses panned out. Quite likely they realized the invites were merely a trap to exterminate them en masse: given the Branch Floridian predilection for fire, the vast gallons of hair spray they use would have hit open flame and incinerated them in one glorious fireball. Maybe the asbestos-lined dressing room we set aside for them was the give-away.
Likewise, none of the invited boy bands like ’Nflax, Flaxstreet Boys, and the recently reformed New Flax on the Block showed. Their non-participation was most likely the result of their not being a Gap, Old Navy, or Banana Republic within driving distance of BadAss. That, or they had to film a Burger King commercial. Sorry folks, we tried; those with front row FlaxFest tickets can keep the complementary flamethrowers provided to “warmly welcome” those boy-band no-shows.
Sadly, there were several other, less welcome cancellations, notably Flaxxy Flaxbourne, Captain Flaxheart & his Magic Flax, Flax No More, and Flaxrÿche. However, this was more than made up for by several unplanned special guests:
Flaxadeth — Wake up Flax, Skull beneath the Flax, Mechaniflax, The Flaxening, Flax in Mouth, Symphony of Flax, Sweating Flax, In my Flaxest Hour, Flax Wars/The Punishment Flax, Flaxer 18, Set the World Aflax, Flax Sells... but who’s buying?
Flax Benatar — Love is a Flaxfield, Promises in the Flax, Flax is for Children, Flaxbreaker, All Flaxed Up, Hit me with your best Flax
Beastie Flax — Fight for your right to Flax, Johnny Flaxall, B-Boy BouillaFlax, Flax Loop, Flaxy Boss, Flaxitude, Lookin’ Down the barrel of a Flax, Professor Flaxy, No Flax ’till Brooklyn
David Bowflax — Flax Oddity, Ziggy StarFlax, The Man who sold the Flax, Flaxagette City, Flaxination, Breaking Flax, Up the Hill Faxwards, Young AmeriFlax
and of course who could forget the surprise encore set by Flax Zappa & the Flaxters of Invention — Return of the Son of Monster Flax, Any way the Flax blows, Flaxtic People, Duke of Flax, Flax any Vegetable, Uncle Bernie’s Flax, Absolutely Flax, The Idiot Bastard Flax, The Chrome Plated Megaphone of Flax, How could I be such a Flax, Little house I used to Flax in, Jazz Discharge Party Flax, The Meek shall inherit Flax, In Flax, Baby take your Flax out, Catholic Flax, Dong Work for Flax, Watermelon in Easter Flax, Lemme take you to the Flax, Revised Music for Low Budget Flax, Shut Up ’n Play yer Flax
End Signs (part 451)
Speaking of Zappa, Frank appeared as a clue in the May 23rd Los Angeles Times crossword
puzzle. What more proof do we need that the End is nigh?!?
You’d
think I’d be happy or even ecstatic about this, but somehow it just creeps
me out. I mean, think about the implications: if his appearance in a widely circulated
newspaper is any indication, it means Frank’ll be getting regular radio play next, which is
unquestionably one of saint’s signs of the Apocalypse.
But despite this ill omen, you gotta admit: it is pretty damned cool...
The Ranch Rant
Sorry, folks, but I must vent on this for a second:
our nation’s craze for ranch dressing is just plain out of hand.
It’s bad enough this over-glorified mayonnaise is everywhere anyway, but we’ve gotten to the point that places will give you ranch even if you don’t ask for it! Jack In The Box is the prime example of this: ranch is on everything there. Worse, they don’t even call it ‘ranch,’ but disguise it as ‘buttermilk house sauce.’ Ugh.
Common sense reminder: if it looks like spoo and tastes like spoo, ergo it must be...
Obviously, this insidious ranch fad is being yoked upon us by Brain Police chefs with no taste buds but a sick sense of humor. Worse, with it is a simultaneous effort to discredit barbecue sauce. Indeed, this dastardly, double-barrel conspiracy was empirically emphasized to me just the other day. This true proof of conspiracy easily illustrates just how deeply the ranch dressing toxin has poisoned our cultural awareness.
I recently had dinner at The Vine with an old friend and neighbor of mine from Ice Station Zappa. Ol’ Girl’s a vegetarian, and was having a non-carnivore fajita with side of fries. She asked for several sides of ranch with it, which she promptly poured over everything.I reeled at this horrific display of innocent french fries drowning in white toxic waste, but managed to keep my composure. Then she offered me one.
“No thanks,” I manage to reply. “They’re no longer Kosher.”
She was shocked that I didn’t like ranch, and launched into a rote testimonial to its alleged yumminess. I remained unswayed. After all, we were talking about ranch dressing. I’ve had this conversation with DK and his deranged ranch-swilling minions enough times that I can hold my own.
Or so I thought; I lost any credibility with her when I suggested barbecue sauce as a more acceptable alternative. Her sneer was searing. “Sorry,” my vegetarian friend told me, “but I don’t get much call for barbecue.”
We dropped the matter, but her comment bothered me, and indeed still does. Has the Brain Police ranch propaganda campaign so brainwashed our vegetarian friends that they completely ignore barbecue sauce?!?
Barbecuing is a cooking technique involving open fire (hence its import to Branch Floridians) and this in no way limits its applications to just roasting flesh. Hell, I was a veggie m’self for 6, 8 months a few years ago, yet still managed to include barbecue sauce with almost all my meals at that time. (Then again, I mostly lived off of 7-layer burritos from Taco Bell...)
To prove this, here is a brief (and by no means inclusive) list of vegetables that barbecue sauce complements:
potatoes (especially french fries and hash browns)
onions (rings or awesome blossoms—forget that horseradish crap)
peppers (bell, jalapeño, or {as Cactus Jack advocates} jabañero)
corn on the cob (it’s better than butter!)
beans (any good chef will tell you bbq sauce is key to killer chili or baked beans)
The list goes on. In fact feel free to share your favorite barbecued vegetable:
FDR & Pearl Harbor
“...everything that the Japanese were planning to do was known to the United States...” —Army Review Board, 1944 |
Far be it for me to jump on the “Ben Affleck Bandwagon,” but several people recently asked Evil Matt about the old FDR/Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory, wanting to know if there was anything to it. EM and I decided that the subject was broad and complicated enough that it deserved its own entry in the Update.
For the few of you out of the loop, the question is, ‘did President Roosevelt have advanced knowledge of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor but do nothing about it so he could have an excuse to enter World War Two?’
There is no question that FDR was just itching to get America involved in the war against Hitler. Unfortunately for him, the American public was decidedly against getting involved in the European conflict. Prior to Pearl Harbor, 88% of the people wanted nothing to do with it, and 60% even thought getting into World War One had been a bad idea. FDR needed a way to bring the country (and Congress) behind him so he could end American neutrality without a negative public backlash against him. To this extent FDR pushed the envelope of isolationism, even going so far as to break international law by overtly sending munitions to England, trading warships for naval bases, etc. However, Hitler refused to take the bait and declare war on America, so Roosevelt needed to try something else. Given public opinion, almost all agreed that it would take a pretty strong incentive to change the public’s isolationist mind.
Something like a devastating surprise attack on American soil, for instance.
It was common knowledge that Germany and Japan (and Italy) had signed The Tripartite Pact in September 1940, allying these nations together. That alliance included pledges of mutual military support if one of those nations went to war with someone not already involved in current hostilities. By terms of the Pact, if Japan declared war on America, for instance, Germany would have to do likewise. The Allies intercepted and decoded numerous communiqués between Tokyo and Berlin which repeatedly show the Japanese essentially asking “If we declare war on America, can we count on you to do likewise?” The German response, rather reluctantly it seems, was “yes.”
This was exactly the back door that Roosevelt needed. It was just a matter of provoking Japan into drawing first blood, which would serve as FDR’s rallying point for involvement.
On October 7th, 1940, Lt. Commander Arthur H. McCollum sent the Director of Naval Intelligence an eight-point plan specifically designed to antagonize and provoke the Japanese into instigating hostilities against the United States. This included deploying American warships in Japanese territorial waters, a total embargo on Japan, and freezing all their Stateside assets. FDR saw the report, and the very next day adopted all of the points in it as policy.
On November 25th, 1941, Secretary of War Henry Stimson met with President Roosevelt to discuss the Pacific situation. In his diary, Stimson wrote of that meeting, “FDR stated that we were likely to be attacked perhaps as soon as next Monday.... The question was how we should maneuver them into the position of firing the first shot without too much danger to ourselves. In spite of the risk involved, however, in letting the Japanese fire the first shot, we realized that in order to have the full support of the American people it was desirable to make sure that the Japanese be the ones to do this so that there should remain no doubt in anyone’s mind as to who were the aggressors.”
The commander at Pearl Harbor was Admiral Husband E. Kimmel, and in the months after Pearl Harbor he went on court martial trial for gross negligence (read: allowing the Japanese to catch the American fleet with its pants down.) Kimmel was eventually exonerated, largely because it was found that he had been mysteriously left out of the loop of almost all intelligence concerning Japanese activities in the Pacific. One must obviously ask, why would the head of the western fleet be kept in the dark with such bad juju brewing on the horizon?
Lets take a look at just what the Americans knew at the time. Army and Navy Intelligence had cracked the three top Japanese diplomatic codes, as well as JN-25, the Japanese Naval code (click here for an actual sample.) Between September 1st and December 6th, they had intercepted and decoded 26,581 messages. A review of these messages show that 2,413 dealt with an upcoming secret naval attack on America, and of these, 188 directly referred to an impending military attack on Pearl Harbor. Yes, it is mentioned by name, and one intercept from November 23rd reads in part “The first air attack has been set for 0330 hours on X-day.”; (Tokyo time, or 8:00 A.M. Honolulu time.) The next day, Admiral Yamamoto himself sent this JN-25 message, which was decoded by the Dutch and British on the 25th and the Americans on the 26th:
(a) The task force, keeping its movements strictly secret and maintaining close guard against submarines and aircraft, shall advance into Hawaiian waters and upon the very opening of hostilities, shall attack the main force of the United States Fleet in Hawaii and deal it a mortal blow. The raid is planned for dawn on X-day — exact date to be given by later order. (b) Should the negotiations with the US prove successful, the task force shall hold itself in readiness forthwith to return and reassemble. (c) The task force will move out of Hitokappu Wan on the morning of 26 November and advance to the standing-by position on the afternoon of 4 December and speedily complete refueling. |
In October 1944, a Top Secret Army Report on all this information concluded “...everything that the Japanese were planning to do was known to the United States... including the probable exact hour and date of the attack.”
On the night of December 6th, 1941, FDR read the first 13 parts of the decoded Japanese diplomatic message which included their intended declaration of war the next day and said “This means war.” Amazingly, he did nothing about this, and when he returned to his 34 dinner guests, he calmly told them “The war starts tomorrow.”
Most of the conspirators were military men, all men of FDR’s own choice, men who only followed orders and FDR never delegated authority. (Chief of Naval Operations) Stark, in answer to charges that he denied IQ to Hawaii, publicly offered a Nuremberg defense in August 1945 that everything he did pre-Dec 7, 1941 was on FDR’s orders. The handful of military men in DC responsible for the disaster at Pearl Harbor were directly under the control of FDR and were later promoted and protected from investigation; promoted with FDR’s full knowledge that they were responsible for not warning Hawaii. On the record, Intelligence tried to warn Hawaii scores of times but were prevented by FDR’s men. Pearl
Harbor: The Mother of all Conspiracies
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Secrets of the Universe
by
Last time we learned how magazines breed; this week it’s...
How Time Works
Ever notice that an awkward or tense situation always seems like its longer than it really is? This is no accident. Indeed, the discrepancy between how long something feels like it’s taking and how long it actually is is a constant ratio that can be expressed by this formula:
Where TR is “real” time and Tf is what it “feels” like has passed.
For example, if you are waiting for someone to get out of the bathroom so you can use it, 30 seconds of Real Time feels like 450 seconds, or 7.5 minutes.
This formula will work with any whole number greater than 2, though to get a non-fractionary figure usually requires conversion to seconds or minutes. An interesting proportion happens when this is done. Consider:
-
You’re waiting for your girlfriend to finish watching Dawson’s Creek so you can catch The Simpsons; her show has five minutes left. Those 5 actual minutes feel like 12.5 minutes when calculated using minutes, but (5 minutes = 300 seconds) feel like 12.5 hours if calculated in seconds.
-
A doctor looks at your chart, says “Hmmmmm, that can’t be right; I’ll be right back...” and leaves. Using the formula, the 23 minutes he is gone equals 264.5 minutes of Fear, whereas its seconds equivalent comes up with 264.5 hours.
This conversion is constant. Coincidence? I think not!
Pac Mania
Social scientists, child psychologists, and even unqualified parents have long debated the relationship between video games and the (alleged) effects they have on the children who play them. The stripped-down logic has been variants of ‘video games are violent, our children play video games, our children are becoming increasingly violent, ergo the games are to blame.’
I’d initially dismissed this as absurd by simply looking at the specifics. After all, ‘Pong’ was the first great video game to arrest our youths’ attention; if video games affected behavior then you’d think we’d have a nation of tennis maniacs with shelf-fulls of Wimbledon trophies. Even looking at overall themes, the majority of the great games of the ’80s were Space Invader variants where the player defends Earth from hostile, marauding Extra-Terrestrials. Again, if video games affected behavior we should have the exact opposite of the “pro-E.T.” craze about us that all but welcomes the bug-eyed Grays as “cute” and “Madison Avenue marketable.”
But wait!
The most popular video game of the ’80s was Pac Man. One must wonder if it’s a coincidence that we now have a nation of teenagers who like to run around dark rooms, gobble up “power pills,” and listen to droning, monotonous electronic music.
Ask Evil Matt[as channeled by Sister Ob’dewlla ‘X’]
An easy issue this go-round, with only three questions in the in-box. Two of them concerned Pearl Harbor, and have been dealt with separately. (actually, MonkeyMan asked “what’s up with the Masons?” but if you think the Pearl Harbor commentary was long...)
Q: What the hell is Velveeta? It can't be cheese, because it's not refrigerated. This could be a conspiracy!A: www.velveeta.com was of little help, but according to the box, Velveeta is “milk, water, milk fat, whey protein concentrate, sodium phosphate, milk protein concentrate, sorbic acid, sodium alginate, sodium citrate, apocaroterol, annato, enzymes, and cheese culture.” It is in the cheese family. While similar to cheddar, it has its own name because it is a distinct variety, in the same way that brie and edam are similar but distinct. Current packaging requires refrigeration, though older boxes were vacuum-sealed, allowing non-refrigerated storage.
Got a question? Ask .
And finally...
The Hedgehog Corner
by
Harriet the Hedgehog
Hedgehog Laws Revisited
I recently received a piece of fan mail asking me if it was still illegal to own a hedgehog in Arizona. (For those who missed this important piece of legality, check out A.A.C. Title 12, Chapter 4, Article 4, Section A , SubSection 2.)
Good question, and until BadAss secedes from The Union, it is one that directly affects me. So I made a call to the ’Zona Fish and Game Commission to ask them if this was still on the books.
Indeed it is, and the original intent to “deregulate” hedgehogs came and went, with the consensus among humans in state government being that we 'hogs are a “breeding threat” if let loose in the wild.
If you’re as outraged as I am, share your anger at the source:
Arizona Game & Fish Department
2221 W. Greenway Rd.
Phoenix, AZ 85023-4399
(602) 942-3000
home page: http://www.gf.state.az.us/
anyway...
That’s all for now, so you know the drill...
trust no one
deny everything
always
keep your lighter handy!
© 2001
(V,iii)