While no one can tell me exactly what's going on with this whole Pledge of Allegience thing--like, whether the little undergod bit is being removed, or the entire Pledge is being removed, or what--I'm definitely seeing some really brainless comments from people in chatrooms about it. Incluing this one:
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The atheists [communists!!!] can't be happy with teaching their religion of Piltdown Man in schools, now they want to change the Pledge of Allegience to something new, from the one we've used since 1776 |
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The corrections in spelling are mine; the words are verbatim; these people are morons.
Where to begin....
No accredited school on the planet is teaching anyone that Piltdown was real. We discovered the problem and solved it. Scientists don't regard Piltdown to have ever existed.
Of course, if you want to discuss texts with truly inaccurate assertions, I can think of one: the bible still describes Earth as a flat square at the centre of the universe around which the sun orbits; it also contains unicorns and dragons, and describes pi as being equal to 3.00. When something like Piltdown remains in a textbook for a couple thousand years, I'll start giving these plebeians my attention again.
The Pledge didn't exist in 1776. The Pledge wasn't even recognised until 1924. The Pledge we're trying to get rid of was approved in 1954 as a bullshit McCarthyist propoganda measure to separate the beatniks from the citisens. What evolved into the hippies and yippies had a similar ProAmerican pledge which sympathised with the communist philosophy. So this new, brainless Pledge came into being in 1954.
After nearly fifty years, something seems to be getting done about it. Finally.
Speaking of communists, I hate to tell you this but: I've looked at the coldwar, and damned if the soviets weren't the goodguys that time.
Okay, I'm joking. The communists were evil; they wanted equality in their citisens; they wanted to prevent the extinction of the lower class. Fucking tyrants.
Don't get me wrong: I'm all for capitalism. If I have a political stance at all, it's a sort of libertarian anarchocapitalistic philosophy: that the government are a service industry which should be open 168 hours per week for those whom want to solicit ther services, and should stay the hell out of the way the rest of the time. These people should not be taxing cigarettes and then telling you that you can't smoke in public buildings, and imprisoning people for twenty years because they had an ounce of Cannabis sativa in their zipcode. Something is very wrong here.
As for the Pledge: I say we just get rid of it. Kill it dead. Remove it from schools and get back to, I dunno, teaching something, maybe.
Deities notwithstanding, what exactly is the purpose of this Pledge? You wanna talk about totalitarian regimes? Good morning Class; let's all stand up and leap into this voluntary pledge to the flag now. I have a better idea: if someone wants to pledge their allegience to this damaged country, and it doesn't interfere with more important matters [like, anything else you could be doing], then fine. But I see no particular need to force kids into this ritualistic chant. Especially every morning.
Good morning, Class; we're going to be learning a few things today; but first, we'll be reaffirming our allegience to Duhmerica, just in case any of you secondgraders happened to become communistic sympathisers last night during the Simpsons.
If Duhmerica are really fragile enough to require this pointless pontification, then simply chanting at a flag is not going to save the country.
Anyway....
I have got a bit of news. I'm heading to DuhMoines in a week or two. I should be flying out of Denver on 30th July, and having my boxcutter collection shipped separately. I have a lot of things to get done in DuhMoines, including various things regarding Wasted--particularly where books and shirts are concerned. It'll be tight, since Corey has to leave in the middle of August to sing for SlipKnot somewhere. Hopefully, we can get everything taken care of before that.
One of the things I'm working on, where books are concerned, is distrubution. There have been some serious problems in that area, but I think I have them largely solved now. If a couple of things work out correctly, we should have a couple other formats for NotS available, as well as other titles in hardcover, softcover, and paperback.
The paperbacks are especially appealing, since inflation has pushed softcovers up to twenty bucks now; I'm hoping to get paperbacks to retail under ten. US$8.95, or whatever the standard is now.
We're also looking into getting EBooks into amazon.com, since people are getting kinda concerned about PayPal now. See PayPalWarning.com for more information.
At the moment, the EBooks are only availble through ClickBank, at EBooks.grem.tv.
As for shirts, StoneSour are back--which are not a new band; that was the band which Corey was in all through the nineties, as evidenced here. Corey's in the process of setting up a merch deal for that, and likes the company he's using well enough that he's suggesting using them for Wasted's stuff too. That's something we're going to work out while I'm in DuhMoines. If it does work out, it'll include distribution, and the shirts will be available in places like HotTopic. That would be cool too.
That's about it for the news. Although something did occur to me the other day in the same chatroom in which I discovered that the Pledge had been used since 1776.
The christians we run into in there have this funny habit of asking whether we, as atheists, celebrate XMas. And, while the answer is pretty much No in my case [that's explained in NotS], the reason that they like to ask that--over and over again, as if it's some new idea which could show how silly atheism is--is because XMas is a christian holliday...even though its only real purpose is to obscure the pagan Festival of the Dead...which, of course, is something else I don't pay much attention to.
So then this occurred to me.
Do christians celebrate July the Fourth?
If so, then they're celebrating their independence from the christian theocracy of eighteenth-century England. Happy Atheist Day, morons....
More later....
--Gremlin