3445 Foiled again!

Friday, January 13, 2012

Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
-- Steven Wright --

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Packing for flying:

If you don't like the idea of strangers handling your packed intimates, there's an easy way to discourage it and still not annoy them.

Buy gallon sized ziplock bags.

Fold your clothes to fit the bags, and pack everything in the bags in such a way that it's obvious what's in the bag, and so that the bags are flexible. A week's worth of panties will fit in one bag. If you wear underwire bras, put fewer in a bag so that the wires can be felt for what they are. Three or four t-shirts, or two turtle neck sweaters, one pair of jeans, or two or three shorts, and so on. Socks should go into a ziplock flat, not rolled, so they can be felt easily. If there are any hard parts, like buckles or decorated areas, fold the item so the hard stuff is on top and visible through the plastic.

If they can see and feel what's in the bags, they won't open them.

Everything else can go in bags, too. Actually, that makes it easier to settle at your destination and to unpack when you get home. Put things like shampoo, toothpaste, deodorant, etc. in your shoes, which should then go into OPEN clear plastic bags, not ziplocks. They will get annoyed if they have to actually open a ziplock.

Carry expensive jewelry with you. Costume jewelry in the suitcase, and anything else that might look tempting, goes into a large ziplock with a piece of cardboard the size of the ziplock. That makes it harder to "accidentally" drop or pocket something.

On your return trip, the temptation is to just jumble dirty clothes. Uh uh. Fold them neatly into the ziplocks, exactly as when you set out, so it's not obvious those are used panties.

They don't check every bag, by the way. The threat of opening the bag is enough to keep the average person in check. Of course, they seem to forget it's not the average person's suitcase that needs checking.... (Oh, yeah, for a moment there I forgot what the REAL purpose is.)
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3444 Squirrels

Friday, January 13, 2012

Expectation is the root of all heartache.
-- William Shakespeare --

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Four metal tissue holders bound for a Bed Bath & Beyond store in California triggered a radiation alarm at a truck weighing station. It turns out the whole shipment was made from contaminated metal. (They don't say, but I wonder if the metal came from Japan.)

The shipment came in from India through the Port of Newark. Have you ever seen a shipping container? They're huge. How many tissue holders would be in one container?

So, if four holders inside a truck can set off an alarm, how can an entire shipping container full of them escape detection?

Oh! Oh! I know! Ask me! Nobody is checking for shipments of radioactive materials! I mean, how difficult can it be? Wave a magic wand as they roll off the ship.

It serves political purposes (and the military-corporate complex) to natter about "dirty bombs" being set off in cities. Stuff like that instills a fear level that keeps us compliant and willing to give up control to those who claim to keep us safe.

Next time you're being groped at a TSA checkpoint, or your suitcase is being rifled and your packed panties sniffed, remember that the purpose is not to find contraband, but to keep you fearful and compliant. To both literally and figuratively keep you in line. To impress upon you that government agencies know best and you can't argue with them.

Shipping containers don't need groping because they can't be made fearful.

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Recall: If you bought metal tissue holders from BBB since July, call Bed, Bath & Beyond at 1-800-462-3966.
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3430 Propaganda is using the right wrong word

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

If you want the rainbow, you got to put up with the rain.
-- Steven Wright --

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Articles abound about Puerto Rican frogs, the tiny thumbnail-sized coqui, showing up and spreading in Hawaii. Every report refers to them as "harmful".

Propaganda! The use of that word "harmful" makes you feel negatively toward them! You immediately assume bad things about them. You are supposed to assume that means harmful to the natural world, the beauty of Hawaii, and of course you want to protect that.

They're tiny. They don't "harm" anything. I mean it's not like they eat baby birds or something. They don't cut down the forest, or move into another species' habitat and make it unsuitable for the original inhabitants, they don't consume more than their share of resources, or over-fish the sea. They don't pave over the world so rain can't get through. They don't kill for the "sport" of killing. They don't push their neighbors into reservations, ghettos, or preserves.

They're just very very very loud, and humans don't like that.

So they're "harmful", and must be eradicated because they're harmful.

Bullpoopy.

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I wouldn't mind if there were some good reason why, like that they have no natural enemies in Hawaii, but that isn't the problem. Birds find them delicious. So far they have caused no imbalances. Their living and dead bodies become resources in about the same niche as the one they occupy. They eat insects, but their offal supports insects.

The sole reason they are "harmful" is their song. We don't like it, so let's kill them!

I wouldn't mind if people admitted they aren't harmful, and the only reason they want to eradicate them is that they are loud, disturb sleep, and may hurt the tourist trade.

But this is not harmful. It's merely annoying. You can't kill things just because they're annoying. (If that were true, we'd have no neighbors.) They have to be "harmful", so therefore that's what they are so we can justify killing them.

A small example of what I meant by propaganda a few posts back.

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PS - This post isn't about frogs. It's about propaganda. Frogs are just the vehicle. Ignore the frogs.
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3409 Propaganda

Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Insurance of whatever kind is supposed to be there in case something goes wrong.
It has been my experience that having insurance seems to prevent anything going wrong.
Let it lapse, and you'll find out....
-- Silk --

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Latest Nugget (yesterday):

We have one tooth breaking through on the bottom, and one on the top. And she's now crawling properly on hands and knees, and she's FAST! The cats are no longer safe.

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This article is short and interesting: http://health.yahoo.net/news/s/afp/healthpoliticsusbritain

To quote from the intro:

"Everyone knows that liberals and conservatives butt heads when it comes to world views, but scientists have now shown that their brains are actually built differently.

Liberals have more gray matter in a part of the brain associated with understanding complexity, while the conservative brain is bigger in the section related to processing fear, said the study on Thursday in Current Biology."

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At http://www.purewatergazette.net/propagandainamerica.htm, there's a good article entitled Propaganda: Nobody Does It Better Than America, by Paul Weber. It's a bit longer, but it's very good. I highly recommend a skim.

We all know that sex sells products. Fear and repetition sells ideas. Appeals to logic and fact sells nothing.

It's sometimes difficult to recognize propaganda - attempts to control your mind and how you think - especially when the propaganda is all you are given to consider, it's repeated over and over as if it's an accepted fact, and you are not given the real facts. Fear-based propaganda works especially well on the conservative brain.

Think about how our freedoms have been eroded over the past ten years, and how so many of us have been convinced that it's for our own good. And it's all based on fear.
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