SemiConscious Dot Org

Come you Masters of War, you that build all the guns
You that build the death planes, you that build the big bombs
You that hide behind walls, You that hide behind desks
I just want you to know I can see through your masks

You that never done nothin’, but build to destroy
You play with my world like it’s your little toy
You put a gun in my hand and you hide from my eyes
And you turn and run farther when the fast bullets fly

Like Judas of old, you lie and deceive
A world war can be won, you want me to believe
But I see through your eyes and I see through your brain
Like I see through the water that runs down my drain

You fasten the triggers for the others to fire
Then you set back and watch when the death count gets higher
You hide in your mansion as young people’s blood
Flows out of their bodies and is buried in the mud

You’ve thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled
Fear to bring children into the world
For threatening my baby, unborn and unnamed
You ain’t worth the blood that runs in your veins

How much do I know to talk out of turn
You might say that I’m young, you might say I’m unlearned
But there’s one thing I know, though I’m younger than you
Even Jesus would never forgive what you do

Let me ask you one question: Is your money that good?
Will it buy you forgiveness? Do you think that it could?
I think you will find when your death takes its toll
All the money you made will never buy back your soul

And I hope that you die, and your death’ll come soon
I will follow your casket in the pale afternoon
And I’ll watch while you’re lowered down to your deathbed
And I’ll stand o’er your grave ‘til I’m sure that you’re dead – Bob Dylan

1,657 American soldiers dead. 12,350 wounded.

24,000+ Iraqi civilians dead.

And all for a pack of lies. Unambiguous, unmitigated, unconscionable lies.

But we all know that Americans are a visual people, right? Numbers don’t have nearly the effect on a nation of tv-addicted idiots that pictures do.

Very well. Here are some pictures.

Enjoy your cookout.

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half-full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multicolored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…. Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether, and two dozen amyls…
– Saint Gonzo

Predictable quote, I know.

This afternoon, the millisecond the last schoolbus full of rugrats clears the school parking lot, I am hopping in my car and heading out to the desert. Several friends and I are going to see the Sasquatch Festival, located at the World’s Best Outdoor Concert Site, the Gorge Ampitheater. We’ll be camping out for two days and nights at this place. To say that I’m looking forward to this with squeaks of anticipatory glee would be something of an understatement.

And, to top it off, my birfday is this weekend (ok, Tuesday. Close enough.) Granted, this is not one of the years in which my birthday falls on Memorial Day, so there will not be a national holiday in honor of my birth, but I can certainly deal with a four day weekend in compensation. In the interest of streamlining the all-important “Buy Aaron Stuff” process, I present to you a few gift ideas. Bonus points will be awarded for creativity, quantity, and monetary value of the gifts. I also accept cash and/or traveler’s checks.

How about a scrolling LED belt buckle?

You can’t go wrong with Shakeutron:

And of course, there’s always the ever-popular GodJesus:

Of course, all these trinkets are pricey. Sure, I’m eminently worth it, but many of my friends are sadly poor. (Bad planning in choosing friends on my part, I guess. Why couldn’t I have befriended rich bastards?) If you want to show your deep and abiding reverence for me, and you’re on a budget, you can’t do better than the one, the only, Smoking Baby!

It’s cheap, it’s stylish, and best of all, it’s sold exclusively at the World’s Greatest Store, Archie McPhee’s ...which just happens to be right around the corner from my apartment!

PS. I am not, any way, shape, or form, endorsing the practice of smoking on the part of infants. Babies should never smoke.

We have experienced something of a shortfall of pleasing images recently, so in lieu of a Make Up Your Own Caption post this week, we offer a “Make Up Your Own Punchline” item, courtesy of The Sporadic Curmudgeon:

Penis Causes Terror Alert!

April 13th, 2004:

QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President.

In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you’d made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa.

You’ve looked back before 9-11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?

BUSH: I wish you’d have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it.

John, I’m sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could’ve done it better this way or that way. You know, I just – I’m sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with answer, but it hadn’t yet.

Allow us to assist you, Mr. President:

(pic and links via PERRspectives Blog )

You’re welcome.

This is what is meant in Prescripture by The Time of Pee – it is the time foretold, when people would be judged not by works, nor by family, nor even by looks, but by their urine…

...They kick your door in anytime they want to. All they have to yell is ‘DRUGS!’ and your spouse is in jail, your kids are farmed out to the state, your car and house are suddenly theirs…

...Nobody up there is a friend of yours; nobody up there wants to see you get what you would call freedom…

It is written in First Irrigations, Book of Urinomics 4:12: “And the Beast said: “By their pee ye shall judge them, and by thy pee ye shall be judged. And all will be divided by their pee. And in the snow shall their names be written.”

– The Book of the Subgenius

Now, see, if our friend Pope Horatio could write like that, I might even begin to believe he was divinely inspired, and start to take his crazy-ass religion more seriously.

To be honest, this post has very little to do with either Drugs or the War On Some Of Them. And really, compared to the wholesale savaging of the Bill of Rights undertaken as part of the War On Terror, the War On Drugs seems almost quaint, doesn’t it? Conservatives are fond of saying that “9/11 changed everything,” and they are right. For instance, was it really only seven years ago that those very same conservatives tried to impeach the President of the United States for getting a blowjob? Seems like centuries. Now they scream “Treason!” whenever anyone gives the current President the stinkeye.

...and there I go off on yet another tangent. In truth, this post was originally supposed to be about what I did today, which was to buy a shredder. A powerful shredder, too, with big, nasty, pointy teeth. It’s strong enough that I can feed junk mail in there, unopened, and it chews it right up. This is especially fun with credit card offers. I stuffed this year’s 1040 instruction booklet in there, all 120 pages of it, and the shredder ground it into hamburger. It’s awesome.

Anyway, buying the shredder got me thinking about paranoia, about how in these dark days, it’s best not to have anything on paper, because if identity thieves don’t go through your trash, somebody Up There probably will. One day you’re minding your own business, and the next, jackboots are kicking down your door. You’ll be like Joseph K., never sure what the hell you’re charged with, but presumed guilty and treated accordingly anyway.

Ok, now I’m really babbling. It’s late, and I’m tired. All I really meant is that shredding masses of papers and bringing the resulting detritus out to the trash is really, really fun. There is a certain satisfaction that comes from shredding. I’m sure Ollie North and Liddy and the others must have enjoyed themselves mightily. Can you imagine the tonnage of shredded paper that will be generated at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in December, 2008? You could throw parades for the next ten years with that much confetti.

No doubt, most of you are already aware that the final installment in the Star Wars saga has zillions of good, patriotic Americans up in arms over its blatant and traitorous comparisons between Emperor Palpatine’s takeover of the Republic and our own Dear Leader’s War on Terror. So great is the anger at Revenge of the Sith that a spectacularly successful boycott has crippled the movie’s commercial appeal, limiting the four day box office totals to a laughably pathetic $158 million. Glory!

But these people, however well-intentioned, fail to fully comprehend the true extent of Lucas’ evil. For Star Wars is not merely a pungent slab of anti-American propaganda. No, it is, in fact, something even more evil than liberalism:

Star Wars is a tool of Satan! (link via Chapel Perilous )

At last, the sheer, squalid depth of this nefarious plot is revealed. Today, the kids are buying action figures and Darth Vader masks; tomorrow, they’ll be sacrificing goats in pentagrams! The madman Lucas must be stopped!

This afternoon, I booked my tickets to fly back home to Maine in July for a friend’s wedding.

Don’t worry, this isn’t going to be one of those “I’m thirty-something, and all my friends are getting married, and I’m still single! I think it’s time to subject the world to some hellish introspection! Boo hoo hoo!” posts. Believe you me, no one is more nauseated by those “dear diary”-type blogs than I am.

No, this post is about Darwinism. Well, that and Brutal, Bloody Violence. The specific question I’m asking is: if one knows for a fact that a certain strain of DNA should not perpetuate itself, does one have a duty to do something about it?

My friend, see. He’s getting married, and he and his blushing bride will no doubt soon be turning their thoughts, as young married couples often do, to the production of children. The problem is that NOTHING IN THE WORLD COULD BE WORSE FOR THE HUMAN RACE THAN IF THIS MAN IS ALLOWED TO REPRODUCE. I’ve known him for 15 years, and he is one of my best friends, but he is a sick, depraved, perverse individual, and his rancid genes must not be allowed to find shelter. His broken chromosomes will spread like a virus, breaking off the heads and shitting down the necks of competing chromosomes, spawning a kind of reverse-evolution that will eventually have us all swinging from the trees again.

Who is my friend? He can be best described in famous words by the late, much-lamented Saint Gonzo:

There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. Some kind of high powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.

A cool person to know, obviously, but most assuredly not someone who was ever meant to spawn offspring. On the day he told me of the upcoming nuptials, the first words out of my mouth, even before “Congratulations,” were “for God’s sake, don’t reproduce.” He just giggled, his eyes rolling in different directions, leering maniacally, as if to say, “The get of my loins shall be Legion. Do something about it, bitch.” And it was then that my mission became clear.

At the ceremony, I must walk up to my friend and castrate him with a salad fork. For the Good of Humanity.

Now, before you automatically recoil in shock and revulsion, ask yourself the question: If you could, by the simple violent application of a fork to someone’s testicles, prevent much further human misery, wouldn’t you? Or to take the analogy further, if you could, for instance, travel back in time and snip a few parachute cords to make, say, George H.W. Bush’s chute fall a little quicker, causing him to smack his nuts on the surface of the water just a leeeeeetle bit harder, making him infertile, and thus preventing the birth of this, wouldn’t you do it? Sure as shit you would. What sane person wouldn’t?

See, it’s the Butterfly Effect, only without that “Punk’d” dipshit. By impaling my friend’s family jewels with a serving utensil, I am guaranteeing that future generations will grow up free, in a world of truth, beauty, and light. It is, quite possibly, the one single act I was put on this earth to accomplish. And trust me, if you knew him, you’d do the same.

You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility. Existentialist 94% Postmodernist 88% Materialist 88% Modernist 81% Cultural Creative 44% Idealist 31% Fundamentalist 25% Romanticist 0% What is Your World View? (corrected…hopefully) created with QuizFarm.com

Perhaps it’s just a product of the sheer amount of recent headlines involving religion, but somehow, this little item got lost in the shuffle: last week, Biblical scholars discovered that 666 is not actually the Number of The Beast:

The main researcher promoting the 616 claim is David Parker, professor of New Testament Textual Criticism and Paleography at the University of Birmingham in England.

“This is an example of gematria, where numbers are based on the numerical values of letters in people’s names,” Parker told the UK’s Independent. “Early Christians would use numbers to hide the identity of people who they were attacking: 616 refers to the Emperor Caligula.”

Upon receiving this news, my mind set to reeling, and I struggled with my faith, imploring Nixon to reveal to me the meaning, and to make sense of it all. After all, if man could be wrong for so long in his interpretation of one Biblical passage, could that not mean he might have wrongly interpreted other ones? And what of those good Christian legislators in New Mexico who voted to spend thousands of taxpayer dollars renaming Route 666 on the entirely logical premise that a number can cause an inanimate object like a stretch of asphalt to be damned? It turns out that the money spent may have wasted, because it was the wrong number all along!

Finally, after many days of fasting and prayer, Nixon spoke to me, and revealed the meaning of 616: it is, in fact, a telephone area code. Thousands of years ago, the Bible’s authors anticipated the invention of the telephone, and using their copy of Area Code Directory, endeavored to warn us where the Antichrist would be appearing. Glory!

After consulting the internets, I discovered that the 616 area code corresponds to Kent County, Michigan. Now I had a general geographic area to search, but I still didn’t know which town the Great Deceiver would appear in. However, like any good Christian conservative, I know that the liberals (Satan’s natural allies) like to congregate in large cities, and the largest city in Kent County is Grand Rapids. By virtue of this infallible logic, the meaning of formerly cryptic Biblical passages was finally made clear:

And I stood upon the sand of Lake Michigan, and saw a beast rise up out of Lake Michigan, having seven heads and ten horns, and upon his horns ten crowns, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy. – Revelation 13:1

To arms, my flock! The location of the Prince Of Lies has been revealed to us at last. Our task is clear: we must make a mass pilgrimage to Grand Rapids, and employ the Pastor Ted Prayer Walker Method to smoke Satan out of his hidey hole. Sure, many people will complain that we are “bunch of loonies” committing “harassment” or some such nonsense, but such is the price one pays for saving the world. Onward, Nixon Soldiers!

Back in March, when we announced the first batch of nominees for the 2005 Craaaziest Christian of the Year™ award, we promised that a new group of contenders would be coming along in May. We will admit, however, to a certain amount of trepidation over our ability to deliver on that promise. Last month, when the College of Cardinals elected an ex-Nazi Grand Inquisitor to be God’s official representative on Earth, it certainly appeared as if the competition had prematurely ended, and we would have to crown a winner with almost eight months left in the year. And how boring would that have been?

Happily, however, we have underestimated the doggedness and can-do spirit of Christians. While the Papists may have already submitted their nominee, other branches of Christianity, determined not to be outdone in the Craaazy™ sweepstakes, have exhibited admirable levels of lunacy in the past few months. In fact, several of our early prospective nominees, such as the Chicago motorists who saw the Virgin Mary in a salt stain and the South Dakota couple who sell candles that smell like Jesus, ended up being bumped in favor of stronger candidates. Talk about an embarassment of riches!

Who would have thought there were so many believers out there willing to go to such absurd, hypocritical, and occasionally violent ends to spread the message of Christ’s love! We salute your abundance of faith and corresponding lack of common sense, tolerance, humility, self-control, or perspective. You are an inspiration to us all!

Without further ado, we bring you this month’s batch of nominees for the 2005 Craaaziest Christian of the Year™:

Pastor claims allowing girls to play sports is un-Biblical!

Religious groups oppose vaccinating girls against cervical cancer virus on grounds that doing so will increase premarital sex!

Pat Robertson claims that ‘activist judges’ are a worse threat to America than Al Queda!

Christian magazine claims that birth control is a plot by Satan to destroy motherhood!

Evolution goes on trial in Kansas!

Christian pharmacist group refuses to fill prescriptions for birth control pills!

Pastor Ted sends ‘prayer-walkers’ out to harass suspected witches – in their own homes!

North Carolina minister excommunicates members of his congregation for refusing to vote Republican!

FDA set to ban gay men as sperm donors!

And, last but certainly not least, we have The Culture of Life promising vengeance on the judges involved in the Terry Schiavo case.

Truly, such an inspiring abundance of insanity will make it exceedingly difficult to choose a winner from this month’s bracket, but choose we must. Let the voting begin. Glory!