A Quiet Leaving

According to Mum, a lot of her neighbors are disturbed enough about the general social climate here that they have quietly moved out of the country. Mostly to Israel. She knows of fifteen families so far who were creeped-out enough in suburban Florida to get the heck out and go to a safer war zone.

Paul went back North for work and because it's safer for him there. I didn't feel safe there after the second shooting, but he is less of a target for being gay there than here. Random bombs and crazy lone gunmen are less of a threat for most people than the social miasma this place is in.

Zombie soldiers in Iraq?

According to a source with battlefield knowledge of the war in Iraq, the US soldiers have been finding syringes with large-bore, very long needles in the insurgents' encampments. These aren't ordinary needles like you might use to shoot insulin or anti-tetanus serum into someone's arm; they are the kind of needle that doctors will use to pierce the sternum to inject adrenalin directly into the heart of a dying drug overdose victim.

The soldiers that the needles appear to have been used on are not ordinary, either. They can be shot several times and they will just keep coming, impervious to pain and the normal debilitation from blood loss. If they aren't physically knocked down by a bullet, they will continue to fight until they drop dead. And if they are not shot, they will fight until they drop dead anyway, with no visible injuries. Whatever is in the drug cocktail they're getting shot into their chest cavity, it makes them super-strong, super-tough, and then it kills them.

Chillingly, there is suspicion that the men who are being "zombified" in this way are not volunteers. They are being conscripted, having their consciousness altered somehow, and turned loose to fight under the influence of some drug that will kill them even if the US soldiers don't.

Forteana in Virtual Worlds

...In video games, anyway.


Excerpt:

It was a true world’s end, where only crude and unpredictable physics applied.

Walking along this rugged landscape, I came to a narrow chasm. As it was impassable, I jumped into it, and found that it actually formed the mouth of a cave leading underground.

Down I went, and at the end of the cave I found—a pile of human corpses.

Eight bodies lying in a stack makes for a hair-raising find on its own. But truly disturbing was that they were all identified as minor characters, at least some of whom I knew were still “alive” elsewhere in the game.3 Imagine finding a graveyard of clones of people you know. That’s what I experienced.

I leave speculation about Fortean phenomena in the real world to the reader.

...And Here It Comes!

Violent Teen Shoould Be Humanely Euthanized

This letter comes from Florida, no less, an hour's drive from here. I really do have a front-row seat. And I have been hearing people saying this in face-to-face conversations, too. I expect it to increase.

Forecast Regarding Prisons

We're going to see a lot of political push to expand the death penalty to crimes other than murder, as well as more talk about getting tougher on incarcerated criminals. We're also going to see unprecedented growth in the for-profit private prison industry, which will be widely regarded as a "good job-creator for small towns."

In the for-profit prisons, initially there will be some minor scandals about cost-cutting by doing things like reducing food allowances and medical care. I can already foresee them cutting out a meal a day ("cuts calories as well, no need for them to get fat on our dime") and progressing to a day a week without food ("even cheaper, we don't need to have the cafeteria staff in that day").
The scandals will soon wane as people get accustomed to the new normal; and besides, "nobody needs to worry about it but criminals."

Currently, the mass mind has decided that criminals can not be rehabilitated. We are even seeing a resurgence of theories about "criminality" being a heritable trait, along with other "anatomy is destiny, you are your genetic makeup and that's that" lines of thought.

Many people are starting from a belief that criminals are criminals because their genes make them criminals, and who therefore believe they themselves are non-criminal due to inherent genetic superiority. This makes "criminal" a class of "other" toward which they feel neither empathy nor ethical responsibility. In this psycho-social environment, especially if we come to a time of scarcity, conditions are likely to result in deliberate killing, as well as exploitation for things like unpaid labor.

Cheap Food is Over

Think you're feeling more of a pinch in your grocery bill? You're right.

What happens, socially, when an affluent population starts starving?

Infiltration: Harborside Christian Church

Paul and I have spent the past few Sundays infiltrating fundamentalist Christian churches. When we do this, we play dress-up and watch how many people think we're a "couple" (even though he is my brother and that'd be creepy). So far he's passed as straight and we've both passed as unremarkable every time, and we've been learning what the Dominionists say when they think they're alone, and it is scary.

I should mention here that by "fundie Christian churches" I don't mean tiny little snake-handling congregations in the woods, I mean megachurches the size and shape of Wal-Marts with parking lots packed fuller than the DUI docket after New Year's. These people have slick, pre-packaged Powerpoint presentations and slick, pre-packaged messages to politicians--and the politicians listen, whether the request is for police to direct traffic leaving church at noon or for Ten Commandments displays in courthouses.

The most recent infiltration was into a megachurch that uses the New International Version of the Bible. The topic of the week was "teamwork" at this church and apparently at plenty of others (they seem to be getting a curriculum from a central location, like different franchises of the same crazy). The service started with a Powerpoint show on the large TV screen located in the front of the building. The presentation showed, among other things, local volunteers helping the homeless in New York by giving them soup and preaching at them (though I had to wonder why they needed to go so far to find homeless people--I know where they could have found them locally). So far, so okay; as long as people aren't being required to accept a religion as valid in exchange for their meal, it's not that big a deal. Then came the inevitable "Make sacrifices to your church!" speech and the semi-aggressive passing of the velvet bucket-on-a-pole. The guy passing the bucket left it stopped in front of Paul till he tossed in a couple bucks ("A show for two dollars isn't bad," he whispered to me). Then they passed the Communion stuff: again, pretty standard. Paul and I palmed the wafers and stuffed Kleenex into the bitty little wine-cups while pretending to drink. Then things got...weird.

The preacher, who seemed to have been trained as a motivational speaker, started teaching about the true meaning of teamwork, and how church members need to be a team. Then, without irony, he quoted Niccolo Machiavelli on leadership, followed by a few other motivational speakers I'd never heard of. Wait...Machiavelli?! Yep. Machiavelli as a positive example. With hardly a blink after that incongruity, the preacher segued into explaining exactly what all those Bible verses about being nice to people and not repaying evil with evil actually mean. According to him, those verses only apply to someone else who is "on the team"--that is, only to church members. Outsiders, it seems, are fair game.

Then the preacher spoke extensively about the programs for "new teammates" and how they would entirely re-teach new church members "as though they are completely unknowing of Christianity" so that the newbies would get only those ideas approved by the church. They also set newbies up with a small group of more experienced members for a "mentoring program." All of this sounded weirdly familiar: this was exactly the same tactics the ISO uses, the tactics that just seem a little too close to brainwashing...

Can't wait to watch even more deeply disturbing things; these are interesting times, and I'm going to enjoy the show as long as I can.