The Genesis of this video goes back a long time; since I was an older, bored sibling.
Originally I thought of it as a children's book (and still do. I've been "working" on the illustrations for a while now). Of course, making a video and creating slime were adventures that I didn't have the access to as a youth. Video cameras were massively expensive, looking up slime recipes was rare, and even if I did make a video....who would I have distributed it to? Family...friends...no way of actually going viral. But now, with todays technology I was finally able to produce something that looks like would have been made way back in the 90's....so I am very sorry. On the plus side, I got to play around with a little editing programs (also not available to me back in MY DAY!), some sound, some end credits that in the old days would have been done with a Mario Paint game for the SNES and a VCR, all in roughly an hour. Not bad, eh? If young Judas had access to these pieces of movie making magic, truly you would have seen films worthy of Ed Wood. Sit back, relax, and laugh at an old mans attempt to bring his teenage years to fruition.
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https://api.spreaker.com/v2/episodes/15081757/download.mp3
https://api.spreaker.com/v2/episodes/15081820/download.mp3 https://www.spreaker.com/episode/15081886 https://www.spreaker.com/episode/15081844 Hey Cogs! Just a few links to my podcasts. I'm trying to go regular, so send me your ideas! Andrew and I talk about the new Solo movie, some girl from Game of Thrones, Trollhunters, and the effects of a car starting. Hi. It's been a while. I've traveled around the world, seen some pretty boring things, been away from my amazing family, and written very little. The bonus of everyone being on lockdown is that I have time to create a little more, and you have time to watch! And you're hungry for content, aren't you? Well, I should be the one giving it to you. And I have! Recently I just had a contest on my Patreon for a hand made Skeletor "Live, Love, Laugh" fridge magnet, and wouldn't you know it? The woman who won had a baby! How's that for amazing! Wasn't even MY baby. She just had one. I'd like to think it's because of how awesome my magnetic painting is. Thanks to those that stayed through my non-posting, and thanks to those who fell away. I'm still on Twitter (barely) and on Instagram and Facebook. Subscribe, pay me the equivalent of a Starbucks Coffee once a month so that i can keep making this terrible content. Thanks Cogs, Sincerely, Judas X. Machina. The Great Emu War
Western Australia, 1932 Campion It is a time of great turmoil for the Australian people. The Emu, nature's deadliest giant chicken, has invaded the shores of Campion. 20,000 emus, migrating after their breeding season, have begun to head to the coast from inland. With the lands previously cleared by British veterans and ex soldiers for the purpose of farming, these mindless economic migrants have found the cultivated land good habitat, and have begun to appropriate the area. The government, terrorized by these flightless, walnut brained birds has called upon its mightiest warriors; Major G.P.W. Meredith, and the Royal Australian Artillery. These brave men, armed only with the Lewis gun that is only able to fire a mere 500 rounds per second, went face to face with the feathered menace on the 2nd of November, 1932. The Minister of Defense, Sir George Pearce readily dispatches the soldiers, conducted under the command of Major G.P.W. Pearce of the Seventh Heavy Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery. Originally begun in October, rainfall caused delay of the war since it had caused the emus to scatter over a wider area… With the ceasing of the rain on November 2nd, Meredith gave the orders to commence the war and collect 100 emu skins, to be used to make hats…for the light horsemen. 50 emus were sighted near the Campion region! They were out of range. Meredith bravely commanded local farmers to herd the emus into an ambush. But the emus split into smaller groups and ran, becoming difficult targets. Yet all was not lost, as 12 whole birds were killed. Two days passed without incident from either side. Then, on Novemebr 4th, Major Meredith established an ambush near a local dam, where nearly 1,000 emus were spotted. Their guns jammed and 12 unarmed, flightless, walnut brained birds died at the hands of the brave, well armed soldiers. The rest of the birds scattered. In the days that followed Meredith attempted to keep a stiff upper lip, and resume the war further south where the birds were reported to be “rather tame.” But the birds had learned. General Blackfeather Emu Spits Spits, a six foot Emu with beautiful black plumage, had taken charge of a flock of Emus, acting as look out while his moronic mates carried out their work of destruction, warning them of Merediths attacks. The two warriors made eye contact, and knew that neither would back down in the coming days. With a flash of brilliance, Meredith demands that the Lewis gun be attached to a truck! This proved to be effective, as the birds are faster than the truck, and the terrain so rough that the gunner was unable to fire any shots. By November 8th, six days after the first engagement, two thousand rounds of ammunition had been fired. The number of Emus killed; uncertain. Accounts range from 2 to five hundred. Meredith bolsters himself with the good news that at the very least, his men have suffered no casualties. Meredith began to withdraw his troops. After the withdrawal, Major Meredith compared the emus to Zulus and commented on the striking maneuverability of the emus, even while badly wounded. “If we had a military division with the bullet-carrying capacity of these birds it would face any army in the world... They can face machine guns with the invulnerability of tanks. They are like Zulus whom even dum-dum bullets could not stop.” The Emu terror continued, however. Attacks on crops reached an almost epidemic rate, and Meredith and his men attempted to lead another charge on the dreaded menace. Taking to the field on 13 November 1932, the military found a degree of success over the first two days, with approximately 40 emus killed. The third day, 15 November, proved to be far less successful, but by 2 December the guns were accounting for approximately 100 emus per week. Meredith was recalled on 10 December, and in his report he claimed 986 kills with 9,860 rounds, at a rate of exactly 10 rounds per confirmed kill. In addition, Meredith claimed 2,500 wounded birds had died as a result of the injuries that they had sustained. The war, however, was a complete failure. The Dreaded Emus, like the nefarious Texans, they continued to persist. A few years ago I read a book by Terry Pratchett, Nation, in which (spoiler) they craft a special brew that you HAVE to sing a song over before you drink it. If you do not appeased the gods by singing this song the beer will poison you and you will die. Pratchett being an atheist, knows there are no gods, so his explanation gives religion a positive boost by explaining the science behind the ceremony; the brew has to age in the right way. If you make it and drink it right away the solution doesn’t go through its full chemical reaction and you die. Singing the song is the equivalent of setting a timer, but the expression is given in religious terms and that religion has enabled the island dwellers to thrive and not be poisoned. It is a religious explanation that has a scientific underlining. The same concept can be applied in the real world with certain Jewish Kosher laws: Jewish people have the highest rates of shellfish allergies. It would make sense that after watching a few of their members swell up and die after eating lobster, that the educated among them would say “God told me shellfish are unclean and we shouldn’t eat them”. What does this have to do with drug dealing and Parmesan? I’m not going to tell you just yet. But I am going to ask some questions to confuse you MORE! Was beer invented by witches? Did they wear pointy hats? Were they persecuted for enchanting people, causing miscarriages, and other devilry? What does this have to do with cheese? No. No. Yes. And they should have been (but not burned). Bear with me and let me explain! We can all agree that Parmesan is amazing. And if we can’t, then maybe you need to be burned at the stake. (Drum beat) All joking aside, if it weren’t for stringent rules regarding the manufacture and production of Parmesan, we probably wouldn’t have the version we have today. As far back as the fourteenth century, Parmesan has been made in the region of Parma, each wheel must meet strict criteria early in the aging process, when the cheese is still soft and creamy, to merit the official seal and be placed in storage for aging. Because it is widely imitated, Parmigiana-Reggiano has become an increasingly regulated product, and in 1955 it became what is known as a certified name. And this also helps to prevent and track simple things like food poisoning. Something that had decimated people throughout the ages. All cheese contains dairy protein called casein. When the body digests this casein it releases casomorphins that attach to your dopamine receptors in the reward area of the brain. Cheese is an addictive, and controlled, substance. Which brings us to Witches….and beer. A Quick Look At the Recipe…. Beer was invented 5000 years ago, so it isn’t a new thing. Virtually anyone can make it, even now in your own home. You just need some grains, hops, malts, yeast, a big kettle, and some time. We just need to follow some steps. The problem with brewing in the last 500 years or so is when certain governments began to take hold. Governments that actually cared about its populace and its moral governance. So how do witches mix in? The internet seems to think it was due to “wrongly” accused Alesters, and a power grab by men. The facts as they are presented* seem to draw correlation between brooms the alewomen (as the beer sellers were called) used, the tall hats they wore, and the beer they produced by cauldron. Certainly, that appears to be the case, it’s so obvious! Pointy hats? Check. Made brews in cauldrons? Check. Made money from selling beer? Check. Used brooms to make beer and advertise they sold it? Check. Men made beer too but burned women for sorcery because they wanted to make money and it’s all a conspiracy to keep women down? Cheeee….but hang on…there’s more to it than that. Step One: Gather Your Ingredients and Figure Out What You're Making To understand how this actually all went about, we can’t compare it to modern capitalism, or gender wars, simply because that system didn’t operate the way it does today. Many English and German peoples basically worked for the government (the Kingdom): the men worked to supply for the kingdom, the women used the leftovers of their crops and yields for a free market system. That’s a simplification, but it is an accurate one. And to really understand where the concept of persecution for beer crafting originated we have to look at the history of psychoactive beers. Yes. Beers that would make you trip balls and potentially kill you. Hallucinogens and alcohol may be a famously unfriendly mix, but that hasn’t stopped brewers throughout the ages from going to great lengths to get high. Historically, herbs were used to stabilize beer, to retard spoilage, to increase palatability and cover brewing failures, to imbue the beer with medicinal qualities, and finally to make beer ‘stronger’ or even hallucinogenic, according to The Oxford Companion of Beer. The Vikings were some of the first to spike their brews with wormwood they found in Finland, and there is evidence they may have also used opium as far back as the third century. In what is now the Czech Republic, a town was named for beer. Yes, the same Pilsen in which the Bavarian brewer Josef Groll invented the now-ubiquitous pilsner back in 1842, may in fact, have contained a hint of deadly nightshade. Some brewers talked about how the whole town of Pilsen was redolent of the smell of hops and narcotics. There was this association with something criminal about it, which fed into the nationalist rivalry in Europe at the time. Prepare and Steep Your Grains of Truth, Malts, and Hops Then we have the introduction of purity laws. These laws came into effect for several reasons: to protect the crafting of beer, and to protect the consumer. In 1516, William IV, Duke of Bavaria, adopted the Reinheitsgebot (purity law), perhaps the oldest food-quality regulation still in use in the 21st century, according to which the only allowed ingredients of beer are water, hops and barley-malt. Before then, you could put in anything you wanted, and the alewomen did. Anything and everything that gave the beer a kick, or encouraged repeat customers The adopted and questionable theory says that it was this event that caused women to be considered witches, with the tools of their trade being used as propaganda. Some historians deny the veracity of this association, such as Dr. Christina Wade of the blog Braciatrix, devoted to the history of women in brewing and bartending. She argues that during the later Middle Ages, when images of brewsters in such tall hats come into the historical record, witches weren’t yet associated with them. (Let alone the fact that it's unlikely that brewsters across Europe, a rag-tag assembly of home-spun brewers to begin with, collectively agreed on the tall hats as a form of marketing). but let's assume that tall hats were a thing; they weren't all pointy....or even tall. Bring Your Kettle or Cauldron to a Boil We then have to include how we understand people then and now: People back then were just as intelligent as we are today, they just didn’t have access to the same kinds of information. We can use Month Python’s Holy Grail as a satirical example of logic: A duck floats on water, wood floats on water. If a woman weighs as much as a duck, then she’s made of wood and therefore a witch. BURN HER! The logic is there, although the conclusion is off. Medieval people could draw conclusions, saw the consequences of actions, and made choices based on those pieces of information. Terry Pratchett showed how someone could be right while also being wrong, and that has happened historically. But what is the mythos of the Witch against our contemporary social understanding? Wearing a tall hat she creates potions; advertises brews beer laced with narcotics and hallucinogens. Keeps familiars; cats keep away mice, which eat the hops Enthralls people with spells; people are addicted to the beer. Summons demons and dances in the moonlight; gets high on her own supply. Seduces men from their bed chambers; the cliché of the drug addict offering sex. Can create infertility or reduce women to birthing monstrosities; we all know about drug use in pregnancy. And how were rivals dealt with? Well, the housewife down the road makes beer that outsells you…there’s got to be a way to get rid of her….right? Knowing now that the home brewing woman would spike her brews with addictive drugs, that she would be able to make the connection between her ingredients and the people’s willingness to buy more and more of her product, what can we conclude? What modern similarities do we have for this? Drug dealers. You Now have Wort, the Sugar That Will Feed the Yeast Our penchant for addictive substances is recorded in the earliest human records. Historically, psychoactive substances have been used by priests in non Judeao/Christian religious ceremonies (eg, amanita muscaria); healers for medicinal purposes (opium); or the general population in a culturally approved way (alcohol, nicotine, and caffeine). Our ancestors refined stronger compounds and devised faster routes of administration, which contributed to abuse. Pathological use was described as early as classical Antiquity. The issue of loss of control of the substance, heralding today's concept of addiction, was already being discussed in the 17th century. The complex argument of addictions are still currently being debated, such as: is addiction a sin or a disease; should treatment be moral or medical; is addiction caused by the substance; the individual's vulnerability and psychology, or social factors; should substances be regulated or freely available. Addiction leads people to do terrible things. Most of us have seen a Requiem For A Dream (a movie based on a book regarding the authors lived experiences), but for those of you that haven’t; drugs and their addictive effects lead to prostitution, crime, sometimes murder, all to appease the fix. So what we have here, essentially, is drug dealers selling people addictive hallucinogenic beers. The buyers become enthralled with the seller. They need their fix. They become “harassed” by demons as invisible bugs crawl across their skin. But now you also have many issues that is brewed together for an interesting concoction. You have the ingredient of government who is not collecting taxes on these drug sales, first off. With that you have the issue of your citizens upsetting the peace with theft, acts of violence and sexually transmitted diseases via intercourse (syphilis was a new disease that was spreading right around the time the purity laws were coming into effect and at the height of the “burning times”. And no, syphilis wasn’t from sex with sheep, don’t get me started). As a person where science is still in its infancy, yet you can still see cause and effect, what conclusions can you make? The monasteries produce beer as well, yet their adherents do not react the same way as those who buy from the alewives…. There must be a spiritual malaise that is causing this, right? (Keep in mind that the Catholic Church considered a belief in witches before the 13th century a form of heresy. Witches were not real and it was wrong for you to believe so.) Add In Some Yeast… And here is another step to the mix: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”. That biblical verse interpretation of “mekhashepha”, or what we read as “witch" comes closer to what is said in the Septuagint, the translation of Hebraic traditions into Greek that was written by Jewish sages in around the 3rd century B.C.E. In the Septuagint, mekhashepha was translated into pharmakeia. which translates “pharmakeia” into “herbalist”. So now you have drug dealers, identified biblically as herbalists, hiding from taxes, harming people either by ignorance or intent. Laws are put into effect that place preference over the safer manufacturing methods of monks and larger breweries, the alewives move into black market territory. And Ferment For A Couple Of Centuries Witch hunts begin. And over the course of two hundred years 40,000 people are killed for witchcraft (or heresy, they were interchangeable in many courts of the time). Mix in plagues and famines and you have breeding ground for massive paranoia, poverty, and increased drugged beer sales. All of this culminates into a cultural icon today; appropriated by modern pagans and Wiccans as the pointy hat witch. The Europeans weren't the first to persecute drug dealers. In preceding centuries, tobacco and cannabis had also known prohibition. Smokers ran the risk of having their lips cut under the first Romanov tsar, Michael Fiodorovich, or of being beheaded under the Ottoman sultan Murad IV. In 1378, the Ottoman emir in Egypt, Soudoun Sheikhouni, was determined to stamp out hashish use: farmers growing hashish were imprisoned or executed, and those found guilty of consuming were said to have their teeth pulled out. And none of those cultures did it to create a Halloween costume, or to force out competition. However, we do get our modern concept of the hashashin or assassin from early hemp users. To me, that says we still shouldn't value those concepts as "good". Not deserving of immolation, surely. To Finally Created a Crafted Brew So it is true, men forced beer brewing housewives out of business. Because they were drug dealers, and based on the consequences of events, these drugs destroyed lives, both physically and metaphysically. And while the method of burning is abhorrent (the protestants hadn’t gained enough political clout to stop torture laws), witches were not the innocent persecuted women touted today. Like in any black market system, there are going to be bodies piling up eventually. Obviously, #NotAllWitches or housewives did this through the centuries. Yet enough of them did to create a cliché, and enough situations happened to warrant for public safety. Today, we have the War on Drugs, and for a long time the Drug Dealer was presented as a Bogey-Man, hiding in the shadows, luring people into torment. We are now moving into a society that seems to embrace drugs and drug dealers. So there you have it. Societal warnings against home brew drug dealers and food safety laws culminated in persecution (some would say rightfully). And that is one bitter Pilsner. No. I am not going to show you nude photos of Hillary Clinton.
BUT During the 1940's to the 1970's Harvard university had a bizarre requirement for all incoming freshman; they asked all young men and women enrolled in their first year to pose nude. Thousands of pictures were taken of such students as Diane Sawyer, George Bush, and Hillary Rodham Clinton. Back in 1995 NYT reporter Ron Rosenbaum found out this story and was the first to report it. I like to bring it up because some students are now complaining that they have to use clear plastic back packs and say they are an "invasion of privacy". And while this was voluntary...it would not be very acceptable now. The reasoning behind this strange request was that a scientist of psychology, William Herbert Sheldon, believed he could study, track, and research diseases such as rickets, scoliosis, and other posture issues. Sheldons written works infered something else...an attempt to study the correlation between a persons body shape and their intelligence. And no written permission of any kind was given by the students. And then there were rumors of break-ins at the university where the photos were stored, with many pilfered photos supposedly ending up on the black market... “You always thought when you did it that one day they’d come back to haunt you. That 25 years later, when your husband was running for President, they’d show up in Penthouse,” confessed Sally Quinn who graduated from a Seven Sisters college, Smith in 1963. I could put all I've spoken on my new podcast into a nice, typed, friendly fonted little package!
But I won't. Please, enjoy the sultry sound of my voice as I explain and find no good reason why you shouldn't kill yourself. And on that note...I beg you to email me, come up with response letters, your own podcast rebuttals, all to prove me wrong! Enjoy. I hate to wade into this, but I feel some of the hysteria warrants it.
I’ll preface this by saying that murder is a horrid thing, and our children do need to be protected against that. There are approximately 25 million high school students in the US right now (it is lower than that, but I’m also including and private schools which for some reason are treated as a different stat). In all of the school shootings (CNN alleges 17, though that could be greater or lower depending on the criteria; the FBI cites a mass shooting as having more than four victims. Chicago has nothing but mass shootings outside of schools), there have been roughly 20 deaths. But I’m going to go ahead and pump that number up to one thousand. Statistically that means that the total deaths caused by mass shootings to teenagers comes out to 0.00004%. Some would say that number needs to be zero, and I would like to agree. What is killing teens more and more is texting while driving. However I don’t think gun control is going to be the most logical way to do that. Some people will trot out Australia, and how their gun violence has gone down. And it is true…their GUN violence HAS gone down….but their violent crime rate stayed the same. What does that mean? Well, imagine suicide was an epidemic, so they passed laws that made ropes illegal. The statistics for rope suicides would go down, right? Yes. But people were still killing themselves at the same rate. They just used different methods. Now, I know already, some of you are saying “Well, that’s a bit of a straw man false equivalency” yet the argument will still be made “Well at least they didn’t use a gun.” Australias crime levels didn’t go down. Their violent crime didn’t go down. Their murder rate stayed the same. So how were guns the problem if nothing actually changed? Change certain gun laws, sure. Do background checks AND actually do them (not like the 82 times Cruz was reported to the police, and the laws that prevented his mental illness from being added to the gun registry websites used for background checks). But a criminal, by definition, does not obey the law. And, law, is mainly a reactionary method. We don’t have a “pre-crime” unit like in that Tom Cruise movie (terribly adapted from a Phillip K. Dick novel). We could increase the punishments for crimes already committed as a preventative measure, maybe. But what does that yield? Should we bring back public execution as a method of behavior method? I want a solution. You want a solution. We’re both coming at the problem from different angles. Me wanting to keep my (non existent guns because I don’t own any) guns is not going to stop a school shooting. You banning guns is not going to stop a pre meditated attack. And even if all guns were banned there are people who will use other methods just as deadly or worse (nail bombs, home made flame throwers*, home made cyanide gas*). We need to focus less on “taking away” or “making new laws” and figure out predictive methods. It’s no surprise to me that out of the 27 mass shooters in the last few years came from fatherless homes. I mainly came from a fatherless home and the most influential person in my life was Optimus Prime. How many of my friends who didn’t have fathers loved Arnold Schwarzenegger movies where everything was solved at the end of a gun (not blaming violent movies on violent people, or even Hollywood). I think the shift has to come culturally, and it will take a long time. I think that interference at early instances are our only hope at reducing gun crime. In Canada we have lower gun crime (but still existent), and I think that is largely due to the common belief that being angry and choosing death is not a solution. Maybe we need to move in more of a meritocracy concept, where instead of pushing the idea of violence as a means to solve our problems (as antifa, school shooters, violent criminals), we push the “I’m going to go and do better than you just to throw it in your face.” Anecdotal time: I was horribly bullied when I was young. Many times, bleeding into the ground while feet kicked me and blows rained down from above, I wished I had had a gun. I had plenty of access to guns, I grew up in a rural area. Instead I chose to be smug. I chose to be “better”, smarter. I wouldn’t kill them…I would eviscerate them intellectually. Still they called me stupid, still they called me names. It didn’t get rid of my anger, but I feel that it was still a safer alternative. Maybe we need to foster that. Maybe we need to foster that “good” competition that forces us to be better people. Maybe we need to bring back actual trophies for achievement. Maybe we need to tell the slow kid to get moving. Maybe we need to tell the “loser” great try, try harder so you can throw it in their face. It may not be good sportsmanship, but maybe things won’t end with a gun. I don’t think change is going to come at the behest of a shaved headed teenager who was in a building a quarter of a mile away during a shooting. No matter how many people march in the streets, gun owners and sympathizers as well as the indifferent, will make more of a change while voting than throwing a concert will. Passing laws are going to make people hide their guns, not get rid of them. You'll turn ordinary people into criminals because of mistrust. And who will be left with all the guns? The criminals and "racist" cops. Maybe that’s just me. Send me your thoughts. I want a solution as much as you do. *These things are frighteningly easy to make. |
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