As I walked through Wal-Mart the other day fighting my way through hordes of incredibly obese shoppers, I had a grim vision of the future.

Wal-Mart and McDonalds have merged into one super corporation, and they have finally taken over the government. All fast food and retail in North America are now controlled by the United States of McWalMart.

Furthermore, there has been a social revolution in the country led by fat feminists. Fat feminism cynically promotes obesity as a natural ideal of beauty because staying thin is too difficult under the corporate controlled media driven culture of consumerism and gluttony (or something).

So, picture it: in the not too distant future, 90% of Americans are incredibly obese, and especially females because Oprah is the figurehead president. Depictions of thin women in the media are officially forbidden as they promote "unnatural" ideals of feminine beauty. Skinny Bitches, as they are called, are treated as contemptuous second class citizens, finding it hard to get a good job or advance socially.

Traditional mens magazines and pornographic materials incorporating thin, beautiful women are officially outlawed as well. However, the men who suffer under this oppressive regime are so desperate for thin women that the black market in thin porn and sexy magazines has become as lucrative as the drug trade.

Indeed, there is now a government task force charged with finding and eliminating the illicit trade of Skinny Bitches Media. But men can't be trusted because the male agents too often are willingly and gladly seduced by the women they are supposed to be prosecuting. So, the task force became composed of the Feminine Fat Elite (FFE).

Some of these Feminine Fat Elite have become so vociferous that they have taken to secretly disposing of the Skinny Bitches - by sitting on them. Now, granted, the FFE is not a terribly effective organization because they cannot run very far or very fast. They take constant snack breaks. And their large frames don't lend themselves well to undercover work or secret surveillance. But enough Skinny Bitches have been crushed by the FFE that thin women live in terror.

Skinny Bitches appeal to the UN and the international community to save them. The League of Athletic Nordic Babes sets up a secret underground network in the United States of McWalmart to smuggle the thin women to Scandinavia.

In response, the FFE orders an invasion of Sweden, but when they pile a small army of agents into cargo planes, they find those planes cannot take off due to the excessive weight. So the invasion is canceled, and a new strategy is debated over a feast of chicken wings and ice cream.

And there my dystopian vision ended, thankfully.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R3QAKQ8LFH1IH...=cm_cr_rdp_perm

Simply a fun "what-if" thought experiment:

October 1962. It is the Cuban Missile Crisis - but Krushchev doesn't back down. Kennedy, under pressure from EXCOMM, orders the full invasion of Cuba. American air forces manage to devastate Soviet rocket launchers in the first few moments. However, in the subsequent invasion, Soviet tactical nuclear weapons are put to good effect. The Americans eventually occupy Cuba, but entire battalions of Marines are incinerated. Cuba itself is scarred and what is left of it falls under the control of a puppet government imposed by the US.

The Soviet response is to send the Warsaw Pact rolling through central Europe. NATO forces are overwhelmed by superior numbers. NATO commanders, with or without authorization from Washington, use tactical nukes to stem the tide, eliciting a similar response from the other side. Before Washington and Moscow finally accept a UN brokered peace, the bulk of both NATO and Warsaw pact forces in Europe are decimated, and central Europe is devastated.

The United States survives intact. But to rebuild central Europe and NATO it calls for a second Marshall Plan which puts a severe drain on the economy, and the comfy free wheeling consumerist lifestyle Americans are accustomed to comes to a complete end. In addition, the horrific devastation in Cuba and central Europe provokes a backlash from large sectors of the populace. The counterculture and peace movements happen years before they otherwise did, and are much more virulent. There are fundamental changes in American society at every level. The twentysomething activists of the 60's come to preeminence in the 80's, and the 80's is known as the decade of socialism in America.

The Soviet Union survives intact. It tries to rebuild its allies but unlike the US cannot afford to do so. Kruschchev is removed from power forcibly by hardline KGB backed politburo members, but eastern Europe is already breaking apart from Soviet influence. Soon, the Soviet economy completely collapses, and there is anarchy and possibly even civil war in the USSR.

The second Marshall Plan stabilizes Western Europe, but even so Europe becomes a third rate power. Horrified by the devastation, left wing groups such as the Green Party come to power. They call for the ejection of all US forces even as they gladly accept US aid. When the Soviet Union loses its grip on Eastern Europe, east and west come together and the European Community proceeds at a faster and more comprehensive pace to prevent another tragedy. They spend the next 30 years rebuilding the continent.

Except for the UK - while a not insignificant slice of its military forces were destroyed, the country itself was far from the actual battlefields. It's on relatively good ground. It pulls out of the European Community except for some token aid, not wishing to drain its resources in further European entanglements. An isolationist mood sweeps the country directed at both Europe and America. No longer united against a common Soviet foe, regional separatism slowly works its ways through the UK.

In the Mid East, there is no USSR to back up the Arabs, and the US has less money and inclination to back Israel. Freed from the moderating constraints of their respective superpowers, regional conflicts flair up constantly. Israel largely mops up the floor with Arab incursions. However, resentment against Israeli hegemony in the region leads to an especially virulent and organized form of militant Islam terrorism, dedicated to destroying all enemies of Islam ...

The Asia-Pacific comes out of the war completely unscathed, aside from the fact that China fights a brief border war with India. The US consumerist dollars that fueled Japanese (and later Chinese) economies are not there, as US citizens pay heavy taxes to help pay for Europe's rebuilding. Instead, China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia and Australia form increasing economic and trading ties. As the USSR collapses, China finds undemocratic capitalism more appealing than Stalinism.

By the year 2000 the USSR is long gone, a broken shell, with the European part fighting an uphill battle to join the EU, and the Siberian part increasingly falling under the shadow of China. Europe is united but weak and reluctant to act on the world stage. The US economy and military is half of what we know them today, and 40 years worth of cultural evolution has made America look a lot more like Sweden in outlook. China, via its Asian Pacific trading block, becomes the world's great power.

When China tries to quell Muslim militants in its western provinces, Muslim terrorists hijack planes and crash them into the burgeoning Shanghai skyline. The 21st century becomes a contest between the cultural descendants of Mohammed and Confucius for global influence, with an ambivalent West adjusting to its new role as powerless bystander.

http://blogs.villagevoice.com/runninscared...oran_wins_r.php

Hail Wotan.

A study concludes that so-called negative moods can lead to better thinking: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20091102/lf_nm_.../us_mood_memory

Those of us who are cynics have known this for years. Science s finally catching up.

It gets more weird all the time: http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLSnZjLPor8

Sadly this reminds me of the women from my old job.

And we need to burn their books this Halloween!!

I want to wear This Costume just to piss off the overly PC activists protesting against it.

Clifton, Chas S. Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America. AltaMira Press. Oxford, UK. 2006

Chas Clifton's exploration of the murky world of Neopagan origins is based on scholarship and research, but is clearly written for the general reader and offers a pleasant and informative read. The author states in his preface he wrote the book because the stories of the first generation of American paganism were not being told. The denizens of that era are now a considerably aging demographic with little time left to tell their stories. Moreover, the leaders of a later generation of paganism, most notably that of the eco-feminist variety, have crowded out earlier manifestations. Finally, the crazed fad of invented lineages and manufactured origins have considerably obscured the true genesis of Neopaganism. Her Hidden Children is presented as a corrective to distortions and omissions in the tale of American Neopaganism, and it thoroughly succeeds. Chas focuses mostly on Wicca, the faith given shape by Gerald Gardner, and traces its development in England to its exporting to America, where it mingled with the social climes of the day and then, in its modified form, was exported back to England and the rest of the world.

“Wicca” came into being with Gardner's 1954 publication of Witchcraft Today. Gerald Gardner, a UK civil servant, claimed to have been initiated into a coven that operated under a surviving witch religion indigenous to the UK. Wicca was passed off as a “fertility religion,” concerned as it was with ritual nudity and sexual symbolism. His claims were given some legitimacy by the shoddy scholarship of Margaret Murray, who had written of a Western European witch religion that had been persecuted by the Catholic Church. Modern researchers now dispute Murray's writings. They also recognize Gardner's religion as stemming from his interests in existing ceremonial magick groups, Freemasonry, and his obsession with nudist circles (and, perhaps, certain sexual fetishes such as BDSM).

From England it was brought to America by the Bucklands. Buckland, an RAF veteran, was initiated by a successor to Gardner and moved with his wife to Long Island, New York for employment. Buckland himself initiated several into the Gardnerian tradition. Other individuals from the US would go on to receive initiation from Britain and then return to the States to train their own students. Small publications on the occult were produced, and through these and other correspondences Wicca began to grow. Interestingly, Wicca attracted some people involved in pre-Gardnerian forms of occultism, who modified their practice to better conform to Gardnerian Wicca due to its relative popularity. This constituted the first generation of Neopagans in America in the 1950's and early 1960's.

British Wicca had an ethnic consciousness,with its members promoting it as the natural religion of the UK, stemming from its supposedly ancient roots in the British Isles. It also had a high degree of patriotism, and allegedly British occultists were conducting their own magical campaigns against Hitler. No American pagan could claim to be living in a land directly connected to European paganism, nor was British patriotism especially relevant to them. What America did have, as the author points out, is a kind of reverence for its captivating natural landscape, and a belief that the land was itself holy and pristine as expressed by certain artists, writers and intellectuals for two hundred years. American paganism slowly departed from its British roots as a closed, initiatory cult of fertility magic into a broader, more open religion centered around nature worship.

The author identifies three strands of nature worship. “Gaian” nature is named for the Greek goddess of the earth, as well as the hypothesis of James Lovelock that the earth is itself a living organism. Gaian nature worship is, as you might expect, the reverence of the earth (the global ecosphere) as a divine force. But there are two other strands as well: the “Cosmic” nature which posits a Neoplatonic like belief in pantheistic forces such as astrology; and an “Erotic” nature which views the human body and sexuality as a conduit to earth and cosmos. These three strands aren't exclusive, and indeed, many Neopagans hold to all three.

The increasing nature-worship view of paganism occurred in the late 60'sand early 70's with the American Counterculture, of which an increasing environmentalist consciousness was a component. The other great components of the Counterculture were increased drug use and feminism. As the former, many pagans found that entheogens could replicate the altered states of consciousness sought by shamanism – or, at least, they found it convenient to justify drug use as such. As to feminism, the idea of the witch as an empowered female, persecuted by the patriarchy, was quickly seized and popularized by such activists as Z Budapest and Starhawk.

This increasingly politicized, eco-feminist slant on “witchcraft,” the second generation of American paganism, increased in popularity during the 1980's. It was exported back to England (and throughout the postmodern West) where it became a fixture of Leftist leaning groups and counterculture activists looking for an alternative view to normative, Judeo-Christian and capitalist society. Not only was it decried by social conservatives, but more “traditional” witches (i.e., those who could claim lineage from Gardner's 1950's initiatory cult) found it a bastardized faith.

The book's penultimate chapter looks at forms of neopaganism other than Wicca/witchcraft. Among others, it looks at Druidry (a more scholarly, less politicized nature friendly religion); The Church of All Worlds, a pagan group inspired by a science fiction novel; and groups I had never heard of such as the Church of Aphrodite and Feraferia.

In the sum of things, I found this book quite enjoyable. I would recommend it to others interested in the shadowy and sometimes bizarre subculture known as Neopaganism.