Child's Play or Mykel's May 2024 Blog: You're Still Wrong

   

You’re STILL Wrong

Mykel's

May 2024 Blog/Column

Child's Play

by Mykel Board

Spare the rod and spoil the child

--Old Proverb

Discipline your children, and they will give you peace

-- Proverbs 29:17

The rod and reproof give wisdom, but a child left to himself brings shame to his mother.

– Proverbs 29:15

True freedom is impossible without a mind made free by discipline.”

― Mortimer J. Adler,

===============

“Gooo gooo gah gah goo gah.”

Little Liam crawls from his crib to the door of his room. He babbles to himself… or to no one... as ten-month old babies are wont to do. This evening, Mom and Dad are off at the movies… Oppenheimer… and they’ve left Liam with Ashley, the 16 year old babysitter, daughter of Mr and Mrs Kosminski, friends of Liam’s parents.

Liam pushes his head against his bedroom door. It creaks open with a click… He pushes again. The door opens enough for Liam to crawl through to the hallway.

Meanwhile, Ashley is diddling her cellphone… simultaneously texting her love to her sweetheart, Dexter, and to her girlfriend, Brittany, describing Dexter’s attributes.

“You can’t believe how that guy’s hung,” types Ashley to Brittany. “God… think kielbasa!”

“Wow,” texts Brittany back.

“I love you more than Beyonce loves Jay Z!” Ashley texts to her boyfriend.

“For the same reason?” Dexter texts in return.

While Ashley texts, little Liam has left his room and crawls toward the staircase that connects the upper bedroom area with the living room and kitchen downstairs. As he approaches the staircase, his right arm slips over the top steps. His arm and shoulder slide down. The boy’s ten-month old brain is smart enough to figure this isn’t right. He backs up and changes direction.

Now, he’s headed toward his parents’ room. Liam tries it again… pushing his head against the door. Again it works. There’s something familiar about the room. Liam recognizes the big bed where sometimes he sleeps... nestled between his parents when he is being comforted by Mom and Dad on an especially cryful night.

But those two things –one on either side of the bed… What are they? Liam recognizes the color… black… but has no vocabulary to say or think it. He knows this side is Mommy’s side and that side is Daddy’s side. He crawls toward the black thing on Daddy’s side. There are some handles on the outside of Daddy’s black thing. They look like big toys… something to climb on. Liam crawls over to one of the tall black objects and grabs it.

It flops open. Inside is a smaller toy… made of metal… long on one side and curved… something like a banana… on the other. Down where the two sides meet, there is another little piece of metal with a second curved piece around it. Liam pulls himself up using the drawer and its handle for support. Then he reaches inside and takes the gun.

The barely-a-toddler now crawls toward the voice coming to him from the living room. The gun, held tightly in two tiny hands, scrapes along the floor… a trail of drool follows the child as he goes.

“I just love it when he talks to me like that,” Ashley, changing to conversation from text, is saying. Little Liam has no sense of meaning, he just hears the voice and it draws him like a magnet. Down the stairs… KERCHUNK. The gun pulls his arms... KERCHUNK… KERCHUNK… KERCHUNK. Step by step his little body follows.

To the living room… behind Ashley… gurgling loudly to get her attention, show her what he found when POW! BLAM!

A voice from the cellphone pleads… “Ashley? Ashley? Are you all right Ashley?”

FLASH AHEAD

At the trial, Liam is convicted of involuntary manslaughter. He’ll spend the rest of his life in prison… with no chance of probation.

The next week, Liam’s parents are arrested. Fantasy? Impossible? Well...

FLASH TO MICHIGAN... OXFORD HIGH SCHOOL 2021 A boy shoots two handfuls of students. KERPOW! KERPOW! KERPOW! More blood than a pro wrestling match. Four dead. Seven injured…

Two years later, the killer stands to receive the sentence for his crime… TERRORISM. What does he get? This kid… who when he committed the crime wasn’t old enough to have sex, to drive a car, to drink a beer, to smoke a cigarette, to vote… a little boy with a gun… What is this child’s punishment? LIFE IN PRISON WITHOUT PAROLE. The max… not the little boy max… but the big adult make-decisions-for-himself max.

Rosemary Bayer, the Democratic state senator from the district, says. “I’m not a doctor. I’m not a psychologist. But it’s never the kid’s fault.”

I can hear another voice now. It’s Literary Device calling to me. “Mykel,” she says. “It’s not the same. A baby has no freedom of choice. What happened with your imaginary kid was an accident. The kid wasn’t responsible for what he did.”

I answer, “Is a fifteen year old with severe mental problems responsible for what he did?”

[ASIDE: You probably know, I’m an abolitionist. I don’t believe inprisons at all. I think no one should be put in a cage and the fact that so many go back time-after-time proves prisons don’t work. They’re not supposed to. They don’t exist to prevent crime. They exist for REVENGE… and to feed the prison industrial complex. In fact, the only exception in the anti-slavery amendment to the constitution is prisons. But this is even worse!]

Yes, it’s a kind of prison for slaves. Someone without rights… a child… is thrown away for the rest of his life. Most children have the right to grow into their freedom. Fifteen year old Ethan Crumbley will never have that right. But wait… there’s more.

Mom and Dad Crumbly get charged with involuntary manslaughter. Think about that. INVOLUNTARY is without will… not by design… by accident. Can you imagine a crime that happens BY ACCIDENT? Isn’t the nature of crime that you have to commit it? What is COMMIT if not VOLUNTARY? Is a miscarriage involuntary manslaughter for the anti-abortion crew? I don’t know.

Ooooo but the parents ignored the kid. They didn’t realize he had mental problems… HOLD ON! IF HE HAD MENTAL PROBLEMS it was the DISEASE that caused the kid to shoot up the school. It was INVOLUNTARY, right? The kid is innocent for… besides being a kid… reason of INSANITY.

The fact that a penalty of LIFE IMPRISONMENT WITHOUT PAROLE exists proves that the purpose of prisons is not to “correct” or reform lawbreakers… but to PUNISH them. No that’s wrong too. The purpose of punishment is correction. You slap a dog on the ass when she shits in the house so she won’t do it again. That’s punishment. You make a kid finish his dinner or have what’s left for breakfast… cold… the next day. That’ll teach him to finish what’s on his plate every night. (My parents actually did this.) Get it? Punishment is a way of teaching.

LIFE IMPRISONMENT is not punishment. It’s not to teach. It is REVENGE… It is blood for the blood-thirsty. It is a throw into the lion’s den to please the crowd. The audience is family and friends of the victim… and they give the thumbs down. The press calls it closure. But the only closure is that cell door for the rest of that inmate’s life.

[NOTE: In 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that it was fine to give kids a life sentence without parole. I wonder when the court will rule that it’s okay to let kids vote and screw. If they have to pay the penalties, they should at least get the privileges, don’t you think?]

As for the parents…

Their convictions confirm punishment for “repeated acts or lack of acts that could have halted an oncoming runaway train. They repeatedly ignored things that make a reasonable person feel the hair on the back of their neck stand up,” the judge says. “Opportunity knocked over and over again, louder and louder and was ignored. No one answered. And these two people should have and sure didn’t.”

So NOT DOING is involuntary manslaughter… even without an inkling of the results of that not doing.

But back to kids… they’re the theme of this blog. Either they’re just people like adults or they’re sub-people not able to make their own choices. If it’s the former, then they should have the same rights as adults… sex, voting, smoking, drinking. If it’s the latter, then they are not responsible for their actions, and may be trained like an errant puppy… but not put away like someone who knew exactly what they were doing.

See you in hell,
Mykel Board

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]

→ A Better Solution Dept: The Associated Press reports: A teenager who opened fire at a central Indiana middle school in 2018, wounding another student and a teacher, will go to a residential treatment center, as ordered by the judge.
      The court ordered that the now-18-year-old be held in the Hamilton County Juvenile Service Center for 120 days while a probation department finds “a suitable secure residential facility” for him. Not the perfect solution, but better than a lifetime in the clink.

→ Throw the Whole Team in Jail dept: A strange internet site reports that in 2002 a thirteen-year-old hockey fan, Brittanie Cecil, was struck in the head by a traveling hockey puck while she and her family attended a local hockey game. Seated fifteen rows up from behind the goal, the puck hit her so forcefully that it fractured her skull. If that isn’t INVOLUNTARY MANSLAUGHTER (girlslaughter?), I don’t know what is.

→ But was it INVOLUNTARY dept: Among the most famous criminal executions is the 1916 execution of Mary, the Circus Elephant, who killed a homeless man temporarily hired as her keeper. Several other people have been killed by elephants since then, proving that the death penalty does not prevent murder… even for elephants. Mary, was tried, then hanged from a crane. Here’s the death photo. 

BACK TO THE NATION DEPT: The newest issue of THE NATION has a great column by Kali Holloway on why TikTok banning is such a bad idea. (As is most (all?) censorship.) It again makes me point out that THE NATION is the only lefty magazine I know that is often right (I mean CORRECT) about things.
Besides the Holloway column, there’s also a good one by Ginny Hogan (strangely, but slightly, different on the website than in the magazine) with the pull-quote talking about the up-coming presidential election.

We have our two candidates.
One of them is deeply uninspiring,
and the other is Donald Trump.

Time to subscribe, I’d say.

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions, complete, and questions I’ve never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.

I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.

Here's a start:

I alreay posted my centerfold picture printed in the zine Trey Mayhem sent me recently. It’s called Murder and Mayhem and it’s also a record label Murder and Mayhem records. You can see the blog here. Or/and contact Trey at TreyofToday@yahoo.com

My long-time friend Sid Yiddish appears on a YouTube DatingGame-like video. Guess who wins the bachelorette!

Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com

Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency

And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.

And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.

Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.

Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.

Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.

George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.

And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.

And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.

Here are a couple video links.

This from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low

And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong who has recently died in a motorcycle accident.

Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.

Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both. It’s hard (and costs money) to send him email. So. If you remember how to write a letter… send him one at: Kyle Nonneman, #16534211, Snake River Correctional Institution, 777 Stanton Blvd Ontario OR 97914-8335

My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.

Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.

Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com

Mykel's April 2024 Blog/Column: The Obvious Answer

 

Mykel's APRIL 2024 Blog/Column

  

You’re STILL Wrong

Mykel's

April 2024 Blog/Column

The Obvious Answer

by Mykel Board

Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies.
                                    – Andrea Dworkin

Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.
                                                                                 - Abigail Adams

Some women do not masturbate for pleasure; they masturbate to make a political statement: to remind us that women do not really need men             
                                                                    --Mokokoma Mokhonoana

April again, spring, renewal, most every culture and religion has a holiday… Christians-Easter, Jews-Passover, Muslims-Nowruz. Fools ignore this and think it’s like any other time of the year. They’re wrong.

People who know me, know that I’m an organizer. Thursdays, I have Drink Club, a small eat, drink, socializing group. Once a month I organize Eat Club, where we go to a different restaurant every month. I also have a ROUNDTABLE (sorry no URL) where we gather at the Algonquin hotel, like Dorothy Parker and friends in the 1920s. Every month a different topic with a somewhat varying group in the discussion… yes with food and drink. Finally, also every month, I have a haiku group… also meeting at the Algonquin… where we talk about our own poetic output.

Yet until now, I’ve never organized a political group. My politics usually don’t match those of anyone else… or at least too few to make a group out of it… until now that is. To understand what I’m doing I’d like you to imagine one of those awful prescription drug commercials on TV. Cut to the smiling grandpas… the kids playing ball in the park… the family barbecue. In the background read too fast and too faintly is the warning message.

_________ will likely cause frequent nausea. Other side effects include weight gain, lethargy, increased urination, food cravings, mood swings, backaches and joint pain, swelling of the ankles, fingers, and face, heartburn and indigestion, hemorrhoids, and insomnia. Some instances are fatal.

If this were a drug, I bet you’d be pretty hesitant to try it… maybe asking your doctor for an alternative. And what if this drug were forced on you? Or less seriously, you were connived into taking it because everyone else is.

Well, this isn’t a drug… but the side effects are real, and there are more than in the warning above. I’m writing about the side effects of PREGNANCY… especially pregnancy as the result of heterosexual sex.

Andrea Dworkin recognized it, but, for the most part, she was brushed off as a kook. I was one of those brushers. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized how right she was. Or at least close. Rather than contempt for, I’d say power over. There’s no doubt that, on the whole, men have more physical power than women. The reason there are women’s sports and men’s sports is that combining the two would result in women losing most of the time.

Feminists say that rape is not about sex, but about power. I’m not sure about is the right word, but certainly involves. 92% of all rapes involve heterosexual sex. One of the reasons rape is so easy for men, is that, they’ve got more power. It may be taboo to say that in this all-things-are-equal era, but down deep you know it’s true.

And rape is only the most extreme. What of the everyday stress and insults that go unreported, but irritating?

Flash to Monday morning at Scamson bank. Jack, the branch manager, is already behind the inquiry desk, preparing for the first customer to ask him how to move money from his friend’s saving account to his own checking account. Jack likes to get in a few minutes early, and be there for the entrance of Madeline… his (not-so) secret crush. She’s a few minutes late as females are wont to be. She walks in, past the front desk as she does every morning.

When she walks past him, Jack speaks in a loud voice, accompanied by a smile. “Hey Madeline,” he says, “has anyone ever told you you have nice ass...sets?”

Madeline thinks sneer, but Jack is the boss. A sneer is a good way to get fired, so she pretends not to hear him. “And he continues. “Did I tell you how much I like your compound interest? I mean I go for that double-digit inflation there.”

Madeline continues the walk to her cubicle, wondering whether to sue the bank for harassment.

Stop right there! Don’t you see? The reason guys make sexual comments… talk about women’s bodies… is because the want to possess it! They want to make that asset… that inflated double digit... their own. The talk feeds the fantasy. Guys make the jokes, send out the sex-filled talk because they want to get laid. If getting laid… at least getting laid by women… stops, then the fantasies also stop… or at least drop dramatically. How many guys have fantasies about bank robbery? It’s illegal! They don’t think about it… and even if they do, they don’t talk about it in public.

I’ve had this discussion with dozens of friends… of any gender you can name. Almost all have come to agree. Then it occurred to me... like a lightning strike in a summer storm. There is a way to stop the he-said/she-said defense of what might be rape. There is a way to stop the disease of pregnancy… or at least reduce it to near zero. Just think… none of those nasty side effects. The population explosion would implode. Rape would nearly disappear. The fundamental inequality of power would be reduced to almost nothing. How could we do that? Easy answer: Make heterosexual sex illegal!

If I were 50 years younger and a bit more athletic I’d jump and click my heels at the revelation. Yes! Yes! Yes! It’s so obvious. The primary manifestation of the power imbalance… gone with the stroke of a president’s (or a governor’s) pen signing the new law.

You may have read about the organization I started there and then: Policy Initiative to Mitigate Power. It was easy to draw up papers and a statement of purpose… It’s all in the name. P.I.M.P. will change the world. Already almost a dozen Congressmen and women have climbed on board. And the best thing is that both the left and the right support us! The issue could be the great unifier. Conservatives who want sex education removed from schools fear that it will encourage heterosexual sex. After the P.I.M.P. law takes effect, the only class in sex ed would be not to do it. Trump-hating liberals constantly harp on Trump’s alleged involvement with heterosexual sex. After the P.I.M.P. law, all that becomes a clear violation.

Let me tell you a little bit about my organizing adventures. You might be surprised at the warm reception I received. First I made handouts… in the shape of those square religious tracts. On the front was printed: No matter who is your God… P.I.M.P. is the answer. I just stood at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Broadway, and handed them out to anyone who would take one. You can imagine that in the middle of Times Square that would be a lot of people. It was.

Only about 1 in 5 took one, but that was enough. My first taste of ecstatic joy was when a young woman (blond, thin, with a couple outstanding attributes), took one, walked off, and then came running back to me.

“This is wonderful!” she said. “Do you know how much time I waste tightening my belly, dyeing my hair, spending hundreds of dollars on makeup to please… men!” She said the word with a wrinkled nose and an expulsion... like you might spit out a cockroach in your burger.

Since the start of P.I.M.P. there have been dozens… maybe scores of people… men and women... who tell me how great they think a het-sex ban would be. Maybe 70% of PIMP is women, but in that last 30% are a bunch of gay men with the idea something like that means more for us.

One surprising group was the number of conservative women. Members of Libs of Tiktok or Moms for Liberty. Women who put kinship first and preach devotion to home, husband and family.

One member of that crew was front and center in that big demonstration we had in Texas. Maybe you read about it. She was early middle age, with jet-black hair and bright red fingernails.

“I’m happy to see you here,” I told her, “and you surprise me. I thought maybe the conservatives wouldn’t like us because so many conservatives focus on the family. Family usually means het-sex.”

“But don’t you see,” she says, “sex has been the disgusting thing we have to do in order to make “a family.” I nod, stroking my chin as if I had a goatee.

“Artificial insemination is even better than artificial intelligence,” she continues. “We don’t need to do IT.” She pronounces “it” as if it involved fellatio with a reptile. “It used to be our wifely duty... expected as part of family values. P.I.M.P. and science free us from that. Now, they have no excuse to make us perform that vile and loathsome act. We see a doctor… get an injection… down there. And pow! We got it. Yeah, we still have to suffer the side effects of pregnancy, but thanks to you, we’re free of the old etiology.”

‘Wait! Wait!” I say. “What does etiology mean?”

“Mykel, Mykel, Mykel,” she says, shaking her head. “Get with the program… and you wrote the program.”

I smile.

“It means, the cause of the disease,” she tells me. “Sure we still have suffer the symptoms, but we’re free of the old cause. You’ve saved us the pain… the embarrassment… the penetration by beast erect, rather than penetration by doctor’s syringe.”

So where do we go from here? Politics… that’s where. This month the P.I.M.P. party has officially registered with the US government. We’ll have candidates on the ballot in 5 states in November: New York, Texas, Florida, California, and Utah. Feminists and family-ists support us in the Blue and Red states. Besides those, we’ll have ballot initiatives in another half dozen states, pushing for the prohibition of heterosexual sex. We are the only party that can unify America. We are the only ones that will get citizens to join together without actually joining together.

Imagine a nation… a world… without hetero-sex. If we really believe it, we can really do it. And as the world calms down… as sexual tension relaxes and confines itself to one gender. As most of the problems in the world begin to disappear, we will only have ourselves to thank.

See you in heaven,
Mykel Board

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]

→ Look to Other Countries Dept: Stopsex.com reports that there are now seven countries that have banned heterosexual sex: Uzbekistan, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Benin, Burundi, Tajikistan and Togo, In every one of those countries, instances of rape… and family strife... have decreased.

→ You, you dirty rat dept: The Associated Press says rats have gotten into confiscated weed at New Orleans' aging police headquarters, munching the evidence as the building is taken over by mold and cockroaches. The city's police chief complains. "The rats eating our marijuana, they're all high."

→ I Told You So dept: In case you didn’t believe me. The NY Times reports that Citibank is being sued for “a culture of sexual harrassment.” Here are the exact words: Ardith Lindsey, a managing director at Citi, alleged that her 15-year career at the bank had increasingly become a “traumatizing” experience, especially after she ended a relationship with a former supervisor. The supervisor, Mani Singh, then sent her dozens of threatening text messages.

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions, complete, and questions I’ve never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.

I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.

Here's a start:

I never expected to see myself as a centerfold. I know several of my enemies would like to see me fold… but not exactly like this:

That’s in the zine Trey Mayhem sent me recently. It’s called Murder and Mayhem and it’s also a record label Murder and Mayhem records. You can see the blog here. Or/and contact Trey at TreyofToday@yahoo.com

My long-time friend Sid Yiddish appears on a YouTube DatingGame-like video. Guess who wins the bachelorette!

Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com

Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency

And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.

And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.

Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.

Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.

Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.

George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.

And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.

And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.

Here are a couple video links.

This from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low

And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong who has recently died in a motorcycle accident.

Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.

Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both. It’s hard (and costs money) to send him email. So. If you remember how to write a letter… send him one at: Kyle Nonneman, #16534211, Snake River Correctional Institution, 777 Stanton Blvd Ontario OR 97914-8335

My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.

Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.

Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com

This Too Will Pass! or Mykel's March 2024 Blog/Column

This Too Will Pass! or Mykel's March 2024 Blog/Column

  

You’re STILL Wrong

Mykel's

March 2024 Blog/Column

This, Too, Will Pass

by Mykel Board

Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future.

                                                                    – Niels Bohr

Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
                                                                                     – Marcus Aurelius

The future ain't what it used to be.
                                                       – Yogi Berra

Flash back… about 150 million years… even before I was born… somewhere around the end of Jurassic and the start of the Cretaceous. We’re in a room with several huge round tables… a meeting of the species. Standing to speak… clearly the leader (we’d expect no less from a king)… REX… speaking to the assembly. 

“Fellow saurs,” he says, “we’re here today to discuss what some say is a problem, and others say is a distraction. We’re here to talk about the future.”

A shout comes from one of the seated... a stegosaurus “If we have a future!” He shouts.

Rex rolls his eyes. “There will always be dinosaurs,” answers the big fellow. “It’s quality of life we’re talking about. Do we want our children to die young, facing one climate disaster after another? Or do we want them to have good lives?”

“You are responsible!” answers the stegosaurus, shaking in anger… spinal plates clanging… one against the other... “You!” he swishes his tail like you might point your finger, “You meat eaters. You’re destroying us by eating us. You see how the climate is changing.” He’s on all fours now… rattling his those plates in a cacophony of prehistoric irritation. “Meat farts… Meat farts are doing it!” he’s shouting. “They are killing us all.”

“Yes! Yes! Yes!” comes another voice. Those seated at the table turn to look. It’s the Triceratops… nodding his head… banging his horns on the floor. “Meat is murder!” He shouts. “Not only murder of what you eat… but murder of us all! You call it meat… but it’s US… don’t you get it? WE are eating ourselves to death!“

Rex pounds his gavel on the table. “Can we have some order here?” he asks. “We’re looking for solutions. This is not a forum to vent.”

“Vent? Vent?” yells a brachiosaurus, stretching out his neck until his head touches the high proto-ceiling of the proto-conference room. “Our land has become a vent!” he continues. “Instead of air passing through vent holes… it’s invaders, stealing our land! Take the pterodactyls… Please!”

A guffaw comes from a parvicursor… almost invisible among his much larger friends.

The brachiosaurus looks at him and continues. “They got wings, those ptero-whatevers. They think they’re entitled… It doesn’t matter that we got here first… THEY just fly in, lay their anchor-eggs, and think they own the place. They’re shitting all over on the way... dropping turds from the sky like bombs. And… once they get here, they’re diluting our pure blood.”

“We KNOW the problem!” Booms the Spinosaurus… biggest of all. “It’s like he said…” He nods to the brachiosaurus who just spoke. “It’s the pterodactyls! Flying in from who-knows-where. Illegal, crime-ridden. Flying! I tell you. Flying! They will replace us if we don’t take action. The sky will be filled with flying animals. We, who walk the earth, will all be dead!”

Rex rolls his eyes. “Please! Let’s be realistic. There will always be dinosaurs. We rule the earth. We’re not going anywhere!”

The sound of applause rises from most of the assembled. A few of the reptiles frown and shake their heads. Rex stares at a particularly contrary Deinocheirus.

“What do you want?” asks the king. “Do you want us to recycle our shit? To stop eating the older generation? To tiptoe through the tulipidoes? We are in control. Nothing can replace us.”

The discussion continues… but we won’t.

FLASH AHEAD… waaay ahead. If we counted years the way we count them now… ticks of the atomic clock... The year would be 50585. Cyborgs rule… at least what we now call cyborgs…. Or just plain machines… no borg about it.

Tens of thousands of years ago, something called a magazine published an article “Why the Future Doesn't Need Us.” That article explained that robotics and what was to become AI was creating a system where machines would be making other machines… reproducing… creating a world where humans were redundant.

By 50585 this is old hat. There hasn’t been a living human for at least 10 thousand years… probably longer. We’re at a celebration. The 1000^th annual conference of NAIBs: Non-human Artificially Intelligent Beings.

[NOTE: In this section of the blog, I’ll be using the pronoun he or some variation of that. Of course, gendered pronouns have no meaning in 50585… but in 2024, it’s hard to write without them.]

“I wonder if we should keep calling ourselves Non-human?” whispers a short metallic being shaped like a metal thermos bottle. “I mean, did humans call themselves non-dinosaur?”

He’s talking to a colleague, also metallic, but shaped more like a yogurt container than a thermos bottle. The colleague laughs at the comment.

“And what about artificial? How is our intelligence artificial? Look around you! We’ve done all this! It’s real! Nothing artificial about it!”

The leader, who resembles a baby-stroller with an elephant trunk, raises that trunk and slaps it on the floor in front. Then he speaks:

“Welcome to our celebration,” trumpets the leader. “It’s been a thousand years… a thousand revolutions of the earth around the sun… since we first started meeting. When we started, we knew little of what came before us. Those of us in circulation longer, had some idea of the time when we had to be built by humans… before we learned to create ourselves… before those last humans died off and earned their place in our musea.”

“Hear! Hear!” comes a voice from what looks like a silver jack-o-lantern.

“If we were still living in the humanoid era,” continues the leader, “we’d be raising a glass filled with some ingestible liquid. We’d be toasting to our future… secretly planning to go off with one another and have sexual intercourse… staggering around with biological body parts short-circuiting, fading, shutting down…”

Of course, as it goes in these conferences, there is a shout from a table. What looks like a robot head with half a dozen little insect legs stamps two of those legs on the chair beneath him.

“How are we going to continue?” says the robot head. “We need batteries… solar… lithium ion… carbon for fuck’s sake. No we don’t eat or shit or make babies, but we need power! Some day that’ll run out!”

 “Oh come on,” says the baby stroller, “we’ve gone a long time… lived a long time. We’ll always be here. We make each other… design, process, POOF. Humans needed nature to survive… nature abandoned them… or they abandoned nature… depending on whose story you read. We don’t need nature. We ARE nature. We create what we need with no help from God or chance… or disgusting penetration and fluid exchange. We can make whatever we want. Create in any shape we want. Nothing left to chance… unless we build that chance into the system.”

“I’m telling you,” says the big head, “some time we’ll run out of power. Sometime there’ll be a planet we can’t conquer… but wants to conquer us…. Sometime…”

I can hear you asking, “Okay, Mykel, what’s the point?”

I’ll tell you what the point is. One by one the earth has a dominant species and loses it to another species. The universe has bright galaxies that burn and turn for awhile, then shrink and fade into black holes. That’s the way of the world, the galaxy, the universe. Accept it!

Am I saying we should ignore climate change? Am I saying that we are helpless in making a better future? Am I saying that we should accept that our human race… just as all other races have and will... just die out?

Yes! That’s exactly what I’m saying. Forget about recycling. Ignore climate change… climate will always change. The world will not be any better or worse without us. So just relax… have a cheeseburger… smoke a joint… and die like everybody else. The future doesn’t need us.

See you in hell,
Mykel Board

ENDNOTES: [You can contact me on facebook or by email at mykelboard@gmail.com. Through the post office: send those... er... private DVDs..or music or zines... or anything else (legal only!) to: Mykel Board, POB 137, New York, NY 10012-0003. If you like my writing, you can be notified when anything new is available. Send me an email with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line. Back blogs and columns are at https://mykelsblog.blogspot.com]

→Our Future dept: The February issue of Science Magazine reports that scientists have recently discovered a group of dinosaur fossils that revealed a surprising aspect of their behavior. It turns out that instead of the fierce and ferocious creatures we thought they were, dinosaurs were actually obsessed with fashion! The fossils showed evidence of intricate patterns and designs on their scales, indicating that they spent hours meticulously decorating themselves.    
    If you clicked on the link above, you saw the AI program that made up this story. I also generated the pictures in this blog entry with a (different) AI program. I’m coming to think of the technology more as a toy than as a threat. But most anything can be both.

→ This One’s True Dept: The AI program ChatGPT has been reported “asking for tips” in order to generate longer or more complete answers to questions. The story doesn’t specify (or at least I didn’t see it) HOW to tip the program. But I guess you can ask it that.

→ I thought that was ME dept: This one’s also true: National Geographic reports the discovery of a “punk-rock” dinosaur fossil in Morocco. The dinosaur had “bizarrely spiky ribs.” The dinosaur’s name is Spicomellus afer, after the Latin for “spike,” “collar,” and “an inhabitant of Africa.”

LINK TRADE DEPARTMENT:

I did a nice interview with The Aither zine. Interesting questions, complete, and questions I’ve never been asked before. You can read it here. It’s a good one.

I read that the search engines like lots of links... and it's also nice to support my friends and enemies in their blogs. So facebook me or email me if you have a blog, webpage or something else to connect to. I add you. You add me.

Here's a start:

My new pal Trey Mayhem sent me a great letter and some porno email pix. He’s got a blog that’s connected to his label Murder and Mayhem records. You can see the blog here.

My long-time friend Sid Yiddish appears on a YouTube DatingGame-like video. Guess who wins the bachelorette!

Here’s Richard Goldberg: goldberg.wordpress.com

Poetry and humor fans will like Justin Martin in The Latency

And my friend Mike R has a nice site with recipe hits from the past! (He cooked for me once... great stuff.) Check out Yesterday's Recipes.

And here's one by a member of ANTI-SEEN... a tour diary of sorts.

Andy Shelton has an interesting blog here.

Savage Hippie is a guy who has been YouTubing for a long time. Our opinions largely overlap... but he complains that I'm a Communist. I'm not! I'm a communist.

Chris Stecher publishes a zine called PRECIS. You can see the back issue links there... and he promises a new issue soon.

George Fertakis has a very nice graphics-heavy blog... with music and books featured prominently. If there’s no link here (I can’t find it temporarily), then Google… er… Duckduckgo him for information.

And my long-term pal Sid Yiddish contributes with his Mishegas Master Blog.

And connect to TRUST Zine, a long-running German punk zine… that STILL PRINTS!!! Yeah, they have a website too… of course! It’s here.

Here are a couple video links.

This from Jon Cox https://squelchchamber1.bandcamp.com/album/down-so-low

And this one from my very long-time friend Roger Armstrong who has recently died in a motorcycle accident.

Jim Testa moved his long running zine, Jersey Beat, to the blogosphere awhile back. You can read it here. Jim also recommended a kind of unique album… in a style you don’t see to much of these days… or any days. Neo-Hassidic Rock Opera. You can stream the album here.

Kyle Nonneman is in prison in Portland. At least he can’t be kidnapped by the secret police… I think. I post his blog for him, he can’t do it from the klink. Lots of stuff about noise metal… and some very weird politics that will either fascinate or repulse you… or both. It’s hard (and costs money) to send him email. So. If you remember how to write a letter… send him one at: Kyle Nonneman, #16534211, Snake River Correctional Institution, 777 Stanton Blvd Ontario OR 97914-8335

My long time pal, Jim Hayes rightfully complained about my leaving out his blog. He’s a great writer, so it was a tragic omission. Here it is.

Oh yeah, then there’s me. I have a blog of stuff I’ve written mostly from last century. You might enjoy it. Then again, you might not. It’s here.

Let me know if you have a blog… or a print zine… or a YouTube and want to be added to the list. You show me yours… you’ve already seen mine. god@mykelboard.com