Dr. Zoltan recently visited a relatively permanent enclosed structure where justice is administered. He perhaps incurred the dissatisfaction, dislike, and disapproval of the public officer charged with the administration of justice. 

To find out more, visit Dr. Zoltan Dot Com!

The fifth official edition of “Why Are You Asking Me?” has been posted to the Anti-Social Talk Show RSS Feed. Listen to the Podcast on iTunes, or directly download the mp3 file HERE. Please email drzoltan@drzoltan.com to have your question answered by Dr. Zoltan and his research team (also known around the TED Conference as The Temponautical Navigators).

Download audio file (WhyAreYouAskingMe_005.mp3)

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[Transcript begins]

You are listening to “Why Are You Asking Me?” with Dr. Zoltan Oo-bah-lisk. Ue… balisk. Unfortunately, Dr. Zoltan’s research team is on some sort of expedition or… very busy this week. Or either not busy, or taking a week off. So Dr. Zoltan is going to be required to read from a handful of cue cards which were left on his desk by his assistant Brian Compton. Dr. Zoltan narrated some thoughts to Brian, and hopefully they are going to come out OK. Without the research team, but it will probably be a complete disaster. So if you are looking for a professional uh, commentary… You are gonna have to look someone else, like a Dan Carlin podcast or something like that, maybe 2600… um. OK, and here we go. I am going to try reading from these… let me just shuffle them. Am I supposed to shuffle them? I’m not sure. That is what I usually do with cards. OK.

The follow question was found written on the underside of a collating table in the back of a print shop, if you can believe that… written with what appeared to be a CMYK grease pencil of some sort.Hmm. Four color job. It asked, “Dear Dr. Zoltan: are the 2008 US Elections Going To Be Cancelled?”

Well… Dr. Zoltan will now answer that question. After just a moment. Here, put these over here where I can see them. OK.

As most of you know by now, if you watch television… It is a fact that Sarah Palin is the most dangerous person in the United States. Dr. Zoltan does not own a television or… He does have cable, though. Plenty of cables. Back to the story. Uh…

Like a rabid squirrel making a beeline for your pantleg, she must be stopped. That’s what it’s written. It’s uh, it’s written here on this cue card so I’m just reading it. I don’t know what that means.

Sarah Palin’s tactic has always been: I don’t think I was supposed to read the colon. act tough and insane, and your animalistic superiority will intimidate your opponent. She’s right… That was a contraction there. I don’t allow contractions on this show. I’m going to retract that contraction and just make it uh… she is right. Simply because she’s right. Sounds repetitive. She will win because she will win. Team spirit. Sports mentality. Keep fighting no matter what. It doesn’t matter if you have thought your argument through.

Who wrote these stupid cue cards? OK. This just sounds very mechanical.

To many humans… uh. Yes, no… the other too. Too many humans think that debating is like arm-wrestling: that the person who pushes hardest wins. Not so.

Intellectuals such as scientists, mathematicians, and philosophers are required to check their work, take a step back, question everything, and make sure they are correct before they proceed. Sarah Palin will not participate in this twaddle. I don’t know what a twaddle is. Sounds something involving a duck. OK, uh.. the next cue card says.

A human who is unable to doubt — oh, this is uh… this is something I have said in many of my lectures — A human who is unable to doubt his or her ideas is incapable of critical thinking. I believe that. I’ll even repeat it. A human who is unable to doubt his or her ideas is incapable of critical thinking. What they ARE capable of is plunging the world back into the dark ages. I’m sure Reverend Wright wouldn’t even uh… touch that subject. Alright. Uh…

This leads Dr. Zoltan to believe that the 2008 US Elections will indeed be canceled, and the US Government will be replaced with the TED Conference. I don’t know why it says TED Conference. Alright, whatever. Next week the uh, the Research Team should be back from uh, I think maybe they’re at the TED Conference. I’m not even really sure where they are. Thank you all for listening, and let’s hope they get back soon and safely.

[Music fades up]

Dr. Zoltan employs a full-time research team to answer questions just like this one. If you have a question for Dr. Zoltan, please email it to drzoltan@drzoltan.com with “Attn: Speed Metal Dept.” in the subject line.

[End of transcript]

Dr. Zoltan’s “Why Are You Asking Me?” is syndicated by WFIT 89.5 FM in Melbourne, FL and INK19.com.

In this 2008 TEDTalks presentation, Jonathan Haidt explains some of the psychological tendencies (or “morals”) that end in the differences between so-called Conservatives and Liberals. 

Dr. Zoltan wants you to grow big muscles and punch Sarah Palin! Visit http://www.drzoltan.com/blog to find out how you can achieve this in less than 8 weeks with no money down.

In a far off, mythical land, there is a small town called Peanut Butter & Jelly. 

Bill owns a peanut butter farm. Ted owns a jelly orchard. Bill and Ted need a way of getting each others’ products so they can make some tasty sandwiches. But they were tired of trading peanut butter and jelly pound for pound; sometimes it takes Bill a lot more work to make peanut butter than it does for Ted to grow his jelly plants. And sometimes Bill doesn’t need as much jelly. 

So instead they trade pieces of paper called Money. They found it to be a convenient abstract way to exchange energy. If Ted loses his taste for peanut butter and wants to instead buy some bread, he can just save up the paper and give it to Mike. Mike has a bread farm up the road. And it just so happens that Mike loves both peanut butter and jelly. So they use this universal money to measure the worth of their products and exchange their energy. They have a nice little economy going. 

Peanut Butter: $5.10
Jelly: $4.76
Bread: $6.29

The prices on their products fluctuate. Sometimes it rains on one of their farms and they have to raise the prices a little bit to make up for the lost crops. Sometimes one of the crops grows too fast and they have to put the extra in jars in the garage. And that’s OK. Everyone is fair to each other and they know they need each other to make these awesome peanut butter & jelly sandwiches.

Then a guy named Nuno comes into town. Nuno has never been good at anything but acting like an idiot. Every week his hair is a different color and he hits himself and falls down a lot. He’s a prankster and offers to wander around the farms and tell dirty jokes. No one is really sure what to pay Nuno, because he’s not really making anything all that useful. But oh, boy… he’s funny!

Nuno demands to be paid $500 million dollars a year. He throws a tantrum and doesn’t want to have to work on a farm with Bill and Ted. He’s special. Unfortunately, the economy of Peanut Butter & Jelly can’t support Nuno without some help.

A guy named Harvey hears about their problem and moves into town. He is a politician / banker. He invents a thing called a Credit Bank. Bill, Ted, and Mike can all just borrow money from an imaginary source to pay Nuno — as long as they promise to pay it back at the end of the year. Both Bill and Ted believe that peanut butter & jelly is the wave of the future, and that soon they should be making enough money to pay it all back. 

Harvey also charges a fee of $500 million dollars a year to run the Credit Bank. Bill and Ted agree to borrow the money to pay Harvey, so they’ll owe the Credit Bank $500 million dollars each.

Mike decides to not subscribe to Nuno’s service. He doesn’t know what the other guys are thinking, but that sure does seem expensive. He works hard on his farm all day and doesn’t understand why Nuno and Harvey should get paid so much.

But Harvey and Nuno believe that what they provide is much more valuable than some mundane sandwiches. Every night, Nuno puts on a performance after dinner. Their favorite skit is when Nuno pretends to be gay. For some reason this is funny every time. And Harvey made it all possible!

For an entire year, Harvey sits in a nice office and eats peanut butter & jelly all day long. At lunch time, Nuno runs around making fart noises and everyone has a great year, laughing as they work. But at the end of the year, Harvey says it is time to pay the Credit Bank back. 

Unfortunately, both Bill and Ted have only made about $1000 each that year in selling peanut butter & jelly to each other. The rest of the money Bill and Ted earned went to assorted hidden fees charged by the Credit Bank. Didn’t they read the fine print? And in the end, there is no way for them to pay the Credit Bank $1 billion dollars. 

Harvey declares a State of Economic Disaster, takes the $1000 of hard-earned money from each of them, and regrets that he has no choice but to take possession of their farms and turn them over to the Credit Bank. 

Being a politician on the side, Harvey also passes a law that says all business transactions must go through the Credit Bank. He prints up little plastic cards that must be swiped through a machine for all transactions. All business will be monitored, and of course there are fees for all of this. Confusing fees. Hidden fees. From now on, the value of each person, rather than by their personality or abilities, will be measured according to a Credit Score. 

The Credit Score will be determined by an esoteric and confusing formula that analyzes every microscopic financial behavior, including but not limited to the speed at which the person swipes their Credit Bank Card through the machine at different times during the day, and how too-late or too-early they are in their purchases in relation to the temporal average. There are experts who are paid to figure out things like this: “our analysis has shown that a person who eats lunch 5 minutes early on a Thursday cannot be trusted with a mere 10% APR. We’ll have to increase it to 11.5%.”

Mike can’t handle the insanity and abandons his farm. After all, he made over $1000 that year, and that’s pretty good! He loads up his truck full of bread seeds and drives off over the hills, not looking back. He’ll find a place where people are realistic. A place where people don’t don’t get caught up in imaginary business.

Harvey’s Credit Bank takes over the farms. He brings in heavy machinery and barrels of noxious chemicals. Trucks full of strange-smelling sludge drive in and out of factories all day and night. Instead of making actual sandwiches, they squirt sugary ooze that “tastes like” peanut butter & jelly sandwiches into plastic tubes and sell them for $1 each. Much cheaper! Yay for “Capitalism!”

Financially devastated by the collapse of their economy, Bill and Ted get to work in the factory, pushing buttons and carrying heavy things. They wear goggles, gloves, and respirators. They cough a lot. Twice a day they are allowed to sit in a room and lick the ooze out of the tubes while Nuno (who is now demanding $7 billion a year for his antics) dances around with an orangutan. He loves the attention and has to keep working every year because he spends most of his annual income on expensive underpants from an exotic city on the other side of the planet. It is expensive to be an entertainer!

Bill and Ted will die in another 2 years from chemical poisoning and malnutrition. Nuno will live forever, because clowns are indestructible.

With the money he made in recent years from his brilliant business transactions, Harvey retired. He obviously has some experience with this. He now spends all of his time on his own personal organic farm that grows REAL peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. He continues to earn 10% of the profits from the factory, which exceed $750 trillion a year. He owns a dozen or so identical corporations, each with their own military and midget chef / custodian.

Quiz:
1.) What happened to the small town of Peanut Butter & Jelly?
2.) If an economy is energy, and all energy much be accounted for, where did all of the energy / money go? Do you think it is fair that Entertainers, Bankers, and Politicians (like Nuno and Harvey) got paid so much? Do you think that created an imbalance that led to economic ruin?

{ This post was written and proofreaded by Dr. Zoltan! If you believe George W. Bush is going to invent a National Emergency and cancel the elections, you are right. So visit http://www.drzoltan.com/blog. Get out while you can. }

What better way to celebrate seven years of confusion than with a campfire sing-a-long? Dr. Zoltan & Will have released a song called Freefall (Catchy Folk Tune To Celebrate The End of the Republic). You can download the song for FREE if you fill out this contact form: http://www.drzoltan.com/contact.php

CREDITS
Will Maier - Vocals
Dr. Zoltan - Acoustic & Electric Guitar, Keyboard, Bass, Drumkit From Hell

Cover art by CarlKingCreative

DR. ZOLTAN’S THOUGHTS ON 9/11
Dr. Zoltan’s take on this is very simple. He is not a conspiracy theorist, he just does not believe the official story of what happened on 9/11. He does not know what sort of dark force is responsible for making the buildings fall down, but here are his thoughts on some peripheral (yet central) issues.

The White House and CNN gave oversimplified explanations for the disaster and used them to justify an endless war. The American public cynically disregards their own powers of research and observation, handing over too much power and responsibility to their government and the media. There are many unanswered questions about 9/11 and the official stories are as confusing as the nutty ideas put forth by paranoid amateur filmmakers. More time and energy is spent on horrible tabloid stories like Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears than investigating a real crime. 

Instead of helping us make sense of it all, corporations and the government are feeding the stupidity of the masses, perpetuating consumerism and instilling a deep fear of objectivity. Team-oriented politics and conformist cult branding, fueled by religious dogma, racism, and fear, are substituted for the importance of… IDEAS. 

The War On Terror is a press release right out of George Orwell’s 1984. Terrorism is asymmetrical by nature. It cannot be fought with a “War.” Its sole purpose is to cause a government to implode on itself by bloating its military and restricting the freedoms of its citizens — warrant-less tapping of communications, detaining of random suspects, expanded executive powers, et cetera. Through this, a handful of chaotic individuals can cripple a country of hundreds of millions. In a police state everything grinds to a halt in the name of protecting the homeland from the boogeyman. Benjamin Franklin said it best: “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

The truth is that “fun” products like cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, and junk / fast food kill more humans than terrorist attacks ever could. But in a world of billions of crazy humans with their hands on deadly technology, occasionally bad things will happen — on purpose. REALLY bad things. Humans can do their best to stop these things, but what they need is the strength and freedom to sustain damage and go on living. 

LYRICS
You’re better off hiding with some weapons in a hole
When a corporate fascist state has taken control
But instead you’re dancing, drinking, and you’re having lots of fun
While the end of the United States has already begun

Chorus
Brother, Look no further, there’s no other proof you need
Buildings can’t collapse at freefall speed

You can expect to see another pseudo-terrorist attack
When the best you’ve got are posing fakes like Tom and Zach
Hiding from the truth behind their blurry poetry
While the crime scene is buried at the bottom of the sea

It’s gonna come to civil war sooner or later
Protesting won’t stop an evil dictator
Don’t try to vote him out, there’s nothing you can say
The tyrant that’s in office isn’t going away

“You know, I was really annoyed with Hillary Clinton’s campaign when it went Rovian. But she stood up for our Constitution today. She stood up for our civil liberties today. Barack Obama did not, after promising us that he would. I am disgusted with Barack Obama right now. Completely disgusted.”

From: WilWheaton.net

From the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

Washington, D.C. – The U.S. Senate this afternoon passed the FISA Amendments Act, broadly expanding the president’s warrantless surveillance authority and unconstitutionally granting retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that participated in the president’s illegal domestic wiretapping program. The House of Representatives passed the same bill last month, and President Bush is expected to sign the legislation into law shortly.

“It is an immeasurable tragedy that just after its return from the Fourth of July holiday, the Senate has chosen to pass a bill that betrays the spirit of 1776 by radically expanding the president’s spying powers and granting immunity to the companies that colluded in his illegal surveillance program,” said Senior Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “This so-called compromise bill represents a shameful capitulation to the overreaching demands of an imperial president. As Senator Leahy put it in yesterday’s debate, the retroactive immunity provision of the bill upends the scales of justice and makes Congress and the courts handmaidens to the White House’s cover-up of its illegal surveillance program.”

(NOTE: I have met Kevin Bankston — he helped me out with some legal questions during the recording of Sir Millard Mulch’s “How To Sell…”)

From: EFF.org

“I will MAKE it legal.” -Senator Obamapatine

What Every American Needs to Know (and Do) About FISA Before Tuesday, July 8th from Tim Ferriss on Vimeo.

The above video is from The Blog of Tim Ferriss. Dr. Zoltan followed the instructions presented below and urges all humans in the United States to do so also likewise. 

Daniel explains below several important reasons to act in the next few hours (much more in the video), but for those who are prepared to spend 60 seconds to help protect their liberties and prevent warrantless wiretapping from becoming a new standard in the US, here are two options:

1. ALL AMERICANS: Go to the EFF website here and put in your zipcode to find your Senator’s phone number. Call them and read the short script on the same page. If no answer, click the link at the bottom of the page to e-mail them.
(Tell others verbally to go to “www.eff.org” and click “take action”)

2. OBAMA SUPPORTERS: Go to My.BarackObama.com here and join the group requesting he oppose (as he did earlier) the amendment. This takes about 30 seconds. I suggest changing “ListServ” in the bottom right to “Do not receive e-mails.”
(Tell others verbally to search “obama please vote no” on Google and My.BarackObama.com will be in the top 3 results, currently #1)

…and a special bonus:

“There’s no leftist movement in America, there’s no populist movement here, and the best think that could happen is that this thing just breaks up. So right now I am in favor of the politics of the very worst. I wasn’t going to vote against Bush. For one thing, I’ve never voted in my life and I didn’t want to ruin my lifetime record for something as stupid as that. I didn’t vote FOR Bush either, but I knew he was going to win whether it was legal or not. It was clear that he would win. Actually, we are very close to some kind of weird post-modern fascism here, including the Reichstag Fire and the whole thing.”

To read the entire interview with Hakim Bey (including the curse words, which were removed from this post), go to: http://sasha.miltsov.org/krasoty/bey1

According to myth, Kevin Mitnick (social engineer and hacker) was so powerful that he was able “to launch nuclear weapons by whistling into a payphone.”

In 2001, Emmanuel Goldstein, editor of 2600 Magazine (The Hacker Quarterly) produced a documentary called Freedom Downtime. It is a documentary on their Free Kevin Protests, in which a crew travels across the entire U.S., independently investigating this controversial figure. At the time that this documentary was created, Mitnick had been in prison for over 3 years without a trial.

This is a 12-part YouTube video.

For more information about Kevin, visit the Wikipedia page about him: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_mitnick

{ This post was written and approved by Dr. Zoltan! If you believe that free things should be free, visit http://www.drzoltan.com/blog. Otherwise, convert all of your possessions into money, and watch the money get bigger and bigger. }