re·cal·ci·trant

riˈkalsətrənt/

adjective

1. 1.

   having an obstinately uncooperative attitude toward authority or discipline.

Beer and nukes

"You can't be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline - it helps if you have some kind of football team, or some nuclear weapons, but in the very least you need a beer."

~ Frank Zappa

War and baseball

"Sometimes a strikeout means that the slugger’s girlfriend just ran off with the UPS driver. Sometimes a muffed ground ball means that the shortstop’s baby daughter has a pain in her head that won’t go away. And handicapping is for amateur golfers, not ballplayers. Pitchers don’t ease off on the cleanup hitter because of the lumps just discovered in his wife’s breast. Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake.

Perhaps they are. I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G.Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it’s so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace [sic]. Hence G.Q.’s thesis that pro ballplayers — little as some of them may want to hear it — are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting."

~ David James Duncan

Racket

an·o·dyne

ˈanəˌdīn/

adjective

1. 1.

   not likely to provoke dissent or offense; inoffensive, often deliberately so.

Transcend

Meanwhile, back in future America

Yikes... I mean, just - yikes. Hunter S. Thompson* said "America is raising a generation of dancers." To where are we dancing? Who's calling the tune?

And since the ad pictured above is part of a campaign conceived in Colorado, here's a quote from Extreme Behavior in Aspen:

"We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear — fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer."

~ Hunter S. Thompson, February 2003

*It should be noted that Thompson was indeed a proponent of birth control.