Let me tell you something about Korea. If you want to order Human meat, you can, for 28 dollars a pound. It comes from the prisoners they have there.

Faler,
Sounds interesting. Can you provide evidence that this allegation is true, or at least where you heard it from?

Not that I'm interested, of course. Well, at least not for myself...

Stay away from this thread. It's haunted.
Cheers, Translator

Concerning the purchase of human flesh from the prisons of North Korea, it was available for a period of time from the Church of Euthanasia's catalog.

Their catalog however is down, I don't know if it's coming back.

I know that here in the United States human flesh consumtion is illegal. I haven't found a specific law, but, it fits under Abuse of a Corpse.

However, purchasing human flesh, will be a lot like purchasing the banned liquor, Absinthe. Although it is illegal in our own nation, the green fairy can be purchase online from European countries, and the US, isn't to keen on monitoring incoming packages.

here you go
http://www.churchofeuthanasia.org/

I'm sorry I asked. I won't ask how you knew about that site.

Wow. I just read all the above replies. First off, I must say that Dandilion's start off to this ball just floored me. The idea of using Anne Frank's Diary as a weapon against capitalism and Bush is actually classic Bradbury if you ask me.

451 was in many ways about cultural ignorance. I still remember being struck as a kid by one of the first scenes where the ambulance drivers come in to assist the suicidal wife and they can't figure out how to operate their machinery. They just press a button and it works. The machine basically tells them what to do, and the government likes it that way.

The best thing a dictatorship can do is control your input to information and make you feel it needs what it has. You need 4 walls of flatscreen t.v., not one or two, like the fireman's wife does.

Bradbury I think caught on, even way back then, to the fact that as technology gets better, we need to go to fewer and fewer places to get information, and books, especially ones that are timeless, can fowl up the whole system because they're immune to the "ideas of the moment." Books aren't trendy, they don't press buttons for instant gratification. They imagine. And that's scary when it's done outside the realm of big brother's control.

In America, we start replacing numbers on keyboards at Micky D's with pictures of burgers and such.

In North Korea, they rely on the fact that nobody could figure out the keyboard in the first place. They just tell the people it's a burger on the key, and they believe it. Unfortunately for us, it might be a nuke.

But here, as Bradbury predicted so long ago, we're sliding to the same place, out of laziness really.

I've thought about 451 alot ever since I got my new cel phone about a year ago. It's got voice recognition and it lets me call anyone just by punching in their names. I don't need the keypad anymore. A year ago, I could have dialed twenty people or more on the keypad, from memory. Now that it's all voice and name based, I can't remember a single number. If I was stranded on the road without my phone, I wouldn't know who to call.

But if I was in North Korea, or 451's world, I'd be right at home.

L.

Your expression "cultural ignorance" really hit me. I teach philosophy classes at our community college and am constantly amazed at the things the generation just getting out of high school have not read . . . not even heard of. Biblical allusions have to be explained to them. They have never been exposed to books like "Lady Chatterley's Lover". Some had never even heard of Lawrence. Only a few have heard of Vonnegut. We were discussing Natural Law and the Constitution and current rulings on the Supreme Court that used Natural Law ideology in their reasoning. They'd not heard of Clarence Thomas or his hearings. When I bring up historical events, they often manifest totally blank stares. The vast majority knew nothing about the American Transcendentalists.

When we lose our literary and philosophical history, we lose our culture. And our culture influences who we are as individuals and as a nation.

While I enjoy, sometimes, being the first one to expose them to things, it is sad that many in this rising generation are so unfamiliar with our literary, philosophical and political history.

I agree. It is startling enough how little I, and other people in my generation, know about classic literature. But we are giants of knowledge when you compare it to people coming out of high school today.

My grandmother used to do her taxes and pay her bills all by figuring it out with longhand math.

I was one of the first classes in my school to be allowed to use a calculator, (this is when they were first getting small enough to carry around). but i still had to work things out by hand.

Now, students do everything with a calculator. Where's the real learning involved? Part of doing the work, the reading, whatever, is teaching your mind to be quicker and more adaptable.

When everything is easily fed to you, the only thing you become is fat.

Become Fat? For the record I'm 5 foot 11, and 130 pounds.

My generation (I'm 22), we're not that different. Perhaps it is your vantage point. When you look at the past, you tend to look with rose tinted spectacles.

I think the definition of "educated" has simply changed. I may not know much of what you mentioned earlier, but my knowledge and focus is simply on different subjects.

I can speak of music, Punk, Goth. I can tell you the meaning and thinking behind hundreds of songs from the past. Not just alternative stuff. I can speak of Pink Floyd, The Beatles.

And um, as far as using the calculater, and all that stuff. The role of the human has simply changed. A manager of tools, who still has knowledge of the basics, things move faster this way.

We're fine, I'd like to quote the Who at this point, "The Kids are all right."

You'll have to excuse me, I just had my wisdom teeth pulled, and I figuered out there's alternative ways top ingest the pills they gave me.

I'm Just kidding

I just thought of something. A "witch docter" from the jungle can dance circles around any botanist from the western world.

And a tribal man who lived on his feet doesn't even need shoes to run circles around our greatest track athletes.

People haven't changed much, it's enviroment. Many are reading less, but that doesn't mean they're thinking less. The direction has simply changed.

Faler,

I stand corrected. I guess it's really easy to say, "the world is going to hell in a handbag!" And as we both know, it's not, yet anyway.

Different cultures, like different generations, have different and unique skills. I still can't get my Dad to figure out how to program his damn voicemail on his cel so I can leave him a message. My Grandfather couldn't figure out how to operate the air conditioner in his pickup until he died.

But at the same time, I think what stuff like Farenhiet 451 warns us about, (which I recommend to you if you haven't read it)is that it's easy to let technology make you complacent. It's easy to step off the bus and stop thinking for yourself.

There will always be intelligent people, but they will never know what they can accomplish if they don't know how to try.

I don't know what part of the country you live in, but have you ever noticed how hard migrant people work? I mean any migrants, from just about anywhere. They work themselves crazy, because they know what it's like to not have what we have.

In India right now, a few million programmers working for dollars a day are doing what a few thousand programmers used to do here for much more money. They're smart and they're hungry.

Bradbury has known for years that technology can easily replace human instinct, and when that happens, there are no great works of art, no great leaders, and no great teachers. It's the human instinct that makes you appreciate Goth and argue intelligently and argue your way out of doing your math homework.

But, who knows what you, or I, are missing, because we've never had to find out, the way some other people have. Sometimes, the sum total of your potential is related to how much you have to lose.

Well, I don't know which circle you are in, but I see many motivated young Americans. I have traveled to South America, to lend their military a hand. And those guys, AAAAAAAHHHHHHH! They'd let the enemy dance circles around them. They fight their wars so half standard.

There was an incident in Colombia were we argued who was tougher. Us Americans all burned ourselves with a lighter, and they didn't want to argue any more.

Their are poor people in America. This country does have some seriouse problems, that are resulting in creating quality individuals.

I have noticed the most motivated ones are the ones that are suffering. America is not without this. The masses may be pleased, but is it not a sharp point that makes the incision?

It would be nice if people in general were, motivated, but as long as there's a few good ones here and there, this nation will continue to excell.

Sons and Lovers is better, Mr. Dark
Cheers, Translator

A lot of people would agree with you. Lady Chatterley was my "first" Lawrence, and so I have very fond memories of it. I also love a lot of his short stories. In my MA program, the professor who taught Lawrence was a brilliant and gorgeous woman. She focused on Lady Chatterley, also, in her British Lit class -- felt that novel was more accessible and that it was easier for students new to Lawrence to see his distinction between a life of nature (romance) and an industrial/technological life of reduced humanity.