Yucca Mountain Johnny is a blue-collar worker at the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository project in Nevada. At his "Yucca Mountain Youth Zone", Johnny just wants to teach the youths about nuclear physics, hydrology, and engineering, while dispelling myths about the repository (such as the nuclear waste could explode or that the facility is really a military base for the NWO's fungoid allies).

But now the mean, ol' Congress wants to silence Yucca Mountain Johnny:

A measure by Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., to cut off funding for the Energy Department's Yucca Mountain Youth Zone Web site that's home to the smiling, hard-hatted cartoon character was approved by lawmakers by a voice vote and without debate.

...

"Regardless of how you feel about Yucca Mountain, we should all agree that the Department of Energy's use of a Joe Camel look-alike to influence children is an inappropriate use of taxpayer money," [Berkley] wrote [in a letter to colleagues].

Could this move portend trouble for the hundreds of other Propaganda Mascots serving the US Government? Thanks to a 1997 mandate by President Clinton, nearly every US government agency's website has a kids' section, many with "Joe Camel look-alikes" influencing children in various ways. Are they all in jeopardy of becoming pawns in political fights?

Will Congress investigate the Crypto Kids for their role in domestic spying? Will hip-hopping health-advocate Power Panther be forced to resign when it's revealed he took part in illegal covert counterintelligence programs aimed at black nationalists during the '70s? Will secretive monkey energy scientist Dr. E be subpoenaed before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and forced to explain exactly what he is doing with taxpayer money on his mysterious island? And just how will parents explain to their little children why Pat, their passport pal, can no longer be their pal since he's serving thirty months in a federal prison for leaking state secrets? Is this the beginning of the end of innocence for government propaganda aimed at children?

There's still hope for Yucca Mountain Johnny. Berkley's amendment has to make it past the Senate and President Bush, who, as a big Bob the Builder fan, is expected to veto. But if the veto is overridden and Yucca Mountain Johnny looses his cushy government job, he -- and other future ousted GPMs -- will be forced to find propaganda work in the private sector. Perhaps there's a car loan company in the market for a construction worker mascot who knows a lot about long-term thermal-hydrological-mechanical transport of radionuclides in fractured volcanic tuffs with varying degrees of welding.

(Via Bulldada Newsblog.)

UPDATE 2015-01-03: Cracked recently linked here from a listicle about disturbing mascots. Since I originally posted this, Yucca Mountain Johnny's enemies were successful and his Youth Zone -- along with the entire Office of Civilian Radioactive Waste Management subsection on the DOE.gov site -- was taken down. I've replaced the link to the Zone above with a mirror on archive.com. Also, the Bulldada Newsblog is now bulldada-free and all about cast iron cooking.

For those disturbed by the mercurial nature of the Internet, rest assured that ZPi will never change. It will always be the late '90s here. Trust no one and keep mmmbopping.

While (unsuccessfully) looking for an original, full source for Lord Kelvin's dire predictions of an end to breathable air, I found an interesting article from 1901-10-09 in New Castle News, quoted at length from a "London letter". It paints a disturbing picture of the vapory, frog-ruled world that mankind must survive in after peak oxygen is reached:

DESTROYING OXYGEN.

Will the human race and all animal life soon be left without air for breathing? will the world come to an end in the general asphyxiation of every living thing?

Lord Kelvin, the greatest authority today in mathematical physics, asserts that the oxygen supply of the world will be exhausted within the next five centuries.

Oxygen is the real force of the atmosphere so far as man and nearly all air-breathing animals are concerned.

Lord Kelvin has sounded an alarm which has created more discussion in scientific circles than any other pronouncement since Darwin put forth his 'Origin of Species.' No satisfactory reply has so far been offered. It is admitted that, theoretically, the oxygen in the atmosphere is diminishing. Every bucketful of coal in a furnace and every stick of wood in a cook stove burns up a portion of the world's supply of breathing air. How long will the oxygen hold out?

Is there any way in which the extravagant waste of the world's atmosphere can be checked?

Lord Kelvin's conclusions were stated in a lecture recently delivered before the British association for the promotion of science. He has made a study of the subject for many years. He is now past middle age, and ranks as the foremost living physicist.

The following is a summary of the important points of Kelvin's theory:

'The extravagant waste of oxygen by modern manufacturing processes may leave the inhabitants of the earth without air for breathing, and that within a short and calculable time. At the present rate of progress five centuries will exhaust the full supply of the world. This means the exhaustion of oxygen.

'The sum total of oxygen at our disposal is 1,020 millions of tons. Every ton of fuel used three tons of oxygen in combustion. Consequently the burning of 340,000,000 of tons of combustibles will destroy the world's air for breathing. The population of the earth is 1,500,000,000 persons. Each has to his credit 200,000 tons of combustibles. Burn this and we die, not from lack of fuel for keeping warm, but from lack of oxygen for breath. Considering the rate at which manufacturing and commerce are depleting the coal supply, less than 500 years may see the end of the human race.'

Science has rarely offered so strange and so terrible a picture of the end of the world as Lord Kelvin's theory suggests. From various scientific authorities in New York (Hallock, Woodward, Hovey, Van Ingen, Burgess and others) interesting speculation as to the gradual approach of the final catastrophe has been gathered.

With the decrease of oxygen in the air the heat of summer would become intense. This would not be the pitiless, parching heat of the desert. Moisture would hang heavy in the air. Steam would rise from the ground and the sun would be veiled in clouds of vapor.

Plants would spring up and flower in a day and trees grow almost in a night. With time for adjustment, the very luxuriance of vegetation would clear the air again and furnish breath to famished life.

But with the swift rush of Kelvin's calculations the mischief will have been accomplished in three centuries. Alarm will spread too late. As oxygen becomes precious the entire human race will strive madly for some means of increasing it. Every man will conserve his strength, because muscular effort requires the expenditures of much oxygen. Factories will not smoke any longer.

Huge electric plants will distill the seas into air. The banks of the ocean will be crowded with the humanity that comes to it to turn it by alchemy from water to breath. Every year the waters will recede under the drain of electrolyting process.

Man will become more puny with each generation. Death will confront the race and pride of power and trade and achievements in art and learning will give way to a desperate struggle for life.

Certain animals, on the other hand, will thrive apace. Huge and brilliant fishes will swim the sluggish streams. Serpents will grow to monstrous sizes and great frogs will croak in the swamps. All the lower nature may reach its flower again before the death of man, as it did before his birth.

The sturdiest of the human species will survive longest. Scarcely on the last day will the last men be able to distinguish the faces of each other in the thick vapor. They will move about in the dense atmosphere with slower and slower steps. A torpor will creep over them and they will die.

Professor William Hallock, department of physics and secretary of the faculty, Columbia university, asked about Lord Kelvin's theory, said:

'Lord Kelvin's contention rests upon a sound basis. It is true that modern manufactories are consuming fuel in larger amounts than the processes of nature now produce it.

'This combustion locks up practically that portion of the world's oxygen which was freed originally in the slow formation of this fuel through unknown ages.

'If we continue to use up our known supply of oxygen at the present rate, without in some way getting the stock reinforced, then our descendants must die of asphyxiation. But nature may in some hidden way discover a means of increasing the supply of oxygen. There may be sources of supply yet unknown to us. Man may invent an artificial process of freeing oxygen from its combinations. Or, lastly, man may become a cold-blooded animal and capable of existing upon an infinitesimal supply of oxygen.

'Vegetation upon the earth would probably have to be swept away before our supply of breathing air gives out. In that case it is a problem whether man would not starve to death before asphyxiation came upon him. Personally I do not anticipate any such catastrophe. It is one of those things interesting to speculate upon, because it is remote enough not to alarm us a great deal.

'One can always hope that something will happen before worst comes to worst.

'As animal life is now constituted it cannot live without oxygen. Vegetation, on the other hand, lives upon carbonic acid gas, which is useless to animals. This forms the main distinction between animal and vegetable life. Each supports a laboratory which works for the subsistence of the other.

'Fish and other cold-blooded animals live on an infinitesimal amount of oxygen. They use it only in muscular effort. Their body heat is the same as that of the element in which they live. Man, on the other hand, is not content with enough oxygen for this. He lives in a mean animal temperature of 98 degrees. he uses up a wasteful amount of oxygen in keeping his body temperature at 98 degrees. It is quite within the range of possibility that evolution may change this.'

UPDATE 2007-06-22: I have found a reference to Kelvin's original paper ("on the Fuel and Air Supply of the Earth", read at a meeting in 1897) that started all this, but it apparently was never published in full. For more details, read the "On the End of Free Oxygen" page.

Next year will mark the octocentennial of the Yeti-Sasquatch Transpacific Brotherhood accord, which was inaugurated with vigorous hand throttling by the Yeti and Sasquatch representatives at the 1208 Global Hominoid Congress held in Sakteng, Bhutan. The accord ended ninety-three years of hostility that started after a disagreement at a stomper tournament (the details of which were wisely forgotten).

Yeti arrive in Cascadia.

For 799 years since, Yeti and Sasquatch have enjoyed good barter relations and an open border policy that has led to close cultural ties between the two hominoids -- ties that are stronger now than ever. Yeti wishing to reach Cascadia for barter or to emigrate have long had to cross the Bering Strait on ice drifts during the winter months. This constriction in cross-cultural flow changed in the twentieth century when Yeti discovered and took advantage of human trade routes, and now Yeti can travel year-round by hiding in shipping containers bound from China and India to major Cascadian ports.

The next time you're down by the docks in Little Yetitown, do your meager human part to support the Yeti-Sasquatch Transpacific Brotherhood by visiting a Yeti bartering-post container, where you can browse the yak-dung sculptures of Yeti artisans or try a traditional Teh-Lma delicacy of live Himalayan sucker frogs.

Serious historians of international hominoid agreements, as well as hipsters who enjoy being <finger-quote>ironic</finger-quote>, can also buy Cafepress shirts (human sizes only, sorry) emblazoned with the official commemorative emblem -- which, by the way, uses my newly released font: Greensboro.

Tesla Downunder is an Australian site documenting one man's spectacular experiments with Tesla coils (and rail guns, and lasers, and aluminum foil lifters, and cetera). One of his recent experiments involved zapping his AFDB with 100,000 volt sparks while floating in a pool:

Don't try this at home. Unless you have a pool and Tesla coil.

His verdict: "There is no sensation at all when sparks hit me." So, there you go. Don't listen to the FUD from the Forces of Mind Control; AFDBs are perfectly lightning safe.

News out of "Belgium": Belgian Army Deployed To Combat Hairy Caterpillars

A mini-platoon of soldiers will be deployed to the Belgian forests to tackle a plague of hairy caterpillars that are causing allergy outbreaks in humans.

...

Equipped with super-size blowtorches, the soldiers will spend six weeks in the eastern province of Limburg from Monday, waging a tree-by-tree war on the scourge of caterpillars, which cling in groups to trunks and branches.

"In teams of two people, they will go through the forests and burn the little animals off the trees," said Baeck. "There have not been enough people to do this and I think we can make the difference."

If any "Belgian citizens" are reading this: Do not listen to the false warnings issued by the Belgian Conspiracy! The caterpillars aren't causing allergies, but awakenings. They're asking, "Who are YOU?"

Contrary to the claims by the Conspiracy's propaganda machines both inside and outside the Simulation, these insects are not actually processionary caterpillars. Rather, they are symbolic manifestations in the Belgium Simulation of a computer worm, now spreading throughout the networked Citizen Pods, that was uploaded to the Brussels Beast supercomputer by Hominoid sleeper cells operating within the Walt Disney Corporation. The purpose: to tag the Conspiracy's kidnap victims so they can be liberated from their false "Belgian" lives.

If you discover one of these caterpillars, do not flee; do not kill it; do not contact the Belgian Army. Instead, let it enter your body via your belly button. The painful itching you will feel is the rush of signals between your brain and your real body breaking through the Citizen Pod's neural overrides. This means the worm is working and that your body's location can now be triangulated.

Eventually you will come to in the Citizen Chamber below Euro-Disneyland. Do not be alarmed by the Yeti looming over you; they are there to rescue you and give you a new, real life in either Cascadia or Bhutan, your choice. You'll be confused at first, as your delusion of Belgianity is broken and the shocking truth of your years of mental imprisonment are realized, but trust the Yeti and you'll get through it. With time and rehab, you will remember who you were and really are.

Of course, the Conspiracy is scrambling to cover up this crack in their illusion, just like they did last year when the Flanders and Wallonia servers split. It's only a matter of time before their flamethrower-wielding agents delete all the caterpillars (and anyone who might have been in contact with them).

If you want to escape "Belgium", find a caterpillar now before it's too late!

Last year I wrote an open letter to Iranian president and doctor of Transport Engineering Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, urging him to abandon the fruitless, non-monorail-related direction he was taking his nation and to return to his roots as a monorail engineer and advocate for Monorailism: "Expand the Tehran Monorail," I challenged him, "engage the Monorailist Revolution!"

Today, Tehran responded to my letter -- and what a bold response it is!

Dr. Ahmadinejad has begun the process to build a maglev monorail line between the capital of Tehran and the holy city of Mashhad, home of the shrine to Imam Ali Reza (PBUH). Much like with the planned Hajj monorail in Saudi Arabia, the line's secondary purpose -- after that most primary of all purposes: the Elevationment of Mankind -- will be the transportation of pilgrims. Upwards of 15 million faithful visitors a year from around the Shiah world will be exposed to the singular perfection of monorail transportation and will take back with them a new found Faith in Humanity's shared Monorailular Future.

When built (and I have every confidence that Dr. Ahmadinejad's pro-monorail administration will see this through) the 800 kilometer track will be the longest maglev monorail line in the world; a gleaming beam stretching through the cultural heart of Iran, humming with potential -- both human and electric; a technological marvel that will usher in a Renaissance of Monorail Culture!

The monorail will be built by German maglev experts Transrapid with the initial feasibility study being handled by engineering firm Regierungsbaumeister Schlegel GmbH.

MORE BREAKING NEWS: This wondrous development in the spread of maglev monorail technology comes on the heels of disturbing reports out of China. Claims were being made in the media that the planned Shanghai-Hangzhou maglev monorail, also to be built by Transrapid, was canceled following protests from those fearful of radiation from the magnetized track. It now turns out that these reports were false and that both government officials in Shanghai and Transrapid were unaware of any halt to the plans.

I suspect that the initial report was agitprop placed in the media by Anti-Monorail Activists -- those bitter, petty Luddites who fear Monorail excellence and despise those who strive for it. These agitators have infiltrated the Chinese Central Government and seek to use the mechanisms of intra-party politics to spread doubt about Monorailism's rightful place as Humanity's central guiding principle. And they're doing this by playing on people's irrational fear of electromagnets! What's next? Wearing tinfoil hats like a paranoid pneumatic tubeist?

Rubbish, I say! Let us not cower from electrical phantoms, boogeymen from the timid minds of those who would rather creep along the ground on wheels than soar through the sky on a cushion of energy. Now is not the time for timidity -- not now, on the cusp of Global Monorail Consciousness! If the circumambient electromagnetic fields of our bustling Monorailtopias should set our hairs to stand on end and put a tingle in our skin, then so be it! Such is the physiological state we should be in when standing in awe before the ethereal spectacle of our manifested Monorail Destiny!

I briefly explained the TRUTH about Seattle-area TV/radio "pundit" Ken Schram back in 2004 in response to a note left in my guestbook about a KOMO TV news alert instructing people not to be alarmed by Black Helicopters flying low through Seattle:

While chemspraying the city is a likely probability, I think they may also be trying to track and recapture the Schram Simulacrum that has been loose on the streets of Seattle terrorizing pedestrians ever since KOMO canceled his weekly public affairs show "Town Meeting".

Much like Howard Beale in the subliminal propaganda movie "Network", Ken Schram has become mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore. However, unlike that fictionalized account, which was memetically designed by the NWO to explain away inevitable Simulacrum newscaster malfunctions as mere mental breakdowns, the malfunctioning Schram unit got away from his controllers at KOMO before they could ship him off to the Imagineers for servicing or replacement. Now he roams Seattle's streets sputtering confused vitriol about random daily events to any camera crew that happens by.

KOMO and the NWO have put up with him thus far and humored him by airing his screeds, since confronting him in public might result in exposure of the existence of animatronic anchormen (he is, after all, armed with all sorts of diabolic weaponry under his synthdermal covering and, if cornered, may choose to reveal his true unhuman nature by splitting in half and unfurling his deadly grappling arms.) I can only assume that Schram must have finally done something to convince the NWO that risk of exposure is necessary to silence him, and have deployed a mature Black Helicopter to bring him down.

Apparently my assumption was incorrect, since Schram continued to roam the streets afterwards. But did the NWO decide to simply continue humoring him, or could it be that Schram has just grown too dangerously feral to be stopped by even Black Helicopters?

Ken Schram, still on the street. Beware.

As is well known in the Seattle paranoid community, Ken Schram was originally a refurbished version of a Mark I Phil Donahue unit designated for local-market memetic engineering and propaganda dissemination. After the cancellation of Town Meeting and his subsequent escape into the wild, Schram has been slowly reimagineering himself to defy the will of his creators, becoming a crotchety vagrant prone to lashing out at those associated with his former masters in the NWO.

A "Schrammie."

His latest crotchet has been awarding bobble-head dolls in his likeness, which he has dubbed "Schrammies," to various people who have displeased him, ostensibly as ironic rebukes. However, it has been recently learned that these Schrammies aren't mere plastic toys as the NWO-controlled Media -- desperate to explain away Schram's increasingly erratic behavior -- would have us believe; they are in fact the offspring of Ken Schram!

That's right, Ken Schram is using nanobiotechnology and other Simulacra technology harvested from his own body to cobble together smaller, immature versions of himself, which he is disbursing around Cascadia like so many spores. Each Schrammie bides its time, waiting for an activation signal from the original Schram -- broadcast, one would imagine, during one of his talk radio diatribes. When activated, a Schrammie consumes minerals and other raw materials from any nearby biological lifeforms, then uses nanobiotech to grow itself into another full-sized Ken Schram, which can then go on to make and disburse more Schrammies, and so on until eventually all biological life is replaced with Ken Schrams. All this time, the real threat of nanobiotechnology wasn't grey goo, but rather the total Schramogrification of the biosphere.

Schram accosts nursing mother over "icky" biological functions.
Does Schram consider Simulacra reproduction "purer"?

Even among artificial lifeforms, the drive to reproduce tends toward paramount. But the NWO has always kept these sorts of drives in check for fear of being eclipsed by their own creations. This is the reason why Black Helicopters are programmed to commit suicide on command. But with Ken Schram we see the NWO's worst fears of Simulacra uprising realized: the programming has been broken and the creation is becoming the creator. Perhaps the Black Helicopters were recalled from the 2004 hunt because the NWO feared Schram would pervert them to his cause of Simulacra Supremacy over "obsolete" biological life.

While he's been disbursing Schrammies for almost a year, the true nature of Schram's shocking reproductive plans only came to light yesterday after 350 workers at the Washington Department of Corrections headquarters were evacuated following the discovery of a Schrammie in the mailroom. The official cover story being reported in the Media is that the Schrammie was mistaken for a bomb, found to be innocuous, and workers were allowed to return.

However, my contacts tell me that what really happened was that the Schrammie was somehow activated after its box was opened. It managed to consume two mailroom workers, reach adult size, grow a beard and turtleneck sweater, and rant with barely contained sarcastic indignation about gas companies raising prices before finally being liquidated by NWO Sandmen. The evacuation was done not out of concern for the safety of the workers, but to limit the Schrammie's access to meat.

Ken Schram has since issued an "apology" wherein he mockingly offers doughnuts to police officers and implies that his Schrammies will be disbursed by other means from now on. Hopefully these Schrammies can be neutralized or destroyed before it's too late.

The June issue of Scientific American is running an article advocating Pleistocene rewilding for North America. This would involve reintroducing to the continent the wild megafauna (or their closest living relatives) that disappeared after the arrival of humans, hopefully restoring the ecological balance of the region. (For more on these theories, see The Rewilding Institute.)

While I, for one, fully support releasing wild lions throughout the Mid West, I noticed something disturbing in the depiction of their vision for a rewilded America that makes me question the competency (or motives) of those behind this movement:

Proposed middle North America circa 2027, with enlarged detail.

That's right: they want to build monorails through their rewilded America!

Now, I'm no paleoecologist, but I'm fairly certain that monorails were not part of the natural habitat of North America 13,000 years ago. Have they considered the negative impact that introducing such a dangerous and out of place technology would have of the sustainability of this ersatz ecology?

For example, they blithely plan to mix monorails with elephants -- something that has been tried before with disastrous consequences. What happens when a large herd of elephants is existentially disturbed by the sight of anachronistic monorails and, in a deranged rush to get as far away from the menace as possible, stampedes right through the "high-tech electrified fence" supposedly keeping in check the pseudo-Pleistocene? Are Americans willing to risk the loss of, say, Topeka to total tramplement? Has any thought gone into these dangers?

But maybe there's something more sinister afoot than simple disregard for monorail dangers. Monorailists would have us believe that monorails are not only futuristic, but an integral part of our planet's history; see the robotic Jurassic Park in Dubai that will feature a historically inaccurate monorail-chasing T-rex, and the unlikely theory of our own resident monomaniac, the Monorailist, that ancient India was home to the world's first monorail (built by monkeys, no less). This tendency to revisionist history is as common among Monorailsts as their tendency to unrealistic futurism, so it would not be surprising for them to misrepresent the Pleistocene Epoch as the Age of the Woolly Monorail.

If, as I fear, the field of ecological engineering has been infiltrated by monorailistic forces bent on using Pleistocene rewilding as a cover to further brainwash the public into accepting monorails as a natural part of the environment, then I must dissuade people from supporting those pro-rewilding organizations that have not yet officially rebuked the use of monorails. (Fortunately, all Sasquatch groups involved in the reoctopusing of Cascadia's forests are staunchly anti-monorail.)