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\ \  /_/i e w e r                             issue 24 vol. 1 July 6/99
 \ \/| |i s c r e t i o n                                ISSN 1481-2266
  \__| |/                                                 v_d@iname.com
   | _ |/                                       archived at disobey.com
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     T h e r e   a r e   1 7 8   d a y s   r e m a i n i n g . . . 

In this issue:

       WELCOME
       QUOTABLE 
       SHAGGED BY A SPYSHITE
       I DON'T LIKE THE MEDIA, BUT THE MEDIA LIKES ME 
                                                 - BY MARILYN MANSON  
       ETC


:: WELCOME ::
Welcome to the "Canada and America celebrating birthdays means nothing
more than a day to scarf down food and not work and it don't matter 
'cause I'm on vacation anyways" issue. So Canada turned 412 years old 
on July 1st and America turned 203 and July 4th. Really. It's a little 
known fact that Canada is older than the US. Uh huh. Trust me. My 
sister's an historian, I know. 

This issue marks absolutely nothing. Morbus and Goatboy and still to
busy dealing with life to be have time to contribute their columns so 
we'll forge ahead without them.  

Mail from readers last issue includes this from A-P:

> Good job on VD#23.  We were going to say we "enjoyed" it but that's 
> not the right word, especially with that article on the Hiroshima 
> survivor.  By some chance did you ever see a comic book by another 
> survivor who was a kid when the Bomb was dropped?  It was translated 
> from the original Japanese edition; we think it was called "I Saw It 
> Happen".  Read it years ago.

Thanks A-P (is it just me or does anyone else think A-P's parents were
incredibly cruel for naming him A-P?). No, I've never read this comic
but I would really like to. Any VD readers out there know where I can 
find a copy of this comic? I'll even pay for one if I have to...or I
can trade insider tips on how to become a friend of Morbus's so when
he takes over the world he won't kill you. Really.

In the mean time, A-P continued on:

> And as for that "Sanizac" story-- COME ON!  Atheism in a pill.  (Is 
> Morbus behind this one, too?)  Now there's that book, _The "God" Part
> of the Brain_ (www.Godpart.com), and then Sanizac shows up... Hey, 
> what about an article on trepanning?

Funny how Morbus gets blamed for everything...but then again it is 
Morbus we're talking about so it must be his fault. Maybe we should
start an alt.anti-Morbus.evil.evil.evil newsgroup.... Anyways, for now 
on we will forward any mail from disgruntled (or aroused? <g>) priests 
to Morbus... As for the trepanning, I published someone else's article 
on trepanning years ago in another zine. I'll see if I can dig it up...
Other than that, quit whining <g>

And AFeXT, who bitched so elegantly last issue, spewed forth again:

> Damnt, Stop doing that stuff.

Uh, no. You want to dictate things? Then get your own damn zine.

Uh oh, here we go again.....


:: QUOTABLE ::
"So don't expect the end of the world to come one day out of the blue --
it's been happening every day for a long time."
-Marilyn Manson


:: SHAGGED BY SPYSHITE ::
I got this in my mail from the exoScience (http://www.exosci.com/)
mailing list (yes, I am on just about every mailing list there is...)
and thought I would pass it along to stir up you paranoid types...

###
A report from the European Parliament has surfaced over the existence 
of a multinational (United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, 
and New Zealand) spy system that has been in place for many years which,
among other things, tracks and analyzes all data passing through 
certain communications satellites, transoceanic submarine cables, and 
internet exchange points. This system, known as "Echelon", is capable 
of recognizing data of political and/or economic interest.

"According to a former employee, NSA had by 1995 installed "sniffer"
software to collect traffic at nine major Internet exchange points."
-TechWeb

The Echelon system has been used both for political and economic means.
Industrial espionage against European corporations, whose governments 
are not involved in the Echelon system, has been reported. Even more
staggering is the potential for the invasion of the privacy of ordinary
citizens.  The data interception systems are obviously in place and are
being used on data passing through these systems.

"Together with the giant American National Security Agency (NSA) and 
its Canadian, British, and New Zealand counterparts, DSD operates a 
network of giant, highly automated tracking stations that illicitly 
pick up commercial satellite communications and examine every fax, 
telex, e-mail, phone call, or computer data message that the satellites
carry.

The five signals intelligence agencies form the UKUSA pact. They are 
bound together by a secret agreement signed in 1947 or 1948. Although 
its precise terms have never been revealed, the UKUSA agreement 
provides for sharing facilities, staff, methods, tasks and product 
between the participating governments.

Now, due to a fast-growing UKUSA system called Echelon, millions of
messages are automatically intercepted every hour, and checked 
according to criteria supplied by intelligence agencies and governments
in all five UKUSA countries. The intercepted signals are passed through
a computer system called the Dictionary, which checks each new message
or call against thousands of ``collection'' requirements. The 
Dictionaries then send the messages into the spy agencies' equivalent 
of the Internet, making them accessible all over the world."
- The Age <-(the source for exoScience's piece above that VD 
unceremoniously ripped off...-Ed.)

Well, there you have it. And from follow up stuff I read I gleaned the
ways in which each government get around certain ethical issues. See,
it's against the law for each of the governments involved to use such 
technology on their own citizens but it's not against the law for Canada
to get Britain to eavesdrop on our communications and then forward the
info gathered to the Canadian government. So each nation "legally" 
spies on the each other, freely trading info back and forth and 
everyone is happy because no laws are being broken. Well, no technical/
operational/on-the-books laws, but moral and ethical laws? That's a
whole other issue... All I can say is spy this motherfucker....
          __  ___ ___ ___    _    _ ___
          | \  |   |  |      |\  /| |
          |_/  |   |  |_     | \/ | |_
          | \  |   |  |      |    | |
          |_/ _|_  |  |__    |    | |__

I don't know about you, but *I* feel better... Of course you all 
realize that this issue has all the keywords used to trigger the
"sniffers" - so now we're all on the government's watch list, really.


:: I DON'T LIKE THE MEDIA, BUT THE MEDIA LIKES ME - BY MARILYN MANSON ::
This is another item that I received from Patrick on the -wormz- 
mailing list. Yeah it's Marilyn Manson, I know, but it actually an 
interesting read on his take on the Littleton thang.

###
[taken from www.rammstein.com, of all places]
Columbine: Whose Fault Is It? 5/28/99

I don't like the media, but the media likes me.
by Marilyn Manson

It is sad to think that the first few people on earth needed no books,
movies, games or music to inspire cold-blooded murder. The day that 
Cain bashed his brother Abel's brains in, the only motivation he 
needed was his own human disposition to violence. Whether you 
interpret the Bible as literature or as the final word of whatever God 
may be, Christianity has given us an image of death and sexuality that 
we have based our culture around. A half-naked dead man hangs in most 
homes and around our necks, and we have just taken that for granted all
our lives. Is it a symbol of hope or hopelessness? The world's most 
famous murder-suicide was also the birth of the death icon -- the 
blueprint for celebrity. Unfortunately, for all of their inspiring 
morality, nowhere in the Gospels is intelligence praised as a virtue.

A lot of people forget or never realize that I started my band as a
criticism of these very issues of despair and hypocrisy. The name
Marilyn Manson has never celebrated the sad fact that America puts 
killers on the cover of Time magazine, giving them as much notoriety as
our favorite movie stars. From Jesse James to Charles Manson, the 
media, since their inception, have turned criminals into folk heroes. 
They just created two new ones when they plastered those dipshits Dylan
Klebold and Eric Harris' pictures on the front of every newspaper. Don't
be surprised if every kid who gets pushed around has two new idols.

We applaud the creation of a bomb whose sole purpose is to destroy all
of mankind, and we grow up watching our president's brains splattered 
all over Texas. Times have not become more violent. They have just 
become more televised. Does anyone think the Civil War was the least 
bit civil? If television had existed, you could be sure they would have
been there to cover it, or maybe even participate in it, like their 
violent car chase of Princess Di. Disgusting vultures looking for 
corpses, exploiting, fucking, filming and serving it up for our hungry 
appetites in a gluttonous display of endless human stupidity.

When it comes down to who's to blame for the high school murders in
Littleton, Colorado, throw a rock and you'll hit someone who's guilty.
We're the people who sit back and tolerate children owning guns, and 
we're the ones who tune in and watch the up-to-the-minute details of 
what they do with them. I think it's terrible when anyone dies, 
especially if it is someone you know and love. But what is more 
offensive is that when these tragedies happen, most people don't really
care any more than they would about the season finale of Friends or The
Real World. I was dumbfounded as I watched the media snake right in, 
not missing a teardrop, interviewing the parents of dead children, 
televising the funerals. Then came the witch hunt.

Man's greatest fear is chaos. It was unthinkable that these kids did 
not have a simple black-and-white reason for their actions. And so a
scapegoat was needed. I remember hearing the initial reports from 
Littleton, that Harris and Klebold were wearing makeup and were dressed
like Marilyn Manson, whom they obviously must worship, since they were 
dressed in black. Of course, speculation snowballed into making me the 
poster boy for everything that is bad in the world. These two idiots 
weren't wearing makeup, and they weren't dressed like me or like goths.
Since Middle America has not heard of the music they did listen to 
(KMFDM and Rammstein, among others), the media picked something they 
thought was similar.

Responsible journalists have reported with less publicity that Harris
and Klebold were not Marilyn Manson fans -- that they even disliked my
music. Even if they were fans, that gives them no excuse, nor does it 
mean that music is to blame. Did we look for James Huberty's 
inspiration when he gunned down people at McDonald's? What did Timothy 
McVeigh like to watch? What about David Koresh, Jim Jones? Do you think
entertainment inspired Kip Kinkel, or should we blame the fact that his
father bought him the guns he used in the Springfield, Oregon, murders?
What inspires Bill Clinton to blow people up in Kosovo? Was it 
something that Monica Lewinsky said to him? Isn't killing just killing,
regardless if it's in Vietnam or Jonesboro, Arkansas? Why do we justify
one, just because it seems to be for the right reasons? Should there 
ever be a right reason? If a kid is old enough to drive a car or buy a 
gun, isn't he old enough to be held personally responsible for what he 
does with his car or gun? Or if he's a teenager, should someone else be
blamed because he isn't as enlightened as an eighteen-year-old?

America loves to find an icon to hang its guilt on. But, admittedly, I
have assumed the role of Antichrist; I am the Nineties voice of
individuality, and people tend to associate anyone who looks and 
behaves differently with illegal or immoral activity. Deep down, most 
adults hate people who go against the grain. It's comical that people 
are naive enough to have forgotten Elvis, Jim Morrison and Ozzy so 
quickly. All of them were subjected to the same age-old arguments, 
scrutiny and prejudice. I wrote a song called "Lunchbox," and some 
journalists have interpreted it as a song about guns. Ironically, the 
song is about being picked on and fighting back with my Kiss lunch box,
which I used as a weapon on the playground. In 1979, metal lunch boxes 
were banned because they were considered dangerous weapons in the hands
of delinquents. I also wrote a song called "Get Your Gunn." The title 
is spelled with two n's because the song was a reaction to the murder
of Dr. David Gunn, who was killed in Florida by pro-life activists 
while I was living there. That was the ultimate hypocrisy I witnessed 
growing up: that these people killed someone in the name of being 
"pro-life."

The somewhat positive messages of these songs are usually the ones that
sensationalists misinterpret as promoting the very things I am 
decrying. Right now, everyone is thinking of how they can prevent 
things like Littleton. How do you prevent AIDS, world war, depression, 
car crashes? We live in a free country, but with that freedom there is 
a burden of personal responsibility. Rather than teaching a child what 
is moral and immoral, right and wrong, we first and foremost can 
establish what the laws that govern us are. You can always escape hell 
by not believing in it, but you cannot escape death and you cannot 
escape prison.

It is no wonder that kids are growing up more cynical; they have a lot
of information in front of them. They can see that they are living in a
world that's made of bullshit. In the past, there was always the idea 
that you could turn and run and start something better. But now America
has become one big mall, and because of the Internet and all of the 
technology we have, there's nowhere to run. People are the same 
everywhere. Sometimes music, movies and books are the only things that 
let us feel like someone else feels like we do. I've always tried to 
let people know it's OK, or better, if you don't fit into the program. 
Use your imagination -- if some geek from Ohio can become something, 
why can't anyone else with the willpower and creativity?

I chose not to jump into the media frenzy and defend myself, though I
was begged to be on every single TV show in existence. I didn't want to
contribute to these fame-seeking journalists and opportunists looking 
to fill their churches or to get elected because of their 
self-righteous finger-pointing. They want to blame entertainment? Isn't
religion the first real entertainment? People dress up in costumes, 
sing songs and dedicate themselves in eternal fandom. Everyone will 
agree that nothing was more entertaining than Clinton shooting off his 
prick and then his bombs in true political form. And the news -- that's
obvious. So is entertainment to blame? I'd like media commentators to 
ask themselves, because their coverage of the event was some of the 
most gruesome entertainment any of us have seen.

I think that the National Rifle Association is far too powerful to take
on, so most people choose Doom, The Basketball Diaries or yours truly. 
This kind of controversy does not help me sell records or tickets, and 
I wouldn't want it to. I'm a controversial artist, one who dares to 
have an opinion and bothers to create music and videos that challenge 
people's ideas in a world that is watered-down and hollow. In my work I
examine the America we live in, and I've always tried to show people 
that the devil we blame our atrocities on is really just each one of us.
So don't expect the end of the world to come one day out of the blue --
it's been happening every day for a long time.

MARILYN MANSON


:: ETC ::
You can catch VD. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whatever. If you want VD delivered
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Conversely, if you don't want VD, figure it out (it has something to do
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If you have something you'd like to see in VD or an idea for a section
you'd like to write or whatever, type it up and send it in a note to
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Viewer Discretion is archived exclusively at Low Bandwidth - 
http://www.disobey.com/low/listings/viewer_discretion.htm
Because Morbus is therefore he isn't here.

Morbus doesn't appear courtesy of banana peel between his toes.
Goatboy doesn't appear courtesy of schoolsux.com

Next issue July 20/99 


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Morbus made me put this here cos he's a "visionary"...
 
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