May 31, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 397
Nobody likes an incomplete idiot. If you're stupid, be as stupid as can be and don't pretend otherwise. People will know you're an idiot but will respect your honesty. That's about as good as it gets for idiots, but it's at least something.
HUMANS: HOME TO 1,000 SPECIES OF BACTERIA, AND OTHER SCIENCE NOTES
News from the world of science states that healthy human beings are hosts to around 1,000 species of bacteria, ranging from harmless to absolutely essential to our well-being. Without some of them we could not survive. That's either pretty disgusting or pretty amazing, depending upon how you feel about bacteria. It does, however, put our vaunted world-domination into perspective, no? Our big brains, opposable thumbs, supreme adaptability and endless inventiveness would be impossible without germs. That must drive mysophobics (people with a fear of germs) nuts. Well, guess what? We're all in this together, us and our 1,000 little friends.
So, for those of us earnestly scrubbing our skin with anti-bacterial potions and attempting to cleanse our innards of these little microbes, well, good luck. It's not going to happen, and if you do somehow succeed in achieving sterility, you die. So it seems that little boys, with their propensity for getting all muddy and handling worms and frogs and the like, have it right. Germs are our friends, at least 1,000 of them anyway. As for the others, many of which can make us very ill or extremely dead? Better to let our immune systems sort out who's who and get on with our lives. Barring that, there's always doctors, and barring that, graveyards.
In other science notes, the deadliest animals in the world are rated in a Top Ten list. What could possibly be deadlier than lions, polar bears, cobras, crocodiles and charging elephants? That would be the Poison Dart Frog, #1 on the list, weighing less than an ounce and measuring about 3/4 of an inch long. These bad boys produce enough slimy toxin on their backs to kill 10 humans. They got their name from the practice of indigenous tribes in South and Central America of smearing frog neurotoxin on the tips of their arrows and darts. You need not be a deadly marksman to take down prey with one of these missiles. A mere scratch and you're feasting on wild boar in no time, without having to chase a dangerous wounded animal through miles of rain forest.
In Japan, scientists are feverishly working on robots that people can have sex with, simulating human flesh and responsiveness. They're working on simulated females, of course. You've got to figure that Japanese scientists are getting a little tired of their human lovers making fun of their small units. Here's hoping they keep these sexbots away from foreigners, otherwise it's back to square one.
Astronomers are searching for Earth's twin. What, separated at birth and all that? And which one is the evil twin? So far, they've only been able to locate distant cousins, but that makes them only hotter to find our long lost sibling. Maybe they figure we could use a spare the way we've been treating this one. And, with our population scheduled to hit 9 billion by the middle of this century, maybe some extra real estate will come in handy.
Speaking of robotics, scientists are looking to expand their impressive repertoire of artificial body parts from limbs, joints and heart valves to brain implants and even growing new penises (Are you listening, Japanese robot lovers?). Some of them figure they'd better start with men and kill two birds with one stone and just give in to nature by locating the brain directly into the penis, which pretty much runs the show for guys anyway. This way the head could be filled with spare parts for the rest of the body, or maybe as a reservoir for holding a lubricant to oil all our new metal limbs. Better yet, make the head a handy mini-keg of beer!
And in further Science News, no cure is yet in sight for the common cold and the most effective remedy remains chicken soup. Colds are caused by germs, they say, but one we haven't figured out how to kill. Maybe we need one more species of bacteria to come live inside of us to prevent colds? Why not? Make it 1,001. It seems that the only completely bacteria-free creatures on this planet are bacteria themselves. The rest of us are composites, hosts for bacteria and other tiny organisms. Perhaps evolution is just bacteria's way of getting around without having to grow legs? And just maybe humans are the result of bacteria wanting to stand on the moon. Who knows? The bacteria are saying much one way or the next.
So, for those of us earnestly scrubbing our skin with anti-bacterial potions and attempting to cleanse our innards of these little microbes, well, good luck. It's not going to happen, and if you do somehow succeed in achieving sterility, you die. So it seems that little boys, with their propensity for getting all muddy and handling worms and frogs and the like, have it right. Germs are our friends, at least 1,000 of them anyway. As for the others, many of which can make us very ill or extremely dead? Better to let our immune systems sort out who's who and get on with our lives. Barring that, there's always doctors, and barring that, graveyards.
In other science notes, the deadliest animals in the world are rated in a Top Ten list. What could possibly be deadlier than lions, polar bears, cobras, crocodiles and charging elephants? That would be the Poison Dart Frog, #1 on the list, weighing less than an ounce and measuring about 3/4 of an inch long. These bad boys produce enough slimy toxin on their backs to kill 10 humans. They got their name from the practice of indigenous tribes in South and Central America of smearing frog neurotoxin on the tips of their arrows and darts. You need not be a deadly marksman to take down prey with one of these missiles. A mere scratch and you're feasting on wild boar in no time, without having to chase a dangerous wounded animal through miles of rain forest.
In Japan, scientists are feverishly working on robots that people can have sex with, simulating human flesh and responsiveness. They're working on simulated females, of course. You've got to figure that Japanese scientists are getting a little tired of their human lovers making fun of their small units. Here's hoping they keep these sexbots away from foreigners, otherwise it's back to square one.
Astronomers are searching for Earth's twin. What, separated at birth and all that? And which one is the evil twin? So far, they've only been able to locate distant cousins, but that makes them only hotter to find our long lost sibling. Maybe they figure we could use a spare the way we've been treating this one. And, with our population scheduled to hit 9 billion by the middle of this century, maybe some extra real estate will come in handy.
Speaking of robotics, scientists are looking to expand their impressive repertoire of artificial body parts from limbs, joints and heart valves to brain implants and even growing new penises (Are you listening, Japanese robot lovers?). Some of them figure they'd better start with men and kill two birds with one stone and just give in to nature by locating the brain directly into the penis, which pretty much runs the show for guys anyway. This way the head could be filled with spare parts for the rest of the body, or maybe as a reservoir for holding a lubricant to oil all our new metal limbs. Better yet, make the head a handy mini-keg of beer!
And in further Science News, no cure is yet in sight for the common cold and the most effective remedy remains chicken soup. Colds are caused by germs, they say, but one we haven't figured out how to kill. Maybe we need one more species of bacteria to come live inside of us to prevent colds? Why not? Make it 1,001. It seems that the only completely bacteria-free creatures on this planet are bacteria themselves. The rest of us are composites, hosts for bacteria and other tiny organisms. Perhaps evolution is just bacteria's way of getting around without having to grow legs? And just maybe humans are the result of bacteria wanting to stand on the moon. Who knows? The bacteria are saying much one way or the next.
May 30, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 396
Most people don't care all that much about other people's opinions of what we like to eat. On average they don't live a second longer than anybody else.
SEND IN THE GEEK MARINES!
President Obama and the Pentagon are creating a new branch of the armed forces, a cyber unit specializing in computer warfare. They will be trained to defend the nation's computer systems against hackers, saboteurs and spies, and also to attack the computer systems of our enemies, thus disrupting their military communication and/or financial stability. Finally, a military position for the nation's geeks! Armchair nerd warriors have been practicing their entire socially-challenged lives for just such an opportunity! Already there are CIA geeks in Nevada operating the unmanned Predator Drones in faraway Afghanistan that blow up houses and cars full of terrorists with pinpoint accuracy. Imagine the possibilities of an entire branch of the service manned by computer nerds and hackers?
They could steal the identities of people like Osama bin Laden, taking out bogus second mortgages on his caves, buying flat screen televisions, luxurious vacations and cars with his credit cards, stealing his ATM pin code and emptying his checking account, thus ruining his finances and making it impossible for Al Qaeda to finance further terrorist activities. These official hackers could penetrate the computer systems of the North Korean army and reset their rocket coordinates so that the next time they decide to test fire a rocket it hangs a U-turn and goes after Kim Jong Ill.
Imagine the snarky snickering that will go on in Geek HQ when they hack into the computer servers in Iran and flood them with pornographic photo-shopped images of the head mullahs having 3-ways with both boys and girls. Or better yet, goats. And the next time the Saudis announce they are raising the price of oil, have the Geek Marines threaten to flood their nation's television stations and home computers with images of women leaving the house unveiled, unescorted and driving cars. Piece of cake for experienced hackers. And if that doesn't work, have them electronically siphon off some of the royal family's billions and transfer it to our own treasury.
Of course, organizing nerds and hackers into a disciplined military unit will be a challenge. They're not exactly your typical gung-ho, physically fit recruits. They're kind of pasty-faced and jittery, and tend to be either chubby or pencil thin and do their level best to avoid direct sunlight. They are not used to keeping regular hours or mixing with many other human beings. They are also full of whacky conspiracy theories and take science fiction movies very seriously, traits that no amount of training will erase. So maybe for this branch of the service, the Pentagon will have to rethink their one-size-fits-all approach to boot camp.
Being that they need these geeks so much in order to be an effective organization, they might try to tailor their training and discipline to reflect the lifestyles of these people. Forget the 10 mile runs at dawn. Nerds and hackers are just getting to bed at that time after spending the whole night planting viruses in the computers of movie reviewers who gave a thumbs down to the Harry Potter films. Skip the physical exercise and forget about barracks. Let the recruits live in facilities that resemble their mothers' basements, leaving them only to attend classes and Star Trek conventions.
Their work shifts should be elastic too. There are times when these people will work for 48 hours straight at their computer keyboards on some particularly challenging project, sustained only by Doritos and Pepsi. Then they might eat a box of dry raisin bran, drink a half gallon of orange juice and sleep for 14 hours straight. Not exactly military precision there, so you'll have to recruit a whole lot of extra personnel so that when some of them collapse there will be others to man the computers. When an exciting challenge presents itself, they'll all be willing to sit around in their underwear for countless hours at their computers, doing crazy impossible things just because they can. You have to coddle valuable people like this and overlook their eccentricities and their taped-together horn rim eyeglasses.
As far as uniforms go, the military can save a bundle by just providing them with T-shirts, jeans and sneakers, with maybe a North Face parka, a stocking cap and a scarf for cold climates. Military haircuts are also out of the question, as is shaving and showering on a regular basis. You won't even have to pay them all that much since they'd be doing the same things for free back at home. Give them some state of the art computers and let them hang up their posters of Luke Skywalker and you'll have cyber soldiers every bit as dedicated as regular soldiers, only a lot less personally appealing.
Which is fine, since they don't like being out in public all that much and the military won't want anybody to know who their official hackers are, so you can keep them secret. They're used to people treating them like they were invisible anyway. More money can be saved by skipping the conventional arms training too. It might be a good idea to make it a point to keep these people away from explosives, firearms and sharp objects. Geeks tend to be sort of awkward and clumsy so maybe the automatic weapons and shoulder held rocket launchers are best left to our regular troops.
Concerning the boot camp practice of breaking them down emotionally and rebuilding their characters in military mode, that's not a good idea either. These people are brilliant with computers and technology, but emotionally unstable in other areas. That's a mind set the army won't want to alter. Paranoia, resentment and childish maliciousness are the ideal emotional makeup for people charged with attacking and disrupting other nations' computer systems. As far as rules go, if you tell a geek he cannot do something, consider it done before the close of business that day. Besides, if you fill these geeks with self-esteem and teach them to be well adjusted individuals, they'll quit the army and go make themselves internet billionaires.
So the training and operation of Operation Geek Marines has to be undertaken very carefully, and mindful of the sort of monsters we could wind up creating. Look at what these people have done from an old laptop in Mom's basement: penetrating the Pentagon's and NASA's databases, spreading computer viruses throughout the world and crashing untold numbers of computers just for the hell of it and wreaking financial havoc because they were bored one afternoon. Provide them with Cray super computers and state of the art gadgets and interfaces, there's no telling what these geeks will do. We just might wind up with one of them as president when they decide to electronically alter the election results one year. We could wind up with "President Timmy." Then where would we be?
They could steal the identities of people like Osama bin Laden, taking out bogus second mortgages on his caves, buying flat screen televisions, luxurious vacations and cars with his credit cards, stealing his ATM pin code and emptying his checking account, thus ruining his finances and making it impossible for Al Qaeda to finance further terrorist activities. These official hackers could penetrate the computer systems of the North Korean army and reset their rocket coordinates so that the next time they decide to test fire a rocket it hangs a U-turn and goes after Kim Jong Ill.
Imagine the snarky snickering that will go on in Geek HQ when they hack into the computer servers in Iran and flood them with pornographic photo-shopped images of the head mullahs having 3-ways with both boys and girls. Or better yet, goats. And the next time the Saudis announce they are raising the price of oil, have the Geek Marines threaten to flood their nation's television stations and home computers with images of women leaving the house unveiled, unescorted and driving cars. Piece of cake for experienced hackers. And if that doesn't work, have them electronically siphon off some of the royal family's billions and transfer it to our own treasury.
Of course, organizing nerds and hackers into a disciplined military unit will be a challenge. They're not exactly your typical gung-ho, physically fit recruits. They're kind of pasty-faced and jittery, and tend to be either chubby or pencil thin and do their level best to avoid direct sunlight. They are not used to keeping regular hours or mixing with many other human beings. They are also full of whacky conspiracy theories and take science fiction movies very seriously, traits that no amount of training will erase. So maybe for this branch of the service, the Pentagon will have to rethink their one-size-fits-all approach to boot camp.
Being that they need these geeks so much in order to be an effective organization, they might try to tailor their training and discipline to reflect the lifestyles of these people. Forget the 10 mile runs at dawn. Nerds and hackers are just getting to bed at that time after spending the whole night planting viruses in the computers of movie reviewers who gave a thumbs down to the Harry Potter films. Skip the physical exercise and forget about barracks. Let the recruits live in facilities that resemble their mothers' basements, leaving them only to attend classes and Star Trek conventions.
Their work shifts should be elastic too. There are times when these people will work for 48 hours straight at their computer keyboards on some particularly challenging project, sustained only by Doritos and Pepsi. Then they might eat a box of dry raisin bran, drink a half gallon of orange juice and sleep for 14 hours straight. Not exactly military precision there, so you'll have to recruit a whole lot of extra personnel so that when some of them collapse there will be others to man the computers. When an exciting challenge presents itself, they'll all be willing to sit around in their underwear for countless hours at their computers, doing crazy impossible things just because they can. You have to coddle valuable people like this and overlook their eccentricities and their taped-together horn rim eyeglasses.
As far as uniforms go, the military can save a bundle by just providing them with T-shirts, jeans and sneakers, with maybe a North Face parka, a stocking cap and a scarf for cold climates. Military haircuts are also out of the question, as is shaving and showering on a regular basis. You won't even have to pay them all that much since they'd be doing the same things for free back at home. Give them some state of the art computers and let them hang up their posters of Luke Skywalker and you'll have cyber soldiers every bit as dedicated as regular soldiers, only a lot less personally appealing.
Which is fine, since they don't like being out in public all that much and the military won't want anybody to know who their official hackers are, so you can keep them secret. They're used to people treating them like they were invisible anyway. More money can be saved by skipping the conventional arms training too. It might be a good idea to make it a point to keep these people away from explosives, firearms and sharp objects. Geeks tend to be sort of awkward and clumsy so maybe the automatic weapons and shoulder held rocket launchers are best left to our regular troops.
Concerning the boot camp practice of breaking them down emotionally and rebuilding their characters in military mode, that's not a good idea either. These people are brilliant with computers and technology, but emotionally unstable in other areas. That's a mind set the army won't want to alter. Paranoia, resentment and childish maliciousness are the ideal emotional makeup for people charged with attacking and disrupting other nations' computer systems. As far as rules go, if you tell a geek he cannot do something, consider it done before the close of business that day. Besides, if you fill these geeks with self-esteem and teach them to be well adjusted individuals, they'll quit the army and go make themselves internet billionaires.
So the training and operation of Operation Geek Marines has to be undertaken very carefully, and mindful of the sort of monsters we could wind up creating. Look at what these people have done from an old laptop in Mom's basement: penetrating the Pentagon's and NASA's databases, spreading computer viruses throughout the world and crashing untold numbers of computers just for the hell of it and wreaking financial havoc because they were bored one afternoon. Provide them with Cray super computers and state of the art gadgets and interfaces, there's no telling what these geeks will do. We just might wind up with one of them as president when they decide to electronically alter the election results one year. We could wind up with "President Timmy." Then where would we be?
May 29, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 395
The biggest gamble you'll ever make is with your heart. There's no two dollar window in love. It's all or nothing.
WHO NAMED IT THE HOLY LAND?
The narrow strip of the Middle East known as the Holy Land to 3 religions is as unholy a patch of real estate as ever existed. Born of bloody conquest, the Biblical state of Israel was in its early stages run by a bunch of brutal warrior kings who claimed they we having conversations with God. That's never a good prospect for living in peace. As they were conceived, in blood and conquest, so they were destroyed, time and time again. Of course whenever they were conquered and dragged off into slavery, the Israelites figured that they weren't being religious enough to satisfy the singularly bloodthirsty God that they invented in order to justify their own insatiable bloodthirstiness.
Not to be outdone in the hatred and slaughtering department, 2 other major religions, first Christianity and then Islam, rose up and began slaughtering people on a scale far grander that King David or his greedy son Solomon could have imagined. Indeed, these two religions went global in their savagery, reducing the Jews to a mere footnote in the history of God-inspired slaughter. By the time of the Crusades, the Jewish people had long since been dispersed to all corners of the earth, never really recovering from the brutal Roman conquest and occupation and the destruction of their temple. They were on the sidelines while Islam and Christianity duked it out over their former homeland, but they never forgot their salad days as the biggest and baddest haters and killers in the region.
The centuries went by with Christians retiring from the Crusades and taking their bloody act on the road to the New World, with Islam languishing in poverty and backwardness after centuries of domination of a huge empire called the Caliphate, stretching from Spain through all of North Africa and right into India. Enter the British, who took advantage of Islam's decline by taking over over the Holy Land mainly to steal oil to fuel their Industrial Revolution. They fought off the Ottomans and many other armies to maintain control of the Middle East, relinquishing these lands only at the dissolution of their empire following World War 2.
So when the British left they hacked up regions of the area into a bunch of nations that seemed logical to them since they weren't from around there. The reality was a bit different, though, and warfare and tribal genocide has been the order of the day over there ever since. Add the newly reinvented Israel with their Biblical visions of regional might into the mix and Bingo!, all the ingredients for bloody slaughter were back in place in The Holy Land. And since the end of World War 2, that's what the world has been treated to: more killing in the name of God.
Now the United States, the current Rome/Britain, gets into the mix over there in the nation of Iraq, with the predictable lack of success in bringing any sort of order to the region. While our vastly superior military forces predictably annihilated any armies foolish enough to engage them, the wars over there tend to drag out in guerilla insurgencies with the added twist of suicide bombers. Everybody still hates everybody else, no form of government is acceptable to anybody and we're wondering what the hell we were thinking when we got involved in this ridiculous section of the planet.
Nearly 5,000 of our sons and daughter are dead, thousands more maimed, and the pinhead of a president who thought it was a good idea to stroll across a patch of quicksand is now industriously trying to clear dry brush from the state of Texas. Which is an appropriate metaphor, since in ten lifetimes he could never clear Texas of dry brush, anymore than he could clear the Middle East of millennia-old hatreds. Our new president has his hands full cleaning up after the Sage Brush Kid and is desperately trying to figure out a graceful exit from the Holy Land. Maybe it got the name the Holy Land from a mistake in translation, and should more likely be called the "Holy Crap, These People Are Insane! Land." And while curing the insane is still a mystery, it is surely not an effective cure to join them.
Not to be outdone in the hatred and slaughtering department, 2 other major religions, first Christianity and then Islam, rose up and began slaughtering people on a scale far grander that King David or his greedy son Solomon could have imagined. Indeed, these two religions went global in their savagery, reducing the Jews to a mere footnote in the history of God-inspired slaughter. By the time of the Crusades, the Jewish people had long since been dispersed to all corners of the earth, never really recovering from the brutal Roman conquest and occupation and the destruction of their temple. They were on the sidelines while Islam and Christianity duked it out over their former homeland, but they never forgot their salad days as the biggest and baddest haters and killers in the region.
The centuries went by with Christians retiring from the Crusades and taking their bloody act on the road to the New World, with Islam languishing in poverty and backwardness after centuries of domination of a huge empire called the Caliphate, stretching from Spain through all of North Africa and right into India. Enter the British, who took advantage of Islam's decline by taking over over the Holy Land mainly to steal oil to fuel their Industrial Revolution. They fought off the Ottomans and many other armies to maintain control of the Middle East, relinquishing these lands only at the dissolution of their empire following World War 2.
So when the British left they hacked up regions of the area into a bunch of nations that seemed logical to them since they weren't from around there. The reality was a bit different, though, and warfare and tribal genocide has been the order of the day over there ever since. Add the newly reinvented Israel with their Biblical visions of regional might into the mix and Bingo!, all the ingredients for bloody slaughter were back in place in The Holy Land. And since the end of World War 2, that's what the world has been treated to: more killing in the name of God.
Now the United States, the current Rome/Britain, gets into the mix over there in the nation of Iraq, with the predictable lack of success in bringing any sort of order to the region. While our vastly superior military forces predictably annihilated any armies foolish enough to engage them, the wars over there tend to drag out in guerilla insurgencies with the added twist of suicide bombers. Everybody still hates everybody else, no form of government is acceptable to anybody and we're wondering what the hell we were thinking when we got involved in this ridiculous section of the planet.
Nearly 5,000 of our sons and daughter are dead, thousands more maimed, and the pinhead of a president who thought it was a good idea to stroll across a patch of quicksand is now industriously trying to clear dry brush from the state of Texas. Which is an appropriate metaphor, since in ten lifetimes he could never clear Texas of dry brush, anymore than he could clear the Middle East of millennia-old hatreds. Our new president has his hands full cleaning up after the Sage Brush Kid and is desperately trying to figure out a graceful exit from the Holy Land. Maybe it got the name the Holy Land from a mistake in translation, and should more likely be called the "Holy Crap, These People Are Insane! Land." And while curing the insane is still a mystery, it is surely not an effective cure to join them.
May 28, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 394
People who disagree with you are generally not stupid or evil. They just disagree with you. Life goes on.
COME MR. TALIBAN, TALLY ME BANANAS...
Looks like the Taliban are here to stay. Having been kicked out of power by America in Afghanistan, they took their act on the road and are threatening to topple the government of neighboring Pakistan, such as it is. The Pakistani government hasn't been all that effective this past decade or so, so the Taliban figure that's as good a country as any to bring back the MIddle Ages. No word on what their plans will be regarding Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, but if you want to really set a region back 800 years, nuclear bombs would do the trick handily.
These Taliban guys have a curious agenda: no music, no dancing, no movies, no TV, no education for females, no neatly trimmed beards (!), no embracing a different stripe of Islam from their own, no, no, no and NO. Radio's allowed, but only the Taliban broadcasts, presumably by their equivalent of Rush Limbaugh. These clowns will tolerate no competing theologies, even going so far as blowing up an ancient statue of Buddha back in their glory days running Afghanistan. They would have you believe that, just like any other deluded fanatics, they alone speak for God.
Which would make them just another silly curiosity if it wasn't for the fact that God has been telling them to kill everyone that they possibly can and to suck whatever joy they can out of everyone else's life. This is not at all unusual with religious fanatics of any faith, but what is unusual is that they seem to be winning their war on sanity in a lot of places in the Ikstans of this world. A lot of people throughout the world are now more worried about Pakistan than any other place due to the very real possibility of a nuclear armed Taliban. Not that any other nation will do anything about it.
They would prefer that America handle this problem. This way, they still get to criticize America for being an imperialistic super power while at the same time having the Taliban denied getting their mitts on nuclear bombs. It's a win-win situation for everybody but America and the Taliban. We get stuck in another war in yet another shithole country fighting against suicide bombing insurgents and the Taliban get stuck being dead.
This will come to pass if the Pakistani government can't get it together to kill the Taliban themselves, a huge problem for them since their very powerful military intelligence organizations are often on the side of the insurgents, acting as a shadow government. Pakistan itself wishes America to solve their problems, and as much as they publicly protest the use of unmanned drones flying into their country to kill Taliban, they send strong private signals to send in the drones. If all this sounds confusing, well, it is. If there were no nuclear weapons in Pakistan, no one would give a damn who runs that country.
They never did have a government that was all that effective, with a huge chunk of their population living in the Bronze Age side by side with an educated, sophisticated segment of society, just like their blood enemies to the south, India. So this schizoid nation is the one America is expected to save? Or rather, to save the world from a nuclear holocaust at the hands of illiterate fanatics? So, whatever troops we pull out of Iraq will wind up in the land of the Ikstans, more of our good kids being sacrificed because no other nations will stand up to the fanatics and deny them their nuclear holocaust. Buckle up, it's going to be another long and bumpy ride.
These Taliban guys have a curious agenda: no music, no dancing, no movies, no TV, no education for females, no neatly trimmed beards (!), no embracing a different stripe of Islam from their own, no, no, no and NO. Radio's allowed, but only the Taliban broadcasts, presumably by their equivalent of Rush Limbaugh. These clowns will tolerate no competing theologies, even going so far as blowing up an ancient statue of Buddha back in their glory days running Afghanistan. They would have you believe that, just like any other deluded fanatics, they alone speak for God.
Which would make them just another silly curiosity if it wasn't for the fact that God has been telling them to kill everyone that they possibly can and to suck whatever joy they can out of everyone else's life. This is not at all unusual with religious fanatics of any faith, but what is unusual is that they seem to be winning their war on sanity in a lot of places in the Ikstans of this world. A lot of people throughout the world are now more worried about Pakistan than any other place due to the very real possibility of a nuclear armed Taliban. Not that any other nation will do anything about it.
They would prefer that America handle this problem. This way, they still get to criticize America for being an imperialistic super power while at the same time having the Taliban denied getting their mitts on nuclear bombs. It's a win-win situation for everybody but America and the Taliban. We get stuck in another war in yet another shithole country fighting against suicide bombing insurgents and the Taliban get stuck being dead.
This will come to pass if the Pakistani government can't get it together to kill the Taliban themselves, a huge problem for them since their very powerful military intelligence organizations are often on the side of the insurgents, acting as a shadow government. Pakistan itself wishes America to solve their problems, and as much as they publicly protest the use of unmanned drones flying into their country to kill Taliban, they send strong private signals to send in the drones. If all this sounds confusing, well, it is. If there were no nuclear weapons in Pakistan, no one would give a damn who runs that country.
They never did have a government that was all that effective, with a huge chunk of their population living in the Bronze Age side by side with an educated, sophisticated segment of society, just like their blood enemies to the south, India. So this schizoid nation is the one America is expected to save? Or rather, to save the world from a nuclear holocaust at the hands of illiterate fanatics? So, whatever troops we pull out of Iraq will wind up in the land of the Ikstans, more of our good kids being sacrificed because no other nations will stand up to the fanatics and deny them their nuclear holocaust. Buckle up, it's going to be another long and bumpy ride.
May 25, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 393
The first wars between humans began as conflicts over valuable hunting grounds. nothing has changed except for the weapons.
REMEMBERING SAINT VETERAN
So, it's Memorial Day, and as usual for this holiday there has been no shortage of reminders that this is a day not only for hotdogs, beer and baseball, but for remembering the countless war veterans who fell in our many wars. Well, these days people send out e-mails about this, elevating our soldiers into the ranks of sainthood, and challenging anyone to deny them their due canonization by daring you not to forward this message to everybody you know. Deleting these trivial things of course makes you someone who hates America, They attribute everything good about America to to our soldiers, driving home the point that our cherished rights and freedoms were won by the blood of heroes, every one a sainted martyr. The vast majority of these e-mails are generated by people who were never in boot camp, never mind a real live bloody war. Not so fast, Mr. and Ms. Superpatriot.
Not every war is a grand crusade and not every warrior is a noble hero. And the enemy soldiers that fought against us were every bit as dedicated and patriotic as our soldiers, and every one of them had a mother who loved them and a family who missed them when they got killed, just like our guys. And not a man among them fought against American soldiers with the thought in mind to abolish our Bill of Rights or hoping to ban football on Sundays. The great majority of wars are fought for another reason, for money. So what our soldiers are defending is their homeland, of course, but the reason they are defending it has very little to do with our national values. It's all about somebody wanting something more at the expense of someone else.
Contrary to what some say, violence has solved a lot of things. Not for the losers, of course, but the winners feel pretty good about things afterwards. Winning a war often means that you get to live in a nice place, while the world's deserts and other barren wastelands get populated by the losers. Nobody volunteered to live in the shitholes of this world, no matter what they say about how unique and beautiful a place is their dusty homeland. It's only dumb luck that the descendants of the people forced to live in the sandy wastelands of the Middle East find themselves sitting on top of a sea of petroleum.
They sat on top of that oil for centuries and it did them about as much good as all that sand did until the Industrial Revolution made petroleum the new gold. And it still didn't do them much good since corporations from powerful nations prevailed on their armies to take over these oil rich nations and steal their petroleum to make the rich nations even richer. It's only in the past 75 years or so that the sand-dwellers have gotten control over their own oil and began behaving just as poorly as the nations who conquered them. So poorly in certain cases, that the United States of America used this poor behavior as an excuse to attack Iraq in order to steal their oil. A bunch of criminals running America at the time said it was about something else, but that was just a bunch of lies that many people saw through at the time and which have since been proven to be completely false.
Within weeks of having invaded Iraq, every meter measuring the flow of oil from Iraqi wells got broken all of a sudden so that there was no telling how much oil American corporations stole in partnership with the leaders of the American government. Nearly 5,000 of our soldiers were killed and many more maimed, getting turned into suckers by cynical billionaires. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died too, a whole lot more than their dictator ever killed. The dictator they used to have, that is, the guy we had hung by the neck until dead. Well, our soldiers are still there six years later, the gas meters are still broken and the price of gasoline is on the rise again. So, how noble are Iraqi veterans? Whatever their noble intentions, their personal goodness or their level of dedication, they are engaged in an illegal war of aggression and theft.
Does the fact that they were blatantly betrayed by their own government force us still to honor them with accolades as if they were defending a kindergarten on Main Street, U.S.A.? These are volunteer soldiers who know going in that they would have to obey orders, no matter what. That is the only way a military organization can function, and what makes it an ideal instrument for greedy leaders to use in any way they see fit. You can't blame the soldiers and veterans for having been forced to fight in crazy wars like in Iraq, Vietnam or inside America exterminating Native American tribes, they had no choice in the matter. It is never their idea to do these things. But do they need to be elevated to sainthood for participating in an illegal and immoral war? Exactly how does that work?
Whose conscience are we assuaging here? It wasn't our idea to attack Iraq either, an idea that was sold like a cure for the common cold and like suckers at a carney sideshow a whole lot of us bought that bottle of snake oil. Another curious thing is that having an all-volunteer military makes war hawks of many people who formerly were very vocal in their opposition to war, when their asses were potential cannon fodder for the military draft. They sure had plenty of questions then. Funny how so many of us are perfectly willing to let the other guy die for our wrong-headed ideas sold to us by con artists.
The true hero would participate himself if he felt so strongly about it. For those who never saw limbs flying and faces burnt away and have zero chance of being forced to, we've become a pretty warlike bunch of paper tigers. Like the West Indians say; "Every dog is bad in his own backyard." Let's see how loud they growl when surrounded by other dogs with sharp teeth. If the government ever decides to reintroduce the military draft, look for a cottage industry producing peace signs to spring up overnight. Washington would once again be the site of massive antiwar rallies.
Still the crime of turning our brave and dedicated soldiers into suckers goes unpunished. To have exposed them to the horror of war for no reason but greed and geopolitical power is the real crime here. Such wars do not protect our nation or make the world safe for democracy or any of those other mindless slogans used to sell naked aggression against a weaker opponent. So, fine, on Memorial Day let's remember the bravery and sacrifice of our veterans, but let's do so with eyes wide open. And let us hope that we never again send these brave young men and women on any more fool's errands.
Not every war is a grand crusade and not every warrior is a noble hero. And the enemy soldiers that fought against us were every bit as dedicated and patriotic as our soldiers, and every one of them had a mother who loved them and a family who missed them when they got killed, just like our guys. And not a man among them fought against American soldiers with the thought in mind to abolish our Bill of Rights or hoping to ban football on Sundays. The great majority of wars are fought for another reason, for money. So what our soldiers are defending is their homeland, of course, but the reason they are defending it has very little to do with our national values. It's all about somebody wanting something more at the expense of someone else.
Contrary to what some say, violence has solved a lot of things. Not for the losers, of course, but the winners feel pretty good about things afterwards. Winning a war often means that you get to live in a nice place, while the world's deserts and other barren wastelands get populated by the losers. Nobody volunteered to live in the shitholes of this world, no matter what they say about how unique and beautiful a place is their dusty homeland. It's only dumb luck that the descendants of the people forced to live in the sandy wastelands of the Middle East find themselves sitting on top of a sea of petroleum.
They sat on top of that oil for centuries and it did them about as much good as all that sand did until the Industrial Revolution made petroleum the new gold. And it still didn't do them much good since corporations from powerful nations prevailed on their armies to take over these oil rich nations and steal their petroleum to make the rich nations even richer. It's only in the past 75 years or so that the sand-dwellers have gotten control over their own oil and began behaving just as poorly as the nations who conquered them. So poorly in certain cases, that the United States of America used this poor behavior as an excuse to attack Iraq in order to steal their oil. A bunch of criminals running America at the time said it was about something else, but that was just a bunch of lies that many people saw through at the time and which have since been proven to be completely false.
Within weeks of having invaded Iraq, every meter measuring the flow of oil from Iraqi wells got broken all of a sudden so that there was no telling how much oil American corporations stole in partnership with the leaders of the American government. Nearly 5,000 of our soldiers were killed and many more maimed, getting turned into suckers by cynical billionaires. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died too, a whole lot more than their dictator ever killed. The dictator they used to have, that is, the guy we had hung by the neck until dead. Well, our soldiers are still there six years later, the gas meters are still broken and the price of gasoline is on the rise again. So, how noble are Iraqi veterans? Whatever their noble intentions, their personal goodness or their level of dedication, they are engaged in an illegal war of aggression and theft.
Does the fact that they were blatantly betrayed by their own government force us still to honor them with accolades as if they were defending a kindergarten on Main Street, U.S.A.? These are volunteer soldiers who know going in that they would have to obey orders, no matter what. That is the only way a military organization can function, and what makes it an ideal instrument for greedy leaders to use in any way they see fit. You can't blame the soldiers and veterans for having been forced to fight in crazy wars like in Iraq, Vietnam or inside America exterminating Native American tribes, they had no choice in the matter. It is never their idea to do these things. But do they need to be elevated to sainthood for participating in an illegal and immoral war? Exactly how does that work?
Whose conscience are we assuaging here? It wasn't our idea to attack Iraq either, an idea that was sold like a cure for the common cold and like suckers at a carney sideshow a whole lot of us bought that bottle of snake oil. Another curious thing is that having an all-volunteer military makes war hawks of many people who formerly were very vocal in their opposition to war, when their asses were potential cannon fodder for the military draft. They sure had plenty of questions then. Funny how so many of us are perfectly willing to let the other guy die for our wrong-headed ideas sold to us by con artists.
The true hero would participate himself if he felt so strongly about it. For those who never saw limbs flying and faces burnt away and have zero chance of being forced to, we've become a pretty warlike bunch of paper tigers. Like the West Indians say; "Every dog is bad in his own backyard." Let's see how loud they growl when surrounded by other dogs with sharp teeth. If the government ever decides to reintroduce the military draft, look for a cottage industry producing peace signs to spring up overnight. Washington would once again be the site of massive antiwar rallies.
Still the crime of turning our brave and dedicated soldiers into suckers goes unpunished. To have exposed them to the horror of war for no reason but greed and geopolitical power is the real crime here. Such wars do not protect our nation or make the world safe for democracy or any of those other mindless slogans used to sell naked aggression against a weaker opponent. So, fine, on Memorial Day let's remember the bravery and sacrifice of our veterans, but let's do so with eyes wide open. And let us hope that we never again send these brave young men and women on any more fool's errands.
May 24, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 392
What is life but an attempt to establish some sort of order out of chaos? Towards that end, the universe gives us plenty to do.
THE GREAT SCIENTIFIC FUTURE, MINUS PEOPLE
Some scientists just won't let go of the notion that the machines we have created will soon supplant us, an idea as old as Frankenstein. Like a dog with bone, they won't stop chewing on that silly theory. These are the same people who put the first lens in the Hubble space telescope in backwards, mind you, haven't cured a disease since polio back in the 1950's and can't for the life of them come up with a replacement for internal combustion engines, a technology dating to the 1600's. Recently they got all huffy because millions and millions of us didn't drop dead from the swine flu just because they predicted we would. So you've sort of got to take scientists' predictions with a boulder of salt. As far as this "singularity" they predict will happen around the middle of this century, they can't even agree on what it will entail other that the machines surpassing us in intelligence. Well, speak for yourselves, Einsteins.
Some of these guys say that the "Terminator" scenario will occur, with the world's interconnected computers deciding that humanity is obsolete and needs to be exterminated like so many termites. Others say that machines will begin designing and building super-intelligent robots on their own, and doing it so quickly that their evolution will be measured in months, not millennia like every other creature. These new uber-creatures will kill us off and inherit the earth within the space of a decade or two. Exactly how they will accomplish that is open to debate, since we're the ones that are armed to the teeth and have a very long history of killing other creatures and one another on a grand scale, not the imaginary robots. Lots of guys would like nothing more than to shoot the hell out of a bunch of androids.
Still others hold out hope for some sort of chip-enhanced immortality for some humans, getting fitted with all kinds of tiny artificial intelligence implants to super-size our own brains, while replacing our organs and muscles with plastic and steel replacement parts. Naturally the "some humans" they envisage gaining immortality are themselves.This sounds like a lot of wishful thinking on their part and a huge dose of egotism, and some have even said out loud that they hope to preserve their advanced knowledge and valuable expertise for the benefit of mankind, like they are some sort of indispensable people. Naturally no mention is made of their complete lack of any discernible personality, which would be pretty much the same as having that race of robots that others predict. No, thanks.
Who do these people think they're kidding? While the internet and the rise of computers has been a beneficial and world-changing occurrence, these machines haven't yet shown any ambition towards conquest of any sort. Any harm done by machines is done with people running them. So far, of all the thousands of deaths in car crashes, not a single one occurred as the result of a car acting on its own. And as sophisticated as computers are, they don't do a damned thing on their own either. Attributing human treachery to machines is an odd conceit, and pretty nuts. If mankind meets its demise at the hands of machines, it will be with one of us at the controls doing something stupid or malicious.
As far as replacing body parts, doctors seem to be doing just fine using donated human organs, even replacing a couple of faces lately. Sure, we've got some titanium hips, plastic heart valves, pacemakers and the like, but they don't last as long as living human tissue, still the best bet for people. The few dorks that have had chips implanted into their wrists have only succeeded in becoming human GPS devices, with no change in their IQ. Which is too bad since you've got to be pretty stupid to put a GPS chip in your wrist. Just who the hell would care where they are? Might come in handy to avoid them, though.
So far nothing remotely exciting has happened to these fools who can't wait to become human cyborgs like their favorite Star Trek characters. These people need to get out more, mix with regular people a little bit, maybe come to their senses and start working on something useful. There's a few pressing problems where they might want to turn their attention, things like the daily genocide of world hunger that kills a child every 3 seconds. There's still all those pesky deadly diseases they haven't gotten around to curing; cancer, diabetes, AIDS and malaria. There's a worldwide energy shortage, a pollution crisis, a shortage of sanitary fresh water resulting in 6 million deaths a year, all sorts of things that need attention. Maybe those expensive educations could come in pretty handy if our science people could just pull their heads out of their butts and get real.
Some of these guys say that the "Terminator" scenario will occur, with the world's interconnected computers deciding that humanity is obsolete and needs to be exterminated like so many termites. Others say that machines will begin designing and building super-intelligent robots on their own, and doing it so quickly that their evolution will be measured in months, not millennia like every other creature. These new uber-creatures will kill us off and inherit the earth within the space of a decade or two. Exactly how they will accomplish that is open to debate, since we're the ones that are armed to the teeth and have a very long history of killing other creatures and one another on a grand scale, not the imaginary robots. Lots of guys would like nothing more than to shoot the hell out of a bunch of androids.
Still others hold out hope for some sort of chip-enhanced immortality for some humans, getting fitted with all kinds of tiny artificial intelligence implants to super-size our own brains, while replacing our organs and muscles with plastic and steel replacement parts. Naturally the "some humans" they envisage gaining immortality are themselves.This sounds like a lot of wishful thinking on their part and a huge dose of egotism, and some have even said out loud that they hope to preserve their advanced knowledge and valuable expertise for the benefit of mankind, like they are some sort of indispensable people. Naturally no mention is made of their complete lack of any discernible personality, which would be pretty much the same as having that race of robots that others predict. No, thanks.
Who do these people think they're kidding? While the internet and the rise of computers has been a beneficial and world-changing occurrence, these machines haven't yet shown any ambition towards conquest of any sort. Any harm done by machines is done with people running them. So far, of all the thousands of deaths in car crashes, not a single one occurred as the result of a car acting on its own. And as sophisticated as computers are, they don't do a damned thing on their own either. Attributing human treachery to machines is an odd conceit, and pretty nuts. If mankind meets its demise at the hands of machines, it will be with one of us at the controls doing something stupid or malicious.
As far as replacing body parts, doctors seem to be doing just fine using donated human organs, even replacing a couple of faces lately. Sure, we've got some titanium hips, plastic heart valves, pacemakers and the like, but they don't last as long as living human tissue, still the best bet for people. The few dorks that have had chips implanted into their wrists have only succeeded in becoming human GPS devices, with no change in their IQ. Which is too bad since you've got to be pretty stupid to put a GPS chip in your wrist. Just who the hell would care where they are? Might come in handy to avoid them, though.
So far nothing remotely exciting has happened to these fools who can't wait to become human cyborgs like their favorite Star Trek characters. These people need to get out more, mix with regular people a little bit, maybe come to their senses and start working on something useful. There's a few pressing problems where they might want to turn their attention, things like the daily genocide of world hunger that kills a child every 3 seconds. There's still all those pesky deadly diseases they haven't gotten around to curing; cancer, diabetes, AIDS and malaria. There's a worldwide energy shortage, a pollution crisis, a shortage of sanitary fresh water resulting in 6 million deaths a year, all sorts of things that need attention. Maybe those expensive educations could come in pretty handy if our science people could just pull their heads out of their butts and get real.
May 22, 2009
SILLY QUESTIONS
If somebody painted the White House a different color, would it still be known as the White House? And would it have any effect on the balance of world power? Would the Blue House command much respect?
Other than their family and friends, does anyone recoil in shock with the news reports of another rap star getting shot?
Is winning American Idol a ticket to anything? One is hard pressed to think of anyone who emerged from that show being widely idolized. Unless maybe there's some secret cults operating out there somewhere with altars to Clay Aikens and Ruben Studdard, conducting rituals and offering sacrifices and whatnot. That would be pretty amusing.
If Rush Limbaugh is now the head of the Republican Party, does that mean that Andy Dick is now the head comedian?
When people clamor for public schools to teach Creationism, do they mean only the Judeo-Christian version with the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve? Or maybe they mean all of them, like the Native American theory of creation where the earth was dug from the bottom of the sea by a muskrat and placed on a turtle's back? Or how about the Chinese take on creation that the universe was once a big black egg containing only Pan Gu, who went to sleep for 18,000 years, then woke up and broke out of the egg with an axe and got busy creating the sky and the earth? There's a whole bunch of creation stories, some of them pretty entertaining. Might as well give the kids a choice of fairy tales.
Did debates over the merits of torture go on during the Spanish Inquisition?
Do people who Twitter all day long have jobs? Are they called Twitterers or Twits? And those "followings" you hear about, are they religious in nature?
Exactly who was it that declared war on fat guys in the United States? For what reason? They seemed like a pretty happy, law abiding bunch. Did they do something bad we need to know about?
Back in the days when no child got picked up in a car from school, did a lot them go missing?
Doesn't Shotgun Dick Cheney seem a whole lot healthier and talkative now than when he was Vice President? When he was running the Bush The Younger Administration from some hidden underground lair it seems he was always getting one body part or another replaced with a high tech device, and the longest speech he was able to muster was a tersely barked "no comment." Could it be that the process is now complete and he'll live forever as an evil half man, half robot, always appearing on TV just as chatty as can be, spreading fear and advocating the worst things imaginable?
Do terrorist suspects have some sort of diabolical ability to escape our stateside maximum security prisons that American serial killers and dangerous gangster prisoners do not? Doesn't seem all that likely, does it?
Is there a specific reason why people are eating ostriches all of a sudden? Are they scrambling their giant eggs too? Just one of those bad boys would do breakfast for the whole family.
Are the caribou and elk as ecstatic as everybody else about the successful reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park?
Are scientists disappointed that the swine flu didn't turn out to be a major pandemic and kill millions of people? Nobody likes to be wrong, especially people in long white lab coats. Think maybe some of them are mad at the rest of us for not dropping like flies and ruining their perfectly good theories?
If you can get a star named after yourself, can you pick the sun? Then everybody would have to call it by your name. How cool would that be?
When Al Franken gets to be a Senator, can America finally form a Senate Comedy Committee, thus formalizing the Senate as a bunch of clowns? Who would be better qualified than a professional humorist?
If we introduced Polar bears to the Antarctic, would it be okay to call them Bipolar Bears? What would they care as long as they had plenty of seals to eat?
Other than their family and friends, does anyone recoil in shock with the news reports of another rap star getting shot?
Is winning American Idol a ticket to anything? One is hard pressed to think of anyone who emerged from that show being widely idolized. Unless maybe there's some secret cults operating out there somewhere with altars to Clay Aikens and Ruben Studdard, conducting rituals and offering sacrifices and whatnot. That would be pretty amusing.
If Rush Limbaugh is now the head of the Republican Party, does that mean that Andy Dick is now the head comedian?
When people clamor for public schools to teach Creationism, do they mean only the Judeo-Christian version with the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve? Or maybe they mean all of them, like the Native American theory of creation where the earth was dug from the bottom of the sea by a muskrat and placed on a turtle's back? Or how about the Chinese take on creation that the universe was once a big black egg containing only Pan Gu, who went to sleep for 18,000 years, then woke up and broke out of the egg with an axe and got busy creating the sky and the earth? There's a whole bunch of creation stories, some of them pretty entertaining. Might as well give the kids a choice of fairy tales.
Did debates over the merits of torture go on during the Spanish Inquisition?
Do people who Twitter all day long have jobs? Are they called Twitterers or Twits? And those "followings" you hear about, are they religious in nature?
Exactly who was it that declared war on fat guys in the United States? For what reason? They seemed like a pretty happy, law abiding bunch. Did they do something bad we need to know about?
Back in the days when no child got picked up in a car from school, did a lot them go missing?
Doesn't Shotgun Dick Cheney seem a whole lot healthier and talkative now than when he was Vice President? When he was running the Bush The Younger Administration from some hidden underground lair it seems he was always getting one body part or another replaced with a high tech device, and the longest speech he was able to muster was a tersely barked "no comment." Could it be that the process is now complete and he'll live forever as an evil half man, half robot, always appearing on TV just as chatty as can be, spreading fear and advocating the worst things imaginable?
Do terrorist suspects have some sort of diabolical ability to escape our stateside maximum security prisons that American serial killers and dangerous gangster prisoners do not? Doesn't seem all that likely, does it?
Is there a specific reason why people are eating ostriches all of a sudden? Are they scrambling their giant eggs too? Just one of those bad boys would do breakfast for the whole family.
Are the caribou and elk as ecstatic as everybody else about the successful reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone National Park?
Are scientists disappointed that the swine flu didn't turn out to be a major pandemic and kill millions of people? Nobody likes to be wrong, especially people in long white lab coats. Think maybe some of them are mad at the rest of us for not dropping like flies and ruining their perfectly good theories?
If you can get a star named after yourself, can you pick the sun? Then everybody would have to call it by your name. How cool would that be?
When Al Franken gets to be a Senator, can America finally form a Senate Comedy Committee, thus formalizing the Senate as a bunch of clowns? Who would be better qualified than a professional humorist?
If we introduced Polar bears to the Antarctic, would it be okay to call them Bipolar Bears? What would they care as long as they had plenty of seals to eat?
May 20, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 390
One of the finest advances in modern technology is the "DELETE" button. Too bad we can't use it on some of the people we run across.
DON'T ASK WHAT'S THE POLICY
So, you're a soldier, an Air Force fighter pilot and a combat veteran. You've earned nine air medals, including one for heroism. You have fought in two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Your government has spent $25 million training you and you've proved yourself over and over to have been worth every cent of their investment in you. You are a lieutenant colonel, a leader of men 18 years into your career, a fine soldier by every standard of measurement. Well, except for one little thing. You are a homosexual man. So, what does your government do to thank you for 18 years of outstanding service and heroism? They fire you.
The man in question is Lieutenant Colonel Victory Fehrenbach. Two years from retirement eligibility he's having his career stained by the Air Force by forcibly discharging him for being a homosexual. What bearing being gay has on flying a jet fighter and blowing stuff up and killing people is anybody's guess. Apparently he did it better than most, what with all the medals and the elevation in rank to Lieutenant Colonel. His record was exemplary. That's not the Air Force's complaint. They're willing to flush away 25 million of our taxpayer dollars because Fehrenbach was both an exemplary officer and gay. So maybe the thinking here is that killers of men should not also be lovers of men in their private lives.
And that's basically what soldiers are trained for, to be killers of men. Whether you think soldiers are honorable or despicable, that is what soldiers do. Pretty much anybody can join the armed services, and at times pretty much everybody has to when a military draft is instituted. There hasn't been a military draft in America for many years, and the all-volunteer armed service we employ today are very good at their jobs. They've been killing a whole lot of people in recent years. So, why does anybody think that only heterosexuals should be allowed to kill people legally? Do the homosexual killers of men have to settle for being serial murderers back here at home, and thus subject to arrest, imprisonment and possibly even execution for the kind of behavior that earns medals for bravery if they were soldiers?
Doesn't seem fair. Because as well as being killers of men, soldiers risk their own lives by being the potential victims of the other side's killers of men. A whole lot of them get maimed too. Like many a draftee in years past often wondered, why should the gays get out of it? Being gay certainly isn't contagious. Being gay doesn't mean you cannot be brave or do strenuous things. There have been a lot of gay soldiers, although most of them did not openly admit it. There have also been gay boxers, athletes, policemen and firefighters, professions that require a lot of courage and strenuous activity. So if a gay person wants to put his life on the line and maybe get to kill a whole bunch of people, well, why not?
What are these generals afraid of? Don't our armed services exist to protect every American? So why not let every American participate. The argument used against gay soldiers is the identical argument once used to deny black Americans their full Civil Rights and the opportunity to participate in every part of American society. That sort of thinking made 15% of the population Niggers, with all the indignity that the term implied. Would any general today fire a hero pilot because he was black? It's just like that whole gay marriage controversy. It's only a controversy because people are standing in the way of their fellow Americans' freedom, sort of the opposite of what America was designed for. Jim Crow didn't go away, he just started dressing better.
Some people talk about "allowing" homosexuals to form civil unions, like it was our call to allow or disallow any group of citizens the same rights everyone else gets. Well, guess again. It's not our call, it's in the Constitution, the piece of paper Colonel Fehrenbach swore to defend even though its full privileges were denied him. We don't allow our fellow citizens their rights, they have them automatically when they are born or become naturalized American citizens. Any law that denies any man, woman or child the same rights as everybody else is unconstitutional, and any person who actively promotes such blatant oppression is a worthless asshole.
And just what the hell is a civil union but marriage, anyway? But the people who want to create a new sort of civil union, one that is specifically not a marriage, don't include any provisions for non-gay people to enter into them, thus creating a separate-but-equal institution, the kind of thing that was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1954 in Brown vs The Board of Education. This reinforced the American ideal that separate is never equal when the separation is legally mandated.
If you want to be allowed to be you, then you can't deny Colonel Fehrenbach the opportunity to be himself. If he wants to serve his nation by flying a jet, killing people and blowing stuff up and has the qualifications to do so, well, let him. He's put his life on the line every time he got into that aircraft and flew a combat mission. He's more than paid his dues and earned the respect and loyalty of his commanders. And if he wants to marry somebody named Fred, that's his business and nobody else's. And then there's the money involved, too. Besides the wasted 25 million spent on Victory Fehrenbach's training, how many billions do we throw away buy so busily oppressing 5% of our population?
And what about the human costs? What about the men who could be trained by a man such as Fehrenbach? His experience and knowledge just might save another pilot's life. How many lives could have been saved by all those Arabic interpreters fired by the Pentagon years ago because they were gay? With enough Arabic interpreters working on intercepted terrorist messages, perhaps 9/11 could have been thwarted. Their absence made the process of deciphering Al Qaeda's messages a long and tedious one, completed only after the attacks took place. But apparently a lot of people don't care about that. All they know is that they've got Niggers back. Having Niggers to be superior to is very important to a lot of people, and this time they mean to keep them down. Let's not humor these shitheads by buying into their bigotry. Let Colonel Fehrenbach keep his job and his dignity as a human being, such as it is, and stop this un-American tyranny against 5% of our citizens.
The man in question is Lieutenant Colonel Victory Fehrenbach. Two years from retirement eligibility he's having his career stained by the Air Force by forcibly discharging him for being a homosexual. What bearing being gay has on flying a jet fighter and blowing stuff up and killing people is anybody's guess. Apparently he did it better than most, what with all the medals and the elevation in rank to Lieutenant Colonel. His record was exemplary. That's not the Air Force's complaint. They're willing to flush away 25 million of our taxpayer dollars because Fehrenbach was both an exemplary officer and gay. So maybe the thinking here is that killers of men should not also be lovers of men in their private lives.
And that's basically what soldiers are trained for, to be killers of men. Whether you think soldiers are honorable or despicable, that is what soldiers do. Pretty much anybody can join the armed services, and at times pretty much everybody has to when a military draft is instituted. There hasn't been a military draft in America for many years, and the all-volunteer armed service we employ today are very good at their jobs. They've been killing a whole lot of people in recent years. So, why does anybody think that only heterosexuals should be allowed to kill people legally? Do the homosexual killers of men have to settle for being serial murderers back here at home, and thus subject to arrest, imprisonment and possibly even execution for the kind of behavior that earns medals for bravery if they were soldiers?
Doesn't seem fair. Because as well as being killers of men, soldiers risk their own lives by being the potential victims of the other side's killers of men. A whole lot of them get maimed too. Like many a draftee in years past often wondered, why should the gays get out of it? Being gay certainly isn't contagious. Being gay doesn't mean you cannot be brave or do strenuous things. There have been a lot of gay soldiers, although most of them did not openly admit it. There have also been gay boxers, athletes, policemen and firefighters, professions that require a lot of courage and strenuous activity. So if a gay person wants to put his life on the line and maybe get to kill a whole bunch of people, well, why not?
What are these generals afraid of? Don't our armed services exist to protect every American? So why not let every American participate. The argument used against gay soldiers is the identical argument once used to deny black Americans their full Civil Rights and the opportunity to participate in every part of American society. That sort of thinking made 15% of the population Niggers, with all the indignity that the term implied. Would any general today fire a hero pilot because he was black? It's just like that whole gay marriage controversy. It's only a controversy because people are standing in the way of their fellow Americans' freedom, sort of the opposite of what America was designed for. Jim Crow didn't go away, he just started dressing better.
Some people talk about "allowing" homosexuals to form civil unions, like it was our call to allow or disallow any group of citizens the same rights everyone else gets. Well, guess again. It's not our call, it's in the Constitution, the piece of paper Colonel Fehrenbach swore to defend even though its full privileges were denied him. We don't allow our fellow citizens their rights, they have them automatically when they are born or become naturalized American citizens. Any law that denies any man, woman or child the same rights as everybody else is unconstitutional, and any person who actively promotes such blatant oppression is a worthless asshole.
And just what the hell is a civil union but marriage, anyway? But the people who want to create a new sort of civil union, one that is specifically not a marriage, don't include any provisions for non-gay people to enter into them, thus creating a separate-but-equal institution, the kind of thing that was struck down by the Supreme Court in 1954 in Brown vs The Board of Education. This reinforced the American ideal that separate is never equal when the separation is legally mandated.
If you want to be allowed to be you, then you can't deny Colonel Fehrenbach the opportunity to be himself. If he wants to serve his nation by flying a jet, killing people and blowing stuff up and has the qualifications to do so, well, let him. He's put his life on the line every time he got into that aircraft and flew a combat mission. He's more than paid his dues and earned the respect and loyalty of his commanders. And if he wants to marry somebody named Fred, that's his business and nobody else's. And then there's the money involved, too. Besides the wasted 25 million spent on Victory Fehrenbach's training, how many billions do we throw away buy so busily oppressing 5% of our population?
And what about the human costs? What about the men who could be trained by a man such as Fehrenbach? His experience and knowledge just might save another pilot's life. How many lives could have been saved by all those Arabic interpreters fired by the Pentagon years ago because they were gay? With enough Arabic interpreters working on intercepted terrorist messages, perhaps 9/11 could have been thwarted. Their absence made the process of deciphering Al Qaeda's messages a long and tedious one, completed only after the attacks took place. But apparently a lot of people don't care about that. All they know is that they've got Niggers back. Having Niggers to be superior to is very important to a lot of people, and this time they mean to keep them down. Let's not humor these shitheads by buying into their bigotry. Let Colonel Fehrenbach keep his job and his dignity as a human being, such as it is, and stop this un-American tyranny against 5% of our citizens.
May 17, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 389
People are going to be who they are whether you approve or not. Besides, who asked you?
SUPPORT OUR TROOPS. BRING THEM HOME.
Ever notice how war mongers always ask people who question their lust for war whether or not they support our troops? They figure no can say no to that one, thus winning their argument without having to argue. Why fall into that fool's trap? Either you are in favor of a war of against it and you should have solid reasons why. Supporting our troops has nothing to do with it. If the war mongers loved our soldiers so much they wouldn't send them to war in the first place. Would they take the soldiers' place? Doubtful. By and large the biggest war lovers are the people who never fought one. Why ask anyone to do what you yourself are unwilling to do? That is the way of the coward. Unfortunately for our troops, the nature of military service is that soldiers obey their orders, even when their government is using them in a cowardly and deceitful way, like expendable pawns on a chess board.
Right now there are no American troops actively engaged in defending America since there is no one attacking America. Our troops are off attacking other countries. In Iraq American troops were used to steal oil that belonged to someone else. Was there any other reason to invade Iraq? What, to save them from a tyrant? If that was American policy, why didn't we attack Zimbabwe and hang Robert Mugabe? And just like in Afghanistan, the war lovers would have you believe it is our duty to remake these nations in the image of America. Why not remake camels into aquatic mammals too? Maybe you figure they're tired of all that sand and would welcome living like otters as a refreshing change of pace. You figure that if you're a complete idiot, that is. It's pretty obvious that camels are not going to take to the rivers and streams anytime soon, at least not very enthusiastically.
So if you pay attention to the obvious, what is being done rather than what is being said, you have a situation where the troops we love to support are engaged in some pretty unsupportable activities. What began in Afghanistan as a military expedition to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda thugs has turned into 6 years of war with nothing to show but death, destruction, corruption and patently ridiculous attempts to turn camels into otters. Rather than get in, kill the enemy and get out swiftly without giving a crap who governs a nation that was stupid enough to host Al Qaeda, we're stuck in a war that looks more and more like the Vietnam War with every passing year, right down to the lame attempts to win hearts and minds at the point of a gun. Is there anybody these days saying how much the government of Vietnam resembles American democracy?
So, support the troops all you like, just don't ask for it to be unanimous. Can you support our troops and detest what they are doing? How exactly does that work? Better to support them by bringing them home. It sure wasn't their idea to invade those nations and stay there for 6 years as human targets for a resentful population while our politicians get to act tough on their backs. When all is said and done, Iraq will be the Iraq it would be if we never invaded and Afghanistan will melt back into the 16th century where they seem most comfortable. And as long as they are not launching armies at our shores, that's really none of our business. Now is the time for our new president to put an end to this folly. Get the hell out of Iraq, and if they can't kill or capture bin Laden, then there's no reason to be in Afghanistan either. Too much blood has been spilled for nothing but the egos of war mongers. Enough. Support out troops. Bring them home.
Right now there are no American troops actively engaged in defending America since there is no one attacking America. Our troops are off attacking other countries. In Iraq American troops were used to steal oil that belonged to someone else. Was there any other reason to invade Iraq? What, to save them from a tyrant? If that was American policy, why didn't we attack Zimbabwe and hang Robert Mugabe? And just like in Afghanistan, the war lovers would have you believe it is our duty to remake these nations in the image of America. Why not remake camels into aquatic mammals too? Maybe you figure they're tired of all that sand and would welcome living like otters as a refreshing change of pace. You figure that if you're a complete idiot, that is. It's pretty obvious that camels are not going to take to the rivers and streams anytime soon, at least not very enthusiastically.
So if you pay attention to the obvious, what is being done rather than what is being said, you have a situation where the troops we love to support are engaged in some pretty unsupportable activities. What began in Afghanistan as a military expedition to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda thugs has turned into 6 years of war with nothing to show but death, destruction, corruption and patently ridiculous attempts to turn camels into otters. Rather than get in, kill the enemy and get out swiftly without giving a crap who governs a nation that was stupid enough to host Al Qaeda, we're stuck in a war that looks more and more like the Vietnam War with every passing year, right down to the lame attempts to win hearts and minds at the point of a gun. Is there anybody these days saying how much the government of Vietnam resembles American democracy?
So, support the troops all you like, just don't ask for it to be unanimous. Can you support our troops and detest what they are doing? How exactly does that work? Better to support them by bringing them home. It sure wasn't their idea to invade those nations and stay there for 6 years as human targets for a resentful population while our politicians get to act tough on their backs. When all is said and done, Iraq will be the Iraq it would be if we never invaded and Afghanistan will melt back into the 16th century where they seem most comfortable. And as long as they are not launching armies at our shores, that's really none of our business. Now is the time for our new president to put an end to this folly. Get the hell out of Iraq, and if they can't kill or capture bin Laden, then there's no reason to be in Afghanistan either. Too much blood has been spilled for nothing but the egos of war mongers. Enough. Support out troops. Bring them home.
SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE TOUCHED HEARTS AND OPENED EYES
So India's election returns are in and the ruling party will remain in power. For anyone who's seen the movie "Slumdog Millionaire," you have to wonder exactly why they got voted back in. A outstanding movie that won an Academy Award for Best Picture, Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of a group of orphans who basically raised themselves in the direst poverty imaginable. It is a feel-good story since the two main characters, a young man and a woman, become reunited at the end after the young man wins a fortune on A TV game show. Their story is told as a response to each correct answer he gives on the show, an explanation of exactly why a "Slumdog" like himself could amass the necessary knowledge to answer some challenging questions. The reasons for his hard-won knowledge become apparent when he is being tortured and interrogated by the police when the game show host accuses him of cheating.
The young man was not cheating, and was grudgingly returned to compete on the show, where in spite of being discouraged and misled, he persevered and won the top prize. Then he gets the girl and the credits roll. But the story is not as simple as that and the movie depicts the unbelievable poverty and oppression suffered by a goodly portion of India's population. The depiction of the horrible, unsanitary and barbaric world of "Slumdogs" is given almost matter-of-factly, like it was no big deal that in a nation that possesses nuclear arms, generates more college degrees in computer sciences than the rest of the world combined and is fast becoming Asia's economic powerhouse that such conditions could exist. The existence of hundreds of millions of have-nots in the middle of high tech splendor seems not to bother Indians.
Boys and girls kidnapped by modern day "Fagins" and trained to beg and steal, some getting crippled or having their eyes burned out to become more effective beggars, the attractive female children having their virginity auctioned off to fat old pedophiles, well, that seems okay with Indian society. And while the Indian government protested that this movie unfairly depicted this seamy side of Indian society, no one claimed that the film makers invented any of this, and many humanitarian organizations feel the movie did not show enough of the very real misery, that the film makers could have gone a whole lot farther. They we telling a commercial story that met with an extraordinary amount of commercial success, and the world they depicted is unchanged for their having done so, at least so far.
Judging by the election results, it looks like it will be many years before any fundamental changes are made. But perhaps there are some more dramatic movies to be made from this social cesspool, a rich mine of stories about wasted lives, casual cruelty and untapped potential. Bronze-Age life coexisting with high-tech 21st century prosperity. While there are many compelling stories to be told about this, the better story would be the Indian government doing something about it, a very unglamorous and non-dramatic undertaking, and an effort not likely to be made anytime soon. Meanwhile, coming soon to theaters near you: Slumdog 2,3,4,5,6,7....
So India's election returns are in and the ruling party will remain in power. For anyone who's seen the movie "Slumdog Millionaire," you have to wonder exactly why they got voted back in. A outstanding movie that won an Academy Award for Best Picture, Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of a group of orphans who basically raised themselves in the direst poverty imaginable. It is a feel-good story since the two main characters, a young man and a woman, become reunited at the end after the young man wins a fortune on A TV game show. Their story is told as a response to each correct answer he gives on the show, an explanation of exactly why a "Slumdog" like himself could amass the necessary knowledge to answer some challenging questions. The reasons for his hard-won knowledge become apparent when he is being tortured and interrogated by the police when the game show host accuses him of cheating.
The young man was not cheating, and was grudgingly returned to compete on the show, where in spite of being discouraged and misled, he persevered and won the top prize. Then he gets the girl and the credits roll. But the story is not as simple as that and the movie depicts the unbelievable poverty and oppression suffered by a goodly portion of India's population. The depiction of the horrible, unsanitary and barbaric world of "Slumdogs" is given almost matter-of-factly, like it was no big deal that in a nation that possesses nuclear arms, generates more college degrees in computer sciences than the rest of the world combined and is fast becoming Asia's economic powerhouse that such conditions could exist. The existence of hundreds of millions of have-nots in the middle of high tech splendor seems not to bother Indians.
Boys and girls kidnapped by modern day "Fagins" and trained to beg and steal, some getting crippled or having their eyes burned out to become more effective beggars, the attractive female children having their virginity auctioned off to fat old pedophiles, well, that seems okay with Indian society. And while the Indian government protested that this movie unfairly depicted this seamy side of Indian society, no one claimed that the film makers invented any of this, and many humanitarian organizations feel the movie did not show enough of the very real misery, that the film makers could have gone a whole lot farther. They we telling a commercial story that met with an extraordinary amount of commercial success, and the world they depicted is unchanged for their having done so, at least so far.
Judging by the election results, it looks like it will be many years before any fundamental changes are made. But perhaps there are some more dramatic movies to be made from this social cesspool, a rich mine of stories about wasted lives, casual cruelty and untapped potential. Bronze-Age life coexisting with high-tech 21st century prosperity. While there are many compelling stories to be told about this, the better story would be the Indian government doing something about it, a very unglamorous and non-dramatic undertaking, and an effort not likely to be made anytime soon. Meanwhile, coming soon to theaters near you: Slumdog 2,3,4,5,6,7....
The young man was not cheating, and was grudgingly returned to compete on the show, where in spite of being discouraged and misled, he persevered and won the top prize. Then he gets the girl and the credits roll. But the story is not as simple as that and the movie depicts the unbelievable poverty and oppression suffered by a goodly portion of India's population. The depiction of the horrible, unsanitary and barbaric world of "Slumdogs" is given almost matter-of-factly, like it was no big deal that in a nation that possesses nuclear arms, generates more college degrees in computer sciences than the rest of the world combined and is fast becoming Asia's economic powerhouse that such conditions could exist. The existence of hundreds of millions of have-nots in the middle of high tech splendor seems not to bother Indians.
Boys and girls kidnapped by modern day "Fagins" and trained to beg and steal, some getting crippled or having their eyes burned out to become more effective beggars, the attractive female children having their virginity auctioned off to fat old pedophiles, well, that seems okay with Indian society. And while the Indian government protested that this movie unfairly depicted this seamy side of Indian society, no one claimed that the film makers invented any of this, and many humanitarian organizations feel the movie did not show enough of the very real misery, that the film makers could have gone a whole lot farther. They we telling a commercial story that met with an extraordinary amount of commercial success, and the world they depicted is unchanged for their having done so, at least so far.
Judging by the election results, it looks like it will be many years before any fundamental changes are made. But perhaps there are some more dramatic movies to be made from this social cesspool, a rich mine of stories about wasted lives, casual cruelty and untapped potential. Bronze-Age life coexisting with high-tech 21st century prosperity. While there are many compelling stories to be told about this, the better story would be the Indian government doing something about it, a very unglamorous and non-dramatic undertaking, and an effort not likely to be made anytime soon. Meanwhile, coming soon to theaters near you: Slumdog 2,3,4,5,6,7....
So India's election returns are in and the ruling party will remain in power. For anyone who's seen the movie "Slumdog Millionaire," you have to wonder exactly why they got voted back in. A outstanding movie that won an Academy Award for Best Picture, Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of a group of orphans who basically raised themselves in the direst poverty imaginable. It is a feel-good story since the two main characters, a young man and a woman, become reunited at the end after the young man wins a fortune on A TV game show. Their story is told as a response to each correct answer he gives on the show, an explanation of exactly why a "Slumdog" like himself could amass the necessary knowledge to answer some challenging questions. The reasons for his hard-won knowledge become apparent when he is being tortured and interrogated by the police when the game show host accuses him of cheating.
The young man was not cheating, and was grudgingly returned to compete on the show, where in spite of being discouraged and misled, he persevered and won the top prize. Then he gets the girl and the credits roll. But the story is not as simple as that and the movie depicts the unbelievable poverty and oppression suffered by a goodly portion of India's population. The depiction of the horrible, unsanitary and barbaric world of "Slumdogs" is given almost matter-of-factly, like it was no big deal that in a nation that possesses nuclear arms, generates more college degrees in computer sciences than the rest of the world combined and is fast becoming Asia's economic powerhouse that such conditions could exist. The existence of hundreds of millions of have-nots in the middle of high tech splendor seems not to bother Indians.
Boys and girls kidnapped by modern day "Fagins" and trained to beg and steal, some getting crippled or having their eyes burned out to become more effective beggars, the attractive female children having their virginity auctioned off to fat old pedophiles, well, that seems okay with Indian society. And while the Indian government protested that this movie unfairly depicted this seamy side of Indian society, no one claimed that the film makers invented any of this, and many humanitarian organizations feel the movie did not show enough of the very real misery, that the film makers could have gone a whole lot farther. They we telling a commercial story that met with an extraordinary amount of commercial success, and the world they depicted is unchanged for their having done so, at least so far.
Judging by the election results, it looks like it will be many years before any fundamental changes are made. But perhaps there are some more dramatic movies to be made from this social cesspool, a rich mine of stories about wasted lives, casual cruelty and untapped potential. Bronze-Age life coexisting with high-tech 21st century prosperity. While there are many compelling stories to be told about this, the better story would be the Indian government doing something about it, a very unglamorous and non-dramatic undertaking, and an effort not likely to be made anytime soon. Meanwhile, coming soon to theaters near you: Slumdog 2,3,4,5,6,7....
May 14, 2009
BOB CRE$PO & THE BIG $PENDER$ PLAYING LIVE!
BADBOB'S BBQ! 3112 LAWSON BOULEVARD, OCEANSIDE, NY, 11572, (516) 561-7427. SATURDAY, MAY 16TH, 9PM. GREAT FOOD, FREE ADMISSION! THE SECOND BEST BAND INTHE WORLD: BOB CRESPO, GARY KROMAN, DAVE FORMAN, LARRY VEDILAGO, IAN ZDATNY
visit bobcrespo.com
visit bobcrespo.com
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 387
Sometimes the craziest things that pop into your head are right and true. Not very often, though. Usually crazy stuff is just crazy stuff, so don't go hog wild with yourself and the weird things your mind comes up with from time to time.
WHAT WOULD PRECIOUS RAMOTSWE DO?
Anyone who's a fan of Alexander McCall Smith's novel series, "The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency," has to love the HBO series of the same name. Set in Gabarone, the capitol of Botswana, the main character among a bunch of memorable characters is one Precious Ramotswe, a woman possessed of a "traditional build" and an uncommon amount of common sense. The casting for the Cable TV series is amazingly good, and the portrayals of the head of the private detective agency Mma Ramotswe, her blunt, uptight assistant Grace Makutsi and her laconic ace auto mechanic fiance turned husband Rra J.L.B. Maketoni are outstanding. Mma and Rra are, respectively, the form of respectful address for men and women in Botswana, a nation Mr. Smith depicts as being a generally moral, loving and polite country. The people there are all at once naive and unworldly and yet possessed of a timeless wisdom, a great understanding of life and a deep empathy for their fellow human beings.
The detective work undertaken by Precious Ramotswe is not all that similar to the seamy potboiler American Private Eye novels. Mysterious blondes with a past and shady husbands are in short supply and few people are guarded or deceptive about their personal lives. Violence in the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency novels is rare and even the villains in the books are not all that menacing, more like opportunistic miscreants who threaten the overall honesty and integrity of life in Botswana. When a truly dangerous person turns up, unlike hard-boiled American fictional detectives, Mma Ramotswe never takes them on but sensibly calls in the police to deal with them. She doesn't even carry a gun.
Nor is she that breed of fictional detective like Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe who flaunt their superior brains and uncanny powers of deduction. Usually her solving of a problem (there are few actual crimes involved) is accomplished by her willingness to point out the obvious and the quiet courage to see a problem through to its end, even when this means overcoming one's own personal fears and shortcomings. Sometimes appealing to the innate decency and goodness of the perpetrators does the trick, reminding them that everyone in Botswana is Botswana, no matter what their station in life, and that they are letting their nation and fellow citizens down by behaving poorly. In other words, Precious Ramotswe is exactly who we need in America right now, someone to remind us that we are all in this together.
The universal decency and worth of people is a given in her world, each man, woman and child a unique jewel in the greater mosaic of the world. The quaint, unworldly and idealistic notions portrayed in these novels is not unlike the ethos of America in our not-so-distant past, before wealth and technology propelled us into being the No.1 Men's and Women's Super Power, a mantle we have worn uneasily since the Second World War. In our true essence, America still is a rather young, naive nation filled with decent, moral people. The high tech and privileged world we inhabit hasn't really changed that, but it has brought all sorts of unworthy people into prominence. What we need is a Precious Ramotswe around to remind us of who we really are.
America was founded on the notion that ordinary people have enough goodness, wisdom and sense of fair play to run their own affairs, both in our government and our private lives. When gaps in our goodness were found, we took steps to correct them, and to make sure that every American shares the benefits of America. The potential to rise quickly in wealth or political power by the application of extraordinary abilities has just been reaffirmed, not only by the election of Barack Obama but also the amassing of great wealth by the likes of Bill Gates and other techno-wizards. The 8 years of rule by barbaric thieves and warmongers has been repudiated, and the economic suffering brought on by the recent financial collapse is being acknowledged as the consequences of cheating.
Mma Ramotswe reminds us that we all have a conscience, both a personal one and a national conscience. We Americans are America, and what we do reflects on who we are as a nation. When we act poorly, we hurt our brothers and sisters. When we act well, we help everyone and enhance the general welfare of our country, in any endeavor we undertake and at any level of society. A floor left unswept, a kindness not performed and a lesson not taught hurts us all. This is the sort of simple truth that gets lost in the sauce far too often, and the fact that we inhabit a dangerous, complicated world is no excuse not to be on our own best behavior. LIke we teach our children: if you act like your enemy, then there is nothing that separates the you from him. If someone's behavior repels you, do not copy it. Why is that so hard a concept to grasp?
Precious Ramotswe knows better, and so do we all. It is up to each of us now to do better. To Mma Ramotswe, what she does and how she behaves is nothing especially noteworthy, only what is to be expected from a good person. And so, for ourselves, for America and for all our brothers and sisters we need to do better. And who would our brothers and sisters be? Everybody everywhere. And so the question, when confronted with any problem great or small, is this: What would Precious Ramotswe do?
The detective work undertaken by Precious Ramotswe is not all that similar to the seamy potboiler American Private Eye novels. Mysterious blondes with a past and shady husbands are in short supply and few people are guarded or deceptive about their personal lives. Violence in the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency novels is rare and even the villains in the books are not all that menacing, more like opportunistic miscreants who threaten the overall honesty and integrity of life in Botswana. When a truly dangerous person turns up, unlike hard-boiled American fictional detectives, Mma Ramotswe never takes them on but sensibly calls in the police to deal with them. She doesn't even carry a gun.
Nor is she that breed of fictional detective like Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes and Nero Wolfe who flaunt their superior brains and uncanny powers of deduction. Usually her solving of a problem (there are few actual crimes involved) is accomplished by her willingness to point out the obvious and the quiet courage to see a problem through to its end, even when this means overcoming one's own personal fears and shortcomings. Sometimes appealing to the innate decency and goodness of the perpetrators does the trick, reminding them that everyone in Botswana is Botswana, no matter what their station in life, and that they are letting their nation and fellow citizens down by behaving poorly. In other words, Precious Ramotswe is exactly who we need in America right now, someone to remind us that we are all in this together.
The universal decency and worth of people is a given in her world, each man, woman and child a unique jewel in the greater mosaic of the world. The quaint, unworldly and idealistic notions portrayed in these novels is not unlike the ethos of America in our not-so-distant past, before wealth and technology propelled us into being the No.1 Men's and Women's Super Power, a mantle we have worn uneasily since the Second World War. In our true essence, America still is a rather young, naive nation filled with decent, moral people. The high tech and privileged world we inhabit hasn't really changed that, but it has brought all sorts of unworthy people into prominence. What we need is a Precious Ramotswe around to remind us of who we really are.
America was founded on the notion that ordinary people have enough goodness, wisdom and sense of fair play to run their own affairs, both in our government and our private lives. When gaps in our goodness were found, we took steps to correct them, and to make sure that every American shares the benefits of America. The potential to rise quickly in wealth or political power by the application of extraordinary abilities has just been reaffirmed, not only by the election of Barack Obama but also the amassing of great wealth by the likes of Bill Gates and other techno-wizards. The 8 years of rule by barbaric thieves and warmongers has been repudiated, and the economic suffering brought on by the recent financial collapse is being acknowledged as the consequences of cheating.
Mma Ramotswe reminds us that we all have a conscience, both a personal one and a national conscience. We Americans are America, and what we do reflects on who we are as a nation. When we act poorly, we hurt our brothers and sisters. When we act well, we help everyone and enhance the general welfare of our country, in any endeavor we undertake and at any level of society. A floor left unswept, a kindness not performed and a lesson not taught hurts us all. This is the sort of simple truth that gets lost in the sauce far too often, and the fact that we inhabit a dangerous, complicated world is no excuse not to be on our own best behavior. LIke we teach our children: if you act like your enemy, then there is nothing that separates the you from him. If someone's behavior repels you, do not copy it. Why is that so hard a concept to grasp?
Precious Ramotswe knows better, and so do we all. It is up to each of us now to do better. To Mma Ramotswe, what she does and how she behaves is nothing especially noteworthy, only what is to be expected from a good person. And so, for ourselves, for America and for all our brothers and sisters we need to do better. And who would our brothers and sisters be? Everybody everywhere. And so the question, when confronted with any problem great or small, is this: What would Precious Ramotswe do?
May 13, 2009
BOB CRE$PO & THE BIG $PENDER$ PLAYING LIVE!
BADBOB'S BBQ! 3112 LAWSON BOULEVARD, OCEANSIDE, NY, 11572, (516) 561-7427. SATURDAY, MAY 16TH, 9PM. GREAT FOOD, FREE ADMISSION! THE SECOND BEST BAND INTHE WORLD: BOB CRESPO, GARY KROMAN, DAVE FORMAN, LARRY VEDILAGO, IAN ZDATNY
visit bobcrespo.com
visit bobcrespo.com
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 384
When you're feeling down, all the antidepressants in the world and no amount of cheering up will snap you out of it like a beautiful sunny day.
BUILDING A SONG
Anybody like songs? A show of hands, please? Whoa, looks like it's unanimous! I suspected as much. Ever wonder how those bad boys get done? Well, you start with your basic songwriter, in this case, me. You put together a melody and lyrics, some chords and some singing and you have your raw material for a song. You work on the story, if there is one, the rhymes, carefully matching the syllables and tying the verses together with a chorus. Sometimes you need a bridge, but not always. Once you've got the basic outline put together, the song starts telling you what it needs and if you're smart you'll listen. Certain melodies flow together naturally and lead back into one another.
If what you have sounds awkward, toss out the offending parts and leave what feels right. It's not exactly a precise science, but there's rules, most of which you'll have to break from time to time whenever a song tells you to. If your song is trying to tell you something, don't argue. It is what it is. So now you have your verses, your choruses, your bridge (maybe) and all your chords all lined up like ducks in a row, and you play it over and over, searching for the right feel. A good song doesn't lie and doesn't sound forced. It should sound like it's been around forever, comfortable with itself and feeling like a whole piece. Once it feels like that, Bingo, you've got a song!
Now you want to record it. At that point, that whole piece becomes a rough sketch again, unless you want to record it with only a single instrument and vocal. Which is just fine for a lot of tunes. But maybe for your song you're hearing something else. Drums, electric guitars, bass, keyboards, harmonies. Some horns, maybe. Now you've got to arrange that song for an ensemble, that song you sweated over and worked so hard to hone into shape. Well, guess what? Other people are going to put their two cents into it now.The drummer needs to find the right beat for it, and the bass player has to work with him like meshing gears in a machine. They are the rhythm section and on top of the work they do is where the other instruments and the voices take their cue.
The guitar parts and keyboard parts and vocal harmonies have to dovetail smoothly with the rhythm section or all is chaos. And maybe all these other musicians hear things that you did not when you wrote the song. And so you listen to them and hear what they're saying and playing. Maybe you had some parts in mind that simply don't work for this particular song. There are choices to be made now. No sense getting married to an idea that's clearly not working, that doesn't help the song at all. It also makes little sense to do something flashy just because you can. If it doesn't serve the song, save it for another day. So you try this, experiment with that, maybe argue with your fellow musicians, but by and by the song emerges from the input of everyone involved.
There's also the guy spinning the dials, the recording engineer, who may or may not be one of the musicians doing the playing. If you're lucky enough to be working with musicians and technicians that you trust, then their voices have equal weight in these discussions, and you the songwriter are but one of those voices at this point. Do you start off with a bang or build slowly? Do you build a crescendo and then cut to a whisper for dramatic effect? Depends on the song. The loudest voice in making these decisions should always be that of the song itself, the whole reason you are in the recording studio in the first place. Be true to the piece of music, first and always. When everyone in the room knows that, an honest song is made.
Very often someone other that the songwriter will hear something or add something that will put the song over the top; a hook, a subtle part, a memorable vocal harmony or a suggestion for phrasing the lyrics differently. Maybe you were playing the song too fast or too slow. So now you've hammered out these decisions and you record your song. And if the song is happy with your decisions, it will let you know by rewarding you. You will mix it and listen back and be happy with what you hear. Then with any luck so will a lot of other people. There are, after all, a thousand ways to record any particular song. Think of Richie Havens singing Beatles songs. He doesn't sound anything like The Beatles but the songs are well served by what he heard in them and the new insights revealed by his renditions.
Songs can be tailored to different artists and different styles of music, and as long as the artists involved listen to what the song is telling them, then the results are almost always enjoyable. But what I'm talking about here is a brand new song, never before recorded, from its conception in the head of a dreamer to its birth in the recording studio as a polished, finished song, brought into the world by many hands and minds. It's a privilege to be a part of this process of making songs, and an honor to work with the talented people that live in the world of music. We're all off our rockers, for sure, but without lunatics like us there would be no new songs. Keep your eye on this website for "Everything Changes," my latest baby still in the womb of the studio. It is being crafted by loving hands and will be ready soon. Meanwhile, do I keep that ringing guitar part, change it or leave it alone? I'll just listen to to it again and see what the song has to say about it...
If what you have sounds awkward, toss out the offending parts and leave what feels right. It's not exactly a precise science, but there's rules, most of which you'll have to break from time to time whenever a song tells you to. If your song is trying to tell you something, don't argue. It is what it is. So now you have your verses, your choruses, your bridge (maybe) and all your chords all lined up like ducks in a row, and you play it over and over, searching for the right feel. A good song doesn't lie and doesn't sound forced. It should sound like it's been around forever, comfortable with itself and feeling like a whole piece. Once it feels like that, Bingo, you've got a song!
Now you want to record it. At that point, that whole piece becomes a rough sketch again, unless you want to record it with only a single instrument and vocal. Which is just fine for a lot of tunes. But maybe for your song you're hearing something else. Drums, electric guitars, bass, keyboards, harmonies. Some horns, maybe. Now you've got to arrange that song for an ensemble, that song you sweated over and worked so hard to hone into shape. Well, guess what? Other people are going to put their two cents into it now.The drummer needs to find the right beat for it, and the bass player has to work with him like meshing gears in a machine. They are the rhythm section and on top of the work they do is where the other instruments and the voices take their cue.
The guitar parts and keyboard parts and vocal harmonies have to dovetail smoothly with the rhythm section or all is chaos. And maybe all these other musicians hear things that you did not when you wrote the song. And so you listen to them and hear what they're saying and playing. Maybe you had some parts in mind that simply don't work for this particular song. There are choices to be made now. No sense getting married to an idea that's clearly not working, that doesn't help the song at all. It also makes little sense to do something flashy just because you can. If it doesn't serve the song, save it for another day. So you try this, experiment with that, maybe argue with your fellow musicians, but by and by the song emerges from the input of everyone involved.
There's also the guy spinning the dials, the recording engineer, who may or may not be one of the musicians doing the playing. If you're lucky enough to be working with musicians and technicians that you trust, then their voices have equal weight in these discussions, and you the songwriter are but one of those voices at this point. Do you start off with a bang or build slowly? Do you build a crescendo and then cut to a whisper for dramatic effect? Depends on the song. The loudest voice in making these decisions should always be that of the song itself, the whole reason you are in the recording studio in the first place. Be true to the piece of music, first and always. When everyone in the room knows that, an honest song is made.
Very often someone other that the songwriter will hear something or add something that will put the song over the top; a hook, a subtle part, a memorable vocal harmony or a suggestion for phrasing the lyrics differently. Maybe you were playing the song too fast or too slow. So now you've hammered out these decisions and you record your song. And if the song is happy with your decisions, it will let you know by rewarding you. You will mix it and listen back and be happy with what you hear. Then with any luck so will a lot of other people. There are, after all, a thousand ways to record any particular song. Think of Richie Havens singing Beatles songs. He doesn't sound anything like The Beatles but the songs are well served by what he heard in them and the new insights revealed by his renditions.
Songs can be tailored to different artists and different styles of music, and as long as the artists involved listen to what the song is telling them, then the results are almost always enjoyable. But what I'm talking about here is a brand new song, never before recorded, from its conception in the head of a dreamer to its birth in the recording studio as a polished, finished song, brought into the world by many hands and minds. It's a privilege to be a part of this process of making songs, and an honor to work with the talented people that live in the world of music. We're all off our rockers, for sure, but without lunatics like us there would be no new songs. Keep your eye on this website for "Everything Changes," my latest baby still in the womb of the studio. It is being crafted by loving hands and will be ready soon. Meanwhile, do I keep that ringing guitar part, change it or leave it alone? I'll just listen to to it again and see what the song has to say about it...
May 11, 2009
JUST ASKING...
When Manny Ramirez, Roger Clemens or Alex Rodriguez get caught doing steroids, stuff they took to make them even better baseball players, is that as bad as, say, the President of the United States attacking a country for no reason at all, resulting in hundreds of thousands of violent deaths? How about Bishops and Cardinals covering up for pedophile priests? Or cops and judges on the take? Judging by the reaction of a lot of loudmouths, you would think all these things are equal. Who elected or appointed baseball players to be the moral barometer of our society? And are crooked cops, bishops, judges or presidents being crooked to make themselves better cops, bishops, judges or presidents? Or just the opposite? How frivolous a society do some people think we are when they elevate athletes to the status of judges, bishops and presidents? Why not include gambling casino operators, strip club owners and rap stars while they're at it? Just asking...
At some point in his presidency, Barack Obama will have to cease blaming Bush and Cheney for the horrible mess they left behind them. That point has not been reached yet. If anything, Obama gets a lot more patience than the average new president. He's not even in office for four full months. His administration still hasn't yet gauged the extent of the damage. While every president leaves office with a couple of things needing to be fixed, those guys screwed up in every way imaginable, not just one or two major areas. So maybe the disgraced right-wingers should lay off their constant tours of every TV show that will have their lying asses. Is there any possible reasonable explanation for attacking the wrong country, letting a major city drown, trying to dismantle the Bill of Rights, stealing all the money or opening up a franchise of the Gestapo? Is there any reason why anyone would look back at those 8 years of having barbaric animals in charge of America with wistful nostalgia? Just asking...
Twitter, which is e-mail lite and the latest inane waste of time, has been financed to the tune of over a hundred million dollars and is already starting to resist being bought out by the internet giants for billions. It's free to use Twitter, so presumably only the phone companies whose lines are being used to transmit the hundreds of millions of dumb-ass messages are getting paid. So, do they make money on sheer volume? No, that can't be right, since a hundred million times nothing is still zero. So how do all those venture capitalists get their money back? What's the angle here? Just asking...
What is Alternative Rock an alternative to? And what is Indie Rock independent of? And just what the hell is Youthful Crossover Alternative Country Rock? Is there some rich guy's unemployable brother-in-law somewhere in the music industry who's been given the job of classifying music and has screwed it up completely? And if so, is it okay to hunt him down and beat him mercilessly? Just asking...
So, a judge in Saudi Arabia says that it's okay for a husband to slap his wife around if she spends too much on one of those black sacks Saudi women are required to wear on their infrequent furloughs from house arrest, like it was their idea to wear black potato sacks in a blazing hot desert. Another Saudi judge twice denied the request of an 8 year-old girl that she be granted a divorce from her 47 year-old husband. In civilized countries this man would be considered either a pedophile or a confused Catholic priest. Saudi women have to put up with all this crap on top of risking death by stoning, lashing or beheading for dressing and acting like a normal female. What is the Saudi judges' ruling on how Saudi men get to treat their teenage boyfriends? And if not to anger management and sensitivity training, where do all those oil trillions go? Air conditioning? Just asking...
At some point in his presidency, Barack Obama will have to cease blaming Bush and Cheney for the horrible mess they left behind them. That point has not been reached yet. If anything, Obama gets a lot more patience than the average new president. He's not even in office for four full months. His administration still hasn't yet gauged the extent of the damage. While every president leaves office with a couple of things needing to be fixed, those guys screwed up in every way imaginable, not just one or two major areas. So maybe the disgraced right-wingers should lay off their constant tours of every TV show that will have their lying asses. Is there any possible reasonable explanation for attacking the wrong country, letting a major city drown, trying to dismantle the Bill of Rights, stealing all the money or opening up a franchise of the Gestapo? Is there any reason why anyone would look back at those 8 years of having barbaric animals in charge of America with wistful nostalgia? Just asking...
Twitter, which is e-mail lite and the latest inane waste of time, has been financed to the tune of over a hundred million dollars and is already starting to resist being bought out by the internet giants for billions. It's free to use Twitter, so presumably only the phone companies whose lines are being used to transmit the hundreds of millions of dumb-ass messages are getting paid. So, do they make money on sheer volume? No, that can't be right, since a hundred million times nothing is still zero. So how do all those venture capitalists get their money back? What's the angle here? Just asking...
What is Alternative Rock an alternative to? And what is Indie Rock independent of? And just what the hell is Youthful Crossover Alternative Country Rock? Is there some rich guy's unemployable brother-in-law somewhere in the music industry who's been given the job of classifying music and has screwed it up completely? And if so, is it okay to hunt him down and beat him mercilessly? Just asking...
So, a judge in Saudi Arabia says that it's okay for a husband to slap his wife around if she spends too much on one of those black sacks Saudi women are required to wear on their infrequent furloughs from house arrest, like it was their idea to wear black potato sacks in a blazing hot desert. Another Saudi judge twice denied the request of an 8 year-old girl that she be granted a divorce from her 47 year-old husband. In civilized countries this man would be considered either a pedophile or a confused Catholic priest. Saudi women have to put up with all this crap on top of risking death by stoning, lashing or beheading for dressing and acting like a normal female. What is the Saudi judges' ruling on how Saudi men get to treat their teenage boyfriends? And if not to anger management and sensitivity training, where do all those oil trillions go? Air conditioning? Just asking...
May 7, 2009
PROGRESS REPORT ON THE STARVATION PANDEMIC
This is a progress report on the Worldwide Starvation Pandemic for the year 2008. The numbers are finally in and as a useful comparison, 2008 will be compared with numbers of the previous year, 2007.
Deaths from Starvation, 2007: 13,140,000
Deaths from starvation, 2008: 13,140,000
Deaths per day, 2007: 36,000 (one every 2.4 seconds)
Deaths per day, 2008: 36,000 (one every 2.4 seconds)
Percentage of fatalities in children under 5 years old, 2007: 85%
Percentage of fatalities in children under 5 years old, 2008: 85%
Coordinated International Relief Efforts organized, 2007: None
Coordinated International Relief Efforts organized, 2008: None
World leaders who have championed the cause, 2007: None
World leaders who have championed the cause, 2008: None
Heads of major religions who have proposed urgent action ,2007: None
Heads of major religions who have proposed urgent action, 2008: None
International corporations that have offered help, 2007: None
International corporations that have offered help, 2008: None
Wealthy nations offering surplus food, 2007: None
Wealthy nations offering surplus food, 2008: None
Irrigation and agriculture education initiatives began, 2007: None
Irrigation and agriculture education initiatives began, 2008: None
Emergency medical teams assembled by the United Nations, 2007: None
Emergency medical teams assembled by the United Nations, 2008: None
Lives saved: 0
Projected worldwide deaths from starvation, 2009: 13,140,000
Projected deaths per day, 2009: 36,000 (one every 2.4 seconds)
Projected percentage of fatalities in children under 5 years old, 2009: 85%
Progress made: None
This has been a report on the World Starvation Pandemic.
Deaths from Starvation, 2007: 13,140,000
Deaths from starvation, 2008: 13,140,000
Deaths per day, 2007: 36,000 (one every 2.4 seconds)
Deaths per day, 2008: 36,000 (one every 2.4 seconds)
Percentage of fatalities in children under 5 years old, 2007: 85%
Percentage of fatalities in children under 5 years old, 2008: 85%
Coordinated International Relief Efforts organized, 2007: None
Coordinated International Relief Efforts organized, 2008: None
World leaders who have championed the cause, 2007: None
World leaders who have championed the cause, 2008: None
Heads of major religions who have proposed urgent action ,2007: None
Heads of major religions who have proposed urgent action, 2008: None
International corporations that have offered help, 2007: None
International corporations that have offered help, 2008: None
Wealthy nations offering surplus food, 2007: None
Wealthy nations offering surplus food, 2008: None
Irrigation and agriculture education initiatives began, 2007: None
Irrigation and agriculture education initiatives began, 2008: None
Emergency medical teams assembled by the United Nations, 2007: None
Emergency medical teams assembled by the United Nations, 2008: None
Lives saved: 0
Projected worldwide deaths from starvation, 2009: 13,140,000
Projected deaths per day, 2009: 36,000 (one every 2.4 seconds)
Projected percentage of fatalities in children under 5 years old, 2009: 85%
Progress made: None
This has been a report on the World Starvation Pandemic.
May 6, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 385
If all the world's a stage, then it''s show time and you're on. Break a leg.
FOLLOW THE BOUNCING BALL - GOD IS ON OUR SIDE!
Dear reader. Following the news today, I was struck by all the war news. Our armies, their armies, two other armies savagely having at each other somewhere under the sun. Actually, a lot of somewheres under the sun. So, here we are, humanity, soiling this brand new millennium right off the bat by slaughtering one another. So much for a new era of peace, understanding and brotherhood. Wars are supposedly fought for different reasons, or at least, that's what we tell ourselves, when basically it comes down to 2 motives, greed and vengeance. Greed for money, power, land, resources or ideas, and in turn, vengeance for having been attacked over money, power, land, resources and ideas. No one seems willing to break this cycle.
In order to motivate armies to participate in this deadly old man's game, the young soldiers who actually do the killing and the dying must be convinced that the enemy is their personal enemy instead of a group of human beings very much like themselves who happen to be standing in the way of the old mens' lust for gold and power. Usually this is attained by telling them that God is for us and against them. Which brings us to a song I wrote about this curious phenomenon. It struck me that no army in history has ever marched into war without believing that God is on their side, even though every religion sort of frowns on killing our fellow human beings. It's a military march song, the kind you hear sung by hundreds of marching soldiers at the end of a movie glorifying war, with the lyrics in subtitles and a bouncing ball dancing across the words so you can sing along with the purposeful young men waving their flags. So, having not much else to say about this, here's the lyrics. Follow the bouncing ball:
GOD IS ON OUR SIDE
YOUNG, SO PROUD AND GRAVE
SO VERY CLEAR OF HEART AND MIND
STRONG, AND TALL AND BRAVE
THEY LEAVE THEIR MOTHERS' LOVE BEHIND
TRUE, THEY MARCH TO WAR
THEY MUST DEFEND THEIR NATION'S PRIDE
LIKE THOSE, WHO MARCHED BEFORE
THEY KNOW THAT GOD IS ON OUR SIDE
OLD AND VERY WISE
A GENERAL STANDS ON SOLDIERS TRUST
PAIN SHOWS IN HIS EYES
HE TELLS HIS MEN OUR CAUSE IS JUST
FIGHT, AND GLORY'S YOURS
AND IF YOU FALL, YOU FALL WITH PRIDE
LIKE THOSE, WHO FELL BEFORE
WE KNOW THAT GOD IS ON OUR SIDE
SO MAMA, DON'T YOU CRY
YOU KNOW THAT GOD IS ON OUR SIDE
AND IF I AM TO DIE
THE LORD WILL TAKE ME TO HIS SIDE
SO MAMA DON'T YOU CRY
LOVE AND TEARS OF RAGE
FILL UP A MOTHER'S HEART AND EYES
WHY MUST WARS WE WAGE
WHY MUST A MOTHER ALWAYS CRY
WHY THE GRAND PARADES
THE COLORED FLAGS, THE FOOLISH PRIDE
IN ALL THE DAYS WE PRAYED
WE PRAY THAT GOD IS ON OUR SIDE
SO MAMA, DON'T YOU CRY
YOU KNOW THAT GOD IS ON OURa SIDE
AND IF I AM TO DIE
THE LORD WILL TAKE ME TO HIS SIDE
SO MAMA DON'T YOU CRY
BOLD, THE CANNON BLOWS
A THOUSAND MILES FROM HOME SWEET HOME
RED, THE RIVER FLOWS
A THOUSAND BOYS DIE ALL ALONE
GONE, A THOUSAND DREAMS
A THOUSAND OCEANS DEEP AND WIDE
AND IN THEIR FINAL SCREAMS
THEY PRAY THAT GOD IS ON OUR SIDE
SO MAMA, DON'T YOU CRY
YOU KNOW THAT GOD IS ON OUR SIDE...
Thank you for your time. Wage peace with a vengeance. - Bob Crespo
In order to motivate armies to participate in this deadly old man's game, the young soldiers who actually do the killing and the dying must be convinced that the enemy is their personal enemy instead of a group of human beings very much like themselves who happen to be standing in the way of the old mens' lust for gold and power. Usually this is attained by telling them that God is for us and against them. Which brings us to a song I wrote about this curious phenomenon. It struck me that no army in history has ever marched into war without believing that God is on their side, even though every religion sort of frowns on killing our fellow human beings. It's a military march song, the kind you hear sung by hundreds of marching soldiers at the end of a movie glorifying war, with the lyrics in subtitles and a bouncing ball dancing across the words so you can sing along with the purposeful young men waving their flags. So, having not much else to say about this, here's the lyrics. Follow the bouncing ball:
GOD IS ON OUR SIDE
YOUNG, SO PROUD AND GRAVE
SO VERY CLEAR OF HEART AND MIND
STRONG, AND TALL AND BRAVE
THEY LEAVE THEIR MOTHERS' LOVE BEHIND
TRUE, THEY MARCH TO WAR
THEY MUST DEFEND THEIR NATION'S PRIDE
LIKE THOSE, WHO MARCHED BEFORE
THEY KNOW THAT GOD IS ON OUR SIDE
OLD AND VERY WISE
A GENERAL STANDS ON SOLDIERS TRUST
PAIN SHOWS IN HIS EYES
HE TELLS HIS MEN OUR CAUSE IS JUST
FIGHT, AND GLORY'S YOURS
AND IF YOU FALL, YOU FALL WITH PRIDE
LIKE THOSE, WHO FELL BEFORE
WE KNOW THAT GOD IS ON OUR SIDE
SO MAMA, DON'T YOU CRY
YOU KNOW THAT GOD IS ON OUR SIDE
AND IF I AM TO DIE
THE LORD WILL TAKE ME TO HIS SIDE
SO MAMA DON'T YOU CRY
LOVE AND TEARS OF RAGE
FILL UP A MOTHER'S HEART AND EYES
WHY MUST WARS WE WAGE
WHY MUST A MOTHER ALWAYS CRY
WHY THE GRAND PARADES
THE COLORED FLAGS, THE FOOLISH PRIDE
IN ALL THE DAYS WE PRAYED
WE PRAY THAT GOD IS ON OUR SIDE
SO MAMA, DON'T YOU CRY
YOU KNOW THAT GOD IS ON OURa SIDE
AND IF I AM TO DIE
THE LORD WILL TAKE ME TO HIS SIDE
SO MAMA DON'T YOU CRY
BOLD, THE CANNON BLOWS
A THOUSAND MILES FROM HOME SWEET HOME
RED, THE RIVER FLOWS
A THOUSAND BOYS DIE ALL ALONE
GONE, A THOUSAND DREAMS
A THOUSAND OCEANS DEEP AND WIDE
AND IN THEIR FINAL SCREAMS
THEY PRAY THAT GOD IS ON OUR SIDE
SO MAMA, DON'T YOU CRY
YOU KNOW THAT GOD IS ON OUR SIDE...
Thank you for your time. Wage peace with a vengeance. - Bob Crespo
May 5, 2009
BOB CRE$PO & THE BIG $PENDER$ PLAYING LIVE
!¡BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND AT BADBOB'S BBQ! 3112 LAWSON BOULEVARD, OCEANSIDE, NY, 11572. SATURDAY, MAY 16TH, 9PM
Call for reservations & directions: (516) 561-7427. ¡COME ONE, COME ALL FOR GREAT MUSIC AND GREAT BBQ! BOB CRESPO, GARY KROMAN, DAVE FORMAN, LARRY VEDILAGO AND IAN ZDATNY
visit bobcrespo.com
Call for reservations & directions: (516) 561-7427. ¡COME ONE, COME ALL FOR GREAT MUSIC AND GREAT BBQ! BOB CRESPO, GARY KROMAN, DAVE FORMAN, LARRY VEDILAGO AND IAN ZDATNY
visit bobcrespo.com
THE GO AWAY LIST
People who need to go away, in no particular order:
Shotgun Dick Cheney: Supposedly retired in what should be complete disgrace, Shotgun Dick has been reinforcing his image as a shameless hate monger, torturer and killer of human beings by going on TV a lot lately and defending the Bush The Younger Administration like those 8 years were some kind of Golden Age instead of the corrupt and incompetent cesspool that they were, a disaster for America and the world. And if anybody still thinks that Dumbya was in charge, well, ask Shotgun Dick who was calling the shots. The buckshot stopped at his desk. We know, we know! Now go away, Darth.
Donald Trump: A man who makes everybody's Go Away List, Donald Trump made his name as a builder and developer. Lately his building and development skills have been concentrated on his own ego, which was already one of the most formidable in existence but now threatens to dwarf the Sears Tower. Perhaps if we promise him yet another airhead blonde trophy wife he'll go away. No wait, that's been done repeatedly before but he just never goes away. What's it going to take to convince this airbag that we find him as entertaining as a root canal?
Lindsay Lohan: Isn't this kid supposed to be an actress? Anybody remember any movies she's been in lately? Or ever, for that matter? That's very Madonna-like, who is a singer on paper, but few people can recall any of her songs. Between the lesbian-not-a-lesbian soap opera, the public drug rehabs and car crashes, is there an interesting career in there somewhere we should know about? If not, then just go away.
Glen Beck: If you thought Bill O'Really was the biggest buffoon on Fox News, well, he's been eclipsed by the blubbering fool Glen Beck, an absolutely off-the-wall moron and rabid fear monger. He''s got some kind of I'm-a-real-America-and-those-who-disagree-with-me-are-not shtick, pretty much revolving around the 9/11 attacks, imagined conspiracies and the dire threat of useful social programs. It's hard to identify his message since he routinely loses any semblance of self-control. His is a strange act for a guy who's supposedly a political commentator, and a lot of people can't decide whether he's a psychotic clown, a shameless opportunist or just someone who hates everybody. Whatever the case, this guy needs to go away.
The American Chopper Guy: Paul Teutel, Sr., the Hulk Hogan look-alike who's the main guy on the TV show "American Chopper," has been everywhere lately, even getting Sarah Palen (another Go Away List All Star) to get all weepy about his (!) patriotism, of all things. A loudmouth who bullies and berates his children, he's just one of thousands and thousands of guys who can supe up Harley Davidson motorcycles. Why give this irritable dope a TV show and invite him to appear on every other TV show? Fire his grumpy ass and let his goofy son Michael take over.
NASCAR Drivers: Is there a pressing reason to make celebrities of guys who's main skill is turning left all day while driving really fast? And call them athletes? And why do they wear those whacky coveralls with 85 car product ads sewn on to them when they appear someplace other than a racetrack? They're probably afraid no one will know who they are without them. Not to worry Goober, as soon as you open your mouth and nothing remotely intelligible comes out, people will know you're a Nascar driver. Go make another left and disappear.
Shotgun Dick Cheney: Supposedly retired in what should be complete disgrace, Shotgun Dick has been reinforcing his image as a shameless hate monger, torturer and killer of human beings by going on TV a lot lately and defending the Bush The Younger Administration like those 8 years were some kind of Golden Age instead of the corrupt and incompetent cesspool that they were, a disaster for America and the world. And if anybody still thinks that Dumbya was in charge, well, ask Shotgun Dick who was calling the shots. The buckshot stopped at his desk. We know, we know! Now go away, Darth.
Donald Trump: A man who makes everybody's Go Away List, Donald Trump made his name as a builder and developer. Lately his building and development skills have been concentrated on his own ego, which was already one of the most formidable in existence but now threatens to dwarf the Sears Tower. Perhaps if we promise him yet another airhead blonde trophy wife he'll go away. No wait, that's been done repeatedly before but he just never goes away. What's it going to take to convince this airbag that we find him as entertaining as a root canal?
Lindsay Lohan: Isn't this kid supposed to be an actress? Anybody remember any movies she's been in lately? Or ever, for that matter? That's very Madonna-like, who is a singer on paper, but few people can recall any of her songs. Between the lesbian-not-a-lesbian soap opera, the public drug rehabs and car crashes, is there an interesting career in there somewhere we should know about? If not, then just go away.
Glen Beck: If you thought Bill O'Really was the biggest buffoon on Fox News, well, he's been eclipsed by the blubbering fool Glen Beck, an absolutely off-the-wall moron and rabid fear monger. He''s got some kind of I'm-a-real-America-and-those-who-disagree-with-me-are-not shtick, pretty much revolving around the 9/11 attacks, imagined conspiracies and the dire threat of useful social programs. It's hard to identify his message since he routinely loses any semblance of self-control. His is a strange act for a guy who's supposedly a political commentator, and a lot of people can't decide whether he's a psychotic clown, a shameless opportunist or just someone who hates everybody. Whatever the case, this guy needs to go away.
The American Chopper Guy: Paul Teutel, Sr., the Hulk Hogan look-alike who's the main guy on the TV show "American Chopper," has been everywhere lately, even getting Sarah Palen (another Go Away List All Star) to get all weepy about his (!) patriotism, of all things. A loudmouth who bullies and berates his children, he's just one of thousands and thousands of guys who can supe up Harley Davidson motorcycles. Why give this irritable dope a TV show and invite him to appear on every other TV show? Fire his grumpy ass and let his goofy son Michael take over.
NASCAR Drivers: Is there a pressing reason to make celebrities of guys who's main skill is turning left all day while driving really fast? And call them athletes? And why do they wear those whacky coveralls with 85 car product ads sewn on to them when they appear someplace other than a racetrack? They're probably afraid no one will know who they are without them. Not to worry Goober, as soon as you open your mouth and nothing remotely intelligible comes out, people will know you're a Nascar driver. Go make another left and disappear.
May 4, 2009
BOB CRE$PO & THE BIG $PENDER$ PLAYING LIVE! ¡BACK BY POPULAR DEMAND AT BADBOB'S BBQ! 3112 LAWSON BOULEVARD, OCEANSIDE, NY, 11572. SATURDAY, MAY 16TH, 9PM. Call for reservations & directions: (516) 561-7427 ¡COME ONE, COME ALL FOR GREAT MUSIC AND GREAT BBQ! BOB CRESPO, GARY KROMAN, DAVE FORMAN, LARRY VEDILAGO, IAN ZDATNY
visit bobcrespo.com
visit bobcrespo.com
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 382
Nothing you possess is worth anything unless it is shared. Except, of course, herpes. No one will mind if you keep that one all to yourself.
SIBLINGS
We are truly all brothers and sisters in this world. We so often behave like small children. Look at us bicker and fight like cats and dogs! Watch us seek favor over our siblings with our parents (God) with the loudest voice. See us squabble over the best areas of the playground. See us hurt and insult one another over small matters, then refuse to share our toys and our candy. Look how we point guilty fingers at one other. See us turn our back on the tears of others. Truly we are all brothers and sisters. Maybe it's a better idea to be good friends. Friends don't do those things.If they do, you can always make new friends, but you're sort of stuck with your brothers and sisters. Be leery when other nations offer the hand of brotherhood. Better the hand of friendship.
May 2, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 381
There is progress and then there is Twitter. Nobody really gives a rat's ass what anyone else had for lunch today, unless it was especially interesting, like live scorpions or something. Barring that, stick your Twitters where the sun don't shine.
SO MUCH FOR THE SWINE FLU. CAN WE PANIC ABOUT HUNGER NOW?
In what has to be a severe blow to those medical reporters you only see once in a while on TV, the widely advertised worldwide pandemic of swine flu is turning out to be no big deal. Not that anyone other than pseudo-journalists are disappointed, since the last thing this world needs is something else to kill us off in droves. Hell, we've already got the regular flu, which kills a couple of hundred thousand people across the world every year. Topping the flu as a killer of young people is car crashes. Topping car crashes is war, good for hundreds of thousands of annual deaths, sometimes spiking into the millions when a real doozy is being waged. Then you have your old reliable big time killers of humans, diseases like malaria, cancer, AIDS, diabetes and the like, slaying hundreds and hundreds of of thousands annually. An even bigger killer than these mainstream ailments are the many diseases contracted from drinking contaminated water, a steady 5 to 6 million deaths every year.
But the real heavyweight champ of human killers is, and has always been been, starvation. While not technically a disease, it might as well be since it is pandemic in proportion and kills 36,000 people every single day, one person every 2.4 seconds. Oops, there goes another one! That's 13,140,000 human beings every year, year in and year out, except for leap years, when the death toll jumps another 36,000. The vast majority of these dead people are children under the age of 5. Their death is a slow and painfully tortuous one, a death not even the cruelest barbarian would inflict upon his enemies. And yet, to date, no armies of medical reporters or outraged journalists have seen fit to alarm the world about this eternal genocide.
While it is right and proper to remember and honor the victims of the Nazi holocaust of the 1940's, bear in mind that the annual death total for that act of genocide is double that, a brand new holocaust every six months! Where are the memorials, the documentaries bearing witness to the senseless slaughter of mostly children? The sadder thing is that starvation is easily curable. The medicine, already widely available in surplus amounts, is food. No decades-long medical research effort is required to find a cure. The cure is sitting on shelves and in warehouses of prosperous nations right now.
Can we treat starvation as an emergency? It is, after all, the very definition of one. Picture any other calamity claiming the lives of 36,000 people every day, whether it is a volcano, a war or some new deadly disease. Wouldn't that get the world's attention? It would dominate the headlines of every newspaper and be the main focus of every single TV and radio broadcast. Billions would be freely donated to find a remedy and aid the victims, statesmen would outdo themselves in impassioned speeches and the world would be called upon to unite in the face of this dire threat.
That's not the case with starvation, though, the world's dirty little secret, 36,000 small, twisted and emaciated bodies swept under the rug every day, a fresh corpse every 2.4 seconds. Think of the photos of the piles of skeletal corpses from the death camps of the holocaust. Now picture their faces as toddlers and pre-schoolers. Just like your own children in every respect, minus the joy, the comfort and the protection they take for granted, as well they should. Where is the joy in these children? Who will protect them? Who will teach them, and who will help them grow? When nobody is even willing to tell their story on the world stage, how can they ever be saved?
The means are available to save the starving. The means are also available to educate their poverty stricken parents on how to farm more effectively, how to secure sanitary water supplies and how to preserve food. It is the will to do so that is lacking. There is certainly no profit to be made from doing this, at least not in terms of money, so maybe that's the problem. The profit to our human spirit, however, will be incalculable. Imagine being a part of the generation that finally swore to eradicate hunger after all these thousands of years of human strife and bickering, of all those bloodthirsty butchers earning the nickname "The Great" for the act of killing on a grand scale?
Imagine being part of a movement to reject the hostile way of life and beginning to save lives on a grand scale? It is possible, it's doable and it's not nearly as complicated or expensive as waging war. The effort won't automatically unite mankind or any of that idealistic crap, but it will be the right and proper thing to do, reward enough in and of itself. To declare in the United Nations and in every world capital a Universal Right to Eat and a Right to Live would not solve the problem immediately, but it would officially recognize this catastrophe and formalize the policy for saving the lives of the weakest and most vulnerable among us, the starving children of this world. Starvation is something for us to panic about, and to move heaven and earth to conquer. It is a holocaust, a pandemic and a killer tsunami rolled into one, every day and every year. How long will we turn our backs on our brothers and sisters? You're on the computer now and you're done reading this. Now look up a worldwide food charity and see how you can help. You'll be glad you did.
But the real heavyweight champ of human killers is, and has always been been, starvation. While not technically a disease, it might as well be since it is pandemic in proportion and kills 36,000 people every single day, one person every 2.4 seconds. Oops, there goes another one! That's 13,140,000 human beings every year, year in and year out, except for leap years, when the death toll jumps another 36,000. The vast majority of these dead people are children under the age of 5. Their death is a slow and painfully tortuous one, a death not even the cruelest barbarian would inflict upon his enemies. And yet, to date, no armies of medical reporters or outraged journalists have seen fit to alarm the world about this eternal genocide.
While it is right and proper to remember and honor the victims of the Nazi holocaust of the 1940's, bear in mind that the annual death total for that act of genocide is double that, a brand new holocaust every six months! Where are the memorials, the documentaries bearing witness to the senseless slaughter of mostly children? The sadder thing is that starvation is easily curable. The medicine, already widely available in surplus amounts, is food. No decades-long medical research effort is required to find a cure. The cure is sitting on shelves and in warehouses of prosperous nations right now.
Can we treat starvation as an emergency? It is, after all, the very definition of one. Picture any other calamity claiming the lives of 36,000 people every day, whether it is a volcano, a war or some new deadly disease. Wouldn't that get the world's attention? It would dominate the headlines of every newspaper and be the main focus of every single TV and radio broadcast. Billions would be freely donated to find a remedy and aid the victims, statesmen would outdo themselves in impassioned speeches and the world would be called upon to unite in the face of this dire threat.
That's not the case with starvation, though, the world's dirty little secret, 36,000 small, twisted and emaciated bodies swept under the rug every day, a fresh corpse every 2.4 seconds. Think of the photos of the piles of skeletal corpses from the death camps of the holocaust. Now picture their faces as toddlers and pre-schoolers. Just like your own children in every respect, minus the joy, the comfort and the protection they take for granted, as well they should. Where is the joy in these children? Who will protect them? Who will teach them, and who will help them grow? When nobody is even willing to tell their story on the world stage, how can they ever be saved?
The means are available to save the starving. The means are also available to educate their poverty stricken parents on how to farm more effectively, how to secure sanitary water supplies and how to preserve food. It is the will to do so that is lacking. There is certainly no profit to be made from doing this, at least not in terms of money, so maybe that's the problem. The profit to our human spirit, however, will be incalculable. Imagine being a part of the generation that finally swore to eradicate hunger after all these thousands of years of human strife and bickering, of all those bloodthirsty butchers earning the nickname "The Great" for the act of killing on a grand scale?
Imagine being part of a movement to reject the hostile way of life and beginning to save lives on a grand scale? It is possible, it's doable and it's not nearly as complicated or expensive as waging war. The effort won't automatically unite mankind or any of that idealistic crap, but it will be the right and proper thing to do, reward enough in and of itself. To declare in the United Nations and in every world capital a Universal Right to Eat and a Right to Live would not solve the problem immediately, but it would officially recognize this catastrophe and formalize the policy for saving the lives of the weakest and most vulnerable among us, the starving children of this world. Starvation is something for us to panic about, and to move heaven and earth to conquer. It is a holocaust, a pandemic and a killer tsunami rolled into one, every day and every year. How long will we turn our backs on our brothers and sisters? You're on the computer now and you're done reading this. Now look up a worldwide food charity and see how you can help. You'll be glad you did.
May 1, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 380
Nobody really likes whiskey, but there aren't any other options when you want to get stupid drunk and be that guy. Yeah, that guy.
FROM THE OBSERVATION DECK
You have to wonder what's up when you see soldiers armed with machine guns and armored vehicles outside polling places, like now in India's elections. Guess India's not all that stable. Actually, it's been very volatile lately. What, nobody's meditating over there anymore?
You also have to wonder why nobody mentions the words "civil war" when it comes to Pakistan. When native armed militants take over a bunch of provinces within a nation and threaten to do more of that sort of thing, isn't that sort of the textbook definition of civill war? Perhaps no one wants to utter the "C" words; civil war and chaos, in a nation with a substantial nuclear arsenal. Not acknowledging something, however, has rarely been an effective strategy.
The panic over swine flu seems a bit hasty. There's only 257 confirmed cases and relatively few deaths worldwide out of 6 billion people. Starvation, on the other hand, killed 36,000 people today. It killed 36,000 people yesterday too. And the day before and the day before that and the day before that. World leaders are not panicking, however, and by and large seem to be taking it pretty well, even though it will kill another 36,000 tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that forever. Curious, no?
The House of Representative finally passed a Credit Card Holder's Bill Of Rights. They figured it was either that or start prosecuting and jailing the credit card company bosses like they do regular gangsters and loan sharks, small-timers in comparison to the credit card cartel.
All sorts of reasons are being put forth for the bankruptcy of the Chrysler Automotive Corporation. Could it be those giant gas-guzzling SUVs they insisted on manufacturing for years after it became apparent they were ridiculous vehicles to own? How many years did they think Americans would drive cars that don't look really cool? Other than their convertibles and retro-look PT Cruisers, Chryslers are boring. Inefficient and unreliable we'll forgive, but boring? Get real! There's a reason why Studebaker was exiled to Canada. Chrysler, this is America, not the Soviet Union of the 1970's. A partnership with Fiat just might be the answer. The Italians have been building cool cars for a long time, for the most part small, expensive and fairly frivolous, but very cool looking. Now, if Chrysler/Fiat can pull off building affordable cool cars like the Mustang, Camaro, Le Mans, Thunderbird, GTO or Trans Am, they'll be back in the black. Build a wicked looking ride or go away.
The unprovoked war of aggression against fat guys shows no sign of ending any time soon. Indeed, there isn't even a proposed timetable for ceasing hostilities. Bad enough they were labeled as "obese" by killjoys who aren't happy unless they're making others miserable, then given the horrible designation of being "morbidly" obese, but now they've come up with a new self-esteem annihilator called Super Obese! Super Obese? What did fat guys ever do to these people to deserve the Super, never mind the morbidly? Enjoy themselves, maybe? Or, worse yet, smoke a friggin' cigarette? Most of us like fat people just fine. It's the civilian vice squad we can't stand.
You also have to wonder why nobody mentions the words "civil war" when it comes to Pakistan. When native armed militants take over a bunch of provinces within a nation and threaten to do more of that sort of thing, isn't that sort of the textbook definition of civill war? Perhaps no one wants to utter the "C" words; civil war and chaos, in a nation with a substantial nuclear arsenal. Not acknowledging something, however, has rarely been an effective strategy.
The panic over swine flu seems a bit hasty. There's only 257 confirmed cases and relatively few deaths worldwide out of 6 billion people. Starvation, on the other hand, killed 36,000 people today. It killed 36,000 people yesterday too. And the day before and the day before that and the day before that. World leaders are not panicking, however, and by and large seem to be taking it pretty well, even though it will kill another 36,000 tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that forever. Curious, no?
The House of Representative finally passed a Credit Card Holder's Bill Of Rights. They figured it was either that or start prosecuting and jailing the credit card company bosses like they do regular gangsters and loan sharks, small-timers in comparison to the credit card cartel.
All sorts of reasons are being put forth for the bankruptcy of the Chrysler Automotive Corporation. Could it be those giant gas-guzzling SUVs they insisted on manufacturing for years after it became apparent they were ridiculous vehicles to own? How many years did they think Americans would drive cars that don't look really cool? Other than their convertibles and retro-look PT Cruisers, Chryslers are boring. Inefficient and unreliable we'll forgive, but boring? Get real! There's a reason why Studebaker was exiled to Canada. Chrysler, this is America, not the Soviet Union of the 1970's. A partnership with Fiat just might be the answer. The Italians have been building cool cars for a long time, for the most part small, expensive and fairly frivolous, but very cool looking. Now, if Chrysler/Fiat can pull off building affordable cool cars like the Mustang, Camaro, Le Mans, Thunderbird, GTO or Trans Am, they'll be back in the black. Build a wicked looking ride or go away.
The unprovoked war of aggression against fat guys shows no sign of ending any time soon. Indeed, there isn't even a proposed timetable for ceasing hostilities. Bad enough they were labeled as "obese" by killjoys who aren't happy unless they're making others miserable, then given the horrible designation of being "morbidly" obese, but now they've come up with a new self-esteem annihilator called Super Obese! Super Obese? What did fat guys ever do to these people to deserve the Super, never mind the morbidly? Enjoy themselves, maybe? Or, worse yet, smoke a friggin' cigarette? Most of us like fat people just fine. It's the civilian vice squad we can't stand.
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