June 30, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 423
No one can explain love, or why anybody loves anyone or anything. Which is fine. Why ruin a beautiful thing with some dry scholarly explanation?
RICH PEOPLE FROWN ON LOSING ANY OF THEIR DOUGH
So, Bernie Madoff gets the max, 150 years in jail and forfeiture of every penny he has, and then some. He was ordered by the judge to cough up $171 billion smackeroos in restitution, a sum even Bill Gates can't cover. Everybody knows the thousands of victims of his Ponzi scheme will never recover anything but pennies on the dollar and that Bernie won't live for all that much of his sentence, what with him being in his 70's and all, but the judge felt that a message had to be sent. Not the message that people with tens of millions of dollars to invest definitely know better than to hand their dough to a guy promising gangster loan shark interest rate numbers as a return on their investments and when they do so they are knowingly aiding and abetting a crime.
No, no that message. The message is; don't mess with rich people's dough! That's why bank robbers get sentenced to 30 years while those who rob grocery stores get maybe 8 or 10 years, tops, as long as no bloodshed is involved. While Bernie Madoff wasn't at all violent and even had the enthusiastic cooperation of a great many of his victims, he chose to rip off the very wealthy. None of them will be prosecuted for knowingly investing in a pyramid scheme. They will suffer a horrible fate nonetheless: most of them will be just regular rich instead of fabulously rich. One lady even looked for sympathy because she had to sell her $48,000 fur coat. Get out the hankies and violins.
Take his lovely wife Ruth Madoff, for example. She just cut a deal with prosecutors allowing her to keep "only" $2.5 million dollars. Most of the world (my hand is raised, thank you) would jump at that deal, but Mrs. Madoff acts like she has been sentenced to live in a corrugated tin shack with no plumbing and eat cold gruel for the rest of her life. Not exactly. While she won't be living in a Manhattan penthouse worth tens of millions of dollars anymore, getting two and a half million won't exactly place her in the position of having to get on line at the next government cheese handout. Even putting that dough in the bank at the paltry interest rate of 2 and a quarter percent would yield her an annual income of $62,500 before taxes, well above the national average. Add her social security to that and she'll be just fine; well fed, properly housed, medically insured and quite comfortable. No tragedy there.
The tragedy is the non-fabulously wealthy people Madoff ripped off, honest workers who scrimped and saved and trusted their nest egg to a thief and are now near destitute as they face old age. Then there's the people who trusted other financial planners with their fortunes, people you expect to actively manage your money prudently and not hand it over to a guy they had to know was running a scam. Are any of these finance professionals facing criminal charges, or at the very least industry sanctions for abandoning their responsibilities to their clients for a fast buck? While many of them are being sued for malfeasance and corruption or scamming or whatever the legal term is for stealing a whole lot of money as opposed to stealing a more modest amount, so far prosecutors are acting like they cracked the case completely with the sentencing of Madoff.
But who knows? Maybe the District Attorney's office has more indictments up its sleeve. It's hard to believe that Madoff pulled this off with no accomplices other than his greedy rich clients trying to earn double the going rate on their money. There had to be a lot of high ranking people in his office who were in on the scam. What about his secretary? Secretaries know everything about the businesses where they work. You'd hate to see a low paid working stiff go to jail, but what if that low paid working stiff aided and abetted a huge crime? Then there would be the other executives in Madoff's firm, really rich guys like himself who may or may not be claiming they were as surprised as the rest of the world that the company they helped run was a neatly wrapped box of air. The DA is playing followup indictments and charges close to the vest.
But the bottom line is that the rich really, really hate giving up any of their dough. Every dollar they spend makes them a dollar less rich. That's the mindset that led Wall Street to become an entire culture of Bernie Madoffs, as greedy and unscrupulous a bunch of louts as Ebenezer Scrooge. They ruined the good names and the very existence of respected companies that had been doing honest business for many decades, some of them for over a century. These were companies and individuals who made great fortunes playing it straight, following the rules and reaping the rewards of being at the highest levels of the one of the most rewarding businesses on earth.
All they were asked to do was not fuck it up. This was the golden goose that would provide them and their descendants with fabulous livings forever. Just don't fuck it up! Not a lot to ask. But greed is a powerful force, one all human beings have to one degree or another, even though we know it's wrong. Half the laws we have on the books are aimed at curbing greed. "Thou shalt not steal" is a prominent early example. But in recent years, beginning with Ronald Reagan de-clawing the regulatory agencies overseeing the people who handle everybody's money, greed became fashionable. Fast forward twenty two years to Bush the Younger and Shotgun Dick Cheney getting elected, and they ratcheted up greed to official government policy.
They actively gutted the financial regulatory agencies by underfunding them and not hiring replacement personnel when people retired. Then they implemented the most massive peacetime transfer of wealth from the working classes to the super wealthy in human history in the form of tax cuts. It got to the point of having less than 1% of the population owning the majority of the nation's wealth. Then of course it all blew up in everybody's face and the government was forced to bail out these greedy pricks to the tune of trillions of tax dollars, which they then proceeded to blow on hookers and Picassos until a few of them got their asses fired.
And the rest of them still don't really get it, they just toe the line to avoid jail. Neither does Madoff get it, who thought 12 years in the slammer and a hundred dollar fine sounded okay to him. The judge disagreed and gave him 150 years, only because he wasn't allowed to give him a thousand. Bernie needs some company in the form of Wall Street felons in prison, his fellow greed heads, people who were in essence handed America on a silver platter and asked only that they not fuck it up. They weren't handed a seedy currency exchange booth in an open air bazaar in some desert nation, but the gleaming towers of Wall street, private jets, mansions, exotic vacation homes and trophy wives. They were modern day princes and nicknamed themselves "Masters of The Universe."
And yet this was not enough. They wanted Bill Gates money, all of them, even though they had invented nothing, and they lied, cheated and stole to make it happen, very nearly taking the entire country down with them when their house of cards collapsed. Mr. Madoff was merely the most audacious and conspicuous of the thieves. And just maybe Madoff did the country a favor for being so public a greedy asshole. The credit card companies and banks have been quietly ripping off poor and working class people for decades with usurious rates and hidden fees, but Bernie mostly targeted the very wealthy, and when you go after rich people's money, the shit hits the fan big time. The whole world watched this tawdry saga unfold. And now Madoff gets the max, waiting for some his colleagues to join him.
Maybe they can form a new prison gang, selling cigarettes, drugs and shivs to their fellow inmates at outrageously high prices. Call themselves the Ex-Billionaires or Masters of The Universe or something catchy like that. That will probably go over with the tattooed and muscular lifers about as well as a 3 day lock down and before long these bankers and CEOs will be doing the laundry and cleaning the cells of guys named Big Jamal, One-Eyed Freddy and Vinny The Neck.Then perhaps the rest of the financial services community will get it though their heads that greed isn't good.
Maybe they'll figure they'll just have to eke out a living somehow on their million dollar salaries and pay their taxes like everyone else. It's either that or One Eyed Freddy. From a lot of us who have a hard time working up any hatred for a guy who never did anything to us since we didn't have enough dough for him to steal, thanks Bernie! You've done your nation a service. In a pretty shitty way, but a service just the same. You've brought the world's attention to the biggest ring of thieves that ever lived. Let's make Bernie just the first of many members of the Ex-Billionaires prison gang.
No, no that message. The message is; don't mess with rich people's dough! That's why bank robbers get sentenced to 30 years while those who rob grocery stores get maybe 8 or 10 years, tops, as long as no bloodshed is involved. While Bernie Madoff wasn't at all violent and even had the enthusiastic cooperation of a great many of his victims, he chose to rip off the very wealthy. None of them will be prosecuted for knowingly investing in a pyramid scheme. They will suffer a horrible fate nonetheless: most of them will be just regular rich instead of fabulously rich. One lady even looked for sympathy because she had to sell her $48,000 fur coat. Get out the hankies and violins.
Take his lovely wife Ruth Madoff, for example. She just cut a deal with prosecutors allowing her to keep "only" $2.5 million dollars. Most of the world (my hand is raised, thank you) would jump at that deal, but Mrs. Madoff acts like she has been sentenced to live in a corrugated tin shack with no plumbing and eat cold gruel for the rest of her life. Not exactly. While she won't be living in a Manhattan penthouse worth tens of millions of dollars anymore, getting two and a half million won't exactly place her in the position of having to get on line at the next government cheese handout. Even putting that dough in the bank at the paltry interest rate of 2 and a quarter percent would yield her an annual income of $62,500 before taxes, well above the national average. Add her social security to that and she'll be just fine; well fed, properly housed, medically insured and quite comfortable. No tragedy there.
The tragedy is the non-fabulously wealthy people Madoff ripped off, honest workers who scrimped and saved and trusted their nest egg to a thief and are now near destitute as they face old age. Then there's the people who trusted other financial planners with their fortunes, people you expect to actively manage your money prudently and not hand it over to a guy they had to know was running a scam. Are any of these finance professionals facing criminal charges, or at the very least industry sanctions for abandoning their responsibilities to their clients for a fast buck? While many of them are being sued for malfeasance and corruption or scamming or whatever the legal term is for stealing a whole lot of money as opposed to stealing a more modest amount, so far prosecutors are acting like they cracked the case completely with the sentencing of Madoff.
But who knows? Maybe the District Attorney's office has more indictments up its sleeve. It's hard to believe that Madoff pulled this off with no accomplices other than his greedy rich clients trying to earn double the going rate on their money. There had to be a lot of high ranking people in his office who were in on the scam. What about his secretary? Secretaries know everything about the businesses where they work. You'd hate to see a low paid working stiff go to jail, but what if that low paid working stiff aided and abetted a huge crime? Then there would be the other executives in Madoff's firm, really rich guys like himself who may or may not be claiming they were as surprised as the rest of the world that the company they helped run was a neatly wrapped box of air. The DA is playing followup indictments and charges close to the vest.
But the bottom line is that the rich really, really hate giving up any of their dough. Every dollar they spend makes them a dollar less rich. That's the mindset that led Wall Street to become an entire culture of Bernie Madoffs, as greedy and unscrupulous a bunch of louts as Ebenezer Scrooge. They ruined the good names and the very existence of respected companies that had been doing honest business for many decades, some of them for over a century. These were companies and individuals who made great fortunes playing it straight, following the rules and reaping the rewards of being at the highest levels of the one of the most rewarding businesses on earth.
All they were asked to do was not fuck it up. This was the golden goose that would provide them and their descendants with fabulous livings forever. Just don't fuck it up! Not a lot to ask. But greed is a powerful force, one all human beings have to one degree or another, even though we know it's wrong. Half the laws we have on the books are aimed at curbing greed. "Thou shalt not steal" is a prominent early example. But in recent years, beginning with Ronald Reagan de-clawing the regulatory agencies overseeing the people who handle everybody's money, greed became fashionable. Fast forward twenty two years to Bush the Younger and Shotgun Dick Cheney getting elected, and they ratcheted up greed to official government policy.
They actively gutted the financial regulatory agencies by underfunding them and not hiring replacement personnel when people retired. Then they implemented the most massive peacetime transfer of wealth from the working classes to the super wealthy in human history in the form of tax cuts. It got to the point of having less than 1% of the population owning the majority of the nation's wealth. Then of course it all blew up in everybody's face and the government was forced to bail out these greedy pricks to the tune of trillions of tax dollars, which they then proceeded to blow on hookers and Picassos until a few of them got their asses fired.
And the rest of them still don't really get it, they just toe the line to avoid jail. Neither does Madoff get it, who thought 12 years in the slammer and a hundred dollar fine sounded okay to him. The judge disagreed and gave him 150 years, only because he wasn't allowed to give him a thousand. Bernie needs some company in the form of Wall Street felons in prison, his fellow greed heads, people who were in essence handed America on a silver platter and asked only that they not fuck it up. They weren't handed a seedy currency exchange booth in an open air bazaar in some desert nation, but the gleaming towers of Wall street, private jets, mansions, exotic vacation homes and trophy wives. They were modern day princes and nicknamed themselves "Masters of The Universe."
And yet this was not enough. They wanted Bill Gates money, all of them, even though they had invented nothing, and they lied, cheated and stole to make it happen, very nearly taking the entire country down with them when their house of cards collapsed. Mr. Madoff was merely the most audacious and conspicuous of the thieves. And just maybe Madoff did the country a favor for being so public a greedy asshole. The credit card companies and banks have been quietly ripping off poor and working class people for decades with usurious rates and hidden fees, but Bernie mostly targeted the very wealthy, and when you go after rich people's money, the shit hits the fan big time. The whole world watched this tawdry saga unfold. And now Madoff gets the max, waiting for some his colleagues to join him.
Maybe they can form a new prison gang, selling cigarettes, drugs and shivs to their fellow inmates at outrageously high prices. Call themselves the Ex-Billionaires or Masters of The Universe or something catchy like that. That will probably go over with the tattooed and muscular lifers about as well as a 3 day lock down and before long these bankers and CEOs will be doing the laundry and cleaning the cells of guys named Big Jamal, One-Eyed Freddy and Vinny The Neck.Then perhaps the rest of the financial services community will get it though their heads that greed isn't good.
Maybe they'll figure they'll just have to eke out a living somehow on their million dollar salaries and pay their taxes like everyone else. It's either that or One Eyed Freddy. From a lot of us who have a hard time working up any hatred for a guy who never did anything to us since we didn't have enough dough for him to steal, thanks Bernie! You've done your nation a service. In a pretty shitty way, but a service just the same. You've brought the world's attention to the biggest ring of thieves that ever lived. Let's make Bernie just the first of many members of the Ex-Billionaires prison gang.
June 28, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 422
If you are an idiot, don't complain about other idiots. With any luck, they're even dopier than you and you're the one who comes up smelling like a rose.
CRYBABY NEO CON MEN
Boy, you thought that liberals where whiners? Compared to the disgraced and disenfranchised Neo-Cons, they're a bunch of tight-lipped stoics. Who would have thought these tough talking bullies would turn into schoolgirls the minute they were out of power? Well, pretty much anyone who's familiar with bullies, that's who. War mongers who feared to wear a uniform themselves when they were of age never did have any credibility, all they had was power. And they exercised that power without heed to any Constitutional constraints, perhaps figuring that document to be too liberal for their liking. They decided to invade Iraq for what they fully knew were false reasons, causing death and destruction and costing America almost 5,000 of our sons' and daughters' lives while many thousands more were grievously wounded.
They used the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington as a political tool to limit the rights and freedoms of American citizens, viewing that devastating attack as a political opportunity to solidify their own power through fear mongering and dictatorship-style crackdowns. They implemented the torture of prisoners of war in violation of a treaty that America signed, The Geneva Convention, not caring a bit that it was wrong, unconstitutional and, just as importantly, that it exposed our own soldiers to torture in the event of their capture. They didn't care because they were tough guys! Or at least tough guys on the asses of others, a pretty easy stance to take when your own personal comfort is never in jeopardy.
These people also oversaw the greatest peaceful transfer of wealth from the working classes to the wealthy in human history, seeking to roll back the social progress America began to make in the 1930s. The vast majority of America's wealth has been concentrated in the hands of a small minority under the watch of the Neo-Cons and their undisguised contempt for the poor and the working classes was most evident during Hurricane Katrina, when they let New Orleans and wide swaths of the Gulf Coast drown while they patted each other on the back.
They never did hunt down the guy who attacked America, Osama bin Laden, because it proved to be difficult, or at any rate a lot more difficult than invading Iraq, hanging their leader and stealing their oil. Besides, capturing bin Laden would deprive them of their Bogeyman, and his successful video career was their greatest asset when it came to passing laws aimed at spying on American citizens and gutting the Bill of Rights. He was of much more use to them roaming free than dead or captured and he played brilliantly into their hands with one "Death to America" rant after another, secure in the knowledge that the hunt for him had been put on the back burner. Osama bin Laden was a more effective member of the Bush The Younger Administration than any 10 bright eyed young Christian Fascists.
This was the atmosphere in America when it was time to elect a new president in 2008. Is it any wonder that the American electorate recoiled in horror at the monster we had allowed to be created in our midst and voted their cynical, evil asses out of the White House and both Houses of Congress? These faux tough guys who were tough at everyone else's expense with no risk to themselves were gone, and a new president had to deal with the massive wreckage they'd left behind. The economy was on the brink of The Second Great Depression, America was reviled throughout the world as a war mongering empire and the rights and freedoms that are the birthright of every American were under attack by our own government. Greed, tyranny, corruption and incompetence had brought America low.
So the country voted the bums out, hoping they just went away in disgrace when they saw the fruits of their handiwork, the monumental failures in every area of their policy making. Well, guess again. The Neo-Cons are out in force, all over TV, the newspapers and the internet defending their record and attacking the new administration that is not even 6 months old. They are crying like any schoolyard bully who has just had his nose bloodied by a former victim. They say Obama is un-American, the very same thing that got them tossed out on their ears. They cry that he is a Socialist, all the while collecting the benefits of the social legislation of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the form of hefty pensions and protection of their Federally insured bank accounts, which would have evaporated in the financial crisis they themselves created if not for FDR.
They defend torture (!) and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus as necessary emergency measures. Well, Einsteins, the use of torture and the suspension of the right to appear before a court of law to answer any charges against one is considered an emergency by most Americans. You don't defend America by becoming less American and abandoning the ideals and the legal rights that so many have fought and died to create and preserve. You know, people who actually were tough guys and put their own lives and fortunes where their mouths were. The people who created this nation were considered liberals, if by liberal you mean caring about the other guy and putting his rights, his welfare and his pathway to opportunity on an equal footing as their own, even unto the point of dying for their beliefs.
Which is pretty much the opposite of the mindset of the Neo-Con men, a mindset entrenched in corporate America as it continues to operate as if Bush The Younger and his Supreme Leader Shotgun Dick Cheney were still calling the shots. Well, they're not, and as it turned out they are being viewed more and more by rank and file Americans as the enemies of the state they always were. As so they complain and lash out and weep for themselves like petulant children. And our new president must still deal with cleaning up after these selfish infants, no matter how long and loud they wail. The mess America finds itself in is their mess, one they knew they were creating but did not care as long as they got theirs, a classic childhood problem that only careful guidance and stern parenting can correct. It's time for these incompetent creeps to grow up and take their medicine. You want to have a say in how things get done, don't act like you care, just care.
They used the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington as a political tool to limit the rights and freedoms of American citizens, viewing that devastating attack as a political opportunity to solidify their own power through fear mongering and dictatorship-style crackdowns. They implemented the torture of prisoners of war in violation of a treaty that America signed, The Geneva Convention, not caring a bit that it was wrong, unconstitutional and, just as importantly, that it exposed our own soldiers to torture in the event of their capture. They didn't care because they were tough guys! Or at least tough guys on the asses of others, a pretty easy stance to take when your own personal comfort is never in jeopardy.
These people also oversaw the greatest peaceful transfer of wealth from the working classes to the wealthy in human history, seeking to roll back the social progress America began to make in the 1930s. The vast majority of America's wealth has been concentrated in the hands of a small minority under the watch of the Neo-Cons and their undisguised contempt for the poor and the working classes was most evident during Hurricane Katrina, when they let New Orleans and wide swaths of the Gulf Coast drown while they patted each other on the back.
They never did hunt down the guy who attacked America, Osama bin Laden, because it proved to be difficult, or at any rate a lot more difficult than invading Iraq, hanging their leader and stealing their oil. Besides, capturing bin Laden would deprive them of their Bogeyman, and his successful video career was their greatest asset when it came to passing laws aimed at spying on American citizens and gutting the Bill of Rights. He was of much more use to them roaming free than dead or captured and he played brilliantly into their hands with one "Death to America" rant after another, secure in the knowledge that the hunt for him had been put on the back burner. Osama bin Laden was a more effective member of the Bush The Younger Administration than any 10 bright eyed young Christian Fascists.
This was the atmosphere in America when it was time to elect a new president in 2008. Is it any wonder that the American electorate recoiled in horror at the monster we had allowed to be created in our midst and voted their cynical, evil asses out of the White House and both Houses of Congress? These faux tough guys who were tough at everyone else's expense with no risk to themselves were gone, and a new president had to deal with the massive wreckage they'd left behind. The economy was on the brink of The Second Great Depression, America was reviled throughout the world as a war mongering empire and the rights and freedoms that are the birthright of every American were under attack by our own government. Greed, tyranny, corruption and incompetence had brought America low.
So the country voted the bums out, hoping they just went away in disgrace when they saw the fruits of their handiwork, the monumental failures in every area of their policy making. Well, guess again. The Neo-Cons are out in force, all over TV, the newspapers and the internet defending their record and attacking the new administration that is not even 6 months old. They are crying like any schoolyard bully who has just had his nose bloodied by a former victim. They say Obama is un-American, the very same thing that got them tossed out on their ears. They cry that he is a Socialist, all the while collecting the benefits of the social legislation of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the form of hefty pensions and protection of their Federally insured bank accounts, which would have evaporated in the financial crisis they themselves created if not for FDR.
They defend torture (!) and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus as necessary emergency measures. Well, Einsteins, the use of torture and the suspension of the right to appear before a court of law to answer any charges against one is considered an emergency by most Americans. You don't defend America by becoming less American and abandoning the ideals and the legal rights that so many have fought and died to create and preserve. You know, people who actually were tough guys and put their own lives and fortunes where their mouths were. The people who created this nation were considered liberals, if by liberal you mean caring about the other guy and putting his rights, his welfare and his pathway to opportunity on an equal footing as their own, even unto the point of dying for their beliefs.
Which is pretty much the opposite of the mindset of the Neo-Con men, a mindset entrenched in corporate America as it continues to operate as if Bush The Younger and his Supreme Leader Shotgun Dick Cheney were still calling the shots. Well, they're not, and as it turned out they are being viewed more and more by rank and file Americans as the enemies of the state they always were. As so they complain and lash out and weep for themselves like petulant children. And our new president must still deal with cleaning up after these selfish infants, no matter how long and loud they wail. The mess America finds itself in is their mess, one they knew they were creating but did not care as long as they got theirs, a classic childhood problem that only careful guidance and stern parenting can correct. It's time for these incompetent creeps to grow up and take their medicine. You want to have a say in how things get done, don't act like you care, just care.
June 27, 2009
WHY WOULD ANYBODY...
Why would anybody, governor, president or bus driver, apologize to anybody but his wife for having an affair? Are we a bunch of scolds all of a sudden, pointing shame-on-you fingers? The sex lives of others is none of our damned beeswax. Governors and presidents are dopes to play along with this infantile obsession and should tell nosy people to stay the hell out of their private business. They never seem to apologize for the stupid policies they implement and the dopey decisions they often make, so why do they feel they have to apologize for something that has no bearing on how they do their jobs and zero effect on the people they govern? Puzzling...
Why would anybody obsess over the manner of Michael Jackson's death? The guy isn't even cold yet and you have a cottage industry sprouting up wondering who was responsible for his drug use. Well, who else would that be? Us? And that whole bit about how society somehow failed him? Exactly what did we ever do to the guy? Listen to his records? Make him fabulously wealthy? Isn't it his own business and his own responsibility how he ran his life? Who cares how he died? It's a big loss and it's sad, but certainly not something to convene an emergency session of Congress over. There hasn't even been any autopsy results yet, so maybe we can let the poor guy rest and let his family deal with their pain with a little dignity. Oh wait, this is America, and we own our celebrities, dead or alive. Never mind...
Why would anyone who doesn't live there think they can solve the problems in the Middle East? Even the best brains who do live there don't have a clue. It's an area most people in the world would consider uninhabitable filled with people who hate each other that the world would pretty much ignore if there wasn't so much oil buried under the blazing sands in a lot of the countries there. You add the intertribal hatred to the insatiable greed for petroleum by the outside world and add a huge dash of tyrannical leaders wanting to be very, very important in the grand scheme of things and you have yourself a set of unsolvable problems. You'd think the Nobel Peace Prize committee would get tired of being burned and pass a rule barring the awarding of their prestigious prize to a bunch of clueless gas bags looking to earn Great Statesman points. Maybe the better deal in the Middle East is to let the people who have to live in that sweltering sandbox figure it out for themselves. They could do no worse. Or maybe they could, but it is their sandbox, and they are the ones who have to deal with any grand schemes made by dreamers. Better it should be home grown dreamers than carpetbaggers with ulterior motives who don't give a rat's ass about the actual people there or the quality of their lives.
Whether or not you believe in the threat of global warming, why would anybody oppose conservation measures and clean technology? Weren't we always taught not to shit where we eat just because that's the cleaner way to live? Why should we maintain a tidy planet only because of some dire threat? That's like saying that if there is no possibility of global warming, well, pollute away! Poison the land and the waters and blacken the sky to our hearts' content! Sorry, but our mothers raised us better than that. Let's just clean up after ourselves because we're supposed to and not ruin the playground for those who want to use it when we're done. Imagine people treating your home like they do the world? It would be a long time before you invited them back, no? What's right is right, and reason enough in itself to behave properly and be clean.
Why would anybody think it's some sort of national tragedy that 3 million people were unprepared for the switch from analog to digital TV transmission? What, they didn't have enough notice? Well, things change sometimes. How many of us are still sitting on huge music collections of vinyl records, cassettes and 8 track tapes? Nobody announced CDs, they just sort of happened. Now digital TV happened and that's that. Your old TV antenna is a rotary phone now, a buggy whip. We all have to get with the program of cell phones, computers and all the rest of the doodads that are standard operating procedure in modern life. Or not. There's always that option, one that works out just fine for the Amish. Life goes on...
Why would anybody obsess over the manner of Michael Jackson's death? The guy isn't even cold yet and you have a cottage industry sprouting up wondering who was responsible for his drug use. Well, who else would that be? Us? And that whole bit about how society somehow failed him? Exactly what did we ever do to the guy? Listen to his records? Make him fabulously wealthy? Isn't it his own business and his own responsibility how he ran his life? Who cares how he died? It's a big loss and it's sad, but certainly not something to convene an emergency session of Congress over. There hasn't even been any autopsy results yet, so maybe we can let the poor guy rest and let his family deal with their pain with a little dignity. Oh wait, this is America, and we own our celebrities, dead or alive. Never mind...
Why would anyone who doesn't live there think they can solve the problems in the Middle East? Even the best brains who do live there don't have a clue. It's an area most people in the world would consider uninhabitable filled with people who hate each other that the world would pretty much ignore if there wasn't so much oil buried under the blazing sands in a lot of the countries there. You add the intertribal hatred to the insatiable greed for petroleum by the outside world and add a huge dash of tyrannical leaders wanting to be very, very important in the grand scheme of things and you have yourself a set of unsolvable problems. You'd think the Nobel Peace Prize committee would get tired of being burned and pass a rule barring the awarding of their prestigious prize to a bunch of clueless gas bags looking to earn Great Statesman points. Maybe the better deal in the Middle East is to let the people who have to live in that sweltering sandbox figure it out for themselves. They could do no worse. Or maybe they could, but it is their sandbox, and they are the ones who have to deal with any grand schemes made by dreamers. Better it should be home grown dreamers than carpetbaggers with ulterior motives who don't give a rat's ass about the actual people there or the quality of their lives.
Whether or not you believe in the threat of global warming, why would anybody oppose conservation measures and clean technology? Weren't we always taught not to shit where we eat just because that's the cleaner way to live? Why should we maintain a tidy planet only because of some dire threat? That's like saying that if there is no possibility of global warming, well, pollute away! Poison the land and the waters and blacken the sky to our hearts' content! Sorry, but our mothers raised us better than that. Let's just clean up after ourselves because we're supposed to and not ruin the playground for those who want to use it when we're done. Imagine people treating your home like they do the world? It would be a long time before you invited them back, no? What's right is right, and reason enough in itself to behave properly and be clean.
Why would anybody think it's some sort of national tragedy that 3 million people were unprepared for the switch from analog to digital TV transmission? What, they didn't have enough notice? Well, things change sometimes. How many of us are still sitting on huge music collections of vinyl records, cassettes and 8 track tapes? Nobody announced CDs, they just sort of happened. Now digital TV happened and that's that. Your old TV antenna is a rotary phone now, a buggy whip. We all have to get with the program of cell phones, computers and all the rest of the doodads that are standard operating procedure in modern life. Or not. There's always that option, one that works out just fine for the Amish. Life goes on...
June 26, 2009
MICHAEL JACKSON - HE SURE WAS DIFFERENT
So, Michael Jackson has died at only 50. Fittingly enough, his death was surrounded in paradoxes and shrouded in mystery. A man of monumental talent, a singer, songwriter, dancer and all around entertainer, he lived his life as he saw fit, whether or not the rest of the world understood or approved. And it was by many accounts a bizarre world, made possible by fabulous wealth and a willingness to be considered strange. Only it probably didn't feel strange at all to him, more likely it felt like home. And in the end, it was really no one else's business since they weren't the ones who had to live that life, he was. It was his to do with as he pleased.
His troubles were as well-documeted as his music career, even resulting in child-molestation charges, of which he was acquitted. That he preferred the company of children to adults was well known. The home he built for himself in California was basically a child's theme park, aptly called Neverland. His adventures in self-invention led to a series of plastic surgeries that physically transformed him before the eyes of his public. Again, he didn't seem to care what anybody thought of his metamorphosis. He also entered into a couple of oddball marriages, including one to the daughter of Elvis Presley, the original pop superstar who went his own way lifestyle-wise and died prematurely under mysterious circumstances.
Also like Elvis, he was always making dramatic comebacks, another #1 hit never seeming out of reach. At the time of his death he was in rehearsals for a spectacular European tour, the seats already sold out. The promoters of the tour recently had him undergo an extensive medical checkup and he was pronounced fit and healthy, further making his sudden death an enigma. Well, enigma or not, the world is mourning Michael Jackson today and his death is dominating all media outlets. Again like Elvis, it is his music that will be his enduring legacy, an impressive musical catalog that has long been a staple of popular American culture and will continue to be for years. And his breakthrough work in music video remains the gold standard for that genre.
Few actually knew the man, and no one owned him. He followed his own instincts for better or worse and lived life on his own terms, as far as that is possible. One of the most public and publicized people to ever live, he still maintained his privacy and shielded his 3 children from the white hot glare of his fame. He was a public figure, not public property. The shrewd business acumen that led him to launch a solo career at age 13 and outbid Paul McCartney on the Lennon-McCartney Beatles song catalog eventually failed him and he allegedly died in unbelievable debt, rumored to be in the hundreds of millions. But again, who knows? Like so much about the man and his life, speculation and rumors often take the place of hard facts.
He wasn't in the business of confirming or denying all that much, and is beyond all that now. He leaves us like he came to us, a mystery and a very different person from most human beings. Once again he answers to no one and seeks no approval for who he is or how he lived or died. Michael Jackson was who he was, did what he did and thought what he thought. And that's just fine, and his unbreakable right. In the end what we have is his music, and that's more than enough. His album "Thriller" remains the single biggest selling album ever, and in total all his albums sold over 750 million copies, an astonishing figure. The mourning for him is heartfelt and real on every continent, not only his home nation. His art touched billions of lives. He spread joy and love. No matter what else he was or wasn't, that's an excellent legacy. Here's hoping Michael Jackson finds the peace he never found here.
His troubles were as well-documeted as his music career, even resulting in child-molestation charges, of which he was acquitted. That he preferred the company of children to adults was well known. The home he built for himself in California was basically a child's theme park, aptly called Neverland. His adventures in self-invention led to a series of plastic surgeries that physically transformed him before the eyes of his public. Again, he didn't seem to care what anybody thought of his metamorphosis. He also entered into a couple of oddball marriages, including one to the daughter of Elvis Presley, the original pop superstar who went his own way lifestyle-wise and died prematurely under mysterious circumstances.
Also like Elvis, he was always making dramatic comebacks, another #1 hit never seeming out of reach. At the time of his death he was in rehearsals for a spectacular European tour, the seats already sold out. The promoters of the tour recently had him undergo an extensive medical checkup and he was pronounced fit and healthy, further making his sudden death an enigma. Well, enigma or not, the world is mourning Michael Jackson today and his death is dominating all media outlets. Again like Elvis, it is his music that will be his enduring legacy, an impressive musical catalog that has long been a staple of popular American culture and will continue to be for years. And his breakthrough work in music video remains the gold standard for that genre.
Few actually knew the man, and no one owned him. He followed his own instincts for better or worse and lived life on his own terms, as far as that is possible. One of the most public and publicized people to ever live, he still maintained his privacy and shielded his 3 children from the white hot glare of his fame. He was a public figure, not public property. The shrewd business acumen that led him to launch a solo career at age 13 and outbid Paul McCartney on the Lennon-McCartney Beatles song catalog eventually failed him and he allegedly died in unbelievable debt, rumored to be in the hundreds of millions. But again, who knows? Like so much about the man and his life, speculation and rumors often take the place of hard facts.
He wasn't in the business of confirming or denying all that much, and is beyond all that now. He leaves us like he came to us, a mystery and a very different person from most human beings. Once again he answers to no one and seeks no approval for who he is or how he lived or died. Michael Jackson was who he was, did what he did and thought what he thought. And that's just fine, and his unbreakable right. In the end what we have is his music, and that's more than enough. His album "Thriller" remains the single biggest selling album ever, and in total all his albums sold over 750 million copies, an astonishing figure. The mourning for him is heartfelt and real on every continent, not only his home nation. His art touched billions of lives. He spread joy and love. No matter what else he was or wasn't, that's an excellent legacy. Here's hoping Michael Jackson finds the peace he never found here.
June 25, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 419
"She sells seashells by the sea shore" is not only a tongue twister, but also a classic illustration of a bad business plan. It's far more profitable to sell them inland where they are a novelty and not readily available for free.
STILL WONDERING...
You have to wonder what the one Supreme Court Justice out the nine of them was thinking when he dissented from the Court's 8 to 1 decision that it is wrong and unconstitutional to strip-search a child. Maybe somebody should strip-search the hard drive on his computer and see what he's downloading.
You have to wonder about President Mahmoud "Peewee the Puppet" Ahmadinejad of Iran demanding an apology from President Obama of America for his condemnation of Iran's brutal reaction to the mass protests against the election results that saw Peewee getting more votes than there are voters. The authorities went ballistic, arresting, pummeling and killing protesters. Of course he didn't deny the election fraud or the brutal crackdown, he just resented Mr. Obama mentioning these things in public. Obama has so far said nothing in response, figuring Peewee will soon have his hands pretty full trying to avoid getting killed along with the Mad Mullahs who pull his puppet strings in the coming Iranian civil war.
You have to wonder about people who drop casual cultural references to reality shows they assume everyone watches. Here's a clue: everyone doesn't. Most of us are happily unaware of who's who in these white trash manifestos and the inside jokes and references mean zip to us. The standard reaction is "Who? What?" and then a very brief bit of wondering about such odd things. A no time are we tempted to tune in to "Lost in The Amazing Race With Desperate Untalented Nobodies."
You have to really wonder about the screening process involved in picking a candidate for Governor in our states. Add Sanford to the names McGreevey, Spitzer, Palen and Schwarzenegger. Then again, when you look at the horrendous quality of the various State Legislatures, you stop wondering.
You have to wonder about Allen Stanford, the Texas billionaire who was just arrested for running a 7 billion dollar investment scam. Not wonder about his consuming greed or his casual disregard for other human beings, but exactly how a con man from Texas got the name Sir Allen Stanford. It seems he had dual citizenship in the United States and Antigua, one of the last vestiges of the British Empire. You also have to wonder about the people who knighted him, providing him with the "Sir." Did they think there was any other reason an American investment guy applies for citizenship in Antigua than laundering money and hiding from American authorities? He's only around the 100th thief to do this. You'd think they'd get the drift by now, no?
You have to wonder why U.S. corporations have still not hired the guys who talk young men in the prime of their lives into becoming suicide bombers. These guys could sell ice to Eskimos. Maybe General Motors wouldn't be in the dire straits it finds itself in if they had hired some of these guys to sell their cars. They make P.T Barnum look like a rank amateur.
You have to wonder about the strategy of dismantling the Iraqi Army once they were defeated. Armies don't give a crap who's the boss of the country, they do their army duty for whoever is the boss. It sure wasn't their idea to have Sadam Hussein in charge of things. Now that it's time for America to leave Iraq it looks like the Iraqi Keystone Kops will be asked to keep order over there, under the direction of General Barney Fife. Good luck to Iraq, or whatever the new countries that form from its ashes call themselves.
You have to wonder about President Mahmoud "Peewee the Puppet" Ahmadinejad of Iran demanding an apology from President Obama of America for his condemnation of Iran's brutal reaction to the mass protests against the election results that saw Peewee getting more votes than there are voters. The authorities went ballistic, arresting, pummeling and killing protesters. Of course he didn't deny the election fraud or the brutal crackdown, he just resented Mr. Obama mentioning these things in public. Obama has so far said nothing in response, figuring Peewee will soon have his hands pretty full trying to avoid getting killed along with the Mad Mullahs who pull his puppet strings in the coming Iranian civil war.
You have to wonder about people who drop casual cultural references to reality shows they assume everyone watches. Here's a clue: everyone doesn't. Most of us are happily unaware of who's who in these white trash manifestos and the inside jokes and references mean zip to us. The standard reaction is "Who? What?" and then a very brief bit of wondering about such odd things. A no time are we tempted to tune in to "Lost in The Amazing Race With Desperate Untalented Nobodies."
You have to really wonder about the screening process involved in picking a candidate for Governor in our states. Add Sanford to the names McGreevey, Spitzer, Palen and Schwarzenegger. Then again, when you look at the horrendous quality of the various State Legislatures, you stop wondering.
You have to wonder about Allen Stanford, the Texas billionaire who was just arrested for running a 7 billion dollar investment scam. Not wonder about his consuming greed or his casual disregard for other human beings, but exactly how a con man from Texas got the name Sir Allen Stanford. It seems he had dual citizenship in the United States and Antigua, one of the last vestiges of the British Empire. You also have to wonder about the people who knighted him, providing him with the "Sir." Did they think there was any other reason an American investment guy applies for citizenship in Antigua than laundering money and hiding from American authorities? He's only around the 100th thief to do this. You'd think they'd get the drift by now, no?
You have to wonder why U.S. corporations have still not hired the guys who talk young men in the prime of their lives into becoming suicide bombers. These guys could sell ice to Eskimos. Maybe General Motors wouldn't be in the dire straits it finds itself in if they had hired some of these guys to sell their cars. They make P.T Barnum look like a rank amateur.
You have to wonder about the strategy of dismantling the Iraqi Army once they were defeated. Armies don't give a crap who's the boss of the country, they do their army duty for whoever is the boss. It sure wasn't their idea to have Sadam Hussein in charge of things. Now that it's time for America to leave Iraq it looks like the Iraqi Keystone Kops will be asked to keep order over there, under the direction of General Barney Fife. Good luck to Iraq, or whatever the new countries that form from its ashes call themselves.
June 24, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 418
They say that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Well, yeah, it does. It also makes you an absolute buffoon for our endless absolute amusement.
THE MULLAH WHISPERER STRIKES OUT
Well, after only one therapy session with Iran's Supreme Leader, a particularly frisky and uncontrollable Mullah named Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Mullah Whisperer had declared this creature to be incorrigible. Yesterday bobcrespo.com dispatched the Mullah Whisperer to Tehran to straighten the guy out and he got right on it, taking the red eye to the Iranian capitol straight from Lebanon, where he was just finishing up a successful training session with some formerly rabid Mullahs there. He interviewed the subject and immediately began behavioral training, but it seems that this is one Mullah that is completely averse to adaptation to social situations, exhibiting a complete disregard for others.
It was a stunning admission from the Mullah Whisperer, who was hired by this website with the simple aim of getting Iran off the front page of every newspaper, not really caring one way or the next what goes on in Iran. We have no desire to tell the Iranian people what sort of nation they should run, so long as it doesn't hog all the headlines when we drink our morning coffee and peruse the newspapers. Ayatollah Khamenei is the guy who's making the place crazy, so we figured he was the prime candidate for having a few sessions with the Mullah Whisperer. Imagine our chagrin when The Whisperer said the guy should be euthanized after only one session? He said this was one of those rare instances where it was immediately obvious that this was one very mad, very rabid Mullah with no chance of being rehabilitated.
The Mullah Whisperer's words were borne out just this morning, when every newspaper's front page sported Khamenei's likeness and the lead story was how Iran will never, ever give in to demands for reform and that further crackdowns can be expected. While admitting that his government sort of overdid it in the election-stealing process, where they had their guy winning by a landslide of more votes than there are Iranian voters, he declared this act of electoral thievery was no violation (!) of Iranian law. He then went on to outline a number of whacky conspiracy theories, another sure sign of delusional tendencies. When things go south for guys like this, it's never their fault, it's always some shadowy conspiracy against them. He's unleashing his Revolutionary Guards to kill, pummel and gas people in the streets and is locking up protesters and political figures at at impressive clip, pretty much ensuring his own eventual downfall.
So look for Iran to be in in the forefront of the news for a good long while. Like it or not, that's where all the juicy stories of mindless government brutality and revolution will be coming from, always big sellers in the news. On the plus side, however, Iran will no longer be the perceived threat to regional and international security it has been of late. Nations in the throes of revolution and civil war are rarely big players on the world stage until they sort out their own internal troubles. And as far as them obtaining nuclear weapons? Well, thanks to the Mad Mullah, that's on the back burner for the foreseeable future. Looks like it's back to basics weapons-wise for Iran, with stones and molotov cocktails thrown by the protesters, prompting the predictable response of tear gas, bullets and truncheons from the authorities.
So maybe sending in The Mullah Whisperer was all to the good after all, especially since with his guarantee of success or your money back lets bobcrespo.com off the hook for his hefty fee. His unsuccessful session with Ayatollah Khamenei also served to inform the world just what sort of false threat Iran was in the first place. It is a nation filled with regular, normal people being led by a very crazy, delusional and violent government, sort of like it was here under Bush The Younger and his Supreme Leader, Shotgun Dick Cheney. Just like it was for those 8 years in America, the Iranian president does not run their government. Which makes the idea of rigging the election of their president so lopsidedly a puzzling thing. Had they made it look like their boy won by a more modest margin, that would have mollified the opposition into thinking they came close, we'll get' em next time and all that other delusional bullshit, thus avoiding a lot of headaches.
It seems delusion and misconception are the main ingredients of Middle East politics, and now this Supreme Dunderhead Khamenei has let them rule him completely. If he had allowed his man to win by a whisker instead of a landslide, there would be no riots and no revolution and he could have blithely continued about his business of being an international thorn in everybody's side. But those guys never see forest for the trees. Once you get the word Supreme in front of your name, your ego is bound to get out of control. All he had to do was Google Diana Ross to confirm this, but no, Khamenei just had to follow his worst instincts and pour gasoline on the fire, and now we're stuck with his headlines until somebody finally puts him to sleep and restores order in Iran. When even the Mullah Whisperer can't reach you, your days are numbered.
It was a stunning admission from the Mullah Whisperer, who was hired by this website with the simple aim of getting Iran off the front page of every newspaper, not really caring one way or the next what goes on in Iran. We have no desire to tell the Iranian people what sort of nation they should run, so long as it doesn't hog all the headlines when we drink our morning coffee and peruse the newspapers. Ayatollah Khamenei is the guy who's making the place crazy, so we figured he was the prime candidate for having a few sessions with the Mullah Whisperer. Imagine our chagrin when The Whisperer said the guy should be euthanized after only one session? He said this was one of those rare instances where it was immediately obvious that this was one very mad, very rabid Mullah with no chance of being rehabilitated.
The Mullah Whisperer's words were borne out just this morning, when every newspaper's front page sported Khamenei's likeness and the lead story was how Iran will never, ever give in to demands for reform and that further crackdowns can be expected. While admitting that his government sort of overdid it in the election-stealing process, where they had their guy winning by a landslide of more votes than there are Iranian voters, he declared this act of electoral thievery was no violation (!) of Iranian law. He then went on to outline a number of whacky conspiracy theories, another sure sign of delusional tendencies. When things go south for guys like this, it's never their fault, it's always some shadowy conspiracy against them. He's unleashing his Revolutionary Guards to kill, pummel and gas people in the streets and is locking up protesters and political figures at at impressive clip, pretty much ensuring his own eventual downfall.
So look for Iran to be in in the forefront of the news for a good long while. Like it or not, that's where all the juicy stories of mindless government brutality and revolution will be coming from, always big sellers in the news. On the plus side, however, Iran will no longer be the perceived threat to regional and international security it has been of late. Nations in the throes of revolution and civil war are rarely big players on the world stage until they sort out their own internal troubles. And as far as them obtaining nuclear weapons? Well, thanks to the Mad Mullah, that's on the back burner for the foreseeable future. Looks like it's back to basics weapons-wise for Iran, with stones and molotov cocktails thrown by the protesters, prompting the predictable response of tear gas, bullets and truncheons from the authorities.
So maybe sending in The Mullah Whisperer was all to the good after all, especially since with his guarantee of success or your money back lets bobcrespo.com off the hook for his hefty fee. His unsuccessful session with Ayatollah Khamenei also served to inform the world just what sort of false threat Iran was in the first place. It is a nation filled with regular, normal people being led by a very crazy, delusional and violent government, sort of like it was here under Bush The Younger and his Supreme Leader, Shotgun Dick Cheney. Just like it was for those 8 years in America, the Iranian president does not run their government. Which makes the idea of rigging the election of their president so lopsidedly a puzzling thing. Had they made it look like their boy won by a more modest margin, that would have mollified the opposition into thinking they came close, we'll get' em next time and all that other delusional bullshit, thus avoiding a lot of headaches.
It seems delusion and misconception are the main ingredients of Middle East politics, and now this Supreme Dunderhead Khamenei has let them rule him completely. If he had allowed his man to win by a whisker instead of a landslide, there would be no riots and no revolution and he could have blithely continued about his business of being an international thorn in everybody's side. But those guys never see forest for the trees. Once you get the word Supreme in front of your name, your ego is bound to get out of control. All he had to do was Google Diana Ross to confirm this, but no, Khamenei just had to follow his worst instincts and pour gasoline on the fire, and now we're stuck with his headlines until somebody finally puts him to sleep and restores order in Iran. When even the Mullah Whisperer can't reach you, your days are numbered.
June 22, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 417
If you act like a doormat, don't complain when people walk on you. Doormats have no other use.
THIS A JOB FOR THE MULLAH WHISPERER
If you're like a lot of us, you're getting a little ticked off at the nation of Iran hogging all the headline space in your newspaper. Okay, we got it, they held an election for president and the outcome was rigged, which really isn't the beef among Iranians. It's the fact that it was rigged to give the incumbent a landslide victory that pisses them off so much and sends them shrieking into the streets. If the government had made it a close but respectable rip-off, we'd be reading about our own crooked politicians instead of theirs, and the the world would go back to not thinking about Iran all that much.
And it's not even like their president gets to run the damned country, either. There's an old crackpot in robes called The Supreme Leader that actually holds all the reins of power in Iran. This guy's named Ali Khamenei. That's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to you. Seems he's the successor to one of the most miserable looking bastards to ever start a revolution, the late, unlamented Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, he of the overthrowing of the Shah and the American Embassy hostage taking back in 1979. It seems he didn't like the way things were shaping up in Iran back then, people getting educations, women not wearing potato sacks and the nation as a whole being a stable, modern, moderate and prosperous one.
So Khomeni started the Iranian Revolution and all of a sudden Iran was the Islamic Republic of Iran, run by a group of his fellow mullahs with him as Supreme Leader, industriously leading Iran back to a time that never was, some made-up fantasy about when Muslim women wore potato sacks and Persia (Iran) was the light of the world. The fact that the chador is a relatively recent innovation created by men who fear women and prefer teenage boys and the last time the Persian Empire dominated the world was over a thousand years before Islam was invented didn't stop these delusional clowns from imposing the sugar plum visions in their heads on 70 million people.
The world learned all it needed to know about Ruhollah Khomeini when a video was shown shortly after he took power of a ten year old naked girl with her freshly severed hands hung on a string around her neck being paraded through the streets with other so-called "criminals and enemies of the state." As she stumbled along weeping, holding her bleeding stumps high trying not to bleed to death while being spat upon and stoned by Khomeini's henchman, you wondered how long such a cruel and insane regime could endure. Well, 40 years so far, and they've cost their nation the world's respect and their own freedom, and have done and said some very despicable things. The final straw, apparently, for decent Iranians was the rigging of a sham election. Why anyone needs to rig a meaningless election anyway is a mystery, but no one knows what goes on under the turbans of Ayatollahs.
And now they've gone too far. These people are hogging headline space as if this was important to anyone outside Iran. It is not. It's sort of up to Iranians to straighten out Iran. A lot of world leaders have been trying to demonize the whole nation in recent years, ignoring the fact that Iran is a modern, fairly westernized and educated nation. The fact that their crazy mullah government has been for years funding terror networks is certainly not the fault of the entire nation, any more than a grandmother from Spokane was responsible for Bush The Younger's heinous invasion of Iraq. And all their rumblings about building nuclear weapons? So far those efforts have been as real as their invented glorious past.
Anytime you have a theocracy brutally repressing a nation, you're bound to see a troubled land torn against itself, and that's what Iran is right now. And it's not like the rest of us can do much of anything about it. The government there is already trying to blame Western media and governments for their own ineptitude in rigging elections. They say the rest of the world has inflamed Iranian citizens with propaganda. Well, if by that they mean that the rest of the world by and large holds honest elections and doesn't have any Supreme Leaders in charge of the elected governments, well, maybe they have a point. The very existence of a better way is a temptation to others to try to make their own lives better.
So, barring the rest of us imitating the ways of Iran, what's to be done about these crazy mullahs so we can have our newspapers back? It's time to call in The Mullah Whisperer! Yes, there's a guy who specializes in soothing unruly Ayatollahs, those frisky scamps who just won't listen and ignore all attempts at training. The Mullah Whisperer insists that they are not intrinsically bad, and don't need be put to sleep, at least outside of a mad, rabid few anyway. He says they're misunderstood creatures and can be persuaded by his own tried and true methods when all other avenues have proved fruitless.
Well, judging by events in Iran, it looks like the Ayatollahs over there are really chewing up the furniture and crapping on the carpet, so this is clearly a job for The Mullah Whisperer. The peace of mind of an entire nation is at stake here, to say nothing of the rest of the world wanting to read about something else over their morning cup of coffee for a change. Towards this end, bobcrespo.com is volunteering to commission The Mullah Whisperer to fly to Tehran and straighten out the Ayatollahs. His job will be to convince these unruly Supreme Council people that the careful lessons and training they received from their mothers is all they need to know, and from now on it's the Golden Rule or The Mullah Kennel for them.
No more calling anybody Great Satans, no more funding of suicide bombers and no more threatening to annihilate their neighbors. He will gently but forcefully persuade these Mullahs that being well-behaved is in everybody's best interest. The Mullah Whisperer is eager to tackle this challenge, and is now rehearsing his "bad Mullah, bad Mullah," speech and packing a lot of Mullah treats like severed hands and porno pictures of teenaged boys as a reward for good behavior. He's even bringing rolled up newspapers in case they need a sharp rap on the snout or a peek at what kind of headline hogs they have become. It's time to reclaims the news.
And it's not even like their president gets to run the damned country, either. There's an old crackpot in robes called The Supreme Leader that actually holds all the reins of power in Iran. This guy's named Ali Khamenei. That's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to you. Seems he's the successor to one of the most miserable looking bastards to ever start a revolution, the late, unlamented Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni, he of the overthrowing of the Shah and the American Embassy hostage taking back in 1979. It seems he didn't like the way things were shaping up in Iran back then, people getting educations, women not wearing potato sacks and the nation as a whole being a stable, modern, moderate and prosperous one.
So Khomeni started the Iranian Revolution and all of a sudden Iran was the Islamic Republic of Iran, run by a group of his fellow mullahs with him as Supreme Leader, industriously leading Iran back to a time that never was, some made-up fantasy about when Muslim women wore potato sacks and Persia (Iran) was the light of the world. The fact that the chador is a relatively recent innovation created by men who fear women and prefer teenage boys and the last time the Persian Empire dominated the world was over a thousand years before Islam was invented didn't stop these delusional clowns from imposing the sugar plum visions in their heads on 70 million people.
The world learned all it needed to know about Ruhollah Khomeini when a video was shown shortly after he took power of a ten year old naked girl with her freshly severed hands hung on a string around her neck being paraded through the streets with other so-called "criminals and enemies of the state." As she stumbled along weeping, holding her bleeding stumps high trying not to bleed to death while being spat upon and stoned by Khomeini's henchman, you wondered how long such a cruel and insane regime could endure. Well, 40 years so far, and they've cost their nation the world's respect and their own freedom, and have done and said some very despicable things. The final straw, apparently, for decent Iranians was the rigging of a sham election. Why anyone needs to rig a meaningless election anyway is a mystery, but no one knows what goes on under the turbans of Ayatollahs.
And now they've gone too far. These people are hogging headline space as if this was important to anyone outside Iran. It is not. It's sort of up to Iranians to straighten out Iran. A lot of world leaders have been trying to demonize the whole nation in recent years, ignoring the fact that Iran is a modern, fairly westernized and educated nation. The fact that their crazy mullah government has been for years funding terror networks is certainly not the fault of the entire nation, any more than a grandmother from Spokane was responsible for Bush The Younger's heinous invasion of Iraq. And all their rumblings about building nuclear weapons? So far those efforts have been as real as their invented glorious past.
Anytime you have a theocracy brutally repressing a nation, you're bound to see a troubled land torn against itself, and that's what Iran is right now. And it's not like the rest of us can do much of anything about it. The government there is already trying to blame Western media and governments for their own ineptitude in rigging elections. They say the rest of the world has inflamed Iranian citizens with propaganda. Well, if by that they mean that the rest of the world by and large holds honest elections and doesn't have any Supreme Leaders in charge of the elected governments, well, maybe they have a point. The very existence of a better way is a temptation to others to try to make their own lives better.
So, barring the rest of us imitating the ways of Iran, what's to be done about these crazy mullahs so we can have our newspapers back? It's time to call in The Mullah Whisperer! Yes, there's a guy who specializes in soothing unruly Ayatollahs, those frisky scamps who just won't listen and ignore all attempts at training. The Mullah Whisperer insists that they are not intrinsically bad, and don't need be put to sleep, at least outside of a mad, rabid few anyway. He says they're misunderstood creatures and can be persuaded by his own tried and true methods when all other avenues have proved fruitless.
Well, judging by events in Iran, it looks like the Ayatollahs over there are really chewing up the furniture and crapping on the carpet, so this is clearly a job for The Mullah Whisperer. The peace of mind of an entire nation is at stake here, to say nothing of the rest of the world wanting to read about something else over their morning cup of coffee for a change. Towards this end, bobcrespo.com is volunteering to commission The Mullah Whisperer to fly to Tehran and straighten out the Ayatollahs. His job will be to convince these unruly Supreme Council people that the careful lessons and training they received from their mothers is all they need to know, and from now on it's the Golden Rule or The Mullah Kennel for them.
No more calling anybody Great Satans, no more funding of suicide bombers and no more threatening to annihilate their neighbors. He will gently but forcefully persuade these Mullahs that being well-behaved is in everybody's best interest. The Mullah Whisperer is eager to tackle this challenge, and is now rehearsing his "bad Mullah, bad Mullah," speech and packing a lot of Mullah treats like severed hands and porno pictures of teenaged boys as a reward for good behavior. He's even bringing rolled up newspapers in case they need a sharp rap on the snout or a peek at what kind of headline hogs they have become. It's time to reclaims the news.
June 21, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 416
Don't flatter yourself that you are too smart for this world to hold your interest. Smarter people than you found plenty to do. If you are always bored, chances are you're pretty damned dull yourself.
JUST GOES TO SHOW YOU...
The head coach of the Iraqi National Karate team was slain yesterday. This supreme master of the marshal arts was bested by someone trained in the ancient western art of gun. Just goes to show you that there's always a bigger fish in the sea, or at least one with a more effective weapon than all that chopping and kicking...
American officials have urged Iranians on both sides of the Iran post-presidential election rioting to back off on the violence. 13 people were killed in one day, or about 76 fewer human beings than are murdered in America every day. Just goes to show you that one nation's shocking violent death toll is only another day at the office in another nation...
Speaking of post-election protests in Iran, reports are surfacing that the social networking tool Twitter played a large part in organizing protests and circumventing the ban on news reporting. It is already being called the Twitter Revolution. Wonder if they use OMG? Or maybe it's OMA, for Oh My Allah?Probably not too many lol's or emoticons being used when the tear gas and bullets start flying, but just maybe some comrades in arms have made a new bff in the heat of battle. Just goes to show you that even the dumbest ideas can come in handy every so often, as long as you don't exceed 140 characters...
So now the Republican Congressmen are Twittering back and forth, comparing themselves to the Iranian rioters and accusing the American government of isolating them. Well, they can't blame the administration, since it was the American people who voted them off the In-Power Island. Doesn't stop these former power abusers from crying sour grapes all day every day. Just goes to show that some people never get it, never will and never get over themselves...
Steve Jobs, the multi-billionaire brain behind Apple computers and ipods, has just received a liver transplant. Now if they could only do something about giving him a new personality, maybe he'd be a semi-tolerable person. Just goes to show you that wealth and brains don't guarantee health or happiness. Look at Bill Gates, who's the richest guy on Earth but is still stuck being Bill Gates, possibly the dullest person ever.
Speaking of strange individuals, it looks like computer hackers are finally getting their due, sort of. The United States government and its military forces are forming new units dedicated to fighting computer sabotage and attacking enemy computer systems. Guess who they'll be forced to hire and provide with security clearances? That's right, all those weird geeks with the vampire complexions, Star Trek fixations and inflatable girlfriends who are really good at hacking into supposedly electronically secure data bases. Just goes to show you that maybe you should have been a lot nicer to the Nerd Herd back in high school now that they will have the official power to hack your identity into tiny little pieces...
Susan Boyle, the frumpy spinster who knocked everybody out with her great singing voice on the TV show "Britain's Got Talent," lost in the final voting to some American-style break dancers dressed as L.A. street thugs, the kind of act that went out of style around here just as it was getting off the ground about 20 years ago. The dance group is called Diversity and consists of ten attractive young dancers leaping around and contorting like there was an electric short circuit onstage that was sending strong jolts of current through them. Just goes to show you why music and video aren't always a match made in heaven, and that young and attractive trumps forty-something and dowdy every time, no matter how much or how little talent anyone has...
The acclaimed scientific study that purported to identify the gene for depression has turned out to be faulty science that doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny. One result is the original team that did the lab work and published their findings is said to be suffering from extreme depression, which indicating that there just might be an irony gene floating around in our DNA somewhere. Which just goes to show you that this whole identification of specific genes for specific personality traits has a very long way to go before these God-complex people can offer consumers custom-made babies.
In a startling outbreak of common sense, British schools are scrapping the grammar rule "i before e except after c." There were always far too many exceptions to that weird rule, so many that it seems to have kicked in the depression gene in a lot of schoolchildren trying to figure out the crazy rules to English grammar. Just goes to show you that the British aren't all as dumb as the break dancing fans over there.
The animal rights organization PETA is going ballistic at New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg for catching and killing a couple of thousand geese who were endangering human life at New York's airports by getting sucked into jet engines and making the planes crash. They're also peeved at President Obama for swatting a fly. Which just goes to show you how far up their asses some people have buried their heads. They might have earned some humanitarian points for themselves if they had volunteered to ship those geese to some of the 36,000 people who die of starvation every single day somewhere on this planet, but they'd never do that since human life holds little value to them, except maybe their own lives, such as they are.
American officials have urged Iranians on both sides of the Iran post-presidential election rioting to back off on the violence. 13 people were killed in one day, or about 76 fewer human beings than are murdered in America every day. Just goes to show you that one nation's shocking violent death toll is only another day at the office in another nation...
Speaking of post-election protests in Iran, reports are surfacing that the social networking tool Twitter played a large part in organizing protests and circumventing the ban on news reporting. It is already being called the Twitter Revolution. Wonder if they use OMG? Or maybe it's OMA, for Oh My Allah?Probably not too many lol's or emoticons being used when the tear gas and bullets start flying, but just maybe some comrades in arms have made a new bff in the heat of battle. Just goes to show you that even the dumbest ideas can come in handy every so often, as long as you don't exceed 140 characters...
So now the Republican Congressmen are Twittering back and forth, comparing themselves to the Iranian rioters and accusing the American government of isolating them. Well, they can't blame the administration, since it was the American people who voted them off the In-Power Island. Doesn't stop these former power abusers from crying sour grapes all day every day. Just goes to show that some people never get it, never will and never get over themselves...
Steve Jobs, the multi-billionaire brain behind Apple computers and ipods, has just received a liver transplant. Now if they could only do something about giving him a new personality, maybe he'd be a semi-tolerable person. Just goes to show you that wealth and brains don't guarantee health or happiness. Look at Bill Gates, who's the richest guy on Earth but is still stuck being Bill Gates, possibly the dullest person ever.
Speaking of strange individuals, it looks like computer hackers are finally getting their due, sort of. The United States government and its military forces are forming new units dedicated to fighting computer sabotage and attacking enemy computer systems. Guess who they'll be forced to hire and provide with security clearances? That's right, all those weird geeks with the vampire complexions, Star Trek fixations and inflatable girlfriends who are really good at hacking into supposedly electronically secure data bases. Just goes to show you that maybe you should have been a lot nicer to the Nerd Herd back in high school now that they will have the official power to hack your identity into tiny little pieces...
Susan Boyle, the frumpy spinster who knocked everybody out with her great singing voice on the TV show "Britain's Got Talent," lost in the final voting to some American-style break dancers dressed as L.A. street thugs, the kind of act that went out of style around here just as it was getting off the ground about 20 years ago. The dance group is called Diversity and consists of ten attractive young dancers leaping around and contorting like there was an electric short circuit onstage that was sending strong jolts of current through them. Just goes to show you why music and video aren't always a match made in heaven, and that young and attractive trumps forty-something and dowdy every time, no matter how much or how little talent anyone has...
The acclaimed scientific study that purported to identify the gene for depression has turned out to be faulty science that doesn't stand up to scientific scrutiny. One result is the original team that did the lab work and published their findings is said to be suffering from extreme depression, which indicating that there just might be an irony gene floating around in our DNA somewhere. Which just goes to show you that this whole identification of specific genes for specific personality traits has a very long way to go before these God-complex people can offer consumers custom-made babies.
In a startling outbreak of common sense, British schools are scrapping the grammar rule "i before e except after c." There were always far too many exceptions to that weird rule, so many that it seems to have kicked in the depression gene in a lot of schoolchildren trying to figure out the crazy rules to English grammar. Just goes to show you that the British aren't all as dumb as the break dancing fans over there.
The animal rights organization PETA is going ballistic at New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg for catching and killing a couple of thousand geese who were endangering human life at New York's airports by getting sucked into jet engines and making the planes crash. They're also peeved at President Obama for swatting a fly. Which just goes to show you how far up their asses some people have buried their heads. They might have earned some humanitarian points for themselves if they had volunteered to ship those geese to some of the 36,000 people who die of starvation every single day somewhere on this planet, but they'd never do that since human life holds little value to them, except maybe their own lives, such as they are.
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 415
Some people consider themselves intense and let you know it. The rest of us think they're irritating assholes who should go be intense someplace else.
UFO BLACK BOX TRANSCRIPT
The following is a excerpt from the flight log of an alien space ship visiting the Earth. The audio recording was found at the top-secret wreckage of a flying saucer in a corn field in Iowa about 3 weeks ago. Surprisingly, the aliens piloting the craft speak English, but with a very slight New Zealand accent, sort of like Sam Neill. The names of the aliens are Kenny and Lorenzo, another big surprise. Bobcrespo.com was fortunate enough to obtain a transcript of the flight recordings, don't ask how. Check out what aliens think of us:
Kenny: "Well, I don't know about you, pal, but I'll be glad to get off this one horse planet."
Lorenzo: "Amen to that, brother, but I will miss the babes. You have your report ready?"
Kenny "You kidding? What the hell am I gonna tell Central abut this crazy place? They told us to keep our work on the QT and only interview people in isolated areas! What the hell do they expect?"
Lorenzo: "What else? The usual drill, you know, that we've been negotiating with their best an brightest, proposing cultural exchanges, trade missions, the usual routine..."
Kenny "Yeah, right, like that mullet hairdo jackass Slick! Or that dumbass lunatic in the mud hut in Tibet, what the hell was his name?"
Lorenzo: "Yeah, that was Narayan, the goat guy, the one who thought were riding a chariot from heaven."
Kenny: "I thought we screwed up again and accidentally brought somebody from out of the past again. "
Lorenzo: "Don't remind me. If Central ever finds out that Dick Cheney was our fault and he's really an Inquisitor from the Middle Ages..."
Kenny: "Don't even go there, Lorenzo! He really screwed things up for everybody, didn't he? But don't worry, no one will find out, and Cheney won't ever let on, not after we installed all that hardware in him so he can stay alive for another 200 years. He'd have an awful lot of explaining to do...
Lorenzo: "It's amazing none of these dopes caught on..."
Kenny: "Why should they? Half their planet lives just like they did a thousand years ago! Who would have thought we'd be flying halfway across the damned galaxy to interview people who plough their fields with a water buffalo or some redneck with a yard full of rusty cars in front of his double wide?"
Lorenzo: "Well, that's the only people Central lets us talk to! They say we'd blow our cover if we pulled up into a big city."
Kenny: "Tell me about it... Boy, if it wasn't for those pole dancers and massage girls, this trip would have been a complete wash out! I gotta say, those happy endings are pretty cool..."
Lorenzo: "That's another thing you'd better not mention in the report, Kenny. Central gets a little touchy about sex with humans."
Kenny: "Can I help it if their fantasy was having sex with an alien? What were we supposed to do, say no?"
Lorenzo: "Well, we'll just keep that between us, pal. We've got to do this by the book..."
Kenny: "Yeah, I guess I'll just go with the standard bit about this planet not being ready to join the Galactic Guild, maybe try them again in a couple of hundred more years..."
Loerenzo: "Yeah, you're right. Maybe by then they'll have that whole Middle East deal figured out."
Kenny: "You kidding me, Lorenzo? These bozos haven't been able to straighten out that hell hole in 5,000 years! What the hell difference will a couple of hundred years make?"
Lorenzo: "Well, we have to tell Central something, Kenny! We've been here for thirty five years and the only ones we've spoken to are trailer trash and people barely two steps removed from being hunter-gatherers!"
Kenny: "Well, we could put in for an extension... tell them we need more time to study the females of Earth..."
Lorenzo: "Maybe you've got something there. They'll never buy our cultural negotiations nonsense, anyway. This way we could do an in-depth report on pole dancers and massage girls, tell Central we think they might have vital information or some crap, that the names Tiffany and Heather have some special place in Earth society..."
Kenny: "Yeah, that would keep them off our back for awhile...."
Lorenzo: "And keep us in happy endings too!"
Kenny: "Now you're talking! No more dopes with pot bellies and baseball caps."
Lorenzo: "No more toothless guys in robes with a camel and eleven skinny sheep he calls his harem in the middle of some dreary desert!"
Kenny: "No more crazy reindeer herders from Lapland or those little poison dart clowns in the Amazon!"
Lorenzo: "Only hot Earth babes with an alien fetish from now on! Let's just take her out to orbit and figure this out."
Kenny: "Yeah, go ahead..."
Lorenzo: "Me? I thought you had the wheel!"
Kenny: "You mean you're not driving? Holly shi..."
And that's where the tape ends. Apparently aliens aren't all such ace pilots. The space ship was pretty mashed up but they're very much like humans when it comes to building their aircraft, with everything being really flimsy except the black box recorder, which is completely indestructible. Why none of us ever thought to build our planes out of the same stuff we make the black boxes out of is a huge question, but at least it shows we have something in common with aliens in at least that one area. Anyway, no one is sure if these two aliens will be missed when they don't report in to Central, whatever that is, but given the peaceful and somewhat limited scope of their mission that the black box recordings seem to indicate, no one seems all that worried about the prospect. It even looks like Tiffany and Heather are eagerly looking forward to another visit from spacemen, so here's to happy endings.
Kenny: "Well, I don't know about you, pal, but I'll be glad to get off this one horse planet."
Lorenzo: "Amen to that, brother, but I will miss the babes. You have your report ready?"
Kenny "You kidding? What the hell am I gonna tell Central abut this crazy place? They told us to keep our work on the QT and only interview people in isolated areas! What the hell do they expect?"
Lorenzo: "What else? The usual drill, you know, that we've been negotiating with their best an brightest, proposing cultural exchanges, trade missions, the usual routine..."
Kenny "Yeah, right, like that mullet hairdo jackass Slick! Or that dumbass lunatic in the mud hut in Tibet, what the hell was his name?"
Lorenzo: "Yeah, that was Narayan, the goat guy, the one who thought were riding a chariot from heaven."
Kenny: "I thought we screwed up again and accidentally brought somebody from out of the past again. "
Lorenzo: "Don't remind me. If Central ever finds out that Dick Cheney was our fault and he's really an Inquisitor from the Middle Ages..."
Kenny: "Don't even go there, Lorenzo! He really screwed things up for everybody, didn't he? But don't worry, no one will find out, and Cheney won't ever let on, not after we installed all that hardware in him so he can stay alive for another 200 years. He'd have an awful lot of explaining to do...
Lorenzo: "It's amazing none of these dopes caught on..."
Kenny: "Why should they? Half their planet lives just like they did a thousand years ago! Who would have thought we'd be flying halfway across the damned galaxy to interview people who plough their fields with a water buffalo or some redneck with a yard full of rusty cars in front of his double wide?"
Lorenzo: "Well, that's the only people Central lets us talk to! They say we'd blow our cover if we pulled up into a big city."
Kenny: "Tell me about it... Boy, if it wasn't for those pole dancers and massage girls, this trip would have been a complete wash out! I gotta say, those happy endings are pretty cool..."
Lorenzo: "That's another thing you'd better not mention in the report, Kenny. Central gets a little touchy about sex with humans."
Kenny: "Can I help it if their fantasy was having sex with an alien? What were we supposed to do, say no?"
Lorenzo: "Well, we'll just keep that between us, pal. We've got to do this by the book..."
Kenny: "Yeah, I guess I'll just go with the standard bit about this planet not being ready to join the Galactic Guild, maybe try them again in a couple of hundred more years..."
Loerenzo: "Yeah, you're right. Maybe by then they'll have that whole Middle East deal figured out."
Kenny: "You kidding me, Lorenzo? These bozos haven't been able to straighten out that hell hole in 5,000 years! What the hell difference will a couple of hundred years make?"
Lorenzo: "Well, we have to tell Central something, Kenny! We've been here for thirty five years and the only ones we've spoken to are trailer trash and people barely two steps removed from being hunter-gatherers!"
Kenny: "Well, we could put in for an extension... tell them we need more time to study the females of Earth..."
Lorenzo: "Maybe you've got something there. They'll never buy our cultural negotiations nonsense, anyway. This way we could do an in-depth report on pole dancers and massage girls, tell Central we think they might have vital information or some crap, that the names Tiffany and Heather have some special place in Earth society..."
Kenny: "Yeah, that would keep them off our back for awhile...."
Lorenzo: "And keep us in happy endings too!"
Kenny: "Now you're talking! No more dopes with pot bellies and baseball caps."
Lorenzo: "No more toothless guys in robes with a camel and eleven skinny sheep he calls his harem in the middle of some dreary desert!"
Kenny: "No more crazy reindeer herders from Lapland or those little poison dart clowns in the Amazon!"
Lorenzo: "Only hot Earth babes with an alien fetish from now on! Let's just take her out to orbit and figure this out."
Kenny: "Yeah, go ahead..."
Lorenzo: "Me? I thought you had the wheel!"
Kenny: "You mean you're not driving? Holly shi..."
And that's where the tape ends. Apparently aliens aren't all such ace pilots. The space ship was pretty mashed up but they're very much like humans when it comes to building their aircraft, with everything being really flimsy except the black box recorder, which is completely indestructible. Why none of us ever thought to build our planes out of the same stuff we make the black boxes out of is a huge question, but at least it shows we have something in common with aliens in at least that one area. Anyway, no one is sure if these two aliens will be missed when they don't report in to Central, whatever that is, but given the peaceful and somewhat limited scope of their mission that the black box recordings seem to indicate, no one seems all that worried about the prospect. It even looks like Tiffany and Heather are eagerly looking forward to another visit from spacemen, so here's to happy endings.
June 19, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 414
The problem with living every day like it was your last is that most people's last day is pretty darned traumatic, to say nothing of being completely unproductive. Seems like a pretty stressful way to operate.
SO MUCH FOR SILENCE. NOW HOW ABOUT SOME EXPLAINING?
Our former Puppet-in-Chief Bush The Younger finally broke his silence about President Obama and reminded us once again how dopey he is. Apparently he's making good enough progress in his ongoing effort to rid the state of Texas of brush that he could take some time out to make a speech. Well, perhaps the word speech is a bit generous, but he did make some incoherent statements that left reporters scratching their heads and our nation's comedians scrambling for their note pads and tape recorders to compose new jokes. Just like old times!
Looks like Bush The Younger is once again peeved about his old boss Shotgun Dick Cheney speaking for his administration and making all the decisions, and once again showing why Cheney had to stage a coup following the 2000 election. The man still can't put a coherent sentence together, but to be fair, it is not his fault. In order to speak coherently, one must be able to think straight, and that was never his long suit. Well-rehearsed sound bites were more his thing, stuff like "making America strong" and "If you don't but a new car, the terrorists win." Not exactly Abe Lincoln material, but the best he could do.
So now that Shotgun Dick and Dumbya are back in public life, maybe they can explain some of their policies. It's been a while, enough time for reflection and illumination. Maybe tell us why they left the country in a shambles. Tell us exactly why they thought it would a great idea to copy Gestapo interrogation methods for Prisoners of War in violation of the Geneva Convention. Perhaps identify specifically the offending passages in The Bill of Rights that prompted them to try and eviscerate it. Maybe explain in detail why they decided that regulations were a bad idea for the industries handling the nation's wealth. They also might shed some light on how they got the impression that the people of New Orleans were all incredibly good swimmers.
Or how about shedding some light on why they invaded the wrong nation? That seems like a pretty big faux pas. That's not exactly like putting on mismatched socks, that's a real beaut. Imagine FDR invading Argentina, wrecking the joint and hanging their leader following Pearl Harbor? You'd think lots of questions about his thought process would have arisen after something like that, no? Well, all the excuses offered at the time for invading Iraq were false, and the only plausible reason that remains is to get control of their oil, which has become a mission accomplished with this week's signing of no-bid contracts by Exxon-Mobile, Total, Shell, and BP. Maybe Mister-I-Got-Six-Deferments-Cheney and Mister-I-Deserted-My-Post-In-Time-Of-War Bush can explain why they thought it was okay to cause more than 4,000 American soldiers to die for Big Oil.
And maybe Bush The Younger can tell us why he said that Mr. Obama deserved his silence for the beginning of his presidency but not now. Why he didn't think of that in 1999, before he ran for the presidency? We all deserved his silence and never having to get to know life under Shotgun Dick. People are buzzing about the poor state of democracy in Iran these days, forgetting the horrendous quality of Democracy in America for 8 long years. So let's welcome these two clown princes back into the public eye. With the evil mastermind and his dimwitted puppet on display, they can serve as a potent reminder to never again elect anyone but the smartest guy in the room.
Looks like Bush The Younger is once again peeved about his old boss Shotgun Dick Cheney speaking for his administration and making all the decisions, and once again showing why Cheney had to stage a coup following the 2000 election. The man still can't put a coherent sentence together, but to be fair, it is not his fault. In order to speak coherently, one must be able to think straight, and that was never his long suit. Well-rehearsed sound bites were more his thing, stuff like "making America strong" and "If you don't but a new car, the terrorists win." Not exactly Abe Lincoln material, but the best he could do.
So now that Shotgun Dick and Dumbya are back in public life, maybe they can explain some of their policies. It's been a while, enough time for reflection and illumination. Maybe tell us why they left the country in a shambles. Tell us exactly why they thought it would a great idea to copy Gestapo interrogation methods for Prisoners of War in violation of the Geneva Convention. Perhaps identify specifically the offending passages in The Bill of Rights that prompted them to try and eviscerate it. Maybe explain in detail why they decided that regulations were a bad idea for the industries handling the nation's wealth. They also might shed some light on how they got the impression that the people of New Orleans were all incredibly good swimmers.
Or how about shedding some light on why they invaded the wrong nation? That seems like a pretty big faux pas. That's not exactly like putting on mismatched socks, that's a real beaut. Imagine FDR invading Argentina, wrecking the joint and hanging their leader following Pearl Harbor? You'd think lots of questions about his thought process would have arisen after something like that, no? Well, all the excuses offered at the time for invading Iraq were false, and the only plausible reason that remains is to get control of their oil, which has become a mission accomplished with this week's signing of no-bid contracts by Exxon-Mobile, Total, Shell, and BP. Maybe Mister-I-Got-Six-Deferments-Cheney and Mister-I-Deserted-My-Post-In-Time-Of-War Bush can explain why they thought it was okay to cause more than 4,000 American soldiers to die for Big Oil.
And maybe Bush The Younger can tell us why he said that Mr. Obama deserved his silence for the beginning of his presidency but not now. Why he didn't think of that in 1999, before he ran for the presidency? We all deserved his silence and never having to get to know life under Shotgun Dick. People are buzzing about the poor state of democracy in Iran these days, forgetting the horrendous quality of Democracy in America for 8 long years. So let's welcome these two clown princes back into the public eye. With the evil mastermind and his dimwitted puppet on display, they can serve as a potent reminder to never again elect anyone but the smartest guy in the room.
June 18, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 413
Make time as often as possible for doing nothing at all, and don't ruin it by calling it meditating or reflecting. Just goof off! You'll be glad you did.
ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT...
All you need to know about the ethics of our elected representatives in both Houses of Congress and both major political parties is that they loaded the emergency funding bills for the relief of both the 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina with frivolous pork barrel earmarks. There is no calamity so big that they forget to be small. Wonder if they did that when they declared war on Japan and Germany December 8th, 1941?
All you need to know about radio blowhard and narcotics addict Rush Limbaugh is that when famous rock guitarist Jerry Garcia died, he called him "Just another dead doper." Of course, that was before he was outed as a doper himself and a girly man who used his maid to get him his dope.
All you need to know about Doctor Phil is that he had his license to practice psychology revoked in Texas after being sanctioned for unethical practices and has never gotten another one. The surprise here? Who knew there were psychologists in Texas, never mind an Ethics Committee?
The only thing you need to know about Iran is that the people there are just fine. For the most part they are educated, modern, worldly, sophisticated, friendly and peace loving. They are not our enemies by any stretch of the imagination. Their government bites it, but so what? The Chinese government sucks too but the Chines people are okay and make all our cool stuff. Hell, our own damned government sucks sometimes. Should we hate ourselves too?
All you need to know about steroids is that they work. 73 home runs in one season. $30 million per year salary. Anyone else want to ask why?
All you need to know about big oil and big government is that Exxon-Mobile, Chevron, Total, Shell and BP are about to sign no-bid contracts with the Iraqi government to pump oil from their soil. This will effectively regain what these giant corporations lost when Iraq nationalized their oil fields in 1972, even though they've been stealing millions of dollars worth of oil every single day for years since the Iraq war began while raising retail prices to unprecedented levels. So much for Donald Rumsfeld declaring that "the oil wells belong to the Iraqi people." And so much for the fantasy that our sons and daughters who are soldiers are not the expendable pawns of corporations and their cronies in government.
There is nothing you need to know about Todd Palen.
All you need to know about banking, insurance and investment company CEOs is that they can't think of anything different to do since their corrupt and bumbling behavior nearly drove their companies and the nation into bankruptcy other than to change the names of their companies. After having to be bailed out by Uncle Sam, they still don't get it. And for some reason, damned few of them have gotten pink slips.
All you need to know about Twitter is that it exists. That's about it, unless you've got endless time on your hands and are curious about what color socks Ashton Kutchner is thinking of wearing this afternoon.
All you need to know about Scientology is that Tom Cruise is the leading intellectual of that movement. Face it, short stuff, Moses, Thomas Aquinas or Gandhi you're not. And go jump on your own damned couch the next time you're feeling giddy.
The only thing you need to know about Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, is that he's got a really hot wife. His politics? His effectiveness? Who cares? He's got a really hot wife.
All you need to know about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt is that they put their money where their mouth is when they created The Jane Pitt Pediatric Cancer Center and then donated a million bucks to help refugees of the civil war in Pakistan. So much for all celebrities being frivolous airheads. Kudos.
All you need to know about radio blowhard and narcotics addict Rush Limbaugh is that when famous rock guitarist Jerry Garcia died, he called him "Just another dead doper." Of course, that was before he was outed as a doper himself and a girly man who used his maid to get him his dope.
All you need to know about Doctor Phil is that he had his license to practice psychology revoked in Texas after being sanctioned for unethical practices and has never gotten another one. The surprise here? Who knew there were psychologists in Texas, never mind an Ethics Committee?
The only thing you need to know about Iran is that the people there are just fine. For the most part they are educated, modern, worldly, sophisticated, friendly and peace loving. They are not our enemies by any stretch of the imagination. Their government bites it, but so what? The Chinese government sucks too but the Chines people are okay and make all our cool stuff. Hell, our own damned government sucks sometimes. Should we hate ourselves too?
All you need to know about steroids is that they work. 73 home runs in one season. $30 million per year salary. Anyone else want to ask why?
All you need to know about big oil and big government is that Exxon-Mobile, Chevron, Total, Shell and BP are about to sign no-bid contracts with the Iraqi government to pump oil from their soil. This will effectively regain what these giant corporations lost when Iraq nationalized their oil fields in 1972, even though they've been stealing millions of dollars worth of oil every single day for years since the Iraq war began while raising retail prices to unprecedented levels. So much for Donald Rumsfeld declaring that "the oil wells belong to the Iraqi people." And so much for the fantasy that our sons and daughters who are soldiers are not the expendable pawns of corporations and their cronies in government.
There is nothing you need to know about Todd Palen.
All you need to know about banking, insurance and investment company CEOs is that they can't think of anything different to do since their corrupt and bumbling behavior nearly drove their companies and the nation into bankruptcy other than to change the names of their companies. After having to be bailed out by Uncle Sam, they still don't get it. And for some reason, damned few of them have gotten pink slips.
All you need to know about Twitter is that it exists. That's about it, unless you've got endless time on your hands and are curious about what color socks Ashton Kutchner is thinking of wearing this afternoon.
All you need to know about Scientology is that Tom Cruise is the leading intellectual of that movement. Face it, short stuff, Moses, Thomas Aquinas or Gandhi you're not. And go jump on your own damned couch the next time you're feeling giddy.
The only thing you need to know about Nicolas Sarkozy, the President of France, is that he's got a really hot wife. His politics? His effectiveness? Who cares? He's got a really hot wife.
All you need to know about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt is that they put their money where their mouth is when they created The Jane Pitt Pediatric Cancer Center and then donated a million bucks to help refugees of the civil war in Pakistan. So much for all celebrities being frivolous airheads. Kudos.
June 17, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 412
If it amazes you how very different are men and women, remember this: that's the whole idea, and it's okay. Move on.
YOU'VE GOT TO FIGURE...
Sometimes you read things in the news or hear them on TV, noteworthy events or pieces of information that pique your interest but don't give you the whole story. Then you've go to do some assuming about the situation, or guessing what the whole deal is really all about. Take that presidential election in Iran the other day, where they tell us 46 million people voted by hand-written ballot. Then just a few hours after the polls closed they announced the winner, the angry little guy with the leisure suits, by a huge margin. Which makes no difference to anybody who doesn't live there, or even the people who do since the President of Iran has a boss called The Supreme Leader who's the real boss of all bosses in that country. What was puzzling, though, is how fast they announced the results. You've got to figure that those Iranian election officials are the fastest counters of little slips of paper that ever lived. That's a pretty impressive feat of counting. Or a fraud.
Then you read about how President Obama swears up and down to the world that "America does not torture" and you say to yourself: fine, good, it's about time we knocked off that Gestapo bullshit, it's downright un-American, cruel and unusual punishment and all that. And so you get the impression that the crazy policies of former American Supreme Leader Shotgun Dick Cheney are being dismantled and you breathe a sigh of relief. You're thinking that if we don't torture our prisoners, maybe others won't torture American soldiers when they get captured. Then a few days later you read that America is identifying terror suspects but not arresting them ourselves, but instead fingering them so other countries get to arrest them, countries that do torture. So you've got to figure that this new president is full of shit when he says we don't torture. Then you've got to start guessing what he really means when he says anything about anything else and the relief you were feeling starts to evaporate into that same-old, same-old fooled us again mode. Dang!
Now you start remembering a lot of things the new president said, about there being a new day in America, where everyone's voice is valued and everyone's rights are respected. Then you read where he's on board with denying 5% of Americans the right to marry the person they love. He came out in favor of some lame-ass "Civil Union" for gay people, a separate but equal deal if ever there was one, the same rotten lie offered to black people for the 102 years between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that did away with all that bullshit. Now you've got to figure that this Obama guy has his head up his ass on this issue and you have to guess what else he's dead wrong about. And you maybe wonder if we've got ourselves A Supreme Leader who's the boss of the President lurking in the shadows somewhere like Shotgun Dick used to do.
It's hard to get the whole story these days. News you read on the internet is abridged, like every story is a synopsis of itself tailored to attention-challenged fools. Newspapers are hurting for business and laying off workers, so you've got to figure they are firing their most experienced and responsible reporters, the ones who went to journalism school and can maintain a cogent thought for more than a couple of paragraphs and follow a story to its end. And when was the last time a reporter nailed a president at a press conference with a hard and serious question? You can understand them laying off Bush The Younger since he was a complete dunce who spoke only gibberish, but the new guy is really smart, so why not see how well he can handle a wicked curve ball? You've got to figure that the trend in reporting is to write the story you want to write, not the actual one that is occurring. Which is not reporting at all, it is writing fiction. So now we're stuck guessing at what's going on and figuring we've been screwed again by people not doing the job they are assigned to do. Dang!
There's lots of things you read where you've got to read between the lines for what's really being said - poems, novels, politician's policy statements and other creative writing. It's a good exercise of our interpretive skills, but reading the news should not be one of them. The whole story should be in the lines, factual, clear and unambiguous, a cold recounting of what went on, who did what and what was said by whom. The only exceptions in news outlets are opinion pieces, and those are clearly labeled as such, the columns, the editorials and the commentaries. Reading the news should not leave us having to figure and guess and wonder.
How would you like your doctor to be so ambiguous with telling you the results of your medical examination? That's not an appropriate time for ambiguity and leaving important things out. Maybe some of our journalists need to go to a doctor that tells a story the way they do. After a few of them get really sick or really dead from the lack of information, maybe the rest of them will wake up and realize that they are not telling the whole story, the only thing they were hired to do in the first place. Creative writing and journalism are two very different disciplines. If we want to know what's going on, we read the news. If we want to enjoy a good read, we'll pick up a good book or click on bobcrespo.com.
Then you read about how President Obama swears up and down to the world that "America does not torture" and you say to yourself: fine, good, it's about time we knocked off that Gestapo bullshit, it's downright un-American, cruel and unusual punishment and all that. And so you get the impression that the crazy policies of former American Supreme Leader Shotgun Dick Cheney are being dismantled and you breathe a sigh of relief. You're thinking that if we don't torture our prisoners, maybe others won't torture American soldiers when they get captured. Then a few days later you read that America is identifying terror suspects but not arresting them ourselves, but instead fingering them so other countries get to arrest them, countries that do torture. So you've got to figure that this new president is full of shit when he says we don't torture. Then you've got to start guessing what he really means when he says anything about anything else and the relief you were feeling starts to evaporate into that same-old, same-old fooled us again mode. Dang!
Now you start remembering a lot of things the new president said, about there being a new day in America, where everyone's voice is valued and everyone's rights are respected. Then you read where he's on board with denying 5% of Americans the right to marry the person they love. He came out in favor of some lame-ass "Civil Union" for gay people, a separate but equal deal if ever there was one, the same rotten lie offered to black people for the 102 years between the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Act of 1965 that did away with all that bullshit. Now you've got to figure that this Obama guy has his head up his ass on this issue and you have to guess what else he's dead wrong about. And you maybe wonder if we've got ourselves A Supreme Leader who's the boss of the President lurking in the shadows somewhere like Shotgun Dick used to do.
It's hard to get the whole story these days. News you read on the internet is abridged, like every story is a synopsis of itself tailored to attention-challenged fools. Newspapers are hurting for business and laying off workers, so you've got to figure they are firing their most experienced and responsible reporters, the ones who went to journalism school and can maintain a cogent thought for more than a couple of paragraphs and follow a story to its end. And when was the last time a reporter nailed a president at a press conference with a hard and serious question? You can understand them laying off Bush The Younger since he was a complete dunce who spoke only gibberish, but the new guy is really smart, so why not see how well he can handle a wicked curve ball? You've got to figure that the trend in reporting is to write the story you want to write, not the actual one that is occurring. Which is not reporting at all, it is writing fiction. So now we're stuck guessing at what's going on and figuring we've been screwed again by people not doing the job they are assigned to do. Dang!
There's lots of things you read where you've got to read between the lines for what's really being said - poems, novels, politician's policy statements and other creative writing. It's a good exercise of our interpretive skills, but reading the news should not be one of them. The whole story should be in the lines, factual, clear and unambiguous, a cold recounting of what went on, who did what and what was said by whom. The only exceptions in news outlets are opinion pieces, and those are clearly labeled as such, the columns, the editorials and the commentaries. Reading the news should not leave us having to figure and guess and wonder.
How would you like your doctor to be so ambiguous with telling you the results of your medical examination? That's not an appropriate time for ambiguity and leaving important things out. Maybe some of our journalists need to go to a doctor that tells a story the way they do. After a few of them get really sick or really dead from the lack of information, maybe the rest of them will wake up and realize that they are not telling the whole story, the only thing they were hired to do in the first place. Creative writing and journalism are two very different disciplines. If we want to know what's going on, we read the news. If we want to enjoy a good read, we'll pick up a good book or click on bobcrespo.com.
June 16, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 411
History doesn't mention those who played it safe or thought it prudent not to speak up about the evil they saw around them. Good call, history.
JOIN THE WAR AGAINST MEDDLESOME DOUCHE BAGS!
E-mail your elected representatives to join the fight against a scourge threatening the very fabric of life in the United States of America. This is a crisis so severe that it affects almost every single American man, woman and child. There are people in this great nation out to undermine you and the things that you love. Your Pursuit of Happiness is at risk here! Call them the PC Police, Do-gooders, killjoys, fanatics, annoying dicks, control freaks, cruel busybodies or whatever you like. The official name of this movement was originally called the War On Meddlesome Douche Bags but that was too long so it is simply called The War On Douche Bags.
These people are out to make you dance to their tune, and their tune is a monotonous dirge. They will condemn the things you love and attempt to lower your self-esteem because you refuse to do their bidding. Do you smoke cigarettes? Drink coffee? Love somebody of the same sex? Do you drink alcohol? Use drugs? Are you overweight? Do you drive a car? Do you wear leather? Do you like to eat? If any of these activities or attitudes describes you, then you are under attack by meddlesome control freaks who claim to know what's best for you a whole lot better than you do. The hard truth is that they don't give a damn about you one way or the next, they only want to control you. Doing good is the last thing on their tiny minds.
Those would be the Douche Bags among us, those people who are not happy unless they are making someone else miserable. It's a strange and nasty personality trait, one more rooted in cruelty than anything else. Of course Douche Bags pretend their motivations are pure as Ivory Soap and their only motivation is the betterment of mankind, but they never aim their corrections at themselves. It's you who is wrong, dead wrong about anything you think or say or do, and if only you listened to them you'd be okay. But then some other Douche Bag will come along and tell there's something else dreadfully wrong with you and if you don't change your ways you'll either go to hell, die young, ruin the planet or drag down the moral fiber of everybody else.
Except for the Douche Bags, that is, who seem to think they have cornered the market on righteousness, intelligence and personal saintliness. For the most part these folks are really stupid and insecure and measure their own self-worth only by how much better they can appear to be than everybody else, the key word here being appear. Good people don't aggressively stick their noses where they don't belong and don't condemn the rest of humanity. These cruel little dicks try to demonize even fat children, as if they didn't get a hard enough time from their friends and classmates. Now they've got to deal with some semi-official label calling them morbidly obese thanks to the Douche Bags. They are attacking our children now.
They've already succeeded in convincing the general public to give more respect to cat burglars than they do to cigarette smokers, and to consider drug users as the devil reincarnate. There was a time when there were no laws against drug use in this country, and there were no violent and wealthy drug cartels in existence. These people went really crazy in 1919 and banned alcohol in the whole country, resulting in the rise of organized crime gangs who made untold fortunes supplying illegal booze. Their War on Drugs did the same favor for the drug cartels, a new generation of crazed killers who are now so rich, powerful and violent that they are defeating the armies and police forces of the nation of Mexico.
Thanks, Douche Bags! You happy now with your do-gooding bullshit? Before drugs were illegal people quietly purchased them cheaply at drug stores and used them in the privacy of their own homes. Making them illegal only made them prohibitively expensive, thus creating a criminal culture that surrounds hard core drug users and contributes the majority of America's 2 million-plus prison inmates, more people in jail than in any other nation on earth. So the Douche Bags made the Home Of The Free a lot less free with their inability to leave a complex and touchy problem well enough alone. Their heavy handed approach created a huge national and international crisis out of what used to be the dirty but manageable little secret of consenting adults.
Now they're attacking the food we eat, even succeeding in outlawing certain food products here and there. What's next, criminal food cartels? You let these people get their way and we'll be buying our steaks from somebody with only one name in a back alley for 50 bucks a pop before you know it. The price and quality will vary but you'd better not complain or some other guys with only one name will stomp you or put a cap in your ass. Our prisons will fill to overflowing with people convicted of possession of tasty food.
And if you prefer driving a car bigger than a breadbasket, then you too are in their sights and are guilty of evaporating the ozone layer all by yourself. If you don't love Jesus all that much, you just might be in league with the devil. If you like getting your anti-oxidants from red wine instead of some tasteless gruel, you're a menace to society. If you question the endless wars people like to sacrifice our youngsters in, you're an anti-American traitor who doesn't support our troops. If you don't exercise and jog to the point of wearing a permanent frown, you're a lazy slob. If you believe in the Bill of Rights you support the terrorists. There's nothing you can think, say or do that won't qualify you for condemnation from the Douche Bags. And if you happen to be overweight, it is always hunting season on your ample butt.
Well, it's time to turn the tables on our self-appointed thought police. Join The War on Douche Bags today! It won't be an active attack campaign like the ones they enjoying waging. Instead, warriors in the War on Douche Bags will simply ignore these irritating jerkoffs. No legal penalties will be imposed on these morbid clowns and no stripping of their right to be a complete idiot will be tolerated. No sense becoming what you dislike. It may involve telling them to shut the fuck up when they grow too strident every so often, but we will lead by example rather than browbeating. You don't fight the Douche Bags by becoming a Douche Bag. The War on Douche Bags will consist of each and every one of us doing what the hell we feel like doing as long as we are not harming others and not feeling a bit bad about ourselves for doing so.
We will respect the rights of everyone else to do and think the things that they prefer, even if we disapprove of their activities and ideas. After all, no one's forcing us to join them. Being fat or gay or imbibing in drugs and alcohol is not contagious and nobody's business but the fat or gay or stoned. We will be free to teach our own children what we believe is right and wrong, and teach them to respect the opinions of others who may disagree. We've got all the laws we need governing stealing and hurting and killing other people and will seek to repeal only those laws that attempt to enforce somebody else's idea of what is acceptable behavior and what is not. And we will ignore the self-appointed petty tyrants who can't stand the fact that there are happy, well-adjusted people in this world. Join The War On Douche Bags today. Ignore them and go about your business as you please.
These people are out to make you dance to their tune, and their tune is a monotonous dirge. They will condemn the things you love and attempt to lower your self-esteem because you refuse to do their bidding. Do you smoke cigarettes? Drink coffee? Love somebody of the same sex? Do you drink alcohol? Use drugs? Are you overweight? Do you drive a car? Do you wear leather? Do you like to eat? If any of these activities or attitudes describes you, then you are under attack by meddlesome control freaks who claim to know what's best for you a whole lot better than you do. The hard truth is that they don't give a damn about you one way or the next, they only want to control you. Doing good is the last thing on their tiny minds.
Those would be the Douche Bags among us, those people who are not happy unless they are making someone else miserable. It's a strange and nasty personality trait, one more rooted in cruelty than anything else. Of course Douche Bags pretend their motivations are pure as Ivory Soap and their only motivation is the betterment of mankind, but they never aim their corrections at themselves. It's you who is wrong, dead wrong about anything you think or say or do, and if only you listened to them you'd be okay. But then some other Douche Bag will come along and tell there's something else dreadfully wrong with you and if you don't change your ways you'll either go to hell, die young, ruin the planet or drag down the moral fiber of everybody else.
Except for the Douche Bags, that is, who seem to think they have cornered the market on righteousness, intelligence and personal saintliness. For the most part these folks are really stupid and insecure and measure their own self-worth only by how much better they can appear to be than everybody else, the key word here being appear. Good people don't aggressively stick their noses where they don't belong and don't condemn the rest of humanity. These cruel little dicks try to demonize even fat children, as if they didn't get a hard enough time from their friends and classmates. Now they've got to deal with some semi-official label calling them morbidly obese thanks to the Douche Bags. They are attacking our children now.
They've already succeeded in convincing the general public to give more respect to cat burglars than they do to cigarette smokers, and to consider drug users as the devil reincarnate. There was a time when there were no laws against drug use in this country, and there were no violent and wealthy drug cartels in existence. These people went really crazy in 1919 and banned alcohol in the whole country, resulting in the rise of organized crime gangs who made untold fortunes supplying illegal booze. Their War on Drugs did the same favor for the drug cartels, a new generation of crazed killers who are now so rich, powerful and violent that they are defeating the armies and police forces of the nation of Mexico.
Thanks, Douche Bags! You happy now with your do-gooding bullshit? Before drugs were illegal people quietly purchased them cheaply at drug stores and used them in the privacy of their own homes. Making them illegal only made them prohibitively expensive, thus creating a criminal culture that surrounds hard core drug users and contributes the majority of America's 2 million-plus prison inmates, more people in jail than in any other nation on earth. So the Douche Bags made the Home Of The Free a lot less free with their inability to leave a complex and touchy problem well enough alone. Their heavy handed approach created a huge national and international crisis out of what used to be the dirty but manageable little secret of consenting adults.
Now they're attacking the food we eat, even succeeding in outlawing certain food products here and there. What's next, criminal food cartels? You let these people get their way and we'll be buying our steaks from somebody with only one name in a back alley for 50 bucks a pop before you know it. The price and quality will vary but you'd better not complain or some other guys with only one name will stomp you or put a cap in your ass. Our prisons will fill to overflowing with people convicted of possession of tasty food.
And if you prefer driving a car bigger than a breadbasket, then you too are in their sights and are guilty of evaporating the ozone layer all by yourself. If you don't love Jesus all that much, you just might be in league with the devil. If you like getting your anti-oxidants from red wine instead of some tasteless gruel, you're a menace to society. If you question the endless wars people like to sacrifice our youngsters in, you're an anti-American traitor who doesn't support our troops. If you don't exercise and jog to the point of wearing a permanent frown, you're a lazy slob. If you believe in the Bill of Rights you support the terrorists. There's nothing you can think, say or do that won't qualify you for condemnation from the Douche Bags. And if you happen to be overweight, it is always hunting season on your ample butt.
Well, it's time to turn the tables on our self-appointed thought police. Join The War on Douche Bags today! It won't be an active attack campaign like the ones they enjoying waging. Instead, warriors in the War on Douche Bags will simply ignore these irritating jerkoffs. No legal penalties will be imposed on these morbid clowns and no stripping of their right to be a complete idiot will be tolerated. No sense becoming what you dislike. It may involve telling them to shut the fuck up when they grow too strident every so often, but we will lead by example rather than browbeating. You don't fight the Douche Bags by becoming a Douche Bag. The War on Douche Bags will consist of each and every one of us doing what the hell we feel like doing as long as we are not harming others and not feeling a bit bad about ourselves for doing so.
We will respect the rights of everyone else to do and think the things that they prefer, even if we disapprove of their activities and ideas. After all, no one's forcing us to join them. Being fat or gay or imbibing in drugs and alcohol is not contagious and nobody's business but the fat or gay or stoned. We will be free to teach our own children what we believe is right and wrong, and teach them to respect the opinions of others who may disagree. We've got all the laws we need governing stealing and hurting and killing other people and will seek to repeal only those laws that attempt to enforce somebody else's idea of what is acceptable behavior and what is not. And we will ignore the self-appointed petty tyrants who can't stand the fact that there are happy, well-adjusted people in this world. Join The War On Douche Bags today. Ignore them and go about your business as you please.
June 15, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 410
It is very convenient that God only speaks to one guy in private. Convenient for that one guy, that is. He gets to make lots of rules after that.
AND THE WAR ON FAT GUYS RAGES ON...
Well, here we are deep into America's War on Fat People, with no end in sight. Well, actually there's a lot of ends in sight, and by and large (very large), they're pretty big. Lots of wide loads in this bountiful nation, a tempting target for society's killjoys. There are those people in this and every other society whose lives are incomplete if they are not trying to control the lives of others. Righteous indignation is their main weapon, even though fat people never did anything bad to them. It's not like there's not enough food to go around in America. The people attacking the fat people could get fat too if they wanted. Fat guys aren't stealing their lunch money or eating their portions or anything like that.
You'd be hard pressed to come up with any overt offense committed by our fat brothers and sisters to deserve the label "obese," or the supremely insulting "morbidly obese." That's just cruel. Everybody else seems to get a politically correct label these days but the fat people. How about "Extra-American" or "Mega-American?" Making war on a select group of citizens who have committed no crime is not a uniquely American trait, but we seem to have a real zeal for it. Try smoking a cigarette these days without a snide comment from a total stranger. At least they're not so rude as to approach fat people and berate them when they're eating. Or maybe they are, who knows? The self-righteous always excuse their own blatant rudeness but excuse no one else's perceived shortcomings. Not that they have any answers for anyone's problems, only condemnation.
Then you have the weird diet advocates, the vegetarians, the no-dairy types and the strangest one yet, where people are supposed to eat only what is raised locally. How would that work out for people in Manhattan? Rats, pigeons and shriveled window box tomatoes for dinner? Who could possibly eat only what's produced near them except really isolated farmers? Well, plenty of people on the planet live and eat like that. That would be the Third World, where a whole lot of people are really poor, really hungry and live short, extremely difficult lives. In bygone days the whole world lived like that. Then somebody invented the wheel and people began to go places and ship stuff elsewhere and import new and tasty things to eat. Guess what? People benefitted from the varied diet, grew larger and healthier and lived longer. It's called progress, and it's pretty effective. Anything that cuts the misery and suffering is a good thing, and a variety of food is a very good thing.
If maybe some people decide to partake a little too much of the bounty of this earth and get a little chubby, well, it's nobody else's business. It's not contagious. Why start a war against them? That's pretty drastic, no? Didn't anybody learn from the War on Drugs, an abysmal failure. People are going to do what they want to do with themselves whether anyone approves or not. Since the War on Drugs started 40 years ago, drug use has increased a hell of a lot in this country. Some war. Maybe the reason more people are fat these days is because of the War on Fat Guys. Did anybody consider that? You even have clowns like Mayor Bloomberg of New York City outlawing certain food items, just like in the War on Drugs. He can't govern his own city or properly educate our students, so he decides to go after an easy mark like the fat people, like that's going to make a dime's worth of difference in the quality of life in New York. And the killjoys are ecstatic about it, not so much for any health benefit, but because people's food will now be less tasty.
If they are so worried about food, why don't they ship some to the starving people in this world? 36,000 of them die every single day. If they were really interested in doing good instead making others miserable, they would get involved in helping others. But doing good is not the aim of the self righteous. Any help they profess to be offering is a load of horseshit, they're just in it to annoy people and feel superior. Well, if the only way you can feel good about yourself is to make someone else feel bad, you've got yourself a glaring character flaw there and the rest of us are justified in avoiding your company. Fat people have enough problems without control freaks up their butt all the time. They know how much they weigh, they know how many wardrobes they've outgrown. Now they've got to deal with public campaigns against them too? Give our Mega-American brethren a break here!
How about a War on Meddlesome Douche Bags? How would they like it? Those mentally fragile Peeping Toms would freak out big time. We could hound them the same way they hound fat people, pot heads, gays, drinkers and cigarette smokers. Put ads in magazines and on TV warning of the dangers of consorting with the self-appointed behavior police, how bad they are for your health and how they're ruining America with their endless interference in other people's lives. Whenever they go into their sorry spiels about how they know what's best for everybody else, encourage the public to administer two quick slaps in the hope they will snap out of it and leave the rest of us the hell alone. Of course they won't snap of it right away, so the slapping just might have to be repeated until they shut up and go away, which won't happen either, but the rest of us will feel a lot better for having slapped their silly asses around and let them know we're on to them.
You'd be hard pressed to come up with any overt offense committed by our fat brothers and sisters to deserve the label "obese," or the supremely insulting "morbidly obese." That's just cruel. Everybody else seems to get a politically correct label these days but the fat people. How about "Extra-American" or "Mega-American?" Making war on a select group of citizens who have committed no crime is not a uniquely American trait, but we seem to have a real zeal for it. Try smoking a cigarette these days without a snide comment from a total stranger. At least they're not so rude as to approach fat people and berate them when they're eating. Or maybe they are, who knows? The self-righteous always excuse their own blatant rudeness but excuse no one else's perceived shortcomings. Not that they have any answers for anyone's problems, only condemnation.
Then you have the weird diet advocates, the vegetarians, the no-dairy types and the strangest one yet, where people are supposed to eat only what is raised locally. How would that work out for people in Manhattan? Rats, pigeons and shriveled window box tomatoes for dinner? Who could possibly eat only what's produced near them except really isolated farmers? Well, plenty of people on the planet live and eat like that. That would be the Third World, where a whole lot of people are really poor, really hungry and live short, extremely difficult lives. In bygone days the whole world lived like that. Then somebody invented the wheel and people began to go places and ship stuff elsewhere and import new and tasty things to eat. Guess what? People benefitted from the varied diet, grew larger and healthier and lived longer. It's called progress, and it's pretty effective. Anything that cuts the misery and suffering is a good thing, and a variety of food is a very good thing.
If maybe some people decide to partake a little too much of the bounty of this earth and get a little chubby, well, it's nobody else's business. It's not contagious. Why start a war against them? That's pretty drastic, no? Didn't anybody learn from the War on Drugs, an abysmal failure. People are going to do what they want to do with themselves whether anyone approves or not. Since the War on Drugs started 40 years ago, drug use has increased a hell of a lot in this country. Some war. Maybe the reason more people are fat these days is because of the War on Fat Guys. Did anybody consider that? You even have clowns like Mayor Bloomberg of New York City outlawing certain food items, just like in the War on Drugs. He can't govern his own city or properly educate our students, so he decides to go after an easy mark like the fat people, like that's going to make a dime's worth of difference in the quality of life in New York. And the killjoys are ecstatic about it, not so much for any health benefit, but because people's food will now be less tasty.
If they are so worried about food, why don't they ship some to the starving people in this world? 36,000 of them die every single day. If they were really interested in doing good instead making others miserable, they would get involved in helping others. But doing good is not the aim of the self righteous. Any help they profess to be offering is a load of horseshit, they're just in it to annoy people and feel superior. Well, if the only way you can feel good about yourself is to make someone else feel bad, you've got yourself a glaring character flaw there and the rest of us are justified in avoiding your company. Fat people have enough problems without control freaks up their butt all the time. They know how much they weigh, they know how many wardrobes they've outgrown. Now they've got to deal with public campaigns against them too? Give our Mega-American brethren a break here!
How about a War on Meddlesome Douche Bags? How would they like it? Those mentally fragile Peeping Toms would freak out big time. We could hound them the same way they hound fat people, pot heads, gays, drinkers and cigarette smokers. Put ads in magazines and on TV warning of the dangers of consorting with the self-appointed behavior police, how bad they are for your health and how they're ruining America with their endless interference in other people's lives. Whenever they go into their sorry spiels about how they know what's best for everybody else, encourage the public to administer two quick slaps in the hope they will snap out of it and leave the rest of us the hell alone. Of course they won't snap of it right away, so the slapping just might have to be repeated until they shut up and go away, which won't happen either, but the rest of us will feel a lot better for having slapped their silly asses around and let them know we're on to them.
June 13, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 409
Other than on circus clowns, there's no place in the work place for a polka dot bow tie. There's just no dealing with people who wear them.
NOW TELL US WHY WE SHOULD CARE
We've been hearing all about Lebanon's elections, Iran's elections, India's elections, this country and that's elections, all sorts of information about what these things mean in the grand scheme of things. Everything but why should care about any of this. We don't get to vote in those places and whoever wins can't do anything about our pet peeves. And will any of these places be transformed by these elections? In Iran, the president isn't even the boss, some irritable old fart in a Lawrence of Arabia costume and a God complex runs the show. When they have elections in Saudi Arabia maybe we'll sit up and take notice. Or not, since that's not our country either and none of our business how silly a form of government their people put up with. They seem pretty okay with their king and the 5,000 princes hogging all the oil trillions for themselves, so why should we care?
There's a lot to not care about. Too much caring about things we have no control over is bad for the nerves. LIke the fact that China is insisting that manufacturers install censorship software into every computer sold in their country from now on. So what? We live here, not there. Sounds like O.P.P. - Other People's Problems. And is this surprising to anybody? This is the Chinese government we're talking about here! Oh, but what about the dilemma that presents to the Western corporations who manufacture these machines? What dilemma? They sold 40 million computers last year in China. Of course they're going to cave in and install the censorship software. There's big money involved there. Money talks, ethics walk. No skin off their nose, they don't live there either.
And now that some addled old jerk shot and killed somebody at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, do we have to worry about a rash of these things happening and a whole lot of people all of a sudden denying documented history? Do the words "isolated incident" and "troubled loner" mean anything? It was a regrettable, horrible thing to happen, but not likely to start a trend. Does anyone but completely ridiculous people deny that the Holocaust really happened? General Eisenhower knew the day would come when blowhards and demagogues would attempt to deny the truth, and towards that end ordered his men to document the death camps with as many photos and films as possible and to also preserve the meticulous records of the murdered millions kept by the Germans themselves. Serious people don't doubt the obvious and the well documented. Jail the crazy old coot and move on.
There's a lot of good not caring going on. The Republican party eating itself in front of our eyes, for example. A party that once boasted brains like William F. Buckley, Hennry Cabot Lodge, Jacob Javits, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger and founding member Abraham Lincoln is now run by a group of delusional mental midgets. But why care about them? They're rich as hell, they'll be fine. If they want to argue about creationism, torture and reviving the fiscal policies that got this country into such a mess all day long, let them! They had their shot, blew it big time and are the outside looking in now, wishing failure on their own government and making one moronic statement after another. How much sleep is anybody losing over these toothless fools?
While we're not caring about stuff, let's forget about worrying about the swine flu. More people have died from the bee stings, but the public health officials who predicted a pandemic that didn't happen have declared one anyway, dammit! They won't be made to look like fools, by Jiminy, and if we refuse to cooperate and die off in droves, well, to hell with us, they'll have their pandemic anyway! Besides, it takes the heat off of having to do something about real pandemics that just won't go away, like the 13.4 million starvation deaths every year, the AIDS plague, 5 million annual deaths from tainted water sources and drug-resistant malaria strains that kill hundreds of thousands every single year without the benefit of anyone calling them any sort of emergency.
Of course those things are a tad too obvious and no one can take proper credit for alerting the public, so they sort of get swept under the world's carpet while blowhard public officials tell us the sky is falling. So let's not worry too much about what we're instructed to worry about. Those are invented distractions to keep our eyes off the ball while people with money and power do as they please. There's no shortage of real problems everywhere you turn to waste our caring on alarmist nonsense. Keep your eyes open and on the ball. Only you know what's important to you and what you care about. If you're a grown person and need someone else to tell what you should care about, well, there's no reason to care about you either. Sheep are generally not a huge concern for anybody but shepherds and other sheep.
There's a lot to not care about. Too much caring about things we have no control over is bad for the nerves. LIke the fact that China is insisting that manufacturers install censorship software into every computer sold in their country from now on. So what? We live here, not there. Sounds like O.P.P. - Other People's Problems. And is this surprising to anybody? This is the Chinese government we're talking about here! Oh, but what about the dilemma that presents to the Western corporations who manufacture these machines? What dilemma? They sold 40 million computers last year in China. Of course they're going to cave in and install the censorship software. There's big money involved there. Money talks, ethics walk. No skin off their nose, they don't live there either.
And now that some addled old jerk shot and killed somebody at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, do we have to worry about a rash of these things happening and a whole lot of people all of a sudden denying documented history? Do the words "isolated incident" and "troubled loner" mean anything? It was a regrettable, horrible thing to happen, but not likely to start a trend. Does anyone but completely ridiculous people deny that the Holocaust really happened? General Eisenhower knew the day would come when blowhards and demagogues would attempt to deny the truth, and towards that end ordered his men to document the death camps with as many photos and films as possible and to also preserve the meticulous records of the murdered millions kept by the Germans themselves. Serious people don't doubt the obvious and the well documented. Jail the crazy old coot and move on.
There's a lot of good not caring going on. The Republican party eating itself in front of our eyes, for example. A party that once boasted brains like William F. Buckley, Hennry Cabot Lodge, Jacob Javits, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger and founding member Abraham Lincoln is now run by a group of delusional mental midgets. But why care about them? They're rich as hell, they'll be fine. If they want to argue about creationism, torture and reviving the fiscal policies that got this country into such a mess all day long, let them! They had their shot, blew it big time and are the outside looking in now, wishing failure on their own government and making one moronic statement after another. How much sleep is anybody losing over these toothless fools?
While we're not caring about stuff, let's forget about worrying about the swine flu. More people have died from the bee stings, but the public health officials who predicted a pandemic that didn't happen have declared one anyway, dammit! They won't be made to look like fools, by Jiminy, and if we refuse to cooperate and die off in droves, well, to hell with us, they'll have their pandemic anyway! Besides, it takes the heat off of having to do something about real pandemics that just won't go away, like the 13.4 million starvation deaths every year, the AIDS plague, 5 million annual deaths from tainted water sources and drug-resistant malaria strains that kill hundreds of thousands every single year without the benefit of anyone calling them any sort of emergency.
Of course those things are a tad too obvious and no one can take proper credit for alerting the public, so they sort of get swept under the world's carpet while blowhard public officials tell us the sky is falling. So let's not worry too much about what we're instructed to worry about. Those are invented distractions to keep our eyes off the ball while people with money and power do as they please. There's no shortage of real problems everywhere you turn to waste our caring on alarmist nonsense. Keep your eyes open and on the ball. Only you know what's important to you and what you care about. If you're a grown person and need someone else to tell what you should care about, well, there's no reason to care about you either. Sheep are generally not a huge concern for anybody but shepherds and other sheep.
June 12, 2009
IMPERIAL AMERICA?
Empire or Democracy? Rome couldn't have both, and when it decided to be an empire, it was dictator time. One man rule seems to be the norm for empires, with Britain being the sole exception. Of course early on in her imperial adventures, the king actually did rule the roost over there, but by the time they got around to annexing the subcontinent of India under Queen Victoria, the monarchy had become a figurehead position and it was democratically elected citizens of the United Kingdom that spread and maintained the British Empire.
Of course Britain is an empire no more, having lost control of her vast territories following World War 2, even though they fought on the side of the winners of that conflict. The thought was that the age of colonialism and empires had come to an end, and self-deternination was the order of the day. That didn't stop the Soviet Union from creating an empire out of Eastern Europe, short-lived though it was. It also didn't stop The United States of America from becoming an imperial power, expanding her influence and military presence throughout the world.
We conquered and claimed no new territories in this period, making us an imperial power with a pretty small empire, a odd thing in history. While we still maintain sizable military forces in Germany, Japan and Korea, we don't administer their governments from Washington like a real empire. We also deploy military units in 150 countries throughout the world, out of only 192 nations in existence. That's more nations with foreign forces stationed in them than any empire ever had in all of history. For what reason? Security? Business? The British and Dutch empires were fueled by business interests, with the Dutch East India Company and the British East India company being virtually one and the same as their governments.
So, what has America become? In 1898 we annexed Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain following the Spanish-American War, immediately freeing Cuba but hanging on to the Philippines until after World War 2. Puerto Rico lives on in some sort of limbo between statehood and independence, with it's citizens being born U.S. citizens but unable to vote in our national elections unless they are not on the islands of Puerto Rico itself. Confusing? You bet. Also around the time of the Spanish American War, we annexed Hawaii and hung onto that country too, eventually making it our 50th State, an island 2,563 miles from the rest of the nation. Not exactly what anyone could consider a contiguous area to the mainland, like Long Island or Martha's Vineyard. America has 14 U.S owned "possessions," from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean all the way to Wake Island and American Samoa in the far Pacific.
While some of these are tiny places with no prospects of ever becoming viable nations or States of the Union on their own, that is not the case with all of them, Puerto Rico being the most likely candidate for either independence or statehood. So our empire is pretty unimpressive, territory-conquered and riches-looted wise. Most of the land we conquered, like Western Europe, North Africa, Japan and a series of islands in the Pacific during World War 2, we abandoned as soon as the war was won, leaving armies of occupation in Japan, Italy and Germany. Even though those 3 nations are our allies these days we still maintain a military presence on their soil, just in case they get frisky again. We also hung on to a few strategically located islands for naval and air bases throughout the Pacific.
So, to recap, we gave back all the large and potentially profitable tracts of land we conquered, yet maintain military forces in more countries that any empire ever. While we can't claim to be no sort of empire at all, are we a hybrid empire? Right now we've conquered Iraq and Afghanistan but plan to abandon them too, most likely leaving some military units stationed there permanently. We're also bombing Pakistan with unmanned but deadly Predator aircraft and eying Iran with bad intent. What's the plan, Stan? Is there a plan at all or just reaction to world events?
Is it too late to roll back our empire? Has it taken on a life of its own and is now taken for granted that America has tentacles reaching everywhere on earth and always will? Towards what end? What possible advantage is it to have soldiers in 150 nations? It's not like world peace has been assured by all this, with some sort of Pax Americana taking root. There's wars all over the place, and we are among the biggest participants. Will our position in the world be threatened by rolling back our hybrid empire? More threatened than it is now?
These are questions that never seem to come up in Washington, or anywhere else in America. Is maintaining this far-flung empire beneficial or an unwanted encumbrance? Does it benefit special interests within the government whose function is to spread American influence at all costs, with no thought to what sort of nation we become? It seems at odds with our mission statement, which remains the United States Constitution. The President of The United States has no other title, like when Queen Victoria also sported the "Empress of India" monicker. Shouldn't his first and last priorities always be the 50 states of this union? And shouldn't any personnel we send overseas be bearing food to feed the starving rather than guns to kill the living unless we are directly threatened?
What have we become? How can we fix this? And do we even want to? First, bring our soldiers home to their own country. The past 50 years has been a period of perpetual small wars, one after the other, all over the world. Is that the only alternative to World War 3? Seems doubtful in a world where America is the last superpower standing. We should use our vast power to improve ourselves and the world, not guard it like sentries in watchtowers. Somebody sometime has to have the courage be the first to stand down. Why not the strongest?
Roll back the empire that was never meant to be and get back on the road to becoming America. America is as much an ideal as a reality, one we strive to attain year by year, through trials and trauma, good times and bad. The words upon which we were founded are powerful and true, and we have not realized their fulfillment yet. But we certainly can if we rededicate ourselves to the democratic republic we founded by rejecting the imperialism of Britain and George III. Reject our own creeping imperialism and let the world be what it is and we'll be what we can be, to the best of our abilities. Let us be the ones who rejected an Imperial America on our watch.
Of course Britain is an empire no more, having lost control of her vast territories following World War 2, even though they fought on the side of the winners of that conflict. The thought was that the age of colonialism and empires had come to an end, and self-deternination was the order of the day. That didn't stop the Soviet Union from creating an empire out of Eastern Europe, short-lived though it was. It also didn't stop The United States of America from becoming an imperial power, expanding her influence and military presence throughout the world.
We conquered and claimed no new territories in this period, making us an imperial power with a pretty small empire, a odd thing in history. While we still maintain sizable military forces in Germany, Japan and Korea, we don't administer their governments from Washington like a real empire. We also deploy military units in 150 countries throughout the world, out of only 192 nations in existence. That's more nations with foreign forces stationed in them than any empire ever had in all of history. For what reason? Security? Business? The British and Dutch empires were fueled by business interests, with the Dutch East India Company and the British East India company being virtually one and the same as their governments.
So, what has America become? In 1898 we annexed Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines from Spain following the Spanish-American War, immediately freeing Cuba but hanging on to the Philippines until after World War 2. Puerto Rico lives on in some sort of limbo between statehood and independence, with it's citizens being born U.S. citizens but unable to vote in our national elections unless they are not on the islands of Puerto Rico itself. Confusing? You bet. Also around the time of the Spanish American War, we annexed Hawaii and hung onto that country too, eventually making it our 50th State, an island 2,563 miles from the rest of the nation. Not exactly what anyone could consider a contiguous area to the mainland, like Long Island or Martha's Vineyard. America has 14 U.S owned "possessions," from Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands in the Caribbean all the way to Wake Island and American Samoa in the far Pacific.
While some of these are tiny places with no prospects of ever becoming viable nations or States of the Union on their own, that is not the case with all of them, Puerto Rico being the most likely candidate for either independence or statehood. So our empire is pretty unimpressive, territory-conquered and riches-looted wise. Most of the land we conquered, like Western Europe, North Africa, Japan and a series of islands in the Pacific during World War 2, we abandoned as soon as the war was won, leaving armies of occupation in Japan, Italy and Germany. Even though those 3 nations are our allies these days we still maintain a military presence on their soil, just in case they get frisky again. We also hung on to a few strategically located islands for naval and air bases throughout the Pacific.
So, to recap, we gave back all the large and potentially profitable tracts of land we conquered, yet maintain military forces in more countries that any empire ever. While we can't claim to be no sort of empire at all, are we a hybrid empire? Right now we've conquered Iraq and Afghanistan but plan to abandon them too, most likely leaving some military units stationed there permanently. We're also bombing Pakistan with unmanned but deadly Predator aircraft and eying Iran with bad intent. What's the plan, Stan? Is there a plan at all or just reaction to world events?
Is it too late to roll back our empire? Has it taken on a life of its own and is now taken for granted that America has tentacles reaching everywhere on earth and always will? Towards what end? What possible advantage is it to have soldiers in 150 nations? It's not like world peace has been assured by all this, with some sort of Pax Americana taking root. There's wars all over the place, and we are among the biggest participants. Will our position in the world be threatened by rolling back our hybrid empire? More threatened than it is now?
These are questions that never seem to come up in Washington, or anywhere else in America. Is maintaining this far-flung empire beneficial or an unwanted encumbrance? Does it benefit special interests within the government whose function is to spread American influence at all costs, with no thought to what sort of nation we become? It seems at odds with our mission statement, which remains the United States Constitution. The President of The United States has no other title, like when Queen Victoria also sported the "Empress of India" monicker. Shouldn't his first and last priorities always be the 50 states of this union? And shouldn't any personnel we send overseas be bearing food to feed the starving rather than guns to kill the living unless we are directly threatened?
What have we become? How can we fix this? And do we even want to? First, bring our soldiers home to their own country. The past 50 years has been a period of perpetual small wars, one after the other, all over the world. Is that the only alternative to World War 3? Seems doubtful in a world where America is the last superpower standing. We should use our vast power to improve ourselves and the world, not guard it like sentries in watchtowers. Somebody sometime has to have the courage be the first to stand down. Why not the strongest?
Roll back the empire that was never meant to be and get back on the road to becoming America. America is as much an ideal as a reality, one we strive to attain year by year, through trials and trauma, good times and bad. The words upon which we were founded are powerful and true, and we have not realized their fulfillment yet. But we certainly can if we rededicate ourselves to the democratic republic we founded by rejecting the imperialism of Britain and George III. Reject our own creeping imperialism and let the world be what it is and we'll be what we can be, to the best of our abilities. Let us be the ones who rejected an Imperial America on our watch.
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 407
When things are not going your way, that's pretty much a normal day. It's not you. The world has its own agenda that may or may not coincide with yours. No big deal. Have patience and keep slogging. Your day will come.
SARAH PALEN PIMPS HER KIDS AGAIN
Sarah Palen is so desperate to remain in the minds of Americans that she's taken to pimping her 14 year old daughter. She tried to do it by appearing to do the opposite, but is not nearly clever enough to pull off such semantics. It was she and her husband Todd the Clod who brought up the subject of older men wanting to rape or have sex with her youngest daughter. She was responding to topical jokes made by David Letterman on his late night talk show about her visit to New York City with her family. It seems that Letterman was one of the few people who knew or cared she was in town, and did her the service of giving her publicity, albeit not of the adoring variety she may have preferred.
The jokes in question made no mention at all of her 14 year old daughter and did not even hint at the desirability of raping her or having sex with her. The sexual escapades of her older daughter, the 19 year old Bristol, have been well documented and fully exploited by Ms. Palen and her "handlers." The kid had a baby out of wedlock with her boyfriend, a common enough occurrence and no tragedy. Well, her and boyfriend did not get married as the Palens vowed they would, also a common enough occurrence and probably a wise move, since most kid marriages wind up in divorce court.
The ensuing publicity has now run its course, with Bristol becoming an advocate for sexual abstinence among teenagers, a classic case of locking the barn door after the horse is gone. With no mileage left in that tale, the Palens have been pretty much marginalized outside of Republican Party commentaries comparing her with that other tower of idiocy, Rush Limbaugh. So, the question was, how to rekindle media interest in a shallow, dim bulb of a governor in order to keep her hopes alive of running for president in 2012. Well, she's got another daughter, doesn't she? Yes, that would be the 14 year old Willow!
Which posed another big problem for the governor and her Brain Trust, such as it is. There are few interesting things about young teenagers to anyone who is not in their family. That is an awkward and difficult time of life for even the most well adjusted among us, a time of raging hormones, increased expectations and entrance into a different social atmosphere of one sort or another; high school, new friends, new interests and activities. It is a time of life best experienced away from the scrutiny of public life, since no emotional pain is as acute as the psychic wounds perceived by vulnerable young teenagers. Whether real or imagined, they can't yet tell the difference and their pain and mortification is as real as a physical wound to them.
This is the last person who needs to hear her mother start a national dialogue about older men wanting to have sex with her, or worse, raping her (rape and sex are 2 different activities). She's 14! She's text-messaging her girlfriend about boys, getting used to the idea of high school, playing sports, adjusting to a rapidly changing body while still having a foot firmly planted in childhood. She's also the child of a national celebrity, one who's not exactly revered either, and is the butt of every comedian's jokes. Who needs Mom adding to this load by dragging your little insecure butt into the public spotlight? About sex and rape, no less!
But Mom has a history of exploiting her children in order to gain morality points, even though she failed her elder daughter miserably by refusing to provide her with any sex education beyond the word "don't." Were Letterman's jokes in questionable taste? Sure they were. Did they come anywhere near advocation of what Sarah Palen says they did? Absolutely not. Will she succeed in painting David Letterman as an old pedophile? No. America likes and trusts him a lot more than her. So, what was her angle here? Why bring this up at the expense of her impressionable young daughter? Well, maybe because she's a pimp who will use anyone to remain in the public eye, including her own children? There's always that to consider.
Letterman sure doesn't need the publicity, he's on TV every night. While his humor is not everyone's cup of tea, like all talk show hosts he generates thousands of topical jokes every year, and few have been as generous in providing the nation's humorists with comic raw material as Sarah Palen. Mostly it was unintentional but in some instances very intentional, such as when she appeared on "Saturday Night Live" in the middle of last year's presidential campaign. Being that her side lost the election and she didn't get to be Vice President, she was instantly old news. Who remembers who lost the Presidency a dozen years ago, never mind the Vice Presidency? That's just the way it goes in politics. You lose, we snooze.
It's not like the election was close, either. It was an overwhelming landslide against the Republicans, who have since disintegrated into complete disarray. The fact that the opportunistic and idiotic Sarah Palen remains as one of their leading lights bears witness to this. And who else have they got? The drug-addled Rush Limbaugh, that aging men's clothing catalog model Mitt Romney and the sleaze master of hypocrisy Newt Gingrich, all of them wishing failure on the president of our nation? No wonder the woman sees an opening, figuring she's not quite as distasteful as the rest of the Republican leadership. Well, by pimping her 14 year old daughter, she's proved she can dish with the big boys when it comes to disgracing herself. Her willingness to humiliate her loved ones proves she is truly one of today's Republicans, a party that has succeeded in alienating all the smart people within their ranks. And another nail gets driven into the 2 party system.
The jokes in question made no mention at all of her 14 year old daughter and did not even hint at the desirability of raping her or having sex with her. The sexual escapades of her older daughter, the 19 year old Bristol, have been well documented and fully exploited by Ms. Palen and her "handlers." The kid had a baby out of wedlock with her boyfriend, a common enough occurrence and no tragedy. Well, her and boyfriend did not get married as the Palens vowed they would, also a common enough occurrence and probably a wise move, since most kid marriages wind up in divorce court.
The ensuing publicity has now run its course, with Bristol becoming an advocate for sexual abstinence among teenagers, a classic case of locking the barn door after the horse is gone. With no mileage left in that tale, the Palens have been pretty much marginalized outside of Republican Party commentaries comparing her with that other tower of idiocy, Rush Limbaugh. So, the question was, how to rekindle media interest in a shallow, dim bulb of a governor in order to keep her hopes alive of running for president in 2012. Well, she's got another daughter, doesn't she? Yes, that would be the 14 year old Willow!
Which posed another big problem for the governor and her Brain Trust, such as it is. There are few interesting things about young teenagers to anyone who is not in their family. That is an awkward and difficult time of life for even the most well adjusted among us, a time of raging hormones, increased expectations and entrance into a different social atmosphere of one sort or another; high school, new friends, new interests and activities. It is a time of life best experienced away from the scrutiny of public life, since no emotional pain is as acute as the psychic wounds perceived by vulnerable young teenagers. Whether real or imagined, they can't yet tell the difference and their pain and mortification is as real as a physical wound to them.
This is the last person who needs to hear her mother start a national dialogue about older men wanting to have sex with her, or worse, raping her (rape and sex are 2 different activities). She's 14! She's text-messaging her girlfriend about boys, getting used to the idea of high school, playing sports, adjusting to a rapidly changing body while still having a foot firmly planted in childhood. She's also the child of a national celebrity, one who's not exactly revered either, and is the butt of every comedian's jokes. Who needs Mom adding to this load by dragging your little insecure butt into the public spotlight? About sex and rape, no less!
But Mom has a history of exploiting her children in order to gain morality points, even though she failed her elder daughter miserably by refusing to provide her with any sex education beyond the word "don't." Were Letterman's jokes in questionable taste? Sure they were. Did they come anywhere near advocation of what Sarah Palen says they did? Absolutely not. Will she succeed in painting David Letterman as an old pedophile? No. America likes and trusts him a lot more than her. So, what was her angle here? Why bring this up at the expense of her impressionable young daughter? Well, maybe because she's a pimp who will use anyone to remain in the public eye, including her own children? There's always that to consider.
Letterman sure doesn't need the publicity, he's on TV every night. While his humor is not everyone's cup of tea, like all talk show hosts he generates thousands of topical jokes every year, and few have been as generous in providing the nation's humorists with comic raw material as Sarah Palen. Mostly it was unintentional but in some instances very intentional, such as when she appeared on "Saturday Night Live" in the middle of last year's presidential campaign. Being that her side lost the election and she didn't get to be Vice President, she was instantly old news. Who remembers who lost the Presidency a dozen years ago, never mind the Vice Presidency? That's just the way it goes in politics. You lose, we snooze.
It's not like the election was close, either. It was an overwhelming landslide against the Republicans, who have since disintegrated into complete disarray. The fact that the opportunistic and idiotic Sarah Palen remains as one of their leading lights bears witness to this. And who else have they got? The drug-addled Rush Limbaugh, that aging men's clothing catalog model Mitt Romney and the sleaze master of hypocrisy Newt Gingrich, all of them wishing failure on the president of our nation? No wonder the woman sees an opening, figuring she's not quite as distasteful as the rest of the Republican leadership. Well, by pimping her 14 year old daughter, she's proved she can dish with the big boys when it comes to disgracing herself. Her willingness to humiliate her loved ones proves she is truly one of today's Republicans, a party that has succeeded in alienating all the smart people within their ranks. And another nail gets driven into the 2 party system.
June 11, 2009
YOU'LL HAVE TO PRY MY JOY STICK OUT OF MY COLD, DEAD HANDS
So, with the United States Air Force and the CIA deploying drones in Afghanistan from the comfort of a command center in Las Vegas, Nevada, around 10,000 miles away, how soon will it be before regular people can get their hands on remote-controlled flying guns? Predator Drones are unmanned aircraft armed with sensors, cameras and deadly accurate missiles. Lots of people will want one or two of their own. After all, in America you have people collecting all sorts of non-sporting guns, like semi-automatic pistols and machine guns and the like whose only purpose is combat.
When this technology gets a little more compact, maybe we'll have deer hunters targeting Bambi's mother from the comfort of their living rooms instead of traipsing around the damp woods hoping they catch a glimpse of these elusive animals, never mind getting a clean shot off. With the advanced capabilities of predator technology, the guy will be eating venison in no time. That moose head he always dreamed of hanging in the den? Hell, you don't have to be within 1,000 miles of Maine or Canada to bag one of those bad boys. Just set the coordinates on the drone and it will find you one, your eye in the sky for big game hunts.
And of course outlaws will get their hands on the latest weapons, they always do. This way they could knock off a liquor store from a mile away. Just hook up a speaker to the drone, tell the clerk to put all the money in the sack on the wing and nobody gets blown up. And tape a bottle of your best bourbon to the nose cone while you're at it, sport. Or they could send up a drone above a crowded street and just mug everybody all at once while they sit in a Starbucks miles away from the crime scene, sipping a latte' and munching a bran muffin, just one more customer playing one more video game on his laptop. The people in the street? They'd be putting their wallets and jewelry in the drone's handy loot pouch, scared to death of being blasted by a tiny but potent laser-guided missile.
Drones will come in handy in a lot of ways, even for the non-gun enthusiasts and ordinary law abiding citizens. Given the fact that technology has always been made smaller and more portable, people will be able to carry around their own little pocket-sized drones like a blackberry or an i-Pod. This way when a mugger threatens you with his remote control drone, you can counter with your own little heat-seeking missile drone and blow his right out of the sky. While this may be problematic for older citizens, the Gen X And Generation Next people have been preparing themselves for personal drones their entire lives. After spending thousands and thousands of hours a year playing mind-numbing computer games, there's not much they can't do with computers and game controllers of any size.
And the beauty of all this is that there are no laws against anybody owning a mini-predator drone. There are no regulations of any sort, no waiting period to buy one or pesky criminal background checks or anything like that to prevent you from being the first one on your block to own the new i-Pred from Apple! Your neighbor with that blaring stereo will think twice before he cranks up the volume knob to 11 in his backyard. That guy in the candy store who's always short changing you? Call him him Honest Al from now on! And just maybe Mrs. Fenster will teach her dog not to bark all night long if she doesn't want to find a small pile of charred bones and singed hair where Fluffy used to be.
Who knows, maybe pistols and shotguns will go the way of bows and arrows? With a deadly accurate little Predator Drone, you don't even have to be a good shot, or even in the same neighborhood as your target. Also, there's no smoke, no loud bangs, no nasty recoils. A cop gets a 911 call that a bank is being held up, there's no need to race across town in the old cruiser at breakneck speed endangering innocent bystanders. Just send the Police Drone over to the bank and let the bank robbers think things over for a while. Give them the choice of either surrendering peaceably or having the drone hone in on their right nostril with a mini-stinger missile. Tell them you'll be there in about twenty minutes or so to either handcuff them or hose their brains off the marble floor. Then the cops can finish their lunch, maybe hand out a couple of parking tickets on the way over and collar the would-be robbers at their leisure.
We have seen the future of weaponry and it is a geek joystick. It will soon be miniaturized and mass produced and available at gun stores and electronics outlets nationwide. And just like in the computer games, the shooter doesn't get to see the real violence up close. It will be onscreen, and thus sort of unreal, virtual if you will. Just like the CIA geeks in Vegas blowing up cars and houses full of people in Afghanistan, the death and destruction will be impersonal and far removed, seen only in video images. Of course on the business end of the Predator Drones the death will be just as real as ever, the blood just as red and the stink of burning flesh just as pungent. The killers just won't have to witness their handiwork. Isn't that progress?
When this technology gets a little more compact, maybe we'll have deer hunters targeting Bambi's mother from the comfort of their living rooms instead of traipsing around the damp woods hoping they catch a glimpse of these elusive animals, never mind getting a clean shot off. With the advanced capabilities of predator technology, the guy will be eating venison in no time. That moose head he always dreamed of hanging in the den? Hell, you don't have to be within 1,000 miles of Maine or Canada to bag one of those bad boys. Just set the coordinates on the drone and it will find you one, your eye in the sky for big game hunts.
And of course outlaws will get their hands on the latest weapons, they always do. This way they could knock off a liquor store from a mile away. Just hook up a speaker to the drone, tell the clerk to put all the money in the sack on the wing and nobody gets blown up. And tape a bottle of your best bourbon to the nose cone while you're at it, sport. Or they could send up a drone above a crowded street and just mug everybody all at once while they sit in a Starbucks miles away from the crime scene, sipping a latte' and munching a bran muffin, just one more customer playing one more video game on his laptop. The people in the street? They'd be putting their wallets and jewelry in the drone's handy loot pouch, scared to death of being blasted by a tiny but potent laser-guided missile.
Drones will come in handy in a lot of ways, even for the non-gun enthusiasts and ordinary law abiding citizens. Given the fact that technology has always been made smaller and more portable, people will be able to carry around their own little pocket-sized drones like a blackberry or an i-Pod. This way when a mugger threatens you with his remote control drone, you can counter with your own little heat-seeking missile drone and blow his right out of the sky. While this may be problematic for older citizens, the Gen X And Generation Next people have been preparing themselves for personal drones their entire lives. After spending thousands and thousands of hours a year playing mind-numbing computer games, there's not much they can't do with computers and game controllers of any size.
And the beauty of all this is that there are no laws against anybody owning a mini-predator drone. There are no regulations of any sort, no waiting period to buy one or pesky criminal background checks or anything like that to prevent you from being the first one on your block to own the new i-Pred from Apple! Your neighbor with that blaring stereo will think twice before he cranks up the volume knob to 11 in his backyard. That guy in the candy store who's always short changing you? Call him him Honest Al from now on! And just maybe Mrs. Fenster will teach her dog not to bark all night long if she doesn't want to find a small pile of charred bones and singed hair where Fluffy used to be.
Who knows, maybe pistols and shotguns will go the way of bows and arrows? With a deadly accurate little Predator Drone, you don't even have to be a good shot, or even in the same neighborhood as your target. Also, there's no smoke, no loud bangs, no nasty recoils. A cop gets a 911 call that a bank is being held up, there's no need to race across town in the old cruiser at breakneck speed endangering innocent bystanders. Just send the Police Drone over to the bank and let the bank robbers think things over for a while. Give them the choice of either surrendering peaceably or having the drone hone in on their right nostril with a mini-stinger missile. Tell them you'll be there in about twenty minutes or so to either handcuff them or hose their brains off the marble floor. Then the cops can finish their lunch, maybe hand out a couple of parking tickets on the way over and collar the would-be robbers at their leisure.
We have seen the future of weaponry and it is a geek joystick. It will soon be miniaturized and mass produced and available at gun stores and electronics outlets nationwide. And just like in the computer games, the shooter doesn't get to see the real violence up close. It will be onscreen, and thus sort of unreal, virtual if you will. Just like the CIA geeks in Vegas blowing up cars and houses full of people in Afghanistan, the death and destruction will be impersonal and far removed, seen only in video images. Of course on the business end of the Predator Drones the death will be just as real as ever, the blood just as red and the stink of burning flesh just as pungent. The killers just won't have to witness their handiwork. Isn't that progress?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
