LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 480

No two snowmen are exactly alike.

NO DRAMATIC DISPLAYS OF AFFECTION?

So, what's wrong with the Muslim world has been relayed to us by Paris Hilton. Yes, that Paris Hilton, and, no it was not delivered in a scholarly dissertation in case you were worried that this consummate portrayer of dumb blonde bimbohood left character. Rest easy, she has not. It seems the the producers of Ms. Hilton's latest dopey reality TV show wanted to film segments of the show in Dubai. Dubai, being a wealthy oil sheikdom and one of the few such nations looking past the day when either the petroleum dries up or somebody in a white lab coat cries Eureka when they discover its replacement, has built themselves a state of the art film production studio, figuring that the infrastructure of modern nations includes such facilities. All well and good, and kudos to Dubai for being pretty normal in this assumption.

It's not a groundbreaking development by any means, unless by ultra-strict Islamic standards, which are completely abnormal and contrary to human nature, so let's not get all giddy about some nation doing what most other nations have always done, build the things they need in order to stay viable. The fact that most oil-rich sheikdoms would be completely unworkable minus the oil revenues is not lost on progressive (normal) minds in Dubai. But here's the drawback, and a good capsule illustration of what's wrong with these religion-dominated states. They want to be able to dictate what sort of films and TV shows are produced there, and censor any offending scenes. Which pretty much means that outside of producing Osama bin Laden videos these state of the art facilities will go unused.

Insisting that these rules are in place "to adhere to the region's Islamic norms" they have rejected lucrative deals with Hollywood producers wishing to film parts of their movies in authentic desert settings. So, because this country operates under religious law they turn down pretty much the only money to be made from having so much sand covering most of their real estate. The religious nuts who make these laws mandate there be no alcohol consumption, immodest feminine attire, blasphemy, curse words and, in the final coup de grace to ever having a mainstream movie or TV show made there, "no dramatic displays of affection."

What? Not only does that make it pretty much impossible to film a love story, but it illustrates a particularly demented attitude towards human relationships. Bad enough that these mullahs figure that God made a mistake creating women and it's up to them to mask His deific errors, now no man is allowed to be portrayed actually embracing one of these flawed beings? If they prefer the company of teenaged boys, why don't they just say so? Homosexuality is no sin, unless you declare it so, and they do. Might as well declare having freckles to be a sin for all the choice one has in the matter. But why do they insist on hiding what most people feel is one of the most beautiful of God's creations, the female form?

These guys are just as bad as the Catholic Church's Inquisitors when it comes to imposing their own severely psychotic views on the rest of society. And history tell us that the Inquisition didn't work out all that well for anyone but the Inquisitors. Just like modern Islamic fascists, they treated their own like dirt, thought God's creations needed to be (literally) whipped into shape to correct His mistakes, and hated everybody. That's what made them happy, if no else. No dramatic displays of affection? What else have we got if not one another, and shouldn't displays of affection be encouraged by those concerned with the spiritual well-being of human beings? No wonder these religion police hate everybody and are in a state of constant war. Paris Hilton wisely opted out of making money and generating worldwide publicity for such backward fools. Don't look for the next Bollywood to spring up in Dubai anytime soon.

LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 479

To have a friend, be a friend.

IT'S THE SAME ALL OVER

There's a great old blues song called "The Same All Over," with the refrain declaring happily "It's the same all over, there's people everywhere you go!" Which is true as can be. Who of us in this world that aren't hermits or lighthouse keepers isn't surrounded by a sea of humanity, with most of them being pretty wonderful in their own way? Makes you wonder why nations can't get along, especially if you live in a place like New York City where there are people from virtually every nation on the planet living cheek by jowl and getting along just fine. Once you meet and interact with someone, you find out that 99% of the time you're dealing with a decent human being living life as best they can according to their own lights.

It's hard to hate someone who is friendly and interesting and who's kid goes to the same school and plays with your kid. They might think a bit different than you, eat different foods, wear different clothes and pray in a different building, but, bottom line, they just want to be safe and warm and keep their famlies protected, fed and happy. Same destination, different road. You might trade stories, have a couple of laughs, learn a little something about one another and find more in common than you figured. And there's lots more people who are different in some way or another, yourself included, and the world goes around right on schedule, raining and shining on whoever is out and about.

So what's the problem with nations? Why all the war, the conquest, the terror and genocide? Does being part of a tribe mean there's some other tribe you need to hate? And if so, why? How many centuries does that crap have to go on? Hasn't everybody met each other at this point, talked things over, maybe had a cup of coffee and traded stories? The origins of these hatreds are centuries old, and no one alive today can recall the war, the insult or the specific incident that triggered a centuries-long tradition of hating the guy across the border. Or sometimes within the same nation. That's pretty awkward.

It's also absurd, and a contradiction of every moral tradition and every code of ethics known to humanity. Not a one of them says it's okay to act like an ignorant jerk towards our fellow man. It's only in large groups that we get unruly and savage. One on one we do just fine. We remember our moral training in personal encounters and treat the other person with dignity and respect and expect the same in return. And, 9 times out of 10 you find you're not talking to any sort of monster, but a person much like yourself, who loves his family, wants to do what's right and get along with people. Most of us have no wish to harm anybody. Why would we?

But you get involved in the gang mentality and trouble starts. Gangs bring out the very worst in human nature; greed, violence and mindless hatred. Leaders of gangs are generally people you wouldn't want to spend ten minutes with on a personal level, but you just might buy what they selling because they tell you all sorts of crazy things in a very convincing way. They might tell you that you deserve to be better off and that a certain other gang is actively preventing that. Which strikes you as odd since you know people from the other gang and they seem pretty okay. You even have couple of very close friends from that other gang.

But now the rest of your gang is repeating what the leader said about the other gang and getting pretty testy about it. They've discovered huge gripes they didn't know they had and are very thankful to the gang leader for setting them straight about who to hate and push around because they deserve nothing else. It starts with "They're not one of us!" and in not all that much time turns into "They drink our babies' blood!" The leader of the other gang is telling them the same things about your gang, lying little weasel that he is, and all of a sudden you're not talking to your former friends from that gang.

You feel a little guilty about that since you know they are a couple of "the good ones" and would never drink your baby's blood, but you don't want your gang to punish you and call you a traitor to your gang. You never stop to wonder why you now think of them as "good ones'" since that means you accept the view that the rest of their gang is deserving of nothing less than being murdered in their beds with their entire families. You don't even notice that you are no longer questioning that bit of your gang leader's wisdom.

Then the leader of your gang announces that the other gang has done something unpardonable. You can't be certain if that's true or not since it seems pretty outrageous and out of character but he says it so often that the rest of gang is all up in arms and eager to retaliate so you figure it must be true with so many people believing it. Now you're thinking "Who am I to doubt the leader of the gang? Everybody else knows he's telling the truth. And to think that two of those rat bastards pretended to be my friend! Let's start with them!"

And then something horrible happens, people die and get maimed and the other gang retaliates and your gang loses people and it goes back and forth and terrible carnage occurs, mothers bury children, families are torn apart and lives destroyed. Your gang is bloody but unbowed and vows to visit the same terror upon the other gang and their mothers take a turn weeping over their children's graves and sifting through the rubble of their own shattered lives. And this goes on for years until the horror is so widespread that everyone has buried a loved one, both gangs' homes are devastated and people are profoundly traumatized and weary of the hate and the blood and the death.

And so, a little too late in the game, your humanity is rediscovered, your weapons laid aside and the horror and sickening grief at what you have done seizes you and fills you with shame and remorse. Only then does it occur to you to wonder how things ever got this way, how it reached the point of violence and bloodshed against another gang that was in reality, decent people caught up in the same insanity as your gang and unable to stop themselves. And you wonder why you ever went along with your crazy leader and his lies, his insane hatred and his psychopathic blood lust, or why they went along with theirs.

So you scorn your leader and his wicked ideas, and blame him for the savagery. But perhaps one day you come to realize that he did not perpetrate the carnage alone and you ask yourself: "What did he unleash within me that made me so much less of a human being? I knew better! I had friends among those people! I loved them as I would any other cherished friend. I did not speak in their defense. I did not sit them down with anyone from our gang and show them what good people they were. I did not insist that the members of my own gang live up to their mothers' training and forget all this crazy talk about hatred and violence towards their fellow human beings. I did not warn them that they were acting shamefully, I embraced their shame! I did not follow my own goodness and my own humanity and surrendered my ethics like a coward! And for what? There was no gain, no glory and no beauty, only death, suffering and pain that need not have happened."

And so, humbled, you go back to doing what your mother taught you: Be good and play nice. It's really as simple as that. And it's the same all over, children taught by loving mothers to be good, to share and to love. These are the lessons our mothers assured we needed to learn in order to grow up. When you have a misunderstanding, to talk it over with the other person like adults. Get to know people, appreciate their differences, their insight, their existence in our shared world. Everyone has their own beauty and worth, and everyone is our brother and sister. It's the same all over, there's people everywhere you go. Treat them as you would have them treat you. There's still no better idea than the Golden Rule. Now if we could only get nations to listen to Mom and grow up already we could really enjoy this world and this precious gift of life. Wage peace with a vengeance, with all your heart and soul.

LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 478

The very farthest point in time is right now. Or rather, now. No wait, it's really now. And so on. The only thing you can change is what is yet to be.

SMELLS LIKE THE OLD TRICKLE DOWN TRICK...

Anybody remember the Trickle Down Theory of Economics? That was one of the dumber ideas to leak out of daft old Ronald Reagan's empty skull, which was basically to give the wealthy so much money that they were bound to drop some so the rest of us could scramble after the crumbs like so many dogs under the king's banquet table. The policy of cutting taxes to the wealthy and the big corporations and selling it as Trickle Down Economics was very instructive in several ways, the first being that the ruling elite pretty much thinks of the working classes as mangy hounds to be fed off their table scraps. Only problem was that the wealthy are pretty frugal in the table scrap department and very handy when it comes to keeping a death grip on all their dough.

Precious little ever trickled down, so the second instructive point is that the policy didn't work at all. Unless of course you happened to be in the tiny minority of super wealthy people, in which case Trickle Down Economics worked out swimmingly, so long as you were able to ignore all those pesky mongrels with their big sad hungry eyes. You know, the other 99% of humanity wondering where the Trickle went. What Old Ronnie didn't realize is that all the great fortunes ever amassed were made using the Trickle Up Theory, where the labor of the many performing their jobs diligently for a decent wage provided the ownership class with their wealth.

So, how did the ruling elite pay back the working Americans that made them so damned rich? Like any ingrate anywhere, they took all the credit for their success and declared themselves "self-made men" beholden to nobody for their princely lifestyles. They resented the people who made them and their companies wealthy and powerful and so decided to sell their jobs to the lowest bidder. Usually that meant relocating their operations to nations who paid their workers in currency worth less than soybeans and had no words in their language for phrases like "on-the-job safety," "overtime," "collective bargaining," "profit sharing" or "pension."

The result was the de-industrialization of America and a huge highly skilled pool of American workers left to twist slowly in the wind while Senators and CEOs collected big dough from the government not to grow alfalfa on their tennis courts, golf courses and horse paddocks. That is, those of them who didn't get into Big Food, the corporatization of American farming that has forced hundreds of thousands of family farmers out of business and off the land, their land, that they had worked successfully for generations. This is a sort of Corporate Collectivization that is becoming as big a disaster as Stalin's forced collectivization of the Soviet Union's farms in the 1920s. Farming is now called Agribusiness, and the food we eat is less healthy than when Farmer Joe was in charge. Less tasty, too.

Corporations are all about expediency and quick profits, not what's healthy or even all that sanitary. If they possibly could, the corporations would ship the farms overseas too like they did the factories so they wouldn't have to put up with the pesky USDA and their "standards" and Seal of Approval. Today's modern manufacturers would scorn Henry Ford, who paid his workers better than his competitors because he not only wished to turn out an excellent product but wanted his workers to be well off enough to buy his cars. Whatever shortcomings Mr. Ford had, he built his cars in America and valued the resourceful and ingenious American worker as one of this nation's greatest assets. Ford's only protege among modern capitalists is Bill Gates, a great many of who's profit-sharing employees at Microsoft grew wealthy as the company prospered.

We live now in a nation that manufactures very little. This makes us a country vulnerable to international blackmail. In 1941, Japan figured would we sue for peace, or at worst demand a war indemnity from them for knocking out a huge chunk of our Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, their thinking being that it would be just too much trouble for America to fight a prolonged war. Our factories made sure that no one blackmailed the United States and in only 3 1/2 years our industrial might propelled our armed forces to victory over the two most formidable military powers ever assembled, all the while sending vast quantities of supplies and armaments to our Allies. For every soldier and sailor there were three or four skilled workers making sure they were clothed, fed, housed, armed and transported, including 4 million women who showed the world they could survive and thrive in any workplace.

Did any of these Trickle Down billionaires ever think of that when they were busily outsourcing our good jobs and vital production capacity, pocketing the huge difference in labor costs and allowing the highly trained and skilled American workers who made them wealthy to wither on the vine? There is no one trained tho step into their shoes to confront a national emergency, and damned few factories anyway. China sure won't retool her factories overnight to help us in the event of another large scale war. Will we have to hurl data and software at the enemy? Or will a large was be of necessity a nuclear war in a world where a lot of nations have nuclear bombs? Even without that cataclysmic turn of events, a nation without factories is a nation subject to the whims of other countries, to either withhold goods or jack up the prices to force this nation to change our policies to suit their agenda. Sort of like we do now for oil, but on a broader scale.

A nation that can't even manufacture its own underwear doesn't have much leverage. A nation without factories has a dwindling supply of good jobs. A nation with a gutted steel industry is a nation with a short memory. Such a nation quickly becomes a country of haves and have-nots, with the have-nots waiting for crumbs from the haves to trickle down and getting mightily pissed off, number one for being forced to be in the position of supplicant instead of the proud and independent fair trader of skills for decent wages, and number two, because jackshit is trickling down from on high. We made them rich, and now they're done with us.

When the economy tanked because the people in charge of all the money decided it would be great sport to cheat and steal on top of being really rich, American workers took another huge hit while the billionaires got trillion dollar bailouts, not to create or pereserve jobs for American workers but to save their own greedy asses. What is our new President "Change You Can Believe In" Obama doing to change anything other than the nameplate on the desk at the White House? The buck doesn't even stop there anymore, but goes directly to bail out some mega-wealthy patrician boob who couldn't even run the fabulously successful business that was placed in his care. All these clods were asked to do was not to kill the golden goose, just feed it and take good care of it. In other words, just don't fuck things up!

They decided they knew better and put on lobster bibs, sharpened their knives and cooked the damned goose instead, figuring you are what you eat and now I'm golden too!, the smug jackasses. Damned few of them went to jail and fewer still lost their jobs over what was one of the biggest criminal fuckups ever. By and large, the exact same arrogant corporate princes are still in charge of all the money and acting resentful as hell that anyone would blame them for their financial debacle. Well, who the hell else should we blame but the people in charge of the money when the money disappears?

Nobody's dog ate it, no gremlins snuck into the vault and turned it into jellybeans. The people running the economy screwed up the economy big time and they want us to chalk it up as just one of those things? More like another one of those things, like the stripping of America's industrial capacity. Now they're stripping our financial capability. It's only a matter of time before one of these jerkoffs says "let them eat cake" and people start storming their castles with torches and pitchforks. Providing of course, they trickle some cake down to us first. We're not holding our breath and our patience wears thin with the incessant trickle down wreckage of a great nation by its decadent elite.

LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 477

No one is allowed to make any rules they cannot follow themselves. No sense being a complete jackass. What's good for the goose...

AMERICA'S GOVERNOR? THANKS, BUT...

A recent poll revealed that New Yorkers feel that our state legislature is the most corrupt in the nation, which is really saying something when you consider all the stiff competition in this 50 team league. We've also got an appointed Governor who inherited the job from his predecessor who was forced to resign due to outrageous hypocrisy. It wasn't so much the hookers that bothered people with Governor Eliot Spitzer, that's his own business, but the fact that he had largely built his career attacking the prostitution industry and demonizing its clients. So his Lieutenant Governor David Patterson got the job, a decent enough guy but dumb as a sack of Sarah Palins.

Next year is election time and even his own party is urging Patterson not to seek the nomination lest the governorship fall into Republican hands. His response was to call his opponents racists, and perhaps he's right if you count discrimination against the incompetent as racist. Then one even dumber lady from the Assembly upped the idiot ante by attacking Governor Patterson for his blindness, saying he is ineffective because he can't Twitter. So stupid and crazy is this woman that you half expected her to ask just how Patterson knew he was black since he cannot see. So Albany, always a rich repository of corruption, greed, malice and buffoonery, somehow just got worse and it's anyone's guess who will be our next governor.

At any rate, guess who smells blood in the water here? None other than the self-proclaimed America's Mayor, the less-than-honorable Rudolph Giuliani. This is a man who's career was made by the 9/11 attacks even though he did nothing but make matters worse by insisting that his emergency command post be located inside one of the fallen towers. He did so even after the 1993 bomb attack on the World Trade Center prompted all his advisors to insist that this was a huge mistake and would leave the city command structure vulnerable in case of another attack. Which is why he was stumbling aimlessly around downtown that morning dodging debris and directing exactly nothing while abler men implemented an incredibly effective rescue operation. They saved lives and gave their own. We buried many leaders afterward.

Yet somehow the worst day in New York's history became the best day of his life. Rudy Giuliani was on the verge of leaving office a failed mayor, scorned for his autocratic, dictatorial rule and roundly condemned for betraying his wife and young children so callously and publicly. His carefully projected image of championing the common man and cherishing family values was a farce meant for lesser mortals to embrace while he did the opposite, like many a famous dictator. Unlike his apparent role model, he didn't make the trains run on time, but he did claim to have restored law and order and prosperity to New York City. The reality was that he ruined many small businesses while kissing big corporate butt.

His idea of law and order was to lock a great deal of petty offenders like turnstile jumpers and beer drinkers behind bars, a heinous policy against our poorest citizens that continues to this day. His blustery pronouncements about crime were a huge contributing factor to a mindset in America that has led to the incarceration of 2.2 million Americans, the largest prison population in the world by some 700,000 citizens. This unconscionably huge prison population was built largely by cynical politicians like Giuliani using blatant scare tactics to get themselves elected, selling themselves as the brand new sheriff in town.

How much easier it is to lock people away than attack social problems and make progress as a nation, the way America was originally designed to do. Of these 2.2 million prisoners, relatively few of them are actual hardened criminals who deserve long prison sentences. To the Giulianis of this world, prison is the solution to complex social issues, as cruel and mean spirited an approach to leadership as can be imagined, and a surefire method of making things worse. How many young lives have been broken and corrupted forever so that megalomanic politicians too stupid or lazy to lead can claim to be effective leaders? For years Giuliani was the head of that hideous pack.

There was no infraction too small to avoid serious jail time in his eight years as Mayor of New York City, and no powerless pauper was safe from his unrelenting police sweeps. The only thing that prevented him from being a full blown dictator was the fact that this is America and that he lacks any personal courage, as evidenced by his aimless panicky flight on the morning of 9/11 while others tended to the grim business at hand unflinchingly. The fiction that he healed this city afterward is patently absurd. New York is a tough town. We rallied to the side of our own and healed despite, not because of this tired buffoon.

That he went on to great wealth and fame as "America's Mayor" is a sad joke that most New Yorkers just don't get. It wasn't funny for eight years and it wasn't funny on a September morning in 2001. Now he wants to govern our state. Great, not only is Albany a cesspool but now the smelliest of all New Yorkers wants to run it. That would pretty much guarantee that the corruption and inertia will continue while Rudy concentrates on his image, probably pushing for legislation that will condemn even more poor people to our overcrowded prisons. As far as doing the nuts and bolts hard work to tackle the state's many pressing problems, forget it. For Rudy Giuliani, if it's not about him, it's not about to happen. And if he ruins lives and leaves fixing New York's problems for the next guy, well, that's the price to be paid for granting us the benefit of his exalted presence.

America is not the nation of criminals and bums that he and his kind think it is. America is a good nation of good people, generous, courageous and hard working. We deserve better leadership and better state governments. The cowards and psychopaths who dispose of people because they are inconvenient, or because their very existence reminds them of their own failings as leaders need to go away. These clowns spread fear, then ride in on a white horse promising to save us from that fear by any means necessary, constitutional or otherwise. No, thanks. Been there, done that, have the overcrowded prisons, high unemployment, homeless families and empty treasuries to prove it. We cannot afford to follow blowhard ideologues any longer. They always harm the many for the benefit of the few and always leave a huge mess behind. Let's tell Rudy to stay on his America's Mayor World Tour and keep the hell out of New York. He's done quite enough.

LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 476

Knowledge and passion are a formidable combination, the one greatly enhancing the other.

TED KENNEDY: ANOTHER AMERICAN DREAMER GONE

We all knew Senator Ted Kennedy was dying. He made sure of that and used his terminal illness to publicize the cause nearest his heart: universal health care. Mr. Kennedy's losing battle with brain cancer was as public as everything else Kennedy-related. His own attitude towards his date with mortality was that his death was no tragedy after a long and active life, but one more arrow in his quiver for fighting the good fight for the American people, the battle to get health care for every American as a fundamental right on an equal footing with those guaranteed by the Bill Of Rights.

Youngest son of a gifted and tragic wealthy family, Ted Kennedy witnessed his eldest brother being killed in action during World War 2 and his other two brothers being assassinated, one a president and the other trying to be. He ruined his own chances of ever gaining the White House himself by driving his car into a river in 1969, killing a young woman and not reporting the incident for 10 hours, a shameful incident that threatened to ruin his career completely. Still, he managed to become the Senate's most effective legislator and a champion of progressive causes, serving 47 distinguished years. His voice was consistently used to champion causes that would benefit ordinary working Americans in spite of the great wealth into which he was born. He new that social justice need not come with a price tag.

No matter what the issue, Kennedy always voted his conscience and was one of the few dissenters in either house of Congress to vote against the Iraq war, a position that has since been validated by events. And if people insist on branding him liberal, so be it, even though he was unusually adept at finding common cause and co-sponsors for his legislation from the ranks of his conservative "opposition." So this American Dreamer was one who lived in the real world and acknowledged that politics is the act of the doable. And Ted Kennedy got things done.

He introduced the first bill into the Senate to give every American health insurance 40 years ago. There were times when it seemed that he was the lone voice crying in the wilderness for health care reform while others abandoned it or buckled under to powerful industry lobbyists. Even President Clinton forgot about it after receiving an eye-opening defeat in the early days of his presidency. Senator Kennedy vowed to live to fight another day, enduring 8 years of Bush-Cheney disasters, authoring the Patients Bill of Rights with Republican cosponsor Senator John McCain and important Education legislation during these years and keeping a light on for progressive thought.

When America finally got sick of the Neoconman bumblers and thieves and elected Barack Obama our president, Kennedy was ready with advice and ideas about health care reform, seeing the opportunity to finally make this American Dream a reality. It became a knock-down-drag-out fight but Kennedy was more than up to it even as his days were numbered, allaying the fear that his imminent death would kill the issue as well by going public with his battle with a deadly cancer. He turned his fatal illness into a formidable weapon and the bill is before the Senate now, certain to pass in one form or another.

Whether or not this is the final solution to Universal Heath Care remains to be seen, but the important thing is that it will be on the books as the policy of the United States of America to care for its citizens' health. It can be always be reformed or amended as the need arises like any other program or legislation, but it will be the law of the land. Senator Ted Kennedy is the one man most responsible for this landmark bill, just one more battle for the common man that Kennedy was in the thick of, raising his leonine head and his clarion voice for yet another America Dream. He was not a perfect man, but he was a good man, a hard working man and a complex and passionate American original whose like we won't see again. Goodbye, Senator.

LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 475

There's no fool like an old fool, except maybe another damned old fool. They're actually pretty much alike.

MAKING WIKIPEDIA TRUER? TAKE ALL OUR FUN AWAY!

Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia, has finally decided to get actual experts and scholars to review contributions to its pages, which sort of gets you wondering why they never did so in the first place. When any user can edit any entry in an encyclopedia, well, then it's really not an encyclopedia, is it? More like playground for the ignorant and the playful. How else can one explain the paragraph on Mahatma Gandhi's page about his 4 years in Miami as a balloon animal-twisting street mime? Or the line in Lincoln's biography about him inventing velcro. That's just not true! It was Zip-Loc bags that Honest Abe invented, everyone knows that. How about that entire entry on the country of Freedonia, a fictional nation from a Marx Brothers movie? Good trick to pull on all those sixth graders, though, when it's time to make that school report on the small nation of their choice

Seems those fun days are over for those of us who enjoy editing encyclopedias with misleading or comic information. But wait! Wikipedia has not implemented this rule yet! It's still in it's final planning stages and won't be put into place for several more weeks yet, plenty of time for people to have the honor of contributing to an encyclopedia without the benefit of having any letters after their name! PhD, shmee-hD! Let's get busy here, and get our two cents in before the so-called experts take over! Hasn't accuracy and detachment in journalism been rendered obsolete by the internet and the Misinformation Age? Why should encyclopedia authors get to lord it over us with their factual and precise content just because they know stuff, the snobby geeks?

Who can prove otherwise if someone claims that Aristotle was really Irish? And where's the harm in claiming that the Peloponnesian Wars were fought over the proper recipe for souvlaki? It's possible, and as good a guess as any. Let the new "expert" editors sort these things out. With 3 million entries and counting in Wikipedia, it will take them years and years and meanwhile your version of things will stand as the official one. How cool is that? So Google a subject dear to your heart and get busy! Insert the name of one of your neer-do-well ancestors into the history of some royal family or other and claim to be a Baron or an Archduke if you like. Anybody questions you, tell them to look it up in Wiki. "And call me Sir Jimmy!"

Or you could do the same to some billionaire industrialist's family tree and show up at their lawyer's office claiming your cut of the family fortune for long-lost cousin Loretta. Worth a shot. All they can do is say no, but even then if you want to sue the family your claim will carry the weight of inclusion in an encyclopedia. With any luck the jury will be pretty dumb and they'll award you a few mil. At the very least maybe the family will give you a couple of grand just to go away and save them the legal fees. Either way, not a bad payday for a few minutes time having fun with your computer. Beats Twitter any day of the week.

If you're the kind of person who just can't stand to admit being wrong (and which of us isn't?), well, now you don't ever have to, do you? You know that long-running argument you have with your best friend about what is the largest ocean, where you insist that's it's not really the Pacific but the Caspian Sea? Well, Wikipedia can back you up on that with a few minimal changes to the entries on both bodies of water! So there! Or maybe you don't agree with the accepted wisdom of any given subject, and damn the proof to the contrary! Just change the encyclopedia and now Napoleon won the Battle of Waterloo and cotton candy is the best possible nutrition available.

In this modern age of the squeaky wheel getting the most grease even when it is already the greasiest wheel ever but has learned to squeak like a thousand rubber duckies over a loudspeaker, truth is now an elastic concept at best. Truth is what is repeated loudest and most often, and if we can back up our absurd claims with a few Google entries, then those claims become automatic facts. Look it up, pal! It's a beautiful thing. We can now laugh at those earnest fools neglecting their Twitter accounts and chat rooms by sticking their noses into books and journals seeking the truth when they can simply create their own damned truth and have done with it. But time is running out, so get busy making it official that the Suez Canal was built by Druids and Leprechauns and the greatest person who ever lived was yourself. Wikipedia is about to take all our fun away, the spoil sports.

LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 474

Humans and dogs are the only creatures who know how to be genuinely funny. The only question is: Who picked it up from who?

CAREERS AND PRODUCTS THAT MIGHT NOT TAKE OFF

Good news, citizens! The financial wizards who keep track of such things inform us that The Great Recession is lifting. Of course these wizards seem to be the same bunch who stole all the money in the world last year after 10 years of playing Monopoly with everybody else's dough, then proceeded to make the rest disappear, Presto-Change-o! So perhaps we should temper our jubilation a wee bit. So, why should we trust them this time around? Simple, because there is no one else! Other than a few mega-thieves who went to the slammer and one or two that got fired with mucho millions in severance pay, it looks like the same cast of characters is still in charge of all the money in the world, so that's that. Might as well give them the benefit of the doubt, no? Anybody can have a bad decade, right? Right?

So, being that we're going to be in the chips again real soon, might as well start planning to go all entrepreneurial again. Good old American ingenuity and sticktoitiveness ought to get the old markets booming again pronto. The dot com boys are salivating already, certain that their new web thingy will be the next FaceBook or YouTube and they'll be raking in the billions in no time. Go for it, dweeb guys! Manufacturers are dusting off their machinery and planning exciting new lines of useless products to be foisted off on a gullible public. Lemon-scented denture cement, anyone? Cell phones that double as geiger counters? Move over, ShamWow! The possibilities are infinite in this day and age of digital miracles. But, like any age of innovation, some ideas are better than others. Steer clear of investing in these:

The iEye: The latest gizmo offered by Apple Computers, the iEye replaces one of your old fashioned organic analog eyes and fits neatly into the socket! You want Aps, you got Aps! You can not only see better but you can see for miles with the iEye telescopic lens and spy camera, and that's not all! Phone calls, music downloads, GPS locator, video games, you name it, all your favorite applications operated on a virtual screen that appears inches from your face and operated by micro-implants in your fingertips. Twitter in your sleep! Guaranteed to match your remaining eye.

Bloodwater, USA: Exciting and lucrative careers beckon! Bloodwater USA, inspired by the successful private army corporations that made billions getting hired to fight wars and providing high paying jobs to trained killers, Bloodwater is designed to augment a different branch of civil service. What could that possibly be, you say? Two words: Private Firefighters! State and local governments are eager to replace this revenue-negative drain on their treasuries with private workers. The pay? Sky's the limit! It's amazing how quickly people will fork over their cash and credit cards in order to get the flames destroying their homes extinguished ASAP! Now hiring.

Mop Socks: Clean and wax your floor while walking around your house! One-size-fits-all Mop Socks are made from sturdy, stylish and absorbent polyethylene resin that is soapy on the outside, warm and snuggly on the inside. Just dip one foot in soapy water and go about your regular morning routine, dragging your "dry foot" behind you. Repeat the process with wax-foot, buffing-foot in the evening (You'll get the hang of it no time, ladies!) and your floors will stay clean and shiny with no extra work! The perfect solution for the Mom on the go. Comes in four designer colors. Coming soon: Duster Gloves!

The Home Orthodontist: Mom and Dad, what's it going to be, a college fund for the kids or buying Cadillacs for know-it-all Orthodontists when Junior needs braces? Now you don't have to choose! With the affordable and easy to use Home Orthodontist and a pair of needle nose pliers you can install the braces on your kid's twisted teeth yourself! After all, it's only wires and rubber bands! Follow our easy instructions and give them something to smile about on graduation day! Act now and get a complementary EZ Stitcher & Bone Setting Kit complete with hospital-grade suturing needle and Plaster of Paris!

Geek Whisperer: Job openings are starting to appear in this brand new category, with tech employers seeking individuals who can get through to their software engineers when they get out of hand. It seems that the geeks who come up with all those cell phone applications and video games sometimes get absorbed for days on end with Harry Potter movies, Twitter marathons and reading how-to manuals on dating real live non-inflatable girls. Techniques include repetitions of the phrase "dude... dude?... duuuude... dude!", pizza deliveries, dismantling computers and challenging them to reassemble them and a lightweight rubber mallet to the back of their heads. Now hiring.

Baby Boomer Groomers: With the largest generation of Americans ever born getting decidedly long in the tooth, there will be an increasing demand for make-over specialists to teach these scruffy old hippies how to dress for a graceful old age. Baldies with red bandanas and ponytails, sagging cleavage flower children with by now unsightly butterfly tattoos beginning to resemble dying centipedes, tie-dyed T-shirt wearing tubbies and leather vest bikers driving minivans are finally realizing how ridiculous and downright creepy this all looks. That's where Boomer Groomers come in, showing them how to look and act like proper grandparents so they can stop embarrassing their Neo-con Yuppie offspring. Training begins now!

The Euthanator: Die with dignity in the privacy of your own home! Face it Gramps, you're old and in the way. That giant goiter on your neck isn't getting any smaller, and neither is your enlarged prostate. And that nest egg you salted away for your golden years? Does the name Bernie Madoff ring a bell? So, before you get foreclosed on and dragged off to the poor house, die like a man in your own house! The Euthenator comes complete with a blank Last Will and Testament in case you've got two nickels left, a fluffy down pillow upon which to dream your final dreams and enough morphine to kill a moose. Shuffle off this mortal coil on your own terms. Get the Deluxe Two-Pack for mutual suicide pacts for you and the lovely wife! No prescription necessary. Made in Canada.

LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 473

The way to a man's heart is not through his stomach. Wrong organ, but close. Just a little lower, ladies. Always acknowledge the obvious.

DOPOTO REPORTS: NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has spent a leisurely summer doing what we always do; spotting trends, analyzing worldwide news reports and cultural shifts and then pointing out the obvious (we take our name seriously) to interested parties, albeit in a more relaxed way than usual in deference to the season. This has been an especially rainy summer in the Northeast, where DOPOTO headquarters is located, but plenty hot as usual, the odd weather indicative of nothing more momentous than just one of those things. Others would have the world believe that the inordinate amount of rainfall is indicative of some coming ecological or climatological apocalypse, but our dedicated research staff has found that to be as reliable as when many people complained that the moon landings 40 years ago changed the weather forever. Which is to say, unreliable.

While 40 years ago those reports were generated mostly by old ladies just for something to complain about or to make enough noise so that people would realize they were still alive so hold off on the funeral plans already, today's ecological apocalypse Paul Reveres all seem to have some sort of psuedo-scientific axe to grind. Some were saying that the planet has been subject to more hurricanes, typhoons and other violent tropical storms than ever before and that their severity is increasing every year. It turns out there is really no way of knowing that for sure since measuring these things is only a fairly recent phenomenon and a process that has improved very quickly in the past couple of years, just like every other technical aspect of modern society. The Digital Revolution and the Information Age brings us amazing new devices and sources of information more rapidly than our ability to process them can adjust. So naturally conflicting schools of thought emerge as we struggle to keep up with the dizzying pace of our own inventions.

The only thing that hasn't changed is human nature in this constantly changing world. We are a curious race of beings, eager to know what's what about everything under the sun. And so we often take this quest to extremes and jump to conclusions that are not always justified. The only real reason we are aware of so many storms is that we only very recently gained the ability to count so many of them that previously blew themselves out without the benefit of human detection and measurements. The Department has long since established that trees that fall in the forest without people there to hear them do indeed make a sound. It is not always about us. There is no concrete reason to believe that we are subject to more or fewer storms than 200 years ago, when the method of remote storm detection for humans was having your flimsy wooden sailing ship sunk to the bottom of the deep blue sea with all hands and no one the wiser until Jaques Costeau came along in the 20th Century and put Davey Jones' Locker on television.

But, as DOPOTO researchers and analysts have learned during our tenure as pointers-out of the 800 pound gorilla in the room, there are those people who cannot stand not to know about every mystery that has puzzled mankind since the dawn of time and so latch onto any theory that seems to explain these things, no matter how unrealistic or even outlandish, or worse, at least in this department's admittedly biased view, contrary to the obvious. And so they gravitate to an explanation of why the sky is blue according to their personal bent, either religious, scientific or just for the sake of being a know-it-all-blowhard uninterested in actual truth as long as he or she is perceived as an authority in possession of knowledge above and beyond their peers.

Unfortunately, the rapid dissemination of information and the dizzying pace of technological advancement has produced no shortage of people who fall into the blowhard category, usually lazy minds that latch onto a piece of valid information or revealed truth but are too lethargic to explore a subject any further once they have formed a theory. They completely discount any new insights into their pet idea that might serve to contradict their notions. On such practices are built many fine religions and impressive political theories, but no valid science. Science (at the risk of being too obvious even for an organization that specializes exclusively in obvious) is the discipline of seeking provable truth. A true scientist always bows to the obvious and to solid proof, even though that proof may have just wiped out their life's work and long-held theories, rendering their "knowledge" null and void. Plausibility cannot be confused with fact. That's the risk a person takes when they enter any branch of scientific study.

Which is why science is a rare calling, since by definition the scientist is required to be the ultimate realist. A person with the most extensive knowledge is the person most aware of how little they really know for certain. The finest brain surgeon in the world cannot cure the common cold, a humbling realization. True scientists don't leap to hasty conclusions, using terms like "tests indicate" or "results are consistent with" or "field study and experimentation points to" and avoid making definitive pronouncements until proof positive is obtained. True scientists don't have the luxury the rest of us have, to be so certain of something without really knowing why. Which explains why there are so few true scientists. In this lighting-fast age of technology and information, at least human nature is our Rock of Gibraltar for unreasonable assumptions. Nothing much new to report under the sun in that regard. Besides, it's late August, it's hot as blazes, it's sticky and humid and here at DOPOTO we are compelled to admit that we are just as brain-fried as anyone else at this point.

This has obviously been a half-baked speculative lazy-ass summertime doldrums report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.

LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 472

Always save the extra hardware. You just never know when you might need a wingnut.

HOT SEATS

The fabled rock & roll band, The Grateful Dead, used to be a dead end job for their keyboardists, literally. The three guys who filled that seat full time, Ron "Pig Pen" McKernan, Keith Godcheaux and Brent Midland, all died young. After that, anyone approached for the job sort of told them "Well, gee, thanks guys, this is quite an honor and all, but... I don't know, how about if I get back to you on that?" Wisely, the next series of keyboardists that worked with the band did so as featured guests for a tour or an album or so rather than as full fledged members of the band, and thus lived to tell the tale. There aren't many jobs like that, but some.

Take this young punk Baitullah Mehsud, just named to be the new boss of all bosses of the Taliban Relious Gang, Pakistan Chapter. Even had his mug splashed all over international newspapers and video media outlets. Seems pretty full of himself. Only in his late 20's, he already commands upwards of 2,000 Taliban soldiers, so perhaps his smug self confidence is somewhat justified, being a bit of a prodigy in murderous religious gang circles. Thing is, he's probably not the sharpest dagger in the tent, no doubt unaware of the danger of being a gangster and having your photograph published far and wide. Odds are he's too young to remember the career of John Gotti, the so-called Mafia "Teflon Don" who thought it was a good idea for a mob boss to live a high profile life.

Well, Gotti annoyed the crap out his fellow mobsters, people who, unlike Mr. Gotti, realized exactly what business they were in, the illegal sort, where keeping a low profile is one of the secrets to longevity, along with being a murderous son-of-a-bitch. Gotti's paparazzi-loving, designer suit-wearing playboy lifestyle also caught the attention of the authorities, who pretty much kept him on trial for a dozen years on all sorts of serious criminal charges until they finally nailed him for murder and racketeering. He spent his final years getting beaten up by young prison punks in an underground prison that used to be a nuclear missile silo, where he finally wasted away and died of cancer. So much for being a high profile gangster.

Young Baitullah seems to have the murderous son-of-a-bitch part down pat, and quite a thick rap sheet to his credit. Unfortunately for him, his Gotti-like high profile pretty much has the undivided attention of the guys who operate the Robot Predator Drones that have been the bane of the Taliban Religious Gang in Pakistan. Predators are pilotless aircraft run from an office upstairs from a casino in Las Vegas by CIA computer geeks that have been killing a whole lot of high-ranking Taliban in Pakistan. As a matter of fact, Baitullah Mehsud has the CIA geeks to thank for his job since his boss was blown to smithereens by one of their robot planes a few weeks back. These things are so sophisticated they can detect a dime from a mile high and tell whether it's heads or tails, or even whether it's still warm from being in someone's hand.

So, like the keyboard chair in the Grateful Dead or being the #2 man to Osama bin Laden (what have we killed, like thirty of those guys?), young Mr. Mehsud is in a hot seat. Who knows, maybe he's just a big dope with a huge ego and a pea brain that the real Taliban Dons picked to be the adcertised Taliban boss in order to take the heat off themselves. Or maybe he was a huge thorn in their side, encroaching on other bosses' turf and horning in on their music-banning, woman-enslaving action, and this is their way of having him whacked while still retaining the loyalty of his soldiers? Gangster bosses can be very treacherous and cunning, and religious gang bosses even more so.

So look for Baitullah Mehsud's young handsome face to grace the front pages and lead news segments once again in the near future, accompanied by his obituary this time. There will likely be a round of high-fives by the robot controllers in Vegas, followed by a romp in the casino for the geeks, maybe some Black Jack, Baccarat and lap dances all around. And somewhere in Pakistan there will be another young man offered the job of boss-of-all-bosses of the Taliban Religious Gang, Pakistan Chapter. And he will tell them: "Well, gee, thanks guys, this is quite an honor and all, but... I don't know, how about if I get back to you on that? Mind if I just sit in as a featured guest for a while?"

LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 471

Your influence spreads farther and wider than you know. It's a big pond and our ripples reach people we never meet. Try to leave a rainbow instead of a stain.

OPG (OTHER PEOPLE'S GRIPES)

OPG (OTHER PEOPLE'S GRIPES)

Good world we live in. Big, broad and mobile as the Mississippi. Changeable as a kaleidoscope and just as colorful. No reason to ever get bored or stuck in a rut. Filled with wonderful, endlessly interesting people and things with a whole lot of cool stuff to do. At least that's one perspective. Others may feel differently, that this is a wicked world, small and narrow, unrelentingly bland and populated by the selfish, the dull and the loud, with little to do but perform the same endless routine over an over until you drop dead. Sounds like a classic case of OPG, Other People's Gripes. The beauty of this world is that you don't have to share their world view or spend a minute longer in their company than is absolutely necessary.

Sorry pessimists, but it is you that are narrow, dull and uniformly depressing, not the world. The world is just fine, a fascinating place and frankly the only game in town. Anybody have a viable alternative? Until we reach the stars, and that's not happening anytime soon, this world is all we've got, and it's a plenty big enough handful, filled to the brim with a whole lot of joy and love and absorbing challenges. Sure, it's not perfect, but that's where we come in, to try to make some improvements around here. Gives us plenty to do. LIke the Great Sage Yogi Berra reminds us: "If the world was perfect, it wouldn't be." There's always something to reach for, new heights to attain, new problems to solve, new people to meet, a lot of satisfying ways to make ourselves useful and stay busy. And when bad things happen from time time like they always seem to do, well, that's life, and another opportunity to make a positive difference.

Oh, but there's evil in this world, many remind us. Sure there is, and it has a valid purpose too, to show us what is good. Without that contrast, everything would be equal, no good or bad, no desirable or undesirable or no tasty or bland. So we get to choose here, and go with the good, the desirable and the delicious. How cool is that? Or you could sit around and wail and moan and criticize about how very difficult it is to overcome evil and calamity. More OPG. The more time you spend griping, the less time you have to live your life, maybe pitch in and help out, get to stick your two cents worth in when it's time to discuss what to do about things. Leave the wailing and the gnashing of teeth to those who enjoy that sort of thing. Rend not thy garments over spilt milk.

Besides, some people are not happy unless they're miserable, so it's best to let them have our portion of that bitter gruel. It's only charitable, no? Somebody's got to gripe and somebody's got to take action, so that works out pretty good too. To each his own. Its all about the passionate pursuit of happiness, the key words here being passionate and pursuit. Life is a process, not an event, and none of us is ever a finished product until we leave this place the only way anyone ever leaves it. At that point our worries are over. Hopefully you've left enough of yourself behind so that your spirit and your love and your unbounded curiosity are still spreading ripples across this big old pond.

And make no mistake - all that we are, all that we do and all that we say has an impact on others. Just we have been influenced and shaped by those who came before us, so too will we leave our mark, even on people, places and things we never personally encounter. Someday the ones we leave behind will reach the stars and bring our influence with them. No one walks alone, even those who choose to believe that they do. Even self-made men and women draw upon all of humanity and nature to make themselves what they are. In that sense we all invent ourselves, picking and choosing from the infinite possibilities of what it means to be a human being. No other living creature we have ever encountered has that opportunity. A tree can only be a tree and a giraffe has no choice but to eat the high leaves of those trees. A fish can no more be a tiger than a tiger can become a fish. As wonderful as these creatures are, they're sort of at a dead end, possibilities-wise. Birds may fly, but that's about it for them. They can't enjoy a great poem or a baseball game (poetry in motion).

Not so with us. We can fly too, or go where at one time only fish could go. We changed that. While we are all the same as far as being brothers and sisters both genetically and spiritually, we can and do explore a mind-boggling array of human activities, beliefs and outlooks, as kindred and diverse as snowflakes. Some may point out that humans are all over the map emotionally and temperamentally and that makes the world a confusing and contentious ball of wax. Again, OPG. Why complain about the biggest and best toy a thinking creature can have, a ball of wax that changes each time you examine it? A ball of wax upon which you can leave your mark forever? A ball of wax you can make more beautiful, more just, and more filled with love, passion, joy, happiness and playfulness? Some of us are not looking for the complaint department, preferring instead NGH (No Gripes Here) to OPG any beautiful day of any beautiful week. Wage peace and spread love with a vengeance.

LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 470

Love is hard, life is hard, change is hard, loss is hard, decisions are hard. You want easy? Go with Tic-Tac-Toe. After a couple of rounds of that mindless crap, you'll be ready for hard again, and you'll be just fine with it.

FREE PLAXICO (AND AROUND 2 MILLION OTHERS)

Former New York Football Giants' wide receiver Plaxico Burress did a very stupid thing last November. He was out on the town with friends and a teammate having a good time just like a lot of young rich athletes in the big city. Only thing different is that Plaxico had a gun in his pocket, who knows why. The gun went off, shooting him in the leg. Pretty dumb thing thing to do on top of the dumb thing of carrying a pistol around in the first place. To add insult to stupidity and a gunshot wound, he was arrested on a gun charge and reckless endangerment, even though no one else was hurt. Needless to say his season was over and the following April he lost his job when the Giants cut him, voiding a 5 year contract he had signed before the season worth $35 million.

So the guy was in a world of trouble and the mayor of New York was calling for him to go jail, the knee-jerk reaction of almost everyone in America these days for just about any crime or misdemeanor. It's not just easy targets like wealthy young arrogant dopes like Plaxico Burress. Well, arrogance and stupidity may be annoying, but no cause to send somebody to prison. The guy got shot, lost his job and was out 35 million bucks. That's not punishment enough? There was no attack on anybody, no one else sustained any injuries, no malice at all was either displayed or intended. A young man made a stupid mistake and paid a stiff price for it, period, amen. Who the hell are we to want to lock him away in a prison, the place where we send criminals?

And that's exactly what happened to him yesterday, he was sentenced to 2 years in prison, joining a not-so-exclusive American community of 2.2 million souls. There is a sick mentality in this country when we lock up more people in prisons than any other nation on earth. Not only more per on capita, one of every 137 Americans, an unconscionable statistic, but more overall than any other nation. Are Americans that much of a criminal society? The country that has the second largest prison population is China with 1.5 million prison inmates out of a population of 1.3 billion, or one out of every 867 Chinese. We have 700,000 more prisoners than a nation with more than 4 times our population! At the rate we lock people up, if we had China's population, we would have around 9 and a half million inmates. With less than one-twentieth of the world's people, we have one-quarter of the world's prisoners.

Prisons are for criminals and there are many people who belong behind bars, that's indisputable. Just not all that many. This cavalier attitude towards other people's freedom is insane. There are too many arrests, too many charges and too many people locked away for years at a time in the cruel and bitter institutions that are prisons. Prisons should be reserved for hardened criminals who have seriously harmed society and are a continuing danger to society, not as a dumping ground for every individual who has run afoul of the law. Are there no other solutions? How many of our young people have we corrupted forever by not seeking an alternative punishment, not giving them another chance and frankly not giving a rat's ass about them one way or another? Are we that callous a nation?

If we were as humane as the Chinese our prison population would be about 362,000. And China is a totalitarian government while we bill ourselves as the Land of The Free. Why can't we behave as well towards our own citizens as the Red Chinese government? What kind of cruel puritanical barbarians have we become? Sending someone to prison is a very severe and radical radical step not to be taken lightly. There are fewer things as cruel as being sent to prison and we as a society need to make sure that only those criminals who give us no choice in the matter are put away.There are individuals who by their outrageously unacceptable acts or continuous pattern of sociopathic behavior must be locked away from society, some of them forever. Just not one in every 137 people.

One in every 137 people in prison makes America either the most criminally prone society on earth, the cruelest society on earth or a nation that has lost control of its judicial and criminal justice system and has outlawed far too many things. The latter is the sad reality and the horror is that it is accepted by so many people. It is deeply ingrained in our society that people should to be sent to jail, even a young man like Plaxico Burress who went from being a Super Bowl hero one year to an unemployed athlete with a bullet hole in his leg the next. And now to satisfy this society's unbalanced need to exact cruel retribution even for victimless crimes, Plaxico Burress becomes a prison inmate among thieves, rapists and murderers. Is society safe now? Not from ourselves we're not.

If a foolish young man can be locked away in prison for hurting no one but himself, what's to say that any of us won't be next? Instead of prison being a rare and grave punishment befitting very serious crime, prison sentences are being handed out to pot smokers, prostitutes and first time small offenders like it was no big deal. No big deal to those of us not in prison, perhaps, but a huge deal and an incredibly traumatic experience for every prison inmate. Just because the rest of us may trivialize it does not make it trivial.

In this way we trivialize serious crime and exaggerate lesser offenses by sending lesser offenders to the same prisons as serous offenders. It's equating killing three people in a drive-by shooting with buying a recreational drug, or making a prostitute the equal of a rapist. Those things are not the same and the same punishment does not fit all crimes. It is an immature nation that insists upon demonizing the vices of others, never mind criminalizing them with stiff prison sentences. Well over a quarter of our 2.2 million inmates are in jail for strictly drug charges, and more than half are drug addicts forced to steal to support habits that are outrageously expensive simply because they are illegal. There are millions of people not in prison because the price of a whiskey habit is within reason.

Why one and not the other? Alcohol kills more people than all the illegal drugs combined and that's just fine with society. Why is a hopeless drunk any different than a hopeless heroin addict? Other than the $200 a day difference in the price of their addictions, that is. Is one morally superior because he pickles his brain with a legal intoxicant? The truth is there is no difference and 10% of the population are addicts who consume 90% of every variety of intoxicant, legal and otherwise. Legalizing them all would not create a single extra addict, any more than the repeal of Prohibition did in 1933. Legalization would bring the price of hard drugs down to a whiskey habit level, the government would collect billions in taxes and put the violent drug cartels out of business overnight and save the uncounted billions of untaxed dollars leaving the country, to say nothing of an immediate drop in crime.

Then perhaps those with the disease of addiction could be treated like patients instead of demons in human form worthy only of becoming prisoners. And perhaps we could try to better China's record of human rights by locking up only one person in a thousand. We can start by Freeing Paxico Burress, a foolish young man who has already paid the price for his crime in physical injury, a fortune, loss of livelihood and public humiliation. In this nation of immigrants seeking fresh starts and second chances, can we not show the same compassion to one another that Lady Liberty showed to our ancestors when they sailed into New York Harbor? Free Plaxico Burress, and around 2 million other prisoners. We are America, the Land of The Free. Let's make that more than a slogan, shall we?

LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 469

If you're a pain in the ass, it's not necessary to be a pain in the ass every waking moment. Give it a rest every so often, maybe take Tuesdays off or something.

WHAT WE'RE GOOD AT, AND NOT SO GOOD AT (TALES OF THE CIA AND THE ACME BLACKWATER MERCENARY & ASSASSIN COMPANY)

Like Dirty Harry said: "A man's got to know his limitations." The same can be said for governments. While the United States Federal Government takes an unfair rap that it can't run anything properly, that's just not true. Social Security and Medicare are models of efficiency. The National Park system is outstandingly well maintained. Our armed forces are the best trained and most lethal on the planet. Our system of interstate roads is the most extensive anywhere. Even the much-maligned Post Office, in financial trouble recently, does a remarkable job processing and delivering 667 million pieces of mail every day. It's not like America is some chaotic backwater where nothing gets done properly. For the most part, our government does just fine in doing the things that citizens can reasonably expect of their government.

There are those other areas, however, where the U.S. government is not exactly world class. Take diplomacy, for example. We've never been much good at that. Back in the 1920's, the famous comic and social critic Will Rogers was fond of saying that "America never lost a war or won a peace," referring to the disastrous Treaty of Versailles that ended World War 1 and pretty much ensured there would be a World War 2. Even though America's entry into that war was the decisive factor in the victory of the Allies over Germany, President Wilson and our assembled ambassadorial contingent could not convince Britain and especially France to be less rapacious in their peace terms, dooming Germany to crippling poverty and Hitler. America even refused to join the League of Nations, which was Wilson's idea in the first place and rendered completely irrelevant by our refusal to participate.

Well, we've lost some little wars since those days but still have yet to catch up to European diplomats with their centuries of experience and hard-earned realism when it comes to big time diplomacy on the world stage. To our credit, we have not become as vengeful in victory as the Versailles Treaty-era diplomats, but we could have been a little more assertive in preventing the Soviet Union from grabbing half of Eastern Europe following World War 2, setting up a Cold War that cost untold trillions of dollars in a nuclear arms race and terrorized the entire world for almost 50 years. Our diplomats were taken to the cleaners by their Soviet counterparts.

Another thing we're not so good at is espionage and intelligence gathering. When the same Soviet Union collapsed of is own weight in the early 1990's, the people our government hired to keep track of these things as their only job read about it in the newspapers the same time as the rest of us did, and were just as dumbfounded. Thats not a good thing, and made us wonder what the CIA (the too-generously named Central Intelligence Agency) was doing with all the dough we paid them out of our hard-earned taxes. And that was 30 years after the CIA fiasco of an operation to retake Cuba from Castro called The Bay of Pigs Invasion that was a miserable failure and a black eye to an agency that had been up to all sorts of similar shenanigans all over South America. Supposedly the Agency was reformed after that, but subsequent South American adventures under President Reagan led to the Iran-Contra Scandal, another beaut of a shiner for our covert intelligence operations.

And guess who trained and armed Osama bin Laden to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan? Bingo, the CIA! How did that brainstorm work out for us on September 11, 2001? Since that time, they have been unable to locate their former client and protege, the tallest man in Afghanistan and an Arab living among the distinctly non-Arab looking ethnic Pashtun people. So at this point, even the CIA started to recognize that they didn't have much talent for covert operations. Well, no shit Sherlocks! When the dictionary definition of covert is "not openly acknowledged or displayed, unseen," and your covert operations have been a source of derisive newspaper headlines for decades, you pretty much have to concede that maybe espionage isn't really your long suit after all.

But you're the CIA and you're in a bind here; to catch the monster you helped create before he does even more catastrophic damage than he already has without screwing the pooch. For once, you really, really don't want to blow it, but can't trust anybody in-house not to make matters worse. This would have been a good time to appraoch the president and tell him, "Hey, maybe there's some other branch of government you can use for this operation so it doesn't turn into even more embarrassing headlines, maybe someone who can actually catch this guy and his buddies. We really blew it big time when we had a lot of information on his plans before the attack but forgot to share it with anybody else. My bad." Only they notice that President Bush The Younger was too busy at the time squandering the unprecedented good will the entire world had showered on America immediately following 9/11 and clearing brush from his Texas ranch. It was full plate time for the Nincompoop-In-Chief so they went back to the drawing board.

Not wanting to interfere with the massive international diplomacy failures that are a cornerstone of American foreign policy, they decided to hire someone else out of their own pocket (our pockets) to catch bin Laden and his henchmen, figuring maybe they'll be able to give the president some much-needed good news for a change during a very traumatic time for America, what with us getting so devastatingly attacked and having a nincompoop for a president to boot. So, who do they hire? James Bond maybe? Nero Wolfe, deductive genius? Nah, too expensive and not native-born Americans, but still there was much support for both of them in the agency. After careful consideration in staff meetings of each man's qualifications and their stellar track records, the fact that they were both fictional characters finally tipped the scales against them. It was decided to hire the Blackwater Handy-Dandy Mercenary & Assassin Company for the job instead, a private army corporation staffed by (you guessed it!) many former CIA operatives.

Well, as it turns out, they might as well have hired the Susquehanna Hat Company, or Wiley Coyote's personal favorite, The Acme Do-It-Yourself Home Assassination Kit Company. Just like the still-at-large Road Runner, nobody was tracked down and assassinated or captured and brought to justice. Hell, they weren't even located, when a third grader would tell you to look in Afghanistan and just across the border in Pakistan. Not only that, they listened the president's boss, Shotgun Dick Cheney, who told them this would our little secret, so let's keep it on the QT. All those Number 2 men in al Qaeda killed or captured? The Army did that, not even trying to be at all covert or clever about it. In some very public and straightforward operations, they just sort of barged right in, shot the place up and captured whoever wasn't dead. And they did it for their regular Army wages, not the millions given to the Blackwater Handy-Dandy Mercenary & Assassin Company.

This annoyed the CIA no end since now they were deprived of concocting some convoluted scheme involving guys dressed in black turtlenecks dropping though skylights and popping out of wedding cakes with machine guns and getting the drop on the bad guys. See, there were still a lot of pro-James Bond guys on the planning committee as opposed to Nero Wolfe adherents, who just would have figured out where these guys were and sent his right hand man Archie Goodwin to pick them up while he tended to his orchids, no fun at all. The Army option or the figuring-stuff-out option just weren't romantic and exciting enough for them so they went ahead with the multi-million dollar mercenary option and got nothing done.

Mercifully, at least the mercenary option didn't make matters worse. The CIA managing the making-things-worse option just fine with their Robot Predator Drone air strikes that have killed far more civilians than terrorists, the robots not being overly concerned with the identities of the two-legged living organisms they are programmed to terminate. Both programs have resulted in the requisite negative headlines, once again cementing the CIA's reputation as the most ham-handed intelligence agency anywhere and the most overt of covert operatives. So, like good old Dirty Harry says, knowing one's limitations is important, but so is doing something about them. Having a set of diplomats and a spy agency that can't find their own asses with both hands is getting pretty old and stale. Can't we bring in some British tutors, who have been doing these things quite successfully for six centuries? Either that or fire everybody in the CIA and replace them with the efficient clerks who run the Social Security Administration. Just add a letter to the Agency and rename it CIAO.

LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 468

The best revenge is no revenge at all. Keep them paralyzed, wondering when you will strike. Then you can go about your business, leaving them in the dust.

LAWYERS, GUNS AND MONEY

"Lawyers, Guns and Money" is a rock & roll song by the late Warren Zevon. The song describes a situation gotten into by a serial binger and party animal that pretty much got out of hand, even by madman standards. Great song. Lawyers, guns and money, however, can also be used to describe the root causes of many of America's problems. Lawyers? Well, at the risk of taking potshots at an easy target, we've always had too many of them, and they seem to be busier than ever now defending people who abuse the latter two; guns and money. Guns? The geniuses who wrote the Bill of Rights were pretty darned specific in writing those Constitutional amendments in every case but one. That would be the Second Amendment, concerning the right to keep and bear arms. There's lots of wiggle room there.

One of the briefest amendments, it reads in full: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." (The odd placement of the commas is the original punctuation, the final of several drafts.) And that's it. No details on whether or not every Tom, Dick and Harriet can legally walk around towing a howitzer in a shopping cart or wearing criss-cossing bandoliers of bullets as a fashion accessory. And that bit about "well-regulated" and "Militia?" Were the people in the militia the only ones who get to keep and bear arms? Seems like anyone's guess. What about "free State" and "the people?" Would that be the nation as a whole or each individual state of the Union? And would the people be individuals or the public as a separate entity represented by their militia? There's a few more thing left to the imagination, an odd thing to do when writing a constitution, especially for a nation whose imagination knows no bounds.

After all, the founding of a society such as The United States of America at the time when it was founded was a grand exercise in unbridled imagination. To the vast majority of the world at that time, including a substantial portion of the people living in the English Colonies, tossing off the yoke of kings and emperors and having the people themselves running the show was a complete fantasy, an outrageous assault on the accepted world order. Who else but a bunch of dreamers would have included the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" in a list of inalienable rights? Nobody was supposed to be happy except for royalty back then! The fact that their revolution succeeded only fueled American dreams and aspirations to unprecedented heights, and a nation that was an inspiration to the entire world was founded.

LIving up to the ideas and ideals of our Founding Fathers was to become a journey of learning and achievement that we are still pursuing. America has always been as much of an idea as a nation, a quest for perfection in government, individual opportunity, freedom and civil rights. Earth-shaking document that it was, the Constitution was made by humans, and thus imperfect. Hence the amendments. Even in the main draft, slaves, indentured servants and Native Americans were not counted as entire human beings in the census that determined representation in Congress. They were considered three fifths of a human being, a situation that had to be corrected by a bloody and destructive civil as that tested the notion of self government as never before (see Lincoln: The Gettysburg Address).

So perhaps the Second Amendment can be revisited. When you get some yahoo showing up outside a presidential speech in Phoenix carrying his rifle "because I'm in Arizona and still have some rights" and 5 people being shot in Brooklyn on one block in the space of a few hours in separate and unrelated incidents, maybe there is something to the old argument that there are too many loose guns in the hands of too many morons floating around in America. While every state has already amended (or expanded) the Second Amendment to suit themselves, there is no national consensus in a nation that scrupulously regulates drivers, dog owners, parking rules, water consumption, litter recycling and alcohol sales. Is there no middle ground between a completely unarmed populace and drive-by shooting by teenage gangsters?

After all, if people are concerned that taking guns away from people will make it harder to commit stickups and armed robberies, time honored American traditions, let's examine the third part of Lawyers, Guns and Money. Recent events have clearly proven that stealing money is an increasingly non-violent crime. As a matter of fact, it is a crime that has been taken over from the poverty-stricken classes by the ultra-wealthy, making even the largest of gun-driven bank robberies and jewel heists seem like petty larceny in comparison to their spectacular multi-billion dollar hauls. And yet, just like guns, Americans seem reluctant to implement regulations on the insider manipulation of the nation's money supply. And just like guns, the money (or rather, the glaring lack of it) is causing untold misery for ordinary Americans every day of every week of every year.

And so the lawyers rake in hefty fees on all sides of the arguments surrounding guns and money. The National Rifle Association, the vast majority of whose members are completely responsible gun owners, maintains one of the most effective lobbying organizations in Washington and employs brigades of expensive attorneys to challenge any anti-gun legislation anywhere in the nation. What they are essentially doing is telling the nation that their own dues-paying, law abiding membership is wrong and that it's the right of every American to be an irresponsible gun owner, the consequences of crime and death and shooting sprees by high school students and madmen be damned. Sort of puts a crimp in that whole "pursuit of happiness" deal when you have to be in pursuit of cover on a regular basis when bullets start flying.

Like crime in general, the damage of too many loose guns and too much money being stolen by the uber-wealthy falls heaviest of the poor. The United States' response to this? Locking up 2.2 million people in prison, 700,000 more than China with her 1.3 billion people. And the majority of our inmates are drawn from ranks of our poverty stricken minorities, the raw material for the prison industry. Which means there's no shortage of lucrative work for our lawyers involved in the booming growth industry that is America's prison system. Is it cheaper to maintain the world's largest prison system or to clamp down on all the loose firearms floating around society?

We also outlaw every drug but the most destructive of them all, alcohol, and in this way ensure that our prisons will continue to thrive by locking up not only the violent dealers of drugs but also their customers. The money invested in maintaining this policy is incalculable, and the guns required to sustain both the huge criminal drug cartels and the street dealers are in the many hundreds of thousands, if not the millions. Imagine locking up the CEOs of Budweiser and Jack Daniels and all the liquor store clerks and their customers? We'd have to set aside an area the size of Alaska to hold them all, and hire several large armies to guard them. Well, you don't have to imagine such folly since they are part of a legal, respectable, well-regulated and heavily taxed industry, in spite of the fact that they are dealers of the most deadly intoxicant known to man.

But there is no mention of drugs or alcohol in The Constitution. Perhaps like the ambiguous wording of the Second Amendment, the Declaration of Independence counted on "the pursuit of happiness" to cover the use of intoxicants by consenting adults? There is certainly nothing banning them in either document. The notion of regulating human pleasures only evolved late in the game, outlawing prostitution, gambling, drugs and even for a dozen foolish years, alcohol. Well, it's later still in the game and perhaps it's time to switch tactics: repeal all laws against victimless crimes and start strictly regulating firearms.

If the argument is that people will seek out firearms in spite of their illegality just as they do with drugs or prostitutes, then there is no argument for maintaining the legality of the one and not the other. The idea is not to ban guns, but make them difficult to obtain and subject to strict regulation, just like alcohol and tobacco. Hand guns are not toys or fashion accessories and when carried on a regular basis tend to be used sooner or later to settle arguments and grudges and even to express petty concerns like road rage. And when you combine alcohol with guns, as is so often the case, guns win very time and innocent people get maimed and die. Let's reexamine that all-too-brief Second Amendment and our antiquated and puritanical vice laws. Let "Lawyers, Guns and Money" remain a great rock & roll song and not a way of life.

LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 467

If you find yourself taking hostages, odds are you didn't spend sufficient time thinking things through beforehand. SWAT teams generally don't cut you all that much slack when these things happen. Make plans.

CAN WE GET SOME DILLINGERS HERE? A WILLIE SUTTON, MAYBE?

If there is any doubt that we are indeed living in strange days here in America, just take a look at our rogues' gallery of home grown criminals. Who are our most notorious pubic enemies? Wall Street con artists like Bernie Madoff, anonymous identity thieves and credit card scammers who hack into retail data bases. It's embarrassing! A nation that produced Jesse James, Billy The Kid, The Dalton Gang, Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid, Al Capone, Dutch Shultz, Bonnie and Clyde, Meyer Lansky, Baby Face Nelson, Ma Barker, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bugs Moran, John Dillinger, Lucky Luciano, Crazy Joey Gallo, Vito Genovese, Murder Incorporated and Willie Sutton can't even muster a decent liquor store bandit these days.

If it weren't for foreign-born terrorists we wouldn't have any desperadoes around at all these days, and that's not satisfying at all because we hate those bastards. In the fairly recent past, America loved it's flamboyant, larger than life bad guys, daring men and women with style, flair and attitude to spare, thumbing their noses at convention, living fast, dying young and leaving a good looking corpse. We wouldn't have them any other way and sometimes these people were among the most popular Americans, right up there with Babe Ruth, Elvis and Clark Gable. Would Bernie Madoff have handed back his cash to a farmer like John Dillinger did during a bank heist, saying " We don't want your dough, Pop, only the bank's." Hell no! He'd have pried the poor guy's gold fillings from his teeth for good measure (of course Bernie could never muster up the courage to knock off a bank with a gun instead of from the comfort of his penthouse suite).

When Frank and Jesse James were robbing trains in the 1870s, the railroads were the villains to much of rural America, not the James Gang, and with good reason. The Robber Barons who owned the railroads were notorious for robbing poor farmers of their land by force of arms, their hired company goons never hesitating to shoot down defenseless farmers, women too. Same thing in the 1930's when the banks collapsed and went on an orgy of foreclosures of homes and farms trying to recoup their losses caused by their own greed. The trigger happy company goons were back. The nation cheered Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger and a host of others who relieved the banks of their cash but never bothered working people. These famous crooks were often shielded by the rural communities hardest hit by the Great Depression. Similarly, urban workers refused to cooperate with police and Federal authorities nosing around for leads as to the whereabouts of their favorite Robin Hoods' hideouts.

From the 1930s to the 1950s Willie "The Actor" Sutton was as popular as Frank Sinatra. This silky-smooth bank robber and master of disguise never carried a loaded gun because "somebody might get hurt," explaining that he only carried a gun because "you can't rob a bank on charm and personality." A polite man, he also said "you can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word." This Brooklyn born quote machine also explained, when asked why he robbed banks, "because that's where the money is!" Where are these guys today? These were real American icons!

Here's what we have now: hackers, accountants and scam artists who never even meet their victims or look danger in the eye. There's not a memorable quote to be heard, no trace of panache or gallantry and barely a discernible pulse to be found. There's no passion, no zest for life on the edge, no wit and no grit. No background stories of any interest at all and no trace of any sense of humor, sardonic, ironic or otherwise. There's not a tough guy in the whole crowd and every one of them turns snitch when they get caught in an age when police can't touch a hair on their expensively barbered heads. Pathetic!

When these paper tigers are arrested and do their perp walks for the cameras, they cannot meet anyone's gaze, averting their eyes in shame, trying to pull their entire heads into their designer suits like human turtles. Contrast that with pictures of real tough guys when they were in custody, looking the world dead in the eye, proud, defiant, their eyes gleaming and that unrepentant combination of a smile and a sneer on their wide open faces, declaring: "This is who I am. Take it or leave it!" And millions of rank and file Americans took it just fine, instinctively understanding these rebels against a haves versus have-nots society that was the America of their day, even more so than it is now.

That unflinching look told the world; "I may be a bad man, did some lousy things things, sure, but I'm a man and I'll be damned if I'll crawl for your amusement. Do your worst!" You never heard any lame bleatings like you get from our modern white collar crooks, about them not thinking they were doing anything wrong, or deeply regretting that they besmirched their sterling reputations, like they were the victims of their stealing all the money in the country. They just do not get it that they are ushering in a new era of haves versus have-nots by their limitless greed. The Dillingers and Suttons never hid behind such self-serving delusions. They knew where that train was headed when they got on board. They got on anyway, figuring at least they'll make theirs a memorable ride.

In the Golden Age of Tough Guys, suspects were treated to the "Third Degree," which consisted of beating confessions and cooperation out of prisoners. For days, if need be, with no platoons of thousand dollar an hour lawyers in sight until the cops either broke their man or their knuckles on his thick skull. These public enemies laughed in the cops' faces and never squealed, taking their medicine of going to prison, where a lot of them broke out sooner rather than later. John Dillinger did so twice, once with his famous wooden gun carved in the prison wood shop, while Clyde Barrow rescued some of his loyal gang members from a chain gang in a spectacular shootout and Model T-Ford getaway. And when they made their exits, they went out with a bang, literally, often in a wild shootout with cops, sheriffs or the Feds.

When Jesse James, John Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde finally met their bloody fates, much of the nation mourned their deaths as they would a beloved president. When Willie Sutton emerged from prison in 1969, the public welcomed him home and he made even more money from banks as a security advisor and also made a popular television commercial for a credit card company. When the Enron wimps and the Madoff co-conspirators get out of jail, who will even notice? They are a national disgrace in a nation with a rich history of colorful folk hero bandits who flipped the bird at authority but embraced the masses.

Today's noted criminals were the authorities, in effect, leading bankers and executives who were already very wealthy and had no reason to steal. They had no hard luck stories of having been born on the wrong side of the tracks and held no grudge against a world where the deck was stacked against them from birth. These bland idiots already had it made, already had everything the Dillingers of this world could only dream of. None of the great robbers would have ever understood rich guys blowing a sweet deal like that. Probably would have slapped them silly for being such dimwitted un-American chumps.

LIKE EXPLAINED, PART 466

When your invisible friend starts criticizing every little thing you do, that's usually when you begin to drift apart. It's all for the best, really.

MIGHT AS WELL JUST SURRENDER TO THE MADNESS

You see the insanity all around, seemingly everywhere you turn; the government aimlessly trying to find its bearings in the face of weird crisis after weird crisis, their opposition that was kicked out of office losing their marbles completely and seeing devils and witches at their windows, the assembled media absolutely shrieking gibberish at the moon, the insane Twitter craze, Reality TV, wars that run longer than the TV series "M*A*S*H," golfers (!) making the front pages of newspapers like they were actual athletes, it's all too much. You resist and rail against it and point out the madness to whoever will listen, vowing to remain a beacon of sanity in a mad world until everyone comes to their senses again.

It's a lonely calling but you're determined to keep a light on in the window. So you wait. And wait. And wait some more. Nothing. Then you look out your window and you see clowns, leprechauns and unicorns leading a parade down Main Street and all your neighbors are marching along! In tutus, no less, playing air trombone! And then it hits you like a ton of bricks: it's not going to get any better. The madness is here to stay. Maybe that Mad Cow Disease affected more than just Elsie and company, you're thinking. Maybe it's my turn now, who am I to think I'm immune? And so you surrender to the universal madness. Maybe some of these things cross your mind:

Is being a member of the PGA governing body anywhere near as prestigious as sitting on The National Potato Board or the American Milk Council? And which of the three is the most exciting post?

If Jesus was God's son, why didn't he just use his X-Ray vision to toast the Romans when they started brandishing the cat-o-nine-tails?

Do the aliens that abduct humans ever really ask to see our leader? Seems like they're pretty satisfied with trailer trash. They must admire the mullets.

Since the French were nice enough to give us the Statue of Liberty, couldn't we give them something nice in return, like saving them when there's a war, maybe taking that pesky Vietnam off their hands? Never mind...

Do British people use that cool accent when we're not listening? Think maybe they're messing with our heads and they really sound like folks from Philly when they're hanging around with each other?

Are famous authors required to wear corduroy sport jackets with elbow patches and turtlenecks while smoking a pipe? The goatees seem optional.

Exactly what is Indie rock independent of, and what is Alternative an alternative to? These maladjusted nerds look and sound remarkably alike. Or maybe they're just actors playing a part and the music is all made by the same studio cats in Seattle? Seems logical...

Maybe you start wondering if any emergency room ever treated an old man for an erection lasting longer that four hours? Seems like the last thing Gramps would complain about. More likely he'd parade around the front yard pantsless for a while to impress the neighbors, maybe tie a ribbon on it.

Wasn't the whole beauty of Afghanistan and the Taliban the fact that we don't live there? You know, not really having to think all that much about people reluctant to join the sixteenth century, never mind current times? Now they're in the headlines more than the Octomom.

You wonder about all these kids learning to play soccer and figure that's just training for facing a future of living frustrating, meaningless lives. They run back and forth willy-nilly for a couple of hours kicking a ball while maniacal adult coaches scream gibberish at them and goad them on, not even getting to use their damned hands, maybe scoring one goal between the fifty or sixty of them out there shouting and running and kicking each other in the shins, not really knowing exactly what the heck is the point of this whole futile exercise. They are never permitted even once to pause and take stock of the situation, maybe decide as one to just walk away from such madness and go play baseball or shoot some hoops or something, where at there's at least some skill and strategy involved, and a game with a clear objective. And yet, the government does nothing about it.

Maybe you start wondering if you're getting enough anti-oxidants, that you should be more the picture of vibrant health like Larry King. Maybe consider drinking a couple of quarts of red wine every day.

You start believing that Yosemite Sam and Donald Trump are real people.

You figure that talk shows tell you all you need to know about show business and politics. You decide to run for President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a maverick independent with a program for real reform. You go door to door vowing to ban romantic comedies and teen movies from receiving Oscar nominations and proposing stiff prison terms for Harry Potter look-alikes. You win in a landslide.

You wonder why Oprah doesn't do a show on the heartbreak of psoriasis.

You create a reality TV show set in Texas called "Two Thumbs Down," where contestants vie for the right to pull the switch on the electric chair, giving host George Bush The Younger a huge career boost returning to the only activity at which he excelled - executing subnormal teenagers. He will carefully "review" each death sentence, consisting of a quick glance, a dramatic double thumbs down, then his signature rendered in several different colored crayons, "Presidentiatory Style!" At the end of each show, one lucky winner gets to throw the switch. The show buries "American Idol" in the ratings race.

You put in your application to the Federal Government to become a judge on one of their "Death Panels" hoping to be seated next to Paula Abdul.

You organize a ragged mob armed with torches and pitchforks and storm a White Castle fast food joint, shouting for the head of Dr. Franken-Phil.

You invent aluminum foil solar panels to be placed on one's forehead to power iPods, pacemakers and beer can hats, wearing it everywhere you go. No one notices.

Maybe you decide that there really is something to that whole Twitter craze and you send out the same message over and over again, 50 times a day: "What coherent message can I possibly send to anybody in one hundred and forty characters or less? This makes absolutely no sense at all and is completely and utterly ridicu" You gain the largest following on Twitter.