September 30, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 511
Love doesn't care whether or not you are ready to be in love or want to be in love. You have nothing to say in the matter. Might as well just open your heart to the adventure of a lifetime. Win or lose, it will be one hell of a ride.
THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE STRANGE
Life is good, death is bad. That's pretty much everyone's take on that whole life and death thing. Not too many people feel the opposite is true, but there are some. They would be the strange. Stranger still when you realize that these lost souls hold that opinion for years and years, yet never act on their convictions and do away with themselves, thus freeing more oxygen and subway seats for the rest of us. Then there are those who feel that death is good for certain other people, a more common brain malady. Again, few of these people act on their beliefs, content to wish those people dead and hope that someone else is enterprising enough and courageous enough to carry out their morbid fantasies for them. There are those willing to do that, murderers, psychopaths and soldiers, but the last group gets a pass on their killing since it is never their idea to fight wars, usually some pompous old fart who's in charge of them and has serous issues and/or a greedy heart.
That's the way of the world, filled with the good, the bad and the strange. We are a fierce race of beings, we humans. It's all about the passion. We love one another fiercely, hate some people fiercely and kill people fiercely. We sometimes even kill for love, as strange as that sounds. It could be a love affair that blows up in someone's face and twists their mind into thinking that everything will be okay if they kill their rival, the one they love, or both. That's never worked out for anybody ever but it hasn't put a stop to that sort of thing. People who are that far gone mentally rarely think these things through. Either that or they think that they will be the exception that proves the rule. At any rate, their handiwork doesn't get to be called a love crime. A crime of passion, maybe, but there are all kinds of passions swirling around human hearts, not all of them so attractive.
Then there's the killing done for love of country, like that makes it okay. As recently as 64 years ago, the world wrapped up a war that saw 65 million people being slaughtered over nationalistic passions, with none of the participating nations achieving anything close to the goals they set for themselves at the beginning of the war. Cities of rubble canceling out the labor of centuries, decimated populations, gerrymandered national borders and tense standoffs between hostile nuclear-armed rivals wasn't exactly the picture in the minds' eye when the various armies first marched into battle with flags waving, bands playing and maidens blowing kisses at the brave young warriors. God was on their side and they were going to save the world.
After a half dozen years of wholesale slaughter, monumental cruelty and nations laid waste, the hollow eyes of the survivors told a different tale, young men grown old before their time, wasted young women scavenging piles of rubble to feed sickly children and mountains of corpses of innocents joining the millions and millions of fallen soldiers. Didn't seem so glorious anymore and God was nowhere in sight, possibly off in a corner somewhere cringing in remorse over what His children had done to one another, wondering like any parent where He went wrong when a child does something unspeakable. And who could blame Him? The landscape in 1945 was an abomination of death, hatred and destruction on a scale previously unimaginable.
Logic dictates that then would have been a good time to reassess how different nations deal with one another. It was a time when men and women from all over the world were for the first time exposed to people of many different nationalities, and when the guns weren't blazing, got to interact with these strange creatures, and more often than not found out that they weren't so different from themselves after all. They all loved their hometown, Mom's cooking, their sweethearts and wives, their country and wanted a better future for their children. The letters written from the battlefields to home differed only in the languages in which they were written, not in the content. The letters sent in return were also interchangeable in their messages of love, concern for safety and the sharing of routine news of home, family and neighborhood. The wrinkled snapshots carried by every soldier reinforced the universal experience of being a part of humanity.
So, why was the world at each other's throats? What could we do to avoid this happening again? Could the United Nations do what nations themselves had been unable to do forever, to live in peace, to deal with one another with tolerance, understanding and good faith? That is what cried out to be done, what all of mankind wanted more than ever before. It was time to put a stop to the killing forever. Not only logic, but people's hearts demanded this, their souls ached for peace. Some of the conquerors helped rebuild the conquered, hostile dictatorships were turned into peaceful democracies, while others grabbed and enslaved small vulnerable nations and erected an invisible Iron Curtain that would divide former allies for half a century. Logic, goodness and human heartache were losing out to the bad and the strange. The moment had passed for international reconciliation and the world dug in its heels once again waiting for the Third World War.
That never happened, but plenty of other wars filled our spare time, and a hell of a lot of genocide too. So much for learning from our mistakes. And yet the vast majority of people remain loving, earnest and peaceful souls, wanting only to live their lives safe and warm and to give their children a better world than the one they inherited. What's stopping us? Why do we allow our old men to start wars they will never have to fight? Why do we still bury our idealistic young soldiers in faraway lands? Why do mothers the world over weep for their children and curse the grand parades and colored flags that sent them on yet another misguided crusade?
What is this strange thing inside of us, that barbaric force that overrides our love, our goodness and our finest instincts as human beings? Will there always be within us the good, the bad and the strange? That's a battle to be fought one heart at a time, perhaps the only war that matters to humanity, the only war that can ever have a good outcome, the war within each of us to do what is right. We already know what is right and what is wrong, that's not the problem and never was. The problem confronting each of us is to apply that knowledge in every situation we face as a first resort. We already know where our last resort will lead us. We have cried those tears, felt that remorse and swore never again more times than can be counted. Let us swear again and again and again until we get it. Let us wage peace with all the love in our hearts.
That's the way of the world, filled with the good, the bad and the strange. We are a fierce race of beings, we humans. It's all about the passion. We love one another fiercely, hate some people fiercely and kill people fiercely. We sometimes even kill for love, as strange as that sounds. It could be a love affair that blows up in someone's face and twists their mind into thinking that everything will be okay if they kill their rival, the one they love, or both. That's never worked out for anybody ever but it hasn't put a stop to that sort of thing. People who are that far gone mentally rarely think these things through. Either that or they think that they will be the exception that proves the rule. At any rate, their handiwork doesn't get to be called a love crime. A crime of passion, maybe, but there are all kinds of passions swirling around human hearts, not all of them so attractive.
Then there's the killing done for love of country, like that makes it okay. As recently as 64 years ago, the world wrapped up a war that saw 65 million people being slaughtered over nationalistic passions, with none of the participating nations achieving anything close to the goals they set for themselves at the beginning of the war. Cities of rubble canceling out the labor of centuries, decimated populations, gerrymandered national borders and tense standoffs between hostile nuclear-armed rivals wasn't exactly the picture in the minds' eye when the various armies first marched into battle with flags waving, bands playing and maidens blowing kisses at the brave young warriors. God was on their side and they were going to save the world.
After a half dozen years of wholesale slaughter, monumental cruelty and nations laid waste, the hollow eyes of the survivors told a different tale, young men grown old before their time, wasted young women scavenging piles of rubble to feed sickly children and mountains of corpses of innocents joining the millions and millions of fallen soldiers. Didn't seem so glorious anymore and God was nowhere in sight, possibly off in a corner somewhere cringing in remorse over what His children had done to one another, wondering like any parent where He went wrong when a child does something unspeakable. And who could blame Him? The landscape in 1945 was an abomination of death, hatred and destruction on a scale previously unimaginable.
Logic dictates that then would have been a good time to reassess how different nations deal with one another. It was a time when men and women from all over the world were for the first time exposed to people of many different nationalities, and when the guns weren't blazing, got to interact with these strange creatures, and more often than not found out that they weren't so different from themselves after all. They all loved their hometown, Mom's cooking, their sweethearts and wives, their country and wanted a better future for their children. The letters written from the battlefields to home differed only in the languages in which they were written, not in the content. The letters sent in return were also interchangeable in their messages of love, concern for safety and the sharing of routine news of home, family and neighborhood. The wrinkled snapshots carried by every soldier reinforced the universal experience of being a part of humanity.
So, why was the world at each other's throats? What could we do to avoid this happening again? Could the United Nations do what nations themselves had been unable to do forever, to live in peace, to deal with one another with tolerance, understanding and good faith? That is what cried out to be done, what all of mankind wanted more than ever before. It was time to put a stop to the killing forever. Not only logic, but people's hearts demanded this, their souls ached for peace. Some of the conquerors helped rebuild the conquered, hostile dictatorships were turned into peaceful democracies, while others grabbed and enslaved small vulnerable nations and erected an invisible Iron Curtain that would divide former allies for half a century. Logic, goodness and human heartache were losing out to the bad and the strange. The moment had passed for international reconciliation and the world dug in its heels once again waiting for the Third World War.
That never happened, but plenty of other wars filled our spare time, and a hell of a lot of genocide too. So much for learning from our mistakes. And yet the vast majority of people remain loving, earnest and peaceful souls, wanting only to live their lives safe and warm and to give their children a better world than the one they inherited. What's stopping us? Why do we allow our old men to start wars they will never have to fight? Why do we still bury our idealistic young soldiers in faraway lands? Why do mothers the world over weep for their children and curse the grand parades and colored flags that sent them on yet another misguided crusade?
What is this strange thing inside of us, that barbaric force that overrides our love, our goodness and our finest instincts as human beings? Will there always be within us the good, the bad and the strange? That's a battle to be fought one heart at a time, perhaps the only war that matters to humanity, the only war that can ever have a good outcome, the war within each of us to do what is right. We already know what is right and what is wrong, that's not the problem and never was. The problem confronting each of us is to apply that knowledge in every situation we face as a first resort. We already know where our last resort will lead us. We have cried those tears, felt that remorse and swore never again more times than can be counted. Let us swear again and again and again until we get it. Let us wage peace with all the love in our hearts.
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 510
Pretending there is no danger can lead to catastrophe, but pretending there is no Wisconsin is harmless enough. Better to go with the No Wisconsin thing if you're delusional.
MODERN MYTHS EXPLORED
When we think of myths and legends we think of bygone ages, when ignorance and superstition was the order of the day. Back in the day, diseases were considered to be the result of "ill humors" best treated by shutting up the afflicted in airless, filthy rooms and treated with appallingly bizarre medicines and potions that gave the sick body one more stiff challenge to overcome on top of whatever disease they had. Sort of explains those average 40-year life spans. In those dark days, people who demonstrated any ability out of the ordinary were considered witches or demons, and they were either burned alive or put on trial by being thrown into a river. If the accused drowned, they were innocent, but if they could swim and survived the ordeal, that proved their guilt and another bonfire was built.
Otherwise reasonable people actually believed this stuff, and a whole lot more ridiculous things, and the powers-that-be at the time, Monarchs and The Church, actively encouraged such ignorance and unreasonable fear, the better to control the masses. And it worked like a charm for untold centuries, although at the expense of human progress. But human progress was of little concern to the wealthy and privileged, who had already progressed light years ahead of their subjects in terms of education, sophistication, nutrition, health, wealth, life spans and general ease of living. They saw no need to change the status quo when they had the whole world at their service.
But, progress happened anyway in spite of their best efforts to stifle it, and in fits and starts humanity has arrived in the modern era, or as least as modern as can be under the circumstances. Those circumstances are the stubborn retention of myths by humanity, invented and illogical beliefs that fly in the face of reality and experience. Just one small example is the notion that homosexuals are homosexual by choice. Well, let's examine the thinking process that would entail: "Well, I am human and so have free will, at liberty to decide what sort of life I will lead. Hmm... now, which lifestyle choice will be guaranteed to shatter my family, expose me to universal scorn and derision and guarantee that I am stripped of many or the basic human rights enjoyed by everyone else, and pretty much ensure a lifetime of agony, guilt and isolation? I got it! I'll be gay!"
Has 5% of humanity come up with the same solution? Seems excessive and quite dubious. Of course that is nothing but a myth, and a ridiculous one at that, yet one as persistent and the belief in demons and witches. Science and medicine is certain that homosexuality is as much a choice as being freckled, tall or left-handed, in other words, in-born. Then again, physical and medical scientists in the Middle Ages struggled against the popular notions that the earth was the center of the universe and that the plague was God's punishment of the wicked. Inch by tedious inch, eyes were opened and myths debunked, only to be replaced by new myths. Take that whole American Dream myth where anybody can grow up to become president. Thankfully that is not the case, otherwise there would be more family-connected idiots like Bush the Younger and fewer remarkable men like Abraham Lincoln.
Yes, but what about the other part of the American Dream, the part where anyone can get rich? In some cases that are few and far between, that is true and America has many famous people who went from rags to riches, their stories being so popular because they were so singular. For the most part, the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor and the middle stays somewhere in the middle. And the rich fight every instance of social progress introduced as a threat to their monopoly on being rich, from fair pay for a day's work to Women's Suffrage to Social Security to Civil Rights to Universal Heath Care, and in all cases seek to enflame the middle classes that these thing are a threat to them as well.
An the middle classes have accommodated them admirably like serfs hopping to their masters' service, even though the top 1% of Americans possesses more wealth than the bottom 95% of all Americans combined. That 95% includes the entire middle class, precious few of whom will ever join the 1% ruling elite, the ownership class. Any who support legislation that would benefit any but the 1% are derided as Socialists, which has somehow become a curse word in this nation, on a par with "witch" or "demon." Which is odd, because almost every wealthy person is the beneficiary of socialist programs, from tax breaks and write-offs to direct subsidies for their corporations, or in the form of phony "farm subsidies," where they agree not to grow alfalfa on their tennis courts and horse paddocks for a hefty annual stipend.
The rest of America has to make do with what they earn in salary, money-wise, but there are many socialist programs from which we all benefit, and not just Social Security and Medicare. There are the sidewalks that line our streets, for one thing. We didn't have to build them, the government did. There are the Police and Fire departments and Boards of Education in every locale that operate at no charge to the citizenry. Then there is the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard who defend us and fight our wars, and none of them gets to send out a monthly bill like the Cable TV company. Our interstate highways can be used by anyone for free, even demons and witches, er, that is... Socialists.
Our so-called Capitalist System is riddled with Socialism, which is just fine with the capitalists so long as they are the greatest beneficiaries of governmental largesse. The corporate welfare system in this nation dwarfs the payments and benefits given needy individuals. And the poorest recipients of welfare and social benefits are subject to far greater regulation than our wealthy corporations, who want it both ways, having both an unregulated free market and a steady flow of Socialist subsidies. This corporate socialism has created a vast pyramid scheme where those at the top remain there and those occupying the various layers beneath this 1% of Americans pretty much stay put as well, with minimal flow upward and downward within the lower 95%. And the recent tax cuts handed to this 1% by Shotgun Dick Cheney and Bush The Younger only cemented their position at the top by transferring trillions of dollars from the middle classes in the middle of the pyramid to those at the pinnacle.
So, the myth being propagated by the wealthy and shouted from rooftops by their Pavlovian Minions of the Middle Class that President Obama is an evil Socialist is very curious, especially in the light of his making huge Socialist payments to the financial industry to save them from collapsing under their own greed. When he proposes a Socialist program like Universal Heath Care for every American, only then is his Socialism deemed to be evil and anti-American. You'd think they would have waited a decent interval between their free money payments and their anti-Obama campaign. Talk about biting the hand, eh? And a lot of people are lining up to drink that Kool Aid, a great many of whom have benefitted by the Socialist programs of Unemployment Insurance, Social Security and Medicare, to say nothing of the government-provided smooth streets and sidewalks where they hold their rallies.
It is a sight to warm the heart of the 1% in the penthouses high atop the "Capitalist Pyramid." Well, if Socialism is good for the capitalists (and it has been very, very good), let's have a little more for the rest of us, even if the rich and the corporations have to start paying their fair share of taxes again. And if the average net worth of the top 1% dips below 10 or 20 million apiece, well, they can always start saving their soda cans for the nickel deposit and cutting coupons from the Sunday papers like everyone else. Just don't let them make up the difference from our struggling hides anymore, as they have been doing for a long, long time. So much for the myth of Free Market Capitalism.
Otherwise reasonable people actually believed this stuff, and a whole lot more ridiculous things, and the powers-that-be at the time, Monarchs and The Church, actively encouraged such ignorance and unreasonable fear, the better to control the masses. And it worked like a charm for untold centuries, although at the expense of human progress. But human progress was of little concern to the wealthy and privileged, who had already progressed light years ahead of their subjects in terms of education, sophistication, nutrition, health, wealth, life spans and general ease of living. They saw no need to change the status quo when they had the whole world at their service.
But, progress happened anyway in spite of their best efforts to stifle it, and in fits and starts humanity has arrived in the modern era, or as least as modern as can be under the circumstances. Those circumstances are the stubborn retention of myths by humanity, invented and illogical beliefs that fly in the face of reality and experience. Just one small example is the notion that homosexuals are homosexual by choice. Well, let's examine the thinking process that would entail: "Well, I am human and so have free will, at liberty to decide what sort of life I will lead. Hmm... now, which lifestyle choice will be guaranteed to shatter my family, expose me to universal scorn and derision and guarantee that I am stripped of many or the basic human rights enjoyed by everyone else, and pretty much ensure a lifetime of agony, guilt and isolation? I got it! I'll be gay!"
Has 5% of humanity come up with the same solution? Seems excessive and quite dubious. Of course that is nothing but a myth, and a ridiculous one at that, yet one as persistent and the belief in demons and witches. Science and medicine is certain that homosexuality is as much a choice as being freckled, tall or left-handed, in other words, in-born. Then again, physical and medical scientists in the Middle Ages struggled against the popular notions that the earth was the center of the universe and that the plague was God's punishment of the wicked. Inch by tedious inch, eyes were opened and myths debunked, only to be replaced by new myths. Take that whole American Dream myth where anybody can grow up to become president. Thankfully that is not the case, otherwise there would be more family-connected idiots like Bush the Younger and fewer remarkable men like Abraham Lincoln.
Yes, but what about the other part of the American Dream, the part where anyone can get rich? In some cases that are few and far between, that is true and America has many famous people who went from rags to riches, their stories being so popular because they were so singular. For the most part, the rich stay rich, the poor stay poor and the middle stays somewhere in the middle. And the rich fight every instance of social progress introduced as a threat to their monopoly on being rich, from fair pay for a day's work to Women's Suffrage to Social Security to Civil Rights to Universal Heath Care, and in all cases seek to enflame the middle classes that these thing are a threat to them as well.
An the middle classes have accommodated them admirably like serfs hopping to their masters' service, even though the top 1% of Americans possesses more wealth than the bottom 95% of all Americans combined. That 95% includes the entire middle class, precious few of whom will ever join the 1% ruling elite, the ownership class. Any who support legislation that would benefit any but the 1% are derided as Socialists, which has somehow become a curse word in this nation, on a par with "witch" or "demon." Which is odd, because almost every wealthy person is the beneficiary of socialist programs, from tax breaks and write-offs to direct subsidies for their corporations, or in the form of phony "farm subsidies," where they agree not to grow alfalfa on their tennis courts and horse paddocks for a hefty annual stipend.
The rest of America has to make do with what they earn in salary, money-wise, but there are many socialist programs from which we all benefit, and not just Social Security and Medicare. There are the sidewalks that line our streets, for one thing. We didn't have to build them, the government did. There are the Police and Fire departments and Boards of Education in every locale that operate at no charge to the citizenry. Then there is the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard who defend us and fight our wars, and none of them gets to send out a monthly bill like the Cable TV company. Our interstate highways can be used by anyone for free, even demons and witches, er, that is... Socialists.
Our so-called Capitalist System is riddled with Socialism, which is just fine with the capitalists so long as they are the greatest beneficiaries of governmental largesse. The corporate welfare system in this nation dwarfs the payments and benefits given needy individuals. And the poorest recipients of welfare and social benefits are subject to far greater regulation than our wealthy corporations, who want it both ways, having both an unregulated free market and a steady flow of Socialist subsidies. This corporate socialism has created a vast pyramid scheme where those at the top remain there and those occupying the various layers beneath this 1% of Americans pretty much stay put as well, with minimal flow upward and downward within the lower 95%. And the recent tax cuts handed to this 1% by Shotgun Dick Cheney and Bush The Younger only cemented their position at the top by transferring trillions of dollars from the middle classes in the middle of the pyramid to those at the pinnacle.
So, the myth being propagated by the wealthy and shouted from rooftops by their Pavlovian Minions of the Middle Class that President Obama is an evil Socialist is very curious, especially in the light of his making huge Socialist payments to the financial industry to save them from collapsing under their own greed. When he proposes a Socialist program like Universal Heath Care for every American, only then is his Socialism deemed to be evil and anti-American. You'd think they would have waited a decent interval between their free money payments and their anti-Obama campaign. Talk about biting the hand, eh? And a lot of people are lining up to drink that Kool Aid, a great many of whom have benefitted by the Socialist programs of Unemployment Insurance, Social Security and Medicare, to say nothing of the government-provided smooth streets and sidewalks where they hold their rallies.
It is a sight to warm the heart of the 1% in the penthouses high atop the "Capitalist Pyramid." Well, if Socialism is good for the capitalists (and it has been very, very good), let's have a little more for the rest of us, even if the rich and the corporations have to start paying their fair share of taxes again. And if the average net worth of the top 1% dips below 10 or 20 million apiece, well, they can always start saving their soda cans for the nickel deposit and cutting coupons from the Sunday papers like everyone else. Just don't let them make up the difference from our struggling hides anymore, as they have been doing for a long, long time. So much for the myth of Free Market Capitalism.
September 29, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED PART 509
Why the chicken crossed the road is nobody's business but the chicken's. Who cares anyway? The burning question is - what came first, the chicken or the egg, and the chicken's not talking. Mysteries abound.
DON'T ASK
Never ask hypochondriacs how they're feeling. They just might tell you and that's going to be one long conversation, and very one-sided at that. There's a lot of questions we'd be better off not asking. Curious beings that we are, we're relentless with the questions, and that's mostly a good thing, and leads to a whole lot of discovery and enlightenment. Like our teachers told us, if you don't know, ask, and you shall learn. Pretty sound advice on the face of it, but its companion adage, "there are no stupid questions," flies in the face of human experience. There are lots of stupid questions, a plethora of things we just should never ask. Consider these:
"Is that thing loaded?" Rarely is there a good outcome when this question is asked.
"What does this button do?" See above, and whatever you do, don't press that button.
"What's your problem?" Unless you're a doctor addressing a patient, there's no possible good answer for that one. Similarly: "What's wrong with you?"
"What did they put in this delicious sausage?" Shut up and eat. There are some things you do not want to know.
"Why does Jesus want gay people to die and the rich ones to pay no taxes?" Depending upon who you ask, you could start a riot, initiate a convoluted argument with an ignorant buffoon or make Glen Beck cry again.
"Who's got the best college football team this year?" Depending on who you ask, you could start a riot, initiate a convoluted argument with an ignorant buffoon or make all the sportscasters cry again.
"Why don't corporations recruit the salesmen who talk young men in the prime of their lives into blowing themselves up?" Actually, that's a good question. Those guys could sell snow shovels in Brazil. Sales Rep of the year? It's Mullah Jihad again!
"If a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear it, will it still squash Bambi like a bug?" Yes. Yes it will.
"Wanna see the scar from my operation?" No, most definitely not.
"Have you had that looked at?" Before asking this question, make sure the person actually has something wrong with them and isn't just plain old ugly. That could be pretty awkward.
"What if I don't want to take my shoes off?" If you ask this in an airport, the next question will involve how you feel about a full body cavity search.
"What's under that kilt?" Well, what the hell do you think is under that kilt?
"What could be the harm in it?" Whatever it is you ask this one about, rest assured there will be a great deal of harm in it.
"Is that your natural hair color? The next two things you'll wonder about is if that bright red complexion is her natural skin tone and how someone who weighs 115 pounds can pack such a wallop.
"Do you think that paint is still wet?" Only one way to find out, isn't there?
"How long before Afghanistan becomes a stable democracy?" That would be when someone invents a time machine that can transport entire nations from The Dark Ages to the present, or maybe when Barack Obama's great-great grandson is conferring with his generals on how many soldiers, tanks and warplanes it's going to take to convince Afghanis we are their BFF.
"Why haven't you joined Twitter yet?" This question is yet one more annoying message from slackers with too much time on their hands and the misconception that everyone wants to know the blow-by-blow details of their tedious lives.
"Are you going to finish that?" Yes, I am planning on finishing that, now that you mention it. That was the whole idea when I ordered it. Thanks for asking, though.
"Why didn't I think of that?" Because someone else did.
"Want to see the latest pictures of my dog?" Unless your dog is posing with the Playmate of The Month, expect a negative reply.
"Guess what?" Nobody feels like guessing what's on your mind. Spit it out.
"Does this outfit make me look fat?" Well, since you brought it up...
"Why me?" It's got to be somebody. Why not you?
"Is that a Susquehanna Hat?" Anyone even slightly familiar with Abbott & Costello can tell you this is one question you don't want to ask or answer.
"Is that thing loaded?" Rarely is there a good outcome when this question is asked.
"What does this button do?" See above, and whatever you do, don't press that button.
"What's your problem?" Unless you're a doctor addressing a patient, there's no possible good answer for that one. Similarly: "What's wrong with you?"
"What did they put in this delicious sausage?" Shut up and eat. There are some things you do not want to know.
"Why does Jesus want gay people to die and the rich ones to pay no taxes?" Depending upon who you ask, you could start a riot, initiate a convoluted argument with an ignorant buffoon or make Glen Beck cry again.
"Who's got the best college football team this year?" Depending on who you ask, you could start a riot, initiate a convoluted argument with an ignorant buffoon or make all the sportscasters cry again.
"Why don't corporations recruit the salesmen who talk young men in the prime of their lives into blowing themselves up?" Actually, that's a good question. Those guys could sell snow shovels in Brazil. Sales Rep of the year? It's Mullah Jihad again!
"If a tree falls in the forest and there's nobody there to hear it, will it still squash Bambi like a bug?" Yes. Yes it will.
"Wanna see the scar from my operation?" No, most definitely not.
"Have you had that looked at?" Before asking this question, make sure the person actually has something wrong with them and isn't just plain old ugly. That could be pretty awkward.
"What if I don't want to take my shoes off?" If you ask this in an airport, the next question will involve how you feel about a full body cavity search.
"What's under that kilt?" Well, what the hell do you think is under that kilt?
"What could be the harm in it?" Whatever it is you ask this one about, rest assured there will be a great deal of harm in it.
"Is that your natural hair color? The next two things you'll wonder about is if that bright red complexion is her natural skin tone and how someone who weighs 115 pounds can pack such a wallop.
"Do you think that paint is still wet?" Only one way to find out, isn't there?
"How long before Afghanistan becomes a stable democracy?" That would be when someone invents a time machine that can transport entire nations from The Dark Ages to the present, or maybe when Barack Obama's great-great grandson is conferring with his generals on how many soldiers, tanks and warplanes it's going to take to convince Afghanis we are their BFF.
"Why haven't you joined Twitter yet?" This question is yet one more annoying message from slackers with too much time on their hands and the misconception that everyone wants to know the blow-by-blow details of their tedious lives.
"Are you going to finish that?" Yes, I am planning on finishing that, now that you mention it. That was the whole idea when I ordered it. Thanks for asking, though.
"Why didn't I think of that?" Because someone else did.
"Want to see the latest pictures of my dog?" Unless your dog is posing with the Playmate of The Month, expect a negative reply.
"Guess what?" Nobody feels like guessing what's on your mind. Spit it out.
"Does this outfit make me look fat?" Well, since you brought it up...
"Why me?" It's got to be somebody. Why not you?
"Is that a Susquehanna Hat?" Anyone even slightly familiar with Abbott & Costello can tell you this is one question you don't want to ask or answer.
September 28, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 508
The book "How To Win Friends and Influence People" has no chapter about making people feel lousy. That approach generally wins enemies and alienates people. Outside of a church, no one likes to be angrily berated. For arrogant know-it-alls, your best shot at success is preaching the Word of God According to You. Better than nothing, but not that much.
EYESIGHT TO THE BLIND? WHAT ELSE CAN WE DO?
Now we're talking! Eyesight is being restored to the blind! As part of an experimental pilot program by the National Eye Institute, 37 people have had partial eyesight restored to them via corneal implants. With varying degrees of clarity, people who could not see can now distinguish shapes, shadows, light, people and in some cases large lettering. While still in its early stages, the results have been nothing short of miraculous to the people formerly inhabiting a black world. Recent leaps in miniature electronics, gene therapy, artificial corneas with camera eyeglasses and medical science are bringing to fruition the ultimate Holy Grail of medical science. How cool is that?
Which leads one to wonder what else we can do. Apparently making cars that get decent mileage is more complex than restoring sight to the blind or putting a man on the moon like we did 40 years ago, so you get sort of confused by the mixed results on the science front. While it's been very obvious that the amazing computer and communication advances have transformed the world dramatically in recent years, the medical field seems to be particularly adept at adapting the new technologies.
Consider those afflicted with serious heart conditions, which 30 years ago routinely killed people at a young age or condemned them to taking it very easy lest they drop dead from the slightest exertion. These days injured hearts are repaired in routine bypass operations, valves are being replaced and weak hearts made strong again so that even people who have had major heart attacks can live long and productive lives. Amputees can also look forward to an amazing new generation of prosthetic limbs that will respond to brain impulses like a living limb, also thanks to electronic miniaturization being adapted to living tissue.
There's a lot of great work going on. Now if they could cure cancer, diabetes, AIDS and malaria. But who knows, technology is making such rapid leaps that those cures may come soon enough to save many people suffering today. Cancer survivability is better than it was 5 years ago, and researchers are finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as far as figuring out just how the hell AIDS works, the first step to finding out how to cure it. There are already drugs available to help HIV infected patients live normal lives and avoid developing full-blown AIDS, so that disease is no longer an automatic death sentence.
The industrious and successful medical researchers make you wonder what's up with other branches of science, especially in the field of energy, an increasingly critical issue for humanity. We've known that oil is a finite and polluting resource for a couple of generations already, but so far we're still setting greasy stuff on fire to propel us from place to place, sending ever more noxious fumes into the air we all breathe. The suspicion is that the energy scientists are counting on their more talented counterparts in medical research to come up with a cure for emphysema so we can keep burning stuff until there's nothing left to burn and then they'll figure something out.
Apparently the United States Government agrees with that strategy. When addressing mandatory gas mileage for cars, the best they could do is demanding that automobiles get 35 miles per gallon, 7 years from now! There's already cars that get that mileage right now, just not all that many of them. And that's not even a very impressive figure in a world where the demand for petroleum is growing swiftly and the earth isn't making any more of it, at least not for a few hundred million more years when enough of us rot into a greasy black goo. Most experts agree that we just don't have that kind of time.
As far as funding a broad and compelling search for alternatives to internal combustion? Not a huge priority. Maybe the jugglers and clowns that pass for our legislators forgot that we are the nation that put a guy on the moon when most of them were still in grammar school. Perhaps too many of them would sorely miss the bribes, vacations, campaign donations and expensive gifts from the oil and auto industry lobbies. Or just maybe they forgot that the leap to the moon was commissioned by the government. They called it The Apollo Project, made it a huge priority and assembled the requisite scientists, technicians and aviators into a well-funded and intelligently coordinated effort that produced the desired results of landing a man on the moon and them some.
The "then some " byproducts of the race to the moon was the cornucopia of miniaturized electronics, fiber optics and silicon chips that fueled the rapid development of incredible computer devices and ushered in the Information Age. Imagine using the fruits of the Apollo Project to form an New Apollo Initiative to search for new sources of energy? Just as in the original Apollo, there's no telling what other incredibly beneficial technologies might emerge from this effort. The inventions made possible and real by that monumental effort were at the time considered impossible, just as many people today consider clean and plentiful energy an impossible goal. Hell, we have people restoring eyesight to the blind right here and right now! Don't tell us what's impossible anymore. Men on the moon, eyesight to the blind. We have made miracles. We can make more.
Which leads one to wonder what else we can do. Apparently making cars that get decent mileage is more complex than restoring sight to the blind or putting a man on the moon like we did 40 years ago, so you get sort of confused by the mixed results on the science front. While it's been very obvious that the amazing computer and communication advances have transformed the world dramatically in recent years, the medical field seems to be particularly adept at adapting the new technologies.
Consider those afflicted with serious heart conditions, which 30 years ago routinely killed people at a young age or condemned them to taking it very easy lest they drop dead from the slightest exertion. These days injured hearts are repaired in routine bypass operations, valves are being replaced and weak hearts made strong again so that even people who have had major heart attacks can live long and productive lives. Amputees can also look forward to an amazing new generation of prosthetic limbs that will respond to brain impulses like a living limb, also thanks to electronic miniaturization being adapted to living tissue.
There's a lot of great work going on. Now if they could cure cancer, diabetes, AIDS and malaria. But who knows, technology is making such rapid leaps that those cures may come soon enough to save many people suffering today. Cancer survivability is better than it was 5 years ago, and researchers are finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel as far as figuring out just how the hell AIDS works, the first step to finding out how to cure it. There are already drugs available to help HIV infected patients live normal lives and avoid developing full-blown AIDS, so that disease is no longer an automatic death sentence.
The industrious and successful medical researchers make you wonder what's up with other branches of science, especially in the field of energy, an increasingly critical issue for humanity. We've known that oil is a finite and polluting resource for a couple of generations already, but so far we're still setting greasy stuff on fire to propel us from place to place, sending ever more noxious fumes into the air we all breathe. The suspicion is that the energy scientists are counting on their more talented counterparts in medical research to come up with a cure for emphysema so we can keep burning stuff until there's nothing left to burn and then they'll figure something out.
Apparently the United States Government agrees with that strategy. When addressing mandatory gas mileage for cars, the best they could do is demanding that automobiles get 35 miles per gallon, 7 years from now! There's already cars that get that mileage right now, just not all that many of them. And that's not even a very impressive figure in a world where the demand for petroleum is growing swiftly and the earth isn't making any more of it, at least not for a few hundred million more years when enough of us rot into a greasy black goo. Most experts agree that we just don't have that kind of time.
As far as funding a broad and compelling search for alternatives to internal combustion? Not a huge priority. Maybe the jugglers and clowns that pass for our legislators forgot that we are the nation that put a guy on the moon when most of them were still in grammar school. Perhaps too many of them would sorely miss the bribes, vacations, campaign donations and expensive gifts from the oil and auto industry lobbies. Or just maybe they forgot that the leap to the moon was commissioned by the government. They called it The Apollo Project, made it a huge priority and assembled the requisite scientists, technicians and aviators into a well-funded and intelligently coordinated effort that produced the desired results of landing a man on the moon and them some.
The "then some " byproducts of the race to the moon was the cornucopia of miniaturized electronics, fiber optics and silicon chips that fueled the rapid development of incredible computer devices and ushered in the Information Age. Imagine using the fruits of the Apollo Project to form an New Apollo Initiative to search for new sources of energy? Just as in the original Apollo, there's no telling what other incredibly beneficial technologies might emerge from this effort. The inventions made possible and real by that monumental effort were at the time considered impossible, just as many people today consider clean and plentiful energy an impossible goal. Hell, we have people restoring eyesight to the blind right here and right now! Don't tell us what's impossible anymore. Men on the moon, eyesight to the blind. We have made miracles. We can make more.
September 27, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 507
There are few more irritating sounds than rich people complaining about anything. Fair or not, it's true. When it comes to what's fair, the rich have beaten the odds by light years, so if no one listens to them moan, so what? They're still rich.
SO, CAPITALISM IS DIFFERENT FROM MONARCHISM... HOW?
Sometimes you have to look at things you took for granted your entire life and say; "Why?" Take this whole capitalism thing, roughly defined as private ownership of the means of production operating in a relatively unregulated free market. Profits are earned by owners, wages paid to workers. Profits are either distributed to ownership or reinvested in new technologies or industries. The eternal market forces of supply and demand determine product costs and workers' wages. We have been told that upon this system the Western World and America in particular has grown fabulously wealthy.
You look around you, notice that in America the standard of living is pretty good, people aren't starving to death and the nation has an impressive infrastructure. Our economy is the most powerful and successful in world history, and we have more rich people than any other nation and an incredibly large middle class who live in relative comfort and financial security. So you're thinking, yeah, sure, capitalism is the bomb, we've got it made over here, especially when you look a huge regions of this world where people live in backward squalor; ignorant, diseased, illiterate, hungry and oppressed. You're glad you are an American.
Then you start looking deeper into capitalism and you find out that in America today the richest 1% of the people own more wealth than the bottom 95% of Americans combined. You recall your history lessons and oral histories about sweat shops, company stores, robber barons, monopolies, strikes, labor wars, lockouts, child labor, blacklists and 12 hour work days. Maybe you're thinking that ownership isn't all that different from the royalty America overthrew in her Revolution in the 1770's and 1780's. Monarchs ran the entire world back then, and made no claims at all about their rule being fair or the wealth being equitably distributed.
They took the lion's share of the wealth to build castles and buy jewels and funny clothes and have grand parties while the vast majority of humanity lived in appalling poverty while they worked themselves to death in service of a tiny minority who called themselves royalty. European royalty got educated, well fed, grandly housed and finely clothed while the masses were illiterate, hungry, sick and in rags. The Catholic Church and its later offshoots were the equally wealthy institutions that in partnership with royalty conspired to keep the peasants in backbreaking servitude their entire lives, refusing to teach them to read or learn the truth about the greater world around them.
The masses were ruled by fear, superstition and brute force. This went on for endless centuries until the British Colonies in North America said "Enough!" The leaders of the rebellion against the British Empire wrote the most profound political documents ever produced, guaranteeing universal human rights to the citizens of their new nation, their new kind of nation. No man would be king, or duke, earl or prince either, and the people would elect their own leaders. No religion would be enforced by this new nation, and it was forbidden for Church and State to collaborate on anything at all. Against all odds they succeeded and The United States of America was created.
The country was full of hard working people suddenly free of the stifling monarchs. Education caught on, enterprise was encouraged and the bountiful land and resources were exploited to their fullest, creating a land of opportunity that attracted millions and millions of immigrants. Like any group of people anywhere, some grew rich, and the chance to become wealthy was the calling card of this young nation. The fact that there were some states in America that held slaves bothered a lot of people, but not enough to do anything about it for about 80 years when it took a terrible civil war to put an end to that last barbaric vestige of monarchism.
Now all of America was free, and the Industrial Revolution was transforming the nation and the world. That's when the new monarchists made their move, grabbing the majority of the wealth and building vast fortunes on the backs and the health of workers. Banks somehow took ownership of family farms and it soon seemed that every ordinary worker owed something to some wealthy institution. Miners were forced to live in company housing, shop at ridiculously overpriced company stores for all their needs and provide their own blasting caps and safety equipment out of what was left of their meager pay.
Thousands died and when they did their families were turned out into a cold world with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Either that or their young male children were forced to work in the mines so their family would not perish. In urban industries, sweat shops, child labor, 7-day work weeks and unsafe working conditions killed thousands more as the robber barons built mansions, travelled in private railroad cars and held grand balls congratulating themselves on their status as self-made men. Attempts at collective bargaining for better wages and working conditions were met with lockouts, firings, clubs and rifles. A bloody labor war was fought right up until the height of the Great Depression, when the government finally decided to side with the workers and social change was slowly achieved, with every small increment of change fought tooth and nail by the ownership class.
These "Capitalists" figured that all wealth was rightfully theirs and they need only pay their workers enough to eat so that they were strong enough to labor to provide more wealth to ownership. There was hunger in America, the most bountiful country on the planet, right up until the 1960's when another president sided with the poor and provided food stamps. Even though starvation was erased, poverty was not and since the late 60's the segment of society whose wealth has grown the most is the one who needs it least, the richest 1% of Americans, the ownership class.
There is a reason why this class of wealthy individuals advertises and celebrates every instance of someone rising from poverty to wealth in America and that is because it is an incredibly rare occurrence. The class of people that were poor in the 1920's, the 1930's, the 1960's or the 1990's are overwhelmingly still poor. The class that was rich in those times are now richer than ever. The American Dream of rising from rags to riches remains just that, a dream, to 99% of Americans. To the elite 1%, depressions or recessions mean very little in terms of lifestyles.
Even in 2008 when 5 trillion dollars in wealth disappeared due to the greed and corruption of wealthy bankers, the super wealthy didn't go broke. Even if some of them lost half their wealth, $50 million gets you every bit the lavish lifestyle that $100 million does. Or if someone who was worth a mere $10 million now has only $5 million, will anyone need to hold a fund raiser for them? As for the rest of us, we're saddled with another set of royalty hogging nearly half the wealth of this nation of 303 million citizens. We may say to ourselves that we are blessed to have our nice little houses and our cars and are sending our children to college, but we pay and pay and pay the ownership class dearly for these privileges every step of the way during our hardworking lives, and most of us are only a job loss, a disease or an accident away from losing everything we have worked for all our lives.
Our family farmers have been replaced by corporate agribusinesses who feed us less wholesome and nutritious processed food, our skilled factory workers have seen their jobs sold to the lowest overseas bidders. Our small businesses have been eliminated by giant corporate box stores paying less than subsistence wages. In the early 2000's an administration hostile to America's workers engineered the biggest heist ever with tax breaks to the super wealthy, transferring trillions of dollars from the pockets of the working classes to the wealthy, the largest peacetime transfer of wealth in history.
How exactly is capitalism different from monarchism? The wealthy robber barons who engineered the 2008 financial debacle that devastated so many ordinary Americans are still in power, still playing dangerous games of chance with the wealth of a nation while unemployment swells to well past danger levels. If ever we needed the government to befriend the working classes again, it is now. When the top 1% of our nation has more money than the bottom 95% of the people, we are a monarchy with no actual king, but no shortage of peasants. Capitalism is a rousing success for the elite, an abysmal failure for the rest of us. So much for taking things for granted.
You look around you, notice that in America the standard of living is pretty good, people aren't starving to death and the nation has an impressive infrastructure. Our economy is the most powerful and successful in world history, and we have more rich people than any other nation and an incredibly large middle class who live in relative comfort and financial security. So you're thinking, yeah, sure, capitalism is the bomb, we've got it made over here, especially when you look a huge regions of this world where people live in backward squalor; ignorant, diseased, illiterate, hungry and oppressed. You're glad you are an American.
Then you start looking deeper into capitalism and you find out that in America today the richest 1% of the people own more wealth than the bottom 95% of Americans combined. You recall your history lessons and oral histories about sweat shops, company stores, robber barons, monopolies, strikes, labor wars, lockouts, child labor, blacklists and 12 hour work days. Maybe you're thinking that ownership isn't all that different from the royalty America overthrew in her Revolution in the 1770's and 1780's. Monarchs ran the entire world back then, and made no claims at all about their rule being fair or the wealth being equitably distributed.
They took the lion's share of the wealth to build castles and buy jewels and funny clothes and have grand parties while the vast majority of humanity lived in appalling poverty while they worked themselves to death in service of a tiny minority who called themselves royalty. European royalty got educated, well fed, grandly housed and finely clothed while the masses were illiterate, hungry, sick and in rags. The Catholic Church and its later offshoots were the equally wealthy institutions that in partnership with royalty conspired to keep the peasants in backbreaking servitude their entire lives, refusing to teach them to read or learn the truth about the greater world around them.
The masses were ruled by fear, superstition and brute force. This went on for endless centuries until the British Colonies in North America said "Enough!" The leaders of the rebellion against the British Empire wrote the most profound political documents ever produced, guaranteeing universal human rights to the citizens of their new nation, their new kind of nation. No man would be king, or duke, earl or prince either, and the people would elect their own leaders. No religion would be enforced by this new nation, and it was forbidden for Church and State to collaborate on anything at all. Against all odds they succeeded and The United States of America was created.
The country was full of hard working people suddenly free of the stifling monarchs. Education caught on, enterprise was encouraged and the bountiful land and resources were exploited to their fullest, creating a land of opportunity that attracted millions and millions of immigrants. Like any group of people anywhere, some grew rich, and the chance to become wealthy was the calling card of this young nation. The fact that there were some states in America that held slaves bothered a lot of people, but not enough to do anything about it for about 80 years when it took a terrible civil war to put an end to that last barbaric vestige of monarchism.
Now all of America was free, and the Industrial Revolution was transforming the nation and the world. That's when the new monarchists made their move, grabbing the majority of the wealth and building vast fortunes on the backs and the health of workers. Banks somehow took ownership of family farms and it soon seemed that every ordinary worker owed something to some wealthy institution. Miners were forced to live in company housing, shop at ridiculously overpriced company stores for all their needs and provide their own blasting caps and safety equipment out of what was left of their meager pay.
Thousands died and when they did their families were turned out into a cold world with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Either that or their young male children were forced to work in the mines so their family would not perish. In urban industries, sweat shops, child labor, 7-day work weeks and unsafe working conditions killed thousands more as the robber barons built mansions, travelled in private railroad cars and held grand balls congratulating themselves on their status as self-made men. Attempts at collective bargaining for better wages and working conditions were met with lockouts, firings, clubs and rifles. A bloody labor war was fought right up until the height of the Great Depression, when the government finally decided to side with the workers and social change was slowly achieved, with every small increment of change fought tooth and nail by the ownership class.
These "Capitalists" figured that all wealth was rightfully theirs and they need only pay their workers enough to eat so that they were strong enough to labor to provide more wealth to ownership. There was hunger in America, the most bountiful country on the planet, right up until the 1960's when another president sided with the poor and provided food stamps. Even though starvation was erased, poverty was not and since the late 60's the segment of society whose wealth has grown the most is the one who needs it least, the richest 1% of Americans, the ownership class.
There is a reason why this class of wealthy individuals advertises and celebrates every instance of someone rising from poverty to wealth in America and that is because it is an incredibly rare occurrence. The class of people that were poor in the 1920's, the 1930's, the 1960's or the 1990's are overwhelmingly still poor. The class that was rich in those times are now richer than ever. The American Dream of rising from rags to riches remains just that, a dream, to 99% of Americans. To the elite 1%, depressions or recessions mean very little in terms of lifestyles.
Even in 2008 when 5 trillion dollars in wealth disappeared due to the greed and corruption of wealthy bankers, the super wealthy didn't go broke. Even if some of them lost half their wealth, $50 million gets you every bit the lavish lifestyle that $100 million does. Or if someone who was worth a mere $10 million now has only $5 million, will anyone need to hold a fund raiser for them? As for the rest of us, we're saddled with another set of royalty hogging nearly half the wealth of this nation of 303 million citizens. We may say to ourselves that we are blessed to have our nice little houses and our cars and are sending our children to college, but we pay and pay and pay the ownership class dearly for these privileges every step of the way during our hardworking lives, and most of us are only a job loss, a disease or an accident away from losing everything we have worked for all our lives.
Our family farmers have been replaced by corporate agribusinesses who feed us less wholesome and nutritious processed food, our skilled factory workers have seen their jobs sold to the lowest overseas bidders. Our small businesses have been eliminated by giant corporate box stores paying less than subsistence wages. In the early 2000's an administration hostile to America's workers engineered the biggest heist ever with tax breaks to the super wealthy, transferring trillions of dollars from the pockets of the working classes to the wealthy, the largest peacetime transfer of wealth in history.
How exactly is capitalism different from monarchism? The wealthy robber barons who engineered the 2008 financial debacle that devastated so many ordinary Americans are still in power, still playing dangerous games of chance with the wealth of a nation while unemployment swells to well past danger levels. If ever we needed the government to befriend the working classes again, it is now. When the top 1% of our nation has more money than the bottom 95% of the people, we are a monarchy with no actual king, but no shortage of peasants. Capitalism is a rousing success for the elite, an abysmal failure for the rest of us. So much for taking things for granted.
September 26, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 506
Life is a carnival. Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, and children of all ages! Cotton candy, daredevils, jugglers and clowns! It's show time.
THINGS THAT DON'T MAKE SENSE
Ah, mysteries and contradictions. Gives us all something to wonder about. Scratch our heads even, maybe send us to the library or the internet to investigate what's up. Take that Twitter thing, where people get to annoy the crap out of their friends all day long sending them short messages informing them what they had for lunch, that they just sneezed or how much they think that fat lady on the bus weighs. The curious thing is that it is wildly popular, proving that there are at least 25 million people with far too much time on their hands. What's really curious, though, is that they just raised another hundred million simoleans to "fund" their company, on top of the $55 million that they raised to start the Twitter company.
The people who sunk the 100 mil into Twitter say they their investment means that the company is now worth a cool billion dollars. What? How that works exactly is a mystery. Of all their funding, Twitter has spent just $25 million, leaving $115 million. And they have taken in exactly zero dollars, since the Twitter service is free. Many industry experts say that there is no way for Twitter to ever make any money, and so far, so good, they haven't earned a dime. Is this some sort of clever strategy? Throw so much money at a money-losing enterprise that people think it's a good investment and then they sell the Twitter company to someone else or maybe go public and sell shares in the thing? To which the rest of us scratch our heads and say; "Good luck to you, sir!"
People generally like things to make sense when it comes to world events and business. Poets, painters, comics, actors and rock & rollers can get away with making very little sense, that's part of the excitement and challenge of our various arts. Gives us something to think about, and sometimes forces us to look at things in a different way and provides us with unique insights into life and humanity. That's what artists do. Political and business leaders, on the other hand, should be a little more down to earth, what with them being engaged in very serious activities and all. When all the bankers went nuts last year and made 5 trillion dollars disappear like they were a bunch of Houdinis and David Copperfields, few of us were amused, and any insights we gained were pretty negative, to say the least.
The whole world was plunged into a dangerous recession and many small investors were ruined, those who could least afford it, especially those older people who lost their retirement nest eggs. What came over these titans of the finance industry? Why did they decide to cheat, lie and steal? They were already very wealthy and their businesses were the closest thing to the Golden Goose that could be imagined. They made tremendous profits for many generations and provided their children the opportunity to join their executive club and make their own fortunes when their time came.
Which of them popularized the notion that regular banking and wise investing was too boring and the time had come to have some real fun with everybody else's dough? If their hare-brained schemes hadn't blown up in all our faces nobody would today be questioning their obscene salaries and outrageous bonuses. All they had to do was keep doing what bankers have always done, keep an eye on everyone's dough and don't take any crazy chances. Maybe they took their cue from President Bush The Younger, who acted like the opposite of a president, doing crazy things that made no sense at all and acting like a real jerk all the time. Couldn't even put two coherent sentences together. Very unpresidential.
Funny thing is, the country got used to having a real crude rube without any brains at all as its head of state and elected him to a second term. And that was after he invaded the wrong country (!) in response to America getting attacked. That was a pretty crazy turn of events. Maybe the bankers noticed this stuff, maybe said to themselves, "Saaay, maybe we can get in on some of that crazy dumb guy action!" And then they started packaging tons and tons worthless mortgages they should never have written in the first place into obscenely high priced bonds and sold them as the best thing since gold bouillon. That worked out so well for a while that they figured they'd just help themselves to huge bonuses out of their stockholders' money to celebrate being real live rootin' tootin' outlaw cowboys!
And so the rest of us once again were left scratching our heads and can't help but notice that presidents and bank executives are not entertainers or artists at all, but people we expect to act with some dignity, intelligence, discretion and integrity. To make sense. Watching a president let a major city drown doesn't qualify as performance art. Allowing him to conspire with the wealthy elite to transfer trillions of dollars from the working classes to the wealthy in his famous tax cut didn't seem so amusing either. Getting mugged by your own government in a Robin Hood-in-reverse heist may be a thought-provoking variation on an old theme, but upon reflection wasn't such a rewarding learning experience at all for the suddenly poorer poor.
Then the corporations noticed that there was very little regulation going on anymore, what with the Feds being obsessed with reading people's e-mails and otherwise violating the Bill of Rights as well as trying to convince people that when Americans torture people it is not really torture because they do it in the American way. How that worked exactly was never satisfactorily explained, nor was the fact that most of the outlaw bankers kept their jobs when the bottom fell out of their crazy schemes.
Then a new president was elected, this Barack Obama guy, a real smart fellow who said he was going to do things differently and change a lot of stuff. Only it's been nearly 10 months now and he hasn't done much of anything with the overwhelming Congressional majority we just handed him except to reward the bankers for their stupidity and greed by bailing their asses out of trouble with trillions of our tax dollars. Now we're really asking what's up! Guantanamo prison is still open for business, our troops are still in Iraq, our cars are all still lousy mileage clunkers and will be for years to come and Osama bin Laden is enjoying a thriving video career while we prop up a doomed democracy in Medieval Afghanistan.
Not only that, he's letting Congress decide what to include in his big health care bill. That ought to be interesting, as in tragic, confusing and unworkable interesting. Didn't Obama lead us to believe he had a solid plan? When you have a solid plan you don't let the jugglers and clowns in the circus add their two cents worth. They're jugglers and clowns, for God's sake, and you're supposed to be the damned ringmaster! Ah, mysteries and contradictions. Is it any wonder why we prefer our artists, actors and singers? At least they are straightforward about the fact they they don't need to make a whole lot of sense to be effective. Poetic license, however, does not extend to presidents and executives, and they need to snap out of it pronto.
The people who sunk the 100 mil into Twitter say they their investment means that the company is now worth a cool billion dollars. What? How that works exactly is a mystery. Of all their funding, Twitter has spent just $25 million, leaving $115 million. And they have taken in exactly zero dollars, since the Twitter service is free. Many industry experts say that there is no way for Twitter to ever make any money, and so far, so good, they haven't earned a dime. Is this some sort of clever strategy? Throw so much money at a money-losing enterprise that people think it's a good investment and then they sell the Twitter company to someone else or maybe go public and sell shares in the thing? To which the rest of us scratch our heads and say; "Good luck to you, sir!"
People generally like things to make sense when it comes to world events and business. Poets, painters, comics, actors and rock & rollers can get away with making very little sense, that's part of the excitement and challenge of our various arts. Gives us something to think about, and sometimes forces us to look at things in a different way and provides us with unique insights into life and humanity. That's what artists do. Political and business leaders, on the other hand, should be a little more down to earth, what with them being engaged in very serious activities and all. When all the bankers went nuts last year and made 5 trillion dollars disappear like they were a bunch of Houdinis and David Copperfields, few of us were amused, and any insights we gained were pretty negative, to say the least.
The whole world was plunged into a dangerous recession and many small investors were ruined, those who could least afford it, especially those older people who lost their retirement nest eggs. What came over these titans of the finance industry? Why did they decide to cheat, lie and steal? They were already very wealthy and their businesses were the closest thing to the Golden Goose that could be imagined. They made tremendous profits for many generations and provided their children the opportunity to join their executive club and make their own fortunes when their time came.
Which of them popularized the notion that regular banking and wise investing was too boring and the time had come to have some real fun with everybody else's dough? If their hare-brained schemes hadn't blown up in all our faces nobody would today be questioning their obscene salaries and outrageous bonuses. All they had to do was keep doing what bankers have always done, keep an eye on everyone's dough and don't take any crazy chances. Maybe they took their cue from President Bush The Younger, who acted like the opposite of a president, doing crazy things that made no sense at all and acting like a real jerk all the time. Couldn't even put two coherent sentences together. Very unpresidential.
Funny thing is, the country got used to having a real crude rube without any brains at all as its head of state and elected him to a second term. And that was after he invaded the wrong country (!) in response to America getting attacked. That was a pretty crazy turn of events. Maybe the bankers noticed this stuff, maybe said to themselves, "Saaay, maybe we can get in on some of that crazy dumb guy action!" And then they started packaging tons and tons worthless mortgages they should never have written in the first place into obscenely high priced bonds and sold them as the best thing since gold bouillon. That worked out so well for a while that they figured they'd just help themselves to huge bonuses out of their stockholders' money to celebrate being real live rootin' tootin' outlaw cowboys!
And so the rest of us once again were left scratching our heads and can't help but notice that presidents and bank executives are not entertainers or artists at all, but people we expect to act with some dignity, intelligence, discretion and integrity. To make sense. Watching a president let a major city drown doesn't qualify as performance art. Allowing him to conspire with the wealthy elite to transfer trillions of dollars from the working classes to the wealthy in his famous tax cut didn't seem so amusing either. Getting mugged by your own government in a Robin Hood-in-reverse heist may be a thought-provoking variation on an old theme, but upon reflection wasn't such a rewarding learning experience at all for the suddenly poorer poor.
Then the corporations noticed that there was very little regulation going on anymore, what with the Feds being obsessed with reading people's e-mails and otherwise violating the Bill of Rights as well as trying to convince people that when Americans torture people it is not really torture because they do it in the American way. How that worked exactly was never satisfactorily explained, nor was the fact that most of the outlaw bankers kept their jobs when the bottom fell out of their crazy schemes.
Then a new president was elected, this Barack Obama guy, a real smart fellow who said he was going to do things differently and change a lot of stuff. Only it's been nearly 10 months now and he hasn't done much of anything with the overwhelming Congressional majority we just handed him except to reward the bankers for their stupidity and greed by bailing their asses out of trouble with trillions of our tax dollars. Now we're really asking what's up! Guantanamo prison is still open for business, our troops are still in Iraq, our cars are all still lousy mileage clunkers and will be for years to come and Osama bin Laden is enjoying a thriving video career while we prop up a doomed democracy in Medieval Afghanistan.
Not only that, he's letting Congress decide what to include in his big health care bill. That ought to be interesting, as in tragic, confusing and unworkable interesting. Didn't Obama lead us to believe he had a solid plan? When you have a solid plan you don't let the jugglers and clowns in the circus add their two cents worth. They're jugglers and clowns, for God's sake, and you're supposed to be the damned ringmaster! Ah, mysteries and contradictions. Is it any wonder why we prefer our artists, actors and singers? At least they are straightforward about the fact they they don't need to make a whole lot of sense to be effective. Poetic license, however, does not extend to presidents and executives, and they need to snap out of it pronto.
September 25, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 505
You are under no obligation to humor the willfully ignorant. You need not fight every battle, but for the important things, silence is complicity. Speak up!
QUESTION EVERYTHING - THE CORRUPTION EQUATION
Prevailing wisdom. Quite a concept, that. Sort of takes the wind out of every sail that would seek to find another course. Naturally a whole lot of prevailing wisdom is pretty sound, like the concept of right and wrong, the fact that the sky is blue and that gravity anchors us to the ground. Hard to argue with those, and pretty foolish too. But there are a whole bunch of other bits of accepted wisdom that aren't so easily swallowed, and when something makes you choke, maybe you need to ask why. Is it just you, or are there others who doubt that corruption is inevitable? After all, most people you run across are not corrupt, so why is it accepted that a certain amount of corruption in public and private institutions is to be accepted and tacitly tolerated?
Indeed, when you think of personal corruption, do not politicians spring to mind? In America, who hasn't railed against our Congress, our state assemblies and our local governments as being riddled with corrupt and power mad individuals? And when you look at other nations, like Mexico or any Middle Eastern nation, you realize that corruption in official circles is a way of life, as predictable an inevitable as the sunrise. And then you meet individual Mexicans and Middle Easterners and find them to be just fine, with no built-in corruption gene, and you start asking questions. Even in the so-called Communist nations where the theory is that everybody owns everything equally, you find corrupt leaders enriching themselves at the expense of the many, and you wonder why that is for these ideological Puritans.
Maybe you even meet an assemblyman from your home state and find out that he's an honest person too, but someone forced to operate in a system long infested with back room deals and blatant self-interest. Maybe you wonder exactly how inevitable human corruption is, and whether the institutions we have set up have been flawed from the beginning, and that the conditions for temptation and corruption are inherent in these institutions. You notice that many of the various state assemblies have a very low pay scale for the representatives, and even the United States Congress and Senate are vastly underpaid positions for the relative demands and great responsibilities that go along with these important jobs.
Then you notice that these are the same men and women through whose hands flow the trillions and trillions of dollars that make up the public budgets of this large country, and the temptation comes into closer focus. A representative of any district not within commuting distance of the capitol by definition must maintain two homes and a minimum of two offices. Frequent travel between their home district and their place of work is not free, but necessary. Simply doing the math on what they earn and what they need to spend to do their jobs properly reveals quite a gap in dollars earned and dollars spent, a gap that must be filled somehow, and few of our elected representatives are independently wealthy.
So you figure that the mathematics of an inadequate salary combined with the proximity to the practically limitless resources of our public treasuries produces some skewed sort of algebra that encourages larceny. Now factor in wealthy business lobbies who ardently court these representatives with gifts, vacation trips, campaign donations and personal services in return for favorable legislation and The Corruption Equation begins to emerge a little more clearly. The system that was designed to give our citizens an independent voice in our government is flawed by money, in some cases too little and some far too much.
And we tolerate this state of affairs as the cost of doing the public business. Underpaid legislators with the same private needs as any other citizen, to earn a living to provide their families with food, shelter and an education, are practically forced to supplement their meager public salaries one way or another. And even if the way they supplement their income is completely legal, their power to affect legislatively whatever business they have chosen makes their outside incomes suspect. If a man or a woman holding public office gets involved in real estate, for example, they can potentially guarantee their success in that business by introducing and passing favorable zoning laws or tax breaks for their personal projects.
Many of us recall those toilet seats the Air Force bought for $500 apiece many years ago and can't help but wonder how many public officials owned stock in that toilet seat company. Then there were the $200 hammers sold to the Pentagon, presumably to knock sense into one another's thick skulls. Through such contradictions and tainted opportunities, many inherently corrupt people are now drawn to public service, seeking not an opportunity to serve and make a contribution to society, but a chance to get rich quick by any means at their disposal and serve only themselves.
Such men and women are naturals in this arena, and corrupting the process of government is one golden opportunity after another for some of these very skilled individuals. These are the people whose rise to prominence fuels the prevailing wisdom that corruption in inevitable. Every so often a few especially greedy and thuggish public servants are arrested and prosecuted and we tell ourselves that we are straightening things out, a foolish notion that ignores the legions of more subtle and deeply entrenched thieves on our public payrolls.
There is a reason that many men and women in public service emerge from the experience as wealthy individuals. The inside knowledge alone that is available to legislators represents a huge advantage in investment strategy, and the ability to pass laws to protect your personal investments is an asset none of their constituents enjoy. And that's just the passive route to personal enrichment at the public expense. Imagine the opportunities for hard working thieves bent on amassing a fortune they could never have earned legitimately?
The Corruption Equation grows exponentially when publishers line up to hand a lot of these people millions of dollars to have someone else write a book about their "experiences" in public life, especially the disgraced, the arrested or otherwise exposed corrupt hacks who have spent a great deal of their working lives screwing up our political system. So even if you are so greedy and corrupt that you get caught and sent to jail for a couple of relaxing years in some Federal Minimum Security prison, you can still come away with a handsome profit.
How do we solve the Corruption Equation? Same way it was created, money. Pay our public representatives an excellent salary and demand excellent performance. Insist on transparency when it comes to their own personal financial dealings. If they wish that personal information to remain private, then fine, let them remain private citizens. No one is forced to run for office. To represent your fellow citizens in Congress, in any executive branch or state assembly is a unique privilege reserved for those who desire to make their nation a better place. There is a price to be paid for that privilege, and that is being a public figure and publishing your financial dealings.
Create an independent public agency at every level of state, local and federal government to monitor our public servants and the work that they do, an agency with no power at all to affect legislation, only to report to their employers, we the people, on the performance of our leaders. Those found wanting will be shown the door, to a prison cell if need be. And finally, take all the lobbyists out and shoot them down like dogs. No sense being completely reasonable here in what has become a completely unreasonable situation. The Corruption Equation just doesn't add up.
Indeed, when you think of personal corruption, do not politicians spring to mind? In America, who hasn't railed against our Congress, our state assemblies and our local governments as being riddled with corrupt and power mad individuals? And when you look at other nations, like Mexico or any Middle Eastern nation, you realize that corruption in official circles is a way of life, as predictable an inevitable as the sunrise. And then you meet individual Mexicans and Middle Easterners and find them to be just fine, with no built-in corruption gene, and you start asking questions. Even in the so-called Communist nations where the theory is that everybody owns everything equally, you find corrupt leaders enriching themselves at the expense of the many, and you wonder why that is for these ideological Puritans.
Maybe you even meet an assemblyman from your home state and find out that he's an honest person too, but someone forced to operate in a system long infested with back room deals and blatant self-interest. Maybe you wonder exactly how inevitable human corruption is, and whether the institutions we have set up have been flawed from the beginning, and that the conditions for temptation and corruption are inherent in these institutions. You notice that many of the various state assemblies have a very low pay scale for the representatives, and even the United States Congress and Senate are vastly underpaid positions for the relative demands and great responsibilities that go along with these important jobs.
Then you notice that these are the same men and women through whose hands flow the trillions and trillions of dollars that make up the public budgets of this large country, and the temptation comes into closer focus. A representative of any district not within commuting distance of the capitol by definition must maintain two homes and a minimum of two offices. Frequent travel between their home district and their place of work is not free, but necessary. Simply doing the math on what they earn and what they need to spend to do their jobs properly reveals quite a gap in dollars earned and dollars spent, a gap that must be filled somehow, and few of our elected representatives are independently wealthy.
So you figure that the mathematics of an inadequate salary combined with the proximity to the practically limitless resources of our public treasuries produces some skewed sort of algebra that encourages larceny. Now factor in wealthy business lobbies who ardently court these representatives with gifts, vacation trips, campaign donations and personal services in return for favorable legislation and The Corruption Equation begins to emerge a little more clearly. The system that was designed to give our citizens an independent voice in our government is flawed by money, in some cases too little and some far too much.
And we tolerate this state of affairs as the cost of doing the public business. Underpaid legislators with the same private needs as any other citizen, to earn a living to provide their families with food, shelter and an education, are practically forced to supplement their meager public salaries one way or another. And even if the way they supplement their income is completely legal, their power to affect legislatively whatever business they have chosen makes their outside incomes suspect. If a man or a woman holding public office gets involved in real estate, for example, they can potentially guarantee their success in that business by introducing and passing favorable zoning laws or tax breaks for their personal projects.
Many of us recall those toilet seats the Air Force bought for $500 apiece many years ago and can't help but wonder how many public officials owned stock in that toilet seat company. Then there were the $200 hammers sold to the Pentagon, presumably to knock sense into one another's thick skulls. Through such contradictions and tainted opportunities, many inherently corrupt people are now drawn to public service, seeking not an opportunity to serve and make a contribution to society, but a chance to get rich quick by any means at their disposal and serve only themselves.
Such men and women are naturals in this arena, and corrupting the process of government is one golden opportunity after another for some of these very skilled individuals. These are the people whose rise to prominence fuels the prevailing wisdom that corruption in inevitable. Every so often a few especially greedy and thuggish public servants are arrested and prosecuted and we tell ourselves that we are straightening things out, a foolish notion that ignores the legions of more subtle and deeply entrenched thieves on our public payrolls.
There is a reason that many men and women in public service emerge from the experience as wealthy individuals. The inside knowledge alone that is available to legislators represents a huge advantage in investment strategy, and the ability to pass laws to protect your personal investments is an asset none of their constituents enjoy. And that's just the passive route to personal enrichment at the public expense. Imagine the opportunities for hard working thieves bent on amassing a fortune they could never have earned legitimately?
The Corruption Equation grows exponentially when publishers line up to hand a lot of these people millions of dollars to have someone else write a book about their "experiences" in public life, especially the disgraced, the arrested or otherwise exposed corrupt hacks who have spent a great deal of their working lives screwing up our political system. So even if you are so greedy and corrupt that you get caught and sent to jail for a couple of relaxing years in some Federal Minimum Security prison, you can still come away with a handsome profit.
How do we solve the Corruption Equation? Same way it was created, money. Pay our public representatives an excellent salary and demand excellent performance. Insist on transparency when it comes to their own personal financial dealings. If they wish that personal information to remain private, then fine, let them remain private citizens. No one is forced to run for office. To represent your fellow citizens in Congress, in any executive branch or state assembly is a unique privilege reserved for those who desire to make their nation a better place. There is a price to be paid for that privilege, and that is being a public figure and publishing your financial dealings.
Create an independent public agency at every level of state, local and federal government to monitor our public servants and the work that they do, an agency with no power at all to affect legislation, only to report to their employers, we the people, on the performance of our leaders. Those found wanting will be shown the door, to a prison cell if need be. And finally, take all the lobbyists out and shoot them down like dogs. No sense being completely reasonable here in what has become a completely unreasonable situation. The Corruption Equation just doesn't add up.
September 24, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 504
People like their bankers to be cautious fuddy duddies and not wild men. Wild men have other functions in society other than handling everybody's money and running the economy. Recent events have proven wild men stink at that.
TWITTER TO SANTA CLAUS
It's never to early too get your letter to Santa Claus sent. Early bird catches the worm and all that. Why wait until December when he's inundated with millions of requests for Tickle Me Elmo dolls and iPhones? So the thinking here is that this year we get the drop on America's retailers and Greeting Card companies that kick off Christmas season simultaneously with Halloween, and treat it with about the same reverence. So, in the spirit of modernism, let's Tweet Santa our unreasonable demands this year. Outside of his mode of transportation, Santa Claus has always kept up with the latest technology. How else can he keep track of the exploding population? He's all about the technology and cutting his work load.
He's got that whole naughty and nice deal down a science these days, having subcontracted that work to a statistics company in India. This way he's free to read all the e-mails and twitters he gets requesting this gift or that and can quickly download who's deserving of an X Box and who gets the lump of coal. He actually encourages the use of Twitter due to its electronically enforced brevity, that 140 character limit. So, in the interest of science and in the spirit of Christmas, bobcrespo.com has collected some of the early Tweets to Santa Claus from some prominent people. An added bonus is that this early in the season he even has the time to reply to the tweets. Here goes:
Santa - Thanks for the bonus last year. Have already spent it and am hoping to get a bigger one this Xmas, LOL. - The Big Bank Dawg
Don't hold your breath, Dawg. Looks like you'll have to make due on your $3 mil salary this year. The Mrs. is still PO'd about the millions in cash I gave away last season. - Santa
Dear Santa - You are my BFF and I just know you'll get me a new reality show! The one I have really stinks. - Paris
Dear Paris - Not to be a spoil sport, my dear, but haven't all your shows really stunk? Maybe the problem isn't the show, kiddo. Just a thought. - Santa
Santafier - Hopin' you could see your way clear to get me one of them nifty jet pilot costumes. Mr. Cheney took mine away when I was done Presidentiating. - Dubya
Dubya - You are still one dumb son-of-a-bitch and I'll always regret my gift to you of the 2000 election. Lose my Twitter address. -Santa
Claus - Here's what I want and it's a fabulous idea: You and me, reality show: "Trump Vs. Claus." We battle it out for who gets to sponsor Xmas. - The Donald
Dear The - I'll have you for breakfast, pompous fool. You're on! Only we call it "Claus Vs Trump." - The Santa
Claus - Title change is a deal breaker. Everybody knows the Trump name represents quality and fabulousness. - The Donald
The - Get real, Perry Combover! I was a household name before you dreamt of your first trophy wife, who if you recall, was a Christmas present from yours truly! Deal's off! - Claus
Claus - You'll be hearing from my attorneys, fat man. - The Donald
Dear Chump - Bring 'em on! You think Santa's afraid of your lawyers? I'll cross you all off my list! The Claus
Dear Santa, I know this might not be up your alley, but can you maybe slow down my wife's aging process? She's starting to look like my Mom and my Twitter fans are getting creeped out. - Ashton Kutcher
Dear Ashton - Who told you to marry granny, you dope? I'm Santa Claus, not Jesus! Have you seen Mrs. Claus? Best I can do is a couple of rounds of Botox treatments or a splashy divorce, your call - Santa
Santa - I think I'll go with the Botox deal. There's always next Christmas for the divorce. - Ashton
Asston - You greedy young punk! Just for that I'm giving your wife a handsome young pool boy this year who adores older women. - Santa
Dear Santa - Thanks for the new liver. One drawback, though. It has no Aps, can only do regular liver functions. Can anything be done about that this Christmas? -Steve Jobs
Steve - What can be done is you can thank God, you arrogant buffoon! A man died to give you that liver! And this Christmas you're getting some grown-up clothes. You can't be the boy genius in blue jeans for 30 years. -Santa
Dear Santa - I don't want anything for myself, only for you to rain hell fire on the liberals, the non-believing pagans and the Socialists who are staining my America. -Glen Beck
Dear Glen - You're scaring me, boy. Seek help ASAP! - Santa
Santa - I was wondering if you could provide me with something to do, maybe spark another race riot ala Rodney King or something big like that. Since Obama got elected no one listens when I yell at white folks. - Jesse Jackson
Dear Jesse - Get over it. Santa has given you many charismatic and oratorical gifts over the years and you used them to divide instead of unite. I gave you Dr. King as a teacher, too, but you didn't pay attention. This year it's a bottle of Old Spice and a red tie like the rest of the retired Grandpas. -Santa
Infidel Dog - As a Muslim I do not believe in you, but can't help but notice the many gifts you have bestowed upon America, or as we like to call it, The Great Satan. Can you give me the global voice I so deserve? - Ayatollah Ali Khameini, Supreme Leader of Iran
Dear El Supremo - Sure, you can make world headlines in a flash if you admit there was a holocaust, stop trying to enslave your women and ditch the stonings and beheadings already. Maybe lose the Merlin the Magician robe too. - Santa
Infidel Dog - Take all my fun away, Pawn of Satan! I knew you were in league with the enemies of God. I shall issue a fatwah upon you! - Ali Khameini
El Supremo - A fatwah? I'm already pretty fat, but go right ahead. The more of me, the merrier, as Mrs. Claus likes to say. My gift to you this Christmas will be a gift to the entire world. I will leave you unchanged so we all continue to be amused by your whacky antics. Jim Carey's got nothing on you, Supremo, LOL! - Santa Claus, Supreme Leader of The North Pole
He's got that whole naughty and nice deal down a science these days, having subcontracted that work to a statistics company in India. This way he's free to read all the e-mails and twitters he gets requesting this gift or that and can quickly download who's deserving of an X Box and who gets the lump of coal. He actually encourages the use of Twitter due to its electronically enforced brevity, that 140 character limit. So, in the interest of science and in the spirit of Christmas, bobcrespo.com has collected some of the early Tweets to Santa Claus from some prominent people. An added bonus is that this early in the season he even has the time to reply to the tweets. Here goes:
Santa - Thanks for the bonus last year. Have already spent it and am hoping to get a bigger one this Xmas, LOL. - The Big Bank Dawg
Don't hold your breath, Dawg. Looks like you'll have to make due on your $3 mil salary this year. The Mrs. is still PO'd about the millions in cash I gave away last season. - Santa
Dear Santa - You are my BFF and I just know you'll get me a new reality show! The one I have really stinks. - Paris
Dear Paris - Not to be a spoil sport, my dear, but haven't all your shows really stunk? Maybe the problem isn't the show, kiddo. Just a thought. - Santa
Santafier - Hopin' you could see your way clear to get me one of them nifty jet pilot costumes. Mr. Cheney took mine away when I was done Presidentiating. - Dubya
Dubya - You are still one dumb son-of-a-bitch and I'll always regret my gift to you of the 2000 election. Lose my Twitter address. -Santa
Claus - Here's what I want and it's a fabulous idea: You and me, reality show: "Trump Vs. Claus." We battle it out for who gets to sponsor Xmas. - The Donald
Dear The - I'll have you for breakfast, pompous fool. You're on! Only we call it "Claus Vs Trump." - The Santa
Claus - Title change is a deal breaker. Everybody knows the Trump name represents quality and fabulousness. - The Donald
The - Get real, Perry Combover! I was a household name before you dreamt of your first trophy wife, who if you recall, was a Christmas present from yours truly! Deal's off! - Claus
Claus - You'll be hearing from my attorneys, fat man. - The Donald
Dear Chump - Bring 'em on! You think Santa's afraid of your lawyers? I'll cross you all off my list! The Claus
Dear Santa, I know this might not be up your alley, but can you maybe slow down my wife's aging process? She's starting to look like my Mom and my Twitter fans are getting creeped out. - Ashton Kutcher
Dear Ashton - Who told you to marry granny, you dope? I'm Santa Claus, not Jesus! Have you seen Mrs. Claus? Best I can do is a couple of rounds of Botox treatments or a splashy divorce, your call - Santa
Santa - I think I'll go with the Botox deal. There's always next Christmas for the divorce. - Ashton
Asston - You greedy young punk! Just for that I'm giving your wife a handsome young pool boy this year who adores older women. - Santa
Dear Santa - Thanks for the new liver. One drawback, though. It has no Aps, can only do regular liver functions. Can anything be done about that this Christmas? -Steve Jobs
Steve - What can be done is you can thank God, you arrogant buffoon! A man died to give you that liver! And this Christmas you're getting some grown-up clothes. You can't be the boy genius in blue jeans for 30 years. -Santa
Dear Santa - I don't want anything for myself, only for you to rain hell fire on the liberals, the non-believing pagans and the Socialists who are staining my America. -Glen Beck
Dear Glen - You're scaring me, boy. Seek help ASAP! - Santa
Santa - I was wondering if you could provide me with something to do, maybe spark another race riot ala Rodney King or something big like that. Since Obama got elected no one listens when I yell at white folks. - Jesse Jackson
Dear Jesse - Get over it. Santa has given you many charismatic and oratorical gifts over the years and you used them to divide instead of unite. I gave you Dr. King as a teacher, too, but you didn't pay attention. This year it's a bottle of Old Spice and a red tie like the rest of the retired Grandpas. -Santa
Infidel Dog - As a Muslim I do not believe in you, but can't help but notice the many gifts you have bestowed upon America, or as we like to call it, The Great Satan. Can you give me the global voice I so deserve? - Ayatollah Ali Khameini, Supreme Leader of Iran
Dear El Supremo - Sure, you can make world headlines in a flash if you admit there was a holocaust, stop trying to enslave your women and ditch the stonings and beheadings already. Maybe lose the Merlin the Magician robe too. - Santa
Infidel Dog - Take all my fun away, Pawn of Satan! I knew you were in league with the enemies of God. I shall issue a fatwah upon you! - Ali Khameini
El Supremo - A fatwah? I'm already pretty fat, but go right ahead. The more of me, the merrier, as Mrs. Claus likes to say. My gift to you this Christmas will be a gift to the entire world. I will leave you unchanged so we all continue to be amused by your whacky antics. Jim Carey's got nothing on you, Supremo, LOL! - Santa Claus, Supreme Leader of The North Pole
September 23, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 503
They say never talk to strangers. That explains all those damned wars we've been fighting forever. The better deal might be to find out what's on the other guy's mind before sending in the Marines.
LOVE BINDS US
Pretty much everybody loves somebody and something, usually lots of of somebodies and somethings. There's the lovely wife or the handsome Dan husband, the wee ones, Mom and Dad of course, our siblings, boyfriends, girlfriends, and cousins and aunts and uncles, our revered grannies and gramps if we're lucky enough to still have them around, and dear friends too. Then there are the things we love, even though some people say you can't love things, only people. Well, pish and tosh on that notion, because it's just not true. Everyone loves music (even opera in some extreme cases! go figure...), and lots of us love baseball, or cars, or gardening, chocolate (true love!), sailing, snow, stamp collecting, Scrabble, new clothes, books, movies, beaches, sunsets, shoes, Sponge Bob, painting, cooking, skipping rope, you name it. And pretty much everybody loves their country and their hometown, even some places the rest of us are less than enthusiastic about.
We're lousy with love, we humans. Gets us in trouble some times, and losing it can be a real pain in the heart. It's something we feel before we know what feelings are, before we can speak or walk, or read or dance the tango. Sometimes we love someone so much that it hurts, and our hearts ache with fullness. Sometimes we take our love for granted and let is go unspoken, but it is a powerful force just the same, and its removal or just the threat of its removal can bed devastating. It is the tie that binds us one and al, the human glue that keeps us exasperating nut jobs from bopping one another over the head on a regular basis.
We can be annoying, every last one of us. After all, one of the biggest definitions of human is "imperfect," as in I'm only human. Well, there's nothing "only" about being a human being, as complex, mysterious and unpredictable a creature as ever walked God's green. We even surprise ourselves often enough to realize that there's more than meets the eye to people. There's all that damned love, for one thing, seething and boiling inside even the mildest among us. It motivates our every action and informs every life. Our best memories are tangled images of love and the joy of sharing it with our special people at very special times.
When you examines these memories, as often than not the times and events weren't so special at all, just regular times doing regular stuff. What made these memories stand out was the love for the special people, a love that is still as fresh and tangible as the day the memory was created and deposited in our personal data banks forever. Who can forget the love of a child for his or her best best friend? Or what we call our "first love," the romantic kind? The truth is that our hearts had been rehearsing for that day since we were born, pouring love all over all kinds of people and things and activities, and getting showered with love in return.
There was once a guy who pointed this out to us, a carpenter's boy from an obscure corner of the Roman Empire and a Jew by birth. He made the outlandish claims that love was the greatest of God's commandments, and that love would solve mankind's problems. He was a real stickler for love, and travelled around his home country teaching people all kinds of lessons about love and how it was the universal thread that binds all of humanity together. The times in which he lived were pretty violent times, just like now and any other time you care to mention. Only thing was, this guy turned his back on all that sword play and war making, telling his followers it wasn't worth a wooden nickel. He was merely pointing out the obvious, as any of his followers who looked into their own hearts and found them swelling with love can attest.
Jesus was the guy's name, and his teachings and his ministry annoyed the crap out of a lot of the powers-that-be in his country, a hodge-podge of military, royalty, occupying powers and religious authorities that had forgotten about the love in their hearts and were in a pretty rotten state of mind. He was warned again and again to cut it out already and stop getting on the nerves of the powerful but he didn't pay them any mind, even dismissed them as unimportant in the grand scheme of things. That's a dangerous thing to do with petty officialdom, those unfortunate creatures who channel their love into self-worshp and glorification, with the predictable results of becoming ridiculous human beings. Well, ridiculous people can be very dangerous when threatened and they wound up killing this young Jesus guy for his troubles.
Turns out the joke was on them and his message of love outlived them all. His followers now number in the billions and their love is beyond our puny capacity to measure it. The sad thing, though, is that we confine our love, and forget that Jesus taught us to love all people, love them with the same fierce passion with which we love our families and friends. Hardest of all, he told us we should love our enemies! That's a real challenge, to be sure, but if you examine that bold statement closely, it contains the answer to the unending violent times and the bloody carnage that passes for history around here, and around every other place too. If you really get to know your neighbor, for that is who our enemies are on this small world, odds are you'll find a person whose heart is as filled with love as your own.
Every human everywhere shares the universal trait of learning to love before they can walk. We all want to be safe and warm and keep our families the same way. We all would rather love than hate, rather love that fight, rather love than stain our spirits with small and petty complaints. We all would rather live than die, since life is one of the things we love most of all. When one of us loses their life, as one day we all do, those of us who loved them seek one another out and love each other more fiercely than ever, and share memories of love of the person we lost as we say goodbye.
It is an overwhelmingly powerful and universal experience, and always it is love that heals the loss of a loved one. We remember the good, the beautiful, the courageous and most of all, the love. Take away all our toys, all our riches and all our possessions, and still people are blessed and rich. We have love. Turn away from love at your mortal peril, embrace it for your salvation. Love all of God's children for the beautiful beings that they are. Love is the tie that binds, that heals, that bestows beauty and worth and life itself. And as a humble carpenter's son once pointed out 2,000 years ago, love will one day bring us peace. When we are ready, when our eyes can finally see what our hearts already know for certain, and when we allow ourselves to be all that we were designed to be, love will bind us all. It's the only game in town.
We're lousy with love, we humans. Gets us in trouble some times, and losing it can be a real pain in the heart. It's something we feel before we know what feelings are, before we can speak or walk, or read or dance the tango. Sometimes we love someone so much that it hurts, and our hearts ache with fullness. Sometimes we take our love for granted and let is go unspoken, but it is a powerful force just the same, and its removal or just the threat of its removal can bed devastating. It is the tie that binds us one and al, the human glue that keeps us exasperating nut jobs from bopping one another over the head on a regular basis.
We can be annoying, every last one of us. After all, one of the biggest definitions of human is "imperfect," as in I'm only human. Well, there's nothing "only" about being a human being, as complex, mysterious and unpredictable a creature as ever walked God's green. We even surprise ourselves often enough to realize that there's more than meets the eye to people. There's all that damned love, for one thing, seething and boiling inside even the mildest among us. It motivates our every action and informs every life. Our best memories are tangled images of love and the joy of sharing it with our special people at very special times.
When you examines these memories, as often than not the times and events weren't so special at all, just regular times doing regular stuff. What made these memories stand out was the love for the special people, a love that is still as fresh and tangible as the day the memory was created and deposited in our personal data banks forever. Who can forget the love of a child for his or her best best friend? Or what we call our "first love," the romantic kind? The truth is that our hearts had been rehearsing for that day since we were born, pouring love all over all kinds of people and things and activities, and getting showered with love in return.
There was once a guy who pointed this out to us, a carpenter's boy from an obscure corner of the Roman Empire and a Jew by birth. He made the outlandish claims that love was the greatest of God's commandments, and that love would solve mankind's problems. He was a real stickler for love, and travelled around his home country teaching people all kinds of lessons about love and how it was the universal thread that binds all of humanity together. The times in which he lived were pretty violent times, just like now and any other time you care to mention. Only thing was, this guy turned his back on all that sword play and war making, telling his followers it wasn't worth a wooden nickel. He was merely pointing out the obvious, as any of his followers who looked into their own hearts and found them swelling with love can attest.
Jesus was the guy's name, and his teachings and his ministry annoyed the crap out of a lot of the powers-that-be in his country, a hodge-podge of military, royalty, occupying powers and religious authorities that had forgotten about the love in their hearts and were in a pretty rotten state of mind. He was warned again and again to cut it out already and stop getting on the nerves of the powerful but he didn't pay them any mind, even dismissed them as unimportant in the grand scheme of things. That's a dangerous thing to do with petty officialdom, those unfortunate creatures who channel their love into self-worshp and glorification, with the predictable results of becoming ridiculous human beings. Well, ridiculous people can be very dangerous when threatened and they wound up killing this young Jesus guy for his troubles.
Turns out the joke was on them and his message of love outlived them all. His followers now number in the billions and their love is beyond our puny capacity to measure it. The sad thing, though, is that we confine our love, and forget that Jesus taught us to love all people, love them with the same fierce passion with which we love our families and friends. Hardest of all, he told us we should love our enemies! That's a real challenge, to be sure, but if you examine that bold statement closely, it contains the answer to the unending violent times and the bloody carnage that passes for history around here, and around every other place too. If you really get to know your neighbor, for that is who our enemies are on this small world, odds are you'll find a person whose heart is as filled with love as your own.
Every human everywhere shares the universal trait of learning to love before they can walk. We all want to be safe and warm and keep our families the same way. We all would rather love than hate, rather love that fight, rather love than stain our spirits with small and petty complaints. We all would rather live than die, since life is one of the things we love most of all. When one of us loses their life, as one day we all do, those of us who loved them seek one another out and love each other more fiercely than ever, and share memories of love of the person we lost as we say goodbye.
It is an overwhelmingly powerful and universal experience, and always it is love that heals the loss of a loved one. We remember the good, the beautiful, the courageous and most of all, the love. Take away all our toys, all our riches and all our possessions, and still people are blessed and rich. We have love. Turn away from love at your mortal peril, embrace it for your salvation. Love all of God's children for the beautiful beings that they are. Love is the tie that binds, that heals, that bestows beauty and worth and life itself. And as a humble carpenter's son once pointed out 2,000 years ago, love will one day bring us peace. When we are ready, when our eyes can finally see what our hearts already know for certain, and when we allow ourselves to be all that we were designed to be, love will bind us all. It's the only game in town.
September 22, 2009
POLITICS MADE SIMPLE: LIBERAL = THINKING OF THE OTHER GUY, CONSERVATIVE = SELF INTEREST
To be identified as a liberal was for years a badge of dishonor. Still is to a lot of people. Well, screw that. Anybody tells me I'm some sort of pussy to be a liberal I'll tell them straight out they're full of shit. Or Kool Aid, take your pick. Liberalism is simply the politics of looking out for the other guy as well as yourself. It makes more sense to care about more than yourself. No one walks this earth alone and there are no self-made men, never have been. True, there are many successful people who did things their own way, took great risks and made great things happen by the force of their brains, personality, willpower, hard work and ingenuity, and that's pretty cool. Let them be as successful as they can possibly be. None of them are successful, however, or even alive, without an assist from their fellow man.
Henry Ford never stood on an assembly line. Abraham Lincoln never led a cavalry charge during the Civil War. Thomas Edison never climbed a high-tension electrical tower with a flashlight, a tool kit and a prayer to find out what's wrong with the electric grid he created. Andrew Carnegie never personally dug the iron ore from the bowels of the earth that was smelted into steel in his foundries in Pittsburgh by thousands of men. Great men all in their respective fields, all risen from humble backgrounds to the very pinnacle of achievement, wealth, power or all three. Every one of these "self-made" men was the product of human society, starting with their families, their doctors, their teachers, their peers and their first employers.
After those early experiences they took the reins of their own lives and made history, always with an able assist from their employees, their country, their partners, their customers or constituents and even their rivals. There are many such men and women in American history, and every generation produces more. Some hold liberal political views, others are conservatives. Most of them are very admirable people, others are decidedly not. Wealth and success has very little to do with political outlook or inherent worth as a human being. And there have been worthless human beings in both the liberal and conservative spectrum of politics, no doubt. It's just that the majority of the worthless pieces of shit hold conservative political views.
Sorry, but that's just the way it is. Look at which side of history conservatives have stood. They opposed the abolition of slavery, the creation of Social Security, racial integration, withdrawal from the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. How were any of those conservative positions anything but shitty? And when Bush The Younger attacked Iraq for no reason at all, conservatives blasted opponents of that war as liberal scum. What, it's bad not to want 4,300 of our soldiers and 100,000 innocent Iraqis to die for nothing, and it's good to want 4,300 of our soldiers and 100,000 Iraqis to die for nothing? That's a pretty crazy way to look at things. Pretty stupid, too.
The fact is that this nation was founded by liberals, as far from the political mainstream in 1776 as it was possible to be. Our Founding Fathers insisted that their new nation would stand for freedom, equality, opportunity and tolerance for all. These liberal zanies even insisted that the pursuit of happiness was an inalienable right! How gay is that? And none of them insisted that their version of happiness was the only one allowed in their new nation, going so far as to insist that there would be a complete separation of church and state, and any one could practice any damned fool religion they felt like and get no grief from the government as long as they weren't harming anyone else. That was an unbelievably radical step in the 1700s.
Actually, none of the things the Founding Fathers created was radical, only eminently sensible. Calling the states United, for one thing, only reinforced the notion of human interdependence, even as we declared our independence from the stifling conservatism that was the British Empire. A united society doesn't necessarily mean a homogenized cookie cutter society, but a diverse group of people sharing common interests interacting with one another and building a society together. And the liberals who founded this society took pains to insure that no individual member of society should be forced to surrender their identity, their beliefs or their privacy.
These Quixotic fools inspired the world and triggered a massive emigration to these shores by millions of people fed up with conservative and repressive monarchies. Their liberal ideas took hold and before a century was out fewer and fewer monarchs remained who held any real power, figureheads at best, if not outright abolished like in France. Another century and a half has passed and you can now count the monarchs who hold any power on your fingers, and their countries are for the most part miserable shitholes that oppress the hell out of their people. The countries with quasi-kings, or dictators, are also living nightmares for their hapless citizens and are also for the most part miserable shitholes. Those are very conservative places, only they might call their conservatism fundamentalism, a handy excuse to shit all over others while hogging all the good things for themselves.
Not that every democracy is Shangri-La, but it's the best deal that humans have come up with yet for governing themselves. And liberals invented it. Liberals have also initiated most of the improvements on our democracy, from abolition of slavery, to better working conditions, to Social Security, to Medicare that saved generations of seniors from medical expense bankruptcy, to civil rights, to Food Stamps that eliminated hunger in the richest nation ever, to voting rights and women's suffrage to today's modern day battles for universal health care and an end to the disenfranchisement of America's last remaining niggers, our homosexual citizens.
Supposedly it is a liberal thing to want to provide health care for all and give every citizen their civil rights. No, it is not a liberal thing, it is a human thing, the decent thing. Conservatives are once more positioning themselves on the wrong side of history. Many of them make religious arguments about gay rights, forgetting that the United States Constitution makes no provision at all for recognizing religious arguments, only moral ones. Religious arguments put forth by today's very confused and un-Christianlike conservatives are rarely anything but immoral (see Iraq and torture). And when you get Fundamentalist Christians getting involved in politics, well, there's no talking to those assholes at all. They think everyone but themselves is deserving of nothing less than hell fire both in the afterlife and right now. Fuck them and their un-Christlike attitudes.
To deny any American citizen identical rights to every other American citizen is wrong not only by moral and American government standards, but also by any religious standard, unless somebody out there is worshipping a God who loves a few of His children a hell of a lot more than the others. Okay, scratch that, since that means a whole lot of somebodies and a whole lot of religions, another pressing reason why our Founding Fathers decided there wasn't a damned one of them that practices what they preach. They all seem to have some chosen people that are exalted at the expense of others. On such notions were monarchy and slavery built, and conservatism too. America doesn't roll like that, not anymore. Liberal stands for being good to others, conservative means a me-first philosophy that is more than willing to oppress others, or kill them if that's what is convenient to attain their selfish ends. Real men and women look out for one another. Cowardly greedy children look out only for themselves, no matter who else gets hurt. It's really as simple as that.
Henry Ford never stood on an assembly line. Abraham Lincoln never led a cavalry charge during the Civil War. Thomas Edison never climbed a high-tension electrical tower with a flashlight, a tool kit and a prayer to find out what's wrong with the electric grid he created. Andrew Carnegie never personally dug the iron ore from the bowels of the earth that was smelted into steel in his foundries in Pittsburgh by thousands of men. Great men all in their respective fields, all risen from humble backgrounds to the very pinnacle of achievement, wealth, power or all three. Every one of these "self-made" men was the product of human society, starting with their families, their doctors, their teachers, their peers and their first employers.
After those early experiences they took the reins of their own lives and made history, always with an able assist from their employees, their country, their partners, their customers or constituents and even their rivals. There are many such men and women in American history, and every generation produces more. Some hold liberal political views, others are conservatives. Most of them are very admirable people, others are decidedly not. Wealth and success has very little to do with political outlook or inherent worth as a human being. And there have been worthless human beings in both the liberal and conservative spectrum of politics, no doubt. It's just that the majority of the worthless pieces of shit hold conservative political views.
Sorry, but that's just the way it is. Look at which side of history conservatives have stood. They opposed the abolition of slavery, the creation of Social Security, racial integration, withdrawal from the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. How were any of those conservative positions anything but shitty? And when Bush The Younger attacked Iraq for no reason at all, conservatives blasted opponents of that war as liberal scum. What, it's bad not to want 4,300 of our soldiers and 100,000 innocent Iraqis to die for nothing, and it's good to want 4,300 of our soldiers and 100,000 Iraqis to die for nothing? That's a pretty crazy way to look at things. Pretty stupid, too.
The fact is that this nation was founded by liberals, as far from the political mainstream in 1776 as it was possible to be. Our Founding Fathers insisted that their new nation would stand for freedom, equality, opportunity and tolerance for all. These liberal zanies even insisted that the pursuit of happiness was an inalienable right! How gay is that? And none of them insisted that their version of happiness was the only one allowed in their new nation, going so far as to insist that there would be a complete separation of church and state, and any one could practice any damned fool religion they felt like and get no grief from the government as long as they weren't harming anyone else. That was an unbelievably radical step in the 1700s.
Actually, none of the things the Founding Fathers created was radical, only eminently sensible. Calling the states United, for one thing, only reinforced the notion of human interdependence, even as we declared our independence from the stifling conservatism that was the British Empire. A united society doesn't necessarily mean a homogenized cookie cutter society, but a diverse group of people sharing common interests interacting with one another and building a society together. And the liberals who founded this society took pains to insure that no individual member of society should be forced to surrender their identity, their beliefs or their privacy.
These Quixotic fools inspired the world and triggered a massive emigration to these shores by millions of people fed up with conservative and repressive monarchies. Their liberal ideas took hold and before a century was out fewer and fewer monarchs remained who held any real power, figureheads at best, if not outright abolished like in France. Another century and a half has passed and you can now count the monarchs who hold any power on your fingers, and their countries are for the most part miserable shitholes that oppress the hell out of their people. The countries with quasi-kings, or dictators, are also living nightmares for their hapless citizens and are also for the most part miserable shitholes. Those are very conservative places, only they might call their conservatism fundamentalism, a handy excuse to shit all over others while hogging all the good things for themselves.
Not that every democracy is Shangri-La, but it's the best deal that humans have come up with yet for governing themselves. And liberals invented it. Liberals have also initiated most of the improvements on our democracy, from abolition of slavery, to better working conditions, to Social Security, to Medicare that saved generations of seniors from medical expense bankruptcy, to civil rights, to Food Stamps that eliminated hunger in the richest nation ever, to voting rights and women's suffrage to today's modern day battles for universal health care and an end to the disenfranchisement of America's last remaining niggers, our homosexual citizens.
Supposedly it is a liberal thing to want to provide health care for all and give every citizen their civil rights. No, it is not a liberal thing, it is a human thing, the decent thing. Conservatives are once more positioning themselves on the wrong side of history. Many of them make religious arguments about gay rights, forgetting that the United States Constitution makes no provision at all for recognizing religious arguments, only moral ones. Religious arguments put forth by today's very confused and un-Christianlike conservatives are rarely anything but immoral (see Iraq and torture). And when you get Fundamentalist Christians getting involved in politics, well, there's no talking to those assholes at all. They think everyone but themselves is deserving of nothing less than hell fire both in the afterlife and right now. Fuck them and their un-Christlike attitudes.
To deny any American citizen identical rights to every other American citizen is wrong not only by moral and American government standards, but also by any religious standard, unless somebody out there is worshipping a God who loves a few of His children a hell of a lot more than the others. Okay, scratch that, since that means a whole lot of somebodies and a whole lot of religions, another pressing reason why our Founding Fathers decided there wasn't a damned one of them that practices what they preach. They all seem to have some chosen people that are exalted at the expense of others. On such notions were monarchy and slavery built, and conservatism too. America doesn't roll like that, not anymore. Liberal stands for being good to others, conservative means a me-first philosophy that is more than willing to oppress others, or kill them if that's what is convenient to attain their selfish ends. Real men and women look out for one another. Cowardly greedy children look out only for themselves, no matter who else gets hurt. It's really as simple as that.
September 21, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 501
False humility is just one more lie. No sense turning virtues into vices to make yourself feel better. You fool nobody and it doesn't work anyway.
DOPOTO REPORTS: RANDOM OBSERVATIONS OF THE FALSE AND MISLEADING
The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), as part of our ongoing mission to (what else?) point out the obvious, has stumbled across various small news tidbits that bear closer examination. One would be the closing down of an ambitious solar energy project in the State of California for its potential negative environmental impact. The location of this supposedly harmful installation? Downtown Los Angeles or on the outskirts of San Diego, two populous regions? No, the location was in the middle of The Mojave Desert, as sun drenched a locale as one could hope for when engaged in collecting the sun's energy. The human population of the site is zero, thus exposing no human beings to whatever risks are inherent in solar energy, even though those risks are so low as to allow solar panels to be installed on the roofs or in the gardens of human homes, to say nothing of the fact that people walk in sunlight pretty frequently.
So, why the cancellation of a project designed to alleviate California's dependence on foreign oil, the state most dependent upon internal combustion? It seems that the site is to be declared a national monument. To exactly what is anyone's guess. Perhaps a monument to vast wastelands sitting idle? A scorpion refuge? And if the national monument were declared to be the piece of broiling desert right next door to the solar energy collection apparatus, would anyone have noticed? The 5,130 acres that the solar collection farm occupies closely resembles the remaining 22,000 square miles of the Mojave. Could it just be possible that the environmental groups that succeeded in killing this important project were funded in large part by corporations whose interest in maintaining the energy status quo were threatened by solar power? To reject this possibility outright would be to ignore the obvious, a cardinal sin in The Department's view.
Another series of political criticisms aimed at trade unions has caught DOPOTO's attention. Conservative commentators cannot attribute enough evil to these organizations designed to protect workers. Unions are blamed for the de-industrialization of America and the prohibitively high prices of American goods and services, as well as the lowering of standards for certain jobs like teachers, police officers and other civil servants. Never in these observations is it reported exactly why unions were formed in the first place. It was certainly not because workers desired to pay union dues on top of all their other monthly expenses.
It was a natural reaction to the callous treatment they received at the hands of greedy employers who would have gladly worked them to death at poor wages and discarded them to poverty and suffering when their backs were too bent or broken to work anymore. Sweat shops, unsafe conditions and poor wages in exchange for skilled labor were not the workers' ideas, but those of ownership and management. Collective bargaining was the only tool available to workers, and the union movement is responsible for today's 40-hour work week, overtime pay, safety rules, pensions, medical coverage and countless other benefits enjoyed by every working American, whether or not they are union members.
These benefits were hard won by suffering and an actual war that was fought on American soil when ownership hired private armies of goons to beat and kill striking union workers. In other cases the industrialists prevailed on various state governments to attack American workers with National Guardsmen and State Militias. Blood was shed on both sides and the war was fought to an uneasy standstill. These things actually happened and are hard history, too often ignored or made light of by glib revisionists. Like all history, however, these facts are written down and can be easily accessed by anyone more interested in truth than in general impressions.
General impressions are soft and malleable, but facts are hard and immovable, which is why few demagogues have extensive backgrounds in fact checking and honest assessment. When truth is at odds with theory, an honest man will alter his theory. That is how science works, and no theory gets to be declared a fact until proven beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise. Politics and business are not branches of science, however, and as such rely heavily on false assumptions. The spotty results of political and business history bear this out, with no shortage of calamities on both fronts resulting from wishful thinking and false assumptions being championed as hard truth. This is as obvious and the name of this Department. The recommendation here is research and study, or as a sign in an obscure but beloved Brooklyn candy store once sagely advised: "Be sure brain is engaged before putting mouth in gear."
This has been a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.
So, why the cancellation of a project designed to alleviate California's dependence on foreign oil, the state most dependent upon internal combustion? It seems that the site is to be declared a national monument. To exactly what is anyone's guess. Perhaps a monument to vast wastelands sitting idle? A scorpion refuge? And if the national monument were declared to be the piece of broiling desert right next door to the solar energy collection apparatus, would anyone have noticed? The 5,130 acres that the solar collection farm occupies closely resembles the remaining 22,000 square miles of the Mojave. Could it just be possible that the environmental groups that succeeded in killing this important project were funded in large part by corporations whose interest in maintaining the energy status quo were threatened by solar power? To reject this possibility outright would be to ignore the obvious, a cardinal sin in The Department's view.
Another series of political criticisms aimed at trade unions has caught DOPOTO's attention. Conservative commentators cannot attribute enough evil to these organizations designed to protect workers. Unions are blamed for the de-industrialization of America and the prohibitively high prices of American goods and services, as well as the lowering of standards for certain jobs like teachers, police officers and other civil servants. Never in these observations is it reported exactly why unions were formed in the first place. It was certainly not because workers desired to pay union dues on top of all their other monthly expenses.
It was a natural reaction to the callous treatment they received at the hands of greedy employers who would have gladly worked them to death at poor wages and discarded them to poverty and suffering when their backs were too bent or broken to work anymore. Sweat shops, unsafe conditions and poor wages in exchange for skilled labor were not the workers' ideas, but those of ownership and management. Collective bargaining was the only tool available to workers, and the union movement is responsible for today's 40-hour work week, overtime pay, safety rules, pensions, medical coverage and countless other benefits enjoyed by every working American, whether or not they are union members.
These benefits were hard won by suffering and an actual war that was fought on American soil when ownership hired private armies of goons to beat and kill striking union workers. In other cases the industrialists prevailed on various state governments to attack American workers with National Guardsmen and State Militias. Blood was shed on both sides and the war was fought to an uneasy standstill. These things actually happened and are hard history, too often ignored or made light of by glib revisionists. Like all history, however, these facts are written down and can be easily accessed by anyone more interested in truth than in general impressions.
General impressions are soft and malleable, but facts are hard and immovable, which is why few demagogues have extensive backgrounds in fact checking and honest assessment. When truth is at odds with theory, an honest man will alter his theory. That is how science works, and no theory gets to be declared a fact until proven beyond any doubt, reasonable or otherwise. Politics and business are not branches of science, however, and as such rely heavily on false assumptions. The spotty results of political and business history bear this out, with no shortage of calamities on both fronts resulting from wishful thinking and false assumptions being championed as hard truth. This is as obvious and the name of this Department. The recommendation here is research and study, or as a sign in an obscure but beloved Brooklyn candy store once sagely advised: "Be sure brain is engaged before putting mouth in gear."
This has been a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.
September 20, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 500
Life is too short to make every mistake or learn every lesson personally, so learning from others is vital. The very first and best lesson to learn or to teach another is knowing right from wrong. This way when you get into unfamiliar territory you can always refer to Life 101 and you'll be fine.
LET'S END WELFARE... FOR CORPORATIONS
Welfare is for poor people down on their luck or health or both, a declaration by society that we do not throw our most helpless citizens away like so much inconvenient trash. In America, we value the individual and champion human rights. To do less than to subsidize the powerless would violate these principles laid forth by our Founding Fathers. It would also make the rest of us lesser human beings, those who stepped over the broken bodies of our brothers and sisters as we reached for the brass ring of the American Dream. If it takes a bit of socialism to be who we claim to be, so be it. The two most successful and efficient American government programs ever formulated are social programs that ensure that the individual is well cared for.
One is Social Security, started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to make sure that our elderly are not impoverished by loss of income after a lifetime of work. The other is Medicare, put into place by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and one also ensuring that our senior citizens are not bankrupted by the health care they require. Johnson also created welfare payments to the poor and the food stamp program that eliminated hunger in America. Today the phrase "hunger in America" sounds like a joke, but it wasn't so funny to starving Americans before Mr. Johnson got busy on their behalf. He acted on the unfinished business of providing a solution to "a third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished" that so shocked FDR.
This was America he was talking about, the wealthiest nation in the history of nations and one of the most bountiful places on earth. Yet somehow it was also a place where people were hungry and disenfranchised until a leader did something about it, Roosevelt with The New Deal and Johnson with The Great Society. Millions of American lives were transformed for the better. For these "socialist" accomplishments we should all be proud, and never begrudge the help given to those in need. There but for the grace of God, and all that. Many of the recipients of government social programs have become our finest citizens.
Our current President, the son of a poor single mother, comes to mind, rising from poverty to Colombia, Harvard, the Senate and the Presidency. How many of our current Senators and Congressmen had fathers who worked in FDR's CCC camps or on New Deal building projects or who went to school on the G.I. Bill? How many of today's college graduates have government sponsored loans to thank for their educations? And how much better off is America as a nation for including every citizen in our opportunity sweepstakes? Today America, for all our recent problems, stands alone as the lone superpower on earth and the most prosperous nation in history.
America is a generous nation, but sometimes too generous. The social programs described above are but the smallest part of Federally subsidized taxpayer handouts. The lion's share goes not to individuals, but to corporations, those publicly subsidized businesses that are supposed to operate in a free-market system. Well, guess what? Many of them don't and this does not refer to the industry-saving bailouts given by Presidents Bush The Younger and Obama to the banks and financial service industries or to the recent automobile company bailouts. A great deal of that money has already been repaid and all of it will be returned at a profit to Uncle Sam, just like the tidy profit they earned when they bailed out New York City in the 1970s.
The Corporate Welfare System involves private companies who have become accustomed to being subsidized by the federal government even though they do not need the help. They are not evil for accepting this help, and as corporations with but one mandate, to make a profit, would be foolish not to grab the free cash, either in the form of direct subsidies, tax breaks, reduced insurance rates, outright grants or government guarantees of their products. It is the government that is wrong to allow this to be possible. These are not new or marginal companies in need of assistance. Many are Fortune 500 companies and famous blue chip entities, household names synonymous with capitalist success. Why is America subsidizing these financial powerhouses?
The whole idea of capitalism is the sink-or-swim forces of the free market, sort of an industrial Darwinism that has made The United States, and Westernized capitalist nations in general, fabulously wealthy. While cutthroat competition is the norm in free market capitalism, sponging off the government is not. Aside from the fact that is is wrong, it gives the corporations that are skilled in siphoning off tax dollars an unfair business advantage over their competitors. It takes away their incentive to produce the best possible product and provides them market leverage they did not earn. Many corporations run extensive lobbying organizations to maintain this steady flow of free supplemental income.
These highly professional Washington insiders make their efforts well worth the while of the corporations, buying key politicians with gifts, bribes, trips, campaign donations, women, men or blackmail, whatever it takes. These lobbyists have even been known to write legislation or portions of laws that are directly beneficial to their corporations and sponsored by a Senator or Congressman, then signed into law by a president. That's about as big a perversion of the American government as can be imagined. One result of this unlawful and immoral partnership is that corporate taxes now contribute only around 10% of annual government revenues, down from the approximate 33% total in the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression.
Since that time American corporations have become far more numerous and prosperous. When you are writing your own tax laws, is it any wonder? They have also removed a great deal of their production from American soil, turning their backs on the workers who made them wealthy and declaring themselves "multinationals," loyal and beholden to no nation. So brazen have these corporate princes become that in the early 2000's they engineered the largest peacetime transfer of wealth from the working classes to the super wealthy in history. It happened in America and was called a tax break and sold as the idea of President Bush The Younger, a man who could not walk and chew gum at the same time, never mind mastermind a heist of that magnitude.
So it's time to cut the corporations loose. Chop their umbilical cords and let them sink or swim in the marketplace to which they pay such grand lip service whenever the government rattles their cages with proposed rules or regulations designed to stop them from polluting or stealing or cheating or anything else they don't feel like stopping. Shut down the lobbies and shut down corporate welfare and let businesses be businesses and not dependents of the American taxpayer. If some of them fail, well, how will this be different from any other recession or business failure?
Other companies will spring up to take their place, and will operate under the new realities of having no governmental partner to save them from their own greed and incompetence. They will prosper like corporations in America have always prospered; by hard work, ingenuity and fair trading. They will obey existing regulations, pay the prevailing tax rates and turn out the best product they can. This is what has always happened and what continues to happen every day of every week with new companies starting up. Most new businesses fail before a year is out, as they always have, but many succeed, some of them phenomenally so. Employees are hired, products produced and money generated.
This is not a new concept nor is it rocket science. It is business and was never meant to be a partnership with our government, not unless they intend to share their profits with the Sugar Daddy nation that subsidizes them, and they never did. These corporations take our money because they can and for no other reason. It's time to fix it so they cannot. Welfare is for the poor, the hurting and the dispossessed, not for wealthy corporations who would be wealthy with or without government handouts. It only makes whores out of our politicians and our businesses. It also takes money away from our government that could better be used to provide health care for our nation's citizens.
That bit of politics would also benefit our corporations immensely in world marketplaces since medical insurance premiums for their workers would no longer have to be added to the price of their products. So there's one socialist policy removed from the few and one given to the many for the benefit of all. With any luck at all, these bits of social tinkering will meet with half the success of the New Deal and The Great Society initiatives that have so improved life for the vast majority of Americans. Last anyone checked, the majority still rules. The majority just elected a president with social programs in mind, that election representing the only lobby regular American citizens need.
One is Social Security, started by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to make sure that our elderly are not impoverished by loss of income after a lifetime of work. The other is Medicare, put into place by President Lyndon B. Johnson, and one also ensuring that our senior citizens are not bankrupted by the health care they require. Johnson also created welfare payments to the poor and the food stamp program that eliminated hunger in America. Today the phrase "hunger in America" sounds like a joke, but it wasn't so funny to starving Americans before Mr. Johnson got busy on their behalf. He acted on the unfinished business of providing a solution to "a third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-nourished" that so shocked FDR.
This was America he was talking about, the wealthiest nation in the history of nations and one of the most bountiful places on earth. Yet somehow it was also a place where people were hungry and disenfranchised until a leader did something about it, Roosevelt with The New Deal and Johnson with The Great Society. Millions of American lives were transformed for the better. For these "socialist" accomplishments we should all be proud, and never begrudge the help given to those in need. There but for the grace of God, and all that. Many of the recipients of government social programs have become our finest citizens.
Our current President, the son of a poor single mother, comes to mind, rising from poverty to Colombia, Harvard, the Senate and the Presidency. How many of our current Senators and Congressmen had fathers who worked in FDR's CCC camps or on New Deal building projects or who went to school on the G.I. Bill? How many of today's college graduates have government sponsored loans to thank for their educations? And how much better off is America as a nation for including every citizen in our opportunity sweepstakes? Today America, for all our recent problems, stands alone as the lone superpower on earth and the most prosperous nation in history.
America is a generous nation, but sometimes too generous. The social programs described above are but the smallest part of Federally subsidized taxpayer handouts. The lion's share goes not to individuals, but to corporations, those publicly subsidized businesses that are supposed to operate in a free-market system. Well, guess what? Many of them don't and this does not refer to the industry-saving bailouts given by Presidents Bush The Younger and Obama to the banks and financial service industries or to the recent automobile company bailouts. A great deal of that money has already been repaid and all of it will be returned at a profit to Uncle Sam, just like the tidy profit they earned when they bailed out New York City in the 1970s.
The Corporate Welfare System involves private companies who have become accustomed to being subsidized by the federal government even though they do not need the help. They are not evil for accepting this help, and as corporations with but one mandate, to make a profit, would be foolish not to grab the free cash, either in the form of direct subsidies, tax breaks, reduced insurance rates, outright grants or government guarantees of their products. It is the government that is wrong to allow this to be possible. These are not new or marginal companies in need of assistance. Many are Fortune 500 companies and famous blue chip entities, household names synonymous with capitalist success. Why is America subsidizing these financial powerhouses?
The whole idea of capitalism is the sink-or-swim forces of the free market, sort of an industrial Darwinism that has made The United States, and Westernized capitalist nations in general, fabulously wealthy. While cutthroat competition is the norm in free market capitalism, sponging off the government is not. Aside from the fact that is is wrong, it gives the corporations that are skilled in siphoning off tax dollars an unfair business advantage over their competitors. It takes away their incentive to produce the best possible product and provides them market leverage they did not earn. Many corporations run extensive lobbying organizations to maintain this steady flow of free supplemental income.
These highly professional Washington insiders make their efforts well worth the while of the corporations, buying key politicians with gifts, bribes, trips, campaign donations, women, men or blackmail, whatever it takes. These lobbyists have even been known to write legislation or portions of laws that are directly beneficial to their corporations and sponsored by a Senator or Congressman, then signed into law by a president. That's about as big a perversion of the American government as can be imagined. One result of this unlawful and immoral partnership is that corporate taxes now contribute only around 10% of annual government revenues, down from the approximate 33% total in the 1930s, at the height of the Great Depression.
Since that time American corporations have become far more numerous and prosperous. When you are writing your own tax laws, is it any wonder? They have also removed a great deal of their production from American soil, turning their backs on the workers who made them wealthy and declaring themselves "multinationals," loyal and beholden to no nation. So brazen have these corporate princes become that in the early 2000's they engineered the largest peacetime transfer of wealth from the working classes to the super wealthy in history. It happened in America and was called a tax break and sold as the idea of President Bush The Younger, a man who could not walk and chew gum at the same time, never mind mastermind a heist of that magnitude.
So it's time to cut the corporations loose. Chop their umbilical cords and let them sink or swim in the marketplace to which they pay such grand lip service whenever the government rattles their cages with proposed rules or regulations designed to stop them from polluting or stealing or cheating or anything else they don't feel like stopping. Shut down the lobbies and shut down corporate welfare and let businesses be businesses and not dependents of the American taxpayer. If some of them fail, well, how will this be different from any other recession or business failure?
Other companies will spring up to take their place, and will operate under the new realities of having no governmental partner to save them from their own greed and incompetence. They will prosper like corporations in America have always prospered; by hard work, ingenuity and fair trading. They will obey existing regulations, pay the prevailing tax rates and turn out the best product they can. This is what has always happened and what continues to happen every day of every week with new companies starting up. Most new businesses fail before a year is out, as they always have, but many succeed, some of them phenomenally so. Employees are hired, products produced and money generated.
This is not a new concept nor is it rocket science. It is business and was never meant to be a partnership with our government, not unless they intend to share their profits with the Sugar Daddy nation that subsidizes them, and they never did. These corporations take our money because they can and for no other reason. It's time to fix it so they cannot. Welfare is for the poor, the hurting and the dispossessed, not for wealthy corporations who would be wealthy with or without government handouts. It only makes whores out of our politicians and our businesses. It also takes money away from our government that could better be used to provide health care for our nation's citizens.
That bit of politics would also benefit our corporations immensely in world marketplaces since medical insurance premiums for their workers would no longer have to be added to the price of their products. So there's one socialist policy removed from the few and one given to the many for the benefit of all. With any luck at all, these bits of social tinkering will meet with half the success of the New Deal and The Great Society initiatives that have so improved life for the vast majority of Americans. Last anyone checked, the majority still rules. The majority just elected a president with social programs in mind, that election representing the only lobby regular American citizens need.
September 19, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 499
People are very puzzling and fickle, which is why so many of us own dogs. They're pretty easy to figure out and very consistent. The odd thing is why dogs put up with people.
A BRAVE STANCE ON THE MISSILE SHIELD
Barack Obama has made the first move towards disarmament, a policy that will surely see him crucified in print and electronic media by his political opponents. The President has decided to scrap the folly of Star Wars missile shields in Europe, the brainchild of daft old Ronald Reagan and furthered by the even dopier Bush The Younger. The idea was that we would build missiles to shoot down enemy missiles before they blew up either our allies or us. Of course that meant that our potential enemies would have to get busy inventing something to thwart this missile shield, prompting us to spend more dough to thwart their thwart. And then they'd have to thwart our thwarts of their thwarts and so on and so on. If that sounds silly, well, it is. Upon this crazy idea was built the Cold War, which scared the crap out of mankind for nearly 50 years until the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight.
The end of the Cold War, however, did not put an end to Cold Warriors, whose entire mindset was permanently fixed on building bigger and better nuclear missiles. The result is that existing nuclear missiles can now kill everything on the planet a hundred times over. The Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal is still intact, now in possession of Russia. Our own nukes are still around too, of course, aging rockets in their reinforced silos, cruise missiles in submarine tubes and bombs in the bellies of aircraft ready to be launched at a moment's notice, all having a global reach. If anything, the digital age has made them more accurate than ever. Not that accuracy would matter all that much in a full-blown nuclear war, since the result would be death to everything and everyone on earth.
Rather than negotiate the gradual elimination of these weapons like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon attempted to do, the Star Wars initiative was sold as an antidote to nuclear attack, never mentioning exactly what would happen to the nuclear payloads of the missiles our anti-missile missiles shot down. Outside of lassoing them and flinging them into the sun or into outer space like Superman would do, you would still have hundreds of nuclear missiles with their multiple kiloton warheads falling somewhere. That is assuming that the Star Wars thing worked in the first place, with most responsible scientists in agreement about its complete ineffectiveness.
So even if these thwarted nuclear bombs fell in flames on the nations that launched them, there's no guarantee that the bombs would not detonate anyway and that the wind would eventually carry the deadly radiation to every corner of the earth. Rather than an immediate nuclear holocaust we would then have a few months to think about how fucking stupid we were to think we could play "chicken" with nuclear bombs in the first place while waiting for our skin to melt from our faces and our bleached bones to glow in the dark. And the not-so-funny thing is that everybody knew that! The Star Wars missile shield was really just one more stop-gap in a never-ending arms race that led to only one destination, the complete annihilation of humankind. So President Obama bowed to this reality and said "No More!"
Somebody somewhere had to say that and, far more importantly, act upon their words. Almost every politician everywhere will tell you that their goal is a nuclear weapons-free world, but few of them have done a damned thing about it. It is only now, post-Cold War, with the United States as the only Superpower left standing, that we can be in the position of making the first move. Rather than use our position of strength to increase our lead in the Horrible Death For All Mankind Department, we can begin to peel away the layers of killing machinery that still holds the entire world hostage, even if we are no longer on the edge or our seats about it like we were when America and the USSR were trading threats and playing global chess by staging small wars on other countries' real estate.
While America and Russia are still playing the proxy war chess games (Iraq, Afghanistan [by both nations], Georgia, Chechnia, etc), this one small step means something important, something long overdue. Let the war mongers cry that the President is placing American security at risk. Let them lament not having the power to kill every man, woman and child on earth a hundred times over, as if that were something desirable. We have already bathed in the blood and the fear of their solution for 60 years now, and America has been attacked on their Cold War watch. Our greatest city and our nation's military headquarters were in flames 8 years ago from an attack by an enemy, nuclear umbrella or no nuclear umbrella.
The fact is that the use of any nuclear arsenal, large or small, is unthinkable. Our possession of the vast majority of nuclear bombs has not helped us, nor has it stopped other nations from attempting to acquire their own. The rapid leaps in technology have even made it theoretically possible for terrorists to obtain such a bomb, and were they to detonate one in America or in one of our allies' cities, our nuclear arsenal would still be useless to us since there would be no nation to bomb in retaliation. If in the event of such a horrendous act, could we trust every nuclear power to stay their hand from vengeance, even the nation who suffered such an attack? Even a minor volley of nuclear missiles would devastate huge portions of the planet and kill hundreds of millions of innocents.
That is the reality, and a reality that has finally dawned upon a sitting U.S. President, the only man in the position to begin to reverse the series of horrible decisions all the nations involved have made about nuclear weapons. America is in the driver's seat seat now, and it's time to turn this vehicle right around and drive somewhere peaceful, away from the edge of the abyss, to lead by example. Next stop: eliminating our nuclear arsenal, an albatross around our necks and a loaded gun pointed at every head on the planet. Do we go on hoping that every future leader in every nuclear armed nation will never pull that trigger? Or do we start taking the bullets out of the gun? President Obama has started unloading the gun, and if he accomplishes nothing else, for this we must be grateful, applaud his courage and insist that he continue down this road. We know where the other road was headed, and it wasn't anyplace good. Just maybe this new road will lead us towards the light. We'll never know unless we try, and if we don't try, shame on us.
The end of the Cold War, however, did not put an end to Cold Warriors, whose entire mindset was permanently fixed on building bigger and better nuclear missiles. The result is that existing nuclear missiles can now kill everything on the planet a hundred times over. The Soviet Union's nuclear arsenal is still intact, now in possession of Russia. Our own nukes are still around too, of course, aging rockets in their reinforced silos, cruise missiles in submarine tubes and bombs in the bellies of aircraft ready to be launched at a moment's notice, all having a global reach. If anything, the digital age has made them more accurate than ever. Not that accuracy would matter all that much in a full-blown nuclear war, since the result would be death to everything and everyone on earth.
Rather than negotiate the gradual elimination of these weapons like John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon attempted to do, the Star Wars initiative was sold as an antidote to nuclear attack, never mentioning exactly what would happen to the nuclear payloads of the missiles our anti-missile missiles shot down. Outside of lassoing them and flinging them into the sun or into outer space like Superman would do, you would still have hundreds of nuclear missiles with their multiple kiloton warheads falling somewhere. That is assuming that the Star Wars thing worked in the first place, with most responsible scientists in agreement about its complete ineffectiveness.
So even if these thwarted nuclear bombs fell in flames on the nations that launched them, there's no guarantee that the bombs would not detonate anyway and that the wind would eventually carry the deadly radiation to every corner of the earth. Rather than an immediate nuclear holocaust we would then have a few months to think about how fucking stupid we were to think we could play "chicken" with nuclear bombs in the first place while waiting for our skin to melt from our faces and our bleached bones to glow in the dark. And the not-so-funny thing is that everybody knew that! The Star Wars missile shield was really just one more stop-gap in a never-ending arms race that led to only one destination, the complete annihilation of humankind. So President Obama bowed to this reality and said "No More!"
Somebody somewhere had to say that and, far more importantly, act upon their words. Almost every politician everywhere will tell you that their goal is a nuclear weapons-free world, but few of them have done a damned thing about it. It is only now, post-Cold War, with the United States as the only Superpower left standing, that we can be in the position of making the first move. Rather than use our position of strength to increase our lead in the Horrible Death For All Mankind Department, we can begin to peel away the layers of killing machinery that still holds the entire world hostage, even if we are no longer on the edge or our seats about it like we were when America and the USSR were trading threats and playing global chess by staging small wars on other countries' real estate.
While America and Russia are still playing the proxy war chess games (Iraq, Afghanistan [by both nations], Georgia, Chechnia, etc), this one small step means something important, something long overdue. Let the war mongers cry that the President is placing American security at risk. Let them lament not having the power to kill every man, woman and child on earth a hundred times over, as if that were something desirable. We have already bathed in the blood and the fear of their solution for 60 years now, and America has been attacked on their Cold War watch. Our greatest city and our nation's military headquarters were in flames 8 years ago from an attack by an enemy, nuclear umbrella or no nuclear umbrella.
The fact is that the use of any nuclear arsenal, large or small, is unthinkable. Our possession of the vast majority of nuclear bombs has not helped us, nor has it stopped other nations from attempting to acquire their own. The rapid leaps in technology have even made it theoretically possible for terrorists to obtain such a bomb, and were they to detonate one in America or in one of our allies' cities, our nuclear arsenal would still be useless to us since there would be no nation to bomb in retaliation. If in the event of such a horrendous act, could we trust every nuclear power to stay their hand from vengeance, even the nation who suffered such an attack? Even a minor volley of nuclear missiles would devastate huge portions of the planet and kill hundreds of millions of innocents.
That is the reality, and a reality that has finally dawned upon a sitting U.S. President, the only man in the position to begin to reverse the series of horrible decisions all the nations involved have made about nuclear weapons. America is in the driver's seat seat now, and it's time to turn this vehicle right around and drive somewhere peaceful, away from the edge of the abyss, to lead by example. Next stop: eliminating our nuclear arsenal, an albatross around our necks and a loaded gun pointed at every head on the planet. Do we go on hoping that every future leader in every nuclear armed nation will never pull that trigger? Or do we start taking the bullets out of the gun? President Obama has started unloading the gun, and if he accomplishes nothing else, for this we must be grateful, applaud his courage and insist that he continue down this road. We know where the other road was headed, and it wasn't anyplace good. Just maybe this new road will lead us towards the light. We'll never know unless we try, and if we don't try, shame on us.
September 18, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 498
Wonders abound and never cease. Keep your eyes and your heart wide open and feel the power of life, of love, and of miracles.
IT'S AUTUMN AND THINGS ARE ABOUT TO CHANGE
Pity the people with less than four seasons. Here in New York City on the northeast coast of the United States, Summer is just about over. A hot day here and there still reminds us of the oddball rainy Summer we have had, but the air at night tells a different story. It's almost Fall, that brisk, blood-quickening time of year that assaults our senses and jolts us out of our warm weather lethargy. It's buzz time, and suddenly you're more alive, more aware, more curious. You notice the subtle changes in the sky, the trees, the flavor of the air you are breathing. You figure any week now the leaves are going to go all yellow, orange and gold overnight and blow all our minds a little bit. You start to get excited. About everything. Breakfast, noisy school buses, cars, women in scarves and turtlenecks, sunlight, books, playoff baseball, football, fire engines. People are moving a little quicker, a brisk spring in their step.
The geese in the parks are eating their faces off, fattening up for their long flight to their timeshares down south. They'll let us know what kind of Winter we're in for by their departure date. When the time comes, they circle around a couple of times getting into their vee-formations and honking up a storm, arguing goose aguments about who's in charge of the whole operation. You wonder how they decide who gets to go in what formation, if they are cousins or in-laws or the like. There is no full moon quite like a full moon in Autumn, presumably what they call a harvest moon in places where they actually harvest stuff. Around here we hope that some geese formations will fly across the full moon honking their so-longs and see-ya's until Spring. We wave at them, hoping they'll bring us back a T-shirt or a coffee mug or something, even though they never seem to remember. You figure they probably forgot your address and don't know your size anyway so the heck with it.
When Autumn comes to New York, this citiest of cities, the incredible energy level ratchets up to its greatest heights, and the whole place is a hive of happening. The rock clubs rock harder, the subways are packed to the gills as they boogie down the tracks on their appointed rounds and the 8 million of us lucky enough to call this place home are wired for sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes, eager for more of everything, aching to be and do! The sweaters and jackets are out, the women are shopping like beings possessed and the men are all raw nerve endings taking it all in. Everybody is doing their thing and living large.
You turn around and the trees are bare, the nights are cold and you can see your breath in hot puffs in the morning, tangible evidence of the mad life that percolates inside each and every one of us. You see the tourists checking all this out and you envy them a little bit because they are seeing it for the very first time, at first amazed and taken aback, then jumping right into the swing of things with both feet. You wonder what that's like, New York from the outside looking in. Then you think about all the New Yorkers who came here from every place imaginable on the planet who all had that first time, that crazy day when they entered Wonderland. At some point each of them decided; I want this, this can be my place too, I can have some of this! No matter where they are from they became true New Yorkers at that moment and now cannot imagine living anywhere else. You're thinking that for a whole lot of them that moment was on a brisk Fall day.
And so you pull out the leather and the suede, maybe buy a new hat and you cruise around your town, drinking it all in, planning your plans and feeling your joy. You see the rosy cheeks on the children, the wind blowing the ladies' hair this way and that. Your head swims and your spirit soars. You feel a very real love for your city, your home and for all people everywhere, wishing they could feel what you are feeling at this sweet, sweet moment. Your heart is full. Of life, love, humility, wonder, ecstasy and vitality. Your mind is reeling at the endless possibilities of what it means to be a human being. All is good and clean and pure. Everything you see is wonderful, worthwhile and wholesome. If you drew your last breath in this sublime moment you would have no complaint. This is what Autumn in New York can do to a person. It's the best time of year in the best place on the planet and you are a part of it. Miracles are real.
The geese in the parks are eating their faces off, fattening up for their long flight to their timeshares down south. They'll let us know what kind of Winter we're in for by their departure date. When the time comes, they circle around a couple of times getting into their vee-formations and honking up a storm, arguing goose aguments about who's in charge of the whole operation. You wonder how they decide who gets to go in what formation, if they are cousins or in-laws or the like. There is no full moon quite like a full moon in Autumn, presumably what they call a harvest moon in places where they actually harvest stuff. Around here we hope that some geese formations will fly across the full moon honking their so-longs and see-ya's until Spring. We wave at them, hoping they'll bring us back a T-shirt or a coffee mug or something, even though they never seem to remember. You figure they probably forgot your address and don't know your size anyway so the heck with it.
When Autumn comes to New York, this citiest of cities, the incredible energy level ratchets up to its greatest heights, and the whole place is a hive of happening. The rock clubs rock harder, the subways are packed to the gills as they boogie down the tracks on their appointed rounds and the 8 million of us lucky enough to call this place home are wired for sights, sounds, smells, touches and tastes, eager for more of everything, aching to be and do! The sweaters and jackets are out, the women are shopping like beings possessed and the men are all raw nerve endings taking it all in. Everybody is doing their thing and living large.
You turn around and the trees are bare, the nights are cold and you can see your breath in hot puffs in the morning, tangible evidence of the mad life that percolates inside each and every one of us. You see the tourists checking all this out and you envy them a little bit because they are seeing it for the very first time, at first amazed and taken aback, then jumping right into the swing of things with both feet. You wonder what that's like, New York from the outside looking in. Then you think about all the New Yorkers who came here from every place imaginable on the planet who all had that first time, that crazy day when they entered Wonderland. At some point each of them decided; I want this, this can be my place too, I can have some of this! No matter where they are from they became true New Yorkers at that moment and now cannot imagine living anywhere else. You're thinking that for a whole lot of them that moment was on a brisk Fall day.
And so you pull out the leather and the suede, maybe buy a new hat and you cruise around your town, drinking it all in, planning your plans and feeling your joy. You see the rosy cheeks on the children, the wind blowing the ladies' hair this way and that. Your head swims and your spirit soars. You feel a very real love for your city, your home and for all people everywhere, wishing they could feel what you are feeling at this sweet, sweet moment. Your heart is full. Of life, love, humility, wonder, ecstasy and vitality. Your mind is reeling at the endless possibilities of what it means to be a human being. All is good and clean and pure. Everything you see is wonderful, worthwhile and wholesome. If you drew your last breath in this sublime moment you would have no complaint. This is what Autumn in New York can do to a person. It's the best time of year in the best place on the planet and you are a part of it. Miracles are real.
September 17, 2009
LIFE EXPLAINED, PART 497
Things happen, time goes on, people change. Everything else is just details.
DOPOTO WELCOMES JIMMY CARTER INTO THE FOLD
The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) welcomes former President of The United States James Earl Carter to our world. In a question and answer session at The Carter Center in Atlanta, our former president responded to a question about the verbal attacks on our current president, Barack Obama, specifically the large number of Nazi and Adolph Hitler comparisons being bandied about. Mr. Carter's response was: "There is an inherent feeling among many of us in this country that an African-American should not be president," thus identifying the 800 pound gorilla in the national living room, racism. His comments naturally resulted in a torrent of denials of a character similar to one where William Shakespeare once noted how a certain party "doth protest too much."
Kudos to Jimmy Carter, a man of honesty and integrity. The cynical and careful ways racists operate these days fool few Americans, yet even fewer of us are willing to point out the obvious, perhaps out of fear of being smeared with the same brush, or unwilling to revisit the national agony that is race relations for the entire history of the United States. Many would love to pretend that the election of a black president has waved a magic wand over the issue of racism and made it disappear. They would also like to pretend that the Wall Street titans who made all the money disappears will one day make it magically reappear with a "Presto, Change-O!" and tell us that the whole financial collapse was "all part of the show, ladies and gentlemen."
The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious, however, cannot let such illusions stand. Our mandate is a simple one: separate the wheat from the chaff, a duty that we take quite seriously. And so the firestorm over Mr. Carter's candid observation begins. It will be interesting to see how President Obama's critics justify their comparisons of the man to Adolph Hitler and his party to the Nazis, comparisons that should be saved for only the most heinous of mass-murdering dictators and their tyrannical state apparatus. So far it is an empty bag of gas, otherwise there would be no public voices of opposition or anti-government rallies permitted, as anyone with the slightest familiarity with The Third Reich can attest.
And exactly what element does the opposition appeal to when they spread lies about Mr. Obama being a Muslim of Kenyan birth? Certainly not to Rainbow Coalitionists. To be perfectly clear, that would be the racist elements of American society. Never before in the history of this Republic has a movement been launched to impeach a president before he has even been sworn into office. Generally those efforts are reserved for when a sitting president commits a crime against the Constitution he has sworn to uphold. Thus far in Mr. Obama's 8 months as president he has yet to propose any legislation or practice any executive policies that would violate the United States Constitution. So, while impeachment is not a realistic option, it seems that thinly disguised racial attacks on his character are the way to go, those being far easier than formulating actual ideas and workable policies as an alternative to the president's own agenda.
When the Republicans brand Mr. Obama a Marxist and a Socialist, are they not purposely omitting the Republican Corporate Welfare System they created and maintained for decades? Taxpayer-funded direct welfare payments and tax relief to wealthy corporations have far outstripped the subsistence level welfare payments to underprivileged individuals by trillions of dollars and always have. They prefer that our nation abominates the poorest recipients of social benefits while ignoring the wealthiest beneficiaries of government handouts. The recent massive bailouts of America's financial industry by both the Bush The Younger and the Obama Administrations were merely automatic extensions of an extensive Corporate Welfare State long established and rarely questioned.
Republicans walk on thin ice indeed with the Socialist accusations, so perhaps that explains the shift to Nazi comparisons, where no embarrassing corollaries can be pointed out, except perhaps for their torture and domestic spying policies. Perhaps they feel that impugning the man's character and doing everything short of openly calling the president "a Nigger" will disguise their appeals to racist America. Not on DOPOTO's watch, or Jimmy Carter's either. The American people are not stupid, at least not many of them. Racists are are a dying breed, running in packs and howling that the sky is falling, and perhaps it is. On them. On their evil philosophy. On their day in the sun.
As for the rest of America, they have elected progress and turned their backs on racism. The results of the 2008 elections were obvious. Whether President Obama is a great president, a lousy president or somewhere in the middle of the pack has no bearing on the choice made in 2008. A man was judged by the content of his character and not found wanting. He was handed an overwhelming majority in both Houses of Congress and expected to govern according to his own lights within the Constitution of The United States of America. If that exposes the racists for who and what they are, so much the better. The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious likes things to be clear and unambiguous. Frankly, we are uncomfortable with deceit.
This has been a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.
Kudos to Jimmy Carter, a man of honesty and integrity. The cynical and careful ways racists operate these days fool few Americans, yet even fewer of us are willing to point out the obvious, perhaps out of fear of being smeared with the same brush, or unwilling to revisit the national agony that is race relations for the entire history of the United States. Many would love to pretend that the election of a black president has waved a magic wand over the issue of racism and made it disappear. They would also like to pretend that the Wall Street titans who made all the money disappears will one day make it magically reappear with a "Presto, Change-O!" and tell us that the whole financial collapse was "all part of the show, ladies and gentlemen."
The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious, however, cannot let such illusions stand. Our mandate is a simple one: separate the wheat from the chaff, a duty that we take quite seriously. And so the firestorm over Mr. Carter's candid observation begins. It will be interesting to see how President Obama's critics justify their comparisons of the man to Adolph Hitler and his party to the Nazis, comparisons that should be saved for only the most heinous of mass-murdering dictators and their tyrannical state apparatus. So far it is an empty bag of gas, otherwise there would be no public voices of opposition or anti-government rallies permitted, as anyone with the slightest familiarity with The Third Reich can attest.
And exactly what element does the opposition appeal to when they spread lies about Mr. Obama being a Muslim of Kenyan birth? Certainly not to Rainbow Coalitionists. To be perfectly clear, that would be the racist elements of American society. Never before in the history of this Republic has a movement been launched to impeach a president before he has even been sworn into office. Generally those efforts are reserved for when a sitting president commits a crime against the Constitution he has sworn to uphold. Thus far in Mr. Obama's 8 months as president he has yet to propose any legislation or practice any executive policies that would violate the United States Constitution. So, while impeachment is not a realistic option, it seems that thinly disguised racial attacks on his character are the way to go, those being far easier than formulating actual ideas and workable policies as an alternative to the president's own agenda.
When the Republicans brand Mr. Obama a Marxist and a Socialist, are they not purposely omitting the Republican Corporate Welfare System they created and maintained for decades? Taxpayer-funded direct welfare payments and tax relief to wealthy corporations have far outstripped the subsistence level welfare payments to underprivileged individuals by trillions of dollars and always have. They prefer that our nation abominates the poorest recipients of social benefits while ignoring the wealthiest beneficiaries of government handouts. The recent massive bailouts of America's financial industry by both the Bush The Younger and the Obama Administrations were merely automatic extensions of an extensive Corporate Welfare State long established and rarely questioned.
Republicans walk on thin ice indeed with the Socialist accusations, so perhaps that explains the shift to Nazi comparisons, where no embarrassing corollaries can be pointed out, except perhaps for their torture and domestic spying policies. Perhaps they feel that impugning the man's character and doing everything short of openly calling the president "a Nigger" will disguise their appeals to racist America. Not on DOPOTO's watch, or Jimmy Carter's either. The American people are not stupid, at least not many of them. Racists are are a dying breed, running in packs and howling that the sky is falling, and perhaps it is. On them. On their evil philosophy. On their day in the sun.
As for the rest of America, they have elected progress and turned their backs on racism. The results of the 2008 elections were obvious. Whether President Obama is a great president, a lousy president or somewhere in the middle of the pack has no bearing on the choice made in 2008. A man was judged by the content of his character and not found wanting. He was handed an overwhelming majority in both Houses of Congress and expected to govern according to his own lights within the Constitution of The United States of America. If that exposes the racists for who and what they are, so much the better. The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious likes things to be clear and unambiguous. Frankly, we are uncomfortable with deceit.
This has been a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.
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