Since September 11, 2001 the news consists, in large part, of a cascading tsunami of 'terrorist bombing' reports. I've gotta say, So WHAT!
Is there some real NEWS value in that? Are ANY of us really SURPRISED? And by 'us' I don't just mean us Americans.
I'm talking about the universal 'us'; anyone with a pulse and consciousness. What are we expecting from individuals whose lives are so entirely devoid of humanity that their sole form of entertainment takes the form of a mindless automaton all trussed up in sticks of dynamite out to avenge some bogus prophet whose sole contribution to the world is a band of mindless automatons.
What I propose is this.
You've doubtless seen the now famous video of the little kid who falls on the floor and starts crying as soon as he catches sight of a parent or sibling, and who, on being ignored, stops crying, jumps up, comes looking for the parent or sibling, and on finding that unfortunate individual, promptly falls on the floor and starts crying again.
Suicide bombers are just grown up little kids falling on the floor crying. As long as the media give them notice, they'll keep it up.
Let's IGNORE the bastards for a while.
Stop even reporting the fact that another dope all wrapped up in bogus piety and dynamite has blown him or herself up and taken a few dozen unfortunate innocents along for the trip.
Do that a while and they'll figure it out, get bored, and find some NEW way to get attention, which is all they really want, in the first place.
Sunday, April 04, 2010
Monday, November 23, 2009
Where Has All The Value Gone?
$53,000,000,000,000.00 (fifty-three trillion, the TOTAL US debt in the aggregate, all values taken into account) in 2009 has about the same buying power as $3,529,467,725,824.10 (three trillion, five hundred twenty-nine billion, four hundred sixty-seven million, seven hundred twenty-five thousand, eight hundred twenty-four dollars and ten cents) had in 1940.
Annual inflation (a compound amount) over this period was about 4%.
Don't you wish you had invested a hundred bucks in 1940? Or that someone in your family had, in your name?
Tuesday, August 04, 2009
Wow. Give Peace another chance.
Mr. Clinton is still a force to be reckoned with.
The world owes him much. This nation owes him much more.
Two young enterprising if foolish journalists owe him their lives and their freedom.
Thanks, Mr. Clinton, you done good.
Hey, all the rest of you good folks in high places.
Pay attention.
The world owes him much. This nation owes him much more.
Two young enterprising if foolish journalists owe him their lives and their freedom.
Thanks, Mr. Clinton, you done good.
Hey, all the rest of you good folks in high places.
Pay attention.
Friday, July 17, 2009
Twitter Me…Twitter Me
The more I Tweet, the Twittier I feel.
In reviewing the tweets of some of those whom I was formerly following, I discovered a vast dissimilarity in the topics being discussed or tweeted about. That seems inconsistent with the intent of the whole exercise, in my limited ability to comprehend such esoteric matters.
Seems to me, dontcha know, that the entire thing is devoted to the idea of aggregating thinkers of like interests, to the mutual benefit of all involved. Rather, I'm getting followed by numerous individuals who, for the lack of a better term, stultify.
Problem is, I found myself getting sucked into the morass, and following THEM just because they followed me first. Now THERE's an interesting conundrum, wouldn't you say?
If you start following me, and I start following you BECAUSE you started following me, where do we wind up?
For the life of me, I keep coming up with a circle. God only knows where THAT is gonna go.
So, as a contribution to the loftier intent of the creators (the original Twits, that is), I have culled approximately one third of the Twitterers I was formerly following, and now only follow those whose interests and experiences somewhat mirror my own…at least superficially.
Does this mean I'm mean? Peculiar? Picky and ornery?
Who'd a thunk it?
In reviewing the tweets of some of those whom I was formerly following, I discovered a vast dissimilarity in the topics being discussed or tweeted about. That seems inconsistent with the intent of the whole exercise, in my limited ability to comprehend such esoteric matters.
Seems to me, dontcha know, that the entire thing is devoted to the idea of aggregating thinkers of like interests, to the mutual benefit of all involved. Rather, I'm getting followed by numerous individuals who, for the lack of a better term, stultify.
Problem is, I found myself getting sucked into the morass, and following THEM just because they followed me first. Now THERE's an interesting conundrum, wouldn't you say?
If you start following me, and I start following you BECAUSE you started following me, where do we wind up?
For the life of me, I keep coming up with a circle. God only knows where THAT is gonna go.
So, as a contribution to the loftier intent of the creators (the original Twits, that is), I have culled approximately one third of the Twitterers I was formerly following, and now only follow those whose interests and experiences somewhat mirror my own…at least superficially.
Does this mean I'm mean? Peculiar? Picky and ornery?
Who'd a thunk it?
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Thursday, August 07, 2008
$79 Billion Iraqi Budget Surplus. ALL OURS?
Now, let me see.
Do I understand this proposition? Iraq. The nation we invaded and conquered back in 2003, for the gross transgression of being guilty of the mistake of having Saddam Hussein as its President at the time, now has accumulated enormous capital surpluses; something near or exceeding seventy-nine Billion dollars (give or take a few); and WE, the United States, having accumulated something exceeding five hundred Billion dollars in deficits over the period, now want the people of Iraq, whose homeland we invaded, whose countryside we laid to waste, whose innocent thousands upon thousands are displaced, dead, injured, homeless, cast-out, families divided, children parentless, mothers and fathers childless, all by virtue of our vast military machine and blood-thirsty nature… those injured, unfortunate, put-upon thousands are being told that they may have to forfeit some of that seventy-nine billion to help us out, since we ran up such a big bill invading their country.
Is that really how it is?
Did Iraq ASK the United States to come over, destroy its infrastructure, cast-out its President, kill its thousands and stir up a hornet’s nest of insurgent militants all of whom HATE the United States and what it has come to represent over the course of the last seven or eight decades of saber-rattling and side-taking in the Middle-East, all the while proclaiming loud and long how much the United States of America values its good neighbors and allies in the oil-rich states of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Yemen, and others. Just as long as those states bow, scrape, do homage, and sell cheap oil.
Heck no.
While the Bush White House planned the invasion of Iraq, the brain-trust of the 2001 World Trade Center disaster sequestered itself in hidey-holes in Afghanistan or maybe Pakistan, fully expecting retaliation. Imagine their delight and amazement when our prodigiously capable military machine was unleashed upon Iraq, whose people and government held no special affection for Al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, and the other guys whose names are not nearly as well known, because they’ve largely been IGNORED.
Think of it. There’s good ol’ Osama, sitting up in his palatial cave, waiting to get the crap kicked out of him, when lo and behold, Praise Allah, the Americans are kicking shit out of Baghdad. OH MY GOD. What the HELL are those guys in Washington THINKING?
What INDEED?
George W. Bush, the questionable President of the United States, his boss, Dick Cheney, HIS boss, Donald Rumsfeld, and HIS Boss Karl Rove all sat around the table in the oval office and down at the pentagon in the Situation Room (sans Wolf Blitzer, I’m sure, because he’s totally CLUELESS, USELESS and the world’s most accomplished NARCISSIST), and postulated on how quick THIS was gonna be, how GREAT a victory it’d be, how WE’D SHOW ALL OF THOSE TERRORISTS a thing or two about SHOCK and AWE. Not to mention Bull Shit and Fiction.
Saddam just HAD to go. After all, he might have been Rumsfeld’s’ good old handshaking buddy back when Iraq was dealing Iran fits across their mutual border, but he’d made the mistake, had the AUDACITY, the TEMERITY, to invade Kuwait (our oil-spigot on the Gulf) and after Dubya’s Daddy kicked him out of THERE, Saddam was so Insane (a little play on words there, heh heh), that he actually tried to KILL George H. W. Bush.
Big BIG fuck up.
Got his name on America’s short shit list along with the OTHER axis of EVIL ne’er do wells.
Rumsfeld had to do a quick hand washing. His old buddy had suddenly fallen out of FAVOR.
But WAIT…
Remember, guys, back in the 80’s, when Saddam WAS our Buddy?
We gave him ALL KINDS of military assistance. Weapons. Weapons of MASS DESTRUCTION.
REMEMBER THOSE canisters of VX and SARIN we gave him to use on IRAN?
He probably STILL has ‘em. He only used a LITTLE of it on those Kurds, ya’know.
Those constitute a THREAT to the Security of the United States now. That’s all we need to JUSTIFY invading Iraq AGAIN. This time we’ll get RID of Saddam. He tried to kill Dubya’s Daddy.
So WHAT DO WE DO?
Naturally, we invade Iraq. Big media event. Live TV from the front lines. Outstanding FOX reporter (the ONLY ONE EVER TO LIVE) dies on his way up-country from a damn blood-clot in his leg. What a waste.
But that waste of a life is only emblematic of the wholesale waste of lives, both American and Iraqi inevitably following the warrantless American Coalition action against the nation of Iraq, whose only offense was stubbornness.
Why, when WE broke it do we expect them to pay for fixing it?
If we HAD NOT gone into Iraq, guns a’ blazin’, there wouldn’t be ANY need for reconstruction.
America broke it.
America oughta FIX it.
Do I understand this proposition? Iraq. The nation we invaded and conquered back in 2003, for the gross transgression of being guilty of the mistake of having Saddam Hussein as its President at the time, now has accumulated enormous capital surpluses; something near or exceeding seventy-nine Billion dollars (give or take a few); and WE, the United States, having accumulated something exceeding five hundred Billion dollars in deficits over the period, now want the people of Iraq, whose homeland we invaded, whose countryside we laid to waste, whose innocent thousands upon thousands are displaced, dead, injured, homeless, cast-out, families divided, children parentless, mothers and fathers childless, all by virtue of our vast military machine and blood-thirsty nature… those injured, unfortunate, put-upon thousands are being told that they may have to forfeit some of that seventy-nine billion to help us out, since we ran up such a big bill invading their country.
Is that really how it is?
Did Iraq ASK the United States to come over, destroy its infrastructure, cast-out its President, kill its thousands and stir up a hornet’s nest of insurgent militants all of whom HATE the United States and what it has come to represent over the course of the last seven or eight decades of saber-rattling and side-taking in the Middle-East, all the while proclaiming loud and long how much the United States of America values its good neighbors and allies in the oil-rich states of Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Yemen, and others. Just as long as those states bow, scrape, do homage, and sell cheap oil.
Heck no.
While the Bush White House planned the invasion of Iraq, the brain-trust of the 2001 World Trade Center disaster sequestered itself in hidey-holes in Afghanistan or maybe Pakistan, fully expecting retaliation. Imagine their delight and amazement when our prodigiously capable military machine was unleashed upon Iraq, whose people and government held no special affection for Al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden, and the other guys whose names are not nearly as well known, because they’ve largely been IGNORED.
Think of it. There’s good ol’ Osama, sitting up in his palatial cave, waiting to get the crap kicked out of him, when lo and behold, Praise Allah, the Americans are kicking shit out of Baghdad. OH MY GOD. What the HELL are those guys in Washington THINKING?
What INDEED?
George W. Bush, the questionable President of the United States, his boss, Dick Cheney, HIS boss, Donald Rumsfeld, and HIS Boss Karl Rove all sat around the table in the oval office and down at the pentagon in the Situation Room (sans Wolf Blitzer, I’m sure, because he’s totally CLUELESS, USELESS and the world’s most accomplished NARCISSIST), and postulated on how quick THIS was gonna be, how GREAT a victory it’d be, how WE’D SHOW ALL OF THOSE TERRORISTS a thing or two about SHOCK and AWE. Not to mention Bull Shit and Fiction.
Saddam just HAD to go. After all, he might have been Rumsfeld’s’ good old handshaking buddy back when Iraq was dealing Iran fits across their mutual border, but he’d made the mistake, had the AUDACITY, the TEMERITY, to invade Kuwait (our oil-spigot on the Gulf) and after Dubya’s Daddy kicked him out of THERE, Saddam was so Insane (a little play on words there, heh heh), that he actually tried to KILL George H. W. Bush.
Big BIG fuck up.
Got his name on America’s short shit list along with the OTHER axis of EVIL ne’er do wells.
Rumsfeld had to do a quick hand washing. His old buddy had suddenly fallen out of FAVOR.
But WAIT…
Remember, guys, back in the 80’s, when Saddam WAS our Buddy?
We gave him ALL KINDS of military assistance. Weapons. Weapons of MASS DESTRUCTION.
REMEMBER THOSE canisters of VX and SARIN we gave him to use on IRAN?
He probably STILL has ‘em. He only used a LITTLE of it on those Kurds, ya’know.
Those constitute a THREAT to the Security of the United States now. That’s all we need to JUSTIFY invading Iraq AGAIN. This time we’ll get RID of Saddam. He tried to kill Dubya’s Daddy.
So WHAT DO WE DO?
Naturally, we invade Iraq. Big media event. Live TV from the front lines. Outstanding FOX reporter (the ONLY ONE EVER TO LIVE) dies on his way up-country from a damn blood-clot in his leg. What a waste.
But that waste of a life is only emblematic of the wholesale waste of lives, both American and Iraqi inevitably following the warrantless American Coalition action against the nation of Iraq, whose only offense was stubbornness.
Why, when WE broke it do we expect them to pay for fixing it?
If we HAD NOT gone into Iraq, guns a’ blazin’, there wouldn’t be ANY need for reconstruction.
America broke it.
America oughta FIX it.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Brother; What a World
It's been months since my last post. I've been pre-occupied. Well, not exactly pre-occupied, really. Just lazy.
But I've been saving up, and I've got a list of things I'm going to comment on during the next few days, so stay tuned.
Today, it's the inordinate preoccupation with homeland security engulfing this nation. First thing is the term 'Homeland Security'. Man, I despise that phrase. It sounds like something out of the early twentieth-century, somewhere in an eastern-bloc client state, promulgated by a government controlled media.
What happened to suddenly turn the United States into 'the Homeland'? Only native Americans (in my opinion, the most abused segment of our population, by far) ought to be entitled to use that term, since anyone out of the Caucasian, Eurasian, Asian, Hispanic, or other ethnic origins ought, by right, to refer to their countries of origin as their homeland.
Furthermore, it's my personal belief that it would be better and more cost effective a war against terrorism, if we faced the terrorists on our own turf where:
But I've been saving up, and I've got a list of things I'm going to comment on during the next few days, so stay tuned.
Today, it's the inordinate preoccupation with homeland security engulfing this nation. First thing is the term 'Homeland Security'. Man, I despise that phrase. It sounds like something out of the early twentieth-century, somewhere in an eastern-bloc client state, promulgated by a government controlled media.
What happened to suddenly turn the United States into 'the Homeland'? Only native Americans (in my opinion, the most abused segment of our population, by far) ought to be entitled to use that term, since anyone out of the Caucasian, Eurasian, Asian, Hispanic, or other ethnic origins ought, by right, to refer to their countries of origin as their homeland.
Furthermore, it's my personal belief that it would be better and more cost effective a war against terrorism, if we faced the terrorists on our own turf where:
- they're outnumbered,
- isolated,
- have long lines of supply,
- intermittent communication with headquarters
- have no local support
- carry automatic weapons
- won't eat spareribs (a dead give-away)
…than to continue to fund the effort on foreign soil where all of that stuff I just listed (except the spareribs part) applies to US.
I'm 63 years old. Too old to be deployed against foreign forces, but not too old to send a few to Allah, where they're welcome to their martyrdom and their 70 virgins. I'd be more than happy to oblige any who care to show up in Birmingham, by ushering them off this mortal coil to their rightful place among the Muslim faithful.
I don't actually believe we ought to be pursuing the 'terrorists' in foreign lands. It only satisfies their need to single out the United States as the 'Great Satan'. I especially don't believe that there was ever any compelling reason to invade Iraq in 2003. Iraq had nothing to do with alQaeda and September 11, 2001.
The invasion of Iraq, (the entire fiction that the invasion was intended to 'free Iraq' from the oppressive administration of Saddam Hussein, to defend the United States and its allies against Weapons of Mass Destruction), is a product of Mr. Bush's overarching desire to assuage his family's obsession of getting even with Hussein for attempting to kill George H. W. Bush. Well, you don't have to wreak havoc on a whole nation to kill one guy, Dubya! Why not just challenge him to a good old Texas style gunfight at the Baghdad Corral?
Unfortunately for the thousands (now deceased) of our armed forces once deployed in Iraq, Mr. Bush had the power handed to him by the Supreme Court. The power to commit armed forces in an unjustified and preemptive war against a nation whose only offense against the United States was defiance and a vast underground storehouse of petroleum, which Bush coveted; it is evident on its face that Iraq's military capability posed absolutely no threat to the United States.
And now, what do we have?
An Iraq which, thanks to our invasion and the precision of our weapons delivery systems and the unmatched destructive power and deadliness of those munitions, could not effectively defend itself and its petroleum production and delivery assets against the third grade of Our Lady of Sorrows.
Another famous fiction loudly proclaimed by this war-loving, bring-it-on macho Bush White house is that we're helping the poor Iraqis in their quest for democracy. If there were ever any such quest, it must have been subliminal, because it never made the front pages over here, much less Baghdad.
I'm sick of George Bush. I'm sick of the entirely pugnacious foreign policy his administration has foisted on the world. Democracy HA! It's no more democracy than what Putin has in Russia. What Bush has done with this nation is criminal, depraved, and most of all insane.
And that, friends is the real problem.
The simple fact is this.
George W. Bush is certifiably insane, and thus not responsible for all the crap he's caused.
Worse than that is this.
We're more nuts than HE is because we saw it coming and let it happen.
Have a wonderful day, ya'll.
I don't actually believe we ought to be pursuing the 'terrorists' in foreign lands. It only satisfies their need to single out the United States as the 'Great Satan'. I especially don't believe that there was ever any compelling reason to invade Iraq in 2003. Iraq had nothing to do with alQaeda and September 11, 2001.
The invasion of Iraq, (the entire fiction that the invasion was intended to 'free Iraq' from the oppressive administration of Saddam Hussein, to defend the United States and its allies against Weapons of Mass Destruction), is a product of Mr. Bush's overarching desire to assuage his family's obsession of getting even with Hussein for attempting to kill George H. W. Bush. Well, you don't have to wreak havoc on a whole nation to kill one guy, Dubya! Why not just challenge him to a good old Texas style gunfight at the Baghdad Corral?
Unfortunately for the thousands (now deceased) of our armed forces once deployed in Iraq, Mr. Bush had the power handed to him by the Supreme Court. The power to commit armed forces in an unjustified and preemptive war against a nation whose only offense against the United States was defiance and a vast underground storehouse of petroleum, which Bush coveted; it is evident on its face that Iraq's military capability posed absolutely no threat to the United States.
And now, what do we have?
An Iraq which, thanks to our invasion and the precision of our weapons delivery systems and the unmatched destructive power and deadliness of those munitions, could not effectively defend itself and its petroleum production and delivery assets against the third grade of Our Lady of Sorrows.
Another famous fiction loudly proclaimed by this war-loving, bring-it-on macho Bush White house is that we're helping the poor Iraqis in their quest for democracy. If there were ever any such quest, it must have been subliminal, because it never made the front pages over here, much less Baghdad.
I'm sick of George Bush. I'm sick of the entirely pugnacious foreign policy his administration has foisted on the world. Democracy HA! It's no more democracy than what Putin has in Russia. What Bush has done with this nation is criminal, depraved, and most of all insane.
And that, friends is the real problem.
The simple fact is this.
George W. Bush is certifiably insane, and thus not responsible for all the crap he's caused.
Worse than that is this.
We're more nuts than HE is because we saw it coming and let it happen.
Have a wonderful day, ya'll.
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