APROPOS NOTHING AT ALL: Professor Noah Chumpsky points out in Manhandling Constance that the inoffensive Mountain Dew Slurpee is in reality a means by which corporate America freezes those portions of the brains controlling the judgement of the American consumer and renders it helpless against the onslaught of advertising. You heard it here first.
Saturday, February 28, 2004
Tuesday, February 24, 2004
A PORCINE OF THE TIMES: Not enough has been said these past few years about liquid manure and I'm sure not enough will be said about it in the future, but I am now reliably informed that the Germans, perennial jokesters that they are, have created the world's first online database devoted solely to the buying and selling of liquified dung, said aqueous excrement coming from German, Polish, and Czech pigs before their inevitable conversion to bratwurst. A British company, not wanting to be left behind in the race to create a new whirled ordure, has announced that they too will sell liquid dung via the Internet. Company spokesmen say that they will be targeting the Middle East with their product, which is made of a mixture of cow and sheep dung, as fecal groups in the region have made clear their opposition to pigs and pig products in any shape or form, pigs being one of the very few areas of agreement between all parties in the region.
Wednesday, February 18, 2004
SCIENCE FACT AND FICTION: It is a scientific truth, proven by a host of detailed and extremely expensive studies at Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in southern California, that the best way to demonstrate the power of the electromagnetic force and its interplay with the force of gravity can be found in the intense attraction between spaghetti sauce and any clean white dress shirt in its immediate vicinity. Please do not attempt this experiment at home; the FBI will want to know why you are conducting atomic research away from the prying eyes of the Federal government and your mom will yell at you. Those stains don’t come out by themselves, buster.
Monday, February 16, 2004
PRESIDENTS DAY: Remember, today is Presidents Day, when we honor the accomplishments of Millard Fillmore, Rutherford B. Hayes, and John Tyler, who, by the way, married a much younger woman than himself (but so did Grover Cleveland), and was the only former President of the United States of America to be elected to a seat in the Congress of the Confederate States of America. On the other side of the Potomac, the only US President to be elected to the Senate after his presidential term was Andrew Johnson; the only President to serve in the House of Representatives after his term in the White House was John Quincy Adams. The only Speaker of the House to serve as President was James K. Polk, and the only first generation American to be President was Knox's mentor, Andrew Jackson. The first attempt on the life of a president was made by a psychotic named James Lawrence, who believed that he was the president of the US and the Prime Minister of Great Britain at the same time, and who tried to shoot Jackson; both pistols misfired. The Secret Service did not exist in those days so there was no one to whisk Jackson to safety except his friends, who did not try to whisk Jackson to safety but did try to keep Jackson from beating Lawrence to death with his walking stick. The only bachelor to serve as President was James Buchanan, who was the president before Lincoln and believed that it was illegal for the Southern states to secede, but that it was equally illegal for the Northern states to stop them from seceding. The last veteran of the Revolution to serve as president was James Monroe; the last veteran of the Civil War to serve was William McKinley; the last veteran (in all likelihood) of World War II to serve is George H. W. Bush. The first Roman Catholic to serve was John F. Kennedy, who was also the last President to die in office. To date, eight Presidents have died in office: William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Kennedy. Of these, Harrison, Taylor, Harding, and Roosevelt died of natural causes; Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy were all assassinated. Kennedy was the only President assassinated by rifle fire; Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley were killed by assassins using pistols.
The two father son Presidents were John Adams and John Quincy Adams, and George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. The only grandfather/grandson combination was William Henry Harrison and his grandson, Benjamin Harrison. Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt were distant cousins.
The two father son Presidents were John Adams and John Quincy Adams, and George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. The only grandfather/grandson combination was William Henry Harrison and his grandson, Benjamin Harrison. Theodore and Franklin D. Roosevelt were distant cousins.
Saturday, February 14, 2004
<Thursday, February 12, 2004
INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW: Now that Barbie and Ken, America's super couple, are no longer seeing each other, rumors have been flying here in Media Land that the couple broke up do to Ken's involvement with a certain young woman who doesnt need any "Affleck" insurance anymore. They've been seen canoodling in the dark corners of certain New York hot spots. I wonder who it could be.
Saturday, February 07, 2004
THE FOLLOWING is a response to Joan's comments over in Iberian Notes. I suggest you go there first and read the comments and then read this. I've posted this in the Comments section in Iberian Notes but I had to cut it up to make it fit there.
First, the bit about the most horrible crime in history. Joan, as I recall, World Wars 1 and 2 both started in Europe with no help at all from the United States. The Pacific War, as the Japanese call it, started when Japan attacked China and then attacked the United States because we would not roll over and play dead when the Japanese wanted us to stop supporting China. By August of 1945 everyone knew the Japanese were beaten; even the Japanese knew they were beaten. But being beaten and knowing it is not the same as actually surrendering, and the Japanese military was not going to surrender without taking all of Japan and as many Americans as they could down with them. The US got a foretaste of what was going to happen when we invaded Okinawa in 1945. The Japanese pulled one of their dying to the last man stands on Okinawa, complete with swarms of kamikaze planes, banzai charges, and the like. In addition to all of that, close to 100,000 civilians died because they were simply in the way of the two armies fighting. The Japanese military was already training the civilian population on the Japanese mainland to fight the Americans with sharpened bamboo spears and to strap explosive charges to their bodies, rush into the American lines, and blow themselves up, killing as many Marines and soldiers as they could in the blast. (sounds familiar, don’t it?) And then there was the political situation in the US. If Truman had launched an invasion of Japan, gotten thousands of American boys killed, and then afterwards announced that we had a weapon that would’ve ended the war without getting all those boys killed, then angry mobs would’ve hanged Truman from the nearest streetlight on Pennsylvania Avenue. Remember Churchill’s dictum: in victory, magnanimity. In short, first you win, then you make nice. While they are still capable of resistance they are the enemy and that’s the way they get treated: they get the option of surrendering, whereupon they will be treated with mercy, or getting killed in an orderly and proficient military manner. The decision to use the atomic bomb ended the war in the Pacific months before it would have ended otherwise and saved the lives of countless American military men and Japanese soldiers and civilians. The reason, Joan, that you may never have heard of Limousine Beach is that the massive landing at that Japanese beach never took place; the atomic bombings put the great fight at that beach into the category of history’s might-have-beens.
As for the Cold War, this is purely my opinion, but I think that it was as nearly foreordained as anything in history can be. Stalin wanted a buffer between himself and the West, and he wanted that buffer directly under his control. The United States, on the other hand, did not fight the war to deliver Europe out the hands of one monster in order to deliver the peoples of Eastern Europe into the hands of another. Expecting Truman to do or say nothing while Stalin consolidated his hold on Eastern Europe is foolishness squared. Truman understood that whether he wanted it or not, he was now in a global power struggle with Stalin. Wallace may have thought that playing nice with the Russians may have been the way to go, but fortunately we never got to find out what Wallace and his mob of fellow travelers would have done when confronted with an aggressive Soviet Union. And please pardon me for saying so, Joan, but Europe got to battle the Soviet Union with the welfare state because the American military was there making sure the Soviets didn’t roll over the border with their tanks. The next time the welfare state defeats anyone by whacking them over the head with a stack of income tax forms let me know; that’s something I’d pay good money to see.
Bush=Hitler? Many scary similarities? Well, let’s see. Bush did not get the majority of the popular vote, this is true, but then the way elections are run in the United States it is the vote of the Electoral College that is important, and Bush got the majority there. I’m sorry that this offends your sensibilities, Joan, but that’s the way things are done here and have been done here since 1788. Bush is not the first minority President (John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, and Benjamin Harrison in 1888 all won in the Electoral College and lost the popular vote) and he probably won’t be the last. I keep hearing about Bush’s crushing civil liberties, but I haven’t seen too much evidence of it. The Patriot Act has been used sparingly, and some of its more controversial aspects have not been used at all. The American Library Association has been bellowing like a stuck pig over the provisions concerning libraries, yet those provisions have never been used, and when read closely, aren’t really anything new. The government has always had the power to subpoena library records here, despite the ALA’s trying to prove it’s a new and sinister threat to American liberties. In a similar vein, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals held recently that Jose Padilla, the so called dirty bomber, as an American citizen could not be kept as an enemy combatant just because George W. Bush thinks he is. Civil liberties in the United States remain fairly robust, as always, Joan.
Silencing the political opposition? Joan, this is an election year in the United States. By the time Election Day rolls around George W. Bush will be called an idiot, a moron, a warmonger, and an embarrassing clod everyday of the week and twice on Sundays by the Democrats. Major legislation will be held up in committee for as long as possible in order to make sure Bush gets no credit for it; his judicial nominees might as well hang on to their present jobs because they’re not getting on the federal bench anytime soon; federal bureaucrats who think they ought to have more money in their budgets or that the President is a threat to their nice little bureaucratic kingdoms will be leaking their discontents to the press every chance they get. This is the United States, Joan; the problem is not that the political opposition is being silenced, but rather no one can get them to shut up. Bush this, Bush that, Bush the other thing, when all we are really interested in here are Janet Jackson’s breasts.
It was easy for the Nazis to jump on the Reichstag fire, Joan; they started it. Unless you’re suggesting that Bush knew about 9/11 beforehand then there’s no real comparison. We are not arrogating unto ourselves the right to attack people without provocation; we are warning states that use terrorists as a way of attacking us that they will no longer be able to get away with it, and that if they develop weapons of mass destruction then we reserve the right to defend ourselves before they get a chance to use those weapons against us. If I know someone is coming to kill me then it is stupid to wait for them to get to my house before I defend myself; better to catch them on the way to my house, at a time and a place of my choosing. I do not want the great big hole where Chicago used to be to provide the tangible proof that these people have given a bomb to terrorists. I realize that not everyone sees eye to eye with me on this, but I trust you will excuse my preference for living Americans and unpopularity to being popular amidst a host of dead Americans.
First, the bit about the most horrible crime in history. Joan, as I recall, World Wars 1 and 2 both started in Europe with no help at all from the United States. The Pacific War, as the Japanese call it, started when Japan attacked China and then attacked the United States because we would not roll over and play dead when the Japanese wanted us to stop supporting China. By August of 1945 everyone knew the Japanese were beaten; even the Japanese knew they were beaten. But being beaten and knowing it is not the same as actually surrendering, and the Japanese military was not going to surrender without taking all of Japan and as many Americans as they could down with them. The US got a foretaste of what was going to happen when we invaded Okinawa in 1945. The Japanese pulled one of their dying to the last man stands on Okinawa, complete with swarms of kamikaze planes, banzai charges, and the like. In addition to all of that, close to 100,000 civilians died because they were simply in the way of the two armies fighting. The Japanese military was already training the civilian population on the Japanese mainland to fight the Americans with sharpened bamboo spears and to strap explosive charges to their bodies, rush into the American lines, and blow themselves up, killing as many Marines and soldiers as they could in the blast. (sounds familiar, don’t it?) And then there was the political situation in the US. If Truman had launched an invasion of Japan, gotten thousands of American boys killed, and then afterwards announced that we had a weapon that would’ve ended the war without getting all those boys killed, then angry mobs would’ve hanged Truman from the nearest streetlight on Pennsylvania Avenue. Remember Churchill’s dictum: in victory, magnanimity. In short, first you win, then you make nice. While they are still capable of resistance they are the enemy and that’s the way they get treated: they get the option of surrendering, whereupon they will be treated with mercy, or getting killed in an orderly and proficient military manner. The decision to use the atomic bomb ended the war in the Pacific months before it would have ended otherwise and saved the lives of countless American military men and Japanese soldiers and civilians. The reason, Joan, that you may never have heard of Limousine Beach is that the massive landing at that Japanese beach never took place; the atomic bombings put the great fight at that beach into the category of history’s might-have-beens.
As for the Cold War, this is purely my opinion, but I think that it was as nearly foreordained as anything in history can be. Stalin wanted a buffer between himself and the West, and he wanted that buffer directly under his control. The United States, on the other hand, did not fight the war to deliver Europe out the hands of one monster in order to deliver the peoples of Eastern Europe into the hands of another. Expecting Truman to do or say nothing while Stalin consolidated his hold on Eastern Europe is foolishness squared. Truman understood that whether he wanted it or not, he was now in a global power struggle with Stalin. Wallace may have thought that playing nice with the Russians may have been the way to go, but fortunately we never got to find out what Wallace and his mob of fellow travelers would have done when confronted with an aggressive Soviet Union. And please pardon me for saying so, Joan, but Europe got to battle the Soviet Union with the welfare state because the American military was there making sure the Soviets didn’t roll over the border with their tanks. The next time the welfare state defeats anyone by whacking them over the head with a stack of income tax forms let me know; that’s something I’d pay good money to see.
Bush=Hitler? Many scary similarities? Well, let’s see. Bush did not get the majority of the popular vote, this is true, but then the way elections are run in the United States it is the vote of the Electoral College that is important, and Bush got the majority there. I’m sorry that this offends your sensibilities, Joan, but that’s the way things are done here and have been done here since 1788. Bush is not the first minority President (John Quincy Adams in 1824, Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876, and Benjamin Harrison in 1888 all won in the Electoral College and lost the popular vote) and he probably won’t be the last. I keep hearing about Bush’s crushing civil liberties, but I haven’t seen too much evidence of it. The Patriot Act has been used sparingly, and some of its more controversial aspects have not been used at all. The American Library Association has been bellowing like a stuck pig over the provisions concerning libraries, yet those provisions have never been used, and when read closely, aren’t really anything new. The government has always had the power to subpoena library records here, despite the ALA’s trying to prove it’s a new and sinister threat to American liberties. In a similar vein, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals held recently that Jose Padilla, the so called dirty bomber, as an American citizen could not be kept as an enemy combatant just because George W. Bush thinks he is. Civil liberties in the United States remain fairly robust, as always, Joan.
Silencing the political opposition? Joan, this is an election year in the United States. By the time Election Day rolls around George W. Bush will be called an idiot, a moron, a warmonger, and an embarrassing clod everyday of the week and twice on Sundays by the Democrats. Major legislation will be held up in committee for as long as possible in order to make sure Bush gets no credit for it; his judicial nominees might as well hang on to their present jobs because they’re not getting on the federal bench anytime soon; federal bureaucrats who think they ought to have more money in their budgets or that the President is a threat to their nice little bureaucratic kingdoms will be leaking their discontents to the press every chance they get. This is the United States, Joan; the problem is not that the political opposition is being silenced, but rather no one can get them to shut up. Bush this, Bush that, Bush the other thing, when all we are really interested in here are Janet Jackson’s breasts.
It was easy for the Nazis to jump on the Reichstag fire, Joan; they started it. Unless you’re suggesting that Bush knew about 9/11 beforehand then there’s no real comparison. We are not arrogating unto ourselves the right to attack people without provocation; we are warning states that use terrorists as a way of attacking us that they will no longer be able to get away with it, and that if they develop weapons of mass destruction then we reserve the right to defend ourselves before they get a chance to use those weapons against us. If I know someone is coming to kill me then it is stupid to wait for them to get to my house before I defend myself; better to catch them on the way to my house, at a time and a place of my choosing. I do not want the great big hole where Chicago used to be to provide the tangible proof that these people have given a bomb to terrorists. I realize that not everyone sees eye to eye with me on this, but I trust you will excuse my preference for living Americans and unpopularity to being popular amidst a host of dead Americans.
STILL MORE JANET: Entertainment Tonight will report tonight that Janet Jackson's right breast now has an agent. The syndicated entertainment news show says that Janet's right breast has signed a contract with the William Morris Agency and will try to follow in Janet's footsteps as a dancer and singer. There is some word that Janet's leftt breast may also sign with the noted talent agency, but those talks remain under cover at this time.
MORE JANET: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced today that the Army's Fifth Special Forces Group and the Marines' Third Marine Expeditionary Force would be deployed to Janet Jackson's right breast to investigate rumors that al-Qaeda fighters had infiltrated her nipple and were prepared to use it as a staging ground for further terrorism against the United States and its allies.
Tuesday, February 03, 2004
RE: JANET JACKSON: I always supposed there was a reason why the tv was called the boob tube. Now we know why.
Sunday, February 01, 2004
CULINARY NEWS: As you may know, here in the northeastern United States we put a lot of salt on our roads during the winter. Sometimes we do this without actually trying the roads first, which drives the highway designers crazy. They spend years perfecting their craft and the idea of mere amateurs adding salt, pepper, or what ever else tickles our fancies to the creations they've spent days, weeks, perhaps even years concocting, fills them with an almost existential horror. One almost hesitates to think what would happen if some poor misguided highway commissioner actually asked them for a bottle of ketchup.
