I knew it was in the works – friends said she had been burning the midnight oil, that drafts had gone back and forth between her and the publisher. There were writes and rewrites, arguments over tone and content, and especially about her writing style – she claims to be subconsciously derivative of Hannah Arendt but the publisher wanted something fresh, more in the Sarah Palin style.

Anyway, it finally hit the shelves. I got mine today.

(Forward by Sean Hannity!)

I am thankful for little people. I don’t know who they are, but they make my shoes and clothing, carry away my garbage, and, I am told, even go down in the sewers to make sure that it all flows smoothly. I really, really appreciate them.

I am a member of the Democratic, or “left” side of the two ruling collectives here in our great Republic. We are the ones who really care about little people. We are better people than the Republicans, who abuse them. We of the Democratic collective know more about little people, which is why they support us when we put our leaders before them for the biennial voting ritual.

We care. For instance, we want to keep them educated in the means of social advancement by giving them the necessary education to survive in today’s world. Where once the tools of the important occupations were the broom and shovel, pipe wrench and dolly, today they are the cash register and scanner. Oh yeah – and that thing that makes my lattes – you know – the steam shooter? (?)

Here’s a humorous story: This happened down in New Mexico recently. There is a chain store known as “The Wal-Mart” (NYSE: WMT) where little people shop for Chinese goods, and where other little people perform various important functions. One of the functions is to gather shopping carts from the parking lot and return them to the entrance. They use a machine that pushes them from behind while a little person walks in front guiding them.

Anyway, I suppose you’d have to see the store video to appreciate the humor, but one of these little people got on the cart-pushing machine and tried to escape. He was a portly McDonalds-fed specimen, and was easily run down by another portly specimen, a “security guard”, as The Wal-Mart labels them. Imagine the scene as one blubberous specimen overtook the other!

When interrogated, the escapee claimed to be disappointed at having aspirations of “a better life” where he would be “rewarded” for his “hard work”. It was a clear case of EV, or expectation virus. He was not a breeder, so there were no offspring. The store management euthanized him.

Sidenote: Remember when Roman slaves were executed, and their heads placed on stakes to line the road into the city? How far we have come since those brutal days!

Anyway, EV does pop up now and then, but is largely under control. When brought home from the war of the 1940’s (the one where everybody had to fight, there being a real enemy and all), returning veterans collectively decided they were entitled to a “better life”, as the traitor Roosevelt put it.

The virus was rampant during the fifties and sixties until antidotes were found, and is pretty much wiped out now. The antiviral drug known as “Proctoutsource” was very effective, as was Neo_Nafta and of course, the aged but effective “Rightowork”, still sold over the counter. Non-infected Mexican species of lp’s are also replacing those strains where the virus occasionally exhibits in a latent strain.

Things have settled down, and the breeding stock is kept functional for the productive years in a corn-fed state with heavy doses of television. Tobacco people do a good job of spreading the smoking habit, so that many of them die shortly after their productive years end. And reading, that awful two-edged sword that both infects and inoculates, has been brought under control.

During the height of the pandemic, little people had infiltrated the information delivery system with images of death in one of the foreign conflicts. It wasn’t well understood then, but apparently these images inflamed passions. The TV has been retaken by the ruling parties, and the threat is eliminated. The indoctrination system is working well.

Life is good. The masses are calm, EV under control. Education throws a wet blanket on the land of the free. You can see it in faces … blank stares, passions let free only at sporting events or during election cycles, when the “voting” ritual allows for a grand staging of their “freedom”. (Best damned control word ever invented, IMHO.) Dangerous energies are well under control.

All is well. Let’s be thankful for the little people, but even more so for those great minds among us who have tamed them, removed the threats to our way of life, and made the holidays a time when we can really toast one another with sincere gratitude.

To the good life!

I watched a movie made years ago, Gardens of Stone, starring James Earl Jones, James Caan, Angelica Huston, and directed by Francis Ford Coppola. It was a serious movie and well done, with unresolved differences over the Vietnam War exposed and fleshed out a bit. The “Gardens” are, of course, military cemeteries.

I carry one lasting memory from the movie (two, actually, the other having to do with “asexual reproduction”). In the following scene. Sgt, ‘Goody’ Nelson and Jackie Willow, a recruit who wants to go to Vietnam, are at a bar.

Goody: It’s a funny little war, kid. Things have changed.

Willow: Like what?

Goody: Well, to begin with…the peace-loving Vietnamese – if I hear that again, I’ll puke. They’re bellicose. They’ve fought for a thousand years, and they like it.

Willow: Damn right.

Coppola, no stranger to irony, surely knew the absurdity of these words. These were men devoid of self-awareness.

Muslims are a very clean people, and a peaceful people by any standards. They fight their turf wars, they have criminals and rigid religious constructs and extremists, just like us. Many Americans have now done a ‘Goody’ on them, branding them a violent people who give us no choice but to rain hell on them.

Muslims, when they defecate, are advised by the Qur’an to be fastidious, to clean the anal area with water and the hands thereafter to avoid any contamination of other people or food.

Americans wipe the anal area with paper, spreading the fecal matter about, and leaving it to fester until their next shower. Dr. D.A. Cameron surveyed the underpants of 940 Englishmen, and found contamination ranging from colored stains to “frank massive feces”. He was disillusioned of them that “a high proportion of the population are prepared to cry aloud about footling matters of uncleanliness such as tomato sauce on a restaurant tablecloth, whilst they luxuriate on a plush seat in their fecally stained pants.”

I can think of no better image of the Americans who are currently slaughtering Muslims in our latest holy wars.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

I have very little insight on why we invaded Afghanistan, and await some inspiring insight from some foreign source down the road, long after the goals have been achieved. Meanwhile, in true post-Vietnam fashion, the details are being withheld from the American public, and we are shielded by close control of imagery. If we don’t see pictures, we do not comprehend the violence that we are raining down on those people. We do, of course, hear abut our own trials and travails and casualties. The bastards!

The debate is framed as “should we send more troops” or not. The real alternative, getting out, is not given hearing here in the land of the free.

The above interview aired in Great Britain.

The following viral email has something unusual going on in it – it contains truth. It is about Jewish accomplishments in science, economics and literature – they are far disproportionate to their relative numbers in the human population. Of course, the base goal of the email is to degrade Muslims, and the origin is probably in the basement of some stupid right wing Christian.

I answered this email as follows:

Since this is one of those annoying viral emails, it doesn’t deserve a lot of attention. I will only tell you that you are on the precipice of important information. The Jewish culture has indeed produced scholars, artists and scientists far out of proporttion to their numbers. Some have traced the origins of this phenomenon back to the Ashkenazi Jews of northern and central Europe. But it is much more complicated than that, and further research would be warranted on your part.

Just a few observations:

One, Jewish accomplishments far exceed those of all gentiles, not just Muslims. I don’t know what the point is here.

Two, Jewish people, very, very intellectually accomplished, don’t believe in Jesus. Maybe you should rethink your position on that.

Third, and not unrelated, there are very few Jewish Cy Young Award winners. I can only think of one: Sandy Koufax. There are no Jewish linemen in the NFL.

And finally, there are about 13 million Jews in the world today, yet your Revelations tells us that only 144,000 will survive – 12,000 each from the twelve tribes. Your Jesus is going to slaughter all the rest.

What’s up with that?

Very interesting article here, by Charles Murray.

—————

Here’s the email making the rounds:

I micro-burst or sorts blew through here these past couple of days, in the post below entitled “A Fun Week“. Dave Budge and “Black Flag” had a discussion going on over at Electric City Weblog and it spilled over here. It reminded me of the closing scenes of Blazing Saddles, and Harvey Korman’s words to the cab driver: “Get me out of this movie“.

But it was interesting and I presume nothing. These are two men representing strains of the libertarian ideology, which is well-grounded and with which I am wholly at odds. I believe in human freedom, and that without government, we cannot be free. That, to the libertarian, if I may so presume, is contradictory, as government itself holds in its hands the chains by which we enslave ourselves.

So Dave and Black Flag fought it out, and were at the boundaries of polite restraint, and did not cross it. Here are some notable snippets from the post below – they are not at all linked -just things that made me go “Hmm” as I read through the exchange. Each one could lead to another micro-burst.

Wisdom is the understanding of one’s own ignorance. (DB, citing Socrates)

Man’s fatal flaw is imposing his assumptions on his fellow men. (Black Flag)

You fall into the trap of many libertarian ideologues that ideological purity holds primacy over politics. Fine, but what we have is politics to deal with. (Budge)

Absolutely – randomness does not defile consistency. Do you think a dice is consistent? Does it not provide an ‘answer’ with a range? Every time? Today as it did yesterday, and will tomorrow? (BF)

Yes, but you see Dave, I’m chatting with you, not them – because they’re dead, and hopefully, you’re not. BF

Ayn Rand said that there were no contradictions in nature, and that apparent contradictions could be resolved by changing underlying thought assumptions. I’ve been troubled by one of very large implications for many years now. It was called the “Kirkpatrick Doctrine” and was used as justification for U.S. support of right wing dictatorships. In essence, Ambassador Kirkpatrick said that oppressive left wing regimes like the Soviet Union could not be dislodged because they owned the minds of their subjects by means of indoctrination and thought control. Right wing totalitarian states merely acted to control behavior, and could easily be replaced by democratic societies.

My only problem is this: The leadership of the Soviet Union gave up power without bloodshed.

It’s been quite an interesting week, what with arguing with Craig Moore about the Lancet study on Iraq deaths and all. Plus, as Steve points out below, Electric City Weblog has been great fun. A lot of it has to do with Budge being back on beam, but the subject matter and the wide range of personalities have a lot to do with it too.

That is what blogging is about, in my mind. We don’t inform, we are a small community, the world doesn’t care about us, but it is fun.

I did learn one thing, however, something as obvious as the nose on my face; something that, once I realized it, cleared a whole lot of smoke from the air around US foreign policy.

It is the definition of “terrorism”. Here’s what the Army Field Manual says:

the unlawful use–or threat–of force or violence against people or property to coerce or intimidate governments or societies, often to achieve political, religious, or ideological objectives.”

Here is what it means in actual practice as the U.S. patrols the world:

Carol at her very interesting Missoulapolis blog broaches a subject that intrigues me – tweeting. She references another blogger (making this a blog circle-jerk) who says that, oh my gosh, President Obama doesn’t write his own tweets.

I would be so disappointed if he did. I find nothing in our society more illustrative of our shallowness than the tweet culture. I once thought of them as haikus, a form of poetry. People were compressing large thoughts down to a few ethereally transmissible words. Since I am not capable of reading or writing poetry, or of compressing thoughts, I thought that the twitter culture was a good thing, or at least would lead to some useful literature.

Of course it’s not and hasn’t led to anything interesting or useful. It’s pop culture made even poppier and banal. There is only one further step downward – the elimination of language as a vehicle for complex thought, or Wordspeak.

All of my blogging energy for a week got used up in one day today. Craig Moore wanted to have it out with me over the “Lancet 2” report from 2006, the one that said that 655,000 Iraqis had died in that war. Gregg set up a special thread over at Electric City Weblog, and I spent some time reading material referenced by Craig, and writing my own summary of the pros and cons of Lancet and the implications of the theater around it.

So I wrote it up, and tried to be thorough and fair, though I could not resist using the expression “Vichy Iraq” for the new government the U.S. installed.

Craig’s response was classic: “BS”. That was it.

Last anyone heard of him, Craig Moore was farming cattle around Ryegate, Montana. He never again entered a blog site.