Tales of Real Wimps, Part 1

(Blogging has been difficult owing to an excess of real work...Begging forgiveness)

Introduction and presentation of Wimp Number One

(Remember: wimp rhymes with limp)

Intro

Every now and then, amidst all the blood, gore and imbecility generated mostly by the male of the human species (90% of the prison population, for instance), one comes across a genuine key to what plagues this Blue Planet of ours. It stands out as a glistening gem of backwardness, of cowardice, of mind-boggling ignorance. This series is never-ending, since the sheer stupidity of men – I am referring to the two-leggeds whose reproductive organs hang out – is apparently never-ending as well, though I do not believe that it is necessarily genetic. The weaker, more insecure these men are, the more they try to oppress women, and the more they show their wussiness, their parochialism, their utter lack of genuine masculinity.

Women have done a great deal of work over the centuries to actually survive men, and in the past 80 or so years, their hard struggle to seek a form of equality has burst to the fore in myriad ways and has produced laws to promote equality. Why should the obvious require a law, I wonder? For a very good reason: Men still think they are superior to women and they still fear that women wish to clamber up onto their “high” platform to share some ephemeral glory. I am not sure that this fear is justified. I believe women would like to have their own platform and enjoy a rich communication with men. But I may be wrong here or simply generalizing to vigorously.

Anyway, that is some of the background to my little series, which hopefully will give some food for thought, maybe raise some issues…

Big books

Yes, religions in this series will get their fair share of broadsides, of course, since much of the evidence shows that the world’s major religions seem to have been devised with the sole aim of oppressing women. And here I would like to distinguish the spirituality of these religions. The fountainhead of many of these movements has been a deeper quest to understand the human existence and its purpose, if any, in the Universe. This spirituality has often been stolen and perverted by narrow-minded and power-hungry men, who then went on created wrathful, bigoted gods in their own image, gods with a bullhorn and an Excel sheet, noting down every little violation of some provincial little law designed not by any invisible being, but rather by power-hungry slobs who, not being able to feel their oats by their own merits, have decided to impose them by some other means. And anyone violating this alleged divine law is then sent to some ghastly gallows, hacked to bits, burned up on an iron frame, pulled apart, eviscerated, buried in sand, lapidated.

And women have often been the victims of male hatred of life, of beauty, of freedom, of otherness.

"God's" will, apparently...

Real wimps from the land that gave us Tantric practices

In this gallery of real wimps, let us begin with this group from India: Sri Ram Sena, which apparently translates as “the Army of Lord Ram.” Ram, of course, is a proper name, not the animal. Let us remember these glorious males, who feel offended, threatened and humiliated by the plain fact of some women showing up for a drink in a bar. Ram's soldiers then proceeded to attack them, chase them, bully them. The details are well-known by now, the link below has a fairly good description of the events. Obviously, these glorious half-studs have a profound fear of women. But rather than advertise the fact, if I were in their shoes, I would go see a shrink or some other spiritual healer.
Pramod Muthalik, boss of Ram's special forces, did apologize, presumably because the embarassing incident shot around the world thanks to the Web.... He added a "but," namely that his group of wimps was protecting Hindu womanhood ("women and girls"), thus emphasizing the fact that his emotional development has remained stuck in the same groove for the past 40 years or so. I am not quite sure this fellow, who was born in 1963, has understood anything, and if that hasn't happened yet, it is time for him and his followers to abandon hope.

Exhibit N for nipple

Let us remind his silly little army of troglodytes, that women are different but equal to men, and that we men were all conceived as women originally, which is why they have nipples. We become men a little later by a mechanism that should be perfectly explainable. Though I suspect that through sheer mental laziness or deficiency, some men would prefer to believe that a mysterious being at that point has pulled out the Excel sheet again and has determined that the creature will become male (i.e. first-class citizen), or female (i.e. tenth-class citizen, cleaner-upper of male messes). Let me suggest, as well, that women do much of the work that is keeping India in shape, that is keeping children clothed, educated, sheltered, fed and protected, in spite of men, rather than with their much needed help. What are these men idling about in a bar for anyway? Is that helping women, Mr Muthalik? If the army of Lord Ram wants male companionship only, there are clubs where old British colonels get together, alternatively Alcatraz or a similar institution. As mentioned above, you find a lot more men behind bars than women.

And if they really want to help Hindu women, I am sure there are hundreds of ways of doing that, they just have to ask some women's organizations, of which there are hundreds. I might suggest lobbying for better schools, for more and equal pay, for proper workplaces, for labor laws, for a little wealth-spreading. Or simply investing in the house and home rather than spending money in some idiotic male-only bar and wasting time acting like pre-adolescent twits.

For more on the subject, try one of the NYT blogs The Lede

(PS: I agree with Ms Ghose about Valentine, but simply because I find these marketing fests are offensive. I have nothing against a feast of love.)

I see a rich crop of entries....

The sound of an economy crumpling

Oh, what a lovely recession

January passed with its drumfire of gloomy figures processed into dreary statistics – mostly records in unemployment rates and factory closings – by the same “protocolistas of the obvious” who used to whoop up the system of total deregulation. From Panasonic to Toyota, from GM to Microsoft, all major industries have lost jobs, thousands of jobs, tens of thousands of jobs. It's called downsizing, but don't let that fool you, it's good old pinkslipping. And I, for one, have the nasty idea that the multinationals and other feudal lords of our economic system are using the recession as a smokescreen to dump a few extra workers and whup the others into shape using "optimization processes." By the same token, the downturn in demand is real and it is gradually rippling through economies like some vigorous tsunami not yet rising to full size in shallow waters to form a horrid and lethal wave... Even the high-rpm engines in China and India have suddenly slowed down as well, brave little Switzerland, with its heavy reliance on exports and generally robust economy is feeling the cold. Still, the Swiss government doesn’t dare take a stick to UBS and other banks that squandered billions in high-risk financial adventures and have been paying out bonuses to bankers, presumably to shut them up. The whole system has become so infantile, one wonders whether these men and some women ever grew up.

Meanwhile, President Obama tried to move money into the American system in a somewhat sustainable manner, i.e. putting it into enterprises like weatherizing homes, improving schools, bridges, roads, or simply dumping it into states. Spreading it, in other words. Real stuff for a real economy. And it is desperately needed, has been for decades, but the ultimately-liberated market gurus wanted to drown government in a bathtub, n'est-ce-pas Mr. Nofziger? We remember that the investment economy tried to make money out of money with all sorts of schemes some of which were not more or less bogus than Madoff's Ponzi scheme. This makes France's Third Republic in the last decades of the 19th century look like a paragon of rectitude.
Naturally, Obama is experiencing static from the Republicans, who are still feeling their collective bile rising at having lost to the pipsqueak Senator from Illinois. They still repeat the mantra of tax cuts for the rich like some hideous Baptist tchotchke that keeps repeating "What would Jesus do?" They have obviously run out of any constructive ideas and in the vacuum has stepped the grand gasbag Rush Limbaugh. This should sink what’s left of the old GOP in a few months, unless some more reasonable politicians like Olympia Snowe from Maine show up on the podium to give Boehner and Co. a whack on the fanny. But astoundingly, they managed to nitpick it to the point where it might not, in fact, be terribly effective.... As a friend who suffered testicular cancer once told me: "The pump still works, but the well's run dry." That, at any rate, is Paul Krugman's view in the NY Times today.

As for Limbaugh (and his colleagues like Beck, Savage, Boortz, Coulter, etc.) he is an overpaid, ignorant, narcissistic and somewhat obscene attention-seeker, a kind of fat, old and male version of Britney Spears. She, at least, managed to put two kids into the world and still has a chance to change her ways. Limbaugh, on the other hand, actually seems to believe his own bilge and is sclerotically repeating it in the hopes that the "base," meaning the lunatic fringe, will keep on supporting him. And it is, it is. In the US, frauds still make money. In fact, if you want to even sell a good idea, package it in fraudian garb (a topic I shall return to, no doubt).

But let us not focus on the symptoms too much. After all, what more could the GOP do but attract attention in one of the venerated American ways, by being vulgar, ugly and aggressively imbecilic.

This still leaves Obama having to use a fair amount of force to push through a bill over some resistance. And the bill’s popularity has been dwindling according to a Rasmussen poll. This may have to do indirectly with Tom Daschle’s tax woes, or rather, the fact that he forgot to pay taxes on some limousine he was using. The Great Unwashed does tend to cross-pollinate data, I am afraid. (Chatty footnote: Back in the mid 80s, when the Reaganauts were ranting against both miniature, allegedly Communist Nicaragua and Moslem Lybia, about 60% of people in a poll in Florida believed that the dominant religion in Nicaragua was Islam...) The other problem may well be a failure to learn a fundamental lesson from the financial fiasco. Let us put the "ownership society" back on the slab for a moment. But this time, let us not forget its cohorts: personal debt and the notion of instant gratification. The latter is another concept that used to be widely discussed, but seems to have gone the way of Vance Packard and the social critics of a generation ago.

Gimmee

There's a reason why it's called piggybank

Owning a house, a car, perhaps having some creature comforts in life is fine. But just because your neighbor has it is not reason enough.

People were even warned by the very gurus of the fast buck: There is no free lunch. And fast food is not healthy. Brokers only managed to sell cheap mortgages to low- or no-income people because of the pervasive notion that anyone can strike it rich easily, because that is the American way. It's not. The American way is to make the rich richer, and the less well-off be damned. This plain fact has been documented over and over again for decades. It can be read in Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (1962), for example. This myth is still swallowed as gospel by millions of Americans every day, and at times it even crosses the Atlantic and infects people's brains in Europe.

Take it easy

It took at least 30 years at least to get into this phenomenal mess. The way out is going to take some time, and it will require not only intelligent and firm navigating on the part of the Obama administration, but also a new paradigm for Americans in general. Patience is one solution. The other is: coming down to earth and being satisfied with less, otherwise you will become the prey of slick-mouthed salesmen. And the first step is recognizing the problems of addiction…. To be continued…

The Alchemist

Amidst the ugliness, a word about beauty...

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born today. His music make us listeners, humble creatures, come alive and dance inside. Everything he touched seemed to glow. He could have taken a lump of coal, set it to two clarinets, a violin, a viola and a cello, and it would have been fit for the tiara of a queen.

It is good to reflect on his music, to reflect on his being, a man so devoted that even as his children died and Vienna's cold and damp winds pushed their way into his bones, he could still write works like The Magic Flute or the three last symphonies. You cannot go to war on Mozart's music, you can only fall in love with the world around you.

One of my favorite little works:


Enjoy

Re-booty

More thoughts on oil and cars. It may be time to restore the system to an earlier date. And why is it that we always have to feel the pain of mega-industries?

Barack Obama rode to power on a car running on green fuel and with gasoline becoming more expensive than milk. And so his message of energy savings and independence did find receptive ears, obviously. By November 4, the shock of $145 plus per barrel of oil was still reverberating in the bones of the car-addicted, even while the sinking economy was beginning to drag down energy prices as well. Within a week of launching his presidency, Obama already put the issue on the table as an early priority. And it makes sense, given that the Big Three failed miserably to devise sustainable strategies in the past and now their gradual demise may well squeeze the entire supplier industry. So what did President Obama have to say?

"We will commit ourselves to steady, focused, pragmatic pursuit of an America
that is freed from our energy dependence, and empowered by a new energy economy
that puts millions of our citizens to work. … Now is the time to meet the
challenge of this crossroads of history, by choosing a future safer for our
country, prosperous for our planet, and sustainable."

Turn up the volume
The reaction from the auto industry was predictable. As David Cole, chairman of the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) told the New York Times: “It would have a devastating effect on everybody, and not just the domestics.” The auto industry has always, consistently and vociferously resisted changing its polluting and gas-guzzling ways for decades and decades. And they have done so by spending vast amounts of money on lobbyists (such as the CAR) that would have been better spent developing new technology. But the bucks were rolling in, and a vast nation of sheep was out there purchasing those ridiculous SUVs blithely ignoring the plain fact that the stuff running their car was coming from foreign soil and was not doing the atmosphere any good. In fact, a whole lobby was created to explain that pollution doesn't exist nor has it an effect on people and the environment. Well, that will sell to people who are willing to believe that dinosaurs stalked the earth with humans 6000 years ago.

The issue of energy dependence or independence is hardly a new one. But in a world in which anyone over 50 is considered a rusting hulk at the bottom of the ocean, and most young people clamp their brains between ear buds that blast them full of commercial thumping, a certain transfer of data has gone missing. Thirty-one years ago, then President Carter had this to say at his State of the Union Address:

“Never again should we neglect a growing crisis like the shortage of energy,
where further delay will only lead to more harsh and painful solutions…. Now we
know what we must do, increase production. We must cut down on waste. And we
must use more of those fuels which are plentiful and more permanent. We must be
fair to people, and we must not disrupt our Nation's economy and our budget.”

The path of least resistance
Then came Whitewash Reagan and suddenly Carter’s good intentions went out the window, alas. In the Happy Days mode, Americans felt it was OK to "move on" and live for the day, buying any car they liked, any car that Detroit wanted to foist upon them. Thus, every Tom, Dick and Jane with an inferiority complex could buy some huge device made for chasing terrorists in the desert and ride from home to the general store, shop and never witch off their engine. Anyone suggesting that this was absurd, that pollution was a real danger, that such vehicles were unnecessary or, heaven forbid, more money should be invested in public transportation, was laughed off the map or even called a Commie or Socialist. The latter two buzzwords, by the way, are always pulled out of the hat when someone feels humungous profits threatened, or some redneck is trying to sound smart. Most would not even recognize Communism if it came out of the corn syrup dispenser at House of Pancakes. Let's face it.

The price of oil was so cheap that innovation could no longer be marketed properly. That was the message from the scientific community, at any rate. At the Research Institutes in Garching, some scientists had found a very effective method to recycle heat using heat pumps and a silicate. But with oil at $12 or so a barrel, no way to get the system into the market where it belonged.

1+1=3
Indeed, in the 30 years between the oil shocks of the 70s and now, the entire world has changed. There can be no doubt that given the right leadership, human endeavor would have easily found a viable alternative to the internal combustion engine (the research was being done, there is no doubt, but it was kept away from the public, since the old system was working so well). But for that, it would have taken real leaders in power, not industry shills and professional deskmen with deep pockets like the class of pol that has risen to the top. Because the problem is not just in the USA. The German and French auto industries also jumped on the gas-guzzle bandwagon and hollered foul each time it was asked to mend its ways. The ADAC, Germany’s automobile club, has consistently lobbied against any regulation, for example. And the CAR equivalent in Germany, the VDA, has done nothing but put on the brakes. In the 70s, attempts were made to limit speeds on German highways, which are to this day the last bastion of official motoring hooliganism in Europe (barring country roads in places like Croatia, Hungary and Serbia, where the momma’s boys are also plentiful and need to counteract their inherent anger by driving big cars and stepping on the gas). These attempts were reversed by the groundswell of conservatism that swept the nation as of 1983. What a shame. By now, we would be used to going slower.

So we have to reboot to a different time, to an era in which we had a chance, like the 1970s. And the industry will squeak. It is doing so already. At an environmental forum in July in Magedeburg, Germany, hosted by Daimler, among others, all the lobbyists were present, sweating away for their masters, pleading to let the free market do its magic. The time may have come to let them grovel and plead. The last time we gave in to them, they ran off with the cash register and trashed the place.

(More to come on this topic, of course… so stay posted)

A good day

Jangling thoughts on Obama Day

Today, Obama will step into the presidency and it is a very important day. Not only because he is the first person of color to lead the USA, but because he has the opportunity, the charisma and the intelligence to bring genuine change and lead not by fear and browbeating, as his predecessor did, but by dint of vision. The many challenges facing the country, the world, are to a certain extent irrelevant. All predictions are always based on parameters of today, and just because people hope for constancy, doesn't mean that there is such a thing. Entropy.... that's the plan. The point is: where does each individual in a collective stand, how much responsibility are we ready to take individually.

But President Obama already sent some good signals not only for the USA, but for the world at large. Everyone has to pitch in, not by wanting and consuming more, but by sharing more. And I suspect he means not only materially. One can give a little bit of sunshine, maybe just by acknowledging others in everday life.

Writing from the center of western Europe, I can say it would behoove people here, too, and the world round in fact, to develop a greater sense of community, to be respectful and considerate, to be friendly with one anther, to spread a little bit of feelgood, especially when the news is filled with gloominess. Yet for some reason, our wealthy, bloated "western" lifestyle, which has set a terrible example to other countries, seems to turn everyone inward. Naturally, because it is based on greed and the need for cheap labor, in other words, it per se exploits the frailty of other peoples, hence it makes us suspicious of anyone approaching us and just being friendly. Here, in the small town I live in, people hardly speak to each other, even if they meet on a daily basis. Other than some insane fear of connecting with neighbors, there seems to be no apparent reason for this bizarre behavior. (Time to welcome the recession... We can easily do with less material and more time. Perhaps some theoretical physicist can come up with a 21st-century e-mc2 expressing this correlation?)

So let the partying begin.

Bells and piffle

Pass the salt

(In short: Forgive generalizations, dear reader, experience has shown that there are diamonds in the rough, but the rough is big and the diamonds are just a few carat. Different is out, lockstep is in: the Hollywood system and society.)


What plagues Hollywood and has reduced 95% of its films to stunningly boring, repetitive strips of celluloid with a shelf-life of around 2 months, is the star system combined with "formula." Unbeknownst to many, perhaps, or known but conveniently ignored or excused, is the fact that Hollywood films are created the way five-year plans were created in Communist countries, namely by committee and according to strict regulations. As a result, they are about as vibrant, thrilling and exciting as the Yellow River Concerto, a schlock-filled piano concerto written by a few Chinese composers during one of those "Cultural Revolutions", obviously with a gun at their heads, that blends a little Addinsell and Rozsa with a smattering of Kalkbrenner, perhaps, and a tiny daub of the Viennese School of Haydn and Co. Hollywood's output of generally saltless, pre-chewed nonsense is then peddled to the public in the US and abroad as if it were Tolstoy mixed with rocket fuel and some very hot sauce.

These products -- and they are exactly that -- are embarassing to look at. The stars, by now, all look and act the same. The facial expressions are identical, the language is identical, speech intonation and patterns are the same, the gestures are identical, the camera angles the same, and the stories.... well, they are based on a few simple premises. One is: A hates B and somehow has to cross the US in a strange or certainly noticeable vehicle. There are some slight variations, like the uplifting tale of a dysfunctional family crossing the US in strange vehicle (RV or Little Miss Sunshine, for example). In the end the protagonists either 1) have sex, 2) suddenly like each other, even though they have been at each others' throats for 85 minutes of tedium, or 3) become functional again without the benefit of therapy or meds. And you thought Rain Man had anything to do with autism?

There are a few other formulas, but not many and ultimately, they all go back to a handful of very basic and obvious plots. An example: The anti-Communist movies of the late 1940s were based on B gangster movies or horror films (My Son John is sort of like Frankenstein...). All it takes is a slow amble through a video store to soak up the tedium of Hollywood on the covers of those thousands of DVDs, faces scrunched up more from some peristaltic traffic jams, it seems, than genuine distress, men showing their teeth and holding huge guns, or adults whose state of love makes them look like anthropomorphed smileys. Let us not mention all that Rambo stuff, which is audience abuse, and comedies that have degenerated to the level of Lumière's Arroseur Arrosé as it is known (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ei6nJfXAuHQ).


A step further
The carts and horses here are becoming mixed up. Perhaps this is not Hollywood, but, more depressingly, the nation's very way of doing things, its mental paradigm, and Hollywood has just discovered it to be a great business strategy and is rubbing it in the way some men keep rubbing one spot chez la femme, because what worked once in, say, 1965, might still be the secret to success in 2009. I am assuming here.
For Americans are, by and large, quite an uncurious, even timorous bunch, and becoming more so as time ticks away inexorably. Not only Americans, by the way.... this attitude is spreading more and more as the Great Unwashed satisfies its needs for constant and eminently predictable distraction with cheap products. Hence all it took GWB to get everyone jumping up and down and praising His Farce of a Presidency was to spread a little brumagem fear. And he did so by creating the ultimate enemy, invisible, intangible and even bearing an easy-to-remember name: the terrorist. And fear, as we know, is control.

The difference
What does this have to do with the price of tea in China? The star system and the formula are not only the strategy of some mega-rich Hollywood peddlers of faux-excitement, but also of news organizations. And the results are uncannily the same. Decades ago, a freelancer could send in stories, some would get published, others not. You learned to "paper your office with rejection letters," but you also rejoiced in the occasional correspondence with an intelligent editor or a colleague. And there was the possibility of getting the story into print, not to see your name in type, but because of the story. You were providing diversity, the quintessence of thrill. The unknown, the mysterious, the recondite piece of info made the difference, like the fake beauty mark on a cream-colored breast. You were the eyes and ears of the media, scouting for things that made a difference, no matter how small.




No longer. Everyone is playing it safe, "different" is out, lockstep is in. Television's news anchors -- wrongly called journalists -- are treated as demiurges. Editors at papers barricade themselves behind spam filters and if contact does arise by sheer accident or dint of persistence, they treat the freelancer the way the chief concierge of a palace might have treated a beggar. As a result, the news has become blotchy, one-sided, predictable as a Kansas cornfield. The rest of the world to the American media -- and the yellow trash in Europe, I might add, like Bild in Germany, Blick in Switzerland, France Soir in France, to name a few -- is like West Berlin in the old GDR maps, a blank spot. Unless, of course, there is blood, disaster, or very rich and successful people becoming more and more rich. The gatekeepers, as they used to be called, are happily ensconced in their ivory towers printing out safe stories that an allegedly lily-livered readership can somehow swallow, as long as it is new, shiny, shrinkwrapped. Because, news stories wilt like butterheads in a steamroom. Gaza, for example, after 20 days, is already slipping, the butchery there passed the 1000 mark, no one wants mashed children for breakfast, lunch and dinner, so its time to turn the kliegs onto some other story. Thank goodness an Airbus 320 landed in the Hudson river and its 155 passengers and crew made it out safely. Let me ask: Since when have the news media been interested in planes landing safely -- albeit spectacularly!

(The few journalists who are allowed to rise up after some hard work and sacrifice end up cashing in their idealistic chips at the pearly gateway and suddenly sing "I'll do unto you as they did unto me." They become the stars, the untouchables, the next guardians of the towers. They have new, better, more shiny friends now. Their former life never existed. ... But I digress...)

Tacos and circuses
By now, news has become a misnomer. It should be called "Daily Surprise," fresh news for fresh people, because we don't look back. We move on, the faster, the better. None of that Eurotrashy thinking stuff. Now the US has a sexy, young, thin, intelligent, articulate, definitely more competent president. And black as well.... so pundits can hail the end of racism as we knew it. The approval rating of the outgoing prez is below freezing, so everyone except for the manifestly untreatable cases are now Good Americans, in fact so good, they don't even need to do a kind of Nuremberg on those bizarre and corrupt characters. Gentleman's agreements, perhaps? News flash of yore: Bush had 90% approval rating before invading Afghanistan in 2001. Oh, there was lots of collateral damage, and OBL got away, but that did not really matter, the whole moment was like, well, a movie... End of news flash. Move on, move on....

Wave the flag, whack that drum, blow that fife, all hail to the new chief. The American bellybutton is once again glowing in all its glory, we are free from the wickedness of the neo-cons, so roll them credits. What did George W. Bush say in his farewell speech, besides the usual whitewashing, boasting, platitudinizing, posturing, even lying? He noted the continuity with the past, the house in which Jefferson lived, and quoted the grand poobah of Republican thought: “I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.”

How noble. And no wonder. But it is what the nation really wants. Zoloft for one, Viagra for the other, a shot of hooch and tomorrow is a new day. In other words: Let someone else clean up the mess. Taking a hard look at the past is so un-American, such a waste of time. I mean, if you've taken a dump, what's behind you smells... right?

And no matter what Obama does, it is hard to see how he can change that attitude, which covers the political spectrum from left to right. Especially when he responds to a question about investigating George W. Bush crimes by saying: "We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” The next movie, I am afraid, is already in committee.

Gobbledygook

Master Dick speaks

This neat clip from 1994 is a great comment about what might happen if the USA had invaded Iraq completely in 1991 and why that would be a really bad idea. The speaker is articulate and seems to have given the option some thought. Not much difference between 1994 and 2003. Except the aboutface that Mr. Cheney performs.

(Note, however, that he did not get it quite right. The Shia, the Sunni, the fact that Iran would become the big powerbroker, or one of the other Arab nations... all that went right by this man, who apparently knows little about the region ... My contention at the time was: take out Saddam Hussein and you'll open the way to some other nationalist leader to take the flag of the Mahdi, as it were... at least Hussein seemed pretty much hated by everyone else, he was therefore a divisive figure in the region... Divide et conquera, heavens, and Blair the Dunce did not get that message? The Brits invaded the planet using "divide and conquer" as a strategy. But no one asked me, in 1991 I was writing travel guides and occasional articles on doggie glasses, because editors were far too timorous to publish real stuff. Meanwhile well-paid pundits spewed hours and reams of nonsense for the masses.... but I digress).



This clip supports Helen Thomas's question as to why the USA went into Iraq (see yesterday's post). But Dick "Darth" Cheney ain't saying. After running the country for eight years -- you don't think the GWB could, do you? He never ran anything in his life -- we suddenly realize: The VP was just as incompetent, thick-skulled, evil and parochial as his understudy. Fifth-rate individuals, who brought in controllable tenth-raters like Chertoff.

The quality of conservatism in the USA can be measured by Pajamas Media's hiring of Joe the Plumber to go report on Israel. The man obviously has the intellect of a pipe wrench. The Huff Post lists a little interview he had with an Israeli reporter.... Does this man have work? Will anyone ever hire him as a plumber even, once the lunatic fringe has dropped him as the liability he is?
I can imagine sort of the following conversation:

Ring, ring,
- Joe the Plumber, may I help you?
- Hi Joe, Marty here, from the General Store. I have a leak in my basement, and don't know where it's coming from.
- Hi Marty, where is the leak?
- In the basement.
- Do you know where it's coming from?
- No, that's why I'm calling.
- So how do you know there's a leak...

and so on...


But under a Palin/McCain administration, he could have been Surgeon General, or head of Homeland Security or even Defense. No 7000-dollar toilet seats with Joe.

Speaking of Sarah Palin. The conservatives have made a delightful film of why Obama got elected, placing the blame on all sorts of things other than their own very silly candidates and McCain's two disastrous decisions: He chose Palin, and he chose to go with some very stupid dirt throwing at a time when even conservative Americans in the Televangelist Belt were beginning to wonder if maybe W. had been speaking to the wrong Jesus. The docu is pure trash, but it did provide Jon Stewart with a great target to practice pie-throwing:

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Blamey Whinehouse

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Quick reminder that before November 4, Palin said that the election was in God's hands. So why blame it on the media again, when this all powerful being who created everyone, but hates most of them, decided that Sarah Palin was not going to magically become Frau Präsidentin... Are these people for real? The whole thing was Disneyesque, let us face it, with Elmar Fudd joining Cruella and one of the Beagle Boys as Joe the Plumber. These people must grow up.