You Are Only As Sane As Your Belief System Allows You To Be

We all have belief systems, ways to cope and interpret the world going on around us. Some embrace religion, some embrace politics, or a combination thereof, it's our way of trying to stay sane in an increasingly crazy world. That is the world of man.
But some people cling to belief systems even after they have obviously failed them. To continue to do the same action and expect a different result is by definition insanity, and yet, there they are, clutching at straws.
In Baltimore, a judge has agreed to drop charges against a mother who starved her child to death after he refused to say Amen after breakfast if the boy is resurrected. The boy, who was just one year old, was ordered to be withheld food by the leader of a Christian cult as a punishment for not saying amen. The mother, who still belongs to said cult, is still holding out that the child will be resurrected.
And speaking of crazy cults, the cult of conservatism claims Sam Wurzelbacher represents the working people. This is a guy who hasn't worked a lick since John McCain brought him up at a presidential debate last year, now spends his time speaking at conservative gatherings about how horny he is. Maybe that's why his book is tanking, working people are having a hard enough time paying the bills, let alone ponying up the money for a book by someone who feels that taking away their free choice represents their best interests, which is why real plumbers heckled him at his last speaking gig. And if you really believe "Jioe" is a plumber, you're as crazy as the people who starved a little boy to death in hopes that he would be resurrected.

See? Another Token Gesture By The Cultural Elite

In yesterday's post, I referred to "Earth Hour" as one of those token gestures by the cultural elite. While everybody else was turning off their lights in an effort to save the planet, the king of the global warming climate change cult kept his lights on. It's not bad enough that Al Gore's home uses twenty times more energy as the average household, but when it was time to put his money where his mouth is, he showed me that, well really his quest for reducing his carbon footprint is a s real as his quest for manbearpig. You have to make sacrifices so that the cultural elite can continue their consumptive ways.
Now, I do think that it's important that people make an effort to cut the crap out of their lives. But, as I said, to only do it one day a year because of some corporate sponsored event that they can use to improve their image, write it off on their taxes or use as a basis for some carbon trading scam is ridiculous.

Excuse Me, But I Have To Shovel More Global Warming Offen My Sidewalk

Environmentalists Hail Earth Hour as a Big Success. Of course, when the lights came back on, and the sun rose the following day, the Earth was still littered with garbage, humans still felt the need to convey themselves about in gas guzzling and air polluting vehicles, so how much of a success was it really? Was anything really done to alleviate global warming climate change?
Driving through my neighborhood last night on the way to the grocery store, the only houses with lights out were the ones unoccupied due to mortgage foreclosure. What we have is another one of those token gestures by the cultural elite, like lapel ribbons or mandatory "volunteerism" where we are asked to make sacrifices that they won't have to make because of political connections or carbon trading scams where they can continue to pollute as much as they want by buying carbon credits from suckers people like you and me.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating the continuation of the poisoning of our planet, I'm just saying that when corporate types get on board with something like this, there's probably more in it for them than just improving their image. So, please, shop when you feel bummed out, turn out your lights when they want you to, and salivate like a fucking dog every time they ring a bell. But to only do something about the planet only when they suggest (or can make a profit from it)makes them look as powerful as you look silly.

Television Just Got A Little Suckier

Just when I think television couldn't get any worse, Fox has announced it's intention to air The Osbournes:Reloaded as a series of specials starting March 31. That was worth getting my digital TV converter for. Is this what they plan on replacing Prison Break with? I'm sure I stand alone in condemning such an obvious attempt at trash television, but listen to this! In one episode, a male audience member is tricked into making out with a grandmother for $100. Ha. Ha ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. How funny!
Can't we make these people go away? I mean, with the exception of Ozzy himself, does any other member of the first family of foul have a discernible talent? I've noticed Ozzy looking a little hunched over these days, is that from carrying the rest of his clan on his coattails?
I'm sure the show will be a big hit, because most Americans are more brain dead than Ozzy himself. This is good for the rest of the clan, who would otherwise be forced to work real jobs where they might be forced to display some humanity. But no, thanks to the idiocracy, they have entered the entertainment offspring entitlement aristocracy where being related to someone even remotely talented gets you in. (Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie work the door)
One segment of the show, sure to be funny annoying is when the Osbournes go to work at places like fast food drive thrus! Wacky! This will proves that they are totally inept at actually working along with being inept as human beings.
This is all your fault. Sure you loved to watch the Osbournes on their first "reality" show, and even bought it on DVD. But when Ozzy put out the CD of cover tunes, it didn't sell as well as expected, and now he's gotta cover that advance from the record company somehow, and this folks, is it.
I know, I know, I don't have to watch it. And I can turn the channel when commercials for it come on during every break for the next week. And I can switch the station when the all the morning radio shows are crawling over each other to play the most mundane clips themselves. And I can ignore the many nitwits who will extol the virtues of such trite and unoriginal programming. But I still have to live in a country where this trash is foisted on to a willfully waiting public who will swallow it clean like some spoodge sucking strumpet.
It's times like these that I wish that maybe Iran did have a nuclear weapon program, (unfortunately, they don't)and there was a major thermonuclear war that wiped out a large percentage of the world's population, because if this is what we've crawled from the primordial muck to attain, then somewhere we must have gotten lost and it's time to start all over again.
But that's just me.

I Really Miss That Guitar

(photo courtesy Matthew Richards)
I've been doing that Facebook thing for a while, not really, I think I signed up a month or two ago, and left it at that.(My home page is here if you wish to add me as a friend) Then today, I decided to try to change somethings on there (namely, my name, as it is listed as one of the many pseudonyms I've adopted over the years) only to see a blast from the past.
It was 1993, I think, and I was playing guitar and singing (screaming on key, really) for the coolest band I ever was in, Dysfunktional Son of God. These were the glory days for me, and there was nothing better than playing out. But what really struck a nerve for me was seeing an old friend.
Directly behind me, in front of the drum set was an old hollow body electric I used to a have, a Framus. I got it from a friend who ran an antique/vintage clothing store. I picked up an old saddle, with silver and turquoise trim, out of a free pile at a garage sale. I thought my friend, Chuck may be interested in it, so I took it down to his store. When I got there, he showed me his most recent acquisition, which was the guitar. Knowing that I know something about guitars, he asked me what I thought of it. It was excellent, fine German craftsmanship. I showed him the saddle, and that twinkle appeared in his eyes that always did when I brought him something unusual. He then offered a trade, the saddle for the guitar. It was only after the deal that I told him I got the saddle for free.
I don't why I got rid of that guitar, although I gather it was probably so I could buy some drugs. Like a lot of other things, I let a lot of good guitars slip through my hands because I couldn't smoke them. Now I'm down to only three, including the Fender that I'm playing in the picture. Somethings, like memories, are worth holding on to.

Macaca See........

I remember a time, not too long ago, when the Republicans were evil. I mean real verifiable evil, sulfur and brimstone evil, nasty as they wanted to be. But now what has happened?
Republicans used to set the pace, they turned liberal into a bad word and successfully painted everyone who opposed them and their nefarious ways as a traitor. They made tax cuts for the rich as American as running a war on a deficit and were proud of it. Now what are they up to?
Stalking Democrats with video cameras, hoping to force a macaca moment. This is sad and pathetic, and maybe a bit creepy. The plan is to ask questions of Democratic congresspeople they see as vulnerable in 2010 in hopes of forcing out an embarrassing response, which they'll then post to YouTube. Did I say a bit creepy? I meant to say full on bull goose looney creepy. But not evil. And that's what makes it sad and pathetic.
The GOP used to be about ideas. Not good ideas, but ideas nonetheless. But the voters resoundingly rejected those ideas in the last two election cycles, because, face it, they didn't work. Now all they have left in their bag of tricks is some second rate and second hand chicanery. They get it now-newspapers and talk radio are out, the new gizmo to spread their message is this internet doohickey. So they're trying to recreate what occurred naturally.
In 2006, Sen. George Allen, running against Jim Webb in Virginia, made an offhand remark about a Webb staffer following Allen's campaign as a macaca. Which turned out to be a racist slur, since S.R. Sidarth,the man Allen was addressing, was a 20-year-old of Indian descent. OOps!
Now the Republican Dirty Trick squad has decided this is the way to regain their footing. Not by actually having anything remotely resembling ideas themselves, because they all became intellectually bankrupt backing Bush/Cheney for all those years. Now all they can do is trot out Michael Steele and Bobby Jindal in hopes of scoring points in the whole "We don't see color either" department, and rally around Sarah Palin, because she kinda sorta represents the morality they claim to have when their teenage daughters aren't getting knocked up and having babies out of wedlock, destined to suckle at the public teat until some corporation, looking for an inroad into closely knit political circles, hires her as a "consultant" where she'll make $100K to introduce certain people to other certain people while Dad is out racing snowmobiles and Mom is winking at gray-haired old men at the regional party caucus.

The Altered State Of Richard B. Cheney

AIG is planning to use $450 million of the second round of economic stealfromus to pay bonuses to "attract and retain the best and brightest talent to lead and staff the AIG businesses", you know, the ones that led the company to the verge of bankruptcy. I guess they're not the ones to blame for the current economic fiasco.
And neither is the Bush administration, according to it's chief criminal, Richard B. "Dick" Cheney. According to Dick:"I don't think you can blame the Bush administration for the creation of those circumstances."
Aren't the Republicans all about personal responsibility? Yet, no one in the party has the cojones to stand up and say, "I fucked up". Hell, they even blamed 9/11 on Clinton. And, yes, they even blamed our current economic woes on, you guessed it, Bill Clinton. But wait, what does Cheney say when asked about Obama saying he inherited our current economic woes from Bush?

"The notion that you can just sort of throw it off on the prior administration -- that's interesting rhetoric, but I don't think anybody really cares about that."

Cheney's Death Squads Need To Be Investigated

George Bush was fond of talking about his legacy in his final days, and how history will vindicate him for his actions. But as more and more revelations leak out from his administration, things may have been worse than we imagined.
Seymour Hersh has a story about how Dick Cheney ran an assassination ring out of the office of the vice president. Extrajudicial executions are always looked back fondly by historians. Perhaps Deborah Jean Palfrey didn't hang herself.
Cheney was always up to no good in the Bush administration, from creating a special conduit of fabricated intelligence on Iraq to authorizing torture of people he wanted to confess to crimes that he himself committed. That is why we need a Truth Commission now, while the evidence is still fresh.
The Obama unchange administration has admitted they intend on defending the criminals from the previous administration against allegations they used torture. Well, they're not really allegations, since they all have admitted to it. Nor do they intend on prosecuting the Bush administration for starting an illegal war. We the people as citizens need to demand our government take action and investigate the many crimes perpetrated in our name by unjust men who used our military as their own private army to profit from war and drive the country to the point of bankruptcy, both financially and morally.

Chuck Norris, All-American

Remember those Chuck Norris Facts that were so funny (to people who considered Walker, Texas Ranger to be good entertainment) a few years back? Nobody took them seriously, because, they were so outrageous, everyone knew they were a joke.
There was someone who did take them seriously, it would appear. None other than Chuck Norris himself, who on Glenn Beck's radio show suggested he would run for president of Texas because Texas was never formally a part of the United States in the first place and that if rebellion is to come through secession Texas would lead the way. Hey, I'd be happy to cut Texas loose, especially eight years ago. Norris also claims there are thousands of right wing sleeper cells (I'd love to hear him lisp that phrase) that are armed and ready for a second American revolution. Sounds like a bunch of terrorists to me.
Norris also claims that "we've bastardized the First Amendment, reinterpreted America's religious history and secularized our society until we ooze skepticism and circumvent religion on every level of public and private life." So, to counter that, you would circumvent democracy so that you and a bunch of Jesus tards can impose your imbecilic views on people with a brain? This is all we need a now, a bunch of armed juiced up mongoloids helping the world's worst movie star grasp on to what little bit of the spotlight left shining on him to forward his own warped reactionary agenda.
Norris even goes one step further and suggests that our military refuse the commander-in-chief's orders. Sounds a bit treasonous, but do you suspect that when and if Obama orders our troops home from Iraq, they're going to ignore him? Better just to ignore Chuck Norris and his really, really, bad toupee. And if Chuck Norris was as tough as the jokes made him out to be, four or eight years of a Democratic presidency should be no problem at all.

Ketchup America

It seems so long ago.
back when I started this blog, when many of us started blogging much of mainstream America and it's media were cowering in fear, sure that there were terrorists lurking everywhere, and if we didn't invade Iraq, they would surely kill us all.
In the blogosphere, however, things were different. It almost felt like borderline treason, passing along nuggets of information amongst ourselves that for whatever reason, wasn't made public to the people.
Remember the Downing Street Memo? The official British document that stated US intelligence was being 'fixed' around an invasion of Iraq? I can still remember having to email a link to the local paper's editor about it because they hadn't heard of it.
I also remember a pervasive feeling that Bush and Cheney, who were setting themselves up with near-dictatorial powers, would never step down from the presidency.
So when the Obama Justice department released nine of the Bush administration Office of Legal Counsel terror memos no one was surprised that nearly every legal expert has denounced them strongly as being tyrannical . They can do that now because Bush and Cheney have gone away.
But this is not news. Many people have known that the Bush regime was over the line on many things. Some have suggested a >Truth Commission, and I for one agree. We cannot really move forward waiting for the rest of the American people to catch up on what's been going on these past eight years.

Never Give A Book Deal To Someone Whose Fan Base Doesn't Like To Read

True story here. Yesterday, Wilbur asked me who Joe the Plumber was. I tried to explain to him that Joe, whose name isn't really Joe, and isn't really a plumber, somehow became famous when candidate Barack Obama was in his neighborhood and Joe asked him a question about how much Barack planned on raising his taxes. This made him a darling of the over $250,000 a year media pundits who benefited dearly from the Bush tax cuts. The irony is, with the new economic stimulus plan, Joe would be getting a tax cut, but now, by exploiting his instant celebrity, he probably is now one of those whose taxes will be raised. For this year, anyways.
Joe is also a good example of why the economy is so screwed. Someone, in their infinite (or infinitesimal) wisdom deemed it necessary to grant Joe a book deal.That was a good idea. I guess book editors, like Joe himself, thought his fame would go on infinitely, leapfrogged him over thousands of real hopeful authors (like the record company that leapfrogged him over talented musicians and singers to give him a record deal) to give him a book deal, probably ghost written, that now looks about as intelligent a decision as choosing Sarah Palin as your running mate, or granting a mortgage to someone like me.
Well, Joe, your time's almost up. Soon, you'll have all these wonderful memories of when you used to be someone while you're snaking some fat lady's toilet. Hope you kept a scrapbook!