What are the psychological implications of contemplating Fight Club all the time and constantly reciting the best anti-social lines from Transmetropolitan?

The only way to know you’re sane is if you still question your sanity.

Meh. Maybe I just need to go on a good bender.

How long until Memorial Day?

Mallard Fillmore today announced his “Don’t Vote if you don’t know anything” PSA. That’s a fine idea. I’d like to add my voice to the chorus begging the ignorant to avoid the polls this year. The Republic can survive wars, rebellion, treachery, legislative gridlock, recessions, depressions, and any other bad thing that can be thrown at it but it can not survive an uneducated electorate.

So, do us all a favor this year and DON’T VOTE if you:

• Believe the Republic is one step from Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.

• Believe in the depths of your heart that Conservatives are evil fascists or Liberals are stupid commies.
• Believe that the President is a moron or the Senator doesn’t believe in anything.
• Believe that war is never the answer or that war is always the answer.
• Believe that gay marriage is a civil rights issue or that homosexuality will be the undoing of us all.
• Believe that it may be neccessary “. . . to take things away from you on behalf of the common good;” or that entirely freeing the engines of commerce from taxation is good policy.
• Believe that if Kerry wins we’re all doomed or that if Bush wins we’re all doomed.

If, in your heart of hearts, you have ever put stock in any of the above statements – for the love of all that is good and holy, abstain from voting this year. You are entirely too ignorant to govern yourself let alone have any voice in the governing of the common weal.

This is an important election. I happen to think our future rests upon the outcome; but I also know that regardless of the outcome, balance will return at some point in the future. We may have to lose tens of thousands of people, hundreds of millions of dollars and decades or centuries of political evolution but things always find a way to rebalance.

It would be nice, though, if we could make the right choice now and save ourselves lots of stuff and bother.

I’ll be voting for the President because he’s the only choice this year, because he’s the best man for the job and because I believe the march of freedom can not be helped along by appealing to the policy of the mythic past.

To move ahead you need to think ahead.

The big headline in the local (Hanover, PA) paper reads:

The subheading reads: “The day the war turned . . .”

OK, is it just me or does running into some expected resistance and taking some expected and light casualties not seem like such a big damn deal? So, we had to fight some scrappy little camel jockeys in bypassed urban centers. That’s why we brought along the British Army. Who better knows how to fight scrappy little ideological fighters in urban areas? They’ve been battling in Northern Ireland since the start of the modern “troubles” in the 1960s. Turn the Limeys loose, the towel heads don’t stand a chance.

Lessee, in late 1944 a totally unexpected German onslaught was unleashed in the Ardennes forest. Multiple SS and Panzer divisions plowed through thin lines of combat troops and quickly caused havoc among rear-echelon troops (cooks, mechanics, and the like). Despite complete air superiority, close air support was unavailable for the first several days of the assault due to bad weather – snow and low cloud cover. Regardess, in a matter of days, our poorly supplied and equipped troops stood their ground in pockets, slowly fought their way to encirclement of the German thrust and began the destruction of the last strong elements of the Wehrmact and the eventual march to victory in the spring of 1945.

Sound familiar? Right up to the “poorly supplied and equipped troops” part I think it does. Oh yeah, except for the “totally unexpected German onslaught” bit. We have moved hundreds of miles through enemy territory with neglible losses. We have spared the lives of tens of thousands of the enemy through our own restraint. We are about to engage the remainder of the enemy’s top notch forces – kindly coming out to battle us at their severe disadvantage – while cowardly units of suicidal terrorists roam our flanks and rear scoring minor successes from time to time but inevitably being wiped out before they can threaten again. All of this was expected and planned for and our equipment is still in complete working order with no lack of supplies. In addition, we are currently landing and unloading tons of humanitarian relief supplies to ease the suffering of civilians – and all this while combat still rages at the front.

Oh yeah, I think we ought to just throw up our hands right now. Naturally we can never stand against a bunch of sand monkeys with decades old technology fighting because some terrorist bastard has a gun to their head. Yep, no hope, no hope at all.

As my own personal idol says, “I hate you all. And if any of you truly cared about me you’d all kill yourselves.”

I read a bit of an interview with an officer in the 3d ID who, when asked what his plans were replied, “Baghdad. That’s where we’re going, one step at a time.”

Now that’s just bad ass. Reminds me of William Tecumseh Sherman in 1864 who mumbled that his final destination was “salt water.” What lies in wait along the way matters no more to our boys in the desert than what laid in Sherman’s path.

On that subject, I thought we’d be in Baghdad by the end of last week. I truly didn’t see any reason not to think so. What I hadn’t considered is the mind-boggling extent to which we’ve tried to preserve Iraqi lives and property. Our insistence on this point is so extreme it seems we’re even willing to endanger our own troops to ensure Iraqi well-being. That’s just amazing to me and very indicative of the sort of nation we are. Iraq is not the enemy, Saddam and his cronies are our enemy and so we have been doing our damnedest to ensure that death and destruction only comes to Saddam and his protectors. Does anyone honestly think that any other nation in history would put their own cooks and maintenance personnel at risk in order to keep advancing and eliminate the real target? Not bloody likely.

I do hope, however, that if we lose too many more prisoners or take more casualties we’ll cut loose. I doubt highly we’ve seen shock and awe. I know we’re capable of much more. How about cluster bombing a thoroughfare right through the middle of the Republican Guard? Does anyone doubt we could cut an interstate for our people, right through the middle of their armor, within a matter of hours? I reckon the Iraqis are getting the idea. You notice the two Apache pilots were having a bite to eat and something to drink while they were being interviewed. A sight different that the treatment of our POWs during the weekend.

Let them fight back. We could teach them in an instant that it’s in their own best interest not to resist. In the meantime, roll on lads. Roll on.

Michael Moore, the poster boy for McDonald’s lawsuits, won the Oscar for best documentary film. Funny isn’t it? That purely untrue piece of liberal propaganda being considered a documentary?

The Academy should have known he’d do something stupid and sure enough, he mouthed off about the President and the war. Typical BS. I had hoped he’d be lustily booed and fortunately he was, albeit with some cheers mixed in. I had expected he’d be roundly denounced and his behaviour would be largely ignored by the media – so much for that hope.

You’d think the rotund son of a bitch was some sort of hero. Standing up against the oligarchy, etc when all he really wants to do is rewrite the Constitution to further his agenda.

It occurs to me, after watching Barbra Streisand’s remarks about her happiness at living in a country where all are entitled to speak what they believe that she, and everyone like her is full of shit. Trust me, if I were to go forth and proclaim that I believe all white women with overlarge noses are part of a cabal designed to make Clinton the President for all time I do think a few liberals (not to mention everyone else) would have something to say against my freedom of speech. I know for a fact if anyone were to leap up at the Academy Awards and speak in defense of life, the Second Amendment or the Electoral College they’d be booed far more loudly and lustily than even that worthless blob of cellulite, Michael Moore.

So much for freedom of speech. Your freedom only extends as far as you toe the line of the thought police. Never forget that. Orwell got it wrong, it’s not rightists that will restrict your freedoms – it’s the do-gooders, the zealots and nanny-state nicompoops who will rob you of your right to think different.

Fight ‘em, every way you can, or one day you may wake up to find babies legally murdered by the millions, fat bastards attacking one of the original amendments of the Constitution and winning awards for it, words twisted until they have no meaning any more, democratically elected leaders compared to one of the worst tyrants and murderers in history (I don’t mean Saddam) and the worst tyrant and murderer of the 20th century (not Saddam either) celebrated for his vision.

Oh never mind, it’s already happened. Did somebody say pitchforks and torches?

Tonight people are fighting and dying on live television and meanwhile, back at the ranch, we can watch a blonde with spectacularly large boobs daringly tucked into a dangerously unsubstantial halter top grabbing electric eels for money. A mere twenty-five minutes from now we we be able to watch ridiculously over-rated people blubbing over a worthless little gold statuette awarded for making a fool of yourself on the silver screen and contributing mightily to the downfall of our culture and society.

Man, you just have to love America.

Can I tell you how much I would love to see one of these overpaid, overcoiffed morons talk some smack about the war and vaporize their career on live television? Mmmm, I think I can smell the burning hair gel even now.

Remember kids, the revolution will be televised.

I just watched “Three Kings” again and I realized how badly we fucked those people in 1991. I suppose the campaign now underway is atonement for our moral collapse. We could have done this then, we could have avoided a second round of destruction and death but no, the realpolitikers were still in charge and stability was the most essential war aim. It would be nice to see Colin Powell relieved of his duties as Secretary of State not only for his previous opposition to the current war but for his absolute failings during the first Gulf War. Morality is not negotiable. You do not send half a million men halfway around the world to defend a group of oil-rich sheiks while leaving an entire nation at the whim of a psychotic murderer.

I accuse all the protestors of moral corruption. I accuse all those in power in 1991 of a lack of vision and I commend those who have suffered the slings and arrows of a morally bankrupt people and media and have demanded the right to prosecute this war for our safety and the liberty of others.

Funny isn’t it how one George Bush’s lack of vision can be redeemed by another George Bush? Finally, George Bush kill Saddam. Victory to our arms and freedom to the Iraqi people!

It looks like the air campaign’s been ramped up tonight although not, apparently, to the level of the previously advertised “shock and awe.” And why not? One may well ask. For my part, I’d have let them have it all at once. It’s been over 12 years of this sort of crap and we’re all pretty damn sick and tired of it. So why not immolate the little rats in their holes and be done with it? Well folks, we’re trying to rebuild the Middle East with Iraq as our new bedrock…therefore, we’d like to leave some of the folks around and on our side. I think this war has been prosecuted absolutely brilliantly. First, a surgical strike attempting to wipe out the top honchos. Then, a blitzkreig coupled with steadily increasing levels of airpower. The question is, how long do we give them to surrender entirely before we really let rip? At this point, they’ve had two days. Some of them have to be wondering if we really can do what we’ve advertised. Hence, upping the level of bombardment tonight. I say they’ve got through tomorrow to pack it in or we unleash hell at dusk tomorrow.

Stay tuned spider-fans, the big one’s still a possibility.

Like the one gang member said to the other gang member.

Something big’s going down, at just about the time I figured it would. Airstrikes in Baghdad, bombing along the frontier and reports that the British and Marines are moving out and into Iraq. Whether this is, as has been commented, “the full tilt boogie for freedom and justice” or not it looks like things are definitely moving in the right direction.

Now it remains to be seen if Saddam actually got hit last night and, if so, how long the desert rats will hold out before packing it in. I would assume that the common Iraqi soldier, if he didn’t have a gun to his head, would have rode off into the sunset long ago. Here’s hoping their commanders get the idea and get it quickly before anymore people have to die for Saddam.

So much for the Mother of All Battles big fella. Do you think we could redecorate his commemorative mosque to memorialize the real deal?

I am absolutely sick to death of hearing bleating appeals to “International Law” as if such a thing actually existed at all. You’ll hear – we’re already hearing – that our war for the liberation of Iraq is “illegal” that it is contrary to “international law” and that possibly we should be punished as war criminals for waging an aggressive war against another sovereign state.

Bollocks.

There is no such thing as “international law.” What’s more, there is no such thing as law at all without an understanding that it is to be obeyed and some fellow nearby willing to enforce it. We know this from our own founding. We were to be a nation of laws and not of men. Take the responsibility for rules away from fickle leaders and codify those rules into law. Now, set up an executive branch whose primary responsibility is to enforce those laws, combine that with a population that creates its own laws through its elected representatives and hey presto! You’ve got a peck of people willing to obey the law and a fellow with a damned big stick willing to enforce same.

How does this apply to the international arena? It doesn’t. Not even a little bit. There might be some things we can all agree on. Generally speaking Western Judeo-Christian civilization doesn’t think too highly of torture, etc. Hence, the Geneva convention which a goodly part of the world isn’t a party to. How about strictures against aggressive war. Well, we’ve got the UN but since nobody elected them and even the appointed members are seldom from nations with representative bodies leading them why should anyone in the world have any stake in the UN’s pronouncements of “law?” They shouldn’t. What’s more, the UN has absolutely no mechanism for enforcing its “laws” and so it falls to the hyperdynamopower supercop US of A to stand up for the flim-flam of contracts comprising “international law.”

Don’t be fooled. The only law is that which is moral and can be enforced. Do you mean to tell me that demanding the elimination of a tyrant who routinely kills his own people, has started two offensive wars and has attempted to assasinate former heads of state is illegal or immoral? Well then, piss on you.

We’re the world’s cop. Like it or not. Thankfully we’ve got a President who understands this and, despite his hamfisted good intentions of working within the community of thieves and liars know as the international community, is willing to go along in the end and get the job done.

No doubt, we’re definitely at war. The President just said so. Man, I love how he always says, “My fellow citizens.” Anyone who’s read some political theory understands why that’s so spectacular and so much more meaningful than the old, “My fellow Americans.” Citizens have a responsibility to society as a whole…you think the President is trying to tell us something?

Somehow I keep having the funny feeling of tuning into my RCA set around 11 AM on a Sunday morning in 1941.

Anyone else feel a very bizarre sense of deja vu?

So much for this evening. I think I’ll go to bed now although I fully expect to wake up hearing of the rapid advance to Baghdad and possibly the beginning of the final siege.

Good night.

I was just about to give up for the night but it looks like, just shy of six AM in Baghdad, the war has begun.

Dunno, they claim air raid sirens have started and some bombing has ocurred but looking at live feed from Baghdad I don’t see anything like the bright lights of 1991 and there are still cars driving on the roads.

Must be that they’re just prepping the target areas. Dawn isn’t a terrible time to start a war but why the heck would you allow the enemy the advantage of daylight?

Looks like it might be a daylight war. More prayers and a short wait for the President. I’d say the war hadn’t actually begun but if we’ve hit Baghdad, then things are definitely progressing.

You know, I keep remembering Edith Roosevelt’s line from “Rough Riders”. “This is your war. You’ve done your best to start it.” Strange. But F ‘em anyway.

Saints preserve us.

So, it’s after 8 PM on Wednesday. The deadline has passed, Saddam hasn’t run for his miserable life and we are already engaged with Iraqi forces. Reports have come in that earlier this afternoon Iraqi artillery positions were destroyed, the SBS has engaged enemy forces in Basra and we’re FINALLY accepting Iraqi prisoners/defectors. Now what? No bombs yet but the sandstorms could be causing problems. As far as we know the ground forces haven’t crossed the frontier but it’s a full moon so maybe they don’t want to risk the advance in the good light.

Still, there’s no question we’re going to war. The hour of liberation is at hand. Good luck to our forces. My best wishes to the Iraqi people. Let’s all hope the war happens as quickly and cleanly as possible so we can all get back to the more important business of rebuilding the world and ensuring liberty to all its people.

Keep your heads down folks. It could be a hell of a rollercoaster ride.

Man, are things ever accelerating now! I wanted to write down last night what I thought the President should say but, to my happy surprise, he said almost exactly what I wanted him to say – except for ending on the happy comment that ” . . . as I speak the land, sea and air forces of the United States have already begun the liberation of Iraq.” Oh well, I was hoping for the “St. Patrick’s Day War” but I’ll settle for the “Random Wednesday in March War.”

A fine weekend although I’ve actually drank my limit of alcohol for the forseeable future. It’s scary. For the first time in a long time I had no desire to drink yesterday or thus far today. I must be getting old. Tramped all over creation this weekend. Started Saturday on the ski slopes, ended the day in a succession of South Jersey biker bars. Sunday I headed up to Jim Thorpe with a pal to meet some other lads and do the St. Pat’s parade but we ended up parking on the other side of the river and up a hill and figured we were too late so instead of marching we walked the entire parade route and then watched the parade come down the hill.

I have to say, if you’re ever looking for a good town to party in for St. Pat’s, Jim Thorpe takes the cake. The entire town was out drinking (literally) in the streets. Keg parties on front porches and general mahem. Sweet.

Skipped NYC to come home instead. Took a little whiskey up to my pal’s grave for the holiday and hung about a little while in our resident “irish pub.” Couldn’t manage to stay awake long enough to hear any music so it was back home to watch “Michael Collins” and cheer on the President.

Good speech. I have to find a transcription today as I missed the second half due to a sudden vision of nuclear disaster. Freaky. Ah well, the stock market’s up, the war’s likely to be over by the end of the week and things are looking up all over. Here’s to American resolve and the power for good.

Goddamn, can’t a brother catch a break! One thing piles upon another until one just wants to retire to the beach – and I don’t even like the friggin beach!

Ah well, all’s discombobulated on the war front. Our good friends in the UK are trying to play both ends against the middle and so may ask us to drop the “second” UN resolution – which of course will be the “automatic trigger for war” the Frogs and all the other Euro-weenies are so petrified of. Well, screw you pal, we’re out to make the world a better place regardless of who we have to kill to do it. By the by, while I’m on the subject, if you haven’t seen the television show “Profiles from the Front Lines” it’s on ABC Thursdays at 8 and it’s well worth the watching. Damn fine stuff. Surely all monitored and managed but most excellently cool all the same. God bless the United States Army and affiliated forces. Can you even begin to imagine the world without us?

On another subject – this war may finally be the end of the ” – American” craze. I have always described myself as a mutt but I am mostly Irish – American and German – American. Well, since the Deutsch are on the side of the perfidious Frogs and the Irish just bailed on any conflict not waged under the auspices of our resident morally bankrupt world guvmint what’s a brother to do? I ’spect all of us will just have to settle for the finest appelation ever expressed in the history of mankind – American. Suits me.

Sure and I thought the micks and huns were good for a fight. Shows how the world has changed. Next you’ll be telling me Germans don’t like busty blondes and the Irish have taken to the twelve step program.

Fuuuuuuuuuuck! I just don’t understand it no more.

I’m sure by now everyone’s read the news. A British unit out doing weapons practice near Iraq was surrendered to by Iraqi soldiers who, upon hearing gunfire, assumed the war had begun. This is just too perfect. Here it is, straight from the Sunday Mirror’s mouth:

A British Army source in Kuwait contacted me to explain how the extraordinary surrender bid unfolded. The source said: “The British guys on the front-line could not believe what was happening. They were on pre-war exercises when all of a sudden these Iraqis turned up out of nowhere, with their hands in the air, saying they wanted to surrender.

“They had heard firing and thought it was the start of the war.”

I, and the Brits, actually feel pity for the poor fellows. They had already risked the border crossing to surrender, presumably in the hope of getting some food and decent clothing and instead had to be escorted back across the border into a less than welcome reception, I’m sure. What a drag. Like someone said, “Pip pip, there’s a good wog. Back across the sand old boy. It’s not quite time for you lot to go tits up. Give it a week or so.”

I dunno. What’s the appropriate response? Maybe something like, JESUS CHRIST! THE FUCKING ENEMY SOLDIERS ARE SURRENDERING WHEN THERE ISN’T EVEN A WAR! DOESN’T THIS TELL YOU SOMETHING!

Note the capital letters – maybe those in control can hear better when you shout. Nah, apparently the fact the Iraqis are now voting with their feet for a better life isn’t sufficient for the “striped pants set.” Heaven forfend, whatever shall we do without the U.N? Quagmire! Quagmire!

Whoa, finally things are apparently calming down. I thought for sure yesterday would be nice and mellow, instead I spent nearly the entire day on the telephone doing about 10 things at once. Not how I planned it but it did make the day pass relatively swiftly.

I am beginning to feel the need for a campaign to eliminate all possibility for a right turn on red. Some numbskull old lady sat behind me today at a red light and BEEPED at me repeatedly – I suppose in order to get me to make the turn. Well, sorry lady but F YOU! First of all, I generally dislike turning right on red under any circumstances. I’ve been known to do it if A) I’m in a hurry or B) there’s no other cars around within sight. I’m damn sure not going to try to squeak in a right turn against cars turning left. What if they cut their turn too tight? Hell, I know if I was one of the cars turning left I’d be pissed at some dude turning right into me. People need to calm the hell down. You’ll get there eventually and waiting through a 30 second red light is not even in the same league as driving 15 or more miles through a virtually non-existent snowfall at 10 MPH. Sorry. It just ain’t.

So, I think I need to start carrying around a tire-iron so when some prick behind me starts beeping at me for a perfectly legitimate application of traffic law I can just leap out of the car and smash in their window. Good for me, good for the insurance industry. What’s the downside?

If you read the article I offered Wednesday you would have noticed the comments of Hawra al-Zuad, an Iraqi exile living here in the United States. These comments were left presumably by her:

For the people that still think that we shouldn’t go out to war…..Have you ever heard of a country that cuts off a ear or tongue for saying something against the president or for nothing…What about a law that tatooes an X on your forehead if a person doesn’t go to the army.

I could go on and talk about the grinders near the Euphrates..The only thing left to say is the people of Iraq deserves to live their lives. Just like we do.

Amen. Amen. Iraq is the cradle of civilization. Surely it is incumbent on us to ensure she can hold her head high among the civilized nations of the Earth. “Liberty is not America’s gift to the world. Liberty is God’s gift to humanity.” Everyone deserves to live their lives in a manner of their choosing. That’s one of the most beautiful things about our United States: you can be whatever you resolve to be. We are the shining city on the hill. Despite our faults, despite our many errors we are still the last best hope of Earth. Is it too much to ask that we ensure that same promise of liberty to those around the globe that dream of living in freedom?

Amen Hawra. I hope you do get to go back for spring break and see an Iraq free, for the first time in its existence, to live in harmony with its neighbors and free to chose how best to make its own way in the world to the benefit of its people.

As part of our ongoing series on “Why We Fight” – anyone ever seen those old WWII films? – we present the voice of the Iraqi people via this excellent article:

. . . few Iraqis speak in puzzles anymore. They ask direct questions. Here is the rest of that Monday morning conversation:

“Do you know when?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Are you coming?”

“Yes. I am coming. We will . . . ”

The second speaker, an Iraqi in Michigan, began to provide details but quickly reconsidered, ending his thought in mid-sentence. He says he was shocked by the candor coming from Iraq. “Never in the history of Iraq do people talk like this,” he said later.

“Why are you silent?”

“I’m afraid that you’ll be in danger.”

“Don’t be afraid. We are not afraid. This time is serious.”

“I am coming with the American Army.”

“Is there a way that we can register our names with the American forces to work with them when they arrive? Will you call my house at the first moment you arrive? I will help.”

If that doesn’t make you want to run right out and slap a peace-pansy I don’t know what can. How about this hope for the future?

Another, Hawra al-Zuad, is a 16-year-old student at an Islamic academy in suburban Detroit. Her sky blue headscarf seems to coexist comfortably with her marked Detroit accent. Although she doesn’t remember her family’s flight 12 years ago, she is eager to return to her native Iraq. “I’ll go visit right away,” she says. “I want to go see how it is over there. I forgot everything about it. I want to see my house, where I used to live when I was little.”

A good way to spend summer vacation, I suggest.

She quickly corrects me. “Spring break. I hope it’s spring break.”

And there’s what all the peace-pukes have been missing. These are a people ready, willing and able to fight to win their freedom. As the article points out, they’ve already done it once with near success. Too bad We the People didn’t fulfill our promises. Can you imagine the go-go 1990s with a Middle East in the last throes of despotism? Hell, we’d probably not be in a recession now, Clinton might not have been President, we’d certainly still have a WTC, the list goes on and on. But no, we had to piss about for 12 years abandoning our friends and placating our enemies and now look where it’s got us.

F ‘em. Kill ‘em all. These folks will back us. Who needs the rest of the world?

Somebody must have been this morning because things went as nearly perfectly as I could hope. Started at 5 AM with bringing up the two host sites – painless. By 5:30 we had three of six remotes on line with no problems. By 6:30 the two last production remotes and by shortly after 7 the final remote. Then by 8, despite some routing difficulties, the final 2 non-frame sites were online. Not too damn bad. You try bringing up a network, scatted across seven states with well-meaning but generally technically incompetent folks out there to help, with virtually no snags whatsoever. I chalk it up to competence on my end, a great deal of help from a list of folks too numerous to mention and just bloody good luck. A great deal of prayer over the last weeks and months probably didn’t hurt either.

What a damned nightmare. I’m very glad it’s all but over. I think the relaxation will kick in sometime after lunch (haven’t eaten in nearly eight hours) and then maybe I’ll actually be able to sleep soundly tonight for the first time in weeks.

And then maybe tomorrow, I’ll actually have a chance to catch up on all the things I’ve missed over the last couple of weeks. Mmmm, calm cool and collected. I love that feeling.

Yep, that’d be me. Not as if anyone bloody noticed.

After a crappy, stress-filled week the damned job didn’t even get done due to Verizon’s lying down on the job again (tell me again why PA didn’t crush them as the monopolistic little bug that they are?). So, it’s time for part 2 of the crappy, stress-filled week. At least it would be if I actually gave a shit anymore. By this point I don’t think I care. I will when things start to ramp up again but for right now, I’m all about the maxin’ and relaxin’.

And since nothing new is happening anywhere in the world there just isn’t much to talk about. I suppose I could comment on how spectacularly dissappointing Gods and Generals was but it’s been done to death everywhere Civil War types gather. Besides, I’ve got to come up with a writing sample this week. Now where in the hell am I supposed to come up with a respectable – mind you – writing sample? It isn’t as if I write anything but vitriol. It’s been a long time since college and I don’t even have any of those old papers around anyway. I suppose it’ll be creative writing time. Damn, I never could write a good story. Either I’m correct in that my stories are uninteresting or I’m being too hard on myself as usual. Either way, I’m fecked with a capital F.

So much for maxin’ and relaxin’.

Actually, not yet. But on another note the web is chock full of NR ‘y goodness today.

An excellent article, which I won’t link to, on why Europe is so dead-set against our aims. Makes perfect sense and also explains why liberals (like my Mom) constantly harp about how I don’t listen. I do listen, I just fight to win.

And then there’s this absolute gem. You gotta read it. This fellow sums up PRECISELY what I’ve been harping about for the past months and completely internalizes all my arguments and pours them forth far more cogently than I ever have. Not that I had anything at all to do with his article. I’m small potatoes. Hell, I’m not even a spud. I just find it really nifty that an official pundit is saying exactly the same thing I’m saying and for a change I had the idea first.

We’re working to end Islamic terrorism the hard way, over the course of the next several decades. Taking down corrupt regimes. Establishing democratic institutions. Building nations. The Taliban came first. Saddam is next in line if for no other reason than we’ve got a pretext for going after him: He’s in violation of the surrender terms which kept him in power in 1991. And after Saddam? Maybe Syria. Maybe Iran. Maybe the Sudan. The testimonies of Iraqi civilians, after we liberate them, will provide us our next fig leaf for doing what needs to be done. Beyond that, the writing will be on the wall for Libya. For Egypt. For Saudi Arabia. Wherever radical Islam festers, we will go. And we will go in force, and in waves, and with an absolute certitude that the cause of individual liberty and human rights is just.

After a time, the people themselves won’t wait for us; they will witness the ordinary miracles of freedom, the better lives of liberated populations, and they will not abide tyranny for long. They will wise up, and they will rise up. No one wants to get caught on the wrong side of history. The Arabic word “Islam” means submission, but submission is meaningless, it is merit-less, unless it is undertaken freely. If in the end free people no longer submit themselves to Allah’s will, the religion itself will wither and die.

It’s not a new world order.

It’s a new world.

Makes me happy.

Stage one complete and now the reality of the size and complexity of the operation sets in and the sick-to-the-stomach nervousness commences not to be dispelled until the entire project is complete.

And that’ll take the rest of the week and potentially into the next.

Lovely. There’s nothing like looking forward to not sleeping, feeling sick, and generally being discombobulated for a whole week. If I sit just so, I can actually feel the cold tingling sensation on the back of my neck as the blade starts to descend.

Goddamn job. Maybe I’ll be a gardner next. I think I could handle fighting earthworms and rabbits all day.

Wanna know about my life? A fellow named Spider Jerusalem (who conveniently enough doesn’t exist) summed it all up nicely:

By four o’clock, I had discounted suicide in favor of killing everyone else in the entire world instead.

That’s beautiful man. Brings tears to my eyes every time I read it.

But on another note, I was thinking last night about regrets. I don’t mean the sort of every day regrets like, “I regret I had that last beer.” “I regret I didn’t get the name of that chick who was slobbering all over my dick last night.” Nah, I mean the BIG regrets. The deep down ones that when you’re lying on your deathbed kicking the sheets at the injustice of it all you think to yourself – dammit, I really wish I’d done THIS.

So, what’s your deep down regret? What do you know now you’ll regret for the rest of your life? Me, I know I’ll regret never having killed someone. I think I can assume I’ll never have that opportunity in this life but damn, I will regret not having known that feeling.

Enough morbidity. The sun is shining, my hair is falling out and in a mere seven hours there’s nearly an entire case of beer in the fridge. What a lovely day.

Hah hah hah! They now have their own official site. Head on over to the Axis of Weasels site.

Worth a look.

Finally, some folks in Chicago have sued two theatre chains for showing advertisements before the film. Their legal reasoning has to do with posted movie start times – admittedly a very flimsy argument. They either want the start times adjusted to account for the time the ads consume or to be compensated $75 dollars per viewing.

Now, I don’t believe this will get very far. When adjusting start times do you take into account the coming attractions previews as well? Who judges arrival times on a matter of 1-3 minutes anyway? Wouldn’t you risk missing some of the flick?

Legally I think this case is dead on arrival. Morally I think it’s an excellent and overdue litmus test. We, the consumer, pay – handsomely in some cases – to attend a motion picture. I know that even here in the backwater regular price is running about $7.50 per. I also understand that the theatre business is tough. As I understand it theatre owners contract for a specified length of exhibition for any particular film during which time their share of the profit is close to non-existent. Any addtional exhibition time is their money. Typical, the studios and distributors get the biggest piece of the pie while the folks who do the grunt work get screwed…sort of like the music biz. Advertisements are a way for theatre owners to make up the difference and try to make a bit of a profit. With the runs of theatre bankruptcies in the past couple of years I can see that it’s needed.

Regardless, it’s in damn bad taste to make us pay to watch commercials. Isn’t that just an ad-man’s dream? In the end, although I understand both sides of the suit, I’m totally with the people suing and I hope they effect change. Sadly, I think the only way to make change a reality is to just stop going to specific theatres until the management changes its ways. But in a time when escapism is heartily needed I don’t think that’s a viable solution.

And I feel fine, really I do. Bollocks to everyone but us and bollocks to those of us who can’t see clearly the duty before us and rush to execute that duty with all the faculties at their disposal.

That being said, I was about to berate myself mightily for not having anything to say lately because, well, everything that can be said has already been said. I mean really, how often can you berate the Frogs and the ex-Deutsch for being the cheese (or weinerschnitzel) eating appeasement monkeys that they are?

Infinitely, in fact, but it does get old after a time.

Anyway, I was interested today to read an article by the indispensable John Derbyshire concering our tortise-like “rush” to war and the apparently lightning-quick British Way of War.

The last war for me – the last war I saw my own country engage in, and some of the participants in which I knew personally – was the Falklands War of 1982. Speed and daring were certainly on display in Margaret Thatcher’s response to Argentine aggression; and the wrist-flapping mountebanks at the U.N. had very little to do with what transpired. Talking with American friends, however, they tell me that there is a characteristic American way of war, which involves the slow accumulation of overwhelming force, which is then unleashed in a brief, terrible campaign. Speed and daring don’t come into it much. It’s a different national style of war making.

I couldn’t let that one slide so I sent him the following email:

I read your comments of 2/18 with some interest. Like you, I am hedging my bets on war with Iraq. I should very much like to see it go forward as much for the purely military/security reasons as for the belief that toppling Saddam will lead to a domino effect of freedom throughout the Middle East. I feel so strongly about this that I am convinced it is all but irrelevant which Middle Eastern state we invade so long as we invade someone and demonstrate overwhelmingly that we simply won’t accept their sort of hypocritical totalitarian higgledy-piggledy anymore.

But, I am surprised at your reference to the “British way of war” being markedly superior to the slow buildup of the “American way of war.” Agreed, the Falklands campaign was a masterpiece of swiftness but that was against an all but non-existent threat – much like the American campaigns in Panama and Grenada. Rather, I think of the quick British actions in the opening days of World Wars One and Two where the BEF was nearly crushed (in the Great War) and only narrowly escaped being driven entirely into the sea (as in the Second World War). Reasonable folks can disagree about the American contributions to those wars (particularly the First) but there is something to be said for an overwhelming build up of men and material and then a final quick strike. In WWII, of course, we built up men and material for two and one half years only to finally unleash it and end the war in Europe less than one year later.

I think I’ll take the surety of a slow buildup followed by a swift and overwhelming assault over the immediate strike with whatever forces are at hand and endless hand-wringing over an outcome in doubt.

That being said, hurrah for the British all the same. After being betrayed by the Irish (whose whiskey distilleries are owned almost entirely by the French), and the Germans (whose transgressions are patently obvious) at least I can still, in good conscience, sit down with a pint of bitter and cheer John Bull. And this due to a Labour Prime Minister no less!

Will wonders never cease?

While looking at ridiculous news broadcasts about yesterday’s snowfall it struck me how pathetic a creature modern man is. There was a time when the biggest worries were finding food and a warm place to spend the night. Now we go into absolute convulsions over where we’re to dispose of a mere two feet of snow.

How lame is that?

Yep, it’s pretty clear mankind hasn’t got the stones to handle any sort of setback or hardship. Ho for the days when blizzards were handled with preparation and hard work. I’ll take a one way trip to the days when difficulties were overcome with perserverence and an iron will.

You want to know why we can’t/won’t go to war even when it is so patently required? We go to pieces at several inches of snow! How the hell can we be expected to handle defending our fellow men at the potential cost of our lives?

So much for global warming, eh?

God damn the human race. What a bunch of inconsiderate, lazy, inefficient, worthless, venal, useless chunks of fucking protoplasm!

I damn near got through the day without any smiling idiot getting in my face about Valentine’s Day and had, as I planned my evening, completely forgotten the date but then, damned if I didn’t think I might try to get some supper and catch a flick. Oh no, sez the wastrels that constantly impede my path, it’s mother-fucking Valentine’s Day! Therefore, all us poster children for the Right to Choose will be wandering the streets, taking up all the seats in every restaurant and standing several hundred deep trying to buy tickets to the theatre so we can stuff our gobs with popcorn, slathered in coagulated oil and salt and laugh out loud and the typically inane fare we’re force-fed by our heroes in Southern California.

Fuck ‘em. The whole bloody species. Dammit, I’m not an entirely unreasonable mammal but God Damn! People had better start learning to stay the hell out of my way.

Oh, genocide. Where have you gone?

I know I’m a day early but I’m just so gosh-darned excited I couldn’t wait.

Hey, it’s better than our current Hallmark^TM holiday. Feckin’ Valentine’s Day. I think Dickens (with my help) said it best:

“If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Happy Valentine’s Day’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own chocolates, and buried with a Hallmark^TM card through his heart. He should!”

And so, I offer my annual tribute to this day of love, chocolates and sappy cards:

Yep, the sentiment expressed says it all. F this.

Or redcoats or [insert tale of invaders told to frighten children here]. I find it stupefying how many people are just sheep. Easily frightened and easily led by the nose due to fear. So, we’re at threat yellow. Big f’in deal. We’re at war folks! Did you miss the memo? As I see it war means you and your populace are at a high threat level at all times. Do you think the folks in central Germany and the Ruhr were wandering about fat dumb and happy through 1943 and ‘44? Nope. I bet they were as ready as the could be with the understanding that when the bombs started falling no amount of bottled water or battery powered radios would mean a good goddamn.

So, run right out and buy all the bread and water you can carry. Stock up on batteries and candles. Make sure you own a transistor radio. Hell, if you’re completely over the edge feel free to coat your house in duct tape and wander the streets in suits made of saran wrap. If the bombs or germs or vapors suddenly appear it ain’t going to mean nothing. There will be no warning. There will be no time to prepare. It will happen, people will die and then we’ll have to

1. Clean up the damage and go on as after 9/11
2. Hopefully realize how idiotic we’ve been since 9/11
3. Understand there are bad people in the world who don’t hate us for our SUVs but rather for our beliefs, our freedom and the other intangibles we wouldn’t change if we could
4. Finally get the lead out and begin the liberation of the Earth

No, I don’t aim low. Aim high, man, aim high. I seem to remember an old thought of mine: Always aim for the stars so if you miss, you end up with the sky and that’s a fair comprimise. I think in this case that means, aim to free all people, if we miss then we still have to deal with the French, Germans and Belgians but we’ll have a whole mess of happy new allies to back our play.

How cool a word is that? Hyperpower. Now if we could only add the word dynamic, as in “dynamic hyperpower” or hyperdynamopower, then we’d really have something. For, as we all know, the word dynamic just makes things sound cool.

I have to say, aside from being annoyed with the Catholic Church I am absolutely ashamed to be part German. What ever happened to Blitzkreig? To killing Belgians willy-nilly because some small Belgian child accidentally crossed in front of a division of troops on their way to the Channel? How the mighty have fallen. Can everyone comprehend the oddity of a Franco-German common citizenship? France and Germany becoming essentially one nation? Talk about the world turned upside down! We can hope, and pray, that this is all just a devious plan on the part of the Reich to conquer France once and for all under the auspices of diplomacy but I think it is not. Oh, poor Father Deutschland – I fear they were right about you. You don’t deserve the power and people you have.

But more importantly is my thought last night about “Why they Hate Us.”^TM Of course, the stock answer is our power and wealth and our nigh soulless culture. Fine, fine. That is as it may be. I think they hate us because we don’t use that power and wealth well. What’s the point of sending hundreds of billions of dollars in foreign aid to nations ruled by theives and barbarians? Gee, big surprise – food aid being sent to North Korea isn’t getting to the people, instead it’s going to feed the army. Well, slap ma jaws! As if we didn’t see that one coming. Billions and billions of dollars have gone to the thugocracies of Africa, Central America, Asia, etc and what have we earned in return? The enmity of people who continue to live in fear and squalor while their “leaders” build lavish new residences with the American taxpayer’s money. Meanwhile, the lefties here at home rail against American involvement in world affairs, annoyed that we abuse or misuse our overwehelming hyperdynamopower to support the bubbleheads around the world who enslave their own people.

So, what’s the answer? I say we reinvest that foreign aid – at least the dough that goes to kleptocracies the world over – and put it towards building our own, unilateral peace force. Then we simply invade all the nations that haven’t earned the right to exist under their present form of government and ensure that power goes to the people. Pax Americana, remember? It looks like – and I daily pray it happens – we’re going to do it in Iraq but why stop there? Invade North Korea, conquer Africa, liberate East Asia. Under the banner of liberty, march throughout the world bringing freedom to the masses. If done well, we could change the world for the fourth time in our national existence.

Mmmmm, hyperdynamopower punch!

And they all fall down.

I’d like to take this time to apologize to everyone for the woeful behaviour of the Catholic Church in the past several months. Not satisified with the catastrophic scandals wracking the American Church now they’ve gone and sacrificed their backbone and any claim to moral superiority by sounding like a bunch of stupid Frenchmen. I suppose, in a way, one could attempt to understand their position – drawn from a supposed respect for life. What gets my goat is that in their insistence on “preserving life” they completely ignore the fact of the thousands of Iraqi citizens tortured, killed and otherwise desperately incovenienced by the current regime. So much for respecting life, why not just come out and say it? You respect order. That’s all. Nothing terribly wrong with that but it does leave one’s moral worth wanting from time to time.

Nope, we’ll take the risk to deliver liberty to our LBBs and as a delightful little side-benefit ensure peace and security to ourselves.

“Barring a miracle (for which we all must pray), this nation is going to war.”

An interesting sentiment from someone who is committed to disarming that Iraqi wingnut. For my part, I don’t think we ought to pray for peace. Matter of fact, I’m not even all that convinced that war is a terrible thing. Destro said it best, “War is man’s most natural state: the fittest survive and the greatest technological advances are made.” There’s lots to argue with in that statement but the basic premise is true, war is man’s most natural state. Ever read philosophy? Show me a philosopher who doesn’t continually wrestle with the essential conflict of life. Talked to a teenager lately or watched one of those woefully bad John Hughes 80s flicks? Same same. Everything is war and everybody dies eventually.

That being said, I think it is absolutely imperative we go to war in the Middle East. I don’t care if we invade Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, etc. It’s utterly irrelavant who we invade and occupy as long as we do it to someone. Iraq is top of the list because it’s the most immediate threat to us but it really doesn’t make any difference. The mission is to wipe out these pipsqueak, bass-ackwards, paleo-political semi-states. That goes for all of them. Once Iraq falls, Iran will topple. Then we’ll be able to put serious pressure on Saudi Arabia. Once they’re out of the way the other little hangers-on states will get the idea. Will this accomplish anything towards ending the War on Terrorism? Absolutely not. It may even make it worse. Will we all be better off in the long run? Absolutely.

And so the question is that which I have asked myself so many times: If you’re such a big fan of war and so perfectly willing to sacrifice the lives of tens of thousands of people around the world, why haven’t you ever served in the military?

The answer is simple, until now Uncle Sam didn’t need me. Now, I’m getting a bit long in the tooth but rest assured, if we were to suffer a setback in the Middle East but our resolve remained strong and more men were needed to do the fighting and dying – I’d be the first in line to sign up. This is that important. Bollocks to all the talk of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and so forth. What the war is about is a Pax Americana. We’re going in to get the rats out of their holes and make the world safe for us. Period.

And Africa’s next, dammit.

On another, less strident note, tomorrow marks the first anniversary of this little WWW recording device. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the entire experience. Probably said some things that will come back to haunt me (see above) but it’s been a laugh.

Bonus points if you can calculate the number above. I’m too damned annoyed to be bothered with it right now but I know it’s big.

Alright, I’ll allow that the snow last night was treacherous and today was a little rough but that’s NO EXCUSE for making me drive back from Hanover last night (18 mi.) in second gear and never going faster than 25 mph. It took a bloody HOUR! If we had stopped at a traffic signal I feel fairly certain I would have climbed out, went to the car in front causing the obscenely slow progress and smashed the driver’s head into the steering column. I’m telling you, I was PISSED!

And now today, better than last night but still rough on the curves and the damn nitwits won’t accelerate past 35 mph, even on roads that look as clean as if they’d only been rained on.

Either I have to move north where they know how to handle snow or the rest of these pickaninny weenies have to move south. This here state ain’t big enough for all of us. I mean, really, KEE-RIST! Therefore, as a public service I provide my snow emergency checklist:

1. If you hear the weather report and feel an undeniable urge to purchase two gallons of milk, a case of bottled water and several loaves of bread. Move south.
2. If a slight dusting of snow turns you into Granny Gruntcakes out for her Sunday drive in the old Model A. Move south.
3. If stepping outside to get the mail involves more than two layers of clothing (including undergarments) and/or ridiculously ugly/furry boots from 1982. Move south.

I’m sure there are plenty more possibilities, maybe some kind readers will chime in with one or two but the gist of it is, speed up or get the hell out of my way!

Go ahead, tell me the United States Marine Corps aren’t the baddest muthas on the planet!

photo by Scott Nelson/Getty Images

Man, I love those guys. What rag-headed camel jockey can stand up to that? Particularly when you expand the photograph to show the good Captain Muralt mounted atop his M-1 Abrams. Death is coming. Get out of the way or suffer the consequences.

On another note, for the ease of all one or two of our readers, the all new Mess of the Damned (.org) icon is now available here. Use it for your favorite programs or use it to create your very own desktop shortcut directly to Mess of the Damned (.org). Fun with friends! Great at parties!

As much as I despise Fast Eddie Rendell I have promised repeatedly that if he takes positive steps I’ll be the first to congratulate him. Therefore, allow me to be among the first to congratulate him on taking a stand against the woeful mismanagement of the Pennsylvania Convention Center by refusing to release state funds to help pay for the maintenance/expansion of same. So far, the convention center project has been a typical Philly politics, graft and union boondoggle. So bad, that it’s commented that no organization has rescheduled a convention there after dealing with the foolishness once. Hurrah for taking a stand against “business as usual.”

Now we get to wait and see what the budget brings. I had a thought this morning on the way over. How odd is it that just as I receive the first Federal income tax refund in my full-time working life – with the potential for even more in the years to come – that my refund is likely to be sent directly to the Commonwealth? I suppose cynics would call that Federalism. I call it wicked waste.

I am coming to the conclusion that democracy sucks. Just listed to the thunderous blowhards at the U.N. after the Secretary of State’s speech. All have to get their word in. All have to soar to heights of rhetoric. All have to repeat, over and over again, the same things that have been said before. And what happens in the end? Absolutely nothing. Nothing changes. Nobody changes their mind. Some might be more convinced and others less unconvinced but nobody shows the slightest movement off their base position. What an utterly useless excercise.

Democracy only works with a strong hand at the tiller. Theodore Roosevelt knew this. I think President Bush is starting to understand. You may dither with the talking heads and let them spout their blatherscythe but in the end you’ve got to go right ahead and do what you think right and trust the purveyors of pomposity to go right along with you.

What’s particularly maddening is that the need to be seen and heard, which infects all politicians, carries down to the lowest level – our wide variety of social clubs. I find it spectacular that a fellow who wishes to suggest that we spend $20 on paper products has to announce himself to the President of the organization, stand up and launch into a ten or more minute exposition on the finances of the group vis a vis the current national economic position and how that relates to worldwide fluctuations in gold value and the speculative aspects of brazil nuts. Wouldn’t it have been much more simple and pleasing to everyone else just to say – if you need to be heard at all – that’s a damn fine idea! I make a motion, seconded and so moved?

We’d be able to get through meetings in 30 minutes, congressional sessions in mere months and maybe actually accomplish something at the U.N. in less than, what’s it been? 54 years?

So, democracy’s useless. A benevolent absolute monarchy is always the best choice – you just can’t rely on benevolence being a hereditary trait.

Bonus points if you catch the reference in the title. It nicely sums up my peroration.

Wouldn’t that just be a PRO-war rally? I suppose being pro-war is not something you ought to go out and loudly proclaim in a public forum – even if it is true. Regardless, I am very proud of these folks for putting this together and I hope thousands upon thousands of good Americans show up to show their support. I know that it’ll never get covered in the press but maybe it will at least enable the “great silent majority” to air their voices in contrast to the plethora of bunny huggers and members of the Baldwin family foaming at the mouth with anti-war slogans.

Gee, wouldn’t it be wonderful if pro-war became a positive thing and anti-freedom negative in our current context? Talk about redefining the English language.

Damn, I’m weary. Been having nightmares the past two night so sleeping is basically snooze for a couple of hours, sit up with the lights on for an hour or so, snooze for a couple of hours, repeat. I’m just about sick and tired of the whole thing. So, I went to do a little internet research and found out one of the causes of nightmares is alcohol abuse or the withdrawl from same. Bingo! Now the question is, how long does the withdrawl take or should I just go on a bender tonight and start the cycle all over again?

Next time, remind me not to give up drinking for even a day. It isn’t worth watching your grandfather demand to talk to James Monroe – who is actually on the telephone in the other room – immediately before he hurls himself down the basement stairs and comments, “That’s just what I needed, sir” prior to expiring.

Sure, just try and get back to sleep after that.

What a way to start a weekend! There’s nothing in the world like preparing for a world-class drunk on a Saturday morning and getting a phone call, “Turn on the TV. The Space Shuttle just blew up.”

Thanks a million. But it did give a mighty fine reason for spending the balance of the day drinking – as if a reason was needed.

So we’ve lost another shuttle. I was there in 1986, standing across the huge lake from the lauch tower, barely visible through binoculars five miles distant. I saw the ship rise at the head of a great plume of smoke and fire and saw it fall back to earth again as streaks against a cloudless sky. Believe me, it isn’t an experience I cared to repeat but deja vu’s a bitch.

I wonder if this isn’t the end. We’re on the verge of the next great leap in deep space technology and now we’ve lost another seven people to the unheralded dangers inherent in manned spaceflight. Do we have the moral fortitude to continue? I don’t know. I wonder sometimes.

How about Israel? Don’t you think the people over there are wondering when they’re going to catch a break? Don’t you think some of them are shaking their fists in God’s general direction and screaming, “I thought we had a covenant, dammit!” It just doesn’t seem right.

But, despite the hard knocks we’ve taken in this wholly bizarre year there is promise ahead. I hope by the end of the year that liberty is ascendant and expect we won’t recognize the world as it is in the new world to come. It’s about time something went right.

First of all, if all these sluts are throwing themselves at me as evidenced by my spectacular amount of daily XXX related mail – why ain’t I having a whole helluvalot more fun?

OK, that makes this really three quick things.

Today must be “Bust on the Academy Day” in my usual trip around conservative media outlets, and I have to say, I agree with every bit of it. The Academy – generally encompassing outlets of higher education – is chock full of bunny hugging nancy boys who couldn’t recognize reality if it jumped out of a bush, weilding an enormous baseball bat shaped dildo and looked like Noam Chomsky. Here’s their problem:

On the one hand, Leftist intellectuals

And so, on to Iraq. Nothing particularly new in the second half of the President’s speech. Sure, he laid out some specifics, gave some numbers and illustrated some of the torture methodology but none of this is news to serious people who have been studying Iraq and other dictatorships for the past 100 or so years. Same same for totalitarian butt-heads the world over.

I was highly gratified to hear a specific reference to the long-suffering Iranian people. One of the much-hoped-for outcomes of our invasion and occupation of Iraq will be the downfall of the Iranian regime next door. The first steps on the road to liberty for all the people of the Middle East.

North Korea got the usual treatment, we can’t really do much about you right now but we’ll not be blackmailed and if you push you’ll only end up isolated and alone. Or as Colin Powell once said, “The could launch a nuclear strike but we’d turn their country into a charcoal briquette by noon.” Meh, so much for the “great leader” and his pitifiul last outpost of Stalinism. You know, as a rule of thumb, any country that has to include every single word relating to democracy in its name (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, People’s Republic of China, etc) probably is precisely the opposite of what those words mean.

So, in the end, Mr. President laid things yet again at the doorstep of the U.N. and is leaving that useless body to stew in its own juices. Saddam has continually defied the edicts of the U.N. If they don’t have the cajones to stand up to him now then we’ll do it for them. Man, that’s good stuff. Ought to reveal the paper tiger once and for all. I loved the line about consulting with the U.N. but disarming Saddam regardless. If that doesn’t make it pretty plain that we don’t give two scratches of a plumber’s arse about that bunch of nanny state munchkins I don’t know what does.

So, that’s it. The State of the Union for 2003 is liberalism at home and the old “speak softly and carry a big stick” paradigm abroad. I have all kinds of fun comments scratched on my notesheets but the time has passed so I’ll keep them to myself.

I kept waiting for him to break into the speech and announce that the bombs had started to fall…alas, for that long-awaited announcement we’ll have to wait about two more weeks.

Whew! What a day. Finally I get around to commenting on what may be the finest speech in the last decade. I took notes but left them at home so I’ll have to rely on my memory and the plethora of commentaries and news articles out there today about the State of the Union. Almost makes you wistful for the old days of the President’s Annual Message doesn’t it?

First off, I have to say I thought the speech was absolutely brilliant – both rhetorically and politically. One of the finest uses of the politician’s trade is to take your enemy’s talking points and make them your own issues. The President did this again and again. The Dems want to whine about the economy? Fine, here’s how we’ll fix things. Old folks are having a tough time and health insurance is too expensive? We can fix that too. The underpriviledged? Yep, got some help for them on the way. What about the environment? How about major new initiatives on that front as well.

How ya like dem apples?

So the first part of the speech was dedicated solely to domestic priorities:

Senior citizens will get to have choice, just like beneficiaries of the Federal Government’s health plans. Brilliant. If it’s good enough for Sen. Daschle, it should be good enough for Gramma and Grampa Kettle. Who can argue that what the politicos and other bureaucrats deserve is wrong for America?

We’ll toss some money towards underpriviledged kids and drug addicts. That ought to put a bit of a band-aid on crime and poverty and, along with Welfare Reform, move us toward a time when everyone gets the same chances as everyone else.

Tax cuts across the board, right bloody now! Spot on, I loved the line about allowing the American people to keep their money. Isn’t it telling that the Democraps couldn’t be bothered to stand and applaud at that remark? Hell, the House Minority Leader – that Californian paragon of left-liberalism – even laughed on national TV! Heh, allowing the American people to keep their own hard-earned money. Wotta scream! Don’t they know there are others more deserving of their money than they?

AIDS relief to Africa. Unprecedented and amazing to all. Not only does this pull the rug from under the Democraps charges of uncaring, unthinking Republicans but it calms the conservative masses who’d certainly object to the spending by couching the effort in purely moral terms. We have the money, we have the power, we can help and what’s more, we have an absolute duty to help.

Then came the two things that made me very happy – a call for a total ban on human cloning and a call for a ban on partial birth abortions. Some call this a sop to the “far right” but in reality all they are is a continuation of the policies already laid out and demonstrating a deep and abiding respect for human life. We are going to spend billions of dollars helping the elderly, the poor and addicted, AIDS sufferers in Africa, etc. Surely we can do no less at home and protect the health, well-being, and very existence of those least able to protect themselves? Partial birth abortion is infanticide for chrissakes! Baby killing! Isn’t it amazing that people who, 40 years ago, spat on American servicemen coming back from a war nobody liked very much and called them “baby killers” find it almost impossible to abhor that very real practice now? So much for the moral compass of the lefties.
Ah, and then the bit I loved best out of the whole speech – the bit about hydrogen powered automobiles. I worry this was tossed in at the last minute – maybe as a sop to environmentalists, maybe to head off the “no blood for oil” rhetoric, maybe because it’s a wonderful way to move our interests away from the Middle East and “an important step toward helping the Saudis get back to their roots as goatherds and tribal bandits.” Who knows? For my part, I found it Kennedy-esque. With a timetable it could have been as energizing and spectacular as the old challenge “to send a man to the moon in this decade.” Just think of the possibilities!

And then, on to Iraq and the rest of the Axis of Evil. I think I’ll leave off here as I’ve already written a lot and there’s a lot to digest. More later.

This is absolutely the best thing I’ve seen all month!

Priceless. I wish I could have it printed on the back of my “I hate the French” mug.

Typically I try to restrain my more fascist tendencies. It is endemic in all deep lovers of law and order to tend towards right-wing extremism but I have to say, after reading about the foolishness in Pittsburgh over the weekend I’d really like to shoot two or three of these folks.

Folks in Pittsburgh organized an anti-war rally. No problems there, every man-jack of us is entitled to declare our opinions as loudly as we please. Here’s the rub. Several of these left-wingnuts decided they’d impersonate the dead Iraqis that will surely result from “Mr. Bush’s War.” To that end they laid down in the street, impeding traffic and generally causing a publicly noticible nuisance. It all went very calmly and for a change even the bunny huggers were respectful of police authority and calmly got up and left when the police said it was time to leave. All well and good. My problem is with their actions in the first place. We are all entitled to air our opinions, that’s a right.

Amendment I – Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Fair enough, I’ve no problem with their right to spout the most vile, wicked sort of peace-nikery that bubbles up from their sick little cesspools of minds. What I do have a problem with is them incoveniencing other law-abiding citizens to do so. Where in the First Amendment does it give any of us the right to affect any other of us in our “petition[ing] the government for a redress of grievances?” Me, I’d have announced, “You have ten seconds to disperse.” And at the end of that ten seconds I’d have shot one of them. Annouce again, “You have ten seconds to disperse.” If they hadn’t already gotten the picture shoot another, and so on. They’d shortly get the message and get the hell off the street.

This method would have the extra added bonus of doing much to relieve the gun-control controversy. On the one hand the lefty nit-wits could begin to clamor that the police shouldn’t be armed either with the happy result of thereby shattering much of their arms control argument (Only the police and military should have guns. Since it’s their job to protect us, why do we need to be armed?). On the other hand they could all realize exactly what the Second Amendment was designed to protect and therefore they’d all get armed and become as staunch defenders of the Second Amendment as Charleton Heston. Bollocks to the ACLU. What about the Civil Liberties of those folks trying to drive downtown? Don’t they have the right not to be bothered, nay assaulted, by these libertoid twits?

Oh for a good old-fashioned civil emergency. Then the burnings could commence aplenty.

And I ain’t just talking about that sorry excuse for a Super Bowl last night.

Finally put the old fella in the ground today. Nifty ceremony and a bright, beautiful spot with a south-eastern vista to be planted in.

So we now return you to your regularly scheduled normalcy. Maybe I’ll even be able to get some sleep. Yeesh.

Everyone ought to take some time to look at cafepress.com. They have some nifty stuff over there. For instance, just yesterday I finally broke down and ordered my Fightin’ Whites t-shirt – “Everything’s gonna be all white!” – and one of these nifty little items.

Well worth the expense. I may have to go back and buy some more. Support your favorite bulletin boards, blogs, what have you.

Buy buy buy! It’s your patriotic duty. The President said so.

A friend poses a good question

saddam has odered any scientist \ biologist \ weapons specialist who co-operate with u.n. inspectors, along with thier families killed. and people dont want to go to war with him…….what the hell are they thinking?

I’ve so far refrained from posting much on Saddam. Partly because it’s being done to death and partly because the whole argument is an exercise in futility. His offenses are plain. The need for action is self-evident. And yet the world persists in granting him chance after chance to do right, make amends, and avoid the hammer-fall.

I no longer think the war is inevitable. The French have made it fairly plain they’ll veto any Security Council resolution approving military action. Naturally, while they couch this in humanitarian, leftist, diplomatic fashion their real motives are purely economic. The frogs have most of the oil contracts with Saddam, when he goes their contracts are invalidated. Ergo, they have a vested interest in keeping him in power. German motives for opposition are closer to home, Schroeder made it a campaign issue to “stand up to” the United States to draw attention away from his own failures. Having made so spectacular a promise he can’t very well go back on it.

We’ve simply waited too long. We’ve given the opposition time to organize. We’ve allowed the talking heads to monopolize their idea of the “moral high ground” – although as my friend points out, morality is completely on our side. Sure, the President’s strategy will point out that the UN is a straw man, completely incapable to defend its own founding principles but what good does that do us? The incapacity for defense has somehow become a laudable state, the fact that you won’t go to war – even against the most monstrous regime since Hitler/Stalin (take your pick) – has somehow become praiseworthy. The ability to project military power around the globe in the name of liberty and security has become something to be feared and resented and somehow barbaric.

Piffle. The world doesn’t deserve us. I’d go back to arguing for isolationism – let the buggers stew in their own juices – except that the forces of evil (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, China, North Korea, France, Germany, etc) would take that as a sign of surrender and only press the attack further.

Maybe we do need to take a page from the peaceniks’ book. When they scent blood they don’t stop until the animal is dead. When do we start hunting?

Well, at least my pal went in good company. I just read that Bill Maudlin, the WW2 cartoonist of great fame also died Wednesday.

So now Jeff in his Civil War kit and Bill in his fatigues and tanker jacket can both wander on off into the sunset. I tell you, there must be good company in heaven.

I lost a friend last night. As near as I can recall it’s the first “adult” friend I’ve lost. In the past I’ve lost family – an uncle, grandparents, a couple of great-grandparents – and people I’ve known have died but this is the first pal, drinking buddy type friend that up and died on me. One of the hazards of having older friends is losing them one at a time until you’re left, all alone, at the end. Happens to the best of us I suppose.

So, no more German beers. No more documentaries from Discovery or History or TLC. No more switching from the Super Bowl halftime show to watch overdeveloped trailer trash smack each other with office chairs – otherwise known as professional wrestling.

I heard he’s being buried in his Civil War uniform. Appropriate for a dude who grew up in Gettysburg and spent his entire life tramping the battlefield, fully steeped in history. Maybe that’s why I keep having this vision of him. Back in the 90s there was an R&B video that showed Easy-E (after he died) looking back over his shoulder as he ascended to heaven. I keep seeing Jeff, in his kit, ponytail tucked under his forage cap and Enfield on his shoulder, looking back over his shoulder with a sort of half-grin and tramping off into the ether.

Fair journey my friend. May you be in heaven a half hour before the Devil knows you’re dead.

I was right! I’m not crazy after all – crazy like a fox maybe.

There are commies everywhere! And I ain’t talking Clintonista, socialist medicine and the big welfare state kind of crypto-commies. I’m talking straight-up, kill everyone who argues with you, redistribution of wealth by force, take over the world, Ronald Reagan hates you kind of commies.

Man, where’s the Duke when you need him? The fella had it right when he said during the Civil War, “We don’t have men fit for these times.”

On this 30th anniversary of Roe v. Wade everyone ought to take a moment to bow their heads and remember the 40 million plus children whose young lives were brutally snuffed out by those who have pledged to defend life. Remember how pissed everyone was when the Islamo-fascists lopped off Daniel Pearl’s head on TV? Now, imagine how disgusted and angry you’d have been if they had popped him – while still living – in an oversized blender and punched up puree. Yet, this sort of thing happens to hundreds of human beings every single day and nobody’s got the brass cajones to stand up and call it what it is.

Murder.

So much for the soapbox. My Grandmother has a shirt that I think is way over the top. It says, “Thanks Mom for not aborting me.” Pretty in your face. Usually I’d hesitate at that strident a message but being a 1973 baby and therefore perfectly positioned to be among the first of the holocaust I find those sentiments frighteningly appropriate on this day.

Later on, more Rendell bashing. You just gotta love a dude who gets up on the podium and says, in effect, I can’t promise I’ll accomplish anything I’ve just proposed today. Man, ain’t politics grand?

A relatively shitty weekend broken up by a relatively decent party. I figured out why the whole world went to hell in the latter part of the week though. Damn full moon. Always screwing things up.

I have two predictions for the time ahead.

1. This Eagles team – don’t ask me what this means specifically, I haven’t decided yet – will never make it to the Super Bowl. Something will have to change. Regardless, the Eagles as we currently know them will never go to the big game. Damn the Philly sports curse!

2. We’re not going to invade Iraq. Support is already slipping, the bunny-huggers have had ample time to get organized – as evidenced by the rally this weekend in the capital – the administration is split, Congress sees enough anti-war support to want to debate the question again, Saddam appears to be caving to the inspectors, etc. It all adds up. We’re not going. Pity, we could have saved those people from decades more of the most terrible oppression imaginable but the United States simply doesn’t have the moral fortitude it once had. I know the Romans had a latin phrase for it which I can’t immediately recall but it had something to do with the weakness inherent in luxury.

Man, what would Ronald Reagan say if he could remember he’s not Bonzo?

I actually have something to say at long last on the cloning thing. I won’t even dignify the Raelian claims by commenting on them. Instead I was reading an article on the effects reproductive cloning might have on the institution of marriage. Marriage, of course, is already facing major difficulties and may be in its death-throes. Be that as it may I think the idea of cloning yourself in order to have a kid is pretty bent. Personally I wouldn’t want to have myself as a kid. I know not only how many headaches I gave my parents but also how really rough I perceive my childhood was. I also know that I’m not entirely tickled with the person I am right now and I also know that there are a fair number of people who’d – from time to time – like to kick my head in. Why on earth would I want to recreate myself so that little me could go through some approximation of the trials I went through? Not to mention how bizarre it would be to have yourself wiping your arse in your incontinent years.

OK, then. Who to clone if you really want a kid and have given up all hope on the natural front? An old girlfriend? Tell me that wouldn’t have all sorts of interesting Woody Allen-ish repercussions to an aging person seeing the object of their desire recreated in their prime. How about your Mom or Dad? That at least has some sort of peculiar attractiveness to it in its own very sick way. Just think, you could have Mom in her prime wiping down yer backside in your autumn years just as she spent her prime doing in your infant years. Woo, that makes the mind boggle don’t it?

OK, enough fixation on scatalogical imagery. It is a legitimate question though. Are people really so spectacularly narcisstic that they’d want to recreate themselves? I doubt it. At least outside of New York City. So what do we do? Permit the few oddballs to recreate someone from a few strands of hair or just put the kibosh on the whole thing from the start? I opt for the latter and fall back on my old standby, just because we have the capability to do something does not neccessarily imply we should do something. I know there’s a proper philosophical/logical term for that maxim but it escapes me just now.

Heh. This is priceless:

The Philadelphia Eagles also came close last year and they will be playing their final game in Veterans Stadium which is to this city what the old Garden was to Boston. The Vet, like the Garden, has an awful playing surface and some of the surliest fans in America. The average lynch mob exhibits more decorum than the crowd at an Eagles game.

I miss the old days of D batteries from the 700 level. One last hurrah in the old Vet and then it’s off to San Diego! Whee doggy!

What a hell of a week. From the heights of good times and great beer to the depths of misery and Mad Dog 20/20 in a matter of hours. Feh.

My prescription is as follows: drink heavily tonight and beat your head into walls while railing against the injustice of:

• The universe in general
• That heeb bastard in Harrisburg
• All the Irish whiskey distilleries being owned by the French
• The universe again, just for good measure

Tomorrow a meeting, then the big annual Kinney-bash. Sure to be replete with weirdness and assorted abominations. So long as I don’t have to curl up to sleep inside the turbine of a 747 again, I’ll be relatively happy. Probably go upstairs and sleep on a pile of dirty laundry curled around an AK-47.

When you go to sleep around this sort of people, it’s best to do so well-armed.

That c**k-smoker! Well, I was already terribly concerned about his plans for the financing of the public schools (where’s the money coming from Eddie?) and his gambling intentions, not to mention that he’s – in my favorite turn of phrase – “one cheesesteak away from death.” Now the sonuvabitch has gone and made it personal. We can’t march in his damned inaugural parade. Get this, someone on the parade staff must have suddenly realized that a group portraying the American infantryman from the Revolution through modern times might actually carry guns! Heaven forfend! Guns? With soldiers? Oh heavens, this will never do. Never do at all.

So, because the poor folks don’t have enough “security” – as if the whole city won’t be locked down tighter than goddamn Fort Knox – we were asked to leave the firearms behind. Admittedly, you could portray a soldier wrongly without a firearm but to do the thing justice and to properly honor the men we represent the tool of their trade is an essential requirement. To be asked to leave the guns at home is a travesty and an insult. So, we told ‘em to go stick it up their lefty bottoms. See if that cures your irrepressible idiocy. A little .30-06 enema ought to help.

Well, it’s not all that late but I’ve been drinking and stewing and right about now I’m disgusted with Fast Eddie, the Democratic Party, the City of Philadelphia and the mother that ejected that worthless tub of slime into my world. (The US? You mean the whole continent? — Yeah, it’s mine.) I think this is but the first salvo in a war against all that is good and true in our dear commonwealth and I think Fast Eddie will come to a sickening realization that here in the “red T” of PA we just don’t cotton to that sort of higgledy piggledy.

Nothing to report today…pretty much one of those SNAFU kind of days. Funny how more and more days seem to be like that.

I had a couple of thoughts but can’t seem to remember what they were so I won’t record them just yet. I’m sure they were chock full of juicy hate. In fact, I know they were. Ah well, I’m forgetting things…next thing I’ll be repeating myself incessantly. Funny how more and more days seem to be like that.

Man, that’s a good slogan. It almost even rhymes…forgive me if I can’t think of the word that means “it almost even rhymes.”

Long article by Mr. Victor Davis Hanson on why the creme de la creme of American society – those princes of pop culture – hate the very society that gave them all they have. Interesting read. Can’t say I buy all of it but there are some good ideas and some good explanations and might even assauge some of your own worries about the state of things and things to come.

Promised my cousin I’d give him a shameless plug. He wants to be a comic book artist and to that end has begun to work on a story which, I think, shows a great deal of promise. Pretty cool stuff with a whole lot of potential. If anyone knows anything about the orders of angels and demons from midieval mythology, let me know – it might come in handy.

Well hot diggity damn if the Eagles didn’t pull off a bit of a squeaker to beat the Falcons and advance to the NFC title game. No big surprises on the opponent, Tampa Bay has been one of the big names this year. I figure next week is the “real” Super Bowl. Given the NFC’s propensity for winning in the big game and the comparative records of the NFC champ team(s) and the AFC teams whoever comes out on top of the NFC has a damn fine chance to win it all. Naturally there’s always the “Philadelphia Curse” to deal with but we may yet pull one out.

Pity about the “Turnpike Super Bowl” though. As much as I absolutely despise Pittsburgh and all its people, and all its sports teams and all it stands for it would have been cool to see PA rule the world for a day – but, such is life.

Enough football from me, I don’t know much about the sport and can’t claim to follow it closely except as the season winds down but I’m pretty excited and looking forward to Sunday.

Big news today! You can finally get a chance to get back at the RIAA and maybe make some little cash in the meantime. Looks like the big case against the recording companies for price-fixing is nearly finished and a settlement has been determined. By registering on this site you can become part of the class and, depending on how large the class grows, you might score from $5 to $20 bucks. Just be sure not to do something stupid like running out and buying a CD with it.

And in other news, looks like I’m going to march in the inaugural parade for our catastrophic new governor “Fast Eddie” Rendell. I was deeply torn as I hate the guy and most everything he stands for but the chance to march in a governor’s inagural parade doesn’t come along every day so I figured I ought to take advantage of the opportunity while I can. And so we add another nifty thing to my long list of experiences. I gotta say, as oddball as living history is, I’ve really gotten to see and do some pretty amazing things. Besides this upcoming parade I’ve marched twice in the St. Patrick’s Day parade in NYC, been part of the honor guard at Arlington National Cemetary on Decoration Day, been part of the honor guard at the Lincoln Memorial on Lincoln’s Birthday, marched in a parade in Harrisburg to support the introduction of a bill preserving PA Civil War monuments, escorted the last remaining widow of a Federal soldier at a funeral for what were thought to be remains of a Civil War soldier, etc Hell, the list goes on and on and that’s only the really nifty things I’ve done, I haven’t even mentioned the places I’ve visited on the way to, during or on the way back from gigs all over the east.

As pitiful and small as my life sometimes seems, when I stop and think about the places I’ve been and the things I’ve done – not only through my hobby but also through travelling with the family, etc – I’m kind of amazed. I surely ain’t the most urbane fellow but I’ve been around the block a couple of times. Miserable thought at the beginning of yet another day of work…can’t do anything fun for 8 more hours. Bummer.

The operative question, of course. To tell the truth, I just haven’t been able to bring myself to put pen to paper – so to speak. There’s a whole hell of a lot of things going on in the world and I can’t bring myself to comment on any of them. Odd, ain’t it?

Quote of the week:

“Rio. Bikini clad girls cavorting with war criminals under a hundred foot Jesus. I’ve dreamed of this my whole life.”

Now that’s humor.

“Fairfax County Police are targeting Reston and Herndon area bar-restaurant patrons suspected of having one too many drinks.”

According to Virginia statutes and the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC), any place with a liquor license is considered a “public place.” Accordingly, police are allowed free access to such places, and, should they find any customer over the legal alcohol limit of .08 or suspect a customer of being intoxicated while still being served or present in an establishment, police can write that person a ticket for public intoxication.

Now how much does that suck? Lessee, as I recall, the BAC limit of .08 is what? 2 drinks for a normal sized person? So, I go into a bar, have two drinks and the Gestapo can drag me outside, run me through a field-sobriety test and potentially ticket me for public intoxication. I’m beginning to seriously believe in John Derbyshire’s super-secret EFTA Suuure, why go out and track down real criminals when you can make your quota of “public service” by molesting otherwise law abiding citizens who’ve stopped by for happy hour? Brilliant.

And never mind getting blotto in a pub and walking home. Certainly I’ve, once or twice, been so trashed that I should have been cited for public intoxication. There was the one time I broke an ankle on the way home and the other time that I was singing rebel songs so loudly people were opening their windows and yelling at me to shut up (just like some old movie about New York). I could go on but I’ll spare you.

Just wait until MADD passes the .04 BAC limit. Oh boy, then if you have one drink you’re busted. So much for a glass of wine with dinner. Doesn’t anyone remember how well Prohibition worked out?

First, a moment of silence as we’ve lost our first hero of the New Year. Joe Foss, Marine aviator and Ace during WWII died Wednesday. It’s a pity, in a time when we’re up against as big a threat as we faced during the last great war and in a time when the mass of the people haven’t got the stones to face our problems and attack them head on we’re also losing all the old fellows who sorted things out the last time we got in such trouble. A pity.

Just read about the latest Democrat to throw his hat in the ring for 2004. This fellow, Senator Edwards, wants “the campaign to focus on what’s good for regular people.” Gee, where have we heard that before?

I know, we conservative types harp over and over again on the injustice of Democrap accusations that somehow the GOP and the current administration are “run to a large extent by insiders and for insiders.” Naturally that’s complete and utter bullshit. Never mind the election of 2000, the people, this year, voted to put the GOP in power in both houses of Congress. One might think that meant the people (that sacred word) favored the policies of the GOP and didn’t think it was run “by insiders and for insiders” but rather “of the people, by the people, and for the people” to quote the original great Republican. It’s positively disgusting the way this charge keeps getting trotted out. How, precisely, does allowing you to keep more of your money, have more choice in where your kids go to school, where you go to the doctor, what you buy in the stores and what car you buy somehow miraculously become a bad thing? Sure, a few folks get wealthier and wealthier and they too get to keep more of their own hard-earned dough but you get wealthier too…maybe not at the same rate but nobody can deny we’re all making more dough and are probably better off overall than our parents were. Which is better? More money for you all to buy cars, houses, toys? Or having your money forcibly levied to provide over-priced medical care, food and housing for the “poor?” Gee, it might just be me but I remember a nation founded once upon a time over a tax revolt.

Oh well. We do need some northerners in the race too. I’m also sick of listening to half-assed southern accents in all the debates. You see what trouble we got into when an un-reconstructed moron with helmet-head got into the Majority Leader position. About damn time we had a good, old-fashioned, tight fisted, logical and “uncaring” Yankee in office. It’d stop this constant higgledy-piggledy right quick.

2002 has come and is on the verge of going (depending on your timezone). Another year down, another one to come…my 30th on this earth if anyone’s counting. I should hope 2003 will be a year of pleasant changes and movement as I am firmly of the opinion a man should have accomplished something by the time he reaches 30 but I expect more of the same. That being said, my predictions for 2003 are:

1. Nothing new on my front.
2. The North Korea crisis will be resolved peaceably but with a great deal less of the “swapping stuff for good behavior” higgledy piggledy than has been prevalent in the past.
3. Iraq will be invaded, Saddam will quickly fall and the remaking of the Middle East will continue apace.
4. The economy will improve.

Hrm, that pretty much covers everything I can think of. Nothing anybody else couldn’t reason out by themselves. I’ll have to think a while about some things that might happen that nobody else could have predicted. How about an Eagles SuperBowl? A Phillies play off series? Possible, possible. I prefer to deal in known quantities and I’m too much a cynic to bank entirely on silly minded hope but I reckon 2003 will turn out to be OK…a year of death and destruction resulting in liberty and justice for all.

Second and last Christmas over the weekend. Spent Saturday tooling around Philly looking at the Christmas decorations in the downtown department stores, the big lightshow in ex-Wanamaker’s and the Christmas Carol display in Strawbridge’s. A holiday tradition so to speak and always enjoyable. We repaired to Grammy’s house in NJ for the holiday feast and the last gift exchange (Pollyannas and grandparent’s gifts). Didn’t make out too bad, got a nice marble rolling pin for knocking people on the head in my kitchen, a book on the Adamses and the latest edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Nifty cool. Well worth checking out if you ever see a copy anywhere.

And in the wider world cloned babies steal the Kenyan election and force North Korea to the barganing table. Yeesh…I go away for the weekend and the whole world falls apart.

What a bizarre week. It feels like Tuesday or Wednesday rather than Friday, courtesy of our mid-week weekend. Black 47 tonight in Harrisburg oddly enough, thank the good Lord that I can ride along with the Hanover crew and don’t have to haul myself up there and back…I’d never make it…not enough sleep in the past several weeks.

So, I’ve been thinking since last Sunday about the great war to come in Iraq and how the multitudes of usual suspects are coming forth with the usual platitudes against war in any form. It occurs to me that our going to war in Iraq is perfectly consistent with and is the highest application of our founding principles:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Now, of course, the peaceniks will say, “But this applies to the people overthrowing their own government.” Ah ha! I say, just so, but didn’t the colonists in America appeal constantly for external help to defeat their opressors? We borrowed money liberally from the Dutch, received diplomatic, military and financial support from the French. Hell, Frenchmen, Germans, Polish, etc put themselves in harm’s way (and some died) in defense of our liberty. Isn’t it only just that we provide such help as we can to those in the world who struggle alone for freedom?

The bunny huggers always appeal to the brotherhood of man. If there really is such a brotherhood doesn’t it behoove us, as the mightiest power ever to stride the earth, to support our brothers in their time of need? The Iranian people are in a state of near-revolution – shouldn’t we rush to their aid? The Iraquis rose once with our encouragement and then suffered untold horrors when we abandoned them thanks to our State Dept. and our fine now Secretary of State. Shouldn’t we go back to repair the damage we have caused? To lift these folks up, to provide them with their inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?

Are we redefining “just war” theory? I reckon so. We have to be very careful, as we tread on dangerous ground, but I think that America always seeks to do good, even if she does not always succeed and it makes sense for us to carefully apply our power to help those in need. Even the liberals who love the Great Society and the New Deal where our economic power was pressed into the service of those in need should understand applying our military power to help others in need.

Or don’t they believe in the applicability of the Declaration of Independence and our founding principles to all men, everywhere?

Eh, I know it’s a Canadian holiday but dammit, it’s British as well. So, I’ll celebrate British Boxing Day by boxing up all my new stuff for the long trek up three flights of stairs to my already overcrowded abode. Didn’t get anything overly spectacular, a good tea kettle and a tea set, got some books and a filtering water pitcher and a new set of pots. I am just entirely too practical…actually I spend all my money on toys and amusments and leave precious little for things like food, clothing and other needs so I let people buy me my needs and I provide for my wants. My Christmas present to myself? A $2000 surround sound speaker system. Mmmmm, Saving Private Ryan in DTS surround sound. Swanky.

I was watching the snow fall yesterday and was suddenly struck with remembrace of all the folks who couldn’t spend yesterday lounging about with their families so a quick minute to remember the soldier and sailors out there whacking heretics. I even took a second to remember the PennDOT folks clearing roads so I could get back to my house last night.

God bless ‘em, every one.

Christmas at last, I’ll try not to be sappy or too annoyed at how people have done their damnedest to ruin the season entirely but a few words for the day:

“The angel said to them, ‘You have nothing to fear! I come to proclaim good news to you – tidings of great joy to be shared by the whole people. This day in David’s city a savior has been born to you, a Messiah and Lord. Let this be a sign to you: in a manger you will find an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes.’

Suddenly, there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying,

Glory to God in high heaven, peace on earth to those on whom his favor rests.

Happy Christmas to everyone. Peace on earth to those on who God’s favor rests.

What a day! Here I sit, sated on turkey with all the trimmings and joyously reading article after article on Trent Lott’s resignation as Senate Majority Leader. Thank the good Lord who looks down from above. I am reminded of Martin Luther King’s speech, “Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

I dunno, what brought Lott down? I reckon he was going to fight until people started comparing him to Bill Clinton – willing to sacrifice the party and the country for his own personal power and prestige. One should hope that’d be enough to shame any man. And people still doubt the everlasting harm Clinton has caused this country. Twits.

So, that’s the end of that chapter. Now we can move ahead. Now if only we could show the Christmas spirit with some fireworks over Baghdad, we might just have something. Again, my new favorite holiday quote, “Peace on Earth to men of goodwill. All others stand by.” Hot diggity damn, 2003 is going to be a hot time in the old town tonight.

Wow, I was already going to comment a bit on race after reading this article yesterday and lo and behold, what do I find but a snippet on Ars Technica with the results of a study demonstrating that, genetically speaking, race does not exist.

Like I said, Wow.

I have long maintained that when we talk about race we’re actually discussing culture. There are black folks, mexicans, etc who work hard, learn the lingo and move themselves up in the world just as there are white folks who collect welfare and live in trailer parks with no ambition to improve their lot in life. Skin color/race therefore isn’t nearly the deciding factor…the culture is. I mean, look at the Canadians and French for chrissakes. They’re bloody useless….should all the rest of us white folks be dragged down just because they’re white too? Not at all, it isn’t the skin color that causes their problems, it’s their pissant culture.

Well, now science has finally caught up with my brilliant flash of insight and declared that, in fact, when looking at a person’s genes you can’t tell what color they are. Bingo! Now tell me that’s not a screaming argument for the abolishment of “racial” preferences and a great thumping good reason to treat all persons alike, regardless of skin color or culture. Assimilate or be damned. People are just people…come up to the happy medium and we’ll all be much happier.

That’s capital letters Truth:

*looks at the current world’s population* You must have a lot of frustration then.

What pisses you off?
Created by ptocheia

Two words for this fine Tuesday morning:

Is 61:1-2a, 10-11

The spirit of the Lord GOD is upon me,
because the LORD has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring glad tidings to the poor,
to heal the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives
and release to the prisoners,
to announce a year of favor from the LORD
and a day of vindication by our God.

I rejoice heartily in the LORD,
in my God is the joy of my soul;
for he has clothed me with a robe of salvation
and wrapped me in a mantle of justice,
like a bridegroom adorned with a diadem,
like a bride bedecked with her jewels.
As the earth brings forth its plants,
and a garden makes its growth spring up,
so will the Lord GOD make justice and praise
spring up before all the nations.

Wow! Is Trent Lott a spectacular jack-ass or what? He basically trumpeted the fact he’s an unthinking moron but now he’s apparently threatening to resign his Senate seat if forced to step down as Majority Leader thereby leaving an open seat for a Democratic governor to appoint. Brilliant, Monty! “If I’m going down, I’m taking the party with me.” Gee, I ain’t from Mississippi but I am a Republican and I’m pissed that this fellow would even consider that turn of events a potentiality…we all worked very hard to pull off an upset win in November and return power to the GOP and now this fatheaded twit is willing to screw every single Republican in the bleeding country if he doesn’t get his way?

If we already thought him unfit to be majority leader, he’s pretty well proved it now.

I gotta say, I really dig this Moveable Type system. If I can ever master CSS and keep track of all the different templates, etc I would really have something. In any case, here’s the first attempt at a redesign which will eventually become the front page of MotD.org. Cool no?

Big day today! Not only is it Friday the 13th but it’s also the 140th Anniversary of the 1862 Battle of Fredericksburg. I have always liked studying Fredericksburg because it’s one of the fights where the Irish Brigade distinguished themselves and created the legends that eventually led to the acceptance of irish folks into mainstream American society. For me, that’s pretty important.

In other news the no-good Bishop of Boston finally threw in the towel. I find it unfortunate that he was permitted to quit rather than being removed by the Pope ala MacArthur in Korea (“The son of a bitch isn’t going to be allowed to quit! He’s going to be fired!) but at least he’s gone. What I find funny is the instant commentary from the laypeople of Boston that they “hope to be allowed a say” in the choice of the next Archbishop. Um, sorry to tell you folks but Mother Church ain’t a democracy, it’s sorta kinda a top down organization starting with the big man himself (that’d be God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and then to St. Peter and his successors and finally, after trickling through layers of heirarchy coming down to us poor slobs tossing dough into collection baskets. I can be in favor of the people having some say in the dispersement of our donations, hence Parish Councils and advisory boards, etc but I cannot countenance the running of the Church by the laity. That just don’t fly and if anyone thinks it could then they’re essentially dismantling the foundation of the Church. If we accept the boys at the top are closer to God, then we have to allow them the decisions and trust to God that’s he’s getting through. Sometimes I wonder, but one has to hope. Sounds to me like all this exercise of lay power is the beginnings of another schism…American Catholicism anyone? Time to burn some heretics.

In any case, don’t do anything stupid today and best of luck with the bad luck of the 13th day.

Well this is the best thing I’ve read since 2 PM today. One spectacular anti-Canadian rant! Thank God! There is intelligent life in the universe and others who see the Canadians for the worthless, anti-American, socialists they truly are. Hot damn! And for a bit more anti-Canadian goodness read the following and then make up your own mind:

——————–

Quote:

Army Trains On Gay TV Series
September 5, 2002
By Jan Prout, 365Gay.com

(Toronto) The Canadian military is using a gay fitness show to train the troops. The Department of National Defence has purchased 26 episodes of Urban Fitness.
The series, which runs on Canada’s PrideVision, the world’s first gay TV network, bills itself as “Feeling fit. And doing it in style”.
The show will be shown by closed circuit broadcast to the troops in Europe and the Middle East.
“It’s hip, informative and inspiring,” says producer Paula McClaren.
“From the average viewer to the advanced fitness buff, everyone will take something away from it.”
Urban Fitness is the creation of host Derek Noble, a personal trainer who counts John McEnroe, John Cusack, Michael J. Fox, Maria Shriver and Rutger Hauer among his clients.
On one show, Noble kayaks New York’s Hudson River to the Statue of Liberty. Another focuses on “the hedonistic art of massage.”
The Department of National Defence did not say how much it paid for the series, or how it would be used in troop training, but it is bound to be welcomed by gay and lesbian soldiers.
Canada’s military does not exclude gays, although there is no information on how many GLBT soldiers, sailors or pilots there are.
The series has also been sold to TV Pride in Europe, Australian television and Israel’s Ego Channel.

Seems our dear friends the ACLU are at it again, this time over a new Pennsylvania law requiring all students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and perhaps sing the National Anthem daily. Damn fine idea, I’m all for it. Naturally the ACLU says this tramples all over our right to free speech and free expression, etc. Bollocks, I say. Part of being an American is understanding, accepting and pledging your “life and sacred honor” to the ideas expressed in our founding documents. One simple way of doing that is pledging allegiance to the flag since, in my mind, the flag stands for those ideas as expressed over the years and carried to far flung places in our never-ending quest for “truth, justice and the American Way.” The ACLU using the Constitution to subvert the assimilation and integration of people into the American way of life is absolutely despicable. I know someone during the Civil War — probably Lincoln — wrote that no nation ever wrote into its Constitution the instrument of its destruction. If this political correctness business goes too far that is precisely what will result, our destruction. To use the Constitution to further that goal is the most terrible perversion of that glorious document I can imagine.

Oh man, the burnings, the burnings. I know I tend toward fascism at times but wouldn’t some good, old-fashioned pogroms of all these ultra-secular, ultra-liberal, nanny state wankers just do wonders for the soul? It’s enough to make you want to shoot somebody.

Thank God! On this terrible day of Jimmy Carters winning Nobel Prizes and typical bunny hugging wing-nuts expounding on how war won’t accomplish the goals they themselves set for human rights someone has succinctly summed up my political philosophy. Conservatism. Hey, I may thoroughly enjoy being called a monster, a close minded bigot and all the other terrible things people say about conservatives and I love it when my mother keeps saying, “We didn’t bring you up this way.” But it really is a positive good thing…change ain’t always good. Slow, cautious evolution is the way to go and that’s what I’m all about.

Well, this is it. The big day, the countdown has begun. I figure a man ought to have accomplished something by the time he turns 30 and I haven’t accomplished jack-shit in my 29 years on this lovely little mudball so I’ve got one year to do something and get somewhere. I damn sure can’t stand 60 or 70 more years of this sort of same-same bullshit . . . it’s terrible, I don’t fear death at all and actually would probably welcome it . . . be a hell of a lot easier than trying to amuse myself for decades on end with nothing to work with. Kind of like being locked in a closet with nothing but Rob Schneider movies for a year. Death would be a blessed release.

But, I do enjoy pissing people off and generally making a nuisance of myself so if nothing else I can wallow in misery and eventually behave like the fellow in the “Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” who spent his eternity flying around the universe and insulting every being therein in alphabetical order. It’s better than nothing.

On another note, some wing-nut preacher came to Philly Sunday claiming that the snipers and September 11 were all due to our acceptance of homosexuals. I don’t know what papers he’s been reading but I wouldn’t exactly say we’re entirely accepting of gay folks. I rather think we’ve arrived at pretty much the right balance…there are limits to what’s acceptable but within those limits you’re pretty much free to do what you like without anyone getting in your face. Good article on poisioning young minds, damn sad actually. Far as I’m concerned these people are no better than the priests who run around molesting kids…either way you’re scarring these kids for life and it ain’t fair. Hopefully they at least do some internet surfing or read an occasional newspaper and get another point of view. Otherwise they’ll have to be part of the burnings, rather than those doing the B-B-Q-ing. Fucking psychos.

Oh Boy Oh Boy Oh Boy! Talk about killing two birds with one stone:

Oooooooh, it’s almost too delicious to contemplate. ‘Tis making me go all rubbery and warm inside.

I had another titanic realization over the weekend but, being that I was driving and therefore neither near a computer or able to scratch it down in my omnipresent notepad I’ve forgotten it already. Makes you wonder if we humans couldn’t have solved all the problems of the world if we weren’t so damnably forgetful. I wonder if God gives us these brief flashes of insight and then rips them away so quickly for a purpose. Maybe just to remind us who’s in charge.

And speaking of the human race, if you want to see the human race at its absolute worst; the most vile, greedy, impatient, ignorant, inconsiderate and downright unpleasant they can be . . . go Christmas shopping. So much for the season of giving. Between the goddamned Salvation Army and their omnipresent (word for the day) bells, ignorant moron shoppers impeding the aisles, hurried/harried motorists swerving through parking lots like it’s the Indy 500 and the general fat-ass-ed-ness of the population . . . it’s a harrowing experience. I bloody well hate Christmas and a shopping trip is all it takes to remind me.

But on a lighter note, I am sure I mentioned Strom Thurmond turned 100 last week. Excellent link to an excellent article about his life. Just thought I’d mention I’ve met the old fellow as well. A bunch of us were doing a Lincoln’s Birthday ceremony in the Lincoln Memorial and after, while in full Civil War dress uniforms we decided to eat lunch in the Senate cafeteria. On our way into the Capitol who should we run into but Sen. Thurmond and an aide on his way out after the conclusion of the day’s business. I think he mumbled something about “damnyankees” and probably tried to tell us a story about his mother and the damnyankees in South Carolina during the war but his aide hustled him on his way. Nifty fellow. Funny story, and I didn’t even mentioned getting waylaid at the metal detectors due to the copious numbers of brass buttons on our uniforms and my pal with pockets full of lead toy soldiers. Damn funny.

I’ve been lately reading David McCullough’s “Truman.” Hell of a book about a hell of a guy. If it weren’t for Truman’s devotion to worthless New Deal values I’d be an unabashed Truman partisan…too bad the modern Democratic Party doesn’t have a clue how to do it.

In any case, my interest of late in President Truman makes it highly appropriate in my eyes that the carrier USS Harry S. Truman departed today for service in the Persian Gulf. Assuming we’re going to war within the next six months it will be the Truman that takes the fight to the enemies of mankind. Even better is the quote issued from the loudspeakers as the ship departed, it just completely sums up American policy:

“Peace on Earth to men of goodwill. All others stand by.”

That is bad-ass, very Truman and perfectly appropriate.

Give ‘em hell Harry.

Hell of an article I just read. Basically smacks all the lefties in the face for being pie-in-the-sky morons…which is what I’ve been saying all along. What’s best is he even says Karl Marx would be pissed at today’s lefties for doing their damnedest to impede the progress of “the most developed . . . form of capitalism” while we sit in this waypoint on the highway to perfect socialism. Well, I have to disagree with the socialism part although in reality that probably is the best of the best…humankind is simply incapable of acheiving it…too greedy, too much in love with things.

So, go out and bury a lefty in the snow today. Good insulator, they won’t freeze to death but they’ll damn sure suffocate.

And on another note, a friend of mine is sick as the devil, a collapsed lung, pneumonia in the good lung and several virii…prayers are welcome…but the point is that to give any hope of recovery they actually put him into suspended animation. Nifty cool! Apparently they’ve got his body entirely shut down and don’t plan to bring him out of it for at least a month. Now that’s a Rip Van Winkle thing in truth! And what a hell of a time for a football fan to have to be disconnected for a month. And what fun things can we think of to tell him when he wakes up? Lessee, the Cowboys won the Superbowl? Iraq nuked D.C. so the government moved to St. Louis and we nuked Baghdad while Israel nuked Cairo, Damascus, Riyhadh and Tripoli. We won the war and eliminated the bulk of the bad guys.

Damn, wishful thinking I suppose. But it would be nice.

Allow me to preface this by saying I am not a “proper” punk — contrariwise I am perhaps the most proper of punks. I don’t know anything about a “movement,” I don’t wear the punk “uniform” or neccessarily follow proper punk politics (I am a Republican for chrissakes) but does it strike anyone else as a little odd that there is a magazine called “Punk Planet”? My understanding, such as it is, of punk is that it was a rebellion against pretty much everything. Commercialization, abandonment, isolation…you name it punk was against it. I betcha they even eyed major record labels oddly, kind of like the old Haight-Ashbury crowd when the major labels came a callin’. So doesn’t it seem odd there’d be a magazine, with advertisements presumably, dedicated to being punk? I dunno, the whole thing just seems wrong. I would think punks would want to be independent…do your own thing and just enjoy the crowds and the music. I guess I’d be wrong.

Same goes for bikers. For a group of people who supposedly are all about individual rights and freedoms it seems pretty bizarre to me that they all dress exactly alike. I can understand it sort of in the old days, all someone could afford perhaps were jeans and a battered t-shirt…maybe a leather jacket to keep the wind out but now there are designer biker clothes…big bucks. Not to mention the Harley-mania. It seems to be a thing that bikers have to stop at every Harley shop they pass and buy a t-shirt. It’s cool in a way, it shows where you’ve been, but it seems a little like old folks in their motor homes having campground stickers plastered all over the back — and nobody thinks they’re cool.

Ah well, that’s just me, the all-purpose individualist. And by the way, if you’re ever at a Civil War event…I’ll be the one in blue…looking just like everyone else.

Wow! Busy day, either that or I’m just more awake than usual. Check out this report on the environment. Makes you think. I can remember harsher winters than the last few years just in my memory. Is that neccessarily a bad thing? For us winter-sports types…hell yes! Everyone else would, I think, argue no. Are the summers correspondingly harsher? I can’t say for sure, I’ve always disliked hot weather so the misery seems equal today to what it was 25 years ago. I doubt it’s much worse.

So are we better off or worse off? We’ll hash that out later and in the meantime set Dr. Genome loose to do his mind-boggling thing.

OK, goddamnit! Now I really AM mad! As if these fecking leftists aren’t doing their damnedest to screw up my country they’re now targeting my birthday for chrissakes! I tell you folks, I am the target of a vast left-wing conspiracy!

Hot off the wire, December 10 is not only Human Rights Day (yeesh), but Jimmy “peace-at-any-price” Carter is being awarded his Nobel Prize that day! It’s no joke, even one of the Ben & Jerry’s guys is going to get arrested to promote peace on my birthday! Dammit, I want war! I demand the President drop some bombs on December 10 just so my birthday doesn’t turn out a total lefty wash.

What’s next? Lemme guess, next year when I turn properly old (30) they’re going to feed me tofu cake and offer gifts of dolphin-safe tuna and a complimentary membership to the ACLU? Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn.

It really is enough to make you want to shoot someone.

Ahhh, my dear fellow Pennsylvanians…I hope you’re happy. Your newly elected governor, Fast Eddie of Philadelphia, is already showing the sort of judge of character he is. His driver and sometimes advisor has been detained by police for driving around in a Lincoln full of drugs. Wonder who those were destined for? Probably payoffs to the lesser elements of Philadelphia and Harrisburg society to ensure the administration gets off to a wonderful start.

In all honesty, Fast Eddie probably is blameless in all this. It’s just interesting to note. Expect much more of this sort of higgledy-piggledy from the Rendell administration…it’s just the way Democrats behave.

Back at last from New Joisy — “You can get in for free but have to pay to get out.” I think that should be the state motto.

Lovely weekend, all things considered. I did remember to bring booze so that helped ease the rough edges of so many days in close proximity to my beloved family. We did cruise out to the shore one day and not only got to see the ocean but also stopped by the old dirigible base at Lakehurst and stood on the spot where the Hindenberg disaster occurred. For an event with the notoriety that disaster possesses it is woefully under-commemorated. The small plaque in the middle of an untended ex-runway was only erected in 1987 and one must therefore assume the site was essentially unmarked until that date. I feel bad for the poor folks who, dressed in their best duds for a trans-atlantic crossing, perished in the firey furnance in the middle of the ass-end of the planet. What a bummer. Still, neat to see.

And so we enter the “Big Christmas Countdown.” Probably my least favorite time of the year, particularly following so closely on the heels of my favorite time of the year. I suppose it’s non-stop shopping for the next 23-odd days. And eight days until I’m one year closer to death. Yikes and away!!!

This is damned close to the greatest quote ever:

“Mr. Iwanyk, 32 years old, first suspected that his TiVo thought he was gay, since it inexplicably kept recording programs with gay themes. A film studio executive in Los Angeles and the self-described “straightest guy on earth,” he tried to tame TiVo’s gay fixation by recording war movies and other “guy stuff.”

“The problem was, I overcompensated,” he says. “It started giving me documentaries on Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Eichmann. It stopped thinking I was gay and decided I was a crazy guy reminiscing about the Third Reich.”"

Sorry pal, the dude fixated on the Third Reich…that’d be me. But seriously folks, the above is courtesy of Ars Technica.

On another note, Happy Thanksgiving. My favorite holiday of the year is at last imminent and although I can’t muster even the least bit of excitement or interest other than an overriding urge to drink beer and go to sleep I reckon I’ll come around sometime tomorrow. Enjoy, my best to everyone.

There’s nothing like a newly-minted citizen to say very plainly what makes America so great. Read the commentary basically cut out all the bits about racial profiling and you’ll see why we’re so spectacular.

Wow. I have been neglecting my responsibilities…chalk it up to sickness and a bad case of the shits. The I-don’t-give-a-shits. However, it’s a short week and we’re in the countdown now to my favorite holiday of the year so things ought to perk up if I do. Funny though, I just can’t muster any excitement about anything. Even the things I’ve tended to get excited about in the past several months have always proved anti-climatic. Staring 30 down with a one year dealine until that date is starting to get to me I think. It’s definitely time for a change, preferably a major one at least in employment/career if not neccessarily one of my patented “dump all my friends and uproot to somewhere/something else.”

Yikes and away! Off to a lovely meeting and then another glorious day of doing stupid things and trying desperately to stay awake.

While relieving myself after lunch I saw on the wall — I dig how places are putting the newspaper up on the wall above the pissers these days — that Al Gore is “back” and seriously considering another run for the big office in 2004. Oddly enough (for the mainstream media) the paper noted that Republicans are more excited about that prospect than Democraps. And why would that be, you might well ask?

Well, as I see it, despite narrowly winning the popular vote — which as we have all learned plays only a secondary role in our Presidential electoral system — Al still lost. Add to that the wonderful electoral victory of the Republican party in the late election and our current President’s soaring popularity and you come up with a formula not only sure to tilt the election toward the President but to ensure the downfall of the Democratic Party as a viable political force for years to come.

Just let the Dems come out swinging, like Al says “letting it all hang out.” Run their typical race baiting, divide and conquer strategy by a public so disgusted with divisive national politics that they upended history and gave total control of the Federal government to one party and see what happens. Anybody think people will overwhelmingly vote for the folks that aren’t out there tailoring their message to certain narrow interest groups and instead talking about the interests of the nation as a whole? Riiiight. Oh boy, oh boy, the Dems are steering more to the hard left these days, back to their “roots” in the anti-war, anti-law and order, anti-everything but drugs and free sex culture of the ’60s and 70s. Anybody think that might disgust an American public in favor of war, in favor of pro-life policies, in favor of “family values” . . . whatever that means?

Hot damn, who here thinks that a solid thumping in 2004…say a landslide for President Bush and roughly 75% control of both houses of Congress for Republicans won’t cause the Dems to go further into their hate-mongering, financially destructive, anti-patriotic ways? Hey presto, the destruction of the Democratic party for the forseeable future and the reawakening of the American people from their “long national nightmare.”

Whew. What a weekend. Spirits may have been a bit dampened not only by the ever-present rain and cold but by the recent spate of deaths in the Civil War community. I had a fine old time though.

Friday night I headed out to see an old friend and commune with Mr. Kinney who, for whatever reason, showed up to an all Civil War weekend in full Irish Guards kit complete with an inappropriate Black Watch kilt. Wanker. Drank some, then headed downtown to visit with the rest of the Reserves at Uncle Larry’s house and drank some more. Got a phone call that the rest of the “family” had arrived at my place so I headed there and drank even more and at some point fell asleep.

Woke up Saturday fully clothed and proceeded to be regaled with tales of my behavior in the latter part of Friday night before being put to bed. Fortunately I was home so nobody was permanently damaged…physically or mentally. I always worry…the last time I can’t remember what I did I apparently verbally assaulted two ladies while wielding a M-65 entrenching tool like a lightsaber. Typical. Headed out to the parade and wandered a bit around the formation area saying hello to everyone then up the street to a lovely spot on the wall outside O’Rorkes with an excellent view of the entire parade. I swear the bloody thing went on forever but it was wonderful to watch for a change rather than participating and getting more and more annoyed as the idiots in charge ruin the entire experience.

Once the parade was over spent a fine time relaxing outside with an ever-changing array of folks. Tried unsucessfully to catch a nap around 4, finally gave up and went back uptown. Another old friend rolled in around 630 so we had a couple and then headed up to the NR dinner to catch the awards ceremonies and visit with the other folks there. Bailed from the Dobbin House and bee-lined to the G Bar for a last couple of pints before day’s end. Caught up with Mr. Kinney finally although the other kilty boy (Mr. Rall) was still MIA. The Bar was packed like it hadn’t been in years and at one point all the Confederately inclined folks left and we had a bar filled solely with the glorious blue of loyal Union men. Saw some more folks come out of the woodwork for the first time in years and finally retired around 2. Nifty.

Sunday was spent wandering around, visiting some more folks on the way out of town and generally coming down from the weekend high.

All in all a most excellent weekend. It didn’t quite go as “imagined” but I did get to see everyone I could think of even if I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with any one group of people. Now I can roll happily into the holiday season and then cruise on into the long white season before spring dawns and the whole insane carnival starts again.

I have tripped upon H.L. Mencken in my daily readings. A pretty interesting fellow, spent his whole life in Baltimore writing about how wonderfully screwed up things are…essentially a good, old-fashioned curmudgeon. Apart from his hatred of religion and surety that all races but the white race haven’t got a prayer of advancement (largely through no fault of their own apparently) I could get to like the fellow. Like this quote which pretty much sums up what’s wrong with Democraps, commies and the like:

“It remains impossible…to separate the democratic idea from the theory that there is a mysterious merit, an esoteric and ineradicable rectitude, in the man at the bottom of the scale – that inferiority, by some strange magic, becomes a kind of superiority… ”

I recommend searching out some quotes for yourself.

Heard a bit on NPR (National Proletariat Radio) this morning about the Senate “Spouses Club.” Now, of course, there is no such thing persay but they were recounting the people who have belonged and commenting how it can’t be called the Senate “Wives Club” anymore because of the number of female senators…and hence male spouses. Damned if they didn’t mention that two of those spouses are, get this, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole.

Now that’s funny. Dole can beat Clinton with his good arm for besmirching not only Dole’s own reputation and accomplishments but for staining forever the Office of the President of the United States. Won’t that make for some interesting cocktail parties.

I have to say, as bad as Clinton was I am still not convinced Bob Dole was the man for the job in 1996 although, having heard Dole speak at college I am greatly impressed by the man himself and in awe of the service he has provided his nation. I wish everyone had known that at the time…think how much different our country would be if Clinton had not served a second term.

This is a neatly arranged little commentary that explains why we’re in the mess we’re in, government-wise (is that even a word?)

The Constitution established a limited federal government. What else could its principal author, James Madison, have meant when he wrote in Federalist 45 that the powers of the new government would be “few and defined”? The Civil War amendments perfected the design by affording federal remedies against state violations of individual rights. And there things stood until the Progressive Era, when the political activists of the day sought to bring us better living through bigger government, mostly at the state level. An active judiciary, in the name of law, stood rightly athwart that effort, for the most part. With the New Deal, however, political activists shifted their focus to the federal government ? only to be thwarted again by a judiciary actively enforcing the limits the Constitution placed on political power.

Strict constructionism bay-bee! Except for Jeffersonian strict constructionism…I think Jefferson was a tool.

Been having some damn fine discussions on economics via email with another one of these damned liberal conservatives. I hate those guys, just make up your mind and come on over to the darkside. I thought I made some fine and cogent comments on the differences I perceive between lefty and righty economic policies…have a read and see what you think. It does provide some insight into my often convoluted thought processes:

“From time to time I slip back into my flower-child upbringing. I think it’s obscene that CEOs get millions of bucks while the folks at the bottom make six or seven bucks an hour but forcing the company to pay those bottom folks 11 or 12 bucks and hour isn’t going to accomplish anything…the CEOs damn sure won’t take a pay cut…they’ll just cut the workforce or go out of business entirely. Greed is paramount, in almost all things. So you end up with a bad situation and two choices: legislate higher wages, less working hours, etc (the Democrat way) and have businesses essentially stop working hard or fold entirely thereby bringing down the entire economy or allow businesses to do things their way, with just enough regulation to stop the very worst abuses and thereby give them incentive to produce and drive the economy along benefiting everyone…even those who don’t make much dough.

I reckon about the minimum someone could make without company provided health insurance is $7.50/hr and still have a reasonable life. That’s what I started out at, I lived close to the vest but did alright. It ain’t a comfortable life but I didn’t have to go without much. I agree minimum wage is probably too low but if you raise it you jeopardize a lot of smallish businesses and thereby jeopardize a lot of jobs. My Dad probably employed 10 or more people at his store…probably half or so at minimum wage…others higher. I reckon if he had to pay them all double what he paid them he might have only been able to keep on 1/2 or 2/3ds of them. Which is better? Besides, I think the theory of minimum wage should work something like, you get a job fresh out of high school or while you’re still attending school. With few or no expenses what do you need $10 an hour for? By the time you start to move out on your own and need some more dough you’ve built up the experience to earn more money or move to another job that pays better.

Who knows? Maybe things ain’t fair but they’re more sustainable than anywhere else in the world. Besides, all men aren’t “born” equal. Just “created” equal. See the difference?”

I like that last sentence…suddenly we go from economic theory to debating the meaning of the Declaration of Independence. Just what exactly did the Founders intend when they phrased things the way they did? Say what you will but that’s really the basis of American politics…trying to figure out what a bunch of rich white guys really meant when they wrote those magnificent documents over two centuries ago.

OK, if you managed to get this far, another note — I’m looking for suggestions of historical events for my sort of “Where’s Waldo” project I’ve been tinkering with. I figure photographed events are ideal but I might be able to work with painted representations as well…check it out:

http://www.messofthedamned.org/motd-history.html

Heh, friggin’ commies…the Democraps are finished…at least for a little while.

http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/dhenninger/?id=110002593

I have long maintained that strong people get shit upon regularly because they can hold up under the strain. Weak people have nice, calm, uneventful lives. I figure there are a set number of challenges in the world and they have to be doled out, since the weak can’t handle them the strong have to take on a disproportinate number in order to ensure the survival of the species. I finally found some good proof:

http://www.texasdwi.org/jacqui.html

That’s some heavy duty stuff and for that girl to maintain even the semblance of a positive attitude just floors me. Incidentally her image and the story are part of a new anti drunk driving campaign in Texas. Pretty persuasive I think.

Another year rolls around to another Armistice Day or Veteran’s Day as we call it here in America. Go out and hug a veteran, thank them for what they did for us and then go beat your head against the wall for not stepping up to the plate and volunteering to serve. I myself shall do the latter. It seems like there’s a good deal of Veteran’s Day info out this year, I suppose it’s that whole being at war thing that makes us stop and think. Of course, anything that makes us remember the debt we owe to the armed forces and the people who serve is an absolute good. Dem dere ragheads don’t die all by themselves you know, it takes a man with a gun…preferably a very big gun.

So once again we celebrate the debt we owe and steel ourselves to the weeks and months ahead. How cool would it have been for the war to start today?

Hah hah hah! F-ing Democraps! I like this, I like it a lot. It will certainly make my job a lot easier when the times comes to seize power and commence the burnings. And I particularly like it because it is honest.

I just don’t see how you justify unending welfare support. I can understand everyone needs a hand now and again, I myself took advantage of the help offered (although if it wasn’t there I could have gotten by all the same) but help is one thing…suckling at Uncle Sugar’s tit for months and years is something entirely different. How about mandatory military service for folks on welfare? We could provide housing, food, day care, etc…all the things we do now for military families and they could provide generations of cannon fodder. Sounds like a good deal to me…kind of like my old idea of eating the homeless. Since people are so queasy at thinking of some poor cow being electrocuted to make that cheeseburger but laugh out loud when human beings get greased by automatic weapons fire in any city in America why don’t we make cheeseburgers from people? Hell, we could put all the gangbangers into the butcher shops…they ought to fit right in. Tell me Jeffrey Dahmer couldn’t chop a mean steak.

Fine, fine. Nothing that extreme. OK, howabout I keep my money…you keep your money, or give it to the lazy…I don’t f-ing care. I can eat meat all I want and you can eat steamed kumquats and not worry yourself about my f-ing steak.

Live and let live. ‘Cause if you don’t, I’m going to kill all of you.

Yeah, I’m kind of annoyed today . . . and I don’t know why.

Hate to over-ride my earlier screed but I just wrote that “voting is the only right we have left” and it struck me how woefully true that is. If I knew the Bill of Rights by heart as I should I could probably go right down the list and show you how every one has been violated (except maybe the rule about quartering troops in peacetime…I think that’s in there). Regardless, think on it, the right to free speech was elimnated (at least in political circumstances) starting at 12:01 this morning when McCain-Feingold went into effect. The right to bear arms is being whittled away daily and PA just elected a governor who would like nothing more than to disarm the state. It goes on and on.

I’m not a libertarian wing-nut and I’m damn sure not a “civil liberties” idiot but dayum, we keep losing every day and I find that it ain’t Mr. Ashcroft who is constantly violating our rights…rather it’s the “equalizers” the ones who think everyone is the same no matter what God and biology puts in the way. Thank the Lord for the ACLU, without them…we might actually be a free people!

It’s kind of a bright, overcast day. Remarkably appropriate for this day of all days. All I can say is what I said when my eyes first opened on CNN this morning . . .

Dissapointments abound though…

In Pennsylvania the morons of this state elected Fast Eddie as Governor. It is true that we like to alternate parties in the mansion but our last Democratic governor was a social conservative and did well by us fiscally. Fast Eddie is all liberal. Like one commentator said, “hold on to your guns and wallets because he’s coming for both.” I would add morality to the things soon to be under assault.

In Georgia a Republican was elected Governor for the first time since Reconstruction. Amazing. And they sent a Republican to the Senate.

Hawaii went Republican. Can you see Trent Lott in a grass skirt?

To the complete and utter bamboozled idiots in New Jersey, I give up. You people are not worthy of being citizens of this great republic. You’ve been hoodwinked! You’ve been bamboozled! (apologies to Malcolm X) The Democraps violated every aspect of the law, both in letter and in spirit, to put Lautenberg on the ballot and you clueless dopes rewarded them for it. There’s no hope for the Garden State anymore.

Same goes for California. Grey Davis runs your state into near collapse and you grant him another term to complete the destruction. It’s like having Godzilla ransack your city and then, after you lay him low some bunny hugger convinces you it’s not his fault, it’s just his nature so you let him loose to smash whatever’s left. Twits.

God bless the voters of Minnesota, Missouri and (we hope) South Dakota anyway. After the travesty of Wellstone’s memorial service ol’ Fritz can go back into retirement. Toodles. Missourians took responsibility for the future and put a good Republican in office. Looks like there’s a fair chance the Democraps will even lose in Daschle’s home state…you want a referendum on leadership? You got a referendum on leadership.

The Socialist Republic of Maryland elected a Republican Governor. We may have lost New Jersey for all time but there’s hope for our near southern neighbor yet.

That’s about it, lots of betrayals, lots of great victories. Now some of the Supreme Court justices can retire knowing that the President’s nominees to replace them will be confirmed by a Republican Senate. We might be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel now. Overturning Roe v. Wade? Outlawing cloning and fetal stem cell research? There’s hope.

Like the Democraps wish they could say, “Vote early and vote often!” It doesn’t matter who you vote for, although one would hope you’d see through the plethora of lies and come to a reasoned and intelligent conclusion — and then vote Republican — but it is vitally important that you exercise your right as a citizen and take responsibility for our government through the right to vote.

And on this fine election day a wonderful dig at the quite useless and spectacularly annoying Canadians:

“Graham and Jean Chr

Good weekend all things considered. Flogging Molly and Andrew W.K. Thursday night at the Troc in Philly. One of the opening bands dressed up in costume and the Mollies came out all dressed as Andrew W.K. which just added to the whirling dervish happiness of the evening. A little sleep and then over to Philly for a marginally interesting tour of City Hall, then some work for my bro at his office and then off to Mercersburg to check out the new temporary family digs. Nifty. Back to Gettysburg and some more tidying sort of work then back to real work today. Yikes and away!

Over the weekend I was yet again called “closed minded” by my mother of all people. Of course she is a dyed in the wool Kennedy liberal/ex-flower child who still thinks Ronald Reagan is the personification of evil. The jury’s still out in my mind but more and more people are thinking Reagan saved the world so somewhere in between is the truth. Regardless, I am of the opinion that calling someone “closed minded” or telling them they “don’t listen” is what liberal types do when you won’t finally bow to the unerring accuracy of their belief system and finally surrender to their all-knowing wisdom. I tried to figure out exactly what she meant by saying I “don’t listen” but the best response I got was something along the lines of, “if you can respond to the other person’s arguments before they’ve even finished making them, you don’t listen.” I responded that I’ve heard all the arguments before and anyone who watches the evening news will be continually bombarded with the same arguments and again, how do you know someone listened if even at the end they disagree with your point. No good answer was forthcoming.

Anyway, I have come to several conclusions. One is that it is absolutely an insult to call me closed minded. Anyone who has known me for many years knows I have changed my proclamations regularly. As I think back I realize I really haven’t changed my deep down beliefs (pro-life, anti-tax, anti-big-government, etc) but I have changed the outward manifestation of them. I even found a sign I made during the 1992 election which borrowed a Civil War period quote and ended up saying “I feel I would like to shoot a [Republican] and yet I know this would not be in the spirit of Christianity.” I was an unabashed Clinton partisan, claimed Bob Dole was the antichrist (until I heard him speak) and even thought the whole impeachment thing somewhat unsavory. I’d still defend the man if he were President as the office is deserving of respect even if the man in the office is a complete ninny (as Clinton was).

What I am is a zealot. When I find something to believe in I go all the way, maybe even tending toward the ridiculous in the fervor of my beliefs and I will readily take the extremist view because by arguing that you might convince people the truth lies somewhere in the middle which is where they ought to have been all along. I would never call anyone “closed minded” or tell them they’re “not listening” because that’s just petty. Just because they don’t agree with you doesn’t mean they’re wrong, it just means they haven’t seen the light yet and in my style of debating that doesn’t mean cutting off debate and giving up hope, “Oh you’ll never understand! You’re closed minded!” Rather it means I need to ratchet up the intensity, beat down their walls of argument and belief and drag them kicking and screaming into the light of truth, justice and the American Way.

Yup, turn up the heat. When they tell you you’re “closed minded” that means they’re out of arguments. When the enemy runs out of ammo that’s not the time to open negotiations, that’s the time to charge their trenches, firing as you run and force a peace on your terms. In all things, war to the knife and the knife to the hilt.

Goddamit, I hate moral quandaries like this. There’s a columnist named Mark Steyn who writes the most excellent conservative-type pieces on any number of subjects and always does so with rapier like wit and humor but he writes for a Canadian paper. Bloody hell! Can I still like the fellow and enjoy his writing even though I reject his nation and everything they stand for? Oh the pain.

So, read and enjoy. Sniper-boy was a Muslim, whacking people just for being people. Stop trying to cover it up, we are at war with Islam…period. Just like the 13th century all over again (forgive me if I get the dates wrong). God defend the right.

ps. much props to Bampf for the link.

Watched another debate last night, Ed v. Mike. I have to say, despite being the unabashed Fisher partisan that I am, I thought Mike came off very well in the first half but utterly bombed the second half.

On the schools, Mike laid out his plan to have the citizens vote on whether they want to pay property taxes or go to a graduated income tax. This accomplishes three things: it keeps the burden off the state budget, it allows the people to pick their poison and it forces school boards to go back to the people and allow them to vote up or down every subsequent time the board wants to raise taxes. That’s about as democratic as it gets and it ensures your money stays local. Brilliant.

However, in the second half of the debate Mike began all his answers with a dig at Ed. Rather than just say what he’d do and move things along he began by saying what Ed had already screwed up…then he gave his answer. To me this came off as petty and if this is what’s meant by negative campaigning I can’t say I like it very much. When asked a question answer that question. Don’t try to put or take words from the other fellow’s mouth. Just answer the damn question.

Regardless, Ed kept flogging Philly as if that was something to be overwhelmingly proud about. He may have saved the city from total collapse but it’s still a damn sight away from being a truly viable proposition and doesn’t seem to be enjoying the renaissance of a New York or a Boston. Nor will it until the people of Philadelphia drag themselves away from the old Democratic machine way of doing things and cut taxes tremendously, destroy the unions and enforce all the laws. Philly, still a blue collar town.

So, I’ma voting for Fisher, no doubt, but I think he hurt himself last night. Pity the last debate of the election had to end on such a sour note.

Another day another dollar. Like the man said, “SSDD.” Cool.

Miserable weekend, boozed Friday night and then naturally didn’t sleep for shite, tried to booze Saturday but was so worn out I felt like cold shite all day. Worked a bit yesterday morning and I think finally licked the problem that’s been dogging me for three weeks or more so yesterday afternoon was tolerably pleasant. Felt like a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. Here’s hoping things stay quiet for a while.

Off to Philly Halloween night for Flogging Molly! Ought to be a hoot, I’d bet some people come in costume and everything. Sweet! And I’m getting my damn self there so if there’s post-show partying to be done I’m in for a change. Dunno what the remainder of the weekend will hold but there’s always fun to be had in Gettysburg not to mention maybe actually sleeping in a bit for the first time in months. Man, that’d be nice.

You know something, when I first heard the names of the two sniper suspects (John Allan Muhammed and John Lee Malvo) I laughed. The first thing that popped into my mind were the aliens from Buckaroo Banzai. Every one of them was named John something (John Bigbooty, John something else, etc).

Johnny Muhammed almost sounds like Johnny Bravo’s alter ego. The whole thing is just too funny for words.

As a public service to those of you who plan to be citizens worthy of the name and actually get up off your beer stained couch and vote on November 5 I present the stances of the two gubernatorial candidates gleaned from their televised debate on October 24. I must really be getting into this politics thing, I actually took notes during the debate. I haven’t done that since college.

On Taxes: Ed claims he keeps getting misrepresented and says he can’t promise not to raise taxes although in Philly he managed to do everything but initiate the second coming of Christ on Earth without raising taxes.
Mike Fisher naturally says Ed is full of shit (he’s right) but says he can accomplish his goals without raising taxes.

On the Schools: Ed says we need the state to toss in more than its current share of 35% and mentioned that local control ends up with wealthier districts spending more on their pupils than poorer districts. He gave an example of Gettysburg spending roughtly $15,000 per student and some poorer district spending $4500 per. Me, I think $15,000 per student is disgusting but that’s just me. He plans to come up with a whole hell of a lot of money through a variety of schemes all of which come down to raising taxes one way or another.
Mike wants to force school districts to use Act 50 and put property taxes vs. income taxes for school funding to a vote. Up or down. He claims the reason this option hasn’t been offered is that it also requires any future tax increases to be put to a vote. Sounds like a spectacular idea to me, retains local control of school funding, keeps the state’s funding levels where they are at and puts the whole thing up to a vote. Brilliant!

Guns: Ed claims to be OK with current gun laws but would like to add a one handgun per month restriction. All this is, of course, total horseshit because he has already said (albeit off the record) that he’d like to see guns banned.
Mike thinks we’ve got enough laws and that the current Federal statutes are more than sufficient.

Stem Cells: Ed is pro-choice so naturally he’d like to see Stem Cell research extended to allow scientists to do whatever they like. He fits that position into his desire to see high tech business locate in PA.
Mike is pro-life, he thinks the President’s position is a good one and supports the partial ban.

Abortion: Again, Ed is pro-choice and said he ought to be elected since, if Roe v. Wade is overturned by a conservative Supreme Court you can count on him to veto any attempt to criminalize abortion in PA.
Mike is a strong Catholic and pro-life. Bully for him!

Same Sex Benefits: Ed’s against gay marriage but in favor of same sex partner benefits for state employees although he claims he would not require them for other businesses. All this despite the fact that his granting of said benefits to workers in Philly was overturned by the courts.
Mike is in favor of the status quo, which is consistent with all his other positions. Whew, constancy? Who’da thunk it?

Gambling: Both men are in favor of slot machines at race tracks. Ed says the people of PA are gambling elsewhere so why not allow it? Lovely little bit of moral equivalency that. Ed proposes to allow more lottery drawings, to market the lottery more aggressively and allow thousands of slot machines at race tracks and then dump the extra dough into education.
Mike is for the slots but wants to use the money to support prescription drug benefits. Says Ed is massively overestimating the revenue to be gained. Mike maintains his opposition to video poker as it is a moral catastrophe. Ed seems to have backed off on Keno and video poker but it seems to just be another slippery move from the master obfuscator.

Urban Issues: Ed sounds like he digs the old urban renewal schemes that failed 30 years ago. He’d like to bulldoze urban blight and then offer that land for use. He’ll also dump 2 billion into trying to bring capital into PA.
Mike is in favor of good, supply side policies, lower business taxes to bring businesses and capital into PA. He says that’s his number 1 goal.

Brain Drain: Ed wants to create tax incentive zones for business around our major colleges and universities. I thought that was brilliant, keep new businesspeople in a college mindset and you create a whole new class of nut-ball liberals with dough to maintain a Democratic dynasty.

They each said a bit about their prospective Lt. Governors. Ed says he’s behind CBK but couldn’t really explain where she’s been. Mike was very specific saying he’d give Jane Earll control of his education reform plans. State legislators have been overheard saying they’d like to see Jane in charge.

Lastly Ed said he most disliked Mike’s “scaring” people about his background and the fact he’ll favor Philly over the rest of the state with his policies. Mike most disliked the fact that Ed hasn’t yet released his 2001 income tax returns even after two filing extensions. He even offered Ed $100 in Kinko’s gift certificates to go down and get them photocopied so the voters could see.

So, that’s my take on the debate. Ed’s a hard guy to fight and I’m not sure Mike Fisher is the fellow to do it although I did come away with a much greater sense of the guy and a feeling that deep down he’s a good fellow with good ideas. Ed just strikes me as some sort of shifty Sicilian gangster planning to loot the treasury for the good of his pals.

Guess we’ll have to see how the next week goes.

OK, first of all…who wants to vote for a Corleone as Governor of Pennsylvania? Has anyone actually listened to Ed Rendell talk and felt comfortable with a fellow talking like every gangster in every movie ever made being in charge of everything? Yikes.

Ok, blow by blow…Ed lied for five minutes straight. “I didn’t say that. What I actually said was this.” Lah – Dee – Fucking – Dah. What a jackass.

Have to say, I have been a Fisher supporter from day one…more because I despise Rendell than because of anything Fisher said but day-um, I’m really starting to dig Mike Fisher. Look at the two fellows…which do you trust? A man with beetles glued to his forehead or Fisher who’s pretty calm, cool and collected.

I got more to say but I have to digest things and post more later.

The final word on why Europeans suck so much and why America is pretty much exasperated all of the time:

A few weeks ago, a piece by an American internet essayist showed up in my in-basket. It is an arresting statement of a newly familiar thought:
It’s like we’re the guy who ended up being the designated driver for the planet. Sure, we’d love to sit back and drink ourselves into a stupor with the rest of the globe, but we’re responsible for getting as many people safely home as possible.

Every so often, while we’re sitting around wishing we could kill a few beers like the rest of the planet, a sloppy drunk, drooling Europe comes over to where we’re sitting. Then, they take another swig of vodka straight out of the bottle and tell us not to worry about a thing because they’ll drive everyone home in their ‘international law’ van.

But we know, if we drink up, that we’ll just get a call at 4am asking us to bring our tow truck and the ‘jaws of life’ to clean up the bloody mess on dead man’s curve. That’s the burden of being an American.

So much to say and so little time. For your perusal, yet another demonstration of how far gone Californina (and Berkeley in particular) is:

“In Berkeley, a proposed law would make it a crime punishable by up to six months in jail to sell brewed coffee not certified as Fair Trade, organic or shade- grown. Fair Trade means farmers are assured equitable prices; shade-grown coffee is grown under trees that provide bird habitat and protect soil.”

Beauty. Juan Valdez would have been mightily thankful if he hadn’t given up coffee for cocaine.

Goddamn but I hate Michael Moore! What a gigantic jackass! In one interview he managed to pillory everyone in the nation who actually moves us ahead. Apparently he’d be much happier in Sweden where everyone is taken care of from the cradle to the grave and their economy has been contracting for the last couple of decades. Universal health care is great, but it doesn’t work anywhere that’s tried it. Have a look at the free clinics in Britain or the old Soviet Union…lovely places.

Piffle. What a gigantic fat moron! Man, I’d really get pissed if it wasn’t that I’d been up since 5 AM, had to work yesterday (Sunday) and just found out today that I get to go away next week on a fun and useless business trip.

Hot damn! It just doesn’t get any better than that.

Ahhh, the intricacies of network management. Too bad I don’t really know enough of the deep down guts of TCP/IP to figure things out on my own and too bad I don’t care.

Actually, if it wasn’t a production environment which basically precludes any testing at all that would result in downtime this might be a fun problem to pick apart and repair. Why are things running so slow and how can we improve the architecture to speed them up? Great! Fix it, but don’t change nothing in the process.

Oh well, another six day work week with only one day to try and sleep in and that cancelled out by having to be on the battlefield by 9 AM. I’m damn tempted to bail on the day’s activities but I promised I’d be there so by damn, I’ll be there.

But hooray all the same for a (so far) relatively calm Friday.

Ach, another Alumni Weekend approaching. I actually think it’s alumni weekend both at my high school and my college in the same weekend. I, of course, will be attending neither as I don’t much like most of the people I have ever met in the world and the few folks I keep in touch with are the only ones that matter.

Funny, people always give me a raft of shit about fearing change, not wanting to shake things up, getting too comfortable. I suppose since college that has been the case, six years of basically doing the same things with the same people. Before that though, I changed my “whole world” every four years or thereabouts. Spent five years in elementary school with the same folks then left them for another group in middle school for three years…then left them for a totally different bunch in four years of high school and then left them again for a group of one year at Penn State and three years at Gettysburg College. Then again, I had to form a new set of “adult” pals for “real life.” For a person who puts a lot of stock in his pals, that’s a whole hell of a lot of rebuilding over a relatively short lifespan.

Yep, so F alumni weekend! All it means to me is you can’t have a pint in the Pub ’cause it’s too damned crowded to move.

I think I am finally beginning to understand why referring to the good ol’ U.S. of A as the “homeland” — as in Department of Homeland Security — bugs me so much. Anyone remember the “melting pot?” Back in the days of Schoohouse Rock and before we all went wild over multi-culturalism we used to be very proud of the fact that the United States was a melting pot of cultures and civilizations. People came here from all over the world and formed a society based on nothing more than shared ideals. We were a melting pot, everyone brought something and the resulting agglomeration produced our amazing society. Because of this very fact, without even bringing up the point that we really are a union of states and therefore our state is our “homeland”, the idea of the melting pot precludes the United States being a “homeland.” I suppose our honelands could be Germany — where the Rader/Rotter/Roeders came from — Ireland — where the Hagartys, Lynches, Dukes, etc came from — or any other nation any one of us hails from. America, however, is our nation. Surely there aren’t people in the United States who announce they are American merely because they happened to be born here. In this day and age anyone can go almost anywhere and make a new life, even adopt another nation as home, enough people have come here and done that certainly. No, I would hope that those who claim to be American understand why we are what we are and understand that we are a nation created from ideas, not nationalities, ethnic groups or any of the other things that divide the nations of the old world.

So that’s why the United States is not the “homeland.” It just isn’t. No way.

Once again, who’s for calling this “Dept. of Homeland Security” the Department of Defense and putting the DoD back to the good old title of Department of War?

Ah, so everyone’s favorite “model ex-president” has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Think he won it for standing up to the evil and corrupt American regime and visiting the happy worker’s paradise in Cuba? Wouldn’t be surprised…by winning the prize he joins such august company as Le Duc Tho of North Vietnam, Yassir Arafat and the entire UN. Hot dawg! Now that’s the sort of people I want to be associated with.

I think in the past several years the European elites have been so corrupted by the soft, hedonistic times we live in that they fail to see real peacemakers even in our midst. Then again, one might think they could skip the prize this year, seeing as the world is at war and they’ve skipped the award during the last two world wars.

I propose G.W. Bush for next year’s prize, they gave it to Teddy Roosevelt for strong-arming an end to the Russo-Japanese war in 1906, why not give it to G.W. once he succeeds in strong arming the democratization of the entire Middle East? It would certainly be far superior to giving it to lily-livered intellectuals and communist sympathizers.

I was watching Gladiator last night and was struck by how very close our civilization is to Ancient Rome in the time of the “bad Caesars.” Bread and circuses, bread and circuses. I wonder if our love for violence, on TV and in movies and video games doesn’t stem from the same impulses that drove the Romans to gladiatorial arenas. We’ve been bred to be less forthright about our penchant for extreme gore and violence but I know the impulses haven’t been eliminated.

I had a cogent argument here but that was nearly 24 hours ago and a miserable day of miserable weather intervened and pretty much blew the actual argument right out of my head. The thought behind the argument remained, however, so I figured I’d share that with you and maybe your brain will start working as mine obviously can’t.

ohmigosh! An internet comic, with a politically motivated strip, and maybe conservative? Or at least not the typical commie-liberal-pinko-bedwetter type of drivel usually spewed?

Be still my beating heart.

http://www.sluggy.com/

Check it out, one of the best arguments for the threat of military force I’ve seen…and it skewers the UN which is always and everywhere a good thing.

Looks as if someone else finally feels a little odd about the word “homeland” as in Department of Homeland Security. Just a little un-American. But as another fellow pointed out:

“. . . it

“So I’m going to join the [AoP] and I’m off tomorrow morn.”

Butchered version of a lyric from one of those republican (Irish) tunes I like so well. Appropriate to the time and place as tomorrow I depart on the great re-inaugural annual trip to the west. Haven’t been out past the Appalachians since my interesting travels to Mississippi in 1998, missed one trip due to a broken ankle and since then either haven’t mustered the interest or haven’t wanted to take the time to make the trip. Well, I’m going this time by God, hurricane or no hurricane.

As I take my leave I wanted to present this article for your amusement. Full of interesting thoughts. I tend to agree being as I am somewhat religious and definitely conservative and relatively moralistic. Works for me.

So lemme guess, you thought they were joking when people started mentioning that the health gurus and the “we’ll help you in spite of yourselves” do-gooders might be targeting junk food as the next big eradication campaign. How wrong you were.

I heard this morning that someone (actually the Canadians and Swedes, God bless the little buggers) has discovered that starchy foods cooked at high temperatures (like frying in oil) can develop a chemical compound that causes cancer in animals. Hot damn. Again…think starchy foods fried in oil…potato chips and french fries right? Yep, the lovely folks who brought you our staggeringly huge welfare state now intend to regulate (and almost certainly eventually outlaw) french fries and potato chips.

I suppose that fellow who’s suing the fast food industry is just tickled by all of this. Talk about some fine ammunition. Not only did the counter-folk not tell him that gobbling down the finest products of America’s strip-malls would turn him into a fat slob but now they gave him cancer.

Bastards!
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, hot-diggity-damn! Hope all you Democrap types are just as happy as pigs in poo since a couple of your peace-mongering whack-job Congressmen went over to Bagdhad to plead the case against Brother Bush’s “All-New Illegal Oil War.”

What I wouldn’t give for someone with the brass ones to actually file a case for treason. Start with Mr. American Taliban, then move right ahead to these two giant wigglers.

I suppose, in reality, this couldn’t be considered treason since we’re not actually at war with Iraq even though they are clearly and defiantly a rogue state at odds with the entire “international community” all the lefties are so enamoured of. Rather, this simply strikes one as being in spectacularly bad taste, on a level with a Congressional delegation stopping by Tokyo on December 6 to lambast President Roosevelt on his saber-rattling ways and to plead the case of the Japanese Emperor. If only you’d relax the oil embargo Mr. President, the Japs will calm down and play nice.

Meanwhile, the battlefleet steams ineoxorably forward.

I hear the usual alliance of commies/bunny huggers/hippies and liberals are busily engaged in wrecking DC in order to protest the actions of the World Bank. How nice of them, destroying property and tying up rush-hour traffic is really an excellent way to make your point and gain allies in your struggle…no matter how wrongheaded your cause may be.

I have to say, I’m tempted to join the protest. I’m all for a bit of random violence and I despise anything with the words “International,” “World,” or “United Nations” in it so the World Bank must be a fine target. Why are we protesting again? Oh, to stop the western global hegemony from spreading progress throughout the world? No? To protest the destruction of the world’s forests? No? ‘Cause we’re spoiled little brats who have been so pampered by the progress of economic prosperity and freedom throughout the world that we really haven’t anything better to do?

Ahhh, that’s the one. Brilliant.

Ahh, sod the weekend…it was a long time ago and so little has happened in the interim. Haven’t been able to get mad in a while…too weary. Thought I had a nice mad-on building the other day over teeny-bopper morons who call themselves Roman Catholic saying they’ll stay in the Church despite the scandals in the hope of “changing it from the inside.” Stupid bastards. The Church was established by God…”you are Cephas, the rock, and upon this rock I will build my Church.” That pretty much indicates things flow from the top down, not bottom up. This ain’t a democracy folks, God tells the Pope how things go and he tells the rest o’ the little people. Just ’cause Phil Donahue sez condoms and pre-marital sex is the best thing since God created whiskey don’t make it so.

Buuut, that wasn’t enough to get me really mad. You know what did it?

Our ever-loving Federal government, in the latest in an unceasing attempt to save us from ourselves, plans on mandating that every man-jack of us runs out and buy a brand spanking new television set…hopefully before December 2006.

Now, I have to admit I don’t know what the real reason for the rush is but someone out there has to be pushing real damn hard for digital TV for Congress to even consider a mandate for new purchases. There ain’t no grandfathering here like there was with unleaded gasoline and even with unleaded if you bought the high octane stuff your old car would still run, nope…at some point analog TV signals are going to be terminated and all the gear we have is going to be nice shiny, highly expensive paperweights. Naturally the entertainment industry is all for this, more dough in their pockets and the chance to force copyright killing “rights management” upon us all through legislative fiat. I dunno, is it just me or did I miss the section of the Constitution that gives Congress the right to dictate our purchases as consumers?

It’s odd I know but the whole thing smacks of bread and circuses…give them a clearer picture and more channels and maybe the dunderheads will leave us alone.

Hey, maybe 57 channels of BET will occupy those folks and put the reparations thing to rest once and for all.

Man, it has been a while! In the interim I’ve been to 1862 and 2002 and a couple other waypoints in between.

I have to say, the whole thing was pretty anti-climactic. After getting next to no sleep last week in a frantic effort to finish up an issue shirt and then rolling into a guaranteed no sleep weekend I reckon I was entirely too jaded to really notice what happened to me.

Thursday – typical day. Worked on the shirt until Limey rolled up, then supper and libations and visiting with everyone else as they cruised into town.

Friday – up early and sewing. By 11 everything was gathered and the shirt was finished enough to move into the field (needed buttons and buttonholes, topstitching and reinforcement. The former could be had on the field, the latter can wait). Off we roved to the Waffle House for the last good meal before the big hoo-hah. I have to say, the event sucked. As me and Da Limey rolled through the camps we were sorely tempted to just keep on driving out the exit and seek our fun elsewhere. Air mattresses, hotel folding cots, gal-troops, polyester and bad 1862 impressions were the order of the day. At least we had our 27th Indiana impressions down pat. I have to admit it was pretty cool to go to Antietam wearing essentially the same thing and carrying the same weapon as my g-g-g-grandfather did 140 years ago. Pretty nifty. Spent the day lounging and s(l)utering and off to an early and bad rest.

Saturday – for whatever reason the Mifflin Guard and sundry other batl’ns sounded revile at 3 1/2 AM rather than the expected 4 1/2 AM. Up and at-em bright and early with a light breakfast made of the remnants of last night’s supper (rice and salt beef). On the march around the afore-mentioned 4 1/2 I expect…lovely misty moisty morning. Thank God for the kind souls who provided floodlights in case, heaven forfend!, one of us might twist an ankle on the way to the front. Wouldn’t want to miss the battle with a semi-period wound or anything would we? I think that situation was well commented upon by the spontaneous cheering that broke out in the lines when the lights were finally doused. Typical artillery duel followed by the typical cluster fuck of a battle complete with bullet-proof fatsos in grey kits outflanking the entire Federal army as if anyone cared. For whatever reason our little 60 man detached outfit were the only Feds to make it entirely through the corn. Nifty cool. Later, more breakfast, then photos and then I started my adventure into Sharpsburg . . . which is to be continued.

The band music caught my ear last night so I took some time to head downtown and happened upon a grand September 11 memorial ceremony. Part of it was actually very cool…lots of flags, two fire trucks parked nose to nose with ladders extended forming an arch from which hung another flag. A couple of speeches that were hard to hear and the unrolling of a massive flag on the side of the bank. All very cool. I made it through the speeches and lasted until they started belting “Proud to be an American,” the old Lee Greenwood song from the Gulf War. At that point I wanted to be sick, I got angry and so I went home and took a couple of belts from the whiskey bottle.

Pride is good. Anger is better. This maudlin, psychotheraputic, self-congratulatory back slapping has got to stop. It’s all well and good to congratulate ourselves on what we’ve accomplished so far but turning the attacks into a “tragedy” fit for a Hallmark card is the absolute worst thing we can do. This wasn’t a tragedy, it was an act of pure evil agression. An attack on the centers of our military, economic and political might. A strategic upping of the ante in a global war which, it has been persuasively argued, started in the early 1990s and has continued since with each attack growing bolder while our response gradually wound down until we made no response at all. If we don’t remember the anger we felt on September 11 and the hate we felt for the people who attacked us we will lose the war. If we instead turn this into a nightmare which will fade away, if we spend time discussing it in group therapy sessions and lighting candles of false unity, we will lose the war.

That’s it for me, no use flogging a dead horse and I’ve said quite enough over the past several days. It’s time to move ahead and get on to the next hurdle…convincing the nancy boys at the UN that we’re going to clear out the Middle East with them or without them and if alliances have to crumble that’s the way it’s going to be. NATO may have to become a Warsaw Pact…you go along with us because we tell you to. One last word on anger, a year after Pearl Harbor nobody was doing grief counseling or showering whiny tributes on the windows and orphans of Pearl or trying to “understand” why the Japs did what they did. Instead the men fighting overseas erected signs with Admiral Halsey’s quote, “Kill Japs! Kill Japs! Kill more Japs! You will help to kill the yellow bastards if you do your job well.”

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could update those words for the first war of the 21st Century.

From Richard Brookheiser, author and New Yorker:

“So here is a last New York greeting to Osama, should he be alive, or even if he is enjoying his reward. F**k you, pal. You got a problem with that?”

Now that’s just f-ing beautiful.

As I continue to reflect on the day I find myself wishing I had more time today so I could go and visit a recruiter and discuss the possibilities of service. I have long held that every American should serve their country in some way but, me being me, no-one ever considered me suitable for military service and all the other touchy-feely service organizations just seem asinine. I did, however, do some reading on the Naval Reserve and it looks like it might be just the thing. Now it’s simply a matter of looking seriously into it and then taking the plunge. Could be an adventure.

So the “great” day is upon us and I hope that, like me, you are spending it doing nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Maybe saying a quick prayer or two for victory and maybe one for those who died although it doesn’t do to dwell on the deaths except as fuel for our determination to exterminate the vermin who perpetrated the attacks. Very few people went around on December 7. 1942 whining about the lost and bleating that we need understanding and tolerance. Instead people marched in great parades, with brass bands and serried ranks of troops; while overseas, on two fronts, the men (and women) of America took the fight straight to the enemy and dug him out of caves on Guadacanal and the deserts of North Africa.

We should be doing the same.

Instead of moments of silence and prayers and reading the names of the dead how about grand recruitment drives? How about mass enlistments? How about the first stage of the invasion of Iraq? How about a clear-cut statement that we are willing to support the Iranian people in their struggle against the mullahs? How about a nice big fat rasperry in the face of the Saudi Crown Prince and a forced commitment to end his support of radical Islam throughout Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East?

We have to do something and turning September 11 into another Hallmark card holiday just ain’t going to cut it. This maudlin, weepy, whiny bs has got to end…right here and right now. I think we ought to pressure our representatives and senators to declare September 11 a new national holiday. Remembrance Day. Every year we can rededicate ourselves to what we are as Americans. Remember what’s so wonderful about this nation and ensure that we all do our part to protect it.

Well that’s positively revolting. Just had a look at Yahoo’s “Living Tribute”. Funny, none of the photos of “heroes” are military personnel who are, at this very minute, scattered all over the world making sure the folks who caused September 11 never get the chance to hurt anyone ever again. Added to that indignity is the balderdash they offer for “memorial tiles” grouped under such touchy-feely headings as Hope, Love, Peace, Tolerance, Religion and Unity. I’m all for Hope so long as it’s my hope that these desert monkeys get up to Allah only to be sent down to burn. Love is fine, I love my country and would love to get some payback. Peace is cool too, Pax Americana. Tolerance? Can’t really say I have much tolerance for the pull-starts or their friends in America. Religion is all well and good, as long as it’s in the proper context. Unity is just crap, nobody is united truly…we’ve all got our own views on why this went down and what we need to do about it. My advice would be to quit weeping and whining and start killing people.

Well hot damn! Our corporate offices are going patriotic tomorrow, wear your red, white and blue!

I actually find this somewhat offensive as it could imply that we are unpatriotic other days of the year. I know this isn’t true of the majority of the folks here but I don’t think September 11 should be treated like St. Patrick’s Day and commemorated by the wearing of the colors.

I have always been a patriot, I was no more patriotic on September 12 of last year as I was on September 10. I couldn’t possibly have been more patriotic. I simply cannot comprehend people who believe the United States is anything less than the greatest nation ever to exist on the planet Earth and that we are the best hope for humankind that has been conceived to this point.

As far back as I can remember we stood when the National Anthem was played and put our hands on our hearts when the flag passed even during opening ceremonies for sporting events on television. I can only think of one time when I considered myself on the verge of opposing our military and that was at the beginning of Desert Storm and due, I think, to my mother’s pernicious liberal slant and the leftovers of her opposition to the war in Vietnam. I never bought into the flower child view that the Vietnam war was bad, evil or any of the other bollocks we’re taught these days. I felt that it may have been a mistake but that the men who fought it were heroes and the villians, if any, were the pansies in suits and ties who sent them there and then wimped out before the job was done.

Right, getting off the beaten track. Suffice it to say I will not consciously dress in red, white and blue tomorrow. I will remember in my own way. Probably by watching my new DVD of “What We Saw”, CBS News’s compilation of September 11 coverage. Then I’ll probably go down to the bar and sit with my friends and laugh and shoot the shit just like every other Wednesday night and generally adopt the stance of “defiant normality” which more and more seems to be the most appropriate response.

Never forget what happened, never lose the hate and anger that wells up inside all of us when we think of that Tuesday morning a year ago. Don’t let it heal. Don’t try to “move on.” Go on about your daily business, do what you need to do to get ahead in life, but remember and pray for vengeance.

Oh heavens, oh dear me, we’ve been warned folks…an attack on Iraq would “open the gates of hell in the Middle East.” My oh my, whatever shall we do. I guess car bombs in Kabul, assasination attempts in Kandahar, almost daily reports of dead civilians in Israel, anti-American balderdash being preached from the pulpits throughout Arabia and four hijacked jetliners used as gigantic flying bombs by Arab men doesn’t qualify as the “gates of hell.” Dunno, I figured we’d all seen hell. The only way things could get worse that I can comprehend is a reinstitution of the draft and total war against the nutcases in the east…and I ain’t entirely convinced that’s a bad thing.

I tell you, the man’s a national treasure, he really is:

“I know it’s a practical and political impossibility and would be downright wrong to boot, but I swear I would take great perverse pleasure in seeing the US cut off every last dime of aid money, call every last Peace Corps volunteer home, and ostentatiously present the UN with a big fat invoice for back rent on that noisy brothel they occupy on the Upper East Side. Then I’d just love to see Bush call a press conference to announce that “the bombing of Baghdad begins in five minutes. Anybody who so much as squeaks, you’re next. Fuck you.”"

Now that’s what I’m talking about. Straight from the horse’s mouth at Cold Fury. Like I’ve said before, I obviously don’t spend enough time writing on this thing and I don’t like to repeat myself (but everybody’s doin’ it) but what I wouldn’t give to be this erudite and to the point on my best day.

testing finally

Hawt diggity damn! The time has come at last to move to a real blog system on me own damn site! Swanky.

So, if things seem odd for whatever reason, relax. I’ll have them sorted out directly. In the meantime, when things are done point yourself to vitriol.messofthedamned.org and peruse the new digs. Hopefully all will go smoothly.

Ok ya monkeys, feel free to heap scorn upon my ceaselessly balding head. I passed on a Philly gig that would have scored me 55K a year plus the envy of men and love of women throughout SE Pennsylvania. Well, maybe not the love of women but the rest of it was true. What a hell of a time for someone to offer me such an opportunity. As bad as things get here in my happy workplace it’s still one of the better gigs I’ve had (only the college was better — but for much less pay) and I have only lately come to the decision that this really is home and that I could pretty much stay in my domicile for a very long time. Sure, now offer me the big bucks to move away. Bloody wankers.

So the money would be nice, the chance to be a city kid might be cool (although that just ain’t me) but while I was sipping sherry at the symphony with Mrs. So-and-So and Mr. Ladeedah I’d be thinking of summers under the arbor and winters before the fire in O’Rorkes with a pint in hand swapping stories with the lads and laughing so hard I stopped breathing. Wednesday nights are my safety valve, they keep me from killing people. Like my friend said, “We’ll have to get you one of the handbooks on being a Civil War bum like the rest of us.” What would I do without Gettysburg?

Those wacky Mormons are at it again. Oh the pain, the horror, the violations of the first amendment! This poor, poor fellow married 5 women (girls really) all between the ages of 13 and 16 and the big bad Federal Guv-Mint (TM) saw fit to jail him for pedophilia. How can that be? Why, he was only practicing his religion! Bollocks. Forget the fact that Mormonism is completely insane, perfectly on a level with the cults of UFOs and the return of Elvis the King, one simply cannot violate a universally agreed upon social contract (one man-one woman marriage) even if his religion demands it. As I recall, and I could be wrong, even Brigham Young gave up polygamy when it became clear normalized relations with the rest of the United States was at stake. Joseph Smith, in my opinion, created the ridiculous “religion” as any other cult leader would. To get chicks (polygamy helps) and to get his jollies off the power of group worship.

Enough Mormon bashing. Actually, you can never do enough Mormon bashing but that’s enough for now. I read that people in the know are calling twenty dollar bills “yuppie food stamps” since that’s all anyone has on them due to the ATM revolution. I always preferred my patented term “flat green drinking tokens” but I suppose you have to be a boozer to appreciate the subtlety.

Anybody that’s the praying type say a prayer that today is a nice, calm, mellow sort of day. I am just about at the end of my tether and unless I get some rest I may fray and snap…and that ain’t pretty. The rainy, crappy looking sky ain’t helping either.

Shee-it.

I suppose we all get shit on in our own way but damn, my brother has some spectacularly bad luck with technology…particularly technology that I buy for him. Bought him a stereo with a 3-CD changer, lasted right around a year and broke. Bought him a Palm m500, broke within six months. Helped choose and purchase a Toshiba laptop, big bucks, hard drive went physically bad inside of 3 months. So, he’s pretty much lost everything. His Palm had names, addresses, notes, etc and that’s all fried. His laptop had notes for a project he was working on and nearing completion and now that’s all gone. I tell you, I don’t mind getting kicked in the teeth. I can handle it. I figure it’s my lot in life, those of us who can handle bad things get lots of them so weak people don’t kill themselves. No worries.

But damn, leave my people alone you great white joker! Piss off and let them be.

And on another note, who the hell can I recommend for computers now? Toshiba always seemed to be pretty hot but this sucks. I have two broken Dells to deal with and Dell is useless. I’ve had relatively good luck with Gateway and HP but they just seem shady and kind of dumb. All computers stink and I think we should go back to graph paper and mechanical pencils.

I have too much to say and no time to say it, a whole weekend and a day without posting anything…dayum, I think I may burst with mid-20s angst! I wanted to complain about the reparations weirdos. Did anyone stop to think if we could deduct the cost of their transport here, medical care, housing, food and all the welfare and affirmative action programs enacted over the past 140-odd years from the amount they think we owe them? I reckon we could just call it even. Slavery was a bad thing, we’re real sorry. Matter of fact, we’ve gone further and done more to express our sorrow and to try to make amends than any other slaveholding nationality has ever done! Yep, let’s call it even before we have to tally the bill.

Cold Fury has a great screed on leftist hypocrites. For all their whining they are damn lucky to live in this nation where you can say such patently idiotic things and still be respected as other than a lobotomized drooler. Check him out here. But this is the best part:

What I can’t figure out about all of these whackadoo-left rationalizations is how completely inconsistent they all are. I mean, we’re talking here about people who truly hate and fear Jerry Falwell more than Mohammad Atta. People who find a way to overlook the violent subjugation of women as a cultural or religious “difference” but think Clarence Thomas ought to be tarred and feathered. People who hate and fear the development and honing of US military strength and consider it a threat to the entire world, but think it’s not a problem (and none of our business) for Saddam to cobble together a few nukes to point at us and Israel. People who still think George W “stole the election” but insist we deal with Yassir-he’s-their-baby Arafat as “the duly elected leader of the Palestinian people.” People who protest loudly against shedding blood for oil but call for federal investigations into the oil companies’ supposed price-gouging every time gasoline prices go up three or four cents. People who readily dismiss more-than- credible charges of sexual harassment and even rape against Bill Clinton but, if the same acts were even rumored to have been committed by a corporate bigshot like Bill Gates, would be parading through Berekely with his head on a pike.

Aaaaand finally, I need to get some sleep but first I have to drive to Philly tonight, meet a fellow in Center City tomorrow and then drive back and survive half a day of work. It’s hell I tell you, it’s been a damn rough week after an enjoyable but exhausting weekend and next weekend promises more of the same. The only hope is it won’t be so damnably hot. I need a damn vacation.

Goddamn. Is everyone else as sick to death of hearing about Elvis as I am? Sweet suffering Jesus, the man was a fat, useless sack of drug OD-ing shit who bought it on the toilet fer chrissakes. Talk about white trash! Do we commemorate Ida Mae who died in the great mobile home fire of nobody-gives-a-crap? Surely not. Elvis was in the same damn league.

I dunno, I could never muster respect or admiration for drug users and particularly for those “idols” who died of overdoses. I always though Jim Morrison was a self-centered prick and never much liked his music. I dig Janis’s tunes a bit more but she was still a screwed up little girl who couldn’t get hold of herself and go on with life. Dunno what happened to Jimi, that one I never understood at all. No reason that I can see for his ODing. Still, what a weenie. Elvis falls into the same category and musters greater scorn than the rest because not only was he a useless bit of trailer trash he didn’t even play very good music. Ahhhh, like the t-shirt sez:

“Elvis was a bitch.”

All sorts of really good stuff on the web today. USA Today has a two part breakdown of exactly what happened to the Nation’s air traffic system on September 11. Amazing stuff. I read an article on how the Islamo-fascists weren’t actually trying to accomplish anything on September 11 other than theatre on a grand scale intended only to further their very own little fantasy world. And the topper, a very cogent and well thought out argument to make September 11 a new national holiday, a secular sabbath. Close all the stores, stop and think. The author calls it a “Day of Remembrance.” I vote we title it Remembrance Day. That pretty much sums up what we want to do, remember what happened, remember how we reacted and most of all remember how spectacularly lucky we all are to be living in this nation even in this time in history. I’d sign a petition and maybe it’s worth talking to your congressman about. Seems a good idea to me.

Oh heavens, whatever shall we do? The Mexican President suddenly doesn’t want to parley with our President. Oh dear me, what a pity. Apparently a Mexican drug dealer came into Texas and killed a cop in the midst of a drug deal gone bad. So naturally we executed the worthless greaser. Unfortunately the Mexicans are raising a fuss and are terribly discombobulated (apparently with the help of our friends the Euro-weenies) that we would do such a thing in clear violation of international-blah-blah-blah. What a bunch of morons. Can everyone see how horribly bothered I am by the fact the Mexican Prez won’t be coming up to Crawford to beg and plead for us to legalize a whole bunch of useless spics who can’t even speak the language. I consider we Americans blessed. At least our dear President won’t have a chance to cave into these ridiculous demands.

And in other news, our ally, the just and righteous king of the good and kind Saudi people has gone on vacation in Spain at a cost of roughly six million dollars a day. Now usually I’m not a fan of environmental worries but maybe we ought to ease back just a little on the gas-guzzlers. If we could put a dent in the Saudi pocketbook maybe the king could only afford a five million dollar a day vacation next month. Maybe he’ll just have to cut his harem down. Of course, in Saudi Arabia that could be taken literally.

I just don’t know anymore. I think we ought to go to war with Iraq. Apparently most of the American people think we ought to go to war with Iraq. I have, however, read some persuasive commentary on precisely why we should not go to war with Iraq. Tough question. I don’t know if Saddam is up to his old tricks or not or even if we have any real justification for fighting him. I reckon we can do just about whatever we please but could we make a plausible case for a proper Congressional Declaration of War? Dunno. It’s a pretty scary time and anyone who isn’t scared when they contemplate the possibilities just ain’t thinking hard enough. Think about it.

1. My guess would be the Iraqis will fight a hell of a lot harder than they did last time. Last time they were mainly fighting to make Saddam look good, nobody wants to die to make some other yahoo look good. This time they’ll be fighting directly for their homes and their people and, regardless of how bad Saddam may be for the Iraqi people, the right to dictate their own destiny.

2. China and Taiwan keep pussyfooting about. What are the chances China takes our distraction in the Middle East as the opening they’ve been looking for to silence Taiwan once and for all? Pretty slim agreed but, man, that’s worrisome given our current “state of readiness.”

3. No doubt some missles will be lobbed by Saddam and maybe Iran (although I doubt it, at least not until we settle in Iraq and show indications we’re coming after the good old Islamic Republic next). Israel will take a hit. Tons of fun especially considering their present situation. Hell, we might even take a hit if not on the mainland then certainly our troops will.

4. We’ll have to spend a lot of time in Iraq sorting things out and we’ll have to be a whole hell of a lot more serious about it than we have been so far about Afghanistan. Afghanistan is on the verge of teetering back into the abyss and we’re off dealing with other things. Sure, running Iraq will help but will it help soon enough?

5. Do we really want to run Iraq? I mean old school, colonial power, like the Romans ran Judea run Iraq? I don’t think we’ve got the stomach for it but obviously these people can’t rule themselves. Look at Saudi Arabia. Look at the afore-mentioned Afghanistan fer chrissakes. We can’t risk that sort of thing happening again especially after we invest blood and treasure in regime change.

And lastly, do we have the balls to see the thing through? I have grave doubts. Americans are soft. We like our remote controls and our take out chicken. The vast majority of us have never had to scrimp and save for anything. We’ve never had to do without. Even when we have to save for something we usually find a way to acquire things without actually sacrificing for them (read Visa/Master Card). Have we lost the capacity for self-sacrifice? Are we even capable of denying ourselves anything? Do we remember how to care about the other guy and happily give in order to keep him going? I’m not talking about taxing the rich to throw money at the poor. I’m talking about rationing…no meat on Thursday so our soldiers can have some Spam in the field. No gas to go to the movies so we can get one more mile closer to Bagdhad. How about sacrificing a son or daughter so our LBBs in Iraq can taste a Big Mac in 10 to 20 years without looking over their shoulder for the thought police? Possible? Dunno. All I know is if the shit hits the fan I’ll enlist. We’ll find out just how much moxie the good old USA still has.

“You commie bozos lost the cold war. Get over it you limp-wristed weasel.”

Now that’s funny. Amazing ain’t it how Euro-weenies think they can lecture us on the finer points of “democracy.” Ahh, get-bent.

Back from a most excellent weekend. Starting with the Warped Tour on Friday which wasn’t as warm as usual and therefore much more amenable to drinking and carousing and continuing with the most purely manly day I’ve spent in a while. An entire day of lounging about the house watching war movies and drinking beer interspersed with horseshoe bouts and garnished with the consumption of meat straight from the grill: hamburgers for lunch and steak for supper. Not only steak, great mouthwatering, impossibly thick chunks of meat, but beans cooked on the open fire still in the can. Beans hobo-style. Now that’s some damnably manly eating right there folks.

So much for left-wing sissies and bean sprout chomping Euro-weenies. Booze, broads and beef…now that’s a weekend worth enjoying.

Funny, I was going to complain about how the FCC has now mandated that we will all be buying digital TV sets by 2007. Isn’t it wonderful how those in power have only our welfare at heart? When they’re not trying to deprive us of our right to self-defence they’re mandating how we will enjoy the mind-numbing entertainment spewed everywhere 24 hours a day 7 days a week. How kind. In the mdist of pondering this instance of government’s concern for our well-being this little story was brought to my attention.

What’re the chances? Ohhhh, probably about as good as government mandating the way television sets should be constructed.

Golly gee. What a surprise.

Congratulations, you’re anger.

I’m really starting to like this guy. He’s as good as me on my best day every day. Always worth reading.

Heard on NPR this morning that the state of Florida has passed a law requiring expectant mothers who don’t know the father to post an ad in the newspaper detailing the possible place of conception and all sexual partners who might possibly have had a hand in conception. Supposedly the purpose of all this is to give the fathers a chance to claim their child prior to an abortion or adoption. Another excellent idea poorly executed. The execution is poor enough but what’s even better is that the girl they held up as the poor victim of this terrible law was only 14 years old at the time of conception! Not only that but she can’t identify the father because she had so many sexual partners at the time she couldn’t possibly remember which one it was! At 14 fer chrissakes!

Pathetic. Just feckin pathetic. Some girl is running around at 14 getting boffed, unprotected, so often and with so many different men that she can’t even recall which one of them knocked her up and we’re supposed to feel sorry for her? Where are the parents? Where’s any sense of shame or responsibility?

What a lovely little world we live in.

We all know Saddam is a psychotic wiggler bastard who needs to be wiped off the face of the earth but wouldn’t it be cool if we could start the revolution elsewhere in the Middle East? Maybe in a country that has been synonomous with terror for the past 30 years and spread the cleansing light of democracy from there?

Right now, Iranian kids are getting their heads cracked open by protesting against the silly holy-rollers who keep them down and nobody’s saying a word. Scary ain’t it? Not one word, anywhere in the western world. Bizarre.

Here’s the big chance to clean out one nest of vipers with the help of the whole people and we’re not doing anything.

Typical.

Now here’s an interesting thought:

“The Hebrew “P’lishtim” is usually translated “Philistines,” but can also be rendered “Palestinians.”"

Wonder when some intrepid David will step up and give Ol’ Pull-Start a nice slingshotted rock between the eyes. Or are we to consider Goliath as the shadowy terror cells and David as squadrons of Israeli gunships? Lessee, leather slingshot with smooth stone or 20mm Vulcan AP? Things that make you go hmmmmmmm.

This is the greatest thing I’ve seen in many weeks. Especially since movies have been sucking the big fattie lately. It’s almost as if, having released that steaming pile of Candian idiot screed call “Austin Powers” all of Hollywood has gone directly down the crapper. Anyway, it made me laugh.

Big up Jamaica! I think that’s what the guy on the radio was saying anyway in the sort of slangy English the islanders use. It’s Jamaican Independence Day! Smoke the ganj and give thanks to Ja for all he has given.

I have always had an affinity for Jamaica. They seem so much like the Irish although from much warmer climes. They’re hard-working but laid back, they like drinking and smoking, dancing music and fighting. I suspect the Brits were a great deal nicer to the islanders once slavery ended than they were to the Irish but then again, the Irish were probably treated so badly because they were thought capable of reform (being white). The black islanders were probably treated like children since, after all, they were only black west indians.

So, Happy Independence Day to Jamaica. If I had any rum in the house I’d drink to it.

I love whiny bitches, people who even after they get into their mid-20s and have gotten past all the teen-angst, college life questions and BS still complain about the difficulties in life and how they’re missing something and Ohhhh, the pain!

Pathetic.

First of all isn’t putting food in your belly and a roof over your head enough to worry about? I found my mind wonderfully focused when suddenly I actually had to come up with the dough to keep myself amused. All those things you worry about in college suddenly didn’t amount to jack-shit. Lovely. Second:

Pain is good.

We need pain. Pain reminds us we’re alive. Pain reminds us what to do and what not to do. Like I read today, poverty and hardship makes you strong, wealth and comfort makes you weak. Why else are silly LBBs in funny turbans wandering about killing people left and right with seeming impunity? Obviously because they’re poor and therefore hungry and therefore are willing to do whatever it takes. Why aren’t we stepping on their heads? Because we’re soft and rich and don’t want to do anything that might endanger that state of affairs.

I’m pissed off…an angry white male…I haven’t had lunch…things have been going poorly today…I hate the goddamn telephone and I need a drink.

Enjoy the weekend. Buy some antiques.

Methinks we’re getting ready to go to war. While driving on 30 yesterday I saw a trailer go by with a turreted armored vehicle on the back sporting a very nice new coat of tan/yellow paint. The last time I saw such things happen with any regularity was in 1990-1991 so I reckon if everyone starts seeing new paint jobs on tanks/Humvees/Bradleys/AFVs you can bet that within six months we’ll be scrapping with our good friend Saddam.

I was thinking about how decades seem to take a couple of years to settle into their pattern. The real part of the 1990s didn’t start until Clinton’s inaguration, even musically we were still listening more or less to 80s music until Pearl Jam/Nirvana and that sort of sound took over in 1991-1992. I’d call that the start of the 90s. Similarly, the 1990s seem to have carried on until this year, musically we still haven’t made a change but the latest glory days of the stock market are winding down and all the dirty laundry of the 90s boom is getting aired. I wonder though, will the end of the 1990s be September 11 or will it end, as arguably the 80s did, with the latest attack on Iraq?

Be pretty bizarre to end two decades the same way wouldn’t it?

Have you ever actually read any blogs? Goddamn but people are useless. Case in point.

While reading a most excellent book last night (The Center Cannot Hold, Harry Turtledove, Fifth in the Great War Series) I realized the problem with the Confederate States of America. My best explanation until now for why secession was wrong was that is was like two kids in a schoolyard sharing toys. One of the kids decides he doesn’t like the way the game is going, they argue and finally the annoyed kid exclaims, “Fine, then. I’m taking my toys and going home!” Still a fairly good explanation I think. But here’s the point, the Confederacy never had a chance. Matter of fact, if the Confederacy had won (I think) democracy the world over would have collapsed and the history of the 20th century would have been very different. Of course, no one is told what might have been but I think there’s a reasonable case to be made. The existence of the Confederacy was an expression of factionalism within a republic, the needs/will of the few outweigh the needs/will of the many. Naturally no government can be run on such principles, look at our current mess where we’re so concerned with taking care of every little minority or special interest group that we run the risk of losing the whole ball of wax in the meantime. For a republic/democracy to work it must be clearly understood that majority rules, in all cases. The Constitution was set up in such a way as to hopefully prevent tyranny by the majority but enshrining the right to peacably assemble and petition for redress of grievances and by splitting the powers of the government into three branches. The legislature can pass a law but do precious little to enforce it, similarly the judiciary can review and comment upon law and ensure the law is consistent but cannot make law nor enforce it. The executive has great powers to enforce the law but cannot make it nor can he offer comment on it beyond approving or dissapproving of it, etc, etc etc.

I’m rambling again…too early, thoughts not organized. Suffice it to say, if the Confederacy had triumphed the principle of majority rule would have been shattered for all time. Never again could a representative government such as ours be created since there was no way for any government (based on the precedent established by the CSA) to enforce its decrees. If “majority rules” was tossed out the window then anyone could do pretty much whatever they like. What, actually, are the chances that the Confederacy itself would have remained intact? How about the western states? Would they have joined the broken Union?

That’s enough random and disjointed commentary for today. I hate rebels, I really do. Power to the people baby…but only if they think like me.

This is actually still from last week but since last week was such a busy and fun-filled week of hellish giggles I don’t think it registered until today. My old childhood home is sold. What’s more it seems like the parents are in the divesting mood, they’re keen on selling pretty much everything in the house. Bizarre. Unfortunately, as I haven’t got a house and likely never will I can’t take anything along. Some stuff I’d like to have but I just can’t bring myself to put it into storage and never get it out. So, it all goes on sale. What’s even worse is that in the midst of this insanely busy year I have to work at getting all my toys and books and whatever else is left in the house out and into my already filled-to-bursting home. Fun fun fun. As if things weren’t bad enough I have to add this incovenience to the list.

In any case, if anyone out there is interested in purchasing some really smashing antique furniture let me know and I’ll be happy to send along the list of items for sale. Hopefully pictures will be available soon. If anyone is interested in actually smashing antique furniture maybe you need to get an apprenticeship with Gallagher.

“Here’s to alcohol: the source of, and answer to, all of life’s problems.” — Homer Simpson

User Friendly claims it’s System Administrator Appreciation Day. I think they’re Canadian (they spell check cheque, that’s proof enough for me) so I wonder…is that only a Canadian holiday or can I go about browbeating stupid users willy-nilly today as well? Do we get a blank cheque (dammit!) on DUI and aggravated assault with an IEEE-1384 cable today?

Keep the planet clean, kill a salesman.

I hate people. One numbskull came to a full and complete stop before entering the Gettysburg circle even though the closest vehicle was half-way around the bloody circle and obviously no threat. Then said numbskull proceeded down the street at a blistering 15 miles per hour before nearly coming to a stop at a green light! Finally lost that bag o’ brains at the 30 split so on I go, merrily motoring towards Hanover only to run into another fine citizen motorist doing almost exactly 10 miles an hour less than the speed limit regardless of the posted limit! It was bloody well amazing, we drove on, past sign after sign advertising 35 MPH (at which he steadily did between 25 and 30) and then past 3 signs in a row advertising 45 MPH (at which he did between 35 and 40).

How on earth can people drive past sign after sign, posting the speed limit and not even attempt to reach said limit? I can understand cleaving strictly to the posted limit. I used to be a stickler myself and still mind at least the spirit of the limit if not the letter but good God, if you’re going to simply refuse to come up to the posted limit pull over at your earliest opportunity and let those who actually have someplace to go get by.

Please folks, help prevent road rage. Steal your grandparents’ keys.

Good news! You only have a 1 in 23 lifetime chance of dying!

OK, OK, it’s not strictly true but it does make for a nifty headline. Actually I think what the chart says is you have a 1 in 23 lifetime chance of dying in an accident. The best news is that you have a 1 in 9 million chance of dying this year from poisonous plants or foodstuffs. So, go ahead and eat from dented cans in the supermarket. What’re the odds anyway?

Un-freekin-believable. Whatta feckin week. I think it has been bloody well nonstop since Monday morning. Between numerous typical hassles on the phone I’ve had a video card go bad on one machine, another machine give me a Windows Protection Error on module [insert unintelligible character string here] (I hate when that happens) and today some nimrod unplugged the entire network stack at one of our core locations effectively dropping three-quarters of the WAN off the face of the bleedin’ earth. Lovely. Just lovely. All I can think about is my old and ancient Thursday curse and worry about just what the hell will befall me tomorrow.

Add to all of this the fact that there simply aren’t any spectacle frames made today that suit me. If I had a handy woman to go shopping with that would help immeasurably but, being me, I suppose I’ll have to settle for my mother and my style-conscious bro. I guess I’ll end up looking like a cross between some Ozzie and Harriet nightmare and an irrepressible French poof by the time this is all over. Maybe I should get a pair like Rick in Major League…big ol’ black plastic frames with a skull and crossbones on the bridge. That’d be different.

Too bad I’m in a semi basement right now, otherwise I’d contemplate leaping out the window. Not to death of course (suicide is for the weak) but a couple of days in the hospital and a month or so to recuperate would suit me just fine right about now. With luck I could get sacked again from my hospital bed and suckle from the Commonwealth’s teat for another six months. Yes indeedy, I’m a welfare baby.

Finally!

We’ve identified the culprits.

Oh, you sick sick man.

Well, it made me laugh.

Hahahahahhahahahahaha!!!!

WTC proposals are up, there’s one cool one with two towers although neither are as large as the originals. Most of them allow for memorial space on the actual site of the original twin towers. Check ‘em out.

Awright, most of you people suck. Either there’s only one person reading this garbage or you’re all too disgusted by my use of horked code to comment. Eh, who cares? I’m mostly writing this ’cause I can’t drink heavily at work. That’s good enough for me.

Saw Road to Perdition last night. Pretty cool flick, slow at times but filled with enough really cool stuff and incredible artisanship that the slow bits were worth wading through. It reaffirmed my interest in being a hitman although, knowing myself, I’m not sure I could do it for long (too stressful) and as the movie thankfully affirmed…you just don’t walk away from that sort of gig.

On another note, Janis Ian, a real old school singer/songwriter has written a perceptive article on the “free music” phenomenon. I have to say, she’s dead on right as far as I’m concerned. I don’t think my CD purchases have declined since the advent of downloading and I know I’ve bought or plan to buy a great many CDs I would either not have bought unless I had heard some of the tunes or would not even have known about. Then again, a lot of the stuff I’m into is not big music so maybe I ain’t helping out the “industry” but the industry can go to hell. One question though, why is she buying Backstreet Boys CDs for her nephews? Yet another generation of silky smooth “sensitive” men await. I wonder if the decline in marriage isn’t due to the fact that men simply aren’t men anymore. A subject for another time perhaps.

And on another note, what a weekend! Big wedding in Scranton of all places, yet another of the college crowd tied the knot. Pretty sweet, definitely one of the high points of the year so far. Plenty of booze of all types and a fairly mellow typical wedding feast. I even got to sit in a rocking chair and gaze out over the golf course at the sun setting over the mountain. That pretty much tears it for me.

Best of luck to Jen and Dan. What a hell of a good time.

Take the “In Which Punk Class Subdivision Do I Fit” Quiz!

They deleted the punk site but suffice it to say, I was a street punk. Boozing and hitting people is what it’s all about.

Woo Hoo! They get it!

Achtung baby! As a great man once said, “I . . . am . . . still . . . aliiiiiiiive.” So, nice calm cool collected 15 hour day yesterday complete with a two way trip to NYC although I never crossed the river out of New Jersey. Close enough for government work anyway. I hadn’t realized, not having gone north in daylight since Sept 11, how screwed up the Mahattan skyline looks without the WTC. Instead of the old gentle curve upwards from the north end of the island to the south culminating in the twin towers there are just these two middling sized islands on the island…bad metaphor. Very odd and discomfiting. Any chance we can build two big towers out of the bodies of Muslim dead? You can use their pull-starts to tie them together.

Damn, I totally forgot about Canada being on fire over the weekend. And me without a topical quote. I leave it to my good friend to make up for my omission:

“. . . the smoky haze of burning Canadians. Pretty bizarre. You could smell the roasted healthcare socialist, wannabe Frenchie, hockey lovin freaks! Don t see (or smell) that everyday, huh?”

Cool. Off to see Harvey tonight without Jimmy Stewart. There’s nothing like a good play about a six foot tall imaginary rabbit to put a nice capstone on a busy week. Thank God for Friday and a wedding with (hopefully) free booze on the weekend. Hurrah!

About bloody time, you say. I suppose the prayers on Wednesday worked since things went relatively painlessly. Apart from the typical nit-picky shite the job went smoothly. Off to NYC tomorrow for another one with potential to go ass over tits so more prayers are welcome. I am adopting St. Jude as my patron saint, a lost cause seems like me.

The weekend was relatively mellow but fun. Apparently I missed the real weirdness Saturday night. After sleeping on a bed of large gravel Friday night I was seeing sleepy vapor trails by 1030 on Saturday so off to my soft bed I went. I even stayed mostly sober all weekend which is a feat. I think the warmth helped. One just doesn’t feel like guzzeling beer on very hot days. At least I don’t.

I had many many thoughts this morning but I am entirely too incoherent to convey them just now. Keep your eyes peeled.

As I likely won’t post tomorrow, Happy Independence Day! Now, go sock an Englishman in the face, then give him a big slobbery smooch for being the weenies that they are and finally giving up hope of ever conquering a people such as we. They’re obviously still sore at us, a friend overheard an Englishman tell his son to, “Quit dragging your feet, you’re not an American!” Hit ‘em twice for me.

That being said, if anyone’s the praying sort say a prayer for me today. The day has started out roughly and promises to go straight to hell in short order. This is one of those days where the task I am faced with could take an hour or could turn into an infinitely long battle of wills between me and poorly written software. All things considered I will be in dire need of a drink tonight.

If you ever get a chance to read something by Michael Leeden, do so. He’s as extreme as it gets, a Machievelli fan (he wrote a book on the guy) and pretty much a warhawk but what I love is how he ends every article he’s written lately chastising the administration for listening to the morons in the State Department with the words,

“Faster, please.”

That pretty much sums it up doesn’t it? Remember the days of late September when everyone was on the edge of their seat waiting for US to respond? What did we keep thinking?

“Faster, please.”

Faster pussycat, kill, kill.

I had something to write about this morning, no doubt scathing and insightful and certain to get me on the list for online Pulitzers whenever they deem fit to offer that prize to us amateur types. Unfortunately I have forgotten entirely what it was. Then I found a link I was saving but it doesn’t work any more so I’ll have to comment on it through description. Basically it was a series of photos of little Muslim children at what looks like a school play or presentation dressed in camoflauged fatigues and carrying toy AK-47s. The first thing I thought was, man, the Islamic world is very clear about the nature of this fight, when is the west going to come up to speed? If you’re dressing your kids in fatigues and outfitting them with mock bombs and guns I’d say you’re pretty sure this is a full-on, all out, clash of civilisations type war. Period. Meanwhile, back in Manhattan, the chattering classes (I love that term) whine about “understanding,” “imperialism,” “moral equivalence” and the like. As if it’s our fault or there’s something we could have done or could do now to calm everyone down. I doubt it. This is the real thing, they intend to kill us and take over the world…no fooling. So what’s wrong with unleashing our power on them? Is sending money and building schools going to change anything? Nah. It’ll probably just tick ‘em off, they’d see it as some sort of Zionist plot to brainwash their kids into ignoring the Jewish menace.

Less talking, more shooting.

Question. What culture?

Lumberjacks and filthy wanna-be Frenchmen no doubt.

Another nutty weekend, this involving moving yet another person from point A to point B and naturally involving the third floor of a house. Regardless, this was the big move, into their very own home so it was pretty exciting as well as exhausting.

Anyway, doesn’t anyone else think it’s funny that the Democrats think they can nail the administration to the wall for “allowing” all these economic scandals to erupt? Enron was first, now Worldcom and Xerox potentially to come. All these companies are revealing that over the last several years they have “cooked the books” to present their shaky finances in more flattering light. Worldcom seems to have discombobulated things to the tune of 3.8 billion, that’s pretty damn impressive. What blows my mind is that Democrats are flogging the bully pulpit blaming all of this on Republican economic policies and claiming that the loosening of regulations on big business is what’s been causing all these troubles when in reality the financial misdeeds have almost all taken place during the Clinton Administration and are only now coming to light. Perhaps it’s Republican economic policy that’s causing these industries to fess up to their misdeeds and, for the first time, correctly report their profits and losses. I suppose they can’t hide anymore behind a massive bureaucracy dedicated to giving them innumerable forms behind which they can conceal their dirty tricks. Instead, in the light of pure market forces they have to come clean if they want to survive.

Seems to me like the Democrats have been the ones with their heads in the sand.

I hate webdesign. Half the time I haven’t got any good ideas at all and the other half the time I have wonderful ideas which my limited knowledge of webdesign and Photoshop won’t let me bloody well execute.

Right now I’m stuck in the “no good ideas” mode. I’ve got a domain which matches one of the sites I tinker with so logically I should put that info on the main page but then how would people get everywhere else? OK, splash screen then. Righty-o. What the hell do I put on the splash screen so it doesn’t look inane? Jeez, I wouldn’t want to end up like this guy.*
*(Sorry, had to be done)

The task for today is to come up with something slightly better than a rank amateur. Hot dawg!

OK, OK, one more then I’ll piss off for a while and go do something constructive. I just checked and it looks to me as if www.messofthedamned.org is officially live! Woo Hoo!

Now I have that damned, I’m so excited song running through my head. Curse my musical bent. Look for fun and games throughout the day as I start to move things over and decide just what I want to do with my very own playplace.

“I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” Lucky we’re out here on the East Coast. If we lived on the left coast right now and tried to say that in school we could be in trouble since our dear friends, the 9th Circuit Court, have declared the pledge of allegiance unconstitutional since it coerces schoolchildren into proclaiming a belief in God.

Wonderful! I’m so glad there are some black robed MORONS watching out for our children’s well-being. Did anyone stop to think that, in spite of modern man’s disassociation with the Supreme Being that maybe, just maybe, we truly are blessed and that our very existence as a nation is and has been dependent on His favor? There aren’t many nations left that have any acknowledgement of God in their public discourse. There is, of course, God Save the Queen but the Queen doesn’t have much to do with the real nitty gritty of politics and power. In our country we open Congress with a prayer. The Supreme Court opens with, “May God save the United States and this court.” It doesn’t get much better than that. And now, some two bit atheist who obviously has led a very easy and sheltered life (noone who has dealt with want or struggled with life’s hard knocks fails to believe in something out there) wants to make sure his kids grow up godless heathens just like him and to save them from the corrupting effects of even saying the word “God” he intends to drag all of us into the pit with him.

For once our elected representatives are on it. Almost to a man they’ve denounced the court and given the Supreme Court clear notice that if they don’t strike this idiotic garbage down, Congress will. At least someone still appreciates the good favor the Republic has enjoyed these 226 years.

Och aye, I finally did it. Decided to waste $5 a month on my very own website. Not a bad deal I think for what I need to do. The price was certainly right. So, in a day or two things will be moving to messofthedamned.org I feel like a father or something.

Toodles, I’m off to play with my new toy.

Somehow intellectual = liberal. I don’t know how this happened. I don’t consider myself any less educated or erudite than most of the knuckleheads that pass for pundits and college professors these days but I am damn sure not a liberal. I just read a comment that said the intelligentsia always gets its way because it never gives up and just continues to hammer things down the public’s throat until the public finally makes the “right” decision. This is quite true, look at the difference between polling numbers (even when skewed) and the things we discuss on a daily basis as if there’s anything to discuss:

gun control – something like 70% percent of people agreed that the Second Amendment guarantees the individual right to bear arms.
abortion – a slim majority think abortion should only be legal when the woman’s health is in danger or in cases of rape or incest

Etc, etc. It goes on and on, I just couldn’t think of any other examples to prove the point right now. It seems sometimes as if our elites, politicians and “intellectuals”, run sometimes at right angles to society. No wonder people join militias.

There is a reason I dislike the IRA post-1921. At that time, and through the present, the elites in charge of the IRA decided that the people had no right to do wrong. That is, the people voted for the end of conflict and the establishment of the Free State as it was without Northern Ireland. Of course this was bad policy but it was the best that could be done and what’s more the people democratically constituted overwhelmingly voted for it. What did the intellectuals do? What do they do now when the people disagree? They completely ignore the people and go off pursuing the ends they consider right regardless of what the masses think. “The people have no right to do wrong.”

Bull. That’s the whole point of democracy/republicanism/what have you. The people have every right to do wrong. Better a large group determines what’s right and wrong than a few fellows in academic robes and funny hats. That’s the entire bloody point. Too bad our so-called “intellectuals” can’t seem to wade through the Constitution or any of the years of Enlightenment political philosophy that led to the founding of this country. I suppose it has too many big words.

Is this kind of stuff true? I suppose I went to a fairly liberal type college. I can remember one professor who spent an entire class day explaining how Stalin’s purges were neccessary for the survival of Soviet Communism. I pretty much stopped going to class after that one.

I still find it hard to believe that students on college campuses actually believe this sort of hogwash. I don’t recall college being all that political. Maybe it was just the laid back rural area we were all in but I seem to recall life revolving more around boozing and trying to get laid than the well-being of our LBB’s* in everywhere-but-here land. I do recall one mass emailing proclaiming such-and-such a day “Jeans Day” to show support for Gays/Lesbians/Transgenders/Hermaphrodites/you get the picture. I do recall being pissed about that one since blue jeans were, for all intents and purposes, the standard uniform of everyone in school so I figured this was a bs attempt to make it look like a show of solidarity when really most people hadn’t even read their email. Regardless, I and my crew very conscientously dressed in anything but blue jeans that day. Less, I think, to express dissapproval of the G/L/T/H/etc people but to express dissapproval of the underhanded tactics the email composer was using to try and press home his point. Generally the whole bloody thing was a big damn joke and we knew it.

How anyone can condemn this nation is absolutely beyond me. Nobody is arguing that we haven’t made mistakes in the past, nor that we’re not making mistakes now, nor that we won’t continue to make mistakes in the future. Hell, we’ll oftimes admit our errors and try to correct them. That in itself is the reason for this nation to be admired above and beyond all others. There are not many places in the world where the people and leaders will admit to their mistakes and try to make amends. Has England ever discussed reparations for slavery? How about the Greeks? Have the Spanish ever considered providing money to the victims of their conquest of Meso and South America? Have the Mayan people ever tried to sort out tribal fights from thousands of years ago and make amends for slaughtering their victims in the most horrible way? Do Native American tribes ever consider apologizing for their slaughter of innocents? How about Mexico making amends for Pancho Villa’s Brownsville raid?

We try, over and over again to do the right thing. To set things right, to apologize for our wrongs and admit our mistakes but nobody else does. And we get excoriated in the press, in public by other nations and by people within our own. What’s wrong with this picture? Fuck ‘em.

*”LBBs” — Little Brown Brethren

I survived the wedding, more on that later. Also trying to add a comments system so keep an eye on that one.

I must be bored out of my tree today, look how much I’m posting! For your reference the US lost to Germany 1-0. Bummer, but the US did hold its own against a hell of a team and beat a couple of other very strong teams so this bodes very well for the future of world-class US football. Give us another four years and we may manage to win a Cup. Then the whole world will be our playground and we will finally reign triumphant in every arena we attempt.

As it should be.

Wanna see how bored I am? Check this out.

Hah Ha! Stupid Saudis. Apparently the king is in Geneva for medical treatment and asked the Swiss for permission to build a new mosque (in addition to the one already there, presumably the royals wouldn’t want to hob nob with your average run of the mill muslims). The Swiss replied, “Certainly, as soon as its possible to build a church in Riyadh.”

My estimation of the Swiss just went absolutely through the roof. Do you think America would have the brass cajones to say that?

Big day today. Germany – US match in the World Cup. I could start to be a football fan, that was some spectacular play this morning in the little bit I got to watch. Who to root for now if the US loses? Ireland’s out, England just lost to Brazil. I suppose we’ll have to cheer for the Fatherland and hope they go all the way.

Meanwhile, in Washington, DC (the happiest place on earth) the Supreme Court has been handing out decisions left and right. Chief among these are a federal ban on executing the mentally retarded. Part of the reasoning seems to be that retards cannot be held to the same standards of responsibility for their actions as the rest of us. Isn’t that a lovely thing to know? Now we’ll have stupid people running about willy-nilly doing whatever they like without the least concern for, don’t you know? We’re not as responsible as you are. Fooey. Just wait until the bleeding hearts spin this one out to its logical end, you had absolutely better treat the retarded as normal people, that is don’t talk down to them, don’t offer help or patronize them or single them out in any way but by God if they kill someone they had better be treated as different from everyone else.

Cake and eat it too anyone?

I have a happy link for later but now . . .

I was reading a good but terribly obvious article about how people make mountains out of molehills. You know, like Jesse Jackson and NOW and all those other groups of silly bored rich people with nothing better to do than rail against nigh-nonexistent problems in our society. Things are pretty good. Things are getting better all the time (the war notwithstanding). All in all you’ve got to think we are living in the golden age of man’s existence on earth. The war seems to me to be the last gasp of the old v. the new. Patriarchal, theocratic society, still largely based on Dark Age culture against modern, equalizing, liberal nationhood.

Back to my point.

The author of the aforementioned article seemed to think the problem was that people just never grow up. When you’re a child you see your opinions as being the most important thing in the world and these jokers just carry that into adulthood. I think of things somewhat differently. I think the problem lies in the fact that these people have never known anything but the most incredible freedom ever granted to human beings since the dawn of time. They’ve never lived under real tyranny. They don’t know what it’s like to really be a second class citizen. To not be able to vote. To not be able to go where you like and do what you want. To truly and honestly have your humanity stripped away and be a piece of property. Not having experienced true opression they take the ideals embodied in our founding documents to the absolute extreme and expect universal freedom. Nobody, nowhere can tell me what to do.

Bollocks.

The founders knew perfectly well that some things were out of bounds but even so, look how many things we’ve brought into bounds in our 226 years of existence.

I say we ship all the bleeding hearts to Iran or one of the African kleptocracies or really make them live as a common Cuban and then see how they feel when they come home. One should hope they’d see the light. One of my favorite quotes of all time? An immigrant was asked why he wanted to come to America. He replied, “I want to live where even the poor are fat.”

Oh America! You poor, terrible, backwards and racist nation. Somehow you’ve finally been trumped by the French. Apparently the silly Frogs, custodians of all that is good and pure in the world have somehow managed to vote all the French mainland minorities right out of their National Assembly. Combine this with the spate of Frog Anti-Semitism of late and you’ve got a fairly good prescription for thumbing our good American noses at the snail-eaters and telling them to go to hell. Frigging Euro-weenies.

Quality link o’ the day.

I am still recovering from the weekend, which is odd since I really didn’t get hogged up and went to bed (I think) at a reasonable hour every night. Regardless, it was a relatively busy time once things started in earnest. Friday was spent kicking about as I arrived in town about five minutes too late to catch the early crew so I wandered the town, annoyed that a fellow couldn’t even get a drink or a sandwich in that one horse village. Ran into the crowd around 4 and things went from there. Crabs and beer and music and discussion and a beer run and some boozing and snoozing. Saturday was an early rise. When you’re out in the field you tend to get up when the sun starts shining in your eyes. Met my men around 930. Pretty neat fellows, they were all Korean War vets so we talked a bit and drilled a bit. Then downtown for the ceremony and an afternoon of aimlessly wandering around with nothing to do since my men up and left. But I looked good so all was well. Saturday night was the winner of the weekend. Seafood and beer at Rock Hall on the deck by a marina, music on the porch and many many fine sights. Then back to the campsite and a trip down the river on the college launch complete with a stop at a little beach bar up the Chester a ways. Just bloody excellent.

Back to Mercersburg for Father’s Day and back to Gettysburg for a week which is rapidly falling apart. Hooray.

Four days to the biker wedding. Whee!

I vote for this quote as a party platform this year and in how ever many years to come it requires to sort all this Islaofascism out:

“If you are a terrorist and kill Americans – you will suffer our terrible and swift justice. If you are a state who aids terrorists – you will experience war and wreckage undreamed of for the wickedness you have wrought. And if you are a nation of the Middle East, whose people are not free, whose media are censored, and whose elections are fraudulent, then you also have proved to be an indirect agent and abettor of this new plague – and so you too shall soon have a rendezvous with the American people and their wrath.”

Forgot to mention, I’ve now been a card-carrying Republican for nearly a week. Naturally it changes next to nothing except puts me somewhat more in line with the rest of the populace hereabouts and aligns me firmly with those sharing my ideology. Oddly enough, this is a hell of a time to be a Republican. Can’t say I’m all that happy with the way things are going just now and the latest balderdash coming out of Colin Powell’s lips is enough to just about make me want to quit politics altogether. Can’t someone just slap his jaws? Certainly noone foresaw we’d be seriously discussing an invasion/overthrow of Iraq when he was tapped for Secretary of State but don’t you think that now we’re pretending we’re serious about it that the guy who left Saddam in power 11 years ago ought not to be in charge of our primary diplomatic office?

Hell, I’m of the opinion that anyone who uses the word “President” to refer to the dictators of Pakistan and China and “Chairman” to refer to that shriveled up old baby-killer in Ramallah ought to be impeached. But it’s just a form of words, right?

It’s been an eventful day. I nearly hit a Congressman on the way out of my alley this morning. Fortunately for him he recognized a constituent that doesn’t put up with any crap from anyone at eight o’clock in the morning and so he wisely widened his turn and let me out. It could have been ugly. Just think, my little alley, full of white trash, hippies, mexicans, puerto ricans, blacks, often the local and/or state police, bankers, congressmen and me. It’s almost a microcosm of our fine nation. I have no doubt that one could even uncover an illegal immigrant or two among my next door neighbors if one were so inclined.

Ahhh, diversity.

Anyway, the wedding season is shortly upon us so, before I forget, I have to wish the best of luck and much congratulations to the first couple to tie the knot in the summer of 2002 that was kind enough to invite me of all people to their wedding. The names are omitted to protect the guilty but they know who they are. I had thought I was missing the shindig so I could lounge around the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake this weekend in the midst of a Civil War gig/boozefest but according to the latest weather report I’ll be huddling under cover with the rest o’ the ought-to-be-committed and avoiding summer thundershowers.

Righty-o. Anyway, the best to both of you. Be good and if you can’t be good, be quick.

Yet another case for propping up our “special friends.”

Bloody heathens.

I am once again reminded what an amazing nation we have here. We are so great that people are willing to attempt to cross 65 miles of uninterrupted desert during the third year of a serious drought and die in the trying. Do you get that? People are so desperate to get into the United States they are willing to die in the attempt! One would imagine that would make us realize what we’ve got.

I have another screed on immigration but for now a Hillary alert is in order. Our dear Senator from New York is presently proposing we add a Department of Child Welfare to our soon to be formed Ministry for the Defense of the Fatherland so we can provide Federal monies to help children who are mentally damaged by the attacks of September 11 and future assaults. This is so bent I don’t know where to begin. Let’s not even mention, as the reporter did, that 2/3ds of the affected children have also seen other violent acts (killings, beatings, etc…this is New York after all) but what in the hell do Israeli children do? Where do the kids of Afghanistan go for their happy pills? Why in hell aren’t American kids as tough or tougher than the rest of the kids throughout the world that live with this sort of thing every day. I suspect that having nightmares about collapsing buildings aren’t slowing down the sales of insert-violent-videogame-of-the-year-here. Heaven forfend that parents might have to actually talk to their kids, counsel them and make them feel safe again. Nah, let’s just throw hard-earned taxpayer monies at these pansies and put ‘em on Prozac at 10. Peachy.

What a country. The new MDF is starting to turn into the trough at which the hogs will feed.

One of the movie critics I usually like to read has completely gone off the deep end. Lately it has become quite clear that he’s a Hollywood-type, leftie, wiggler nutcase but this little comment really takes the cake:

“‘ve always been grateful that I was reckless enough to “drop” a few times during my wayward youth. Whatever spiritual glimpses or understandings I’ve managed to absorb about the cosmic unity of God’s infinite kingdom, I owe to LSD. I saw in a flash what sad, regimented fantasies organized religions are. I felt wowed by the awesome beauty of the celestial scheme, turned on by molecular energy pulsing around and within everything, sensed currents of anxiety and quiet dread in people sitting next to me on the subway. I became an instant devotee of Jesus, Buddha, the Bhagavad Gita, Hermann Hesse, etc.”

Oh hoo-ray. Your life is so spectacularly empty that the only time you’ve ever had a “spiritual glimpse . . of God’s infinite kingdom” was while under the influence of a singularly powerful hallucinogen? Peachy for you. One might suppose that the mere fact you were taking a hallucinogen might preclude any chance you had of really glimpsing God’s kingdom. Woo. People are entirely too full of themselves.

Where the hell do drug users/abusers get off thinking they are on a somewhat higher plane than the rest of us? I can respect the people who smoke a bowl or something to mellow out and relieve the stress of the day. It’s a crutch, certainly but so is a glass of wine or a pint of stout or the occasional pipe. They’re all chemical ways to adjust mood. Where I get bent is when people say, as that fellow certainly did, “If you’re not turned on you’re really missing out.” Just what, exactly, am I missing out on? The chance to turn into a drooling automaton in the corner until the drugs wear off? The chance to wear Birkenstocks, stop showering and chant “Give peace a chance” while I toss bricks through the windows of Starbuck’s franchises in a pointless fight against “Globalization?” Bollocks to all that. There was a time when man was granted his pint in peace and thereby decreased the heavy load of the day and then went on about his business, blissfully free of worry and as relatively clean and sober as he wished. Oh for the good old days.

Something from NR that even a good friend o’ mine can agree with:

“we condemn now Hern

Ha hah! Stupid Chinamen! It’s funny to me that I can, on command, spew oceans of bile at the Canadians, French and Belgians just to name a few but can’t really come up with a good mad-on for one of the biggest totalitarian societies currently in existence. Is it because, deep down, I’m a big fan of a spot of totalitarianism so long as I’m the one in charge? Really folks, I do know what’s best for you. Trust me and I’ll take care of all of it.

Now report to the Office of Homeland Security for your biometric ID chip. Ta ta.

Didja know you can fool fingerprint sensors by cupping your hands and blowing on them? Apparently that can be enough to generate the capacitance needed, which coupled with the fingerprint outline left by the last person to enter sometimes opens the door. Oh yeah, and pics of retinas work well enough on retinal scanners although I personally prefer Simon Phoenix’s way of subverting them in Demolition Man.

Department of Homeland Security. I dunno, for some really strange reason that name just makes me feel uneasy. It sounds totalitarian in a weird way, like Ministry for the Defence of the Fatherland or something appropriately sinister. Regardless, we definitely need it now whether or not many years down the road we still need it is the question and now that it’s a Cabinet level post it will be deucedly difficult to get rid of when that time comes.

I’ve been trying to figure out a better moniker, something that will put the lefties and civil liberties folks more at ease, I think Department of the Common Defense would likely be the best name. Very Constitutional that, very American and less police-state-ist.

Hot diggity damn! After well over 24 hours of being denied access to my very important website they finally got the bloody damned FTP server up and running and we’re back in business. It may be high time to look into dedicated hosting and a domain name and a shell account and all that other good stuff but that can wait.

For now, bow your heads and remember that 58 years ago today men from the allied nations of the free world set foot on the beaches of Normandy to begin the final anhiliation of the Nazi threat. Like one fellow said, “When the ramp went down I saw a vision of hell.”

While remembering D-Day I read today we have to also remember that Rome finally fell to the Allies only one day before the great invasion. Naturally that august event was totally overshadowed by the events on the French coast but it bears remembering. The Italian campaign in WWII was quite possibly the worst fighting in the European theatre that Americans were involved in and compares with any of the Pacific battles or the German Russian fighting on the Eastern Front for stupidity, bravery and tragedy.

Guess I’m going home to watch the beginning of Private Ryan tonight and then probably The Longest Day. Good stuff.

I just read something wonderfully bashing the Sixties (my theory on how the two 60s our nation has survived so far have done more damage to the republic than any other decade will be written up some time). Anyway, there was a comment that struck me. Something about how the “Left” sees no past, only the future. Could it be that all the really terrible political expressions we rail against constantly are not expressions of the “right” or “far-right” but rather of the left? Figuring that the “right” finds its expression in conservative doctrine that would mean that we revere the past and consult its counsel whenever possible before making decisions which will affect the future. Basically, there’s nothing new under the sun so someone somewhere has already been through this situation, let’s find out how they dealt with it. That would mean that to a conservative the past is relatively sacrosanct. The lefties, however, constantly seem to reinvent the past or at least reinterpret it to fit in with their concept of what the future should be. Sounds an awful lot like 1984 not to mention social welfare programs, state control of production, etc. I will have to do some reading to figure out what the dividing line between fascism and soviet style communism is (I imagine it’s pretty thin in practice) but I wonder if Nazism and Stalinism weren’t both lefty rather than one left and the other right.

Something to think on and find out more about once all the other crap I have to do in these two weeks is tended to.

What the hell is going on with India and Pakistan? I haven’t commented thus far because I am sure I don’t have enough information to make a reasoned judgement and pronouncement on the situation and besides, who gives a flying crap about these two pipsqueak countries? If they want to nuke each other, so be it, decrease the surplus population (God knows India could use a little house cleaning). Regardless, the more I read the more I am amazed at the absolute intractability of at least one side. When the time comes for the blame game who’s going to be on the short end? Lessee here, bunch of bloody Hindus with a parlimentary democracy or gaggle of Muslim wack-jobs with a military dictatorship? Survey sez, military dictatorship. What’s the score? India absolutely promises not to make the first strike with nukes, Pakistan refuses to guarantee same. India offers to participate in joint India/Pakistan border patrols in Kashmir to cut down on cross-border terrorism, Pakistan refuses. All India asks is that Pakistan stops cross-border incursions by said Muslim wack-jobs, Pakistan claims they will (and Colin Powell – big cream puff – believes ‘em, even calls the dictator the “President”). Is anyone else buying this line?

Oh hell, people are just so damn dumb it makes my head hurt sometimes. These unevolved “civilizations” of the Near East remind me very much of small children except that everyone knows how to deal with small children. You can give orders, perhaps try to reason with them on little things but in the end main force, or the threat of main force, is the only thing that makes them snap to. Unless of course, they’re me.

Big day today, 60 years to the day since the beginning of the Battle of Midway. Pretty cool. A lone squadron of torpedo bombers turns one direction rather than another to return to the fleet for refueling and suddenly, below them, they can just make out the trailing wakes of the Japanese fleet. By the time it was all over the Japs had been shattered and the tide of the war started rolling inexorably towards the home islands. 58 years ago today men all over southwest England were clambering onto landing craft ready to sail at midnight for Normandy. They didn’t know yet that the invasion had been postponed 24 hours but there they were, packed like sardines into the largest fleet ever assembled for amphibious operations and ready to get at the Germans.

Hot damn, I love history. Makes me all misty eyed.

I fecking knew it! Those bloody damned Canadians are up to something sinister! Sinister I say! Finally I have the proof I need and right after I help the guy from yesterday bring Stephen King to justice I’ll be after the damned Canucks!

God I hate Canadians. Useless socialist Frog wannabes. Quebecois are even worse, they aren’t even happy being useless Canadians, they think they’re French or possibly even superior to the French which, given the massively inflated collective French ego, should be impossible. Pathetic loser nation, can’t even manage to get one of their own teams into the finals of a sport they bloody well invented! Kill ‘em, kill ‘em all.

For those people out there who don’t read BBSpot on a daily basis, The truth about Lennon’s death is just too good to miss, thus its link here. I suppose we have Carter and Reagan to thank for downsizing and normalizing the mentally ill and ensuring that people this loopy won’t get locked up. Makes for good surfing anyway.

Want proof the Republic is doomed? TNT had to turn “King Lear” into a western to get the point across to the drooling legions of cowboy wanna be morons rotting in front of their boob tubes on a Sunday night. Not only that but they set the action in the time between Texan independence and annexation (1836-1845) and got the costuming pretty much completely wrong.

At least they got the military muskets right.

Boom-town, USA. It’s all fun and games until somebody blows a 40 foot crater in the interstate:

“Don Johnson, who works in storage, started at MCAAP in 1985. “Since 9-11, we’ve hired some new people. A guy was driving a forklift, and he accidentally knocked over a stack of bombs. I mean, he jumped off that forklift and took off running. I called after him, ‘Hey, man! Where are you going? Come back here! You heard the bombs hit the ground, didn’t you? If you heard ‘em hit, you’re gonna be fine. Come on back!’ “”

Damn funny.

What’s the deal with these new FBI guidelines? As I haven’t yet read what to think about the whole situation I am left with trying to cipher this one out myself.

On the one hand the new guidelines make perfect sense. Agents will be able to attend public gatherings and do perfectly normal research in libraries and on the internet in order to further their investigations of terrorism. I suppose they could have done all this before when they were off duty but it would provide a very neat technical hook to enable an unscrupulous defense lawyer (is there any other kind) to get their client off the hook by claiming violation of the rules.

On the other hand, the reason these restrictions were put in place was to prevent the sort of wholesale abuse of power the FBI perpetuated in the 1950s and 1960s where they used their ability to sit in on public gatherings to collect information and build files on individuals and groups who had broken no law nor violated anything other than J. Edgar’s dream of a chiffon-draped American with some nice frilly drawers…sorry, lost my train of thought for a second.

Anyway, is this really a matter for the civil libertarians to get their nice J. Edgar branded panties in a bunch about? I still haven’t decided. I have a feeling this is one of those things where if you’re generally inclined to trust the guv-mint it’ll work out alright, if you were an X-Files fan you’ll be bent. I am somewhere in between. It’s certainly a good idea, makes perfect sense and may be neccessary but the good that can be done is entirely based on the goodwill of agents and bureaucrats who usually turn out to be small people with big power and tend to abuse that power. I don’t want to see the Muslim community scrutinized or harassed any more than anyone else, nor do I neccessarily want to have to keep a close eye on swarthy young men in the airport but like Penn said, “there are people trying to kill [us].” Maybe we’ll have to buckle down for a while but keep the pitchforks handy.

Just read an article about a new spanish language TV show put on by the Republican party as part of our dear President’s obsession with winning Hispanic votes. The guy that writes the article is basically lambasting Republicans (like me, I send in the change of party/address form today) for thinking this is a colossally stupid idea and calling it “pandering.” He misses the entire point, the fact that Republicans are trying to include the Hispanic community is not pandering, this is true, to my mind Hispanics should have more in common with Republicans than with Democrats (family values, sexual morality, remember these are largely Catholic people). What’s pandering is offering these programs in Spanish. If we really want Hispanics to be part of the larger community and expect them to be able to fulfill their obligations as American citizens we have got to have them assimilate…learn English, take part in their communities, work hard, etc just like everyone else. Speaking to them in Spanish is pandering to them, it’s allowing the Hispanic community to continue down its course of separation from the main current of American life while still enjoying the freedom and prosperity of this nation. Pitiful that the author apparently couldn’t figure this out.

Like the SOD said, Speak English or Die.

Today is a good day so far. No stupid Canadians left in the Stanley Cup finals, none in the NBA finals (and the Lakers could even lose!) and the Canadian teams in baseball aren’t doing so hot (.500 for the best). Ahhh, the wonderful power of American spreads across the globe stomping on all the little wannabe euro-weenies wherever they are found.

Another Memorial Day come and gone, I only managed to do the Hanover parade and that only as a Civil War soldier (other people horked all my cool impressions before I could get a word in edgewise). The ceremony was nifty though, the typical VFW firing squad and then seven blasts from a 105 brought in by the 108th Field Artillery, 28th Div…the local National Guard types. Pretty sweet. Kind of half snoozed, half watched the Gettysburg parade which was nifty since it was the first time since I started doing Civil War that I hadn’t marched in the parade. It is amazing to me, having seen things yesterday that despite the wealth of information that is easily accessible on the Civil War in particular and the plethora of vendors that provide good kit the bulk of reenactors still show up in public looking like a refugee from some sort of Shriner circus. Scary stuff. Oh yeah, WWII guys are REALLY starting to piss me off!

So now we add reenactors to my list of insulted groups for the day. Morons.

Hah hah, silly Americans! You can never defeat the multi-cultural, morally relativistic juggernaut and you may as well settle in and enjoy the ride into oblivion.

Listen folks, can’t we all agree that some things are just plain bad, unacceptable or at least not to be discussed in polite company? Ah hah you say, good liberal that you are, once upon a time a gentleman was not to be seen in public in his shirtsleeves and the mere sight of a woman’s ankle caused the hearts of young men to flutter in their chests surely this is a better society for being freer? Ah hah I say, so bloody what? I certainly enjoy v-neck sweaters and miniskirts (on ladies, not gentlemen) but what’s so damn bad about buttoning up a little and having some sense of shame?

And that’s what it’s all about, America has lost its sense of shame and its ability to rightly criticize that which should be unacceptable. I know I’m rambling but how about this, getting back to my earlier point, once upon a time immigrants (as they do today) lived their lives never learning english. As much as I am an advocate of english only in this nation today how can I not be a hypocrite when I say I can’t find any fault with thos immigrants? Tis quite simple gentle reader, those immigrants of the past never expected society to work around their handicap, they recognized their inability to speak english AS a handicap and conducted themselves thusly. The immigrants of today seem to think it’s MY problem that I can’t speak spanish/arabic/french/you name it. Righty-o, we’re doomed.

Saw Star Wars again last night, it was better the second time although that might have been due to the fact that I viewed it at a somewhat more hospitable time (630 PM rather than after midnight). Worth going to see. Yoda kicks ass!

On the governor thing, remember when voting that the Democrats’ goal is to use government to ensure social stability. Generally it seems, they accomplish this through redistribution of wealth. Tax the wealthy at a higher rate than the rest of the people (a graduated income tax) then send that dough to the lower orders of society through welfare and any other number of programs. Meanwhile, force social engineering through Federal law to accept you name it (over the years, blacks, women, etc etc etc.) That bit isn’t neccesarily bad provided it’s properly done but when you face a situation like Title IX where percentages have to be identical you run into problems. You are welcome to all the freedom you can handle but you don’t have the right to take away my freedom while doing it.

The conservative goal (I’d say Republican but they are politicians and therefore have to bow to the political exigencies of the moment) is to get government out of your face, lower taxes, open trade and protect the citizens from outside threats while allowing them to deal on a local level with internal concerns.

Okay, so in review, the conservative credo is based largely on Federalism an American formed set of ideas based on hundreds and thousands of years of thinking. The liberal credo it seems is based largely on Marxism which is based on the thoughts of one English fellow and only followed to its logical extent in Soviet Russia and in a watered down namby pamby way throughout European society. Which would you rather be? The descendant of tough, self reliant American colonists or the ideological heir of 19th century Euro-pansies?

Every once in a while I get all sorts of serious, well as serious as I can get anyhow. So yesterday while sitting at a stop light of all places I suddenly began to question creation. I don’t mean questioning God but more like questioning his line of thought. Would any one of us sitting calmly in “paradise” surrounded by servants suddenly say to themselves, “I think I’ll create a universe and in particular one world which I’ll populate with people and let them work out existence for themselves.” That’s bloody brilliant! What in the hell was the deity thinking? I mean really, if you’re going to create a world and create supposedly intelligent beings like ourselves why in the hell would you do it like this? I mean, life ain’t exactly a bowl of cherries.

Maybe it’s like the Matrix, He made us a paradise but our little brains couldn’t handle it so he cast us out into squalor to make do as best we could. Now that I think of it, the Matrix ripped off the Book of Genesis. I already had severe doubts about that flick, that pretty well cements it.

OK OK, enough philosophy/theology for one day. Who am I to question the great “plan” anyhow?

So the voting is over and Rendell is the Democratic candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania. Oh well. I’d be dissappointed (I voted for Casey) except that I can see some very good reasons why some Republican types across the state were asking GOPers to change parties and vote for Rendell in the primary. I suppose the main reason is that Rendell professes some things which make it very easy to draw a clear and sharp dividing line between him and Mike Fisher, the Republican candidate. Casey, for instance was a pro-life, pro-gun politician from a blue collar part of the state, excepting his close ties to organized labor how does that make him different from any Pennsylvania Republican? That’s a good part of the reason his father got elected. Rendell, on the other hand, despite his preference for big business and free markets is an old fashioned Democrat, big government, big subsidies (culled from developing business), anti-gun and anti-life. Those last two points, particularly in PA make it pretty easy to single him out as different from any Republican.

So, here’s to Mike Fisher the unknown. May he soundly trounce Rendell in November and keep PA on the straight and narrow track we’ve been following for many many years.

Oh yeah, VOTE VOTE VOTE!

The best damn commencement speech ever!

Read it and come back.

Who doesn’t think it’s true? Who still believes in the innate goodness of man particularly given all that is happening these days? Agreed, we are probably in a golden age even given our troubles, but are we in a golden age because we’re all good and kind individuals who worked together to better the species? Nah, we’re in a golden age because some men finally figured out that humanity is made up of small-minded morons who nonetheless posess great energy if specifically tasked and so they created a framework to point man in generally the right direction while endeavouring to keep all of us from killing each other.

Yep, that about covers it. People suck.

The most obvious headline ever:

Suicide Bomber Blows Himself Up

Vote vote vote! Anybody who’s a registered Democrat had better get off their ever-widening buttocks and vote tomorrow. For my money, I’d encourage you to vote against Rendell. A Philadelphia politician is definitely not what we need in the Governor’s mansion. Regardless, register your choice.

I am starting to feel like the Holy Family, I have to travel back to the town of my birth to register my vote tomorrow. Naturally it’s my fault since I never changed my registration but we had a family voting bloc in place to move the parents along in their local political aspirations. This is the last time, then I’m taking the big plunge and not only registering to vote in Gettysburg but finally registering Republican. Unfortunately that will prevent me from helping to stop the Democratic party from making incredibly huge mistakes in their primaries but at least I won’t feel so dirty all the time.

So here we are, May 15th, one month from tax day, two weeks (more or less) from tax freedom day and just over twelve hours from the release of Attack of the Clones. Are we excited yet? Nope. I’m actually almost scared. I just can’t muster any excitement. I’m interested in seeing the film but I think maybe interested in the way people are interested in seeing any movie Joe Bob Briggs flogs or anything from the Troma catalog. Like looking at a train wreck or the death of a dream.

I could be wrong, it could be great but it ain’t gonna be. Here’s hoping it’s worth staying up until 2 AM and I come out a happy man. Will the new trilogy ever reach the heights of the old? Hell no. Should the new and old even be mentioned in the same breath? Nope. Do they apparently have any relation to each other at all? Nah. I have three copies of the old trilogy and will purchase them again when released on DVD, I have one VHS copy of The Phantom Menace and couldn’t bring myself to buy it on DVD. I probably will, someday, when the rest are released but Episodes I-III do not deserve a place in the pantheon.

I need to learn how to express the sentiments in c’est la vie in German or some other manly language. It’s fast becoming my new motto, shrug your shoulders and say “Oh well, such is life.” I just don’t like saying it in the pig latin of the cheese eating surrender monkeys. I suppose it makes one seem more effeminately intellectual though. Now all I need is those Euro styled buckle shoes and little glasses and I too can hang out in coffee shops.

Just off one of the top five worst weeks in my short lifetime and gearing up towards another exhausting one. Star Wars Wednesday night at midnight, I have mixed feelings. I reckon there will be more good stuff than in the last one (the only memorable scene in Phantom Menace was the pod racing stuff) but the filler is likely to be so bad it makes you ill. Hopefully it at least ends well so you go out with a good feeling. It better keep me awake or I’ll be pissed.

If I survive Thursday it’s off to DC for Georgetown graduation ceremonies and presumably a weekend of running about raising hell. Dunno if I’m ready for it but that’s the way it’s going down. I’ll be a backside dragging puppy next week fer sure.

Mother’s Day on Sunday. What a pain in the arse. You try coordinating a brother in Philadelphia, a father in Mercersburg and myself in Gettysburg and get us all in one place at one time with all the gifts/food and whatever else we need for the day. Yeesh. I suppose things are pretty well settled now, I hope so anyway since I am right out of time.

But of course, nothing is too good for Mom.

And now, the weekend. Drinking, drinking and maybe a little more drinking with some drill thrown in for good measure. Tomorrow it’s time to learn how to be a Confederate which is funny since the gig everyone is practicing for requires me to do Federal so I can drill some United States Colored Troops. Un-freaking-believable. Me, teaching a gaggle of black National Guardsmen how to be soldiers of 150 years ago. Bring your video cameras, it should be well worth the viewing.

So, if I gave away my right arm for an elegant woman does that mean I have to give away my left arm for a pint of stout? No really, this is a serious quandary. How do I drink my stout without arms? A straw simply won’t do.

Alright, I’ll give up my left leg. I only need the right to accelerate and brake and I’ve dealt without the use of my right leg (except for driving) for a month before so I could probably manage.

God, I need a drink.

Stupid people abound. See NASCAR, American football, Britney Spears, N’Sync, Jim Carrey and Rob Schneider movies, McDonald’s, cigarettes, hog maw, pork rinds, American macro brews . . . shall I go on? It is positively scary to witness the dumbing down of society all over the world. It makes us targets for demogoguery among other evils, look the the quality of political reporting and campaign ads if you don’t believe me. There was a time when primary education consisted of mathematics, grammar, Latin and possibly Greek, elocution and other miscellaneous subjects. I wonder how many current students even at their high school graduation could tell me who spoke latin or what elocution even is? You know, we might actually be doomed.

What bugs me the most isn’t even the pure unmitigated stupidity of the majority of the human race, it’s the potential I know exists and is wasted drooling into your Budweiser while watching the Winston Cup series.

Homina homina homina. Check this out punk-ass bitches! Heh.

Well, OK, it made me laugh anyway. Tis but the first step in the process towards a more full and complete biography so alla ye’s can know everything you never wanted to know about me.

What a week. Just thinking “silly savages” puts a smile on my face. I need culture man, culture! The theatre, the arts, hell I could even go for ballet or opera right about now. How’s come most of those who cluster about me are philistines? Bloody heathens. I’d give my right arm (my beer drinking arm mind you) for a fine lady in a smashing evening gown as companion to any outlet of the fine arts. You know, I need an elegant evening out, suit and tie, champagne and roses. A little elegance to be finished up elegantly draughting Guinness in a rough and tumble pub. Yep, that’d suit fine. Didn’t ye know? I’m the opposite of myself.

See, see! I bloody well knew it! Fucking savages. Er, lessee, to review. Palestinians bomb the hell out of Israel. Israel finally has enough and brings the pain to the Palestinians. Big stupid American lunkheads lean on Israel to cut it out. Israel complies. Palestinians bomb the hell out of Israel.

Vicious cycle anyone? Do you think big stupid American lunkheads get picture now?

Dayum, looked at my schedule this morning and as of now the first weekend I know there’s nothing going on is the last weekend in July. How’s that for booked?

I am thinking I may have to shoot some of my friends just so I have a little more free time.

Cinco de Mayo. Man, I was desperate for a tequila and a Guinness. San Patricio battaltion anyone? Alas, after a five hour gig at work which was only supposed to take 20 minutes and finally getting some grub I was down for the count. Bugger all, guess I’ll have to wait another year to party like it’s dos mil dos.

Hah ha, silly savages.

A “noble savage” is still a savage. That being said, I love these guys, The Fightin’ Whites. That’s just about the funniest thing in the world. But it gets better, the funniest part is that they started the team to protest “Native American stereotypes” by attempting to stereotype white folks…now here’s the funny bit – white folks think it’s funny as hell! Ha ha, silly injuns. The response has been so completely opposite of their expectations they had to revise the team t-shirt to include the comment “Fighting the use of Native American stereotypes” Guess nobody got the joke. The whole thing is insane. Do I object to “Fighting Irish?” Would I object to “Hun baby Belgian killers?” Nope. I can’t think of anything that would offend me on the basis of who I am or where I came from. I know what I am and I’m proud of it, good and bad things. What’s the big deal anyway? I actually had an argument once with someone who insisted the Aztecs, Mayas, Incas, etc were peaceful priest philosophers concerned with living in harmony with nature and studying the skies. Gee, I guess we conveniently left out RIPPING PEOPLE”S STILL BEATING HEARTS OUT OF THEIR CHESTS AND DUMPING THE LIFELESS CORPSES DOWN THE STAIRS OF THE TEMPLE! Hell, the Maya had “flowery wars” where they’d go out and pretend more or less to fight each other not to gain land or tribute but rather to capture enemy troops alive to reserve for later sacrifice. Lovely little priest philosopher culture you’ve got there.

Anyway, like I said, a noble savage is still a savage.

Closing in on yet another weekend. At least I don’t have to drive to New Jersey yet again, like I said, I was starting to recognize people in the toll booths on the turnpike. No discounts but it was nice to see a familiar face. So, I head south for a change and then – oh lucky me – I get to come into work on Sunday morning. Bugger.

I need a vacation and I really need to start shooting people in the head. Why don’t these loopy bastards who run around shooting up playgrounds, etc go to a TV studio or Hollywood soundstage or newspaper office and shoot someone who really deserves it? I just cannot imagine that people are as utterly stupid as they are. You’d think by the time they got old enough to spout their insanity they would have eaten some bad eggs or licked someone’s open sore or done some sort of other idiotic action that resulted in their early and painful deaths.

Best line from Batman? “This [world] needs an enema.” I got a big ol’ bucket of warm water.

I’ve figured it all out. Finally. I have this theory that unmarried men between the ages of 28 and 30-32 go insane. Generally this takes the form of pining desperately after women and immediately wanting to marry the first girl they meet. In my case, since I’m so screwed up anyhow I think the madness is going to be more along the lines of a four or five year anger binge.

All things considered, I reckon I’d rather be pissed off constantly at everything and everyone for several years than whining about lovey dovey crap and making a fool of myself for the same period of time.

Here’s to the early 30s when everything calms down.

Happy Tax Freedom Day! I know I know, I’m a day early but it was just so important I needed to say it early rather than not at all. As of tomorrow we Americans will have finally worked hard enough during the year 2002 to pay off the government. Nifty huh? The question does present itself though, why in the hell do we need to work four full months, one third of a year to pay for the government? Like the men said:

“Americans [in 2002] will work longer to pay for government (117 days) than they will for food, clothing, and shelter combined (106 days),” write J. Scott Moody and David Hoffman in their report. “Only in the last decade have taxes exceeded spending on these basic necessities. In fact, Americans will work longer to afford federal taxes alone (80 days) than on any other major budget item.”

Hot dawg! Is this a great country or what?

And Happy Birthday to my dear brother (today)! Twenty four years old, and twenty four years since I’ve been the older brother. Damn, I feel old.

I need wireless, all the time internet access. I keep forgetting things I want to complain about. I had no less than three good ideas on Saturday while driving but naturally I forgot them all before I got to a computer. Hell, I had a couple of things I wanted to expound upon not ten minutes ago and can I remember them? Of bloody course not. Damn. Must be getting old.

Why does everyone think Empire Strikes Back was the best Star Wars movie? For my money it was the most unlikeable of the original trilogy, I don’t even rate The Phantom Menace in the same category and am beginning to think the new trilogy won’t even get close to the power and magic of the old one. I will reserve final judgement until after I see Attack of the Clones. I’ll say one thing though, the names leave much to be desired.

And speaking of Attack of the Clones. Is anyone REALLY excited about this one? My sense of betrayal after TPM is so strong I just can’t muster any excitement at all over Episode II. I’m FAR more excited about seeing Spider-Man next week than seeing AotC in three weeks. Man, that’s scary. How can I not be stoked to see a new Star Wars movie? It just ain’t right…but there it is.

Heh, Buckaroo Banzai. Whatta flick.

We have a really spectacular country. The reason Americans think we’re so screwed up as a people is that we really and truly believe in the ideals behind the founding of the nation and so we constantly fight among each other to try and realize our interpretation of those ideals. There’s no other country in the world that pulls in immigrants like we do, who the hell would want to move permanently to England, Russia or Canada? Nobody, or at least not enough people to matter. But everyone wants to come to the United States. Unreal. An immigrant was ruminating on the radio the other day about why he, and others like him want to come to America. He asked another fellow and the reply was, “I want to live in a country where even the poor people are fat.” That pretty much says it all.

I think one of the best lines in the Bible, and certainly the one most applicable to the present world situation is (and I paraphrase) “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and render unto God that which is God’s.” Heavy stuff if you think about it. There’s the entire doctrine of the separation of church and state spelled out in one short sentence by none other than God Himself. And Mohammed comes along and determines that God has changed His mind in a few intervening centuries and that church and state are no longer to be separated? Dunno, it’s all very complex and my explanation is overly simplistic but it’s something to think about.

My God, guess who’s in the news again? Al Gore threw his “hat in the ring” more or less. Seems like he really thinks the American people elected him two years ago and he’s going to give it another go in 2004. Never mind that pesky Constitution. It often seems as if the Constitution is only to be invoked when it helps you along and to be gleefully ignored when it proves, in black and white, that you’re full of it. Heh. Oh yeah, Al Sharpton wants to be called “The Honorable Reverend Doctor Al Sharpton.” Hooey. Like the girl said on Saturday Night Live “No matter how many titles he piles up before his name, if the last two words you hear are

All right goddamnit, I have now read two articles lamenting how badly treated professional women are. How after age 40 they have nearly no chance of marriage. How 55% of women making more than $100 Gs a year don’t have children. How women who attend Harvard Business School have to hide that fact from potential suitors lest they get written off before they even get to spend time with the men. What a bunch of horseshit! Apparently all this is due to the fact that men are still undeveloped neaderthals who have absolutely no ability to deal with a woman who might make her needs known or act in any other manner than calmly submitting to be bonked on the head and dragged back to the cave for barefoot baby making. Again, horseshit. Maybe I’m atypical, maybe my upbringing was remarkably enlightened, maybe I’m just spectacularly open minded (although anyone who knew me would likely disagree with at least one and perhaps all three of those points). Nevertheless, I can’t begin to muster even the slightest interest in any individual who doesn’t have their head on straight. I positively can’t stand bubbly airheaded girls who drool unceasingly over management majors and ripped beach boys. Give me a highly intelligent, highly motivated woman any day.

So, for all you poor female souls out there who can’t express your true intelligent self due to the slobbering dimwittedness of my sub-human subspecies, here I am.

Must be a record, I actually was having a good day today for almost three-quarters of an hour! One month until I’ve been doing this gig for two years. Two years should be long enough to do one thing for anyone. Now what?

I like this poem. Probably one of the first bits of poetry I’ve liked since I read Stephen Crane’s stuff years ago:

The earth is full of anger,
The seas are dark with wrath,
The nations in their harness
Go up against our path:
Ere yet we loose the legions

Pretty much sounds like me, don’t you think?

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People are whiny bitches.

That pretty much sums it up.

Take this as a warning, alcohol and strong emotions do not mix. There is constant talk of people “drowing their sorrows” and I am beginning to think that’s about the worst thing you can do, particularly if you take your feelings seriously. Take a raging inferno of any kind, literal or figurative and pour alcohol on it and you’re just asking for trouble.

Do like I do, don’t sweat the small stuff. Given the immense size of the universe, everything is small.

Awright you useless buggers, here’s your chance to do something useful. Go to http://www.revoketheprize.org/ and add your name to the petition, it’s about time someone decided to try to take back Arafat’s Nobel Peace Prize. Amazing they’d grant a peace prize to one of the greatest criminals of the latter half of the 20th and now 21st century. Just goes to show how well the media can be manipulated. Good advice from Mae West (courtesy of a friend), “I stopped listening to what men say and started watching what they do.” Keep that in mind.

Why do people (women mostly) refuse to zip up their coats when its cold out? I can’t even count the number I’ve times I’ve seen girls out and about on a blustery day with their jackets unzipped and yet their arms wrapped around their bodies holding the coat shut. That’s why God gave us fasteners of all types and sizes. To free our hands so we could bury same in the pockets the Lord gave us and thereby stay warm with the least possible effort. Brilliant ain’t it?

Those people won’t be allowed to vote in my republic.

Oh yeah, I mentioned Dudley Moore’s death…props also to the dearly departed Milton Berle and Billy Wilder. We are definitely in trouble as a culture, all the good people are dying and all we’re left with are a bunch of self-interested, self-important, American hating, liberal boobs. Do you REALLY want Barbara Streisand to be the standard bearer for American culture in the world? This country needs an enema. Or a good tsunami, wiping out California and maybe the Village. That would do it I think.

Awright, I was screwed. I am coming to the belief that people really shouldn’t marry outside of their ethnicity/personality type. Look at me, I am half irish catholic and half german protestant. Can you think of a worse combination? I have a real problem with authority and yet I love order. I like to sing but have no voice for it. I’m lazy and shiftless but like to eat. I suppose there was a chance I could end up with all the good parts of both sterotypes, hard working, imaginative, sober, fun to be around, etc. Instead, I ended up with all the bad: drunk, lazy, unimaginative, prone to dark moods and often genocidal. Do me a favor and make sure whoever you end up with is at least complimentary. Opposites may attract but it’s hell on the kids.

Man am I bummed. April Fool’s Day and nobody to abuse. Oh for the old days of homelife and college when there were plenty of unwilling victims close at hand. Spent some time yesterday telling April Fool’s stories. My uncle once pushed all the furniture in the house into one corner behind the door so when you opened up the house it looked like it had been cleaned out. My cousins dressed up in bandages and ripped clothing and claimed they had been in a car accident. One lady opened her door and immediately called the police. When the police arrived they found every piece of furniture in the entire house had been turned around.

Cool stuff. And here I am with nobody to abuse.

I found something nifty that was more political so I put it over there but it’s so damn good you ought to read it. Here.

Oh yeah, I still don’t give a damn about the slaves. Slavery was wrong but we sacrificed 400,000 good American men and 200,000 traitors to settle the issue and finally rid the nation of that crime. Isn’t that reparation enough?

Wasn’t I just screaming about using the courts to subvert the will of the people expressed through their elected representatives? Here we go again! Slave reparations have been brought up over and over again in the Congress and left unpursued every time for a variety of reasons, hopefully chief among which is THEY’RE COMPLETELY BLOODY INSANE! Ahem, not to be undone supporters of slave reparations have now filed a class action lawsuit against companies which as much as 400 years ago supported slavery and so, they claim, can be held guilty for its offense. Read all about it.

On another note, Dudley Moore died…bummer. And our dear president, not satisfied with all the really dumb stuff he’s done in the past several weeks has gone and signed a blatantly unconsititutional campaign finance “reform” law and even had the brass balls to say it had problems as he signed it! Loopy little bugger ain’t he?

Beats Al Gore all cold though.

People suck, hugely. They are, as a group, nothing but a petty bunch of small minded, greedy, vain and useless bastards. Certainly here and there you may find a solitary instance of generosity or heroism but there just aren’t that many good people in the world and when you group them together they turn into nothing more than a mass of uncivilized Darwin loving twits. I can’t recall exactly what cemented that opinion in my mind last night but I know it hit me suddenly. Like it’s news right?

H.G. Wells had already answered my question a hundred years ago, “This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then come languor and decay.” Sounds plausible and if it’s the case then the war will bring us back to greatness. Very possible, you can already see how the fans of languor and decay rail against the war. There may yet be hope.

How full of themselves are Hollywood types? This may be the last year I take the time to watch the Oscars. Between people parading themselves as if they really mattered (how about Tom Cruise’s speech? “Do movies matter? More than ever!” pbbbtttthhhttt!) and the pure unfiltered decadence of the entire affair, not to mention a movie based on lies and bollocks winning everything, it just about made me sick. I did dig the New York short film and Cirque de Soliel’s performance was nifty but please, 1 AM to finish up. Get a life.

I wonder sometimes, more and more it seems like the nation is drifting into a moral decadence akin to the end days of the first French monarchy. Anything goes and if it doesn’t you can usually raise a stink and either cow people into permitting what they find morally reprehensible or use the appointed courts to subvert the will of the elected legislature to accomplish the same goal. Freedom is great but some people don’t understand the responsibilities it entails. Like Spiderman said, “With great power comes great responsibilities.”

“so I found me a whore, with a face just like yours . . . after several gallons of porter.” heh

Here’s the current global situation in a nutshell:
“We are dealing here with people who are, not to put too fine a point on it, nuts. The Arabs, the Iranians, the Pakis, the Libyans: they are nuts, the great majority of them. Nuts. Not playing with a full deck. Not too tightly wrapped. One brick short of a load, one coupon short of a toaster. The smoke not going all the way up the chimney. Not quite 16 annas to the rupee. Nuts.

Is there anything we can do about it? Only what Peggy Noonan told us to do in her brilliant Wall Street Journal piece last week: Do what you do when you find yourself in a roomful of glittering-eyed lunatics down at the local funny farm. Keep smiling, talk softly, don’t make any sudden moves, keep nodding and smiling, and keep a tight hand on the stun gun in your pocket. The Middle East contains three hundred million people, and most of them are crazy as coots. Glad I don’t live there.”

I refer again to Admiral Halsey’s sign from earlier this week.

I dunno, for some reason the name of the Canadian Prime Minister finally sunk in today. Chr

I’m skeered, I realized while driving home last night that I’m starting to look upon New York almost fondly. Somehow it’s gone in my estimation from the soul sucking source of all that’s vile and horrible in the world to a place I would enjoy spending the weekend in provided I didn’t have to pay for lodging. This isn’t healthy. I am actually looking forward to my next trip up there and may petition some people to go sooner than next St. Patrick’s Day. It’s all right, give the moron mayor enough time and he’ll ruin that town entirely. Guiliani can run again in four years right?

Replace the word “jap” in this photo with “islamofascist” and it pretty neatly sums up my feelings on the war.

St. Pat’s has come and gone yet again. Although I didn’t run out and get drunk (had enough of that on Saturday) it was an eventful day to end an eventful weekend. There is nothing in the world quite like several hundred armed Civil War types charging the 6 train uptown and disembarking and forming battalion in the marble corridors of Grand Central Station. As we headed out of the station and down the street to our formation spot we passed through two walls of policemen and firefighters who were cheering and photographing us strangely enough. It’s something to be feted by true heroes. After our long wait to slide into our place in the parade route (lubricated nicely by my foresight in bringing a canteen full of whiskey and a canteen full of apple schnapps complimented by the kind donations of some of our fans sitting in the bars overlooking our spot) we set off up Fifth Ave for 40 blocks of cheers and whistles. I heard later that the crowd was starting to settle down (they’d been there five hours) but when we marched up the street to the fifes and drums with our green flag at the front everyone perked up and cheered loudly and lustily. Nifty feeling. Another subway ride back down town and then we headed off to end the day with multiple pints of Guinness and Black 47.

Sunday we headed downtown on our way out to see the WTC site. It’s one hell of a hole, surrounded by police and military and buzzing with constant construction activity even on a Sunday morning. All the surrounding buildings are under construction with windows blown out and facades smashed by the destruction. I think it was all a bit too much to take in until we saw a stoplight next to the van bent almost double and still caked with the fine white dust we’ve all seen in the pictures of September 11. Eerie. We saw the sculpture from the WTC plaza now set in Battery Park and nicely framed by Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty standing proudly in the harbor. The torch looked to me more like a great middle finger to the world but that’s probably just me projecting my own feelings onto the Green Lady. Long drive home and then settled in for staying warm and dry and thinking over the weekend. I’m almost glad it only happens once a year, it’s all too much for me to handle more often.

Witch doctors! Witch doctors! Witch doctors!

Who the hell cares? In twelve hours I will be in lower Manhattan, hopefully drinking something very strong and alcoholic and settling in for a useless night’s sleep before the great piss up tomorrow. Heh heh, suckas!

Mmmm, quote of the day, “Have you slapped a pacifist today? If not, get to it.” The writer then goes on to denounce the morons (college students and faculty mostly) who harp and rave about how bad the little brown brothers have it while they all relax in relative comfort with no worries at all. I know, from college experience, that worries seem a lot bigger in college than after, likely due to free time. I used to write multiple page missives to a variety of people every day and spend hours on the telephone with a select few discussing, in hindsight, apparently nothing. Now, I can barely muster a paragraph every six months and many people I’ve lost touch with simply because there’s nothing to say. Bizarre. One hopes everyone grows up eventually. Another fine tidbit, Elton John is all for bombing the bejeezus out of the Taliban. Cool. Check it out.

The witch doctor said no sweat. All the pain was something called “dry socket” which sounds vaguely gynecological to me but regardless, a wad of medicine soaked happiness and I’ll be fine in a few days. Whee.
All in all things are looking up, yesterday was pretty rough. I was waiting on two things for St. Pat’s, a shirt from Guinness and a jacket for the parade, neither of which arrived yesterday so the worries started on top of the pain. By the time I got to work today I had both the shirt and the jacket and the pain was gone. Not bad for a couple of hours on a Thursday morning. Just let the luck hold out until tomorrow around 330 and then my fate is out of my hands until I get home Sunday. New York New York baby.

God’s curse on all the witch doctors. I dunno whether something’s broken loose or that dago’s fiddling about with my gums has tinkered with something he shouldn’t have been into but my broken tooth is starting to ache. Damn them all! On another note, I know at least two people who are wonderfully open to persons of all races and nationalities and for the most part seem absolutely free from fear or discomfort in almost any situation. I find that a most admirable trait but I wonder, would it be possible to teach a child to be open and accepting and still avoid the dangerous abyss of moral relativism? There are such things as absolute right and absolute wrong and some people/countries are better than others. As screwed up sometimes as the US seems it also seems like pretty much everyone else wants to be like us. Maybe they want to be like us with some of our problems fixed but the end goal of most of humanity seems to be political freedom and the free market. I’d say that makes us a shining beacon, how do you cement that idea into someone without adding a condescending view towards other cultures?

That 9/11 show was something to see. It brought back pretty intense feelings identical to the actual day six months ago. For the first time since that week I was actually overcome with a need for action. You know the feeling. What can I do? What should I do? Where do I go? Who do I kill? Heading up to NYC over the weekend for St. Patrick’s Day, I expect we’ll make a pilgrimage to the site, any ideas what I should write on the wall down there? I don’t want to sound like a bloodthirsty moron (although I am) but all I can think about is revenge. Sod understanding. We need to embrace our small brown brethren . . . so that they’re kept close and thereby easier to kill.

Just a quick heads up while I’m thinking on it. In case you’ve been living under intense fire in some cave for the last week or so CBS, Sunday night (10 March if I reckoned correctly) is airing the first ever prime time, network TV occurrance of the F word! Woo Hoo! Out of context but seriously folks, a documentary called 9/11 is airing on Sunday night. It’s footage all shot by a cameraman who happened to be documenting a year in the life of a rookie firefighter when 9/11 happened. Supposedly has some righteous stuff in it including footage of the command post in Tower One even as Tower Two collapsed. The guy filming all this missed being trapped in Tower One when it fell by about six minutes. Heavy duty stuff. Hopefully it will serve to remind all the panty-waists who are starting to come out of their holes and criticize the President and the War just why we are doing what we’re doing around the world. If the images don’t do it, maybe the sound of human beings hitting the ground after a 110 story fall will. Sorry, after just reading about this show I just can’t muster much concern for the poor bearded baboons in cages down in sunny Guantanamo Bay. Hostes Humanis Generis. All of ‘em.

Ah the trials and tribulations of the dental industry. I feel like a car that was taken to the mechanic to get an oil change and in the meantime discovered I needed a new transmission and brake system. Phooey. Now I have to go in and have two wisdom teeth pulled. Hot dawg! They tell me it’ll only be local anesthesia though so that seems to be acceptable. The temporary filling the dentist put in popped out the minute I ate something but it still doesn’t hurt so I’ll cross my fingers.

Oh the hazards of living history. As if random projectiles, heart attacks, sunstroke and dehydration weren’t enough I have managed to break a tooth on the hard bread we eat. There goes my “no doctor” policy. If I remember correctly I haven’t been to a doctor or dentist since 1996. Why waste money on food and preventative care when there are so many toys left to buy? Dentist this afternoon, hooray!

YOU GO NOW!!! You been here NINE hours! Happy Weekend.

Tell me this isn’t the rant of the day:

“IS THIS A GREAT COUNTRY, OR WHAT?: Amy Fisher versus Tonya Harding — the Trailer-Park Throwdown, live on — where else? — Fox. Can your camel-stinking Mohammedan dictatorship, cheese-eating surrender-monkeying republique, or Marmite-sucking, dentally-blighted constitutional monarchy do that? Didn’t think so. Let’s roll, Beavis!”

Hah, my lazy, broken down, boozy, balding self is worth $2,049,730. Cool, I suppose everyone is worth something. I’d like to know how Human for Sale came up with that exact amount but it sounds pretty decent. Shtupid. Anyone know a synonym for lazy that starts with B? My alliteration ain’t so hot without one. Speaking of words we had a contest once in college to see who could use the word niggardly the most in any given paper. Nifty word, means lazy, but the lefty professors usually didn’t find it funny. Try using bloviate more often in daily conversation.

While I’m linking and expounding, check this out.

Normally I’m not one to complain and I hate government regulation, particularly of the internet, but spam is starting to get on my nerves. How the hell did I get on all these lists anyway? Every day I get at least 20 emails either offering me a get rich quick scheme, free viagra or all the hot teens I can handle. What a mess. Naturally, I haven’t got anything against getting rich quick or a bevy of hot teens but when getting rich quick involves a significant investment on my part beforehand and the hot teens look more like worn down thirtysomethings I tend to take exception. Some day just for laughs I might have to actually read some of these grammatically inexplicable missives and post the best lines from each.

Favorite quote of the week? “Livid? That’s two degrees past pissed!”

I need more toys. I dunno, for some reason that popped into my head. I actually need a bigger residence to accommodate all the stuff I do have but more is always better. I need more books too. I have been reading lately about some great individuals of the past couple of centuries and I am becoming convinced that part of our problem these days educationally and morally is due to our abandoning the classical education system. I don’t think we all need to learn Latin, Greek and elocution (although learning to strike those marvelous speaking poses would do many newscasters and politicians good) but I do think we need to read the classics. Catullus, Cicero, Socrates, Pythagoras for the Golden Age. Read your Machievelli, Newton, Smith even Marx. I think, if I can digest it I will read Adam Smith next and then probably try to work my way through Sun Tzu and Von Clausewitz. Mebbe read “The Prince” for laughs. Hell of a book.

Is it possible to be an anarchistic conservative?

Ooooh, that’s going to make it hard to sleep tonight.

Why do they hate us you ask? The rest of the world that is. Is it just that their turbans are too tight? Although I generally blame the Belgians for the events of September 11 I think we can trace the beginnings of our problems to the Wizard of Menlo Park, Mr. Thomas Edison. Think about it. What is it that the world hates apart from our sheer power? My guess is they despise our culture. Generally I’m not too terribly fond of our “popular” culture so I can sort of understand. Regardless, what enabled our popular culture to spread across the globe? Probably Hollywood and in a minor way the music industry. And who is responsible for both? Naturally, the inventor of the kinetoscope and the phonograph. Without the electric light, the phonograph and the film projector would we be able to project our culture as easily or as thoroughly as we have? So, as much as I admire him I think Edison needs to share the blame with the Belgians.

I survived the weekend! Hooray! I may have scampered back to my warm house instead of trying to settle in amid sub-freezing temperatures but hey, that’s the price you pay. I have to reiterate…God Damn all Canadians! As if it wasn’t good enough to beat our women’s hockey team they went and did the same thing to the men. I hate ‘em. I need to duplicate my “f the queen” Buckingham Palace pic in front of Parliament in Montreal…isn’t that where the Canadian government sits? I need to write some things on racism and the black/white thing but how do you write that sort of thing without offending someone? Like I ever cared. That’s a bitch of a thing to think about.

God Damn the Canadians! Man, if they weren’t already number one with a bullet on the least liked nations list they would be now. How dare those hockey playing, national health care having, maple leaf loving poofs beat us in hockey for the gold?! I reiterate…God Damn all Canadians!

Damn, I had an old biography that I wrote in college but I can’t find any of my old web work. Sod it anyway. So, I started a new one. It would be funnier except I’m tired and bored and generally annoyed so you’ll probably be able to cipher my mood swings through the prose as it winds its way through my life. An interesting excercise in any case.

Bugga Bugga. I have absolutely nothing on my mind today. If it weren’t for the stress of the week thus far I know I wouldn’t have gotten sick. Now the stress has pretty much melted away. The problems are no longer in my hands anyway. Now what do I do? Fall back on the old standby????

When in doubt, set the bitch on fire.

Words to live by.