Rich People Don’t Know Squat
I think rich people are just great folks, most of the time. But then, because they are rich and can buy an election, they get themselves elected into our government, in very powerful positions. President, for example. The Bush family has been very rich for a very long time. They have been using their money to buy elections, and therefore power, for almost all of that time. Grandpa was a wacko that wanted to take power by force. Since then, they have just bought their way into political power.
There has been a lot written about the Kennedy power and money machine, beginning with Joe and not ending anytime soon, it doesn’t look like. Joe openly talked about buying the Presidential election for Jack. And I’m sure he did just that. Since then, elections have gotten even more expensive. Millions of dollars need to be raised even to be one of the 500-odd (and I do mean odd) members of the House of Representatives. One of the best ways to start is with your rich self and your rich friends. The Senate is even worse.
When Will It Be Safe To Eat Again?
I hate to bring up questions when I don’t have any answers, but I am going to do it anyway. The news today contains a recall of beef, expanding t0 21.7 MILLION pound of hamburger “possibly” containing e. coli. Believe me, if this stuff was safe, the manufacturer would not be recalling it. That’s a lot of money off the hoof.
It seems like every day there is another recall of something that will kill either you, your children, or your pets. Some days it’s meat. Some days it’s designer lettuce. Some days it’s dog food. Some days it’s toys. The only thing that is sure is that it is happening more and more often and that makes me nervous as hell. I don’t understand why the problem is getting worse and I have no idea what to do about it. I’m not sure anybody does or it probably wouldn’t be happening.
My Head (Revisited)
This essay was originally written 26 years ago for inclusion in a column (called Kermit’s Korner) which I wrote in the Netwits SIG section of Compuserve. It is as true today as it was then. My writing has (probably) improved, but the technique for keeping track of one’s head has stayed just the same.
One of the unfortunate circumstances inherent in being human is the striking lack of available documentation. Almost everything we can grab off the shelf to peruse is strictly after market material. That is not meant to disparage the medical profession. It is simply to bemoan the lamentable truth that no factory manuals are known to exist.
Unfortunately, the after market material is sorely deficient where it tries to address even the basic operation of the human brain. There is nothing available to the owner regarding how to clean it, tune it up, enhance performance or even run simple diagnostics.
Were We Rude to Ahmadinejad?
I see a lot of rhetoric about whether or not we were rude to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. I call it rhetoric since it seems to be fueled by one’s stance on American politics, having nothing to do with Ahmadinejad himself. The President of Iran is a despicable semi-human fundamentalist Islamic strong-arm dictator, a fascist in religious clothing, a basher of women, a brainwasher of children, a cold-blooded killer of those that disagree with him, and an all-around dick.
Please note that I don’t think what I just said was rude. It was simply true.
Desktop Blog Tag
I was tagged by The West Virginia Blogger to put up a picture of my desktop. I actually have fifty or so photos that I have taken rotating at any one time, out of several hundred that I have shaved down to desktop size. This is my favorite of the current batch. It is the view over my back fence when I lived in Moss Beach, CA, just south of San Francisco. It brings back great memories, espccially since I now live in Kansas. ;o) I have tagged my favorite bloggers by email, rather than put them on the public spot. I’ll add their pages at the end of this post after they post them. The complete tag follows:
Headlines 001
Headlines sometimes just crack me up. These are not headlines from The Onion, or anything like that. These are all taken from CNN, and from their main list of the day’s news to boot. Some are not really news at all, some are poorly worded (to say the least), and some are just plain stupid. This is just for openers. I keep a text file on my desktop so that I can document these puppies, and when I get enough saved up, I’ll bring you the next installment.
CNN observes secret nuclear mission - If CNN is observing it, how secret can it really be? Surely the Russians or the Chinese can whip together some phony press credentials, and make the party less secret yet. Read more
Firefox Needs To Get Over Itself
I, for one, am getting more than a little tired of having the supporters of Firefox scream at me about how good their product is. I use it part of the time, for testing, and it is indeed a browser. Not a bad one, either. It is self-demeaning for them, though, to have to resort to that much hype just to get people to use a product that they are giving away for free. If they think it’s so great, they should try charging for it. In 30 days, virtually no one would be using it.
I’m not saying that it is a bad browser. It is a perfectly valid browser. But it is not the second coming that its shrill advocates profess. It is the only browser that I have ever had significant problems with, except for a bad patch with Opera that was probably my fault, but that does not make it a bad browser. Then again, I have never had a significant problem with IE, and I use it much more that I have ever used Firefox. Generally speaking, both of them work fine, with an occasional small difference in rendering.
The Similarities Between Ahmadinejad and Bush
It is difficult to ignore the similarities between President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and President George W. Bush. There are differences, thank fate, but the similarities far outweigh them. To quote yet another president, this time Columbia University President Lee Bollinger, the Iranian president is “a petty and cruel dictator.” Little George is certainly petty. He obviously wants to be a dictator, given his ransacking of the Bill of Rights and his single-minded. illegal, unethical consolidation of Executive and Presidential powers. I don’t know if he’s cruel or not, but I have no trouble seeing Little George burning the legs off of bugs or small mammals using the sun and a magnifying glass.
We can also compare Ahmadinejad and Bush in terms of dogmatic religious beliefs. The former does not believe in the Holocaust because it puts the largest enemy of Islam in a good light, the second denies the intent of the founding fathers on the matter of separation of Church and State because it wins him the vote of the stuck-in-the-eighth-century American Christian fundamentalists. Bush also says that he takes direction from God’s voice in his head, although this could be construed as being either way too religious or evidence of further mental disorders, or both. George also has serious issues with science, and will not give a clear answer on whether he believes in evolution or a 6,000-year-old Earth.
Terrorism: No Need For War
George W. Bush has made an entire presidential career out of the War On Terror. He somehow equates a hundred thousand troops in Iraq, constantly annoying the Iraqis, as the major component of that war. I’m sorry, George, but the only effect that the war in Iraq is having on terrorists is to further piss them off. Dubya has managed to antagonize most of the world in his headlong pursuit of power and more power, so we should not be too surprised that the terrorists of the world are also unhappy with Little George.
Terrorists are not stopped by troops. Terrorist are stopped by good intelligence work and good police work. That is not to say that the U.S. military does not have good intelligence services; all jokes aside, it does. From that standpoint, U.S. Military Intelligence should be a major part of our efforts to combat terrorism. But, since terrorists are too smart to come out and line up so that the Marines can shoot them, the huge military presence in the Middle East is a morbid joke.
The War in Iraq
As you may have noticed, I am not in favor. ;o) I do not believe we should be there, I think we are doing the Iraqis much more harm than good, and I believe that we are there at the private behest of Bush and Cheney as vaudeville barkers for the corporate interests that control them. But that is not the worst of it. The worst of it is the injury and death that it causes among American soldiers and the people of Iraq.
Somewhere along the line, we have become so jaded by filthy politics that we are not screaming every time an American life is lost because we are in the wrong place protecting the object of greed of the super-rich. We have begun to think that the sort of small-minded lies and political deceptions that Bush and Cheney used to get us into this farce of a war are just par for the course.
