Satire, Politics, New England, Bullshit
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Sneaky Nonsense

  I received an E-mail from one M. Sanjayan who describes himself or herself as lead scientist with The Nature Conservancy, an environmental organization to which I contribute a few bucks each year.
    The purpose of Mr., Miss, Mrs., or Ms. Sanjayan’s communiqué was to supply me and, I assume, the Conservancy’s million-plus members with a link to my "Very Own Sneak Preview" of how the group has been rescuing American forests and flood plains from commercial exploitation and the proliferation of the human species in places it doesn’t belong.
    In any event, the word "Sneak" combined with the word "Preview" kicked off a long-repressed train (or cargo ship) of thought in my few remaining gray cells:

What the hell is Sneaky about an event that is being broadcast far and wide to anybody and everybody?

    Answer me that, will you?
    You say you don’t give a shit?
    Well that’s just the kind of head-in-the-sand ostrich attitude that results in the proliferation of feral hogs in Florida and the election of Nancy Pelosi to Congress.

                                                                
* * *

    Although the origins of the phrase "Sneak Preview" are lost in the mists and three-martini lunches of Madison Avenues past. I believe (correct me if I’m mistaken) that its first usage emerged from the primordial slime of some unknown marketer’s tiny brain back in the 1960s.
    I’m sure you all remember the ‘60s ─ Elvis and the Beatles were ascendant, sex was being invented by teenage mutants at a three-day pot-fest at Max Yasgur's farm near Woodstock, New York; the nation was being Greened with LSD by Timothy Leary and kindred assholes, and mass nonconformity via advanced hair styling was sweeping the world.
    Since I am congenitally not with it, I was puzzled at the time ─ as, indeed, I still am ─ over why events that are massively advertised on radio, television, the internet, and the print media are billed as "Sneak."
    Used as an adjective, thesauruses (thesauri?) list "Sneak" as synonymous with "Secret," "Clandestine," "Furtive," and "Stealthy." Dictionaries define the word as "Perpetrated without warning" and "Marked by quiet and caution and secrecy."
    Examples of usage include Sneak Thief, Sneak Attack, and Sneak Affair. In other words, the exact opposite of its usage in the phrase "Sneak Preview."
    Like, suppose Al Qaeda had followed the Hollywood Sneak Preview formula prior to September 11, 2001: Here are some of the headlines and TV announcements we could have expected in the months preceding:

● Sneak Atrocity Preview to be broadcast to the Muslim world September 11 via Al Jazeera cable channel 666! Observe with ecstasy as Islamic fanatics crash airliners into Twin Towers for no reason! Thrill to the sights and sounds of Holy Warriors killing themselves and thousands of unbelievers! Rejoice as infidels die in agony. Catch the action live in flaming color and surround sound! Allahu Akbar!

● Sneak Jihad coming to you next month courtesy of Taliban TV! Giggle as Muslim lunatics destroy Twin Towers...delight as Islam heroes crash into Pentagon...See Arab martyrs ascend to heaven and have sex with Virgins!

● Exclusive Sneak Preview of terrorist attack to be aired 9/11 on CBS: Be amazed at collapsing skyscrapers! Listen to innocent victims scream as they die in flames! Be horrified as Dan Rather "Speaks Truth to Power" while he explains how President Bush is murdering American office workers!

    Or what if the Japs had advertised their coming Sneak Attack on Pearl Harbor with a massive media Sneak Preview blitz in the months leading up to December 7, 1941:

● Sneak Attack Preview Coming to your Rocal Theater December 7: Raugh and Cheer as Imperial Air Force Annihirate America Freet, Eriminate many Roundeyes!

● Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere to Raunch Pearl Harbor Sneak Attack December 7! Do Not Miss once in rifetime surprise event!

● Be sure to tune to Radio Nippon next Sunday! Risten to Sneak Japan Sordiers Sink Batterships, Destroy Airpranes, Brow up Civirians!

    Or the Navy Seals offing of Osama Bin Laden:

● President Obama went on national television today to announce a Sneak Preview of the assassination of terrorist Osama Bin Laden next Wednesday at his home in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Sneak live television coverage will begin 1 p.m. Eastern Standard Time with the boarding of Secret Black Hawk helicopters by an elite Sneak Force of Navy hitmen.

● The New York Times has learned that Muslim activist, Osama Bin Laden, will be featured in a Sneak Assassination Preview May 2 when a Sneak Team of Special Sneak Forces will kill him. Unidentified sources say Mr. Bin Laden’s bullet-riddled corpse will be dumped at sea in traditional Mohammedan fashion after he has been gunned down like a dog.

    Or Israel’s raid on Entebbe:

● In late-breaking news, Al Jazeera has been informed by Israeli Defense Forces that a Sneak Preview of a clandestine Jew operation will take place next week (July 4, 1976) to transport a hundred or so Sneak Zionist pig tourists from Entebbe airport in Uganda to the Zionist entity in contravention of international law.

● Speaking at a Texas-style roast pregnant woman barbecue June 28, beloved Ugandan President-for-Life Idi Amin invited his remaining countrymn to visit Entebbe next week to enjoy a Sneak Preview of a secret commando raid by Israeli Special Forces. After the scheduled Sneak Fiasco has engulfed the Ugandan army His Majesty will stage a Sneak Massacre of Ugandan civilians. Bring your own mashed plantain and banana wine! Don’t miss the fun!

Norm Mack, Sneak Blogger, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Future Criminals of America ─ A New Inner City Youth Organization

    On November 11, 2011 (one of the few dates in the 21st Century during which nobody predicted that the World would end) an article datelined Montclair, NJ, appeared in the Manchester Union Leader and web sites and newspapers across this great land.

Teacher could be fired for Comments on Facebook

    As the story goes, New Jersey Administrative Judge Ellen Bass scathingly denounced one Jennifer O’Brien, a first grade teacher in the Paterson, NJ, school system, for demonstrating "a complete lack of sensitivity to the world in which her students live."
    Her Honor (I’ve never understood why judges are endowed with the title "Honor" considering that most of them are arrogant, overpaid, gutless, doctrinaire drones) was outraged by a critique of her budding young scholars that Ms. O’Brien posted on her Facebook page last March.. "I’m not a teacher," she had written to her Facebook friends, "I’m a warden for future criminals."
    The news article went on to suggest that Jennifer’s pique may have been occasioned by some past pranks played on her by her youthful charges that included assault and theft.
    Extenuating circumstances or no, and despite her 13 years in the instruction business, the authorities (none of whom, I venture to hazard, had ever brushed shoulders with inner city denizens) determined that Ms. O’Brien was insufficiently sensitive to realize that inner city boys will be inner city boys and inner city girls will be inner city girls.
    Judge Bass (who is no relation to the fish) went on to recommend that Ms. O’Brien be booted from her tenured position for her extreme lack of sensitivity as well as for the high crime of telling the truth. Moreover, since Patterson is a "poor, urban New Jersey community with a high rate of violent crime" school officials, and, no doubt, the Honorable Bass, interpreted O’Brien’s quasi tweet as racially tinged.
    Oh My Goodness Gracious! How dreadfully insightful of these educators to realize that if someone refers to "future criminals" in a poor, urban New Jersey community with a high rate of violent crime she is actually employing code for (dare I utter the dread words) the African-American Community?
    How dare she!
    As though African-Americans are the ones clogging the courts and jails of America in numbers completely out of proportion to their share of the population when everyone knows it’s those lawless Buddhists and Hindus and Wall street bankers that are responsible for all that mugging and drug dealing and murder.
    Like how non-PC can a grade school teacher get!
    Oh gosh, I’m so shaken by Ms. O’Brien’s insensitivity and inappropriateness that I’m gonna have to load up on some beer and chill out for a few hours with the Giants-49ers and Pats-Jets games

* * *

    Well the fucking Giants once again managed to blow a game they should have won.
    Fortunately, Brady and the Pats mashed the Jets and their obese loudmouth of a coach, Rex Ryan, in the evening. So I guess it was a wash.
    Anyhow...back to New Jersey and such trivia as the erosion of the cerebral cortices of American men, women, and children by the brain-eating parasites of mainstream Liberalism and their judicial and media henchmen.

* * *

    In "1984," the book that broke the back of the Soviet Union, George Orwell described three Commandments that were emblazoned on the exterior of the Ministry of Truth:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

    These Commandments were the central slogans of the tyranny envisioned by Orwell, a dark world in which humanity was crushed beneath the suffocating weight of an all-powerful state led by the omnipotent, godlike dictator Big Brother.
    Paterson New Jersey’s hapless Jennifer O’Brien, like Orwell’s doomed hero Winston Smith, is in a 1984 of her own, as she is slowly crushed by the judicio-academic establishment that holds sway in this country.
    Her crime?
    She violated Liberalism’s most sacred Commandment:

TRUTH IS BIGOTRY

    If you are a teacher, a media figure, a politician, a preacher, or just an average nerd in a high-profile position you risk your career, your livelihood, your family’s well-being, and your physical safety should you dare speak Truth about an ever-growing catalogue of verboten subjects, among them race, sexuality, religion, and gender.
    It’s perfectly okay, according to the PC police, for a black man to smear an entire race as Jesse Jackson did...or for another Black, Al Sharpton, to foment a murderous race riot in Harlem or commit anti-white perjury concerning a lying slut named Tawana Brawley...or for a simpering faggot like Perez Hilton to blackball a naive Miss USA contestant because she was against gay marriage...or for a bigot like Obama’s beloved minister of hate, Jeremiah Wright, to preach "God damn America...or for a murderous lunatic like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to be an honored guest of Columbia University, lecture the student body, and enjoy dinner with a select few privileged undergraduates.
    But let the President of Harvard University {Lawrence Summers) ask whether genetic differences might play a role in the preponderance of men over women in science, and a mass case of the vapors immediately afflicts the entire female faculty, followed by Summers’ forced resignation.
    Or let poor Jimmy the Greek muse that the preponderance of great black running backs in the NFL might be traceable to genetic selection dating back to slavery, and he is tarred, feathered, drummed out of the media, and; banished to the outer darkness for the rest of eternity.
    Or invite a conservative like Ann Coulter or a wishy-washy Republican like George Bush to speak at a college, and the university bureaucracy immediately morphs into tizzy mode followed either by a disinvite "based on security considerations" or else a paternalistic "naughty naughty" if a left-wing student sheep-mob riots on the orders of its sheepdog masters.

* * *

    In an article I posted several weeks ago, Tom Sowell wrote "Our schools are already too lacking in the basics of education to squander even more time on propaganda for politically correct causes that are in vogue."
    Tom, I love you. You’re one of the few islands of decency and sanity remaining in the world of intellect. But you’re wasting your breath with such advice.
    That ship has sailed.
    The Fascists are in control.
    The sad truth is that the population, the great mass of Americans if you will, does not understand that Fascism is not a matter of Left Wing or Right Wing, of Democrat or Republican.
    Mussolini and Stalin and Hitler and Castro and Peron and Mao were all cut from the same cloth.
    Fascism is a state of mind.
    Fascism has nothing to do with politics ─ with socialism, with conservatism, with communism, with anarchism, with nazism.

The common denominator of all Fascists is their craving for control

    And, today, in my beautiful country, the country in which I was so fortunate to be born, the Fascist Spirit, the spirit of subjugation and repression, grows ever stronger; the spirit of free thought ─ and of Truth itself ─ weaker and weaker.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Hurricanes, Gay Marriage, Grammar, and Money

    Envy, and its green-eyed conjoined twin Jealousy, are prominent among the Seven Deadly Sins presented so eloquently by Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy.
    Envy is the itch to grab for oneself something of value that somebody else possesses (like a boyfriend, a lobster-salad sandwich, or an iPad).
    Jealousy, is the desire to strip from another something of value regardless of whether you want it for yourself or not (like a boyfriend, a lobster-salad sandwich, or an iPad).
    Many of the world’s woes, especially the internecine warfare waged by Out-Groups against In-Groups, can be laid at the feet of these human but reprehensible sins.
    Let’s spell out the characteristics and nature of Out-Groups and In-Groups so that we’ll know what we’re talking about. 

 

 

● An Out-Group is a subset of humanity that either Envies certain perceived Assets that an opposing subset, the In-Group, is believed to have or else works to strip the opposing subset of certain perceived Assets of which the Out-Group is Jealous.
● Out-Groups need not be Minorities nor do In-Groups need to be Majorities. For example Females (an Out-Group majority) vs. males (an In-Group Minority). Similarly, the so-called Underdeveloped World (an Out-Group majority) vs. the Developed World (an In-Group Minority).
● A significant factor is that whether or not the perceived Assets that an Out-Group craves are genuinely valuable has little to do with the intensity of the Out-Group’s passion to possess them.
● To sum up, the one constant in the whole affair is that Out-Groups, like children, want whatever they don’t have regardless of the importance, merit, or objective worth of the objects of their desire.

    Here are some current examples of the Out-Group/In-Group dichotomy.

Gay Marriage (Homosexual Out-Group Vs. Heterosexual In-Group)
    As all but the comatose know, the gay community has been hissy fitting for a decade or more over the non-burning issue of same-sex marriage.
    For reasons that neither gays nor straights nor any sane human being can comprehend, homosexual men and women are demanding the right to parade down the aisle in white chiffon and/or lavender tux, swear ever-lasting fealty to their sex partner of the moment, and immediately become entangled in the hellish legal web that has been plaguing the heterosexual community (or as New Yorker magazine would say, the heterosexual "institution") for centuries.
    Are starry-eyed gay couples aware that the right to marriage comes hand in glove (or foot in mouth) with the right to divorce?
    I mean it’s wrenching enough to split with someone you’ve been screwing for a month or a year or ten years without having to cough up a hefty tithe to the courts and the lawyers when one or both of you get tired of the same old same old.
    But what the hell.
    None of that matters. The Out-Group wants what the In-Group has, no matter how pointless or disastrous. That’s what she wrote and that’s all she wrote.

Hurricane Names (Female and African-American Out-Groups Vs. White Male In-Group)
    Once upon a time hurricanes were named after girls ─ Suzie and JoAnn and Beatrice and so forth. The supply was endless what with all the different possible spellings. I mean, like, Caitlin alone could supply several hurricane seasons with Kaitlyn, Kaitlin, Katelin, Katelyn, Catelyn, Caitlyn, Kaytlin, Kaytlin, and Caytlyn.
    Alas, the activist class ─ led by such stalwart harridans as Betty Frieden (who is still alive). Bella Abzug (who is dead, but is expected to rise from the grave at any moment), Erica Jong (who is currently in a clinic for the terminally asinine), and Gloria Steinem (who graduated from ignoble bunnyhood into radical bitchhood) ─ marched on Washington shortly after the bra-burning epidemic of the ‘60s and forced the weather bureau to include boy names such as Bruce and Hugo.
    Apparently this coup did so much to advance the cause of woman’s lib and world peace (as well as draw attention to the fact that topnotch female editorial assistants were paid far less than mediocre major league outfielders), that leaders of the African-American Out-Group are demanding that Black names be included in the hurricane roster.
    So all you white bigots out there, better brace yourself for the next hurricane season. Duwayne, Tyrone, Tonisha, Plaxico, Woopie, Shaquandra, and Tawana are on the way.
    Uh-Oh...I just got word that the Arabs want Anwar and Osama added, the Jews want Moshe and Hyman, the illegal- aliens are demanding Diego, Jose, Encarnacion, and Manuela, and the Thais threaten a boycott of American goods if Sukhon, Ngam-Chit, Phassakorn, and Khemkhaeng aren’t included.
    Y’know, I just thought of something. The female Out-Group wanted male names included because using female-only names was insulting to women. But Blacks want African-American names included because not using Black names is insulting to Blacks.
    See what I mean? It’s all such crap. The fact is that Out-Groups don’t give a shit whether what they want makes any sense. They merely want whatever they think the supposed In-Group has.

Miss, Mrs, and Ms (Female Out-Group Vs. Male In-Group)
    On or about the time that activist women were demanding non-equal representation in the nomenclature of tropical storms, other activist ladies were focusing on gender discrimination implicit in the area of titles.
    Why, they asked, should the marital status of females be identified by the labels Miss and Mrs. while males got off scot free with a universal "Mr."
    Why, indeed? The solution was clear to the avant garde. A third modifier must be created that could proudly stand alongside "Mr." on the podium of life leaving everyone unsure of the marital status of double-X homo sapiens sharing the dais.
    Thus "Ms." (pronounced "Miz" for some reason) made its appearance on the world stage forcing 90 percent of the male population as well as Rosie O'Donnell and Ellen DeGeneres to glance at a chick’s ring finger before hitting on her.
    And so today’s liberated woman is now blessed with three titles to choose from rather than two. However, outside of spicing things up (rather like having a choice of dress-style, shoes, lingerie, hand bags, and hair-dos), it is hard to see just how the introduction of "Ms." improved the lot of the average housewife, career girl, or unwed welfare mother.
    Moreover, if by some historical quirk men had happened to be identified as, say, Mouster for single men and Munsteroo for married men and women had been identified simply by Mosh, you can be sure that female activists would have demanded equivalent sobriquets for themselves, say Moshamoiselle and Muasha.

Equal Opportunity Grammar (Female Out-Group Vs. Male In-Group)
    My friend from Reader’s Digest, Sally French (I hope she’ll still be my friend after this post), introduced what I call equal opportunity grammar to the Digest when she was editor of such massive best sellers as How to Do Just About Anything, Practical Problem Solver, and Household Hints and Handy Tips. (Our redoubtable art director, David Trooper, liked to call the last of these volumes, "Household Hints and Handy Tits.")
    At the time, I was in charge of the company’s line of instructional books (Law, Cooking, How-to, Gardening) and stirred myself sufficiently to review the progress of one of the books Sally was putting together. What I discovered was that she was employing the pronouns "he" and "she" randomly throughout the text. Thus on one page the reader might be advised to "See your plumber, he will solve the problem," and several pages later the reader might be advised to "See your plumber, she will solve the problem."
    I don’t know what to say about this sort of thing except to note that these dancing pronouns make me vaguely uncomfortable ─ not so much because they violate hoary grammatical convention, but rather because I found I was continually having to re-image the book’s anonymous plumbers and other characters to suit the shifting whim of the editor 
    I should point out that the reinvention of conventions is seldom a good idea. I also wonder if traditionally female objects ─ like ships and cars and cats ─ are positives or negatives in the view of the weaker, I mean stronger, sex.
    In conclusion, let me ask if it really improved the lot of the world’s majority type of human being when the poetic meter of the somewhat ungrammatical Star Trek intro was ruined by changing "To boldly go where no man has gone before" to the insipid "To boldly go where no one has gone before?"

Gimme Your Money (Third World Out-Group Vs. Developed World In-Group)
    Unlike the other cases I’ve listed, there is a modicum of logic to the demands by the poorer nations of the world to get their hands on as much of the wealthier nation’s money as they can.
     Rather than calling this Thievery, the process is usually referred to as "Reparations" since it is accepted Liberal doctrine that America, Australia, Canada, and most of Western Europe are wealthy only because they stole the resources of the other nations of the world and enslaved their populations. (For reasons I do not understand, Japan, Finland, Sweden, and Monaco are exempt from these charges.)
    Now, I certainly agree that the average Ugandan and Zimbabwean man or woman in the bush is entitled to live as well as, say, Yoko Ono and Susan Sarandon.
    But what about me?
    I mean, hell, I’m kinda like a small underdeveloped nation myself and I want, in fact I DEMAND, that Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, George Soros, Sean Penn, Barbra Streisand, Michael Moore and all the rest of them there fat cats cough over a few million bucks of their loot to me without delay.
    What’s more, I don’t give a shit if they claim they worked for it, inherited it, stole it, or won it in the lottery.
    I want half!
    And if they won’t give it to me nice-like, I’ll picket their damn homes and piss on their damn lawns and crap on their damn BMWs and then I’ll get on the horn and hire goddamn Barney Frank and have him legislate it away from them.
    So there!

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Mr. Editor: Are There Really Any Non-Mexican Aliens?

    Americans seem fascinated by the question of whether there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Putting aside the dubious assumption that there is intelligent life on earth, the question must be split in two:
        1. Are there other lifeforms out there as brilliant as we humans?
        2. If there are such lifeforms, what are the chances that we’ll hear from them?
   The answer to the first question can be anything you choose ─ "Yes," "No," "Maybe," "Probably," "Definitely, "Whatever," "I don’t give a shit" ─ depending on what religion you subscribe to or how much grass you’ve smoked.
    As for the second question, "What are the chances that we’ll hear from them?" the answer is more straightforward: "Absolutely none."
    Granted, the universe (which as you may be aware is a very large place indeed) could easily be teeming with millions upon millions of high IQ alien civilizations sprinkled hither and yon amongst the few hundred trillion galaxies visible to the naked Hubble, each galaxy containing a few hundred trillion stars like our sun many of which are surrounded by cozy little solar systems like our own with small blue planets circling them on which Allah or Jehovah or Krishna or Dennis Kucinich or some other omnipotent being has ordained a cornucopia of life forms and put them under the supervision of ape-like mammals whose males wear Levi’s and whose females have a passion for designer handbags.
    The problem, however, isn’t whether superior carbon-based entities such as editors of the New York Times inhabit the far reaches of the cosmos ─ it’s whether we can expect to be texting with them on our iPads or iPhones or iPods one of these millennia.
    And that’s where that annoying son-of-a-bitch Einstein comes along to gum up the works and spoil the fun with that stupid dogma of his about nothing being able to travel faster than the speed of light.
    Albert is dead and not about to debate all you fans of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Scottie, and Sulu, who know that all we need to do to speed up our phone calls is to switch into Warp Drive, point our Priuses toward the nearest Worm Hole, and jump into Hyperspace, so I’ll just content myself with pointing out that all of you trekkies are full of shit.

● There ain’t no such things as Worm Holes.
● There ain’t no such thing as Hyperspace.
● Warp Drive is a total crock.
● The velocity of light is 186,000 miles per second and nothing, not even Barney Frank’s tongue, can transmit information or saliva faster than that.
● Scottie's dead, Sulu’s doing commercials, Nimoy is writing bad poetry, and Shatner has abandoned his starship captaincy in favor of transforming himself into a human blimp.

    Live with it! That’s the way it is! It’s not up to you! You’re stuck with it already!
    The upshot? It doesn’t matter a tinker’s damn if you believe there are green pen pals out there with antennae and tentacles and multiple sex organs interested in tweeting attractive earth chicks because there’s not a Chinaman’s chance in hell that anyone will ever hear anything from any of them or that any of them will ever hear anything from any of us:
    It’s really very simple:
    There could be a gazillion super races flourishing throughout the universe or there could be none. We don’t know. We will never know. They’re all so fucking far away it would take longer than a geological age for their "Wish you were here" cards to show up in your E-mail.
    You got that?
    Can you wrap your mind around that?
                                                                
* * *
    
Oh...My...God!...
    You’ve discovered, based on incontrovertible evidence from the Syfy channel, several Steven Spielberg movies, your sister’s hairdresser, and your personal observation of a strange greenish bluish yellowish violetish light in the sky last Wednesday, that there are oodles of super-intelligent lifeforms in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and Messier 59,762 and that they’ve been busily messaging us and dropping by in their Toyota UFOs for centuries and that I’m a close-minded, pig-headed, atheist prick for denying it.
    Okay! Okay! Okay!.
    Sheesh!
    You win!
    I throw in the towel.
    I like totally, y’know, concede to your superior wisdomability and knowledgeableness and humbly grovel at your feet and beg to kiss your ass.
    What’s more I’m gonna go outside tonight and start sending smoke signals via my personal hyperspace worm hole to the nearest black hole I can find.
    I can’t wait to hear back. I just know something amazingly weird is waiting anxiously at the event horizon for my message. I hope it receives my dispatch before the cops show up and haul me away for polluting outer space.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Tom Sowell on Bullying, Another Liberal Cause du Jour

            
                
                                      Thomas Sowell, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at 
                                      Stanford University. His website is http://www.tsowell.com

(The following is an October 26, 2011, article by Dr. Thomas Sowell, one of the finest writers and most coherent intellects on the American scene today. He echoes my feelings about the media-fed, liberal-inspired anti-bullying frenzy that is currently all the rage in primary schools, secondary schools, and universities across the country.)

    BACK IN THE 1920s, the intelligentsia on both sides of the Atlantic were loudly protesting the execution of political radicals Sacco and Vanzetti, after what they claimed was an unfair trial.
    Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote to his young leftist friend Harold Laski, pointing out that there were "a thousand-fold worse cases" involving black defendants, "but the world does not worry over them."
    Holmes said: "I cannot but ask myself why this so much greater interest in red than black."
    To put it bluntly, it was a question of whose ox was gored. That is, what groups were in vogue at the moment among the intelligentsia. Blacks clearly were not.
    The current media and political crusade against "bullying" in schools seems likewise to be based on what groups are in vogue at the moment. For years, there have been local newspaper stories about black kids in schools in New York and Philadelphia beating up Asian classmates, some beaten so badly as to require medical treatment.
    But the national media hear no evil, see no evil and speak no evil. Asian Americans are not in vogue today, just as blacks were not in vogue in the 1920s.
    Meanwhile, the media are focused on bullying directed against youngsters who are homosexual. Gays are in vogue.
    Most of the stories about the bullying of gays in schools are about words directed against them, not about their suffering the violence that has long been directed against Asian youngsters or about the failure of the authorities to do anything serious to stop black kids from beating up Asian kids.
    Where youngsters are victims of violence, whether for being gay or whatever, that is where the authorities need to step in. No decent person wants to see kids hounded, whether by words or deeds, and whether the kids are gay, Asian or whatever.
    But there is still a difference between words and deeds — and it is a difference we do not need to let ourselves be stampeded into ignoring. The First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States guarantees freedom of speech — and, like any other freedom, it can be abused.
    If we are going to take away every Constitutional right that has been abused by somebody, we are going to end up with no Constitutional rights.
    Already, on too many college campuses, there are vaguely worded speech codes that can punish students for words that may hurt somebody’s feelings — but only the feelings of groups that are in vogue.
    Women can say anything they want to men, or blacks to whites, with impunity. But strong words in the other direction can bring down on students the wrath of the campus thought police — as well as punishments that can extend to suspension or expulsion.
    Is this what we want in our public schools?
    The school authorities can ignore the beating up of Asian kids but homosexual organizations have enough political clout that they cannot be ignored. Moreover, there are enough avowed homosexuals among journalists that they have their own National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association — so continuing media publicity will ensure that the authorities will have to "do something."
    But political pressures to "do something" have been behind many counterproductive and even dangerous policies.
    A grand jury report about bullying in the schools of San Mateo County, Calif., brought all sorts of expressions of concern from school authorities — but no definition of "bullying" nor any specifics about just what they plan to do about it.
    Meanwhile, a law has been passed in California that mandates teaching about the achievements of gays in the public schools. Whether this will do anything to stop either verbal or physical abuse of gay kids is very doubtful.
    But it will advance the agenda of homosexual organizations and can turn homosexuality into yet another of the subjects on which words on only one side are permitted. Our schools are already too lacking in the basics of education to squander even more time on propaganda for politically correct causes that are in vogue. We do not need to create special privileges in the name of equal rights.
.
Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Euro-Crap Revisited

    I posted an article last July that was outspokenly critical of the whole idea of a single European currency, of the bureaucratic mindset that led to its creation, and of the slow-motion economic catastrophe that was unfolding as a result. I blamed the genesis of the euro on the mean-spirited fairytales of Marxism, theories that continue to infect the dim cocktail-party minds of the intelligentsia.
    I don't claim any great credit for being prophetic ─ what was happening then, is happening now, and seems likely to happen in the future, is pretty damn obvious.
    Below are some relevant excerpts from my prior piece. For the entire article, click
Euro-Crap Original.

● What in God’s name possessed a clique of European bureaucrats to come up with the foolhardy idea of a single European currency?
● What possessed the member states of the European Community to buy into the madness?
● What kind of grass were they smoking when they imagined that 20 sovereign nations representing a bewildering mix of ethnic, sectarian, and racial groups, each with histories of warfare and conquest; subjugation and victory; bigotry, savagery, and hatred going back 5,000 years, could be welded into a unified superstate?
    There would be no Greek Crisis, Spanish Crisis, Irish Crisis, Portuguese Crisis, Italian Crisis, (and lord knows how many future crises) if those nations had their own free-floating currencies.
    If the citizens of Greece want to live in a welfare state consisting of two or three productive workers for every seven or eight government slugs ─ fine. Without the shackles of the euro, the Greek drachma could float downward to its proper level on the currency exchanges of the world and, should the population so desire, go the way of the Zimbabwe dollar which, when last heard from, was being issued in Z$100 trillion denominations.
    
The virtue of this scenario is that the economic well-being of other nations (including Germany, France, and the U. S.) wouldn’t be hostage to the vagaries of Greek street mobs....
    One can’t but wonder if the notoriously hard-working and thrifty citizens of Germany, having already donated a few hundred billion dollars to their Greek non-brethren, are going to continue to cough up their hard-earned bank deposits to bail out other profligate neighbors to the south.
    Throw Spain, Italy, and Portugal into the pot, sprinkle in a dash of Ireland, season with a few hundred billion euros for contingency, and voilà! ─ the Royal Bank of Scotland estimates that a mere €3.5 trillion ($5 trillion U. S.) slush fund would prevent the collapse of the euro for at least a year, maybe two.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net 

Vanished in the Dust-Bin of Progress

    Columnist George Will pointed out that Liberals, having damaged liberalism’s reputation, are now calling themselves Progressives. Well...not to contradict the erudite Mr. Will (nor defend Liberals), I consider the term "Progressive" to be even less appealing than the term "Liberal."
    Progressive, I assume, means in favor of progress. Progress, I assume, means change. It’s fair to say that the country’s had almost three years of supposed Change (though not much Hope) under the Progressive leadership of Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack (Hope and Change) Obama. And if you think things have been getting better and better I suggest you trot down to Zuccotti Park and tell all the youthful idealists there that they’re barking up the wrong trees and urinating on the wrong sidewalks.
    The plain truth is that Progress is almost always bad.

· Are our lives really better now that we drive ten miles to pick up our groceries at Walmart or Shaw’s rather than walk half a block to the corner grocery store?
· Does milk taste sweeter now that it’s in post-dated cardboard cartons or plastic jugs instead of bottles delivered fresh each morning to your doorstep?
· Is a weeks-old Saran-wrapped cylinder of amorphous dough really a healthier, tastier alternative to a warm, fresh-out-of-the-oven, preservative-free loaf of rye from the local baker?
· Are we more fulfilled now that the roses we buy on Mother’s Day are imported from Colombia and have no scent?
· Are our children’s lives richer now that they wear armor when they’re riding their bikes and are taken to playgrounds devoid of Jungle Gyms and Monkey Bars under the watchful eyes of helicopter parents?

    Cartoonist Roz Chast, that lone shining diamond in the fag-ridden fever swamp of New Yorker magazine, summons up remembrance of things past:

    

    I put together a table, strictly off the top of my head, of some of the things and activities that have vanished or are in the process of vanishing from our lives. A few, perhaps, such as fur coats, fedoras, and the typographers union that was so instrumental in decimating the newspaper business, are just as well dead and buried. The majority, however, represent incremental losses to the grace and richness and variety of daily existence. Here's my list. I'm sure you can think of items to add:

                                             Going...Going...Going...Gone......

BUSINESSES

THINGS

ACTIVITIES, JOBS, AND SERVICES

Travel agencies

Songs that are singable

Group singing at parties around the piano

Cigar stores

Egg creams

Schoolyard handball

Corner Grocers

Fresh butter

Washroom attendants

Shoe shine parlors

Home permanent kits

Soda jerks

Stationery stores

Fresh bread

Milk delivery*

Corner Bakeries

Dill pickles from the barrel

Brick layers*

Five and dime stores

Tricycles

Linotype operators*

Automats

Fur coats

Elevator operators*

Ice cream parlors

Fedoras, Homburgs, Straw Hats

Kids street and sidewalk games (Hopscotch, Red Rover, Stickball, Chinese handball, Ring-a-levio)

Photo developers

Bathing caps

Ad sections in newspapers and magazines for men and women seeking partners 

Butcher shops

Rubbers and galoshes

Employees of the Tongue River Clinic cat house in Miles City, Montana

Fish markets

Great old autos like Packard and Hudson and Studebaker

Listening to Jack Benny and Fred Allen and all the rest on a Sunday evening

Video rental stores

Slide rules

Hitchhiking across America with one valise and almost no money

Real hardware stores

Fountain pens

Staying in two-dollar-a-night hotel rooms

Newspaper kiosks

Slate blackboards

Dressing up for dinner in a good restaurant

Dry cleaners

Stephen Foster songs

Kids going barefoot in the summer

Full service gas stations

Fresh ripe peaches

 

Haberdasheries

Fresh ripe tomatoes

 

Print shops

Boys in shorts and knickers

 

Book stores

Most newspapers*  
*Hurried to the graveyard by unions

    I'm a sentimental slob and I hope you'll forgive me, but when I look back on the past, on those childhood days of sunshine and shadow and stickball and skinned knees and Stenick's corner grocery and old Seltzer's candy store near P.S. 150, I can't help thinking of an old song called When You and I Were Young, Maggie.

I wandered today to the hill, Maggie,
To watch the scene below -
The creek and the creaking old mill, Maggie,
As we used to, long ago.
The green grove is gone from the hill, Maggie,
Where first the daisies sprung;
The creaking old mill is still, Maggie,
Since you and I were young.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Mobs

    In my post, The God Gene, I wrote that there is a specific gene, a Darwinian adaptation, that predisposes members of our species to believe in non-existent entities called Gods. I also ventured that the God Gene was a key factor in mankind’s penchant for banding into competing packs under the banner of one religion or another.
    Over the ages, the implications of the God Gene have been a mixed bag. Clearly, it has played a vital role in man’s domination of the natural world. Unfortunately, it has also had the side effect of inspiring devotees of one imaginary being to spend their lives working to convert or dominate devotees of differing imaginary beings through such time-honored stratagems as pillage, rape, war, starvation, enslavement, and mass murder.
    I also noted that I was one of a small number of mutants who lacked the God Gene.
                                                                *   *   *
    Lately, I’ve discovered another serious chromosomal deficit in my makeup...Apparently I not only lack a God Gene, but I do not have a Mob Gene either.
    The Mob Gene, for those who may not be hip to its existence, is the DNA unit responsible for so much good-natured group fun over the centuries ─ from ancient Rome’s Fickle Crowd (Mobile Vulgus from which the word Mob derives) and Genghis Khan’s Golden Horde to the street mobs of the French Revolution to our own Salem Witch Trials to the Nuremberg rallies of Nazi Germany to the mud fields of Woodstock to the siege of the U.S. embassy in Teheran to the television-deprived blacks of Watts-riot fame to Britain’s recent redistribution of electronic goods via smashed store windows.
    But, as is so often the case in this exciting, facebook-enhanced, iPhone-driven, twitterized world of ours, it is the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA that has proudly pioneered the way to a dramatic new form of Mob ─ The Mob Without a Cause!
    Participants in the Occupy Whatever The Fuck You Happen To Think Of movement that are currently rooting like swine in their self-created filth in urban centers throughout the planet point out that they are both VERY ANGRY and VERY IDEALISTIC.
    Well shit, I’m VERY ANGRY too. I was born angry and the older I get the angrier I get. In fact I think I’m angrier than any of them there Occupy Whatever fuckers. And what’s more I’m so god-awful idealistic I can barely spit. But you don’t see me camping out in front of Peterborough Town Hall with a bunch of fellow geriatric cases, smoking crack cocaine, chanting slogans about Hitler and Mao, and crapping into the marigold containers.
    Hell No! 
    When I’m pissed off (which is always), I just barge into my wife’s room after dinner and start venting some of my pent-up hatred. And when she kicks me out (as she will) because she’s engrossed in a 550-pound tumor or Rosie O’Donnell flapping her sagging tits on OWN and is sick of my bitching anyway, I just go outside and run in circles around the big white pine tree until I turn into a pool of butter.
    One thing about the Mob Gene, however, distinguishes it from the God Gene...unlike the God Gene, other members of the animal kingdom also possess the Mob Gene, most famously lemmings, sheep, and cows.
    All it takes is one activist Border Collie to get the herd moving from its lush pastureland (or parents’ basement) to the slaughterhouse (or New York City financial district). A few nips on a few leg tendons, some strategic barks of command (with or without loudspeaker), and the flock gallops off to its appointed destination, there to bleat and defecate until the authorities arrive with hoses, pepper spray, and a New York Times reporter.
    All-in-all a well-wrought mob makes a beautiful spectacle...and even more beautiful is the exultation stirred in the breasts and testicles of its participants.
    In what other venue than a mob can a human being so completely shed the onerous shackles of civilization and enjoy the red hot freedom of anonymity? Where else can one’s every action, no matter how destructive, unsanitary, or mindless, be legitimatized by simply immersing oneself in an all-concealing mass of fellow ovines, bovines, and assholes?
    A mob confers invisibility, you see, which is the greatest freedom of all. And along with invisibility comes liberation ─ liberation from responsibility... liberation from accountability... liberation from rational thought.
    Embedded in the bosom of the mob, encouraged by its roars and chants, obedient only to the will of its sheepdog master, the mob member can at long last indulge in all those long-denied, wonderful, half-forgotten animal pleasures of childhood ─ hatred, vandalism, theft, taunting, arson, rock-throwing, bigotry, tantrums, threats, irrational whining, pointless demands.
    What then is the hapless non-mob participant to do as the mob luxuriates in its primeval joys of intellectual atavism, physical filth, legal immunity, and the right to commit random violence?
    Here’s my take on it for what it’s worth:

Suppose it’s St Patrick’s Day and you run into a rolling mob of drunken Irishmen. You have two options ─ get out of the way or get shoved into the gutter.

    There ain’t nothing else in the refrigerator, friends.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

For Christ’s Sake Already

    Those stalwart guardians of the public weal and our freedom ─ the New York Times, the Washington Post, the families of dead terrorists, Texas Representative Ron Paul, and law-abiding mass-murder clubs like Al-Qaeda ─ are Shocked!...Shocked! that a gentle AMERICAN CITIZEN named Anwar al-Awlaki and his even-gentler AMERICAN CITIZEN comrade in peace, Samir Khan, were recently incinerated by an American drone. (After which they were transported by a covey of angels to Muslim Heaven, there to dwell in everlasting sexual intercourse with a boundless supply of cute little virgins.)

                 
            Anwar Al Awlaki (L) and Samir Khan, murdered Sept. 30 by an unconstitutional drone 

    What savage outlaws we Americans have become, obliterating two AMERICAN CITIZENS as they were happily driving around the lush Yemeni countryside enjoying their hard-earned vacations abroad (seven years for Anwar, three years for Samir). Can you believe the phony, trumped up pretexts for killing these two dedicated citizens? Waging war against the United States? Arranging for the murder of random American citizens? Working with terrorists to turn the world clock backward a thousand years so that humanity could again wallow in the bliss of a Muslim caliphate under the benevolent protection of all-knowing Imams like Anwar himself? It is to laugh.
    What is wrong with us as a people?
    How have we fallen so low as to equate the trivial lives of a few hundred, or a few thousand, or a few hundred thousand Americans with the beauty of living in a brave new world of Sharia where women, as in times of old, will once again enjoy the heartwarming luxury of slavery and where men will experience the soul-cleansing thrill of prostrating themselves ten or twenty times a day with their assholes aimed toward Mecca?
    By what right does our government see fit to ignore our constitution as interpreted by learned academicians, brave legislative weirdoes, and magisterial media conglomerates that have devoted their lives to subverting that very constitution and to destroying the fabric of the country where they live and work?
    I for one (or two or three) am absolutely outraged at such high-handed flouting of legal precedent. American citizens (if not foreigners) have every right to be exonerated before a jury of their peers no matter how vile the crimes they have committed. And if they don’t want to come home to face trial, why...why...why...it’s...it's...just not nice!
    Ron Paul, that great legal mind and exemplar of tolerance, patience, morality, and constitutionality, has called for impeachment of the President or the attorney general or their lawyers or whomever he can think of. How dare we defend ourselves against our enemies, he muses, against traitors, against mass murderers, against psychopathic religious fanatics when they are AMERICAN CITIZENS? If they were British or Chinese or German or Maori it would be okay he seems to suggest. But AMERICANS? Outrageous!
    My Gawd! this entire affair reeks of horrid memories of lawless Israelis violating Argentine sovereignty by kidnapping Adolf Eichmann or brazenly interfering in the internal affairs of Uganda to transport a few useless Kikes back to their homeland.
    As Congressman Paul and many other outstanding American thinkers and constitutional experts so aptly point out, the entire matter could have been solved with a simple, polite iPhone text message to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh (now that he’s back from his three-month holiday in a Saudi Arabian hospital) humbly requesting the return of the vacationing pair of gentle American Muslims to the United States on misdemeanor charges of inappropriate behavior and failing to register their motor scooters.
    Such a civilized, commonsense action would have solved the entire matter in a trice in accord with any number of constitutional amendments and international protocols. And if there was any subsequent difficulty, we could have brought the matter to the attention of the United Nations. No doubt Russia, China, the Arabs, and our friends throughout the Muslim World would have leapt at the chance to support us.
    As a further gesture of good will, if the peace-loving Yemenis had any qualms about our motives, it would have been an easy matter to assure them that the trial would take place in California before the same judge and jury that handled the O. J. Simpson case so brilliantly.

    
All right. Enough heavy-handed sarcasm.

1. It’s glaringly obvious that the New York Times is pulling out all the stops in hopes of somebody or other leaking a memo that will claim our government is evil, thereby securing yet another Pulitzer for the Newspaper of Record and its staff of traitors.
2. Ron Paul is not only a bigot, but a fucking idiot as well.
3. If a man chooses to dress up like a bit character from one of Woody Allen’s lesser comedies and spend his time on earth plotting to murder his fellow human beings, he should be wiped off the face of planet.
4. If some brainless, hate-filled young jackass worships such an insane creep and spends his time on earth doing the madman’s bidding, then he too should be executed like the savage beast he is.

    What it boils down to is this: If someone attempts to kill one of my children, I’ll blow his fuckin’ brains out if I can get the drop on him.
    And the New York Times can go straight plumb to hell.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Introducing...But Wait...There’s Much, Much More!

    Undeterred by the world-wide economic meltdown, several wars, a precipitous decline in fertility rates among white, non-illegal aliens, and a devastating pandemic of "But Waits!" and "Much, Much, Mores" in television commercials, American entrepreneurs are still managing to ejaculate a torrent of useless new products.
    Here is the crème de la crème of crap that will be arriving in time for the holiday season on the shelves of your local Walmart..

INTRODUCING CRUST. This semi-amazing new 100% organic cheese-flavored dental gel will bleach your teeth to dazzling whiteness within seconds of its very first application thanks to its secret ingredients, Clorox, OxiClean, and White Lead. BUT WAIT! There’s much, much more! Not only will your gleaming teeth blind your various sex-partners’ eyes like the HIDs of an oncoming Mercedes, but your gums, tongue, mouth lining, lips, and the upper six inches of your esophagus will shine in the dark like radioactive pearl. And best of all Proctor and Gamble, the immense conglomerate behind this ground-breaking new piece of crap, guarantees CRUST’s efficacy for two years or until your teeth corrode.

INTRODUCING STOPPA-DA-MADNESS. At last, a weight-loss product that Works Real Good! Does your life revolve around Kentucky Fried Chicken, Big Macs, Cheesy Gordita Crunches, Burger King Triple Stackers, fried dough, smoked beef suet, chicken fat sandwiches, lard soup, and sautéed hog giblets? Did you squander your month’s supply of food stamps on Yankee Doodles, Yodels, Devil Dogs, Doubled-Stuffed Oreos, Frito-Lays, Pop-Tarts, Snickers Bars, DiGiorno Frozen Pizza, and Goldfish Crackers? Not to worry! You can stuff yourself till you puke and still lose weight with Stoppa-Da-Madness, General Mills’ 100% Organic tapeworm salt. Just sprinkle lightly on your daily mush. No matter how much vile swill you ingest thousands of Stoppa-Da-Madness’s slimy little parasitic grubs will get right to work in your intestinal tract gobbling up every particle of crap you consume along with whatever other body parts they can sink their teeth into! BUT WAIT!. There’s more! Order now and you’ll receive a free baseball card (shipping and handling extra) showing liberal icon Michael Moore before-and-after he slimmed down from a 450-pound mound of blubber to a 445-pound sack of suet..

INTRODUCING CAT-BE-GONE: Tired of scooping dried turds out of a stinking cat box? Fed up with stepping barefoot on phlegm-sodden hairballs that your pet hacks up on your wall-to-wall carpeting? Appalled at seeing your sofa clawed to shreds? Disgusted at finding decapitated mice on your pillow? Saddened when you discover that your prized bonsai has been stripped of foliage and reeks of cat urine? Weep no more my lady! Salvation is at hand! Heavily impregnated with 100% Organic Zyklon-B imported direct from Auschwitz, Cat-Be-Gone kitty litter solves all your feline problems in one lethal stroke. BUT WAIT! There’s much, much more! With each vat of Cat-Be-Gone you’ll receive a second vat FREE! And if that isn’t enough you’ll also get a FREE one-year subscription to the New York Times web site, a genuine Ginza knife, and two Get Out of Jail cards. Hurry! Call now! Don’t delay! When this offer ends it ends!

INTRODUCING I-KNIFE. Move over Swiss Army, Apple’s done it again!. Who needs a heavy, ugly, fat reddish-brownish-orangy thing that weighs down your trouser pocket when you can have a sleek, wireless, 100% Organic whatsis that’ll do just about anything you can think of. It peels, it shaves, it takes pictures, it tells time, it shoots poison darts, it kisses your boss’s ass, it fries eggs, it tells ethnic jokes, it breaths underwater, it swats flies. BUT WAIT! There’s much, much more! Girlfriend frigid? Take your i-Knife into bed with you (make sure your girlfriend’s there, too), press the little pink button on your i-Knife, gently insert the appliance into your loved one as directed on the pop-up touch screen, then lie or lay back and listen to her shriek in agony. You say you don’t have a girlfriend? No problem! Just whisper the words, "Shit outta luck" into your i-Knife and voilà! this remarkable little tool will morph into a really fun jerk-off machine. Available at Ocean State Job Lot, Walmart, Hammacher Schlemmer, Amazon.com, and fine outlets everywhere. Not $10,002, Not $10,001, Not $10,000, but only $9,999.99!!!

INTRODUCING HIPPO-COAT: Does your house require painting every 50 years? Does the roof leak like a sieve during hurricanes, nor’easters, tornadoes, heavy rains, light drizzles, mists, and morning dews? Does the siding resemble Nick Nolte’s face after a night out with Charlie Sheen? Have your Alaskan huskies run away because you can’t keep your home warm in the winter? Well...your suffering is over! Call 1-800-MYHIPPO and have all your problems solved in one fell swoop! HIPPO-COAT, LLC will air-drop several tons of 100% Organic muck (made from recycled 1960’s polyester bell-bottom pants) onto your home. Once the stuff solidifies (six weeks or less) your domicile will be hermetically sealed forever. No more leaks, no more fuel bills, no more drafts, no more oxygen! NOTHING will be able to get in or out. BUT WAIT! There’s much, much more1 Have a bedbug problem?...HIPPO-COAT asphyxiates the little bastards. Sick of your in-laws dropping in unexpectedly?...You’ll die laughing as they try to break through HIPPO-COAT ‘s rock-hard shell. Bothered by sunshine streaming through the bedroom window in the mornings?... HIPPO-COAT will keep your home’s interior in perpetual darkness!

INTRODUCING DYNOGLU: What active young sadist wouldn’t be overjoyed to find this wondrous new 100% organic toylike product under his Christmas tree or in his gun cabinet for Kwanzaa season. Secretly spirited out of the biological warfare vaults of the KGB and Planned Parenthood, this amazing new adhesive forms an unbreakable bond between skin and anything you can think of ─ wood, plastic; metal; animal, vegetable, mineral. Imagine what fun you’ll have watching your pet Chihuahua run in circles after you apply a few drops of Dynoglu to its eyelids! Or how about Dynogluing rubber stoppers into your sister’s nostrils while she’s sleeping? What a hoot! Or maybe you’ll want to coat your dad’s toilet seat with Dynoglu. Just imagine what will happen when the old fart does his morning business! BUT WAIT! There’s much, much more! Order a 24-pack of Dynoglu within the next five minutes and we’ll send you a 100% organic stinkbomb and a pint of 100% organic nitroglycerine. Carefully (very carefully) pour the nitro into your neighbor’s mailbox, add the stinkbomb, Dynoglu the box shut, and wait for the hilarity to begin!

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Coming Soon to Your TV Screen

    With another television season about to descend mercilessly upon a helpless public, Dome of Glass has managed to obtain double secret previews of the worst of the new programs to help you defend against the onslaught.

•Stubble.
Based extremely loosely on the non-blockbuster non-prime-time series Whisker Wars and featuring endless interviews with famous people you never heard of and don’t like, Stubble let’s you in on the secrets, arcane rituals, specialized shaving instruments, and expensive hair salons that allow such celebrities as Brad Pitt, Hugh Jackman, Hugh Laurie, Russell Crowe, Homer Simpson, and hundreds of other male sex objects to maintain perpetual ten-day growths of facial hair. Conceived by Isaac Mizrahi and a cabal of fellow fashion industry queers, Stubble is expected to appeal to prepubescent girls, post-menopausal women, the nation’s burgeoning gay population, and a few male nerds hoping to attract members of the opposite sex by attempting to grow scraggly veneers of chin whiskers. (Filmed before a live audience.)

•You’ve Come a Long Way Baby. A heavily botoxed Rosie O'Donnell stars in this British action/adventure/mystery/comedy/sci-fi/drama as a mysterious Liverpudlian fag hag endowed with a wide array of superpowers including the ability to feign attacks of Tourette’s syndrome, speak in tongues, sneer threateningly, and mount young girls in a single bound. Ms. O'Donnell is slightly supported in her unsuccessful attempts to fight crime by a cast featuring Lady Gaga as Madonna, Madonna as Whoopie Goldberg, Mel Gibson as Shylock the Usurer, and the late Marlon Brando as Pierre the Pillsbury Dough Man. (Filmed before a dead audience.)

•Degenerate Housewives of Jaffrey, New Hampshire.
Aimed at the same estrogen-soaked demographic that watches Desperate Housewives and Real Housewives of This, That, and the Other Place, this new reality show, womanned by a select group of really ugly New Hampshire wives, follows the girls as they engage in a different perversion each week. The pilot episode is set in the Rindge Walmart were two of the group (Smile Train survivor Ariadne Pelletier of Antrim and wealthy Rosamon Duckworth of the Peterborough Duckworths) are remanded to the notorious Cheshire County lockup in  Keene after a contretemps with an immense Walmart customer who was clogging the Beauty aisle in the store’s pharmacy section. While in jail, both housewives are subjected to acts of inappropriate behavior (shown in graphic detail) until rescued by Oprah Winfrey. In ensuing episodes, the wives confront such contemporary topics as husband poisoning, shoplifting, infanticide, marital sex, pre-marital sex, post-marital sex, cougarism, and carb-loading before adultery.

•Cardboard Caravan. In an all-out effort to improve its sagging ratings, PBS is initiating this exciting spin-off of its hugely unsuccessful Antiques Roadshow franchise. Cardboard Caravan, as the name vaguely implies, deals with all aspects and ramifications of the popular pastime of paper goods collecting, from the simple garnering of roadside litter to the joy of treasure-hunting in the newsprint, magazine, corrugated cardboard, and scrap-paper bins of the Peterborough Recycling Center to the thrill of stealing rare manuscripts and first editions from museums and public libraries. Each program will take place in a different exotic locale. Shows already "in the can" include episodes in Berlin (New Hampshire), Lebanon (New Hampshire), Dublin (New Hampshire), Rome (New York), and Paris (Maine). The series will be shown on all PBS stations provided air-time is available between fundraisers.

•Seven and a Half Men. If Two and a Half Men was a blockbuster, how can three times as many men go wrong? This naughtily daring sitcom marks the return of Charlie Sheen in the role of a middle-aged, delusional, megalomaniacal drug addict named Charlie Sheen. Set in the Psychiatric ward of Dannemora State Prison, the initial episode sees Sheen wallowing luxuriously in a private cell and having imaginary sex with an imaginary hooker. Sheen’s idyllic life is interrupted when his bisexual fraternal twin and fellow nut-case Alec (Alec Baldwin) is unceremoniously dumped on him as cellmate. Not knowing that Charlie believes himself to be the reincarnation of Malcolm X, Alec (who believes himself to be Keith Olbermann in drag) begins arguing politics whereupon Charlie kicks him in the balls. As you can well imagine, this leads to much hilarity, many fart jokes, and a lot of witty bathroom humor. I won’t give away the rest of the show’s boisterous mirth. Watch it yourself if you have the stomach. (By the way, the "half-man" of the title is a rapist dwarf, thus eliminating any problem for the show's producers of having him grow up.)

•Buried in Crap While Whispering. M. Night Shyamalan is said to have conceived this docu-drama while in a 48-hour-long drug-induced coma during which he was exposed to non-stop reruns of 1,000 Ways to Die, Dog Whisperer, Hoarders, Snapped, and Jeopardy. Using an artful amalgam of archival footage, studio re-creations, and outright lies, Shyamalan projects the miseries, joys, successes, failures, disgusting diseases, and lurid deaths of overweight men and women who crack under the pressure of spousal abuse and expire agonizingly beneath mounds of self-accumulated trash while attempting to housebreak their pet Chihuahuas. All dialogue must be in the form of a question ─ "Who bit my armpit?" "Whose stump is that?" "Why am I dying horribly?" "May I leave the room?" "Is beheading your father a felony or a misdemeanor?" "Does neatness count?" "What is Alex Trebeck?"

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Signs of Intelligent Life in Hymietown?

    Last December in The Jewish Vote: Stuck on Stupid I visited the bizarre phenomenon wherein Jews ─ year-in and year-out, decade-in and decade-out ─ vote for left-liberal politicians who pursue policies that are antithetical to Jewish self-interest and who, at best, find Jews distasteful and, at worst, are crypto-antisemites.
    In a sign that The Chosen People are beginning to use their brains rather than their behinds, constituents in the strongly Jewish Ninth Congressional District in New York voted to fill the seat (if not the Jockey shorts) of disgraced Democrat Anthony Weiner (he of the Twittered dong) with Republican Robert Turner who is not only a conservative, but a Roman Catholic to boot.
    A noteworthy aspect of the September 6 special election was that Turner’s defeated opponent, David Werner, is an Orthodox Jew who fits every clichéd criterion of liberaldom ─ pro abortion, pro gay marriage, jake on building the ground-zero Mosque, pro high taxes.
    Despite the spin that the New York Times and other organs of the fabrication industry attempted to put on the election, the key determining factors were Not the economy, Not race-based anti-Obama prejudice, Not endorsements by former NYC mayors Rudolph Giuliani and Ed Koch.
    Turner’s victory and Werner’s defeat were out-and-out repudiations of the Obama administration’s anti-Israel policies, the Obama tax-the-rich bullslhit that everyone with half a brain knows is thinly disguised Newspeak for "Take the money from the greedy Yids and give it to the poor oppressed African-Americans," and the ever-growing undercurrent of Jew-hatred that infects the Democrat party, the media, and the entire liberal establishment.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

More On Krugabe

    I posted the following notice a couple of weeks ago:

Bloggers who don't like Paul Krugman (almost everybody) have taken to calling him "Krugabe" rather than "Krugman."
Can anyone tell me what "abe" is supposed to mean?
Best I can figure, it's a reference to a creature known as a Mudokon in the video game Oddworld.
Y'know, I really hate it when people use in-group words without defining them. It's like using an abbreviation without saying what the abbreviation stands for.

    Although stats show that quite few people read my request, nobody could or would enlighten me as to what "abe" means in the context of "krug." I remain, unhappily and frustratedly, in the dark.
    Since I’m not a man who gives up easily ─ pointless persistence and obsession with trivia are among my many failings ─ I have continued to invest intellectual effort and Google-time in the matter. Here are some notes I’ve made on the subject:

● Should one pronounce the name Krugabe as "Krugabee" as in Huckabee? If so, what the fuck does that have to do with the price of tea in China?
● Should I be searching for the meaning of "gabe" rather than "abe?" Wikipedia informs that Gabe is a diminutive of Gabriel as in Gabe Kaplan. It is also a tune from Motor Motel Love Songs, whatever the hell that is, as well as the surname of a Bulgarian poetess and a former Welsh rugby union player, whoever the hell they are.
● Could the word "Abe" be a sarcastic reference to Abraham Lincoln? Geez, I hope not. That would not only be pretty lame, but an insult to Honest Abe as well.
● Is ABE one of those stupid acronyms, like LOL, and IMHO and OTOH that e-mailers, bloggers, twitterers, facebookers, and related nitwits use? If so, might it stand for something like "Asinine Bearded Egomaniac" or "Aggressive Bullshit Ejector" or "Absurd Bloviating Emobitch."

The richest trove of abes that I unearthed in my studies came from the Urban Dictionary Here, for your non-edification, are the dregs of the lot in inverse order of unimportance:

  1. A person who has a beard that makes him look like Abe Lincoln
  2. Someone that is freakin’ crazy. (Example: "Dude that guy is so Abe.")
  3. A new-age name for God. (Example: "Atheist says, ‘Abe doesn't exist.’ Abe responds, ‘Yes I do.’ Atheist says,: ‘Oh, Wow...’")
  4. When you, or someone else has been assassinated in a video game such as halo. (Example: "That blue dude just Abe'd the red teams sniper.")
  5. The role you play in the Play Station game. "Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee". (Example: "Abe is the best darn floor-waxer in RuptureFarms. He also just happens to be the millennial Hero selected by fate to rescue his fellow Mudokons from slavery.")
  6. A Big Erection. (Example: "Ohhh that chick gave me Abe")
  7. A complete tool. (Example: "Look at that abe over there. ")
  8. The unfortunate fashion statement when a scraggily pubic hair peeks out from someone's bathing suit. (Example: "That chick was hot, but did you notice that she was sporting an abe outside of her thong?")
  9. An extremely unattractive snaggletoothed virgin female with full-on Abe Lincoln facial hair (Example: "OMG did you see that chick? She is totally an Abe!")
  10. A collection of cut-off pube hairs. When a man shaves his pubes off and puts them in a pile. That is called an Abe. (Example: "OMG Look at that pile of Abe.")

          
                    Krug-Abe                          Pubic Hair-Abe                    Mukodon-Abe
    Perhaps Mr. Krugman himself would care to clean up this whole kettle of fish. I and three or four people around the blogosphere would be slightly grateful.
    In the nonce, my request for information (and ideas, guesses, stupid suggestions, and outright fabrications) remains open.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

BULLETIN: During a disjointed conversation with my beautiful, brilliant daughter Lale this morning (it's my birthday) I told her about my Krugabe problem. After a moment's consideration she hazarded the guess that "Krugabe" should be pronounced Kroo-Gah-Bay as in Moo-Gah-Bay, a reference to the insane and murderous African dictator Robert Mugabe. I suspect this is the answer to the mystery.

                              
                      Resemblance? Perhaps if Mr. Mugabe grew a beard and Mr. Krugman started
                      wearing hornrims and his old SS uniform the similarity would be more obvious.

In the Beginning Was the Word

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God"
            The Gospel According to St. John

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean ─ neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be the master ─ that’s all."
            
Through The Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

    I love words and I respect words.
    I believe that of all the attributes that make human beings unique on earth and perhaps in the universe, it is the melding of words with our consciousnesses, our intellects, our core beings, and our very souls.
    I also believe that one’s native language determines to a large extent one’s outlook on reality. Would the madness and fanaticism of so many Muslims exist were it not for the wild extremes of imagery endemic to Arabic?
    Of all mankind’s thousands of languages, some living, many dead, I feel that the most beautiful and richest is English with its immense vocabulary accumulated over the millennia through conquest and defeat, through empire and ancient tribes and the armies of long-vanished Caesars, through the daring of men, who, as Churchill said, "journeyed across the centuries, across the oceans, across the mountains, across the prairies."
    It is no accident that English has become a universal tongue, for it incorporates within its vastness most of the world’s other languages.
    I treasure my native language and I thank God for being born into it and for the freedom of thought that is intertwined in its very nature,

* * *

    I’ve always been a man of The Word (though I’ve never claimed to be God, at least when sober, and though I do own to excursions into the realms of mathematics and engineering at times in my life when it was more expedient to eat rather than write unpublished novels.)
    My love affair with words is traceable to my mother, a Lady Macbeth-like figure who may have been disastrous at motherhood, but who was excellent at English ─ she was a legend in her own time during her many years in the English Department at William Cullen Bryant High School in Queens. It was she, through repetition, through example, and by whacking my ass, who instilled in me the difference between "good" and "well," "bad" and "badly," and the transitive verb "to lay" and the intransitive verb "to lie."
    I have no doubt that her training in vocabulary and grammar, which I in turn infused in my own children with unremitting brutality, is the reason none of the seven is in jail at the moment. (Although I must confess that my second eldest daughter is a corporate lawyer which is almost as bad.)

* * *

    All this brings me to liberalism and the root cause of why I despise it ─ its unremitting assault on the English language through distortion, bowdlerization, and unctuous sycophancy.
    Liberals view English, My English, as cheap, malleable potter’s clay to be twisted and debased according to the shifting whims of their vapid religion.
    It is the belief of all liberals that by manipulation of language enforced by threats of public opprobrium (i.e., Political Correctness) they can alter reality. Let's look at some of the cornerstones of the liberal vocabulary.

Liberal

    In politics, the very term "liberal" has come to mean the exact opposite of it’s dictionary definition which is Generous, Open-Handed, Broad-Minded, Unorthodox, and Tolerant Of Others’ Ideas. Today, the acolytes of liberalism have transmuted the word into a synonym for bigoted, doctrinaire, close-minded, intolerant, and vengefully vicious.
    The New York Times’ Fascist-in-chief, Paul Krugman, for example, calls his excretions "The Conscience of a Liberal." This from a conscienceless intellectual dwarf who struggles to exorcise the traumas of his friendless childhood by projecting his juvenile resentments and humiliations onto people he does not know via invective, slander, and fabrication.

African-American

    Card-carrying liberals have ordained that any man or woman with the slightest smattering of African ancestry must be referred to as "African-American." In past years, of course, it was equally vital to use the word "Black." Before that the preferred adjective was "Colored." Before that it was "Negro" I also remember that calling someone an "Afro-American" was once considered racist (since all of us were Americans, not "hyphenated Americans.")
    It is not clear just how a kaleidoscope of changing appellations helped or harmed the status of the individuals involved, but it certainly gave the liberal thought police a constantly updated arsenal of weaponry with which to attack targets of their distaste and, abetted by a compliant liberal media, force them into contrite apologies and, frequently, loss of jobs.
    I recall listening to a callow, liberal asshole on PBS describe the well-known 18th century Negro French composer and violinist Boulogne de Saint-George as "A French African-American." Such nonsense would be hilarious if it weren’t so pitiful and yet I doubt if a single liberal having heard that broadcast or reading this post would consider it to be as puling and disgusting as it actually is.

Affirmative Action

    This ridiculous euphemism has now been enshrined in our universities, courts of law, governmental institutions, and media alongside War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength as a keystone of political Newspeak.
    I don’t give a fuck whether anyone likes it or not. "Affirmative Action" means "Quota." "Quota" means "Affirmative Action." Reality is not altered by the application of smarmy weasel words.
    It is indifferently inconsequential what kind of twisted sophistry Ruth Bader Ginsberg indulges in or what kind of nonsense Humpty Dumpty voices: If there are 1,000 openings in an Ivy League freshmen class and 20 percent are affirmative-actioned for blacks and another 15 percent for Hispanics and another five percent for American Indians (oh, sorry, Native Americans) that means that there is a quota of 200 blacks, 150 Hispanics, 50 Indians, and 600 for the dregs (Jews, Orientals, Whites, Catholics, and other lesser breeds without the law).
    Perhaps, in some golden future, Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama and Henry Reid will succeed in amending the Constitution for the benefit of the Democrat Party by outlawing mathematics and common sense.
    Until that happens a quota is a quota is a quota.

Diversity

    "Diversity" is the incestuous offspring of the rape of "Miss Affirmative Action" by her brother, "Mr. African-American." The chief function of the word is to defuse any attempt to point out that the virginal Miss Affirmative Action is actually that pseudonymous old bitch Mrs. Quota The point being that if a College adds a sufficient quantity of black to a white student body and runs the mix through the Blend Cycle of an Osterizer, the resultant grayish mass is a benefit to all.
    So if you’re a white boy denied admission to Harvard because your slot has been taken by a black boy with half your credentials and a special race-based scholarship, stop your goddamn whining and be thankful you live in such a great liberal society as America.
    David Skorton, the President and Suckup-in-Chief of my alma mater, Cornell University (to take a case close to my heart), cannot seem to issue a statement without swearing allegiance to the flag of the United States of Diversity and to the University for which it stands, one college under Diversity, with scholarships and quotas for all designated minorities.

Special Needs Children

    I’m too lazy, too busy, too old, and too ignorant to trace the history of the many words that have been applied and discarded in connection with those among us ─ how shall I put it ─ who are a deal below the break-even point on the IQ scale.
    I remember a group of 20 or 30 kids in P.S. 150 in Queens who were segregated in a special classroom with a special teacher. The term then in use was "Retarded" a clinical-sounding expression that (liberal) pedagogues introduced to replace such familiar nouns as idiot, moron, and cretin. Almost immediately, in the cruel, innocent way of children, "Retard" became the put-down of choice among the classroom set.
    Result? "Retarded" (itself a euphemism matured into an insult) was replaced by a string of other euphemisms ─ intellectually challenged, special education, learning disability, special needs. Yet, strangely, not one of these shifting, "sensitivity" definitions helped to improve the lot of those to whom they were applied.
    Back in my days in Westchester County I recall the much-heralded advent of the Board of Cooperative Educational Services. BOCES was (an may still be) an umbrella bureaucracy embracing special education, remedial education, special needs, and every other variety of crap disability the teachers' union could come up with. Surely, the grammar Mafia insisted, this single masterstroke would eliminate centuries of prejudice applied to those of below average intellect.
    Result? Within the blink of an eye, the entire student population had a new pejorative at its disposal.
    Somebody you don’t like? ─ "He’s a F...ing Bocee."
    Your brother introduces a snake into your bed? ─ "I'll kill you, you little Bocee."
    A teacher you hate? ─ "What a Bocee."

* * *

    "What's in a name?" Juliet asked. "That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet."
    Alas, according to liberals, everything is in a name, and nothing is in reality.
    Should we decide to call a rose a turd, why then it will stink.
    And should we call a turd a rose, why then it will acquire a most delightful fragrance.
    Thus, if we pay lip service to goodness, we are therefore good.
    If we call ourselves liberals, we are therefore generous and temperate.
    If we call our enemies bigots, they therefore become bigots.
    If we call censorship the "Fairness Doctrine," we are therefore advocates of fairness.
    If we call terrorism "militancy," there is no longer such a thing as terrorism.
    But why bother to go on.
    If one chooses to live lies and to persecute those who prefer truth, so be it. It’s the way of the world. After all, we live in a democracy where the majority rule. And the majority can never be wrong.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, nbmack@myfairpoint.net

What the Hell Does "abe" Mean?

    Bloggers who don't like Paul Krugman (almost everybody) have taken to calling him "Krugabe" rather than "Krugman."
    Can anyone tell me what "abe" is supposed to mean?
    Best I can figure, it's a reference to a creature known as a Mudukon in the videogame Oddworld.
    Y'know, I really hate it when people use in-group words without defining them. It's like using an abbreviation without saying what the abbreviation stands for.

Norm Mack, Peterborough, dog@myfairpoint.net

Quote of the Week

“When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
From "An Ignored 'Disparity': IV," a column by Thomas Sowell, January 19, 2012

Eyesore of the Month

Architectural Abortions from the USA and Around the World


Photo and commentary courtesy of Jim Kuntsler's
Clusterfuck Nation. Thanks Jim, Click to enlarge

Presenting the Lamar Building, Augusta, Georgia. The original Beaux Arts structure dates from 1913. The "penthouse" was added in the 1970s – designed by eminent architect I.M. Pei. Thanks to correspondent Tom Tomaka for sending. He writes: "Yesterday while visiting Augusta, GA I stumbled out of dinner and thought I was suffering the effects of too many Rob Roys.... If it was already so classic and impressive, why did they put a helmet on it?"
    Well, Tom.... because America IS Darth Vadar!

Chart of the Week


(Click to enlarge)

Correct Me If I'm Wrong, But...

{To free up space in this sidebar, I've moved older entries to a separate sidebar below called "The Correct Me Archive"]

***After Super Bowl XLVI, when a few asshole fans began shouting insults at her about her husband Tom Brady, Brazilian supermodel, actress, UN goodwill ambassador, diet guru, and new mommy Gisele Bündchen, shouted right back:
    "
You need to catch the ball when you're supposed to catch the ball. My husband cannot fucking throw the ball and catch the ball at the same time."

   
                Gisele ─  who else? (Click to enlarge)
    Right on girl!
    
I’m a Giant fan, but that’s what I call standing up for your man.

***I’ve commented previously on the IVR (Interactive Voice Response) fad, an amazingly absurd technology that replaces a simple push on a phone button with a protracted and pointless conversation with a female automaton. This pervasive and nonsensical bullshit exists because an army of marketing assholes concluded that "IVR be cuttin’ edge an’ ever’body am doin’ it so us has got to be doin’ it too...duh."
    In a similarly asinine vein more and more news-oriented web sites (e.g., Drudge and USA Today) have rolled out Auto Refresh, a Medieval torture device that causes the page you’re watching to vanish every minute or two, then, (after a delightful pause to allow your blood pressure to rise) gradually reemerge.
    Why?
    
Once again, following a few thousand meetings, the marketing assholes who run the corporate world merged their tiny brains and came up with this marvelously inane idea, upon which the leading cretin among them was assigned to draft a form email to be sent to all Chief Executive Morons:

Uhhh, duhhhh...Boss Man or Boss Lady as Yous Cases Might Be.

Uuuuhhh...Us marketing assholes been tinkin’ hardly and us agrees dat sum kinda AutoFrescha ting am gonna make peoples tink dat yous web sight is right on top of all da latest news stuff becawse ever’ time th’ page shuts off dey’ll...duuuhhh...tink yous is postin’ sum kinda hot news type stuff when yous aint. Y’followin; me?

    Of course, for those hundreds of millions of internet users who might feel that Auto Refresh is infuriating crap, you can always take action. For example, email your thoughts to drudge@drudgereport.com . In a month or two you’ll hear back....nothing.
    Is there an alternative? Sure. Just resolve never to watch fucking Drudge or any other Auto Refresh site again..


***In a speech Monday, Attorney General Eric Holder said that voting rights for "minorities" are under assault. His chief complaint was that some states require voters to provide ID at the polls.
    For the sake of clarity, Dome of Glass offers this translation of Mr. Holder’s remarks:
"Some states are preventing illegal immigrants, prison inmates, underage juveniles, dead people, and African-Americans with multiple identities from voting for Barack Obama."
***The officiating at Sunday’s (January 15) Packers-Giants playoff game went far beyond mere incompetence, penetrating, instead, into the realm of scandalous.

● A fumble that was recovered by the Giants was incorrectly called "down by contact" despite instant replay proving it was, indeed, a fumble.
● A perfectly clean, legitimate, and unavoidable hit by the Giant’s fearsome DE Osi Umenyiora on Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rogers was ruled illegal, presenting a crucial and utterly unwarranted gift first down to the Packers.
● Several blatantly late hits by Packer defenders on Giant’s quarterback Eli Manning were ignored.
● The Giants were forced to punt after an official cost them a first down by incorrectly spotting the ball a yard short of where the runner had been downed..

    Two of the atrocious decisions led directly to Green Bay touchdowns.
    Three of them cost the Giants opportunities of their own to score.
    Fortunately for the reputation of the National Football League, the Giants were able to defeat the combined forces of the Packers and their Zebra allies. Nevertheless, the NFL must immediately open an investigation into the actions, motives, and behavior of the officiating crew.
    Pending results of the investigation the entire crew ─ and especially referee Bill Leavy, already famous for blowing calls in Super Bowl XL ─ must be suspended indefinitely.
    In the meantime, the best that can be said of these supposedly impartial arbiters is that they unconsciously tried to influence the game in the Packers favor.
    The worst that can be said ─ and what many fans believe ─ is that they deliberately attempted to arrange for a Green Bay victory.
    
It’s a damn shame that seven very well-paid men, charged with ensuring a fair game, succeeded in staining an otherwise enjoyable and exciting contest.

***Denver Broncos quarterback Tim Tebow regularly drops to one knee, bows his head, and gives thanks to Jesus Christ for whatever successes he’s had on the field. He also tends to bring up his faith during meetings with the press.


  Tim on the field thanking Jesus for something or other

    The result?...a firestorm of criticism from his black teammates, envious ex-quarterbacks like Jake Plummer, and assorted talking heads.
    In contradistinction, an ass named Steve Johnson, a black man, spent a minute or two prancing around the end zone last Sunday (November 26) performing a ridiculous and insulting one-act ballet after catching a five-yard pass. Although subsequently given a slap-on-the-wrist fine, there was not a word of opprobrium from the white plantation owners who sit in the fastnesses of their broadcasting booths and television studios.
    Now, regardless of my personal feelings about gods and sons of gods and near relations of gods, I think it’s Mr. Tebow’s absolute right to express his religious beliefs on the gridiron, in private life, on street corners, and in front of TV cameras. Moreover, although I’m a leading member of the Church of Atheism, his actions do not bother me in the slightest.
    I recall a black athlete, the late great defensive end Reggie White, who wore his Christianity on his sleeve and was praised to the skies. (Reggie's nickname was "Minister of Defense" and he often led his teammates in prayer.)
    So what are we to think...that it’s okay for a black man to believe in Jesus as Savior, but not a white man?
    Why the double standard?
    Why this racial bigotry that sees a white athlete castigated for exhibiting his faith in God while black athletes are applauded for behaving like obscene juveniles?
    If it isn’t cowardice, I’d like to know what the hell it is.
    How about some answers Deion Sanders and Chris Berman and Ron Jaworsky and Mike Ditka and Tom Jackson and Cris Collinsworth and Michael Strahan and Joe Theisman and all the rest of you big, fearless, macho guys?
    Don’t tell me you’re afraid to speak up because some weasely little PC vigilante might turn you in to the PC police?

***Lost in the pointless hoo-hah concerning the whereabouts of Ann Dunham at the time baby Barack vacated her womb, is a far more significant question: Why have Obama, his enablers, and his lawyers quashed disclosure of any objective information concerning his education, test scores, college theses, scholarly articles (or lack of same), scholarships, and academic performance?
    When a man and his camp followers invest major amounts of time, money, and financial resources in preventing the disclosure of what is, for most of us, totally innocuous information, the inescapable conclusion is that the man has something to hide.
    Among undisclosed documents and data:
    ● LSAT (Law School Admission Test) scores
    ● SAT (Scholastic Aptitude Test) Scores
    ● GRE (Graduate Record Examination) scores
    ● AFQT (Armed Forces Qualification Test) scores
    ● AGCT (Army General Classification Test) scores
    ● IQ test scores (routinely given to grade-schoolers)
    ● Achievement test scores (routinely given to grade-schoolers and high-school students)
    ● Records from kindergarten, grade school, high school, college, and law school
    ● Columbia University thesis
    ● Scholarships (if any)
    ● Scholarly articles (if any)
    ● Mentions in law reviews (if any)
    As I suggested in a prior post, long before Donald Trump started shooting off his mouth, the answer to this obfuscation is obvious.
    The man who was elected President in 2008 is a cardboard cutout, a puppet, an ignorant manipulandum who rose through the ranks of academia and politics via affirmative action, political pull, and the machinations of vultures like Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Valerie Jarrett, Khalid al-Mansour, and Bill Ayers ─ people whose sole interest was to ride the Obama hobby-horse into power regardless of the consequences to the country.
    To say that Obama is arrogant or elitist or demagogic or a socialist is nonsense ─ the man doesn’t have the intellect to be any of those things.
    Barack H. Obama is a plain, out-and-out, natural-born ignoramus whose dim mind fancies that the American people are as stupid as he is.
    So far he is being proven correct.

***The New York Times, in a despicable exhibition of arrogance, bias, and intellectual corruption, hired the whining, brain-dead, little left-wing wimp Michael Kinsley to review President George W. Bush’s best seller, Decision Points.
    Be prepared for a shock. Kinsley didn’t like the book! What a fucking surprise!
    What plans do Sulzberger, Keller, et al have for future assignments? Ann Coulter to review Darwin?...Paul Krugman to critique Glenn Beck?...Katie Couric to discourse on Sarah Palin?...Chrisopher Hitchens to analyse the Old Testament?

From Kinsley’s review:
Bush’s policy [on stem cell research] continues to do damage by leaving the impression that stem cells are controversial and require some sort of compromise between science and morality.
From the European Consortium for Stem Cell Research:
Because a single, well-identified type of cell is affected in Parkinson’s disease, stem cells offer great potential for treatment.
And this news item:
In December 2001 Michael Kinsley announced that he has been suffering from Parkinson's disease for eight years.

    Let me sum up Kinsley’s belief system: "When it comes to my own skin, my own life, and my own well-being, morality can go fuck off."
    If this sorry excuse for a man had an atom of ethical fiber in his minute soul he would have recused himself as a reviewer for being hopelessly biased. But minor considerations such as ethics, fairness, intellectual honesty, journalistic standards (an oxymoron?), and common decency have never interfered with a true Liberal’s readiness to prostitute himself for a few dollars ─ nor with the New York Times readiness to cough up the 50 bucks per needed to purchase their scrawny butts.

***It’s pretty obvious from my posts that I’m not a prude when it comes to using words like "bitch," and "fuck" and "shit" and the rest of the rich Anglo-Saxon lexicon of obscenities. I’d like to think I use these words openly and honestly and with purpose ─ either for humor or for emphasis. Maybe I’m wrong for doing so, but it’s the world we live in and there’s no escaping it.
    On the other hand, it turns my stomach when smarmy Hollywood marketing freaks and their ilk bring their sub-teen bathroom-brain talents to bear on motion picture titles.
    What do I mean?
    I mean, specifically, those snickering, naughty-naughty, giggle-giggle, "Aren’t we daring" bullshit films like "Meet the Fockers," "Little Fockers," and "The Spy Who Shagged Me."
    Mr. De Niro, Mr. Powers, Mr. No-Neck Ben Stiller: the word is FUCK. If you don’t have the guts to use it, then go home to your mansions, sit on your little potties, and fock off.

***Question: Why is it that women with ponytails look cute and sexy, but men with ponytails look like total assholes?

Video of the Year


    For my money, this is the funniest  video on the Web.
    It’s hardly a secret ─ the 1:21-minute You Tube clip of a dog being tormented by its master has racked up more than 44 million 53 million 63 million hits 89 million hits, many, no doubt, repeat visits.
    It came my way thanks to my old friend Jane Polley from Reader's Digest days.


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The Correct Me Archve

***The New York Times hit the nail (or Libyan) on the head October 21 with an editorial that is sure to stand alongside "Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus" and "Go West Young Man" in the Pantheon of Universal Inanity.
While the civilized world (and Muslims as well) were dancing joyfully over the mutilated corpse of Muammar el-Qaddafi , the Times’ editorialists came swiftly to the aid of the nascent republic with profound and insightful advice. "Libyans must channel their passion into building a free and productive country" the headline screamed atop the NYT web site.
Ohhh....My...God! Why didn’t I think of that!
And here I was about to tweet the transitional Libyan government advising it to set up a repressive tyranny in their newly liberated tract of sand and clamp down on any signs of growth, prosperity, or happiness.
Thank God for the New York Times! The newspaper of record deserves every Pulitzer Prize and Order of Lenin it has ever received or ever will receive.
And there’s more good news! The Times has dispatched renowned columnist Paul Krugman and his sexy co-columnist Maureen Dowd to the desert non-kingdom to help the nation get on track for receiving massive American aid by ensuring that their camel-herding-based economy collapses.


***By coincidence, George Will's September 15, 2011 op-ed column, "All in the Federal Family," echoes my post of the same date, "In the Beginning Was the Word." Mr. Will, a well-known and respected syndicated columnist, writes:

In societies governed by persuasion, politics is mostly talk, so liberals’ impoverishment of their vocabulary matters. Having damaged liberalism’s reputation, they call themselves progressives. Having made the federal government’s pretensions absurd, they have resurrected the supposed synonym "federal family."
Having made federal spending suspect, they advocate "investments for job creation," a euphemism for stimulus, another word they have made toxic

In Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll describes Alice’s trial by a pack of cards led by the tyrannical King and Queen of Hearts.

"Hold your tongue!" said the Queen, turning purple.
"I won't!" said Alice.
"Off with her head!" the Queen shouted at the top of her voice. Nobody moved.
"Who cares for you?" said Alice, (she had grown to her full size by this time.) "You're nothing but a pack of cards!"

Friends, there is no need to knuckle in to a limp-wrist cabal of timorously vicious assholes.
It’s time and past time to take up arms against liberalism’s war on the English language. Liberals are nothing but a pack of cards.

***Somebody named Hilton Als (with a name like that you just know he’s gay), in a paean to late fag-hag playwright Wendy Wasserstein in the September 12, 2011 New Yorker, observed that Wasserstein belonged to "that generation of playwrights [that]...sent up institutions like heterosexuality and marriage."


Wendy Hilton
I don’t know Wasserstein’s oeuvre from a hole in the wall nor do I care to; nor do I know to which planet she sent up the various targets of her displeasure.
Neither do I know Mr. Als and his oeuvre (if he possesses any) nor do I care to.
What I do know is that anyone who refers to heterosexuality as an institution is an illiterate asshole not to mention a paying member of the Church of Gayness.
As President Obama might say and often does: Let me make myself perfectly clear:

● The Smithsonian is an Institution.
● Slavery is an Institution.
● Harvard is an Institution.
● Marriage is an Institution.

But Heterosexuality?
Is a Vagina an institution? Is Testosterone an Institution? Is Love an Institution? Is Masculinity an Institution? Is Hunger an Institution? Is an Erection an Institution? Is Sexual Intercourse an Institution? Is Death an Institution?
To pursue Hilton’s logic, I guess he considers Fag-Haggery, Homosexuality, and Pedophilia to be Institutions as well.
What a friggin’ jackass.
[And yeah, I did a Google check and Mr. Als is indeed gay. So now we know why the New Yorker hired him.]

***I don’t know much about Jon Huntsman, former Utah governor and Jonny-come-lately to the crowded field of Republican presidential hopefuls, but judging from the quantity of front page space devoted to Jon in the New York Times, he is Liberaldom’s John McCain/Bob Dole straw man of choice for the current election cycle.
Mr. Huntsman is trim, moneyed, and Mormanish with distinguished graying hair, a cute first name, and no discernable moral or political convictions that might get in the way of a sound thrashing in 2012 by Pinch Sulzberger paramour, Barack Obama.

***The last space shuttle has, supposedly, made its final flight. I guess NASA and the D.C. bureaucrats will now busy themselves with some new scheme on which to squander a few trillion rapidly depreciating U.S. dollars ─ maybe a manned flight to Jupiter to investigate a mysterious black monolith that recently landed on the moon.
Even when I was an aerospace engineer at RCA,
I didn't see much purpose in burning up vast quantities of fuel in order to shoot Americans into space except, perhaps, to beat the Russians to the punch or to prevent an army of technicians and scientists from going into marketing or becoming hedge fund managers.
Yeah, yeah, yeah....I know...we might not have had space blankets and zero-gravity crappers without the Apollo program, and we certainly wouldn’t have been treated to Neil Armstrong fucking up his little speech when he set foot on the moon. (If it had been Obama, he would have had a teleprompter to help out.)
As I mention in a recent post, the Englishman George Mallory was keen on climbing Mt. Everest because it was there.
That’s about the long and short of why we send men into space ─ with one important difference: Mallory had the right to do anything he wanted with his own life and fortune no matter how stupid, but ferrying people back and forth from space platforms or propelling them to the moon, mars, or whatever, involves absurd amounts of time, resources, and taxpayer money.
In the future, let’s stick to using outer space for what God intended ─ to provide TV service to Uganda, Antarctica, and New Hampshire, to spy on the North Korean missile program, and to help female drivers find their way home after a few too many in the local bistro.
This country should get the hell out of the manned space flight business. It’s a total loser. And if, 20 years from now, we wake up to learn that Mao Zedong has become the first mummified Chinese tyrant to land on Uranus, who gives a good goddamn.

***I see that CNN has cancelled liberal whore-master Elliot Spitzer’s "In the Arena" bullshit-fest, itself successor to the previously cancelled "Parker-Spitzer" bullshit-fest co-starring pseudo-conservative dishrag Kathleen Parker.


Kathleen and Eliot in happier times.

When Parker was dumped a few months ago, I advised CNN to pair Spitzer with a conservative female who didn’t feel impelled to preface her every observation with "I may be wrong, but..." or "Perhaps your right, however,..." or "In my opinion, Eliot..." Not surprisingly, CNN’s management didn’t heed my advice.
After all, folks, faithful members of the Church of Liberalism, those tingly-legged souls who control the media, would happily see their organizations wither and die rather than allow an opposition spokesperson to enter their crumbling cathedral.

***Plaxico Burress, the wide receiver who caught the winning touchdown pass in Super Bowl XLII that ended the New England Patriots perfect season, has been released from prison after serving two years on a gun charge.


Plaxico's Super Bowl-winning catch for the Giants

You may recall that Plaxico managed to shoot himself in the thigh in a New York City nightclub in 2008. As the tale goes, he had tucked his Glock semi-automatic into the waistband of his sweatpants. Not surprisingly, the gun began sliding down his leg. Not surprisingly, he attempted to stem the descent. Not surprisingly, he accidentally pulled the trigger.
A loud bang ensued followed by EMS workers, police, bail postings, lawyers, sentencing, and a speech by Mayor Bloomberg.
Now that Plaxico has paid his debt to society and is looking for a job, he has pledged to assist the Urban League and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. "Guns don’t help anybody," Plaxico is quoted as saying.
I’m not sure that is a universal truth, but I will say that it is a universal truth that one should not wear sweatpants to a New York City nightclub whether or not one is packing a Glock.
In any event, I wish Plaxico the best. He’s one hell of a wideout even he is a can short of a six-pack..

UPDATE! Plaxico has signed with the Jets. I was hoping he'd return to the Giants, but what the heck, half a cup's better than none.


***The Infidel World (us) is currently being entertained by a traditional media cud-chewing extravaganza involving so-called uprisings that have been roiling the Islamic World (them).
Youthful idealists in Tunisia, Lebanon, Egypt, and Yemen (soon to be followed, no doubt, by faithful followers of The Prophet elsewhere) have been busy for several months rioting, looting, setting themselves on fire, issuing threats, making strange noises with their tongues, stoning women, and Allahu-Akbaring. In other words, as my wife used to put it in re her sons’ activities after they reached the age of jerk-off, they’ve been "doing their thing."
Food shortages, foreign instigators, intrusive journalists, Twitter, Facebook, cell phones, unemployment, rigged elections, despotic rulers, Zionist conspiracies, U. S. perfidy, Hillary Clinton’s stumpy legs, Disney’s glorification of an Unbeliever Mouse, Richard the Lionhearted’s attempt to wrest Jerusalem from the Turks, Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire, Danish cartoonists, Koran flushings, and Barack Obama’s failure to perform Wudu after pissing have all been adduced as sparks that set off the conflagrations.
Perhaps. But careful regression analyses and several triple-blind studies by Dome of Glass cast doubt on these explanations.
It now emerges that peoples of Islamic persuasion require periodic mass "freshenings" (rioting, looting, setting themselves on fire, issuing threats, making strange noises with their tongues, stoning women, and Allahu-Akbaring) every 50 to 75 years to freshen and reinvigorate the population’s healthy flow of fanaticism, much as a dairy cow needs to be fucked every few years in order to freshen and reinvigorate her flow of milk.
In the case of a typical cow, the casus fucking is, generally, the cow going into heat in the vicinity of a bull.
In the case of a typical Mohammedan mob, the casus dementia can be almost anything provided a full moon, television cameras, BBC crews, and Jimmy Carter are in the area.

***A few years back, a large, muscular White moron named Mark Gastineau, a defensive end for the New York Jets, took to performing what he called a "Sack Dance" whenever he brought down a quarterback.
Everyone thought he was an asshole.
Everyone was right.
The league outlawed his "dance."



Mark Gastineau doing his sack
dance over a fallen quarterback

Nowadays when a Black football player pulls the same sort of crap or worse the broadcasters and commentators chime in: "He’s letting his emotions hang out"...:He’s having fun"..."The fans love it"..."Let the kid enjoy himself."
Well I don’t know what fans other than myself love, but when a 300-pound lineman performs simulated sexual intercourse after he sacks a quarterback or a 250-pound running back prances around jiggling his ass after scoring a touchdown or a six-foot-four wideout does the cakewalk after he catches a pass or a 260-pound linebacker straddles the man he has just tackled and beats on his chest like a mountain gorilla, he is insulting his opponents, debasing himself, and acting as if his audience is as crass and stupid as he is...even if he is Black.
What? I’m a racist? Fuck you.
It’s the media whores and coaches and team owners and NFL officials — the White apologists who think of Blacks as children with ADHD and who, out of fear and bigotry, permit and abet these ugly, undignified, embarrassing, and unsportsmanlike displays — that are the real racists.

***In a recent NYT recap of L’Affaire Olbermann, replete with typical liberal euphemisms for left-wing fascists ("outspoken," "distinctive," "mercurial," "forceful"), reporters Bill Carter and Brian Stelter emphasize Olbermann’s role in hiking MSNBC’s ratings and establishing the channel’s "brand.". According to the article, Olbermann’s daily rant and frequent Paul Harvey-like cornball readings of James Thurber stories, boosted MSNBC viewership from several hundred thousand to a million plus.
What nobody seems to ask is: What sort of people constituted Olbermann’s following? Since I personally never met anyone who admitted to watching the show, my assumption is that the audience for a rabble-rouser like Olbermann consisted (you guessed it) of rabble.
Look friends, any psychotic megalomaniac with a prime-time slot on cable TV can entice a million or two zombies to tune in provided the channel is jake with having the dregs of the earth as an audience and can dig up enough zombie advertisers and wealthy zombie activists like George Soros to foot the bill.

***The New York Times, America’s crusading or jihading Newspaper of Record, has once again trumped the opposition.
In a stunning and highly disturbing exposé published August 11 by two Jews and someone who sounds Polish, the Times has revealed a horrific shortage of "minority" third-base coaches in major league baseball. Here are the shocking facts straight from the horse’s ass, er, I mean mouth as reported by Alan Schwarz, Thomas Kaplan, and Jack Styczynski:


About 40 percent of the players in Major League Baseball are black, Hispanic or Asian, and the sport is seen as a leading example of diversity, yet a curious disparity has emerged in a corner of the game.
Among baseball’s 30 teams, only 23 percent of the third-base coaches are members of minorities, compared with 67 percent of its first-base coaches. The disparity has existed for decades but it is now about twice as large as it was in 1990, based on an analysis by The New York Times.
The question is why.
It is more than a mysterious quirk...

Is there no bottom to the bottomless pit of American bigotry...no top to its topless tower of anti-minority evil?
The Times itself, despite valiant efforts to purge racists from within its own ranks, has unwittingly fallen prey to the awful sickness of discrimination.
Why have Schwarz, Kaplan, and Styczynski failed to note that not one quadriplegic Asian is employed as a batperson by the Boston Red Sox?...That not a single Hispanic lesbian has ever hit in the cleanup position for the New York Yankees?...That only one midget has ever appeared in a major league game and, after he drew a base on balls on four straight pitches, the powers that be forbade future midgets from appearing in lineups?


Eddie Gaedel at bat in 1951 for the White Sox,

And how many seven-foot-tall black sportswriters are employed at the Times despite the fact that 11.37 per cent of players in the NBA are seven-foot-tall blacks? None! Coincidence? Mysterious quirk? I think not.
I leave you with this final thought:
Independent and rather sloppy research by Dome of Glass has found that 99.98 percent of cornerbacks in the National Football League are African American or some other kind of African and yet There Is Not a Single Black Third-Base Coach in the NFL!

BULLETIN! The Boston Red Sox have just named Daisuke Matsuzaka as their third-base coach. This raises the percentage of Asian-non-American third-base coaches to 3.333% (6.667% if you count Dice-K’s interpreter who will share the position with him since none of Dice-K's teammates speaks Japanese)


***My wife and I went to buy a car last November to replace our ’95 Saturn. Our first stop was the Mazda dealer in Keene. As soon as we arrived, a heavyset member of that peculiar breed of human known as A Car Salesman bounded smilingly out of the showroom.
"What can I do for you folks?" it inquired.
"We’re looking for a new car," I said.
"Anything in particular?" it asked.
"Small," I said. "Cheap."
Its smile faded, but it gamely led us to a collection of several hundred vehicles in various shades of maroon, blue, silver, red, gray, white, and black arrayed in a row like whores in a cat house.
I took one look and said, "What the hell are these things?"
"Introducing the new, updated, redesigned, improved 2010 Mazda3," the Car Salesman proudly said.
.

2010 Mazda3. Teeth, mustache, and pink eyes
available for modest cost at DOMEOFGLASS.com
I stared at the Car Salesman, stared at my wife, stared back at the Car Salesman, gathered my thoughts.. "These are the fucking ugliest automobiles I have ever seen," I said politely. "Do you have any 2009 leftovers?"
"They’re all sold," said the Car Salesman.
"I can understand why," I said.
"Let me tell you about the exciting new features in our ‘10s. There’s..."
"I don’t care how many new features these monstrosities have. I’m not going to get up in the morning, go to the garage, and be greeted by a gaping, grinning, chrome-lipped black-holed car snout. Who designed the damn thing; the make-up guy who did Heath Ledger as the Joker?"
"But..."
"Sayonara. I’ll see you at the bankruptcy proceedings." And with that my wife and I took off as fast as our pickup could manage, praying the while that the horrific image of the new, improved, exciting 2010 Mazda3 would not linger in our nightmares.
─────
Back home, gin-and-tonic in hand, Two and a Half Men on the boob tube, I reviewed the day’s events. What in God’s name possessed the executives at Mazda to approve of this abomination, I asked myself.
At first I assumed the idiots in marketing were to blame, but I soon rejected this hypothesis ─ it takes a perverse sort of genius to come up with something so appalling as the 2010 Mazda3, and it’s well-known that marketers don’t have any genius, perverse or otherwise.
No, I decided, there was only one possible explanation for the vehicle: An agent employed by one of Mazda’s evil competitors ─ Honda, Toyota, Subaru, Isuzu, Suzuki, Mitsubishi, Hyundai, Kia ─ must have infiltrated the firm’s top management, installed Paris Hilton as head of automotive design, replaced the design team’s engineers with Haitian Zombies, and then bribed, black-mailed, and seduced the CEO, COO, and Board of Directors into approving the resultant catastrophe.

About


    The image of the young lady crouching alongside her pet sabretooth is from “Savage Pellucidar,” a painting by the great Frank Frazetta.
     “Dome of Glass” is a reference to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem "Adonais," which contains the lines:
         Life like a dome of many-colored glass,
         Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
         Until Death tramples it to fragments.

    The poem is an elegy to fellow poet John Keats who died of tuberculosis in Rome, February 23, 1821, at the age of 26.


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