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Rants February 21, 2010

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1. Last week when I sent out my weekly Whine and Snivel email newsletter, a young woman wrote back immediately and asked to be removed from my mailing list. You know, I spent a lot of time getting out that newsletter and it really hurt my feelings to discover that only one person read it.

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2. Once again I ask you to please indulge me while I read to you one more email. You might have heard that our friends in Congress have voted themselves a fantastic health care package. But too bad for you if you require hospital care. This email suggests that we have a constitutional amendment that says: "Congress shall make no law that applies to the citizens of the United States that does not apply equally to the Senators and Representatives; and, Congress shall make no law that applies to the Senators and Representatives that does not apply equally to the citizens of the United States ". But if this law passed, who would want to run for Congress?

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3. What comes to your mind when someone talks to you about their God given rights? --- Have you ever had anyone try to impose their God given rights on you? While looking up something else I recently stumbled onto a web page that had a whole list of God given rights. And while reading through them it was obvious that this particular litany of God given rights was laughably provincial and obviously outdated. Some of the God given rights listed really didn’t apply any more, at least in this country. Being of an academic bent, my first thought was how interesting it would be to read a book called, God Given Rights Through The Ages as compiled by scholars from China, India, Russia, Iraq, and any other country that could see the value in such a study. Wouldn’t you enjoy reading in one huge volume how God given rights had constantly changed through the years in dozens of cultures, as dictated by economic expediency?

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4. My friend Winky, who belongs to our community theater group, sold me tickets for the entire season. One evening I chanced to meet him up by the box office and because he didn’t come on until late in the first act, he decided to sit up back with me and watch the first part of Ibsen’s An Enemy of The People. I could tell that Winky was really absorbed by the play, but I was getting more and more nervous because he never made a move to go on stage. At last he tapped me on the arm and whispered, “You’ll like this scene. This is where I come on.” [Wilfred Larson]

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5. Is it your understanding that the recent Supreme Court decision permits foreign companies and countries to contribute to our political campaigns? Is it possible that an endless flow of campaign dollars from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China could now determine who will represent us in the White House and in Congress? You might agree with me and the Supreme Court that it is only fair when foreign intervention is a two way street. For years our military industrial complex has enabled dictators to take out democratically elected governments almost everywhere.

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6. I heard someone say this in Henry Allen’s store in Tenants Harbor years ago so it must be true. It was about a note that Winky’s mother sent in to school one day in 1943. “Please excuse my son for being absent yesterday. He had diarrhea and his boots leak.”

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7. Here’s another note that Winky’s mother once sent to his teacher. “Winky was absent from school last week because he had a fever, sore throat, headache and upset stomach. His sister was also sick, fever and sore throat, his brother had a low grade fever and ached all over. I wasn't the best either, sore throat and fever. There must be something going around, because even his father got hot last night.”

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8. Here’s the silliest email I’ve seen this year. It says that someone invented a breast implant that can store and play music. This implant is considered a major social breakthrough, because women have always complained that men stare at their breasts and do not listen to them. You don’t have to think about this too long before you realize that this is true. Women do not want men staring at their breasts --- which is why women wear low cut dresses and suspend on a gold chain, about 8 inches below the chin, a shiny piece of metal. This flashy piece of metal is designed to divert and hold the eye’s attention. Every year loving husbands give their wives two or three more gold links for the chain.

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9. I have always been a fan of President Calvin Coolidge, because of the many witty things he said. And I just read another good thing about Coolidge in The Little Brown Book of Anecdotes. Did you know that Coolidge was a Republican who led “a conservative administration that promoted American business interests” which, of course, “failed to check [their] financial speculation that ended in the 1929 Wall Street crash”? Thanks to Coolidge and his conservative Republican friends, who caused The Great Depression, Republican presidents learned the necessity of keeping tight controls on the lending practices of our big banks and haven’t let them run wild since.

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10. http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=867 Have you read a recent article on prisons for profit? Unlike a state run prison that has an interest in educating inmates and giving them an occupation, the more people you can put in a privatized prison and the longer you can keep them in there, the more money you make. When you run a prison for profit you naturally do everything you can to make more of a profit: pay the staff less and charge the prisoners more for services, like telephone calls. You might have heard that when whiskey was outlawed in this country, a great amount of taxpayer money was spent trying to catch and incarcerate the people who were getting rich selling booze. It is the nature of many people to want booze and drugs, and whether they are legal or not, anyone who wants booze or drugs is always able to find it. One wonders if some drugs will ever be legalized in a country where there is big money to be made by putting people who sell illegal drugs in jail and keeping them there. Nowadays, when you hear people talk about being tough on crime, there’s a good chance they own a piece of the action.

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11. Here’s a Picasso quote I found last week while looking for something else: When Picasso visited an exhibition of children's drawings, he said, "When I was their age, I could draw like Raphael, but it took me a lifetime to learn to draw like them."

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12. Here’s a great quote by movie actor George Raft, who earned and spent about ten million dollars in the course of his career. George said, "Part of the loot went for gambling, part for horses, and part for women. The rest I spent foolishly."

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13. My friend Winky was once asked what he would take if his house were on fire and Winky said, “The fire.” [Jean Cocteau]

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Not read on air:

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From a website called Crooks and Liars: http://crooksandliars.com/node/34901

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A four-month investigation by The Nation has found since 2007 at least seventy-five registered lobbyists, public relations representatives and corporate officials--people paid by companies and trade groups to manage their public image and promote their financial and political interests--have appeared on MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, CNBC and Fox Business Network with no disclosure of the corporate interests that had paid them. Many have been regulars on more than one of the cable networks, turning in dozens--and in some cases hundreds--of appearances.

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And here’s something we all knew. But it was good to see it in print again. Years ago I compared Bush with a little boy who pokes a stick in a hornets’ nest. You leave the hornets alone and eventually they calm down and go back in their hole in the ground. Bush didn’t stir them up because he was stupid: he stirred them up intentionally to keep us on a war economy and move us closer to a fascist state. Bush's "war on terror" has certifiably made us less safe, and more likely to suffer future terrorist attacks, as that 2006 National Intelligence Estimate made clear: A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks. [A frightening corollary is the intense xenophobic anti-Iraq-Iran-Muslim propaganda that is being produced to prepare the unlettered masses for all-out war.] The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document. The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled “Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States,’’ it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

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Ever hear of lemon socialism? “There’s good reason to feel outraged at the growing appearance that we’re running a system of lemon socialism, in which losses are public but gains are private.” “Lemon socialism is also referred to by the circumlocutions "privatizing profits and socializing losses" and "socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor", and variants thereof.”

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