Road To Hell

Liberals, as a group, have often attributed Geo. W. and the Neocon’s boneheaded decision to invade Iraq to their (or at least W’s) pure stupidity. In fact, of course, nothing of the sort is true. The decision to send troops was a perfectly rational move to establish an American presence – “an unsinkable aircraft carrier” – in the heart of the Arab and Moslem worlds. From Iraq, the US could project power in any direction, toward Iran, Syria, or Saudi Arabia, depending on the need. From Baghdad and Basra, American land and air forces could range out over deserts and seas to threaten our enemies, protect our friends, and, oh, yes, secure American access to oil.

The problem? Well, you already know it. The invasion was predicated on the assumption that we were liberating a nation-state that which would remain coherent even if its resident despot were removed. In fact, of course, nothing of the sort was true. Iraq was cobbled together by Gertrude Bell and the British who thought it would be fun to see if you could make a country out of people who hated each other. Without a thoroughly totalitarian despot at the helm, a Frankenstein’s monster like that is going to fall. And, now, we’ve got the results of our war of liberation . . . chaos, civil strife, roadside bombs, and death by a thousand cuts.

So, in other words, the invasion wasn’t stupid.

It was, however, a gross criminal error.

And . . . in the real word . . . that’s whole hell of a lot worse.

Keep the Nay in Napalm

So, a few days before Christmas I was out getting a some last minute gifts. In the parking of the Mall I spotted a car parked near mine. It was a new one, rather expensive, and all nice and shiny.

It also had a bunch of bumper stickers. They read (from right to left) something along the lines of “Keep Christ in Christmas,” “Shock and Awe” (this with a small picture of a jet dropping bombs), “America, love it or Get Out,” and, last, a modified pro-George W. Bush sticker with a large “W” attached to an American flag and, below that, “whup ass.”

I hurried away.

I didn’t want to meet to the person who owned that car.

I might have been forced to admit that I didn’t know what part of the Bible it was that Christ (as in “Keep Christ in . . .”) said something along the lines of “Blessed be they who napalm women and children.”

I suspect it may be in the Sermon On The Artillery Platform, but I don’t really remember.

holiday greetings

Merry Christmas to all! And to all a good night.

Xbox Xbox Xbox X-freaking-Box

Okay, would everybody on the freaking planet who is NOT trying to buy a freaking high-priced Xbox this freaking holiday season to play psychotic video games involving larges amounts of simulated carnage on Christmas morning please raise their freaking hands?

One . . . two . . .

Okay. Thanks. Just checking.

horse's a...

The current attempts, in places like Kansas and the White House, to forbid the teaching of evolution and replace it with the dogma of Creationism is, alas, proof of the old adage.

To wit: you can lead a horse’s ass to water, but you can’t make it think.

JJ on Oz

J.J. Bittermuch from hell:

Don’t know if you’re following the news of street violence in Australia, Paris, and so on. Quite nasty, really. Young men, mostly Arab or North African, going on rampages and smashing up everything in their path.

Now, I know they’ve been “oppressed” and “denied” and “discriminated against” . . . and, at least in Australia, they didn’t start the violence (well, okay, maybe they did, or maybe they didn’t, but that’s not the point) . . . and I should be thoughtful and tolerant and kind . . .

And yet . . . and yet . . . why can’t I escape the image of immigrants going abroad in search of a better life ...

And then doing their level best to make everywhere else just as sh*tty as it was at home?

Unnatural

Amazing really. I mean, the way that the people who oppose genetically modified food because it is “unnatural” are the first ones in line for botox and liposuction.

Bittermuch (and De Sade) on Politics In the Bedroom

J.J. Bittermuch writes from hell:

I’m struck by how often Americans cannot seem to understand why anyone would hate us, nor fail to fall to their knees in gratitude when we tell them the live their lives and run their countries.

So, let me offer what, I hope, will be a clarifying anecdote.

Some time ago, now, I saw that a woman has written a relationship book that counsels women on how to deal with their men. The book has drawn endless fire from social critics because, the critics said, the book told women to submit to their husbands without a whimper.

I finally got around to looking at the text and discovered that, in fact, it said no such thing. Boiled down to elementals, what the author actually wrote was that if women cared to keep their husbands and boyfriends then they should not correct their every utterance, nor call them stupid and ineffectual in front of their friends or children, nor devalue their ideas or ambitions, nor otherwise treat them as annoying yet dimwitted anthropoids who haven’t quite learned how to count above ten without taking off their shoes to use their toes.

I love it.

What other culture on the planet would define basic civility toward your life-mate as the morbid symptom of pathological masochism?

Hummers and Necon Wisdom

I read in the paper the other day that the Pentagon is rushing to replace the Humvee vehicle with something . . . anything! . . . with greater survivability in the streets of Baghdad. It seems that the Humvee, which in its original incarnation had almost no armor, and thus today is the proverbial sitting quacker when Islamic (and other) nutcases start tossing high explosive at’em.

Amusing, in a grim way.

You see, when the Neocon-Bushites took over the government in the coup of 2000, one of the first things that merry band of draft dodgers and absentee National Guardists did was tell the professional soldiers of the country How To Wage War. Chief among these Fuehrer-directives was that war, in the future, would be a matter of speed and maneuver. You don’t defeat the enemy by taking him head-on. You dash around his strong-points, get behind him, attack his command-control-communications, and generally blast him into pieces before he knows what hit him.

Ah, but the professional soldiers already knew that. They’d known since the 1940s, when people like Rommel and Patton proved it hands down. They also knew that those kinds of tactics work . . . in open country, and in conventional warfare. That’s why they were so successful in the first and second Gulf Wars.

BUT, the professional soldiers ALSO knew that low-intensity, asymmetrical, urban war is another kettle of piranhas entirely. There, you have to deal with endless pin-prick attacks, in back alleys and basements, day in and day out. In THAT kind of war, a billion dollar supersonic jet with a smart nuke is pretty damn useless, thank you very much. But a good old sandbag may just save your life . . .

And all of that the soldiers of the Pentagon knew . . .

Wanna guess who wouldn’t listen? Huh? Wanna?

And now we have the products of Neocon wisdom . . . coming home . . . in body bags.

Dutch Treat . . .

Speaking of Islamic extremism (see the entry below this one) . . .

It is now just over a year since Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh was allegedly murdered by Mohammed Bouyeri, who was allegedly an Islamic extremist and not merely a pig-brained lout with a Jack the Ripper complex. And, interestingly enough, on the anniversary of van Gogh’s death, I heard on the radio several Moslem clerics getting very huffy and demanding the West show greater tolerance. In fact, the implication was that we oughta apologize while we’re at it.

So let me get this straight. You shoot me, and I’m at fault and need to grovel a little.

Okay.

But . . . if that’s the case . . . logically . . . then the reverse ought also be true . . . and if the West wants your friendship . . . then we ought to just nuke the chicken-snot outta ya at the first opportunity.

I mean, if that’s the way the system works.

transfer the tumor

I see in the papers that Iran’s “hard line” president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has suggested that the Holocaust didn’t happen and that “the tumor” of Israel be moved to Europe. Don’t you just love it when a statesman makes a reasonable, rational, constructive suggestion like that? Restores your faith in religious fascism.

Tell you what, let’s follow his lead. I modestly propose that we transfer him as well. Say, to Pluto. Or hell. Whichever.

Then there's historians

Not that I got any business throwing stones . . .

Having met a full share of historians in the last few years, I can now say without fear of contradiction that the average member of my potential profession is so dang tight-asterisked that a good dose of Ex-Lax at the right conference could wipe out the whole breed in a single flushing.

That wasn't nice . . . and this isn't either

Well, maybe that last post (see below) wasn’t quite fair. It’s just that I’m amazed how often it is that when you meet a full professor in postmodern media studies they’re maddeningly pompous, have pot bellies the size of a pygmy hippo, and sport enough facial hair to start their own fuzz farm.

And that’s just the women.

Warthogs on Film

If God did not mean for pompous warthogs with chin whiskers to wear ties and spout semiotics, then why did He invent film studies?

Putting the Fun in Fungus

Notes from the Academy:

Ah, what a wondrous thing is the scholarly life. . .

Where else could you take ANY topic, no matter how obscure or absurd (“Conceptions of Toe-nail fungus among the Byzantines,” “Failed use of semi-colons in Sumerian temple texts,”) . . . stick “Class, race, and gender” on the front of it . . .

. . . and, then, by God! Have a career?

Sorry, Sorry, Sorry . . . and fowl remarks

Sorry for the long delay in posting. You see, among other things I’m a 48 year old graduate student. This means that for the last few weeks I’ve been writing six papers and doing my academic chicken with its head cut off routine. It’s really quite amusing. Assuming, that is, you’re the kind of sicko person who gets into that sort of thing. Sorta like morgue pictures from CSI, but without the giggles.

Prophets and Madness

In my state, we have gay marriage, or at least, we have it for the moment. Various groups are attempting to make it unconstitutional. Indeed, in the paper the other day there was the photo of a religious leader present in town to lead the fight the threat posed to heterosexual weddings by the other sort. The man had a striking face -- the features sharp yet solid, the eyes clear and piercing.

It was, in short, the face of a prophet. A specific sort of prophet. A fanatic. The sort who stumbles out of the desert, bearing with him sunstroke and spleen, declaring his the voice of God, and thus to trouble all humanity with his mighty, gnawing hatred of life.

Notes from the Academy:

It can be difficult for newcomers to understand the language of professors and scholars in the modern academy, particularly when they are progressive, advanced, and insightful. Therefore, I have decided to provide some degree of translation service. Below is a short list of terms and expression as they’re said in academy followed by what they really mean. This will, I know, prove invaluable to all incoming students.

When they say: They mean:

*Genocide : White Male
*Holocaust : White Male
*Racism: White Male
*Murder: White Male
*Rape: White Male
*Plague: White Male
*Famine: White Male
*Tooth Decay: White Male
* Integrity, Honesty, and Righteousness : White Female with an advanced degree from a prestigious women’s college and a small family fortune in the low, but respectable millions. Trust funds preferred.

Oh, and way at the bottom:

Child Care: non-white Female with a brown face and a funny accent who is paid under the table and doesn’t have a green card and whose opinions, of course, do not matter.

Bittermuch on The Professortariat

The late J.J. Bittermuch writes me from the fifth circle (the Wraithful) of Hell:

“The important thing to remember about the professortariat is that academics are strongly rewarded for saying whatever it is that the cultural elite wants to hear. That’s how you get grants and tenure.

“The problem is that there is sometimes a lag between the speaker and the message. That is, when the elite wants a new message, it has to somehow deal with the professors who are already in position, repeating the dogmas that had before been the keys to the kingdom.

“Thus, in much of the 19th century (and again, in the 1950s), it was the academic’s job to say that everything in Western culture was just ducky, thanks, and that the rest of the world should line up and fight Communism and/or learn how to use soap. Which we’d sell them. At inflated prices. Of course.

“Then, in parts of the 20th century, and particularly in the 1960s, when the children of the elite decided they didn’t want to head off to ‘Nam or where-ever, academics got their brownies by being the severest critics of America and the West.

“Now, in the 21st century, the cultural elite has new goals – specifically, to gain control of oil reserves and, if possible, prevent China from doing so. Ergo, we have a new message from the top, and it involves young men marching off to die in gawdawful deserts and maybe, given time, on Pacific beaches.

“The problem is that many of the academics at the Universities still haven’t gotten the word, and they’re out there preaching reform and revolt. So, we have the myth of the “tenured radical” as a result.

“But, of course, there’s no such thing. The ‘tenured radical’ is just trying to do what he’s always done . . . only, he finds himself with his lips puckered in the air, the derriere in question having mysteriously moved to some new location.”

d*amning Detroit

In the paper today I read that the Detroit car makers are concerned that with gas prices just a tad below $4 a gallon and climbing that people might, just maybe, stop buying their SUV, Hummers, and BIG trucks for guys with small wee-wees.

In a word, f*cking duh.

Look, guys, we’ve all known since the 1970s that eventually we were going to run out of oil, or that the Arab countries would get miffed at us and shut off the taps, or that some disaster (like Katrina) was going to take most or all of our production off line.

And what did you do in those thirty years?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

You have refused to develop more efficient cars. You have declined to give any but the most token effort to hybrids. You have staged PR campaigns about hydrogen vehicles, but — let’s be honest — you never had any real intention of putting them on the market or investing in the infrastructure necessary to make them possible. You’ve just gone and on, doing what you had always done, and getting us all deeper and deeper into a hole.

In short, you got yourselves into this mess, and if yours were really profit-making entities in a competitive free enterprise system, then we ought to just let you go chapter 12 the way you damn well deserve.

But there’s the rub. In spite of all your claims to the contrary, you’re not profit-making entities in a competitive free enterprise system. You’re members of a thinly disguised cartel which has managed to dictate how we use energy and how the economy functions. Thus, when you go down, you take us with you.

So . . . I got a modest proposal. Forget chapter 12. That’s for businesses. For you . . . we reserve the consequences of incompetence in government and state-craft.

You’ll love the prison at Guantanamo. It’s so tropical.

Katrina and Perfect Symbolism

From the Department of Absolutely Perfect Symbolism:

I heard on the radio yesterday (9-Sep-05) that FEMA — the government agency which was supposed to deal with horrors and disasters, but which was disemboweled by the Necons and Bushites so they could pump more pork into their secret police qua scam racket known as Homeland Defense — has a webpage for folks trying to get assistance after Katrina.

The kicker?

As of the date of the report, it would only work with Microsoft software. Anyone running anything else is up a sh*t creek with a CENSORed for a paddle.

So, given a choice between genuine competition plus free enterprise, and a vast de facto monopoly . . . well . . . let’s just say that the Bushite heart (not to mention several other organs) belongs to Big Daddy.

Katrina and Guns

Note to NRA:

Did you notice that now and then helicopters had to abandon rescue efforts in New Orleans when they were shot at? That’s right. Some nutcase thought it would be fun to bring down the aircraft that were trying to save babies and old people, not to mention everyone else.

Tell me, just one more time, about how good unrestricted gun ownership is for America.

Katrina, God, Justice

Okay, the Religious Right has the interesting habit of blaming bad things on God. That is, when something nasty happens to the country, they say, it’s cause the Big Guy In The Sky is punishing us for our sins. Thus, after 9-11, the Rev. Pat Robertson announced that the terrorists were the fruit of Feminism and Liberalism, and then, more recently, Rev. Fred (“Kill a Kweer For Khrist”) Phelps claimed that American war deaths in Iraq were the Lord’s judgment upon us for tolerating homosexuality.

Yet, consider the logic . . .

All of these terrible things happened when the nation was actually voting for conservative Christian figures. The attacks of 9-11, the war in Iraq, and now, the horrific “act of God” known as Katrina all occurred at the precise moment when the nation was ruled by the Religious Right . . . when the most homophobic administration in the recent history is in Washington . . . and when Christian fundamentalists stalk the streets hunting down proponents of Gay marriage, evolution, and stem cell research . . .

Ergo, judging from the all too abundant evidence, the Lord God Almighty hates Republicans and Evangelicals, and sends fire and flood to scourge those nations and peoples who support them.

Katrina 3

I see that the GOP/Necon Junta has released a fuhrer-directive from the bunker warning moderates and liberals not to “play politics” with the human tragedy of Katrina.

Really? Like the way they “played politics” when they spread rumors that the tragic death of Ron Brown was a murder? And the way that they “played politics” when they dragged the country though a useless impeachment of a sitting President? Like the way they “played politics” when they exploited the horrors of 9-11 to invade the wrong country? Like they way they “played politics” when they claimed that anyone who disagreed with them was a traitor?

Gee. Golly. Gosh.

With moral leadership like theirs, how could we fail to follow?

Katrina 2

You do know, of course, that even as I write this, there is . . . somewhere . . . some part of the Necon Junta’s mindfuck machine is gearing up to prove that Katrina is all Clinton’s fault.

Katrina

Katrina . . .

If anyone in the world believes that the Necon Junta and the smirking chimp in the White House really give a damn about the American people, then they should read the following article from the Associated Press, currently available on Yahoo:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20050901/ap_on_re_us/hurricane_katrina_52

Smear Boat -- cont.

Turns out, actually, that someone did do a little research into the Swift Boat Vets for Truth. In May, 2004, Joe Conason had a fascinating piece in Salon entitled “Smear Boat Veterans for Bush” (http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2004/05/04/swift/index.html )

In the piece, Conason presented extraordinarily compelling evidence that the Swift Boat group was, in fact, the wholly artificial creation of a band of professional ultra-Right dirty tricksters and Bushite operatives (including some of the people who managed to sabotage McCain’s run for the White House).

Yet, did you hear a word about that in national press at the time?

Could someone explain, one more time, about the Liberal Bias in the media? I promise. I’ll take notes.

Swift Boats and Sheehan

So I see in the paper that the Right is attempting to discredit Cindy Sheehan by “exposing her Leftist politics.” Apparently, or so we’re told, her past statements and beliefs invalidate her current ones.

Interesting.

Say, did anybody look into the previous political opinions and backgrounds of the “Swift Boat veterans for Truth” when they were torpedoing the Kerry campaign?

Just curious.

Giving the Left a Farping Clue

The political Left in America fascinates me. From the Reagan years to the present (I write this in 2005), Liberals have been rendered impotent by the seemingly boundless appeal of the Right. They ask themselves again and again: How could such a thing happen? How is this possible?

Let me offer these bewildered people a clue.

For nearly forty years, you told the American people in general, and white males in particular that they were a revolting band of sheep-rapists who tortured dogs and napalmed babies and ought to pay extra taxes just for breathing.

And you expected them to like you?

Ideology 2

More on ideology and idealists . . .

I believe that most idealists are actually rationalists, and that most ideologies are, at base, founded on purest reason. For example, some years ago, I read an article in a major publication regarding the human tragedies attending one of Africa’s endless wars. The article concluded with the description of a boy that the reporter had seen at a hospital. The child had been struck by shrapnel and had lost, among other parts of his body, a testicle.

A few days later, the same publication ran a letter it had received from a reader about the article. The reader, a woman of strong opinions, pointed out that if the reporter had bothered to examine girls in the region he would have noticed that many had been subjected to “female circumcision,” that is, the removal of external genitalia. Compared to this crime against an entire gender, she wrote, one boy with a little metal in him was hardly worth discussing.

It was an interesting letter . . . though, I must confess, at first, I didn’t follow the logic. What the writer was saying, after all, was that one innocent victim’s personal tragedy was rendered (by magic?) less significant by other victims’ personal tragedies. It didn’t seem to follow, in other words, that one bit of agony should be made less by more.

But, then, I realized I had misunderstood. The writer was, in fact, speaking as an ideologist, and what she was really saying was “The pain of people who are like me is more important than the pain of people who are not.” Or, more precisely still, “Your pain is less significant than my pain” – a sentiment, which, I think, is at the secret core of all ideologies, no matter nobly it may be otherwise expressed.

And, you must confess, it is entirely rational.

Not particularly attractive.

But wholly rational.

Drill, ye ideologists, Drill!

I’ve discovered that most ideologies are sort of like sitting on a dental drill.

You’re pretty sure they have a good point, but you also have the feeling you’re getting scr*wed.

The Late J.J. Bittermuch

I received sad news the other day. An acquaintance of mine, J.J. Bittermuch, quite possibly the world’s most astringent man, passed away suddenly when his bile glands exploded from excessive capacity. However, shortly after being translated instantly to the fifth circle of Hades (the Wraithful, if you’ll consult your Dante), he re-established contact with me via Magic 8-Ball, Ouija Board, and Internet email.

Last night, around midnight, he sent me the following:

“I’ve been reading that banal little exercise that it pleases you to call ‘explosive-cargo,’ though ‘toxic waste’ strikes me as the better title. But, anyway, it warms my heart to see that you’re still the reasonably dimwitted troglodyte you were before. Nice to know that some things remain inviolate.

“For example, you remain clueless about life in the academy. Let me, my dear fellow, put your pointed little head in the right direction . . . and explain the obvious.

“The thing to remember about ‘higher education’ is that the ‘higher’ is theoretical and the ‘education’ a myth. Professors are rewarded not for their ability to convey information to students, but rather for the capacity to impose turgid prose on learned journals and score grants from bounteous foundations.

“And so, we have the result—Educators . . . who couldn’t teach a rectum to defecate.”

Eurotrash

Notes from the Academy:

What would European intellectuals do without Americans? Why, they might have to go back to being anti-Semitic.

Assuming they ever stopped.

All Mama Rand's Chillins

I love Libertarians. They’re so sincere. So earnest. So serious. So full of sh*t.

~

No. Really. I love ‘em. Libertarians remind me of what socialists were like in the 1960s—-absolutely certain that they have the future under control, assured of their own intellectual superiority, convinced of their moral authority . . .

And, most of all, like the Left of my youth, they are beginning, now, ever so uneasily, to wonder if (as Geo W and the Neocons install a petro-theocracy in America), that maybe . . . just maybe . . .

They’ve been scr*wed.

Mo PoMos

Notes from the academy:

Reading a postmodern historian is like going to a blindfolded dentist for a filling. You get a number of holes and rather a lot of screaming . . .but remarkably little progress.

Bushwhacking

Is it just me, or . . .

Does it seem like the Administration is more interested in protecting the President from having to talk to one, middle-aged, middle class, unarmed woman who happens to be the mother of a dead boy . . . than in protecting American boys and girls from snipers, chemical weapons, and roadside bombs?

Nukes, Terrorists, Hearts of Darkness

The previous entry might make you think I’m a foe of “the war against terrorism.” Untrue. Yes, I think the invasion of Iraq was a complete and total muck up, but I also think the war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda was justified, necessary, and even moral . . . or, anyway, as moral as war can be. Nations and governments have an obligation to defend their citizens when they are attacked.

Indeed, in the shadowy recesses of my dark heart, I have sometimes wondered if it wouldn’t have been better if we’d taken the affair nuclear right after 9-11 . . . say, toss a few sub-kiloton devices at the Al Qaeda camps, which tended to be fairly remote. Non-combatant deaths would have been minimal, and more importantly, the world would have been given notice that anyone contemplating the mass murder of Americans (and, further, citizens of any Western nation) faced instant and total obliteration.

Of course, afterwards, the United States would have been roundly denounced for its actions. But, come. Let us be frank. What difference would that make? Right after 9-11, and long before Geo-W’s ill-conceived invasion of Iraq, a glance at the editorial pages of newspapers around the world . . . even in Western Europe, even in the English-speaking world . . . revealed that the opinion of a whole lot of Heavy Thinkers was that the ole US of A had dang well got what it deserved, thank-you-very-much, and that we, as a culture, should respond to the slaughter of our people by dropping our collective pants and saying, “Please, Sir, may I have another?”

The point being that we could curry the favor of the People Who Know Best the world over . . . or we could just bash ourselves in the head a few times with a 2x4. It would achieve just about as much, and be a whole lot quicker.

Bushwar Two

Regarding the previous posting. “Bush-War.” I like that. Great term. Very descriptive. “You can almost taste it, can’t you?”

Bushwar One

This one I got from my father.

It has been fascinating to watch as the justification for the Bush-war in Iraq has changed with time. First, it was because Saddam had WMDs (he didn’t); then it was because Saddam was a tyrant (he was, but so is Robert Mugabe, and we don’t seem to bombing the sh*t out of him at the moment); and, now, at least as of this writing, we’re told we’re in the Gulf as part of the war against terror.

Except . . . well . . . you see . . . what’s filled the power-vacuum in the Southern part of Iraq seems to be a number of Islamic Fundamentalist militias heavily influenced by Iran. In other words, we have put into power the very people who would just dearly love to fly the not-so-friendly skies into a few more of our population centers. Those people hadn’t been effective before because Saddam was shooting and gassing them, along with anybody else who even remotely threatened his position.

Ergo, viewed from the perspective of a cold hearted, self-interested, realpolitickin’, son of a CENSORED, the invasion was a waste and it would have been a lot more profitable to have left Saddam where he was.

He was killing the people we wanted killed, and doing it more cheaply than we could ourselves.

Postmodernists (PoMos)

One of the BIG THINGs in the academy for the last couple of generations has been postmodernism (a.k.a., that stuff they had in the Matrix but with a French accent). Boiled down to elementals, the postmodernists (PoMos for short) teach that we are all sealed into our little bubbles of perception and therefore can never share a common reality. Nor does any one single “reality” exist. In fact, what we think of as “Reality,” is really a “hegemonic narrative” imposed by an exploitive and oppressive social elite to maintain its dominance over the rest of us.

Thus – and I’ve actually heard this said – whether or not there really was a Holocaust is both un-provable and irrelevant. What matters is who tells the tale and why. The answer is – or so say some of my professors – the Jews, who employ the “narrative” of genocide to justify Zionism and gain a privileged position in social interactions.

On reflection, I’ve decided there is a proper response to PoMos.

It involves an Uzi.

University Life

For twenty years, I was in the trade press. Specifically, I wrote about computers. Then, one morning, I realized that if I wrote one more gawdam article about disc drives, I was going to kill somebody.

So I went back to the academy and set out to get a Ph.D. in history. I’m now about three quarters of the way there. On the whole, it’s been fun. But . . .

You know what?

Some professors make disc drives look like a Brittney Spears rubber catsuit hootenanny-qua-Chippendale tarantella-fest on d-meth at the Playboy Mansion.

Xcargo Returns

Yes, oh my friends and neighbors, I’m back.

Some of you my have been subscribers to my original explosive-cargo ezine. You will recall that this was my weekly column of gibberish, feeble attempts at humor, and occasional mutterings of the mildly moderate political sort.

I gave it up some years ago when I realized that:

A) I didn’t feel funny any more (some would say I never was funny, but we won’t listen to such base canards. Nor malevolent mallards. Ha Ha Ha. Eh . . . it’s a joke. See. Canard. Sounds like a duck. Mallard. Um. Oh, never mind); and,

B) When I left the trade press to return to the academy, I found I simply didn’t have the time for writing 2000 extra words a week; and,

C) I discovered that my ezine was being widely ignored while people like Drat Sludge were making a fortune and bringing down elected officials a lot. Made me grumpy. You wouldn’t like me if I was grumpy. I turn green and grow fangs. Well. Greener than normal. Hard to tell in this light.

But, alas, I’ve decided to return. No. No. I’d spare you if I could, but it is impossible. You’ll just have to cope. After all, you knew the job was dangerous when you took it.

So, fasten your seatbelts and let’s be off . . .

Onward and upward.