Thursday, February 24, 2011

Falling off the deep end

Ok folks…the entire world has gone off the deep end. Is there no one left out there that has any common sense?  We expect a certain amount of eccentricity from Hollywood, so it’s no surprise to anyone that Charlie Sheen is in the news again. Seems CBS has shut down this idiot’s show because he can’t leave the cocaine alone.  Even got himself hospitalized after a porn star orgy.   Then there’s Lindsey Lohan, headed for jail…again…or so the reports indicate.  She’ll probably do 30 minutes, maybe an hour behind bars.  It’s all a publicity stunt.   Then you got that Colorado hockey coach who for some reason known only to him thought that the appropriate response to  what he felt was a bad call by the reffs was to strip.  Yes, he removed most of his clothing and lodged his protest wearing only his pants and socks. CHL officials suspended this idiot for the remainder of the season.
Then there’s a report of Amber Portwood being involved in a nude photo scandal.  Well, ok…who is Amber Portwood, and why does anyone care if she posed nude?  Don’t we have anything better to worry about than some reality show cast member most of us never heard of posing for naked pictures?  Who cares?  I looked at the pics. Take my word for it, no one will care. Amber, I got news for ya, Playboy ain’t gonna be calling any time soon.
Speaking of posing nude, there’s a new flap going on over Hollywood celebrities posing nude while pregnant.  The fuss being raised is not over the celebrity, nor the fact that she’s posing nude.  Seems that some moron has decided that this practice exploits the unborn child some way and how wrong and unfair it is to the child.  They site Demi Moore’s pics in 1991 as an example, with mentions of several other stars, Britney Spears among them as examples.  Again I have to say “so what?”  Moore’s pictures were 20 years ago, the child is now an adult and I couldn’t even tell you if she had a boy or a girl, nor do I care.  Britney Spears has shown us everything she has at one time or another, so why is a baby bump newsworthy?  People take these Hollywood folks far too seriously. The same person raising the ruckus about the babies is also trying to blame the poor body image lots of people have of themselves on this type of picture. These people are not role models, nor should they be.  They are actors. They make their living by entertaining us, not teaching us how to live.  By the time the make up artists, airbrush and photo editing people get done, they don’t even resemble a normal human being but believe it or not, they are!  They suffer from stretch marks, the extra weight, and all the other things pregnant women put up with, but they have armies of technicians that keep us from seeing it.  If you look at these pics and think anything else, you’re kidding yourself.  Don’t blame your poor body image on them, it’s your own delusions.  What you see these stars do is all carefully staged and managed, it’s not real folks.  You could send Quasimodo in for a photo shoot with these people and he’d look fabulous.  It’s all make up and digital photo editing, don’t believe it.
Then I saw this headline : Congressional Budget Chief Warns of Burgeoning U.S. Debt .  Well, no s%#t Sherlock, did you figure that out all by yourself?  Somebody in DC is worried about the explosion of debt because it might be a problem someday.  Of course according to him, its all Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security’s fault. Has nothing to do with the administration handing out billions of dollars to countries that hate us, companies and banks that were allowed to let their “bailouts” be used in an unregulated manner to the point that they can’t even tell you what they did with it.
The one that jerks my chain the most is the story about our lawmakers trying to figure out how or even if they should arm ICE agents in Mexico.  Seems that under an agreement reaching back to 1990, US agents are not allowed firearms in Mexico.  Yes, that’s right…our Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, operating in a country where there is little that resembles law and order, a country where more than 30,000 people have been murdered since 2006, cannot carry weapons to defend themselves while in Mexico.  There are only 2 ways to handle this folks.  Either you arm our agents, with sufficient firepower to put down any attack, or you pull them out and put them on our side of the border.  A border which should be sealed, by the way.  You want to know how to arm them?  It’s easy. You give him a .40 caliber Glock for each hip, put an AR-15 on his back, a knife in each boot and one on his belt.  Then you give that agent about 25 more agents armed the same way, all with orders to shoot to kill anyone attacking them.   This is not hard.  Oh, but wait, Mexico might not like that, you say.  Tough, I says.  Of course, Uncle Sam will have to grow his cojones back to do this, but if they protest, we say, fine.  No armed agents means no agents at all.  No agents means no foreign aid.  Cut them off.   It’s about time we stopped taking all this abuse and did things our way for a change.   We’ve backed off, not meddled anywhere we didn’t absolutely have to, we send all that food, money and medicine to friend and foe alike, and see what it’s gotten us?
We as a people have become a nation of neutered mewling babies and have elected leaders that reflect that.  We are scared of our own shadows, so cowardly in fact that anyone who attempts to defend himself or his family from an attacker is made to be the villain. We try to buy off all these nations that hate us and our success, with promises of more food, money and military protection all the while refusing to see what they are doing.  I have no quarrel with the people of most of the nations in the world.  They want to have jobs and raise their children and live life in a way that makes them happy. I wouldn’t deny that to anyone, unless what makes him happy is depriving me or mine that same opportunity. It’s the nut-job leaders in some of these places that are causing the problems.  You take some hard line religious fanatic who is so delusional that he’s convinced that God has appointed him to bring about Armageddon, no amount of money will stop him from trying.  I sometimes get told that I watch too much television, but I think Alfred Pennyworth (Bruce Wayne’s butler in the Batman stories) said it best: “Some men aren’t looking for anything logical.  They can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with. Some men just wanna watch the world burn. 

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Harry Reid, Nevada Brothels and the end of the world.

Have any of you watched the news today? Or even looked at the headlines on the news services? If you have, you’ll know that the world has gone insane in the last few weeks.  If not, you need to take a look and see what’s going on around you.   I would particularly urge Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader to take a look. If the headlines I’m seeing are true, somebody needs to get that man in front of a tv or newspaper quick because he does not know what’s going on.
Let me explain why I think so.  We have Middle Eastern governments toppling like so many dominoes. Libya, Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria  and even Jordan have protesters marching in the streets demanding change, bloodshed and death everywhere.  There are reports of it happening in Iran, with Imahdikkahed, or whatever the president’s name is there threatening capital punishment for any who participate. Iraq is the same mess it’s been for the last 2 decades, and Pakistan is still trying to straddle the fence between being friends with the United States and continuing to support and aid all the terrorist groups that operate from there.  As a result, the stock market plunged more than 200 points today and crude oil shot up from an already inflated price of around $86 to over $93.  We have Americans and others being captured and murdered by pirates off Somalia’s coast, Democratic lawmakers now in 2 states hiding from Republicans, a national debt that will exceed the gross national product by the end of the year, businesses dying like flies, millions of Americans unemployed and losing their homes and that’s just a start. The last issue of this blog was all about government waste, we have a drug war going on in Mexico that has killed more than 30,000 people has begun spilling over into this country because of the wide open borders, and reports of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations working with the drug cartels in Mexico to further threaten the United States.
So what is Harry Reid, Senate Majority Leader worrying about?  Brothels in Nevada!  What in the hell is he thinking?  Why is he even talking about this with all the serious stuff going on the world? Granted, he is from Nevada, but he was elected to a federal post, not county commissioner.  Let the locals worry about local stuff, and get on with fixing the healthcare disaster, the national debt disaster, or any of the other national disasters we are facing. Do the job that your people elected you to do!  Who gives a rat’s ass if there is a brothel in Nevada?  China owns 2/3 of our nation and he’s worried about a brothel?  This mess in the Middle East will drive oil prices out the roof and topple our economy.  Iran continues to harass Israel, who won’t put up with much more and will take military action if the threatened much more.  That will quickly lead to an escalation the likes of which have not been seen.  You think the $4 a gallon gas was bad before, wait till it’s $10! That’s what all out war in the Middle East will do for you. And that won’t be all, folks.  How quickly we forget.  Skyrocketing fuel prices will cause skyrocketing prices on everything else.  Food, medicine, electricity, materials for the factories to run, feed for the chickens and cattle all will spiral out of control and we’ll be plunged into an economic depression that will make the Great Depression of 1929 look like an economic hiccup.
No one in this country can do very much about the conditions in the Middle East beyond preparing us for that eventuality, but Reid and the rest of the Senate along with our President and the House should be working on plans to protect us from the effects of all this.  They should be working to reduce our national debt, and cutting out all the ridiculous programs that I talked about last time.  They should be figuring out how to put Americans back to work and stop the landslide of foreclosures.  Instead, Congress is screwing around with stuff that should by definition be of local concern.  A past issue of this blog was about how the FCC wanted to set federal standards for local programming. I’ve talked at length of how the Department of Education has railroaded through laws like “No Child Left Behind” which has imposed federal standards on local schools, and how that has failed dismally, by the way.   Why all of a sudden is Congress so interested in meddling in local affairs?  Is it because they are so overwhelmed by the enormity of their jobs that they just can’t do it?  Is it because they simply don’t care about why they sit in those seats?  Some of both?  What’s next in this chain of events…having to get Congressional approval for building permits?   Can you see having to petition your Senator to sponsor a bill to get you a garage sale permit?  Congress, Reid included, needs to turn its attention to running the country at the national level and leave local affairs to the locals.
A $14 TRILLION national debt (that’s more than $45,500 per citizen) and the Senate Majority Leader is worrying about a few brothels in one state.
Why does R.E.M.’s “It’s the end of the world as we know it” keep running through my head?