More Bailouts Wanted!

We're making money.  That's why.

The big bailout of the TBO's Socialist...

What?

Who?

I thought he was a Goldman Sachs consultant.

Okay.  The big bailout by former Republican and President, George W. Bush, is about to pay off big time for our Federal Goverment, although George III will not be the one to spend it on flying to Mars.

We stand to make 8 Billion dollars if we sell the Citibank stock we bought.  When no one else would offer more than a roll of pennies for its shares.  When Citi was so pathetic that its CEO had allow some government tool to actual watch what his expensively compensated compensation committee paid him.

But Citi is better now and its stock is worth several real dollars per share and we get to sell it for a profit.

On the other side of the ledger, though, our bailout investments are as underwater as you average Arizona desert ranch house.  We pretty much have to forget our billions in AIG, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Which is just as well because those names are just odd.

The Dinosaurs... uh... Ate Themselves to Death

And you thought American obesity was bad.

According to a Fortune article on CNNMoney.com, meat-producing animals accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than all the vehicles we love to drive around, 18% to 13%.

Now, if you have seen any meat lately, you looked at it as pretty inert.  It just sits there until you put it on the grill or something equally hot.  It's not doing anything, like jogging and breathing out CO2 (which is why some tree-huggers refuse to jog at all and many hold their breath while sleeping; anything to delay the Armageddon of Global Warming).  So, can beef consumption actually be good?  Global Warming-wise, that is.  (Your arteries are on their own.)

And what do dinosaurs have to do with any of this?

Almost all really tasty meat comes from animals that are called ruminants.  These are not so much animals who sit around pondering the onset of Global Warming as animals who keep chewing their food while the others ponder. Why that matters is not clear, but what happens to part of the green stuff they over-chew is well known to scientists and people who used to smoke around cows:  Methane production.

Methane is a much worse greenhouse gas than CO2 and, of course, can blow up in your face, and apparently in more ways than one.  Cows are the best example, because chew food for hours and emit methane--as well as CO2 when they breathe--from both ends.  While this efficient for the cow, it is lousy for the environment.

Don't feel bad about eating beef, though, because the cow is pretty much done with its methane emissions by the time you get your NY Strip or pot roast on your fork.

Which brings us to the dinosaurs.  Not the steak part, but the ruminating.  Most dinosaurs were vegetarians and some probably ruminated for days, too.  Tyrannosaurs are exempt from this discussion because they were the ones eating dinosaur steaks.  But can you imagine the methane coming from a plant-eater like a Titanosaur, which was the size of your house.  If you have a three story house, two family rooms and a pool.

Not to mention the smell (which we delicately avoided until right now).  They must have cranked out methane like crazy, eventually executing themselves, and the poor blameless Tyrannosaurs, with their own Mega-Global Warming.

Who needs a comet punching out Mexico when you've got a malodorous sky full of methane?  It would be Global Warming on steroids with no Al Gore to shout from what he thought was a rooftop.  Like he could be heard over all the munching and more munching.  Thank God dinosaurs didn't smoke.

Is there a lesson here for humans?  It can't be that driving is bad, since a cow with gas is worse than a Camry with gas, if less likely to accelerate.  Eating beef is okay, since it's methane days are over and being a vegetarian may not be wise for humans any more than cows.  You don't have to worry about being a dinosaur at all, except on a national or papal basis.

Perhaps, in the end--and pardon the expression--it would be best to avoid ruminating about Global Warming. Or, at least, making a big stink about it.

A Hail Mary, in Time for Easter

Recently, Scaley and the Supremes in DC decided not to entertain a constitutional challenge to the hip Latin (but not the J-Lo's Marc Anthony Latin) version of the Hail Mary, called "Ave Maria", often confused with West Side Story Boulevard, a back alley off Broadway.  A high school in Washington State banned the hit single from a 2006 commencement ceremony.  And it was an instrumental, which would put the audience to sleep anyway.

The leader of the string-only group, Kathryn Nurre, sued the school district, claiming her Constitutionally guaranteed rights to free speech and banjo playing were being violated.  (I'm just guessing at the banjo, but it would give the song a nice boing and it has strings, right?)

After the usual steps of court decisions, Kathryn was at the figurative front door of the Supreme Court of the United States, banjo and sheet music in hand.  Aside from Justice Sam Alito, the Court had no interest in hearing either her case or her banjo.

Apparently, Kathryn's version was composed by a German guy named Franz Biebl for a Munich suburb's firemen's choral group a while back.  Surely, Kathryn figured a bunch of firemen were pretty secular and she only wanted to do the musical part.

All of which begs the question...

Wasn't Ave Maria secularized long ago by the use of the Hail Mary pass.  Nobody thought Mary had ever actually laid a finger on a pigskin let alone heaved it straight heavenward, since barely anyone did that before, I think, Doug Flutie.  You've heard the expression "Hail Mary Pass" at every football game from midget leagues to the NFL for ages.  When atheists use it most Sundays with their eyes and clenched hands directed ceilingward, how religious can a top-ten football cliche be?

Can't the same be wondered about Mary herself?  She was born Jewish, of course, as was her son, but that doesn't really count.  Most of us were born something.  Mary got more use out of angels than a Country singer, but they--the angels--were not into religion in those days; they mostly carried swords and God's voice mail.  As far as Gospel students can determine, Mary never considered being born again, maybe because  muddy river water can really irritate your sinuses. That is almost secular humanist-level indifference.

Mary never sang Kathryn's controversial song, but she was the fist to hear part of the lyrics.  It began with Gabriel's angelic, if incomplete, greeting:  "Hail, Full of Grace, the Lord is with Thee".  Which is how Jesus could have been called Grace had he been a girl.  Close call, that.

It does not appear that Mary encouraged Jesus to be born all over again, either, one virgin birth having been embarrassing enough.  Not to mention crowded and nearly as fatal to Jesus as it was to all the other male infants within hailing distance, now known to be about sixty yards of so, with the wind.

Jesus had to wait for the then-fashionable baptism until he was an adult.  Had he asked, Mary would have told him it was a messy waste of time, since she had no Original Sin in her mitochondrial DNA to be washed away.  As it happened, it took Jesus 40 days of serious hiking to clear the Jordan's silt from his sinuses.

It's beginning to look like the whole Hail Mary/Ave Maria bit is just another hummable salute to a secular-leaning Jewish mother, however famous.  Who's to complain about the playing of a sports anthem with no words, addressed to a religiously equivocal minority?

But Kathryn, here's the suggestion Sam Ailio should have made to you:  Get Weird Al Yankovic ("Eat It") or Cledus T. Judd ("Cletus Take the Wheel") to write some funny new lyrics for your song--ones that you won't use, so don't pay them a lot--and dream up a catchy and slightly bawdy football title for it.  Anything with the words "Big", "Ben" and "Score" in it will do, since you already have your lawyer.

Even though you graduated a few years ago, type up the new lyrics you don't intend to use and resubmit your program for 2010, with a short music sample, say one with a hip hop arrangement, which you wont' use either.  He'll turn that off right away and just approve it.

And you're home free.  Truly, proudly free.

Except the lawyer and lyricist payment plans.

Oh. And Joan Crawford Was Right.

This Blog rarely takes on anything controversial unless it has a solution.  The Proximania(tm) post, with its trademarked solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem, is a recent example.

So, abortion.

This admittedly old topic breached its meddling head during the healthcare debate.  Pro-abortion types wanted abortion funding included in the law, while the anti-abortion types didn't' want abortion defined as healthcare at all.  The bill past after some last minute abortion deal was made a couple Democrats happy enough to put the bill over the top.

But you know, the healthcare-abortion thing is not over.

First of all, take a breath.  (You'll need it.  This is a longish, if essential, post.)

The healthcare bill was really an insurance bill.  We are still stuck with health care firmly in the trustworthy and efficient hands of big financial services companies who dabble in health insurance, mega-profit making non-profits with licensed blue crucifixes on their chests and the governments mascaraing as insurance companies.  The term reform has never been put to such effective comic use.

Assuming that health care in the country is all about insurance, why do we mention abortion at all?  Just because we can?  Probably.

My health insurance, when I had some, did not cover any number of procedures, like curing crows' feet with botox or zapping cancer using nano-sized black holes.  We were approaching the time when obstetrics itself will no longer be covered, because lawyers made it too expensive to underwrite for any sane insurance company, let alone the ones we have in this country. 

So, how doe we solve this problem?

When the Constitution and its johnny-come-lately Bill of Rights were ratified, fetuses had few, if any, rights.  They could not vote in elections; own property on their own, including people; serve in the armed forces (Don't Ask Don't Tell being totally unnecessary in such cases); drive cars, which we didn't have anyway; take jobs away from illegal aliens; or much of anything.  Women didn't really have any more rights than that, except that they counted five fifths when it came to counting for gerrymandering purposes.  And men were the ones who said how many rights women and fetuses had, or, let's face it, didn't have.

Not much guidance there, as Scaley and his Goths would tell you.

If women had been child-bearing men, instead of just women, this would be easy.  No man would allow any government anywhere near his Privates, or at least wouldn't tell.  And no real man would vote to allow governmental interference in something that important.  But women, like it or not NOW, are not men.  And men have said that child-bearing is so important to running a country and raising a decent army that society's men should decide how to run child-bearing, since they have done so well at country-running.  (Child-rearing is being handled adequately these days if you don't cotton to evolution.)

After the Civil War (or The Glorious if Aborted War of Liberation, depending on where you are from), men passed a Constitutional amendment giving equal protection of the laws to...  "Any Person".  So who's a person?  Slaves, for sure, not that it mattered for decades; women, mostly, not that it mattered for decades; cows, dogs, cats, horses, fish, no; really smart dolphins, maybe.  Really rich Corporations, yes, and it matters.  Fetuses?  Hmm.  It doesn't say.

The Supreme Court, when it used to actually think about such things, pulled a Solomon and figuratively split the fetus into three parts.  One part had more rights than a woman, one had fewer and the final part had about the same as a woman, meaning men could dictate the handling of the bodies of both. 

Pretty fair, you'd say, but why do female-sexed fetuses get to have more rights than female-sexed human beings?  Don't get all up in a logical tizzy.  All will be settled in the end.

So, there were still those, then and now, who were horrified at this fetus tri-sectioning.  We are morally offended when a dog or cat is sectioned and served in a Chinese restaurant.  These folks seemed to think that the fetus from the instant God, personally, spliced a couple cells together, had way more rights than the woman around it.  Section the women, instead! they cried.  Cooler heads prevailed and women largely got to remain in one piece, except for the uterus, which men can reach for society's purposes.

What a mess.  Especially if you are a woman, fetus or a mass of pre-existing conditions in need of health insurance coverage this week.

The solution is to follow Scaley to his logical conclusion.  For the all-male Founders, women and fetuses really had no rights to begin with and neither should be considered as real a "person" as a corporation, say, except for counting heads, in whomever located, for the census.  So, the government gets the women.

Well, that's just not a good idea.  That's like herding cats across the Yellow River.  The government doesn't really need all of the women.  No, I don't mean 35% of them, from puberty to 40 and especially Megan Fox.  Just section out the uterus and ship it to a big government complex, like Fort Knox or the CDC, since it so vital.  Do the sectioning of the women a day or two after birth when you have control of the whole body.  Surely, men are smart enough now to figure out how to use the damned things, if they have a few million decent sized beakers in which to hold them.

But maybe not.  If the beakers don't work, just take the whole body, declare it a Uterine Holding Device, UPS it to Fort Knox, or, better yet, Blue Cross or United or Aetna since they can run things twice as well as any government.  That's good:  We get to privatize the whole operation.  Once, the Uterine Holding Devices (UHD's) arrive at the Insurance Company Uterus Storage and Utilization Faculty, they can be stored there until they are needed by the government for fetus fabrication. 

Mind you, the UHD's will be fed really well--corn meal would be an excellent choice except it goes into gasahol, so soybean is next best--and clothed in plaid skirts and white blouses from re-tasked Victoria Secret.  (Presumably, silk negligees, rope and accessories will carry seriously diminished profit margins.)  The UHD's will be supplied with mental soothing via Lifetime and "Twilight" movies.  Luckily, they need never worry about the fate of printed books or evolution.

What if the governmental conception leads to a life-threatening pregnancy?  Oh, hell, there are plenty more UHD's where that one came from. We're not China, after all.

No system is perfect and some of these UHD may escape.  To be safe ban those metal hangers, as Joan Crawford so presciently demanded years before she even ran Pepsi.  We are banning the more harmful incandescent light bulbs, so hangers should be no big deal.

(And, guys, pray every night that UHD's don't start thinking and voting for themselves.)

China to Design the Rope, Too

As Alan Greenspan would tell you, Capitalism is better than Communism.  That's because even a really dumb CEO is smarter than all non-executive proletarians combined.  However, true that may be, the Reds have the best quote:  "Them Stinkin' Capitalists will design, manufacture and sell us the rope with which we will hang them."  More or less, and attributed to Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, The Big O or anyone else who would actually use "with which" in a pithy quote.

Don't we wish it were still so.

Which brings us to Applied Material, its CEO, Mark Pinto, and some really high tech "rope",  microprocessor and solar fabrication equipment.  Don't quibble; it's an analogy to be wrapped up at the end of this piece.

Applied Materials is setting up a major league lab in China.  Not just any lab, but one of the most advanced in its high tech field and one that comes complete with serious Silicon Valley corporate overhead.

The city of Xi'an, the New York Times tells us, has landed the newest and largest Applied Materials research labs, including its top solar lab; its annual shareholders meeting; and its CEO, Mark Pinto.  Mark is moving his whole family to China next year.

Xi'an is not as fluky as that name, which means some sort of "peace", like the kind that comes after you've lost a war, either.  It is an old city and was a capital various dynasties if not the current Communist (you already forgot it's still Communist) version.  The very first Chinese Emperor set a ludicrously high standard for Xi'an from day one.  He fabricated 8000 Terracotta soldiers, fitted out with chariots and horses, to amuse himself and terrify any invading statues. 

Xi'an didn't sit still, even if its army did.  It was at the eastern end of the historic east-west trade route, the Silk Road, which was either paved with silk, traveled slowly by worms or carried silk negligees and matching rope for bedposts off to the west. 

The city now has 47 schools of higher education and cranks out armies of real, fast moving engineers quite happy to make less than your Wal Mart greeter.  Are Chinese smart enough to be good design engineers?  You haven't been on a US college campus lately or you would know who teaches most of our engineering students their math and physics. 

Applied Research has no qualms and has bet big money on Chinese expertise.  Each of the Xi'an Applied Research labs is huge.  Each is designed to be bigger than two football fields, a measurement totally lost on the Xi'an Chinese who are more used to watching Team Terracotta playing FoosBall for the last 2200 years.

Pure coincidence?  Applied Materials is cutting its workforce in the Capitalist countries of America and Europe by at least 10% over eighteen months.

Mark Pinto's Applied Research isn't alone in putting top research facilities in China.  Intel has done it for all of its three mainline research programs.  GM has done it (I know, I know).  IBM's been there for 15 years already.  Get used to it.  High Tech design and other intellectual property jobs are heading over to China now that all the other jobs are already there. 

You may be too young to recall Ross Perot's Giant (Job) Sucking Sound caused by NAFTA, but this China thing barely makes any noise at all any more.

But, hey, you will always have our jobs at Wal Mart.  If you are tri-lingual.

Okay, the rope, which you can buy at Wal Mart on your break.

The famous rope quote may be really good, but it's an antique.  We haven't made the rope for years.  The Communists in China have been making the rope and shipping it back to us.  At least, we used to design the rope that our CEO's would sell.  Well, it looks like that part is almost over.  Once the Chinese design the rope, too, they won't need a Mark Pinto, either.  They'll just sell the rope, that they designed, manufactured and warehoused directly to themselves.

Where do Capitalists fit in that scenario?  It's all neatly tied up.  Except for the hanging.

Idaho Secedes from Union

Not totally, but where it hurts.  Idaho loudly enacted a statute that ensures that its militia-crazed citizens will be forever free from Federal attempts to ram healthcare down their raw throats.  The Gem-State citizenry shall not be made to pay fines or suffer threats of penalties.

Wow.  TBO and his Near-Socialist faction in Congress are in for it now.  No point in passing what they, behind closed Democrat doors, call "The Limbaugh Memorial Costa Rican Healthcare Act."

Those folks in Idaho won't go for it and they have their whole big state behind them.  True, Idaho only has a million and a half people in it, but there may be twenty million guns, many from Memphis, Tennessee.  Those are no-nonsense people who named their State Trout the "Cutthroat".  And where your state has an aviary, Idaho has the World Center for Birds of Prey.

And Idaho-born Sarah Palin got some sort of degree there.

No.  Idaho.

Let those Democrats pass a hundred the Healthcare threats and mandates they want.  Idaho will remain a free state and maybe hoard its potatoes, trout and lentils, the production of which tops all other states.  TBO could send his troops to surround Idaho, if he ever gets them back from Muslim territory, but Idaho will eat damned well, thank you all very much.

When, if, they get sick, Idahoans can choose their own healthcare without bureaucratic intervention.  Militia medics are always around to treat their fellow Idahoans, even while holding off the Federal siege.  It may be rough, frontier medicine, but it will keep Idahoans free.

Sure it might hurt more than in Manhattan, but here, just bite down on this piece of rawhide.

And, one last thing, Mr. Hawaii, does your sissy, lei-about island paradise even have a State Raptor?

Proximania(tm): Mid East Solution Complete with Trademark

You know you were ticked off at the Israelis for telling the world that it would build more townhouses in East Jerusalem as soon as Joe Biden went home.  Did Bibi Netanyahu say that these houses were only for Israelis crazy enough to live in them?  Probably, but not quite that way.

How did the Israelis' Proximates take it?

Proxi-what?
 
It's important, but we'll get to that.

First, the Israelis' Proximates (Palestinian Arabs) were not wild about this expansion in their hood.  Some brave Proximates shot off a rocket from their Gazan hiding place into Netiv Ha'asara, part of what most of the world agrees is Israeli territory.  According to MSNC, Ansar al-Sunna, a group so radical that they think Hamas are pussies, claimed credit.  They seemed like they were proud of themselves for killing some migrant worker, a guy who migrated all the way from Thailand of all places looking for work.

They couldn't even hit any Israelis.  Maybe they can't see half as far as Sarah Palin in a fog.

Diplomatically--a term alien to Hamas--the timing was not great.  Europe bigwig, Lady Catherine Ashton, a real British Baroness, had just hopped into Gaza an hour earlier. How embarrassing is that?  And this all happened a day before the International Strings-Attached Quartet was to prattle it up in Moscow about the Israeli-Palestinian troubles.

Was it only a week ago, that Joe Biden was in Israeli getting his ass handed to him by Bibi's home-building government?  It would almost be quaint now, except Bibi wouldn't call Hillary Clinton to explain himself the way Bill used to. 

Everyone's all riled up.  Tensions are shooting blood pressures and oil futures off the charts.

Now, Proximania.  Because the various parties to the Mid East crisis are now calling semi-peace talks that probably won't happen "Proximity" talks, this blog hereby coins a new name for the area:  Proximania.

Screw this Palestine moniker.  It doesn't mean anything but it gets everyone all exercised.  It derives from Philistine, referring to a bunch of Greek interlopers who moved into the area like Israeli's into East Jerusalem.  Let's ditch the designation altogether.

The entire area will henceforth (diplomatic for "from now on") be called Proximania as it once was called Palestine.  Proximania connotes people living side by side, but not really touching, kind of like Ned the Pie Maker and his irresistibly touchable lady-love Chuck in "Pushing Daisies".  (Use the link to buy the series to see how it is such a good analogy, because when they do touch, someone usually ends up dead.) 

Arabs over there can continue to call themselves Palestinians all they want, now, because the term doesn't really have much impact in Proximania.  No one will care who is or is not descended from the Philistines and whether they were from Atlantis or not.

Israelis and Palestinians can call each other "Proximate".  Or "Proximatey" if they are Sea People.  An abbreviation to "mate" is a natural.  And it all  sounds so like a bunch of friendly sunburned Aussies that they will probably stop testing their proximateness with rockets and tank rounds. 

Israel could change its name, if it was smart, to something like The United Jews-Only States of Proximania.  The Palestinians could name their state The Hamasish Caliphate of Proximania.  Neither rolls off the tongue, but have you heard those languages over there?

As you can see, this is all very well thought out by someone who spent three hours either in a governmental office waiting for service or by a silent Skype phone waiting impatiently for Bibi to call.

March 19th shall be set aside as "Proximania Day"(tm), if only because two days were needed to clean up after St. Patrick.  By next March 19th, there should be plenty of Proximania Day emblazoned T-shirts, coffee mugs and AK-47's for everyone.

Guns Are People, Too

We know that Scaley and his Goth-garbed gang down in DC have ruled that Corporations are people, too. Or persons, if there is a difference. As a consequence, Corporations have the right to buy Congressman's ear outright, just as you or I could had we a bottomless purse.

Not the bottomless purse my wife used to use. That one had everything required for a fortnight stay on a desert island, in full makeup. Everything except for Congressman-level cash.

It is no surprise, then, that we learn that guns have rights, too, just like you and me.

Is this old Scaley and his judgmental henchmen? Not so fast, cynics.

First, some background.

Thanks to the AP, we woke the other day to find that two of the guns used in the recent shooting at the Pentagon and the one in Vegas came... Where? Venezuela? Russia? China? South Carolina?

Ever hear Marc Cohn's song Walking In Memphis? (If not, buy it right now at underlined Amazon link left. This post can wait. The song is a classic.)

These two guns did their walking in Memphis. Right out of the police locker, apparently.

The Memphis cops seized the guns in criminal cases, as they do all guns in all criminal cases, and stowed them until it was time to part with them at the end of a case. As the top public safety organization in Memphis, the cops surely destroyed all these guns, so that they--the guns--would never threaten the citizenry or the cops again.

Or not.

Not in Memphis. The police in Memphis, and other places in Tennessee, have the option to destroy confiscated guns or trade them in for other stuff, like new guns and the bulletproof vests they'll need when the formerly confiscated guns are aimed right back at them.

In Tennessee, the cops had the rights. Until March 4, 2010, the same ironic day as the Pentagon shootings. On that day, Tennessee's governor, Phil Bredesen, cheerfully signed a new law that gives the guns their own rights. Now, the Memphis cops, even though scandalized by the misuse of their once-seized weapons in DC and Vegas, are second fiddle to the weapons themselves.

Thanks to Gov. Phil and the boys, your Tennessee gun has rights. It can not be destroyed any more than you or me under TBO's health care reform. Unless the weapon, if seized in a criminal case, is old or so screwed up it doesn't work at all. Until it is no longer useful, that seized gun gets to be set free into the wild, just like your pet gator when if reaches ten feet long.

How this new law came about is anybody's guess. I'm sure fiscal arguments were pitched into the legislature and the NRA has always felt that the right to a gun means the gun has rights. Maybe Christians were for it, since it seemed the confiscated guns were going down a right-less black hole and Christians don't believe God allows black holes any more than evolving genomes.

The new Tennessee law may have a Three Strikes rule for all I know, just like the one for human offenders. They can be branded with one or more big "A" (for "Again"), like a spared Nazi in "Inglourious Basterds". Any gun seized three times, that is, one carrying two big A's, in a criminal case in Tennessee gets locked up until it won't work any more. At that point, someone in authority can deny that gun any further gun-oil treatment. It's on to its final repair. By cremation.

There is one problem that the politicians in Tennessee missed. If guns are people, too, what happens to the axiom, "Guns Don't Kill People, People Kill People". This new Tennessee law messes up this Eleventh Commandment royally.

Maybe this slogan, having served so well over time but now inoperable, as well as unsafe, should be tossed into the smelter, too.

St. Patrick, Designated Driver?

Most of us have only just recovered from the excesses of Pi Day  and now face St. Patrick's Day with all the parades, green ale and shamrock-festooned aluminum-foil hats. 

It all makes you tax your aching head with a reason to go on another damned... church service.

St. Patrick is about as authentic as Punxsutawney Phil.  Oh, yes, Pat (Latin for Paddy) existed, about 1800 years ago just as Phil does today, but he was born on the very wrong side of what even the English now call the Irish Sea.  Pat was, in fact, a Romanized Celt, as opposed to the Romanticized Celt he is today.  Pat probably spoke both Latin and Celt, which are pretty close Gaelic, but deader.  On a pirate ship home, he heard voices--Paddy, it's a pirate ship!--and became a Born Again Christian.  This after being enslaved to tend sheep for seven long years while atop Brokeback Mountain, Ireland.

Yes, a pirate ship, but maybe it was another mountain. 

Anyway, Patrick converted, became a priest  And turned right around and went back to Ireland in a missionary role.  You can figure that he provided the voices needed to convert others to Christianity, because he did better than any other missionary of his era.  He also provided shamrocks to his flock--the converts, since he didn't have to work the sheep any more--to explain how the Holy Trinity and photosynthesis make sense.

Do not try this at home.

Legend has it that St. Patrick drove all the snakes off of Ireland and all the way to Australia just to eat some bunny rabbits, but ophiologists (Latin and, maybe Celt, too, for snakeologists) tell us that Ireland never did have any snakes (any more than Australia had rabbits, for that matter).  That is because nothing with even a tiny brain really wanted to live on that cold green rock and snakes pretty much get their own way about such things.  Still, it's a good myth and may have some allegorical meaning that is best sorted out at great length after, say, 10:45 on March 17th.

Speaking of which, Green Beer did not enter in the picture at all for the eventually-patron-sainted ventriloquist (the voices you'll hear, remember?).  Though he understood both the Trinity and photosynthesis, Pat could not synthesize a decent tasting green dye, a feat still not mastered from what you probably don't remember of last year's celebration.

On second thought, maybe that mountain got confused with some parade thing.

Notwithstanding the confusion to come, St. Patrick did give us one holiday on which we don't have to buy flowers, candy and cards. Or jewelry, should the day be missed somehow.  Everyone, even the profane and inane among us, sees St. Patrick's day heading in.

If not always passing out.

New Politics Power: The Blood Party Arises

The Tea Party (formerly Tea-Baggers, whatever that may have originally meant to them) and now the Coffee Party are shaking up American politics.  They probably stand for things, if not actual tea-bagging, but most people only know of them because of the cool names.  Everybody drinks coffee and some effete drink tea, unless it is Iced Tea or Long Island Iced Tea, both of which some of us drink ourselves, in varying proportions.  (Right now, actually.)

Both The Tea Party and The Coffee Party want action out of our politicians.  Good luck with that and have some more caffeine.

Well, there is a new, more powerful movement underway, one that gives the hair-shaking jitters to politicians and leaves party members with steadier clenched fists.

It is not here in America.  Yet.

At least one Blog calls it The Blood Party.  If it sounds like the latest Megan Fox movie, it isn't.  It started in Thailand, where protesters are gathering up liters of blood, since they don't have gallons.  They then splatter the blood all over a politicians house or car.  If it sounds like PETA gone wild, that's because it is.  Of course, we all know about blood splatter from the folks on "CSI", but this is blood spatter on steroids, more like Jack the Ripper painting Whitechapel not white.

Or, maybe, AIDS.

Yep, Thailand has AIDS, however successfully it has rammed condoms down... uh... worked to reduce it.  Can you imagine taking the chance that your blood-covered Lexus is AIDS-free?  You'd just let it speed away on its own.  As it is very likely to do anyway.

The Thais are very civilized people and starred in "The King and I" before most of you were born.  If they think a blood party is good politics, who are we to doubt.

I am confident that this country can supply a hell of a lot more blood than Thais can.  We have blood banks all over the place and Blood Party charter members will be required to give a gallon a month (probably not all at once) to build up a symbolic free speech offensive capability that would put Justice Scaley's corporate free-speakers to shame.  Party members could set up coffee tables (how ironic) in their neighborhoods to take blood and sell strong Iced Tea (doubly ironic) along with lemonade.  Don't forget, drug addicts, homeless, illegal aliens, children and hemophiliacs are everywhere, too, and can be encouraged to donate by any decent sized, syringe-yielding... uh... party.

Using untainted blood is safer, but safer is what has stuck us these present stuck-in-their-own-muck politicians.  The Blood Party should go with tainted blood, at least at first.  AIDS is good.  Hep C.  Ebola.  Whatever.  The worse the taint, the more potent the political statement.

But maybe get your second best friend in the Blood Party to actually deliver the splatter.

Pi Day Transcends St. Paddy's

Do not stop reading.

The mere appearance of the symbol (π) or the word "Pi" is enough to bring back trembles that began in Junior High.  But you know perfectly well that you haven't thought of Pi for years.  If you had or have kids, you just let it rest at "Use 3.14, for God's sake!" and let them do their own damned homework.  If they still have homework.

Today is 3.14, as the Europeans would have it, and, therefore, is Pi Day.  But not as cool as five years from now when it will be 3.1415 (ironically no rounding here).

Pi Day has traditionally been lost in the run up to St. Patrick's day, just like your car keys or, for that matter, your car.  Mathematicians are too busy working on the next generation of mortgage-backed-security derivatives for Goldman Sachs to loose on us when the SEC stops looking, probably next week.  They can't be gathered in one Irish bar easily, like the rest of us.  You try talking about multi-dimensional space with pretzels in your mouth for five hours.  Such words, aside from, Pi maybe, do not flow as readily as green beer.

Unlike St. Patrick, however, Pi can wait.  Pi is as infinite teenage angst, for which it is partially responsible; as transcendental as a Ralph Waldo Emerson essay (see teenage angst above); and as misunderstood as Alan Greenspan's legacy (see teenage angst above but apply it to a 401K).

So, what is Pi, you having long since forgotten it and the teenage heartache that supplanted it?  Pi is the product of the circumference of a circle (that's the round part) and its diameter (the straight-through-the-heart part, the heart not being on the ring itself).  Something like that and, no, you don't need to remember these things when you move to the next blog.  They are just approximations, just like 3.14.

It should be noted that 3.14 is a very weak approximation.  (Think this blog versus, say, literature.)  Pi has been computed out to 1 trillion digits and it keeps on going.  Like a circle, Pi has no end.  That is a real circle, not the oblong-looking things you are doodling right now.  In that endless sense, Pi is just like God or the usual Megan Fox obsession.

Pi is not restricted to circles, either, which are as two dimensional as any Jim Cameron character. It even had its own smaller-than-Avatar-grossing movie.  And Pi is in the middle of all kinds of objects. like baseballs, and equations, like the volume of a baseball.  Add steroids to get multi-dimensional equations with Pi, equations that reach $30 million a not-endless-season.

Let the celebration begin!  Let it run right through St. Paddy's Day.  Hell, let it run all the way to next year.  Pi is like that and deserves no less.

But, don't try a Pi Parade at home without a bucket of Dramamine and shift-designated bartenders.  Each of whom can double as your spotter.

Wind-talkers Get Cutting Edge BeforeYou Do

Hold on a second.

Like me, you have been using the Internet since Al Gore fired it up on his honeymoon.  You probably bought a cell phones when they were bolted to cars.  You are practically an early adopter of everything short of Cambodian children, the better half of Bradgelina having beaten you badly there.

So why is it that 15 000 square miles of desert gets LTE before you do?

LTE is short for Long-Term Evolution.  Naturally, half of the country does not believe in any-term evolution, so they should keep their landlines.  LTE is next wave, 4G (G for Generation) wireless technology.

Oh, don't start on that WiMax stuff.  That's Sprint, for God's sake, and it is only in, like Baltimore---yes, there still is a Baltimore since "The Wire" was canceled--and Portland..., in one of those Portland states.

LTE is the future of cell phones.  iPads will show you 1080p "Avatar-3D" on LTE, even in the mall, if you are lame enough to go to a mall.  You'll get to download "Gossip Girl" on the damned beach.  That's where sand is supposed to be Hi-Tech.

Not in the desert!

Sure, you like the Navajo as much as anybody who took their land a half dozen times and wrote promises to them in invisible ink.  But, come on, all 200,000 of them live in a desert and don't need to Hulu the way you and I do.

Yeah, yeah, Navajo schools need better Hi-Tech.  Why?  They've already go the coolest, most undecipherable language on the planet. You couldn't learn it if you had giga-whatever from Space.  You saw "Windtalkers", right?  So, you already know how the Navajo  helped their fellow, if treaty-challenged, Americans, specifically the guys who used to be Nichols Cage and Christian Slater, beat the crap out of the Japanese in World War II.  LTE can't top that.  Leave these resourceful people in the past, with 2G where we can't see them on YouTube.  Better yet, leave them in their casinos where we can end up giving them back some of the wealth we used to, I don't know, build Phoenix?

When does Naples get LTE?  We don't even get FIOS down here.

This had to be another one of TBO's big ideas, although it seems more Clintonesque.

That is, well, because the Navajo are getting the Chinese to build it.

Dogs and Cats on China Government Menu

Maybe in not the way you'd expect, though.  Sure, you can eat Siamese chops or Cocker Spaniel  with tofu (double yum) in many Chinese cities, but the government is considering pulling the tasty treats off the menu.

For the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government ordered all dog meat off the menus and local puppy chow stalls in the markets.  If nothing else, this act proved the Chinese understand the sensitivity of the issue.  Americans, for example, don't like to eat pet food unless they are on Social Security.

Chinese pet meat vendors claim that they are, in fact, not pet meat vendors.  They certainly wouldn't eat their own pets, as that would be uncivilized.  They only butcher those raised on canine and feline farms or ranches, although, they allow, you shouldn't let your dog out without a leash.

Farms?  Ranches?  Yep.

I don't know how you farm a cat or force march a herd of dogs (just try that with cats) overland to the Chinese equivalent of Abilene or Dodge City, but apparently the Chinese do.  Is there a John Wayne-like movie playing in Guangzhou with a long dusty mutt drive and the strained emotions and bean side-effects that go with it?  Instead of "Red River" they get "Yellow River"?

Should we all jump on a plane and travel 20 hours to see--and eat the fruits of---this charming bit of Chinese history before it is outlawed everywhere but Korea?  Well, maybe just hearing about it is enough of a thrill.

But don't forget when your job moves you to Shanghai:  When we American's hear "It's raining cats and dogs", we reach for an umbrella.  In China, for now, anyway, you reach for a fork.

New Home Building Boom in Whose Neighborhood

Building Boom?  Great!

Not in your neighborhood.  Not so great.

In East Jerusalem?  How much is really, really not so great?

Isn't building in occupied territory illegal under international law?   Uh huh.  Almost as illegal as invading another country because you really dislike their dictator.  But some people do this kind of stuff anyway.

Israel has its reasons.  After toasting the Arabs in 1967, it annexed the newly conquered  East Jerusalem the way The Book's King David did a few thousand years ago.  Assuming he existed.  Not that the maybe-David's rule thereabouts lasted for very long.  The US and rest of the international community do not recognize Israel's post-conquest annexation of Jerusalem and occasionally denounce the gentrification of the town's eastern neighborhoods.  But every developer of note runs into such guff and you're not much of a developer if you quit at the first bit whining by locals, outside do-gooders or Europeans.

This new home building approval came just after American VP Joe Biden had finished talking, this time with Israel PM Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu, not to be confused with Bebe Neuwirth from "Fraisier" who could dance circles around Bibi and Joe longer than Joe could talk and you know how long that is.  Anyway, in a joint news conference Joe and Bibi announced a start to indirect Proximity Talks with the Palestinians.  They are called "proximity" talks because the Israelis and Palestinians are almost resigned to living in close proximity to one another for the foreseeable future.

Unless, Ejad and his Iranian cohorts drive all the Israelis into the sea.  Not problem free, however:  "Hey, damn it!  I'm a Sunni Arab... glub glub."  Like Ejad cares.

It may appear natural that the Palestinians lay claim to Jerusalem.  It is in the middle of Palestine, after all, and isn't anyone who lives--or was at least born in--Palestine a bona fide Palestinian?  Not according to the Muslim variety of Palestinians; Jews don't get to be Palestinians.  Which the Jews probably don't mind.

Clouding it all, the very term Palestine is derived from the name Philistine, all of whom were very much not Jews.  So if the Palestinians are descended from the Gaza-based Philistines, how do they have a claim to any part of Jerusalem?  Well, most Palestinians didn't descend from the Philistines at all, but are Arabs who came from Arabia.  Arabia is the place where The God of Abraham--and of your Jews, Muslims and every single Christian (and the very same God most atheists don't believe in)--planted Ishmael after his step-mother banished him from the family tent.  Arabia has lots of room--and dry heat--and not all that many inhabitants, sort of like Nevada, but without the dice.

The Jews did rule a nice junk of Palestine a long time ago, especially Jerusalem.  The Philistines may have sacked it a few times.  But the Persians conquered and ruled the whole area, including Jerusalem, for a while until Alexander took it and Persia from them.  So did the Romans.  You don't hear them demanding it as a provincial capital, not even Persia, now spelled "Iran" on your map.  The Turks ruled Jerusalem, too, more recently than any Arab.  Even the British did, who took it from the Turks.  The Philistines?  Not really.

So...  What?

If history teaches us anything, it teaches us that..., well, it doesn't matter.  Nobody really has a claim on anything, since we all came later and from somewhere else.  Except, perhaps, Kenya, where The Big E (our Mitochondrial Eve) started the whole messed-up human race.

And, oh, yes, our American President, The Big O, is a direct descendant of The Big E.  His own father was Kenyan and much more recently than pretty much anybody in Palestine or in East Jerusalem.

Well.  Who has the best claim to Jerusalem, now?

Lindsay Lohan admits Milkaholism

Well, not Lindsay herself, but her lawyers, who know what an admission is.

Lindsay and her lawyers, like many of you watching the Super Bowl, saw the E-Trade ad with its precocious babe-trader (no, not a freckle slaver) trying to hide his fling with a known milkaholic infant slut named Lindsay.  Cute ad you said to yourself, right?

But didn't you immediately make the association?  I sure did.  Slut? Lindsay?  'Holic?  The milk part, I wasn't so sure.  Until now.

By the way, I have been a fan of Lindsay Lohan since before she redid "Parent Trap" and drove Herbie in the Indy 500.  She was a cute kid who could sing and act and she has turned into something else as a young adult.

But just what "something"?  A milkaholic slut?  Why would she go so public in admitting such a thing?

How does 100 million bucks sound?

It did to her lawyers, too.  I'd admit to all kinds of things for a 100 million nano-dollars let alone the full-sized ones. Lindsay's lawyers filed suit against E-Trade and the baby actors who actually made the scurrilous connection obvious.

E-Trade responded that it just used a popular female baby's name.  Lindsay knows better.  "Lindsay" is a name that she alone made famous and that is associated with her alone, like Oprah or Megan Fox.  Come on, name another ten Lindsay's.  Can't can you.

Lindsay or Lindsey was only number 34 of the top female baby names on the Social Security Administration list in the '90's.  The two names' association Miss Lohan helped them land at a combined number 93 for the 00's.  Popular?  An easy choice?  I think not.  And Lindsay Lohan, herself, helped make those names almost unlikely, dropping in baby-name popularity by 60% in the recently completed decade.

There being no way to know that a just-born daughter will turn into a milkaholic slut, parents now shy away from the iconic "Lindsay".

So, come on, E-Trade.  Who are you kidding?  Your young, clever ad writers probably named their girls Hannah Montana or even Miley, but not, definitely not, Lindsay.

I have studied the YouTube Version of the ad and I do see a slight weakness or two in Lindsay's case.  The baby Lindsay only has about 100 freckles and is not a redhead, although Lindsay isn't either these days.  Otherwise, the kid does remind me of Lindsay Lohan in a slinky bibbed outfit, dancing way beyond nap time.

E-Trade should immediately pay the $100 million and the baby girl who milked-up performance in the ad should make amends with Lindsay by apologizing or offering her a cookie.  E-Trade should get the stood-up girl kid to do a new loop for the ad.  "Was that milkaholic Lindsey--with an "e"--over last night?"

Single name star status restored.  And back in the news, too.

Upside Down in (Getting to) Space

Everyone knows that the Space Shuttles are headed for the Elephant's Graveyard.  They are a little long in the tusk, after all, and can't get us to Mars.

The Big O has a new plan that does not include returning military personnel to the Moon.  Been there, done that.  Repeatedly and using light bulbs and dials.  TBO wants to go to Mars, despite that fact that we now know the Moon has scads of water that would support daily showers even the French wouldn't turn down.

The Moon is too close for TBO.  Earth orbit is for Iranians and their frightening Space Worms.  TBO has vision and sees farther than Sarah Palin with binoculars, all the way to other planets.  And, apparently, did not see "Invasion from Mars", which would keep anyone away from that rust-colored rock, or any movie theater.

But that is not the upside down part.

Republicans set an agenda decades ago of privatizing everything the government does, including war.  In Iraq, George III privatized military trucking; cafeteria supply; diplomat security; boozing on duty and stealing someone else's AK-47's.  Blackwater and Haliburton subsidiaries were running everything so well they were too drunk to hit half the civilians they shot at and electrocuted soaped-up soldiers in their own showers.  Oh, and not the bad soldiers.

That soapy shower thing probably set European hygiene back to the 1990's.

And embarrassment?  Blackwater changed its bad-ass Yankee name to the almost Chinese Xe.  Really, it did.

At home, the Republicans tried like crazy to achieve their dream goal, pursued since Ronald Regan last sold Borax:  Privatizing Social Security.  They had Bear Sterns, Lehman's, Merrill Lynch and AIG all lined up to multiply your Golden Age Retirement Nest Egg faster a CEO's private jet could get to DC for a bailout.  The GOP argued persuasively that Wall Street could do better investing your retirement in mortgage-backed derivatives than the Federal government could by simply borrowing from the Social Security No-Trust Fund to spend on... whatever the Democrats send money on.

Sadly, the Republicans could not quite get Social Security privatized and look what happened to Lehman's whole company and, worse, to Merrill-BoA's bonuses.

So how is it that the Republicans are painfully adjusting their panties over TBO's shuttle replacement program?  TBO wants to privatize Earth orbiting for humans, by getting private industry to take over both space station relays and low-g tourism that you don't have to be Warren Buffet to book.  Isn't that a Republican agenda?

Apparently, not.  According to Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, privatizing will destroy a great Federal program.  Like there are any, in Republican flinty eyes.  She claims that TBO's approach would leave us dependent on the Russian mob to get supplies of Twinkies to the International Space Station.  No way, she says, can American private enterprise match the Russians.

Huh?  We're talking the Russians.  These are the same dupes that an ex-soap hawker-turned-President scared to death back when the Bangles used only their hands to "Walk Like an Egyptian".

So, Kay, be honest:  American business, the geniuses behind the Segway, Nano-dollars, self-cleaning windows and Alice In Wonderland-3D, can't invent a better rocket launcher than the Russians?

It is a sorry day for all of us who claim (for the moment) to be proud Republicans.  We are going to give up Our Most Compelling Issue, Privatizing absolutely everything, and hand it over to a former Socialist and petulantly orate about losing out to what used to be the Soviet Union?

Wake up, Republicans!  Privatize space!  If God created it, we can Privatize it!

Get Xe!  They'd kill to do it.

Read an E-Book Week Means Free Books

Between March 7 and March 13, 2010, Smashwords and other E-Publishers are running a Read an E-Book Week promotion. The plan is to convince everyone on Earth to read at least one e-book that week.  It is a pretty ambitious plan.

I suggest my own book, You Could Call It a Christmas Story, because, despite the long title, it is really a short story and you can renew your Christmas spirit and do your e-book part very quickly and very free.  (Note the Coupon Code is RFREE.) 

Smashwords is the great e-publishing outfit that I use to offer my books in all the major e-book formats used on Kindle, iPhone, Sony, Nook and most others, including anything running a browser.  That is a wonderful thing, since doing it myself proved even more time-consuming than blog writing.

The Smashwords name itself is a play on their clever program that, for example, takes one of my books and smashes the all my carefully wrought formatting out of it and renders the words in various e-book schemes.  The software doesn't put the words into random order, but it might help.

At Smashwords, you will have to register, but it is painless worth it, because you will, eventually, have an e-book reader of some sort if only your cell phone or media player.  Fight it all you want, you still will.  A generous guy knew I wanted an e-reader so he gave me his Kindle.  And I love it.

Do not, however, read Joseph Conrad on any e-reading device without some Scotch handy.  A lot of it

Anyway, with the hefty 100% discount, my books, like my Christmas story, are free for this week.  Click on this Loiseau Development Link to head off to my own site for more info and individual book links.

What more could you ask for?  For this Read an E-Book Week, all my book are cheaper than a Camry if not as fast.

Warm and Fuzzy Snake Tale

Is there anyone who is not afraid of snakes?  Seriously.

I've never been bitten by a snake, let alone swallowed by one, but they scare me even when stuffed and mounted in a museum.

Hollywood knows this.  "Anaconda" was a big hit and it barely tried to be a real snake.  The anaconda was half as big as a submarine and could fly through the air when necessary, as when it had to eat up that bad girl who'd had casual, if tropically hot, sex in reel one.  "Snakes on a Plane" had a title so scary it, fortunately enough, barely needed a movie to go with it.

So? you ask.

So, maybe we are lucky to have what we have.  How would you feel about a snake that ate dinosaurs?  Not just any dinosaurs either, but the young'uns of the largest dinos ever?

Well, paleontologists actually found such a snake when a dinosaur last ruled this land. And the snake was older than Ronald Reagan by decades, at 67 million years.

Ironically, the paleontologists didn't even think it was a snake, just some titanosaur hatchling bones.  Hatchling dinosaurs are the ones fresh from the shell, with yoke still on their cute little claws.  A passel of their bones with no 100-foot stay-at-home titan-o-mom was a nice find, but hardly a career-maker.

Until a guy from the University of Michigan, Jake Wilson, took a second look in 2001.  Hatchlings, sure.  Fossilized dino egg, too.  But, uh, there seemed to be something snaky around it all.  Sure enough, on further paleontologing, Jake and Co. realized that they had a brand new, if very ancient, species of hungry snake found with its young and younger-than-young prey. 

The best part, for snake-lovers and the worst part for the rest of us, is that this eleven and a half foot snake was patiently, almost maternally, keeping the titanosaur eggs and babies warm. 

For dinner.

Hey, Doc! I'm Old. Let Me In!

Medicare patients, you'd better line up a vet.  And not for your dog.

The Washington Wizards--the ones not playing basketball but just as bad--couldn't get their Congressional act together to stop a previously legislated 21% chainsaw cut in the reimbursement Medicare pays physicians. 

First, while it is true all doctors drive cars named Mercedes or Porsche, they barely get enough from Medicare patients to cover their fees for malpractice lawyers, who drive Lamborghini's and Bentley's.

Second, why was a 21% cut passed in the first place, since everyone knew doctors wouldn't see old people for half the cost of a decent haircut.?

Thirdly, can't we fire all the doctors?

The last being first, our doctors are not Rhode Island teachers, for God's sake.

The second is easy, too.  Nobody wants a doctor who drives a Yaris.  What medical school in Haiti produces a Yaris-driving oncologist?  I hope my Medicare cardiac surgeon--if there are any left when I can use them--drives a really expensive car and has two more sitting in the five car garage in his beach house.

The first, and last, question requires you up your cynicism dosage by the 48% you pay on your credit card now.  Congress does this all the time.  They pass a law that "pays for itself" by pretending to cut future expenses, like Medicare reimbursements, knowing full well that they will kill that cut before it actually goes into effect.  That way, our leaders can claim to keep budget deficits down under a trillion or so for the next ten years:  "Saving $800 Million Dollars in Medicare alone!"  They have no intention of actually allowing that savings to happen and, before TBO can find twenty red-white-and blue pens, their staff starts scheduling legislation for next year to reverse the savings.

Goldman Sachs and their Greek clients would be proud.

But something went wrong this year.  The Republicans and the Democrats in Congress just couldn't get to it.  They were too busy reforming health care and letting an ex-pitcher named Bunning strike out a few million unemployed with just his change-up. 

Nobody expected the whole 21% to stick.  Congress always changes the number.  Not in 2010 they didn't.  So, the doctors are extra pissed off.  Since they can't do just 79% of a liver transplant or a hip replacement, they are going to take fewer Medicare patients.  How you can make out taking both less money per patient and fewer patients, I don't know, but that is the plan.  Doctors have to be highly intelligent, but not really business smart.

Perhaps, the doctors figure that The Big O will at least squeeze Nancy and Harry enough to produce a law to make everybody, even twenty-somethings as immortal as I used to be, get a doctor and pay for health care they don't need.  And at a decent, insurance-inflated price.  The docs may be right.

But that Pelosi-Reid Health Sort-of-Reform Act of 2010 will probably include a mandated 48% cut in insurance payments to doctors in 2011.  It has to pay for itself, right?