Three Mile Island

Yes, I remember Three-Mile Island. I am in the energy conservation business indirectly with the work I do in lighting. I am also a rampant believer in the capitalist system and the free market.

What I find interesting is that every time someone proposes nuclear power for the US, the local TV stations drag out their copy of The China Syndrome and runs it as a Special. The movie of course portrays this horrible disaster, all caused by evil greedy capitalists and their excuse-making engineer running-dog lackeys.

Then they run a “Chernobyl: [n] years later” special.

Then CNN/ABC/MSNVC/See?BS! will bring Jane Fonda out of embalm-ment and interview her as though she is some sort of authority on nuclear energy. Something like what Congress did in having Meryl Streep testify in the Alar hearings.

Obviously, those who are paid to recite lines written by others are qualified to discuss physics and agriculture. Funny: my pal David out in California holds over 50 patents in physics-related items, but has never once been asked to be in a movie.

But, I digress.

What is left unstated is the fact that no other country used the technology used at Chernobyl.

Second, the China Syndrome example cannot happen unless the laws of physics are changed. Not even Congress, or the Chicago board of aldermen can do that.

Third, the reactors in use today bear almost no resemblance to the reactors of 40 years, or even 10 years, ago. The technology is so far superior and so much safer it is like two different worlds.

As a comparison, think of TV sets. 40 years ago, the average color television weighed in at close to 80 lbs even for a table model. They consumed 450W of power on average and peaked as high as 600. The picture aso looked like hell and moving them from room to room could throw off the color, such as it was. Today’s sets bear only one characteristic of the old sets: the shows still suck.

When one considers that the country that brought us disasters like the Renault Dauphine and the Citroen 2CV is able to run a large number of nuclear power stations with a very high safety record there is no reason to think we could not.

About the only thing keeping us from doing nuclear is our government officials quaking in fear of every Lexus Leninist, Bentley Bolshevik, Mercedes Marxist, Maybach Maoist, and Prius pants-wetter with access to a word processor and a FAX machine. In other words, Limousine Liberals.

And yes, I would be perfectly willing to live down-wind of a nuclear plant. They do not scare me in the slightest.

Keep in mind this is the same crowd that touts insanity like wind farms and solar. Wind farms are huge, they are ugly, the generators fail frequently, and in some cases are rough as hell on wildlife. But they are what are being demanded. Demanded, with one proviso: NIMBY! Not In MY Back Yard!

An off-shoe windfarm was proposed for the Nantucket area, but both Teddy Kennedy (D Chivas Regal) and Walter Cronkite (former See? BS! news reader) opposed the project. It would not even be visible from shore, but Senator Kennedy did not want even the IDEA that it MIGHT be in the area where he goes sailing. But he sure wants wind farms in YOUR neighborhood, you prole!

And, no, I would NOT live in proximity to a wind farm because of the noise; a low-frequency throbbing due to slight differences in generator speed.

The problem with solar is: it is Not There Yet. There have been some amazing advances in efficiency in just the past few years. The problem remaining is that the cells have finite life before their ability to generate ceases. This life allows them to generate only a percentage of the amount of energy it took to fabricate them in the first place. It has not yet reached unity, so they are actually a negative saver of energy.

Another negative saver of energy is the farm subsidy program that mandates adulterating gasoline with a high-pollution chemical called ethanol. That, however is another subject entirely.

Comments?

The begging beginneth…

I am now starting to get mailings begging for political contributions, because as you know, our little bread-and-circuses show-election is upon us.

Let me get something right out front here: I am not easily pigeon-holed when it comes to my political beliefs. I was raised in a family that was, and remains, so Democrat that they do just about everything but roll out a prayer rug, face Hyde Park, and chant “Thy Holy Name Be Franklin” five times a day.

“For those of you in Rio Linda”, I am referring to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

My mother was very active in California Democrat politics, and when I was a very young boy I had, sitting in our living room, Adlai Stevenson, two-time candidate for President, his choice for VP Estes Kefauver, and although I am not 100% sure, I may have seen John F. Kennedy there as well. And one you never heard of: Irving Glasband. I’d give you a link, but all I can find is election results, and his listing among the Jewish Funeral Directors of America. Yep. A mortician ran for Congress.

At age 7 I was standing on Hollywood Boulevard passing out balloons and campaign literature for the Democrats. What did I know! I was 7!

An interesting side note about Adlai Stevenson. Back in those days it was common for candidates to come through cities and have what were called motorcades. The candidates for one or the other party would organize these things, get the permits, announce them, and then have a parade down a main street, riding in open convertible cars. My family was rather well to do in those days, and many of the “grass roots” people like my mother had Cadillacs. Mom had a Chrysler convertible then, and this was the car Stevenson insisted on riding in in 1956. Why? Because he said a Caddie was a car Republicans (and by implication, elitist evil rich) rode in and he refused to be seen in a Cadillac. Given his own wealth and elitism, he was being a hypocrite, but what else is new?

I outgrew all that nonsense by about age 25 or 26. No, I am not a Republican, and never have been registered as one. I was registered Democrat “like my momma”, then went with the Libertarians. I have been “Decline to state” for 20 years, and here in Tennessee we are not registered by party so it is a moot point. I vote the candidate, not the party.

In 1980, I voted Republican for Congress. Go ahead, you knee-jerk reflexive Bush-haters; give me hell for that. But if you think I was going to vote for the head of an organization called White Aryan Resistance instead, you have another thing coming. And yes, he ran on YOUR party’s ticket. He was the Democrat candidate. YOUR candidate. Doubt me? Get onto your favorite search engine and key in Tom Metzger.

(Now, how may Democrats pulled the lever or punched the card for Metzger because of that “D” by his name? How many MORE, given the Democrat party’s REAL racial history, pulled or punched because of who he is and what he stands for?)

Another example of my apostasy: In the run-up to California’s governor recall, I voted for Tom McClintock, not Aaahhnuld. When the actual recall election took place, I did vote for him; anything to ditch Gray Davis. I kinda expected Aaahnuld to become what he is today, but it was better than more Davis, and better than providing a stepping stone for Cruz Bustamante to step up to the governorship when Davis was Term Llimited out.

Earlier this week, I received a beg-a-thon mailing from the Republican National Committee.

Here is my reply to them:

To Whom it may Concern,

No, I am not registered Republican. This is Tennessee; we don’t register by party here. How typical: you want to represent us and yet don’t take the time to find out how things work here. Whether it is arrogance or stupidity hardly matters.

Do you really think I want a traitor and criminal like Juan Amnestia McCain as my President? McCain-Feingold’s gutting of the 1st Amendment and pro-amnesty sums up the positions of this member of the Keating Five. Too bad I am one of those voters who has a memory longer than the average member of the electorate.

He is also running as the standard-bearer of the party that has shot the government’s budget, deficit, and level of intrusiveness in our everyday lives so far through the roof it is disgusting.

There are no parties in this nation that represent my views. REAL lower-case r republicanism does so, but there is no party that stands for it.

Sorry, folks. You will get not a single dime from me. I suggest you hit the fundamentalist churches, Americans for Truth, Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council, and others more inclined to contribute to your partnership with the Democrats in destroying what little we have left of our Constitution, our national identity, and our way of life.

In short: go to hell.

Sincerely yours,

What are your thoughts about… BO?

Sorry for the delays, folks. Work has had me as busy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

Let me set the table here: For my foreign readers, there is a tradition of informality in American politics.  We give nicknames to our Presidents.  Or, we will use their initials.  JFK for John F. Kerry Kennedy. “Dubya” (W, or doubleyou) for George W. Bush. “Ike” for Eisenhower.  

I think, therefore, in the spirit of American tradition, I will call Barrack Hussein Obama, “BO”.

So.  What are we to make of BO? It all boils down, in my mind, to this: he is thin-skinned to a laughable degree.  Someone says something he does not like, and he snivels to the press about it, and declares the topic off limits.

• 20 years of attendance in a hate-filled, anti-American, anti-Semitic church
• his ears
• his Muslim schooling
• his long-lasting friendship with the likes of Bill Ayres
• his coziness with Louis Farrakhan
• his wife and her nasty remarks
• his domestic policies
• his foreign policies
• his willingness to talk with our enemies with no conditions (”precondition” is not a word; don’t bother writing to me with a ‘correction’)
• Hammas loves him
• his middle name
• anything else he does not want to hear

In his latest little snit, he is upset about an ad running here in Tennessee doing a point-counterpoint of is wife’s remarks and the sentiments of Tennesseans.  You know: people Michelle would NEVER even deign to talk with. People who get their hands dirty farming, or building Saturns and Nissans.  Not folks like her who have sinecure jobs with “community outreach” in their titles and a $400,000 pay package, and whose biggest daily concern is which outfit to wear.

BO warned people they “better be careful…” regarding this sort of thing.

Be careful of what, sonny?  Will you have some Daley machine people come knocking on doors in middle of the night? Maybe send Chicago’s finest to beat the stuffing out of someone after claiming they “resisted arrest”? Word to the wise, you pants-wetting sniveler: the rest of the country is not Chicago. Your machine does not run things here.  Most of the rest of us do not quake in fear behind locked and chained doors because Our Betters in Cook County make it impossible for us to defend ourselves.

We also stand up for what we believe in and no small-time machine politician will tell us how we will think or what we will say.  Deal with it.

For those of my many ones of readers who still believe in BO, I ask you to do something for me. Watch a video of him giving a speech before a crowd. Watch him speak on television. See how smooth he is? How “exciting”?  How well-spoken?  Fine. And I grant you that.

Now, grab some tapes, crank up YouTube on your computer, or watch him live, being interviewed.  Even on the soft-ball questions from sycophants like Chris Matthews, or virtually any female reporter, he stammers, stutters, repeats three- and four-word phrases in an effort to gain time. Gain time to think of something, ANYthing, to say.  It is like watching a proselytizer dealing with a question or statement to which they have not been programmed to respond.

In short, get him away from the Tele-Promp-Ter® and he crumbles like a month-old saltine. As loathsome as I find Hillary Clinton, I would really rather have her answering that Phone Call at Three in the Morning than Barrack Obama.

Watch what happens as the campaign goes forth. He will, eventually, fall back on the race card. Give it time. His sniveling about uncomfortable topics will reach a tipping point.  And as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow morning, he will morph into the Jackson/Sharpton schtick and scream “racism!”.

The election for President will be over.

…Like a Virgin

I had a close-to-emergency recently, for which I needed one of those pay as you go mobile phones. I marched into a Walgreens and bought a Virgin Mobile telephone and a refill card. I did my damndest to activate the phone, to no avail.

Calls to their tech support line got me this recorded-prompt system using the voice of a teenage girl called Simone. Happy, ditzy, slovenly pronunciation, and cutsie-pie smalltalk. This is hard for a curmudgeonly bear to deal with, so by being persistent I got to speak with a human being. Once. Problem not solved.

Without going into the gory details, I returned the phone to Walgreens, and after a call to customer service to explain my plight, they even refunded the cost of the refill card although this is VERY much the exception to the rule.

One thing VM DID do is get me on their e-mailing list. To de-subscribe, one needs to give one’s mobile number and a password. Well, gang… I never got a working number!

For those who are not up in such matters: VM is a company owned under the Branson combine. Virgin Atlantic Airlines, Virgin music stores, etc.

They launched a cell phone (excuse me, a mobile phone) system that rides the Sprint network. The “format” for their advertising and instructions is a slightly Americanized version of British English. One does not buy a card to refill minutes, one “tops-up” the minutes. One does not call for tech support, you “ring them up”. With that in mind, I will show you the email I sent yesterday in order to get them to stop doing the only reliable thing they ever did with my service, which was to send me promotional emails. Here is my reply.

“As I never did get my Virgin Mobile phone to activate, and have since returned it to the store and gotten my money back, I do not wish to receive your mailings.

“I haven’t the faintest idea what to put for a phone number as, (to hold with the British-English theme of VM), the poxy thing never bloody worked and your bally tech support’s response to my plight was Sweet Fanny Adams. I got bollocks!

“So, based on my email address, please de-list me from your mailings. Thanks very much.”

Fortunately, the crisis passed, and a kind stranger allowed me the use of a spare cell phone for about two days. All is fine with the world.

More on the Presidential races soon!

The Election, part 2: the parties

Greetings, ladies and gentlemen

I know many of my readers are literally counting the days until George Bush is no longer President. For those of you who see Bush as Chimpy McHitlerburton and other such Daily Kos-esque terms for him, it may come as a big surprise to you that many of us on the other side of the political spectrum do not find the man much to our liking either. It is for far different reasons than you may have.

I really have no idea why the left seems to foam at the mouth so much over Republican presidents. Let’s look at the record, shall we?

Consider Richard M. Nixon. Here is a man who will cause spluttering, foaming at the mouth, and fall-on-the-floor writhing fits whenever his name is brought up. This is not true just among the young or my own generation (I am a “boomer”). My mother’s generation of Democrats see him as the very personification of the devil himself. There is even a story of a lady who walked out of a beauty salon and within seconds, there was a cloudburst. Standing there with her fresh ‘do now a soggy mess, she shaked her fist at he sky and shouts, “that damn Nixon!”

His name is the “Susquehanna Hats!” or “Niagara Falls!“ phrase guaranteed to launch any self-respecting person left of center straight through the roof. It is part of their very existence.

But… why?

Richard Nixon gave us:

• Wage and price controls
• The Environmental Protection Agency
• Government-mandated, race-based set-asides for hiring and education. We used to call that”discrimination:.
• Signed the Equal Employment Opportunity Act
• Extended the EEOA to include “gender” (sex) equality
• Opened relations and commenced trade with China

What more could anyone want?

• More government jobs and the taxes to pay for them.
• More government employees means more union members.
• Making nice with a country that was at that time very vocal about its intentions toward our nation’s future and very survival. A country that, today, is fighting a quiet war against us with defective and dangerous products it knows most Americans are damned fool enough to buy.

Let’s try another evil Republican President. George Bush 41:

• Gave us the Americans with Disabilities Act. An act that states we even need to keep drunks and addicts in our employ.
• He raised taxes to pay for pet projects, pork, earmarks, and other pick-pocket items for members of both parties. This is nothing new, but we expected better.
• Handed us the biggest increase in government spending, regulation, controls, and intrusiveness into the lives of the American public since Franklin D. Roosevelt.
• Let a Democratic senator craft an education bill, to be administered by the Department of Education.

The D of E is an agency founded by Jimmy Carter as a gift to the teachers unions for supporting his election bid, and which every Republican president since has vowed to get rid of. They have “gotten rid of it” by piling billions upon billions of dollars onto its budget every year.

(I won’t even bring up the subject of comparing literacy, numeracy, science knowledge, and knowledge of history in today’s students, compared to those of us who stumbled helplessly through the halls of academe without the benefit of an agency in Washington to Guide Us and Help Us).

In short, I have no idea why y’all complain so much. These three have done more to grow government in recent history than even Lyndon Johnson.

Just so that you all aware of my place in the political spectrum, I am all over the park. I now live in a state where one does not declare a party, and the primaries are “open”. When I lived in California, I marked “decline to state”. The reason is that none of the established parties represent me.

The Democrats are hopelessly bound into the idea of victimhood and benign racism. The Democrat party has always been home to racism; this statement may surprise some of you, but it is the truth. In the olden days before the 1960s, they were far more open about it. George Wallace, Theodore Bilbo, J. B. Stoner, Albert Gore (Sr) and others were quite open about their hostility to black people. Lyndon B. Johnson stated that his signing of a civil rights act ‘would have the niggers voting for us for the next [several] hundred years’. The longest serving senator is a Democrat, Robert Byrd. He is a past high official (”Kleagle”) and recruiter for the Ku Klux Klan, among other things.

It is not just blacks that the Democrats were so down on. Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom so many Jewish people picture as being nothing short of a saint, was himself a bigot. “After World War II began, FDR had privately said to Morgenthau and a Catholic appointee, Leo Crowley, “You know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance.” (Newsweek, “FDR’s Auschwitz Secret, Michael Benschloss, 14 Oct 2002). Roosevelt’s own State Department turned away Jewish refugees even though the horrors of the concentration camps had already become common knowledge.

Today, the Democrats have developed far more tact. Rather than directly keeping black people “in their place” with terror and segregation laws, it is done through welfare that compels the father not to be around. It is through the evils of quota hiring and quota college admissions. setting up entirely too many people for failure. Or, the ones who would have succeeded in the first place are now doubted. “Is Dr Jackson qualified?”

The Republicans, also known as the GOP, for Grand Old Party, are ensnared in much of the more repulsive characteristics of what some folks identify as “Christianity”. They have this almost sick obsession with the sex lives of other people. They see folks wanting to be left the hell alone as having “an agenda”. At one GOP convention, one of the clergymen brought there to speak made some particularly offensive remarks about the religions of others. Nice guy, and nice of God’s Ordained Party to invite him, and cheer him.

Peace & Freedom? Please.

The Green Party has much of their party platform lifted directly from that of the NSDAP, a party founded in Germany in the 1930s. They went on to cause a bit of trouble for the rest of the European continent up until 1945.

The Constitution Party starts off proclaiming their devotion to Constitutional inerrancy. I support that. But! You get no further than the second paragraph of their Preamble, and they start in with the Jesus stuff, then in the fourth paragraph at least seem to contradict the second. Sorry. This Jewish man is not interested. I hear talk like that and can decipher the code without even lifting a finger.

The Libertarians lost me years ago when there was so much in-fighting, and so much argument over angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin trivia that nothing got done.  They have not had a viable candidate for years.

So: where does The Friendly Grizzly stand? The best way to define me is a strict constructionist regarding the Constitution. And I mean the entire thing, not just the Amendments. This puts me in the position of being opposed to the existence of just about every Federal agency that exists today. There is no provision in the Constitution for them, and ought not to be. That is not what this country was all about when Jefferson, Franklin, Hamilton, and the rest of those “dead white slave-drivers” got together in Philadelphia.

Next time, I will discuss the candidates still left standing at this time.

The election, part 1: some background

Ladies and Gentlemen: I’ve been getting a lot of friendly ribbing about how I had more or less abandoned my blog. Some have said they like my writing style, and want to see more, others find my opinions and worldview unique enough to get them thinking. Okay, then. Time for me to at least try to do some new entries every few days.

I have decided to rant write some thoughts regarding our upcoming election. I want to provide some background, then will go on from there in later entries.

For my overseas readers, we have an election coming up as you well know. The US system of government is intended to be what is called a representative republic. The USA is not, and was not founded as, a democracy. Many of our own citizens are not aware of this, or pretend that it is.

In a representative republic, we elect representatives, called congressmen, to go to our nation’s capital and represent us. The number of congressmen from a particular state is based on the state’s population. States like California have many congressmen, states like Alaska may have only one. Every ten years, once the national census has been taken and calculated, the number of congressmen is adjusted. States that lose population may lose a congressman, ones that go up, gain one.

Congressmen were intended to represent the people, and elected by people in districts whose borders are established usually by the state governments.

We also have what are called senators. No matter the size of the state, or its population, each gets two. The original intent of our founding fathers was to have senators selected by the state government. The reason was that while congressmen are elected to represent the people, senators were to represent the interests of the state. This idea (a proper and reasonable one in my view) was swept away with the passage of the seventeenth amendment to the United States Constitution in 1913. So, the election of senators was turned into a popularity contest.

(The 19-teens saw the introduction and passage of amendments that have created chaos in this country, but that is fodder for more blog entries).

Then again, this came about when the federal level of government was beginning a record level of growth, something our founders would have found horrifying. This consolidation of power was the beginning of what will be our eventual end as a set of states united.

We are still formally called “The United States of America”. I invite you to run that through your mind. Slowly and analytically. United STATES. That is, a set of different and distinct places, each with possibly differing ideas about law, customs, morality, beliefs.

The idea of our federal level of government was to provide some common grounding regarding basic, or “human” rights, a common defense, and a monetary system in order to make interstate commerce feasible. A good metaphor would be the True Value hardware stores. Each is either a little mom-and-pop store, or a very small chain. They each join in under the True Value umbrella in order to achieve buying power like the big chains have, and to be able to afford promotion in the form of radio ads and newspaper inserts. Each store is too weak to do it on their own. But by combining themselves into a community, they have these things, and more. Mom and Pop still run their own store, hire the folks they want, set their own hours in order to serve their particular customer base.

As has happened with any republic based on democratic principles, this all started to slip away, very noticeably starting in the 1860s. Without going into a chapter-and-verse essay about it, we have become not a federation of states that have united in a common boundary, but have become “Theunitedstates”, or Yooessay. It is now nothing more than a brand name, if you will.

We have gotten ourselves to the point where folks in Arizona are taxed to pay for some pet project of a senator from West Virginia. Folks in Montana must live with a law a senator in Massachusetts thought was A Good Idea. It does not matter that in either case, there is no Constitutional provision for the project or the law in the first place. As it stands now, there is not one single senator, and MAYBE one congressman who upholds the oath they swore when they took office. In that oath is a phrase about defending and protecting the Constitution.

I took an oath with the same phrase when I enlisted in the US Navy, and abide by it to this day. They called it an oath; I did it as a statement of affirmation. Same thing.

Our election process has now deteriorated to where We the People voting for whomever will bring home the most in the way of make-work projects for local buyers of influence, or for some of us, voting for those who have the guts to say “no”. We the People are voting for whomever will ram laws through that pressure groups of all types see as A Good Idea. Whomever will fund our pet projects using money confiscated from other people via the badges and guns of government. Examples include community centers with restricted access, federal assistance in the construction of football and baseball stadia and other Shrines to the Jockstrap that could never pay for themselves. Or the biggest pet project of them all, light rail.

With all this in mind, stay tuned for more commentary.

Stay tuned!

Stay tuned, folks; I am making a comeback shortly!

The Crisis Crisis

A few days ago, I received an email from a very good friend of mine who lives out in California. This man is highly educated, has led a productive life, and – much to my envy – is now retired and spending quiet times with his lovely and vivacious wife.

He wrote to me about the recent articles about how the bee population has taken a sudden drop. He asked me, using his word, if I had any “info” on this phenomenon. First off, the word is “information”. “Info” is one of these new words that has crept into the lexicon due to laziness, and the rise of text-speak in everyday life. Friend, you know better than that! For SHAME! What would Ms Ebbits have said about such a thing! Tsk!

No, I do not have any information about why this event is taking place. It is in all likelyhood happening because Mother Nature is taking some sort of corrective steps. I do not for one moment think that the bee population will die off, or any of the rest of it. The remaining bees will take the right steps to assure their survival, just like the spotted owl now lives successfully in barns, and blackbears often spend their hibernation beneath houses, unknown to the owners.

If I did know why the bees are dying I might call up the press and tell them. Then again, I could call up the press and blurt out some nonsense that the decline in the number of cars with white-wall tires is causing this, because of the resultant decline in the reflected light from down low, up into bee hives, which was proved beneficial to bees by someone equally as unqualified to comment on such things as I am. Someone like, for example, a has-been pop singer or a lawyer.

It is a sad fact, but the people of the United States are suckers for any new crisis someone can dream up. We The People do not stop and think things through. The result is, any person or group of persons can dummy up a good letterhead, run a letter with any stupid theory through a FAX machine set to sequence-dial NBC, ABS, Reuters, AP, UPI, the BBC, and CBS (see? BS!).

The Cranberry Crisis

This is not a recent thing. I remember some time around 1958 or 1959 that some “authority” came out right around the first week of November, claiming that cranberries were suspected of causing cancer. Just like that, out of nowhere, our traditionnal holiday treat would be the slow and painful death of us all! Of course this was right in time for the Thanksgiving holiday. The nation went into a big arm-waving, running-in-circles tizzy. It was all over the news for about a week or so. Sales of cranberries and cranberry sauce took a huge hit, and folks were scared of What Might Have Happened in past holiday seasons. Oh, Gawd! Am I dying?

Yes, you are right. It all blew over. There was nothing to it. What had been declared true on page 1 above the fold was dismissed on page C23, next to the truss ads.

A lot of harm was done to farmers and packing houses, but these stories sell ewspapers.

The Killer Car Crisis

In 1966, a lawyer put out a book called Unsafe At Any Speed. Much of what was in the book was later proved either heavily exaggerated, or was more what one finds emanating from the north end of a southbound horse. The book dealt with the alleged (and in some cases true) defects in the engineering of American cars. There was even a chapter on how excessive chrome and brightwork was a hazard.

Then again, lawyers know all about engineering, so he should know, right? Meantime, European manufacturers were turning out flaming deathtraps like the VW Beetle and the Renault Dauphine, but no one seemed to notice. Again, the press ran with it, the public went into panic mode, and demanded that our betters in Washington not just sit there, but Do Something. The result was a room full of lawyers writing safety standards for automobiles.

The Fruit Crisis

In later years, we had a movie actress, Meryl Streep, testifying before Congress about Alar, an agricultural chemical. She claimed it was “the most potent cancer-causing agent in our food supply”. No reason was given why the testimony of someone whose profession is to recite lines written by others should be lent credence in the matter. Apple sales fell, farmers were hurt badly. Then the public learnt it was a crisis about nothing.

The Republican Party continues their screaming about a different sort of “Fruit Crisis”. The American public must be warned about the Homosexual Agenda! It’s a CRISIS! Fortunately, at least from my viewpoint, this particular crisis has been greeted, as it should be, with yawns from most of the American public. This screaming and yelling is not serving its purpose anymore; the base now knows that the GOP is selling the country out just as much as the other party.

A well-known television hostess made some loud remarks about beef. You can predict the results.

Global Cooling uhh, Warming, I mean Climate Change!

About thirty years back, we were handed A Brand New Very Important Crisis. The coming of Global Cooling! All of this was traced to everything from car exhaust to the felling of rain forests, the burning of coal, to the - to be polite - out-gassing of our bovine friends who are being raised to produce the hamburgers that Oprah said we should not be eating.

Now, we have what was until a few months ago was called Global Warming, but is now called Climate Change. All of this has been traced to everything from car exhaust to the felling of rain forests, the burning of coal, to the - to be polite - out-gassing of our bovine friends who are being raised to produce the hamburgers that Oprah said we should not be eating. There are politicians running around the contry in chartered jets big enough to carry 300 passengers warning us about how we are destroying the planet with our profligate use of energy. One of these, a chap called Albert Gore, Jr, gets so exhausted from all of this evangelizing that he must sometimes stop at one of this three homes, crank up the air conditioning, and sit and relax among his thousands of square feet (hundreds of metres)he occupies with his wife and no one else. You may recognize Mr. Gore. He used to be vice President or a Senator or something.

Are we starting to spot a pattern here, gentle readers?

It seems we cannot go six months without some new crisis being invented.

I think the only crisis that is justified is one of confidence. Confidence in the mainstream media, and of politicians seeking ever-more control over our lives.

Corzine’s Crash

New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine was recently rather badly injured in a car crash. He was on his way to a meeting with D0n Imus and the alleged reverend Al “diamond merchant” “jew bitch” “white interloper” Sharpton.

It seems hizzoner felt that he can have his motorcade bust the speed limits in a big way so that he could get to his meeting on time. Radley Balko, of The Agitator, does not believe that the good guv should be issued a citation for not wearing a seat belt. After all, the man was fighting for his life, blah blah blah. I normally am in agreement with Mr. Balko, but not this time.

Corzine is one of these sanctimonious pricks who feels he knows what is best for his subjects citizens. WE need to fasten our seat belts of feed the state treasury and get points on our license, but his majesty HE is both the king governor, and is well connected, so the law does not apply to him.

In short, he’s a Kennedy; the law is there for the common folks, not America’s royalty.

WE might be late for a job interview, or that meeting that lands the big contract. If WE bust the limit, we fatten the treasury. The esteemed governor has police cars and flashing lights to brush aside the common people so he can rush to be in the presence of the great Rev and kiss his ring. Or something.

I don’t think we need to even bring up his stance on self-defense. He’s a) democrat, and b) governor of New Jersey. You do the math.

I think that ticket needs to be written, and placed right next to his menu selection card on his next meal tray. And that menu should include crow. Screw him.

British Hostages

It’s been a week since 15 British subjects (more on that in a moment) were taken hostage by the Iranians. The subjects were in Iraqi waters at the time, so this is clearly an act of war. These folks were taken virtually under the eye of their ship’s commanding officer who did little more than watch. I imagine this was done on orders from the folks in Whitehall (the British analog to our use of the word “Pentagon” to mean military higher-ups). I say this because I cannot imagine any Royal Navy captain standing there doing nothing for his men.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Teauney Blaaahh (that’s what he says his name is) is saying all manner of things and doing nothing. Is this man, in reality, really Jimmy Carter with a different accent?

Due to the political realities of the European Union, the hostages are now not really British, but European. The rest of Europe is in a very good economic position to put a very tight squeeze on Iran to gain the release of their fellow Europeans. But, they won’t.

Those who boost the European Union so highly when it is to their advantage, see NO advantage in doing this economic squeezing; they just want business as usual. So, what were citizens of “Europe” 10 days ago are, conveniently, British subjects now, ergo, no one cares.

Gads. Where is today’s Winston Churchill? Indeed where is Margaret Thatcher when Britian so sorely needs her? Is Mr Blaaahh too busy figuring out where to put the next street camera, or next biometric identification scheme to take care of what NEEDS taking care of?

What has become of Britain and its leaders and her people?

What does it say to the world that in the last 50 years, the only British Prime Minister with any balls was a woman?