The 23rd Qualm

(from an anonymous author on the internet)




The 23rd Qualm



George Bush is my shepherd; I dwell in want.



He maketh logs to be cut in national forests.



He leadeth trucks into the still wilderness.



He restoreth my fears.



He leadeth me in the paths of international disgrace for his

ego's sake.



Yea, though I walk through the valley of pollution and war,



I will find no exit, for thou art in office.



Thy tax cuts for the rich and thy media control, they
discomfort me.



Thou preparest an agenda of deception in the presence of thy
religion.



Thou anointest my head with foreign oil.



My health insurance runneth out.



Surely megalomania and false patriotism shall follow me all the
days of thy term,



And my jobless child shall dwell in my basement forever.



Oy, Gevalt.

Sometimes It Helps to Review Old Stories - Not Original, but Useful Lessons

MANAGEMENT LESSONS
*****************************

Lesson Number One
*****************
A crow was sitting on a tree, doing nothing all day. A small rabbit saw the crow, and asked him, "Can I also sit like you and do nothing all day long?" The crow answered: "Sure, why not." So, the rabbit sat on the ground below the crow, and rested. All of a sudden, a fox appeared, jumped on the rabbit and ate it.

Management Lesson: To be sitting and doing nothing, you must be sitting very, very high up.

Lesson Number Two
*****************
A turkey was chatting with a bull. "I would love to be able to get to the top of that tree," sighed the turkey, "but I haven't got the energy. "Well, why don't you nibble on some of my droppings?" replied the bull. "They're packed with nutrients." The turkey pecked at a lump of dung and found that it actually gave him enough strength to reach the first branch of the tree. The next day, after eating some more dung, he reached the second branch. Finally after a fortnight, there he was proudly perched at the top of the tree. Soon he was promptly spotted by a farmer, who shot the turkey out of the tree.

Management Lesson: Bullshit might get you to the top, but it won't keep you there.

Lesson Number Three *******************

When the body was first made, all the parts wanted to be Boss. The brain said, "I should be Boss because I control the whole body's responses and functions." The feet said, " We should be Boss as we carry the brain about and get him to where he wants to go." The hands said, "We should be the Boss because we do all the work and earn all the money. "And so it went on and on with the heart, the lungs and the eyes until finally the asshole spoke up. All the parts laughed at the idea of the asshole being the Boss. So the asshole went on strike, blocked itself up and refused to work. Within a short time the eyes became crossed, the hands clenched, the feet twitched, the heart and lungs began to panic and the brain fevered. Eventually they all decided that the asshole should be the Boss, so the motion was passed. All the other parts did all the work while the Boss just sat and passed out the shit!

Management Lesson: You don't need brains to be a Boss - any asshole will do.

Lesson Number Four
******************

A little bird was flying south for the winter. It was so cold, the bird froze and fell to the ground in a large field. While it was lying there, a cow came by and dropped some dung on it. As the frozen bird lay there in the pile of cow dung, it began to realize how warm it was. The dung was actually thawing him out! He lay there all warm and happy, and soon began to sing for joy. A passing cat heard the bird singing and came to investigate. Following the sound, the cat discovered the bird under the pile of cow dung, and promptly dug him out and ate him!

Management Lessons:

1) Not everyone who drops shit on you is your enemy.
2) Not everyone who gets you out of shit is your friend.
3) When you are in deep shit, keep your mouth shut!

W Has Energizing Idea - Nukular Power

The Nero News Service, "As the World Burns"

In U.S. President Bush's Saturday radio address to the nation (2/18/06), he said that he has a plan to help us get off of our addiction to oil - nukular power. Yup, that's right, why smoke pot when you can shoot up heroin.

He reported that nukular engergy is "safe and clean" and it generates "large amounts of low-cost electricity without emitting air pollution or greenhouse gases." Concerned about protecting Americans and the world from the projected horrors of global warming, W is seeking ways of cutting down on greenhouse gasses.

"Look, greenhouse gasses can't be shot down out of the air like quail - heh heh. If they could, I'd have the Vice President take care of it for us, and I'd have him bring some hunting buddies along, like maybe John McCain and Hillary Clinton. We got us a problem. It's called Bovine Flatulence. Yep, that's right, cow farts. They are a major source of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. Now, I'm not proposing that Americans are addicted to beef or anything like that. After all, when I stop being president, I'll be making Got Milk? ads like everyone else. So, we have to come up with a plan. That plan is to make E-lek-tricity from nukular power. It's simple, clean, and Dick Cheney says its a great way to make lots of money."

The Plan: Taking a page from the Reagan White House's Star Wars, where a technology was proposed to save us before it even existed, the president has proposed two really good ideas, based upon the available and probably true intelligence from key sources in the Nuclear Energy Institute, the industry's lobbying and promotional outlet (see www.nei.org for W's nukular power speeches before he gives them). The first idea is to use smaller reactors in other countries that don't have the technology to build bigger reactors. Of course, the smaller reactor technology doesn't exist, but neither did Star Wars, and we still managed to spend a lot of money on it. Besides, the president found a drawing of a small reactor, so he figures the real thing can't be far off into the future, else, how would someone have been able to draw a picture of it.

There, isn't that a cute little reactor?

The next idea is for taking care of the tons of radioactive hazardous waste that comes out the other end of the greenhouse free power plant. Yep, that's right, no greenhouse gas emissions, but plenty of nasty highly radioactive crap coming out the back end of the plant. Well for that his answer is to return the used fuel (radioactive waste) to a fuel supplier nation and recycle it using a process that does not result in separated plutonium, according to the US Energy Department. The recycled fuel would then be used in advanced burner reactors in fuel supplier nations.

ONE LITTLE PROBLEM, sort of like the little problem with the small reactors....
<>The advanced burner reactors do not yet exist either. These fast reactors would consume transuranic elements - plutonium and other long-lived radioactive material with atomic numbers higher than uranium - while extracting their energy. Here, the word burn does not mean incinerate or combust, the Energy Department explains, it means to transmute or convert transuranics into shorter-lived isotopes. Do you get the picture???? Rope-a-dope, Mission Accomplished - again.


Yup, we're going to find ways to pay for the spread of nukular reactors around the world while we take decades to develop the new technologies to make this possible in the vision of W. Here's what our fearless leader, who one right-wing nutcase is calling, The Rebel In Chief (see book by Fred Barnes if you want) was told to tell us would happen...


"these countries would agree to use nuclear power only for civilian purposes and forego uranium enrichment and reprocessing activities that can be used to develop nuclear weapons."

and, remember, the weapons of mass destruction were hidden in Iraq....

Now, what this involves is nukular fuel reprocessing.

"If the Bush administration establishes nuclear fuel reprocessing the new policy would overturn a 30-year ban on the technology. Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976 and 1977 promised that the United States would not reprocess spent nuclear fuel.

The challenge, says the Department of Energy (DOE), stems from the fact that certain technologies used to separate out plutonium from used fuel, could be used to produce material for a nuclear weapon." (February 20, 2006 (ENS))

And this weeks double speak winner is: "more proliferation-resistant separation processes"


So, in the words of Charles Mingus, when the nukular explosion comes, "you can kiss your ass goodbye."

Someday, see the film The Journey by Peter Watkins, 1988. A 14.5 hour movie about the international war machine and the international peace movement.

Good night and good luck.

Be well, keep your feet on the ground most of the time, but jump for joy regularly.

For real news coverage, as opposed to the Nero News Service, see

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2006/2006-02-20-03.asp

Fast Food for Thought

A friend sent this to me:

Subject: Memories

"Hey Dad," one of my kids asked the other day, "What was your favorite fast food when you were growing up?"

"We didn't have fast food when I was growing up," I informed him. "All the food was slow."

"C'mon, seriously. Where did you eat?"

"It was a place called 'at home,'" I explained. "Grandma cooked every day and when Grandpa got home from work, we sat down together at the dining room table, and if I didn't like what she put on my plate I was allowed to sit there until I did like it."

By this time, the kid was laughing so hard I was afraid he was going to suffer serious internal damage, so I didn't tell him the part about how I had to have permission to leave the table. But here are some other things I would have told him about my childhood if I figured his system could have handled it:

Some parents NEVER owned their own house, wore Levis, set foot on a golf course, traveled out of the country or had a credit card. In their later years they had something called a revolving charge card. The card was good only at Sears Roebuck. Or maybe it was Sears AND Roebuck. Either way, there is no Roebuck anymore. Maybe he died.

My parents never drove me to soccer practice. This was mostly because we never had heard of soccer. I had a bicycle that weighed probably 50 pounds, and only had one speed, (slow). We didn't have a television in our house until I was 11, but my grandparents had one before that. It was, of course, black and white, but they bought a piece of colored plastic to cover the screen. The top third was blue, like the sky, and the bottom third was green, like grass. The middle third was red. It was perfect for programs that had scenes of fire trucks riding across someone's lawn on a sunny day. Some people had a lens taped to the front of the TV to make the picture look larger.

I was 13 before I tasted my first pizza, it was called "pizza pie." When I bit into it, I burned the roof of my mouth and the cheese slid off, swung down, plastered itself against my chin and burned that, too. It's still the best pizza I ever had.

We didn't have a car until I was 15. Before that, the only car in our family was my grandfather's Ford. He called it a "machine."

I never had a telephone in my room. The only phone in the house was in the living room and it was on a party line. Before you could dial, you had to listen and make sure some people you didn't know weren't already using the line.

Pizzas were not delivered to our home. But milk was.

All newspapers were delivered by boys and all boys delivered newspapers. I delivered a newspaper, six days a week. It cost 7 cents a paper, of which I got to keep 2 cents. I had to get up at 4 AM every morning. On Saturday, I had to collect the 42 cents from my customers. My favorite customers were the ones who gave me 50 cents and told me to keep the change. My least favorite customers were the ones who seemed to never be home on collection day.

Movie stars kissed with their mouths shut. At least, they did in the movies. Touching someone else's tongue with yours was called French kissing and they didn't do that in movies. I don't know what they did in French movies. French movies were dirty and we weren't allowed to see them.

If you grew up in a generation before there was fast food, you may want to share some of these memories with your children or grandchildren. Just don't blame me if they bust a gut laughing.

Growing up isn't what it used to be, is it?


MEMORIES from a friend:

My Dad is cleaning out my grandmother's house (she died in December) and he brought me an old Royal Crown Cola bottle. In the bottle top was a stopper with a bunch of holes in it. I knew immediately what it was, but my daughter had no idea. She thought they had tried to make it a salt shaker or something. I knew it as the bottle that sat on the end of the ironing board to "sprinkle" clothes with because we didn't have steam irons. Man, I am old.

How many do you remember?

Head lights dimmer switches on the floor.
Ignition switches on the dashboard.
Heaters mounted on the inside of the fire wall.
Real ice boxes.
Pant leg clips for bicycles without chain guards.
Soldering irons you heat on a gas burner.
Using hand signals for cars without turn signals.

Older Than Dirt Quiz: Count all the ones that you remember not the ones you were told about Ratings at the bottom.

1. Blackjack chewing gum
2. Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water
3. Candy cigarettes
4. Soda pop machines that dispensed glass bottles
5. Coffee shops or diners with tableside juke boxes
6 . Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers
7. Party lines
8. Newsreels before the movie
9. P.F. Flyers
10. Butch wax
11. Telephone numbers with a word prefix (OLive-6933)
12. Peashooters
13. Howdy Doody
14. 45 RPM records
15. S&H Green Stamps
16 Hi-fi's
17. Metal ice trays with lever
18. Mimeograph paper
19 Blue flashbulb
20. Packards
21. Roller skate keys
22. Cork popguns
23. Drive-ins
24. Studebakers
25. Wash tub wringers

If you remembered 0-5 = You're still young
If you remembered 6-10 = You are getting older
If you remembered 11-15 = Don't tell your age,
If you remembered 16-25 = You're older than dirt!

I might be older than dirt but those memories are the best part of my life.

Don't forget to pass this along!!
Especially to all your really OLD friends

Unemployment Down and Prices Must Go Up

The Nero News Service, "As the World Burns"

The Labor Department reported this week that the January unemployment rate hit an unexpected low - 4.7%. But, at the same time, the number of new jobs created dropped off. The economy added 1.98 million jobs during all of 2005, down from the 2.1 million generated in 2004, according to annual revisions by the Labor Department released Friday (borrowed from the LA Times).

So, unemployment down, but so are new jobs. What's up?

Well, the number of people who the government says have dropped out of the labor force is up. Dropped out of the labor force??? Are you wondering what that means? Think of it this way. You have a wonderful job, flipping burgers or breaking your back and knees at a construction site, or maybe you make widgets in a plant that hasn't been moved to China or India yet, and then, the bosses lay you off. You look for work, but you can't find it. You look, for months, and months, maybe for more than a year. You can't find it. Finally, someone decides that you must not really want a job, so they say that since you have not found one you are so discouraged that you have decided to live without one, and so, YOU have dropped out of the labor force. (Halelujah, I'm a bum. Halelujah, bum again....)

Also up, the inflation rate. The 3.3% annualized wage gain for 2005 lags behind the 3.4% yearly inflation rate (also borrowed from the LA Times). So, workers wages aren't keeping up with increases in the cost of living - a pattern that has been going on pretty consistently since the late 1970s.

Also up, Mr. Greenspan and the Feds (turns out that Greenspan was a jazz musician in his youth, so a name like a band is on the mark) decided that as a fond farewell to Mr. Greenspan, they would raise interest rates yet another time. They were thinking that all those employed workers were going to make the labor market tight, which would put pressure on employers to increase wages, and that would increase inflation.

So, what's up - well, we're getting screwed, still. More jobs but fewer jobs, More work but less pay, AND, just to make sure that your boss doesn't have to give in when you ask for a raise, the Feds have made borrowing money more expensive, so your boss will say that its too hard to get hold of money right now, sorry.

And, frosting for this cake, the recent Bush Administration budget request for the war in Iraq (not including Afghanistan) will put the Federal tab for the war at $440 billion.

But, it is true, the economy is stonger. Another Mission Accomplished.

Saints

President Bush was scheduled to worship at a small Methodist Church outside
Washington, D.C. as part of Karl Rove's campaign to reverse Bush's rapidly deteriorating approval ratings. A week before the visit, Rove called on the Methodist Bishop who was scheduled to preach on the chosen Sunday. "As you know, Bishop," began Rove, "we've
been getting a lot of bad publicity among Methodists because of the president's position
on stem cell research and the like. We'd gladly arrange for Jack Abramoff's friends to make a contribution of $100,000 to the church if during your sermon you would say that President Bush is a saint."

The Bishop thought about it for a few minutes, and finally said, "This parish is in rather desperate need of funds ... I'll agree to do it."

The following Sunday, Bush pompously showed up for the photo op, looking especially smug even while attempting to appear pious.

After making a few announcements, the Bishop began his homily: "George W. Bush is a
petty, vindictive, sanctimonious hypocrite and a nitwit. He is a liar, a cheat, and a low-intelligence weasel with the world's largest chip on his shoulder. He used every dirty
election trick in the book and still lost, but his toadies in the Supreme Court appointed
him. He lied about his military record in which he used special privilege to avoid combat,
and then had the gall to dress up and pose on an aircraft carrier before a banner stating
"Mission Accomplished." He invaded a sovereign country for oil and war profiteering,
turning Iraq into a training ground for terrorists who would destroy our country. He
continues to confuse the American people by insisting on a nonexistent connection between
the horrors of 9/11 and the reason he started his war in Iraq. He routinely appoints incompetent and unqualified cronies to high-level federal government positions and as
a result, hundreds and hundreds of Americans died tragically in New Orleans. He lets
corporate polluters despoil God's creation and doom our planet. He uses fear-mongering
to justify warrantless spying on American citizens, in clear violation of our Constitution.
He is so psychotic and megalomaniacal that he believes that he was chosen by God. He is
the worst example of a Methodist I have ever personally known.

But compared to Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and the rest of the evil fascist bastards
in this administration, George W. Bush is a saint.