It only makes sense if you don't think too hard...

Again, Comrade Kucinich should be voted out of the public eye. His comments, and this article, reflect two big logical flaws in the whole discussion over bonuses.

The first is that it's somehow "bad" that people make a lot of money; this is a ludicrous idea assuming that the money is being made honestly, not stolen. The second is that "banks" should be discouraged from taking risks; this is silly. Taking risk, in anticipation of adequate reward, is the whole point of the banking/investment industry, and any well-functioning (read:capitalist) economy in general.

"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."--Adam Smith

Channeling the inner Hank Moody

So… the list of people who I know personally and have published books is short but distinguished. It now also includes Greg Gammer, who now has his novel The American Nightmare out in the world. Congratulations to Greg!

The book itself looks interesting, so this is not one of those half-hearted congrats posts – though (full disclosure) I haven’t read any of it while writing this post…. But I will as soon as he releases the Kindle version.

ObamaCare - the prequel

You can go to the doctor and get medicine for a plethora of ailments. You can get everything from anti-fungal cream to steroids to Viagra to cancer drugs to knee replacements to lobotomies to radiation treatment to allergy shots to a baboon liver installed instead of your real one. All from doctors and free-market pharmaceutical companies that develop this stuff.

But the one thing right now controlled by the government, H1N1 Piggy Flu vaccine - just try getting that. Nope. Some of you (read:me) don't qualify. Those that do (read:wife and kid) had to wait almost three hours in line - OUTSIDE. In the COLD. Where they could GET SICK. But government-run healthcare is BETTER, you see. It's better because EVERYONE was waiting in the cold. It's unfair if only some people are stuck outside.

Oh, and they may run out of vaccine. Again.

No pizza. How about some "F You" instead?

It used to be that when I got accosted by panhandlers it would be someone completely derelict - the kind of hobo you'd see on the street yelling at trees or fighting with ghosts, sporting a mangy beard that was half Taliban, half pubes. But now we live in the age of Obama, and with all this hope and change burrowing its way to our collective prostate, being a beggar is far less exclusive. Today I was stopped on the street by a guy. Well-dressed, clean-shaven, and other than wearing dark glasses at night he seemed "normal", whatever that means nowadays. He even carried a briefcase. I stopped because he threw a "dude!" At me as we passed each other - and I thought he recognized me. Not "Excuse me, sir." Not "Buddy can you spare a dime?" Dude.

Then, he reaches out to shake my hand! "Hey man, could you help me out?" Oh shit! Stranger danger, I thought. No handshakes from random stranger in swine-flu season, thanks. "What's up?" I throw back at him briskly. Or bruskly, whichever's the right vocabulary word.

He seemed affronted. "With all due respect - with ALL DUE RESPECT - I'm trying to get a slice of pizza..." He had to repeat "with all due respect" for me, because apparently that's like a secret code word for "buy me pizza". My toddler just uses "PIZZA! PIZZA!", I should teach him this trick.

Anyway, I high-tailed it outta there. I had to hurry to vote against Corzine (which in Russian translates loosely to "basket").

How about you? Do you buy pizza for strangers?

Hybrid Man-Eating Pythons

So I’ve previously ranted at length (http://freshmediocrity.blogspot.com/2009/07/pet-burmese-python-strangles-toddler-in.html) about the danger posed by pythons. I know, everyone thinks I’m over-blowing the python threat, like my rants about the “war on Xmas” (http://freshmediocrity.blogspot.com/2005/12/war-on-christmas-road-to-victory-part.html) over-blew the threat of Koala-loving drivers. But check this shit out. The CSM has this story (http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0915/p02s01-usgn.html) reassuringly-titled “HYBRID MAN-EATING PYTHONS? FLORIDA IS ON ALERT”.

In an [sic] case of real life imitating Hollywood, the US scientific
community is increasingly concerned that two nonnative python breeds currently
slithering free in south Florida could morph into a giant man-eating swamp coil.

The capture of five African rock pythons recently near an Everglades already teeming with the gentler Burmese pythons has scientists worried about so-called "hybrid vigor" – a phenomenon that occurs when interbreeding uncorks volatile recessive genes, passing traits such as aggression onto the offspring. Think Africanized bees.

The two species have interbred in captivity. While Burmese pythons aren't known to eat people in their native habitat, the African rock python, unfortunately, has been known to do just that (emphasis mine).

The “Africanized bees” of the python world! Great! It’s all fun and games until one of these things winds it’s way through a trailer park or clan rally or goat-rape (http://freshmediocrity.blogspot.com/2008/09/theres-no-justice-for-rednecks-victims.html) or whatever else they do down south. Then, when it coils around some fat, toothless, delicious redneck, and EATS THEM WHOLE, the goddam rednecks will somehow blame Obama.

Is it something in the water?

I wonder, what happens when someone signs on to write a column for the NYT? Does the paper filter the list of candidates to make sure no one with any reasonable cognitive ability is dismissed? Do they only accept columnists from an approved Party list, in effect serving as the propaganda arm of the [use your imagination] Party, without having to consider the commercial, logical, ethical, or journalistic impact of their content? Or maybe they hire normal people, and through a hazing period of tiger cages, Clockwork Orange-style indoctrination, and massive doses of LSD turn them into barking lunatics?

For example, reading anything written by Paul Krugman SHOULD result in a reaction of "Paul, what the fuck is wrong with you?" But yet, he gets to keep devaluing the NYT, journalism, and the Nobel Prize with crap like this piece pining for Richard Nixon's economic policies. Nick Gillespie at Reason wrote a critique of Krug-nonsense here, but frankly a critique could be written weekly about Krugman's inane rambling. But he writes on.

Or this week, when "The World Is Flat" author Thomas L. Friedman, who also writes a column for the NYT, conjured up a screed about how China is better governed than America. Allow me to quote Matt Welch's piece from Reason's Hit & Run column:

The next time anyone tries to tell you that Thomas L. Friedman is a serious
thinker, or a tribune for global democracy, or even a good columnist, or
basically someone who isn't worth sending on the next slow boat to Shanghai,
please refer him to this despicable column from today, then ask: Do you, too, prefer Chinese governance to American democracy? No really, Friedman says that:

There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today.

Then there's the recurring fun and games of Maureen Dowd's convulsing gibberish, and Roger Cohen's "reporting" of how happy the Jews of Iran are.

I don't understand - who pays for all this nonsense?