Completely setting aside my actual beliefs about evolution, creationism and intelligent design, mainly because I don’t have any, I find the Church Of The Flying Spaghetti Monster to be one of the most brilliant and funny parodies I’ve ever encountered.
Did you know that the US Naval Reserve has an email “Joke of the Day” service? I didn’t. But this morning I found one of their emails in my inbox. It was soooooo funny, that I feel bad not sharing it.
Dear SpoonFighter,
Did you know that your particular skills and interest in law enforcement or the intelligence field could help you secure a better future in the U.S. Naval Reserve?
We currently have opportunities available for Master-at-Arms, Intelligence Specialists, Cryptologic Technicians and Intelligence Officers. Serving in one of these positions, you will play a key role in our nation’s defense as you acquire exceptional training in your respective profession.
In exchange for your part-time commitment, you will be provided with many benefits and rewards. You will also work with the latest technologies and anti-terrorism techniques as you gain invaluable experience in crime prevention, physical security, threat assessment, and more.
One of the greatest benefits of joining our force is that you won’t have to sacrifice your personal life to serve. Your training sessions will almost always be with the Naval Reserve unit located closest to your home.
To learn more about the Naval Reserve, we encourage you to visit navalreserve.com.
Part time commitment. Training close to home. Yeah, and I’ll bet I can work from home, too, when my unit gets called up to man a ship bound for Iraq.
What’s sad and not very funny about this letter is that it completely ignores the fact that there’s a war on in Iraq that is heavily dependent on the service of National Guard and Reserve soldiers. According to Wikipedia,
National Guard members and reservists now comprise a larger percentage of frontline fighting forces than in any war in U.S. history (About 43 percent in Iraq and 55 percent in Afghanistan). There are now 183,366 National Guard members and reservists on active duty nationwide who leave behind about 300,000 dependents, according to U.S. Defense Department statistics.
Source Wikipedia
The New York Times reports that this number has fallen from a high of 220,000 to 138,000, largely because so many reservists and guardsmen have reached the end of their two-year involuntary service limit. Link
Not sure what to say on this one: The Department of Homeland Stupidity goes after The San Fransisco Bay Area Puppeteers Guild.
Unbelievable. I just read this CNN article, “No-Fly List” Keeps Infants Off Planes, and I’m stunned. Basically, it reports that infants and small children are being prevented from boarding planes because their names either match or are similar to names of suspected terrorists on the Federal “No-Fly List.”
The list is absurd, in the first place. You have to provide a Social Security number, date of birth, and the maiden name of your mother’s first pet before the phone company believe that you’re you, and not one of thousands who share your name. But if your name matches or is even similar to one on the government’s list of suspected naughty people, you get to sit in the lobby of the airport, subsisting on a diet of overpriced candy bars, until some disgruntled TSA employee who used to be a Telecom executive remembers where he put his rubber gloves and petroleum jelly. Never mind the fact that the terrorist was probably using an alias, anyway.
But what’s truly ludicrous is that small children are being kept off planes because “their” names are on the list.
“Yes sir, I am aware that your son Ben is only nine months old, but can you prove that he is not also Ali Bin Faisal, the notorious terror mastermind?”
Clearly there’s a problem in the system. Call me crazy, but if a three-year-old kid named Osama Bin Laden shows up at Denver International Airport with his parents for a flight to Washington, D.C., I’m pretty sure the President’s gonna be okay.
Here’s the point. If a person is so stupid that he or she would need to check a child’s background because that child’s name matched one on the “No-Fly List”, that person needs to be on a short yellow bus, not at the airport checking tickets and bags. It’s like making a doctor check a woman for prostate cancer. And if the system is so poorly designed that it forces its employees to waste their time on the absurd, then it probably isn’t doing a very good job keeping us safe.
It’s happened again.
Another acquaintance of mine has jumped on the Real Estate Agent bandwagon. At least once per month, someone I know tells me that they’re becoming a real estate agent. I wish them all the best, but there’s too damn many. I just found out that the pastor of a church I attended a few years back is now an agent.
I can’t even use the word “house” in a sentence without someone nearby handing me a business card or flyer. Just this weekend, my wife was driving by a garage sale, and made the mistake of slowing down. She didn’t notice that the house next door had a “For Sale” sign posted in the yard. A real estate agent, dressed completely in black, leaped out of the bushes and nearly managed to pull her from her car. She only escaped because a second real estate agent, from a competing firm, hit the first one with the sign. When I think of how narrowly we escaped owning another home, I shudder.
Seriously, though, what’s going to happen to all these people when the real estate bubble bursts? When all your friends are doing it, and it’s in the news every day, it’s probably too late. History is full of “next big things” that burned hot and then burned out, leaving trails of destruction behind them. I think of the Dot-COM craze, the Telecom boom, or the Democratic Party, and I weep for huddled, dirty masses who lost their shirts and their hopes of a better life.
If you haven’t taken the plunge, don’t. If you are a realtor, get out while you still can. And if you want to know how to really make your financial dreams a reality, I actually have the secret of the next big thing. Thousands of people just like you have used my methods to generate incredible amounts of money. For the incredibly small fee of $50.00, I will send you my patented, proven Wealth Generation Kit that will show you how easy it is for you to become rich beyond your wildest dreams. Act now, and I’ll even throw in two bonus booklets, How Get Any Woman Into Bed, and Song-Birds of West Virginia, absolutely free!
It’s August 1st, 2005. My 10,809th consecutive day here on Earth, not counting the 280-or-so exciting days I spent in utero. It would be tricky to pin down the exact number of days, were I to include that period, due to the fact that no one seems to be able to pin down the exact moment when the metaphysical bits of a person glom onto the icky little bundle of cells.
The only thing that’s really clear to me about Life is that people have been pretty much the same throughout recorded history. Technology has increased, culture has developed, but people still do the same things, want the same things, and struggle with the same questions. “Answers” are offered from time to time for what it all means, why we’re here, what we’re supposed to be doing. Some are better than others. Some may even be true. But for most of us, if not all of us, we’ll never know. We just hope, and muddle through. And have kids, so they can hope and muddle through, too.
Most people on the planet hope and believe that Someone (or a group of Someones, or maybe an all-pervasive Someoneishness) is out there giving meaning to everything we do here. I’m one of them. Yes, I am a member of a major religion which offers answers to the nagging questions of life. But at a deeper, much more personal level, I wish the big Someone would just show up. Not just for a handful of people but for everyone, in person, and explain this mess.
We could all stop wondering, at least for a few minutes. He’d probably have to show up every couple years, of course, to keep us from fighting about whether he was peacock blue or sky blue or prefered peanuts to cashews or something. And we’d probably tick him off a lot because we’re all rather selfish.
But he doesn’t. Again, my religion has some reasons for this. To me, intuitively, the only thing that makes sense is that this is all some sort of test to see what kind of people we’ll chose to be when there’s no “Someone” hanging around to make us be one way or another.
I quit the South Beach diet after one week. I couldn’t handle the following side-effects:
* feeling like a lobotomy patient
* having, as my wife described it, “rotting beef breath”
* being so constipated that it was like having concrete in my colon
How can you possibly loose weight if you never poop?
So, now I’m back to my usual, infrequent-excercise-and-beer diet. I plan to write a book.
In other news, I am moving ever closer to paying someone else to host this website, and buying a domain name. I had been thinking of going with “hotdogsoup.com,” but now I think I might try something different. If you have any suggestions, by all means let me know so that I can rip off your idea.
Of course, there really aren’t any domain names left. Some enterprising a**h*** seems to have purchased ever word in the dictionary, and most of the possible combinations of those words. They have not, of course, put up websites. In a few years, we’ll all just have to use IP addresses.
A friend of mine, whose home on the web is The Blank Paper, is just wrapping up a six week stay in Yemen. For those of you who don’t know, Yemen is a Muslim state on the Arabian penninsula. Here is an excerpt from his concluding blog entry:
The people here are really no different then in most places in the world. The barriers of language and religion only serve to mask that the average person anywhere merely want to be able to provide a good life for their families and loved ones. The international intrigues are only the playing ground of intellectuals and pundits. Most people live lives of quiet ambition, rarely judging people by their governments, but by the merits of each individual.
To read the rest of this entry, click here. Or, to check out his whole blog, click here.
I’m trying the South Beach Diet. Today is day one of the two-week-long “Phase One.” During this period, I can only eat vegetables or raw meat bitten from the hind quarters of a passing animal. No animals yet, and I’m getting very hungry. My co-workers are starting to look tasty.
I feel woozy and light-headed, today. If today is any indication, I’d guess that the South Beach Diet works by fooling your body into canabalizing your brain over the course of several weeks, thereby reducing your weight by the mass of your brain (3 lbs.), and reducing you to wandering in circles, drooling, at South Beach.
Despite what my conservative friends think, I’m not actually a liberal. I was a conservative, grassroots activist, once upon a time. In fact, I lean right, when I don’t know what else to do. But when it comes down to it, politics shouldn’t be like cheering for the home team. There’s nothing enlightened or noble in supporting your party or ideology like Chicago supports the Cubs.
I don’t form my opinions based on an ideology I’ve already accepted as true. I don’t assume that a person or group has noble motives or integrity because I happen to share their opinions. I don’t feel any obligation to have my opinions on one issue be consistent, on the Left-to-Right spectrum, with my opinions on another issue. I think it is entirely reasonable to be anti-death penalty and pro-life. Or in favor of Universal Health Care and against Universal Welfare. Or in favor of the War On Terror, and against the War In Iraq. Or pro-America and anti-Bush. I would rather talk with and listen to a politician of noble intentions from either party, than one of ill intentions from my own.
You know what? I was a Bush supporter in 1998, before he was even a candidate for President. I voted for him in 2000. I believed him through 9/11, Afghanistan, and the beginning of the war in Iraq. But I don’t believe him any more, because he lied. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
Do you remember the year leading up to the invasion? I do. The Bush administration advanced two reasons–and only two–to justify invading Iraq: Weapons of Mass Destruction, and an active relationship with Al Qaida. Those were the reasons he gave to the American people and to the United Nations Security Council. Freedom and democracy for the Iraqi People? That was just a sugar coating to help us, and the Iraqi people, swallow the fact that many Iraqis would die as a result of our invasion. If you think I’m wrong, go look at the rhetoric used by the Bush administration when war was still a question of if, not when. It wasn’t until shortly before the invasion that the rhetoric changed.
If you still don’t believe me, take a political science or history class. Nation-States don’t invade each other for altruistic purposes. It just doesn’t happen. Nation-States go to war for self-defense, defense of their allies, strategic national interest, and pride. Other “reasons” are just rallying points to get everyone on board.
When Bush took office, Saddam had been abusing human rights in Iraq for decades, and there were places in much greater need of “liberation.” Some of those places would have been much easier to liberate, too. But no one one in the administration said anything about war until 9/11 made the American people angry, scared, and willing to consider things that a year before would have been unthinkable. One of two things is possible. Either Bush wanted to attack Iraq all along, or intelligence after 9/11 convinced him that Iraq was an immediate threat. I can’t say which. But freedom and democracy for Iraq weren’t on the radar until much, much later.
I have my suspicions, of course. From the beginning there were rumors in the media that Bush, and those around him, fancied a little war in Iraq. I didn’t believe it at the time; perhaps I do now. A friend of mine from the Republican side of Capitol Hill in DC told me–six months before the invasion–that Bush administration officials were acting as though war was a forgone conclusion. “I wish they’d just get on with it,” he said.
Both of the reasons Bush gave for invading Iraq turned out to be wrong. There weren’t any nukes, cannisters of nerve gas, or vials of smallpox. There isn’t even evidence that WMDs were in Iraq at some point, in recent years. And we now know that there was no relationship to Al Qaida or 9/11 or plans to commit terrorism against the US. All we found were some old shells that had, years ago, contained chemical weapons, a couple of trucks that could have been used to make chemical weapons, or pharmaceuticals, or Coca-Cola, and a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy in Al Qaida.
Now, it’s quite possible we just had bad intelligence data, and made a mistake. But an honest leader–or even a cunning one–would have said, “We invaded Iraq for reasons that turned out to be wrong. I’m sorry. But now we have a job to finish, and an opportunity to bring democracy and freedom to the Iraqi people. I ask for your continued support.”
Hell–Bill Clinton admitted and apologized for lying about cheating on his wife. And that had no direct relationship to his job. If Bush had offered any kind of apology or admission of error, he would have had my respect and continued support. But he didn’t. Without missing a beat, he has attempted to rewrite the past by suggesting that freedom and democracy were major justifications for his decision to go to war. They might be the reasons we stay, but they weren’t the reasons we went. If you disagree about that, it’s time for you to put on your white Nikes, drink your Cool-Aid, and wait for Hale-Bopp to swing back around. Either that, or produce some credible evidence (ie., not a statement by Karl Rove or Bill O’Reilly) to share with the rest of us.
In short, I’m saying that I used to believe him, and now I don’t. I don’t believe him when he or members of his administration tell me that war was a last resort, that it was never a forgone conclusion, or that everyone in Guantanamo is a confirmed terrorist or “very bad person.”
So quit telling me that I’m liberal, or a lefty. I’m just paying attention to the facts and making my own decisions.
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Here’s a column by someone who says it better than I can:
Opinion Piece by Molly Ivins, Syndicated Columnist
My favorite quote:
I did not oppose the war because I like Saddam Hussein. I have been active in human rights work for 30 years, and I told you he was a miserable s.o.b. back in the ’80s, when our government was sending him arms.