Next Victim: Iran

A recent Headline News survey question caused me much concern: “What should President Obama do about Iran?”

Was I having auditory hallucinations? Had I slipped into some bizarre parallel universe? Perhaps I was  just having a senior moment induced by the relentless summer heat. A quick google search put me somewhat at ease: Obama is indeed NOT the president of Iran but, in fact, is the president of the U.S. as I have strongly suspected since the last inauguration when his holiness took the oath of office.  The United States of America  - not Iran, not Iraq, not Afghanistan, not Pluto, and not Cygnus X1. From whence does this strange assumption come from that the U.S. (or just Obama) is responsible for Iran?

I don’t hear Iranians, for example, asking us to do anything about Iran. They’ve probably paid pretty close attention to what’s been happening with their “liberated” neighbors. Asking the U.S. to come help you with your political unrest is akin to inviting John Wayne Gacy to be the clown at your child’s birthday party. Hopefully, in this case, a simple no thankyou will suffice, but, as we’ve seen, the U.S. has come to believe that it doesn’t NEED an invitation to come to your rescue. You can bet your sweet ass that the CIA has been an uninvited guest in Iran since just right after the Big Bang and a cursory glance at rogue U.S. government history could lead a reasonable person to suspect that the U.S. government actually CAUSED the current melee in Iran to fulfill some nefarious political agenda.

What are Iranians going to do about Iran? What’s Obama going to do about the United States - besides expanding its debt and perpetuating the false notion that federal government is the answer to everything? What are WE going to do about president Obama? That would seem to be a much more pressing question.

While we’re arbitrarily spreading responsibilities paper thin across the globe why shouldn’t I be asking the the Republic of Haiti what it’s going to do about my 401k plan or what Mother Teresa is going to do about my raging Viagra boner? Since we’re talking about having the bankrupt U.S. make decisions for yet another remote and alien land that our average adult citizen can’t find on a map, these seem like apt comparisons.

 I guess we’re supposed to take some solice in Obama being pseudo muslim and is consequently prevented by this religious affiliation from pulling a George Bush on us, but has no one noticed that muslims (just like most other religions and races) regularly murder each other with all the concern one might have for dog feces stuck to the bottom of one’s shoe?  And you don’t get to be president of the U.S. without rattling your sabre and having a willingness to slaughter millions at the drop of a hat. Let’s be honest here: “Doing something” about Iran will entail murdering lots of innocent people … in order to protect them from being murdered. Such is the logic of our times.

Public School Inches Closer To Its Death

First it was no more dodge ball because it’s disrespectful to throw a ball at someone. Then games as benign as tag got the axe, after all, touching someone that doesn’t want you to touch them is technically assault. Eventually an even more ludicrous notion gradually crept in to playtime at public schools: sports and games of any kind should not have winners and losers because losing is bad for a child’s self-esteem. Eventually some schools just abandoned recess and Phys Ed altogether mostly because that time was seen better spent trying to raise our abysmal academic test scores but also perhaps because any incentive to actually perform any physical activity well had been replaced with punishment for hurting someone else’s feelings.

Alas, even math and science curriculums weren’t immune from this insanity as the “feel good” approach of the poorly titled Outcome Based Education philosophy of  “education” took hold. Failing grades and red marks on tests make kids feel bad, don’t cha know, so it really shouldn’t matter that 7 times 3 equals 21 because a good education should focus more on how “7 times 3” makes you feel, and there’s no wrong response to that.

From there we banned hugging, high-fiving, pats on the back and hand shaking for reasons to insipid to even bother going into - something about safety and orderliness. (And I very deliberately say “WE” as a stern reminder that these are our schools that we pay for with our wages earned with our labor.)

But our race toward the bottom doesn’t stop there. Now, if your kids are still lucky enough to be allowed to participate in sports programs, you soon won’t be able to take pictures of them at school sponsored sporting events? Why, you so innocently pine? Because photos of kids playing sports are potentially pornographic and the schools don’t want these pictures ending up on child porn sites, the first place most parents rush home to publish these photos too. You can’t make this stuff up, folks. Take a couple Tylenol and read about this here.

I imagine that things such as school yearbooks will eventually become relics of the past also for similar reasons.  After all, what’s to stop some child obsessed pedophile from buying a yearbook at a garage sale then taking it home to whack off to it? Clearly we need to outlaw all photos of all children to protect them from such vulgar exploitation. Children should be raised in incubators with tubes piping knowledge and faux experiences into their brains - how could we not have realized this sooner? Then if we could all just stop breathing since everyone that breaths eventually dies which makes breathing 100% fatal.

When did we, as a society, become seemingly incapable of performing ANY cost/benefit analysis on security related measures? If all you want out of life is for you and your children to be safe, not get your feelings hurt, nor experience failure or disappointment of any kind then why bother being born at all? The real solution for your ilk is suicide because it’s a given that corpses aren’t burdened with any of those annoyances ever. Nor do they have to constantly harass their local school boards or city council members to get this level of buffering between themselves and reality. All they have to do is lay there and let the maggots convert their flesh back into dirt. Maximum security with minimal effort.

Of course none of these modern lapses of common sense are without their good side. I often wonder, for example, what sort of advantages I’ll have in the  latter half of my life living amongst a population of completely sissified, pantywaists that see harm lurking behind every molecule in the universe. What great fortune it might be to find that I’m the only person left in the “developed” world who isn’t afraid to go outside. I could charge people a million dollars for taking their garbage to the curb, watering their grass, and picking up their anxiety meds at the pharmacy. Simple tasks such as these could warrant congressional medals of honor or at least a purple heart for breaking a sweat while braving the elements. Hordes of authors barricaded in their suburban tombs will right novels about my legendary cojones - that is if they haven’t become too afraid of disease ridden keyboards and the innate dangers of forming sentences out of words and insights out of sentences.

Then, as I always point out when reporting on the latest follies of public school, such absurd shenanigans fuel the ongoing exodus from these brain-rotting institutions, a retreat away from big government, nanny statism that should have started and completed long ago. As I spew my venom in these anti-public education rants part of me is simultaneously doing a celebratory jig and breathing sighs of relief as the absurdity becomes more apparent to all with each bit of outrageousness this system oozes forth and insultingly asks us to accept as necessary because it’s for our own good.

Anything that makes more wholesome alternatives to raising children more attractive are to be embraced, perhaps even encouraged. Ultimately, what could serve home schooling, unschooling, and private schooling better than zealously rallying behind every horrible idea local school boards put on the table. No touching allowed? Hell yes! We don’t even want students looking at or talking to each other in the halls or during breaks! And we want this wrapped in a zero tolerance policy too. Expel all 70 million of those misbehaving little fucks for holding hands or accidentally brushing up against each other in crowded hallways. Send them home and free up a hundred billion dollars per year in tax revenue, balance the god damned state and federal budgets, and let’s become human again. Where do I sign?

Different Than You

The best years of my life were not high school, my first copulation was not memorable, and I do not give a rats ass what my credit score is. I don't have a retirement plan, health insurance, or a doctor's appointment nor do I care to acquire such things. I see no religion in church, security in marraige, objectivity in science, or representation in government. There are no liberals liberating anyone nor conservatives conserving anything as far a I can tell.

Also conspicuously absent are neighbors in "neighborhoods". The American Dream is a tomb with an attached garage. How did these dark, lifeless car caves get moved to the front of our houses while our charming, chat inducing front porches got moved to the back? This is the work of ghouls and vampires, not humans. We should be burying our dead in these structures, not living in them. The house I'm staying in now doesn't even have front windows. Well, it has them, but they've been shrunken to neck-high, rectangular slits that run across the top of each wall, impractical and reluctant tokens of acknowledgement to the natural beauty that flourishes outside. In fact they stretch around the perimeter of the house as if we were in a german bunker waiting for the allied forces to spring from the homes around us. It looks incomplete without gatlin guns and razor wire mounted to the sills and crumpled centerfolds of movie starlets in suggestive poses thumb tacked to the walls. What paranoid delusions inspired such a design, and in such a quiet, little town where, prior to the construction of this house, there had been only one murder since the town's settling?

But I digress. I know this sounds terribly cliché, but I am sincerely troubled by how far removed I feel from such a wide variety of popular and iconic American values, memes, and mental constructs. I don’t like baseball or apple pie. I find homeownership unappealing for a list of reasons too numerous to explain, though I've touched on one above. The idea of settling into a 45 year, nine to five career path under the employ and constant surveillance of others sounds like the aspirations of self-loathing retards. Although I understand that having 2.5 children (the national average) is better than having just one who would have no siblings to keep him/her entertained, it seems to me that a more idyllic number of bank draining replicants would be zero.

I don’t even care for the color combination used for Old Glory. Red and blue don’t go well together in clothing or décor, especially not when emphasized with intermittent white, so why are these colors garishly cohabiting our nation’s flag?  To make matters worse, our flag’s version of these colors are too much like primary red and blue, which are used almost exclusively for toddler toys, and, although sadly appropriate for a nation of emotionally stunted dolts, still too harsh to be waving above every government facility and jutting out like a heil Hitler salute from the front of neatly manicured tombs.

I do display a few of the trappings of red-blooded, modern Americana, but don’t let my Jeep and Pabst Blue Ribbon beer fool you. These are merely souvenirs I’m gathering before I return to my home planet, Zarkron, in the 5^th dimension above the Andromeda galaxy.

A Free Ethics Lesson

Sometimes people ask me about writing insurance claims for hurricane victims, "Don't you feel bad about your livelihood depending on the misfortune of others?" An owner of a pizza restaurant asked me this once and I politely reminded him that his nice house, his new car, and his sexy wife were purchased with the empty stomachs of hungry children. Even construction contractors and carpenters, of all people, have asked me the same question somehow oblivious to the fact that much of their job security comes from the deleterious (albeit gradual) effects of weather on building materials. Profiting off of slow and cumulative damage to homes and businesses is fine, you see.

I would gladly inhabit a world where, perhaps as in the Garden of Eden, people didn't have needs, but no one has yet provided me with the necessary interstellar coordinates and the spaceship I would need to get there. Besides, what I really wanted to do for a living was pimp hoes. Instead I shake down big, evil insurance companies for cash to give to pizza craving, hurricane victims. So let us count our blessings and get that plank (or calzone as it were) out of your eye. While pizza man is TAKING money from needy people, I'm GIVING money to them, and at no small effort.

Maybe pizza man would like to come stay with me in a sleazy, humid motel one thousand miles from home with no electricity for a few back to back, one hundred hour work weeks and then wait five or six months to get paid. It aint ice road trucking or crab fishing but I bet it would send the wittle pizza-wizza man packing. I bet pizza-wizza man wouldn't complain, however, if all the grocery stores ran out of food (as they do sometimes in a weather catastrophe) and the only place anyone - including insurance adjusters - could find something to eat was at his leeching, parasitical pizza parlor hovering like a vulture over every calamity.

If this line of work has taught me anything it has taught me to be very slow to judge what other people do for a living. Let’s add to that a new level of patience, flexibility, gratitude, grace under pressure, resourcefulness, friendships, and yes, some evil-vibing, bloodstained twenty dollar bills I can withdraw from the bank so I can take my friends out for some pizza-wizza.

Note to self: Things I need to write about:

1) The alternate parallel universe I come from where Hillary Clinton won the election and how it's virtually indistinguishable from this one save a few skinheads trying to take out president elect I'llbombya.

2) How the current bailout fiasco/crisis/takeover is proof of every single bad thing I've ever said about reality and how yesterday's tinfoil hat wearing, conspiracy nutter is today's deer-in-the-headlights, mainstream news anchor.

3) Some postmortem observations of McStain and Sarah Failin's campaign.

4) A piece I'll probably title, "How bad does Ron Paul look now?"

5) Winter.