Blogger Pays Price for Insulting Lachrymose, Fiber-Starved Cult Leader

It looks like Moxie has shaken the flying monkey cage. She invented a Glenn Beck drinking game. You drink when Beck does any part of his trademarked shtick: becoming hysterical, crying, or describing his highly publicized hemorrhoids as “terminal.” His fans have launched a bizarre campaign of persecution in her blog comments. It’s truly insane. Maybe it’s a Mormon thing; if I were her, I’d check my stats for Utah IPs. People who have lived in Utah claim Mormons actively conspire to promote each other and suffocate everyone else who tries to do business there. I don’t know if that’s what’s happening to Moxie, or if it’s just the embarrassing nuts who hang out at Freak Republik.

Once again, I have to say that I am mystified by the Beck phenomenon. It is not a good thing. Beck is many things a conservative should not be. Whiny. Melodramatic. Paranoid. He seems to be very well informed, and he’s not stupid, but he projects an image not unlike that of Nathan Lane in The Birdcage. He is a silly man, and usually, it’s not intentional.

As I have grown to know him, I have come to find his TV shows hard to watch, so I haven’t seen enough of him to be a Beck expert. But he’s usually on the radio on Tuesday mornings, when my father and I drive to our weekly breakfast. Beck’s whining is incredible. I can’t believe people can stand to listen to it. How can a grown man act like that?

Man, I wish I could still hear Phil Hendrie once in a while. I miss Hendrie, I don’t mind Laura Ingraham and Hannity, and I can put up with Rush because he’s smart. And I love Cigar Dave, although he’s not primarily political. That’s about all I can take.

I see the world in terms of blessings and curses, and the state of the GOP–America’s only political hope–shrieks “curse” to me. We can’t do anything right. We brought the world Pajamas Media and The Half-Hour News Hour. Fox News is turning into a freak show. We picked a poorly vetted Vice Presidential candidate and gave her about half an hour to prepare for a series of difficult debates and interviews. We chose a Presidential candidate who is known for his bad temper, liberalism, and persistent use of the term “gook.” Nothing seems to go right for us. Now we appear to think Glenn Beck has the face we want to project to the world. Why stop there? Can’t we get Art Bell?

Maybe he’s dead.

I used to complain a lot about the right eating its own young. The Zero Sum Gang keeps new talent down, so we are stuck with a few well-known conservative media figures, no matter how incompetent or embarrassing they become. They’re a lot like the Big Three. They know they can do anything they want, so they feel free to indulge their worst faults. So, to choose an example, now we have Ann Coulter using a slang term for “vagina” in her books, to describe liberal politicians. That’s the kind of thing we promote as our public image.

I infuriated a lot of people when I started criticizing Coulter. They thought she was “tough” and had lots of “guts.” I don’t think calling Al Gore “a total fag” on camera indicates bravery per se. I think it indicates that you have some kind of problem, and that people shouldn’t be encouraging and enabling you. At a minimum, they should possess the tiny quantum of brains required to avoid choosing you as a figurehead.

People who aren’t real bright say we should reflexively support any conservative who makes it big. My response is that reflexes are for creatures like worms and frogs. Human beings think before they act. Here’s a nutty question: what if we only supported media figures who are good for the party and good for America?

No, that’s too far-out. That’s limp-wristed fairy talk. Only total liberal fags think like that. Let’s OFFEND. Because the best defense is a best offense. Or something.

We can do better than Beck and Coulter, but we never will. Maybe it’s because conservatism used to be largely about God, and now it’s about excluding God in order to have a “big tent.” The code phrase is “socially liberal but fiscally conservative.” To me, that has always sounded like, “I like smoking dope and sleeping around and having abortions, but my saving virtue is that I am also selfish.”

The GOP used to be God’s party, sort of. Now it seems like he doesn’t have a party. I suppose conservativism is still considerably closer to Christian values, but these days, that seems incidental.

I don’t think Glenn Beck is sincere. Maybe I give him too much credit, but I can’t believe he’s serious about his wacky theories and his free-flowing tears and his maudlin manipulations. His job isn’t to move America to the right. His job is to attract an audience. So he does what works. That’s my opinion. Give Rush credit; he is apparently a somewhat unsavory person, but he seems to mean what he says. He’s pretty good about maintaining his dignity on the air. Beck is more like Norma Desmond. Unfortunately, unlike Norma, he’s getting his closeup.

I hate to see conservative males personified by a weepy Chicken Little who needs to go take a handful of ‘Pirin. I have criticized Ted Nugent for his gross remark about what Hillary Clinton should do with a rifle barrel, but I’d be much happier if he and not Beck had been chosen as our new secular icon.

But I promised myself I wouldn’t cry about it.

Finally Found a Person Who is Scared of Me

To the incredibly pitiable individual who is trying to change the password on my Youtube account: it is an amazement to me that people whose time is as utterly worthless as yours are part of my species.

Honestly, why do genes for this kind of cowardice even exist? How can someone be so terrified of me that their only means of getting at me is to weasel around with my Youtube account? This person would probably have to wear a diaper to confront me in person without making a mess on the floor. Here’s what I have to say to them: BOO!

Even if they somehow manage to get into the account, I can have a new one up in half an hour. Don’t know if I’d bother, but I could.

Maybe it’s some kind of bot from Eastern Europe. This is the kind of thing that keeps former communists busy these days.

Conservative Humor Takes Another Beating

Drudgebart.tv.com asks, “who is behind Obama Teleprompter Blog?”

After looking at it, I think the better question is, which friend of Andrew Breitbart’s forced him to mention this on the Drudge Report? It has to be someone he owes a major favor. It’s like reading the ingredients on a soup can.

I should add that I say that because I think it’s supposed to be humor, but it’s impossible to tell.

I have to wonder if the Half Hour News crew is involved.

I Project Creepiness

I don’t get Glenn Beck. I just don’t. If I want to see grown men cry like babies, I’ll go to the liquor store and start breaking bottles of Chivas. If I want hysteria, I’ll start reading Amanda Marcotte.

I am not alone.

Saddest Thing Ever: Stealing Business Plan From Pajamas Media

FAIL FAIL FAIL

Has anyone EVER had a subscription news site that made money? I mean, regular news like you get in a newspaper?

This is why PJTV will fail. In fact, I would say the notion was “pre-failed” before it ever started.

Auntie Entity for President

Ob*ma continues working his magic on the stock market. As I write, the Dow is down about 30 points.

I’m not sure why I keep citing the Dow. It’s a somewhat narrow index. The S&P contains a bigger number of companies, so it is presumably more reflective of the state of the economy. I guess citing the S&P on a blog is a waste of time, though, because most people don’t know what it is.

Someone or other has put out a list of troubled companies. I’ll cut and paste part of the article.

A lot of big, well-known companies are in danger. On the list: Advanced Micro Devices; AirTran; AMR (parent of American Airlines); Chrysler; Duane Reade; Eastman-Kodak; Ford; General Motors; JetBlue; Krispy Kreme; Palm; R.H. Donnelly; Reader’s Digest Association; Rite-Aid; UAL (parent of United Airlines); Unisys; and US Airways.

That doesn’t disturb me too much.

1. AMD makes silicon chips. I don’t think we’re in any danger of running out of those.

2. Airtran, AMR, Jetblue, UAL, and US Airways don’t bother me, because airlines go broke all the time. The industry is crowded, and people keep getting into it anyway, thinking they can still make a profit. I’m not sure why they do this, but it is a fact of life.

3. Chrysler, Ford, and GM overpay for labor, they are badly managed, and they make boring products, so they need to fail. One of the important functions of the free market is to get rid of dead wood so better companies can move in.

4. Duane Reade and Rite Aid operate drugstores. I would guess that they are getting hammered because of the presence of better companies like CVS and Walgreen’s. The drugstores are still here. They just have different signs out front, the service is better, and the prices are lower.

5. Krispy Kreme makes grade B- doughnuts, and for some reason, people got the crazy idea that this was an important and unique product line. A retreat to sanity was inevitable.

6. Eastman-Kodak? They still exist? Do they even have a purpose now that every electronics firm in the universe is making digital cameras?

7. The problems at R.H. Donnelly do not upset me, because I have never heard of R.H. Donnelly. I hope they don’t supply something really important, like oxygen.

8. Reader’s Digest. Replaced by the Internet. Like your daily newspaper.

9. Unisys. That’s a tech, isn’t it? Techs fail. No news there.

I suppose all sorts of bad companies are going to get spanked before Obama is finished working his economic miracle, in which he will bring North Vietnam-style prosperity to the misguided capitalists of the United States. The streets may one day be filled with panhandling Pointy-Haired Bosses.

Too bad Obama won’t be among them.

If you’re still in a Geithnerian dither about buying a gun, you better snap out of it. Life may be very weird in the depression. Stuff you can afford to have stolen now may be more important in 2011. It may be possible for Obama to outlaw the sale of all truly useful guns. He’s already trying. But outlawing possession is much harder. It’s good to have what you need before the bans go into effect.

The other day it occurred to me that wealth may be redefined over the next year or two. For example, right now, a Manhattan condo is a concentrated bit of wealth. A lousy little apartment two hundred yards from a violent ghetto may be worth seven figures. Will that be true when Americans start using their yards to grow vegetables? Maybe five acres of farmland will be more desirable. I think people in suburbs and cities will envy everyone else. The best situation, probably, is rural land twenty or so miles from a city. Close enough for trade. Far enough away for security and a relative degree of freedom.

Some people say gold has no intrinsic value, and that it may be worthless in the future. I understand the argument, but I think they’re wrong. Gold only becomes worthless in very strange situations, like those involving lifeboats and concentration camps. Paper money represents promises, and promises are only as good as the institutions that make them. But gold is gold is gold. We will always need currency; it’s stupid to think an economy can run on barter. Imagine trying to run a store, where everyone barters. It would take five years for ten people to check out at the groceries. “I need these corn flakes. Here is a cord of firewood.” “We don’t need firewood.” “Okay, here are fifteen pairs of shoes.” “Sorry, we don’t take Crocs.” “How about this small block Chevy?” “I guess that will do. How do you want your change?” “Chainsaws and diesel, please.”

That’s barter. It does not work on the kind of scale you need to keep an economy running. You’d have to take a forklift with you every time you went to the mall. No, you’ll have to have currency, and if paper money loses its power, currency will mean coins, and coins will mean precious metals only. And there are only two of those that matter. Gold and silver. I very much doubt we’ll have platinum coins. It’s hard to melt, for one thing.

Stones will lose their value. They already have. The value of precious stones is artificially maintained. Those stupid diamonds women insist on receiving are not rare at all; when a man is forced to spend $20,000 on a rock, the vast majority of the money buys nothing except a fiction maintained by a greedy cartel. It’s the single dumbest buy most people make in a lifetime. Well, after an expensive wedding. You have to love the way people celebrate their devotion by starting their lives with five figures’ worth of new debt. Idiocy.

I think if I got married, I’d suggest a modest ring and some bullion. Romance is romance, but flushing huge sums of money down the toilet is only romantic to the stupid.

Here’s another thing: you can’t melt stones down into standardized coins.

Useful possessions will have increased value, but that doesn’t mean gold won’t.

I think a lot of things that are valuable now will be relatively worthless in a couple of years. Antiques. Luxury vehicles, including cars, motorcycles, aircraft, and yachts. Art. Most collectibles. I expect Las Vegas to have very hard times; who will want to fly to a far-off city to lose money, when people are standing in line to get free soup? I think this is a scary time for cruise ship operators and people who run resorts.

It’s an interesting time to be alive, and it’s fun to try to make predictions. It’s fun now, I mean, because things haven’t gotten really bad yet. Later it won’t be fun at all.

Bird Guts as Reliable as Pundits

This morning I watched the Dow-Jones Average, as it sort of almost went positive. I wish I had copied the little headlines I saw. I don’t recall the exact words, but the basic message was something like “Dow Breaks Out as Rally Continues! Obama to Appear at Press Conference, Turn Evian into Wine!”

Can I tell you something about financial gurus? Almost none of them know anything. They make money when the market is strong, and they lose money when it’s weak. Listen, anyone can swim downstream. If you want to know who has a brain, find out who can make money in a prolonged bear market. I don’t know of anyone who fits that description. They exist, but I can’t think of any, offhand. A lot of people have gotten very wealthy by buying blue chips and forgetting they owned them, but I don’t think that makes them experts.

Here’s another fact for you. Many of the talking heads you see on cable have a gigantic interest in seeing the market do well. Many of the heads live off commissions and fees, and when people think the market is dead, they stop trading, and the heads don’t make as much money. So generally, you should weight their predictions heavily toward the negative. They usually overestimate the strength of the market, and they do it because confident investors and traders make them money. Want to find out how the housing market is doing? Ask a mortgage broker. “THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A BETTER TIME TO BUY! Excuse me while I sell some more blood so I can get some McNuggets.” Same thing.

Back when I was in law school, I traded. I don’t really know anything about finance, but I know what momentum looks like, so I made money easily. I went an entire year with only one negative trade, and it was a small one. People don’t believe me when I say that, but it’s the gospel truth. I remember the stock. Microsoft. I lost about $600. I also sold out before the tech crash, with a juicy profit that paid a big chunk of my law school tuition (all three years’ worth). People don’t believe that, either. Because it makes them feel stupid. Sorry; some people avoid getting burned in tulip-bulb crazes. That’s just how it is. The fact that I was one of them in 1998 or whatever the year was doesn’t make me a bad person. If you thought Dell was going to 5,000, maybe you need to go back and retake third-grade math.

I knew a law student who said he was going to start a fund. He may have done it. I can’t remember. He was making money hand over fist. He had a Quotrek with him all the time. He had investors who wanted to let him handle their money. Guess what he’s doing now? Practicing law. The tech crash separated the wheat from the chaff, and he was chaff.

When stocks went bad, I didn’t know what to do, so I didn’t invest. Maybe that will make you feel better, if you think I’m claiming I’m a financial genius. I was smart enough to know when it was easy to make money, but when it got hard, I was as lost as anyone.

The investment gurus are the same way, to a much greater extent than you would think possible. There are professional fund managers who end years with net losses. How is that possible, for someone who claims to be a guru? It shouldn’t be. If they actually knew half of what we think they know, they should make money every year. There are people who do, even if they’re not famous.

It appears that Bernie Madoff was so inept, he couldn’t make money in a bull market. That’s incredible. Things went well prior to the 2007 bust, yet Madoff was not able to make money. He decided a Ponzi scheme was the way to go. And he was one of the most respected investors in history. He would literally have been better off putting the money in CDs.

Tim Geithner. He was supposed to be the savior. Or rather, the undersavior. Didn’t pay his taxes, but that was okay, because he was somebody’s Wonder Boy. He claimed he was too dumb to understand the tax code–that is actually the excuse he gave Congress–but we just KNEW he was smart enough to fix the economy. Never had a private sector job. Never proved that he knew anything, except how to steer a government desk. Was in charge of New York’s Federal Reserve Bank while Wall Street (which is in New York, hello?) imploded, and did nothing about it. But he looked smart sitting around at hearings, and his name sounded sort of Jewish, so presumably, he knew all about money! I really believe that was what people thought a couple of months ago. People are just that crazy. After all, they buy BMWs because they think the Nazis were smart. That is absolutely true.

Geithner has turned out to be the biggest disappointment since Ishtar. No one seems to understand how he suddenly got so stupid. The better question is, why did we think he was a brain in the first place? If he was smart, wouldn’t he have done something helpful while he was running the New York Fed? Why didn’t we try to hire Jack Welch or Warren Buffett? How about Jim Rogers? Don’t tell me we couldn’t afford them. Look what Geithner has cost us. A salary of a billion a year would have been a bargain.

If you ever expect to make money in stocks, you have to learn how to pick stocks for yourself, and you have to have a set of buying and selling rules, and you have to follow them. For example, when your stock drops 8%, you sell. That’s Peter Lynch’s rule. You don’t wait around, pretending the money is still in there somewhere, compressed like a spring, waiting to bounce back to its correct size. It’s gone, baby. It no longer exists. Your stock’s past value has no relationship whatsoever to its future value. Find another stock which is more likely to do well. Don’t sit on a stock that has dropped 50% because you still have faith in the story that caused you to buy it. Make a set of target buy and sell prices, and stick to them. Otherwise, you’re just playing the ponies.

Don’t pay attention to the crowing Cramers and the tendentious Wall Street bookies who depend on account churning to keep them in Ferraris. Use your common sense. If you don’t have common sense, don’t play the market. Get a savings account. Buy a house you really intend to live in, so you can ride out the hard times. Winning is a good thing, but not losing is much more important.

Geithner knows absolutely nothing. Obama is hopelessly incompetent. We have not found our deus ex machina yet, and anyone who says things are shaping up is making a wild guess that goes against all the evidence.

HA! I see the market went positive again while I typed this. Guess what it means when the market seems weak part of the day and strong the other part of the day? It usually means it’s WEAK.

SHTF Food

I decided to check into survival food. I am not planning to maintain a one-year supply; I think if things get so bad I have to eat out of a closet for a year, it means the world is coming to an end and death is the preferable option. But having a month’s worth of food is not a bad idea. I learned a few things.

1. White rice keeps for eternity. Just keep it dry.

2. Dried beans will stay at top quality for one year. After that, they slowly get harder and take longer to cook. If they get so hard you can’t cook them normally, you can make flour out of them and bake them. How you’re supposed to do that, I do not know. But dried beans are cheap, so there’s no excuse for not having relatively fresh ones.

3. Canned tuna and salmon last nearly forever. Ten years, at least.

4. Acidic canned goods should be used within two years.

5. Oatmeal is a great idea. It lasts a long time, it’s light, it’s cheap, and it makes you poop, which is important when you’re eating survival-type food.

That’s about all I’ve come up with, but it will do.

I got curious and tried to find out whether the local lizards are edible. They probably are, if you discard the guts. Cats eat them and develop temporary hind-leg paralysis, which confuses them greatly. But cats eat the whole lizard. Here’s why I think the rest of the lizard is safe. Most lizards here are anoles, which are related to iguanas, and Latin Americans chow down on iguana meat all the time. In fact, some of them do it right here in Miami.

It’s a guess. I know.

One bright spot in the survival picture: I would have a great excuse to kill squirrels. Hateful little beasts. Hateful, but tasty. And I could drive around shooting Muscovy ducks and peacocks, which spend their lives generously fertilizing our sidewalks and porches. And forget the fishing regulations.

I could get a cheap country ham and hang it in a closet. It wouldn’t rot. A ham site says they last forever, but the new ones don’t have enough fat on them to prevent excessive water loss. Guess you could paint it with melted paraffin.

I think these items, plus multivitamins, would keep me going until the food pipeline got working again.

I don’t really think we’re headed for starvation. I think we’re going to end up on the same level of prosperity as other socialist nations.

No Joy

I couldn’t get this blog to load today, and I think Blogrolling is the culprit. I’m not positive, but something called “ytmg” held everything up. I know Blogrolling now has pop-up ads. Maybe that’s the connection.

It’s time to kiss Blogrolling goodbye. I never understood how they made money, and I appreciate the free service, but I’m not going to screw up my blog to help them compensate for years of giving away their product.

I really dread this. To create a WordPress blogroll, you have to enter one blog at a time. I better check and see if there is a plugin.

If you’re on my blogroll, don’t worry. I’ll try to bring you back. Not that my current traffic levels justify the effort.

More

I found out how to import Blogrolling data to a WordPress blog. Oddly enough, when I Googled, the answer (nearly) was on a post over at Moxie’s. Once you upgrade to WordPress 2.7-something, a menu named “Tools” will appear, and there will be an import tool for blogrolls in there. The comment at Moxie’s suggests 2.5 is the same, but I had a later version than that, and I couldn’t find the import deal. The “Tools” menu did not exist. There were import tools, but if there was one that worked with Blogrolling, I didn’t see it.

Once you have 2.7 (which I now do), it’s a very simple job 1. Go to Blogrolling. 2. Go to “Get Code.” 3. Select the OPML code, which is pretty far down the page. 4. Copy. 5. Enter this code (a URL) in the WordPress import tool form.

So I saved all my blogs, and for the first time in months, I can now edit them.

Critical Condition

I heard from Mish Weiss on Sunday. I checked in on her tonight. Her blog says that she is unconscious and entubated because of hemorrhaging from her eyes and nose. If you look up AML leukemia, you will find that this is a common problem, and that it frequently causes death. Mish is in critical condition. Please keep praying.

My Ears are Fascinating

First off, please say a fresh prayer for Mish Weiss. She got a look at her prognosis, and she has been very down.

Now for a painstaking discussion of my own trivial concerns.

I am feeling much better. I’m pretty sure the giant dose of MSG I got on Saturday is what kept me awake Saturday night. Something to think about in the future. I am also starting to wonder how safe aspartame is. I looked at the list of things it’s suspected of causing, and a fair number hit home. I have concerns about my short-term memory, for example.

When you consume aspartame, you eventually end up with a certain amount of methyl alcohol in your blood. This is a poison. It can damage your vision and so on. Defenders of aspartame point out that things like tomato juice contain a certain amount of methyl alcohol. Anti-aspartame do-gooders claim there is some difference–I forget what–that makes the alcohol found in juices harmless. I’ve also read that aspartame eventually turns into formaldehyde, which is not a great thing to have in your body. I’m sure some Google cowboy will post the whole story in comments.

Like I said yesterday, I avoid artificial sweeteners. Not because I have solid evidence that they are bad, but because the general rule is that when you cheat nature, something bad happens. I’m not referring to things like building houses or bathing, which arguably defeat nature’s efforts to mess with us. I mean things like taking drugs to enhance performance, or doing weird things to try to halt the aging process, or other efforts that are clearly unnatural. It’s hard to define the difference, but I know it when I see it.

The most disturbing example I can think of is killing unborn babies to steal their cells to help people who have already been born. What could be more warped and unnatural? The natural order works like this: one generation sacrifices itself for the benefit of the succeeding generation. When you do it the other way around, it’s as perverse as cannibalism.

I identified one reason for the sounds I heard. While I tried to sleep, I heard blood pumping in my ears. Looks like I have swimmer’s ear on one side. I know exactly how I got it. I have a neighbor who is a real mess; there are junk cars in the front yard, the backyard used to be a bona-fide jungle (not nearly as nice as it sounds), the house is run-down, and he can’t control his dog. It’s really sad, listening to a grown man walk around his yard, pleading with a standard poodle which has no idea what he’s saying, because it hasn’t been trained.

Anyway, his dogs bark a lot, so I wear ear plugs to bed. Now I pay the price. I am taking appropriate measures, and my ear is getting better.

In the past, I used to call the cops when he had a loud party late at night, or his dogs yapped. Then I decided to be a Christian about it and try to attack the situation on my own end, and of course, I threw in prayer. So far, these efforts have yielded an earache. But I really prefer to do it this way. I believe interpersonal relations are very hard to fix without God’s help.

Also, there must be reasons why I’m such a light sleeper. If I can figure those out, I’ll be a lot better off than I would be if I merely silenced one source of aggravation. Why swat flies? That’s how George Bush puts it. Go for the broad solution.

I don’t get much caffeine, and I haven’t had nicotine since God knows when. I have laid off the aspartame. Maybe things will improve. I wonder if there is a way to soundproof a window, or at least reduce the sound, without replacing it.

I stole more garbage last night, and I’m proud of it. Proud, I tell you. A neighbor had a couple of non-rotten mahogany logs in his trash pile, and one was suitable for sawing up, so I nailed it. I think it’s time to start making mahogany bird toys for Maynard and Marvin.

MSG Boy Makes his Debut

Yesterday I was exposed to four substances: aspartame, MSG, malathion, and caffeine. Last night I heard blood pounding in my ears, and during much of the night, I was too alert to sleep. It’s not stress. What stress could I possibly have? I’m wondering what caused the problem.

I don’t think it was the caffeine. I had a cup of coffee, a quart glass of tea, and part of a Diet Coke. That’s not a big load.

Malathion is supposed to be one of the safest bug killers there is. They send trucks up and down the streets here at night, blasting it into the air to keep the mosquitoes down. If it were a real problem, I think the liberal freaks who live here would be spasming and screeching and rending their hemp diapers in front of TV cameras every week. Also, malathion effects only last a few hours.

That leaves aspartame and MSG.

Lately I have tried to cut down on artificial sweeteners. I know they’ve been tested, but there is something that just doesn’t smell right about having your cake and eating it, too. The older I get, the less I believe in free lunch. And these days, the FDA admits that some people have reactions to aspartame. I don’t drink or eat all that much sweetened stuff, so I’m not afraid to use real sugar. But yesterday I had to have Mickey D’s, and that meant Diet Coke. And I had some sugarless yoghurt on hand, which I ordinarily would not eat, and I had a couple of cups.

Once a week, I go to breakfast with my dad, and I use Splenda in my coffee because I’m too lazy to stir sugar until it dissolves.

Maybe I should lay off this stuff completely. I don’t really need it.

The MSG came from takeout Chinese. I had to have some extra spicy shredded chicken extravaganza. I just had to. I’ve heard people complain about MSG, but I figured they were just whiners.

Whatever it was, I can’t wait for it to get out of my system. I felt wonderfully relaxed when I went to bed; I watched my Doug Stowe box-making video for a few minutes, and if you can watch this guy make boxes without passing out, you are abnormal. He talks slowly and takes his time with the work, and it puts me in a trance. Five hours later, I found myself wide awake, and when I tried to sleep, I had nightmares. And I had nasal congestion. And I still don’t feel right.

Maybe it’s time to line the walls with foil and start wearing a respirator.

Grinch Obama Steals Christmas in February

Wow, I just read about Obama’s plan to reduce charitable tax deductions. I can’t find the exact formula, although I see the rate goes down from 35 percent to 28 percent, for those evil productive citizens we call “the rich.”

Let’s see. I don’t recall the exact figure, but in one of the years preceding the 2000 election, Dick Cheney and his wife gave something like 10 million dollars to charity. That’s the correct order of magnitude. So under Obama, the deduction would go from $350,000 to $280,000. What happens when the rich see consequences like this on their returns? Obviously, they donate less. So Barack Obama’s plan to finance idiotic things like research to combat nonexistent global warming is to take food out of the mouths of the poor.

If global warming is caused by human industry, we already solved the problem. We elected a team whose backward economic ideas are going to make industry cease.

Under conservatism, the government considers people smart enough to decide what to do with their money, so it tries not to take too much of it. Under liberalism, the government considers our money its money, and it taxes us as much as possible, leaving what amounts to an allowance. But in the past, liberals were willing to allow us to decide what to do with our charitable donations. Now, by discouraging giving, they’re pulling the leash tight. Bureaucrats and left-wing fat cats with government connnections will get the money. The poor can go pack sand. And that makes sense, because liberalism was never about helping the poor. It was about consolidating money and wealth in the hands of a central government: the Mommy Dearest state. Conservatism is about liberty; liberalism is about being taken care of, necessarily including being told what to do.

Will this affect people who donate to religious charities? Surely not. Wouldn’t there be a first amendment issue? I know Obama hates other parts of the Bill of Rights, but I didn’t realize he was trying to repeal this one.

I know this. Liberals would love to cut off donations to churches, because they hate God, and because they want the state to be in charge of charity. A person who gets a hot meal and a clean bed from the church might convert! Marx forbid!

It’s very scary. For a long time, I’ve been pointing out that America seems to be a permanently defeated nation. Our sins wiped out our blessings, so now we’re going to be like the poor quasi-prisoners who make up the citizenry in socialist Europe. I’ve seen it coming, but it didn’t seem real. Now it’s hitting home. My beautiful country is on its heels, and soon it may be a memory, like pre-Castro Cuba.

At least capitalist Cubans got to leave. We have nowhere to go.

European prosperity seems to be in an even steeper nose dive than our own. It looks like the Swiss may be in big trouble. For decades, they’ve profited by helping American tax evaders. Remarkably, they thought our government would never do anything about it. How could they believe that? Now the piper is knocking on their door. And he’s going to get paid. Secret Swiss bank accounts are a thing of the past for Americans. The Swiss don’t have the leverage to say no to our courts.

A whole bunch of Americans are going to get fined or go to jail, and some of them will be famous. It will be a strange pageant of bad judgment and repercussions. I wonder how much this will hurt the Swiss banks. We’re not the only people who use them, but I’m sure our business is important. And I don’t know whether there is a good reason, other than secrecy, to use a Swiss bank.

This is not the way to save money for our nation. The way to save is not to spend the money in the first place. When you’re a complete fool and you think it’s a good idea to pass out doomed, ineffective multi-trillion-dollar bailouts while trying to buy an impossibly expensive national health care system, you aren’t going to save the country by stealing crumbs from soup kitchens.

That’s liberalism for you. When they run the show, you can have somebody else’s cake and eat it, too.

Nuance in Action

It’s another Obama rally on Wall Street! Of course, in Obamese, “rally” is the word we use when we want to say “freefall.” Right now we’re down 150 points, and there is little HOPE that the trend will CHANGE.

Thank God, the left has rewritten the rules of logic. That will save us; when you’re a socialist, wishing will make it so.

These days, a person who borrows money he can’t repay is “a victim.” A person who is ejected from a home he can’t pay for and ends up renting again is “homeless.” Failure is something you reward. Success is something you punish. And amazingly, when you punish success and reward failure, people get more and more productive, and life just improves without measure! After that, we all grow wings and sell our cars because we can fly everywhere we want to go. Be careful up there! Don’t collide with a pig!

Back in the old days, before logic was repealed, overhauled, and replaced, a company that was mismanaged would go out of business, smarter people would buy the assets and hire the employees, and the new company would do better than the old one. A person who got a house loan he could not afford would sell at a loss and go bankrupt and start over, or the bank would foreclose, and a solvent person would buy the house. Then the buyer who lost the house would rent an apartment. We called this “capitalism,” and it led to the greatest combination of stability and wealth any nation has ever known.

These days, when you accept a bad loan with everything disclosed in advance and your eyes wide open, the government takes money away from your responsible neighbor and gives it to you so you can keep your home. Then the government has the gall to tell your neighbor this was done to help HIM.

Your neighbor has less money to take care of himself and his family. He has less incentive to work and save and invest and help create jobs, because the Mommy Dearest State will let him blow his money on beer and lotto tickets and then catch him when he falls. He will adjust his behavior accordingly, unless the Messiah restructures human nature. Of course, that’s the socialist’s worst fantasy. The one that makes their system so pathetic.

The lenders that gave these loans need to go out of business. They knew exactly what was going on, unless they were on psychedelic drugs. I knew what was going on, and I’m just a lawyer.

Earlier in the decade, I represented a couple of car salesmen. They had worked at a number of dealerships in the Miami area. Guess what they told me? They told me how car loans work. Let’s say you’re a crackhead, but you want an Escalade. You go to a car dealer, and you point at the car you want, and they give you a loan form. And you say, “but I am a crackhead and I have no income.” They say, “We did not ask you to declare your income. Just sign the form.” And you sign it, and they fill it out, and if needed, they dig up a forged 1040 and attach it. This is literally true. Then they send it to GMAC or whoever the lender is, and the loan gets approved. This happens every day, all over this city. Well, it DID. Back when people were able to sell cars.

Maybe “crackhead” is an exaggeration, but the rest of it is absolutely true. Car dealers routinely forge documents in order to get lenders to cough up. Surely the lenders know it; how could they not? And if car dealers do it, surely the same thing happens in the housing industry. Get a lender to pay, take your piece of the action, and move on. Then the lender sells the loan and moves on. Somewhere down the line, someone in China eats it, but you got your little piece of cheese, so it’s okay. I can’t believe the lenders don’t know what’s happening. They would have to live in lead-lined booths. Surely they must be making these bad loans with the intention of passing them on before they tank.

You have to wonder how this affects lending standards. If the qualifications of buyers are exaggerated on a broad scale–and they are–you have to wonder how much inflation is built into the standards.

I’ll explain. Imagine the lenders think the average home buyer has a $60,000 income and $5000 in debt. But because the people who put mortgage applications together have lied so much, the true figures are more like $40,000 and $10,000. And the average buyer makes his payments. What happens? The lender ends up with unrealistically high standards. The lender thinks you need $60,000 and $5000 to be a good risk, but the reality is, people with the other figures are pretty safe. Wouldn’t that make it harder for honest applicants to get credit?

I also wonder what the Chinese think, when they see the documents. They must go, “Wow! Americans are even richer than we think! This guy’s application says ‘crackhead,’ and his address is ‘dumpster,’ but he earns more yuan in a day than I make in a month!”

I don’t actually know if the Chinese see the original documents when they buy American mortgages. I have no idea how that works. But they do buy our mortgages. Your stuff is Chinese. Your house is Chinese. You might as well go ahead and buy a wok. Which will probably be made in Mexico.

The free market and logic are like gravity. Eventually they are going to win, because they never take a break. They never stop. Redistribution of wealth only works when the free market redistributes it from unproductive people to productive people. Obama is building a house of cards, and we’re in a windstorm. I still can’t believe Bush helped him do this. Remind me again why people thought Bush was conservative.

A rising tide lifts all boats. In the past, anyone could do well, because America was prosperous. It was easy to succeed. That probably won’t be true from now on. My answer is to get my house in order, change my behavior, and try to find my way into God’s good graces.

Oh, boy. Down 180. Think of all the people out there who saved all their lives and just lost their retirement money. This is absolutely terrible.

House Acts Swiftly to Protect Imbeciles From Themselves

I just read that the House has passed a bill that makes it illegal to keep a chimp as a pet. There goes my plan to kidnap the president of Iran.

It is definitely a bad idea to have a chimp for a pet. No doubt about that. Soy-sucking gun-haters who faint at the sight of a .22 cartridge seem to make up the majority of people who own really inappropriate pets or who try to snuggle up to wild animals and then get eaten, but the obvious fact is, a big strong wild animal is much more dangerous than a whole basement full of assault rifles. Here’s the reason: assault rifles won’t escape and rip off the mailman’s testicles. Guns don’t kill people. Angry chimpanzees DO.

That being said, do we really need this bill? Only idiots have dangerous pets, and this particular type of idiot (I want to be careful here) is in the minority. And there is a legal theory called “strict liability” which, if enforced by slimy tort lawyers (thought to be primitive ancestors of chimpanzees), would probably be a pretty good deterrent.

It has been a long time since I studied for the bar exam, but I think it works like this. If you have something really dangerous in your house, and someone gets hurt because of it, you have to pay. Period. The court doesn’t want to know whether you were negligent. Maybe you kept your box of dynamite on top of the fridge where you were sure the kids would never find it. Nobody cares. You’re liable. And the example they always use when they teach about strict liability is a tiger.

Having seen what chimps can do to people–in particular, their peculiar and well-documented fascination with testicles–I can tell you that I would much rather face a tiger, which kills prey pretty quickly. The other day I saw a photo of the last famous chimp victim. He has two fingers left, his genitals are completely gone, he’s in a wheelchair, and while he has skin on the front of his head, I would not call it a face. If a tiger is grounds for strict liability, surely a chimp qualifies.

Ordinarily this kind of law wouldn’t interest me much, but it’s a little unnerving when the feds start deciding what kind of pet you can have. Here in Coral Gables, there is a law that makes it illegal to own any type of reptile. Try to imagine an American childhood that doesn’t feature at least one dead turtle. It’s unthinkable. Under Obama, liberty is going to shrivel like a slug on the Bonneville Salt Flats. Little things like the monkey law help the snowball gain mass.

I guess you could say that if strict liability were a good deterrent, people would not have chimps. Maybe that’s true. I just dread the day when the Obama Jugend comes to my house to make sure my dog is a neutered vegetarian and that I don’t have any dangerous contraband on the premises, such as hamsters.

Let me conclude by proclaiming that only free men own chimps, although not always testicles.

Cue John Gibson.