Latewire

Bill

So I'm quitting nicotine for the 11th time, and got to thinking damn this stuff is awesome. If it weren't for the cost and health effects I'd still be smokin'. So why does everyone have to be hating?

Health Nazis

The first national anti smoking crusade was from everyone's favorite overused hyperbole of evil Uncle Adolph (Link). I can't separate modern activists from their prestigious pedigree as their goals and ideology are extremely similar. The idea is simple, it's not only in your interest to quit smoking it's in the nations interest. The state or your local do-gooder is better able to make decisions about your consumption and ultimately your body is the property of the state.

The Nazi State not only discouraged smoking but also enacted the broadest anti-smoking legislation on the planet including banning smoking in workplaces, banning the military from smoking in uniform, and banning smoking of everyone under 18 in public. Like what the Autoban did for personal transport this legislation would become blueprint to the world flowering with the idea of community health.

Not to be left out, other dictators including Mussolini and Franco jumped on the band wagon. And like most things any Italian government has attempted; the program backfired terribly. Leaving Italy slightly ahead of European averages.

Butt Out Science

Cigarettes smoking cause the smoker cancer. Second hand smoke causes cancer. The first is undeniable true the second has never been proven. What? How can the American Lung Association claim it does? Both the EPA and the UN fudged statistics within their own studies to arrive at conclusions that where desirable for the issing agency. (Link) (Link) This persecution is clearly of trying to shore up belief by any means necessary to promote an agency agenda; It's not enough that smoking kills smokers, but it must kill everyone around them as well in order to justify funding a public health effort.

The sad thing is, no one but smokers really care. Other environmental pollutants like perfume, Corn Nuts, and children go unregulated and largely unstudied but as smokers are an undesirable minority and must be held to the closest scrutiny.

The Smell of Ass

People stink. Places where people congregate for lengths of time smell worse. Clubs and Pubs in the UK found that out the hard way when a law was passed outlawing cigarettes. Overnight the awful smells of cigarette smoke dissipated and patrons where bombarded with the smell of people and pub i.e. ass, beer, and puke. (Link) Some pubs even purchased fake cigarette smell to spray to try and hide the stench and bring back the old happy feeling of quite desperation. (Link)

I can't say I enjoy the smell of cigarettes nor do I enjoy the smell of people, but something strikes me that smoking bans in drinking establishments are targeted against the working class. The busybodies who enact such legislation probably have never broken a sweat, much less sat down with a bunch of sweaty men looking to tie one off after a day's work of heavy manual labor. In order to equalize things, I purpose banning do-gooders from coffee shops and spraying liquefied smug around to keep the
'atmosphere'.

The Man

The Man hates smoking (see Health Nazis) but loves taxes on tobacco. When talking about tobacco anti-smoking crusaders love to call tobacco merchants 'Merchants of Death,' what would the call the single largest recipient of Death Money? The Man receives more revenue than any single tobacco company, more than the tobacco wings of R.J. Reynolds or Philip Morris. Does this make The Man the King of Death? For this reason alone, I am convinced the man won't kill tobacco outright, or at least until he has taxed most sales into the black market.

Though still legal, The Man in his wisdom, has sought fit to fuel a black market through insane levels of taxation. Creating smuggling, adding another level to the underground economy, and making tobacco trucks a more common target than armored trucks in places like New York. (Link) Spurring criminal enterprise and raking in the dough, the Man should be ashamed. But no, he gets more brazen every year.

My Say

It is my opinion that smokers are marginally above pedophiles in the rungs of modern social acceptance among non-smokers. It's for this reason the majority has time and time again put us down. In a shocking turn around the general public has grown health conscious has quit smoking in droves, only to compensate by stuffing themselves to levels of obesity unheard of in human history.

When Obama was outed as a smoker, there was a cacophony of screams of health Nazism until the Obama campaign issued a statement that he was trying to quit. The guy is going to be president, let him enjoy his smokes. Not only that, he should be allowed to enjoy his smokes in public without wailing and gnashing of teeth.

After there are far worse things in this world than tobacco, shouldn't you anti-smoking types be working on getting them fixed first?

1m1w

that viewing obscene amounts of drawn out pornography does not in fact count as studying for Human Anatomy & Phsyiology 112. Ah, wasted youth.

P.S. Rumours of my death have been woefully underexaggeratted. Sso I got kicked in my softspot fontanelle by a moose, so what, I got better.

Hank

Here’s another installment in the lead-up to Dr. Daniel R_e’s mind-opening series on nutrition and poison foods.

I’ve been a food freak for as long as I can remember. I love eating food, cooking food, and learning about food. I’m in the process of training to grow my own food. I’ll eat darn near anything except lima beans and Rocky Mountain oysters*. I have certain favorite dishes that I seek out in every place I can, and really dig comparing notes on various restaurants with other chow fanatics. For example, between 1995 and 2005, I ate dozens of Reuben sandwiches, ordering them in many states at every joint I visited that featured them on the menu, searching for the ultimate. [Pro tip : the grand winner was and remains Chompie’s ‘Grandpa Ruby’s Reuben’ – nonpareil, and available in Tempe or Scottsdale.] Currently, I’m on a grilled cheese safari that started in June of 2008. [Current point leader : Mile High Grill in Jerome, AZ]

Sounds like fun, huh? It is. But there’s a catch. Something else that I started in June is the transition from the poison to the Poison-Free Lifestyle ™ . For those not in the know, the Poison-Free Lifestyle™ is concerned primarily with excluding from one’s eating patterns such things as chemical additives like BHT, highly-processed ingredients such as modified corn starch, animal products that have been subject to the use of antibiotics, cannibal feed, or other nasty manipulation, and produce that has been grown with the addition of chemical pesticides or fertilizers. These excluded products are broadly construed as ‘poison’ for varying reasons. The chemical pesticides are kind of a no-brainer – those are literally poison, petrochemical compounds that you wouldn’t put in your mouth under any reasonable circumstances. Ditto known FDA-approved poisons like aspartame, which has been conclusively proven to be carcinogenic. The logic of excluding chemically modified and manipulated ingredients is a little more conceptual : even though eating pure modified corn starch or soy lecithin (for a terrifying and true account of how this stuff is produced, read the excellent and unbiased “Twinkie, Deconstructed”) hasn’t been proven to be harmful, the basis for rejecting it (and a great many other things that are hidden in the ingredient lists of nearly every item in the grocery store) is that it’s a food that’s twisted out of its basic form by processes that the consumer doesn’t understand and which involve harmful chemicals and is then tucked away into foods that you’d think would be perfectly free of weird synthetic ingredients without the consumer’s knowledge. Poison-Free eaters avoid these because a) the agents used in processing these ingredients are usually literal poisons, and we don’t trust manufacturer assertions that all the poisons ‘evaporate’ or are otherwise neutralized by the process end, and b) because we object on principle to having this chemical garbage snuck into our food in the first place and then told that it’s part of a wholesome and nutritious breakfast.

‘OK’, you say, ‘Good for you, champ-o, but what does this have to do with being a food freak or your grilled cheese quest?’ Here’s the nut. If one adheres strictly to the Poison-Free rule of “Read the label and don’t eat it unless you’re OK with every ingredient on there,” it’s nearly impossible to go eat at a restaurant and it just doesn’t make sense to eat at one. See, if restaurant food costs more than home-cooked food (which it always does – often by something like a factor or eight to ten), and at the same time, the restaurant food uses ingredients that are not poison-free (which very nearly all restaurants do), then it makes no sense to pay a huge premium to a restaurant for food that you wouldn’t pay for in a grocery store in the first place. Let me repeat that : it makes no sense to pay a premium in a restaurant for food that you’d reject for your home table as ‘poison.’

So why not, you ask, only go to poison-free restaurants? The answer is simple : because they are few, and the those that exist are generally lacking in menu, quality, service, vibe, or some combination of the above. When we go out to eat, it’s for pleasure, not to force a dry quinoa steak with patchouli sauce down our gullets while the bedreaded cook inadvertently shakes hair fragments and week-old cannabis seeds from his dome into our dessert. We want a delicious variety of food served competently in a place with a hip vibe.

OK, whiner, you reply, why not just stop going out and eat at home? Well, this is the obvious solution, but what fun is that? Sometimes, we just want to get out and chill with delicious food somewhere other than the domicile, hip as it may be. Also, it’s pretty hard to engage in safari behavior when you’re the one cooking the dang quarry, since by controlling every aspect of the production, you have a pretty good idea what the results will taste like.

The essential fact is that the problem is at present insoluble. We want to go out to eat often, but it’s illogical and bad form to pay someone to poison you. If one has kids, the folly is compounded. It’s impractical and annoying to demand to see the ingredient list for every item in every restaurant kitchen. We do seek out joints that are putatively poison-free, but they are so lacking in numbers that when one adjusts for the average “bad food, bad service, or just wack” restaurant-pool attrition, they might as well not exist at all.

What we’re doing right now is allowing ourselves a certain number of poison lunches or suppers pre month so that we can satisfy our restaurant addiction. This is a stupid solution, though, and we really feel the sting of stupidity when we drop $75 for a fancy dinner that is laden with high-fructose corn syrup, gross factory-farm dairy, and pesticide-dunked leafy greens. I don’t know how long we can keep acting like idiots in this way.

In a world where almost all commercial food products are chock-full of terrible manipulations and outright deadly poisons, and the thinking household really has to be careful and read the label of what they buy to eat if they want to avoid being dogs at the antifreeze puddle, where does the restaurant trade fit in? We go to restaurants because they have tasty food and cool atmosphere. But if the food is food that we wouldn’t eat if offered to us for free in another setting, much less pay for, how can we reasonably buy it from the restaurant? We can’t, that’s how. It’s dumb, stupid, and makes no sense.

To restauranteurs : you better get wise before we do, and start making sure, when you present that bill for a costly supper, that it doesn’t represent a Jonestown bargain.

Hank

"Take Sick and Die"
Original by Boyd Rivers
Additional lyrics and music by Hank

You're going to have to take sick and die, one of these days
You're going to have to take sick and die, one of these days
All the medicine you can buy,
All the doctors you can hire...
You'll still have to take sick and die one of these days

You're going to have to take sick and die, one of these days
You're going to have to take sick and die, one of these days
You can appeal to higher powers
Bargain with Jesus in small hours
But you'll have to take sick and die, one of these days

You're going to have to take sick and die, one of these days
You're going to have to take sick and die, one of these days
All precautions you can take
All that health food sure won't save you
From having to take sick and die
One of these days

You're going to have to take sick and die, one of these days
You're going to have to take sick and die, one of these days
You can live just right as rain
Never cause another living thing pain
But you'll still fall sick and die
One of these days

You don't have to go and live out in the wild
You don't have to try to connect with natural life
'Cause every thing under the sky
That grows, crawls, swims, or flies
Every life must fail and die
One of these days.

Hank

As Bill's fine article below suggests, those of us living in the United States and Canada are fortunate enough -- at least for now -- to have the legal privilege to own and use firearms. Guns are owned for a variety of perfectly reasonable purposes : for sport and subsistence hunting, for recreational and target shooting, for their historical and aesthetic collectibility, for home and personal defense. Like other hobbies, firearms collecting and use provides the enthusiast with fodder for interminable technical conversation and comparison of one's aptitude with that of other fanatics. And, unlike golf, shooting can give you skills that'll be useful when the revolution comes. 'Sideways'-style goon-repellent tactics aside, it's pretty tough to defend your homestead with a five-wood.

There is, however, a problem. A combination of influence from movies and video games, deep-rooted fears, and the real destructive power of guns often leads the enthusiast to increasingly seek out and admire weapons designed for what is often termed 'combat,' that is, military/police-style armed conflict with multiple opponents. There's nothing wrong with this on paper -- after all, the guys who wrote the Constitution intended for citizens to have the capacity to self-organize to resist invasion and other assaults. In practice, though, this way of thinking creates a strong market for weapons and accessories that are scary-looking, expensive, and often wielded by folks who couldn't hit the side a whale if they were Jonah. In turn, when these weapons appear in the media, especially when in the hands of unstable crazies who use them in terminal games of 'Lazer Tag,' their appearance and the terms used to describe them ("semi-automatic," "high-capacity," "picatinny") are used to demonize not only those weapons in particular, but privately-owned firearms in general.

Of course, very few crimes are committed with 'combat firearms' as we're considering them here. Most gun murders and suicides are done with garden-variety civilian handguns, rifles, and shotguns. You don't generally see scruffballs with pantyhose over their heads sticking up a 7-11 with a $2000 customized AR-15 or a Class III machine gun. The bottom line is that you don't need a lot of bullets or fancy accessories to do a crime, and if you're desperate enough to commit one, you probably don't have a lot of cash to spare on Aimpoint dot sights, folding stocks, and drum magazines. But on those occasions when a "Call of Duty II"-enthusiast-cum-combat-firearms-collector does take a break from 'fragging' his buddies to rampage through his workplace, a mall, or sporting event, it's a PR disaster for responsible citizens.

Unlike the late, great-but-wrong-on-this-one Bill Ruger, I think it's a very bad idea to prohibit the sale of any firearms, including 'high-capacity' models and other scary-looking heaters. I do think, however, that all shooters should resist the temptation to start gearing up for the Tribulation as soon as they're old enough to buy a handgun. Face it : if you don't spend the time and money to master the fundamentals of shooting, all the 'night vision monoculars,' 'low-glare tactical finishes,' and extended magazines in the world aren't going to help you when you're faced with the sort of situation you think you're preparing for. Like the roly-poly Internet commando shown in Bill's post, most 'combat weapons' collectors are preparing not for a real-world confrontation, but for the bull session at the upcoming gun show or nutter conference.

Notwithstanding Mark Twain's just view of statistics, some oft-cited ones bear repetition here. The plain fact is that most firefights, the events for which combat firearms guys putatively plan against in dreadful preparation and secretly hope for, are engaged at 7 yards or fewer and involve the exchange of 3 or fewer shots. The old timers like Jeff Cooper, Skeeter Skelton, and Elmer Keith knew this, and they advocated accordingly for defensive weapons able to engage any target, through cover or not, and 'end the fight' with a minimum of fuss. They knew that they didn't need, in the words of firearms expert Nate Dogg, sixteen in the clip and one in the hole. They needed to solve bad problems with as few well-considered shots as possible to minimize the danger of good folks getting hurt.

Cooper, Keith, and Skelton also knew the value of constant disciplined practice. When you're busy on Internet chat boards reading the latest dish on SOCOM-inspired tactical slings and other fanciful accessories, it's hard to get a lot of range time in.

A fair amount of activity in the 'combat firearms' world is the result of a strange and noxious combination of fear and fantasy. For example, I knew a guy who had a powerful fear of illegal immigrants from Mexico and who accumulated 'combat firearms' in anticipation of one day engaging multiple Mexican targets in a vigilante situation, like some kind of racist 'Cobra.' Fortunately for us, this guy never got his chance to ‘liquidate’ a roomful of immigrant criminals. Guys like this are poison for PR.

The nut here is that the wise gun owner will recognize the power of public perception and what it means for the security of his rights. The wise gun owner will realize that he (or she!) is not on the SWAT team and resist buying equipment intended for such applications, at least until they can shoot a decent group. And, if compelled by fear to obtain military – style weapons, the gun owner should get some real training in how to use them from the scary-but-serious guys at Gunsite, Thunder Ranch, or a similar institution. A ‘tactical’ rig in the possession of a responsible and well-trained shooter is a reasonable if fearful hedge against unforeseeable aggression by multiple assailants. In the hands of the Internet hobbyist / loser hatefreak, it’s a deadly ‘NES Zapper’ that will be used as an exhibit against gun ownership by those who seek to abridge liberty.

Bill

Overview

Perhaps you've been in a message forum where the topic 'Gun X iz teh best ever!!!11!!!1' has popped up or simply been talking to the local meathead who is a member of The Cult of Gun X, the conversation will claim that Gun X will bring peace on earth and good will toward men or claim that Gun Y will explode in your hand causing total protonic reversal. Chances are you are talking to a Gun Snob or dealing with Gun Snobbery. This bias is harmful both to any hopes of rational discussion, and to the shooting community in general. It is my intention to talk about what is said and my version of the truth.

Gun Snob Truths

These are statements and sentiments commonly made by Gun Snobs, and a closer examination by yours truly:

"You get what you paid for." - I am willing to sell my bowel movements for $10,000 a plop, that means you will be getting $10,000 worth of feces. Think about it. This statement is made by people who keep telling themselves that they dropped a whole lot of money on a firearm and has to constantly justify the purchase to themselves.
"This gun is great see the pics." - While a firearm may or may not have aesthetic virtue (which is in itself entirely subjective) unless the firearm is meant solely for show or to be shown off how a firearm looks only matters to owner pride. This snob is saying "Ooo pretty pretty nickle finish with ivory grips and gold highlights, it goes great with my sequin vest and pimp cane."
"Gun Y is inferior as it failed here." - There are pictures and anecdotes of just about every firearm that had one failure or another, a somewhat common one being the Kaboom:

Usually this has to do with faulty ammunition loadings. Plus there are seldom any pictures or anecdotes of the thousands of times this has not happened. It should be noted that maintenance also plays a big role in weapon failure and the lack there of. Often maintenance makes the difference between a well functioning piece and a weapon that jams every other round. Every major firearms manufacturer has had a recall.
Random model advice. - Often said by the "you get what you paid for" meathead. Though sometimes useful, often meatheads will give you advice on firearms they have never tried or repeat advice given by people who have never tried the firearm. You may notice that the 'Uber Gun' they are suggesting you buy is one that they own or are trying to sell you.

The Caliber Jihad

Any person who has had any lengthy conversation about firearms has run into The Caliber Jihad, a long quasi-religious battle where caliber zealots scream heresy in an attempt to anoint their chosen round as best. This topic is more littered with manure than a feedlot, and frankly I don't feel like getting the hip waders on. But as everyone has an opinion I'll toss in my dos pesos:

Only shots that hit count.
Shit happens, especially in a shitty situation.
Where a shot hits is more often than not more important than what hits.
If you can't get a tight grouping at a modest range in practice, you have absolutely no business discussing caliber.

The Uber Gun Myth

The crux of my rant. Contrary to popular opinion there is no 'uber gun.' There are a plethora of makes and models that are accurate and dependable, the choice between them is every bit as subjective and personal as your choice in undergarments. Shoot what you like, and try before you buy. Imagine the fat sweaty Gun Shop Guy or Keyboard Commando feeding you information telling you what underwear you should be wearing. (Though I'm sure the topic has come up in some survivalist forum, and there are people who love sniffing the skid marks of others.)

Closing

What is important is to ask yourself 'does this firearm meet my needs and do I like shooting it.' And more importantly don't make comments about firearms you have no experience on. That is not to say that there are not makes and models that are universally bad, but these tend to be well acknowledged from a variety of sources, but most criticism short of a recall notice or a class action suit should be treated with some degree of skepticism.

Watch out for gun snobbery, there is a great deal of flat out exaggeration about positive and negative attributes about various makes and models. Use multiple sources in making a selection not just fans and detractors. Keep in mind no advice is as important as your own experience and your ability to utilize your chosen firearm.

Oh yeah, HKs suck.
_________
_____

Actually HK makes excellent products, but I have serious problems with their attitudes towards small distributors and civilian customers.

Hank

[ed. note : the preferred pronunciation of the word "guitar" is as "git-are," with emphasis on the first syllable]

Those who have loved ones afflicted with the disease called 'guitar-playing' will know that it's an ailment comparable in social acceptability to leprosy. Guitar-players are universally shunned by healthy folks for many reasons : some hygienic, some economic, but most often because guitar-players are unable to shut up for even a second once they start yammering about pickups, fingerboard radii, and fret gauges.

For this reason, guitar-players are outcast from polite society and are ghettoized in appalling hovels known as 'guitar stores.' In reality, as can be easily ascertained by stopping by one of these establishments (bring your respirator!) and observing the conduct therein, virtually no transactions take place there, so the extent to which they can truly be called 'stores' is very limited. They are really akin to halfway houses, refugee camps, and alleys. In these benighted places, they guitar-players are free to jabber at each other with baseless opinion, half-cloaked lies, pathetic boasting, and meaningless parroting of guitar-industry propaganda. Like within the criminal flophouse, there is constant internecine struggle, secret hatred, and barely concealed malice amongst the denizens of guitar stores – each of the afflicted secretly wishes to demonstrate his own guitaristic superiority to the other. This bizarre competition to covertly determine who ‘sucks’ the least, while maintaining the pseudo-easygoing atmosphere that guitar-players habitually and hypocritically create, has earned guitar-playing the sobriquet of ‘finger-sports’ amongst the British cognoscenti.

Guitar-players are notable for their crypto-religious adherence to lore and myth – especially as pertains to their equipment. Since they, as a group, have no grasp whatsoever of physics and engineering, the fields of study that actually produce and govern the performance of their equipment, they rely instead on received knowledge that inevitably originates from old dope-addled hacks who look at guitar sound as a kind of voodoo magic. I encountered a fine example of this on a recent venture into the belly of the beast. I was with some aspiring victims of the guitar-playing plague, perusing the walls of a local ‘guitar store,’ and selected a contagion (this is the proper term for a guitar) for one of my buddies to try out.

The balding shill whose job it was to attempt to sell guitars to the penniless informed us that the construction method used to build this particular contagion, ‘the glue-in neck method,’ was vastly and inherently superior to all other construction methods (such as the ‘bolt-on’ and ‘neck-through’ methods, for those keeping score!) , particularly with regard to the guitar’s ability to sustain notes. Now, ignoring the actual acoustic science that exists on the subject, there remains a truly deep rift of opinion on this issue. For example, those guitar-players who favor the Fender style of guitar, such as James Burton, Brent Mason, and Richie Sambora, are wont to say that the ‘bolt-on’ technique employed by their preferred instruments is superior. As far as this clown’s statement is concerned, a casual listen to the performances of deceased ‘bolt-on’ adherents such as Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Vaughan will demonstrate that note sustain is just fine on instruments of this construction. How about the chubby whiner Billy Corgan, whose sustain is so lengthy that he probably leaves the studio between notes to shop for more Tim Burton-inspired apparel? This whole tiresome debate serves mainly to save guitar-players from having to think or talk about the actual notes they choose to play. Of course, most guitar-players have no idea what notes they’re playing, anyway, so that point is largely moot.

Wait, you say! Why is this author saying that he accompanied his buddy into the den of filth, rather than trying to steer the poor guy clear? The plain answer is that this author is one of the afflicted. Bear this in mind as you continue through this brief piece; imagine that you’re watching ’28 Days Later’ as narrated by one of the zombies.

Let’s look at another aspect of guitar construction that is the subject of wide an uninformed debate : weight. There is an army of guitar-players, particularly those with slavish devotion to the model of instrument named after genius player Les Paul, which avers that increased weight – even in excess of ten pounds – has a positive influence on guitar tone and also increases ‘sustain.’ This is stupid. When weights start to get in double-digit territory, that’s a serious burden to shoulder for any length of time – you might as well be carrying around a fully-loaded Squad Automatic Weapon or similar equipment. Imagine shouldering a gallon and a half of Sunny Delight for a three-hour set.

The ergonomics debate aside, preference for heavy guitars ignores the physical mechanisms by which guitars operate. A guitar, even an electric guitar, is an acoustic instrument that produces sound by amplifying the vibrations of a string that is held at a certain tension; this amplification is achieved when the neck and body of the guitar resonate with the vibration of the string. The string is at a fixed tension for a given pitch – that is, the string is only exerting so much force on the guitar when it vibrates, and this is the force that causes the sympathetic amplifying vibrations to occur. The more mass the string has to move (induce resonance in), the less resonance will be produced and fed back into the string for electronic amplification. Therefore, if increased resonance is desired – and it is – we should be looking to reduce mass, as this will allow the string to accomplish more work with the force it is able to exert. It has been argued that since the electric guitar’s amplification process essentially only amplifies string vibration and not acoustic body vibration, the object of guitar construction should be not to make the instrument resonate as a whole, but rather to reflect vibration directly back into the string from its anchor points at the nut and bridge by means of making the neck and body reflective but acoustically damped, as we see in heavy guitars that have a lot of finish and glue in them. This viewpoint is misguided, however – the string in fact re-uptakes the acoustic motion from the entire body.

One has only to observe the difference between, say, a violin and a modern, slave-made gluebucket electric guitar to see where the manufacturing has gone a-gley. A violin weighs 15 ounces and will deafen you if you sit to close to it. A slave guitar weighs 11 pounds and you can’t hear the thing at all unplugged, and when plugged in, it sounds tinny and thin. Even the common slave-made acoustic guitar will generally weigh in at six pounds or more, and its voice will be dwarfed by properly-made acoustic instruments like violins and banjos. Why, we ask ourselves, are banjos so loud and annoying? It’s because their resonating surface – a skin or drum head – weighs very little and therefore transmits, rather than absorbs, most of the energy imparted to it by the string. The string can easily move it. Contrast this with the resonating surface of a crummy Les Paul : two inches of glue-soaked plywood covered in ten coats of paint goo.

Now, clearly, we don’t want a guitar to sound like a banjo, and we also don’t want the solid-body electric guitar to be so resonant that it feeds back uncontrollably. The point here is the trend toward heavier, more heavily finished, more veneered, and generally more damped guitar designs is folly and goes very far to explain why every single emo band on the radio today has an identical, mushy, dead guitar tone. Compare for example the muffled guitar tone of ‘Fall Out Boy’ or ’My Chemical Romance,’ whose guitarists favor heavy guitars, to the equally-distorted but much more detailed and lively sound of Frank Black or the guy from Blur, who prefer lightweight guitars.

Now, there may be some afflicted who will cry ‘Bias! Clearly this author is and advocate of Fender guitars and a detractor of The Gibson!” This is untrue. While Fender designs have the potential to be lighter and more resonant that, say, the Gibson Les Paul, this is far from consistently the case. For example, one of the contributors to this site possesses an excellent Gibson SG that weighs less than seven pounds and is notably unencumbered by a goopy finish, and sounds like a living thing. On the other hand, I personally hefted a Fender Telecaster at local ‘guitar shop’ that couldn’t have weighed less than twelve pounds – an utter brick. Correct – that is, light – guitar weight is possible only when the correct, properly-dried wood is chosen and then put together with as little heavy damping glue as possible, and finished with a minimum of synthetic goop. Guitars with shiny plastic finishes are going to sound dead, as are guitars that are made from many pieces of wood and glued together.

There are guitar makers out there who do their best to educate the public about the reality of what makes guitars sound like they do, and what techniques can be used to improve their sound. Two such makers are Ken Parker, who led the march toward lighter guitars in the 90s, and Robert Novak, who is able to convincingly articulate the effect of scale length (the string’s vibrational length) on guitar sound. (Pro tip : Scale length is the single biggest determinant of a guitar’s fundamental tone!)

Unfortunately for the public, who is forced to listen to the output of guitar players as they bash and mewl away on the radio, Internet and TV, guitar players are too stupid to read the treatises of these or other well-informed makers, and instead just want the same guitar that the guy from their favorite band plays. This perpetuates the cycle of poor design and guitars-as-furniture. Though, looking at the way my own furniture is constructed and finished, I’d rather that guitar makers did indeed take their cues from cabinetmakers, instead of General Motors, who seems to dictate the bulk of finishing and styling cues on modern instruments.

Again, we return to the violin as an example. Now, a fine violin looks very nice, but it doesn’t look like a poly-finished tiger maple-and-wenge armoire from the 80s boudoir of a cocaine boss, nor does it look like the impressive laminated shoulder stock of a presentation-grade target rifle. The armoire and the rifle are made to be eye-popping lifestyle accessories calculated to impress the observer, whereas the violin is made to produce a pleasing sound for those who can hardly see it, if they can see it at all. Sadly, most of today’s guitars that don’t look like cars tend to have more in common, appearance-wise, with gaudy accessories than with real instruments. They are made to impress the looker, rather than thrill the listener. This is wack.

To those poor souls afflicted with the disease of guitar-playing : stop buying guitars for their value as eye candy and start really listening to how instruments sound. If you wish to sound like something other than a bee soaked in turpentine, you need to seek out a guitar that is rich, lively, and responsive in tone. Do not audition guitars though digital effects or heavy distortion – you must consider the real, raw voice of the guitar. If it sounds good unadorned, it’ll sound good with whatever garbage sound processing your crummy style demands. But if it sounds wimpy and dead in its natural state, you can be assured that you’re going to sound like ‘Altar Bridge’ when you pile on the effects and saturation. Stop listening to baseless jabber talk and hoary myth, and start listening to the sound.

Once you’ve learned to choose an instrument that sounds good, I’ll publish my next column, which excoriates your technique and note choice. Happy recovery from your fellow ward inhabitants at Latewire!

Daniel Roe

For those who don't know, Bittorrent is a peer to peer to peer to peer file transfer program which has been adopted by the "pirate" community (read: Everybody) to illegally exchange files, including but not limited to television shows.

Now, I'm a big fan of paying for media. I'm not one of those idiots who thinks that just because everyone pirates, it means it's morally okay. Piracy is stealing, and stealing is wrong. This does not actually affect my actions at all, but I just wanted to opine that I'm not encouraging theft.

First off, yes I know you can stream most shows off the parent company website, but who has time or patience for commercials? I would honestly prefer to spend the other 20 minutes of a "one hour" show at an AA meeting or a book club than watching commercials.

With piracy, I get no commercials, just like iTunes. If you watch 6 hours of TV a day, that means you spend 2 hours a day watching commercials. Imagine how awesome you'd be at guitar/keyboard/drums/kazoo if you practiced for 2 hours a day.

Secondly, the iTunes store costs too much. $2 for one TV show? So what if I get to keep it forever, 95% of the time it's only worth watching once or twice.

Piracy, obviously, is free. As such I don't feel bad about deleting it.

Thirdly, say you do want to watch them again (years from now). Can't do it. I don't know what the computers of the future will look like, but I know iTunes DRM will probably be so wacky it may not work, if iTunes even exists in its present form. Great, now that $2 is an even bigger waste.

If I want to keep pirated files, I can rest assured that programs like VLC will support their format on whatever future computing device happens to come out.

Fourth, the quality sucks major balls. I have a modest 32" LCD TV and I can see the digital artifacts from a mile away. Not to mention the sound quality, which is tinny and craptastic.

Amazingly, pirated television shows are routinely better than iTunes. Some are even HDTV quality, which beats most broadcasts!

Fifth, it takes too long after the initial broadcast for the shows to show up legally online. iTunes takes about 12 hours from broadcast to available. Thursday night and Friday morning are two totally different times. If I get it Thursday night, I can watch it. If I get it Friday morning, I have to fit it in between drinking, studying, chores, errands, murder, and every other damn thing. If I'm watching TV, it means I had shit-else to do, weekends are not one of those times.

Pirated shows usually turn up a few minutes after or even before the current broadcast, depending on your time zone. A person on the east coast will rip the broadcast, edit out the commercials, wrap it up, and post it online within a few minutes after it airs. iTunes has the shows submitted to them beforehand by the studios and yet they still can't keep up!

Unfortunately, piracy is wrong. The alternatives, however, make it so many people with better things to do/spend money on are basically better off throwing away their televisions. Maybe not such a bad idea, come to think of it...

Update I've just been informed that Apple has secretly integrated HDCP into their new files. I'll do a whole separate "I told you so" on it.

Hank

In a radical upset of the smart money, lanky upstart Obama buries wasted husk McCain in the polls.

The Latewire odds had been shortening from 45:1 (in favor of McCain) since the debate season started and McSlain started to act crazy and erratic, finally slipping to 10:1 in his favor on Election Day. These odds were based on three major trends that have consistently shown up in American politics :

1) Those with lower levels of income and education tend to vote Republican because they are ruled by fear. Fear is used very adoitly by Republican marketers to manipulate public opinion.

2) The old and the rich, who typically turn out in force, tend to vote Republican because they are ruled by greed; the young, who are typically ruled by hormones and reactionism, tend to get drunk instead of voting

3) Obama is black, and white Americans tend to fear black people

The powerful victory of Obama tells us that at least some of these trends did not hold. My analysis is :

-The disadvantaged saw through McCain's tax cut rhetoric to his fundamental affinity for debt spending on the one hand, and were duped by Obama's promise to rob the richest 5% for the benefit of the remaining 95% on the other. Also, people quaked at the thought of the weird Palin stepping in when McCain keeled over from exhaustion on the second day of office.

-The rich and old failed to mobilize, probably due to complacency OR defeatism

-America at large has finally come to grips with the reality that black people are perfectly viable citizens.

It's this last factor that is most staggering. Based on the amount of racist horse feathers I hear on the street, I have been saying that it'd be another 10 to 15 years before there would be a chance for a black president. It is the case that the destructive blight of race antipathy still lurks in the hearts of many Americans. The election results, however, demonstrate that a good chunk of folks are, in plain fact, getting over it.

This is a landmark day. Obama may not represent policies that are tolerable. But he surely represents the political victory of tolerance. Who can deny that it's a triumph?

George Clinton must be happy on this day. Obama is Ali, and maybe we shouldn't be surprised that he is in the White House. Richard Pryor didn't live long enough to claim his post as Minister of Education, but he must be grinning with satisfaction that all those chants of "Gainin' on ya!" were more than just some jive talk.

Daniel Roe

Okay so I hate forums. I hate them so damn much I think it's high time I make it so I don't have to read them anymore.

Comments, however, are awesome. What a conundrum, how come latewire isn't considered a forum? There's a very subtle difference: forums are gay.

I decided that with a couple free hours this afternoon I should dust off my PHP and fix it so we don't have to deal with this crap anymore.

Therefore, now when you click "view comments" on any article here, it'll show you the article and dump all the comments in STRAIGHT AMERICAN STYLE TEXT BOXES all in an order at the end of the article. Yeah, almost like a blog, except this isn't a blog, because blogs are also gay.

I'm gonna go get drunk now. Happy 31st.

UPDATE: I'm not planning on opening up guest commenting, since I don't have the time to implement an anti-spam system, or sort through the junk when said system fails. Just freakin register.

Hank

It's time for a kind of lead-in to Dr R_e's series on nutrition, self-maintenance, and poison foods. Except this piece has little to do with medical science, and much to do with the sheer comedy of pathos that is the vegan movement.

If you want to know about the roots and history of the vegan movement, you can read it on Wikipedia or watch a pair of elephant seals in heat. Suffice to say that people decided to start talking about how they were 'vegan' after it was discovered that bees have feelings. Well, really, it was when 60s rich kids realized that a lot of people who didn't eat meat -- vegetarians -- weren't in it to make a political statement or even to oppose animal cruelty, but just for health reasons or even because they didn't care for meat. Hell, these kids said, these so-called 'vegetarians' aren't even into ahimsa or the wheel of karma! "Hypocrites!" they yelled. "How would you feel if you were a chicken and some huge two-legged villain came into your home each day to steal your eggs?!" When it was pointed out that eggs are, like, chicken period and not actually chicken babies, the newly-minted vegans moved on to vilify the cruel exploitation of bees for honey, the slaughter of bugs for shellac, and numerous other little murders that humans abet daily by buying products derived from animal use.

And so it went, with a certain percentage of each generation's upper-class twits being attracted to veganism as a really effective (and, thanks to $6 packs of vegan jerky and really expensive fake cheese and hot dogs, not to mention plastic shoes) expensive way to annoy their parents. The veganism-as-irritant tactic grew more desirable as the years wore on : imagine trying to irritate your mom with your punk-rock tapes --- when your mom has the Stooges' second album on her iPod as workout music?

Veganism is not a health movement, not even putatively, but the very thinness of the average vegan causes many outsiders to believe that the diet is a health-based one. In point of fact, all teenagers, Comp Lit students, and noisy hippies are skinny, and veganism is more an accessory for these bony hipsters than the cause of their morphology. Veganism's reliance on highly processed foods (such as the aforementioned pseudo-dogs and their TVP-based ilk) for protein pretty much tanks any claims to health. When vegans find out how TVP is made (hint : hexane!) they get pretty mad, but since they don't want to eat beans and other legumes and worry that nuts will make them fat, they continue to chomp away at their Tofurky and other chemical treats, smug in the knowledge that no animals were harmed in their production -- unless one counts the vegan itself!

The moral position of veganism is untenable to the point of laughability. Since the avowed point of veganism is to avoid doing violence to any animals or insects ('ahimsa'), and uncountable numbers of voles, squirrels, birds, aphids, snakes, centipedes, worms, groundhogs, and thousands of other types of beast are killed daily by the normal practices of conventional vegetable farming (especially when one factors in the clearing of farmland), the vegan loses before he even begins. Of course, the smart vegan will subsist solely on gathering wild plants while walking veeery carefully. Show me a feral vegan, though, and I'll show you what in Phoenix we call a 'crust punk' and bet you five that he eats McDonald's when he thinks nobody is looking.

All these points are old saws. I'm parroting them here to disabuse the Latewire reader of the notion that the jerk kid in the dirty hoodie with 'Fifteen' on his iPod and a mouth full of vitriol for those who use honey in their tea has any real clue what's going on. Vegans as a group care little for what's in their food as long as it's not animal-related; they'll happily gobble down preservatives, hydrochloric acid residue (ni hao, Bragg's Liquid Aminos!), and bleached flour. Half of them chew aspartame-laced gum and the other half swill energy drinks that have enough man-made chemicals in them to start a war.

The road to food consciousness, and on to food security, starts with knowing what is good to eat, and what is not, and being aware of what is in your food so that you can avoid the bad stuff. Vegans miss the mark by making food choice into a banner for political egoism.

If you want to avoid the Roman-tragic fate of the vegan, cut down on the badgering moral rhetoric, turn that pack of soy ham jowls over, and do the first thing one should always do, just like GZA said : read the label.

Daniel Roe

In an effort to preserve the modicum of sanity I have left, I've decided to block every website that could give me any political, foreign, or domestic news, at least until after the November election.

I have a theory that ones disposition is inverse to how "in touch" one is with what's "going on in the world."

This will give me much more time to invest in more productive activities, like counting my toes and spray painting my cat.

With any luck, more people will follow my lead and the fiends whose job it is to piss us off will get discouraged and quit.

Ya'll are slave owners,
Dan

Hank

There's a scene early in last year's blockbuster flick "No Country for Old Men" when Josh Brolin comes home after plundering the bloody scene of a botched drug deal with a gleaming .45 tucked into his waistband. His wife, with whom he lives in a crummy apartment, asks where he'd obtained the thing. Brolin curtly responds, "At the gettin' place."

Now, anybody who saw that movie will know that in fact, the enviable chrome had not come from 'the gettin' place,' but had been stolen from a corpse shortly after Brolin had left another homie to die by thirst, wounds, and 'el lobo.'

When foreign banks open their email to find a fresh infusion of US Dollars, US depositors find that their account insurance has more than doubled, holders of bad debts are relieved of those 'troubled assets,' and US taxpayers open up their mail next year to find a meager 'stimulus check,' these beneficiaries might ask their benefactor where all this money came from. After all, much like Brolin's character in the movie, the US government has fallen on tough times and is very, very hard up for cash. In fact, like Brolin, it has little but war memories, a moustache, and a gun. So where are the dollars in the firehose coming from?

To hear Bernanke and Paulson, the architects of the current situation, tell it, this vast pile of dollars -- trillions of them now -- came from the gettin' place.

In fact, Bernanke and Paulson's gettin' place isn't much different from Brolin's. Nor does their motivation or depth of thought differ a whole lot from that character's. As the desperate cowboy steals the Colt and suitcase from a dead man, Bernanke and Paulson steal these dollars from the corpse of American liberty. At the scene, the injured taxpayers warn about the coming wolves of statism and rampant inflation; they're coldly told that 'there ain't no lobo.' After all, Bernanke and Paulson know better than anyone about these things.

It has been revealed this week that the incredible, unprecedented, criminal Wall Street bailout was merely the first step in a treacherous and macabre dance of doom. When that move failed to 'unfreeze' the credit markets and Wall Street wasn't impressed, Bernanke promised 'unlimited' -- unlimited -- dollars to foreign banks to help their 'liquidity problems.' Soon after, we started to hear the fiendish candidates for President start talking about direct debt relief for individual homeowners, using public dollars. And then, when all these feints and ruses did not have the desired effect, yet another 'stimulus package' -- more dollars -- was fielded in a hopeless attempt to stanch our 'financial system's' very mortal wound.

Public liability for private debt is an abomination, and would be so under under any conditions. Our present conditions of record public debt, to the tune of ten trillion dollars, make the actions of Paulson and Bernanke monstrous to the maximum. When someone is deep in debt, with a seriously negative net worth, we call that person a fool and irresponsible. When that 'someone' is the government, and their debt spending in fact puts the public in the hole while squandering tax dollars, we call that criminal and treasonous as well as foolhardy.

The people at large, and these crazy actors of policy in particular, need to get a handle on a simple, incontrovertible fact : the government has no money. The government has no money! The government is in debt, and any money that it plans to spend it will confiscate from you; any debt obligations it incurs will be collected from you, and your successors.

Even the most fatalistic, 'FTW' types must confront the immediate and dire consequence of the evils perpetrated by Paulson, Bernanke and their accomplices. That is : rampant, uncontrolled inflation. No matter what you may hear from apologists, no matter what gibberish is vented by pseudo-economists, no matter what your so-called 'conservative' friends may say, the result of these terrible decisions shall be a profoundly accelerated inflation and debasement of the dollar.

The reason that this is true is because of a basic, simple, factual truth about economic activity : when the supply of a commodity increases, its price decreases. Money is a commodity that is used to purchase other commodities. Its price is called its purchasing power. When the price of money is high, that means that you can buy a relatively large amount of other items with it. When its price is low, you can buy less. When the price of money falls, it is called 'inflation,' a misleading term that really means that the average prices of other goods appear to be rising -- inflating -- relative to the price of money. In other words, inflation is really a way to describe the falling price of money relative to other goods, and it is caused by one thing and one thing only : increases in the money supply.

When Bernanke, Paulson, and their buddies 'spend' billions of dollars they don't have, and give 'unlimited' new dollars to foreign and domestic banks, and guarantee innumerable private debts, they are, in short, printing money. They are adding vast, nigh-incalculable amounts to the money supply. This is the fact of the matter, and it is starkly true.

There is only one possible result of creating a supply glut : falling prices. When the price of the dollar falls, we call it inflation. To quote John Pugsley in "The Alpha Strategy :"

"An increase in the money supply is the only cause of inflation in the long run. Money is created by fractional-reserve banking, and by the Federal Reserve as it monetizes federal defecits. The future rate of inflation is primarily a function of the size of deficits, since the Federal Reserve is duty-bound to monetize them."

In summary : the cause of inflation is debt spending and the attendant increase in the money supply. There is no other cause. And when the government mounts debt and prints money at unprecedented rates, we should expect nothing else but unprecedented inflation.

This is, as Pugsley would say, the plunder of America. It is also a trespass on our freedom and an assault on our future, as it is our hard-earned dollars along with the security of our future with which these people are toying. Whether they are short-sighted and stupid, or plotting and evil, the result is the same : there certainly is a doggone lobo, and it will be at the door much sooner than they expect.

So what do we do about it? It has been widely suggested that the institutional wheels of theft have been turning for far too long, and the people 'in power' so firmly entrenched or hidden, that we have no choice but to suffer and endure as our future and rights erode and our currency becomes less valuable than kindling. I say that this is a ridiculous and wimpy attitude. There is really only one way to save our freedoms and country from oblivion.

Like the woman-haired killer in "No Country," we know where the politicans are. But that's not where we're going. The politicians are both desperate and foolhardy; we few cannot make them change directly because they fear the public. We must 'get to' those that ultimately control the politicians. We must approach the public directly, for it is the cry of the public for wealth redistribution via taxes that is the engine of government in the long run. The reason we are being sold down the river is because voters and taxpayers are demanding to be sold down the river to protect their short-term interests. Every time that an industry leader requests a subsidy, every time a private individual wants an entitlement, every time a banker wants a loan guarantee from the public, the crisis gets worse. These are the folks that need to be approached, so that they can stop demanding public money from the politicians and start protecting their real interests. But unlike the strange assassin, we visit not with a weapon, but with knowledge and hope.

What a daunting task! How are we to go about educating the public on the serious need to put short-term interests on hold in favor of the preservation of the value of their money, the integrity of their freedom, and the viability of their future? Start by talking to people you know, your friends and family, and point out the basic facts about inflation and debt first, then address the wrongness of public liability for private risk. Let them know that there is no time for complacency, depressive fatalism, or myopia. Things are in motion right now, and only direct action by taxpayers can accomplish what is needed. The public must be made to see that, whatever temporary benefit they may individually receive from public funds, that benefit pales when compared to the grave erosive dangers of inflation, which causes everybody to lose buying power, and debt, which sells our childrens' future.

If you ask people if they generally favor higher or lower taxes, they will usually say 'lower.' Ask them why that is, and they will say it is because they want to keep more of the money they earn. When it is explained to them that they would be able to keep more of that money if they didn't have to pay for some of the 'benefits' they receive from public funding, along with the institutions that administer those 'benefits,' they are forced to confront the true issue. When the inflationary nature of debt spending is included in the conversation, it becomes evident that a preference for these 'benefits' at the expense of a stable currency and a viable future is irresponsible. Fold into this theo the idea of freedom and the integrity of personal property, and the situation becomes even more clear to the person considering the long-term meaning of our choice.

The reason that the people have stood for the theft so far is that we have become so used to having our property violated, supposedly for 'the public good,' that we no longer thing twice about it. We place much faith in the ability of actors like Paulson and Bernanke to know more than we can about our situation, and to make the right decisions for us, because we can't decide for ourselves. This is error. We can see plainly that, despite the wizard-like image that these people project, the facts and correct course are plain. Increased money supply and public debt causes inflation. Massive doses of either are bound to cause inflation that is massive. We don't need ex-industry CEOs turned public administrators to navigate our interests when we can see them so clearly.

As we become aware of our reality and the true nature of the 'crisis,' it's is not less than our duty to tell our fellow citizens about it. Start right now, and don't be discouraged nor intimidated by those who tell you it is either a lost cause or that they know better than you. Our nation was founded by people who would not stand to be plundered and would not be silent. When we stand up for reason, for frugality, and for liberty, when we publicly and privately promote these values, we stand up for the whole of America. We stand up and tell our neighbors that we the people are not, and will not permit ourselves to be, the government's gettin' place.

Daniel Roe

STEP 1: Write a blog entry about "HOW TO GET MORE PEOPLE TO READ YOUR BLOG"

- Bloggers have no lives, so making a post like this which targets bloggers will get a lot of hits from these people who have nothing better to do.
- A blogger's main problem is that nobody gives a shit what they have to say, and subsequently never visit their site. Therefore, this issue is sure to attract the maximal amount of people.

STEP 2: Steal some BS about how you need more photos and better layouts, maybe even write your own BS (if you're the creative sort).

- Possibly put in something about marketing and using advertising as an investment which will almost certainly never pay off (don't tell them that, they don't want to know).
- Originality is not important, but plagiarism is not a good idea. Just reword everything said on another site and change the order.
- Bloggers don't actually need blogging tips, as blog promotion is totally futile to begin with. More importantly, they're probably too lazy or lacking in resources to actually do anything you suggest, they're just looking for that "magic thing" that's going to cost them no money or time but will propel them into internet celebrity. They'll ignore everything else, and therefore won't be able to recognize that you're just saying the same thing over and over again.

STEP 3: NEVER EVER EVER mention that the primary reason nobody's reading their blog is that it's totally useless and nobody has that kind of free time, aside from other bloggers.

- Also don't suggest they blog as a creative outlet, as most of your audience will not be creative, and would lack content ideas if not for their desire to boost their own ego.

STEP 4: Make a YouTube video promoting your blog. This is tough to do, because you have to actually show that you're a human being capable of conversing in a recognizable and coherent dialect.

- If you are unable to speak in a way that does not throw others into paroxysmal cough/vomit spasms, DO NOT ATTEMPT!
- Most bloggers are incapable of human speech, so showing that you are will earn you their respect enough to listen or read, at least for a few minutes.
- Make sure to look comfortable, and maybe have an expensive computer monitor in the background (off, of course, because you're not actually "at work" right now). You can buy defective monitors for cheap, so touch up the paint a little and you have a low-cost prop to bolster your image as a laid-back successful internet superstar.

STEP 5: Ignore the fact that you are totally unable to come up with original content, and are therefore peddling more of the same tired "Blogging Tips" these people have seen a thousand times.

- Avoid the realization that you yourself couldn't do what you're "helping others" with. Not that it's a bad thing, as you're still probably not as vapid and dull as most of these idiots.
- Whenever anyone asks "So where's your successful blog, douchebag?" simply delete their comment from your website.
- While you're at it, post fake testimonials on the front page, and maybe a few from stalker nutbar sycophants. Just remove the words "love slave" from their more pithy unpunctuated star-struck diatribes and it may be good to print.

Noinge.

Hank

Well, if anything is to be said about Barack Obama, let it be that he really knows how to squander an opportunity.

This guy, this &^%##* guy, just went one-on-one with the frayed, decrepit, ibogaine-addled 'Penguin' stand-in known as John McCain, and managed to get his individual ass handed to him by sheer virtue of his lack of focus.

Obama is widely mocked in the press for being 'professorial' in tone and prone to digression, but this wasn't professorial. This was more like second-year-grad-student TA. He forgot th' questions before he even started to answer them, and instead repeated vague anti-"last eight years" saws that were tangential at best.

The classic moment was when some goateed ex-Navy guy asked plainly whether, if Iran attacked Israel, we'd wait for UN approval or just blow them I-ranains up real good tout de suite. McCain emerged from his 3rd plateau drug haze long enough to say "we won't wait" before spiralling into a whirlpool of his own jabber. Obama, on th' other hand, completely ignored the question and started to talk about whether or not Iran should have nukes. Wha-wha-whaaat? It's a truism that Democrats are weak on foreign policy questions, but this guy wasn't even trying. He droned on until the heads on the audience very literally started to droop.

Now, McCain was barely able to stop waddling around the stage and forgetting whether his hero is Ronald Reagan or Teddy Roosevelt for long enough to utter any statement of substance, and when he did, it was likely to be the stuff of fantasy such as his assertion that we can tackle health care, entitlements, and some other huge issue simultaneously (the question was 'prioritize these please"). But for McCain, showing that he can communicate in English rather than lecherous quacks can be counted as a victory, whereas Obama came into the ring with a clear public opinion advantage (on paper at least) and tossed it out th' window by digging his own rhetorical grave in exactly the same manner that his detractors say he tends to do. Obama can put together an English sentence, McCain can't. But when Obama puts them together, his credibility falls apart.

Obama : didn't even try in '08

{ gotta love how McCain dated himself with that repeated 'hand on the tiller' metaphor though! This guy is ready to go full sail ahead; I like th' cut of his jib.... WHAT TH' &^%$ }

Hank

The Swine List : The complete list of House representatives who changed their vote from 'no' to 'yes' and passed the bailout proposal against their constituents' will, by state :

Here's the list of 'public servants' who caved in to fear or greed and betrayed the public interest by voting 'yes' on the bailout proposal of 10-03, after they had voted 'no' on 09-29. Every 'yes' voter should be ejected from office come November, but these House members are most responsible for the failure of congress to uphold our rights and values on 10-03. Send a message : write down these names and vote them out of office on Election Day, and write and call them to let them know that you'll do so!

Arizona :

G. Giffords (D); H. Mitchell (D); E. Pastor (D); J. Shadegg (R)

California :

J. Baca (D); D. Watson (D); H. Solis (D); A. Schiff (D); B. Lee (D); C. Woolsey (D); CM Thompson (D); D. Rohrabacher (D)

Florida :

V. Buchanan (R); C. Mack (R)

Georgia :

D. Scott (D); J. Lewis (D)

Hawaii :

M. Hirono (D); N. Abercrombie (D)

Illinois :

J. Jackson, Jr (D); B. Rush (D); J. Biggert (R)

Indiana :

A. Carson (D)

Iowa :

D. Loebsack (D)

Maryland :

D. Edwards (D); E. Cummings (D)

Massachussetts:

J. Tierney (D)

Michigan :

C. Kilpatrick (D); P. Hoekstra (R); J. knollenberg (R)

Minnesota :

J. Ramstad (R)

Nebraska :

L. Terry R)

Nevada :

S. Berkley (D)

New Jersey :

W. Pascrell (D); R. Frelinghuysen (R)

New York :

J. Kuhl (R)

North Carolina :

H. Coble (R); S. Myrick (R)

Ohio :

B. Sutton (D); J. Schmidt (R); P. Tiberi (R)

Oklahoma :

M. Fallin (R); J. Sullivan (R)

Oregon :

D. Wu (D)

Pensylvania :

J. Gerlach (R); B. Shuster (R); C. Dent (R)

South Carolina :

J. Barrett (R)

Tenessee:

Z. Wamp (R)

Texas :

E. Cuellar (D); S. Ortiz (D); S J Lee (D); A. Green (D); K. Conoway (R); W. Thornberry (R)

Daniel Roe

1m1w

Woman: *Sigh* I sure am bored, ronery and also hot. My fingernails need biting.

You: Hey...

Girl: Oh, hey. Whatsup?

You: Hey, uh... are you by any chance a member of a Masonic Temple?

Girl: What the hell??

You: COS YOU BE LOOKIN' ILLUMI-NAUGHTY!!!! YEAAAAH!!!

Score. Commence tits.

Daniel Roe

American car makers and some grandfathered Japanese auto plants are being bailed out by a $25BILLION "loan" backed up by John Q. Taxpayer.

Under the provision, which was buried in the latest money dump into Iraq and Afghanistan, US automakers as well as some 20-year old Honda and Nissan plants will be subsidized.

Keep in mind, this isn't the first bailout for the auto industry. In 1980, a 675million dollar sum was given to Chrysler, who will of course be bailed out once again, just 28 years after the first time they sauntered into the red.

AP article

Dear PETA:

I have a business idea, and since it concerns animals, well I know how you guys like to make a fuss over every little thing so I'm just going to run this by you. Shark prostitution. I'm going to whore out sharks for people to have sex with.

You see, sometimes people just want a real rough, hard fuck, with the most vicious creature imaginable. We'll keep them sedated and in small tanks, which our clients can get in, and screw them right in their shark vaginas. They'll have fresh water constantly running over them so they can breathe, and special waterproof speakers that'll play smooth jazz to help get them in the mood. Does Kenny G turn sharks on? More research is surely needed.

So PETA, will there be any problems with this? I know what you're thinking.. Maybe this isn't ethical, right? But isn't it? Who knows? Maybe these whoresharks will give rise to mutant sharkmen, and that's a great evolutionary step. That's more than ethical, that's downright kind! Not to mention that they could be a valuable asset to your organization. Perhaps you could start an offshoot organization SPETA (sharkpeople for the ethical treatment of animals). Sure they won't be able to firebomb buildings like you guys like since they'll need to be in the water, but they'll still be able to get in on the fun! Think how much easier it'll be to follow whaling ships, with a whole organization that can follow along right in the water. Sure, they'll probably kill the whale and eat it if the whalers don't, but you guys aren't ever much for details, why start now?

In summation, I hope you consider my attempts to help people have sex with sharks as a friendly gesture for both man and sharkkind. By not replying to this open letter I will take it to mean that you have no problem with it. Also-
By reading this post you agree to my EULA.
This consists of not using info in my post as the basis for any lawsuit, and not suing me for libel no matter what I say.
Failure to adhere to this agreement constitutes breach of contract and will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

Hank

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7636577.stm

Madcap antics on a British freeway - this is 'better living through chemistry.'

Daniel Roe

Biden: "When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened,'" Barack Obama's running mate recently told the "CBS Evening News."

Yeah, that's what he did alright. Then Abe Lincoln got on his cell phone and reminded Biden that FDR didn't take office until 4 years after the crash. Oh, PS: the first television station didn't exist until 1941. I guess FDR was thinking the people of the distant future needed reassurance that the crash of '29 was being taken care of.

Hank

"Mr Paulson will tell the Senate Banking Committee that the personal savings of US citizens are at risk, according to his prepared remarks."

Savings? Americans don't save a damn thing.

Check this out, th' notorious "Section 8" (and I don't mean th' Phoenix punk band :

"Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/09/22/dirty-secret-of-the-bailo_n_128294.html

This is a ^%%*(( power grab if ever there was one. Next thing, Comrade Paulsons will start buying all Libertarians one-way Amtrak tickets.

END BAILOUTS

p.s. if anybody has a good handle on how to get IE6 to read CSS layouts correctly, drop me a line - I couldn't get the EndBailouts layout to display correctly in IE6, so I had to break it temporarily.

Hank

From Slashdot :

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/mendelson_div_conq.html

Daniel Roe

PELOSI:'WE'RE NOT SENDING A BLANK CHECK TO WALL STREET'...

Yeah, a check would have to have money to back it. Ironically, a blank check sent directly to citigroup and whoever the hell else wants some would be a shitload cheaper than what we're doing. At least when you cash a bad check, it bounces... in the case of our bailouts, we just print the money, screw over the lower and middle classes, and say it's in the name of stability.

Awesome.

Hank

Announcing the establishment of EndBailouts.org ( http://EndBailouts.org ), an online resource and petition to end the bailouts :

In the four days since "Paulson is a Whore" was posted, the swine and his lackey Bernake managed to concoct an outrage so monumental that it makes the AIG bailout look like shoplifting.

No public liability for private debt!

One trillion dollars -- equivalent to the cost so far of the Iraq War -- of your money is now on the line to purchase the bad debt of big corporations. Including foreign banks! And unlike the AIG bailout, when the failed private businesses take your money under this plan, they don't surrender control of their company to you. Instead, you get the bad debt, and the reckless companies keep the good! So they stay solvent while your public debt is nearly ten trillion (!) dollars and the deficit in the budget is nearly half a trillion.

We don't have the cash on hand to bail out private companies who made bad bets. We're deep in debt to foreign interests including the Chinese and the Saudi Arabians, the Cayman Islands and numerous other entities whose aims may not exactly jive with ours.

Paulson and his slaves have tossed a grenade through our window. We must throw it back!

We must stand up right now and resist the establishment of a precedent of public liability for private corporate debts. There is no time to delay -- the swine are working all day and all night with coke-encrusted snouts to cheat your children and future generations out of their freedom.

Effective immediately, we're suspending all other creative activity in favor of resisting this crime. Stand with us!

Join EndBailouts dot Org at http://EndBailouts.org and sign the petition, then write your Congresspeople directly and tell everybody you know to take action now! Don't wait -- these crimes depend on hesitation. Sign, write, call at this moment to preserve our values and our money for future generations!

Hank

I never thought that this day would ever come. Well, it's way, way worse than we had even supposed.

For mumbled, muttered reasons that really boil down to the fact that our national government exists to protect not any thing but the interests of large corporations and their officers, the Federal Reserve Bank elected to 'bail out' the tanking pseudo-insurance dodecapus American International Group.

What this means is that eighty-five billion public dollars -- that is, your tax money -- is being used to prop up the "Weekend at Bernie's" style corpse of AIG in 'exchange' for 80% of AIG's shares of stock. So what you get, pal, is a gigantic liability in addition to an immense amount of worthless stock.

Sounds like a pretty good deal, huh? Well, I've got a better one. Overthrow the government.

See, what we have here is a crime. I'll spare you most of the Econ 101 lecture, but here's the basic problem : this government spends a lot of time trumpeting the wonders of the free market (at least the domestic market -- recall 'trickle-down' theory from the 80s?) and adopting policies both social and economic that are putatively designed to allow that market to operate in a way that is minimally hindered. This includes making sure that feisty entrepreneurs have incentive to take the risks that drive business activity by allowing them to keep a pretty good cut of the rewards if their risks pay off. Market activity for profit is gambling, speculative activity doubly so. The incentive to make the smartest, shrewdest choices in the market is provided by what generally happens when risks don't pay off -- one loses one's investme

Latewire

1m1w that viewing obscene amounts of drawn out pornography does not in fact count as studying for Human Anatomy & Phsyiology 112. Ah, wasted youth. P.S. Rumours of my death have been woefully underexaggeratted. Sso I got kicked in my softspot fontanelle by a moose, so what, I got better.

Daniel Roe

1m1w Woman: *Sigh* I sure am bored, ronery and also hot. My fingernails need biting. You: Hey... Girl: Oh, hey. Whatsup? You: Hey, uh... are you by any chance a member of a Masonic Temple? Girl: What the hell?? You: COS YOU BE LOOKIN' ILLUMI-NAUGHTY!!!! YEAAAAH!!! Score. Commence tits.

Hank http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7636577.stm Madcap antics on a British freeway - this is 'better living through chemistry.'

Hank From Slashdot : http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/mendelson_div_conq.html

1m1w

that viewing obscene amounts of drawn out pornography does not in fact count as studying for Human Anatomy & Phsyiology 112. Ah, wasted youth.

P.S. Rumours of my death have been woefully underexaggeratted. Sso I got kicked in my softspot fontanelle by a moose, so what, I got better.

1m1w

Woman: Sigh I sure am bored, ronery and also hot. My fingernails need biting.

You: Hey...

Girl: Oh, hey. Whatsup?

You: Hey, uh... are you by any chance a member of a Masonic Temple?

Girl: What the hell??

You: COS YOU BE LOOKIN' ILLUMI-NAUGHTY!!!! YEAAAAH!!!

Score. Commence tits.

Hank

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7636577.stm

Madcap antics on a British freeway - this is 'better living through chemistry.'

Hank

From Slashdot :

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/research/mendelson_div_conq.html