How Boring is Downtown Sacramento?

No California governor has lived in the governor's mansion since 1967--and it's free! It comes with servants! It's right near where they are supposed to work!

I mean, admittedly, it looks pretty creepy and is probably full of Munsters, but does any other state have this problem? [I seem to recall Blagojevich governing Illinois from Chicago -Ed.]

This Is What a Douchebag Looks Like

Ventral view

Dorsal view

I wonder who would win in a douche-off--Mr. CooL ICE or the Governor of California.

Before becoming Governor, Herr Schwarzenegger used to freeze things for a living

I'd say the odds are 50/50, considering these days Arnold walks around like his entire body is broken, and as long as the proceeds went to a charity that didn't spend 90% of their donations on operating costs, I'd sure buy a front-row seat.

Does Don King still do this shit? If so, give that motherfucker a call for me...

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Et tu, Brute?

How do you know when a straw is your last?

Just when I thought all the straws were long gone, this uber-depressing news comes via Huffington Post:

A central figure behind the Center for Disease Control's (CDC) claims disputing the link between vaccines and autism and other neurological disorders has disappeared after officials discovered massive fraud involving the theft of millions in taxpayer dollars. Danish police are investigating Dr. Poul Thorsen, who has vanished along with almost $2 million that he had supposedly spent on research.
Thorsen was a leading member of a Danish research group that wrote several key studies supporting CDC's claims that the MMR vaccine and mercury-laden vaccines were safe for children.

His study has long been criticized as fraudulent since it failed to disclose that the increase was an artifact of new mandates requiring, for the first time, that autism cases be reported on the national registry.

Mainstream media, particularly the New York Times, has relied on this study as the basis for its public assurances that it is safe to inject young children with mercury -- a potent neurotoxin -- at concentrations hundreds of times over the U.S. safety limits.
The discovery of Thorsen's fraud came as the result of an investigation by Aarhus University and CDC which discovered that Thorsen had falsified documents and, in violation of university rules, was accepting salaries from both the Danish university and Emory University in Atlanta -- near CDC headquarters -- where he led research efforts to defend the role of vaccines in causing autism and other brain disorders. Thorsen's center has received $14.6 million from CDC since 2002.

Leading independent scientists have accused CDC of concealing the clear link between the dramatic increases in mercury-laced child vaccinations beginning in 1989 and the epidemic of autism, neurological disorders and other illnesses affecting every generation of American children since. Questions about Thorsens's scientific integrity may finally force CDC to rethink the vaccine protocols since most of the other key pro vaccine studies cited by CDC rely on the findings of Thorsen's research group.

You know, when you can't even count on doctors and scientists funded by the CDC to be honest about their research into the effects of drugs on children, I think you need to doubt just about everybody out there, no matter what they do.

So, the next time your doctor says you'll feel much better with a new horse-pill down your gullet once a day, the next time your banker says you should take advantage of a great new opportunity, the next time your mechanic says you need a new thingermajigger, tackle him to the ground, stick the tip of a knife into his throat, and ask him again, when his life depends on it.

It sucks that things have come to this, but these days, you need to be sure.


By the way, since I haven't had a chance to mention it before, I had the great fortune of hearing Robert Kennedy, Jr. give a speech once, and it was not only eye-opening, but downright inspiring. I thought to myself that, if it weren't for the speech impediment and the Conservative bent of the deluded common folk, he would be president right now, could be president right now.

He was speaking at the 2008 Border Governors Conference in Universal City, CA, and damn if he didn't--off the top of his head--spend fifteen passionate minutes telling the whole auditorium, in great-yet-completely-accessible detail, how to greenly solve the energy crisis--at a profit--in a mere ten-year span.

It involves updating the nation's admittedly archaic energy grid--at great initial expense, but easily recouped over time--to allow for energy to be soaked up (via solar panels, wind turbines, etc) where fewer people use energy (deserts, the Great Plains, etc) and sent back into the grid to supply those areas where more energy is used but less is generated, which is something that is impossible right now.

It is a simple solution to our problems that the oil companies--and those invested-in/owned-by them--don't like. Meanwhile, Israel--among other small nations--are in the process of converting their energy grid to do this (RFKJ's company is helping them do it) because it makes sense, damnit.

Did the U.S. and Mexican Governors at the conference listen?

Well, let's put it this way--despite the fact that it was a conference focused mainly on better stewardship of the environment (per The Governator), most of the governors weren't even pretending to listen and the Governor of Texas walked out after two minutes.

Maybe RFKJ should have chased him down, tackled him, put a knife to his throat, and...

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Who Knew One Pistol Could Bring Our Mighty Army to Its Knees

Two old men had the following conversation in my head today and I felt like I should share:

"You've been in the bathroom awhile, man. Some shit went down."

"Oh, yeah?"

"Yeah. The other day a man walked into a crowded room with two handguns and opened fire. He somehow managed to kill 13 people and wound another 30 before being shot four times by a responding police officer who he also shot four times."

"Damn, what a gruesome story. Where did it happen? A school? A post office? The Republican National Headquarters?"

"Haha, yeah right--like anybody could get within 100 yards of that place with a gun... It happened at a military base in Texas crammed full of 50,000 soldiers, many of them trained for grueling warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan."

"Ni**a what?! That guy must have been some kinda bloodthirsty elite commando warrior gone rogue or something...wow...does Arnold have an alibi?"

"Whoa, whoa--settle down, it wasn't anything of the sort. The guy was a 39 year-old rotund military psychologist afraid of going to war."

"Shut the fuck up!"

"It's okay, baby--the police will be here any minute to save us."

Maybe one of the reasons we are having so much trouble in our endless war overseas is because a building full of trained soldiers can't disarm one man with a couple of pistols--they have to wait for a 5'4" female COP to drive over to the scene and throw herself in front of some bullets.

The soldiers even let this asshole RE-LOAD not once, not twice, but three times, for fuck sake, since he shot over 100 rounds of ammunition and the highest capacity clip for the FN 5.7 pistol he used (he never fired the .357 Magnum) is 30 rounds.

Note: There was an attempt in 2005 to make this pistol illegal, but it somehow failed...thanks, Bush.

Seriously, as tragic as it is that so many innocent people died, how the fuck is a lone psychiatrist able to get off that many rounds of ammunition in a room full of fucking battle-ready SOLDIERS?! Are they all named Buster Bluth or what?


I feel like if this happened in a high school locker room somewhere, some bone-headed-heart-of-gold football player would have clocked this guy and saved his classmates, even if he knew he might get shot to death in the process.

Not one soldier could fall on this grenade? Not one soldier had a gun to take him out? An entire platoon couldn't have bum-rushed him and taken him out with a few casualties?

How are all these 'soldiers' feeling now, knowing they are all going off to war surrounded by a bunch of selfish chickenshits? It must be rough knowing the guy next to you would rather duck behind a desk than attack a hostile enemy with his gun trained on his comrades.

Wait--are these soldiers even going to be allowed to go to war now? Or are they suffering from Pre-Traumatic-Stress Disorder and summarily relieved of active duty?

Doubtful--the army needs all the cannon fodder they can get these days, which is clearly the problem here...

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Gotta Love the Governator?

As much as I wish Arnold Schwarzenegger was not our governor, I have to admire his (Chief of Staff's) balls in issuing the following veto message to the California Assembly today:


Check out the first letters of lines 3 through 7.

OH!

This hilarity notwithstanding, my problem with the Governator remains: I don't like his schtick, but, at the same time, I can't stop occasionally falling for his schtick, as I might an old flame--which doubly irritates me because it highlights an obvious weakness of mine.

But, I mean, come on--can you blame me? How can you not smile at this Duke of Dweebs?


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Rosa Parks Is A Lot Like A Malicious, Omnipotent Virus

Sorry, PC users--nine million of you are carrying a worm on your computer that could do just about anything and cannot be stopped.

For all of you out there unable to get a handle on the gravity of this situation, imagine instead this comparable, if dumbed-down, scenario:

Alien space ships land on top of nine million buildings across America. Each mysterious, impregnable ship contains a small worm that slithers out unnoticed one day, joins up with the other 8,999,999 little worms, and forms a giant laser-shooting, atom-bomb-shitting, fabulously wealthy, indestructible Voltron space worm that even Arnold Schwarzenegger cannot defeat.


Well, that's what I might compare the situation to, anyway, were I so inclined; others aren't quite as talented, intelligent, or handsome as I am:

“Yes, we are working on it, as are many others,” said one botnet researcher who spoke on the grounds that he not be identified because of his plan. “Yes, it’s illegal, but so was Rosa Parks sitting in the front of the bus.” (courtesy nytimes.com)

Hmmm...is it? I suppose it could be, if the master villain behind this worm scheme is doing all this crazy bullshit in the name of advancing human rights, but I really doubt this is the case.

Or does Mr. Anonymous Botnet-Researcher know something we don't?

Perhaps we should arrest him, probe him, insert a microchip into his brain for no reason, and then ask him what he knows about the benevolent goals of the enemy.

If that doesn't work, let's put Bruce Willis on the case.



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Ten Things I Hated About 2008

1. Deranged bitch Sarah Palin and everybody who thought it was a good idea to get her onto the national political scene. The only positive thing was all the comedy that ensued; comedy which would have made things even worse if nobody listened to it and voted her into office. It's bad enough I have Arnold Schwarzenegger as my governor...


2. The fact that the world seems content to allow a group of ragtag pirates terrorize seafaring vessels at-will off the coast of Somalia. We kill innocent people all across the globe, have been for decades, and yet we can't rid the world of a couple dozen pesky pirates? We know where they live, we know how many hostages they have...but we do nothing. Can't we let those disgraced asshole Blackwater dudes redeem themselves with a covert murder mission or something? Seems fair to me...


3. California's Proposition 8 passed. Due to the Mormon church and other useless religious organizations. I agree with Karl Marx's assertion that "[religion] is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness." It's time we finally separate church and state, before religious fearmongers steal all our freedom. Please?


4. All the assholes that caused the horrific financial crisis currently gripping our globe will never pay for their crimes; rather, their bonuses this year will merely be reduced to 25 times my annual salary. And they might have to sell one of their SoHo pied-a-terre in order to continue paying Bennington girls to spank them with their Freemasonry paddles.


5. Still, always--farmers, merchants, businessmen...nobody realizes that a good year may be an exception and that they should not expect every year to be as good as their best. I find it hard to feel sorry for a farmer who purchased 5000 extra dairy cows after a good year and now cannot sell their milk. I find it hard to feel sorry for a store that excessively stocked up on merchandise it now cannot sell. I find it hard to feel sorry for a company that spent lavishly, gave away all its profits in dividends, hired unnecessary employees, and now finds itself in debt. Good. Drown yourselves in debt, get the fuck out of the marketplace, and let the smart people play the game. Oh, wait--the smart people are all at home drinking bourbon and making love, forever unemployed, forever happy. Play on, demented cowboys, play on.


6. Automakers still refuse to make sexy, environmentally-conscious cars. What is it about the different engines that require ugly bodies? Is it like how responsible people tend to be less attractive than reckless ones? Hmmm...is there a correlation between responsibility and sexiness that rules all matter in the galaxy? Maybe...


7. The fact that crime will always pay more than honesty results in an ever-more-dangerous world. Take this story as a prime example. Just as the greed and carelessness of the men on Wall Street resulted in financial turmoil, the greed and carelessness of law men and politicians the world over will always result in social turmoil. Money talks much more effectively than constituents and consciences.


8. The exponential increase in shittiness in the entertainment industry. Across the board. Music, movies, television, theater. Great movies just aren't being made anymore (last year's Assassination of Jesse James being the rare exception). TV shows suck more than ever (Pushing Daisies, Cashmere Mafia, The Hills...). Music on the radio is appalling (Beyonce? Vampire Weekend? I'd rather hear Ravi Shankar in an endless loop until I die). Theater is dead (replaced by Wicked, et al). Even literature is out the window (did any good books come out in the last...five years? No wonder Wallace left us.) Please read further as to why this is the case.


9. The continued invasion of eHarmony on the lives of the populace. An annoying increase in commercials and web advertising, now they're not even satisfied with just controlling people's dating lives? Who needs a website run by this dude to tell them how to run their marriage? I understand that they don't like to lose their customers, but I think there's a better way to achieve the same end: focus on promiscuity and your customer base will be coughing up money til they die.


10. The fact that the housing crisis has still not rendered homes affordable to the vast majority of people I know who have jobs. Who cares if a house that used to be $700,000 is now only $500,000. How the hell is anybody supposed to save $50,000 for a 10% down payment? And then drop $3500 a month on a mortgage for the next 30 years? (Which results in a lifetime payment of $1.2 million on the $500,000 house, by the way. Do the math.)
Do we all have to become bankers? Who will bake our bread?!


There you have it, folks. Hope it tarnished your New Year's optimism with a smudge of reality. Happy things still to come...

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