Flag Torture and a Return To Fallen Empire

From the United States Flag Code:

§8. Respect for flag:

d. The flag should never be used as wearing apparel, bedding, or drapery.

I recently got an email from TeaParty (dot) org with the subject line "Greetings From The Welfare State". The missive began with the hysterical call to "Fight For Repeal! Plan for Escape!" and went on to attempt to terrify the reader by asking these questions about President Obama:

"Many of us spend time trying to place Barack Obama in the correct collectivist phylum. Is he a Saul Alinsky socialist? An Anita Dunn Maoist? A Van Jones Marxist? A mummified Wilsonian progressive suddenly come back to life?"

I'd be willing to bet my last Food Stamp that 99.9% of the Tea Baggers couldn't tell Maoism from Ma Jhong, but they don't have to. The Bagger honchos are aggressively thinking for them, answering their own histrionic queries with:

"Obama is instinctively a dictator, and dictators are surprisingly quick at seizing power [sic]"

The Bagger who wrote that letter liked their  sentence so much that they repeated it in the very next line:

"Whichever label is most apt, Obama is instinctively a dictator, and dictators are surprisingly quick at seizing power."

Um, yeah. Especially when they campaign for nearly two years and are elected by a majority vote in a near-landslide election. The timespan between Election Day and Inaugaration day is less than 90 days- a veritable instant coup! It is a real testament to Obama's dictatorial prowess that he was able to reach the White House without the aid of the Supreme Court or the financial and political support of the companies that manufacture the electronic voting machines used in Presidential elections. Obama's predecessor needed those allies in order to obtain office, but the wily semi-Kenyan managed to get elected without their help. That proves a conspiracy, doesn't it?

I admit that I do support the Tea Bagger's panic-stricken call to "Escape"! I mean, if those pointy-headed "patriots" don't love America, then they should move somewhere that is more to their liking, such as Singapore, Canada or Hong Kong. Think I'm kidding? Here's what the Tea Baggers are saying about Escape:

"So as we fight to take America back... we might also think about how to escape and where to go if the dreaded prospect of an America governed as a (benign?) autocratic state becomes our reality.

Luckily there might still be some states worth escaping to. With the exception of Washington and Florida most states free of income and capital gains taxes (Alaska, Texas, Wyoming, South Dakota, Tennessee) are solidly red and firearm friendly."

But this part is the real kicker- the Tea Baggers claim to be following the footsteps of the American Founding Fathers, the same Fathers who decided to revolt against the British Empire, yet the Baggers are advocating that Americans flee back into the clutches of the dwindled and increasingly feeble British Empire- some bastions of which are located in or adjacent to Communist China! Read this:

"But every patriot knows that there is no second America waiting for us. A few remaining outposts of the British empire - Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Singapore, Hong Kong - still retaining deep historical attachments to the rule of law might even welcome us in, especially if we're sufficiently wealthy and skilled."

Um, a minor drawback here. They'd have to leave their guns behind. Most civilized countries have strict laws regarding firearms. But I don't expect the Baggers to understand muchabout the world beyond Europe Bad, Murka Good.

Even if they managed to buy their way into a new country ( and nothing says 'Patriotism!' like purchasing a new nationality), they might find a few unsettling surprises in store for them. Canada is full of French-speaking Socialists; Australia let the Dixie Chicks play concerts on its soil when almost no one else would; New Zealand is a Monarchy that doesn't even have a formal Constitution; India is swarming with dark-skinned Hindus who think they own the place; Singapore has enjoyed it's continued prosperity largely due to a substantial ,progressive national tax increase  passed in 1994 (Baggers want a prosperous nation but are unwilling to pay taxes to fund it) and Hong Kong lives in the oppressive shadow of Red China.

Go, I say to the Baggers.  Go to to Hong Kong and take honest, productive jobs as rickshaw drivers and sex workers. Go to Singapore and get caned under the rule of law. Actually, I don't care where you go, just go. Run away to your precious British Empire and don't come back, you punk-ass surrender monkeys.

Skip The Part About Leaving A Beautiful Corpse

Meet Donna Simpson, a public suicide-in-progress. Simpson's stated life ambition is to become the world's fattest woman, hoping to reach the 1,000 pound mark within two years. At around 600 pounds, she is already unable to walk  distances of more than a few feet without using a cart.  At 1,000 pounds, she is likely to be completely immobile, permanently bed-ridden by her own choice.

Disgusting? You bet. But I can't help but be impressed by her ability to set a worse example than her cartoon namesake, Homer Simpson:

                                Not The World's Worst Role-Model

For those who would rather not eat ten large bags of potato chips at a single sitting, I offer a few nutritional short-cuts seen during a recent shopping trip.

Above we have an 11.25 ounce box of pre-sliced Frozen Toast, sold for the  low price of $3.29, or about 41 cents per slice.  Look at the label. Amazingly, this pre-fab simulated toast product can be prepared in only 5 minutes! Wow. That's almost as fast as I can toast a bagel in my countertop toaster and about half as fast as I can toast bread.

The good folks at Pepperidge Farm are assuming that not only are you too lazy to toast your own bread, they are also banking that you are too lazy to butter it. To help, they have 'buttered' it for you by saturating it with margarine and vegetable oil. As a result, you'd be better off eating refried donuts than PF's overpriced grease-sponges.



The stuff of MREs:

Here we have  "Home Style" "Traditional"  turkey, gravy and stuffing packaged in unrefrigerated plastic tubs.  Why bother with the dangerous hassle of dropping a huge turkey into a vat of boiling grease?  Next Thanksgiving, just place one of these  containers in front of each dinner guest and be done with it.

Add some of these for good measure:

This is a 24-ounce package of prepared mashed potatoes. It sells for $4.00. In the produce section, you can buy 5 pounds of potatoes for $3.50 and it will produce about 7 pounds of mashed potatoes. Yeah, I know mashing potatoes is 'work' , but will a little exercise kill you? (Maybe, if your name is Donna Simpson.)

Size Two:

Pictured here is an 8-ounce box of frozen peanut-butter and jelly sandwiches. It contains four two-ounce sandwiches and costs $3.49,  about 85 cents per  tiny sandwich or $7.00 per pound. Apparently fixing a traditional PB&J is just too much work for today's youth, 27% of whom are too flabby for active military duty.

Curiously, the FDA is currently considering passing regulations restricting the amount of salt that is put into processed food. According to the the American Medical Association, 150,000 lives could be save each year simply by reducing sodium consumption.

""Nothing is off the table," said FDA spokeswoman Meghan Scott. 

The salt industry disagrees.

Morton Satin [his real name-ed.], director for technical and regulatory affairs at the Salt Institute, which represents salt producers, said regulation "would be a disaster for the public." 

"If you consume a lot of salt, you also get rid of a lot of salt -- it doesn't mean it's an excess," he said. "I want to make sure they're basing this on everything that is in the scientific literature, so we don't end up being guinea pigs* because someone thinks they're doing something good."  

I fail to see how reducing our salt consumption to healthy levels makes us "guinea pigs", but I can see some obvious harm that will arise: if salt consumption drops by one-half, so will the profits from the sale  of salt. The FDA estimates that we each eat 3 grams of salt every day- someone has to sell all that salt and the sellers aren't happy with the FDA's idea.

*(One third of all American adults suffer from high blood pressure, probably due to years of being treated like a salt-gobbling guinea pig by the food industry)

Monday Machines

Hot buttered diggity!  The Monday Machines CD ships Saturday, pre-orders and downloadable versions are available here: Monday Machines Album.  The CD is available in a hand-printed  special edition (see link for details) , limited to the first 50 copies, so pre-order and reserve one today!

There's also a full line of Monday Machines merchandise and memorabilia  magnificently  marketed   mmmhere.

Most of the music on the CD was recorded in England by Cary Grace (vocals, keyboards, guitars, more) with the help of the rhythm section (Andy Budge:bass, David Payne: drums) from her 2009 double-CD release Perpetual Motion, one of my favorite records of last year.
 My guitars, my vocals and  the bulldozer parts were recorded here in America by me. The entire project was mixed and produced by Cary. She also did the artwork and design for the CD cover and lyric booklet.

How to describe the music? It doesn't really sound like Jefferson Airplane jamming with NEU! with equipment on loan from Pink Floyd and  drugs supplied by Sonic Youth- but if you like those bands, you'll almost certainly like the Monday Machines.


(Hammer and screwdriver not included with mug or CD purchase. See instruction booklet for details.)

Carping The Deity

We Need Your Prayers

No we don't. If God is truly omniscient and  omnipotent, then He already knows what troubles we've seen and  He doesn't need to have anything pointed out to Him by mortals. It seems a bit presumptive to try to tell God something that He doesn't know; it projects the human trait of ignorance onto the face of the Divine. It's like writing letters to George Lucas telling him that Princess Leia needs to be rescued. George already knows.

And if a prayer works as intended, doesn't it risk  diverting God's attention away from some other soul who might also need some Divine help?

That question could answered by: God is everywhere, all the time. He can multi-task just fine.

But if he is everywhere, why point out things that are already obvious to Him? He already knows what's gonna happen.

Around and around we go, all the way to Goldfish Heaven.

On Second Thought

 There are people who need all the help that they can get . These people typically work as remote-managing HR supervisors and near as I can tell, the only thing standing between them and Eternal Damnation is prayer- and maybe the  possibility that Hell doesn't exist. 


Today we got an email from our faraway HR boss stating that we- the five service contractors in the office- had to attend a "team building" exercise to "help build morale". This would be bad enough on any day, but HR Puffinstuff  had decided that  it needed to be done on a Saturday so as not to interfere with our office routine. I have a weekly radio show on a local station that I do every Saturday and it would be interfered with to the point of me needing a last-minute substitute DJ. I've been doing my show for four years and not much demoralizes me more than the idea of missing a broadcast, plus the first and only time HR  visited our lonely outpost, she didn't even stop by my cube to introduce herself. I didn't see that  as especially 'team-building'.

If I didn't have a show, I might enjoy the overtime pay, but I know that I'd be incredibly depressed and sullen if I was forced to forfeit  my radio show in order to attend a corporate indoctrination, so I went to tell my office manager that I couldn't make it.


He was a bit dismayed, but not at me. It seems that both he and our receptionist are moving that day, they've signed leases, packed up and reserved trucks.

"I can't believe I have to come in here on Saturday", said my boss "It'll be dark before I finish moving", he noted.  Our receptionist echoed his words, adding that she would have to find someone to watch her kids while she was in here getting her morale boosted.


"The idea of skipping my show and spending a beautiful spring Saturday listening to HR presentations fills me with team spirit", I grumbled. "I'm pretty morale-ified."

 Then I had an idea. 


"There are five of us, plus HR will be here , plus you each have two teenagers, that  makes ten people. With two trucks ready to go at 6am, and ten people, if we all work together and start at dawn, we should be able to move both houses and be done in time for you guys to listen to my radio show...and really, not much builds teamwork quite like moving refrigerators up and down stairs together. "


Everybody laughed, which was a team-building morale-boosting thing, but I was serious. I told my boss he could pass my suggestion along to HR on account of me being confident that she would see my plan was a worthy cause that would raise everyone's spirits.


"She won't come anywhere near here if she thinks she has to move furniture", observed my boss.


" Gosh. Hadn't thought of that." 

My co-workers thought this was pretty funny. We had a good laugh and shared a mutual bond over our shared dislike of HR.  

I'm sticking to my plans and boosting my morale by doing radio.

The Monday Machines CD ships April 17th. Stay tuned!