I’m going to slit my wrists. I’ve been reading the news again. I always want to slit my wrists when I do that. I know, I know: I’ll get encouragement from readers. OK, then, I won’t, just to spite them. Ha.
One story says that Americans owe some bizarre sum on the credit card and god knows how much on the McMansion and on the five-hundred horsepower riding mower with a mini-combine, backhoe attachment, and satellite GPS for mowing the half acre. I think I’m supposed to feel sorry for them. Actually I think they are a persuasive argument for eugenics.
I don’t get it. What is wrong with these idiots? Debt is easy to avoid. Herewith some blinding wisdom: If you can’t pay for it, don’t buy it. You saw it here first, a percipient contribution to economic theory. Works like a charm, too. Or how about this? Don’t buy more house than you can live in. Move over, Keynes, Ricardo, here I come.
Another story is about how banks are all unhappy because they’ve got bad loans. A probing question if I may (characteristic of this column): Who made the bad loans? Permit me another searing insight. If you lend money to people who can’t pay it back, they won’t. I know, I know, a difficult concept. Not something a Wall Street banker would know.
Thank god America isn’t a third-world country. In Mexico, the radio station of the local university, and other commie fronts, grouse about la impunidad, impunity, meaning that high-ranking criminals never get punished. You know, like the GQ-cover psychopaths who brought about the savings-and-loan scandal, or Milken, Boesky, and Levine, or Enron, and now the impoverishment of half the planet. But what can you expect? Mexico is a very corrupt country.
What I think is, we need a mass hanging. But no. The culprits will just reshuffle into the administration of Precedent O’Bama and remain attached, tick-like, to the withering federal dugs. The rats in the rafters may not be savory, but they look out for each other.
But on to matters of more import than whether we have anything to eat. I read that the world has gone euphoric over Precedent O’Bama. Simultaneously, O’Bama wants to send more troops to Afghanistan. I’ll give euphoria two more weeks. His chief virtues are that he isn’t Bush and isn’t McCain. When you have to choose between two candidates of whom each is worse than the other, you can bet life ain’t gonna be ham hocks and home fries.
Next, I see that the military has bombed another wedding in Afghanistan, killing forty-one. I guess it’s because civilians are easier to kill. They don’t hide very well. Usually they are unarmed.
Anyway, on BBC World News I saw some gringo colonel, maybe called Greg Julian, explaining that it was the Taliban’s fault when America bombs weddings. Most likely the plane had Taliban pilots. Recruiting is getting difficult, and I guess the Air Force has to take just about anybody.
But it wasn’t the fault of the military. In thirty years of covering the Pentagon, the military never did anything wrong. That’s a pretty good record. I know because they told me.
Anyway, Colonel Julian was impressive. He clearly had the makings of a future chief of staff. He was good-looking, delivered the word from corporate in grammatical English, and had the unnerving wholesomeness of a Christian Boy Scout. Definitely JCS material, depending only on his PowerPoint technique . He explained that the military goes to great lengths to avoid bombing weddings, that wedding-avoidance is practically an obsession, and they would try to keep from doing it too much in the future. I reckon it must have made any survivors feel good.
Funny, I too try to avoid bombing weddings, but I’m a lot more successful at it, despite a much smaller budget.
Now, I don’t want to sound cynical or anything. Still, I’d like to know how the good colonel would look at things if his daughter, if he has one, were having her wedding and kerblooey! Daughter and forty members of the family and close friends suddenly become clotting goo over a fifty-yard radius and the bombers say, “We’re sorry, kind of, but that wedding looked just like a troop concentration.” Troop concentrations always feature a woman in a white dress holding flowers. It’s what they teach at West Point.
Stray memory: I read once that bin Laden said he wanted to suck the US into long drawn-out losing wars to bankrupt the country and end its influence over the Moslem world. I don’t know why I thought of that. I need to focus better.
On to jollier topics, specifically federal porn. I find in Der Spiegel Online that Germany has decided against strip-search x-rays at airports. It’s because Germany carries civil liberties and privacy to impractical extremes whereas we, more realistic, know that the most innocent-looking girl probably has a bomb hidden in her skivvies. Those cheesecake scanners doubtless cost only a million bucks each, a song, times all the gates in all the airports in the world. This establishes pretty clearly that no economic interest is involved.
I bet the guys at TSA (Tits Scanners, and Ass) fight over the job of monitoring that screen. Hooboy. Especially as resolution increases. (Pressing research idea: Are color x-rays doable? Bombs probably come in different colors.) Maybe the government could recoup the cost by selling instant prints on request when some hot-ticket babe from a cheerleading squad comes through. Her boyfriend might want them. The rest could go to marketing at cellulite reduction outfits.
Yet more glad tidings. A while back I read where the Chinese did their first space-walk. On another page it said that as usual the Chinese economy had grown at twelve percent or some such number, and then I found a website talking about how China was buying up all the natural resources of Africa. The US can’t because it doesn’t have any money. It owes it all to China. And that’s because we borrowed from Beijing to make kinky nekkid-women scanners for ill-bred affirmative-action retreads at Homeland Security to look at, and bombs to drop on Afghanistan. Which doesn’t make sense, because Afghanistan was pretty much rubble from the start. It’s always been rubble.
I wish we had adult leadership like China has.
And now I hear that NSA is buying Bride magazine. Sounds like they’re hunting. Hey, stay single, or wear Kevlar and disperse quickly. (OK, I may have made that part up. I’m not sure.)
I can’t take any more of this. I really am going to slit my wrists.
I swear it. Anyone need A-Positive? Send a bucket.
