The Rants of Anaximenes

A lot has been written of late about how the current administration is enamored with European-style systems of government, health care, social reform and the like.  Last week, Obama named Donald Berwick as his nominee for the newly created health care bureaucratic head of the Center of Medicare and Medicaid Services. Like his Supreme Court justice nomination Elena Kagan, here is another Harvard academic egghead with no real world experience and a decidedly socialist view of government, which is why no one but Harvard would employ them.  Berkwick is quoted in a 2008 speech to the UK National Health Service as saying the US health care system is "immoral" and that the UK "did it right." Of course, that was not long after Great Briton's Health Secretary was forced to apologize in Parliament for the death of 90 patients in two southern England hospitals because nurses didn't exercise proper infection control by washing their hands.

What the hell happened? Remember the way things were supposed to be by the time we got to 2010?

We were supposed to have zero gravity toilets in routine commercial Pan-Am flights to the moon, a place we had colonized several decades earlier.  We were supposed to have manned missions to Jupiter with talking computers possessing advanced voice recognition interfaces and highly developed cognitive skills.  And instead of cell phones, we were supposed to have access to readily available inexpensive public video-phones so we could see who we were talking to.

But wait a minute!  Those were things that were supposed to have happened almost a decade ago according to the Arthur Clarke story, 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Written in 1968, it seems Clarke slightly overestimated the achievements of mankind in the short span of thirty-three years.  About the only thing he got right is that today, we have Skype.  But since Congress has pulled funding for the NASA Constellation program, we won't be going back to the moon any time soon.

I know this will sound just as egotistical as all hell, and to the God believers it will be blasphemous in the extreme, but I think I could be a better god than God is. I mean it's not like I'm having delusions of grandeur or anything, really, I think a lot of people could be a better god than God is. If you're omnipotent, just how hard could it be? Surely one of us could create a better reality than the one he supposedly gave all of us.

The problem is that our human existence has forever tried to explain itself through a story that just doesn't make any fucking sense. If God loved us as much as all the gospels allege, he wouldn't have screwed it all up with a convoluted concept like free will. After all, that's what got us all banished from the Garden of Eden and started all of this bullshit, isn't it?

If God really was as forgiving as all the disciples said, he would have given Adam a break for eating that damned apple in the first place, wouldn't he? I mean, does it make any sense whatsoever that God would heap upon us misery, war, famine, disease, poverty, evil, suffering and pain just because Adam ate a fucking apple? How draconian is that?

There are things on this planet and in our country that truly perplex me. There are customs, beliefs and generally held notions that just astound me, not for just their stupidity or senselessness, but for the sheer numbers of people who revel in their own folly by believing shit that just isn't true.

Fifty-four percent of Americans, for example, believe in psychic healing. Fifty-percent of people in the U.S. believe that ESP is real and 41% believe that possession by the devil is a fact of life. Twenty-eight percent of people in this country read their horoscope daily not as a muse, but to actually plan their lives around the movement of celestial bodies located trillions of miles away.

 Folks' Folly is a regular rant feature of The Rants of Anaximenes with commentary on and over the galactic stupidity of most people on this planet.

Time for another installment of Folks' Folly to comment on the continued exhibition of the lame-brained, obtuse, dim-witted, simple-minded, thick-headed morons, idiots and imbeciles who never leave me with a shortage of material to write about. Homer Simpson continues to have Einstein-esque intelligence compared to some of the dunderheads on this planet, and will forever remain my avatar for each edition of Folks' Folly.

As usual during tough economic times, the criminal element of our society tends to go into hyper-drive as unemployment increases and consumer spending decreases. I'm not too sure why, since most of these losers had no intention of getting a job in the first place. But then again, none of these mental giants can really figure out how to be good criminals, let alone good citizens. A few cases worthy of mention in this edition of Folks' Folly:

And so, the final list of films in the Twenty Scariest Movie Moments continues in this Part II series, which would actually make this posting the Ten Scariest Movie Moments, wouldn't it?

As much as what you see listed, it might be what you don't see listed that disturbs you. For example, many lists of "top scary movies" include The Shining. Mine doesn't. I frankly laughed my ass off at that movie. There is just nothing Jack Nicholson can do to be scary. The guy is hilarious. For example, Jack Nicholson as Jack Torrance had this exchange with Shelley Duvall as his wife, Wendy:

Wendy: [crying] Stay away from me.
Jack: Why?
Wendy: I just wanna go back to my room!
Jack: Why?
Wendy: Well, I'm very confused, and I just need time to think things over!
Jack: You've had your whole fucking life to think things over, what good's a few minutes more gonna do you now?
Wendy: Please! Don't hurt me!
Jack: I'm not gonna hurt you.
Wendy: Stay away from me!
Jack: Wendy? Darling? Light, of my life. I'm not gonna hurt ya. You didn't let me finish my sentence. I said, I'm not gonna hurt ya. I'm just going to bash your brains in.
[Wendy gasps]
Jack: Gonna bash 'em right the fuck in! ha ha ha
Wendy: Stay away from me! Don't hurt me!
Jack: [sarcastically] I'm not gonna hurt ya...

With Halloween approaching, nearly all of the movie channels on cable are predictably showcasing their seasonal lineup of scary movies. Making the circuit, as one might expect, are the usual selections of the modern genre of horror films that have become the current standard bill of fare from Hollywood, like Saw (times five), Texas Chainsaw Massacre (times six), Nightmare on Elm Street (times seven), Halloween (times nine), Friday the Thirteenth (times twelve).

Do you see a pattern emerging here? No originality.

These are movies with the same basic theme: essentially innocent people being chased, pursued, hunted, followed, trailed, tracked, and/or captured, confined, restricted, restrained or detained by evil psychos, weirdos, wackos, nut-jobs and loons (that possibly possess some supernatural powers) who then get stabbed, slashed, sliced, cut, whacked, hacked, severed, incised, gashed, slit, ripped, lacerated - and in short, killed - in the most excruciatingly painful methods imaginable, all presented in the most graphically detailed and horrific ways. The formula rarely changes, so much so, that film makers are giving up on new characters and creative concepts in favor of just continuing the storyline of the first film with countless sequels. This theme has gotten so ridiculous that the antagonist from the movie Nightmare on Elm Street, Freddy Krueger, meets the antagonist from the movie Halloween, Jason Voorhees, for a showdown in the aptly if unimaginatively named Freddy versus Jason. And oh by the way, get ready to pick a number here too because, believe it or not, a sequel is on its way.

When all else fails in unresolved disputations among people of different ethnicity, and the truth cannot be rebutted with logic, reason, or the facts, it is an unfortunate and now increasingly repetitive tactic to resort to an ad hominem attack that the argument is based on racial bias, a behavior that Caucasian Americans suffering from collective white guilt continually reinforce by backing down and keeping their mouths shut.

Well, I'm not keeping my mouth shut. I intend to protest. Loudly.

How dare the likes of Jimmy Fucking Carter, and even more appalling that NBC News gave him a platform, to declare:

"...an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American."

It's just been a crappy summer, that's all. I'm glad it's almost over. I'm tired of the hot weather, mosquitoes, weeds and the health care "debate." August is a crappy month. It's the only month in the whole year that doesn't have a holiday in it. And no, I don't count Ramadan as a holiday. The stock market is still open, the mail still gets delivered, and Muslims are still killing one another, just like any other day. So, if it's to be considered a holiday, just be advised that it's a crappy holiday.

The only good thing that happened this summer is that a few Hollywood dunderheads finally died. Like, Michael Jackson.

"Oh, but he was so talented...." Yeah? Well, big deal. A lot of people can sing and dance, and most of them can do so without grabbing their crotch on stage. And what did he do with his talent? He turned it into incredible wealth so he could surgically make himself to look like a fucking clown, build a personal amusement park and lure little kids into bed with him.

The Food Network was launched in 1993 and found its way onto my TV remote control's "favorites" line-up somewhere around 1995. Always interested in food (both eating and cooking, but mainly eating), and having been around culinary professionals a good deal of my early career, I was a regular viewer of the Food Network, watching memorable cooking and food related travel shows like Two Fat Ladies, A Cook's Tour with Anthony Bourdain, and License to Grill, the latter two of which have since moved on to other networks. While photogenic personalities of the hosts was important up to a point, it wasn't the point. It was instead the food and the recipes that were the stars of each show in the earliest days of Food Network's programming. You actually could learn a recipe or two, or pick up a technique or two from these talented culinary professionals, and adopt them as part of your own repertoire.

The early Food Network also brought back some of the trailblazing cooking shows that started the whole concept of combining food preparation with television as an instructional learning experience, like Julia Child's Cooking Classics and The Galloping Gourmet. For those of us that grew up watching these original, saintly cooking shows on public television in the 1960s, the nostalgia alone was a welcomed, innovative touch to network programming.

Folks' Folly is a regular rant feature of The Rants of Anaximenes with commentary on and over the galactic stupidity of most people on this planet.

Time for another installment of Folks' Folly to comment on the continued exhibition of the lame-brained, obtuse, dim-witted, simple-minded, thick-headed morons, idiots and imbeciles who never leave me with a shortage of material to write about. Homer Simpson continues to have Einstein-esque intelligence compared to some of the dunderheads on this planet, and will forever remain my avatar for each edition of Folks' Folly.

This is a society that has forgotten how to be ashamed.

Behavior is getting more bizarre, outlandish and outrageous, yet no one is really surprised anymore. Nothing much shocks us. Like bees pollinating fields of flowers, we buzz from one news story to the next, reading about behavior in which no one would have engaged thirty years ago, remaining oblivious, unconcerned, unmoved and unashamed.

In April two years ago on a Monday morning, an individual previously adjudicated as mentally unsound, walked into the Engineering Science and Mechanics building at Virginia Tech and perpetrated the deadliest peacetime shooting incident by a single gunman in US history, killing 32 people and wounding 25 others before committing suicide. That same week on Friday, the nation's interest had focused its attention on Alec Baldwin yelling at his daughter in a voice mail. Our lack of shame knows no bounds. We just buzz on to the next news story.

For those of you who may not know, "blarney" is a real word. When used as a noun, it means deceptive or misleading talk, nonsense or hooey; as in: "He gave me a lot of blarney about why he was late." In other words, blarney means bullshit.

When used as a verb, it means to flatter or wheedle; as in: "He blarneys his boss with shameless compliments." In other words, more bullshit.

As far as I know, I am first to use blarney as an adjective. While the word still mostly means bullshit, I would like to impose a micro definition specifically for the purpose of this blog posting, which would be "slobbering, annoying, liberal, Massachusetts cocksucker." Hence, Blarney Barney.

I like it when so-called "celebrities" spout off in public because it highlights how utterly uninformed and completely fucking stupid they really are. I like to go off on a rant about them when they do it, however, because it's fun, and it makes me feel good. This is a true win-win scenario.

It's been awhile since I've paid enough attention to anyone in Hollywood to want to waste a literary effort on them, but it seems I'm good for about one rant a year for the more bilious, inane members of the entertainment industry who have come to believe that their craft has imbued them with some special worldly insight to which the rest of us are not privy. Of course, we only hear what they say because the media gives these dimwits a platform to espouse their bullshit seemingly at the very apex of their moronity. I suppose there are just as many annoying plumbers, draftsmen, or computer programmers, but the press doesn't give them the same attention as they do with the more intellectually challenged Hollywood elite. Unfortunately, the American public, by and large, is too stupid to do its own thinking, and so these thespian fools find silent audiences that enthusiastically and mindlessly clap at the most of ridiculous statements, like so many of those cymbal-holding battery-operated toy monkeys from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

Folks' Folly is a regular rant feature of The Rants of Anaximenes with commentary on and over the galactic stupidity of most people on this planet.

Time for another installment of Folks' Folly to comment on the continued exhibition of the lame-brained, obtuse, dim-witted, simple-minded, thick-headed morons, idiots and imbeciles who never leave me with a shortage of material to write about. Homer Simpson continues to have Einstein-esque intelligence compared to some of the dunderheads on this planet, and will forever remain my avatar for each edition of Folks' Folly.

The old expression of "playing with fire" is no more applicable than when dealing with hot peppers in the kitchen. Peppers are remarkable if for no other reason than they're the only vegetables in the garden to have their very own rating scale that measures their primary attribute: heat. Or, more to the point: pain.

It is interesting that use of the words "pepper" or "peppers" generally take on two distinct meanings beyond that of their singular and plural use.

When nearly any cinema fan is asked to name the first actor to portray James Bond, the answer is invariably “Sean Connery.” But that is the wrong answer.

The Original James Bond, and the Strange Case of Casino Royale

Eight years prior to Connery donning 007’s shoulder holster for the first time in the United Artist's release of Dr. No, American actor Barry Nelson brought James Bond to life in a one-hour live television production of Casino Royale. The year was 1954, and author Ian Fleming had only one year earlier presided over the publication of this first Bond novel.

James Bond was the ultimate anti-hero: a man who had only a grudging respect for authority, an obsession with high stakes gambling and exotic travel, and an even more fervent passion for the seemingly endless array of sexually aggressive women who surrounded him. While Fleming's first book in this franchise enjoyed some financial success, and Bond's qualities may have endeared the character to the British spy-novel reading public, prospective film producers in Hollywood were intimidated by them. Fleming found a conspicuous lack of interest in producers seeing the potential for a James Bond film. The novel’s emphasis on sex and violence alienated investors during a period in which prudish studio executives were producing movies like Stalag 17, Peter Pan, and Roman Holiday. Even the Academy Award winning movie for Best Picture in 1953, From Here to Eternity, was considerably watered down from the James Jones romance novel of the same name.

Thanksgiving really is my favorite holiday. I like it better than Christmas perhaps because the only thing I am expected to buy is a turkey, and I don't have to gift wrap it or mail it or give it away. There are no obligatory decorations to put up at Thanksgiving. It isn't a religious holiday, so I don't have to listen to any bullshit Christian messages about "peace on earth" and "good will toward men."

Except for members of PETA who worry about shit like how well turkeys were treated before they were fattened, slaughtered and butchered, Thanksgiving is a non-controversial holiday. Contrasted with Christmas, you don't have to worry about upsetting the sensibilities of Jews because you put up a tree in an airport, or listen to any ACLU arguments about why a courthouse can't have certain kinds of decorations on its front lawn.  And even though Hallmark tries hard, no one really expects you to send out greeting cards on Thanksgiving, wishing everyone a Happy Thanksgiving or some other cheerful fucking message.

White Guilt is Dead
By Tom Adkins
(Reprinted without permission)

When I was a kid, I wasn't frightened very much, at least not that I can remember.  I was never scared of the dark, really.  I never thought there were monsters living under my bed or in my closet.  As a matter of fact, I actually liked sitting in my closet, reading comic books with a flashlight and the door closed. It was sort of my own secret respite from the world where, for awhile, I could pretend nobody knew where I was, and that I didn't have to make my bed, take out the garbage, feed the dog, or do some other fucking chore.

Vampires were interesting, but they never really scared me because I didn't believe in them, and getting bit on the neck by some guy in a tuxedo just wasn't all that frightening to me.

Ghosts and goblins were just figments of other people's imagination and besides, I never really knew what a goblin was, anyway. I saw A Christmas Carol at a very early age (actually, I think it might have been a Mr. Magoo cartoon adaptation of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol) wherein Scrooge says of the ghost Jacob Marley:

"You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

So it was with my belief in ghosts.

If you're not a cigar smoker, then you really won't fully understand.

"The only way to break a bad habit was to replace it with a better habit." - Jack Nicholson, explaining why he switched from cigarettes to cigars.

It reminds me of a bumper sticker I saw recently on a Jeep Cherokee tooling down the Interstate.  It read: "It's a Jeep.  If you don't drive one, you wouldn't understand."  It seems like I have seen similar verbiage on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle once.  "If you don't own a Harley, you wouldn't understand."  I'll tell you one thing I understand about Harley-Davidson motorcycles. They need to improve their decibel level.  But then again, I guess don't understand why dressing up like a denim-clad loser with a chain attached to my wallet, riding a motor bike that sounds like a never ending brontosaurus fart is somehow exciting. The only thing I can think of saying whenever I hear one is, "Hey, Einstein!  Check out Midas and get a fucking muffler."

I don't understand because I am not into Harley-Davidson motorcycles. I think people that ride them are buffoons, most especially those middle-aged doctors and lawyers and stockbrokers who hang up their lab coats or Brooks Brothers suites and dress up like Hell's Angels on the weekends to ride around town on their Harley bikes, often with their middle-aged wife in the bitch seat, trying to look cool. Wearing a biker costume and riding a Harley does not make you cool. It's a cliché and it's lame. Good god, man, grow up!

Folks' Folly is a regular rant feature of The Rants of Anaximenes with commentary on and over the galactic stupidity of most people on this planet.

Time for another installment of Folks' Folly to comment on the continued exhibition of the lame-brained, obtuse, dim-witted, simple-minded, thick-headed morons, idiots and imbeciles who never leave me with a shortage of material to write about. Homer Simpson continues to have Einstein-esque intelligence compared to some of the dunderheads on this planet, and will forever remain my avatar for each edition of Folks' Folly.

As the volume of presidential election rhetoric rises faster than the price of gasoline over the next sixty days, energy costs in general will continue to fuel debate over our national policy toward the question of ANWR drilling. I hope McCain's running mate, Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin, will insist that the federal government quit telling Alaskans what to do with their land and to get the hell out of her state.

By the way, when did the federal government usurp states' rights to pursue economic viability with their land, anyway? The federal government is directly denying Alaskan citizens the right to pursue life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, as this state would surely stand to gain economically in many ways were drilling allowed there. Where would the economies of Texas and Louisiana be if the federal government held the same moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico as they do on the coastal plains of the Beaufort Sea? When did this repression of liberty in the name of environmental politics happen, anyway?

This a the fifth and final in a series of five companion postings to my May 23, 2007 essay, The Truth About Truth. Instead of an exposé over the nature of truth itself, however, these five posts will be seeking the truth behind the world's five biggest lies. As I postulated in that essay, there are four kinds of truth: subjective truth, relative truth, objective truth, and absolute truth. The latter of the four can rarely be known, and both subjective truth and relative truth are very often mistaken as absolute. Thus it is with The World's Five Biggest Myths that are taken for absolute truth, when in fact, they are at best relative truths, if not wholly and utterly untruthful. In other words: big, fat, fucking lies.

Myth #5 - Diversity makes us stronger.

"Social values in general are incrementally variable: neither safety, diversity, rational articulation, nor morality is categorically a good thing to have more of, without limits. All are subject to diminishing returns, and ultimately negative returns.”- Thomas Sowell

The truth behind this Myth should be perfectly obvious. "Diversity makes us stronger" is a statement of opinion, not a factual conclusion. It does not follow as a logical deduction that dissimilarities between peoples could possibly make a society stronger as a whole. It doesn't take a sociologist to at least suspect that it might be a more rational assumption if the opposite were true. Look around the natural world at animals that hunt in packs or those that travel in herds, or schools of fish, or flocks of birds. It is obvious that it is their similarities and indeed, their homogeny that makes them stronger and we know that these creatures evolved that way as a survival strategy for their species. Even for humans, diversity didn't evolve naturally. The Caucasian race, the Negroid race, the Mongolian race all evolved separately and in their own distinct locations. Natural Selection precisely chose each race because of their similarities, not for their diversity.

This a the fourth in a series of five companion postings to my May 23, 2007 essay, The Truth About Truth. Instead of an exposé over the nature of truth itself, however, these five posts will be seeking the truth behind the world's five biggest lies. As I postulated in that essay, there are four kinds of truth: subjective truth, relative truth, objective truth, and absolute truth. The latter of the four can rarely be known, and both subjective truth and relative truth are very often mistaken as absolute. Thus it is with The World's Five Biggest Myths that are taken for absolute truth, when in fact, they are at best relative truths, if not wholly and utterly untruthful. In other words: big, fat, fucking lies.

Myth #4 - Most people are basically good.

"Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. There are too many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and the only thing that's wrong is to get caught." -J.C. Watts

A risk management and loss prevention officer of a large international corporation once postulated that accounting controls are set up in various business units to keep people honest. Did you get that? .....to keep them honest, as if to assume that people are not naturally honest. And, in point of fact, they are not as he explained:

"Ten percent of your employees will never steal, so you should not worry about them. Fifteen percent of your employees will absolutely steal from you no matter what you do, so all you can do about them is to try to catch them during or after the fact. But accounting controls are put into place for the other seventy-five percent of your employees who will steal only if given the opportunity."

In other words, most people won't do the right thing simply because it's the right thing. They will do the right thing in order to keep from getting caught. It follows, therefore, to disbelieve the Myth that most people are basically good. They are not. The real truth behind this Myth is that most people will likely do the wrong thing if given the opportunity in a consequence-free environment while no one else is watching. Evidence of this is around us every day.

This is the third in a series of five companion postings to my May 23, 2007 essay, The Truth About Truth. Instead of an exposé over the nature of truth itself, however, these five posts will be seeking the truth behind the world's five biggest lies. As I postulated in that essay, there are four kinds of truth: subjective truth, relative truth, objective truth, and absolute truth. The latter of the four can rarely be known, and both subjective truth and relative truth are very often mistaken as absolute. Thus it is with The World's Five Biggest Myths that are taken for absolute truth, when in fact, they are at best relative truths, if not wholly and utterly untruthful. In other words: big, fat, fucking lies.

Myth #3 - Love makes the world go 'round.

"When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace." - Jimi Hendrix

Okay, maybe this is more of a song title than a myth. It is a concept that the romantic part of us hopes is true, but we all know really isn't true. Love doesn't make the world go 'round. Money, power and sex make the world go 'round. And mostly, it's about money. Power is a result and sex is a byproduct.

This is the second in a series of five companion postings to my May 23, 2007 essay, The Truth About Truth. Instead of an exposé over the nature of truth itself, however, these five posts will be seeking the truth behind the world's five biggest lies. As I postulated in that essay, there are four kinds of truth: subjective truth, relative truth, objective truth, and absolute truth. The latter of the four can rarely be known, and both subjective truth and relative truth are very often mistaken as absolute. Thus it is with The World's Five Biggest Myths that are taken for absolute truth, when in fact, they are at best relative truths, if not wholly and utterly untruthful. In other words: big, fat, fucking lies.

Myth #2 - All men are created equal.

"That all men are equal is a proposition which, at ordinary times, no sane individual has ever given his assent." - Aldous Huxley

While I do revere our Declaration of Independence as one of the greatest documents to have ever been written in this country and as a matter of fact, the very document that began this country, anybody who has spent time in a high school gym class locker room shower knows the lofty notion that "all men are created equal" is a big, fat fucking lie. The Declaration of Independence states:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness..."

There are several points to this statement that bear scrutiny and rebuttal.

This is the first in a series of five companion postings to my May 23, 2007 essay, The Truth About Truth. Instead of an exposé over the nature of truth itself, however, these five posts will be seeking the truth behind the world's five biggest lies. As I postulated in that essay, there are four kinds of truth: subjective truth, relative truth, objective truth, and absolute truth. The latter of the four can rarely be known, and both subjective truth and relative truth are very often mistaken as absolute. Thus it is with The World's Five Biggest Myths that are taken for absolute truth, when in fact, they are at best relative truths, if not wholly and utterly untruthful. In other words: big, fat, fucking lies.

Myth #1 - There is One, True God.

"As long as there has been One, True God, there has been killing in his name." - Dan Brown, author of The Da vinci Code, through the character Sir Leigh Teabing

In my March 25, 2006 posting Deity Dissonance, I expanded a thesis begun in an earlier posting of January 28, 2006, The Matrix as a Metaphor for Religion. The central theme of these two essays was how man has enslaved man with systems of control based on dogmatic belief systems of a higher power in order to exert authority and extort money. Belief systems of the ancient Greeks and Romans, for example, required homage and offerings, presided over by mysterious clergy who explained the ways of the universe to the common man, to the aristocracy and even to royal members of those societies. In exchange for a few Greek drachma or Roman sestertius, the anointed priests would guide people through their life travails with the help of a whole lot of rules that they basically made up. People at the time didn't know that they made the whole thing up, but we know that now, don't we? And the truth is we have merely replaced those belief systems in more modern times with a whole lot of other, newer and different made-up belief systems. So, things haven't really changed all that much.

If you ask anybody below the age of thirty who they think was (or is) the worst president this country has ever seen and you would likely hear the responsum vox populi, "George W. Bush." Hell, it's cool and en vogue to hate our current president. No stand-up comedian or late night talk show host would be able to keep an audience entertained were it not for the mass, almost hysterical hatred for George W. Bush.

Now, Dubya is no dandy, that's for sure. His golly-gee-shucks manner is annoying, and his cabinet is rife with cronies. I have my bones to pick with him, not the least of which is his decision to put the likes of Donald Rumsfeld in charge of the Iraqi war, which was miscalculated from the onset, bungled in the first month and has been mismanaged ever since, now five years later with no concluding strategic plan that would get our troops the fuck out of that country.

What does this sound like to you?

"....when we've got CEOs making more in 10 minutes than ordinary workers are making in a year... and it's the CEOs who are getting a tax break and workers are left with nothing, then something is wrong, and something has to change."

Or this?

"...we're going to rollback those Bush tax cuts that went to all the wealthy people, and we're going to give tax cuts to ordinary families, people who are making less than $75,000. We will offset your payroll tax."

Or this?

"I am here to tell you that every child is our problem, every child is our responsibility."

Or this?

"I don't know about you, but I think it's about time we made college affordable for every young person in America. So we're going to provide a $4,000 tuition credit, every student, every year, but, students, you're going to have to give back something in return. You're going to have to participate in community service. You're going to have to work in a homeless shelter, or a veteran's home, or an under-served school, or join the Peace Corps."

These statements made by Barack Hussein Obama not only sound like socialism to me, they are in fact distinctly socialist concepts: redistribution of wealth, class envy, corporations cast as evil, a denunciation of capitalism, people being taken care of by the state only to be told they must also serve the state.

Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. is a socialist.

Let's talk about something nearly everybody can get behind. If there is going to be any unity in this country, it isn't going to come from the Democrats or the Republicans or the liberals or the conservatives. It isn't going to come from the right or the left, or from Bush or Obama, Clinton or McCain, Huckabee or Nader. It won't be because of hope, a balanced budget, no child left behind, or lower taxes. Or higher taxes, for that matter. It won't be because the troops come home or the troops stay there. It won't be because we get a court order before listening to terrorists' phone conversations or wiretap them indiscriminately. It won't be because of whether we close the Guantanamo detention center or keep it open. And it won't be because of whether we grant Constitutional due process to military combatants, or hook their nuts up to a car battery while asking a few important questions, like: "Where the fuck is Osama bin Laden?"

In short, it won't be because of the government or our politics or the military or your church; and not because of a commission, a tribunal, a court, a legislature, the House, the Senate, the federal bureaucracy, our Commander-in-Chief or the Supreme goddamn Court.

It will be because of Barbecue.

Yes, Barbecue.....delicious, delicious Barbecue.

Folks' Folly is a regular rant feature of The Rants of Anaximenes with commentary on and over the galactic stupidity of most people on this planet.

Time for another installment of Folks' Folly to comment on the continued exhibition of the lame-brained, obtuse, dim-witted, simple-minded, thick-headed morons, idiots and imbeciles who never leave me with a shortage of material to write about. Homer Simpson continues to have Einstein-esque intelligence compared to some of the dunderheads on this planet, and will remain as my mascot avatar for each edition of Folks' Folly.

It's Not Unusual ... it's really unusual
February 6, 2007
The Associated Press

Ageless heartthrob Sir Tom Jones has reportedly insured his chest hair for almost $7 million. Though the 67-year-old crooner's management told a British tabloid that Jones has been "working far too hard in the recording studio" for such frivolity, media reports have confirmed the policy was taken out with the world-renowned Lloyd's of London.

The prestigious insurance house has a history of catering to strange celebrity requests.

Lloyds of London has insured the legs of Fred Astaire, Angie Dickinson, and supermodel Heidi Klum, the hands of pianist Liberace and the fingers of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards. The most famous rear end in the world — the one belonging to Jennifer Lopez — is also said to be insured by the London-based insurance house.

On its website, Lloyds of London boasted that the storied firm issued coverage of a celebrity's chest hair in 2006.

"Admittedly, this is one of the most obscure requests I've had - but I still came up with a wording that addressed the need," underwriter John Thomas said at the time.