An equality of misery: the only equality government can guarantee
The downside of the new, expanded Moronosphere: I keep reading stuff I want to go back to and I can’t remember where I saw it. Here’s one I managed to find again, thanks to Andrew’s Dad.
You probably heard that Cuba is finally going to unban cellphones (legally, anyway — a lot of ordinary Cubans had cadged phones off tourists). Here’s the charming way the AP put it:
Getting through the day without a cell phone is unthinkable now in most developed countries, but Cuba’s government limited access to cell phones as well as kitchen appliances, hotels and other luxuries in an attempt to preserve the relative economic equality that is a hallmark of social life in communist Cuba.
Got that? To preserve relative economic equality, you must ban basic goods the rest of the world takes for granted. The equality of communism is an equal grinding poverty.
Why? Because you can’t make a poor man into a rich man by giving him money, but you can make a rich man poor by taking his stuff away and not letting him amass more. Rich and poor aren’t static qualities; they flow from attitudes and behaviors. The moment Cuba takes oppression away, some people — by fair means and foul — will manage to accumulate more than others.
You know the old saying: you could divide the world’s money equally among us and, five years later, we’d all be right back where we started. Me, I think there’d be some degree of permanent shift: good and bad luck are a factor in some fortunes. But the general principle holds.
You only have to look at the number of people whose lives are ruined by winning the lottery. Like these lumpen idiots who won £100,000 on a scratch ticket in 2006. They’ve pissed it all away, and now they’re back demanding government benefits.
That didn’t surprise me. What did surprise me was the reaction of posters on the site where I read about it: many said government benefits are a right and lottery winnings are a windfall that is supposed to be pissed away on luxuries.
An attitude of poverty.
April 16, 2008 — 12:34 pm
Comments: 37
Shattering my worldview, one dead hippie peace activist at a time
Okay, so this Italian artist — Giuseppina Pasqualino di Marineo, known as Pippa Bacca — decides to hitch right across the Middle East to Israel and the Palestinian Territories. Wearing a wedding dress. For peace.
I know: makes perfect sense to me, too. “She had said she wanted to show that she could put her trust in the kindness of local people.”
Okay, y’all aren’t going to believe this next part: it didn’t have a happy ending.
She was hitching with a friend. They separated in Istanbul and planned to meet up again in Beirut.
Then she vanished and turned up naked and stone dead under some bushes in the woods in Turkey.
A Turk named Murat Karatas was nicked when he tried to use her cellphone. He confessed he had picked her up at a gas station and raped and murdered her.
I know! Can you believe it? It’s like the ordinary laws of time and space don’t apply!
April 12, 2008 — 6:30 pm
Comments: 56
I did not know that
It doesn’t quite line up with what one may hear from Amnesty International and its ilk, but in fact there is a long line of people waiting to get into Gitmo. The U.S. Coast Guard reportedly intercepts some 600 refugees, not all of them from Cuba, in the sea around the base every month. Gitmo itself houses around 30 migrants at any given time.
—Jacob Laksin The American Spectator
March 14, 2008 — 8:12 am
Comments: none
Being a foreigner: harder than it looks
Uncle B and I were out grocery shopping today and I noticed something I guess I’m going to have to get used to. At the sound of my foreign accent, people start and turn to look at me (if nothing else, that tells you how far out of London we are).
It’s not so bad; when they realize what they just did, most people give me a sheepish smile.
I work with a man who is missing the littlest two fingers of his right hand. I didn’t know it until I shook his hand and then — it was completely involuntary — I started and stared down at our handshake. It felt so indefinably…wrong. He must get tired of that look, day after day. Me, I just get grinned at.
Many and high-larious are the zany miscommunications between Weasel and Badger. Like this here thing. The sign up there. It was part of my Christmas loot.
B: It’s Chinese, I guess.
S: What?
B: Weasel zhing.
S: You’re pulling my leg, right?
B: Well, I thought it might be pronounced Weasel ching, but I looked up all the variations I could think of and didn’t find it.
He thought it was a slogan, like “grrl power” or “ban the bomb” or “weasels rule, badgers drool.” Poor bastard; he’ll buy me anything with a weasel on it. Most of which seems to come from California.
For the record, they spell it out here: Crossing. It’s all part of their “use more stuff than strictly necessary on signage” campaign. Way Out for Exit. Give Way for Yield.
December 27, 2007 — 7:41 pm
Comments: 15
Melly Clismouse
Oh, sure, it looks cute.
When the weather turned this Fall, a plague of cold mice descended on Badger House. Uncle B found them in the trap, roughly one rodent per day. Dead, if he was lucky. Otherwise, he had an unpleasant deal of mouse-dispatchin’ to do.
The Maternal B — his mum — bought him this festive holiday rodent to commemorate all his festive holiday rodent skull-smashing.
That’s not the good part. This is the good part. It’s the song he sings when you press his belly.
I’ll bet you a shiny new penny that’s We Wish You a Merry Christmas sung by a Chinese woman who doesn’t speak a word of English.
Melly Clistmas, minions!
December 24, 2007 — 6:48 pm
Comments: 16
Smut week continues on sweasel.com
It snew! Yes, the big storm racing across America reached a Weasel this noon. I flew home at a cumulative speed of 6.25 miles an hour (wot a beaut of a traffic jam!) and…continued putting things into boxes.
So here’s a link to somebody else’s shit! Tokyo Damage Report has been on my reading list since before I read blogs, even. The proprietor is a messed-up American dude in Tokyo who comments on…bands and porno, mostly. This is where I first heard about tentacle porn and used panty vending machines — without the knowledge of which, my life would be immeasurably poorer. Yet, despite the subject matter, his posts are somehow never in the slightest prurient or even smutty.
But the site can be hard to follow. Whenever he gets jammed up in the structure of his own site, he shifts everything around and opens entirely new pages in different places. No blogging software, either; it’s all free-form and bewildering. Sometimes interesting links go here to die.
The photograph above comes from what purports to be a Japanese sex manual from the 1960s. I think. The description got severed from the page scans and I can’t seem to find it again. Anyhow, here’s the book. Sure, it starts off innocently enough, making hand-holding as complex as docking the shuttle to the international space station, but it gets pretty hot after that.
Click at least as far as the nice lady in the leotard making vague gestures at an artist’s mannequin from across the room. That’s oral sex! It looks so wholesome.
December 13, 2007 — 7:44 pm
Comments: 32
Stinks to high heaven
· In September of 2000 TV station France 2 showed footage that it declared was the murder of Palestinian boy Muhammad al-Dura by the IDF. It became iconic. It was shown and reshown and resulted in a hefty body count.
· After further scrutiny, it was clear that the film didn’t show what they said it showed. In November of 2004, media watchdog Phillippe Karsenty called bullshit on France 2, claiming the incident was staged.
· Charles Enderlin and Arlette Chabot of France 2 sued Karsenty for libel and, with an assist from the shameless Jacques Chirac, France 2 won.
· Karsenty appealed and demanded the raw footage of the incident. The appeal judge concurred.
So today saw the release of 18 of the supposed 27 minutes of raw tape. Film. Disc. Whatever. Among the revelations: al Dura peeking out between his fingers some time after his ‘death.’
Richard Landes of the Augean Stables is, as usual, on top of this one, too. For metabackground (don’t you hate fake words with “meta” in them?), Landes also runs Second Draft, which includes an excellent collection of data on Pallywood.
I met Richard Landes at Acepalooza when, asked my name, I blurted out
my own real name. This so shocked basic weasel protocol that
I walked away before I realized I had been conversing with one of
my favorite bloggers.
November 16, 2007 — 11:51 am
Comments: 12
The Nobel continues its boogie to banality
So! My old neighbor Al Gore joins Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat, Kofi Annan, Mohammed El Baradei and Rigoberta Menchú as a peace prizolier — which is more than Mahatma Gandhi can say. Did you know it comes with a million and a half bucks? Here’s hoping Gore has to share it with the entire cast of thousands on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He has his snout deep enough in that trough as it is.
Like all things controlled by committee, the Nobels have always inclined toward suck.
Take my favorite Nobel recipient — this dude with the funny ears, António Caetano de Abreu Freire Egas Moniz (1874-1955). He pioneered cerebral angiowhotsit — injecting stuff into the veins of the head so that tumors and aneurysms show up on x-ray — which was a very good thing. But he won the Nobel for medicine in 1949 for a very bad thing. Says Wikipedia:
The procedure was the lobotomy. Back in Lisbon he ordered that a human brain be brought to him from a morgue, and thrusted a pen through the cortex several times until he was satisfied he knew the approximate angle and depth that would best detach the frontal lobes. He performed the operation on a former prostitute, who afterwards was unable to give her age or say where she was. She was returned to an asylum, never to be seen by him again. Moniz nonetheless considered this a “clinical cure” and continued operating.
The operation was popularized in the US by clinical neurologist Walter Freeman, whose rough-and-ready version involved poking an ice pick through the eye socket and wiggling it around a bit. No lie. If you get a nice, clean version of the famous photo of him performing this neat parlor trick, you can read the name of the Chicago ice company on the handle of his surgical instrument.
Had the procedure been used as a last resort for the hopelessly, violently insane…it would still be wicked, but it would be forgiveable. As it was, lobotomies were famously given the annoying and inconvenient. Rosemary Kennedy got hers (from Freeman himself) to treat “mood swings”. She lived the next fifty-some years in a convent school as a babbling idiot.
If there’s such a thing as a human soul, I’m as sure as sure can be its proper name is “the brain.” Hence, Dr Egas Moniz won his Nobel for inventing a method of granting thousands of troubled human beings a living death. Murder, if you ask me.
In conclusion: fuck you Al Gore.
October 12, 2007 — 9:11 am
Comments: 16
Russian? Anyone?
This was on the back door of an otherwise plain white work van I saw on the commute home tonight. Anyone?
Yeah, I know. Lame post, but I’ve goofed off all day and I hesitate to break a perfect record. It was a cinch the stapler post would dominate the blog all week, anyhow.
Uncle Badger says I deserve you guys. Sometimes, it almost sounds like it’s not a compliment.
October 5, 2007 — 5:04 pm
Comments: 43
People come and go so quickly here
This blog has become one of my favorite daily reads. So I shall show my gratitude by swiping his stuff.
Like this map. The one up top there. Guess what the dots mean. No, guess. Seriously, I’m not typing anything else until you do.
Wrong! It’s a list of all 160 cities in 1900 that had a population greater than 25,000.
Holy smokes! Can you believe it? Granted, some of those cities had a lot more than 25,000 citizens. The top twenty ranged from New York City, at 3,437,202 to Providence, RI at 175,597. (Poor little Rhode Island. Providence has slid to 124th with a current population of approximately 176,862. We’re leaking people!).
It’s so easy to forget that Superpower America is a 20th Century invention. Before that, we were a few happy rubes with cowshit on our boots. One of my favorite displays at the Smithsonian was in the Castle: they preserved intact the 1876 centennial exhibition, showing all our proudest accomplishments at the end of the Victorian era. Tennessee’s entire display is a coon skin and some pieces of wood. With bark on.
Somehow, that map links up in my head with this datum what I also nicked: as of 2006, service industries accounted for 42% of the world’s employment in 2006, agriculture 36.1%. Listen up — we got more peeps driving desks than driving ploughs!
He says (and I agree) that this is a huge milestone: the point at which the majority of our species is no longer in the business of grubbing up food.
Why do these two ideas go together? I…hmm. Well, history moves very fast. And, despite everything, pretty much in the right direction.
Get me! I’m an optimist!
October 4, 2007 — 6:07 pm
Comments: 19