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Vietnam KIA monthly statistics

Vietnam War Deaths by Month

Thus far in Iraq for April ‘04, 98 KIA. Only 50 or 60 more before we hit them bigtime Vietnam numbers!

Hootenanny Magazine

My friends David & Ken did this. I’m really proud of them.

I despise companies that try to force me to learn new words for old things.

I walk into a hamburger joint, I’m ordering a hamburger. A big mac? No, get me a god damn hamburger. Would you like a grande frappucino? No. No, I would not. Gimme a medium coffee, you retarded, advertisement-spewing tool.

The best thing you can do is not watch television. The second best thing is, if there’s a show that you simply have to see, when the commercials come on, mute them.

It’s instructive to watch a commercial without sound; for instance, car commercials. Balloons rise, flags wave, mud splatters, and salesmen walk briskly from one side of the shot to the other, like they have some fucking purpose. They’re busy busy busy! Things is hapnin down at the dealership, so come on down! We have purpose; trust us! We’re smiling, for chrissake! Give us your money!

On Star Trek, everyone is competent, even the guys in red. It’s not their fault they die. But in the 25th century or whenever Star Trek is supposed to happen, when those days really come, of course no one will know his job quite so well as they do on startrek. Problems will arise; they’ll have to break out the checklists and operating manuals. Things will take a long time to do if they can’t be done automatically.

In essence, the machines will be engineered beyond the casual understanding of the crew, and they’ll be commonly locked out of things that should work. The machines will work as designed, they just won’t be designed with the average starship crewman in mind. The machines will be baffling.

This is how it will really be. There will be no Scotty suggesting an obscure tactic in the heat of the moment that just might work. There will be no Jean Luc outfoxing the Borg time and again.

Bones will be there, though. Bones will say “He’s dead Jim” much more frequently than the series leads one to believe.

An idea of God: Take everything that ever was and everything that ever will be. Take a guy in a boardroom, who sees everything that was and will be, and is saying “I’ve taken it into account.”

God’s a different guy in another boardroom, taking the first guy’s saying “I’ve taken it into account” into account.

I was watching the Bill Maher show the other day. During the call-in segment; one caller asked Bill (and Arianna Huffington, apparently his usual guest) how they felt about the “new bailout” for the airlines. Arianna, who somehow became pro-worker between now and when she played would-be kingmaker to her conservative husband back in ‘94, was essentially for stabilizing the industry by reducing the new post 9/11 security taxes. Bill was adamantly opposed to a bailout of any kind, preferring instead that market forces work their unfettered magic on the industry by weeding out the sick and the injured, in order to leave the industry stronger in the long run.

My point is: what unmitigated bullshit. The reason we have a government at all is to prevent the rail barons of the world from squashing their workers underfoot, whether they be programmers, pilots, or garbagemen. Maher (whose opinion I normally respect, or at least pay attention to) prefers to play the dispassionate Darwinian, which seems to be all the rage the last few years, and plays nicely into the hands of the powerful few. The powerful cultivate that philosophy. It allows each industry to be looked at, not as a group of people with families and needs, but as some kind of dumb mechanized vector to be straightened regardless of the human toll.

Every consumer (so by extension, every person) is a member of some big dumb vector, whether he knows it or not. And Consumerism teaches each of us to pride himself on his ability to analyze other people’s industries, and to make personal, dispassionate judgments based on those analyses. Like Bill was doing. I’ve certainly done it, and do it every time I walk into Wal-Mart to buy something for a dime less than I could’ve gotten it elsewhere. I feel bad about it, when I think of it, and I try to spread my dollars around a little. But most people don’t feel that way; most people are smug about saving a few bucks like that, and even though they know, somewhere in the back of their minds, that the reason they’re saving that money is because someone who was paid 10 dollars an hour was replaced by someone making minimum wage, they don’t care.

Those smug consumers are oblivious to the certainty that the mean eye of consumerism will be trained on their own industries eventually. Totally oblivious.

That’s where we are today, where each industry can be scrutinized and straightened in turn, to the ruin of its workers, and everyone else sagely nods while the most vituperous Darwinisms fall out of their heads.

Well, I want Bill Maher’s big, dumb vector straightened next.

It’s important to understand beer.