Wednesday, October 29, 2008

So was there a roundtable at some point...

...to define this term we use alot these days, "extremism", and how often do these roundtables meet to clarify what is extreme, moderate, conservative, liberal, politically eccentric, flaky, provocative in a charming way, radical, off-the-charts...ok kids today the Subject is Welfare.

Now in the Olde Days a person was ashamed to be on welfare, couldn't wait to get off it. Those were the truly sad cases, a woman with kids whose husband just dumped her...oh God how times have changed! Now I've had my spans of being out of work but it never even dawned on me to start fondling the Government Tit. Maybe it's the way I was brought up but during these depressing timeframes I automatically filled out a certain number of applications and wasted tons of postage sending the resumes out, this was in the days before the preferred online methods. It's just the way I'm programmed, wired, it's like breathing drinking and sleeping, you work as St. Paul says otherwise you don't eat...and so who exactly are these people who say if you don't believe in the Welfare State, the safety-net you're an extremist? Now class let's review once again z's main principle that in the end everything tends towards liberalism, even the vast majority of conservatives these days accept the need for welfare, just yesterday Sean Hannity said we still have a safety-net. I recall years and years ago RUSH said to just end welfare, just end it and people will be forced to work but you see RUSH is a bit of a paleo-con, never got with the program and while it seemed harsh to me at the time and likely to give conservatism a bad name I've lived it, I know with a strong family and a good community it's possible. This is the Marvin Olasky position which so influenced Newt Gingrich at the time when he was the Speaker of the House and got welfare reform through. Cooking is my thing not installing fences which I did at one time, you just did whatever got you through the day and blocked it out of your mind. Now some rather old radio interview has just surfaced with the self-avowed non-socialist Barack Obama saying the Supreme Court should get involved in redistributionist change, now if that isn't something out of Chiller Theatre I don't know what is. I'ma gonna vote this Tuesday of course but maybe I just won't watch any election coverage at all that night......get hammered.

retarded machismo

Watching the news yesterday evening and they spent the better part of ten minutes about some study that concluded that most men find women in red desireable,

um...cure cancer first

Sending space probes to the red planet to see if there is or has ever been even traces of the lowest life-forms, we break into your regularly scheduled programming to report to you that a paramecium has just been found on Mars...um, cure cancer first.

Scientists have just succeeded in making the world's first glow-in-the-dark cat...um, cure cancer first.

Joey Buttafuoco and Amy Fisher are now Caught on Tape (though not with each other thank God!), taking erotica to new levels, cure the cancer thing first.

Probing the depths of Loch Ness, there might be one in the Lake Champlain too...cancer.

Making sure a man's Constitutional right to a rock-hard boner is medically ensured, Levitra, Viagra, Cialis, pumps, rods & da cancer.

the latest advances in drugged sleep, having a nice Lunesta butterfly with a chloroform rag and a needle waft gently through your room so that you don't God forbid have to get up at 2 in the AM to use the bathroom...the anti-social cell.

the Gay Brain.....

Tuesday, October 28, 2008

What's a play about Obama without a skinhead or two?

Call me cynical but it's almost like it had to happen, the feds just busted a plot involving two skinheads who planned to drive towards Obama and shoot from open windows and also for good measure to shoot up a black high school. Now I agree with Joe the Blogger who holds that Al-Qaeda poses the biggest threat to Obama, radical Muslims who hold that Muslims converting to Christianity is punishable by death but there's a point to this whole ObamaDrama with two skinheads in the dramatis personae. I caught the report on the UPN 9 News last night here in New York and there was some expert talking of course and up flashed on the screen "Keeping Tabs on the Radical Right", you know something the ADL (the Anti-Defamation League) might have as a regular bulletin for concerned citizens. Now I've lost alot of respect for Abe Foxman's group over the years ever since they lumped Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition in with various and sundry hate groups, being strident or shrill or rigid is not necessarily the same thing as being hateful and plotting mayhem. It's hard to read these things when they flash up on the screen and you're about to go to bed but I caught part of a sentence that went "even on more traditional websites..."

OK, so there you have it. There is a metaphysical, mystical association between the rest of us right-wingers and those skinheads, this goes beyond the loose ties of Obama/Ayers, these are spiritual wisps in the minds of the Left. To the msm we all share the same politics but the neo-Nazis rachet it up a notch or two is all. "Keeping Tabs on the Radical Right", um no, there's the right-wing and then there are skinheads and we don't inhabit the same political universe, sorry. Same thing they tried to do a few years back with mainstream pro-lifers and the occasional abortion clinic bomber, lump us all together and I can only think that this latest episode in ObamaDrama can only help the candidate, a few independents out there may equate conservative opposition to affirmative action let's say with a couple of weirdos out in the hinterlands. You've heard of sleight-of-hand, well the media practices sleight-of-mind, juxtapose certain things on the screen when you're tired and have to work the next day, it's a political imprint and the average person ain't even aware of it and not only that McCain looks positively dull by comparison. I mean if some people hate Obama that much he must really stand for something, the only person McCain might piss off is the cashier at the local supermarket ("it says here the Metamucil's on sale"). It's all like a coloring book, pass the crayons please.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Z's Half & Half Principle

I've always followed politics of course but was never one of those political nerds, the real Hannity types who can tell you who the Senator out in Nebraska is (he probably knew who Sarah Palin was before anybody else did) but one thing has always intrigued me about politics, it has baffled me for years and it's this, as a nation we don't seem to have any lasting political identity, other countries probably don't know how to label us besides the fact that we're a democray (I know I know, the technical answer is we're a Republic). Political power is at best cyclical, some years the Republicans rule both Houses of Congress and now it's the Dems' turn, we've had our share of Presidents from both parties. I've also wondered whether the same people sometimes vote for the Democrat and other times vote for the Republican and so I've finally come up with a principle to explain all this. As I blogged about the last few days it seems one half of the country is very conservative and the other half is for something else and that something else most often involves bigger government, aka classic liberalism and so basically you come up with Z's Half & Half Principle which has as its fundamental premise that no political party has permanent power, nay it ensures it.

Alternate Theory: The American voter is schizo and swings liberal from time to time. This would explain how the country swings back to conservative after a while, maybe the country's had its liberal fill, like bad porno you always think it has to get better, a new TV fall lineup that fails to deliver, you were in the mood for a hot Reuben Supermelt but it gave you the runs. Abortion doesn't seem to animate these voters one way or the other, call them the Whatever Bloc, the Obama seems like a nice guy, I think I'll vote for him crowd.

Getting back to my Main Theory, people believe and they believe strongly no matter what side you're on. If you're a feminist you're not just a feminist but an uber-feminist. Take the Isiah Thomas case which we're all familiar with, no matter whose side you took...well let me put it this way. I was listening to the radio on the way over and Anucha Brown Sanders says she doesn't feel the least bit sorry that he OD'd the other day on 10 Lunesta sleeping pills, you see he was suffering from nostalgic depression and thought he would one day get his old job back, the one he lived and breathed for, I'm tellin' ya this nostalgic depression thing is a dangerous thing and all this hard-nosed bitch could say was he ain't got my pity vote.

The bottom line is this, Beth is absolutely right, we can undo the damage that an Obama presidency would cause, 1/2 & 1/2 makes it possible, it just takes some time and patience. In the meantime a little Kalua couldn't hurt.

OK 3rd theory: no political party has permanent power because it really doesn't matter in the end. As my other main principle states everything tends towards liberalism in the end anyway, what matter what political party is in power at any given moment? Repubs are Liberal-Lite anyway - e.g. they seem to give tacit approval to the notion that abortion should be legal but Roe wasn't the way to go about it but they won't put it this way of course, their criticism of sexual-harassment law seems to be a thing of the Past at least according to the Clintonian timegraph, and Big Government is now accepted by all. In short our goose is cooked.

Friday, October 24, 2008

So it's all Mr. Magoo's fault

There he was, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan being grilled by Democratic Rep. from CA Henry Waxman. Greenspan as we all know was in charge during the Clinton economic boom of the 90's and was a big champion of deregulation and lower interest rates and so Waxman asked him "so you would say your view of the world, your ideology was wrong?" and Greenspan said "partially" although he said that during the last 40 years he saw growing evidence that his views were right so he came to his new position rather late. What Waxman really means is that the conservative view of the world, the conservative ideology is wrong and no sane person would be against regulation of the market and most importantly Wall Street. Never mind that scores of people took out mortgages they could never pay back, to paraphrase the Bard the fault lies not in our stars but in conservatism. So here is the true essence of liberalism, as Bernie Goldberg once noted about the media and I'll apply here liberals don't really see themselves as liberal at all, just reasonable, their truths are so self-evident and so of course we can't let market forces go unfettered (the Randian view, since outdated). It's all good though, it's not that common that the issues in a presidential election become so clear and focused, this can only help the voter make a truly informed decision. We'll know how most of the country feels after November the 4th but I can feel it in the wind, there's nothing like a good nipple to suck on. If we're weaned off government too early we'll be sucking on blankets like cats taken away too early from their mothers so blame it all on Mr. Magoo if it makes you feel any better.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

The thought occured


that maybe half the country is ready for the Marxist approach. Now you would expect Obama's poll numbers to plummet after he confided to Joe the Plumber that he wants to spread the wealth around but maybe that's just the point. As it stands now seems to me one half of the country thinks conservatively and the other half wants their entitlements. Incidentally I find all those egghead profs of political science who are always being quoted beyond vaguely annoying as with their sanctimonious liberalism telling us McCain's criticism of Obama's tax policy as a giant welfare state amounts to our use of racist code words. Pardon? last I heard there were more whites than blacks on the dole, folks who never miss an episode of Springer, white trash guys who circle-jerk so much they're gonna rip the head off that thing, your laundromat crowd and many of them look like they inbreed with each other. They're the ones who are gonna go for Obama and in a big way, YouTubers all who go to the library and hog up the computers scratchin' their nuts, young'ens who get themselves fired so as to collect on the unemployment but not to worry, Mommy can always wash the crap stains out of their underwear.....(count to 10).....had a minor annoying incident before, as you all know my time on the computer is limited and I'm about to post this new rant and up comes this message: Blogger is currently unavailable right now. We apologize for this interruption in service. Just a foretaste, a flava if you will of Nancy Pelosi's Fairness Doctrine in action which, in the Final Version will have tentacles and feelers reaching out into the blogosphere. Get used to it!!

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Conservatives secretly in love with the demigod

Seems the topic du jour this morning on the talk shows is Peggy Noonan's column in the Wall Street Journal basically saying what any good Democrat would say, that Sarah Palin is not ready to be the Chief Executive and that this reflects poorly on McCain's judgement. This former Reagan speechwriter must have had an erotic dream about Bam and you know what they say, when you dream about someone you really want that person. If Salvador Dali were alive today a classic going for many millions would be a surreal image of Bam arising out of the ocean with his giant magic phallus bestowing peace and love and brotherhood upon the whole world.

Other big or I should say overrated story is Colin Powell's endorsement of Bam. I used to work with this young liberal Puerto Rican guy from the Bronx, one of those political junkies but on the other side, might as well be blogging for the Daily Kos so anyway we're rapping one day and I throw out that I thought Republicans have done more for African-Americans in general like putting them in key spots and I brought up Colin Powell and Condi Rice and he goes "yeah, those are house niggers." He might as well have said Scatman Crothers and Corey should be janitors at the White House (W: "Corey, throw another log on the fire"). It's kind of Life's Little Ironies that a few liberals I have encountered in my day-to-day travels are far more likely to use the N-word to sprinkle their speech than us racist conservatives, because they're liberals who are for all the right programs to help blacks down through the years they carry around in their wallet next to their Sam's Club membership card and their TGIF pass a License to Use the N-Word to be renewed every three years. Now I have a diverse workplace and he'd walk around all day referring to just people in general as "these niggers and I went to the mall the other day" and his general tally for n-wording might be 10-15X a day, I kid you not, and he'd freely verbalize in front of our black co-workers as well but it was accepted. Me? if I so much as used the word "niggardly" as in "the honchos are being very niggardly with their budget this year" it'd be "Z, come to the office NOW!" and there'd be no "please" qualifier or "when you get a chance." Well anyway Colin Powell was never a conservative in the first place and I've always found him vaguely annoying, his sense of his own self-importance ("I am about to pronouce"). He reminds me of a manager at work who won't always say HI to you in the men's room, he 's better than you, he knows it, you know it, he's on the computer in his office and you walk through and go "how 'bout that game last night" and he doesn't respond.

Monday, October 20, 2008

With so much study of the paranormal going on

I have a question. Now ghosts can do all sorts of nifty things, shake a hanging coffee cup for 20 minutes when there's no breeze in the kitchen, rap on the wall, turns lights on, move your glass of water you left on your nightstand, give off smells of which you don't know the origin of (perfume and pipe smoke are common ones), sit on the edge of your bed when you're dozing off, communicate to you in dreams, the list is as long as there are ghosts but I have as yet to hear of a practical case of a friendly ghost popping up your car door lock because you left your keys in your car.

BTW I'm not afraid of dead people, I'm afraid of live people.

Friday, October 17, 2008

Drug legalization doesn't pass the acid test


Often when I'm not online blogging I'm googling other subject areas. Someone told me recently about the tragedy of Art Linkletter's daughter so I bothered to look it up. Now I wasn't aware of this and I bet even many anti-drug people aren't either but there's a very disturbing and frightening phenomenon known as "acid flashbacks", say people who take LSD and have an eight hour trip let's say and don't use the drug again for months or even a year, they can and often do have a repeat experience, sometimes more than one, very similar to the original episode, some of the crap stays in your system and affects the central nervous system so they can go through long periods of normalcy and then fog out. Art Linkletter had a daughter and she used acid but didn't use it again for six whole months and then had a flashback experience and jumped out a window to her death. Now just because we may not be winning the War on Drugs at the moment does not invalidate that campaign and here's where the libertarians' argument is very weak, not just acid but any drug use does not take place in a vacuum, the paramount issue is one of public safety. Dunno why William F. Buckley Jr. towards the latter part of his life took the libertarian position and his flagship magazine the National Review made the case time and again. The pro and anti-legalization debate has kind of settled down now, I think the advocates know it's alot like prostitution, it ain't gonna be decriminalized anytime soon but just something for your consideration. Why validate a dysfunctional society?

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Laying down the pipe


Make no mistake, Joe the Plumber will have a megachain of stores in a year or so. Mac won this one, he did good. He brought up all the important themes, Bam's barrage of negative ads, ACORN, Bill Ayers, having a balanced budget in four years time even if it means using a hatchet whereas Bam the surgeon prefers a scalpel, getting spending under control and oh yes, the issue of late-term abortions and saving infants born alive under this procedure. The consensus has it that Bam was on the defensive all night and his answer to the abortion charge was that his vote didn't really matter at the time since Illinois has a similar law on the books. Yeah but so what, why not vote for it again? Every time he got cornered he'd go into his aw shucks grin mode, it's the kind of grin you'd expect if he ever goes A-Rod on Michelle and she accuses him in the kitchen. Out of the three mods I think Bob Schieffer was the best, he warned them early on no talking points and he kept to a bare minimum of words, you didn't even know he was there, he kept out of it and let them go at it. OK, so alot of the post-reaction was fairly typical. There was presidential historian Michael Beschloss, a regular on The Newshour who didn't like it that Mac went negative especially with the Ayers stuff. Mac went negative? yeah and there's gambling in Vegas, pussy! George Stephanopolous echoed this and threw in on GMA this morning that Mac took a hard line against abortion and this may weaken his appeal to women and independent voters and I might add the ghoul-voting bloc but this is the universe these msm'ers inhabit, keep the abortion machinery up and running, change the filters, lube it up, line the kids up and pump it out. Often wondered if the Boy George has a self-portrait in his attic that's slowly deteriorating but anyway Mac's performance in last night's debate was stirring, you could hardly call TV last night boring as it was in the second debate and it will make it far easier for me to go into the booth on November the 4th and pull the lever for him but here's the difference. I'm not like the rest of you who went for him early on, I'm not a party loyalist. It was a long thought process but last night's debate was the tipping point. I'm one of those independent voters you know like Joe the Plumber and I've made my peace.

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

It's McCain's to lose

He practically avoids the whole abortion issue by which he could make headway against Obama. Obama, if he wasn't a senator running for the highest office in the land could just as well be the president of Planned Parenthood. McCain should focus on his opposition to the "Born-Alive Infants Protection Act" which even Hillary and Ted Kennedy supported which practically puts Obama to the left of Freddy Krueger. Also culturally many aren't in tune with modern-day feminism anymore, it's more than a little off-center and has messed up women's heads. Fems have refashioned suitors from the old school as stalker-types with the kind of funny result that women routinely go out with and even marry the porn-addled average Charlie rather than a guy who sends them roses so add feticide to their psychologically vague male hatred and you have a potent mix. Telling a risque joke in the workplace is a crime in their book but strangling a mid-term infant on a cold metal table is not. Ayers is yesterday's news, if McCain can't paint Obama into a corner with the a-word and continues on his present course he deserves to lose. It's a culture war out there and although Pat Buchanan was demonized at the time for bringing this term into our national lexicon nowadays even liberals use it. Just make the feminist link is all, tie him in with the NOW crowd and on abortion legislation he's keeping it psycho. As it stands now conservatives have too many reasons to stay home. Cojones, grow a pair!!

Monday, October 13, 2008

McCain's past ties to abortion clinic bomber

Now that I have your attention. It' s not true of course but imagine if it were! and would the msm even use that all-important adjective tangential to describe his past associations? Now I understand why Bill Moyers has guests on his show saying Obama's past...er...links? to former Weathermen Underground terrorist Bill Ayers is irrelevant, inaccurate and in bad taste for the McCain campaign to point out but everyone seems to be saying it these days like trendy Demochick and FOX News analyst Kirsten Powers. I don't mean talking about the Obama/Ayers matter for three whole hours every day like Hannity does but what I'm not getting is why exactly is Obama's past ties, however tangential, to Ayers that unimportant? and why am I a racist if it's just one of many factors entering into my decision to vote against him? We are in love with Bam, what can I say?

Sunday, October 12, 2008

ASSorted brain farts


a new series, 1st entry:

"Perhaps if Dexter hadn't come along I'd be killing people in my real life instead."
actor C. Michael Hall to BlackBook

really?

Usually after a brain fart the person realizes there was a misfire of two neurons or something and catches it so dunno here, maybe C. Michael doesn't know it was a brain fart instead of being witty. Ever have something like this happen to you? A woman came up to me the other day on my job and asked me a question but for the life of me I don't know what she said even after I asked her to repeat herself. Would it have been rude of me to say "I'm sorry but I don't speak Martian?"

stranded

Saturday, October 11, 2008

It's a vibe thing


A key difference between liberals and conservatives these days is this, conservatives may believe in smaller government but they trust the government more. Libs on the other hand of course believe in much bigger government but they trust it less (e.g. the military) and cons counter this by questioning their patriotism, enter your Asian pitbulls like Michelle Malkin. For your typical right-winger not only is a conspiracy theory a metaphysical impossibility but a sure sign of a mental disorder as well. Most if not all conspiracy theories of the government today come from the fevered precincts of the Left (I'm talking post-John Birch Society here), the most outlandish ones may not be approved of course but they are at least tolerated. When pressed about Spike Lee's charge that the federal government purposely broke those New Orleans levees to drown black people during Katrina a lib's response may as well be "yeah - oh well." If pressed further your average left-winger might explain it as "after Tuskegee all bets are off." So who knows how many coverups there really are even in our own lives? How many of you were adopted but don't know it yet? maybe you were conceived in a deli walk-in box on top of a bucket of Sally Sherman potato salad OR some psycho at work dropped some acid in your Mountain Dew in the lunchroom when you went to use the restroom but you've been seeing a shrink for the last year or so 'cause your head ain't right? They were doing a social experiment at some egghead university and had some hot Latina melonlady flash her tongue piercing at you only to reject you in order to study how men take rejection, Advanced Feminist Studies Room 307. It's not a microchip thing, I simply dub this the UMA Unified Field Theory.

Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Debate, numero dos


There was a cozy feel to this town hall thing last night and I swear it must have been the camera angle. Mac would be talking, the pudgester walking around the stage punching the air talking to the folk and there in the background with the calm cool demeanor and just the hint of a grin was Bam with one foot resting on the stool holding his mike waiting his turn. Didn't the whole thing remind you of letting your uncle go on and on at some social gathering when he had one too many belts and just letting him talk? ("just let him air himself out, pull the car up"). Then Bam goes to Tom Brokaw the mod "Tom, you're doing a great job btw" but wtf was that? Well he should like the media by now, my God! ya think? I can't listen to Hannity anymore, I mean I'm a conservative and all and will say my piece but I ain't into this whole trench warfare shit. He's definitely in a rut like some weird basement masturbator on a nice day when the rest of the neighborhood kids are out playing stickball. A conservative guy I know said to me the other day he wants to see Bam win just so he can see the look on Hannity and O'Reilly's face the next morning. I'm thinking pinched? pained? distracted? dazed and confused? uncomprehending? it hasn't sunk in yet? Bam had that confident look last night of it's mine and just going through the motions and judging from recent polls he can probably suspend his own campaign for a few days himself if he wished, take his wife and kids to the mall.....

My travelblog


Went up the line yesterday with my friend, on up the Taconic past Carmel NY where your ears pop, hooked up with I-84 W and up Route 9. Fishkill, Wappingers Falls, kind of a rundown town, a touch of ghetto, an element of romantic squalor. People who live here tend to work farther south towards the Westchester area where the wages are higher but live near Poughkeepsie 'cause the real estate is lower. There's a Giggles store here with its generic mind-numbing porn with a heavy bias towards the Japanese creepy stuff ("all actresses 18 or over and under duress"), seems a necessity in a depressed area, kind of in keeping with the theme and oh look, there's a Dairy Queen! don't see many of them around anymore. It was Tawana Brawley who put Wappingers on the map. There's a gourmet supermarket here by the name of Hannaford's, nice place. The main goal here was the Po'town Galleria, an ok mall as far as the mall scene goes but generic just the same with an overabundance of trendy t-shirt stores but I'm looking for practical, I really don't need a set of KISS whiskey shot glasses and a humorous set of mini-rubbers. I used to go fishing alot but now I'm a mallrat. After this we hit the Home Depot in the picturesque town of Carmel, this overall general store is so huge it's like an airport hangar, then back on 84 and on down the line. Now I just love the country but there's something about these pockets of civilization surrounded by the boondocks and these wide expanses of open field and swampland that, how do I put my finger on it? you're surrounded by woods and mountains and the possibility of a Bigfoot or two living up there in them thar hills and when the sun goes down there drops like a curtain a certain existential loneliness like UFOs can land here. A state trooper sits in his car on the divider of the highway, takes a couple sips from his hot cup of joe and a bite out of his cruller, glances up into the starry nighttime sky and goes WTF!?!, is that Colossal Man coming out of the saucer? (bleep-bleep) bb-idaho can relate but dunno, seems everything's generic these days. Caught part of the big debate last night of which I have a few thoughts, I always seem to sleep well after these things.....

Sunday, October 05, 2008

The reemergence of the thug liberal


Not that they ever went away. Basically these are your paleolibs, real cave-dwellers and they get off fanning the flames of the culture wars. The neolibs came much later on the evolutionary scale. Neolibs go out of their way to say they respect people of any and all faiths, think Bill Clinton coming out of Sunday services with bible in hand, Barack Obama openly saying he's a Christian. OK so here's the real test to see which kind of lib you are: Bill Maher's new movie/documentary "Religulous". The movie critics who all tend to be liberals anyway just LOVE this movie. Lou Lumenick of the New York Post, Peter Travers of Rolling Stone (dunno if this is really fair though, Travers never met a movie he didn't like) and on and on. One review will do, this one from a Joe Neumaier of the New York Daily News:

Religulous - **** (R) Commentator-comic Bill Maher's dissection of organized religion puts many faiths under the microscope. He asserts, often hilariously, that not believing is America's last taboo. And while this documentary won't put doubt in the minds of his subjects most of Maher's assertions don't feel at all like a leap of faith.

Movie critic Kyle Smith of the New York Post is a special case, normally a conservative-leaning guy he also loved Maher's cinematic rant. I go along with Patrick M who recently said in a blog personal faith is more important to him than dogma but such a nuance seemed to be missing from even Smith's review so dunno, mood-altering drugs in the reservoir again?

Re Maher allow me to update an old Doonesbury cartoon. Now your average asshole is woefully unaware of his own condition but there's a reason for this. Let's say you wake up in the morning and find you're Bill Maher, what would you do? Why you'd have to kill yourself of course and so Nature makes them blissfully ignorant.

Thursday, October 02, 2008

Think tank principles revealed


One of my favorite lines in Atlas Shrugged is when one of the characters says "always examine your premises, one of them could be wrong." It's pretty much a conservative bedrock principle that hard work pays off, work hard and the world's your oyster. Ummm sometimes but not always. Now many people reading this will be able to relate to what I'm about to say and therein you have the making of a principle, the birth of a Murphy's Law and this mapping of the universe always helps you understand Life better. OK, so you're a good hard worker, good work ethic and the company sees what you're made of, what you're capable of and so what actually happens is your workload actually gets increased. How often are one of you about to leave for the day, you put in your time and really pumped it out and then

"can you stay a little late today?"
"do you have time to do this?"

Your hard work is recognized, it doesn't go unnoticed but work then becomes an end in itself, there's no reward system in place (e.g. "you can leave early today" "want an extra day off?"). The reward for hard work is more work, no good worker goes unpunished. Now in the traditional framework you'd get promoted instead of staying a drone or would be given a different assignment at least, maybe not less work but different but this was in the days before think tanks, corporate brain trusts. One of the cardinal conclusions of these study groups is give the best workers more work, have them increase their output, their production. It's amoral as opposed to immoral, workers are like grapefruits, squeeze as much work out of them as possible. It's why we see patterns in the workplace, why things never change, why managers all manage the same way. There's no bag of gold coins at the end of the day, that stuff's for religion and you may happily call this Murphy's Law

The Paradox of Hard Work

Wednesday, October 01, 2008

The Art of the Rant


Good friend of mine, part muse, knows half the people in town. We call him the Mayor and when he holds court you're in for a treat, should be an HBO Live special. Went to the Danbury Fair Mall yesterday, going up the line on the infamous I-684 past the Larry Craig Bedford Rest Area and he got on the subject of Bigfoot, Sasquatch and what's known as the "monster belt" stretching across the upper part of the US, he can spin the yarn just like if you're really there and he goes "even if the government caught a few they'd cover it up." Me: "Why?" "They're weird that way." In the mall parking lot and we change from Boggy Creek to companies who use think tanks to keep you behind the 8-Ball. Went to Stew's to eat, great buffet table, swordfish, bacon and cheddar quiche, Rhode Island seafood chowder, their famous storemade Kettle Chips, fun & games. A little later got on the subject of the trots, known as the runs in most parts and I said why does it seem you always get them every morning just before work? and he goes "it's all trauma-shock. You go to work knowing something bad's gonna happen: 'yeah, the district manager said you didn't pack out Aisle 21' " So I talked about the time I brought up a problem or two to a woman at work and she couldn't relate, he goes "yeah, they're unpained sissies who were never bitten by Life. They go home and have a care-bear on the wall." Then ole Bill Maher, lemonface and his problems with religion and he called it his psychotic reality, you go to Bill Maher "here's something that may help" (i.e. faith) and he just makes fun of you. Then coming back down the line I suggest we go to a deli to see an old friend and we do but at the counter is not him but some older squat Italian woman you'd find in some early Italian horror movie narrated by Boris Karloff and she goes "he no work here no more" (hehehehehehe), didn't explain right away what happened to him, a few eerie seconds of silence and a glint in her eyes and he referred to her later in the car as an "ominous creep with the hulk speech." Winding down the day, almost home and Natasha Bedingfield's "Pocketful of Sunshine" comes on and he says "I like that song...it's weird."