FOR THE HELL OF IT  #3    12/31/10

The last day of the year!  The third blog of the year!  Fortunately, like you, I can contain my excitement.

It’s been pointed out to me that I missed some significant stories in my last blog so I shall return to the subject of peering at some of the stories that caught our attention in 2010.  Understand that not all the musings here will be about the major stories – just the ones I feel like chatting about.  So here goes.

1. Airport Security.  Underwear bombs.  Shoe bombs. Breast milk container bombs… We sure have a lot of terrorist nutters looking for inventive ways to make air travel unpleasant.  The new airport screening system allows screeners (people making about $9.00 an hour) to see through our clothes or, alternatively, give us a pat down heretofore reserved for late night Cinemax viewing.

I say, “who cares?”  You are welcome to see me naked anytime – sometimes you don’t even need to ask!  If I have to walk through a see-through machine or have a nice relaxing pat down where I can pretend I’m being groped by someone attractive just so I can travel and not get killed before I reach my destination, it’s okay with me.  Touch what you need to and look at what you wanna see and then let me go get a gin and tonic and watch the in-flight movie.  While I would prefer that they’d speed things up a bit, I just don’t see this as a violation of my rights.  It is, instead, an affirmation of our ability to adapt to reality and carry on with our world.  So there.

2.  The Oil Spill.  I don’t think we need wonder how such a horrendous event took place – we should only wonder why it took so long to happen and how long it will be until it happens again.  Not only were innocent workers killed on the rig when it blew up but millions of lives – people and animals – were destroyed and billions of dollars lost.  BP, like any company Montgomery Burns would be happy to own, passed down a corporate legacy of maximizing profits over public safety. The government regulators who are trusted to inspect the rigs don’t really know anything about rigs and never will so there were and are no checks and balances in place. Unsafe conditions existed on the rig but stopping production to fix the situation would have cost a little bit of money so it wasn’t even considered.  Instead the rig blew up and people died and the ecosystem of the Gulf area was destroyed.  And guess how many other rigs are still out there – waiting for the same thing to happen?   We don’t need to fear terrorists – we’re plenty capable of destroying ourselves.

BP said they’d fix it all and clean it up and the Obama administration yelled and screamed (after the fact of course – since we are a reactionary system) and BP still made lots of money and people still have ruined lives and the environmental impact is still unknown… but I wager that we will soon be seeing Cajun swamp monsters outside of B movies.

And what have we learned from all of this?  The same thing we learned from Katrina – not a thing.  The oil rigs are still unsafe and New Orleans levees are still liable to burst.  We’re like the people who build their trailer home communities on known flood plains and act shocked when they get flooded out.  “I had no idea a flood plain area could flood.” They cry for government handouts (which are available to them under the Flooded Moron Relief Act of 1988) and take the money and build their homes in the same place as the last one.

We must learn to stop the government from adding regulators to regulatory agencies that are ineffective to begin with, and to hold guilty people accountable for their gross negligence.  Why are no BP execs in jail?  Hmmmmm.  Is money a factor?

3. Health Care Reform.  So medical insurance is too high for everybody who isn’t a BP exec or a government employee?  The way to make it right is to have the government – the same fine people who created the problem in the first place – jump into the insurance business.  Brilliant.  Now bureaucratic drones will have reams of government forms to guide them in making a decision on whether or not you can have a cyst removed from your forehead.  Instead of looking at the industry and reforming it in a way that would make medical treatment more widely available to more people, we are going to throw government at it – even though that policy has worked exactly zero times in the past.

So we haven’t reformed health care. We’ve allowed it to be nationalized without a clue as to how it will work out – unless, of course, we look at past such governmental forays into the private sector and use those utter failures as examples.

I predict a repeal of the Democratic Healthcare reform bill early in 2011.  It will be replaced by an equally odious and impossible to understand Republican Healthcare reform bill.  Then that one will be overturned and so on and so on until we all turn to witchcraft, aspirins and band-aids when we feel ill.

4. WikiLeaks.  Call Julian Assange whatever you like – and he’s been called everything from a rapist to a cyber terrorist to a freedom of the press hero – he is a funny looking guy.  Having taken that decidedly strong stance, let me say that I don’t understand the surprise people exhibit when hearing that US diplomats sometimes make fun of their host nation’s political leaders.  Really?  Wait – people who think they aren’t being overheard will sometimes say things they would prefer had remained confidential?  I just don’t get it.

Are we really this dumb as a people?  What did we learn from Wikileaks?  That our agents have ulterior motives in foreign countries?  That we aren’t a perfect society? That we engage in acts of war and “diplomacy” so loathsome that our military and espionage agents are the same as any other country’s military and espionage agents?

Some people are saying Assange is a traitor to the United States.  These people are forgetting that he’s an Australian and doesn’t have to support the US.  The issue isn’t what he revealed – someone would’ve revealed it sooner or later – it’s that it’s all true and undeniable.  And why should he be treated worse than Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Scooter Libby?

While I wouldn’t have released information that damaged US foreign relations, in this case I question the extent of the “damage” – I assume our people got smirked at a lot at various foreign embassy functions but some of them deserve to be laughed at and should be more honest to start with:  “yes I do represent the US and I must say that we think of you people as total losers that we will happily stamp underfoot if you become too annoying – now, where is that open bar?”

5.  Bristol Palin and Dancing with the Stars.  If this story was of interest to you, if you seriously would watch a program about “stars” and one of the stars is a talentless daughter of a half-term Governor with the political depth of a shallow curb from a state no one’s ever been to, then I don’t know what I can say to you.  Isn’t there something else on to watch?

How about my version of Survivor – where they drop a bunch of  annoying people on a remote island and just leave them there?  No film. No votes. No tribal councils.  Just people surviving or not surviving and we never know how it works out since we don’t care.

Maybe Bristol and the rest of the stars can be on that.

DwightCartoons © Johnny Heller