Cowboy Confessional

America discovered how to cripple the rest of the world and make it buckle to domination.  Nuclear warheads … ineffective.  Death rays … comical.  Genotype specific viruses … puny.  America has already deployed the most devastating, fiendish, economy crushing tool to eradicate mankind.

Television.

Until today I assumed that there were none superior to the All American Couch Potato.  Having invented and for decades perfected to art of after work loafing, augmented with over eating and excessive drinking, it was a given that no nation could rival the Red, White and BoobTube.  Our leadership in idiot box inertia was perfected, from mind numbing Friday night sitcoms to powerful sedatives provided by Budweiser and Frito Lay.  Who on earth could possibly consume more electron “entertainment” the America Lard Butt?

Hong Kong, Brazil, China, India, Philippines, Italy, UAE, Columbia, Mexico, Venezuela, Vietnam, Russia, Thailand, Egypt, Lithuania, Pakistan, Romania and Singapore, that’s who.

Nielsen, the company that has recorded your TV watching habits since prenatal days, is now monitoring the rest of the inhabitable world and Svalbard (look it up).  Their data now indicates that the devil’s own television has corrupted every corner of the world with electricity, and even a few places with only hand cranked generators.  So thorough has Philo Farnsworth’s folly been – spreading like cathode ray virus – that entire swaths of Asia and Latin America are rapidly seeding their own sofas.  As your read this, roots are thrusting out of Brazilian buttocks and Hong Kong hinnies, crawling into the fabric of their recliners and cushions.  In short order these formerly fat-free regions will be lumbering into competitive positioning against Americans for personal curb weights rivaling small pickup trucks.

It is Europe we must nuke.

At the bottom of the television addiction list is a cluster of cultures that must be held suspect and in contempt, as they have not fallen for our devious device.  In close proximity are Germany, Holland, Austria, Switzerland, Norway and Belgium, who separately consume a third less televised radiation than people in The States.  They are suspiciously active, which can only mean one thing:  they are getting outdoors, staying in better shape, and thus preparing to attack.

However, until those lanky Europeans make an overt move, we will have to content ourselves with progress made in the UAE, Egypt, Pakistan and other counties that occasionally breed islamofacists.  It is a long range plan, but we can subdue them through lethargy, saturated fats and inactive life styles to induce coronary heart disease.  Take that Osama, as you sit in your Lazy Boy, chomping on your pork rinds and sucking down a cold Miller.  Die!

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Democrats are cows.

Now I’m not accusing women in Democrat party leadership of being free range bovine, though Hillary is looking more the part as her rump roast ripens.  Nor am I saying men in the party leadership are a bunch mindless heifer humping bulls, despite that description fitting Bill rather well.  Nor do I imply that Democrat voters share a herd mentality, though my Republican friends constantly argue that the proposition is validated by evidence.

Once the Republicans have stable political philosophy, I’ll take their opinions seriously.

What I am saying is that in matters of economics, Democrat party chieftains have the cranial density of your average angus and the stubbornness of a Texas longhorn.  With either species (bovine or Democrat politician), whacking them in the forehead with a two by four produces no meaningful response (however, the good people of Nevada seem ready to apply that process to Harry Reid).  Preaching blindly simple matters of macroeconomics to Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama would be like orating to oxen:  neither audience is bright enough to grasp the concepts.

Outside of conscripted societies, economics is based on people creating things of value.  Exxon puts gas in your car, allowing you to get to your job where you create things of value for other people who buy them from your company, generating your paycheck so you can rent an internet connection to read this blog, click on the advertising and put money in my pocket, which I’ll use to buy some gasoline as well.

Government produces nothing.  The only product of value it can create is keeping one person from harming another, and even that government tends to do poorly.  Only a Keynesian or otherwise enfeebled person perceives that government spending increases economic prosperity, for they fail to see the direct and highly individualized essence of value (I value a good steak while my vegetarian pal values tofu – guess which of us voted for Obama).

Democrats utter lack of insight into the basics of economics has caused the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco to warn about next year’s double dip into recession.  Abbreviating their economic discourse, the San Francisco Fed basically said the odds are good and getting better that we will slide into phase two of the Great Recession (“the macroeconomic outlook is likely to deteriorate progressively starting sometime next summer.”)  This has instigated Fed infighting concerning deficit spending stimulus and other unicorn concepts.  Despite spending at a rate that has launched America toward an inescapable economic collapse, some bovine roaming the White House war room insist that more spending will generate economic growth in the same way that their first round didn’t (can you hear Rahm Emanuel mooing?)  Politicos in the Fed – and, yes, Fed officials have personal and political motives for their decisions – are debating if rampant spending, and artificially keeping interest rates at zero percent, is wise. It ain’t.

The only upside to the looming second dive into the economic sewer is that it will most likely occur as Obama faces reelection, assuring his one term status.

Sadly, Obama has assistance.  His Herford helpers in congress are doing everything possible to prevent economic growth by slowing economics.  The two glaring weaknesses in the economy today are zero job growth and banks not lending.  In such an environment only crackpots and cattle would pass legislation that slowed both even further.  Yet, congress has managed both in one bill by taxing banks an extra 6.7% (based on Wells Fargo’s estimate of the new regulatory and tax burden and their 2009 earnings).

With that heavy new yoke Wells is unlikely to hire anybody or lend businesses money with which to do so.

The essence of economics is people creating value.  The essence of government is preventing such.  The essence of America when barn yard animals (donkeys and cows) run Washington is killing the American dream.

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It is gray and cold in San Francisco today, which means it must be summer time.

I have long accused Gawd of playing one specific cruel trick on every human he assembles.  In my case he made me a Southern gentleman who respects and honors the softer sex, yet also made me overtly amorous, resulting in the innate instinct to bed most of the world’s women and yet ethically restrained from doing so – a lifetime of teal tinged testes.  The Old Man Above made Bill Clinton a billy goat too, but instead of sexual ethics gave him a lust for chubby woman, which might be the worse of our fates.

It occurs to me that perhaps Yahweh might get yucks from inflicting similar ironies on urban settings.  Chicago received a huge industrial economic base and a political infestation to remove all the wealth industry created.  New York was granted a cosmopolitan vibe with a rich arts culture and a population of hard people whose main mission is to suck the art out of life.  Hollywood has gobs of image and no soul.  Washington got power san a conscious.

San Francisco was awarded a beautiful landscape and enough fog to conceal it.  Scenic San Francisco vistas are vacated by summer temperatures that make Alaskan’s shiver (yet people run around naked here is alarmingly large numbers).

While researching my next book (whose subtitle is an insider outs San Francisco) I discovered that San Francisco’s central essence is irony.  It is a town torn between anarchy and fascism, spiritualism and salacity, free love and expensive parking.  In San Francisco for every action there is an equal and opposite overreaction.  Familiarity may breed contempt (and children) but San Francisco breeds contradiction.

Contradictions are, in no small part, responsible for San Francisco being both prototypically American and not American at all.  San Francisco revels and rebels in freedom providing you don’t smoke (tobacco) in public, recycle and compost, and never vote Republican.  This pull between a yen for the freedom to be yourself and civic censure of anyone one free enough to be politically incorrect makes San Francisco America’s bastard step-sister.  As the master Mencken mentioned about San Francisco “What fetched me instantly … was the subtle but unmistakable sense of escape from the United States.”

In San Francisco your banker wears tie dye t-shirts and streetwalkers wear diamonds.  The best bars are dives and the best music comes from buskers.  The best scenery is on the costal cliffs, which the prevailing fog prevents you from seeing except on October 12^th.  This town is irony in action, a perpetual self contraction.  Perhaps Allah’s ambush on Frisco was to give it a split personality where each bipolar part is itself insane.  Yes, if you can deal with The City’s imbecilities it is an entertaining place.  Just keep your hands in the ride at all times.

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Everyone has the right to be stupid.  Unfortunately some people abuse the privilege.

Take the two cases of Jennifer Keeton and Julea Ward, who independently have (il)logical or religious problems with homosexuals.  Both are or were students in public universities (Augusta State and Eastern Michigan respectively) in graduate programs for counseling.  Both women – who are attractive enough to convert Castro District regulars – had the poor judgment to publicly discuss what they thought.

Keeton believes homosexuality is a personal choice and lifestyle but not a “state of being.”  The two are not mutually exclusive.  Some homo sapiens are clearly hardwired from birth to prefer people with similar plumbing.  Others have no particular preference, and choose through trial and Eros.  Keeton sees only one of the two alternatives, which means she suffers from intellectual myopia.

Ward is worse in believing that homosexuality is morally wrong.  One dictionary defines morality as “conformity to the rules of right conduct.”  In an allegedly free society like America, “right conduct” is theoretical.  The People have clearly said that as long as one’s behavior does not purposefully or negligently harm someone else, there is no “wrong” conduct (granted our laws often violate this principle, but that is why The People prefer physically violating their elected officials).  Ward’s assessment is based on her own perception of “right conduct”, which she is free to inscribe on the inside of whatever woman’s thigh she wishes to lick.

Or not.  It is allegedly a free country.

What makes their cases problematic is that they are being tossed out of college onto their perky little heterosexual keisters.  In statements sounding Soviet, the administrators of Augusta State have asked that Keeton be indoctrinated.  A District Judge upheld Ward’s prior dismissal for declining to guide gays and deliberate with dykes.  Keeton was told she had to attend a “remediation program”, which is academic literary effluvium for “reeducation camp” and an attempt to force a fellow human to think what she doesn’t.  With Ward, she was ousted for refusing to counsel people pertaining to matters that she personally opposed based on her religious beliefs.

Who is a girl going to abide by – her God or her government.  Well, God does have seniority.

Several collisions between individual rights are at play here.  People have the right to believe what they like, and no government has the right to force them to believe otherwise.  Consumers have the right to spend their money as they see fit, including taxpayers forced to lob lucre into state colleges.  People have the right of association, which includes the right from association, and thus cannot be compelled to counsel anyone they dislike for whatever inane reasons they may have for disliking them.  Being taxpayers themselves, Keeton and Ward have equal access rights to public universities, and morality codices – be they the student’s or the public’s as reflected through government schools – cannot keep them from access.  Equal access to taxpayer funded counseling services are also extended to taxpaying lumber dykes and butt pirates.

Solomon couldn’t solve this dispute.

Unsurprisingly the correct solution is the most difficult, untenable and unpolitical of them all.  Eliminating government universities solves the whole mess rather nicely.  Keeton and Ward could wonder off to whatever educational institutes of parochial paranoia they prefer, obtain degrees with their own capital, and in their subsequent careers commit whatever malpractice they prefer.  Taxpayers would then be unburdened and could invest directly into the university, curriculum and state of (un)consciousness they conceive.  Everyone can be made happy by cutting government out of the equation.

Which is why it won’t happen in my lifetime.  Government, the original virus, tends to grow, mutate and infect until the host dies or some powerful antibody (a.k.a. revolution) occurs.  Americans have failed to contain the pathogen called government, and thus we must suffer the disease until death or a butt full of armed antiseptics is administered.

A Mexican stand-off (ooops, sorry, an undocumented stand-off) remains.  Freedom of thought must be preserved and thus all attempts by government to force conformity must be eradicated.  Keeton and Ward cannot be dismissed from their equal access/opportunity educational path because they think wrong (and there are only three crimes in the word – the crime of being stupid, the crime of thinking wrong, and the crime of driving with your head up your rump).  Government cannot keep these women from university programs on “thinking wrong” grounds, nor can Mao-like reeducation camps become a substitute for reasoned or unreasonable disagreement.  Government caused this problem by getting into the higher education business, and more government is the worst possible solution.

Ostracization however is always effective.

Nobody can be compelled to associate.  You cannot be forced to like someone else or say a civil word to them.  Shame is an underused tool in modern society, and one that would be very applicable here.  Living in San Francisco I have numerous friends and acquaintances who are members in good standing of the Church of the Carpet Chewer or the Sausage Factory Synagogue.  Can’t say I find a dimes worth of difference between a diesel dyke and a truck drivin’ man, except that the dyke might have more chin stubble.  Homos are people with preferences (and I even share some preferences with lesbians).  It is impossible for anyone who has spent significant time around the other clans to see them as immoral, living a “lifestyle” instead of possessing pre-existing preferences, or unworthy of counseling.  Doing so would be stupid.

Stupid people we mock.  Shame them for willful ignorance.  Deride their lack of insight, empathy and intelligence.  So let Keeton and Ward keep their educational opportunity while we individually marginalize their very existence.  Let’s assure that their social isolation is so profound they will need counseling themselves.

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Of course women are smarter than men.  They have to be.  The deck is stacked against them from birth, so they have to be smart to survive.

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