1972:
My first bike was a Honda 350 back in 1972. When I joined the Army 4 months later, I paid off the loan, and left it in the states. Actually forgot about it, and since I never saw it when I went back home on my visits and no one mentioned it, it was always out of sight and out of mind... UNTIL about 15 years later, when I was riding my brother's 750 Honda, I slipped on gravel and dropped it in the driveway and put a tiny dent in the gas tank. I was so worried about telling my brother and told my mom about it. She said, "Why are you worried about that little dent after what he did to your bike? "My bike?", I said. "Yea, he destroyed your bike in an accident after you went to Italy. Didn't he tell you?" To this day my brother has never mentioned it, but as strange as this sounds, I'm kinda happy that there is something he did, that I can, at least in my mind, pretend that my brother might be scared to tell me about. (emphasis on the word pretend).
1973: Ducati 250 enduro. My first bike I had ever had an accident with.
1975:
An old Norton Comando 850 Chopper. This wasn't my bike, but I was given permission by the owner to ride it as much as like. (I actually rode the chain right off of it.)
1976: Triumph 650 on loan. First of what I considered to be a serious bike. (Probably because it was the first bike that I road that was actually in great condition, and could reach 125mph)
1979: Honda 550 in Texas.
First traffic violations. Straight pipes, and loud. Couldn't ride it for very long at a time without getting a headache. (that's how loud it was.) When I left Texas and went back to live in Italy, I left it at home again. My dad eventually managed to sell it to someone.
2007: Harley Davidson Road King Classic (1450cc)
My youngest daughter, who has her own Harley, came home one day and told me she found a bike just like I the style I wanted. Well I've already put 7000 Km on it in the first 6 months...
POLITICAL
POLITICAL
Barack Obama is noted for his powerful intellect, but I don't think he gets nearly enough credit for the mental dexterity it takes to be simultaneously an Islamic theocrat, atheistic communist and national socialist while posing as a center left candidate. Those must be the compartmentalization skills they taught him at that Manchurian madrasah in Indonesia.
Credit: Talking Points Memo
Thursday, 14 February 2008
It'll Never, Ever, Ever Happen Here
by Cliff Carson
I was reading about the rise of Hitler to power and found that there were eight things he asked the German people to give him (Each of the eight were a surrender of a right they enjoyed per their Rule of Law) so that he and his administration could "protect" the German people from their enemies.
They gave up the rights gladly because Hitler preached that Germany would once again be a great nation if they would be a Christian Nation and trust him to pull them up out of their poverty. Over 90% of the Germans supported him. Once they had given up their rights, they woke up one morning to find that they, the people, were the enemies of the Government.
Every one of those eight have been usurped by this Administration here in the U.S., and way too many people state "If you're doing nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear". That's exactly the rationale that the Germans used to give up those rights.
One day it was too late to disagree.
It is now time to examine some of the actions the Third Reich took and the individual liberties they removed from German Law during this period, and then compare them to our "War against Terrorism Law" Remember our Constitution bans the practice of these items :
1. Denial and Restriction of habeas corpus
2. Un Authorized Rampant militarism without Congress Approval
3. Warrantless Spying on all citizens
4. Arrest and indefinite imprisonment without trial
5. Secret detention
6. Secret Prisons
7. Torture
8. Unfair Trial Practices
George Bush already has claimed a right to adopt, and has put into practice, every last one of the eight Constitutional protections listed above. He has claimed the right to ignore these banned practices.
The Germans never thought it could happen to them. Neither do a majority of Americans.
John F. Kennedy's warning: "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable."
The Wisdom of Old People
The Christian Right and the Rise of American Fascism
by Chris Hedges
www.theocracywatch.org, Nov 15, 2004
(This is an article by Chris Hedges that no major publication will print.)
Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School , told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."
The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global, Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.
He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as The Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States . It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolph Hitler placed over the contents inside his suitcase to hide the rolls of home movie film he took of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the top of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Fuhrer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black and white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge .
He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of religion, rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil nor the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand wringing by Democrats in the wake of the election, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them "demonic" and "satanic," would not have surprised Adams . Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the Biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.
His critique of the prominent research universities, along with the media, was no less withering. These institutions, self-absorbed, compromised by their close relationship with government and corporations, given enough of the pie to be complacent, were unwilling to deal with the fundamental moral questions and inequities of the age. They had no stomach for a battle that might cost them their prestige and comfort. He told me that if the Nazis took over America "60 percent of the Harvard faculty would begin their lectures with the Nazi salute." This too was not an abstraction. He had watched academics at the University of Heidelberg , including the philosopher Martin Heidegger, raise their arms stiffly to students before class.
Two decades later, even in the face of the growing reach of the Christian Right, his prediction seems apocalyptic. And yet the powerbrokers in the Christian Right have moved from the fringes of society to the floor of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Christian fundamentalists now hold a majority of seats in 36 percent of all Republican Party state committees, or 18 of 50 states, along with large minorities in 81 percent of the rest of the states. Forty-five Senators and 186 members of the House of Representatives earned between an 80 to100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian Right advocacy groups - The Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. Tom Coburn, the new senator from Oklahoma , has included in his campaign to end abortion a call to impose the death penalty on doctors that carry out abortions once the ban goes into place. Another new senator, John Thune, believes in Creationism. Jim DeMint, the new senator elected from South Carolina , wants to ban single mothers from teaching in schools. The Election Day exit polls found that 22 percent of voters identified themselves as evangelical Christians and Bush won 77 percent of their vote. The polls found that a plurality of voters said that the most important issue in the campaign had been "moral values."
President Bush must further these important objectives, including the march to turn education and social welfare over to the churches with his faith-based initiative, as well as chip away at the wall between church and state with his judicial appointments, if he does not want to face a revolt within his core constituency.
Jim Dobson, the head of Focus on the Family, who held weekly telephone conversations with K arl Rove during the campaign, has put the President on notice. He told ABC's "This Week" that "this president has two years, or more broadly the Republican Party has two years, to implement these policies, or certainly four, or I believe they'll pay a price in the next election."
Bush may turn out to be a transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck used "values" to energize his base at the end of the 19 th century and launched "Kulturkampt", the word from which we get "culture wars," against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck 's attacks split the country, made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse and paved the way for the more virulent racism of the Nazis. This, I suspect, will be George Bush's contribution to our democracy.
DOMINIONISTS AND RECONSTRUCTIONISTS
The Reconstructionist movement, founded in 1973 by Rousas Rushdooney, is the intellectual foundation for the most politically active element within the Christian Right. Rushdooney's 1,600 page three-volume work, Institutes of Biblical Law, argued that American society should be governed according to the Biblical precepts in the Ten Commandments. He wrote that the elect, like Adam and Noah, were given dominion over the earth by God and must subdue the earth, along with all non-believers, so the Messiah could return.
This was a radically new interpretation for many in the evangelical movement. The Messiah, it was traditionally taught, would return in an event called "the Rapture" where there would be wars and chaos. The non-believers would be tormented and killed and the elect would be lifted to heaven. The Rapture was not something that could be manipulated or influenced, although believers often interpreted catastrophes and wars as portents of the imminent Second Coming.
Rushdooney promoted an ideology that advocated violence to create the Christian state. His ideology was the mirror image of Liberation Theology, which came into vogue at about the same time. While the Liberation Theologians crammed the Bible into the box of Marxism, Rushdooney crammed it into the equally distorting box of classical fascism. This clash was first played out in Latin America when I was there as a reporter two decades ago. In El Salvador leftist priests endorsed and even traveled with the rebel movements in Nicaragua and El Salvador, while Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, along with conservative Latin American clerics, backed the Contras fighting against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the murderous military regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Chile and Argentina.
The Institutes of Biblical Law called for a Christian society that was harsh, unforgiving and violent. Offenses such as adultery, witchcraft, blasphemy and homosexuality, merited the death penalty. The world was to be subdued and ruled by a Christian United States. Rushdooney dismissed the number of 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust as an inflated figure and his theories on race echoed Nazi Eugenics.
"The white man has behind him centuries of Christian culture and the discipline and selective breeding this faith requires...," he wrote. "The Negro is a product of a radically different past, and his heredity has been governed by radically different considerations."
"The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the purposes of the magic are control and power over God, man, nature, and society. Voodoo, or magic, was the religion and life of American Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo, a modernized power drive." (see The Religious Right , a publication of the ADL, pg. 124.)
Rushdooney was deeply antagonistic to the federal government. He believed the federal government should concern itself with little more than national defense. Education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches. Biblical law must replace the secular legal code. This ideology remains at the heart of the movement. It is being enacted through school vouchers, with federal dollars now going into Christian schools, and the assault against the federal agencies that deal with poverty and human services. The Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives is currently channeling millions in federal funds to groups such Pat Robertson's Operation Blessing , and National Right to Life, as well as to fundamentalist religious charity organizations and programs promoting sexual abstinence.
Rushdooney laid the groundwork for a new way of thinking about political involvement. The Christian state would come about not only through signs and wonders, as those who believed in the rapture believed? , but also through theestablishment of the Christian nation. But he remained, even within the Christian Right, a deeply controversial figure.
Dr. Tony Evans, the minister of a Dallas church and the founder of Promise Keepers, articulated Rushdooney's extremism in a more palatable form. He called on believers, often during emotional gatherings at football stadiums, to commit to Christ and exercise power within the society as agents of Christ. He also called for a Christian state. But he did not advocate the return of slavery, as Rushdooney did, nor list a string of offenses such as adultery punishable by death, nor did he espouse the Nazi-like race theories. It was through Evans, who was a spiritual mentor to George Bush that Dominionism came to dominate the politically active wing of the Christian Right.The religious utterances from political leaders such as George Bush, Tom Delay, Pat Robertson and Zell Miller are only understandable in light of Rushdooney and Dominionism. These leaders believe that God has selected them to battle the forces of evil, embodied in "secular humanism," to create a Christian nation. Pat Robertson frequently tells believers "our aim is to gain dominion over society." Delay has told supporters, such as at a gathering two years ago at the First Baptist Church in Pearland , Texas , "He [God] is using me, all the time, everywhere, to stand up for biblical worldview in everything I do and everywhere I am. He is training me, He is working with me." Delay went on to tell followers "If we stay inside the church, the culture won't change."
Pat Robertson, who changed the name of his university to Regent University , says he is training his students to rule when the Christian regents take power, part of the reign leading to the return of Christ. Robertson resigned as the head of the Christian Coalition when Bush took office, a sign many took to signal the ascendancy of the first regent. This battle is not rhetorical but one that followers are told will ultimately involve violence. And the enemy is clearly defined and marked for destruction.
"Secular Humanists," the popular Christian Right theologian Francis Schaeffer wrote in one of numerous diatribes, "are the greatest threat to Christianity the world has ever known."
One of the most enlightening books that exposes the ultimate goals of movement is America's Providential History , the standard textbook used in many Christian schools and a staple of the Christian home schooling movement. It sites Genesis 26, which calls for mankind to " .have dominnion over the fish of the sea, over the birds of the air, over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth" as evidence that the Bible callls for "Bible believing Christians" to take dominion of America.
"When God brings Noah through the flood to a new earth, He reestablished the Dominion Mandate but now delegates to man the responsibility for governing other men." (page 19). The authors write that God has called the United States to become "the first truly Christian nation" (page 184) and "make disciples of all nations." The book denounces income tax as "idolatry," property tax as "theft" and calls for an abolish of inheritance taxes in the chapter entitled Christian Economics. The loss of such tax revenues will bring about the withering away of the federal government and the empowerment of the authoritarian church, although this is not explict in the text.
Rushdooney's son-in-law, Gary North, a popular writer and founder of the Institute for Christian Economics, laid out the aims of the Christian Right.
"So let's be blunt about it: We must use the doctrine of religious liberty to gain independence for Christian schools until we train up a generation of people who know that there is no religious neutrality, no neutral law, no neutral education, and no neutral civil government. Then they will get busy in constructing a Bible-based social, political and religious order which finally denies the religious liberty of the enemies of God." (Christianity and Civilization, Spring, 1982)
Dominionists have to operate, for now, in the contaminated environment of the secular, liberal state. They have learned, therefore, to speak in code. The code they use is the key to understanding the dichotomy of the movement, one that has a public and a private face. In this they are no different from the vanguard, as described by Lenin, or the Islamic terrorists who shave off their beards, adopt western dress and watch pay-for-view pornographic movies in their hotel rooms the night before hijacking a plane for a suicide attack.
Joan Bokaer, the Director of Theocracy Watch, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University , who runs the encyclopedic web site theocracywatch.org, was on a speaking tour a few years ago in Iowa . She obtained a copy of a memo Pat Robertson handed out to followers at the Iowa Republican County Caucus. It was titled, "How to Participate in a Political Party" and read:
"Rule the world for God."
"Give the impression that you are there to work for the party, not push an ideology.
"Hide your strength.
"Don't flaunt your Christianity.
"Christians need to take leadership positions. Party officers control political parties and so it is very important that mature Christians have a majority of leadership whenever possible, God willing."
President Bush sends frequent coded messages to the faithful. In his address to the nation on the night of September 11, for example, he lifted a line directly from the Gospel of John when he said "And the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it." He often uses the sentence "when every child is welcomed in life and protected in law," words taken directly from a pro-life manifesto entitled "A Statement of Pro-Life Principle and Concern." He quotes from hymns, prayers, tracts and Biblical passages without attribution. These phrases reassure the elect. They are lost on the uninitiated.
CHRIST THE AVENGER
The Christian Right finds its ideological justification in a narrow segment of the Gospel, in particular the letters of the Apostle Paul, especially the story of Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus in the Book of Acts. It draws heavily from the book of Revelations and the Gospel of John. These books share an apocalyptic theology. The Book of Revelations is the only time in the Gospels where Jesus sanctions violence, offering up a vision of Christ as the head of a great and murderous army of heavenly avengers. Martin Luther found the God portrayed in Revelations so hateful and cruel he put the book in the appendix of his German translation of the Bible.
These books rarely speak about Christ's message of love, forgiveness and compassion. They focus on the doom and destruction that will befall unbelievers and the urgent need for personal salvation. The world is divided between good and evil, between those who act as agents of God and those who act as agents of Satan. The Jesus of the other three Gospels, the Jesus who turned the other cheek and embraced his enemies, an idea that was radical and startling in the ancient Roman world, is purged in the narrative selected by the Christian Right.
The cult of masculinity pervades the ideology. Feminism and homosexuality are social forces, believers are told, that have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus is portrayed as a man of action, casting out demons, battling the Anti-Christ, attacking hypocrites and castigating the corrupt. This cult of masculinity brings with it the glorification of strength, violence and vengeance. It turns Christ into a Rambo-like figure; indeed depictions of Jesus within the movement often show a powerfully built man wielding a huge sword.
This image of Christ as warrior is appealing to many within the movement. The loss of manufacturing jobs, lack of affordable health care, negligible opportunities for education and poor job security has left many millions of Americans locked out. This ideology is attractive because it offers them the hope of power and revenge. It sanctifies their rage. It stokes the paranoia about the outside world maintained through bizarre conspiracy theories, many on display in Pat Robertson's book The New World Order . The book is a xenophobic rant that includes vicious attacks against the United Nations and numerous other international organizations. The abandonment of the working class has been crucial to the success of the movement. Only by reintegrating the working class into society through job creation, access to good education and health care can the Christian Right be effectively blunted. Revolutionary movements are built on the backs of an angry, disenfranchised laboring class. This one is no exception.
The depictions of violence that will befall non-believers are detailed, gruesome and brutal. It speaks to the rage many believers harbor and the thirst for revenge. This, in large part, accounts for the huge sales of the apocalyptic series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. In their novel, Glorious Appearing , based on LaHaye's interpretation of Biblical Prophecies about the Second Coming, Christ eviscerates the flesh of millions of non-believers with the mere sound of his voice. There are long descriptions of horror, of how "the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin." Eyes disintegrate. Tongues melt. Flesh dissolves. The novel, part of The Left Behind series, are the best selling adult novels in the country. They preach holy war.
"Any teaching of peace prior to [Christ's] return is heresy." said televangelist James Robinson.
Natural disasters, terrorist attacks, instability in Israel and even the fighting of Iraq are seen as signposts. The war in Iraq was predicted according to believers in the 9 th chapter of the Book of Revelations where four angels "which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of men." The march towards global war, even nuclear war, is not to be feared but welcomed as the harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms millions of non-believers to a horrible and painful death.
THE CORRUPTION OF SCIENCE AND LAW
The movement seeks the imprint of law and science. It must discredit the rational disciplines that are the pillars of the Enlightenment to abolish the liberal polity of the Enlightenment. This corruption of science and law is vital in promoting the doctrine. Creationism, or "intelligent design," like Eugenics for the Nazis, must be introduced into the mainstream as a valid scientific discipline to destroy the discipline of science itself. This is why the Christian Right is working to bring test cases to ensure that school textbooks include "intelligent design" and condemn gay marriage.
The drive by the Christian Right to include crackpot theories in scientific or legal debate is part of the campaign to destroy dispassionate and honest intellectual inquiry. Facts become interchangeable with opinions. An understanding of reality is not to be based on the elaborate gathering of facts and evidence. The ideology alone is true. Facts that get in the way of the ideology can be altered. Lies, in this worldview, become true. Hannah Arendt called this effort "nihilistic relativism" although a better phrase might be collective insanity.
The Christian Right has fought successfully to have Creationist books sold in national park bookstores in the Grand Canyon , taught as a theory in public schools in states like Alabama and Arkansas . "Intelligent design" is promoted in Christian textbooks. All animal species, or at least their progenitors, students read, fit on Noah's ark. The Grand Canyon was created a few thousand years ago by the flood that lifted up Noah's ark, not one billion years ago, as geologists have determined. The earth is only a few thousand years old in line with the literal reading of Genesis. This is not some quaint, homespun view of the world. It is an insidious attempt to undermine rational scientific research and intellectual inquiry.
Tom Delay, following the Columbine shootings, gave voice to this assault when he said that the killings had taken place "because our school systems teach children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial mud."
(speech Delay gave in the House on June 16, 1999 )
"What convinces masses are not facts," Hannah Arendt wrote in Origins of Totalitarianism, "and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system which they are presumably part. Repetition, somewhat overrated in importance because of the common belief in the "masses" inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important because it convinces them of consistency in time." (p.351)
There are more than 6 million elementary and secondary school students attending private schools and 11.5 percent of these students attend schools run by the Christian Right. These "Christian" schools saw an increase of 46 percent in enrollment in the last decade. The 245,000 additional students accounted for 75 percent of the total rise in private school enrollment.
THE LAUNCHING OF THE WAR
Adams told us to watch closely what the Christian Right did to homosexuals. He has seen how the Nazis had used "values" to launch state repression of opponents. Hitler, days after he took power in 1933, imposed a ban on all homosexual and lesbian organizations. He ordered raids on places where homosexuals gathered culminating with the ransacking of the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin . Thousands of volumes from the institute's library were tossed into a bonfire. Adams said that homosexuals would also be the first "deviants" singled out by the Christian Right. We would be the next.
The ban on same sex marriages, passed by eleven states in the election, was part of this march towards our door. A 1996 federal law already defines marriage as between a man and a woman. All of the states with ballot measures, with the exception of Oregon , had outlawed same sex marriages, as do 27 other states. The bans, however, had to be passed, believers were told, to thwart "activist judges" who wanted to overturn them. The Christian family, even the nation, was under threat. The bans served to widen the splits tearing apart the country. The attacks on homosexuals handed to the foot soldiers of the Christian Right an easy target. It gave them a taste of victory. It made them feel empowered. But it is ominous for gays and for us.
All debates with the Christian Right are useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday School. These naive attempts to reach out to a movement bent on our destruction, to prove to them that we too have "values," would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. They hate us. They hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution. Our opinions do not count.
This movement will not stop until we are ruled by Biblical Law, an authoritarian church intrudes in every aspect of our life, women stay at home and rear children, gays agree to be cured, abortion is considered murder, the press and the schools promote "positive" Christian values, the federal government is gutted, war becomes our primary form of communication with the rest of the world and recalcitrant non-believers see their flesh eviscerated at the sound of the Messiah's voice.
The spark that could set it ablaze may be lying in the hands of an Islamic terrorist cell, in the hands of the ideological twins of the Christian Right. Another catastrophic terrorist attack could be our Reichstag fire, the excuse used to begin the accelerated dismantling of our open society. The ideology of the Christian Right is not one of love and compassion, the central theme of Christ's message, but of violence and hatred. It has a strong appeal to many in our society, but it is also aided by our complacency. Let us not stand at the open city gates waiting passively and meekly for the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching rudely towards Bethlehem . Let us, if nothing else, begin to call them by their name.
Chris Hedges, a reporter for The New York Times, is the author of War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning . He holds a Master of Divinity from Harvard Divinity School . His next book , Losing Moses on the Freeway: America 's Broken Covenant With The Ten Commandments is published by The Free Press.
Squirrels
Ok, it's official. I'm getting old.
The other day I was walking back to my Harley from the mall.
Coming into the store was this smoking hot 19, maybe 20 year old biker babe.
God, she was hot.
My thought?
"I wonder what her mother looks like."
Idea for this stolen from jokeaday.com. (Don't hurt me Ray, when you find out.)
Music
=========SONGS I LIKE============
Photography
IDIOT SIGHTING
IDIOT SIGHTING:
An award should go to the Virgin Airlines gate attendant in Sydney some months ago for being smart and funny, while making her point, when confronted with a passenger who probably deserved to fly as cargo.
A crowded Virgin flight was cancelled after Virgin's 767s had been withdrawn from service. A single attendant was re-booking a long line of inconvenienced travellers. Suddenly an angry passenger pushed his way to the desk. He slapped his ticket down on the counter and said, "I HAVE to be on this flight and it HAS to be FIRST CLASS".
The attendant replied, "I'm sorry, sir. I'll be happy to try to help you, but I've got to help these people first, and I'm sure we'll be able to work something out." The passenger was unimpressed. He asked loudly, so that the passengers behind him could hear, "DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHO I AM?"
Without hesitating, the attendant smiled and grabbed her public address microphone: "May I have your attention please, may I have your attention please," she began - her voice heard clearly throughout the terminal. "We have a passenger here at Gate 14 WHO DOES NOT KNOW WHO HE IS. If anyone can help him find his identity, please come to Gate 14."
With the folks behind him in line laughing hysterically, the man glared at the Virgin attendant, gritted his teeth and said, "Buzz Off!"
IDIOT SIGHTING:
We had to have the garage door repaired. The Sears repairman told us that one of our problems was that we did not have a "large" enough motor on the opener. I thought for a minute and said that we had the largest one Sears made at that time, a 1/2 horsepower. He shook his head and said, "Lady, you need a 1/4 horsepower." I responded that 1/2 was larger than 1/4. He said, "NO, it's not." Four is larger than two.."
We haven't used Sears repair since.
IDIOT SIGHTING
My daughter and I went through the McDonald's take-out window and I gave the clerk a $5 bill. Our total was $4.25, so I also handed her a quarter. She said, "you gave me too much money." I said, "Yes I know, but this way you can just give me a dollar bill back." She sighed and went to get the manager who asked me to repeat my request. I did so, and he handed me back the quarter, and said "We're sorry but they could not do that kind of thing." The clerk then proceeded to give me back $1 and 75 cents in change.
Do not confuse the clerks at McD's.
IDIOT SIGHTING:
I live in a semi-rural area. We recently had a new neighbor call the local township administrative office to request the removal of the DEER CROSSING sign on our road. The reason: "Too many deer are being hit by cars out here. I don't think this is a good place for them to be crossing anymore."
From Kingman , KS .
IDIOT SIGHTING IN FOOD SERVICE:
My daughter went to a local Taco Bell and ordered a taco. She asked the person behind the counter for "minimal lettuce." He said he was sorry, but they only had iceberg lettuce.
From Kansas City
IDIOT SIGHTING:
I was at the airport, checking in at the gate, when an airport employee asked, "Has anyone put anything in your baggage without your knowledge?" To which I replied, "If it was without my knowledge, how would I know?" He smiled knowingly and nodded, "That's why we ask."
Happened in Birmingham , Ala.
IDIOT SIGHTING:
The stoplight on the corner buzzes when it's safe to cross the street. I was crossing with an intellectually challenged coworker. She asked if I knew what the buzzer was for. I explained that it signals blind people when the light is red. Appalled, she responded, "What on earth are blind people doing driving?!"
She was a probation officer in Wichita , KS
IDIOT SIGHTING:
At a good-bye luncheon for an old and dear coworker: she was leaving the company due to "downsizing." Our manager commented cheerfully, "This is fun. We should do this more often." Not another word was spoken. We all just looked at each other with that deer-in-the-headlights stare.
This was a lunch at Texas Instruments.
IDIOT SIGHTING:
I work with an individual who plugged her power strip back into itself and for the sake of her life, couldn't understand why her system would not turn on.
A deputy with the Dallas County Sheriffs office, no less.
IDIOT SIGHTING:
When my husband and I arrived at an automobile dealership to pick up our car, we were told the keys had been locked in it. We went to the service department and found a mechanic working feverishly to unlock the driver's side door. As I watched from the passenger side, I instinctively tried the door handle and discovered that it was unlocked. "Hey," I announced to the technician, "it's open!" His reply, "I know. I already got that side."
This was at the Ford dealership in Canton , Mississippi
MORE IDIOTS:
Customer, upon receiving her Moolatte: “This has a round lid, can I have a flat lid?”
Me: “I’m sorry, the only lid that fits that cup is a dome lid.”
Customer: “But I want a flat lid, Starbucks always gets me a flat lid! Why can’t you?!”
Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but the flat lids we have won’t fit that cup.”
Customer: “I want to speak with your manager.” *mutters* “Stupid kids…”
(I go and get my manager)
Manager: “What’s the problem, ma’am?”
Customer: “This stupid employee of yours won’t give me a flat lid!” *brandishes the drink in his face*
(My manager takes one of every single lid in the store and puts them in front of her)
Manager: “Go ahead then.”
Customer: *proceeds to try and put the lids on the cup, none of which fit* “This is ridiculous! Why don’t you have a flat lid?! Starbucks always has a flat lid!!”
Manager: “Then go buy your drinks there and leave my employees alone.”
EVEN MORE IDIOTS
Customer: “I just locked my key in my car in front of the shop.”
Me: (I pick up some stuff) “Not a problem, I’ll pop it open for $5.00.”
Customer: “What are you going to do with that stuff?”
Me: “Open your car.”
Customer: “It’s a brand new Mercedes. I just drove it here from the dealer–you can’t touch it!”
Me: “Then how do I open it?”
Customer: “That’s your problem.”
Me: “Actually it’s not; I didn’t lock the key in your car.”
Customer: “You have to open it.”
Me: “Watch me not open it.”
Customer: “OK then, but if you make any scratch or mark at all then you will have to pay Mercedes to repaint the whole car. That will cost thousands.”
Me: “So If I’m successful I get $5.00, but if I make the smallest error it will cost me thousands of dollars?”
Customer: “Yes.”
Me: “Your car might just be there forever.”
STAY ALERT!
They walk among us… and the scary part is that they VOTE
Why We'll Win
History proves that ideas are more powerful than weapons. Sure, in the short-term, those who possess the strongest military and the deadliest weapons will prevail. But powerful new ideas bring greater change over the span of a couple of hundred years than military might.
The wannabe-fascists in America, England, Israel and other countries have won in the short-term. For example, there already is soft fascism in America and England. Wars have already been launched just because America -- as sole superpower -- had the military strength to do it. The elections are already rigged, with only those hand-picked by the powers-that-be standing any chance of winning.
But people world-wide are waking up to the facts of manipulation of intelligence, false flag operations and rigged elections. This is a huge development.
Why?
Well, these things have been going on for thousands of years. These ideas -- which have never before been understood by so large a proportion of the population, are very powerful. Previously, people have believed that their form of government -- whether capitalism, or communism, or socialism, or any other ism -- would basically protect them.
But with an understanding of false flag terror and faked intelligence, people can see that the elite have been playing an entirely different game: the blame-the-enemy-for-your-own-brutal acts-of-murder game.
Once people understand that the powers-that-be in every country and every culture will wrap themselves in the nation's flag, dominant cultural expressions, and prevailing religion and then manipulate the population through the creation of boogeymen, something amazing will happen.
People will rise up and demand new forms of government that cannot be distorted through false flags, cooked intelligence and rigged votes to serve the elite at the expense of the people. Tweaks on the old forms of government, brought about by constitutional Convention (or even new forms of government) will be implemented which will prevent the abuses of the last couple of thousands of years from recurring, and which will create true democratic republics which actually embody the vision of the Founding Fathers. Because America, for example, has become so corrupted, and because anti-freedom forces sought to sabotage the Constitution from the first, the new governments will be better than the world has ever seen before.
I believe that the elites overplayed their hand. I believe that by carrying out the brutal act of cynical murder on 9/11 and by using overt forms of power to try to stifle dissent and truth, the elites have not only sewn the seeds of their own downfall from power, but have also paved the way for an awakening of humankind to the realities of how people have been manipulated by the elites for millennia.
9/11 was a brutal act of murder on innocent Americans. Nothing will ever wash the horrible taste of that treasonous act from my mouth. But I believe that we can make lemonade from the lemon -- and with the ugly truth so obviously displayed for all to see -- use the 9/11 murders to awaken humanity so that the people of the world demand true mechanisms to protect our freedom in a fashion that cannot be destroyed by games of manipulation.
The truth will out. And when the truth is known, the idea generated by that truth -- of the need for true liberty protected from the manipulation of false flag attacks and fake intelligence -- and the action generated from that idea can sweep away the tools of repression and usher in a golden age of liberty and justice better than anything before.
But that will only happen if we are committed to turning the lemons of 9/11 and the gathering clouds of fascism into the lemonade of the best system the world has had, one which comes much closer to carrying out the Founders' intent and which will actually deliver on the promises enshrined in the Constitution.
Obviously, it is difficult to create procedures than can withstand attempts at manipulation. If the demand of the people is strong enough, ingenious methods can be implemented which discourage manipulation.
Moreover, new technologies and new insights into biology, psychology, and related fields will lead to new forms of psychological warfare and manipulation by the elite.
That is why a "vigilant" public is the strongest protection because -- when the public is paying attention -- the elites know they have to behave themselves. That is why informing and waking up the population is the key to protecting freedom in the long-term.
This profile was assembled by cheap laborers in third world countries.
Yes, I exploited wordsmiths in developing nations for my own selfish needs.
Verbs were obtained through shady transactions from Egypt.
Nouns I bought wholesale from Great Britain.
Proper Nouns I had to trade some silver with Australian Aborigines to get the ones we needed.
Proper syntax was a problem. Floods in Indonesia kept me from obtaining Proper Syntax.
I had to settle for Improper Syntax until just recently.
Prepositional phrases are on back order from Pakistan until the current political crisis there is over. (I know you're not supposed to end a sentence with a prepositional phrase. I fucked up.)
A veneer of humor was picked up -- almost as an afterthought -- at (believe it or not) a local KMart Blue Light Special. (It was either a toaster oven or a sense of humor. I went for the humor, figuring only hungry girls would be interested in a profile with a toaster oven.)
Irony came from the Ivory Coast through illegal poaching. I don't condone illegal poaching, but it's ironic that I'm using it anyway.
Colorful metaphors were picked up at a yard sale for 75 cents apiece. (Until I found them, I was using black and white metaphors.)
Idiomatic expressions were originally shipped in from Mexico, but, all of the installation instructions were in Spanish, so I was a day late and a dollar short.
Just to add insult to injury, I found some in English in Ottawa. Any Tom, Dick, or Harry could have found 'em there.
Think you drank a lot last night?
In the olden days, you'd have a shot of whiskey at lunch, finish out your day at the office, come home and have a martini or two, then drive to a cocktail party, down a couple of highballs with a bourbon chaser, and get behind the wheel to race erratically home to your eager, negligee-clad wife.
The Establishment Man was a jovial, booze-powered social animal, and pop culture was ready and willing to encourage his alcoholism at every turn.
(NOTE: Apparently this nostalgic look at the way we were, does not seem to apply to Napa, where this long gone tradition seems to have never disappeared. Thank god for the Napalians who work so hard to preserve our old traditions.)
====================================
The following call came in at 6:30 last Sunday morning:
- Me: "Hello?"
- Some Woman: "Mannie?"
- Me: "Ma'am, what number are you trying to reach?"
- Some Woman: "Mannie, get up now, cause yo gotta go to Sunday School, okay, sweetie?"
- Me: "Ma'am, I am not your sweetie. You have a wrong number!"
- Some Woman: "Okay, sweetie, see you soon!"
- (click)
--------------------------------- At the fish hatchery where I work, we have a small display that describes the now-extinct Michigan Grayling (a kind of fish). This summer, I had the following conversation with a tourist:
* Tourist: "Is the Grayling still extinct?"
* Me: "Yes sir, it doesn't exist anymore."
* Tourist: "Any thoughts of bringing it back?"
* Me: "No, I don't think that's possible."
* Tourist: "Why not?"
* Me: "Because it's extinct."
* Tourist: "Still?"
* Me: "Yes."
......Frustrated, he left.
--------------------------------------------- My wife and I visited together with her friend in an old churchyard from the 1600s. Among the tombstones was one dated around 1725 that had fresh flowers by it.
* Our Friend: "I wonder who has been here with the flowers?"
* My Wife: (joking) "I guess the widow has been here."
* Our Friend: "Yes, I guess you're right. Who else could it have been?"
====================================
------------------------------------ My home town Maquoketa Iowa,
in the midwest back around 1880.
Yep they had parking problems outside
the WAL MART back then too.
Kids now days think they are doing
something new and radical by pimping
out there rides, but I was doing that
years way before they were even born.
Check out my ride when I was a kid.
Who I'd like to meet:
ONE LINERS
I used to eat a lot of natural foods until I learned that most people die of natural causes.
Garden Rule: When weeding, the best way to make sure you are removing a weed and not a valuable plant is to pull on it. If it comes out of the ground easily, it is a valuable plant.
The easiest way to find something lost around the house is to buy a replacement.
Never take life seriously. Nobody gets out alive anyway.
There are two kinds of pedestrians: the quick and the dead.
Life is sexually transmitted.
Health is merely the slowest possible rate at which one can die.
The only difference between a rut and a grave is the depth.
Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.
Have you noticed since everyone has a camcorder these days no one talks about seeing UFOs like they used to?
Whenever I feel blue, I start breathing again.
All of us could take a lesson from the weather. It pays no attention to criticism.
In the 60's, people took acid to make the world weird. Now the world is weird and people take Prozac to make it normal.
How is it one careless match can start a forest fire, but it takes a whole box to start a campfire?
Who was the first person to look at a cow and say, "I think I'll squeeze these dangly things here, and drink whatever comes out?"
Who was the first person to say, "See that chicken there? I'm gonna eat the next thing that comes outta its butt."
If Jimmy cracks corn and no one cares, why is there a song about him?
Why does your OB-GYN leave the room when you get undressed if they are going to look up there anyway?
If electricity comes from electrons, does morality come from morons?
Do illiterate people get the full effect of Alphabet Soup?
Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle?
Do you ever wonder why you gave me your email address?
hy there......oh thank you so much ....but I will not be ever disappointed of you...you are a great person.....we were just excited to see pictures from that great days, cause we had a lot of fun together......sorry for rushing you...:-| hope that everyone is ok and we will see you soon...take care and ride safe! have a great day!
hy there stranger...how are you?? you were waiting for you guys in vigonovo, at wheels of the road ride.....you missed!!! you know....we still wait for your pictures........have a great sunday...send hugs to daisy and mauro.... bye bye
....have a great sunday...send hugs to daisy and mauro....
