Hot cars and small towns

One blistering summer day, my friend, who lives in Grass Valley California, parked in a mall parking lot, got out of her car and shut the door with the keys still in the ignition and her baby in the back seat. She quickly called AAA, to get them to come and open the car.

When the AAA guy arrived, he was unable to open the car door. The car was getting hotter and hotter (it gets into the 100's, in the valley in the summer) and the guy was having no luck. Two cops, while cruising by, saw what was going on and came over to try and help. Still no luck.

They were ready to break the window when the cops spotted a guy walking furtively through the parking lot. They ran after him and brought him back to the car.

"Can you open the door?" the cops asked.

"I think so," the guy replied.

"Well do it," the cops said. The guy made short work of the lock, opened the door, and walked off.

"He's a car thief. We arrested him before." one of the cops told my friend.

Liberal Larry of Blame Bush laments this year's meager hurricane season

"The Red Cross may have provided food and water, but it was the $2,000 ATM cards FEMA distributed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina that helped many such families purchase such vital necessities as booze, drugs and porn."

Rat tales

Every morning on the way to work I pass by a senior citizens' residence that houses hundreds of elderly Chinese. The residence is a gorgeous, huge, former luxury hotel. The folks too old to walk to the BART station and do tai chi, love to push their walkers across the street and scatter bread crumbs for pigeons.

Here in the Bay there are a lot of Black Crowned Night Herons that hang out in Chinatown around the fish market dumpsters. Many of the Chinese feed these dangerous, hissing, nasty tempered, malevolent looking birds old fish and fish remnants. Some of the herons prefer the Kentucky Fried Chicken dumpster.

This morning, while passing the senior center, I saw, ten feet in front of me, a heron eating from a colorful pile of Fruit loops cereal someone had poured on the sidewalk. Then, out from a hedge, came a large rat to join in the feasting. The rat and the heron both nibbled from the same pile, thick as thieves.

Iraqi government gives $1,500 to any Iraqi who'll marry another Iraqi from the opposite sect!

The carpenter at work made a tiny desk, chair and trash can for me

COG, Christian Occupation Government

Miss C finds that the leftist atheists who fear Christians are no different than redneck survivalists muttering into their bowls of Dinty Moore about ZOG, Zionist Occupation Government.

The left speaks of the "infiltration" of the military by Christians. Talks about the "power" the Christian right exerts. Don't I wish.

The left sounds like the white supremacists complaining about the Jews and their ni&&er police, Jews and the banks, the Israeli lobby and on and on.

Global warming causes arson

Hey, it's so fucking warm because of "Global Warming." Damn, it's hella warm. Hella warm! Hell yeah, it's hotter than hell, but there are no fires like there are in real hell, so I think I'll just light some fires so it's really, really like hell.

Probably they'll find out the arsonists are environmentalists from the "Cult of Global Warming."

"They say that all coppers are bastards.

They're not, but those that are make a very good job of it."

Charlie Kray

My neighbor's outdoor cat's food is attracting more than cats!

A needle exchange program modeled on a Canadian program

is being proposed for San Francisco. Miss C has no objection to the premise of letting drug addicts shoot up in a clean environment, thus preventing them from littering the landscape with their filthy, disease slimed, used needles. The problem is that the Canadians also have nurses and doctors available to revive overdosers. They report that they save 800 people a year.

Damn!

Based on that fact alone, Miss C can no longer support the proposal. To Miss C's mind that is a major drawback. "Let the subhuman, total drains on society die," she says.

ACLU defends football fans constitutionally protected right to carry concealed weapons into football stadiums

And hard liquor. Miss C will not be attending any more Raiders games if the ACLU wins this suit. Every time she goes to a Raiders game fights break out. Lots of Raiders fans are gangstas. Miss C does not care to be collateral damage. Thanks ACLU!

The average Iraqi bidnessman don't play that!

Abu R told Miss C about a business meeting he was party to once. There were Arabs from various countries attending. One of them was an Iraqi. Some fine details were being worked out when the Iraqi turned to one of the other Arabs and said, "If you are lying to me, I'll slit your throat." Abu R said everybody knew that he meant it.

Muslims kicking more European ass!

They deserve it for being such pussies.

I'd like to see these Muslim punks come here and try to burn American cars. Americans love their cars.

Not Miss C's idea of Heaven

Chinese Christian co-worker is worried about Miss C's immortal soul. The other day, she told me that she keeps having dreams that "Jesus comes to get everyone, but you don't get to go, because you are not a believer."

"You'll have to pardon me for saying so, I replied, but spending eternity with my co-workers is not my idea of heaven, at all."

What happened to the old sneak attack?

Turkey warned the Iraq Kurdish separatist fighters that "Turkey was going to attack." Native Americans could teach this current crop of so-called warriors a lot about battle strategy.

"Having a French girlfriend is like going to bed with a Rottweiler on your chest every night, only, the French girl has worse breath!"

Devil Dawg has no chair

Have you ever been at someone's house when their dog comes up to you and glares menacingly at you or tries to climb into the chair you are sitting in?

Then the people who invited you over will say, "That's his chair," calmly, matter of factly, in a way that makes you feel as if you should vacate the chair and you look around and realize there is no other place to sit, except on the floor, which is really where the dog should be sitting anyway?

Devil Dog is allowed on the furniture. He sleeps with me. But he is not as important as a guest. When he gets off Wefare and gets a job in the circus, is pulling in the big bucks like that dog who used to be on Frasier, and can use the internet to buy hissself furniture, then, just maybe, he can have a chair to call his own. I will even put his name on it.

Mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom's gallant opposition

Among the colorful candidates running this year to unseat Newsom are a nudist, a professional clown, a homeless man who calls himself "a champion of Jesus Christ," a vegan taxicab driver who goes by the name "Grasshopper," and a local artist known as "Chicken John."

Right-wing worshipper of Satan

Right-wing co-worker worships Satan in his every incarnation. Last week, we gave a retirement party for another co-worker. Right-wing co-worker is an artist and draws pictures on the communal cards we give to retiring friends. He usually draws pictures of Godzilla, whom he adores even more than he does his dark Lord.

This time he had the card on his desk for some time after most of us had already written our salutations.

Then one day he asked me if the retiree was "very religious?"

"Well, I said, she is a practicing Jehovah's Witness."

"OK," he sighed, looking very depressed. "Do you think I should take off the little demons I drew?"

"Uh, yeah, I do," I said.

Which he did, and drew Godzilla in their place.

Nick Cohen says,

"Schoolchildren learn that they must always say who is doing what to whom. In the case of Iraq, many find it impossible to declare who is killing interpreters, Christians and soldiers, and why. Clear English might threaten preconceptions, and that would never do.

The Archbishop of Canterbury is proving a master of the evasive style. Returning from visiting Iraqi refugees in Syria last week, he declared: ‘Women in Christian communities were regularly forced to wear the hijab and were followed as they went to church.’

Yes, yes, Your Grace, but who is forcing and threatening them? He couldn’t speak plainly, because if he admitted that al-Qaeda in Iraq kill Arab Christians for being Christians, he would have to accept that their persecution isn’t the responsibility of Britain and America, but of the psychopathic adherents of theocratic ideology. "

Astronaut Farmer, the movie

Isn't it crazy how the left wants the government to make all our decisions for us and take care of us, and yet portrays government employees as the stupidest humans on the face of the earth? In reality they must think we are the stupidest beings on the face of the earth, that we would need total morons of the variety the left imagines is running the government, to run our lives.

Last week I watched Astronaut Farmer. God what a stinker. The left always portrays irresponsible, dangerous, mentally ill people as heroic figures. You'd think the left would have just loved General Armstrong Custer! The lead character in the film's farm goes into foreclosure because he wants to build a rocket in his barn. He horrifically endangers his family and his fellow townspeople in the process. I just don't get him as a hero.

Everyone at NASA were portrayed as total retards. There is a scene with in which two FBI agents are drinking coffee at a local diner as they stakeout the rogue rocket engineer. One agent holds up a mug and tells the other that "These would make good souvenirs."

"But there's nothing on them," the other agent replies.

Right.

When my Grandma was in a convalescent hospital for due to MS

It wasn't the athiests who came to visit her every week for 20 years, it was the Jehovah's Witnesses!

Britney Spears is not being hyped by the media, she's being persecuted

Britney needs to to strap up with explosives, wait til the paparazzi gets close enough, then, kaboom!

You know compared to most of the people here in Oakland, she's a fabulous mother.

Ducknapping 101, or Crazy Ass Gringos can kiss my ass!

My ex, the taxidermist, had a good friend who owned a gun shop. One day the friend, Alec, went to eat a a local Mexican restaurant known for its great brunches. While entering the restaurant, he spotted some very fat Mallard ducks floating in the decorative pond in front of the entrance.

"Goddamn!" he said. "Those are some big fat ducks! I'm going to come back tonight, after the restaurant is closed, and get me one!" His friends laughed.

Later that night Alec went back to the little pond, reached in, and with his bare hands, snagged a drake Mallard. He quickly rung its neck by holding its head and twisting its body around, as duck hunters do.

He got back to the house and decided he didn't have time to pluck it right then, so he put it in the freezer.

The next day, his wife Joanie came home from work to find the front door open. She walked into the house and looked for her Mexican maid, expecting to smell the delicious odor of cooking food. She walked in the kitchen and saw that the refrigerator door was also wide open. She saw that the check she had written for the maid was still on the table.

She called the maid's home phone number and the maid answered and started yelling at Joanie, furiously, in Spanish. Joanie hung up, very confused. Then she heard it. A strange huffing sound. She followed the sound into her laundry room. There she saw a duck stting on top of her laundry pile, breathing raspingly through it's poor, twisted neck.

She called her husband to ask how the hell a duck got to be in her laundry, whereupon he sheepishly admitted his crime. He came home and finished the duck off.

The maid never did come back.

Fascist, perverted, animal activists yank dogs from the arms of sobbing children!

Or fascists who sell dogs to celebrities, but not to mere "hairdressers" of celebrities.

The Brits are pulling their own teeth because dentists are leaving

the National Health System (socialized medicine) in droves.

This surprises Miss C. She had no idea that there were dentists in Britain.

The British are not generally thought of as good looking

We were discussing female beauty today at work. I said that although most bristish women were not that attractive, the most beautiful women have still been British ones. Vivian Leigh, Joan Collins, Elizabeth Taylor, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Elizabeth Hurley, all stunningly beautiful women.

Fratty co-worker piped in, "Yeah, but we have Jenna Jameson!"

Later I told right wing co-worker about the conversation and told him that, "I live around the corner from a guy who named his Rottweiller, Jenna Jameson."

"Maybe because she wolfs down everything in sight," co-worker said.

On the proposed installation of video cameras in San Francisco

The San Francisco mayoral candidates had radio time this weekend to speak about their proposed policies should they be elected mayor. One of the questions the candidtates all had to answer was on whether the city should install video cameras to deter crime. All the candidates, even the wacky nudist one, reluctantly admitted that cameras deter red light runners.

Two of the Black candidates said that crime was their number one priority. One of them, a woman, was somewhat Black nationalistic in tone. She said that instead of cameras, the city should install more street lighting. She received loud applause and cheers for this revolutionary statement.

The only problem is this, during the trial Miss C served as a juror on one "Litter Enforcement Officer" mentioned that a common area for dumping of stolen vehicles, "Was impossible to keep lit by street lights, as the criminals shoot or break them out as fast as the city can install and replace them."

Once again, reality trumps liberal la la land.

You can't walk anywhere downtown without stepping in piss!

Miss C got stuck next to a lefty on the bus on Friday

I sat next to this guy on Friday. He commented on the slow moving traffic. Somehow slow moving traffic segued into, you guessed it, torture! Then NSA spying. He gleefully related his joyful indignation at living in this oh so fascist state!

Miss C, no matter how nasty, was raised to be polite, so she was subjected to, well, torture, as she nodded along politely as he droned on in leftist orthodox fashion. She has this guy pegged now and will never sit next to him again!

The lefties need to make up their Goddamn minds!

Jimmy Carter said that using the word "genocide" is not very helpful in regard to the current situation in Darfur. Then the Democrats decide to open up a can of figurative whoop ass on Turkey, who is minding its own business and not bothering anyone, by labeling something that happened almost a hundred years ago "genocide." Most, if not all, the people responsible for the genocidal acts against the Armenians are dead and unable to feel the wicked sting of the democrat's censure!

We baby a country who is actually committing acts of real genocide and punish a country who has been behaving in an exemplary way for many years. It's typical, left wing crap. Thought crimes and crimes committed in the past are very important to leftists, because they have shown zero ability to deal with real world, real time problems. Talking smack retroactively, after the bloodbaths have passed is their specialty.

The only reason Tom Lantos and his troup of imbecilic zoo monkeys passed this resolution against Turkey is that they want the US to lose in Iraq. Period. Tom Lantos is a fossil and needs to give way to someone with new ideas.

What I learned from " Secrets of the Samurai Sword"

The most highly valued samurai swords are the "5 body swords." Which are swords that have been tested on criminals and have been proven to slice through 5 bodies at once. Miss C is regretably bloodthirsty and finds this information to be thrilling.

Here he is, Miss America!

Miss C watched an interview with John Edwards on the News Hour last night. Giggle, giggle, simper, coo. Mr Edwards gave the standard, groaningly awful, "If I am selected as Miss America, I will use my crown to help the poor and downtrodden of the world."

Edwards said,
"But what drives me every day is for those kind of chances to be there for everybody. I don't believe in the genetic lottery; I don't think it should be that your children's destiny is controlled by the family they're born into, or where they live, or the color of their skin. That's not America. That's not what America should be, at least."

He said he doesn't believe in the genetic lottery, yet he is clearly the benificiary of it, having been born with an IQ high enough to make it possible to pass the bar exam. Except that he shows little evidence of common sense.

On one hand he says it's not possible to overcome your disadvantages and pull yourself up from poverty by your bootstraps, and yet, according to him, he did exactly that. He came from nothing and now he is a multi-millionaire. How did he do it? If it was possible for him, why isn't it possible for others? Most people are dumber than bricks, that's why. We just have to accept that and work around it.

Brad and Angelina should adopt Jennifer Annistan!

There was an interview in Parade Magazine on Sunday in which Brad Pitt stated that he was staying true to his "ideals," what ever those may be. He left his wife for a woman so stupid and lacking in sound judgement, that she once had the name "Billy Bob" tattooed on her person.

In the article Brad bemoaned the fact that he and Angie's adopted children are constantly being set upon by rapid members of the paparazzi. Then he went on to say they wanted to adopt more children. Both of these idiots are too morally bankrupt and mentally unfit to be parents.

Rage filled animal lovers

I was watching 49 up, last night, the Michael Apted documantary wherein he has followed some Brits from the age of 7, starting in 1964 and every 7 years thereafter. The subjects of the film are 49 now.

During the film they showed excerpts from the first film, when all the kids were 7. The group of kids were at the zoo looking at the polar bear exhibit. One of the cheekier kids picked up a rock and good naturedly chucked it at the polar bear. One of the other kids, face contorted in rage, ran over to scream at the rock thrower.

First of all, a small rock is unlikely to cause harm to a polar bear. Secondly the rock throwing child was merely following his biological destiny, that is to hunt animals. Thirdly, had either child fallen into the exhibit, he would not have lasted more than a few seconds. As Miss C is fond of saying, just cuz you're their buddy doesn't mean they won't kill you last. There are no "Human Rights" activists in the animal kingdom.

Then it's good enough for Miss C!

One woman who was in the jury selection pool for the trial I just served on was waxing lyrical about organic foods in the small break room next to the court room.

"Do you know that McDonald's meat has been discovered to contain little more than kangaroo meat and worms?"

"Ah," I said, very impressed. "Good old kangaroo and witchetty grubs. The traditional diet of the Aboriginal people of Australia. If it's good enough for them, it's good enough for me!"

Secrets of the Samurai sword on PBS"s Nova tonight

Kewl!

Weedee peepo

So who's the narrow minded one?

My Chinese-Christian co-worker told me that she visited her brother's Episcopalian church. Talking to one of the congregation, she mentioned that she was an Evangelical Christian. "Oh, I don't like Evangelicals, they're very narrow minded," the woman said.

"I thought that Episcopalians were supposed to be very tolerant," my co-worker said to me.

"I guess not, I replied. You should have told her that," "Just because other people are bad, that doesn't imply that you are good."

Battles, airstrikes, kill 250 in Pakistan

Excellent!

If a guy thinks he's Napoleon

do I have to hire his crazy ass and call him Napoleon? Do my customers have to pussy foot around him and call him Napoleon too?

I refuse to call Wilfred, Wilma. A transvestite or transexual is suffering from exactly the same mental disease as a psycho who thinks he is Jesus. A man can never, ever, be a woman, no matter how crazy he may be. Whoops, did I just say that?

Psychiatrists need to tell these guys the truth. You are a man and you will always be a man, you are merely suffering from an unfortunate form of mental illness. It's just your brain, which is fucking you up. You look stupid in women's clothes, but your brain doesn't know that, again, because it's fucked up. If you were meant to wear women's shoes, the department stores would carry them in your size. You wouldn't have top go to Roselyn's Big and Tall to buy them.

Leprechaunus Carnivorous

Last week, as I was waiting to cross the street, a guy came up to me and said, "I love your auburn hair."

"Thanks," I said.

"Have you discovered your inner secrets?" he asked.

"No, I said. I really haven't."

"Well, I have, he said. I've studied your charts and posters and you're a leprechaun!"

"I am?" I said.

"Yes, you are, and you'd better get down to the Federal Reserve!" he said.

"I appreciate the advice," I said.

Alexander Hamilton was totally yummy!

Every time I spend a $10 bill, or receive one in change, a wave of lust washes over me.

To the Bedouins "Jimmy Carter" is synonomous with gay, ineffectual and lame!

Abu R once was in the desert with the Bedouins. On this expedition, accompanying him, there was an American kitted out with the most up to date, high tech, military equipment available. Abu R said the Bedouins had a lot of Vietnam era stuff. They wore sandals and dishdashas.

The high tech American had cargo pants that converted to shorts. He converted them. He got so sunburned on the backs of his knees that they blistered.

He started to try and trade his new gear for the Bedouin's old gear. The Bedouins wanted no part of it. The Bedouins began laughing at the guy and calling him, Jimmy Carter.

At night, the Bedouins slept whilst sitting up. In order to protect themselves from scorpions, they carried cans of used motor oil. They would pour the oil in a circle around themselves.

Jimmy Carter did not want to get oil in his blisters so he refused to make a circle around himself. He got bit above his buttocks in the night. He was in terrible pain.

In the morning they had to take him to the hospital. The Bedouins were really laughing then, saying, "Jimmy Carter, they're going to spread apart your butt cheeks! Ha, Ha Jimmy Carter!"

Fred nails it again!

Thinking About Intelligence
More Trouble Than It's Worth

"I have decided that intelligence is pernicious, and should be extirpated. It just causes trouble. Practically every damn fool, deleterious thing our sorry race has done can be traced to intelligence. It is a bad idea. When it is not merely a bad idea, it is usually a waste of time.
Consider. William Buckley is very smart. So is Gore Vidal. Yet in their debates they wrangled like excessively elegant cats and could never agree on anything, except that they were both very smart. So what was the use? Two taxi drivers in a Chicago bar could have failed equally well to decide anything. Or they could have come to opposed and equally erroneous conclusions.
Pick your subject—economics, say, or foreign policy, or crime. You will find brilliant men on Left and Right, each arguing intricately to a bellowing claque of witless followers who don’t know anything about it either. You can tell where they will come out by seeing where they went in—on the Left or on the Right.
Generally intelligence has no effect on conclusions, which are glandularly determined. It just rationalizes hormonal inevitabilities.
Further, there’s no point in knowledge, except to show off with in sports bars. If you are in Willie’s Rib Pit to watch boxing and know about the Long Count (in the Cribb-Molineaux fight), then you amount to something. You do no harm, anyway. All other knowledge is suspect. At best, it is a minor vice, like crossword puzzles. At worst, it encourages people to do catastrophic things with a smug sense of fundamental rightness. The people who got America into Iraq were no end bright and could say impressive things like “Twenty-Seventh Caliphate” and “Theravada Sufism.” Much good it did them. Or us.
Brains just allow you to be more elaborately and ornately disastrously wrong.
However, smart people are at least interesting, like rare tumors, so early on I started having a lot of smart friends. I noticed that most of them were crazy. The right-wingers were hostile paranoids with the empathy of a torque wrench who wanted to nuke somebody. I don’t think they really cared who. The left-wingers were angry totalitarians-in-waiting with minds closed tighter than Fort Knox. For this they needed IQs of 160? You could do as well with derelicts in the Port Authority Bus Station at three a.m.
See, what happens is, as kids the bright don’t fit in. They don’t have much in common with anybody. They dress funny and get made fun of. They can’t dance. They don’t get laid much, or at all. This warps their heads. They retreat into isolation with others like them, become contemptuous of everyone else to get even, and deal in abstractions because it’s all they know. (I claim that if Marx had been able to jitterbug, the Soviet Union would never have existed.)
In short, a large IQ is an infallible predictor of emotional inadequacy.
Where intelligence unfortunately does work reasonably well is in the sciences. Really smart men have ideas; lesser men, usually engineers, make them explode; the least men get the triggers. This suggests that we ought to put a bounty on engineers.
Anyway, at first I figured my friends were nut jobs because I just had strange tastes in friends. Maybe I attracted the demented. Then I found myself on a list-serve of people, mostly men (who are crazier by far than women), who were interested in race, intelligence, and the differences between various human groups.
Many were professors at places like Stanford and MIT—scientists and anthropologists not of the first rank, nor of the second—too rigid, I thought, for originality—but nonetheless highly intelligent. Sometimes one would demurely let slip that “I got 1600 on my SATs before they dumbed them down,” (People attach their self-respect to what they have. In high school I knew a country boy who prided himself on being able to pee farther than anyone else.)
Here I figured was a window into academe, full of towering minds like Plato. These were not squirrels I bumped into in the back alleys of life. They were the real article. I eagerly awaited clarity, dispassion, and the self-abnegation of earnest bloodhounds in disinterested pursuit of Truth. Ha.
No. They too started with their premises, which they didn’t seem to realize were premises, and reasoned doggedly to…their premises. In this they reminded me of Pooh and Piglet tracking the Heffalump around the bush.
An example: One of them used Google to search for rescue operations in the US, Mexico, and China. He found countless rescue stories for America—trapped miners, children in wells, cats in trees, what have you—and only one or two for China and Mexico. From this he did not conclude that the English press just doesn’t cover Mexico and China well—I searched in Spanish and found lots. No. He decided that Mexicans and Chinese do not regard individual life as important. They just don’t bother to rescue people, see.
I don’t know whether this guy had 1600 boards, but if so, he needs to try for 3200 next time.
Here you have it: large IQ, zero grasp of humanity, all is abstractions. (I have another theory that people become psychologists because they lack the normal grasp of human behavior and spend eight years trying to learn what everybody else already knows. A doctorate in psychology is a sure sign of confusion.)
I have lived in both Mexico and China—well, Taiwan—and can report that the fellow’s notions of Sino-Mexican unconcern are highly cephaloproctological.
The tired business of one group or another not caring about human life resonates among the insular smart. It is perennially appealing to conservatives. “Defense intellectuals,” scintillating types with flat heads from being dropped that you could set a martini on, used to say that China could sacrifice five hundred million people in a nuclear war without caring. Today it’s Moslems. (Left-wing intellectuals, similarly afflicted, say “We must sacrifice the masses in this generation to build communism in the next.” Both like the idea of extermination.)
Does any of this make sense? I picture young Pedro running to tell his daddy that sister Maria just fell into the well. “Let her drown, hijo. We Mexicans don’t do no steenking rescue.” After the earthquake that leveled Mexico City in ‘85, passersby on the sidewalks doubtless ignored the screams of the trapped, hands flapping piteously from beneath the rubble, because Mexicans don’t do rescue. And at the firehouses, firemen insouciantly drinking tequila and Squirt and playing cards, because Mexicans don’t do rescue. We ought to put something in the water to keep IQs down. There would be so much less noise."

Cold comfort

A co-worker was lamenting that when she took her son to Chucky Cheese, he insisted on trading his game tokens for girl's plastic jewlery.

She tried to steer him toward the boy's toys, but he would not be swayed.

I tried to cheer her up. "It's ok," I said. "He's probably not gay, he just wants to grow up to be a rapper."

"Or a pimp," our other co-worker said, helpfully.

Me being the only person I know who actually watched Ken Burns documentary "The War,"

I have to tell you that the filmmakers illustrated the best rationalization for dropping the atomic bombs on Japan that I have ever seen. I just wish we had atomic weapons earlier. We could have dropped them on all the islands the Japanese had occupied instead of sending our men to certain death. I am glad Burns was not afraid to let the events show that the atomic bomb ended the war with the least amount of casualties for the Americans which should always be the primary consideration of our government.

The documentary was amazing in that Burns and crew did not pander to the politically correct crowd by editing out all the expressions of hatred the America made of their enemies.

Bill Clinton gave a "conservative" speech at Little Rock's Central High ceremony

Bill told the audience that the "Little Rock Nine" paved the way for Blacks to get an education, but that they must take advantage of the opportunities given them. He reiterated that they must get an education.

Of course there was no outcry over his speech as there might have been if Bill Cosby had given such a speech in Little Rock. Cosby was excoriated for being a hypocrite on the subject of personal responsibility do to some alleged sexual misconduct in the past. Same goes for Clinton.

The secret life of "charming" homeless men

20 years ago when I first got my job with the city, I was pretty naive. Having been raised by a mother who was given eviction notices on more than a few occasions, I sympathized somewhat with homeless people. There but for the grace of God go I, and all that.

On my way to work I pass a McDonald's. It's a popular hangout for the begging crowd, mostly consisting of Black guys in their 30's and 40's. One of the guys that hung out there 20 years ago was a diabetic in a wheelchair. He would banter with me, try to charm me. He called me "Red" and "Redbone". Over the months I saw him, he would ask for money and I usually gave him some or would buy him lunch from time to time.

He was missing one foot at first, then they chopped off more of his leg, and then the other foot and the other leg and on up to his upper thighs. I made a joke to him once, a line from the movie, Little Big Man. when Little Big Man comes upon the snake oil salesman, who has been killing people with his toxic concoctions and has been the victim of justifiable vigilantism and is missing body parts as a result, he says,"They're whittlin' you away quite serious!"

Also at this time I had met a co-worker. She sometimes would talk about her ex husband. How he was violent. She did not talk about him often, but sometimes if you said something that reminded her of him, she would tell a story about him. One time I was telling my co-workers about the 2 cats I just acquired. She told us that she once had a cat she really liked but that her husband would throw it across the room, against walls, and she was sure he would kill it, so she gave it up.

One day I was walking past McDonald's and the homeless guy said, "Say, you work for the city, right? Maybe you know my ex-wife, ------." I was shocked to hear the name of the woman who told stories about her abusive husband.

Here this guy had had a wife with a good city job and health care. All he had to do was be nice to her but this was impossible for him to do. His ex later married an electrician(a really nice guy), they bought a big house and drove expensive cars. She just retired.

I learned a valuable lesson from that experience.