Dead Kennedy

So we're all going to hear about what a great civil servant Ted Kennedy was.
Being born in 1969 I've only seen Ted as the bloated, gray haired, booze-swillin' cretin that he's been for the last thirty 30-something years.
I wonder how much the news is going to focus on his years of service, how he's a survivor.

Speaking of 1969. Are they going to cover Chappaquiddick? Mary Jo Kopechne?
Are they going to speak of how he abandoned her in his submerged car that he drove a bridge? How he left her there to die instead of telling the police? How the police didn't find out about the incident until the next day?
Is the media going to mention his expulsion from Harvard for cheating? Public drunkeness?
Hell no. So far the news is focusing on the positive and how long he's served in the Senate.

Is there any justice?

I didn't think so until my teenage son walked in this evening.
I asked him if he wore the shirt he was wearing to school. He said, "Oh, yeah". It was the topic of conversation that day.
Total coincidence. Not planned.
My son wore his Dead Kennedys T-Shirt. One of my favorite bands from the 80's.
Kismet.

The only question I have about Ted's death is: Why couldn't he have died the same day as Michael Jackson?

-Darth

Cash for Clunkers or The Worst Way To Spend 3 Billion Dollars

The Federal governments C.A.R.S program, popularly known as Cash for Clunkers was devised as a way to a) get people into to dealerships to buy new cars and b) get old poor fuel economy cars off the streets. What this really means is that the Cash for Clunkers program was a way to put money in the pockets of the auto dealers to shut them up for not bailing out GM and Chrysler and appease the ever growing Green movement by appearing to decrease our gas consumption and thereby indirectly reduce our greenhouse gas emissions.

Well they could not have gotten it more WRONG!

Or maybe not, lets look at a couple of points here and you decide who benefitted.

Cash for Clunkers = Economic Stimulus
One of the purported benefits of the CARS program was that it would incentivize the American public to go out and spend money on a new car. Never mind that they might not have the spare cash or the flexibility in their budget to afford a new car. So the first round of Cash, the initial $1,000,000,000 (1 billion dollars ) was allocated by Congress, against the advise of many members on both sides of the aisle, and the media started the frenzy by giving the dealers essentially free advertising in the form of news coverage. This money ran out after the first 28 days or so, so the Senate approved another $2,000,000,000.

The average payout was $4,000, so that means the roughly 750,000 cars and trucks were sold. The average dealer profit on cars that qualified was about $900, so the auto dealers grossed somewhere around $675,000,000. Not bad, however the vast majority of cars that were sold were IMPORTS, not American cars. Some estimates put it as high as 75% of the cars sold were Honda, Hyundais and Toyotas, and not the ones that are built here.

That means that something like $506,000,000 of the profit (stimulus) is leaving our country. This also and more importantly means that the American Taxpayers are giving $2,200,000,000 to foreign auto manufactures so they can have a really nice third quarter.

Brilliant! Thanks Rep. Betty Sutton, D-Ohio, and Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich. as well as Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV. Good looking out.

Reduced Oil Consumption and Greenhouse Gas Emissions
Based on the estimated sales of 750,000 cars and trucks and assuming that they all replaced vehicles with a low MPG of 13 with new cars that get an slightly unrealistic 20, here's the big gas savings:

Using an average of 15,000 miles per year, the "clunker" uses 1,153 gallons of gas and the "green machine" uses 750 gallons for a savings of 403 gallons of gas per year.

Now if each and every car bought under Cash for Clunkers saves 403 gallons per year that means our annual gas saving for the country, based on 750,000 cars sold is 302,250,000 gallons.

Sounds like a lot, but our average DAILY consumption was 378,000,000 gallons for 2008.

That means that we have reduced our annual gas consumption by a whopping 0.27%. Big F-ing Deal. We didn't even reduce the consumption by a full days worth of driving. It not enough to even slightly irritate the Saudi princes.

So you tell me, was Cash for Clunkers the big success they are telling us it was?

With all due respect,
The Chief

A TRAVESTY, ER, HISTORY LESSON

I'm probably gonna bore the ever-lovin'-shit outta most of ya with my foray into international banking and corporate hand-jobs, so quit reading right now and get back to fucking Alley McBeal, or Hardcastle and McCormick, or whatever regurgitated tripe you're all watching nowadays!

Raise your hand, your right hand, starting from your mid-chest. Bend your elbow so your hand is parallel with your breast, fingers extended and thrust it perpendicular at about a 45 degree angle, palm open, fingers straight and stiff and all together, if you are very familiar with a little company called Goldman Sachs. Heute Deutschland, morgen die Welt!! To you too motherfucker! For the rest of us not so STA-PRESSED, corporately inclined, this is a little info as to how deeply we are phqued!!

Goldman Sachs was founded in 1869 by Marcus Goldman and his son by marrige, Samuel Sachs. Headquartered in L.M. New York. It pretty much started every Goddamn thing that's ever been tried or seen on the Stock Market, including, but not limited to a 1928 "closed-end fund" that is pretty much a fucking Ponzi scheme. Seems as though their shenanigans started early. Lots more bullshit company history I won't bore you with. Hell! After researching these stooges, even I felt as though someone had given me about 20 Thorazine!

Cookin' with Gas right up to 1934, Congress passed the Glass-Steagall Act. This law was supposed to shield Americans from dubious stock brokers and shit bum bankers. In the mid '90's under Clinton( sorry liberals, Clinton is a wanker too) 1/2 of the law was revoked. Remember the Dot.Com Bust? Remember anyone going to the Pokey for any of that? I didn't think so... That same year, then CEO of Goldman, HANK PAULSON, made sweet love to Congress to rescind the other half of the law. Then BLAMMO!! Mr. Paulson gets a cushy job as Treasury Secretary ala' Georgie Poo 2 ( A.K.A. the demon corporate ass-crust). Ah... It's good to be a Robber Baron! Who you know and who you blow, I guess...

Anybody remember that scallawag Ivan Boesky? 'Member all the fun he had?! All the damage he did?? NO! Prolly smoking your first 'pinner' filled with Oregano, or trying to get to 2nd base with that pimply faced hominid you were so fond of! You know... The one you were gonna marry or flail yourself off a cliff if it didn't work out, committing a modern day Romeo and Juliet, or some awkward, teen angst bullshit like that. Ivan got the inside scoop from David Brown, (Goldman robot), who was also convicted. Robert Freeman got slammed too. A close butt bud of Robert Rubin ( all you NPR Hippies oughta know that Ewok in Jew clothing or vise versa. Which BTW, NPR is the CIA man!) Too many names for ya yet? It'll give you something to do, after pulling off your 35th speed-wank in less than an hour. Gotta give Mr. Meat Missile a little down time, eh?

2008, Goldman Sachs earned $25 million from underwriting Cali Bonds, but advised their clients to"short" those very same bonds. Any Macroeconomists in the audience? "Shorting" bonds is betting the state defaults. So what? this drives up the cost... Anyone getting a picture yet?

Let's try this tact. Hank Paulson, Lawrence Summers, Robert Rubin, Tim Geithner, Mark Patterson. All people that were or are now at the very top in the governmental Echelon! LOOK THOSE FUCKTARDS UP! Even that MR. "CHANGE" dude that's now in office has seemed to consider it business as usual as far as this is concerned. Look at who he's recommending/ed/already in place for top Fed/ Treasury jobs.

In 2008 "Goldy" got $10 billion in TARP only to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to 1500 some odd employees. 300+ getting $2 mil. and 900+ getting $1 mil.!!!

Wanna hear a quote? Person interviewing, " Does the US Secretary of the Treasury work for the people or does he work for the banking system on Wall Street?" Respondent, "He works for Goldman Sachs." This is a former Assistant Secretary of Treasury!

Have you had enough? I got more! Uncle?!

One might ask why I'm dredging up this shit again. If one is.. Go to your local hardware store, preferably one of the mega chains that has put the mom and pop places outta business. Walk straight in to the gardening department. Find the section that has the largest gardening shears one can find. Probably made in China with metal extracted from the teeth of the workers at the plant that died from malnourishment, or nano-particle inhalation. Take it off of the shelf, making sure to take out as many of your fellow consumers ( since that's all we are you know ) and commit a nice bloody Sepaku right there in the aisle, while screaming " I did it for the money, Ma!"

I dredge this up again because like the saying goes..." We learn from history that we learn nothing from history" George Bernard Shaw. Read some history Dammit!!

That's O.K. Jesus still loves you. AnGry bRaDY

NOW go have fun at thE Mall.......

80's -vs- 90's: One Hit Wonders

I just finished reading a blog about the One Hit Wonders of the 1980s.

The article went into detail about how the 1980s was a decade of OHWs (I'm lazy. I don't want to type it out every time).
I have to strongly disagree with this. I think the 90s had faaarrr more OHWs. They just weren't as memorable.
Sure, the 80s had In A Big Country, Rock Me Amadeus and 99 Luftballoons.
But the 90s had such hits as Flagpole Sitta, I Touch Myself, New Age Girl and Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm.
Out of those samplings from the 90s, can you name any of the artists?

Here's a few others:

Groove is in the Heart - Dee-Lite

Remember in the early ninety's how people were trying to bring back the sixties. You had annoying college students getting into the Grateful Dead because it went with smoking weed? Annoying.
This group made sure to let you know that retards come in all creeds and colors.

What is Love - Haddaway

OK. This song is known only as "those SNL head-bobbing guys" song.
Haddaway's most likely doesn't mind. He's probably getting a $12,000 royalty check every month for this fucking thing.
It IS nearly impossible to hear it with out doing the head thing though. Come on. Admit it.

What's Up - 4 Non Blondes

Still played today. No one could remember the groups name. Everyone knows the song.
Useless trivia: Lead singer Linda Perry went on to co-write with Pink on most her hits. None of which are as annoying as this song.

New Age Girl - Deadeye Dick

Total Tripe. Remember this crappy song? No? Lucky bastards! I could go into detail about how shitty it is and why but fuck it. Just listen to it. Try.

Macarena - Los Del Rio

Destined to become a wedding reception staple. Don't you feel stupid for buying this and putting it on the charts? You know who you are. You're the same assholes who put OMC and Lou Bega on the charts. Damn you.

Mambo No. 5 (A Little Bit of...) - Lou Bega

More wedding reception fodder. Christ. How horrid. Although I do have nice memories of my 8 year old singing and dancing to it at the time. What I wouldn't pay to have footage of that. The little bastard.

How Bizarre - OMC

Who the fuck was this guy and how did he get this on the radio? What does OMC stand for? I don't have time to Google this douche bag. Wiki just shows that OMC was a band from New Zealand. We should have nuked NZ in 1996 because of this. Lord of the Rings could have been filmed somewhere else.

Tubthumping - Chumbawamba

Wow. I have saved the "best" for last. I have to admit. I loved this song when it came out. I worked with a dude that did this bit where he would do this crazy dance when the song came on the radio. It lasted a week. He couldn't keep up. It was on the radio alot. It seemed like every thirty minutes. Most overplayed One Hit Wonder of the 90s.

Pretty much all of these "artists" are forgettable. Everyone remembers Big Country (song title helps), Falco and Nina.
How many of you remembered Harvey Danger, The Divinyls, Deadeye Dick and the Crash Test Dummies?
I thought so.
-Darth

Stop Talking and Say Something

People talk to me a lot. They talk about their jobs, or their wife or their kids or their cars or their vacation... do you see a pattern?

What people don't seem to do though is say anything. Anything meaningful anyway. Yesterday someone said to me that I was being quiet and I realized that I was, because I had nothing meaningful to add to their conversation and for whatever social derogative my hesitation to play along made them uncomfortable.

This is because we have all grown far to used to making noise come out of our mouths than saying anything that is worth being heard. Just watch TV or listen to the radio for five minutes and you get an earful of useless spoken sound.

In general, people love to hear themselves. It serves as a kind of positive reinforcement that what they believe is true and correct because it is being said out load.

Not true.

Just because you talk about your opinion on a subject doesn't make it valid. I can say that the world is full of idiots all day long but it doesn't make it true. But if I were to tell you that the average IQ in the United States was estimated at 98 meaning that for the US at least 150,000,000 people are of below average intelligence (idiots), I would be saying something with meaning.

Now obviously we can't talk with one another in long strings of fact and statistic, but for godsakes when you are having a conversation with someone try to add something worth while.

The other side of this coin is that many people prefer talking to listening. The very act of listening to someone for many people is really just an exercise in not talking. I know someone in particular, who many of you that know me personally will be able to immediately identify, that loves to hear himself talk, but has absolutely no interest in hearing what you have to say about whatever ridiculous or offensive monologue that he is delivering. There are so many people that I could name that love to tell you all about their shit, and fill their litanies with rhetorical questions but rarely even take a breath to let you offer a thought that I could do an entire site dedicated to these types of people. They do this because they don't really want to listen to you, they just want you to listen to them.

There is probably, most certainly, auto-therapeutic element to all this one-sided conversing. Sometimes we just need to vent or we need to hear the words spoken. Take not of this behavior in yourself and remember when your listener needs a turn at the mic to spout, shut up.

With all due respect
The Chief

The Internet Has Made Us All Sickos

I don't know what brought me to Googletrendstoday, but I found myself reading over the list of the top 100 phrases that had been searched on Google in the last 57 minutes @ 3:00pm on 8/20/09. Many of the items I expected, given what I had heard on NPR that morning. Things like "powerball winner" "chesterton tornado", "world s cheapest car", and "octomom".

I listened to Howard Stern this morning as well. He had Rob Zombie on with his wife Sheri Moon. He also talked about Shawn King, Larry King's wife. All three of these names were in the top 50 searches. Again, not surprising,

Also not surprising were searches related to Caster Semenya. She/He/It is an Olympic hopeful that has been setting crazy women's track records recently and has now come under investigation by the IAAF because they aren't sure what Caster's gender is.

Now as difficult as this may sound for Caster, take a look at these photos and maybe you can understand where the IAAF is coming from.

Notice anything strange about this person?

Am I imagining it, or is there a bulge in the normally budge-free area on a woman? Power of suggestion perhaps? Probably not.

This story, Casters ambiguous gender, leads into another topic; ambiguous genitalia. Ambiguous genitalia was the number 2, 4 and 8 searches during about a 4 hour period this morning. If you follow a link to the search for the term "ambiguous genitalia" you will understand whyThe Internet Has Made Us All Sickos.Do you really need to do an image search to see pictures of semi-penises and proto-vages? You can't just imagine what they look like, you actually need to see a set of labia with a 4" clitoris/penis and mini balls that look like really bad hemorrhoids? Who needs that? I sure the hell don't.

But apparently its just the sickos that use Google who do, because Yahoo!'s top searches for the day did not include Caster, ambiguous genitalia or anything remotely interesting.

Actually the people that use Yahoo! must be teenage girls, stay at home moms and video game geeks because the top searches were Twitter, Big Brother, Brittney Spears and several entries related to the new Playstation 3.

One other interesting note is that the number 17 search on Yahoo! for this day was for its rival Bing.

Back to Google for a few last thoughts; at the time this was written the Ryan Jenkins story was breaking so everyone was searching for crap with his name or "i love money" in the search term, but the funniest search term was "white people stole my car".

Lastly, since I hate sports in generally and deliberately don't know sport figures, their names, records or affiliations I had to google IAAF, which was not one of the top 100 terms.

With all due respect,
The Chief

The Sissification of the Next Generation

If you have kids that are under the age of 25, generations Y and Z, chances are you have seen and even participated in the sissification of these kids.

Sissification, from the word sissy, meaning to make someone a sissy, to teach someone to be weak, timid and effeminate.

There are so many layers to this weakening of our social and cultural backbone that it truly should be covered in a series of articles, but I had a couple of specific conversations this weekend that go right to the rotten core of this issue.

A common sissification method is allow the boundaries between male and female dress and play to be blurred to the point of homogenization. Little boys with painted fingernails, carrying purses and baby dolls are things that our grandfathers would have killed for. Just imagine how pathetic these kids look to those who hate us. "Look Haji, Americans are perverse and disgusting. They even teach their boys to be girls."

One of the most irritating is the Sanitization of Language. Yes we all know that its impolite to use curse words in front of small children. (I guess we all know this, I have to admit I don't see the problem.) However the mothers and fathers of the gen y and gen z have taken it upon themselves to add on to George Carlin's list. Words like, "stupid" and "butt" and "ugly" and "shut up" are now BAD WORDS!

Can you believe it? Suddenly now if a kid has a mosquito bit on his arse he has to say "bottom" or "bum" because BUTT is now offensive.

Give Me A Break!

And Stupid? Since when is it impolite to say that the guy who ran across the street without looking at oncoming traffic is stupid. What else is he? Let me guess, Silly?

The word is Stupid. Stupid, Stupid STUPID!

Better yet, you can't say "shut up" either. So what are you supposed to say to the kid on the playground that is calling your mother a mini-van driving whore, "please be quiet"? Give me a another break. I get it that we don't want our kids to tell their parents to shut up, but how can a kid show any kind of backbone telling someone to be quiet?

They can't and there in lies the problem.

By teaching kids that everything that needs to fair, and to share, and to only use nice words and not to rough-house and to shrink like a violet to authority we are turning them into the Generation of Sissies.

Sissifying parents, do you really think that all the other kids are playing by your rules? They're not, and all you are doing is widening the gap between the bullies and the bullied.

Am I advocating teaching kids to cuss like sailors and kick the littlest kid in the head for his lunch money? Of course not, but I cannot stand this mentality that somehow the world has changed and there no longer are winners or losers.

Lets jump to the future for a second, all these nail painted boys that couldn't tell little Johnny to shut up will be cutting themselves and wearing all black, blowing up high schools and shooting heroine because they just can't tell the crack dealers no. By teaching them that everyone must be nice and getting along when they are little, we set them up for failure when they get to be teenagers and realize the real world is not so nice. Its almost cruel.

The world is a harsh place and no we don't need it to be harsher, but turning your kid into a whimpering sissy only makes it worse. The world is lead by people with strong wills and strong hands. I hate to tell you pre-K soccer moms, the world is full of winners and they're going to sweep the floors with your passive little thumbsuckers.