Trick or Treat...with 6,999,999,999 of your closest friends....

On Monday October 31st, 2011 whilst kids in the western world celebrate the festival of All Hallows Eve by participating in the annual ritual of door-to-door extortion for candy, another truly scary milestone in the history of our planet will be reached. By Monday morning there will be 7 Billion human beings on the planet.

Seven Billion.

I can't visualize a number that large and have it make any sense to me...If I were standing on a beach there are trillions of grains of sand granted, but it all makes just one beach. 7 Billion people on the other hand, make a helluva lot more than one beach. Keeping that many people fed, housed, clothed, educated, watered, employed and tended to is simply not possible. The planet just doesn't have the resources. In point of fact, the resources we do have are being consumed at such alarming rates that before we have another war over oil, we may very well have wars over food, or water instead. And can you imagine that amount of waste that 7 billion humans create? It's a wonder that we're not neck-deep in shit already...

As with the plethora of other cheery folks predicting the end of the world as we know it via disease, famine, pestilence, violence or Republican Presidents (cockroaches will rule the planet one day...you mark my words), the newest are those that say that we are simply going to breed ourselves out of existence. In much the same way that global warming will eventually drown all of Florida and most of New York (and not a moment too soon), and the CDC boffins say that a new flu-type virus could easily wipe out a couple of billion people, now it appears we are heading to our doom because there are too many guys that don't wear rubber johnnies...

So I will add this as a sort of public service message to try and do my part to ease the problem:

"Fellas! Don't be a fool, cover your tool...after all, the planet you save, might just be your own..."

Cheers!

Friday Follies: Of cell phone hacking and nekkid pictures...

..as some of you may have heard, there is a separate phone hacking scandal going on in the world that actually doesn't involve Satan and his offspring at NewsCorpse Inc. This one involves a single low-life in Florida who hacked into the phones and e-mails of celebrities with the aim of getting information and/or pics that he could sell to the tabloids. Well, he hit the proverbial jackpot when he hacked into Scarlett Johansson's phone. You see, she had used it to take pictures of herself, sans clothing, and this industrious perv snagged 'em and put them on the interwebs for everyone to see. After 30 or 40 minutes of looking at all of those naked pictures myself, I came to the conclusion that this was an awful violation of her privacy.

But then I got to thinking "wait a minute, who keeps naked pictures of themselves on their phone?"...I would totally understand if her boyfriend/shagging partner/lucky git had pictures of her in the all-together, that would make total sense, but who is narcissistic enough to keep pictures of themselves on their own phone? Isn't the whole point of smart phones the fact that you can use them to take pictures of other naked people? Did she need to hold onto them them in case she forget what she looked like nude? Maybe she kept them in case she got pulled over by the Fuzz, you know,  'I am so sorry officer, I didn't mean to run that busload of nuns off the road, by the way, want to see some pictures of me naked?' But then again, most Hollywood types don't get tickets (unless they're named Lindsay Lohan and are in desperate need of publicity) so I'm not sure it's that either. I do realize that most A-listers are vain and in constant need of self-affirmation, but toting around pictures of oneself in the nude has to be the height of self-absorption doesn't it? Which reminds me, I really do need to delete those pictures of the missus from our holiday...

Cheers!!!

Herman Cain is the stupidest man alive...

I have refrained from commenting about the lastest flavour-of-the-month candidate in the ongoing, slow-motion train-wreck that is the gop presidential nomination process up to this point, but his latest utterance is just too much to pass up.

But before we go there, a quick re-cap of the race so far:

The gop has already fallen in and out of love with Rick Perry, the one guy in Texass that made Dumbya appear erudite and spohisticated (apparently your Pastor can insult Mormons, but Catholics are off-limits). They never got to fall in love with Chris Christie (he was too busy ordering a couple of pies and a bucket of ravioli from the local pizzeria), and whilst the other religious fanatics still in the race, Frothy Mix and Batshit Crazy-Lady desperately try and hang on, the inevitable candidate, Mitt Romney, stands there with not much else to do but smile and wave. Mittens is sort of like the prom date your parents picked out for you, he shows up on the porch, corsage in his hand, waiting for you to face up to the reality that like it or not, he is going to be the one that takes you to the dance. And just like that un-ruly teenage daughter, the fickle gop-voter has decided to thumb their nose once more, and run off with Herman Cain instead.

This self-loathing multi-millionaire black man, who in an alternate universe would probably try and lynch himself if he could, has suggested building an electric fence around the entire US border, posited that Sharia law is going to break out across America unless he gets elected, and that the poor and un-employed have only themselves to blame and not the greedy motherfuckers on Wall Street and their paid accomplices in D.C. Herman has a habit of saying some really stupid things. In fact most of what comes out of his mouth is either totally ridiculous, entirely-made-up or just complete bullshit, but he has now plumbed the depths of the most stone-fuckingly stupid things to say out loud, by suggesting that Jesus Christ was the perfect Conservative who was sentenced to death by a Liberal court.

Now whether you believe in those 2000 year-old fables or not, the one thing that can be wholly agreed upon is that in today's America (most especially in the South) Jesus Christ would be considered a screaming, bleeding-heart, dyed-in-the-wool, San Francisco-loving, hippy-dirtbag-liberal, who is in dire need of some soap and quite probably a couple of hundred sessions on the waterboard as well. The other thing that can be agreed upon is that the folks that ordered him to be put to death were anything other than Liberal.

This one statement alone proves that Cain is utterly un-qualified to hold the office he is running for, and also makes him quite possibly the most stupid person alive.

Whereby the United States Congress channels its' inner Marie Antoinette....

Here in America we continue to witness the genesis of a genuine 'grass-roots uprising' as the Occupy Wall Street movement continues to gather steam (unlike the Tea Party which is merely a physical manifestation of the racist fringe of the republican party and a wholly-owned subsidiary of Koch Industries). The OWS movement has captured the imagination of those that for a very long time have felt left out, stepped-on, beaten-down, and used and abused by a system that tilts evermore in the favour of the 'haves' over the 'have nots'. In other words the 99% of the rest of America that haven't seen their lives drastically improve since 2000, but instead have had their dreams and hopes destroyed by a system that is becoming exponentially more corrupt as every day passes.

There have been a few on the left of the political sphere that have voiced their support for the movement, but those voices have not necessarily been welcomed with open arms. One of the main reasons being that the very object of the OWS's ire is the entire system these politicians represent, one which they feel is broken, skewed and thoroughly corrupt. Naturally the presstitutes in the M$M did their very best to ignore the whole situation for the first week, but as the crowds grew, and as the cops stepped in with their usual hob-nailed boot tact and pepper-sprayed the unarmed protesters, it finally made it's way onto the front pages.

Whilst the politicians and pundits on the right have poured their scorn on the protesters, calling them 'filthy hippies', 'unemployed free-loaders' and other such compassionate christian phrases, Congress itself has decided to provide the ultimate "let them eat cake" moment....

As the OWS movement rallies against the preferential treatment given to Corporate America by those in Congress in the form of tax breaks and tax loopholes, and Senate republicans voted to not even entertain a debate about the President's jobs bill, never mind a vote on the actual bill itself, comes news that both Houses are seriously considering on giving an almost 300% tax break to corporations that decide to repatriate money they sent offshore.

Let me break that down for you: the proposal would lower the repatriation tax rate of offshore corporate money coming back into the US, money that was sent overseas initially so that it could avoid any taxation at all, from 35% to 9%.  And just so you understand we are talking about hundreds of billions of dollars here (that's billions with a 'B') not just a couple of mill here or there, but a metric shit-ton of money.

I am hard-pressed to come up with a situation where there has been a more spectacular display of being completely and utterly tone-deaf as this. Whilst the banks are illegally throwing people out of their own homes, whilst credit card companies continue to charge usurious interest rates even if you've always paid on time and never been over your limit, and thousands of ordinary people in the "richest country in the world" have to decide whether to buy food or pay for their medication, this collection of malcontents, nit-wits and village idiots have decided that the very best course of action for them to take is to give the Corporations another fucking tax break.

Let them eat cake, indeed.....

Just in case you were in any doubt....

The republicans "swept" into power in the house of Representatives last year promising that 'Job creation is our number one priority'....Last night their Senate counterparts voted thusly:

Any questions?

Hell Freezes over...wherein the author feels kinda bad for Mooselini...sort of...you betcha...also...

News came late this past Wednesday evening that the former part-time governor of Alaska and full-time right-wing glory-hole grifter had finally decided NOT to run for President.

As I lept around my living room in joyous bounds of gratitude that we won't have to suffer that annoying-as-fuck whiny-voice of hers on the campaign trail for the next 18 months, came the news that someone infinitely more important had died suddenly. Steve Jobs had passed away at 56 years of age.

I am not a huge Apple computer fan having bought nothing but PC's my whole life (the exception being the Apple Lappy the kid got for xmas last year after her newest and most expensive laptop PC had comprehensively shit the bed less than 12 months after being purchased....fuck you very much Vista/Windooze 7...) but I have bought a plethora of different iPods over the years, both for myself and for others. They were simple to set up and use, worked like clockwork, and ran perfectly unless they were dropped (or dunked) more than a few times. He helped take the fear out of new-fangled gadgetry for idiots and morons like me. For this alone Steve Jobs belongs in Heaven.

I know that his iFans will be extremely iSad to hear of his iDeath, but there is one tiny, tiny glimmer of a silver-lining about the timing of his death, and that is that the announcement of his passing came literally minutes after Sister Sarah made her 'news' public, and thereby completely extinguished (hopefully her final) fifteenth minute of non-deserved fame. There is something poetic about that happenstance. An ignorant, bitter, uneducated, spiteful and lazy fourth-rate celebrity had her final moment of 'Me! Me! Me!' self-idolatry snuffed out by a nerdy visionary that helped educate millions around the world with the products that all sprang up from an idea that he and a mate conjured up in their garage.

And for that too, Steve Jobs,  iThank you.

No nukes, is good nukes....

As the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant slowly fades from memory, ably aided by a press corps with the attention span of a crystal-meth addicted gnat, comes news that England's own dirty little nuclear secret may be coming back to bite the Brits on the butt.

As this very interesting article points out Sellafield could very well wind up being just as bad as Chernoybl in the long run. You see, when mankind was busy playing with its' new toy, you know, blowing pacific atolls to tiny pieces without bothering to remove the local inhabitants, it did what any small child would do on any christmas morning, and just rip through the wrapping paper, tearing open the boxes without worrying about having to clean up afterwards. Well now it's time to clean up and it looks as though it is going to be bloody expensive, and bloody dangerous.

As the proof of global warming becomes more and more obvious, massive ozone holes now opening over the Arctic, mass tree die-offs around the world, the rush to find cleaner fuel is (pardon the phrase) really starting to heat up. But rather than focus on non-lethal methods of powering the planet, mankind is focusing its' attention on something even more deadly to the planet than fossil fuels, and that is more nukes. This is the grand-daddy of bad ideas. It is the ultimate example of jumping out of the frying pan into the fire. As more and more fossil fuel gets burned and returned to the atmosphere the planet (and it's residents) slowly gets closer and closer to the end of life as we know it. If you build hundreds of nuclear power plants as the solution, and they go bang, you can end life as you know it on this planet almost immediately. Yay efficiency!

However, if you used wind, solar and tidal energy for the grid, and heavily invested in converting cars to hydrogen power which would emit not much more than water out of the exhaust, you could really make a difference in improving the planet's health and create millions of new jobs at the same time. Holy shit, what a concept!! And that of course is exactly why politicians on the right, regardless of country, are 100% against it. There's no-one bribing contributing to their campaigns in sufficient dollar amounts to make it worth their while.