100507- A joke

.....Let me see if I understand the philosophy behind 'free-range chicken'. If you have a choice between killing one animal or the other, you should kill the one that's happy?

100504- A joke

.....True story: about 20+ years ago I was watching the US broadcast television premiere of the movie "Godzilla: 1985". No, that's not the joke. It was broadcast TV, so there were paid advertisements. One of the ads was for a device that promised to shield your telephone conversations from electronic surveillance. It came complete with actors playing people who seemed to have serious anxieties about people listening in on their conversations, then expressed appropriately melodramatic relief and confidence once the device was attached to the receiver. I sat there watching that ad and thinking to myself, "Somebody paid money to run that ad. Somebody paid more money than I'm going to earn this year to run that ad. For what? How many people who could conceivably need this product are likely to see that ad? What are the odds that Henry Kissinger was sitting around snarfing cheese doodles and watching "Godzilla: 1985" that night? "He-e-e-ey, dot vould gome in quvite handy, I tink." The whole point of ads like that is that they rely on a certain percentage of the viewers being extremely stupid, or at least too stupid to understand the basics of cost effectiveness analysis. Wiretaps aren't magic. With the technology that existed at the time there would be the cost of the hardware to consider, plus the cost of the installation, plus the cost in man-hours of monitoring any recordings. Now, the only reason someone would fund all of those expenses up front would be if they anticipated that the information culled from the phone conversations would be worth more than the money they invested.

.....All I knew was that if I was holding onto information that valuable, I sure as hell wouldn't be spending my evenings sitting around watching edited Godzilla movies. I'd be watching them uncut and subtitled on VHS.

100415- A joke

.....Today the Tea Party Express (a private company created to siphon resources off from Ron Paul's group) ends its tour in Washington, D.C. They traveled around the country recently, making speeches about how they support "the troops" (paid for, fed, clothed, housed, armed, transported and hospitalized with tax dollars), how they want want the federal government to "keep their hands off our Medicare" (paid for, administrated and distributed with tax dollars), how they want to strengthen national borders (supervised with tax dollars) and how much they love Scott Brown (recently elected in an off-season special election requiring extra tax dollars and salaried with tax dollars) as they roll their large trucks over the nation's highways (surveyed, built and regularly maintained and policed with tax dollars) by burning cheap American gas (subsidized by tax dollars) to tell everyone how bad taxes are.

.....Because it's the rest of us who "just don't get it", and other meaningful phrases.

100227- A joke

.....I'm sure many of you are a bit confused about why a huge powerful country like China throws a conniption fit whenever anyone mentions the Dalai Lama. The short, obvious answer is that he's a living testament to their half century effort at ethnic genocide of the Tibetan culture. If you're going to invade a country for completely illegitimate reasons, it would behoove you to make sure the leader was a thoroughly unsympathetic son-of-a-bitch whose subjects wouldn't dream of smuggling to safety at the risk of their own lives (what? I never mentioned Iraq; did I mention Iraq?) and not a pacifist who devoted his life to better understanding the human experience.
.....No, I believe China's apoplectic temper tantrums have something to do with koans. Koans have been described as zen riddles, questions that have no answers... or infinitely many answers. In fact they're intellectual disciplinary exercises. The eternal bane of dogmatic ideologies like Maoism and fundamentalist religions, koans aren't meant to be answered. They're meant as mental training for approaching any question no matter how difficult by posing one that can't be answered definitively. More is learned by the pursuit of the answer than would ever be learned by the actual answer, had one existed.
.....At some point, the Chinese communists became convinced that Buddhists were simply tricking everyone; that there were answers to all of those questions, and the Buddhists were hogging them all to themselves. By their reckoning, the slaughter and/or enslavement of millions was a small price to pay for knowing "how high is up". The clue that tipped them off was the lifestyle of the monks themselves. Many were brought to the monastery as young boys, got their heads shaved and wore a simple robe every day into adulthood. The communists refused to believe that anybody who spent their entire puberty in a remote temple surrounded by other boys didn't know what the sound of "one hand clapping" was.

100107- A joke

.....Tragedy + Time = Comedy, BUT--
......Injury + Time = Infection

.....so, either infections are funny, or, if they're not, then injuries are not tragic.