Use your head

— America’s newest veterans are filing for disability benefits at a historic rate, claiming to be the most medically and mentally troubled generation of former troops the nation has ever seen.

A staggering 45 percent of the 1.6 million veterans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now seeking compensation for injuries they say are service-related. That is more than double the estimate of 21 percent who filed such claims after the Gulf War in the early 1990s, top government officials told The Associated Press.

What’s more, these new veterans are claiming eight to nine ailments on average, and the most recent ones over the last year are claiming 11 to 14. By comparison, Vietnam veterans are currently receiving compensation for fewer than four, on average, and those from World War II and Korea, just two.

It’s unclear how much worse off these new veterans are than their predecessors. Many factors are driving the dramatic increase in claims – the weak economy, more troops surviving wounds, and more awareness of problems such as concussions and PTSD. Almost one-third have been granted disability so far.

If you had the ability to walk on water, or, perform other magical acts that clearly defy the laws of nature would you perform such acts in front of other people?  If your answer is yes, as Jesus’ answer seems to have been in this picture, I only have one more question.  Did you really expect to get even one fucking moments peace from that moment on?

So, here we have two totally unrelated issues that are screwing with Mrs. N.’s head at this very moment.  Or, are they unrelated?  I will leave that decision to the reader.

#1. The unbelievable number of people I come in contact with, here in America’s Bible Belt, who aspire to nothing more than a life-long disability.

#2.  How Jesus ever could have thought that his friends wouldn’t pester the crap out of him to perform magical stuff for them as a token of his friendship?

Both of these issues deal with human beings and, it seems to me, even a crude and rudimentary understanding of what it means to be human would lead one to conclude that, with regard to both issues above, there wasn’t much clear thinking going on.  Not on the part of the American Military and certainly not on the part of Jesus.

#1.  America has an ALL volunteer military!  What that means is ONLY young people with absolutely nothing better to do than have people shoot at them and try to kill them in many different nasty ways are going to join up.  These kids, on the whole, did rather poorly in school and had little hope of finding a job and supporting themselves in todays economy.  Even more than that, these kids had only a poor hope of even finding their home country on a map of the world.   They have little or nothing going for them and are ripe and ready to swallow the bullshit fed to them by military recruiters.  Hero status is, after all, but a signature away for this generation of gullible rubes.   It comes free with the uniform!

What, it appears, the geniuses down at the Pentagon didn’t count on is the fact that this generation of cannon fodder has never had to compete for anything.  Trophies were awarded them for just showing up.  Even spelling Bees were eliminated from their educational environment lest they be psychologically traumatized by their own poor performance.  Disability, in one form or another, was their lot in life pre military service and should have been expected to loom large in the future of each and every recruit, in one form or another, with few exceptions.    Somehow that appears not to have been the case.  Go figure.

#2.  This is truly baffling.  How could Jesus have thought that he could do something like walking on water, or, turning tap water into wine and NOT totally ruin his life from that point on?  Think about it.  If you knew someone who could do those things would you EVER leave it be… leave them alone about it?  Could you walk past a pond, or, even a decent sized puddle with Jesus and the rest of the boys without saying… “Jesus… show us, show us the walking on water thing… COME ON JESUS!… Ralph hasn’t seen you do it yet, have you Ralph?”

Who would kill a guy like that?  Better yet, who would throw a party or celebration of any kind without making sure to invite Jesus so he could provide the refreshments?  Jesus would have to show up, of course, because no to do so would be rude.  Talk about being in demand!

And what are the chances that Roman, or, Jewish entrepreneurs, theatrical booking agents if you will, would fail to notice a guy, a hot property, like this?  Was he signed to a multimillion shekel contract to play 10 sold out weeks at The Coliseum…? No.  We are supposed to believe that all the talent was just ignored… disregarded like it was nothing.  And nobody stood around yelling…. “Haven’t you seen what this guy can DO?”

We are supposed to believe that someone could walk on water and turn water into wine and everybody didn’t go crazy over it.  Come on.

We are supposed to believe that a generation who never had to compete for a damn thing could fight a war and come home again in one piece.  Come on.

When it comes to things like this Mrs. N. wonders why people just don’t use their heads.

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Easter 100

This particular assemblage of bullshit, balderdash and falderal is called The Easter 100.  If you live in Dixie you will probably assume it’s a new NASCAR race nobody told you about.  It ain’t.  It’s my one-hundredth addition to the ever expanding archives that are known as “The Garage”.   It just so happens that it is Easter Sunday today.

Weeeee

While all my neighbors are down at the church houses singing songs, filling children’s heads with complete nonsense and asking each other if they had heard the “Good News“ yet… I’m home drinking a beer with my eye on a nice carrot cake my other half baked yesterday.  It’s a drippy day here today and, more so than on any other day, it’s a good day for atheists to just stay home.  The religious fanatics are everywhere and it’s Jesus this and Jesus that and bless this, that, and the other thing, every god damned place you look.  The fat little kids are stuffing their faces with chocolate eggs and the obese adults are drooling over the ham and macaroni & cheese cooking slow… over at the home place.  I bet they don’t even know where Easter eggs come from.

OK, that’s the background for todays little excursion into the land of angst.  The starting point for the latest stroll down embarrassment lane.  It all began this morning with me making the mistake of reading the paper.  Fool that I am I used the internet to contact and connect with the nice people over at the New York TIMES and, like I didn’t know better, read some of what they had to offer.  It all began with an article about “Safety” and how OSHA isn’t quite doing the kind of job protecting american workers that most people think they are.  Politics, it appears, gets in the way.  Corporate profits, it seems, come first.  You can only imagine my surprise.

This is my stunt double

I learned that the federal budget for protecting workers is less than half of that set aside for protecting fish and wildlife.  I learned that occupational illness and injuries cost the american economy over $250 BILLION dollars a year in medical expenses and lost productivity.   Every four years… A Trillion Bucks!

The maximum penalty for a violation that causes a “substantial probability of death — or serious physical harm” is $7,000. The highest fine for a willful and repeated violation is $70,000.

Just so you don’t think the people running the show and making up the laws and fines are assholes and screwballs… you should know this.    The Federal Communications Commission can fine a TV or radio station $325,000 for indecent content.

You got that?  You can violate the law and cause someone the probability of serious harm, or death, and it will cost you $7000.  BUT…. If you say fuck on the radio, or, some cheap tart exposes her breast on a TV show…  the fine goes up to $325,000.

THAT is what makes sense to the bastards that run this country.  THAT is the kind of country America is.  I think it is important that people remember things like that when they hear on the news that between 800,000 and 900,000 military veterans are “waiting” two or three years to have their disability claims considered by the government powers that be.  I think it is important that every citizen never miss an opportunity to tell a young person considering joining the military that they are fucking nuts if they do.  Tell them that rather than respecting and admiring them for serving their country… you will write them off as fools.

On holidays such as Easter, when my fellow Americans openly display the nonsense and absurdities they hold to be the very foundation of our culture, I permit myself the imaginary indulgence of picturing the world as it would be… if I were in charge.  First of all I would dress like this…

Then, I think, I would begin to formulate the lengthy list of malicious bastards that I would have shot immediately.  Not that I would want to kill anyone mind you.  Just, well, a kind of feeling that I owe it to them, if you know what I mean.  Before they were shot I would be sure to have someone, a small child perhaps, ask them….

… if they had heard “The Good News”

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

 

JESUS is my Air Traffic Controller

It was announced this week that the control tower at Lynchburg Regional Airport will be closed.  Lucky for people using the airport Liberty University is right next door.  The Local newspaper reported the following…

“Round the clock prayer, targeted, or, “Flight Specific” prayer,… they are still working on the details.”  Either way passengers can rest assured that the entire Liberty student body will be praying like crazy that nobody is trying to land when you are taking off.  None of the students are gay and ample counseling is available for students troubled with masturbation issues, so, we are talking High Octane Prayers.  They are right next door too!

Unfortunately, this is all taking place during one of the happiest seasons of the year in Lynchburg… Easter.

Yes, Easter.  A time for Muslim jokes and the celebration of capital punishment and scapegoating.  A time of pretending and bullshitting the little children into believing that death isn’t real if you know the right tricks and formulas.  A time of Joy and a time of contemplation of the great mysteries of life.  “Why did the South lose the war?”…  “How the Hell did a nigger get elected president?”…  “When is Jesus going to start torturing all the gays?”…

“Preacher says that evolution is a lie straight from hell… Preacher says people and dinosaurs lived at the very same time…  Preacher says people who don’t follow the teachings of The Lord sure going to be sorry when the Rapture comes…

At this wondrous time of year we are all called upon to look to our religious leaders for wise words and sound council.

Let the confusion end!  Let our Great Nation return to the Biblical Truths our Founding Fathers believed in and built this Nation upon.

I wouldn’t worry at all if you find yourself flying into Lynchburg Regional Airport.  Whether you are coming to Lynchburg to visit the world famous Enema Museum, located at the production facilities and home of C.B. Fleet, Co., (the worlds largest manufacturer of enema and douche bags).. or, the site of The United Cigarette Factory where, [“In 1882, James A. Bolzak of Lynchburg revolutionized the cigarette industry with his invention of a cigarette making machine. Within four years, Bolzak was marketing 30 million pounds of tobacco a year from his factory in Lynchburg. Bolzak’s fortune would soon turn to ruin, however, when in 1890, a leak of lubricating fluid went undetected in the cigarette machinery, and thousands of contaminated cigarettes were distributed widely under Bolzak’s “One-Eyed Jack” and “Brown Dick” brands before the dangerous flaw was discovered. The tainted cigarettes tended to explode with fury in the face of smokers when lit, causing hundreds of deaths and disfiguring injuries. Those cigarettes that didn’t explode wreaked their own havoc in the form of serious and often-fatal lung ailments. The cigarette fiasco produced a crippling barrage of lawsuits against Bolzak, resulting in Bolzak’s own personal bankruptcy as well as the ultimate demise of the cigarette factory. Despondent from the tragic turn of events, Bolzak took his own life by stepping in front of a speeding locomotive on the railroad tracks near his factory…..”]  But, that’s probably something you already know.

So there is nothing to worry about.  You will probably land and take off with no problems.  The locals will be praying their asses off that you do.  The only problem I can think of, and it probably isn’t something that you should worry that much about, is if there are any non-Bible Believing Christians on your flight…  you know…

Like Muslims…

Like Jews…  Then, I’m afraid, you might be shit out of luck when it comes to Jesus watching out for your ass.  And, seeing as this is Lynchburg Virginia we are talking about, if you see anybody at the airport waving a flag like this…

Rent a car from Hertz, Budget…  Just get the fuck out of town as fast as you can.  Things are about to get messy in Jerry Falwell Land.

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

Great Moments in Enema History

The earliest documented case of resuscitation by rectally applied tobacco smoke took place in 1746 when a seemingly drowned woman was treated by her husband. On the advice of a passing sailor, the woman’s husband inserted the stem of the sailor’s pipe into her rectum, covered the bowl with a piece of perforated paper, and “blew hard”.   In the 1780s the Royal Humane Society installed resuscitation kits, including smoke enemas, at various points along the River Thames and by the turn of the 19th century, tobacco smoke enemas had become an established practice in Western medicine, considered to be as important as artificial respiration.

One day, in the far future, I have high hope that time travel will become possible.  When that day comes about I’m quite sure a lively debate will take place among scientists, religious leaders and historians with regard to exactly where and when, in time, the first time traveler should voyage.   I have no doubt that there will be no lack of suggestions.  Some will opt for great moments in military history.  Others will demand that the lives of the founders of the World’s Great Religions be observed and investigated.  No doubt still others will seek the answers to such questions as “What really caused the demise of the dinosaurs and the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event?”

None of these questions interests me in the least.  Quite frankly military history and religious stories bore me to tears, and dinosaurs….?  I have four grandchildren.  Trust me, dinosaurs interest them far more than they do me.

Oh no.  If it were up to me, without hesitation, I would vote for a trip to the waterside in the year 1746.

The look on Julius Caesar’s face as he entered Rome triumphantly…

or, the reaction of the crowd when Jesus sawed a woman in half and joined her back together again…

Interest me not in the least.

But, I would give just about anything to be there, on the spot, when a distraught man, holding his drowned and lifeless wife in his arms, was advised by a sailor to….  “Here, take my pipe, shove it up her ass and BLOW as hard as you can.”

You can call me crazy if you like, but, in my opinion, “I came, I saw, I conquered” and “Let he who hath not sinned cast the first stone” got nothing on “Here, take my pipe…

 

Kiss, kiss

Mrs. N.

 

 

 

 

 

The Creation Museum

“The state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot museum brings the pages of the Bible to life, casting its characters and animals in dynamic form and placing them in familiar settings. Adam and Eve live in the Garden of Eden. Children play and dinosaurs roam near Eden’s Rivers. The serpent coils cunningly in the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Majestic murals, great masterpieces brimming with pulsating colors and details, provide a backdrop for many of the settings.”

As a part of their fifth anniversary celebration the Creation Museum has opened a new high-tech exhibit designed to expose the scientific bankruptcy of the evolutionary interpretation of the famous so-called ape-woman “Lucy.”

A full 40% of Americans, when asked, say they don’t believe in evolution.  It’s not as if we need another good reason for the collapse and failure of American culture, but, we have one anyway.

Is it any wonder our government is as fucked up as it is?   Is it at all hard to understand why our schools rank so miserably when compared to schools in other “advanced” nations?

I had an opportunity to talk to a local High School science teacher yesterday.  She asked me if I knew how hard it was to teach biology WITHOUT mentioning evolution.  She informed me that, over time, you get good at it because if you don’t, and happen to engage a student in a public discussion on the “theory” of evolution, you are more than likely to be lectured by your principal, who him ,or, herself has just had their ass chewed out by an angry parent.  So, you teach half-assed biology and, it’s a given that none of the kids ever really catch on fire intellectually, or,  go on to do research, get advanced degrees, or contribute to the hard won encyclopedia of human knowledge.

I have lived in the South for 15 years now.  I love the weather, the ridiculously low taxes, the fact that my garden is already showing dozens of signs of spring.  I love the Blue Ridge Mountains right out my back door and the fact that this area is home to more native species of flowering tree and shrub than any other place in North America.   I,  loving plants and gardening as I do, actually thrilled when I learned that rhododendrons apparently evolved simultaneously in two places on planet earth… the Himalayas and the Blue ridge Mountains.  I can’t see for the life of me how that could have happened, but, it doesn’t stop me from spending hours and hours, every spring, strolling through ancient groves of flowering rhododendrons.  I love the fact that spring and fall are the longest seasons of the year and that native trout streams flow down from the mountains five minutes from my door.   In many ways it is almost a paradise of a place to live.  In two ways it is not.

Racism is found everywhere.

and…… It absolutely Stinks of Jesus!

 

 

 

 

 

 

META-4

Something from Above

As the summer slowly draws to an end here in Dixie I find I can no longer even pretend that I have any idea what is going on.    Not in my yard, not in my town, not in my state, not in my country… not on my planet… and so on and so forth.  I honestly don’t have a fucking clue and there is no use pretending that I do.  I can only make “guesses” that this is the kind of feeling experienced by the Romans when the Barbarians were peeking over the hedges, admiring the layout.  It’s a creepy feeling that things will never ever be the same again.  That feeling is bad enough, but, it all gets much worse when you hear one of your neighbors discussing Jesus and how scientists don’t know everything.

I walked in my garden at sun up this morning and it looked “seedy”.  The stems were too long.  There was rot and old dried up centers to plants that were, just a few weeks ago, factories of growth.  It  all seems to be going the other way now. It’s finishing up and doing its last stretching out before death takes it on some yet undisclosed fall night when the black frost comes quietly.  That is still many weeks away, but, my garden is already prepared.  It’s seedy.

Seedy is the metaphor.  I have lived in seedy neighborhoods where the porches were crooked and the shutters were unpainted and improperly secured.  Seedy people lived there sometimes and hung out in seedy places with other seedy people.  Seedy is the metaphor sun up in my garden put in my head today and I can’t seem to get it out.  It seems too good of a fit for so much of what I see around me.  My culture, my country… my planet, all seem a bit seedy if I take the time to look.  Seedy.

Shakespeare wrote, “Juliet is the sun.”  He didn’t mean that Juliet was a giant ball of luminescent gas.  He meant that she was his light and his warmth and the center of his universe.  He meant that Juliet was “like” the sun in certain ways.  He meant it metaphorically not literally.  If Shakespeare was a Redneck he could very well have written, “Tiffany is asparagus”.  I doubt if he ever would have become famous as a Redneck, or, that writing things like “Tiffany is asparagus” would have made any sense to anyone like “Juliet is the sun” does.  There are metaphors and there are metaphors.  Some are very easy to understand and say things and convey truths by using examples of things that are “like” other things so beautifully that they make the truth of something even more true, even more clear.

In my opinion America has gotten seedy.  I just don’t know a more accurate way to put my feelings.  I hope my metaphor makes sense to someone besides me.

I’m not going to leave you hanging (another metaphor) with this “Tiffany is asparagus” business.  Have you thought about it?  Perhaps you know Tiffany, or knew Tiffany at one time, or someone like Tiffany.  These days she is living in a single-wide on her brothers property up on Puppy Creek.   You know how asparagus changes your urine and makes urinating somewhat of an unpleasant experience.