No Private Right of Adultery. Tiger Woods is indignant that his 'private' conduct has become a matter of public controversy. Oh? Marriage is a PUBLIC contract, a matter of LAW. In many countries, to this day, adultery could get him imprisoned, beaten, or KILLED. He should regard himself as very lucky that most people in this country, where marriage is nearly meaningless now, regard adultery as a civil, not criminal matter. Is the public entitled to know that someone who has been held up as a role model — one TV commentator said Tiger Woods was felt to be "superhuman" before this scandal reduced him to merely "human" — is a sleazebag? You bet your, um, bippie it is. Cheaters like Woods are the real threat to (heterosexual) marriage, not gay men who want to get married to each other — and be faithful. We have had a lot of casual sex, and know that, pleasant tho it may be, it does not begin to rival a loving, committed relationship. We know what we stand to lose if we can't keep our (male-male) marriage together. We even have an expression for it: "Nobody loves you when you're old and gay." Straights have been led to believe that there is no end to serial monogamy. You can always lose this marriage, because there's another one right around the corner, and you won't die alone. Oh? You're sure about that, are you?
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Tiger Woods is an adulterer, a cheat, a scumbag, a sleaze. He was put up on a pedestal, and now he is, like that statue of Saddam Hussein, being pulled down from it. Good. He should lose all his existing endorsements, which were based on a wholesome persona. Let him do commercials for condoms. What better spokesman for condoms than a scumbag? — Trojan Woods!
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Cheating the Poor. An ABC News story this evening about creating jobs featured another scumbag, a CEO whose name and company I didn't get, who advocates that the minimum wage be cut as a way to produce more jobs! How about we keep the minimum wage where it is, and reduce his income to it. Hm. Actually, he thinks the minimum wage is too high. So let's cut his pay to 50¢ less than the minimum wage, and see what a rewarding life he can enjoy at such a wage. Yes, CEO's are paid fairly, at hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year, but minimum-wage workers are overpaid. Of course. I suspect a lot of people working at minimum wage would like to see his throat slit, then his body chopped up for parts for minimum-wage people waiting for organ transplants, his entire estate redistributed to people struggling on minimum wage, such parts of his body as can't be used for decent people, burned, and the ashes scattered in a forest so that living beings of his own intelligence can benefit in some way from his otherwise worthless life.
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How About a Little Sense on Afghanistan? Some members of Congress, mainly, of all things, Democrats, are claiming that "the American people" want out of Afghanistan. Bull. The American people are not as stupid as some members of Congress. We know full well that withdrawal of U.S. and other NATO forces will almost certainly produce a quick triumph for the Taliban, which will then triumphantly reopen training camps and supply all needed assistance to al-Qaeda in attacking U.S. interests everywhere on this planet, including, pointedly, what is now Nazistically referred to as "the homeland". We already had that happen once, and didn't like it. We are not about to have civilians die to protect military VOLUNTEERS.
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Nor do Democrats in general want to see the return of the mass-murderous Taliban to control of Afghanistan even if it were not able to launch attacks upon the U.S. "homeland", because Taliban is a regressive, oppressive monster that would force women back 1,000 years. Do American women, of any party, want the women of Afghanistan to be forced to wear the veil, even a burqa that leaves only the eyes and hands uncovered, be denied an education, be permitted to work in the paid economy only with the permission of their husband, be compelled to stay at home and go out only with a chaperone, and even be killed with impunity if their husband decides the wife has somehow "dishonored" the family? No, American women want no such fate for Afghan women; and were a U.S. withdrawal to produce such a result — which it would, and probably with lethal retribution against women who used the temporary U.S. occupation to do seriously disapproved things like open schools for girls — American women would be horrified at what they have permitted to be done in their name.
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If there is any country we should be withdrawing military forces from, it is PLAINLY Iraq. That is what Obama pledged during his election campaign. It's time for him to fulfil that campaign promise. Withdrawal from Iraq would simultaneously provide more than adequate forces for Afghanistan and free up more than enuf money to pay for Afghanistan without raising anyone's taxes (for that; taxes on the rich should rise ENORMOUSLY to pay all Government expenses generally). The Iraq war has produced 4,367 U.S. deaths. The Afghan war, 930. So which war do these members of Congress want us to end (in defeat)? The Afghanistan war, even tho Iraq was never involved in terrorism against us but Afghanistan's Taliban was. Why might that be? Oh, right. Iraq is a danger to Israel, and Congress is faithful to Israel, not the United States.
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Idiotic Credulity on "AIDS". ABC News did a followup today about reaction to a stupid story yesterday about four kids in South Africa supposedly "orphaned by AIDS". I turned off yesterday's report shortly after it began, once I heard enuf to know what really happened. The setting: a 'poverty-ridden township with no electricity or running water'. Hm. Well, that certainly shouldn't have caused any challenges to health. Nobody needs, say, refrigeration or safe drinking water or sewers to carry away fecal matter to sewage-treatment plants in order to stay healthy. And of course, such a neighborhood surely has fully functional hospitals, clinics, and private doctors' offices to provide the very best of medical care, right? Oh, no. That's wrong. Such neighborhoods have NO hospitals and NO clinics and NO private doctors' offices. And even if someone in such an abysmal slum should somehow manage to be seen by a doctor, South Africa has no publicly-funded universal healthcare nor prescription-drug programs, so a poor family could not afford regular doctor visits nor the medications a doctor would prescribe for any of the uncountable serous afflictions common in Africa.
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What killed those children's parents was what has killed poor people in Africa for millennia, and will continue to kill them for the foreseeable future: poverty and social injustice. The one thing that might make a difference, modern medicine, isn't available to the poor of Africa. It's barely available to the poor of the United States. Walk thru any old graveyard in the United States and read the birth and death dates on tombstones from, say, the 1700s or even late 1800s. Americans were dying at age 46, leaving orphans behind, due to cholera, dysentery, tuberculosis, etc. In New Orleans, recurring epidemics of yellow fever killed thousands of Americans and recent Irish immigrants in their youth and middle years. You don't need any mysterious new "pandemic" to explain early death of poor people in Africa. You especially don't need a virus that supposedly destroys the immune system in ways that no one on Earth has been able to explain. Every methodology put forward has proved false. "HIV", the misnamed "Human Immunodeficiency Virus", is misnamed because that retrovirus has absolutely nothing to do with human immunodeficiency, except possibly as an indicator. But just as a themometer indicates a fever but does not cause it, the presence of antibodies to HIV (which is the most that the standard HIV tests can detect, and some of those results are false positives) in people with depressed immunity does not prove that "HIV" caused that deficiency. We don't call thermometers HFI ("Human Fever Instruments") or HFP ("Human Fever Producers"), and must never confuse an indicator with a cause.
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Magic Johnson was on the Jimmy Kimmel show last nite, on "World AIDS Day". He was diagnosed with "HIV" in November 1991. Why isn't he dead if, as he himself said, HIV is a "deadly disease"? Plainly, HIV does NOT kill. But people continue to die from AIDS, even after they have been given drugs that are supposed to be effective against HIV. How can that be, if HIV causes AIDS but is suppressed by drugs? It can't.
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The reality is that Magic Johnson never had a "deadly disease". He tested positive for antibodies to HIV. His wife didn't get it. His child didn't. He hasn't died from it. But other people supposedly die from it, even after getting the same drugs as Johnson. Is he actually "Magic"? Or was he never in danger from HIV? Media don't ever wonder about such things, but merely trumpet every nonsensical claim of the HIV-causes-AIDS cabal. Even media that are deeply suspicious of the U.S. Government on dozens of other matters believe every SYLLABLE that same Government says about HIV and AIDS. Every syllable. What a bunch of morons.
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Microsoft's Wondrous Word 2007. My brother recently bought a new computer that came with Windows 7 and Word 2007 installed. In case you haven't seen it, Word 2007 works entirely differently from earlier versions. That is, in place of the familiar Windows menus (File, Edit, View, Insert, etc.) at the top of the screen, you see a crazy jumble of things that are not in the slitest self-explanatory, and you have no idea how to get to features you once mastered. Think about that. Microsoft goes to the trouble of establishing a standard look to all Windows applications so people can move easily from one to another, then DESTROYS that in its own core word-processor. That is truly astounding in its stupidity.
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I have a 60-day free trial version on my own laptop, purchased several months ago, but I have absolutely no desire to use it or pay for it after the trial period, so could not advise my brother as to features he'd like to use (such as cross-references with page numbers). I suggested that he look for built-in tutorials or online tutorials.
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So he found some things that were supposed to be tutorials, and said that, so far, the materials he had found seemed like 90% advertising and self-promotion about how wonderful Word 2007 is, but very little helpful information. I've seen some MS puffery about how Microsoft can make your life easier and do all kinds of wonderful things (whether you want it to or not). So I composed and sent this satirical email.

Let me tell you about a program I recently heard about, friend. Afraid your words just aren't making an impact? Suspect people aren't paying attention? I have the solution, my friend. With Word 2007, you can add some spice, some dash, some excitement and sizzle to your dreary, flat text. GRAB your audience and MAKE them read! And keep it brief, to hold today's busy and distracted audience. With Microsoft Slasher™, you can trim the fat and replace dull adjectives with fireworks! Microsoft Slasher™ analyzes your text and cuts all the flab. That ungainly thousand-word presentation is automatically reduced to 75 action words! Passive verbs are changed to active! Ho-hum adjectives are changed to grabbers that speak to today's readers! And once Microsoft Slasher™ has punched-up your text, Microsoft Dazzler™ will apply just the right fonts, colors, bolding and italics to make your text POP! And best of all, both Microsoft Slasher™ and Microsoft Dazzler™ are yours FREE! In Word 2007! Don't delay! Microsoft will come out with a new Office Suite any day now, and we can't guarantee that Slasher™ and Dazzler™ will be in the next version. Microsoft Word 2007: The Writer's Rewriter™! Act now!

P.S. I didn't notice until this post, but my last post was the 1,000th of this blog.
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 4,367 — for Israel.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 7:53 PM