Eight Feet Deep

Rarely do I get any bonafide e-mail at my EFD Hotmail account. Usually, the mail I get is MSN trying to sell me something or a scammer filters through the main inbox. Of course, the junk inbox is almost 100 percent of the times full of junk. I suppose I should give MSN their due as they catch spam much more frequently than Yahoo does on my main e-mail account, although I have to say Gmail is the best among the three of all the e-mail providers who have almost a perfect record of keeping my inbox spam free.

As I said, some spam gets through on the EFD Hotmail account and I had little doubt the e-mail in my box today was from some kind of scammer. First of all, I know of no one named “Amed” who has a mail account in France or the same who would send me an e-mail unsolicited. But I had to admit the subject line of the message was definitely different. It said:

“NYTimes.com: Campaign Stops: Answer the Questions‏.”

Even after the spiel telling me how his cousin or brother or father or whomever was killed in a tragic plane crash and now he has all this money he needs to launder in the U.S., a short link to the above Times story was even provided. What a thoughtful scammer that Amed.

Such an act almost makes one think there is a little humanity out there in this great, big world of greedy, crooked-ass bunko artists — heavy on the “almost.”

If you subscribe to the theories of rightist radio and TV talking head Glenn Beck, then those who bought the “black helicopter” and “one world government” hysteria of the early 1990s should really be s**ting their pants.

For some reason our local talk radio station, KLVI-AM 560, in Beaumont, Texas, put Glenn Beck (I use both names so as not to confuse him with Beck the singer who reminds me of someone who was accidentaly drowned in irony. I don’t know why I should make the distinction, obviously I’m not too hot on either one of them)on their morning lineup. And I heard a bit of a rant of Glenn Beck this morning:

“Last night for the first time ever all the central banks globalized and they all made one move together and they’re all now saying we need to meet, we need to control the globe’s financing. The UN is talking about a UN financial network. One currency. You add to the disenfranchisement now, what is it, 79% of Americans are Christian? How many of those actually still believe in the resurrection, how many believe still really in the return of Christ? 50%? 40%? I don’t know, but it’s large, that actually say, you know, there is some day where all these things are going to come true. Well, one world finance, one world currency, new world order, going to spook the bejesus out of those people.”

Now, let me just take his rant out of context for a minute:

“We could collapse America.” And they go into the malls, they go into our schools, whatever, and there’s ten bombs, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and America freaks out. Well, let me ask you this: The Bubba Factor. Bubba says, “Well, damn these guys, I know exactly who they are.” There’s a guy who works at the 7-11 and he goes in and he shoots him. Well, that guy was an Indian. That guy wasn’t an Al-Qaeda terrorist. He might have been Arab but he wasn’t a terrorist. Well, the government must go in and take down Bubba. But at the same time they take down Bubba, you’ve got the disenfranchisement and you’ve got a group of people who are normal, who say, “Wait a minute, just a second. Okay, that guy was bad, but wait a minute, you’re going after him; you are the guys who did it. You didn’t pay attention to that cell. You knew. You knew the border was open, you knew these people were here in Virginia, and you did nothing because you wanted to save yourself and you wanted to save political correctness.” Now what happens then?”

I don’t know, Glenn Beck. Please tell me, tell me what happens then?

“I told you last week they’ve got a brigade here in America for this eventuality or for terrorism. They’ve got a brigade here. It’s happening. They are preparing. Because if you were President, you would prepare as well. But once they do that, because there’s so much disenfranchisement, all bets are off. It depends on where you’re living in the country. Because we don’t trust each other. Because we don’t trust our leaders. Because we don’t even know our history or our Constitution anymore. I beg of you, please, please read the Constitution. Please read The Real George Washington, The Real Thomas Jefferson, The Real Ben Franklin. Read the 5,000 Year Leap. Read them. Because you may be the one that helps save them. Know these things. Please ponder them in your heart. Please listen to them. Because I don’t tell you this because I want you to freak out and I want you to look, look what’s coming, oh, they are out to get you. I say it because these things are going to happen and they are going to happen rapidly.”

I suppose as opposed to the fake George Washington, Jefferson and Franklin.

But the scary part is that what he says here isn’t taken out of context very much and that’s even more frightening.

Yes inDeeDee Myers, if you made that old bomb shelter filled with MREs to escape from the black choppers into a pool room or a spa and buried all your survivalist gear and camos, then you sure as hell ought to remember where you buried them … WHAT??? You say you burned them after George W. Bush became president??? OMG!

Okay, just watch out for those black helicopters carrying all those multi-racial soldier and sporting the trademark UN armbands. And if they happen to land in your neighborhood, just hope that those folks like to watch Survivor or listen to Toby Keith or Bono or whatever the hell it is you all are up to because if the One Worlders don’t get ya, then, by God Glenn Beck’s rhetoric will.

So what’s up with the economy? Or rather, what’s down with the economy?

Plenty of people pooh-pooh any notion that we are heading toward anything more than a little bump in one’s 401K. The truth is that retirement account losses are nearing $2 trillion. How many O00000000000sssssssssss is that?

A lot of people — intelligent people — are in denial about what can happen. Granted, what can happen is a different animal from what will happen. Could we possibly find ourselves in a depression? It’s happened before in our country. In fact, it’s happened five times more or less in U.S. history. The exact numbers might vary because its definitions of depression, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, depends on what “it” is.

But we are not there yet. Things can get better. That’s not to say they will but they can, just as they can get worse. Which will it be? I don’t know. I think it would be helpful to the U.S. electorate if our two presidential candidates could have an earnest discussion about these issues during their “debate” tonight. Of course, it would also be entertaining to see pigs fly.

Maybe next time you’ll use only one parking place with your big ol’ pickup truck. — NOAA photo.

Is it irrational that I get irritated when I see a large pickup truck parked in more than one parking place? I guess you’d have to ask my therapist that. But in fact, I do tend to get ticked off especially when a large dual-cab pickup is parked in two parking places in which one space could have been more than sufficient to park my little Tacoma pickup.

I suppose it is anal for it to bother me. But parking in a marked parking space is not that difficult. Hundreds of thousands do it every day and most without hitting some other object. Oh, I guess it says something about a person who doesn’t park within the boundaries. They like to color outside the lines. They’re individuals. Or maybe, just maybe, they’re assholes.

Certainly laziness has to play a part in a great many incidences of poor parking behavior. But I have to ask, what kind of energy does one expend parking their car or truck within a specific area?

When I worked as a fireman I had to park some very large trucks in some very confined space and people, meaning the fire brass, the city council, the taxpayers, all wouldn’t take very kindly to someone dinging up their trucks worth sometimes a half-million dollars or upwards. So I parked those trucks just like they should have been parked. It didn’t wear me out — physically or mentally — from what I remember.

So if you would like to make a statement, perhaps you might express yourself in a way in which someone other than yourself will not be affected. But, of course, I know you are too self-involved to consider that, jerkass.

“Now just remember, if you hang around with some Commie pinko now it might come back to haunt you if you run for president many, many years down the line,” Gov. Palin tells the crowd of young admirers over tea and cookies.

It hurts to lose a friend. Even if that friend isn’t really a friend — a pseudo-friend if you will — it is disappointing to find that someone you admire turns out to be much, much less a decent human being than you can imagine.

And that pretty much sums up how I feel now about Sen. John McCain.

I still admire McCain for what he went through during his captivity during the Vietnam War. And he had some good ideas during his time as a U.S. Senator. But he caught the Presidential Fever so badly that he doesn’t care how sickingly he smears his own name or reputation or that of others.

The problems I have with McCain right now don’t even arise from anything he has particularly said but instead comes from his running mate, the annoying Alaska Gov. Mrs. Palin. She is using that attack on Obama “palling around” with former 60s radical William Ayers. And she is using the smear as if Obama was dancing around in a dashiki while sporting a 10-foot-tall Afro and brandishing an AK-47 when he was eight years old — that being the time Ayers was involved in his hijinx with the Weather Underground.

Burn baby burn. Drill baby drill. Indeed baby indeed.

Of course, we have long ago been asked to forget the association between McCain and the Keating Five.
Apparently, the McCainiacs have decided that the campaign has turned so irrevocably south that the only course of action is to Swift Boat Obama. It worked against Kerry and ol’ Gee Dubya ended up with another term. The problem this time though is that the Gee Dubyaites’ tricks worn way too thin so very long ago. Our national security is in shambles. Our economy appears to have been eaten by a wolf and s**t (hey, remember the past tense) over a cliff. And I don’t know if I can remain polite for too much longer.

So there.

Having been born in Jasper, Texas, where that horrible example of horrors took place in 1998, and raised in a nearby burg, even a few months ago I wouldn’t have imagined that I would have ever voted for a black person, man or woman, for president. It’s not that I don’t like black folks, it’s just I grew up in a place that made you feel like you would never, ever vote for a black person for president.

But unless between now and election day, I find out that Barack Obama did something unspeakable like sell secrets to Al-Quida or he is actually a serial murderer in disguise or else he is really, secretly, the son of Dick Cheney, then it looks as if I might actually have to vote for him.

I have been and remain reluctant in voting for Obama. It has nothing to do with his color. I don’t see what color has to do with his campaign anyway. He is part-black African and part-white American. He is a true African-American, much closer to the African than many black Americans. He is also a lot less seasoned as a leader than I would prefer and that is my major problem with him.

But Obama seems less eager to sell his soul to become president than his Senate colleague McCain.

John McCain was a good American. What he went through ensures he will always be an exemplary countryman. He always will remain such in my mind. I just hope he never becomes president. And who knows, maybe this time people will get fed up with the Swift Boating so that McCain does not become our president.