Girl Punches Boy In Face On "Jersey Shore." Yawn, No Big Deal....

Most of us recall when Snooki of Jersey Shore fame, was punched in the face by a young man after she verbally abused him and called him ugly. There was a huge outcry, and Snooki became the new spokesperson for violence against women.

Well, today I viewed a rerun of Jersey Shore (I was bored) and I witnessed the girl Sammie punch her boyfriend Ronnie in the jaw. Where is the public outcry? Where is the domestic violence spot condemning that act? If I would not have witnessed it, I would not have known about it. Worse yet, the roommates run to console the girl because she sobbing and wants to leave the house. The condition of the boy's jaw is virtually ignored except for one other boy who consoles him.

Violence against men is acceptable is the message. Men don't matter as much as women and men cannot truly be abused because they are not women.

What a beautiful society we live in!

Reflections on the Impossibility of Government

By Fred Reed - July 30, 2011

God it's wonderful—really diverting in a macabre sort of way, at least if you have a diseased sense of humor and enough Padre Kino red. Which I do. As I write the world's only delusional superflower, perennially in love with itself, navel-gazing as narcissistically as ever, ignorant, self-indulgent, gurbling like an insane relative in the attic and fondling electro-trinkets from Japan, is broke. Yes, we see a beautiful dive from the high board, two somersaults and a half-twist, into the Third World. And so richly deserved.

Congress, a collection of whores, con-men, and penny-ante sharpers from East Jesus, Nebraska, ponders the Great Question: Default now, and admit manfully to being the economic lepers everyone else already knows we are? Or raise the debt ceiling, keep spending like a spoiled Swarthmore sophomore with daddy's credit card, and collapse a bit later?

It's just lovely. The World’s Greatest Economy holding out the begging bowl to China. “Alms? Alms for the poor?” Maybe I don't have enough Padre Kino after all. Maybe there isn't enough.

On the lobotomy box, congressmen come and go, not talking of Michelangelo, like mayflies but without the brains, calling each other names. They seem to think that they are in an off-year election. I mean, it's only the future of the country. What, me worry? What if a huge cosmic flyswatter came down on Cap Hill and turned them into barely historical smears? How the hell do you start a cosmic flyswatter?

The Republicans want to protect the wars, the rich, and the military companies. The Democrats want to protect the entitlements. Well, ok, I guess killing Afghans matters more than feeding Granny in Spokane. Unless of course you are Granny. Who really cares? I mean, how many “defense” contracts does she have?

But actually the Dems have the best of the argument of national security. Entitlements are our friend. Welfare is the price we pay for not having the cities burn. Mailbox money is our protection, not gaudy aircraft carriers like the USS Thundertrinket, zooom-kerpow.

It's the Empire, stupid. You want spending cuts? Easy, if you don't want to rule the world for three more years before going down history's cloaca. Pull out of Iraq, Afghanistan, Korea, Japan, and NATO tomorrow. Pull out. Pull out. Coitus interruptus. Stop wasting precious engineering talent and non-existent money on pointless funsy weapons of no utility: the F35, the Airborne Laser.

Come to think of it, don't bother. It's too late. The only sensible answer is cheap Mexican red. The US really is poised to enter Central America. You know, continental drift. It can't be stopped. South Korea and Finland among others are far more advanced in their internets. Health care in America is first-priced and second-rate. The country is thirty-third in infant mortality. Schooling would be pathetic if we could raise it to that level, the universities largely farces. The Russians and Chinese have manned space programs; we don't. Industry flees Gringolandia or has fled. The great moiling gerbiltry out there hasn't figured it out. Wait.

I hear babbling about “the recovery.” Which recovery is that? There ain't none, boys and girls. There won't be one. We are not in a temporary recession or correction or what have you. We are going poor. The last dance just finished, and the band is leaving.

And it is self-inflicted. There is, I grant you, a pleasing monumentality about truly phenomenal stupidity. A certain brilliance is needed to be so witless. In this sense the American political system is a work of genius, relying on the principle of Sufficient Ditz-Rabbitry.

You don't need to fool all of the people all of the time. Enough of the people, enough of the time is entirely adequate. Lincoln knew this but, being a politician, didn't point it out. Here is the basis of what Americans believe to be a democracy. Curious: Mexicans know they have a corrupt government, but Americans don't. In the US, books are written about the scams and cons and rips practiced on the public. Few read them, though, and those who do already know what is in them. Enough of the people, enough of the time. If the talking heads on the blinking hamster-diverter don't talk about the swindles, the rubes never know.

The country is in fact ruled by the interlocking directorates of Wall Street, Washington, and the media, Triamese twins joined at the head and aimed at sucking money from the easily fleeced. We're not talking Senior Civics and the Federalist Papers. It's straight drain-the-dullards. And it works. Boy does it.

Can you name anything in America today that is not a disguised fraud? Credit cards are not a convenience, but a way of luring suckers into borrowing crippling amounts of money at usurious interest. The sub-prime circus was carefully designed to do just what it did. There's the student-loan racket, and Big Pharma: A tiny bottle of ophthalmic salt water from Bausch & Lomb, called Muro, costs $23 in Washington, and about $6 in Mexico. That's our government, fixing prices that weren't broken. Pure Third World.

I dunno. What's going to happen when what's left of the cream-flow dries up? Maybe it's the Padre Kino, but...in the last depression of '29, most of the country was rural or close. People, many of them, lived on farms, and didn't need much money.

Today most of the population is utterly dependent on remote mechanized farms winch are dependent on supplies of gasoline and chemicals and then on trucks to take the crop to cities that, if the foregoing chain broke down, could not possibly support themselves. The discovery that food doesn't really come from Safeway will astonish.

I guess I'm paranoid, and no real unrest and disruption could really occur. I guess. I mean, probably. I think. And that's a good thing, because with so many people dependent on entitlements, to the extent that they can't eat without them, and everything dependent on intricate systems that can't handle chaos—hooboy. Think: What happens to skyscrapers if there's no electricity for elevators?

I say invest in drug cartels. Some say gold, but you can't smoke gold. When times get bad people want booze, grass, crack, scag, crank, Oxys, and maybe shrooms for the more advanced. Investment is low, and governmental interference has proved minimal.

I hope I'm crazy. I'd better be.

A Man Is An Unmitigated Fool To Marry

By now most are aware that Jennifer Lopez's and Mark Anthony's marriage is ending. Given the fact that Jennifer is a known kook when it comes to her love life, few men acknowledge the fact that marriage in general is a losing proposition.

In our current recessionary economy, why would a man want to take on a wife and kids to while most jobs teeter on the edge of insecurity? Why would a man want to sign up for a second full time job when most employed men already work more than any men in the world. Why would a man want to participate in the great "buying things" spree that is marriage so that he is a debt slave all of his life?

I know that there are many reasons for men to still willingly slide down the marriage road to ruin in spite of all the evidence staring them in the face.
Parents from a pre-feminist era are culprits that inculcate their sons with the marriage=success mentality.

Hollywood imagery is the next reason. Hollywood never shows the wife gaining weight and smelling up the bathroom after unloading a pile of bowel movement matter. Hollywood never shows the wife's bad breath, her hysterics, her spendthrift habits, or anything else but mythical bliss.

But the primary culprits are women themselves. Anyone with half a brain knows that when a man is in love or infatuated with a women, his normal logical thought process is suspended. Have you ever listened to the lyrics to "When A Man Loves A Woman?" It is women that bamboozle most men at their most vulnerable to their detriment.

It is high time for men to wake up to this marriage scam that dooms them to misery beyond reversal. On the other hand, the Mark Anthony's of the world are superb examples to the younger men of what NOT to do.

Coming Soon: Straight Pride Parade

With homosexuality all the rage, it is now conceivable that homosexuality will become the new normal in a few generations. Take a look at this clip, the future of America:

The IMPERIAL SUICIDE of America

By Bill Bonner

Now, what we see is the whole kit-and- kaboodle of life in the US giving way to desperation, delusion and an irresistible impulse to commit imperial suicide. The economy turns sour. The military becomes malignant. Households are corrupt, bankrupt and dependent. Even the churches sing their hallelujahs to Caesar now.

What's "imperial suicide?" It's what empires do. If no other empire arises to kill them...they kill themselves. China will probably eventually crush the US militarily. But that is far in the future. The US can't wait. It lets the zombies run wild.

At home, Congress debates a "debt ceiling" measure, as if it made any difference. They've raised the ceiling 93 times since they first imposed a debt ceiling 94 years ago. What are the odds that they will hold the line this time?

Zilch. Instead, they'll continue borrowing and spending until the nation goes broke. Count on it.

The US economy was a free-market success story for a hundred years...from the end of the US War Between the States to the end of the Vietnam War. It was the richest, fastest-growing, most innovative, most competitive, and most admired economy in the world. But then, in 1971, Richard Nixon replaced a more-or-less solid dollar, vaguely backed by gold, with a pure paper dollar, backed by nothing but the good intentions of government employees.

As the money went, so went the nation. Our friend and colleague Byron King opines:
The problem with the US over the last 40 or 50 years is that there's too much free money...

We raise three generations of population who are untied from the basics of monetary education - millions of minds poisoned by Economics 101 in universities across the land. "Elastic currency," courtesy of the Fed.

Media & political classes are no smarter than the dummies who walk the land, so they make policy based on "free" money from the Fed... Deficits don't matter.

Currency circulates and inflates the general price levels... People learn to live with it. Even make a virtue of it, doing things like "buy as much house as you can afford; the market will rise and you'll make money." That kind of idiocy.

There's all this excess currency sloshing around the economy, leading to people doing stupid things like drugs, too much alcohol, divorce (Cherchez les femmes), food (obesity), theft, etc...

"Wars cost much silver," wrote Sun Tzu. [Lack of money] kept a lot of nations out of a lot of trouble over the years. Not any more. Who needs silver when you can just print up bricks of paper cash and fly it over to Iraq and such.

Kind of gives a whole new meaning to the term American Exceptionalism... yep, we're exceptional. That's for sure. More prisoners in jail than anywhere else. We fight longer wars than anyone else...and don't win. We give more welfare to more idle people than anywhere else on earth...and we're proud of it.

There's so much money that we don't know how to say no. No limits. Just raise the debt ceiling...spend until you can't spend any more. Then spend some more.

Well, there are no limits until there are limits. Per Ayn Rand... "You can avoid reality. But you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality."

In the space of 40 years the US lost its winning ways. Real, hourly wages stopped growing in 1973. Stock prices, in real terms, peaked out in '99...about the same time that real, per capita private sector growth came to a halt. The number of full time jobs topped out about two years later...and housing hit its peak in 2007.

Abroad, US armed forces continue to squander the most magnificent advantage that a military has ever had. The Pentagon spends 7 times as much as the next biggest spender. And it doesn't even have a worthy opponent. Where does it get the money? It borrows from the Chinese!

And what does it do with all that money? It engages in pointless, blood sucking zombie wars. Its three current engagements alone are expected to cost $4 trillion, according to the latest independent estimates - about as much as its trade deficit over the last 10 years.

Ask your neighbors. What strategic advantage does the US gain from fighting in Afghanistan, Iraq or Libya? They will have no good answer. Probably some claptrap about 'fighting terrorism' is the best they will be able to do; that's what they were told on TV.

A 94-year-old retired Army colonel came over to our house for the 4th of July festivities. A Silver Star winner in WWII, veteran of the Korean War too...we asked what he thought of the Pentagon's strategy in North Africa and the Middle East.

"I am disgusted," he replied. "Those guys just don't know what they're doing. We have no business getting involved in these things...especially in Libya. They're just traps. I have arguments about it when I go into the VA hospital. The young guys - you know, they're in their '80s - are in favor of these wars. Wave the flag. Rah rah...let's go in and do the job. Teach them a lesson... That sort of thing.

"But real war is not a football game. And nobody learns anything...except not to do it again."

Who - with the exception of a 94-year-old veteran - objects to squandering the national treasure, blood and honor on these wars? Almost no one. Why not? Because they've all drunk deeply from the intoxicating cup of imperial power. An ordinary nation fights wars to protect itself. An empire fights wars because that is what an empire does. And it continues fighting until it finally beats itself.

Why didn't Rome pull back its troops from the Rhine or Anatolia or North Africa...in order to protect its homeland from the barbarians? Why didn't Alexander retire to Macedonia, while he still had breath? Why didn't the Germans retreat to the banks of the Oder when they still had the means to resist the Soviet onslaught?

Why doesn't the US bring home its troops, cut its spending, balance its budget and protect its future? Ha...ha...you know the answer. Because the system has been taken over by zombies...people who want to see the spending continue, no matter what the cost. Zombie wars. Zombie social spending. And zombie finance.

And every time we look at it, we see more evidence. California, the West Coast Greece, is going broke. Any guess why?

Happy Independence Day

Here is my 4th of July message for the informed among us.....