Who Loves Being Right

This confirms my suspicions. And the real irony is that the legitimate medicine show kills more people then crack, crank, horse and bathtub gin.

Take 2 Slugs In The Gut And Call Me In The Morning

I've been reading a lot about gun control lately but that's not what I want to talk about today. Between 2003 and 2004 there was a drop of 49,945 in the death rate for Americans. This would also be the same time that Vioxx was pulled from the market due to an increased risk for heart attack.

Vioxx was a billion dollar drug. A wonder that was handed to Merck on a platter from academic research. Vioxx wasn't one of the so-called breakthroughs that big pharm has to lose billions of dollars trying to develop. Professor Xie at Brigham Young U. handed the drug industry everything they needed, almost on a platter, with his paper "Xie WL, et al. Expression of a mitogen-responsive gene encoding prostaglandin synthase is regulated by mRNA splicing. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 1991;88(7):2692-6."

From there the drugs Celebrex and Vioxx were developed to target the cox-2 enzyme. Clinical trials almost took longer then development. They were hailed as a wonder and since it didn't take decades to develop the drug companies turned a profit quickly.

Until they started killing people. What looks like tens of thousands of people in a year.

Guns kill 12,000 Americans each year. It looks like doctors, the FDA and the legal pharmaceutical industry kill 4 times more Americans then guns. It's no wonder the American Medical Association is big on supporting gun control. They don't like the competition.

You Can't Live In The Past pt 2

I am willing to kill for a copy of Dogzilla "Lunch With Ed".

You Can't Live In The Past

I miss Chucklehead.

Antacid

I didn't have a TV set from 1989 - 95. Well I didn't have a TV set like Meghan and Rachel don't have a TV. That is to say, I didn't have cable. I had a 13 inch with whatever the rabit ears could get. For some reason Fox 25 comes in strong but nothing else does. I had a VCR so I could watch movies. When I lived on my boat my TV was a Sega Game Gear with the TV tuner card. 3 inches of "In Color" action. Again, Fox 25 was pretty much all I could tune in. When I built an antenna to see if Swamp was going to be the next Columbine all I could tune in was Fox 25. X-files, The Simpsons, In Living Color, Married With Children & Get A Life. Each as entertaining as the last. Oh yeah and that show about a kid who lived in a ministorage who sometimes turned into a wherewolf. Hermans Head, everyone from Fright Night had a place on Fox. 90210 but for some reason I never got into Melrose Place. 21 Jump Street.

Admit it, TV during the early 90's wasn't that bad if all you could watch was Fox. I was vaguely aware of other networks. What was on other channels? Some show about a girl who was a robot but she thought she was a real little girl. It wasn't Punky Brewster. It was much worse. And some show about a retarded kid. I think it was called Life Goes On. I think the message was that if you're retarded you can do all sorts of crap that seemed rebellous 30 years earlier without the slightest hint of irony.

I'm just glad I never watched it. I did a lot of acid then. I don't think I could handle the flashbacks today.

You totally know I'm going to play this for my students just to see the look on their faces.

I Can't Help Myself

Alright, even though I haven't seen or even heard about most of these I have a blog and dammit my opinion is important. Here are my Oscar picks. And may god have mercy on our souls.

BP Little Miss Sunshine: even the commercials for this make me feel good about myself.

Actor Peter O'Toole: the Academy needs to apologise for insinuating that his career was over with that lifetime achievement award he didn't want to accept for fear of admitting his career was over and he was about to die. How fucking wrong they were. Anyway he should have gotten something for "Troy" he made that epic picture about an epic seem even bigger when he was on the screen. That man pisses more class then I'll ever be. I guess I have a new mancrush of the week.

Actress Helen Mirrin: really I'm guessing blind here. Monkeys throwing poo at 8x10 glossies hanging in Ari Emanuel's office would probably be more accurate.

Supporting Actor Alan Arkin: This is a tough one. Eddie Murphy will get his Academy Award right after Jim Carey gets his. As much as I truly like the Wahlberg family (I'm 1 degree of separation away) and I love the idea of a Funky Bunch renaissance I have to go with AA on this one. The man is due. Anyway, Donny is a better actor.

Supporting Actress Cate Blanchett: Admit it, she's the only one of them we've ever heard about.

Director This is a tough call. As much as everyone wants to see Martin Scorsese finally win one you just know at the last minute it will go to Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu. Then Marty will go snort blow off of Susan Luci's naked ass in the back of the Vanity Faire party.

Foreign Language Film Who the fuck cares?

Adapted Screenplay As badly as I want it to go to Borat you know "Children of Men" is going to get something and since it's not going home with the big banana it will get this.

Original Screenplay You know what? There are entirely too much self congradulatory masturbation exercises in Hollywood. Whatever movie is about gay penguins is going to win. I'm sick of this shit already.

I have nothing to say about the state of the union address except to say it's no small coincidence that the SOTU and the Academy Award Nominations came out on the same day.

Enjoy the Republic.

Set Up To Fail

A short one today but I was thinking that modern wars seem to be set up from the start so that the strongest side initiates agression but then loses. WWI Germany should have won that and would have if the US hadn't come along. WWII Germany again would have gotten away with it if it weren't for us meddling Americans. Korea, technically we're still fighting. There's a cease fire but no armistice. I can't say we won it. Vietnam, they handed us our ass. Gulf War One, well clearly since we hadn't gone a full year without bombing some part Iraq between the end of Desert Storm and 9/11 an argument can be made that our current quagmire is simply part two. Now we're looking at Iran and they're calling in Russia and China who seem to be concerned about the vast investments they've made with their trading partner. I don't see us winning that one.

Lee Might Know The Answer To This One

What do I have in common with the following people?

Bud Abbot, Buzz Aldrin, John James Audobon, Gene Autry, Count Basie, Lloyd Bentson, Irving Berlin, Daniel Boone, Ernest Borgnine, Jim Bowie, James Buchanan, Admiral Byrd, Eddie Cantor, Walter P Chrysler, Andre Citroen, Roy Clark, Samuel L. Clemens (Mark Twain), Ty Cobb, Buffalo Bill Cody, George M Cohan, Nat King Cole, Samuel Colt, Davy Crockett, Cecil B DeMille, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, WEB Dubois, Edwards Vii and Viii, Duke Ellington, Bob Evans, Douglas Fairbanks, WC Fields, Sir Alexander Fleming, The Fords Gerald Glenn & Henry, Benjamin Franklin, Clark Gable, James A Garfield, Richard Gatling, George Vi, Eldrige Gerry, Sir William S Gilbert, King Gillette, John Glenn, Barry Goldwater, DW Griffith, Gus Grissom, Joseph Guillotin, John Hancock, Warren G Harding, Oliver Hardy, Franz Joseph Haydn, Jesse Helms, Patrick Henry, Hoovers Frank & J Edgar, Tim Horton, Sam Houston, Harry Houdini, Burl Ives, Jacksons Andrew & Rev Jesse, Al Jolson, John Paul Jones, King Kamehameha, Jack Kemp, Rudyard Kipling, Marquis de Lafayette, Fiorello LaGuardia, Charles Lindbergh, Sir Thomas Lipton, Robert Livingston, Harold Lloyd, Trent Lott, General Douglas MacArthur, R H Macy, Louis B Mayer, Fredrick Maytag, Tom Mix, John Molson, Jacques Etienne Montgolfier, James Monroe, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Audie Murphy, Nikolay Navikov, Arnold Palmer, James C Penney, John Joseph Pershing, Bronson Pinchot, Paul Revere, Michael Richards, All 7 Ringling Brothers, Sugar Ray Robinson, Roy Rogers, Will Rogers, Roosevelts Teddy & Franklin D, Col Sanders, Telly Savalas, Peter Sellers, Red Skelten, John Philip sousa, Jonathan Swift, William Howard Taft, Danny Thomas, Dave Thomas, Strom Thurmond, Mel Tillis, Harry Truman, Jack Warner, John Wayne, Booker T Washington, George Washington, Thomas Watson, (Laura Ingalls Wilder), Brigham Young, Cy Young, Daryl Zanuck

How Evil Were The Republicans?

George Bush never told me to shut up. He might have read my mail and listened to my phone calls but doesn't that show you that he was happy to hear from me? I find it unusually telling that the first thing the new democratic majority in congress does is to kill the First Amendment. The very first thing these assholes do is propose Senate Bill S1 the Legislative Transparency and Accountability Act of 2007 seems like a reasonable attempt to limit the amount of contact Congress may have with paid lobby groups. However, there is language in the law that will have a chilling effect at the very least and could possibly be used to silence anyone trying to publicly discuss political issues. That means the end of Dean Rules! since my political speach technically fits all the qualifications.

How the hell do I think that? My blog frequently discusses politics and as such is clearly an attempt to influence consensus. I hope my readers think and act on my advice. Do I have 501 or more readers? Well that number in the law is so vague as to be useless. Let's look at it:

`(B) PAID ATTEMPT TO INFLUENCE THE GENERAL PUBLIC OR SEGMENTS THEREOF- The term `paid attempt to influence the general public or segments thereof' does not include an attempt to influence directed at less than 500 members of the general public.

Do you see the problem? No? There is no time limit or definition on what communication means. 500 people in one day, week, year? I had 28,000 hits last year. Roughly half of my daily hits are regulars. That means that I had about 14,000 random visitors which if I remember how to count is more then 501.

But you say, Dean you clearly don't make any money and your blog is hosted for free. Yes that is true but my blog is hosted by Google which makes assloads of money off my and my blogging peers political speach. That's really the target of this law. It's not my blog that's under attack. It's the big blogging hosts. Do you think for one minute that Google isn't going to bend over in the United States (where they and their families live.) They'll bend over in the US faster then they did in China.

I'll probably set up one of the many abandonned computers in my closet to host my new and improved blog. I have a Pentium III that probably could run Linux and host my blog. My upstream connection isn't very strong, Comcast's home broadband is still very asymmetrical. I'll probably do all right for a few months until Comcast changes their TOS to restrict outgoing bandwidth.

At that point you'll probably have to sneak into the woods to read what I or any other political blogger has to say. I already have my tree picked out. I just hope it doesn't end up being the one they hang me from.

Cocksuckers

I hate spam. I hate email spam. I especially hate blog spam. I tend to trash the blog spam because it adds nothing to the discussion.

Yesterday I removed two comments. They were spam. If you want to purchase insurance I recommend anyone other then a scumfuck trying to make money off my blog without offering me any return. Bastards don't even have the common courtesy to offer me a reach around.

Now that I think of it, it's kind of like Google.

"We're Going To Get Hit"

OK, if we can't avoid terrorist attacks despite all your best efforts to avoid them why are we spending so god damned much money and shredding the Constitution to avoid what you admit is unavoidable?

In other words, it's one thing to buy bilge pumps. It's another thing to go bankrupt paying armed thugs to tell us who gets on the Titanic and "Oh by the way, I need to feel your tits because your bra set off my metal detector."

Clearly if you can't protect me despite all the tax money and nail clippers you take from me then maybe I have a whole lot of better fucking things to do with that money. Starting with dollar shot night at "The Nudie Bar" and ending with my being declared exhaulted king of the Moonbase, the possibilities are endless.

You're Going To Think I'm Totally Paranoid

The dollar is worthless. Superwealthy investors refuse to touch it and are divesting themselves (quietly) of their holdings.

The dollar is doomed and anyone holding it when the music stops will wish it really was a hot potato. At least then they'd have something to eat. It seems our ruling class knows the collapse is coming and know how fucking pissed off we're all going to be. That's why they're all buying property in Paraguay.

Another one.

News of the Bush family eventually doing to Latin America what they did to American America seems to have been met with a warning from a covert strike team. Either that or a very lucky thief managed to elude an uncharacteristically inept Secret Service detail and get close enough to the Bush Twins to snag their tampons.

Either way expect the Bush family to flee in the night when our currency collapses. We'll be busy arguing over whether we should form a union with Canada and Mexico and float the new Amero. In the mean time our open border is encouraging everyone the Bush family doesn't want to live down the street from to illegally come here. By the time the Bushes Paraguaian estate and secret Bond Villian lair is complete Latin America should be a nice place to live.

Come to think of it, I want to live there.

Bum Goodies

"If god wanted man to fly... Mr Winn".

"He would have given him wings, Mr Kidd."

A Couple More

Thanks Rickety

Maybe if we took tax payers money and built a big stadium young people will be willing to pay every dollar they have to stay here and wait tables for over educated and over paid boomer retirees who can't find anyone who can afford to buy their house so they can retire to Arizona.

Quickies

Yes it is.

A step in the right direction.

No duh!

Taxachusetts.

We don't mind the shake down. We'll just roll the costs of development into the price of the lot when we sell it to the new homeowner. That way the book value of the other lots in town will go up and city hall can generate more tax revenues. No one loses except the folks getting priced out of the real estate market.

Mine. All mine!!!

Tigger Please

Does my house say "Dead Tigger Storage?" I think the kid had it coming. The wifebeater, fingerless gloves and white suspenders alone make me think he was exactly the kind of dumbass who would try to unzip someones costume and then lie about why a guy in a pussy costume gave him a beat down.



"The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness. For he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you."

Ash Is Sick And Can't Come To Work

I have a mancrush on Bruce Campbell. Obviously it's C A A D or I'm just goint to tape it and never bother to actually watch it.

We're Not Fucking Stupid

It's because the truth doesn't need Hollywood production values with fancy graphics and a soundtrack the way corporate news lies do. The truth also doesn't need 1/5th of my TV screen to be covered in stock quotes and nebulously defined headlines scrolling across the bottom to make sure I'm not paying close attention to what kind of asshattery and bullshit the talking head in the middle is trying to baffle me with.

My job as a teacher today is to make sure my students bullshit meter is properly calibrated. I'm not doing a very good job. My students know TATP cannot be cooked up on an airplane. Oh and the charges against last Augusts terror plot have been dropped.

Why Didn't Somebody Tell Me

I had a dead link two posts down.

This One Is Just To Piss Off Darren

Sorry buddy. The sixth paragraph is not insignificant.

The FBI’s report once again confirmed that violent crime rates are lower in states with Right-to-Carry (RTC) laws. In 2005, RTC states had, on average, 22% lower total violent crime, 30% less murder, 46% lower robbery, and 12% lower aggravated assault rates, compared to the rest of the country.

I'd Love To Have A Beer With This Guy

I wish I wrote this. I remember the last table I bussed. I remember the last dish I washed. I remember lunch duty this afternoon. Teaching is the hardest kind of sales job that anyone will ever do. Students are the only consumer group that demand less for their money (ok... their parents tax money.) It pays less then picking up garbage. I know what it's like to work for a living and even though I think teaching is more politics and show business then education it still beats working for a living. Staying up until 4AM desperately trying to rewrite poorly written curriculum so that my students pay attention to me instead of turn my classroom into Lord of the Flies when they get bored is far more personally rewarding then any measly paycheck and that includes the .4% raise they're giving us for aught seven. The reward comes during that faint moment a week later when I see it in a students eyes that the knowledge I tried to give them in lecture just clicked in their minds during lab.

Lisa and I talked frequently about my dropping out of gradschool. We talked about what would come next. I didn't know where I would land or what I would do. The only thing I really wanted when I returned to New England was to drive to work in a warm car and never have to wait for a bus or the T in February. I've had a lifetimes worth of cold predawn mornings standing in driving sleet, waiting for public transportation that despite the trememdous draft and lack of heat still smells of tinkle and despair.

In America the trains never run on time. Mussolini may have been a fascist but dammit, his trains ran on time. So what does that say about a fascist who wants to shut the train service down? That he's not even as good of a scumbag that Mussolini was? I don't know so much about that. What I do know is what it's like to stand 20 minutes in the cold for a bus that's late, waiting for it to take me to a job I hate.

Instead of baking cookies for the camera or asking state gubernetorial candidates how they'll stop global warming we need to ask our potential leaders serious job interview questions so we can see how they think. We don't need to know not how well scripted their handlers can make them appear to be.

Here are the 3 questions I'd love to hear the ruling class answer unscripted. My answers follow in red.

When was the last time you walked out your front door 5 minutes late for work and discovered you had to scrape the ice off your windshield? This morning.

What was the name of the last grocery clerk that rang up your groceries? Katie.

How many keys are in your pocket right now? Nine keys and 8 supermarket cards.

Unfortunately for America the average response from our ruling class is:

"My garage is heated."

"I've never bought my own groceries" or "I haven't bought my own groceries since college why the hell would I remember the clerks name?"

"None, my driver carries the car keys and some black guy opens my door when I get home."

Then the black guy serves the potatos.

As for wacky job interview questions, my favorite is:

Youre in a boat with a rock, on a fresh-water lake. You throw the rock into the lake. With respect to the land, what happens to the level of the water in the lake goes up, goes down, stays the same?

The answer is goes down. Why is due to bouyancy. The mass of water displaced by the craft is the same as the mass of the boat and every thing in it. The rock goes out, the boat gets lighter and floats up which causes the water to lower in relation to the shoreline. Do not confuse the mass of the rock with the volume of the rock. Density and bouyancy are not unrelated concepts but they're not the same. I'd like to see George Bush try to answer that question.

Tickle Me Zelda

I knew I should have bought stock in Nintendo when none of my students bought a PlayStation3 but some were actually shaking like a junky in lockup for a week because they were too far back in line for a chance to purchase the Nintendo Wii on release.

You Know So That We Can't Escape To A Better Country When The Shit Hits The Fan

The Coast Guard wants the states to enact boaters licenses like a drivers license. Under the guise of terrorist attack the Feds want states to restrict and control who may use a pleasure craft. I can accept the idea of a drivers license to use public roads. The state built the roads and although we have a right to travel we do need a method of ensuring that narrow roads are safe. The ocean is a different story. It was there before the United States Coast Guard was formed and will be there long after humans have gone extinct. The ocean is huge. It's pretty easy not to drive pleasure craft into each other. In fact, it's downright hard to get into a two boat pile up on the open waters. Usually it happens in narrow harbors or during races or just when a couple skippers aren't paying any god damned attention to what they're doing. But it is still a rare accident that happens on the water. So what really is the need for a boaters license? It's about a need that the government has to control every aspect of our lives. If the beaurocracy doesn't approve of our choices in life it enforces it's will, ultimately at the end of some jackbooted thugs gun.

So why would the government want to control who goes out sailing on a boat? For the same reason the government doesn't want us to fly out of the country without their permission. The United States Government doesn't want to repeat Hitlers mistake of letting Albert Einstein, Otto Frisch, Felix Bloch and Enrico Fermi* leave the 3rd Riech. It's not just to keep our enemies from building a new Manhattan Project to stop the Neocons from taking the worlds oil. The United States is the only nation that continues to tax its citizens income when such income is earned abroad. Work and live in another country for any amount of time and the US Treasury still expects you to pay your tribute to Caesar. Clearly we can't let any of the slaves decide to leave by airplane or boat when they realize the noose is tight and the whip is coming to get them.

Oh one more thing, that fence to keep the Mexicans out will do a nice job of keeping us in.



*Fermi was from Italy and not Jewish, his wife was, so he wasn't going to wait around Europe for something bad to happen to her.

Happy New Year

I was thinking of doing a best of post or perhaps a list of the big events from this past year like Didi did. But then I thought I'll just list the things that made me the happiest during 2006.

7 Lazy hammocks and Sam Adams Beer. (Especially the nice letter and refund check Jim Koch sent me for a bad bottle of Tripple Bock.)

6 Channel 56 brought back "Creature Double Feature." Twice.

5 My blog coined the phrase "bum goodies" and made it a viable career choice.

4 Lisa and I now own 13 acres worth of the Town Of Wenham and we don't have to deal with the sex offender tennant any more. And it looks like the town will be running the sewer lines past us so we don't have to deal with Title 5.

3 Lisa and I can concieve children and are approved for 3 more IVF treatments. The clock is ticking again.

2 I have a job I love.

1 Barney.

0 Lisa.