How to Make Friends at Bars, Part 1

Arrive with girl. Proceed with girl to make acquaintances with two random people. Begin dancing.

December 7, 2005

acumen – n. Quickness of perception or discernment; penetration of mind; the faculty of nice discrimination; shrewdness shown by keen insight

how i feel

torn up inside

full of emotions

combative, sad

muppets

Your everyday dose of grief is now ready

Sorry for the lack of updates folks, things have been more hectic then usual plus we’re dealing with some of our own problems at PBH. But here is a comprehensive update of the past few days and the news that should make you feel appropriately miserable.

People shouldn’t die because they have sex. If one thing has constantly angered me with the Bush Administration, it’s the abstinence policy. First off, only a small percent of people seriously practice this in America let alone safe sex, and I imagine it is much worse in third world countries where education and incomes are the lowest, and AIDS rates the highest. This isn’t a moral issue. This is a practical health issue.

Nothing has been funnier then the fall of Duke Cunningham, the Republican congressman from California, being caught taking bribes from the Defense Industry. And I think this Slate article hits it dead on: it’s not the fact that he got caught, it’s how many others probably haven’t and won’t be caught. Washington is an enterprise, and power serves as this areas biggest financial industry. It also doesn’t help the fact that he’s aggressive bobblehead turned cry baby, and that on his first trip back to Vietnam, Cunningham sat down with Vietnamese officials for a formal dinner, and his first words of the evening were: “You gooks shot me down.”

Iraq News. I will just have one long, painful paragraph dedicated to this. Is this in the right publication? I think this should be in the Onion as opposed to CNN. I love how they compare to Iraq and Vietnam, that we left the South Vietnamese on their own, they lost, and so we shouldn’t make the same mistake twice, therefore we should leave Iraq. Thus, making the same mistake twice and letting them ‘lose’ on their own. Am I missing something here? And, in an effort to promote freedom of the press, we’ve been paying to run stories in Iraqi newspapers. Who regards this as truly a big deal though? If you’re dumb enough to believe most of what you read, then you’re just above people who believe everything they see. Oh, and the military we are training in Iraq has begun performing revenge killings against mostly Sunni’s. Good thing I’m nice and warm in Washington DC. To finish this up, I’ll add my favorite link that provides a pretty good first hand account of a contractor’s life in Iraq. I always like first hand accounts that aren’t widely publicized because you can generally rely on their honesty in the things that matter – general atmosphere, interaction with Iraqi’s, and a more toned down perspective then what one would receive in the mass media.

A good article from the BBC on the French riots of this summer. If one thing angered me about the coverage I saw, it was the constant iteration of the word ‘Muslim’ in the American press. And to me, if these events are to draw analogy to anything American, it should the LA riots. Would anyone rightfully consider the LA riots and its participants terrorists or extremists? No, and if anything, those words should be replaced with disenfranchised, detached, or criminal — because that was what both riots were about: reaction and opportunism.

Other intriguing news: a new mammal was found in Borneo and a pack of wild squirrels killed a dog in Russia. First off, how funny is that? Can you imagine someone telling their great grand-children about this? “Melosh was around for great squirrel uprising of early 21st century, they were as black as night, ate my crop, and stole my vodka” (all of this of course said in a thick accent).

That’s the world for now, keep your TV and computers plugged in so you can be crushed by more of the world’s despair until next time.

Post-revolution revolutionary

François-Noël Babeuf (November 23, 1760 – May 27, 1797), known as Gracchus Babeuf, was a French political agitator and journalist of the revolutionary period. The conspiracy of equality organised by Babeuf and his followers aimed at provoking an armed uprising of the plebeian masses against the bourgeois regime of the Directory and establishing a revolutionary dictatorship as a transitional stage to “pure democracy” and “egalitarian communism.” The conspiracy was disclosed in May 1796 and he was later executed for his role in the Conspiracy of the Equals. Although the words “socialist” and “communist” did not exist in Babeuf’s lifetime, they have both been used to describe his ideas by later scholars.