Plan C

As we ever more desperately scrape the bottom of the peanut butter jar we must acknowledge that the last few years have taught us that encouraging economic revival has proved extremely difficult. Plan A (A for Anemic Accommodation?) has obviously gotten us nowhere.

Hundreds of Plan Bs have been suggested and a few tried, with President Obama proposing yet another one, Plan Barack, to Congress and the nation. But no matter how many Plan Bs are proposed or even successfully implemented – which is highly unlikely in the current climate of bald men fighting over a comb – the underlying economic problem will continue far into the future – for no matter what Americans do Asians can do just as well and cheaper. And what possible help is it if Americans are, in fact, better innovators, if Asians can steal patents as well as patenters - for now they are even stealing the very best jobs from those very best minds we brag about having?

Here in tiny Denmark electrical and computer engineers are losing their jobs by the hundreds as their jobs are being farmed out to Asians. A good education, a highly skilled technical education, is now by no means a guarantee of a job or a comfortable life in the West. Chemists, metallurgists, computer programmers, engineers, aircraft, car and windmill designers are all now joining the ranks of the unemployed in America and Europe.

The hideous choice the Western world faces is to either accept lowering our standards of living to that of the third world, with the accompanying total lack of unions, job security, health care, decent pensions, pollution and job safety controls etc – or to bravely resort to perhaps the only thing that will work – Plan C.

Before we discuss Plan C let us acknowledge that the globalization of business has helped bring countless millions out of abject poverty and possibly mass starvation in the East. Never have so many people risen from below the poverty line so quickly. A miracle unmatched in human history is occurring. Yes, many would also point out that what Asians have risen to is also a life of factory slavery where they are treated as less valuable than the machines they man.

Be that as it may, a bad job is better than no job, just as bad food is better than no food. But while the East rapidly changes for the better – at least as far as employment is concerned - the West is collapsing just as fast. The West can now offer the world nothing that East cannot produce cheaper – and soon even better? But as for now, what good does it do the West monetarily if our faltering innovations can be so easily stolen and replicated? And perhaps more importantly, what real good does cash-rich Apple mean to America and not just to Apple's shareholders, if all of Apple's products are made in China? Pride of inventive accomplishment puts food on only a few tables.

Perhaps the only thing that can save jobs and ensure a decent standard of living, not only in the West, but in other non-Asian areas of the world, is Plan C.

C in short stands for Cure, for Containment, for Continents and for Container ships.

Although it may seem like biting the hand that literally feeds me, I must mention here that the biggest container shipping company in the world (..or second biggest.. the ratings change..) is the Danish Maersk line (which also owns Denmark's biggest super market chains.)

Although this company is the pride of Denmark, its pale blue ships crowding every major harbor of the world, the line is working hand in hand with Walmart to destroy every decent job in America and the West.

Can anything be done? Yes, something that is as effective as it is unpalatable and unlikely to be implemented. Yet it is the only thing that might work.

Plan C calls for the containment of container shipping and the containment of continents. If the world were to initiate, let us say, in ten years time, a system where the only shipment of goods allowed between continents is raw materials.. if factory-made products are confined to their own continent, each corner of the world would be left to develop in an equal way. Why shouldn't the residents of South America build their own TVs, computers, cars, plastic sandals? Why shouldn't the Africans, the Europeans?

By stopping all manufactured trade between continents we ensure that the best minds do not fear the loss of their jobs, nor will one area of the world become solely dominant both politically as well as economically.

The East now knows how to grow and prosper, so a quarantine will not permanently derail progress and growth. They have enough citizens to satisfy demand for their products.

Plan C's call for the end of container shipping between continents is the only option and alternative available to the loss of jobs to an area of the world where workers toil in sweat shops for pennies, and force us to pinch our own.

Finally, a containment of container shipping would save the world millions of barrels of oil burned and wasted by these highly polluting ships – and as we commemorate 9/11 – possibly decrease somewhat the risk of terrorist madmen smuggling nuclear bombs to our shores in a container.

What is so hare-brained about a scheme that would save millions of jobs, promote equal and balanced economic as well as political world development, save enormous amounts of oil, as well as cut back drastically on air pollution?

Plan C is unlikely to ever be implemented. But not because it wouldn't work.

The Greatest Inventions

Most people, if asked to name the two greatest inventions in human history would no doubt point to fire and the wheel.

I wouldn't.

To me the two greatest are obvious – money and taxation.

Money, most of us would agree, is something both convenient and essential. Money eliminates the necessity of paying the dentist with live poultry or hookers with nuts and berries.

The invention of money has led to the establishment of trust between strangers. You and I both believe the green piece of paper has more or less the same value to us, so when I hand a stack of them to you, you happily accept them and hand me the iPad I don't really need from the trunk of your car. And we both walk away happy, me however briefly.

Capitalism and credit are based on trust between strangers, something that never occurred in the millions of years of pre-human history. They are the sign of the ultimate optimism.

But what about taxation, the annoyed reader asks between clenched teeth?

Let us take a brief look back in time, using British history as an example:

Three hundred years ago in Britain there were more than 30 different crimes punishable by death – everything from pick-pocketing to poaching the King's deer (..all the deer were the King's deer.)

Why did the Brits back then execute so many people for what we would regard today as minor crimes? Were they crueler and more sadistic than Newt or Rush today?

No. It was because they had no prison system. Why did they have no prison system? Because they couldn't collect enough taxes to establish one. Why couldn't they collect etc ect?

Because the vast majority of people had no money, only chickens – and the wealthy aristocrats wouldn't cough up money but would instead arm their reluctant serfs and send them out to fight the King's wars in place of taxes. Kings had dungeons to hold their well-off and ransom-paying hostages, but they never housed or fed poor prisoners. There were too many of them.. and so the chopping block.

But once capitalism kicked in, trade and the middle class increased, so did taxation. And so prisons and schools (same thing?) and hospitals, police and fire departments were established. Taxation made civilization possible. It paid for the disposal of waste, the more successful fighting of wars, eventually the protection of the environment, minorities, free thought and free speech.

In doubt? The Danes, for example, are known to be the heaviest taxed people in the world, with income taxes averaging 46% and sales tax at 25%. New cars have a 200% tax. Yet poll after poll taken by outside observers have shown the Danes to be the happiest people on Earth?

Why the happiness despite the massive taxation?

Because the 5 million Danes, by pooling their money have bought themselves an army, a navy, an air force, free schools, universities and medical care, pensions for all and housing for the homeless.

Danes are happy and proud because they know they live in a decent society where no one will be left to starve or die for the sole reason they have no money.

Look at any map and you'll see that the countries who tax the most have the most advanced societies. Afghanistan takes in little tax money and suffers, and the Greeks are experts at avoiding the tax man, which has brought their country to near-collapse.

Can taxation get out of hand? Of course. One only has to look at a communist country like North Korea where everyone works for the state, the ultimate taxation, and surpluses are never produced or true incentives allowed.

But a look at Scandinavia will show many things, all signs of truly civilized thinking: high taxation, extremely low church attendance and superstitious beliefs, the greatest degree of free thinking, free speech, and free personal behavior – as well as strong and responsible capitalism and extremely low political and financial corruption.

And all proving that an effective system of taxation and a wise use of taxes leads to the building of strong and free societies..

Paradoxically, Right Wingers not only want to keep your taxes low, they want to make sure you get nothing of real value from your tax dollars. Their gift to us is the freedom to go to hell all by your lonesome.

Us Bleeding Heart Liberals

I'm going to attempt the nearly impossible. I'm going to try to analyze only the flaws and foibles of my peer group, without any regard to our opposite numbers – that is to say I won't be balancing and justifying by saying “..right, okay, but the Right is even worse.”

First of all, I call myself a bleeding heart liberal for several reasons, one of them, of course, being I wish to seem modest and self-effacing – but also because I do recognize many of the sillier thought processes and motivations of people like myself. We are, admittedly, often all too smug, prejudiced, naive and lazy in our thinking.

For example:

Many of us BHLs believe that, if not a majority, than at least a large minority of rich people acquired their wealth by underhanded methods. They cheated, exploited. “You must be mean and devious in order to make much money in life,” is our assumption.

Sadly we don't seem to realize that few people would be in business long enough to acquire much success if they were deceiving their business associates or treading on their employees to any great degree or for any major length of time. In other words you can't run a business for very long if trust is often broken. We BHLs tend to point to the Ken Lays and Bernie Madoffs of the world, as if they were the norm and the honest businessman was as rare and as charming as Jimmy Stewart running his tiny ah-shucks no-interest lending bank.

And mega-successes like Bill Gates tend to confuse us. On one hand, while Microsoft has often been accused of devious and predatory business practices, Bill seems to have redeemed himself in our eyes by his generosity, much in the way Carnegie and Rockefeller gave back most of what they earned-extracted-filched. Just as St Augustine once famously said, “Dear Lord, make me good.. but not yet..” many of our towering business figures seem to go through the same transition – when they were simple millionaires they hated paying taxes – but now that they are multi-billionaires, like Gates and Buffet, taxes are less than gnats buzzing in the room and they encourage raising them.

Another unfortunate tendency on our part is to casually dismiss the complaints of business people.

We either don't believe or don't care if business people are burdened with government bureaucracy or senseless regulations. We by and large trust the government to enact mainly sensible and beneficial policies, when it comes to others – especially the well off. When the government regulates us we find it oppressive.

Another example of we BHL's faulty thinking is the blind assumption that few if any poor people are lazy, parasitic, self-indulgent, bad parents and/or violent or awful citizens. This insistence on our parts that those living in poverty are somehow noble and pure, untainted by greed or covetousness, is surely a sign of wishful thinking on our parts and nearly to the point of established liberal dogma.

BHLs of 19^th century England and America looked at the poor and shuddered. The BHLs wanted to transform the lives of the poor precisely because the poor were all too often criminal, self-destructive and dangerous. Today we tend to say they are simply misunderstood or the hapless victims of circumstance, and we also tend to forget that predatory behavior may be more common amongst the poor than the well off. To paraphrase a wise Frenchman (yes, they exist) “..a wealthy man has no need to knock over gas stations nor break the law by sleeping under bridges..” - an observation we BHLs soothe ourselves with. And we tend to too quickly disregard the pain and suffering caused by predators from the underclasses.

We BHLs also regard any skin color other than white as a sign of primitive nobility, Blacks and browns to us have soul ..and yellows have mystic wisdom. White people are bland, heartless and soulless.

We BHLs also tend to mock white Christian fundamentalists while excusing black.. but only because we like the joy, exuberance and music of black churches? If you syncopate your superstition it makes it much better, we seem to say.

As for sexual relations, we BHLs also tend to increasingly shun the claustrophobic links of matrimony while wishing them on our gay and lesbian population. Hypocrisy? Not exactly, more the willingness to say, “You have the right to be as miserable as the rest of us who've voluntarily committed ourselves to a protective(?) institution.”

We BHL's also tend to over-look the fact that much gay public behavior is seemingly endless examples of loud, trite, repetitive and garish exhibitionism, originally done as understandable pride and defiance ..but now something akin to the self-aggrandizing boasting of bling-encrusted rappers.

We BHLs have also decried the loss of factory jobs to Asia and Mexico for years despite the fact that we have been in the forefront of mocking and rejecting American products, preferring foreign cars, foreign coffee, clothes, electronics, films etc.

While we BHLs are internationalists and hate hearing the French referred to as being rude and cowardly, the Germans as humorless, the Italians as corrupt.. and so on and so on.. we seem to have no problem condemning all Republicans as stiff and selfish or all Mormons as mad as hatters. (Prejudice, unfortunately, is a part of life, as it saves us time.)

As for America's place among nations we BHLs have never met a war we liked – except for the war against Hitler, as Hollywood could never in its wildest imagination come up with a comic book hero so vile and colorful. Those Darth Vader-like costumes clearly told the world, “We're the bad guys!” Fighting Hitler gained our approval, while the so-called cold war seemed silly to us and a waste of trillions of dollars. “Ike should have sat down with Nikita and finished that vodka bottle until they were singing in harmony together,” would have been our naive hope at the time.

(To be fair to us BHLs we had enough sense to favor fighting the North Koreans in the Korean war but opposed the fighting of the North Vietnamese. Proof of our wisdom can be found in examining Viet Nam today. Although the government is stiff and oppressive about some things, no one is starving and capitalism flourishes. Napalm helped no one 40 years ago.)

BHLs are often wrong or at least wishful thinkers on economic issues – but to no greater degree than conservatives, as has become abundantly apparent.

Finally, as Churchill said of Democracy, “It's the worse system, except for all the others,” when progressive liberalism is wrong its usually wrong for the right reasons. When cold and clinical conservatism is wrong it's usually wrong out of spite. (Okay, I couldn't resist comparisons and I succumbed to the desire to justify.. but didn't I manage to stick it out for a praiseworthy length of time?)

Red Rich Blue Rich – Red Poor Blue Poor

One of the great and possibly deciding questions for the coming decades of this new century is how the rich and the ultra rich will evolve and behave - and how the desperately poor adjust to a new and no doubt harsher reality – the new reality being that the ultra rich will continue to acquire obscenely greater portions of the collective pie – while the poor cannot optimistically seek both protection and influence in a return to communist revolution or even collective bargaining, no matter how great their desperation or longing for nostalgic solace and solidarity.

Looking eastward, It seems highly unlikely the growing hundreds of millions of landless and jobless in China are ever going to band together again and demand reprints of Mao’s Little Red Book. Nor will they organize strike after strike, or gather in new Long Marches until they over-run the new Mandarins in Beijing. No, the central government has all the tanks, missiles and bombs it needs for putting down rebellions there, and all paid for with American dollars, and the new Mandarins have a firm stranglehold on food distribution as well.

Equally, on the windy steppes of Mother Russia are the tens of millions left behind in dire poverty by the insatiable and glitteringly ostentatious greed of the kleptocracy likely to cry for a sequel to Lenin’s October putsch and Stalin’s decimation of every group with any power, affluence or influence? Only the die-hard relics over the age of eighty there seem to have any lingering nostalgic dreams of socialist utopias and class revenge.

So what then will be the coming roles of the very rich and the very poor?

Perhaps some of the answers can be found in the examining of the different kinds of rich people – for there are vastly different types and behaviors – just as there are with the poor.

In America, for example, we can, as an aid to general understanding, divide the rich into two groups. Let us call them the Red States Rich or Red Rich for short, and the Blue States Rich, or the Blue Rich. The same can be done with the poor, Red Poor and Blue Poor. (These labels have more to do with mentality than geography – but geography decides voting trends.)

Let’s begin with the Blue Rich. The Blue Rich are exemplified by the likes of Bill Gates, Steven Jobs, Jeff Bazos. These are men, often born and raised in liberal Blue state areas, well educated in renowned colleges, heirs to no great fortunes or blue blood families, but basically self-made billionaires in young new-tech industries - men who also care about poverty, the environment, the big questions of the age and above all shaping a better future for the world and mitigating real problems.

The Blue Rich are fans of Obama, the Clintons, Oprah, vacationing in Tuscany, going back stage to say hello to Bono. They buy Segways and Priuses for their friends and junior family members. They support gay, minority and women’s rights and shudder at the thought of getting their information from Fox. They contribute to refugee relief and fighting cholera in Haiti as well as the global fight against malaria and polio. They espouse (..at least publicly..) the belief that we’re all in this together and we must think of future generations. The Blue Rich are softies and never speak of the need for tough love, steely realism or the dangers of greedy organized labor or the madness of social security “entitlements.”

For that we have the Red Rich, represented by Bushes down through the last four generations, the Coors family in Colorado, the oil-rich Hunts and Basses and Kochs of Texas. These family dynasties, built on old glamourless meat-and-potatoes industries, have shown little concern for health care iniquities, for the environment, for social justice and minority rights, or the least bit of sympathy for the down-trodden at home and especially abroad.

They and their ilk embrace a me-first and a the-government-can-get-out-of-my-way-unless-I-can-bribe-it-to-do-my-personal-bidding philosophy. They feel that as members of large families, with dozens of lazy dependents, incompetent nephews, dull-witted sons, grasping sons-in-law, leech-like brothers-in-law, vindictive ex-wives and demanding mistresses, that their obligation to their fellow man is being more than tested daily locally by the parasites in their own families. Charity begins at home and often dies there, is their experience.

Besides being weighed down and drained and demoralized (..the perfect word!) by blood-related moochers (as, of course, are most Blue State Rich), the Red State Rich are also often highly annoyed that they get so little credit from educated Blue State snobs for creating blue collar jobs and tenaciously keeping the wheels of industry turning.

“Why,” they complain, with a great deal of justification, “does a man like Steve Jobs get all the praise and publicity, while the men who dig for minerals and drill for oil get nothing but condemnation and scorn? Why is Apple sexy and Haliburton thought to reek of sulfur and Hades?” (Geez.. with obvious good reason, I would venture..)

“..and why are all things imported and exotic, decadent and perverse, atheist and profane, preferable to our good old-fashioned American Puritanism and fear of the foreign? For God’s sake, for the first two centuries of our existence America had been amply protected from contamination by our two great oceans, and now we find our soft underbelly being infiltrated by those leaf-blower-bearing beaners from below the border – and how many languid Latino landscapers and lettuce pickers do we need? If that damned Obama wants to start some kind of public works program why not build a new canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific right along our border with Mexico and make it a mile wide with banks a mile high? Along with that, if we can just stop those gays from living monogamous family lives, keep Spanish language signs from being displayed in our airports and motor vehicle bureaus, label Christmas nativity scenes as such and promote the teaching of Creationism in our schools – then we’ll be safe and thrive and remain masters of our own fates!”

Similarly the differences between the Red Poor and the Blue Poor reflect the aspirations of the poor to resemble the rich. The white rural poor aspire to resemble the Red State Rich, while the urban poor look to Obama and Oprah as examples to aspire to. But while the rural and the urban poor are different in many ways they do share one commonality – the fervent hope the Lord Jesus Christ will show them mercy and a life of plenty and pleasure in the next world. (If not him, then the Lottery.)

(We Liberals generally mock the rural whites for their fundamentalist religion – while forgiving black church-goers for their equal fervor – no doubt because we like their music better, black superstition being of a more joyous celebratory nature while white superstition seems so sour, repressed, vindictive and anemic.)

America is an astoundingly unusual country. It is perhaps the only country where the poor (whites) consistently and conservatively vote against their own interests. The rural white Red State residents’ intense dislike of interfering government, unions, collective bargaining, international cooperation or organizations like the United Nations – and especially do-gooder groups like Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Doctors Without Borders, stems from a general and seething skepticism. Because their primary – indeed sole – interest is self, they cannot even minutely understand or believe that anyone else cares about anything else than the self. “They are liars, deceivers when they say they care!” is their sour response. “Nobody really cares. All they want is attention and praise for being do-gooders. Look at all those phonies in Hollywood with their gala benefits. And that damned Sean Penn in Haiti. You can bet he gets his bottled water first! Nobody ever helped me or gave me a thing!”

(..do we need to wonder why???)

The rich Red and the rural poor Red agree that government help is distant, ineffectual, unreliable, bureaucratic, and resembles the DMV at worst and the Post Office at best – and while the government used to be good at keeping the blacks down it now seems more concerned with keeping them alive.

“What’s in it for us?” they bellow when confronted with government social programs and altruistic organizations. Of course they choose to ignore Medicare, Social Security, Interstate Highways, pure food and drug laws, primary education. To hear them talk you’d think all they need to thrive and be happy is the Pentagon, Fox News and the NRA.

But now that so many millions of the rural state residents have lost their jobs perhaps we’ll be hearing less of “You big government liberals can try to pull the pink slip from my cold dead hand..” and more of “Maybe Karl Rove and Rupert Murdoch aren’t my best friends after all?”

As for the follies and the foibles of the Blue Poor? While the Red Poor hate taxes because they fear the government might take away too much should they ever come into money (..How? ..a generous settlement from the insurance company when the Lord Almighty blows away their trailer?) the minority Blue Poor have no such illusions nor fear of excessive taxation. They know they live in unattractive areas with no jobs and that will likely never have jobs, and they know they have no money to relocate to suburban areas where there might be jobs, nor do they have the funds to buy land in rural areas and return to the farming of their ancestors. Part of the reasons for the great migration to the north was their inability to buy sufficient land in the south or to farm without harassment. The Blue Poor feel trapped where they are and can see no viable alternatives. They feel boxed in, and, if not deliberately isolated by the white world, than at least marginalized and doomed to a subservient and second-rate life.

Would most of them vote for a black candidate merely for the color of his skin? Yes, no doubt. Just as many white voters thought and continue to believe that the pale ninny from the far north is a far wiser leader than a brainy black man ..and she shoots things!

Can this rough categorizing of Red and Blue rich and poor be applied internationally? To China, India, Russia, Brazil?

Of course it can, as every nation and nationality, every age has its Robin Hoods and Sheriff Johns, its Bill Gates and Al Capones, its Oprahs and its Silvio Berlusconis and Rupert Murdochs, its resentful rednecks and its snobby urban sophisticates. The future century will produce myriads of heroes and villains – and alas many many more victims of harsh and heartless economic inequality.

Rah Rah Raw

A joke that’s been making the rounds the last few years is this: Hollywood is high school with money.

Allow me my own variation: America is high school with napalm.

How do I justify this harsh assessment?

Recent reports that the combined costs of the Iraqi-Afghani wars have now surpassed 3 trillion dollars.

Now to get a better picture of what that kind of cash amounts to, consider this: The combined populations of Iraq and Afghanistan is about 60 million. If instead of the 3 trillion being spent on bombs, America had chosen to, it could have given each man, woman and infant 50,000 dollars.

The question springs to mind: why hasn’t America chosen the bribery route instead of prolonged and apparently ineffective bloodshed?

Well, cynics might point out that fear lasts a lot longer than gratitude. “If you want to make a man your enemy lend him money,” warn the knowledgeable.

Cynics also warn that if America started giving money to turn enemies into allies, more impoverished countries would become hostile in order to gain bribes to behave.

Perhaps.

But I still like the high school explanation.

Much of American mentality has been formed by high school and especially by high school football. “War” is ceaselessly waged between small towns, their teams venturing forth into enemy territory to bravely fight for glory and to risk humiliating defeat. Gridiron combat gets the juices flowing and entertains these small town warriors and their proud families. Uniforms and victory are intoxicating. The Red Cross and the Peace Corp are wimpy.

All this coupled with the constant drum beating that all things foreign are inferior and foreigners can never be emulated or respected, is the sound track to the American marching band.

There is also a very real practicality to this eternal zest for battle. After the first world war America reduced it’s armed forced to the point where its standing army was the 22nd largest in the world. When war clouds gathered at the beginning of the 1930’s America had to scramble to rearm. The second world war quite naturally taught America to always be muscular and ready.

And to insure readiness a healthy little war is required every single decade. You cannot have a generation or two go by peacefully, because you’ll end up with a military that has never fought a war. Eternal war has many positive benefits:

1 - On the job training makes military people better warriors.

2 – Bombs and planes and other weapons that have been used, have to be replaced – and with newer and better bombs and planes. This creates jobs in the homeland (What does America continue to do best? Manufacture lethal products) and weapon development insures that America stays several steps ahead of the competition, both on the battle field but also in the marketplace. American arms sales abroad equal or exceed money leaving the country to buy drugs. The “pushing” goes both ways.

3 – If America sent 50,000 dollars to every man, woman and child in Iraq and Afghanistan, most, if not all of the money would be spent to buy products made in other nearby countries. But when spent mainly on bombs American workers benefit.

In the British comedy, The Mouse That Roared, a tiny fictional country declared war on Britain, then immediately surrendered in order to receive aid.

Perhaps America might benefit from a fictional enemy, like the residents of Atlantis or Avatar’s Pandora? We could drop all our napalm in the middle of the Pacific ocean and tell our citizens we were hammering the enemy. New bombs could then been ordered, jobs secured – both in factories and in the Pentagon.

An absurd idea?

Isn’t that exactly what we did in Iraq?

Necessity is the Mother (and Father) of Invention

Although we're all sick to death of the Men-are-from-Mars/Women-are-from-even-farther-out psycho babble - and political correctness still dictates that it is socially dangerous to analyze either too seriously or too humorously any possible differences in the psychic make up of the two sexes - sometimes a simple observation is forgivable.

For example, no one can really take exception to the opinion that it was no doubt a man who invented the beer can opener. It was also, no doubt, a man who invented theme parks and Auschwitzes, brass knuckles and dirt bikes. And as for boomerangs, women would unanimously point out that, "What's the point of throwing something away if you want it to come back to where it started?!?"

And only men could have been cement-headed enough to invent something as invigorating and possibly eviscerating as bungy jumping.

But it was in all probability a woman who invented the sneeze protectors covering restaurant buffets. (We American men are satisfied with the germicidal protection afforded by the gallons of tabasco sauce we inundate everything with, from jello to strawberry shortcake and beluga caviar.)

Women invented deodorant. Men invented tiny voodoo figures handcrafted from toe jam. Men invented pornography. Women invented babies in wicked response.

Women, I venture, also invented shoes. The fairer sex's notorious infatuation with foot clothing could well stem from the fact that back in the days of our cave people forefathers, men wandered more in search of food, and therefore had more thickly callused feet. Women wandered from the cave less frequently, burdened as they were with progeny, so their feet were relatively more tender and in need of relief.

But remembering our caveman days, men invented TV and remote controls. (After all, what does a TV screen resemble more than a cave opening? For millions of years we men huddled in the mouths of caves, looking outward, alert and constantly on watch for danger, our families thus protected further back in the cave. And what did we hold in our hands? A spear, a tool which enabled us to better control our destiny. And from a distance, albeit short.)

Yes, we men are only truly happy and secure when we're holding something pointy and potent in our hand.

Women, no doubt, also invented mirrors. My evidence for such an ungentlemanly accusation? Men's magazines are full of beautiful women. Women's magazines are full of beautiful women. Nobody, except homosexuals, really wants to gaze intensely at men, unless the men in question look like Brad Pitt. (Put a long blonde wig on Brad or Leonardo and they'll look like a Baywatch Babe, proving the axiom that all male sex symbols have something feminine about them, and all female something masculine.)

And it was most certainly a woman who invented the yellow light (you know - the light that flashes briefly between green and red, and which tells women to prepare to stop, and men to floor it.) No man would have thought up this symbol of hesitancy and caution. Stop dithering, we reason. Screw this transitory indecision!

But one debate currently taking place, is between a majority who believes that it was oppressive men who invented and have forced middle eastern women to wear the veil, and a less certain minority who point out it could well have been women who invented the device in days long past to protect themselves from lustful gazes of (..or to further inflame?) men. Conversely, it was probably an altruistic man who invented the push up bra in order to make mountains out of molehills, as we men are wont to do.

Women invented leg and bikini waxing. No Marquis de Sade could ever have been so inventively cruel. And if women hadn't invented the cotton ball-make up remover, there would have been no need to import 3 million slaves from Africa!

And speaking of unforeseen and unfortunate consequences, couldn't the blockheaded men who invented the birth control pill have guessed, that along with greater access to women's bodies, we men would now have to subject ourselves to being measured and then compared with other men, our sexual performances judged and ridiculed by the formerly innocent and inexperienced sex? Why couldn't these rational researchers have fine-tuned the recipe and added knock out drops to the subscription?
If women are going to lie there anyway, they may as well catch up on their beauty sleep.

And, oh, yes - men invented sleep. So that we can, if only briefly, get out of having to listen to incessant chatter. (Adam probably deliberately invented the apple pie, thereby inviting aging and death for the same reason. Thanks to Great Gramps an eternity of yammering was thusly made preventable.)

Mother Nature is a Cold Hearted Bitch

Okay, I suppose the title is a bit harsh. After all She creates rainbows. Rainbows and hemorrhoids. Orgasms and earthquakes. And a baby’s laughter and AIDS both result from putting your pee pee in a place that initially seemed inviting.

But I don’t wish to discuss Mother Nature here in her entirety. Let us forget the judicious spin of electrons or the beneficial tidal effects of the moon. Let us instead confine ourselves to biology, to living things and the things Mother Nature seems to command us living things to do – whether we like it or not.

More specifically violence and competition. The distressing thought occurs that Mother Nature’s favorite son might be much closer to Adolph Hitler than to Jimmy Carter. For in nearly every mammalian species – and reptilian as well – Mother Nature insists that males engage is nearly constant, brutal and deadly battle for dominance and the right to spread their seed.

Mother Nature seems to love bad boys.

If we men are indeed put on this planet primarily to battle and to muscle ourselves to the front of the pack by whatever means necessary, might it be some sort of sacrilege to protest or to resist?

Who are we but puny individuals? Who are we to say that Mother Nature is clumsy and primitive and that sharing and universal brotherhood are a much better way generally? For if universal brotherhood were indeed a better way in the long run surely Mother Nature would have discovered that somewhere in the last 3 billion years. But She has not. On the contrary She continues to arrange things, hormones and claws, so that we males continue to invigorate ourselves with blood before we expel semen.

But modern man has attempted to fool Mother Nature. He uses flowers and chocolate and jewelry instead of rape. He uses credit cards and sports cars instead of hand to hand combat or healthy little wars. And worst of all he uses condoms and other forms of birth control in order to have his jollies without issue, thereby short-circuiting totally Mother Nature’s ultimate purpose for creating him!

While Mother Nature intended us males to have sex with as many females as we can gain access to, She never ever intended males to shoot blanks. At least not to deliberately do so.

And for those who maintain we need to get back to nature, to live in pact with nature, I wish to point out that the whole history of humankind has been that of using the artificial to outfox, subdue and civilize nature. We made spears as the artificial extension of fangs. We learned to weave flax and fibers to make clothing, and even the previous wearing of animals skins to ward off the cold was an artificial contrivance to improve on nature. Everything we have and everything we do has been an improvement on the harsh limitations of Mother Nature. Our laws, our countries, our customs, our schools, our hospitals, our taxes. Nearly ever moment of every day is spent countermanding the demands of a cold-hearted Mother Nature.

So if you find yourself condemning Tiger Woods for having sex with dozens of women, praise him for his restraint. For Mother Nature would have allowed and encouraged him – as the leader of the pack – to have sex with many thousands.. as long as he didn’t use a rubber.