Some Things I Don’t Want to Know Before Breakfast

I have just finished reading the morning newspaper with my coffee and tart. When I got to the Health section, I picked up this little gem of knowledge:

“If you took all the human urine produced in the world in one day, it would take a full 20 minutes for it to flow over Niagara Falls.”

I hope you enjoy your next honeymoon at Niagara Falls.

I am not even sure I want to know this speculation AFTER breakfast.

Who sits around thinking this stuff up?



NOTICE: If you would like to read my post on the John Birch Society and McCarthyism, and listen to Bob Dylan singing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues”, it is up and running in Needs More Cowbell. SixxRoxx has invited all of my readers to come on over and read and listen at Needs More Cowbell. Go to the Recent Posts and click on "Powerful Song Memories - by Whit".

Agree or Disagree (Evil)

We used to call the opposition the "enemy" but President Bush calls them the "Evildoers," which casts us back into the Dark Ages. Demonizing the enemy has served as a metaphor in every war we have fought, but Bush apparently uses it in its religious form as if to indicate that the sides of the war consist of God's people against Satan's people. Evildoer describes a Biblical word that occurs at least a dozen times in the Bible, including Revelation: Rev.22.11 “Let the evildoer still do evil, and the filthy still be filthy, and the righteous still do right, and the holy still be holy.” In addition, on September 19, 2001 Bush sent shivers through the spines of Europeans when he used the word “Crusade” in referring to the War on Terror. Remembering the history of the Crusades, the Europeans did not want this attack to broaden into a war between civilizations.

A “Study of the Psychology of Evil” concludes that “central to genocide is the psychological and sociological construction of the concept of the enemy, an abstraction into which the propagandist can embed all the fears and loathing of the citizenry, all their primal anxieties about survival and well-being. Every nation that goes to war must first construct the face of the enemy for its soldiers to want to kill and its citizens to want to work and sacrifice to prevent its takeover of their land, home, way of life, women and children, and even their god.”

The Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn said, “The line between good and evil is not drawn between nations or parties, but through every human heart.” It is a truth that humanity will surely have to absorb if we are ever to stop dehumanizing one another and put an end to atrocities and the absurdity of war.

Do you agree or disagree with Solzhenitsyn’s statement and why?

NOTICE: If you would like to read my post on the John Birch Society and McCarthyism, and listen to Bob Dylan singing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues”, it is up and running in Needs More Cowbell. Sixx has invited all of my readers to come on over and read and listen at Needs More Cowbell.

Hogwash

In a recent interview aired on CNN’s “The Situation Room“, Wolf Blitzer told Dick Cheney that conservatives in Congress “are now seriously questioning your credibility, because of the blunders and the failures.” Cheney responded: “Wolf, Wolf, I simply don’t accept the premise of your question. I just think it’s hogwash.” Prior to Cheney’s use of the word “hogwash”, I had not seen or heard that word used in a long time. Now, suddenly the word is showing up everywhere.

In the brouhaha between Donald Trump and Rosie O’Donnell, Trump told Rosie that Barbara Walters had called him and said that she was on his side, telling him that working with Rosie was a living hell and that she wouldn’t be on the show much longer. The telephone call supposedly took place the previous week while Walters was on vacation. Walters said it was all hogwash.

A check on the use of the word “hogwash” on Google turned up some interesting phrases:

Environmental Hogwash ; utter hogwash; hype and hogwash; hogwash, poppycock, hokum, hooey, horsefeathers and all that rot...; pure bloody hogwash; full of hogwash and e-rumors; bunch of hogwash; a pile of hogwash; a mishmash of hogwash; dispensing hogwash and blather; nonsense, garbage, and hogwash.

The definition of hogwash as used by Cheney and Walters refers to “nonsense or ludicrously false statements”. The word has an interesting etymology. It can be traced back to around 1440 and was, of course, formed from hog + wash; but it does not refer to the water gathered from washing off hogs. Instead, wash, in this sense, is pigswill or leftovers of food and partly liquid waste from the kitchen that are given to hogs to eat. So soon enough, the term hogwash was applied to anything that was completely worthless or absolute rubbish.

The Vice-President and Walters had a whole arsenal of words that they could have chosen from such as the following, which are often preceded by the phrase - "What a load of ....."; sometimes by "What a pile of....." or "What a heap of ....”

* balderdash
* baloney (US, Australia)
* B.S - euphemism for Bullshit
* blatherskite - ETYMOLOGY: blather + dialectal skite, a contemptible person (from Middle English skite, diarrhea, from Old Norse sktr, excrement, from skta, to defecate
* bull
* bulldust - a euphemism for bullshit.
* bunk
* bunkum
* bushwah
* codswallop
* drivel
* fiddle-faddle
* flim-flam
* folderol
* garbage (US)
* horse hockey - (Canadian)
* horsefeathers
* horse puckey
* malarkey (Ireland, US)
* twaddle* crap
* crock of shit, sometimes "what a crock" or shortened to "crock"
* horseshit (US)

Do you prefer the use of hogwash to the other words that are available? Somehow, I can’t envision Cheney using the term “twaddle”, or Walters employing the phrase “crock of shit” instead of hogwash.

NOTICE: If you would like to read my post on the John Birch Society and McCarthyism, and listen to Bob Dylan singing “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues”, it is up and running in Needs More Cowbell. Sixx has invited all of my readers to come on over and read and listen at Needs More Cowbell.

Agree or Disagree (God’s Existence)

In Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov”, Ivan Karamazov concludes, or pretends to conclude, that there is no God. He states, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

Do you agree or disagree with this statement and why?

The Foreign Affairs of Two Georges

Excerpt from George Washington’s Farewell Address, 1796:

“In offering to you, my Countrymen, these counsels of an old and affectionate friend, I dare not hope they will make the strong and lasting impression, I could wish--that they will control the usual current of the passions, or PREVENT OUR NATION FROM RUNNING THE COURSE WHICH HAS HITHERTO MARKED THE DESTINY OF NATIONS: But if I may even flatter myself, that they may be productive of some partial benefit, some occasional good; that they may now & then recur to moderate the fury of party spirit, TO WARN AGAINST THE MISCHIEFS OF FOREIGN INTRIGUE, TO GUARD AGAINST THE IMPOSTURES OF PRETENDED PATRIOTISM--this hope will be a full recompence for the solicitude for your welfare, by which they have been dictated.”

Excerpts from the Second Inaugural Address by George W. Bush, January 20, 2005:

“So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions IN EVERY NATION and culture, with the ultimate goal of ENDING TYRANNY IN OUR WORLD.

“This is not primarily the task of arms, though we will defend ourselves AND OUR FRIENDS by FORCE OF ARMS when necessary.

“ Today, America speaks anew to the PEOPLES OF THE WORLD:

“ALL WHO LIVE IN TYRANNY AND HOPELESSNESS can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.”

A white paper called “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” was presented by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in September, 2000, a year before the attacks on the World Trade Center.

The thrust of the white paper calls for the complete domination of the globe by the United States, with wars against Iraq, Syria, and Iran, domination of outer space and of Cyberspace. It calls for an enlarged military to fight simultaneous wars, and security bases worldwide with extensive military forces posted to keep all nations subservient to US military and economic power. It also calls for nuclear rockets to be fired from spy satellites to suppress any challenge to US global domination. The white paper’s statement of principles outlines a fourfold agenda:

1) Increasing an already enormous military budget at the expense of domestic social programs
2) Toppling regimes resistant to our corporate interests
3) Forcing democracy at the barrel of a gun in regions that have no history of the democratic process
4) Replacing the UN’s role of preserving and extending international order

Questions:

Which President’s speech is more closely aligned with the principles expressed in the PNAC white paper?

Which President reflects your personal views and why?