News With Voltaire Volume 2

Voltaire (François Marie Arouet, 1694-1778) was a French philosopher credited with influencing many of the founding fathers of our country. The picture above is more or less there for two reasons; one it just looks effing cool and two it nicely sums up the philosophy of the man whose writings I've come to admire.

Here is the second installment of News with Voltaire!

"The secret of being boring is to say everything."

"Animals have these advantages over man: they never hear the clock strike, they die without any idea of death, they have no theologians to instruct them, their last moments are not disturbed by unwelcome and unpleasant ceremonies, their funerals cost them nothing, and no one starts lawsuits over their wills."


"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."

And rounding it out with an oldie but a goody....

"Anything too stupid to be said is sung."

Top Ten B.M.F. Moments in American History

Top Ten B.M.F. Moments in American History

We Americans have been given a bad rap lately because after a crisis, we placed our trust in the untrustworthy. But like all the other harrowing moments and / or lapses in our history, this too shall pass. Until then, here are ten historical reminders we can use as sign posts on our way back home. I think we'll find out that it's not that far of a walk.

1. The Boston Tea Party

Not everybody likes tea. And alot of people who don't like it are usually afraid to say it because it might make them look less civilized. But lets be honest with ourselves, it's grass soaked hot water that some explorer presented to some monarch who then in turn forced it down the population's throats. When our forefathers were told that not only was this hoity toity crap going to be forced down their throats as well, but they would also have to pay an extra tax for it; they committed an act of dissent that even Muhatma Ghandi used as inspiration. They dressed up as the least "civilized" people they knew and chucked it off the ships. They didn't do this to frame the Indians, they did it as a statement saying, "We're ALL 'savages' over here, so don't be sending us any more herbs unless they're for smokin'!" For a fictional account of what transpired the next day, check this out.

2. The Declaration of Independence

Penned mostly in a bar on 100% hemp paper, is the best "Dear John" letter given to a monarch since the Magna Carta. Each man who put his signature on this document knew he was potentially signing his own death warrant. Treason wasn't a crime the crown took lightly, and George III was a crazy bastard. Yet living on this side of the ocean, far away from the stink of monarchy and with very little supervision, we concocted a new idea. How about we create a country where people are subject to themselves and not some inbred bafoon with a shiny hat? What if we further that thought and assume that the human being is given certain rights that can't be taken away just because one person is a butthole descended from a long line of buttholes? What would happen if we let the people govern themselves? Well this is what happens....read on!!

3. Our Revolution and That Badass Snake Flag

In the late 1700's, Great Britain was one of the largest superpowers the world had ever seen up to that point. The battle hardened army of King George III had seen action all over the planet and was reputed to be invincible. And the Blackwa....I mean Hessian mercenaries that came with them were known for their cruelty and barbarism. Yet with all this sophistication and reputation, they still insisted on fighting an army of farmers and hunters in the forest while wearing bright red uniforms. They cried "no fair" when our marksmen picked off their officers from the trees, thereby giving birth to the art of sniping. The inevitable victory against these monarch humpers didn't come easily, and we got help from the French in the end to hold them still while we whaled on them. We've since paid that debt back two fold (see # 8). And the whole time, we were using this badass snake flag to show our intent, "step on us, and your ass is bit!"

4. The Barbary Pirate Campaign

Since the early middle ages, the Barbary Pirates were a bane to all who sailed into the Mediterranean. If not payed tribute, they would capture your ship, behead or torture to death it's commander and officers in front their crew, and enslave the rest. So all counties who engaged in trade in the Mediterranean usually complied with the tribute thing and chalked it up to the price of doing business. Then we came along. After Jefferson was elected President, he ceased our share of the tribute and deferred protests and questions of his new policy to "deez nuts" when approached by the envoy from Tripoli. The resulting 4 year war scored as follows: The United States Navy and Marine Corps: 3 killed / 3 wounded / 2 Ships Lost. Barbary Pirates: 800 Dead /1200 Wounded / 4 Metric Assloads of Ships Lost. To this day, descendants of the Barbary Pirates occasionally feel sharp stings to their backsides randomly and seemingly without cause. So this was the first time in our history, we said "you're welcome" to the rest of the world and went about our merry way. It wouldn't be the last....

5. The Old West

Freedom rules. But much like donuts, too much of a good thing can often bloat you and cloud your judgment. This is how it was during our westward expansion. Lack of any honest authority figures coupled with a largely uneducated population made for some pretty interesting scenarios. For example, in a free society, self expression is a right we all have that cannot be infringed upon. So then does it follow, that if my buddy cheats me at poker and I shoot him point blank in the face, I am protected by my rights to express my disdain for dishonorable gamesmanship? After all, liberty was a new concept. At less than 100 years into it, the free world as we know it was going through it's Cambrian Era, and the question of whether it's okay to shoot your friend in the face out of self expression came up quite a bit. A few thousand public hangings later, the general population got this new freedom thing sorted out. This was a time when Good, Evil, and Neutral all made appearances and asked questions that we are still answering today. A definite B.M.F. Moment in our history.

6. Nikola Tesla's Mad Genius

During a time when everything that we consider to be modern was being invented, this guy was getting his ideas stolen by the grumpy old man he worked for. Even though he was an ethnic Serb born in Croatia, he considered himself a patriotic American. When he was finally unleashed from Edison and given the ability to fly on his own, he came up with the technology that eventually led to the internet, cell phones, neon signs, radio, television, electric cars, robotics, better x rays, and of course particle beams. There are a couple of reasons he became just a footnote in your high school history class. The first one is he devised a way for everyone on the planet to have free electricity and information by using specially designed transmitter arrays that would be non polluting and a cinch to maintain. The second is that he actually DID invent a freaking death ray that scared the hell out of everyone so much, that they ridiculed him into obscurity. Today he the only single person on this list of B.M.F. Moments in American history, and all American geeks today can trace their social lineage directly to Nick. Thanks, buddy!

7. The Goddamn Airplane

Yeah, people had hot air balloons. But the Wright brothers saw that as human float, not human flight and decided to give us what we really wanted. So it came to pass that a couple of bicycle geeks with alot of time and not yet broken bones on their hands eventually gave rise to the airplane. Even though there were many attempts that would clearly qualify today as an extra season of Jackass, the crazy bastards did it. "Hi, I'm Orville Wright, and this is the aero-plane!" was often announced to reporters at the sites just before test flights. This was further reinforced by his brother Wilbur, who would add "Yeah dude!" with both thumbs extended. After each horrific crash, they would go over the physics and math in the back of the ambulance before shock, hemorrhaging, and / or blood loss made Orville have to take a break for a while. Eventually though, their efforts paid off and our country became the first culture to embrace the Air Show.

8. Kicking Germany's Ass and Saving France's not Once, but Twice in 25 Years

While compiling this list, I wanted to shy away from the war aspect of our history. Contrary to how it may look sometimes, Americans are actually pretty peaceful people. In fact we had no desire to enter into either of two wars that forced us to kick Germany's ass and save France's (twice), but we got forced into them by military sucker punches. And as peaceful as we are at heart, if you really make the effort piss us off, we usually win whatever war we are in with you. It was already starting to get personal when Hitler decided to attack our mother country, the since forgiven and still beloved Great Britain. And if you know anything about American boys, you know not to mess with our momma. Military strategists all say that it's almost impossible to win a two front war. Yet we had the Empire of Japan, who hadn't been defeated in a war....ever, on one side. And on the other side we had the Nazi war machine who had already conquered most of Europe. We and our honorable British allies charged into this two front war and the ass kicking we laid out was so catastrophic that we still see the results today. The Nazi war machine is now peaceful Germany once again complete with pretentious techno clubs and scat porn. And the once undefeated Empire of the Sun, birthplace of the deadly samurai, is now the land of Hello Kitty, cosplay, and vending machines with girls' dookie drawers.

9. Rock and Roll

It sprouted up all over our country in different places almost all at once. It was called by some the bastard child of the Blues and Gospel, but if you lived in Texas it was Blues and Country, in Kentucky it was Bluegrass and Gospel. Doesn't matter. As much as we may take it for granted now, this was a turning point for all humanity in that music once again became a more visceral experience. Not since people still lived in tribes had music carried so much feeling and sensual expression. Sure Mozart's music was pretty, Beethoven is great too, and that Big Band stuff that was popular right before Rock was born wasn't bad. But once this new music hit the airwaves, people started to go nuts. The conservative types at the time thought it was everything from a passing fad to literally direct communication from Beelzebub himself, and tried their damndest to have it banned. Fifty years later, it's still the music of free hearted people all over the world, born from a free country by a free people.

10. The Effing Moon

It wasn't a hoax, it wasn't faked, anybody with a good enough telescope and laser can silence the skeptics. One morning in Washington, a possibly still tanked from the night before John F. Kennedy strutted into Congress and proclaimed "We're going to put someone on the moon, and we are going to do it in 10 years." And it was done. After the initial shock of "holy crap there's a guy on the moon" wore off, we discovered that there wasn't actually much to do up there. That is other than making three story shadow puppets, chipping golf balls six miles, and calling the Russian president every night to ask if we were blocking his light. Now at the end of the day the only thing that could conceivably be higher than our flag would be Willie Nelson and Tommy Chong together at an Amsterdam coffee shop.

So there you have it, the Top 10 Most B.M.F. Moments in American History.

Written by a liberal....

Cheers!

Merlyn Trey Hunter

WOOAAHH!! Action Alert!!!!

I've just been notified by email that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin and the two republican commissioners on his lap just approved new rules that will allow for a ginormous flood of media consolidation across America. In other words, good bye local and investigative journalism. This is more 1984 crap they are trying to pull to get a stranglehold on every piece of information you receive.

They tried to pull the same stunt in 2003 when they thought no one was looking, but an outcry from people who WERE looking stopped it. This has to end here and now. We have to get back to objective and unbiased journalism before it's too late.

Sign the petition and spread the word. Again, this news is only a few minutes old so there's still time!

Let's Impeach Us a Penguin!!!

Even though it infuriates me to no end that in the last year of a damn good president's term, he and the entire country were subjected to his impeachment at the hands of a bunch of dress sniffing republican weasels desperate to slander him. I remember Ken Starr's hoisting of a dress in the air like he found the Holy Grail.

Fast forward to now. We have the same republican weasels in charge for about six years, completely reversing every good thing that came out of the 90's. Record surplus becomes record deficit. Housing market crashes. A President with the cognitive reasoning of a cocker spaniel sees a memo entitled "Bin Laden Wants To Crash Planes into our Freaking Buildings" and decides it would make a really cool origami project instead of the report it was intended to be. The country is told that gay marriage is a bigger threat than poverty or lack of health care. Basically from 2000 up to 2006, this country was run by the dumbest of the dumb, and for a while people were eating it up.

It got to the point where it began to physically hurt to listen to the news. The poor were vilified, and the rich were given a heaven on earth.

Well the winds of change have once again blown into the halls of liberty. America is waking up from it's testosterone and propaganda induced nightmare to see that they have been deceived. Clinton's indiscretions don't look so bad when you consider the damage done the the country, the constitution, and the free world by these asshats.

There is a Democratic Congressman from my home state that is different from alot of other Democrats in that his spinal column looks to be made of actual bone and not flan. He is driving a campaign to start impeachment proceedings against the turd who has probably been the actual president the whole time.

Please give Congressman Wexler the help he needs to start this process. Sign his petition to start the return to our country's honor. No more torturers, oil tycoons, war criminals, or latter day czars need to go on with business as usual.

Soooo Weeeee! Squeal Like A Con For Me!!

I've had to take a couple of days off, but when I saw this at Democratic Underground, I had to share it. I love how these guys come out with something every three or four months that make the neocons and their thralls screech like wounded fruit bats until congress gets involved. Never mind that Ann Coulter can call for the death of a Supreme Court Justice, forget that the Inflatable Rush can call soldiers who protest the war "phoney soldiers", and if Michelle Malkin goes after a 12 year old boy like a political opponent...that's all okay. Why let Congress get involved, it's all good clean right wing fun.

But when someone from the other side decides to bradcast some truth, well then we need Congress to stop what it's doing and condemn it.

Well guys, they're still around and they got something new. Cover your ears, because the banshees are going into overtime on this one.

From '67 to '07, Truth from Across Time

People are fond of saying "those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it", and that's a very true statement. I think there have been very few cases where it has happened to a nation over such a short span of time such as here though. Just like in Vietnam, a war was started on the pretense of a national security threat and coming to the aid of those in need. And just like then, it was all just a big hoax to line the pockets of merchants and defense contractors.

It's even the same effing cast of characters right down to Rumsfeld being there at the exact moment he could do the most harm. Dick Cheney made a return to bonehead strategic thinking on a global scale after his hiatus too. Tricky Dick Nixon's war cabinet helped organize this war in Iraq and it seems they face the exact same repercussions for screwing it up like last time..... retirement in riches.

Thankfully other things remained the same too though. At first the people who thought this war was a dumb idea were branded liberals, traitors, and associated with Barbara Streisand. But as the body count rises, and the exit door drifts further down the hallway, people are starting to see what this mess is all about. And we have these words from another man from that time who actually deserves to be with us still, but isn't. This is 23 minutes of your life that you really need to invest for the sake of knowing the bigger picture.

Ebenezer Baptist Church April 30, 1967

This is one of the most beautiful sermons the good Reverend ever gave. As you listen, you may get chills as this speech could very well have been made last week about this war.




When I think of all the bigoted flotsam and jetsam coming from current religious leaders like Pat Robertson who actually called for the death of a world leader on national TV, I see why so many are drawn to agnosticism. But here was a man who actually thought Christianity was supposed to be based on the teachings of the gentle Nazarene, and not some Norse god of war. Where IS the Religious Left nowadays? How did mainstream American Christianity slip so far to the right of the political center? Listen to this MLK speech and then one from Pat Robertson and you will swear we are working with religions as far apart as Buddhism and Orthodox Aztec Church of Heart Removal.

A Tale of Two Georgies (Part 1)

Boston December 17, 1773

Ye Olde Uncle Foch Snooze’s Tavern and Whiskerarium

It’s Friday night and the place is packed full of men with too little deodorant and women with too much underwear. Our country is still in its larval stage at this point, but some themes that have stuck with us are readily apparent. Just common folks unwinding after a vicious pre-Revolutionary work week. The atmosphere is tense because of “George”, and his name is brought up quite a bit in both the “liberal” and “conservative” cliques.

Standing on a wooden table giving a speech we have powdery wig wearing Walter Walterson, a conservative in the acceptable definition for that era. Back then they had a different name, they were called Tories. Walter is ticked off what with all of the scruffy looking ne’er do wells rocking the boat by defying HIS beloved George. Intellectual snobs who thought themselves wiser than the king, they were. These riff raff were threatening the status quo that made the Colonies great and British.

“A man should be proud to have soldiers of the crown garrisoned in his house by order of his liege!” Walter announced as he hefted his tin flagon in the direction of a new bailey that was hastily constructed after the last riot. “It shows a special kind of regard for his subjects when his majesty bestows this honor, a special trust! We face the most deadly enemies in the history of our empire whatever inconveniences we must endure for our families’ safety should NOT concern us. Unless you have something to hide that is…..”

Uncle Foch Snooze’s was a Torie tavern after all, so Walt’s spontaneous declaration of crown loyalty and regurgitated propaganda was well met with a room full of “aye”s and similarly raised flagons. “We are the only true citizens of this land! And God has given our kingdom these colonies as a testament to the greatness of the British Empire!! Long live the king!”

Seamus Hannedy and William O’Reely, Walter’s Irish stable boy and manservant (respectively) jumped to their feet in support of their master’s words. Seamus, being the boldest but the dumbest of the two was first to add to the growing pep rally. “Here, here master! Oye gets tahrned in a bed whey whenever me hart thinksa nuttin boot tha king b’gosh I tell ye!” Awkward general silence eventually oozed into a state of equally awkward and confused sounds of accord as the crowd GUESSED he meant something ….well something good. The thing about Hannedy was that even HE didn’t know what was coming out of his mouth half the time. Top notch stable boy though…

The harbor was still a dark amber color from the escapades the night before. The local ruffians backed by their “Sons of Liberty” puppet masters had destroyed a precious cargo of British tea by dumping it overboard from the ships to the water below. The proud vessels Dartmouth and the newly arrived Beaver and Eleanour were violated and the livelihoods of Boston’s tea merchants were shamelessly inconvenienced. Those ships are the king's property, after all. The proud Dartmouth, graceful Eleanour, and yes even the king's precious Beaver were violated all night long by shabby men.

(snicker)

At first, everyone had said local Indians were responsible. One of them even had “I be an injun bloke” written in red paint on the back of his jacket to avoid any potential confusion. Clever ruse….these people were good. However the drunken boasts the next morning pointed to liberal scum, Alexander Hamilton, as the ring leader of these beastly men.

And that was the source of all the fuming and grumbling in the smoky recesses of Uncle Foch Snooze’s that cold Friday night. Resentment was growing, and it was beginning to fester in drinking establishments such as these. These upstart colonists who claim no loyalty to the great George are nothing more than traitors, scallywags, and “readers” in the hearts and minds of this establishment.

These Sons of Liberty were starting to spread their message of defiance throughout His Majesty’s colonies. And last night’s ruckus will serve as a recruiting tool for years to come unless they find a way to stem this tide of liberalism. The notion of a person being in charge of his own destiny and not subject to the king’s rule was laughable at best. If all men are created equal, then why are some men born king? Let their so called “free minds” chew on that one for a while!

Who did these barbarians think they were? After all, even after dumping all of that luxurious tea into the harbor, the soldiers and constables had to stop people from running into the dark Earl Grey surf with enormous crumpets clutched to their chests like boogie boards*. One unfortunate woman who succeeded in the stunt was heard to slur, “quite lovely” before succumbing to hypothermia and adding more chaos to the harbor’s surreal new biochemical makeup. So they were still English at heart after all and the tea was of impeccable quality. What a waste.

Walter continued his tirade. “It’s all these foreign influences, Catholics, Masons, and intellectuals that have taken us here! If we could just go back to being a white, English, Protestant, and well behaved little colony I’m certain all of this chaos will pass! We have mixed ourselves too closely with too many different kinds of people and we have become perilously close to….diversity!”

The simultaneous gasp of the entire tavern conveyed the brevity of his last statement. And Walter used the ensuing silent pause to gaze upon everyone assembled with a look that meant business, brow furrowed, nostrils flared, and talcum powder cascading like unholy snowflakes from his fake hair. Anger and irritation in the crowd were starting to give way to genuine dread and fear. Fear of being forced into accepting undesirable elements of humanity as “different” instead of the more comfortable “less than”. What next? A Catholic governor? Poor people owning land?

The assembled crowd was a cross section of the more wealthy and influential loyalists in the upper colonies. Walter had his riders send invitations to the gathering this morning after reading about the tea incident in the newspaper. There was no masking the paper’s liberal bias anymore as the headline simply read verbatim: “HA HA HA HA!” There were also several articles praising the qualities of this new black tar drink called “coffee”. Yeah, like that would ever take the place of a good cup of tea…..it’ll never catch on here.

“You’ve made your point, young Walterson!” wafted the wizened voice of Sir Cockton “Cock” Shaney. Sir Shaney always made it a point to be the voice of reason at these gatherings. No one was certain what exactly earned him his knighthood, but rumor had it that George and he were student and teacher once upon a time. There was a darkness to him that couldn’t be readily explained. All babies within twenty paces of him just start shrieking inconsolably. Whatever it was, Sir Shaney had a way of making even the hardest British redcoat scamper aside in fear whenever they crossed his path.

Shaney continued “Until this body accepts my last written proposal and acts on it, we shall all be listening to the same speech over and over again, just with different words. I painstakingly pointed out every detail required to make it come to fruition, I even provided visual aids to…”

“Cock!” Walter interrupted.

“Yes?”

“Ah yes, you are referring to the written proposal you submitted by carving ‘just torture the bastards to death’ into your chair and using it to beat your chambermaid into a coma last Christmas party? The council has already deliberated, has made its decision, and stands by it. There were children in the same room for God’s sake, man! We respectfully ask that you lay that plan to rest, Sir, however appealing and intricate as it may seem to you.”

“Fags…..”

Karlton Rovington, the rotund fertilizer tycoon, used the uncomfortable silence to give his input. “The liberal elements in this country have us at a disadvantage on the following fronts: education, press bias, and these weird concepts called ‘facts’. Facts are these strange pieces of information that are supposedly not subject to the crown’s scrutiny or alteration. Here is one example of a supposed ‘fact’, if you jump in front of a running horse you will be hurt. Well what if you’re the king? Wouldn’t the horse either stop or be instantly transported to Hades for its insolence?”

“Oooh ya bet’cher arse this guy’s smart!!!” O’Reely piped in from the back. “Quiet taig!” barked Walter in response. He was also transfixed by the hardcore science his colleague was laying down. “Go on, Rovington, you have our attention.”

The tubby man’s sweat glistened like anointing oil as he continued. “Gladly! If we can defeat their facts, we have them dead to rights. And I am here to tell you that facts are easily killed with some simple formulas. Reason is always overpowered by emotion if that emotion can be tweaked far enough. For example let’s say we have one of these bleeding heart Sons of Liberty types giving another one of their soapbox speeches about how all ‘oppressed and subjugated’ we are. One of us can be there to yell ‘hey I noticed we haven’t been invaded by the Turks yet! I guess it’s a good thing our king keeps you safe enough to be able to make that speech huh?!? Let’s face it, gentlemen, no one wants the Turks invading!”

“The Turks…….my GOD, is that a possibility?!” This came from Willie Gibbsin whose lacquered beechwood wig moved as one unit when he raised his eyebrows at the thought of an imminent Turkish invasion. The same wooden wig probably saved him several nasty cuts after he then shrieked in a pitch that should have been way to high for a man and executed a flawless (but horizontal) triple corkscrew dive through the glass window next to him.

“No, no, no you idiots!! It’s NOT a possibility”, Rovington was trying to calm the quickly panicking room by speaking very loudly and slowly. “It couldn’t happen in a million years, and that’s my point! The common people don’t know that, in fact they know very little about the world beyond their farms and churches. We can say pretty much whatever we want to say, and if we say it with enough conviction, the people will believe the bloody sky is green!"

“But Rovington, you said yourself that we are at the disadvantage when it comes to education.” Walter chimed in, “the leaders of this rabble will know deceit when it’s this obvious, and its part of their agenda to make everyone just as educated as they are.”

“Which is why we must work to kill their ‘facts’ as efficiently as we can. We have to approach the common people as though we were ‘one of them’ and….”

“Eeeeewwwww! Seriously?” Screeched the Widow Coultain

“…and show them that being a good British subject is an obedient one by projecting a sense of superiority over these new ‘freedom huggers’. If they believe we are "just plain salts" like them, we can present our "view" as some kind of backwoods wisdom. We will attack their leaders personally by spreading enough misinformation to keep BOTH sides wondering who is telling the truth. We also need to start our own press works that churns out nothing but praise to the king and our point of view whilst ridiculing all others.”

“We can name it ‘FLOWERS’!!!” Someone in back screamed as though the word “eureka” should have preceded the sentence.

“We can name it after this tavern for all I care, the point is we need a method of steering the hearts and minds of this country back to what’s important: King, country, and working endless hours for us in complete servitude. And by the time we are done with them, we’ll have them thinking God just wants it that way!”

With that the entire tavern erupted into thunderous applause. Hope for a return to the “simpler times” seemed real and attainable. Plans were made and schemes were cooked to thwart this new enemy to the crown. This disgusting notion of “freedom” was about to become just another passing fad like “democracy” in ancient Greece or roller disco in twelfth century Venice*.

A consensus was taken and the first target they were going to focus on was Alexander Hamilton himself. Best to start the effort locally, and besides, it was time he paid for all that tea that was snatched from the king’s Beaver!