The Rant

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from Tiffany Langton


Q: I've heard that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life. Is this true?

A : Your heart is only good for so many beats, and that's it...don't waste them on exercise. Everything wears out eventually. Speeding up your heart will not make you live longer; that's like saying you can extend the life of your car by driving it faster. Want to live longer? Take a nap.

Q: Should I cut down on meat and eat more fruits and vegetables?

A: You must grasp logistical efficiencies. What does a cow eat? Hay and corn. And what are these? Vegetables. So a steak is nothing more than an efficient mechanism of delivering vegetables to your system. Need grain? Eat chicken. Beef is also a good source of field grass (green leafy vegetable). And a pork chop can give you 100% of your recommended daily allowance of vegetable products.

Q: Should I reduce my alcohol intake?

A: No, not at all. Wine is made from fruit. Brandy is distilled wine, that means they take the water out of the fruity bit so you get even more of the goodness that way. Vodka comes from potatoes. Beer is also made out of grain. Bottoms up!

Q: How can I calculate my body/fat ratio?

A: Well, if you have a body and you have body fat, your ratio is one to one. If you have two bodies, your ratio is two to one, etc.

Q: What are some of the advantages of participating in a regular exercise program?

A: Can't think of a single one, sorry. My philosophy is: No Pain...Good

Q: Aren't fried foods bad for you?

A: YOU'RE NOT LISTENING!!!. Foods are fried these days in vegetable oil. In fact, they're permeated in it. How could getting more vegetables be bad for you?

Q: Will sit-ups help prevent me from getting a little soft around the middle?

A: Definitely not! When you exercise a muscle, it gets bigger. You should only be doing sit-ups if you want a bigger stomach.

Q: Is chocolate bad for me?

A: Are you crazy? HELLO ...... Cocoa beans ... another vegetable!!! It's the best feel-good food around!

Q: Is swimming good for your figure?

A: If swimming is good for your figure, explain whales to me.

Q: Is getting in-shape important for my lifestyle?

A: Hey! 'Round' is a shape!

Well, I hope this has cleared up any misconceptions you may have had about food and diets and remember, "Life should NOT be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive and well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways - Chardonnay in one hand -
strawberries in the other - body thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and screaming - WOO HOO! What a Ride!"

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by Bob Clasen

I believe that every rational person has already made up his mind about the election on Tuesday, so it is pointless to say anything more. May the best man win. I was disappointed to find out that Osama Bin Laden is still alive. I sincerely hope that his reemergence is not a sign of any impending attack to try and disrupt the election. I think that the fact that some predicted he was dead was an obvious guess based upon his silence for so long. Obviously they were wrong and were perhaps guilty of wishful thinking.

Today, Sharie and I went to the Rose Bowl with a couple old friends to watch the UCLA Stanford football game. It was a beautiful Fall day, 72 degrees and sunny. The UCLA fans partied on the golf course (which serves as a parking lot for the Rose Bowl during football games) and then celebrated when UCLA beat Stanford 21 to 0. We enjoyed leftover Honey Baked ham sandwiches and home made brownies and barbecued potato chips and a few bottles of beer and caught up on old times. (Kevin was worked with me nearly thirty years ago as a law clerk. He is now a Superior Court Judge in Ventura.)

Tomorrow the Clasen Clan is gathering at Joe and Sue's for the annual Halloween Party. It will be nice to see everyone who can make it.

Happy Halloween to you all and a safe, fair election. I hope that both parties unite to support whichever candidate wins.
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The posting has left the site. I would like to look more closely at your source and the motivation for such an article.

This is for the young swingers? You can find this song rising up the charts on MTV and VH1. It was released this week. I bet it gets in the top 5 if not number 1. Most of his hits do this.

Thanks Eminem

http://www.musicmen.co.uk/e107_plugins/media/media.php?view.88

Statement from Ronald Green, Epstein Becker & Green, P.C.

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 28, 2004--The Parties regret that this matter has caused tremendous pain, and they have agreed to settle. All cases and claims have been withdrawn and all Parties have agreed that there was no wrongdoing whatsoever by Mr. O'Reilly, Ms. Mackris, or Ms. Mackris' counsel, Benedict P. Morelli & Associates. We now withdraw any assertion that any extortion by Ms. Mackris, Mr. Morelli, or Morelli & Associates occurred. Out of respect for their families and privacy, all Parties and their representatives have agreed that all information relating to the cases shall remain confidential.

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http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20041028006128&newsLang=en

In Sioux City, Iowa, Kerry called the missing explosives "a growing scandal" and said Americans "deserve a full and honest explanation."
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Here it is:

THE MYTH OF THE 'MISSING EXPLOSIVES': A SHAMELESS LIE
BY RALPH PETERS (NY Post http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/32832.htm)

October 28, 2004 -- SHOULD the United Nations decide who be comes our president? Sen. John Kerry wouldn't mind. He's shamelessly promoting the lies that the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency is telling about Iraq. [Working closely with the NY Times and CBS News].

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A devious IAEA report suggests that 400 tons of explosives were spirited away by our enemies under the noses of our Keystone-Cops troops after the fall of Baghdad. The document just happened to be released in the closing days of our presidential election. Purely a coincidence, of course. Brought to you by those selfless U.N. bureaucrats who failed in Iraq and are now failing in Iran.
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Since Kerry's willing to blame our troops for a scandal invented by America-haters, let's look at the story the military way, by the numbers.

One: The IAEA claims its inspectors visited the ammo dump at Al-Qaqaa on March 9, 2003, and found the agency's seals intact on bunkers containing sensitive munitions. Unverifiable, but let's assume that much is true.

Two: Faced with an impending invasion, Saddam's forces did what any military would do. They began dispersing ammunition stocks from every storage site that might be a Coalition bombing target. If the Iraqis valued it, they tried to move it. Before the war.

Three: Members of our 3rd Infantry Division — the heroes who led the march to Baghdad — reached the site in question in early April. Despite the pressures of combat, they combed the dump. Nothing was found. Al-Qaqaa was a vast junkyard.

Four: Our 101st Airborne Division assumed responsibility for the sector as the 3ID closed on Baghdad. None of the Screaming Eagles found any IAEA markers — even one would have been a red flag to be reported immediately.

Five: At the end of May, military teams searching for key Iraqi weapons scoured Al-Qaqaa. They found plenty of odds and ends — the detritus of war — but no IAEA seals. And no major stockpiles.

Six: Now, just before Election Day, the IAEA, a discredited organization embarrassed by the Bush administration's decision to call it on the carpet, suddenly realizes that 400 tons of phantom explosives went missing from the dump.

Seven: Even if repeated inspections by U.S. troops had somehow missed this deadly elephant on the front porch, and even if the otherwise-incompetent Iraqis had been so skilled and organized they were able to sneak into Al-Qaqaa and load up 400 tons of Saddam's love-powder, it would have taken a Teamsters' convention to get the job done.

Eight: If the Iraqis had used military transport vehicles of five-ton capacity, it would have required 80 trucks for one big lift, or, say, 20 trucks each making four trips. They would have needed special trolleys, forklifts, handling experts and skilled drivers (explosives aren't groceries). This operation could not have happened either during or after the war, while the Al-Qaqaa area was flooded with U.S. troops.

Nine: We owned the skies. And when you own the skies, you own the roads. We were watching for any sign of organized movement. A gaggle of non-Coalition vehicles driving in and out of an ammo dump would have attracted the attention of our surveillance systems immediately.

Ten: And you don't just drive high explosives cross-country, unless you want to hear a very loud bang. Besides, the Iraqis would have needed to hide those 400 tons of explosives somewhere else. Unless the uploaded trucks are still driving around Iraq.

Eleven: Even if the IAEA told the truth and the Iraqis were stealth-logistics geniuses who emptied the site's ammo bunkers under our noses, the entire issue misses a greater point: 400 tons of explosives amounted to a miniscule fraction of the stocks Saddam had built up. Coalition demolition experts spent months destroying more than 400,000 tons of Iraqi war-making materiel.

Our soldiers eliminated more than a thousand tons of packaged death for every ton the United Nations claims they missed. Does that sound like incompetence? Why hasn't our success been mentioned?

Can't our troops get credit for anything?

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Twelve: The bottom line is that, if the explosives were ever there, the Iraqis moved them before our troops arrived. There is no other plausible scenario.

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Sen. Kerry knows this is a bogus issue. And he doesn't care. He's willing to accuse our troops of negligence and incompetence to further his political career. Of course, he did that once before.

Ralph Peters is the author of "Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace."


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Instant Messenger Delivers Political Pop-Ups


Welcome to the next great leap forward in online political attack ads: instant messaging pop-ups.
Some computer users are reporting a pop-up that appears on their monitors when the only application running is America Online's Instant Messenger.

The ad features a sallow-looking headshot of Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. John Edwards (N.C.), gazing across a wall-to-wall field of $50 and $100 bills. The text reads, "Learn The Truth About John Edwards" and offers viewers the chance to click on a link. That link takes them to a Web site called www.thetruthabouttriallawyers.com. The sites feature two videos excoriating Edwards's history as a trial lawyer. A petition on the site urges people to "Tell John Edwards to urge his friends to: Stop suing our doctors! Stop abusing our courts! Stop wrecking our economy!"

The ad and site are paid for by the November Fund, a group supported by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. It was established to urge tort reform and raise support against Edwards's bid for the vice presidency. The chamber has spent $3 million on the fund so far, according to an October filing with the Internal Revenue Service, which maintains a searchable database on so-called 527 advocacy groups.

Shelley Hymes, a spokeswoman for the November Fund, said the campaign began last Monday and would run through Election Day. She said that feedback "has been terrific" from the technology community and from people who received the ad. She said the group has gotten no complaints, though a Google search reveals griping about the ads on several online weblogs.
AOL accepts political advertising on its service (as does washingtonpost.com) as well as through IM, though spokesman Andrew Weinstein declined to name most other political groups that have bought ad space. The Democratic National Committee runs ads through AOL IM, but not as pop-ups.

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by Bob Clasen

A friend sent me a mock resume of George Bush that portrayed him as a complete idiot, a criminal, a friend of thieves, a coward, a person with no redeeming value.

This is how I respond to people who feel this way about Bush (or Kerry for that matter):
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Doesn't it scare you that voters have elected Bush to the governorship twice and the Presidency once? According to polls, he has a good chance of winning again.

What does it say about democracy that voters would elect a person whom you feel is fairly represented by this (libelous) resume? Voters must be complete idiots. How can democracy work if such a dolt can become President?

I prefer not to think of Kerry in this way because it would speak too negatively about my friends and family who support him. I don't think Kerry is a cretin or an evil villain. I merely think that his strategic thinking regarding the war on terror would likely make him less competent to fight it. I do not question his patriotism or good intentions. If he is elected, I wish him the best, as he will be my President.

It makes decisions easier when you caricature your opponent. If things are Black and White then choices are easy. But real world choices are usually more complex, gray and mixed. I certainly don't think Bush is perfect. The choice in all elections is between the lesser of two evils.

It disturbs me when I see this pattern: simplifying the complex and caricaturing your opponent in order to help to make it seem that difficult decisions are really simple.
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by Bob Clasen


Voter Turnout

Everyone from P. Diddley to Madonna is arguing that we need to “get out the vote.” Felons, senile senior citizens, ignorant teenagers, everyone has a duty to vote “or die” as P. Diddley so curiously puts it.

I would like to propose another notion. Too many people vote. People who do not follow the news, people who do not know the first thing about Kerry or Bush, people who do not know the first thing about politics. People who are serial criminals. People who are not citizens and who should not have been allowed to register. People who can barely read.

Why should an ignoramus vote? If you don’t know anything about the election, stay home, take drugs, watch MTV, but don’t inflict your abysmal ignorance upon the rest of the population, please.

Hollywood, are you listening?

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another dialogue posted by Bob Clasen


On Oct 24, 2004, at 3:31 AM, Peter wrote:


The discussion, to my mind, turns on a key moral dilemma: When is it permissible to do something bad to accomplish something good? When does the end justify the means?

In 1939 would one have found it acceptable, morally, to murder Hitler? Okay, so we’re all in agreement there. But hold on, how do we go about implementing this as national policy today? Do we have a CIA assassination squad lining up names to be bumped off? There are lots of nasty leaders in the world today, on many continents, scattered around the world. Do we just get on with it? Send out the assassination squads? Do we worry about the obvious collateral damage of innocent deaths? And if we are morally empowered to start murdering people in the name of our freedom loving democracy (no inconsistency there), what about destabilising other governments? Or conquering other nations? In such cases, when do we start to bother about the inevitable innocent casualties? As the world’s sole superpower, are we not now obliged to use this power for good? And if it would have been okay in 1939 to murder Hitler, then surely today it is permissible to do similar things which a superficial analysis might think of as heinous, but which clearly are for the long-term advancement of civilisation. No? Where does one draw the line then? Is it even a moral question at all, just a practical question? i.e. America ought, if she were able, to conquer the non-democratic world so as to impose democracy. However, this is patently absurd from a practical standpoint, so we pick our targets carefully, one-by-one. Once Iraq is free, move onto the rest of the Middle East, etc. But this is just tactics and practicalities of implementation; the principle is clear: America has a moral right, perhaps an obligation, nay, even a mission, to use its military power to impose freedom around the world. Particularly around the non-Christian world?

One death to save millions of lives in the hypothetical case of murdering Hitler? Right. 30,000 deaths, and counting, to save what in the real case of the Iraq war?
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Bob replies: The original proposition was that four Cubans had tried to assassinate Castro. Is it "doing something bad" for suffering citizens to assassinate their dictator? I don't think so. Why would it be? Violence is bad if initiated to seize property or simply to murder others. Violence in self defense is justifiable. A dictator who holds power by the wrongful use of force is like a criminal in my mind: a burglar telling me: your obedience or your life. If I can kill the hold up man, I am doing a good thing, not a bad thing.

Of course, if we would have assassinated Hitler, he never would have gone on to do all those terrible things, so you could ask, why did we kill this man? We can’t know what Hussein would have done if he was still in power.

I don’t think that we have a moral obligation to go out and right every wrong in the world. The first justification for invading Iraq was not to spread democracy, but to end a threat. One might argue about the nature of that threat and many people have.

But once we have taken the initiative, gone to war, and overthrown a dictator, I do feel some moral responsibility for trying to clean up the mess left behind. And from a purely pragmatic point of view, we do not want the new government to be even worse than theh old.

But I certainly don’t advocate a Department of Assassination.

If a dictator becomes a threat to the United States, I think he has no moral protection just because he is the titular head of state. The moral argument for war is self defense.

It is entirely different to condemn citizens of a dictatorship who try to assassinate the dictator they suffer under. I do not condemn such citizens and I do not label them "terrorists."

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by Mark Steyn Chicago Tribune


Maybe I'm getting old. I've been covering politics for 53 years, and that's just since John Kerry's convention speech. I'm sick of this election, even before the Democratic Party's chad-diviners have managed to extend it to mid-December. These are serious times and the senator is not a serious man. And so we have a campaign that has a sharper position on Mary Cheney's lesbianism and the deficiencies of Laura Bush's curriculum vitae than on the central question of the age.

Outsourcing the War

There are legitimate differences of opinion about the war, but they don't include Kerry's silly debater's points. On the one hand, the Tora borer drones that Bush "outsourced" the search for Osama bin Laden to the Afghans, though at the time he supported it ("It is the best way to protect our troops," he said in December 2001. "I think we have been doing this pretty effectively."). But, on the other, he claims he's going to outsource Iraq to the French and the Germans, though neither of them wants anything to do with it.

Bush Failed to Get Bin Laden

As for this Bush-failed-to-get-bin-Laden business, 2-1/2 years ago I declared that Osama was dead and he's never written to complain. There's no more evidence for his present existence than there is for the Loch Ness monster, which at least does us the courtesy of showing up as a indistinct gray blur on a photograph every now and again. Osama is lying low because he's in no condition to get up.

But, even if he weren't, that's a frivolous reductive way of looking at this war. He's not a general or head of state; he can't sign an instrument of surrender, and make all the unpleasantness go away. The enemy is an ideology that appeals to various loose groupings from the Balkans to Indonesia, as well as to entrepreneurial free-lancers like the shooter who killed two people at LAX on July 4, 2002. If Kerry's oft-repeated "outsourcing Osama" crack is genuinely felt, it shows he doesn't get this war. And, if it's just cheapo point scoring, it's pathetic.

Iraq is A Mess; Democrat Defeatism

Almost everything falls into that category. Iraq's messy. So? What isn't? America has no Colonial Office, no political administrators with decades of experience in far-flung climes; its occupation of Iraq was learnt on the fly, because there was no other way. But the ludicrous defeatism over what's at worst a partial success is unbecoming to a great nation. If the present Democratic-media complex had been around earlier, America would never have mustered the will to win World War II or, come to that, the Revolutionary War. There would be no America. You'd be part of a Greater Canada, with Queen Elizabeth on your coins and government health care.

Cheap Drugs from Canada

Speaking of which, if there's four words I never want to hear again, it's "prescription drugs from Canada." I'm Canadian, so I know a thing or two about prescription drugs from Canada. Specifically speaking, I know they're American; the only thing Canadian about them is the label in French and English. How can politicians from both parties think that Americans can get cheaper drugs simply by outsourcing (as John Kerry would say) their distribution through a Canadian mailing address? U.S. pharmaceutical companies put up with Ottawa's price controls because it's a peripheral market. But, if you attempt to extend the price controls from the peripheral market of 30 million people to the primary market of 300 million people, all that's going to happen is that after approximately a week and a half there aren't going to be any drugs in Canada, cheap or otherwise -- just as the Clinton administration's intervention into the flu-shot market resulted in American companies getting out of the vaccine business entirely.

Time Is Not On Our Side

The war against the Islamists and the flu-shot business are really opposite sides of the same coin. I want Bush to win on Election Day because he's committed to this war and, as the novelist and Internet maestro Roger L. Simon says, "the more committed we are to it, the shorter it will be.'' The longer it gets, the harder it will be, because it's a race against time, against lengthening demographic, economic and geopolitical odds. By "demographic," I mean the Muslim world's high birth rate, which by mid-century will give tiny Yemen a higher population than vast empty Russia. By "economic," I mean the perfect storm the Europeans will face within this decade, because their lavish welfare states are unsustainable on their shriveled post-Christian birth rates. By "geopolitical," I mean that, if you think the United Nations and other international organizations are antipathetic to America now, wait a few years and see what kind of support you get from a semi-Islamified Europe.

Socialist Health Care

So this is no time to vote for Europhile delusions. The Continental health and welfare systems John Kerry so admires are, in fact, part of the reason those societies are dying. As for Canada, yes, under socialized health care, prescription drugs are cheaper, medical treatment's cheaper, life is cheaper. After much stonewalling, the Province of Quebec's Health Department announced this week that in the last year some 600 Quebecers had died from C. difficile, a bacterium acquired in hospital. In other words, if, say, Bill Clinton had gone for his heart bypass to the Royal Victoria Hospital in Montreal, he would have had the surgery, woken up the next day swimming in diarrhea and then died. It's a bacterium caused by inattention to hygiene -- by unionized, unsackable cleaners who don't clean properly; by harassed overstretched hospital staff who don't bother washing their hands as often as they should. So 600 people have been killed by the filthy squalor of disease-ridden government hospitals. That's the official number. Unofficially, if you're over 65, the hospitals will save face and attribute your death at their hands to "old age" or some such and then "lose" the relevant medical records. Quebec's health system is a lot less healthy than, for example, Iraq's.

Death By Socialized Medicine

One thousand Americans are killed in 18 months in Iraq, and it's a quagmire. One thousand Quebecers are killed by insufficient hand-washing in their filthy, decrepit health care system, and kindly progressive Americans can't wait to bring it south of the border. If one has to die for a cause, bringing liberty to the Middle East is a nobler venture and a better bet than government health care.
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