A rose by any other name, case #17,643

The madness continues. This Reuters story today out of Washington says it all.

And this one from The Kansas City Star.

And even this one out of the People’s Republic of China, complete with a masthead that mentions the 100th anniversary of the birth of Deng Xiaoping.

According to Wikipedia, Deng Xiaoping said the following:

不管黑猫白猫,能捉老鼠就是好猫 (Translation: “It does not matter whether the cat is black or white; as long as it catches the mouse, it is a good cat.”) -- commenting on whether China should turn to capitalism or remain strictly in adherence with the economic ideologies of communism, and

摸着石頭過河 (Translation: “Wading across a river by feeling the rocks.”) -- referring to the fact that China had absolutely no experience with modern capitalism, and

小朋友不聴話,該打打屁股了 (Translation: “It’s time to smack the bottom of unruly little children.”) -- while talking to president Jimmy Carter during his [Deng’s] brief visit to the United States, thereby informing the USA that China was ready to go to war with Vietnam.

One can only trust (a) that the swine flu has nothing to do with swine and (b) that Deng Xiaoping was referring to Vietnam and not to Jimmy Carter.

If one cannot trust one’s government, whom can one trust?


As I said, the madness continues.

How now, brown cow?

I stole borrowed this list from Tracie, who lives down in Florida and blogs under a name too horrible to repeat. She freely admitted that she did not write the piece and didn’t know where she picked it up, but it was too good to keep to herself. So, in a manner of speaking, if you squint your eyes and hold your tongue at just the proper angle, you might say I received permission from her to use it.

As far as I know, the list isn’t copyrighted. But if it is and somebody lets me know, I will remove the post.

Also, as far as I know, the list is meant to be fun. It isn’t intended to offend anyone. If anyone is offended, I may remove the post and then again I may not. If enough people are offended, I will take the matter under advisement.

In the meantime, enjoy.


THE WORLD EXPLAINED


COMMUNISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and gives you some milk.

FASCISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and sells you some milk.

SOCIALISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes one of them and gives it to your work-shy neighbor.
They laugh in your face.

NAZISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both and shoots you.

BUREAUCRATISM
You have 2 cows.
The State takes both, shoots one, milks the other, and then throws the milk away.

TRADITIONAL CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell one and buy a bull.
Your herd multiplies, and the economy grows.
You sell them and retire on the income.

SURREALISM
You have two giraffes.
The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.

AN AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, and force the other to produce the milk of four cows.
Later, you hire a consultant to analyze why the cow has dropped dead.

ENRON VENTURE CAPITALISM
You have two cows.
You sell three of them to your publicly listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with an associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax exemption for the five cows.
The milk rights of the six cows are transferred via an intermediary to a Cayman Island Company secretly owned by the majority shareholder who sells the rights to all seven cows back to your listed company.
The annual report says the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more.
You sell one cow to buy a new president of the United States, leaving you with nine cows.
No balance sheets are provided with the release.
The public then buys your bull.

A FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike, organize a riot, block the roads and set fire to cars, because you want three cows.

A JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
You then create a clever cow cartoon image called “Cowkimon” and market it worldwide.

A GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You re-engineer them so they live for 100 years, eat once a month, and milk themselves.

AN ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You don’t know where they are.
You decide to have lunch.

A RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
You count them again and learn you have 2 cows.
You stop counting cows and open another bottle of vodka.

A SWISS CORPORATION
You have 5000 cows.
None of them belong to you.
You charge the owners for storing them.

A CHINESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have 300 people milking them.
You claim that you have full employment, and high bovine productivity.
You arrest the newsman who reported the real situation.

AN INDIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You worship them.

A BRITISH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Both are mad.

AN IRAQI CORPORATION
Everyone thinks you have lots of cows.
You tell them that you have none.
No one believes you, so they bomb you and invade your country.
You still have no cows, but at least now you are part of a Democracy.

AN AUSTRALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
Business seems pretty good.
You close the office for the day and go for a few beers to celebrate.

A NEW ZEALAND CORPORATION
You have two cows.
The one on the left looks very attractive.

THE BRITISH LABOUR GOVERNMENT
You have two cows, milked by the cow tsar.
One is black and one is white to ensure racial diversity, the black one fancies the white one thus ensuring we have suitable variation in sexual orientation.

AN ULSTER CORPORATION
You have two cows and pay protection for the milk.

A SCOTTISH CORPORATION
You have two cows (the hairy highland variety).
You dip one in chocolate, cover it in batter and deep fry it, just to see if it works.

A ZIMBABWEAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They produce lots of milk for the people.
The State beats you up and steals your cows then gives them to someone who has no idea about looking after them.
The cows die and there is no milk.
It is all the fault of Britain and America.

THE BRITISH POLICE SERVICE
You have 2 cows.
You give them a selection of tasks, including making sure that no one is rude to any other cows for any reason, even if the cows haven’t complained. You ensure that they have the correct ethnic proportion of cows for all the fields in the country, notwithstanding that there are almost no minorities in this field. They are so busy doing these tasks that they have no time to be milked, so you buy some cheaper cows who don’t produce any milk but look as though they should, and you hope that because you can see these cows, everyone will think that there is an abundance of milk.
To fund this, you feed the real cows less so they couldn’t produce any milk even if they weren’t so busy doing non-milk producing activities.

(End of list)


It’s so simple even a child can understand.

I feel so much better now.

Obama: Swine flu not a reason for ‘alarm’

That is today’s headline from the Associated Press. In the article itself, the AP reports that what President Obama actually said was that the threat of spreading swine flu infections -- the World Health Organization says there are 40 confirmed cases in the U.S. now; the CDC says there are 20 -- is a cause for concern but not a cause for alarm.

It reminds me of another president in another decade who said it depends on what your definition of “is” is. It reminds me of David Letterman’s comedic bits where he shows film clips of horrendous crashes and promptly assures us that everything is fine and no one was hurt. It reminds me of George Orwell’s 1984 and the possibility that double-speak has arrived.

Yesterday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said there was no need to close the borders. Today, according to the AP article, President Obama spoke even as the United States undertook close border monitoring to contain the spread of the disease. Phrases like “customs agents” and “Department of Health and Human Services” appeared in the story.

Change. You voted for it. You got it.

The only problem is that the more things change, the more they seem to remain the same. Only the faces are different.

Bits and snippets from the one and only...

...Flannery O’Connor:

“Anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.”

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”

“You would probably do just as well to get that plot business out of your head and start simply with a character or anything that you can make come alive...Wouldn’t it be better for you to discover a meaning in what you write rather than to impose one? Nothing you write will lack meaning because the meaning is in you.”

“When the Protestant hears what he supposes to be the voice of the Lord, he follows it regardless of whether it runs counter to his church’s teachings. The Catholic believes any voice he may hear comes from the Devil unless it is in accordance with the teachings of the Church.”

“To a lot of Protestants I know, monks and nuns are fanatics, none greater. And to a lot of the monks and nuns I know, my Protestant prophets are fanatics. For my part, I think the only difference between them is that if you are a Catholic and have this intensity of belief you join a convent and are heard from no more; whereas if you are a Protestant and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world, getting into all sorts of trouble and drawing the wrath of people who don’t believe anything much at all down on your head.”

“St. Cyril of Jerusalem said to the catechumens, ‘The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.’ No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.”

“One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited His goodness, you are done with Him. The Aylmers whom Hawthorne saw as a menace have multiplied. Busy cutting down human imperfection, they are making headway also on the raw material of the good. Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus’ hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss in vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”

“You will have found Christ when you are concerned with other people’s sufferings and not your own.”


All of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, none of which is quoted above, can be found in her two volumes of short stories (A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, plus The Complete Stories, a combination of the first two plus several stories she wrote and submitted in lieu of a master’s thesis while attending the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop) and her two novels (Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away).

All of the bits and snippets quoted in this post are taken from two other sources, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Flannery O’Connor and The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor by Flannery O’Connor (Sally Fitzgerald, editor), which, if your local library does not carry, shame on them.

Flannery O’Connor died of lupus at the age of 39. Had she lived, she would have turned 84 last month.

(1962 Photo By Associated Press)

Happy feet?

Today’s post (the content, not the title) was suggested by Mrs. Rhymeswithplague.

Our neighbor, Rube (which is his real name and not short for Reuben or anything else), is 80 years old and often sends us interesting and entertaining e-mails. Yesterday he decided that the perfect thing to distribute on a spring afternoon was this clip from The Seven Little Foys.

As Jack Haley, Jr., son of Jack Haley, Sr., once said, “That’s entertainment!”

Both Bob Hope and James Cagney started out as song-and-dance men, I believe, so it was fitting that they played the roles of Eddie Foy and George M. Cohan, respectively, in The Seven Little Foys. I know very little about dancing, but Cagney seems to be the better dancer in this clip. At least, his arms are not flailing about like Bob Hope’s. Or maybe they just have different styles and their duet is brilliant. What do I know? But that’s not why Mrs. RWP suggested this post.

Here’s why.

One of my mother’s favorite sayings, one I heard her say many times because I had a tendency to lean against the kitchen table, was, “If you sit on the table, you’ll get married before you’re able.” Naturally, I said it to my three children, and now I am saying it to my six grandchildren. Old habits die hard. The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree. Or something. Pick your own proverb and insert it here.

What Mrs. RWP wanted to know after viewing the Cagney and Lacey Hope video was: If you sit on the table and get married before you’re able, what happens if you dance on the table?

The only answer I have been able to come up with is that the lampshade may fall off your head.

Do you have other suggestions? Help me out, readers. Do your stuff.

While you are trying to think of a clever answer, concentrate on this photo:

Rules to live by: (1) Always post a sentry during the afternoon siesta; (2) Choose your underwear very carefully.

Today is a day dear to the hearts of Texans everywhere, young and old, near and far, past, present, and probably future. For the record, I was not born in Texas. I moved there when I was six and moved away when I was 20, but I received a thorough indoctrination while there.

Today is the 173rd anniversary of the Battle of San Jacinto that occurred on April 21, 1836, not far from present-day Houston. If you are not familiar with the battle, you can read all about it here. I hope you take the time to read the entire article, because it is a truly fascinating account. If you do, then and only then will you understand the title of this post.

Texans, being Texans, are justifiably proud of having defeated General Antonio López de Santa Anna’s Mexican forces in a fight that lasted just 18 minutes. Hundreds of Mexican soldiers were killed or captured, but only nine Texans died.

Texans, being Texans, decided to erect a little monument in recognition of that fact. The San Jacinto Monument turned out to be the world’s tallest memorial column, 55 feet taller than the Washington Monument in Washington, D.C.

And Texans, being Texans, also decided to engrave the following modest inscription on the base of the monument:

“Measured by its results, San Jacinto was one of the decisive battles of the world. The freedom of Texas (not part of the United States at the time) from Mexico won here led to annexation and to the Mexican-American War, resulting in the acquisition by the United States of the states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah and parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma. Almost one-third of the present area of the American Nation, nearly a million square miles of territory, changed sovereignty.”

As Mama used to say, “Don’t break your arm patting yourself on the back.”

Still, my indoctrination seems to have worked. Today’s post is about San Jacinto.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear...

...Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere
On the eighteenth of April in Seventy-Five,
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year...

One if by land, and two if by sea,
And I on the opposite shore will be,
Ready to ride and spread the alarm
Through every Middlesex village and farm...

You can read the entire poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow here.


Seventy-Five, of course, refers to neither 1975 nor 1875, but 1775. This statue of Paul Revere stands in Boston, Massachusetts. If you look closely, you can see in the background the spire of the Old North Church, which played a prominent role in the famous midnight ride of April 18-19, 1775.