| | Home
The Human Zoo/August 7, 2011
By Gaylon Kent
The Writer's Shack
Notes from around the Human Experience...
WHILE YOU WERE OUT: We took a week off and some things happened. To wit:
HITTING THE ROOF: The executive and legislative branches of our government managed to come to an agreement to further allow this nation to borrow money, as if a nation over $14 trillion in debt needs to borrow more money.
But that is all they did, negotiate a deal, and what they came up with is in no way, shape or form a solution to our overall debt problem, All we did was the fiduciary equivalent of putting a Band-Aid over an open wound. The wound is still there. The Band-Aid may stop some bleeding, but it isn't going to cure the wound.
Numbers Racket: The deal calls for cutting a bit over $2 trillion in government spending over the next ten years. Now, $2 trillion is a lot of money except when you are talking about this nation's $14 trillion national debt.
Nothing Of Substance: Consider this: the roughly $2 trillion dollars in savings over ten years comes out to roughly $250 billion a year. This means - using the current fiscal year as a benchmark - this nation's annual deficit will be cut from $1.5 trillion to $1.25 trillion. This means in ten years our national debt will be somewhere around $27 trillion, which is probably academic because this nation's economy would probably collapse before then.
The Bottom Line: As noted, all we are doing is pushing the substantive decisions off until sometime in the future, hopefully before every penny of this nation's income is required to pay for entitlement programs.
Blame Game: The culprits here can be found simply by looking in the mirror. The nation's electorate has shown time and time again we are content to have our elected officials spoon-feed us what we want to hear, instead of demanding to be told what we need to hear.
Get Out Your History Books: The debt ceiling first appeared in 1917. Prior to that Congress had to authorize each specific instance of government borrowing.
Eff This Noise: Then World War I came around and Congress decided it was too much work to provide authorization every time the country needed to borrow money.
JUST THE FACTS, MA'AM: Our fave 40-year-old unsolved hijacking - and yours too, no doubt - was in the news recently as the FBI reported they had a promising lead in the case of the hijacker known as D.B. Cooper.
Recall Cooper hijacked a plane flying from Portland, Oregon to Seattle, He asked for and received both a ransom and parachutes and sometime after the plane took off from Reno he opened the back door and jumped out. While some of the ransom money has been recovered, no trace of Cooper was ever found.
Oh Yeah: The current lead concerns a woman in Oklahoma who claims to have been a relative of the hijacker. As leads go, and all she is offering is the memory that she heard her uncle talk about doing it, it isn't much.
Which is all right with us. We neither particularly need nor want to see this case solved, and we're certain the FBI has better things to do with its time. Plus, if it is solved, there will no longer anymore unsolved hijackings in this country, which would be bad for our collective morale.
OH JESUS H: Yesterday we provided a review of a Spenser novel by Robert B. Parker, noting that Parker had died last year, so the number of new Spenser novels is probably pretty low.
We were wrong. It turns out a writer named Ace Atkins will be writing Spenser novels.
This is as wrong as it is bad. A series should die when the original writer dies. A writer named Robert Goldsborough put out Nero Wolfe mysteries after Rex Stout died and while they weren't too bad their biggest crime is they weren't written by Rex Stout.
Meet Me At The Bucket: Similarly, the comic strip Gil Thorp sank like a stone after Jack Berrill died. This is because nobody has a vision as deep as the creator. It simply isn't possible.
The Bottom Line: We don't really want to see Spenser novels written by anyone other than Robert B. Parker. Unless the writer has Rita Fiore taking a shower with Spenser. And/or Susan Silverman.
TO BOLDLY GO WHERE ONLY NUTCASES HAVE GONE BEFORE: The US military has announced it is holding a contest designed to see if anyone out there can show the way to future interstellar space technologies.
Dry, Technical Matter: The agency involved is the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the project is called the 100 Year Starship Study, which is a conference for scientists, science fiction writers and other whack jobs who don't date much. The conference is scheduled for Orlando this fall and DARPA is prepared to fork over $500,000 to anyone who can show they can provide something of substance to help further the cause of interstellar travel.
Get Your Official Writer's Shack Policy Right Here: It's about time. And the 100 year time frame is perfect. In 1865 Jules Verne wrote a book about sending men to the moon and just over a century later, in 1969, we were on the moon.
More Bottom Line: It's about time we started dreaming Star Trek type dreams. We're already a generation behind because we lost interest in going to Mars, where we could have been in the 1980's had we cared, which we didn't.
ABOVE AND BEYOND: President George Washington creates the Badge of Military Merit on this date in 1782, the United States' second military award. After falling into general disuse the badge would be succeeded by the Wound Chevron and the Army Wound Ribbon and, in 1932, by the Purple Heart.
More Great Moments In George Washington: After characteristic thought and with 'the deepest regret; President George Washington announces a federalized militia will be sent to western Pennsylvania to deal with what history now calls the Whiskey Rebellion. The militia actually still needed to be raised and didn't get to Pennsylvania until late September and the insurrection would be over by October.
The insurrection was in what was then the far western part of the United States and centered on westerners general dissatisfaction with those zany easterners, specifically a whiskey tax that had been enacted in 1791.
Get Out Your History Books: The Whiskey Rebellion is important because while we generally disapprove of the government smacking down its citizens here at the Writer's Shack, Washington's use of force did show the new government was able to, well, smack down citizens who got frisky and took up arms and refused to pay their taxes, which helped stabilize the young government.
Gee, Thanks Guys: The whiskey tax issue itself also sped along the development of political parties in this country.
Going…Going…Caught: The Seattle Mariners become the first team in major league history to have five sacrifice flies in a game on this date in 1988. They needed each one of them, too, as they were the difference in a 12-7 victory at Oakland.
Most Places Have Interns For This: The record was equaled by the Colorado Rockies in 2006 and the Mariners did it again in 2008.
Going…Going…Gone: Barry Bonds becomes the major leagues all-time home run leader, hitting career home run 756 on this date in 2007.
Thought For The Day: Perseverance must finish its work. - James 1:4
Answer To The Last Trivia Question: Following electrocution, the gas chamber was the next execution method introduced in the United States, in 1924.
Today's Stumper: What was the first military award issued in the United States? - Answer next time!
Comments? Recipes? Complaints? Email the Writer's Shack here!
Home |
| |
