Egypt and Libya Are Different, But Mubarak And Qaddafi Are The Same

I don't think there's a dime's worth of difference between Qadaffi and Mubarak. It's strictly situational. Qadaffi has control of the people with the guns, Mubarak didn't. Call me a cynic, but I'm a firm believer in the Bismarckian philosophy of Realpolitik. Dictators do not fear peaceful protesters, regardless of their number. They do not care what "The World" thinks about them or whether or not Barack Obama is merely "concerned" or has graduated to "very disappointed" in their actions. They do not care about U.N. sanctions or troops that wear powder blue helmets. They do not make ethical or moral decisions. They are not regular people who, for lack of sensitivity training have turned bad. They're wiring is fried. They are narcissistic sociopaths for whom human suffering, aside from their own, has no meaning. They understand human behavior only on a primal level. (Life without a conscience must be incredibly liberating). Force, or the threat of force is the only motivator that has any meaning. The Egyptian Revolution is still in the early innings. But there wouldn't even be a game if the Army had sided with Mubarak. A nice, quick massacre would have been followed by a few weeks of extensive clean-up and American tourists would have been posing by the Pyramids again by Labor Day. I think Libya will end up being what Egypt could have been if the Egyptian Military hadn't had other plans.

The Nissan Leaf: Polar Bears Get Too Much Credit

What was your initial reaction the first time you saw that Nissan Leaf/Polar Bear Hug commercial. Unless you are among the few remaining discerning consumers of popular culture, you were emotionally moved and felt a vague compulsion to buy a government-subsidized car that you could plug into a wall socket. I thought it was a brilliant manipulation of a poplar myth, used to sell a product whose widespread use will have the polar, if you will, opposite effect of that which is defined by it’s seller. If you have not seen this ad, it features a presumably grateful bear who embarks on a Marketing 101 version of Die Groot Trek to hug a Nissan Leaf owner. The message is: Thank you. Your selfless choice to eschew the use of fossil fuels will now guarantee the expansion of the Arctic Ice Cap and I can finally get back to killing baby seals and the odd slow-footed Eskimo. What the bear and the guy with the electric go-cart don’t know is that 68% of our electricity is created by burning fossil/hydrocarbon fuels (coal and natural gas) and another 20% is generated by nuclear fuel.

I will grant you that if 10 million people started driving electric cars there would be a corresponding decrease in the use of gasoline. But there would have to be a corresponding increase in the mining and burning of coal and the drilling and use of natural gas. We might even need more nukes. These are all things that environmentalists find to be unpalatable. So the question is: What would the realized net gain be from a country of people driving electric cars? I don’t know but I’m guessing that the carbon footprint would be about the same. The only discernible differences would probably be people silently whizzing around at 30 miles per hour and a major run on extension cords.

My main concern is that people don’t even take the time to think about these things. Intellectual curiosity has been dying a slow death in this country for decades. The mainstream media have contributed by devolving into conduits of nearly undiluted propaganda and a lazy and fat populace have become passive consumers of their product. It’s the rare individual that asks himself, “If this, then what”? We live in a society where the best commercial wins and the message of that commercial becomes the new truth. And that doesn’t seem to bother too many of us. Polar Bears are really kind of naive, but so are we.

I Had A Dream

I was walking into my house and had just stepped into the foyer and began to close the door when an intruder burst through and knocked me into the wall. He smelled like three days worth of dried sweat and the caked residue of a mustard-ketchup-onion-potato concoction. Like he’d bathed in a giant vat of In-N-Out Burger Animal Fries earlier in the week. I went for a roundhouse kick to his head. As my flip-flopped foot approached the target, a gleaming pair of steel-toed Doc Marten’s replaced the flops. My first kick landed square with a squishy whump and a crunching of bone. Viscous matter and pieces of shattered teeth splattered the wall behind his head. I kept kicking. He was yelling “ouch, ouch”, with an oddly girlish voice tinged with surprise, pain and fear. I slowly woke to the sound of my wife’s voice saying, “Ouch, you’re kicking me”. I apologized, of course, and then tried to go back to sleep. But I couldn’t. I’m not a religious man per se, and I know very little about the metaphysical or paranormal world. But as I began to drift off it occurred to me that maybe in a previous incarnation, or on a different plane of existence, my sainted wife had been less than angelic. Maybe she rolled bums for their Sterno or gaslighted orphans into giving up their milk money. And maybe because of these misdeeds in this earlier “life” she had to take it in shorts in this one. Or, “in the jammies”, in this case. Semi-convinced that I had done no wrong I finally began falling to sleep when my wife said, “You kicked me in the toes”. I said, “You had it coming, I think”.