Calling All Homeless Writers

Win this essay contest and you get a log home with 32+ acres of real estate high up in the San Juan National Forest in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. Write 200 words on why you'd like to own it, pay $100 to enter, and you've got a shot. (You saw this sort of thing in the film The Spitfire Grill.)

Here are two entries that are 200 words (exactly!). Pick one and pay for me to enter and if I win, you get to spend weekends.

Essay #1

The distance between rich and poor in this country has never been greater. This house is now and will remain a dream house for most Americans, not because it’s splendid but because the very idea of owning property can never be more than a dream. Never before in history have so few rich owned such a large percentage of everything, with a cast iron grip. To be poor in America is to be overwhelmed with the hopelessness of your situation. If you’re poor anywhere else in the world, you might not feel so bad because everyone else is poor too. You don’t know any better. But in America, the rich rub our noses in it. Every day, on TV, in magazines and newspapers, we see people living in splendor that we will never achieve. The door to a better life isn’t just locked, it’s barricaded. We live in the land of the expensive and the home of the privileged, where everything is unaffordable to the vast majority. Owning property? Ha! A dream. Never happen. Get your head out of the clouds, they tell us. Except for you. You want to put our heads IN the clouds, and we appreciate it.

Essay #2

My dady was killed in Vietnam and I never met him but my unkul came back and married my mom but he inhaled two much agent orange and died so my mom sold me to a Muslum brothel where they cut out my clitoris and sold it to the Chinese. Now I can't have an orgasm no matter how much sex I have with anyone I meet in the street wear I sleep in the gutter and eat rotten food from trash cans behind Italian restaurants. Luckily, the smell from the gangrene in my feet keeps the rats away from my baby which I'm raising in a dumpster. Maybe I did to much crak when I was pregnant but he keeps coughing up blood and you can see his brain throo the membrane where his skull should be and I can't afford the opperation to fix him so I jsut do more crak. Someone stole my emty refrijerator crate so now we're sleeping in an emty refrijerator witch isn't as cumfortable because the lite doesn't go off when I close the door. Boy, it shoor wood be nice to live in the forest wear I cood catch chipmunks to eat.

Vietnam Redux

The last time I checked the ticker at Cost of War in Iraq, it was at $71,327,736,904.

Apology of the Week

I'd like to apologize to everyone who was offended by my cavalier use of the word "fuck" last week in my article about those assholes at the RIAA. I normally don't use the word "fuck" that much but last week I was so pissed off that "fuck" was the only word to adequately describe my frustration. It won't fuckin' happen again.

Picture Gallery of the Week

Long before Photoshop, wacko photographers were already putting together insane photos for postcards. Check out this gallery of classic trick photography from another century.

Fake Headlines of the Week

GAY PRIDE DAY CELEBRATED NATIONWIDE:Even Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (above) gets into the spirit.
- Ironic Times -

CHARLIES ANGELS WORSE THAN ORIGINALLY FEARED
Bad-movie Alert Raised to Orange
- The Borowitz Report -

Naughty Children Fund Terrorists
- The Daily Bull -

Iraq Converted Legal Short Range Missiles Into WMD's By Stuffing Them With Cork
- The Daily Hog -

Bush Asks Congress For $30 Billion To Help Fight War On Criticism- The Onion - Condi Rice Gives "War and Peace" to Bush, Rubik's Cube to Fish
- The Specious Report -

Google Smackdown of the Week

vs.

and the winner is...

Bush by 1,836.

I Feel So Much Safer Now

Polish Foreign Minister Wlodzimierz Cimoszewicz has admitted that the only reason his country signed on to the coalition against Iraq was that we bribed them by offering a deal with Halliburton.

Meteorologist Hank Brandli has discovered we're already surreptitiously stealing Iraqi oil by pumping it through Kuwait.

At least 19 American soldiers were wounded in an attack on a US base in Iraq, and another US soldier was killed in an assault on his convoy in Baghdad, specifically in response to taunts from the unelected idiot.

To confuse the already traumatized Iraqi populace even further, the "temporary" regime has continued to print currency bearing the picture of Saddam!

Are you an American citizen? Congratulations, you're guilty of bribery. Though the news reads "The United States on Tuesday declared almost 50 countries ineligible for military aid, including Colombia and six nations seeking NATO membership, because they back the International Criminal Court and have not exempted Americans from possible prosecution," the whole media got it backwards. The way it's supposed to read is "The United States on Tuesday declared that it would give military aid to countries that refuse to back the International Criminal Court, thereby exempting Americans from possible prosecution." 

Bribery, clean and simple. American high schools are turning into prisons.

Warmongers 'R' Us

This online documentary about the Carlysle Group will never get shown on American television because it is absolutely guaranteed to piss you off. Evidence and testimony proving we are living under the most corrupt administration in U.S. history.

Merriam-Webster Agrees

Main Entry: corruption 
Pronunciation: k&-'r&p-sh&n
Function: noun
Date: 14th century
1 a : impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle : DEPRAVITY b : DECAY, DECOMPOSITION c : inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (as bribery)

Internet Doohickeys of the Week

Okay, it's sincere and patriotic, but don't hold that against it. This is a beautiful 4th of July greeting card.

Go to http://www.google.com and do a search for the following: "weapons of mass destruction." Click on the "I'm feeling lucky" button instead of the "Google Search" button. Read.

The War Against Plants

"You've got a huge truck full of onions, let's say. And underneath it you've got 3,000 pounds of marijuana. Now try to smell 3,000 pounds of marijuana that's wrapped on top of 10 tons of onions."
- Lieutenant Rick Middleton of the Tucson Police Department: Getting High off NAFTA -

"Make up your mind, Lieutenant. Is the marijuana "underneath" or "on top of" the onions?"
- Xarvon, alien investigator -

20/20 Hindsight

Hey, remember all those terrorist hacker attacks yesterday, Sunday, July 6th? Aren't you glad we were warned about them?

Poster of the Week

Print out Arianna Huffington's Wanted for Ripping Off America poster from her incredible book Pigs at the Trough and post it around town. (Guaranteed to make you angry. Almost too much to bare how much we've been ripped off by scum.)

Don't Take My Word For It

"Even for a man who has made some of the stupidest, most ill-advised, poorly thought out and badly constructed off the cuff comments ever uttered by a high ranking government official, this was way over the line. For George Bush to declare that 'we have sufficient forces' in place to handle any armed threat from Iraqi insurrectionists so 'bring them on' is so lacking in common sense, so devoid of compassion for those effected by the statement, so willful a display of ignorance of how such a comment will be interpreted by both foe and friend alike that it can be considered nothing but indisputable evidence that he is by temperament and intellect grotesquely unsuited for the office. For a man who has never heard a shot fired in anger to stand in a public forum and deliberately goad others to take violent action against the men and women he is directly responsible for is an abomination. How dare he be so callous? How dare he be so hypocritical? How dare he be so stupid?"
- Mike Shannon: Mr President, how dare you? -

"I am happy to report that Ann Coulter has lost her mind."
- Richard Cohen: Crackpot Conservatism -

"Astute observers noticed right away that there were no Arabic sounding names on any of the flight manifests of the planes that crashed on that day. A list of names on a piece of paper is not evidence, but an autopsy by a pathologist is. I undertook by FOIA request, to obtain that autopsy list and you are invited to view it below. Guess what? Still no Arabs on the list."
- Thomas R. Olmsted, MD: Autopsy: No Arabs on Flight 77 -

"The Americans are behind the power cuts and the ensuing chaos... because this will give them a pretext to stay in Iraq forever."
- An unnamed Baghdad shop owner, repeating a popular Iraqi conspiracy theory -

"There is no such thing as a Palestinian people... It is not as if we came and threw them out and took their country. They didn't exist." 
- Golda Meir: Israeli Prime Minister, June 15, 1969 -

"Even if a person traveling in a strange country has all his own supplies with him, he should not eat and drink what he brought with him. Instead, he should buy what he needs from the local shopkeepers in order to improve trade."
- Tanhuma bar Abba: 4th century Palestinian rabbi -

"The watcher is who you really are. The watcher is content and peaceful, and is unattached to things happening in a certain way. It just watches whatever happens with curiosity, including watching the mental/emotional ego-based 'you' doing things, wanting things, creating things, feeling things, and so on. When looked at from this perspective, all the typical things of life still go on, but you aren't so caught up in how they turn out because you have this underlying realization that these things are not what you are. Instead, you realize that you are the one who serenely and objectively watches them happen. Ironically, the doing part of you, when you watch it, rather than identify with it, does a much better job of doing, and the results it creates are almost always better. And, ironically, you are no longer attached to whether or not the results turn out in a certain way. It's as if the doer is a character in a play, and the watcher is the actor who plays the character. As the actor, you know it's just a play, so no matter what the script says, you can just enjoy being in the play, watch it all with wonder and awe and enjoyment as you act it out, and enjoy the challenge of being the best possible actor."
- Bill Harris: Director Centerpointe Research Institute -

"Life is a God-damned, stinking, treacherous game and nine hundred and ninety-nine men out of a thousand are bastards."
- Theodore Dreiser -

"I think its dangerous to teach history. I think we have to educate our children to develop their imagination more than their memory. We don't have so much to remember, and actually what we remember is how to forget. What do we really remember? This war and that war, who killed whom and why. History is basically written with red ink. It's a history of killing. Maybe there was a need for it because people made a living out of the land and people were fighting for the land. Today, when you live on science and technology, you don't need wars. You don't need killings. So I believe I would prefer to educate the children to learn the history of the future, not the history of the past."
- Shimon Peres, ex-Prime Minister of Israel, creator of the Peace Research Institute, in Oliver Stone's new documentary Persona Non Grata (Major film on HBO! See it!) -

"Is there anything more pitiful than the continued media discussion of how Democratic candidates 'lack the stature' necessary to take on Bush? The man stole office, has presided over the looting of the Treasury for private interests, he has encouraged the corporate rape of the environment, he was on an extended vacation while terrorists prepared to savagely strike the nation for which he was responsible, he then went Barney Fife on 9/11 and headed for Nebraska while the East Coast burned, next he employed the assaults as justification for authoritarian destruction of civil liberties, and we now know his entire premise to engage this nation in what is now a quagmire in Iraq was based on wholesale lies and I don't care what anyone says he is still dumber than a rock - BUT WE HAVE TO LISTEN TO PEOPLE DISCUSS THIS CRIMINAL AS IF HE POSSESSES FORMIDABLE STATURE? Who would the media geniuses have the Dems run to match up with Bush stature-wise? Tony Soprano? You know who has absolutely no stature at all? Any media wag that matter of factly implies Bush is a man of legitimate stature."
- Barry Crimmins -

"I thought we were holding our own until this week, and now I'm not sure. If we don't get this  operation moving soon, the opposition will continue to grow, and we will have a much larger problem."
- Richard M. Atchison: Central Command, Experts Question Depth of Victory -

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." 
- Thomas Jefferson -

"The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson." 
- Franklin D. Roosevelt -

"That human life must be some kind of mistake is sufficiently proved by the simple observation that man is a compound of needs which are hard to satisfy; that their satisfaction achieves nothing but a painless condition in which he is only given over to boredom."
- Arthur Schopenhauer -

"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance, and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power knowledge gives."
- James Madison -

"Life is a hospital in which every patient is possessed by the desire of changing his bed. One would prefer to suffer near the fire, and another is certain he would get well if he were by the window."
- Charles Baudelaire -

"In the great game of human life one begins by being a dupe and ends by being a rogue."
- Voltaire -

"If a man could understand all the horror of the lives of ordinary people who are turning round in a circle of insignificant interests and insignificant aims, if he could understand what they are losing, he would understand that there can be only one thing that is serious for him - to escape from the general law, to be free. What can be serious for a man in prison who is condemned to death? Only one thing: how to save himself, how to escape: nothing else is serious."
- G. I. Gurdjieff -

"The Bush Administration no longer flaunts its contempt for nation-building abroad, but it remains resolutely hostile to nation-building at home. Its domestic policy consists almost solely of a never-ending campaign to reduce the taxes of the very rich."
- Hendrik Hertzberg: The New Yorker, Building Nations -

"Every law is an infraction of liberty."
- Jeremy Bentham -

"Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful."
- Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche -

"It is better to have loafed and lost than never having loafed at all."
- James Thurber -

"Personally, I'm always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught."
- Winston Churchill -

"Discussion is an exchange of knowledge; argument is an exchange of ignorance."
- Robert Quillan -

"To the small part of ignorance that we arrange and classify we give the name 'knowledge'." 
- Ambrose Bierce -

"Liberals can understand everything but people who don't understand them."
- Lenny Bruce -

"The universe is like a safe to which there is a combination. But the combination is locked up in the safe."
- Peter De Vries -

"Not a shred of evidence exists in favour of the idea that life is serious."
- Brendan Gill -

"Life is not for everyone."
- Michael O'Donoghue -

"There's nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn't cure."
- Ross MacDonald -

"After several years teaching high school, I've heard all the excuses. I didn't get my homework done because my computer crashed, because my project partner didn't do their part, because I feel sick, because I left it on the bus, because I had a dance recital, because I was abducted by aliens and viciously probed. Houdini doesn't have as many tricks. No one on earth is more inventive than a high school sophomore backed into a corner and faced with a zero on an assignment. No one, perhaps, except Bush administration officials forced now to account for their astounding claims made since September 2002 regarding Iraq's alleged weapons program."
- William Rivers Pitt: The Dog Ate My WMDs -

"There is now evidence that what the world is witnessing is a cold and calculated war plan - at least four years in the making - and that, from reading Brzezinski's own words about Pearl Harbor, the World Trade Center attacks were just the trigger needed to set the final conquest in motion."
- Michael C. Ruppert: How Stupid Do They Think We Are? -

"Last week in Manhattan, President Bush attended a fund-raiser and the crowd began yelling, 'Four more years.' Apparently, the crowd was guessing how much longer we would be looking for weapons of mass destruction."
- Conan O'Brien -

"People who can't laugh at themselves are those who most often laugh at others."
- Noah ben Shea -

Mr. Conspiracy Says...

A good case can be made for the fact that the biggest enemy of mankind right now is China. Check out the China Support Network and find out why you should boycott any goods that say "Made in China." Your money is fueling slave labor, children who are locked into factories at 12 cents a day to make your Christmas gifts, not to mention a nuclear superpower whose philosophy hasn't changed one iota since the massacre at Tiananmen Square. Not only that, but the government can't possibly keep track of what you're NOT buying.

Cartoon of the Week

Quiz from Hell

Before the war: Saddam Hussein brutalized his own people.

After the war: Saddam Hussein can't brutalize his own people. Since he has nothing better to do, he's spending his time planning attacks on Americans.

The war was:

a) a rousing success making the world a safer place.
b) a dismal failure making the world a more dangerous place.

The War Against Ourselves

The White House came out against doubling the $6,000 gratuity paid to families of troops who die on active duty.

Everything Else

Mandatory reading: The BuzzFlash Declaration of Independence for 2003.

Instead of just deleting spam, why not write them back? Check out these hilarious conversations with the writers of Nigerian con letters.

If you're interested in a site that asks some pretty hard questions about the nature of reality, check out The Spiritual Arena.

Do you use a cellular phone? Congratulations, you're helping fund Congo genocide.

The United States is having a bad air day.

Go here, type in your phone number, and give telemarketers the heave-ho.