Freeing people living under the yoke of slavery and torture and murder is a good thing. Everybody on the planet earth living under the yoke of slavery and torture and murder deserves to be freed, and if you personally controlled the largest army on earth, one of the best possible uses you could put it to would be freeing everyone on earth who lives under the yoke of slavery and torture and murder.

So what's the problem with the war in Iraq? Freeing people living under the yoke of slavery and torture and murder is precisely what our beloved leaders just did. How is this not a good thing?

Just as the temperature going up is a good thing for companies in the business of air conditioning, the yoke of slavery and torture and murder are good things for companies in the business of freeing people from the yoke of slavery and torture and murder. If there were no slavery and torture and murder, there would be no need for companies in the business of freeing people from the yoke. 

Nobody wants their company to go out of business. Take The Yoke Company. Way back in the 12th century, mankind still had to eat, and one of the primary answers was agriculture. Fields needed to be turned, and the fastest way to do it was with a plow pulled by a couple of draft animals joined at the neck by a wooden frame called a yoke, giving twice the strength of one draft animal to the plow. No wonder the use of a yoke became synonymous with servitude and bondage. You'd have to be dumb as an ox not to mind being in a yoke.

Way back in the 12th century, investing all your money in a company that manufactured yokes would have seemed a no-brainer. As long as people needed food, fields would need to be plowed, and farmers would need yokes to do it. Nobody dreamed that hundreds of years in the future, John Deere would come along and make yokes obsolete.

You can still buy yokes, probably at whothefuckneedsayoke.com, but other than the Amish and prop departments of Hollywood studios, business is pretty slim compared to the 12th century.

More recently there was The Buggy Whip Company. Way back before the Hummer, they had it made. Everybody needed a buggy. How else would you get places? Walk? Ha! And if you needed to get somewhere in a hurry, how could you do it if you didn't have a whip to strike your horses? What were you going to do, strike them on the butts with your bare hands? Way back before the Hummer, putting all your money into buggy whips would have seemed an excellent strategy because nobody dreamed that the automobile would come along and make buggy whips obsolete.

Those in the yoke and buggy whip industries were justifiably pissed off at the inventions that superseded the need for their products. Yoke people did their best to sabotage the tractor industry, just as the buggy whip industry did their best to sabotage the automobile industry, just as the music distribution industry is currently trying to sabotage the Internet. It's an age old strategy that never works. The future always happens. Every new thing makes some old thing obsolete.

The only strategy that works is changing with the times. Kodak, who manufacture film, aren't trying to sabotage the digital photography industry, they're offering your pictures back on disk when you process your film. They're making digital printers. By the time film goes the way of the yoke and the buggy whip, Kodak will still thrive because they have the foresight to change.

Some products seem to be perennial. They'll go on forever. As long as there are variations of weather, people will need coolers and heaters, so the air conditioning and furnace industries seem pretty safe bets for investment. I'd spread my bet and put 50% of my money in each. 

But let's say you put all your capital into air conditioning just before a long cold snap. Business would slow down and you'd start praying for it to heat up. The instant the temperature rose to 90 degrees, you'd be manufacturing at capacity and you'd be ecstatic. Once the temperature rose to 100, there would be back orders and you'd think you were set for life. You'd start planning your next vacation. And once the temperature rose to 110 and people started dying, you wouldn't know what to think. Would you want the temperature to go up or down? If the temperature went up, your profits would go up, you'd get to buy a yacht, and more people would die. If the temperature went down, your profits would go down, you'd cancel your plans for a yacht, and less would people die. What's more important, you or mankind?

Let's give you a hypothetical couple of buttons that control the weather. Push one and the temperature goes up, push the other and the temperature goes down. Would you push the button that lowers the temperature, sacrificing your own profits for the benefit of all?

Hey, it's just a hypothetical problem. Don't worry about it. Ultimately, you'd just keep manufacturing air conditioners, and if you had a shred of human decency, you'd donate a bunch of them to old age homes and convalescent hospitals.

Nobody wants to live under the yoke of slavery and torture and murder. To get people to live under the yoke of slavery and torture and murder takes muscle. It's only muscle that separates your garden variety megalomaniac from a dictator capable of keeping a large group of people under the yoke of slavery and torture and murder. 

If you're in the business of freeing people from the yoke of slavery and torture and murder, you're out of business if megalomaniacs never get enough muscle to exercise their sickness, and you're faced with the same ethical problem faced by those in the yoke business, the buggy whip business, the music distribution business, and the air conditioning business. You can change with the times or you can try to sabotage the future.

Let's say you're in the business of freeing people from the yoke of slavery and torture and murder. You've got two buttons in front of you. Push one and you generate new business by creating a dictator somewhere on earth who demands your attention. Push two and you create a Kodak moment by transforming your business into one that frees people from the yoke of slavery and torture and murder by preventing any and all megalomaniacs from ever getting muscle in the first place.

And that's what's wrong with the war in Iraq. We know which button they pushed.

A bill before Congress, H.R.1785 and S. 244, initiated by students, puts an abridged version of the Constitution on the back of U.S. currency.

Want to annoy the (anti-gay) American Family Association? They are conducting an online poll about gay marriage, and plan to show their results to Congress. You are cordially invited to fuck up their results.

We didn't "find" Saddam, he was captured by US troops only after he had been taken prisoner by Kurdish forces, drugged and abandoned ready for American soldiers to recover him. "Saddam was not captured as a result of any American or British intelligence. We knew that someone would eventually take their revenge, it was just a matter of time," says an intelligence source in the Middle East.

Remember Michael Schiavo trying to allow his wife Terri to die in Florida after she'd been in a coma for more than a decade? Headline news just a while ago, but according to the media with the attention span of a gnat, nothing much has happened since. Sorry guys, the story continues.

Secret trips by American intelligence officers, late night meetings with Muammar Gaddafi and disclosures that the United States knew about Libya's WMDs, led to Tripoli's pledge to give up their WMDs because they actually had them. Might I point out that Iraq agreed to the same thing only they claimed they DIDN'T have WMDs and it turned out they were telling the truth? Libya = no WMDs and no lives lost. Iraq = no WMDs and countless lives lost. Please explain.

A bipartisan coalition of U.S. House members has introduced the Truth in Trials Act (H.R. 1717). This bill would remove the federal gag placed on medical marijuana defendants in states that have chosen to allow medical use. The bill would let seriously ill patients or people assisting them explain that they were acting to relieve suffering in a manner permitted by state law, allowing them to avoid federal prison if the jury finds their evidence persuasive.

"A little-known provision buried within the omnibus federal spending bill that the U.S. House of Representatives approved [this month] would take away federal grants from local and state transportation authorities that allow citizens to run advertising on buses, trains, or subways in support of reforming our nation's drug laws. If enacted, the provision could effectively silence community groups around the country that are using advertising to educate Americans about medical marijuana and other drug policy reforms. Meanwhile, this same bill gives the White House $145 million in taxpayer money to run anti-marijuana ads next year."
- Congress Votes to Censor anti-War On Drug Ads -

"I am totally ecstatic about what this decision will do not only for me, but for hundreds of thousands of patients across the country. Not too many people get to come up against someone who is as evil as John Ashcroft and actually win and that feels very good. I have the truth on my side, and it was nice to see the justices of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals care about my life."
- Angel McClary Raich: A Landmark Victory - Court Shoots Down Ashcroft on Medical Pot -

These Mother Teresa wannabes say the best thing about capturing bin Laden would be that it would rally the stock market.

The federal government is quite rightly stopping Americans from donating to Arab charities that support terrorism, so why isn't it doing anything about this guy who donates to Jewish charities that support terrorism?

Gallery of the Week

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"What haven't you noticed lately?" 
- Marshall McLuhan -

"One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book, give it, give it all, give it now ... Some more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes."
- Annie Dillard -

"Are al Qaeda's links to Saddam Hussein's Iraq just a fantasy of the Bush administration? Hardly. The Clinton administration also warned the American public about those ties and defended its response to al Qaeda terror by citing an Iraqi connection."
- Stephen F. Hayes: The Clinton View of Iraq-al Qaeda Ties -

"The best way to find these terrorists who hide in holes is to get people coming forth to describe the location of the hole, is to give clues and data."
- Dubya -

"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between political parties, but rather through every human heart."
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn -

"I cannot go to the bathroom while my people are in bondage."
- Captured Iraqi ex-President Saddam Hussein, quoted on "Today" -

"Pressed to explain why his administration had asserted Saddam possessed weapons, when at best fragmentary evidence of programs had been found, Mr. Bush replied: 'So what's the difference? If he were to acquire weapons, he would be the danger,' he said in an interview with ABC News' Diane Sawyer."
- Is the search for weapons over? -

"One of the fascinating aspects of the capture of Saddam Hussein is the way in which some people have permitted U.S. officials to manipulate them into supporting what is basically an immoral action - an illegal and unconstitutional invasion, war of aggression, and occupation of an independent country. Think about it: if Soviet forces had invaded an independent country with the purported aim of disarming and arresting the nations ruler, and if Soviet military forces were occupying the country, bashing peoples doors down in brutal and intrusive raids of their homes and businesses, indefinitely incarcerating people in secret military brigs, confiscating weapons, imposing curfews, banning political demonstrations, and periodically killing innocent people in the process, wouldn't the same Americans who are supporting the U.S. government's actions in Iraq have been outraged at the Soviet government for doing these things? Indeed wouldn't they even be tempted to support those who were resisting the occupation and trying to oust Soviet forces from their land? And if, all of a sudden, the Soviet Union made a surprise announcement that they had taken the ruler of the country into custody, would people's opposition suddenly evaporate and change into enthusiastic support of Soviet forces?"
- Hornberger's Blog -

"No one can read our Constitution without concluding that the people who wrote it wanted their government severely limited; the words 'no' and 'not' employed in restraint of government power occur 24 times in the first seven articles of the Constitution and 22 more times in the Bill of Rights." 
- Edmund A. Opitz -

"According to estimates by the economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez - confirmed by data from the Congressional Budget Office - between 1973 and 2000 the average real income of the bottom 90 percent of American taxpayers actually fell by 7 percent. Meanwhile, the income of the top 1 percent rose by 148 percent, the income of the top 0.1 percent rose by 343 percent and the income of the top 0.01 percent rose 599 percent."
- Paul Krugman: The Death of Horatio Alger -

"Have I not seen dwellers on form and favour
Lose all, and more, by paying too much rent?"
- Shakespeare: Sonnet 75 -

"If Howard Dean and Wesley Clark had their way, Saddam Hussein would be in power today and not in prison, and the world and America would be a much more dangerous place."
- Joe Lieberman -

"If Joe Lieberman had attacked George W. Bush and Dick Cheney in the 2000 campaign the way he attacks fellow Democrats in 2003, George W. Bush would not be president today and the world would be a better place. Joe Lieberman was buddy-buddy with Bush and Cheney in 2000, supports the Bush war in Iraq and votes more often with Bush than the Democrats - maybe he is running in the wrong primary."
- Chris Lehane -

    "U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson said Monday the Bush administration last year told him and other senators that Iraq not only had weapons of mass destruction, but they had the means to deliver them to East Coast cities.
    "Nelson, D-Tallahassee, said about 75 senators got that news during a classified briefing before last October's congressional vote authorizing the use of force to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Nelson voted in favor of using military force."
- John McCarthy: Senators were told Iraqi weapons could hit U.S. -

"There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great."
- Gilbert K. Chesterton -

"I read somewhere that 77% of all the mentally ill live in poverty. Actually, I'm more intrigued by the 23% who are apparently doing quite well for themselves."
- Jerry Garcia -

    "If the police broke into someone's house and trashed the place entirely, killed the pet dog and two of the kids, because they thought there were drugs in the apartment, but it turned out, after they searched and searched and searched, that they had been given a bad tip and there never were drugs to begin with, those police would have some answering to do and a price to pay.
   "So since President Bush seems to have done exactly the equivalent to an entire nation, who should be on trial, Saddam, or President Bush?"
- The Moderate Independent -

    "There are 2 billion children (persons under 18) in the world. BUT since Santa doesn't (appear) to handle the Muslim, Hindu, Jewish and Buddhist children, that reduces the workload to 15% of the total - 378 million according to Population Reference Bureau. At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that's 91.8 million homes. One presumes there's at least one good child in each.
    "Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a second to park, hop out of the sleigh, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left, get back up the chimney, get back into the sleigh and move on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 91.8 million stops are evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false but for the purposes of our calculations we will accept), we are now talking about .78 miles per household, a total trip of 75-1/2 million miles, not counting stops to do what most of us must do at least once every 31 hours, plus feeding and etc. This means that Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second, 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle on earth, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second; a conventional reindeer can run, tops, 15 miles per hour."
- Is There a Santa Claus? -

"Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it whether it exists or not, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedy."
- Ernest Ben -

"In a high-tech cover-up, the Washington Post this morning reports the White House is actively scrubbing government websites clean of any of its own previous statements that have now proven to be untrue."
- White House Covers Tracks by Removing Information -

"It is not the province of the courts ... to rewrite the [law] in order to make it fit a new and unforeseen Internet architecture, no matter how damaging that development has been to the music industry."
- US Court of Appeals -

"If all that comes out during the trial is the crimes that Saddam committed -- and I'm not saying those shouldn't come out -- then I think it could serve to buttress the Bush administration, but if it also comes out about the role of the US in setting up that regime, then I think there will be even greater questioning about why this war happened and why this occupation is going on and what the real interests of the US are at this point."
- Leslie Cagan: national coordinator of "United for Peace and Justice" -

    "Few Americans have heard of Katharine Gun, a former British intelligence employee facing charges that she violated the Official Secrets Act. So far, the American press has ignored her. But the case raises profound questions about democracy and the public's right to know on both sides of the Atlantic.
   "Ms. Gun's legal peril began in Britain on March 2, when the Observer newspaper exposed a highly secret memorandum by a top U.S. National Security Agency official. Dated Jan. 31, the memo outlined surveillance of a half-dozen delegations with swing votes on the U.N. Security Council, noting a focus on 'the whole gamut of information that could give U.S. policy-makers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals' - support for war on Iraq.
   "The government of British Prime Minister Tony Blair quickly arrested Ms. Gun. In June, she formally lost her job as a translator at the top-secret Government Communications Headquarters in Gloucester. On Nov. 13, her name surfaced in the British news media when the Labor Party government dropped the other shoe, charging the 29-year-old woman with a breach of the Official Secrets Act.
   "She faces up to two years in prison if convicted."
- Norman Solomon: For telling the truth -

"The elite ruling class wants us asleep so we'll remain a docile, apathetic herd of passive consumers, and non-participants in the true agenda of our governments - which is to keep us separate, and present an image of a world filled with irresolvable problems, that they, and only they, might one day, somewhere in the never-arriving future, be able to solve. Just stay asleep, America, keep watching TV."
- Bill Hicks -

"Free Speech is the right to yell 'Theater!' in a crowded fire."
- Abbie Hoffman -

Mandatory reading: Using immaculate annotation of quotes from the Bush administration, Letting the record speak allows them to hang themselves with their own words.

Zach Everson continues to take advantage of Amazon with Paris Hilton's Christmas Wish List.

Too embarrassed to look at the actual Paris Hilton tape? Check out the Barbie version.

I guess if Dick Cheney had to pick one website he didn't want anyone to see, it would have to be Cheney's Secrets.

John Rowland, the governor of the strait-laced New England state of Connecticut, has rejected calls for his resignation over corruption allegations saying he is in direct contact with God, who apparently took time off from his full time job of helping Christians win Grammys.

Go here to read the new Federal anti-spam law.

Okay, they're not "official" and they're poorly formatted and they're basically just transcriptions made by a rabid fan, but they are, nevertheless, every single Seinfeld script.

For unlimited astronomical information, including everything happening in the sky from wherever you are, be sure to visit Heavens Above.

This story about the press and Howard Dean is a textbook case of how to take a quote out of context and make it sound like something else.

It's pornography. It's a puzzle. It's pornographic puzzles.

You know what? It doesn't matter who's on Meria Heller's show. Just click here and listen to whatever she's broadcasting right now.

• Good News/Bad News about Saddam's Capture
• Zen Bastard: Blowjobs, Ballet, Baggies - the parts left out of the Reagan movie by Paul Krassner
• Tips on Junk Calls by Ken Rubin
• The Worst Commercial on Television
• Marketing Ploys from Hell
• Zen Bastard: Threats Against the President by Paul Krassner
• The Bush/Nazi Connection: Journalist John Buchanan gets targeted
• Why Schwarzenegger Gropes
• Issue #1 of the Hollywood Free Press
• Me and Monty Python
• Special 9/11 "Don't Take My Word for It"
• Zen Bastard: Who's Need to Know? by Paul Krassner
• Equal Time with Bob Boudelang, Angry American Patriot (An Other Triumph For George W. And You Cannot Prove Those Are My Baboon Noses So Stop Saying That!!)
• Mordechai Vanunu: The Prisoner of Zion by Mary La Rosa
• Equal Time with Bob Boudelang, Angry American Patriot (I Am Not Fair and Balanced and I Am Not A Sissy For Having A George W. Bush Doll So Stop Saying That!!)
• Bob Hope's Last Monologue from Heaven by Lynette Sheffield
• Inside/Outside #1: The Riddicks vs. Judge Burrell by Billy Hayes
• The California Choice
• Why I'm Against Gay Marriage
• Creation Science Fair Proves God Exists by Tom Norris
• What Would Jesus Do About Cramps? by Nancy Cain
• Summer Reading or Harry Potter vs. What's-His-Face
• Scumbags of the Week - Letter to the RIAA
• Hello Mullah, Hello Fatwah
• The Israeli Wall
• Dream Job or How Disinfotainment Today Almost Came Out in Print
• Celebrities vs. the United States Government
• Test of the National Homeland Reconciliation and Healing System
• The Still Missing Artifacts
• Why Bush is Nothing Like Hitler
• Tim Robbins' Speech to theNational Press Club
• Randy Newman's "Follow the Flag"
• How I would Re-Write the Bill of Rights by Satan
• I Didn't See the News Today, Oh Boy
• Global Voice by Jim Channon
• Daniel Ellsberg's Review of the Made-for-TV Movie The Pentagon Papers
• The Lemon Pledge of Allegiance
• U.S. Diplomat's Letter of Resignation
• Message from Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
• Obfuscation of the Week: Who grows the most opium? We do.
• Urgent Plea for Assistance from George W. Bush
• How I Got the Rights to Tom Robbins' Another Roadside Attraction
• Please Help the FBI Find These People
• The Adventures of Xarvon: Alien Investigator
• The Under-Reported Story of the Year - Margie Schoedinger vs. George W. Bush
• Why I'm Optimistic About the Future by Paul Krassner
• Booze (A movie I'd like to see)
• Hope (after the election)
• The Empty Boat by Chuang Tzu
• Special Halloween/Election Issue
• What's Wrong with Leonard Maltin?
• Forwarded E-mail from Satan
• A Letter from Tom Robbins
• Good Thing/Bad Thing - American Foreign Policy
• The Ultimate Politically Correct Flag and Pledge of Allegiance
• A Letter from Paul Krassner
• The History of Denials