When Rush Limbaugh admitted that for the past four years he’s been addicted to illegal pain killers and purchasing them off of the black market, he created something of a quandry for himself and his party.
In the advertising world, “targeting” is a buzz word. Everyone is talking about how they can better target their advertising and streamline their message. Of course, in advertising, targeting makes sense, if you can focus your message only on those most interested in hearing it, not only do you save money by not blasting your message to deaf ears, but you can repeat your message more often to those who might actually buy the product. So, targeting not only makes good business sense, but good advertising sense.
George W. Bush has had a lot of great lines as a President. Between his famous foul-ups of the English language (AKA: Bush-isms), his homely, often religious, quotes that seem to make little sense and his various fibs/half-truths, the Bush presidency has produced more one-liners than your average Rodney Dangerfield performance.
Here’s a statistic that you probably didn’t know and almost certainly won’t believe: The average dress size for a woman in the United States (and most of the world for that matter) is a fourteen.
June 4th was a very bad day for Martha Stewart. In a period of less than 12 hours, she was indicted on nine counts of securities fraud by a federal grand jury and, as a result, stepped down as CEO of the company she helped found and even bears her name. It honestly wouldn’t shock me if the words “Black Wednesday” have already entered her vocabulary to describe that dark day.
Over the past few days, I’ve seen a series of smug articles from war hawks asking the question “Where have all of the war protesters have gone since the American troops were welcomed in Baghdad?” After all, with France seeming to soften its anti-war line and many of the doves in Congress oddly silent, it seems that the anti-war crowd lost their fight.
“Terrorism: An Act intended to cause death or serious bodily injury to a civilian, or to any other person not taking an active part in the hostilities in a situation of armed conflict, when the purpose of such act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a Government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.”
I was once told that you could tell a lot about a political agenda by the people that supported it, that the types of people who support an agenda say almost as much about it as the issues themselves. Well, if that’s the case, then what I’ve learned this past week is that the saber-rattlers and the people pushing forward the agenda for war are a bunch of immature children who can’t let people disagree with them, especially other countries.
When hundreds of poets gathered this past weekend to protest the impending war with Iraq, all of them were risking their reputation but only one of them was risking his job. His name is Bill Collins and he’s the current U.S. Poet Laureate.
The entire nation is buzzing about President Bush’s upcoming plan to revitalize the economy. The media, in particular CNN, has been ranking it as his number one challenge of 2003, the democrats have already begun slamming it as being targeted at the most wealthy Americans and the only thing that’s clear is that everyone wants relief and everyone is looking for Washington to bring it.
The Evangelical Environmental Network, a group of 23 religious organizations lead by Rev. Jim Ball of Philadelphia, has taken up what can only be called an unusual cause, the stamping out of the SUV movement. The group, in conjunction with the SUV Ad Campaign, has begun a television and print ad blitz in eight metro markets asking the question “What Would Jesus Drive?”
Imagine for a second that you had fallen asleep on Nov. 4th and just woke up today. You would have missed the Nov. 5th elections, the Republican Party’s victories, the media blitz, the subsequent change of leadership in the Democratic Party and the windfall of predictions and speculations about what it all means. Basically, you would have woken up in the exact same country your lazy ass fell asleep in a week ago.
In the movie “The People vs. Larry Flint”, Larry Flint, played by Woody Harrelson, gave a lecture to the free speech society he helped fund. In it, he asked one fundamental question of the world, “What is more obscene, sex or war?”
I don’t smoke pot. It’s something that’s never had a place in my life and I’ve always seen drugs, even alcohol, as a potential hindrance to my goals in life. That’s why I’ve always been very careful about where I tread, what I take and when I take it. But despite this goodie-two-shoes approach to all things potentially addictive, I’m probably one of the few human beings that’s genuinely outraged that marijuana is illegal.
During the Super Bowl in January, The White House Office of National Drug Control Policy ran a series of ads linking illegal drug use to supporting terrorism. The critics jumped on this immediately accusing the White House of tapping Sept. 11th fears to push an entirely unrelated issue and worse, accusing harmless drug users of supporting terrorism across the globe.
Yes, Florida has done it again. After the election controversy in 2000, spending millions on election reforms and promising endlessly to improve the quality of the voting process in the state, Florida has managed to create yet another controversy, this one perhaps worse than the first.
I have to admit, I’ve never been much of a baseball fan. In addition to not being a huge sports fan, I’ve always thought of baseball as, well, the sport of wusses. Think about it, there’s little contact between players, the action itself is extremely slow, it gets called on rain and the most exciting moments involve a small white ball being propelled by a wooden bat over a distant wall. Baseball’s the only sport where players get to sit down every few minutes (I wonder how they’d feel if they tried playing soccer) and baseball is also the only sport currently preparing to go on strike.
When it comes to foreign policy, I don’t have many rules, but one of the critical ones I do have is “If you can avoid it, don’t start a fight.” While I think every country, the same as every individual, has the right to defend themselves against aggression, if it is at all avoidable, it’s unwise to be the aggressor.
Greed may be considered a sin, but it’s also a universally understood emotion. Pretty much everyone knows what it’s like to see what someone else has and want it for yourself. It’s only human to want more than what one has and most of the time that isn’t a problem.
Every once in a while, I get one right.
I really hate to waste precious time on something that’s as trivial as the Pledge of Allegiance. In the end, what happens or doesn’t happen to it will have no bearing on myself or any lasting impact on others.
When the Marines in Afghanistan took custody of John Walker, they knew they had a lot more than just another POW; they had a media event. As an American fighting for the Taliban, he has become the source of not only a lot of media attention, but also controversy.
I’ve never desired followers. If anything, I’ve only wanted to create leaders, to imbue individuals with the power and ideas to take control of their lives, change their destinies and, perhaps, change the world.
I hear it all the time on the news and on the talk shows. Where are all the heroes? Where are all of the role models? Where are the people for our sons and daughters to look up to? Where are the people that the rest of the world can strive to be like?
There are those among us who are born with a gift, a gift that lets them see the world in the way few mortals ever could, in a way that eyes alone can never begin to comprehend. These people, these few but proud people, take a look at our world and see not the mass of humanity and objects that exist, but what can exist. They don’t see what is, but rather, they see what could be.
What is it about the written word that draws us to it? What is it that makes so many of us, myself included, dedicate our entire lives to understanding it, to honing it, to refining it like never before. Why is it that, no matter how hard we try, there’s just something magical about seeing things in black and white that we can never capture when just talking or even watching.
As human beings, we’re born with two pieces of knowledge that no other animal on the planet possesses, that we are going to die at some point and that our lives are supposed to fill some kind of higher purpose.
Sometimes in life we find ourselves so busy with our day-to-day existences that we, as people, forget what the larger picture is really about. We get so enwrapped in getting by and surviving that we forget the reasons we fight so hard to stay alive and we lose sight of the things, the countless, wondrous things, that make life on this planet more than just tolerable, but enjoyable.
The mind is a weapon. Like any weapon known to man, with great skill, training and preparation it can be a formidable tool of attack or defense, an invaluable ally in times of conflict. However, also like any other weapon, the mind can be used against its holder and instead of becoming a tool of defense and protection, it becomes a tool of self-destruction and self-devastation.
We all claim to love freedom. When carried on the lips of the patriotic, the democratic and the lovers of liberty, freedom is the greatest thing on the planet. It is the alpha and the omega of the human existence and pinnacle of human achievement. To many, it’s the only thing worth fighting and dying for and to countless others living without it, it’s the only thing worth hoping for.
Everyone seems to wonder why artists of all types always seem to be a little bit out there, a little bit crazy or a little bit beyond the fringe of society. Artists, writers and musicians have a long track record of mental disease, drug/alcohol abuse and other self-destructive behavior. No matter how magnificent or profound their works seem to be, artists themselves seemed to be doomed to lives of misery, insanity and slow destruction.
Many years ago, on the day of atonement, towns would hold ceremonies in which they would place all of their sins into a single goat and then cast it out in the desert, presumably to die of thirst or starvation, in order to purge themselves of their own misdeeds and guilt. While the whole town celebrated being lifted of the burden of sin, one poor goat, which was chosen because he was “without blemish,” was forced to die a slow, miserable death in the hot desert just beyond the town’s borders.
It’s on the lips of the heartbroken and downtrodden, it’s in the poetry of the cheated-on and the abandoned and it’s in the hearts of the abused an trampled, those four little words, “Love is a lie!”
They say that man is a creature of two worlds, the world of the living and the world of the dreaming. In the world of the living, we are all simply people, people roaming the planet doing jobs, paying bills and living our lives. In the world of dreams, we are all writers and musicians who create art, write masterful stories of fantasy and though we may be victims of nightmares at times, we are still able to express ourselves and enjoy ourselves with a kind of child-like freedom never to be found in the waking.
I have a news headline for you: We’re all dead.
For many of us, when we find happiness, we are quick to learn that in society there is a hierarchy of happiness, an arbitrary order that places some forms of self-fulfillment as being greater than others. Where the world calls one kind of happiness “real” or “perfect” it calls another “hollow” or “empty” as if to say that a person riding high on one type of wave is not as truly happy as the man standing next to him, riding a separate, but higher, one.
When whoever uttered the words, “We always hurt the ones we love,” spoke that truism, they probably had no idea exactly how right they were and continue to be.
Questions will always be more powerful than statements. Questions will always linger longer than declarations. But most importantly, questions will always change the world long after their answers have been forgotten.
The quickest road to mediocrity is to quit dreaming. Because the moment you stop dreaming is the moment you stop reaching for something more, the moment you stop growing and the moment you stop excelling.
Time never stops, it never slows down, it never takes a breath. Life goes on. Just because we’re fond of sayings like “The day the earth stood still” or “Time froze for a second” doesn’t mean they’re true.
Have you ever imagined that there was another world just beyond your doorstep. Another universe just outside our own. A place where what we now consider impossible becomes possible, a place where what is now just fantasy becomes reality?
Nothing that I have done up to now has brought me any closer to discovering what I want out of life, much less any closer to achieving it. I can’t begin to count the days I’ve spent wondering the desert of human existence monitoring my happiness and trying to figure out what brought me joy and what brought me pain.
Sometimes I forget why I bother existing in this world. When I look around me, I see nothing but sheep being led to the slaughter, souls being destroyed by vicious shepherds and enough suffering to fill a million masochistic novels.
As I stare over the plain of humanity, I see a populace filled to the brim with idiots, buffoons and sheep. There is no safe haven for people like me, no place to go to get away from the idiocy of the planet. Every restaurant it seems is filled with morons, every movie theater littered with cretins and every place where humans are allowed to walk, there are jerks.
There was a time in which men wore suits of metal to protect themselves when going into battle. At another point, various cultures in Africa fought their battles in the nude seeking a more divine form of protection.
In much the same way we as people protect ourselves against the slings and arrows of the outside world. Some of us raise great walls within our minds and hope to hole ourselves up in solitude and denial. Others, throw open wide the gates to their heart and let the world do what it will hoping that everything will equal nothing.
I don’t know what it is that draws me to the night. All I know is that my soul seems to come alive when the sun goes down and my mind opens up the most during the blackest of nights.
We live in a commercial world my friends. We’re told what’s valuable, like we don’t know what’s important. Like children we can no longer tell what’s necessary and what’s just nice to have. Needs are now created and seldom met, because a met need doesn’t sell a product.
“You don’t need to do that, what you have is good enough,” they say. I disagree. Our society is all about the bare minimum, just getting by. I, on the other hand, am about excelling, going one step further and ignoring the when it’s time to stop.
In the three and a half years I have been running this site, I have done a lot of hypothesizing about the untimely deaths of many men and women: the cause, apathy.
Look around you real fast. Odds are unless someone printed this out for you, you’re reading these words on a computer screen somewhere. Odds are you’re sitting in a room with other electronic gizmos and gadgets. Odds are you’re surrounded by the creations of man and his science.
