What the hell do I think?
Most of the time I feel too damned busy to think, but since you've handed me this soapbox, it's about damned time I tell you what I think.
First off, I like to send out a big ol' "I told you so!" to all the ignorant, bleeding-heart, animal lovers who made it illegal to blast a mountain lion. Guess what? Now you have legions of the damn things using your pricey, foothills backyards like a goddamned buffet. Tonight's menu includes an extra helping of long-haired domestic cat. Tomorrow night I hope a puma gets that yappy goddamned lap dog two doors down. How about a mountain lion in the center of Palo-fucking-Alto? You got it! The police treat the situation as if they have a powerful predator in the middle of a residential area with school about to be let out and shoot the cat. Of course, some gormless tit-head from the group In Defense of Animals demonstrates his utter lack of common sense and rational thought by declaring "I think it's absolutely atrocious the way the police behaved. Obviously the animal was not posing a threat to anyone. It was in a tree." Oh, yes, because mountain lions have their claws, teeth, and killer instinct magically replaced with cotton balls and Teletubbie wuvums whenever they lounge in a tree. How many toddlers would have to be eaten before this cretin smelled the faintest hint of a clue? Any minute now, I expect the pampered Palo Altans and foothill dwellers to raise a hue and cry for something to be done about all the killer kitties crawling around and cramping their lifestyle. They'll want action that costs money, because the great State of California is just swimming in extra cash. Too bad they already voted down a scheme whereby sportsfolks would pay mucho dollars for the dubious privilege of perforating a mountain lion for fun. Not only would the State have a self-funding program for controlling mountain lion populations, but the big cats would be more likely to learn that a human equals death, rather than a light snack.
In a similar vein, roving packs of coyotes are sweeping the foothills clean of pet dogs and cats. The Animal Control folks can't do a damned thing because the only traps effective against coyotes have been banned by popular vote. How to hell do these people get dressed every morning without drowning in their toilet bowls? Holy shit.
Maybe the authorities are hoping that the coyotes and the mountain lions will have a big Aliens vs. Predator rumbled in the hills and shred each other to pieces.
Speaking of animals, I went to the circus last week. Despite the volume of the music set to stun, everyone had a great time. About 70% of the acts were not complete camel dung. Of course, the whole experience left me with a checklist of crap I need to bitch about.
As we're walking into the venue, a crowd of folks with nothing better to do than had out fliers are wave pictures of dead elephants try to explain that circus animals die for my pleasure and that forcing the animals to perform robs them of their dignity. Total, utter bullshit. Yes, the animals die and that a non-stop performance schedule is trying, but the circus is a business and a trained animal that is dead does not sell tickets, at least to anyone you'd want at a circus. Furthermore, whole legions of animals have been slaughtered for me to eat. A catfish was hauled out of the water and butchered just for my dinner tonight. Hell, I've even been the agent of the animal's death. Fresh bonita hauled out of the surf is damned fine eating. Same can be said for mourning dove blasted from the sky with my Ithaca Model 37. So how is the incidental death of a few animals going to keep evil fuckers like me away from the circus? And how would these cock-knockers define dignity? Confine the animals to a zoo? God forefend! Release the animals into their natural habitat so that they can grow diseased and invested with parasites as they face predation, poaching, starvation, and habitat destruction? Dignity my hairy ass.
Chinese acrobats are everywhere. Any time a live show needs to spice things up, they haul out the Chinese acrobats. I don't have anything against Chinese acrobats and the stuff they do is mind-blowing, but it's also borderline pornographic. Here we are at a family show and there's a couple of scary-limber young Chinese women in skin-tight body suits spreading their legs, contorting themselves, entwining their bodies in a slow-motion, Kama Sutra orgy of cup balancing. You know how many men in the audience are oohing and aahing as their thinking "It my next life, I'm dating a Chinese acrobat!"
On the way home from the circus, traffic comes to a near standstill because of an accident… across the divider on the other side of the road. Goddamned looky-loos.
And to continue the animal theme beyond applicability, I think this whole Social Security situation sucks a skunk's ass. Too bad that cagey old fart Greenspan couldn't fix it for good the first time around in 1983. I realize that Social Security was intended as a last-resort safety net for old folks, not as a retirement plan. Retirement at 65? Hell, when the system was set up, the average person died well before age 65 from childbirth or polio or an abscessed tooth or any of a zillion ways that we generally don't have to worry about these days. People are living too damned long and the system hasn't kept up with reality. More than likely, the goddamned politicians haven't had the balls to fix it before it became a crisis. God forbid some Senator jeopardize their cushy seat by telling the voters to wake the hell up and plan for the day that you're not 20 years old and when your parents are too sick and old to change their own diapers. Too many goddamned Boomers grew up with the world handed to them by their parents. And then they handed it off to their goddamned kids. I say fuck 'em all. I'll be damned if I'm going to let these assholes bankrupt my future and that of my children and children's children to finance the retirement of a generation that was too busy humping their way through a sexual revolution and cultivating their sense of entitlement to take responsibility for their own future. As for the SUV-driving, cellphone-blabbing, digital-TV-paying, MTV generation, I say we break them down for body parts while they're still young.
And speaking of bankrupting the future, where are all the hundreds of billions of dollars that we're pouring into Iraq going to come from? My daddy used to scorn the bleeding-heart cocksuckers who pissed and moaned every time the subject of military spending came up. (Hell, I almost called it "defense spending". Can't quite call it that since we attacked Saddam's suckass regime, can we?) "Do they think we're just shoveling cashing into the boilers of the New Jesery?" he'd ask. Of course not. Spending on military stuff is a subsidy, just like the hojillions of dollars we're pouring on the corn growers and gasohol producers in the Midwest so that California can get fucked up the ass once again, forced to pay a premium for fuel that does absolutely squat to reduce pollution but does a whole damned lot to keep the agri-moguls in penis enhancement pills and the pork barrels rolling. Goddamned Southern California was built on the goddamned aerospace industry. (If you're an aviation enthusiast, look here. If you're a uncouth goon with no sense of the wonder of flying machines or of history, please continue.) So when the government starting pouring mountains of dough into defense, SoCal bloomed like a desert soaked with water stolen from the Colorado River or from NorCal. But, and this is a huge, hairy, cellulite-puckered but, I have a feeling that the billions we're spending now will not generate a post-war boom. Why? Because there's not ever going to be a post-war, that's why. Goddamned Bush finally says something that doesn't sound like teased out of his ass with a fishhook: "I don't think you can win it". Of course, the goddamned Democratic douche bags demonstrate their utter lack of moral underpinnings by immediately pouncing on this admission of reality as evidence of Bush's lack of leadership. Of course, the administration spun itself dizzy trying to repair this crack in the Republican dogma. No one who wants to be President is willing to admit that waging a war against terrorism is like fighting a war against poverty or drugs. No matter how much napalm you drop on the Tenderloin or Skid Row, there are always going to be people who can't afford to build a decent DVD collection or who suck dick so they can smoke another rock. There will be no smoldering ruins of Europe and Japan for the United States to so magnanimously rehabilitate, only a slippery bunch of Islamist thugs using our own petrodollars to sock it to us. Yeah, I know. The irony's lost on most folks, especially the throbbing cocks piloting their 11-mpg Hummers through rush-hour traffic. The U.S. will not be the sole superpower, it will be a shambling giant, sloughing off civil liberties as it lashes out at enemies real and imagined. America's getting a taste of what Russia, Israel, and Africa have been swimming in for generations. No the other guy doesn't think like you. He doesn't want to dialog. He dedicates his every breath to see that you and everything you hold dear is scraped off the face of the planet like dog shit from his boot.
So where is the money going? The war windows and widowers should be set for life. They shouldn't have to worry about money until the end of their days, but I don't think that's going to be the case. All the prosthetic legs and arms to take the place of those blown off in combat are pretty pricey, but not billion-dollar expensive. Wherever the money's going, I'm sure all of the children slaughtered in Beslan, Russia and their parents feel so much safer now.
Damn it all to hell.
Pakeha
North American Aviation was in Inglewood by 1934. The T-6 Texan, the P-51, the B-25, the F-86, the F-100, the X-15, and the jaw-dropping XB-70 all came out of L.A. Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica was churning out a plane an hour during WWII. Hughes was doing his thing in Glendale in 1932. Glen Martin built his first aircraft in Santa Ana. Two engineers who worked for Martin in the early years were James Smith McDonnell and Donald Wills Douglas. Allan and Malcolm Loughead flew a seaplane over the San Francisco Bay in 1913. Don't recognize the name? You'd change your name too if people kept calling you Log-head or Loaf-head. That's Lockheed, the folks who brought you the Vega, the Electra, the P-38, the B-26, the C-130, the U-2, the F-104, and whose Skunk Works in Burbank produced the XP-80 (the first American jet fighter) and the magnificent SR-71. Jack Northrop worked for the Loughead brothers before they closed up their shop in 1921 and again after they started business as Lockheed. Convair (Consolidated and Vultee Aircraft) who brought us the B-24 and the titanic B-36 moved to San Diego in the 30s. So that leaves a few big names out, like Chance-Vought (Texas), Grumman and Republic (New York), Boeing (Seattle. Now there's a brainstorm for you. Build an aircraft empire in an area that has good flying weather for two days out of the year.), but generally, if you were in aviation, you were in Southern California.