TOBY PETZOLD

You want in on the ground floor of the next big way to help fat people lose weight? Come up with a way to neutralize their olfactory nerves. I don’t know how it would work —whether it be a surgical or pharmaceutical method— but so much of the pleasure in eating is related to smell and taste that such a measure would surely depress the desire to eat anything more than what sustenance requires.

Of course, the other thing that would be depressed by such a method of weight control would be the person’s spirits. It is extremely discouraging to be unable to smell or taste one’s food and drink. But a doctor could also prescribe happy pills to keep the poor bastard going, so maybe it would work. It’s no less crazy than stomach stapling or lap band surgery.

Oh, well. I don’t guess it would ever really work, anyway. For one thing, it’s dangerous to eat something you can’t smell or taste. Hell, it’s dangerous in general to not be able to depend on those senses. Someone could serve you up some enchiladas con caca and you’d never know the difference until it was too late.

As for me, I’ve got about two or three percent of my smell back —and I really have to work for even that. I find myself daydreaming about what my first smell will be. Will it be pleasant? Yes. Yes, it will.

By way of a link from Glenn Reynolds, read this New York Times account of one of my favorite corporate citizens:

In March 2007, Circuit City came up with a plan to confront softening sales and competition from online and offline retailers: fire the most talented, experienced employees.

Of course, those workers were the retail chain’s single most important point of difference from the legion of Internet retailers and general merchandisers, but in a single stroke, Philip J. Schoonover, the chief executive of Circuit City, wiped out that future.

As a pal of mine used to say when I described a particularly boneheaded course of action I had pursued, “How’d that work out for you, buddy?”

For Circuit City, not so great. The “wage management initiative” erased morale, both for employees and the folks who shopped there. Sales sank after the one-time gain from the layoffs. And last week, the company sought bankruptcy protection.

I strongly approve of Circuit City’s imminent journey down the crapper. That company is a lot of thieving bastards. That’s a fact in your Library of Congress. They sold me a cassette adapter for a portable CD player in my old Honda probably a decade ago and —long story short— it completely disabled my car stereo. Did I have any recourse? Fuck no. Did I fantasize about choking me some bitches like Wayne Brady? Yes. Yes, I did.

Retailers who don’t stand behind what they sell are nothing but thieves.

I am pleased to say that I have never since that incident gone into a Circuit City. I shred or toss their mailers as soon as I see them and I immediately flip the channel when one of their ads comes on. They are dead to me and, soon enough, to us all.

I don’t understand why T. Boone Pickens has put his much-touted wind energy plans on hold. Does he know something about the mid-term future of fossil fuels that the rest of us do not? Regardless of how much he’s invested in wind-tech thus far, it rather undermines the seriousness of his recent proposition that we are facing a crisis when this is how he responds to such a drop as we have lately seen —albeit a pretty huge one— in the prices of oil and gas. It just seems strange. Pickens is in the last quarter of his life —and you gotta figure he’s got the mortgage covered— so why wouldn’t he persist with the next big thing?

Barack Hussein Obama is a disaster in the making —and the American people apparently can’t be bothered. All those lies and manipulations are going to matter at some point, but for now, there’s a new religion in America —a religion of demagoguery, totalitarianism, and insults to our culture.

Once again, I will neither bend my knee nor wear the soulless mask of the enraptured.

at the same time it’s going into the toilet:

NEW YORK, Oct 23 (Reuters) - Moody’s Investors Service said on Thursday it may cut its ratings on New York Times Co[.] into junk territory, citing concerns about continuing revenue declines and risks associated with refinancing its debt.

The New York Times posted a quarterly loss from continuing operations on Thursday and said advertising revenue at its news media group dropped 16 percent for the quarter. […]

Newspaper advertising market conditions are likely to remain challenging in 2009 and continuing revenue declines will make it difficult for the company to bring its credit metrics in line with its investment grade rating, Moody’s said in a statement.

Yeah, but come on! The Grey Lady? She’s too big to fail.

But, what a glorious day that would be.

Remember a few years ago when Bush the Younger told us that we need to do something about Social Security and meant it —especially for younger people? Well, the usual Democratic hacks screamed bloody murder and insisted that nothing is wrong with Social Security and that it doesn’t need fixing.

So the effort failed. A major underpinning of American working (and retiring) life was declared untouchable and we all forgot about it.

But now we are watching enormous banks, insurers, and mortgage underwriters fail as they have not since the early 1930s, if even then. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac? Well, as nauseating liberal frauds like Barney Frank and Chris Dodd told us, those giants were too big to fail. That’s because they were the guarantors of greater home ownership amongst the various minority groups and the economic underclass. Thus, in the name of politics, the American Taxpayer was put on the hook for many hundreds of billions of dollars —and now he is hanging thereby.

You think you won’t see more destruction of other untouchable giants?

In the end, all a person can really count on is his home and some pittance to pay the basics. My castle cannot be breached. If some new form of government is imposed upon me and this society in the months and years to come next, I will fight for what I have, but I will not depend on seeing anything at the end of my wage-earning life close to what I put into the Social Security system. It is all haywire and broken promises from here on in. Waste not, want not. Worship frugality and integrity and honesty. And eat at home.

I wonder how much of the volatility in the stock market can be attributed to the growing realization that America could soon come under the thumb of a Neo-Socialist agenda not seen since, perhaps, the first years of Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration. Surely, these markets can’t really go unaffected by the concern that business is about to see a very substantial increase of taxation and regulation.

Among the Great Ninety-Five Percent that Obama is demagoguing to are a lot of people who aren’t going to get income tax cuts because they don’t pay any income tax as it is. So where can you go from there? That’s right: you can take even more money from people who do work and give it to people who don’t work. That’s not patriotism to anybody but yutzes like Biden. Such men misunderstand what this country is really about and, instead, think of it as a place where both equality of opportunity and outcome alike are guaranteed. What nonsense! 

But you can’t put a feather in that particular cap, my friends, and call it macaroni. Because that cap is stretched into the mask of socialism, which is against both the laws of America and of Nature herself.

I mean, like, holy shit, Joe (emphases mine):

“Mark my words,” the Democratic vice presidential nominee warned at the second of his two Seattle fundraisers Sunday [19 October 2008]. “It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. The world is looking. We’re about to elect a brilliant 47-year-old senator president of the United States of America. Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said. Watch, we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.”

“I can give you at least four or five scenarios from where it might originate,” Biden said to Emerald City supporters, mentioning the Middle East and Russia as possibilities. “And he’s gonna need help. And the kind of help he’s gonna need is, he’s gonna need you - not financially to help him - we’re gonna need you to use your influence, your influence within the community, to stand with him. Because it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.”

Ha, ha! What?! Is this why Biden’s no longer available for “availabilities”? Because his foot is in a constant struggle to get into and out of his big mouth? What on Earth is this man trying to suggest? That Obama’s inexperience itself will invite intrigue against us? And that, no matter what his responses are, the nauseating liberal morans will be expected to keep their regrets to themselves?

“Gird your loins,” Biden told the crowd. “We’re gonna win with your help, God willing, we’re gonna win, but this is not gonna be an easy ride. This president, the next president, is gonna be left with the most significant task. It’s like cleaning the Augean stables, man. This is more than just, this is more than – think about it, literally, think about it – this is more than just a capital crisis, this is more than just markets. This is a systemic problem we have with this economy.“

Watch your wallets, my friends. Clean and Jerk are about to steal your sorry, bourgeois asses blind. No? What “systemic problems” is Biden referring to, do you suppose? Insufficient taxation of the dirty business-owning class? That pesky antipathy working people have against giving their money to chain-smoking daytime TV-watchers who are working on baby number whatever? 

You think wealth is the only thing that’s getting spread around here? The Great Society was so great that you just knew it had to have a sequel, so drop some trou and think of [England].

Many of us who are opposed to Barack Obama —because of the enormous lies he tells about himself, as well as the extreme Leftism hidden in his story— are too slow to surrender to reality. We cannot yet accept that the America we live in is ready to hand the keys over to a narcissistic socialist in the White House and the most liberal Congress in 35 years. The disconnect may be attributed to a quaint adherence to the old standards of patriotism and, indeed, politics. When else, after all, have we made a cultural interloper of this degree our President? I don’t refer to his racial identity —although that’s certainly there— but to his foreignness. He doesn’t have a claim on this culture that I would recognize as American. Instead, he is a harbinger of the Post-American Man —the Citizen of the World who, on nothing but the power of celebrity and diabolism, went before the German throngs and debased what we are. Yes: debased. He reduced what this Republic is to a mistake that needs to be apologized for. So I do not trust his motives and I do not like his supporters, who strike me as woefully ignorant and emotional little feelers. They do not have any reason to support this man but for their emotional reaction to him. They are taking him on faith. What else do they have, though? Some evidence of his worth such as, you know, an achievement? Ask a hundred of his followers and not two of them together could tell you a single fucking thing he’s achieved that would warrant his elevation to the Presidency.

Anyway, we supporters of McCain and Palin are on our own little fools’ errands in trying to persuade the public of the dangers of this New Socialism. I have —and will have, be sure— no regrets for my own part in criticizing Obama, but it’s still poignant to read the people I depend on for my information trying so hard to break a story or pursue a new line of investigation in these last, though interminable, weeks. They want so much for what they write to matter, but it does not. What Obama draws on now is not the rational considerations of informed voters, but the raucous and fanatic emotionalism of the new idolatry —an anti-Bush and anti-Right movement determined to replace what it despises. You will not reach into those little rodental heads and convince them of anything: The One must be made the Change We Need.

What Obama is —as a man and as a patriot— is somehow irrelevant now. The icon got ahead of his reality. These are the days for dreaming. Not American Dreaming, of course; that would be too provincial. These are the days, rather, for illusions and fantasies and all the thoughts of absolution we will enjoy once we do to ourselves what must be done. Now the abnegating! Now the denigrating!

The knowing comes later. The realization must come, but last.

If John McCain would simply describe Barack Obama as a socialist, wouldn’t that almost compel a public discussion of what that word means? I don’t think some people know what’s involved. “Spreading the wealth around” may sound like a great idea to a teenager who’s working for minimum-wage, but to the 40 year-old businessperson who hired this kid to stock the shelves, it’s worrisome to consider that taxes and employee-related costs are going up. As they say, poor people never gave anybody a job —unless you count jobs created by the social necessity of cleaning up after these same people’s mistakes. At that sort of job creation, the social, intellectual, and economic underclasses excel.

The Obamatons are becoming ever more explicit in their grand schemes for the post-Republican, post-American paradise of Obama’s socialist state. They are beginning to bully and cheat in broad daylight. They are, like the terrorists they sympathize and associate with, becoming emboldened. And to what end? To disincentivize work? To undermine the bases of competition and self-worth? To suppress political dissent for the sake of the “common good”? Well, there’s one for you and nineteen for me. Think that’s fanciful? Did you ever think you would see the economic events of the past six weeks? Neither did I.