Nigerian "Friends" say, "Everything is all Right!" and my Proposals for America

I don't know who they are and who is the funding behind them but this group ran a full page ad in todays New York Times with the overall message that everything is all right in Nigeria. That is almost as funny as me saying that everything is all right in America, no problem, don't worry, be happy. Stick your head in the sand people and pretty soon you cannot breath.

The April 3 Edition of Newsweek has a very informative article on Africa and some of the challenges the countries face. I want to send all of us Americans there for a month each. Yeah brother, maybe change would happen.

My Proposals for America
My proposal, as the want-to-be leader of America, is that each American child in High-School automatically spend one year abroad living with a family in another country. It would NOT be a European country with a high standard of living. The host family would send their child - an exchange program - but mandatory. It would be fun to send all the Southerners straight into the Blackest parts of the human world . . . Africa, the South Pacific, South America. White with Blacks, Blacks with whites - you get the idea and you must spend a year abroad to graduate.

My next proposal is that each family in America only be allowed to own a maximum of two cars per household. I predict the automobile companies would assasinate me as soon as possible. There goes the economy stupid! Nonetheless, we must move away from automobiles and an oil-based economy. It is too late, but what the hell! In the long run though, perhaps it is better to encourage mass consumption even more as as to enhance, encourage and facilitate the seeds of our destruction - not only of our economy but the ecosystem?

Another proposal is universal health care for everyone living in America. Smoking would be outlawed and the tobacco companies shut down and thier leaders locked up and forced to work in the oncology wards with smokers as thier only patients. People who smoke, drink to excess and otherwise abuse themselves would be penalized (how I have no idea). We already have universal health care - it is called the Emergency Room (and people wonder why it is so expensive?!).

It is two a.m. here in Northern California and I have mouthed off less intelligently than I have planned - as usual. Still, my timing on Nigeria was not bad this time. My proposals for America are partly driven by my unending ability to rant and rave ad nauseum about the State of America and our leaders. All too easy to do and remain a hypocrit as one of my only readers pointed out. So I thought it would be good to put some of my extremist views out on the chopping block - views better suited to be enacted by a dictator perhaps, but my proposals still. A dictator because the American people would never give into them - they prize their individual freedom to such a great extent they cannot see it is taking this country to a place of no retreat, hope or redemption.

I may have some interesting ideas but at least I won't bankrupt America and turn it into a police state with a populace convinced they are under siege and living in a constant state of fear, mistrust and hatred of the 'outsider'.

Thanks for reading and remember to ask yourself this . . . .

what the hell are YOU doing for your world, neighbor and fellow human being?

I like to THINK I do good but sometimes it may be as simple as helping people that don't want help. In the final analysis, I am just as irrlevant (I absolutely LOVE that word) as the next person.

Charles Taylor and the Corruption of Nigeria

While driving home from the hospital tonight I heard that Charles Taylor has escaped his posh seaside villa in the vacation wonderland of Nigeria. I remembered back to my wonderful but naive days at UCLA where I had a great Professor - Richard Sklar, whom I admired very much and was a good influence on me (teaching me to see past the surface to what leaders do and not what they are saying). I had high hopes for Nigeria at some point. Now it seems that the whole country is a magnet for corruption of the highest order - government ministers stealing millions with no worry at all of being caught. I know the local people are suffering tremendously while most of the leaders at the state and National level are criminals, liars, thieves and braggards.

Yes, I know I am not from Nigeria but so what? I am from the United States where we simply hide and institutionalize our own corruption on a massive scale. I am not saying we are better than Nigeria.

What set my diatribe off is the sheer brazen audacity of Nigeria colluding with Charles Taylor and he escapes so easily. The man is a butchering pig who is guilty of warcrimes. He must be stopped and brought to justice by his own people. The trouble is that most of Nigeria is so corrupt there will be nothing done by them.

The definition of corruption? It is an action taken with the full knowledge that it is wrong and should not be done. But money talks and BS walks as we so eloquently state in America and that is what happened in Nigeria.

A good thing about Nigeria? Sure, the New York Times had a great article on the Guinea worm in Africa. Nigeria is a leader in this respect and is making great strides against this age-old pest. So of course the Nigerian people are not all guilty or bad. The corruption is so entrenched that nothing will get done at any level of the goverment without bribes and gifts to lubricate the way.

I have no constructive idea to offer, only criticism. I will propose this - that the United States stay the hell out of other countries except in instances like this. We should bring the entire intelligence agency (NSA, CIA, NRO, you name your favorite) apparatus to bear on war criminals like Mr. Taylor and that scum - Radovan Karajic (another pig). We should send in Delta, Rangers, whatever task force de jour of the day is and take them and thier lieutenants before the Hague to be tried for war crimes. Sure ain't legal people but I am angry enought to propose this right now. Guilty of cultural imperialism? Damn Straight - at least this time.

Thanks for reading and I hope those idiots in Serbia and Nigeria read this. They way they operate though - I could be a dead man, but I flatter myself methinks.

President Bush is a Laughingstock

Not only is Bush a LIAR of unprecedented proportions along with his bedmate Rumsfeld and Wolfie, he is a joke of man to boot. He is talking out of his rear end only, using doublespeak. While things are getting worse and going to hell in Iraq, he is trying to convince the American people that things are actually, really, really, really getting better! It really is 1994 all over again - thank you George Orwell.

So the lies keep coming and coming, the administration building their case for war and continued interference in another State's affairs by accumulation of detail and weaving it into a tapestry of lies, deception and deceipt. When will the American people stop bending over for Bush?

Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush are men without honor, empathy, a conscious or sympathy except for thier own selfish, traitorous and dangerous agenda. They are destroying America, lock them up, try and execute them.