Wednesday, July 28, 2004

Journal entry postings for 7/28/04

6/6/2004


Smarty Jones lost.

I’m not sure how much of a surprise this should be to anyone. Many former triple-crown favorites have failed over the past decade or two. Why should Smarty be any different?

I mean, come on. The damn horse was rated at one to five. That means for every dollar you would bet on him, you’d only get twenty cents back. A bet ticket on S.J. was worth less than the paper it was printed on. Sort of like the Bill of Rights under dubya.

Sorry, I almost got off on another political rant. I try not to, but it’s hard sometimes.

Let’s face it. Horse racing may be the most crooked sport in existence. And a long-shot horse coming forward to beat the big favorite seems to be a story that happens a lot in the so-called “sport of kings”.

That’s another thing. We live in a damn democracy. Why do so many of us like a sport that’s referred to as the SOK?

Maybe we all have the fantasy that by watching horse racing we’re a lot more sophisticated than we actually are.

Me, I’ll take a football game over a horse race any day of the week.

At least it’s not NASCAR.

6/7/2004

Why do people like Ronald Reagan?

I mean, he tripled the size of the national debt, plunged us into massive deficits, and overspent the military budget to the point where the Pentagon was paying $200 for a hammer.

Everyone says he won the Cold War. They say this despite the efforts of tens of thousands of people, including four Democratic presidents, and the lives of thousands of American soldiers, that worked to bring down the Soviet Union.

Perhaps his policies hastened its collapse, but most historians seem to agree that the collapse was inevitable. He may have contributed to the chaos that now runs rampant in the former Soviet Union, by forcing the collapse before an adequate system could take its place.

But now everyone I meet says he was one step removed from sainthood. When I point out to them some of the failures of his policies, they look at me like I just called their mother a crack whore.

Am I the only rational person left on the planet? Am I doomed to forever be the voice of reason speaking calmly in a sea of shouted chaos? Everyone accuses me of being a far left liberal when I point out the past and present failures of the current government’s policies. When did “liberal” become a dirty word?

You may recall in an earlier journal entry that I gave you a quick test. If you answered honestly to all questions, then you are the most liberal person on the planet.

Welcome to my world.

6/8/2004

I just finished a book called Smoke Screen. It’s the first fiction book I’ve ever read that dealt with the issue of the tobacco industry calmly and rationally, and presented all arguments on both sides, all while under the thin disguise of a work of fiction.

The author, Kyle Mills, is someone whose books I have read before. I was impressed by most of them.

This is a guy who comes up with real, practical solutions to some of the biggest issues and disguises them as novels. And unlike the Conservative rants of Tom Clancy’s books, he actually takes the time to give a fair shake to all sides of an issue.

Let’s face it. Cigarettes are never going away. Yes, they kill. Yes, they ARE addictive. No, we can’t stop teens from smoking if they want to. And it would be impossible to ban them completely. They tried banning alcohol once. As I recall my history, it didn’t work out too well.

Cigarettes are also a vital part of our national economy. The government at every level gets a huge amount of taxes from their sale. Many states in the south depend on tobacco farming as a major source of income. And despite all the lawsuits, the big companies will always survive on some level.

Maybe we should blame the whole thing on that crazy Sir Walter Raleigh. Maybe if he had never discovered tobacco…

Me, I’ve never understood the appeal of cigarettes. Think about it. You’re taking a bunch of fragments of dried leaves rolled up in paper, setting fire to one end, sticking the other end in your mouth, and inhaling the smoke. How, exactly does that make sense? I mean, you don’t stand up in the middle of a house fire and inhale the smoke from that, do you?

Inhaling smoke is dangerous, whether you do it from a fire, or from a cigarette. If a lot more people would learn that basic fact, maybe we’d have a lot less problems.

6/9/04

People are strange.

Have you ever gone to amazon.com and looked up some of the numerous political books that are currently coming off the presses almost faster than they can be printed?

The most interesting thing is the ratings each book receives. They either tend to be one star or five stars. There are very few in the middle.

Of course, most of the one-star reviews of the “liberal” books are usually mispeld and gots bad grammer in they (I did that on purpose).

This indicates a disturbing trend in this country. I see the same thing when I get e-mails from my ultra-conservative cousin. He always misspells words and uses bad grammar in his various rants. He also tends to send me the same things two or three (or more) times. I can’t begin to count the number of times I’ve received the “Clinton hit list” or “Hillary black panther” stories from him or some of his friends and family.

Of course, this is the same cousin who says he is proud to live in one of the three states in the country where you can own a gun without a permit (Tennessee). He also claims to be a Mensa certified genius. I tend to question that, especially when I read some of his comments. There is a difference between being smart and being wise. There’s a difference between intelligence and common sense.

Unfortunately, that distinction seems to be lost on most people today. Look who the president is.

Of course, he’s neither intelligent nor does he have common sense…

6/10/04

So the Pistons are up two games to one now.

I gotta ask one question: Who the hell are these guys?

There are no big names on the team like Shaquille O’Neal or Kobe Bryant. A big night for the typical Pistons player is breaking 20 points. They get almost no respect from sportswriters and commentators. So why are they up two games to one?

I guess the old adage that “offense wins games, defense wins championships” really holds true. Apparently the Lakers have NEVER been held to less than 70 points in a playoff game until the last game.

There’s another team that has proved that same thing true: The Buckeyes.

Two years ago, they used smothering defense to win the national championship. And when they won their last championship back in ’68, they did the same thing.

Maybe that’s why the department that controls the military is called the Department of Defense. After all, it seems to work most of the time.

BTW, there are only 86 days ‘til the first Buckeyes game!

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