Master and Commander

Jesus, what the fuck was I talking about in my last post? Clearly the ravings of a madman. Sagan and the Dark Ages? It must have been the mescaline. Anyway, I’m only posting to complain about Glenn Beck. He was just on my picture box yelling that we should shoot 16-year old Somali’s (we call them pirates) in the head. “Only way to deal with them!” he said.

A nasty little bugger he is. The worst kind. Hannity and Glenn Beck are awful formerly drug addicted cable television maniacs.

Anyway, I’d been waiting for these pirates to take an American ship. Big mistake. Our Navy is like a bored NFL team that has just gotten done with a long training camp, and they haven’t had shit to do in about 30 years. Then the Lions wander in for a pre-season game. In this case, as if by God’s beautiful intervention, some crazy poor 16-year old Muslims with AK-47s kidnap an American captain and just dare them to do something. Ho, ho, ho, guess what bucko, the American Seals finally have something to do.

Now they’d been taking French ships, Dutch ships, Vaginaland ships, but I’ll bet anything they won’t take another American ship for some time. You see, these guys aren’t actually pirates, they’re bluffers. They don’t kill or rape anybody, they just act like they will, and we, in this case, called their bluff.

Whoops. Bluff called. But the media is loving this story. What a great war! Heroes! Navy Seals! Executive decisions!

The thing is, we need to act like these Somali’s actually pose a threat to our shipping capability (which they clearly don’t). Gives us a big American boner. A war we can win cleanly! Shit, I’ll sign up tomorrow. I’ve been on Pirates of the Caribbean at Disney, it’s just singing, drinking and raping. Everyone’s favorite things!

Anyway, good times.

But wow, people really are invested in hyperbole in this country. Perhaps that is the biggest problem. With television and Internet as the dominant form of information exchange: Hype has become a definable currency. This could lead to bad things, and I'd get into them, but I'm not high on mescaline.