Ah, fresh red snapper for brunch. I was up much earlier for toast and coffee at Senor Café, compliments of bingo. The real treat was deep fried fish and chips at noon. Dave-O came by on his way to the beach; I stayed back here to use the cool morning to get all the yard work done and sprinkle for ants. The ants of Florida, the part they don’t tell you about. Here is the snapper, cleaned and scaled by that gorgeous lady butcher at the market. She’s the one who has so much fun handling my meat that I may ask her out one day. Don’t get the impression I eat like this every day. Heck no, some days I get fancy.
According to the staff at Doris’, the fast food restaurants are making a bid for a share of the 90 billion with a “b” dollar Food Stamp program. This would change the very nature of the program, away from a nutritional focus to a Roman-like shift from free wheat to free bread for all citizens. I see the logic, that most people on food stamps are the least capable of buying and cooking their own food. Why not serve them a cheap meal instead, knowing they are more likely to eat it than sell the bags of groceries for beer money? Give them meals instead of groceries and bankrupt the empire.
The current requirement is that no ready-to-eat products can be bought with Food Stamps. But this means the recipient must learn to shop, cook, store, plan, as well as accumulate pots, pans, and a place with a stove, table, plates and utensils to prepare and serve the food. If they could do all that, they probably don’t really need public assistance in the first place, although you did not hear that from me, right? Some call it welfare, others call it necessary during the recession, and everyone agrees it is a political time-bomb. Myself, I would be against the rollback of the program as long as one penny of American taxes goes to foreign food aid.
[Author’s note: Food Stamps are no longer ration booklets, but a debit card. Originally, the plan was that “women, infants and children” (nobody dared to say “Blacks”) were to use the money to supplement their existing budgets to buy nutritious food they could not otherwise afford. Instead and quite predictably, they learned to rely entirely on the stamps, reserving their cash for presumably more important womanly activities. Like having Octo-babies. Almost 50 million Americans will get food stamps this year, less than 12% will be seniors or the disabled.]
Next of all, I want to categorically state that I had nothing to do with the new flag bot software that is attacking Craigslist. It goes in and deletes all the posts, effectively wiping out an entire category. Now, I wish I had invented it, and I was definitely going in that direction when I decided it wasn’t worth it. Craigslist had it coming with their policies and favoritism. As it was, they allowed small organized teams of flaggers or someone with access to multiple computers to dominate a category like music or rants & raves. True, I was the pioneer of most of those tactics, but I wasn’t copying anybody so that makes it okay for me but not for others. See?
The Russians have a crew in a chamber simulating the conditions of a trip to Mars. They are in a mock capsule for the 520 days a round-trip will take. Strange they would spend so much money to study human behavior. They want to know what it is like to inhabit in a three-room container with seven people who are experts at everything, but can’t sing or dance worth a shit. People not of your own choosing, people who help themselves to everything. Who can’t ever leave you alone for five minutes, who criticize everything you do and say or don’t do and don’t say, constantly taunting to see how much you’ll take. Isolated from the entire world for endless years, with no hope of getting out until the sordid business is over when you finally escape and never go back. Day in, day out, year in, year out, listening to their stale jokes, breathing their stale farts, people whom you would not spit on if you could just find the strength to break through those thin, thin walls into that luring but deadly quiet freedom beyond.
All the Russians had to do was ask me--I could have given them some incredibly detailed information on that exact situation.
That brings up another topic. I’ve bemoaned the 30-year delay on the Mars journey, saying the money was wasted on the Shuttle program. Then I got to thinking, what if the opposite was true? The rich are bleeding America for all it’s worth so doesn’t that imply they have a place to go? This planet is full up unless you want to live in Moose Pasture, Ontario, with the jack-pine savages. Would it be easier to keep a space flight ten years ago to Mars a secret? Ask yourself how many news agencies have a radar beam monitoring interplanetary space? Or have reporters with the brains to interpret the results? How do we really know the rich aren’t ready to pack up and leave? Just you keep that in mind the next time you are waiting on your Pop-Tarts.
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