Fred on Everything - GONE!

It's hard to believe that The Cranky One will not be writing (on a free page, that is) any more. He does hold out the hope that he will write for pay, so maybe we'll still have a chance to read His Crankiness.

Here's a few gems from the past:

Instead of NASCAR or the NFL playoffs, all the televisions had some guy being enthroned as president of the US. It was awful. I can stand singing commercials for toilet paper. I once watched a half hour of Oprah and recovered, though with psychic scars. But twelve hours of embarrassing imperial pomp, chattered about by boringly dressed dullardesses with the intelligence of catfish? A freaking coronation with everything except inbred hemophiliac nobles?

In a sane world, a president would sign in online. User ID, password, bingo, he’s president, spare me the media circus. Why involve the rest of us? When I get a new job, I don’t need a $150-million parade that blocks the streets everywhere. It’s a sign of a defective character.

In fact we could probably do a president in software, and save the upkeep on that funny-looking double-wide on Pennsylvania Avenue. Server space is cheap these days. Little processing power would be needed to simulate the average president. An abacus would probably do it.

And:

Emotion determines policy, and the mind provides a window dressing of plausibility.

Consider empathy and its lack, perhaps the most profound dividing line in politics. Do you remember the uproar over exploitation of migrant workers in California? One side was willing to pay ten cents a head more for lettuce so that the migrants wouldn’t have to live in hovels; the other side wasn’t. Similarly, the Pentagon is perfectly willing to bomb cities and kill indiscriminately, to torture prisoners; the other side cringes.

A recurring example is the dispute over national medical care. The conservatives oppose it because they say it would become a bloated federal program, as it probably would. (They do not oppose bloated federal programs that produce profits, as for example the military, but have a deeply principled aversion to anything that might require them to pay taxes. Note that they favor private charity over public welfare, because they don’t have to pay for the former.) They simply can’t care what happens to others.

It's impossible to describe Fred - 'ya gotta read him (Ooooh, I sound like I'm channeling Palin!)