Letter from America

A friend in New Jersey sent me this. I always thought Republicans were such sweet guys! Ah well, read on…

You know you’re Republican when…

  1. Jesus loves you, and shares your hatred of homosexuals and Hillary Clinton.
  2. Saddam was a good guy when Reagan armed him, a bad guy when Bush’s daddy made war on him, a good guy when Cheney did business with him, and a bad guy when Bush needed a “we can’t find Bin Laden” diversion.
  3. Trade with Cuba is wrong because the country is Communist, but trade with China and Vietnam is vital to the spirit of international harmony.
  4. The United States should get out of the United Nations, and our highest national priority is enforcing UN resolutions against Iraq.
  5. A woman can’t be trusted with decisions about her own body, but multi- national corporations can make decisions affecting all mankind without regulation.
  6. The best way to improve military morale is to praise the troops in speeches, while slashing veterans’ benefits and combat pay.
  7. If condoms are kept out of schools, adolescents won’t have sex.
  8. A good way to fight terrorism is to belittle our long-time allies, then demand their cooperation and money.
  9. Providing health care to all Iraqis is sound policy, but providing health care to all Americans is socialism. HMOs and insurance companies have the best interests of the public at heart.
  10. Global warming and tobacco’s link to cancer are junk science, but creationism should be taught in schools.
  11. A president lying about an extramarital affair is a impeachable offense, but a president lying to enlist support for a war in which thousands die is solid defense policy.
  12. Government should limit itself to the powers named in the Constitution, which include banning gay marriages and censoring the Internet.
  13. The public has a right to know about Hillary’s cattle trades, but George Bush’s driving record is none of our business.
  14. Being a drug addict is a moral failing and a crime, unless you’re a conservative radio host. Then it’s an illness and you need ourprayers for your recovery.
  15. What Bill Clinton did in the 1960s is of vital national interest, but what Bush did in the ’80s is irrelevant.
  16. Remember, Republicans will always be the first and fattest hog at the government trough.

Feel free to pass this on, remember: friends don’t let friends vote Republican!

I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.E B White

Brand new blogging softs bring web-footed wisdom to the world

Me am the splendid goose, not the bendy goose!This is my first posting using this nice new WordPress blog software they just installed on the GarfNet server. About time too. It almost wore my poor little web feet out trying to code all those pages manually. Poor old me.

What is a blog I hear you ask? Well, blog, contrary to what the rest of the nitwits who run GarfNet may think, does NOT stand for Bloody Lazy Old Goose.

No. it’s my web log. A sort of web footed diary about being a good little goose. For the benefit of your education, some of my old stuff has been imported too.

Honk! Honk!

Moronic chain emails

If there’s one thing that really gets my feathers ruffled it’s those STUPID chain emails people keep sending to my personal, private email address. Ok, ‘no names, no pack drill’ – but you know who you are!

The truth about chain emails…

Well, I’ll let you all into a little secret: they are all lies. No! you won’t be receiving $1000 dollars from Microsoft for sending ‘this email’ to all your buddies. No! the ‘missing child’ isn’t really missing. She doesn’t actually exist. And No! sending ‘this email’ to everyone you know won’t give you eternal good luck. It won’t make you rich or famous beyond your wildest dreams. It won’t make you beautiful or desirable to the opposite sex (or the same sex if that’s what floats your boat). There is no free trip to Disneyland. Nokia and Ericsson are not giving away free phones. No amount of spamming your mates, (or by now former mates) will cure anyone’s cancer, epilepsy or migraines. And it won’t even touch herpes, chlamydia or any of those ‘social diseases’ you may have contracted after a few good nights out on the town.

So please do NOT forward those stupid chain mails to me!

Chain emails are about as welcome here as a dose of the pox! And I have a special message for the spiteful morons who send me those vile ‘you will have a lifetime of bad luck if you don’t pass on this email to all your friends‘ variety. Cobblers! My ‘bad luck‘ is that I might be in some way associated with you!

On a scale of credibility that already dips well into minus-figures, the most moronic of all the chain emails has to be the the exceptionally dumb Sainsbury’s Vouchers hoax that’s currently doing the rounds here in Old Blighty. And hundreds of silly, greedy Brits have actually fallen for it! Hardly surprising I suppose as this lot actually voted again for that mass-murdering, war-mongering, grinning, two-faced shyster Blair, when he really ought to be serving a long stretch in one of ‘Her Majesty’s hotels’ for war crimes!

Anyway, I will be giving you all the full benefit of my opinion regarding chain emails in a later blog entry. Meantime, here are some sites to visit, particularly with regard to the Sainsbury’s hoax. And just to make it perfectly clear even for those with AOL accounts because in my experience, AOLers seem to be a particularly gullible bunch…

NO! Sainsbury’s is NOT going to give you £60 if you send that dumbassed email to ten of your friends.

It is a HOAX!Mr Goose, you don’t actually have 10 friends, do you? Ed.


AOLers and others with learning difficulties should ask a responsible grown-up to read and explain these to you…

Sites specific to the 2005 October Sainsbury’s hoax…
http://www.sophos.com/virusinfo/hoaxes/sainsburys.html
http://www.sophos.com/spaminfo/articles/sainchain.html
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/sainsburys-voucher-hoax.html
http://www.webuser.co.uk/news/69613.html

Recent postings on forums & blogs about the Sainsbury’s hoax…
http://s12.invisionfree.com/HoaxSlayer_Forums/index.php?showtopic=91&view=getnewpost
http://www.rover800.co.uk/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?2099
http://chris-linfoot.net/d6plinks/CWLT-6HBLDH

People who are as miffed as me with the morons who forward this stupid, obvious hoax. Also, one poster suggests the hoax is actually an email harvesting scam…
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=104227

Good general reading about email hoaxes…
http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/nothing/billgate.asp
http://www.hoax-slayer.com/

One of the best resources on the web for debunking urban myths
http://www.snopes.com/

Sainsbury’s response to the hoax (go to bottom of their web page)…
http://www.sainsbury.co.uk/shoppingandservices/FAQs/aboutourcompany.htm#100

Iraq fiasco

I didn’t want to go to war. I don’t know anyone in the UK who did. So you’ll be glad to learn that it seems our press is finally waking up to the fact that people this side of the pond are more than a little hacked-off that Blair & his cronies have continually lied their heads off about Iraq – conning us into a war that no one except the criminally insane wanted in the first place…

Of course, Tony Blair is an anagram of ‘liar by ton’ – a fact I discovered when I stumbled across a site full of unflattering Blair/Bush anagrams.

Hmmm…

Anyway, according to former (& slightly senile) BBC American correspondent Alistair Cook, in his 15 minute slot on BBC World service entitled ‘Letter From America’, Blair is held in great esteem in the US. Is this true? Bollocks I say! Blair may be more intelligent than Bush not difficult let’s face it – but he is just as dishonest! Take it from me, Blair & his buddies are as bent as a nine pound note!

Worse than Thatcher – the woman who proved that mad-cow-disease could indeed be transferred to humans – Blair has serious delusions of grandeur as he contemplates his place in history. Originally, he thought this would be achieved by taking UK into the Euro currency (quite a good idea IMHO). Instead he got us mixed up in this Iraq fiasco. In fact Blair has led the UK into five wars since his election in 1997 – Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan & Iraq. But it’s a war of a different kind I find particularly intriguing…

One of Blair’s most senior, yet unelected spin doctors, a shadowy character called Alistair Campbell, recently launched a vicious verbal & written attack of the BBC for daring to suggest that the first Iraq Dossier was ‘sexed up’.

Bad move IMHO because ‘Aunty Beeb’ is still quite highly regarded here. Even our seemingly gullible electorate, when given the choice of ‘who do you trust, Blair or Beeb’, only a total moron would choose that grinning shyster. Even if Blair were more honest than Jesus Christ, we Brits would think twice before buying a second-hand car from a bloke who smiles so much!

Not that our poker-faced & stammering Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw ranks much higher in our affections. He has finally admitted that the second Iraq Dossier – the one that was plagiarised from a 10 year old PHD student’s thesis posted on the internet same document that Colin Powel told the UN was an exquisite piece of work was, and I quote, ‘a complete Horlicks’. Of course, our last Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook resigned over Iraq before hostilities began because he didn’t believe his Government’s pro-war hype. Nevertheless, despite the ‘dodgy dossier’ & the diminishing credibility of the first waste-of-paper, the ‘Man of Straw’ still insists the Niger plutonium bullshit is actually true. However he fails to produce any real evidence to support this view.

Or to be more precise, the flimsy evidence he does offer is at least 12 years old!

Looks like the Niger plutonium thing is starting to give the Aussie PM John Howard a bit of a headache too!

And I’m really glad to see that Bush is finally coming under a bit of fire at home.

What took the Democrats so long? Perhaps it may take a few honest Republicans to join the fight too? Presumably there are some? Seems to me that impeachment is too good for Bush. Prison seems more appropriate! IMHO the ‘high crime’ of starting an illegal war really deserves a custodial sentence. Perhaps Bush could be sentenced to share a 2-metre-square, open-air cage with Blair for a while; somewhere ‘nice & sunny’ like Guantanamo? Actually, we’d settle for Blair doing a spell at ‘Her Majesty’s pleasure’ in one of our crumbling, overcrowded & inhumane ruins that he has allowed to fill-to-the-brim & decay due to lack of funds. Ah well, one can dream.

Talking of grotesque, flagrant abuses of power, I wonder if there’s any truth in this, from the Canadian-based Global Research website?

Well that’s enough depressing stuff for now. My message to the ‘real’ Americans is, keep up the protests. Be as big a pain-in-the-ass as you can! It seems to me that the true American heroes are the ones who stand up against injustice & wrongdoing – not those who ‘just follow orders’.

I am constantly meeting people who, IMHO, unfairly regard USA as a nation of ‘gun-slinging warmongers’ and/or ‘corporate fraudsters. This is largely thanks to the actions of that monkey-faced moron in the White House & the shady bunch of ‘neocon’ loonies that pull his strings. Yet, despite growing misgivings about the Iraq war in the UK press, even in the Murdoch-owned sector, our mainstream media still shows very little of the ‘real’ America & what people of principle are about.

Like Saddam and his mates, Bush and his cronies now have a deck of cards produced in their honour. Dubbed the ‘Worlds Least Wanted’, I thought this was quite an amusing idea…

In fact the http://www.tvnewslies.org site provides a thoroughly splendid resource for those of us who are less than happy with our leaders. Might even reduce my Guinness consumption for a few days & send them a few quid.

Finally, this isn’t exactly news so you have probably heard it before but I found this quote from Herman Goering on the ‘Resource Center for Non Violence’ website quite thought provoking…