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The Crapolla According to Fek'Lar
You know you're screwed when...
The U.S. Attorney requests a meeting, and you aren't a corporation.
You've stumbled onto another issue of The Crapolla, a journal written for software professionals. No not the managers; I mean the people who do the work.
This Crapolla is sponsored by...
In This Issue...
We're trying something new!
So it's almost half a month since I said this rag was going to a quarterly schedule. But then, Thanksgiving happened, and I've go something to say about that. So instead of waiting for the ides of February, I'm going to publish stories as I write them. (Please don't say agile, or I'll hurl.) As the issue takes root, I will be making edits and such, but this will keep topics timely.
Thanksgiving's over. You'd never know it. What happened on the fourth Thursday of November 2012, was the American consumer was given crack and a credit card and unleashed upon the retail slaughter houses. Thanksgiving dinner was cooked and served. But instead of a gathering of family to pause and take stock of your good fortune (Hey, I don't care who you are, I know there's someone who's got it worse.), this meal turned into the stoking of fires to operate the consumer's engines at 11. (That's one louder!)
Truly, I am disgusted. Admittedly, when I was young, I was largely bored at Thanksgiving dinner. But now, I like dinner parties. Thanksgiving gives us a noble theme. Notice I haven't bullshitted you with crap about how great it is to see all the family. It's not all beer and skittles during this holiday. It's the effort that has value. Damn it, we're going to at least try to make nice for a few hours so we can be grateful (hopefully) that the others are still living.
That's not what happened this year. In 2012, we said, "Screw you, Pilgrims! I'm going to the mall!" I kept seeing news stories where people said the strangest crap! (Yeah, I know, news is contrived for effect.) One guy said he just went nuts and grabbed stuff. A woman said she bought six TVs last year, and that she had stuff (from last year) she hadn't even opened yet!
Lady, step away from the register!
If you're buying stuff and never even took it out of the box, and now you're back for more, you're insane! (Well except guys who think their dolls will be valuable in 40 years.) You've transcended consumerism. You don't actually need to buy a real product. You could just ask for box number 86. They would hand you an empty box with a big 86 on it. They charge you a pile of cash that you don't have and will be paying high interest rates for, and you can take that empty box home. Congratulations! You've also helped Mother Earth because an actual product didn't need to be manufactured. So less strip mining, and burning of fuels. Woo Hoo!
Damn it! This country is getting wackier and wackier every day! And not in a good way! No, it's gone way off the deep end about how it's imaginary friend blessed them in the parking lot on the way to the retail slaughter house. This isn't the right wacky. The right wacky is where we have Thanksgiving dinner, and everyone makes nice for a few hours, we pause and pretend we're so happy all of those schmucks are alive. You figure out who you need bumped off to move up in the rich person's will. Then you say, "tryptophan!" and fake falling asleep so you don't have to talk to those people. That's Thanksgiving!
For my New Years Resolution, I pledged to cuss more. I mean, in this column. You know how this rag got its name? I was on the early shift. It had to be covered, and it was my turn. I was bored. I started a new email and wrote whatever came to mind. At the end of the hour, I sent it to everyone in my department.
I needed something for the subject line. I decided on The Crapolla According to Fek'Lar because I thought I'd get in more trouble than it was worth to call the emails What The Fuck Is This? See that's the point. It's not to not get in trouble, but to know how much you're willing to pay to have the fun. What The Fuck Is This? was going to be too expensive. Crapolla, what does that mean? See, you can talk yourself out of that trouble.
I don't need to worry about that getting in trouble bullshit anymore. This rag never touches company assets, so I don't need to worry about of all things vocabulary. I'm a very anti-censorship person. If your belief system can't handle a few choice words, how good is it?
So I just thought I'd give ya some fair fuckin' warning!
The Supreme's decided that corporations are now people. They're wrong. People are human beings. Corporations are legal entities which are used to limit liability of the individuals who own the organization. It now appears that corporations have more rights than citizens.
CNN had a great headline: HSBC: Too Big To Jail?
HSBC is a British-based multi-national bank which appears to have no allegiance, or respect for the law. It's just copped to laundering money for drug cartels, and countries whom the U.S. government has frozen the assets of. Now, you can argue all day long about whether or not drugs should be illegal, or whether the U.S. should freeze assets of other countries, but what this gets down to is, if I did this, I'd be in jail.
Instead HSBC will pay a 1.9 billion dollar fine. If that sounds like a lot of money, think again. The money is not the property of any of the people who ordered these felonies. The money belongs to the stockholders whose only guilt is they bought stock in an amoral corporation. The people who committed the crimes, get off scott free. Just like in 2008.
The U.S. Attorney couldn't get anyone in HSBC to tell them who ordered them to break the law. May I suggest we tap Vice President Cheney to water board a few of them? Hey, it's not like it's torture!
The U.S. Attorney said that HSBC was a mindless entity that just lumbered along. Do you know what that reminds me of? Right, zombies! Zombies are mindless, just keep lumbering along, and do despicable things, just like HSBC. Do you know what we do to zombies? Well, first, we hide behind the people from Marketing, because Zombies won't attack them out of professional courtesy. But then we take off the head. HSBC said they fired executives and took away bonuses. Boo Fuckin' Hoo! If these are the guys responsible, why can't they be prosecuted? The execs of HSBC should be sent to GitMo. After all this is a British corporation. Doesn't that make these execs Enemy Combatants?
My suggestion is you immediately go out and make yourself a Delaware corporation.
It's the week after another crazy kid went nuts with guns. America is talking gun control again. I'm hearing about banning large capacity clips, and banning assault rifles, and making people at gun shows go through a background check. The problem is, I don't see how any of this would have stopped this crazy kid.
This is pretty typical fare in America. Something bad happens and everyone jumps on ideas they have, but rarely do they think out what would have happened if the changes they want had been in place. The guns that were used in this slaughter were legally bought in a state with some of the toughest gun laws in the nation. The kid's mother was the gun enthusiast. She did all the paperwork and had all the background screenings done. She wasn't a criminal, and neither was crazy boy at the time. So that means another background check wouldn't have helped.
Changing clips on a gun is a very easy and fast operation. Banning high capacity clips would just mean this crazy kid would have had to bring more clips and switched them out as people continued to hide. I doubt it would have saved lives.
That brings us back to the assault rifle ban. The A4 would have been caught in the ban, but the hand guns wouldn't have. Only one hand gun was used, and it for the suicide shot. There was another in his pocket unused. He had extra clips for the pistols. Had he not had the A4, he could have done just as much killing with the hand guns. After all, this was short range killing.
I truthfully don't believe any of the proposals I've been hearing about would have made a significant difference in this massacre.
I'm not sure what the solution is. Yes, I think something needs to change, but I'd like that change to be effective. The common thread I see in all of these mass shootings is the gunman always seems to be crazy. So how do we keep guns out of the hands of loonies? I don't know, but it strikes me that should be our goal. Any solution that doesn't address the nut jobs, in my book, isn't a solution.
Just Sayin'
This Issue's Headline submission to the National Daily World Enquiring Globe.
Mayan Calendar Falls Off Fiscal Cliff!
Ancient Civilization Pins Up S.I. Swimsuit Calendar Over Old One
Heard in the halls of various software companies.
"You guys do old shit really well!"
"Was that a complement?"
"I never come to work without lube."
"You want a guarantee... from a software company?"
"This is not Disney! If it was Disney, things would be different. Stuff would work and we would all fart sparkles!"
"She called me an idiot. But in the most-positive sense."
"You know it's bad when the atheist starts praying."
There's a sale on somewhere, I just know it!
Fek'Lar
They pay me to think. These are my thoughts. Do you think they are getting their money's worth?
Remember: The Crapolla contains my personal opinions. That's right they're mine, so get your own! And you kids get off my lawn!
Although written with the software professional in mind, my mind tends to wander all over the place, and I sometimes write about politics, mass stoopidity, dumb things I saw, and whatever else comes to mind.
From time to time, I use salty language, thus The Crapolla is not intended for children, or certain people from the Christian Right.
This whole mess is copyright © 2012 by LowComDom Performances, all rights reserved. Wanna send this to your friends? Go ahead and pass out the URL.
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EOJ
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