Just in case you missed it, the United Nations General Assembly voted to demand that Russia withdraw from Ukraine which will have pretty much the same effect on reality as me demanding to bat third in the Kansas City Royals lineup.
The vote was 141 to 5 with 35 countries being too chicken shit to vote (although I feel fairly certain that’s not how it will be recorded in the minutes of the meeting) which now that I think about it, is a surprisingly low number of chicken-shit countries for the UN.
Anyway…
The countries that spoke up for Russia included Cuba, Syria and North Korea and I immediately thought:
“Jesus, when you’ve got those people on your side, you know you really fucked up.”
And if Tucker Carlson also says he thinks you’re doing the right thing, you just might want to rethink your position. Which apparently, Tucker did when it turned out being Putin’s Cheerleader wasn’t nearly as popular as he hoped. Here’s what Tucker had to say about it:
“We didn’t underestimate Vladimir Putin, we overestimated Joe Biden.”
“So, the situation appears to be more chaotic by the day, possibly even spinning out of control. And that, we must be honest, is shocking to us. We’ve been taken by surprise by the whole thing.”
Two things about those statements jump out at me:
1. Apparently it’s Joe Biden’s fault that Tucker Carlson is a Horse’s Ass, and…
2. Tucker seems to be using the “royal we” in what appears to be an attempt to spread the blame, as in: I didn’t make a mistake, we did.
And now some fairly useless information about the “royal we”
Having time and brain cells to kill, I looked up the “royal we” to see where that nonsense originated and this is from the New Yorker:
“The English royal we, or pluralis majestatis, dates to the late twelfth century, around the time of Henry II and his successor Richard I, and meant “God and I,” invoking the divine right of kings. It has since come to be understood that a monarch using the royal we is speaking for the state.”
Turns out saying “we” instead of “I” was a way of dragging God into the argument like “God and I are pissed” and I gotta think if you were a Supreme Being (like Diana Ross or Mary Wilson) and your To-Do List included items like Creating Worlds and Brand New Species (like kangaroos, although they definitely look like the work of a committee) I imagine you’d get awfully tired of someone else involving you in their petty arguments.
Which reminds me of the time I was at one of my mother’s Pentecostal church services and once they got done with the singing and the sermon, they’d get down to business and wait for the Holy Spirit to move them and someone would “speak in tongues” which was always done in a “lost language” that you didn’t recognize and sounded like made-up lyrics from the backup singers in a Doo-wop group (like Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong or Bop-She-Bop-She-Bop) and made me wonder why God never had the people who spoke in tongues blurt out some Spanish or German or French because I would have recognized some words and been way less skeptical.
And then someone would interpret what Rama-Lama-Ding-Dong meant in English and this one Sunday a Husband and Wife had dueling interpretations of some garbled speaking in tongues in which he reminded the congregation that wives should be obedient and then she had a different interpretation and reminded the congregation that her husband was an asshole and they both did it in that Shakespearean English that we seem to think God speaks, like:
“Thou needest to quit being such a sexist douchebag, honeybunch.”
So they were having a domestic argument and dragging God into it which I don’t think He and/or She probably appreciated.
And speaking of bullshit…
On February 22nd Tucker Carlson (shown here estimating the size of his penis) tried to explain his stance on Russia and here’s part of what he said:
“But Joe Biden likes Ukraine, so Putin bad, war good.”
Which makes it sound like Tucker put just as much thought into his position as you might expect: tell me what Joe Biden thinks and I’ll think the opposite, which comes very close to being the current Republican Party Platform.
If you want to read more about Tucker Carlson, here’s the article:
A possibly sexist observation
Anytime you start talking about the differences between men and women you’re asking for trouble even though there are differences and if you don’t believe me, find someone of the opposite sex and both of you strip and stand naked in front of a mirror and then immediately start working on a brand new resume because if you did this at work you’re definitely going to get fired.
Anyway…
In my personal experience (your mileage and experience may vary) women are more likely than men to honk their horns in traffic and my theory about that is men think they may have to get out of their car and fight and, unless they’re female UFC contestants, most women don’t see that happening
Before I honk a horn at anybody I remind myself that the person I’m honking at might be batshit crazy and while he’s not quite batshit crazy, my friend Jason Kendall is the kind of guy you don’t want to honk a horn at, because Jason will get out of his car and confront you and we were once talking on the phone when someone honked at him and he said wait a minute, I’ve got to go kick someone’s ass and when he got back on the phone, said they didn’t fight because it was some 80-year-old man, but then Jason asked a very good question:
“How nuts do you have to be to honk at someone who looks like me?”
That’s my absolute favorite picture of Jason and he’s right in the middle of threatening to kill someone on the Pittsburgh Pirates, but had their name wrong so he was threatening to kill a person who didn’t exist and after his teammates got him calmed down, asked Jason:
“Who the hell were you mad at?”
Which brings us to Vladimir Putin and the question we should be asking as we get more involved in this conflict:
“Just how nuts is he?”
The end of the pandemic and gas prices
We are now in the third year of the pandemic and a recent Associated Press story said we’re about to officially pass 6 million deaths even though in reality we probably passed it quite a while ago because poor-record keeping and testing in parts of the world have resulted in undercounting the number of COVID victims.
The story also pointed out that while we’re celebrating the end of the pandemic here, some remote parts of the world are just now starting to deal with the virus so if you want to escape to some South Pacific island you might want to wait a few years because they’re just now entering the coronavirus shitstorm.
On Tuesday, Joe Biden banned importing Russian oil and warned that might cause gas prices to go up which has already happened even though Russian oil was just banned. So if Russian oil just got banned on Tuesday, why were we already paying higher prices on Monday?
Here’s a theory:
If a camel stubs its toe in Saudi Arabia on a Monday morning, by Monday afternoon you’re paying more for gas here in the US and when you say, “Hey, that camel’s toe is all better now, why am I still paying more for gas?” they’ll tell you that the cheaper gas has to work its way through the pipeline before it reaches the gas pumps, although the more expensive gas got there right away.
And just in case you think I’m making this up, here’s a story about an economist named Sam Peltzman who studied the phenomenon and wrote a paper called “Prices rise faster than they fall” and now here’s a quote from that story:
“Consumers might call it price gouging; economists like Peltzman have settled on a more neutral term: "asymmetric price adjustment." And while economists have conceded this time that whiny consumers happened to be right, they aren't yet ready to sign up for their conspiracy theories.”
Here’s the link to the story:
It was written in 2011 so maybe you think mankind has changed since then, but I just filled up my car and I gotta say I don’t think so and our only hope is Obi-Wan Kenobi or the United Nations demanding that they quit charging an arm and a leg for gas and I’m thinking Obi-Wan Kenobi has a better shot at it.