RobBob

Oben hui Unten pfui

The best waves I ever rode were on July 7, 1977...that excellent day being topped off with beer and the comradery of the girls in the neighboring campsite that evening. Damn, the good old days.

This reminds me, I heard a radio story about masturbation practices in different countries. Seems that boys in India do this in a group...but are supposed to cease the behavior when they get married. Australian women are the honest females, 87% admitting to the practice. Greek men are the biggest liars, with only 8% saying they engage in trasking.

OMG, people walked into my office as I read this, and it was all I could do to contain myself. My face started twisting all around, and finally I had to go into the bathroom and turn the sink on while I laughed out loud.

Bunch of us lived in a house in Austin...one guy's girlfriend got all bent outa shape because another roommate drew a skull & crossbones on his milk along with the words "Back Off Fucker." Seems she was the guilty one drinking his milk.

Lessee, you can take Jim, j_b, ....

Somebody say PYT?

RobBob could not be located for comment ---Mod.

Are you familiar with this theory, that statistically almost anyone in the world is connected to anyone else through six degrees of separation? A reminder of this social theory popped up in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, in an article discussing software (based on this idea) that mines employees' contacts for marketing purposes. Anyway, it got me to thinking, how many degrees of separation between cc.comers? Of course there are the obvious direct contacts ...but more interesting to ponder are some others... Sisu and DFA trask and Sex Choc Harry Pi and Miss Normandy who is most-separated or least-separated??

Does anybody think like I do that today's auto audio is actually worse than 20+ years ago? There's too much bass, and something missing in midrange. I can't remember anything better than the sound of the Velvet Underground's Rock 'N Roll on my power-boosted audio in 1977, rolling home at 3am...

Hey, wait a minute, Goddammit. You called me a Catholic! I'm a good Whiskeypalian, and we almost even elected a gay bishop yesterday (until something about gay porn surfaced ). I like my porn in real life, thanks.

You are correct---I would avoid such a site based on the name. (Jeez, I can't think of anythiong less sexy than the term "suicide.")

Where does that avatar pic come from?!

send the dirty buggers back up north where they came from.

Jim, I said the Middle East. When did the majority of the oil reserves in the Middle East get nationalized? You'll do anything to convince yourself that you won an argument. I got no facts incorrect whatsoever. Western nations provided the market, the technology, and the capital for Middle Eastern nations to get wealthy on oil. Those nations welched on the arrangement. As I have said before, the Western nations' methods may have been crude, but our actions since nationalization have been in an effort to stabilize and mitigate the ransom that the Middle East has extorted through OPEC for oil. You like to believe we meddle in the Middle East for sadistic pleasure, I think. The nationalization of Middle Eastern oil constitutes the largest transfer of wealth in history. Let's move on to another topic.

I am saying that since the Middle East seized oil assets back in the 1970s, western nations in the Middle East have been scrambling to put stability back into that industry. Some may argue that Western nations made huge profits by matching Western know-how and investment capital with Middle Eastern raw materials. But we also made the governments of those nations in the Middle East rich at the same time. But they got greedy, wanted more, and re-structured the deal for themselves. The industrial world has been dealing with the fallout ever since. So I am saying that the US and the Western world aren't the deceitful parties when it comes to the Middle Eastern oil scene. The MIddle Eastern nations all reneged on the deal with us that made them wealthy.

Jim, if you feel so strongly that everything that the US touches abroad turns to shit, why don't you catch the next humanitarian relief plane over there? Don't include me and the rest of the US in your need to engage in self-flagellation. THEY nationalized their oil, WE didn't. The ME should have known that there would be repercussions from that move. The ME started this ball rolling by destabilizing the oil industry structure---western nations didn't. Western nations understandably reacted by trying to stabilize their interests the best they knew how.

I DARE YA!

You'll not hear me defend those two "true believers." I believe the real villain is

Who doesn't believe oil is the reason? Oil is the strategic reason for all western nations to maintain an interest there. Hell, we built and operated the infrastructure there, and made the ME nations rich in the process. If Nixon hadn't gotten his dick caught in the door of Watergate, we probably wouldn't have allowed Kaddafi to start the domino effect of oil nationalization in the ME to start with. As I understand it, Iraq still operates oil industry equipment that is over a half-century old. One could make the argument that it really still belongs to the British, under agreements made back then.

Off White, you are tha man. Thanks for the great overview. Arrrrgh! I'm off to fly the black flag.

Subject: the marine and an iraqi A squad of Marines drove up the highway between Basra and Baghdad. They came upon an Iraqi soldier badly injured and unconscious. Nearby on the opposite side of the road was an American soldier in a similar state, but he was alert. As first aid was given to both soldiers, they asked what had happened. The Marine responded "I was heavily armed and moving north along the highway. Coming south was a heavily armed Iraqi soldier". "What happened then?" the corpsman asked. "I told him Saddam Hussein was a miserable piece of shit, and then the Iraqi told me that Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy and Bill Clinton were miserable pieces of shit." " We were shaking hands when the truck hit us."

Thanks for the advice. Now if I can just figure out how to override my firewall, which is not allowing an incoming TCP connection...

what name-calling? And just what part of this discussion constitutes further thread-creep from the quote that I clipped from mattp? Jim, the funny thing about your posts...you don't seem to realize just how left of center your politics consistently appear. I sentence you to go work for Exxon for 6 months.

Not a non-sequitur, but perhaps you cannot interprete metaphors. The point is, the current system in which our culture believes that suing large companies is a fair way to compensate "victims" (overeaters, smokers, etc.) and a fair way to regulate corporate America, is bound to come to a screeching halt when those companies can no longer make a reasonable return on investment. The Republican answer is to take care of the economic engines that grow the economy. Maybe they overdo it, I dunno. But you and some of the other bleeding-hearts here are so vituperously left that you cannot for a minute allow yourself to see the big picture---that you are trying to turn the US into another Europe, which hastens the movement of industry and jobs to Asia and Latin America.