Nutritional Bisonomics

Here's a couple of statistics that might just be related, although which causes which is up for debate:

Illegal immigrants in the US: 12-20 million
Recipients of food stamps in the US: 30-33 million

Yes, that's right, at least one in ten of the US population is now getting free food paid for by the rest of us, according to Associated Press estimates (although others figure it's now more like one in nine). The federal government has creatively re-branded the food stamps program as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, which is a piece of timeless lefty euphemism. It would better be described as the Free Food Giveaway Program.

Now, maybe I'm a bit slow, but I'm always hearing about how we only have illegal immigration because of all the jobs that legal US residents won't do. ("It's a victimless crime - without them who will pick the fruit or cut your lawn?") Meanwhile there are thirty million US residents getting free food because they don't work. Excuse me, but that is utterly fucked up.

Let's allow for the fact that some of the thirty million SNAP recipients are children. (Given the high incidence of single parenthood and the unselective breeding habits at that end of society, let's face it, it might be quite a lot.) There are still probably around eight or ten million potential workers getting free food, paid for by taxpayers, while not doing the jobs that illegal immigrants end up doing. Why don't they get out there and get jobs? Because they're better off staying at home and sucking on the public teat than busting there arse cutting lawns, gutting chickens or replacing roofs.

It's a simple fact that with a nice cosy welfare safety net people don't have to go out and find work. Meanwhile, immigrants from countries where the taxpayers won't feed you while you sit on your arse are only too happy to come here and work hard. When I had my roof replaced the workers were all Hispanic. I have no reason to believe they were illegals, but they worked hard from early morning to evening. Meanwhile, in some public housing project, hundreds of thousands of people will have been whining about the lack of job opportunity for them, explaining that this is why their kids are selling drugs, moaning about poor schools and tucking into free food provided at someone else's expense.

In theory you could just send all the illegals home and then have the unemployed do the work. Ten million illegal workers replaced by ten million food stamp recipients. It's easy, right?

Here are some more statistics to brighten up your day:

Average cost of food stamp program per person: $113 per month
Number of recipients: 33 million
Total annual cost: $45 billion

Number of US taxpayers: 90 million (135 million tax returns, less 45 million that pay no federal taxes)
Annual cost to each taxpayer of providing free food to other people: $500

That's right, if you pay federal income tax you're coughing up five hundred bucks out of your paycheck so that other people can spend their money on beer, cigarettes, cable TV and other "essentials" while you buy their family's food. That's fucking bullshit. I've heard from a firefighter, working hard and economizing to make ends meet, who got pissed off continually seeing people in public housing with big flat screen TV's that he couldn't even hope to afford, all paid for with other people's money. Their "entitlements". It's amazing what you can afford when your food comes free, your rent is paid by the government and your kids' clothes are given to you.

Something's wrong here, people. It's fashionable to compare the current economic downturn to the great depression, but that's laughable. Back then people would criss-cross the country, willing to do anything to earn a crust. Nowadays you can just sit on your arse and wait for food to drop in your lap. There are, we are told, so many jobs available that we have to let illegal immigrants come here. So why are more than ten percent of the population getting free food then?

It's enough to make you puke, but bear in mind that you'll be replacing that meal with your own money if you do...




Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Crap No-one Needs, #16

The Art Establishment



Have you ever thrown up on the pavement? You might be an artist. Ever spilled some paint on the floor? Yep, sounds like you're an artist. Ever cut a cat in half to see what the insides look like? You could possibly be a psychopath, but you probably have a great future as a famous artist. The whole art establishment is so infested with useless wankers who wouldn't know real art if it crawled up their anus and tickled their spleen, that there's really no qualification required anymore.

Remember the "Piss Christ" photograph? Some moron pisses in a glass and puts a plastic crucifix in it, takes a photo and calls it art. The National Endowment for the Arts, a $155 million Congress-created boondoggle for worthlessness, puts this and other similar shit on exhibition at the taxpayer's expense and calls it art. If there was ever a sector of human endeavor that exhibited the Emperor's New Clothes phenomenon it's the art world: if you think some dozy tart's unmade bed, half a cow in a glass case or someone's crude painting with their own excrement isn't real art it's because "You're just a middle-class drone who doesn't comprehend the artist's deep appreciation of the human condition, communicated through a complex medium in order to bypass our natural emotional filters". In other words, if you think the emperor is naked, you must be stupid.

If all these wankers were just running around on welfare pissing on crucifixes then I wouldn't care, but they're doing it on our dime. It's not the business of government to be subsidizing the arts - if something is good enough then someone will pay to see it. Those that clamor for government arts funding (which, let's face it, means arts funded by taxes expropriated from working people against their will) realize full well that given a choice the working public will not voluntarily pay to support someone who spends his day pissing in a glass and taking pictures of it. Without government intervention art would have to survive on its merits, which would immediately condemn half the liberal arts establishment to get a real job.

Yeah, I know, people pay millions for Damien Hirst so-called artworks. which doesn't mean they have any artistic merit, but that's an entirely different phenomenon: art collection. The whole point of that is for people with more dollars than braincells to buy stuff so they can show off to other such people how wealthy and "enlightened" they are. It doesn't have to be good, only "desirable", an attribute conferred by an art establishment so removed from what the real world thinks as to have rendered their opinions meaningless.

Here's some art rules to live by:

1. If The Bloke Down The Pub Could Do It, It's Not Art

When we watch professional sports we know that the quarterback, sprinter, tennis player or goalie is performing at a level that we couldn't; that's why we pay to see them. They demonstrate excellence. It's the same thing with art. When I see a Bruegel painting I know I couldn't have done it, plus it's interesting to look at. Half of what passes for modern art requires no real talent other than the art of self-promotion and the ability to talk bollocks, which brings me to:

2. If You Have To Explain It, It's Not Art

If you could walk right by the so-called art and have no idea that it was art at all, then it isn't. Notice how modern art requires a soundtrack of interpretation and commentary to help the observer "understand and appreciate" the artist's message. This is a clear sign that it's a load of old bollocks; the number of accompanying words is directly proportional to the speed with which it should be consigned to the dumpster.

3. If It's Not Painted Or Sculpted, It's Not Art

Since music and dance are their own categories, art is a term for things of beauty that are static and to be looked at. This includes pictures, sculptures and maybe certain photography. That's it. It does not include "art installations" which consist of crap just thrown together, or people engaging in "interactive art". This is just bollocks. You know it's bollocks because normal people, uncontaminated by art indoctrination, would walk up to it and exclaim "What a load of old bollocks". Living in a room for fourteen days is not art.

4. If It Needs A Famous Name Attached, It's Not Art

What's the chance that if I'd pissed in a glass and put a crucifix in it, I would have got it into an exhibition in New York? If I cut a dog in half and put it in formaldehyde would I get my own show and have someone pay a million for it? Fuck no. If you took a Constable picture and took the name off you'd still walk past and think "Fucking good picture of a haywain, that." If you walked past the glass of piss you'd think "Jesus, I think someone pissed in that glass. Is there a tramp in here?" So just imagine it's not Tracy Emin's unmade bed, or Damien Hirst's half a cow, or Andres Serrano's glass of piss. What if Albert Bloggs or Dave Brown had done it? Would it still be good enough for an exhibition? Of course it wouldn't - it's not real art, it's just a bunch of art establishment wankers crawling up each others' arses.

Fundamentally the art scene is infested with pseudo-intellectual wankers, and if it that's what makes them happy then good luck to them. Except when the government, laboring under the biggest deficit in history, finds it essential that they confiscate money from working people to hand out to so-called artists who are just climbing over each other to be more "shocking" and "controversial" while not being required to exhibit any real talent.

Here's a suggestion to all those cutting edge art tossers: the Piss Christ is old news - if you want to be really "out there", why not take a dump on the Koran and photograph that? No, I didn't think so. Not so brave when some Islamist would cut off your tiny balls and make an exhibition out of you?


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

A Horse's Head For Chrysler

There was this old mob technique which was employed when they wanted to take over a bar or other such money-making establishment. They'd send in some boys to trash the place or rough up the staff and then offer the management the opportunity to buy protection. The thing is, the cost of protection tended to go up, and to come with other strings attached, so that eventually the owners would just give in and sell up for a fraction of the real value of the business. This is called extortion.

Chrysler is in bankruptcy. The real owners of the business are the secured lenders, since they have first call on all the assets of the business. This is what was agreed contractually when they made the loans. However, the deal being offered to them is to sell up for approximately 20% of what they are owed. Guess who gets 55% of the value of the "new" Chrysler? Yes, it's the UAW autoworkers union.

There are lots of theories about why US automakers went in the toilet, many of them referring to "poor management" or "unattractive product". There's even been a chorus of wisdom suggesting that they lost money because they weren't offering fuel-efficient vehicles, making a neat link with prevailing eco-weenie sentiments while neatly missing the point that the only vehicles they made any money on were trucks and SUVs. No doubt they had poor management, but if the product has been weak it has to be related to the fact that they've been losing money for years. How can you put A-grade vehicles in the market if you make a loss on every one, and would make a bigger loss if you tried to make them better?

Let's cut through all the bullshit: the reason the traditional US automakers are losing money is the gold-plated, over-the-top, extortionate pay and benefits that the UAW has extracted over the years with threats to strike and shut down operations, plunging the companies into insolvency. For years management has chosen to pay off the thugs at the UAW rather than face them down, and just like the poor bar owner faced with the goons from the mob it's hard to pass judgment on them from the safety of your armchair. Any normal company shuts down plants when sales fall (and remember that US automakers have lost share every year), but in the twisted world of the UAW, the automakers have to pay all the workers even if there are no jobs to do, or pay them a small fortune to fuck off, and then pay their medical costs, pension costs and those of their families, forever.

What really pisses me off is Obastard's government brokering a deal where the union gets to walk off with most of what's left of Chrysler, in spite of them having no secured position (unlike secured lenders) and completely missing the fact that the UAW is what caused the whole mess in the first place. They should be grateful that there are any jobs left for their members at all after what they did. Obastard has been bought and paid for by the UAW (campaign donations anyone?) and has pressured the rightful owners of Chrysler to sell out cheap.

Tell me what's so different between the UAW crippling the automakers and then walking off with most of what's left, and the mob running down a bar and then buying it for a song. The labor laws over here just encourage this sort of large-scale extortion (remember the unions did the same thing to the airlines, bleeding them dry until 9/11 came along to finish them off) and it's no accident that the non-union auto operations in the US are growing.

In the twilight world of left-wing ideology we're supposed to look the other way as union thieves take other people's property, since it's all "in the interests of the workers". But what else would you expect from a government determined to confiscate ever more of our money to hand out to its cronies to buy votes?


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

A Simple Explanation...

I was sent the following explanation of the financial crisis, rendered in simple terms:

Heidi is the proprietor of a bar somewhere in Europe. In order to increase sales, she decides to allow her loyal customers - most of whom are unemployed alcoholics - to drink now but pay later. She keeps track of the drinks consumed on a ledger (thereby granting the customers loans).

Word gets around and as a result increasing numbers of customers flood into Heidi's bar.

Taking advantage of her customers' freedom from immediate payment constraints, Heidi increases her prices for wine and beer, the most-consumed beverages. Her sales volume increases massively.

A young and dynamic customer service consultant at the local bank recognizes these customer debts as valuable future assets and increases Heidi's borrowing limit.

He sees no reason for undue concern since he has the debts of the alcoholics as collateral.

At the bank's corporate headquarters, expert bankers transform these customer assets into DRINKBONDS, ALKBONDS and PUKEBONDS. These securities are then traded on markets worldwide. No one really understands what these abbreviations mean and how the securities are guaranteed. Nevertheless, as their prices continuously climb, the securities become top-selling items.

One day, although the prices are still climbing, a risk manager at the bank (subsequently of course fired for his negativity) decides that slowly the time has come to demand payment of the debts incurred by the drinkers at Heidi's bar.

However they cannot pay back the debts.

Heidi cannot fulfill her loan obligations and claims bankruptcy.

DRINKBOND and ALKBOND drop in price by 95 %. PUKEBOND performs better, stabilizing in price after dropping by 80 %.

The suppliers of Heidi's bar, having granted her generous payment due dates and having invested in the securities are faced with a new situation. Her wine supplier claims bankruptcy, her beer supplier is taken over by a competitor.

The bank is saved by the Government following dramatic round-the-clock consultations by leaders from the governing political parties.

The funds required for this purpose are obtained by a tax levied on the non-drinkers.

I wish I could say that I had written it, but unfortunately I've been much too busy, what with having to work extra hard to pay all the taxes required to bail out the dumb fucks who put us in this mess. Beer anyone...?

Weight Loss

Like so many things, it seemed like a good idea at the time. Someone decided that we should have a weight-loss competition at work, which involved teams of five people seeing how much weight they could lose over a couple of months. When I accepted the invitation to join a team I didn't really pay much attention to the other members - after all, I wasn't about to get all psycho about weight loss. Unfortunately what I hadn't realized was that of the four other team members, three were bone-thin bastards with no weight to lose, and the fourth had already been working hard at it for a month, meaning that I was the only one who was a candidate to lose any weight at all.

Now, I'm no fat bastard, but I could probably lose a few pounds and feel no worse for it. Mrs Bison thinks about ten, which is optimistic. Bison Daughter is expecting me to end up with a six-pack, which is simply ridiculous, but represents a charming show of faith in her old man. It's not like I'm in this to win it; there are some people in our office who could - how do I say this delicately? - comfortably lose the bodyweight of a good sized dwarf and hardly notice. Nevertheless I at least want to be sure that we're not the only team to actually get fatter while supposedly trying to lose weight.

So what's my strategy? "Eat less and exercise more" is a well-established approach, but I already exercise five or six times a week, and I'm buggered if I'm going to go hungry. The thing about lifting weights is that it's important to ingest a significant amount of protein at regular intervals during the day, so I can't skip that. The only other time I decided to lose weight I went on a "no pasta, rice, bread or potatoes" regime for a few weeks. (I didn't cut out cakes or sweets.) It worked well, but I became pissy and irritable for a few days, and the aggravation of having to try and find alternatives to these starches while traveling became a monumental pain in the arse.

This time I'm going to cut back on the carbs again, reducing the starches, avoiding cakes and candy, and adding in fruits and salads to fill the space. I've been at this for a few days now and I have to say it's a fucking pain in the arse. Of course Mrs Bison decided to mark my endeavor by making her famous cherry cake, which I had to refuse, even as she repeatedly taunted me with the offer of a slice. (Does she actually want me to lose any weight?) Tomorrow I'm going to take a salad to work, complete with a can of tuna and hard boiled eggs for protein (which hopefully means I won't look completely gay).

Obviously this isn't a diet where I eat less food, only different food. If I was a bloater I might have to reconsider, but I'm only prepared to contemplate minor deprivation in the cause of pointless competition. The problem is that I just discovered Five Guys burgers. There's a place close to the office and I only got round to trying it just prior to the start of this contest. It was outstanding, no other word for it. Fabulous juicy burger, big pile of tasty fries; fuck me, I can almost taste it now. And yesterday Mrs Bison bought ice cream. Fucking diet...



Maybe there's a better way. I could just avoid wearing underwear when they weight us in at the end, that should save a few ounces. Have a haircut the day before, leave my car keys at my desk, wear lighter shoes, that sort of thing. On the other hand, Mrs Bison is now watching one of those tiresome period drama Dickens productions on public television. Watching that would bore the shit out of me. If I can only watch long enough, surely significant weight loss is guaranteed?


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Male Enhancement

I decided to drop my car off for an oil change today before taking Mrs Bison for a gratuitously large Chinese lunch. Normally I'd wait with the car and take the opportunity to look over the new and used cars in the dealer lot, just for fun. Show me a man who can find himself surrounded by cars and not want to look at them and I'll show you a man who doesn't need a car simply because he's on the other bus. I could have checked out new cars when we came back from lunch but today my heart wasn't in it. You see, it appears that in addition to a new car I'll also need a bigger penis.

Whoa! Hold on there - I've had no complaints (he hastens to add) - but I've been reading car magazines recently, you know, things like Car and Driver, and if the advertising is anything to go by I can't get a new car without also doing something about my dick. There was this full page advert headlined "Does Size Really Matter To Your Lover?", followed by a lot of small text, the upshot of which was that I should send anywhere between $70 and $100 to purchase some non-FDA approved dried monkey jizz (or whatever the stuff is made of) which would give me a bigger, thicker more energetic manhood with "Orgasmic Thrust Activation".

Maybe it's because the advert was in a car magazine, but I can't help thinking that orgasmic thrust activation is something you'd find on a new Corvette, maybe to help you pull away quickly at the lights. Except it would be abbreviated to "OTA" and you'd have to nod sagely when the salesman told you that the car had it, even though you had no fucking clue what it did. And it would have its own little light on the dash which would come on after two thousand miles to inform you that the OTA wasn't working, and before you knew it you'd be back at the dealership every other week for them to try and fix it. But it would still be a bragging point: "Yeah, I got the Z06 model because of the OTA - you should feel your neck snap when you hit the gas!"

There was a second advert in the same magazine under a "Size Does Matter" banner, but this time you could spend more than $300. Maybe you get a really big penis with their stuff. But what if it worked? None of your pants would fit anymore, and if you got an unexpected erection at work you'd have to hide it under the desk. Fortunately the risk is low - I'm sure none of this shit works, but there must be plenty of blokes out there willing to roll the dice. And it's got to be good business for the companies who sell it. I mean, not only does it not have to work, they don't even really need to send you any pills. What are you going to do? Complain to the Better Business Bureau? Yeah, I can see that conversation happening.

"I'm calling to complain about this company. I sent them $300 because they said I could add three inches to my penis. And girth too. They definitely said girth. Now I've been taking the pills for a month and nothing's happened. No, definitely no bigger. Because I measured it. With a ruler. How long? Is that really important? It's the same as it was before, surely that's all you need to know? The girth? I don't know, it doesn't feel any thicker. No I didn't measure it - the ruler wouldn't bend. Oh, I suppose you're right, I could have used a bit of string and then measured the string. But I want to complain - they won't send my money back. My name? It's - erm - Smith. Yes, Smith. Address? I'd rather not say..."

Or maybe the company sends you the money back on a big pink check emblazoned with the words "PENIS ENLARGEMENT REFUND". Like that's ever going to get cashed.



Some of the other ads are more subtle - they don't mention size directly but instead refer to "Natural Male Enhancement", which is right up there with Around View Monitor, Lane Departure Prevention System and Electronic Brake Assist in the list of options on your new car. "I'd like it in black with the leather interior and the Natural Male Enhancement package please."

Clearly lots of blokes want a bigger dick. I'd love to be able to reassure them that "Size Doesn't Matter" but my non-scientific survey tells me that "Women Talk About Size". At least one of my colleagues claims to be getting the "short end of the stick" whenever she takes one home. My question is, are new cars disproportionately purchased by men with small dicks who are looking to compensate? Is that the real reason the car magazines are full of penis enlargement adverts? Whatever the reality I'd suggest to any bloke considering sending his hard-earned cash to some outfit promising to add inches to his member that he would indeed be better off putting it towards a new car. Not because it'll make up for the shortfall, but simply because he'll at least get some pleasure from the car. And in the meantime remember this sage advice from a noted stand-up comic:

I took this woman home and when I got undressed she pointed at my dick and said "Who do you think you're going to satisfy with that?" and I said "Me."



Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison

Life Everlasting

Maybe it's fitting that on Easter Sunday, when millions are celebrating the last time someone rose from the dead, I found myself listening to a National Public Radio program about cryonics. Normally I eschew NPR, full as it is of dreary arty bollocks, lefty liberal apologetics and "black-only" racist programming, but it has its moments, and today contained one of them. The program looked back to the early days of cryonics in the sixties, when some bloke called Bob Nelson started freezing people and storing them in the charmingly ridiculous hope of reviving them later. The technology wasn't there at the time, but who knows what will be possible later, and I couldn't help thinking what a horrific thing that would be.

The idea behind cryonics is that most people who die aren't really "dead" according to the "information theoretic" definition of death, since their identity and memory is still preserved in their brain tissue at the moment of clinical death. As minutes or hours go by the brain will decompose and identity would be lost, but in theory if you froze someone who died of something like a heart attack you could revive them later.

Let's leave aside all the scientific questions about how long you could wait to freeze someone, what you'd need to do to preserve the body tissue and all that other stuff. For a start it's arse-clenchingly dull to anyone who's not into cryonics, and I have a suspicion that anyone who is into cryonics is a nutter. Frankly, I couldn't be arsed to research the subject. But let's think about this for a bit. What if it worked? What if people didn't die but just went into stasis for a bit and got revived later?

For a start it's not as though the world is short of people. The population is now estimated at 6.7 billion; when I was a kid I remember being told it was about 4 billion. Even without cryonics we're going to run out of places to put them all, and land to grow food for them. About 60 million people die every year, but even if you only consider the "wealthy" ones the number isn't small. 2.5 million die annually in the US. Assuming that cryonics becomes possible and affordable just imagine the additional land that'll be given over to gigantic frozen warehouses for all their corpses. And what are the eco-weenies going to say about the huge amounts of electricity being used to refrigerate all these bodies; instead of returning their carbon to the earth they'll be using fuel for centuries. Bear in mind that it's not necessary to prove that you can revive people for there to be a market here - there's no shortage of idiots willing to be frozen just on the off-chance of future success.

Let's hope the idea never works - with the birth rate at 75 million per year (a net of 15 million over the death rate), even if we only revived 25% of the stiffs we'd be looking at doubling the population growth.

And what would we get at the end of it? Statistically speaking an awful lot of people die when they're old. I've seen old people: forget the problem with all the senile ones, just think about how they spend their time now. Revive them and before you know it we'll be knee-deep in wrinklies. They already retired so what are we going to do? Pay them another pension until they die (again)? You won't be able to move at WalMart, and forget trying to eat during the early bird special. The economic might of the United States will be devoted to the production of dentures, incontinence pants and arthritis drugs. The promise of cryonics is that we get to see a wonderful future, beyond our dreams, but the revived pensioners are just going to moan about how much better it was in the old days so what's the point?

That's the trouble with people - they don't think things through. Everyone wants to live forever but I'm afraid that doesn't work. Instead of people trying to extend their lives indefinitely wouldn't it be better if we enjoyed life while it lasted, embraced death when it came, and realized that millions of drooling carcases, kept alive only by advanced medical intervention, should be sent on their way? Today millions remember how two thousand years ago someone got nailed to a cross so we wouldn't have to fear death anymore. Doesn't seem like it worked, does it?


Copyright © 2009 Edward Bison