Ah, the halcyon days of youth, when we pledged eternal loyalty to our current best friend, frequently sealing the bargain with the exchange of tokens or blood! But, fortunately, we grew up, and learned the folly of making long-term contracts without an escape clause.

Our wisdom was even continued into the realm of technology. As you know (or should know) entities with whom you communicate on Facebook are called “friends.” (Personally, your interlocutor, The Happy Pessimist, considers this term inapt. There are many people with whom I communicate whom I do NOT consider friends, e.g., the traffic cop handing me a citation, the TSA agent who is attempting to goose me, and the NSA spook who is currently reading this post.) But the vast cyborg that is Facebook permits me to unfriend somebody or something (you never know what is hidden behind that screen: Alan Turing’s ghost, Arnold Schwarzenegger in a Terminator suit, the Blob, me.)

But there is a new threat on the horizon.

Israeli entrepreneur Shelly Furman Asa has now developed a website which is a particularly potent competitor to Facebook – you have to be dead to join the site. Mr. Asa’s site, neshama.org, is populated by pictures of headstones. Putatively, the purpose of this site is to allow folks to memorialize the deceased and spread their memories far and wide.

I predict major problems. Suppose, exempli gratia, that your ex-girlfriend dies in a horrible car accident and is electronically linked to your most recent wife, whom you bumped off. Do you think they will be happy? Do you think that they will haunt you? More to the point, how can they unlink? Failing a Ouija board, how can the connection be modified?

I do not believe that this concept is ready for prime time.

You recall, no doubt, Dear Reader, from your misspent youth of watching cowboy movies, that ranchers in the Wild West allowed their herds to forage on the open range. Because more than one herd might be munching in the same area, and these herds might be under different ownership, it was the practice to mark the cows with a brand unique to the owner – for example the Bar T, the Circle M, and so forth – by searing their hides with a red hot branding iron, leaving a unique scar. Then if, heaven forfend, the herds became mixed, it was child’s play to identify which cows belonged to whom and thus be able to separate the herds and drive them to market separately.

But cows are not the only objects that can be branded. We now learn that this technology has been adopted by Britain’s National Health Service (or at least by one of its surgeons), no doubt blazing the trail for Obamacare.  Dr. Simon Bramhall of Queen Elizabeth’s Hospital in Birmingham, England, has been suspended for branding his initials (“SB”) on the liver of one of his patients. Technology having advanced substantially since the 19th century, SB did not perform this action using a red hot iron, but rather using an innocuous stream of nitrogen gas, thus avoiding the untoward effect of penetrating the anesthesia and causing the patient to leap screaming from the operating table.

There has been much speculation as to the reason for SB’s action. My initial thought was that SB was in dire need of electroconvulsive therapy, Thorazine, a strait jacket, and many hours of “Vy you don’t like your mommy?”

I have, however, rethought my position. I now believe that SB is an undercover operative for the involuntary transplant industry. You know, the guys who entice you to a tryst with a femme fatale, after which you awaken in a bathtub full of ice with a bandage on your rear and one less vital organ.

The involuntary organ transfer people are CRIMINALS! You can’t trust them! What better way, then, to prevent the hijacking by rivals of the fruits of your labor than by branding your product? By offering substantial snitch fees on an anonymous website, a consortium of surgical practitioners can insure that the proceeds from the sale of the fruits of their harvests will be directed to the proper individual.

Congratulations SB! You have struck a mighty blow in the interest of honest commerce.

We are all well aware, Dear Reader, that the purpose of a Government advertisement or slogan is not to inform, but to deceive. How else may we explain that the motto of the Strategic Air Command, the now disbanded organization that flew big, ugly B-52 bombers loaded with thermonuclear death over our heads twenty-four hours a day, was “Peace is Our Profession?” How else explain that the gates of Auschwitz had a sign reading “Work makes you free.”  Lies and distortions are the currency of government-speak.

We like it that way.

After all, how effective would military recruiting posters be if they presented a picture of a mutilated corpse with the caption “Join the Army and Get Your Ass Shot Off.” How effective would a Peace Corps recruiting posters be if it presented a picture of a young woman with disheveled clothing and a bloody face with the caption “Join the Peace Corps and Get Raped.” [This is not speculation, by the way. I knew a young woman to whom it happened, twice. Fortunately, the Peace Corps maintains special hospitals to treat the victims of these attacks. And that is not a joke.]

However, this policy of dissimulation appears to be coming to an end. Our friends at the National Reconnaissance Office, the guys who build the satellites that allow the NSA to perform your colonoscopy without requiring you to get off your own toilet, have a new motto and logo which are emblazoned on their launch vehicle for their latest foray into space. The motto is borderline acceptable: “Nothing is beyond our reach.” OK. However, the logo is something else. It shows a yellow and orange octopus, slightly larger than the earth, beak rasping at the arctic tundra, with tentacles wrapped completely around the planet.

Are you kidding me?

I can only conclude that this logo was designed by the same guys who created the Obamacare website.

As an experienced Citizen of the World, Dear Reader, you are no doubt acquainted with the German predilection for organizing and channeling human activities into the proper path. They achieve this end by training the populace to SIT DOWN, SHUT UP, AND OBEY ORDERS!

Sometimes this approach leads to episodes of unpleasantness, such as World War I and World War II. But now, an even more dire consequence impends. Germany’s biggest political parties have  agreed to ban so-called flat-rate sex  offered by some brothels in the  country.

It is, of course, well-known that those in the boinking industry have traditionally required “something more” for unusual services. But under the fierce pressure of competition induced by the legalization of prostitution in the Mutterland in 2002, some aggressive brothels introduced the flat rate boink, in which you can do whatever you want for as long as your want for a fixed fee of 100 euros.

It is unclear from the press coverage what the motivation for banning this pricing structure is. [N.B:. I have adopted this rather infelicitous locution, id est, ending the sentence with “is,” because this is the grammatical rule in German. During a visit to Germany, Mark Twain was attending a particularly tedious play when his companion suggested that they leave. Twain was reported to have responded “Not yet…I’m waiting for the verb.”] One possible explanation is that it is intended to support the printing industry by requiring the girls to print up price lists. It may also be designed to increase employment by requiring each cat house to employ waitresses to write up each client’s itemized bill.

It is possible that this new policy is driven by the EU’s competition laws, which (unfortunately) are modeled on the competition laws of the good ol’ US of A. The issue here is:

Bundling: (No, you ninny, not the New England kind where you sleep next to your chaste sweetie separated by a “bundling board” to protect her virtue.) This is the kind of bundling in which you require several products to be purchased together. These are a no-no in the strange world of antitrust. I must also remark that such arrangements are also called “tie-in” sales, but I would not use that term here because it could cause confusion with well-defined bondage products.

The other possibility is that this is a wages and hours issue. Given modern technology (Viagra) the amount of time that a client could demand has virtually no limit. Those hundred euros might tie the poor girl up for weeks.

The final possibility is workplace health. I see the poor tart collapsing into exhaustion screaming for mercy while the inflamed and paid-up client is shrieking “More! More! I’m still not satisfied!”

Maybe the politicians are right for once.

In 1983, Monty Python, the British comedy group made up of English Literature Ph.D.’s who decided they wanted to do something meaningful with their lives rather than rot in Academia, did a famous sketch on organ transplantation. A fellow answers a knock at his door by two white-coated minions of the National Health Service (Britain’s version of Obamacare) who inform him that “we’re here for your liver.” When he protests that “I’m still using it” they respond “Is that an organ donor card in your pocket?” Somewhat mystified, he answers “Well, yes” at which point one of the health care providers says “I rest my case” and proceeds to extract the liver accompanied by the agonized shrieks of the victim.

In 1983, it was a joke. Today…

Britain’s newspaper (loosely speaking) The Telegraph (also renowned recently for publishing the secret  documents purloined by Snowden the Rat) has reported that the social services department in the English city of Essex forcibly sedated an Italian woman visiting England on a business trip, performed a C-section on her unconscious person, and then proceeded to take the baby into custody for over a year. They had a court order permitting the C-section, based on the woman’s having had some mental episode.

And you thought Death Panels were bad!

Britain is prologue. Now that the Feds have seized the medical system, we can expect this foreign occurrence to be the harbinger of new improvements over here. If you  have no rights to your unborn child, what parts of your body do you have rights to?

None.

So we can anticipate the promulgation  in the near future of regulations establishing rights to your organs, internal and external, by whoever is designated by the Department of Health and Human Services, for whatever purposes they see fit. We will be pursued down the street by chainsaw-wielding, white coated representatives of DHS screaming “we’re here for your [FILL IN THE BLANK]!”

Times are getting harder, fifty million people are on food stamps, and humans are made of meat.

Yum!