Ah, Dear Reader, you have a dirty mind. I am NOT talking about human sex, a subject with which many of you may already have a passing acquaintance. I’m talking about plant sex. The plants are about to get horny.

Who cares about plant sex? I hear you cry. Plants don’t even move much! What kind of porno can you make out of that?

You care, that’s who. If plants don’t reproduce, when the old ones die the food chain collapses and we’re all toast.

The plant sex problem is not restricted to the declining numbers of honeybees, the so-called “colony collapse disorder” about which you have heard more than enough lately. The problem is much, much worse. All the pollinators are in deep yogurt.

A recent issue of Science Magazine informs us that there have been two major recent studies by scientists crazy enough to spend their lives counting bugs, (a pasttime that most of us outgrew at about the time we stopped shooting spitballs at our elementary school classmates) have obtained two genuinely disturbing results. First the number of pollinators of all kinds is rapidly declining worldwide. Plants get it on by playing kissy face with insects (yuch!), who carry pollen to their eager loins. (Well, not loins exactly. They’re called pistils. Aren’t you glad that I explained that to you?) No pollen, no baby plants. Of course, also no smelly plant diapers crawling with aphids; no screaming shoots waking you up in the middle of the night. But the poor plants would miss the joys of parenthood: no cute kindergarten plays with wilting plantlings muffing their lines and shedding leaves all over the place. Hey maybe this isn’t all bad! No, wait, wait, wait. If they don’t have baby plants, where will we get salad to eat with our steak? Come to think of it, where will the delicious herbivores get anything to eat so they can graduate into steakdom?

You of course are still clinging to the pipe dream that we, as masters of technology and husbandry (that’s farming, you ninny, not taking out the garbage and begging for nookie) will develop domestic hordes of pollinators who will make up the shortfall. Wrong. Another study has demonstrated conclusively that domestic replacements can’t hack it out there in the wild. It turns out that honeybees are not so good in the sack, pardon me, the pistil. If we lose the wild pollinators, pollination will go the way of the dodo.

But this is great!

There are ways to get along without plant kiddies. Some plants live long enough that running out of food becomes a problem for our great-great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren, whom none of us are likely to ever meet. Phooey on posterity! What did posterity ever do for me?

We will learn to eat plants with enormous lifespans. Giant redwoods  live up to two thousand years; bristlecone pines live up to five thousand years; Norway spruce live up to ten thousand years. We will apply our genetic engineering talents to allow us to mate with termites, and we’re in Hog Heaven for millenia. There is also a giant seagrass that lives up to two hundred thousand years, reproduces asexually (a positive application of “go screw yourself”), and can also clone without external assistance. Applying the same technology to allow us to cross breed with manatees, urchins, conches and sea turtles, we can keep munching virtually forever.

Yum!

The 1999 movie “Fight Club,” is a non-stop sociopathic riot based on the idea that moral and intellectual liberation comes from beating one of your fellow club members to a bloody pulp while the rest of the club members watch. Any male who subscribed to this unusual philosophy was welcome to join. While joining this club is not on my own list of pressing needs, it does represent one end of the club spectrum: a club defined by who its members are.

But that is not the only kind of club that exists. My kind of club is encapsulated in the famous dictum of Groucho Marx: “I do not choose to belong to any club that would accept ME as a member.”  Right on! I want to belong to a club that is defined not by who belongs to it, but by whom it excludes. A cool kids club, like a country club or the Hell’s Angels or the Mafia.

Regretably, many of us do not have the money to join a country club, the motorcycle and accoutrements (boots, leather jacket, chain, switchblade, axe, and machine gun) to join the Hell’s Angels, or the Sicilian background to join the Mafia. This leaves us in something of a quandary.

However, I have come upon a solution, which will provide some of you with a path to exclusivity.  I am starting my own highly exclusive club. In order to remedy the gap in the social panorama left vacant by Fight Club, I am starting FOUP Club. FOUP? What the hell is FOUP? you ask. Let me enlighten you, Dear Reader.

FOUP (rhymes with “soup”) is an acronym for Fat Old Ugly People.

Think about it. There are many fat people. There are many old people. God knows, there are many ugly people. But only a select few combine all three characteristics. Face it, if you are fat, you will probably not get old because you will drop dead of coronary artery disease, diabetes, or by being buried in the debris of a building which has collapsed under your weight. If you are ugly, there is a high probability that you will expire by flinging yourself off a high precipice when you are rejected for the umpteenth time by a member of the opposite sex. Old takes care of itself — just wait.

FOUP’s have a variety of ways to be rejected by the membership committees of other clubs. They want their members to be slim, beautiful, ageless people. They believe that they can dictate the canons of desirability to the rest of us.  Nonsense! We FOUP’s can seize the reins of social power, and grind the young, skinny, beautiful people into the dirt.

All that we need to do is begin to announce that we have rejected applications for membership by Claudia Schiffer, Angelina Jolie, Garth Brooks, and a few others. This does not have to be true; all we need is a publicist to get it bruited about in the leading literary publications, like Cosmopolitan, People, the National Enquirer, and the like. Soon the story will be picked up by Fox News, MSNBC, and the Drudge Report. Suddenly, FOUP’s will become in, trendy, the objects of insane jealousy, courted by late night talk shows, and offered eight figure book deals. Our membership committee (me) will be inundated with applications, 99.5% of which we will reject by sending the applicants insulting, smarmy letters telling them that they are undesirable swine, too thin, too young, and too beautiful to consort with the likes of us. Put on forty-five pounds, we will tell them, age fifteen years (or at least look it), and undo those nose jobs, facelifts and tummy tucks and then perhaps we will talk to you.

And while they are struggling mightily to meet our outrageous demands, we will all go on diets, visit the plastic surgeon, and have the playing field all to ourselves.

Ha ha!!

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus the king of Ephyra was punished for his deceitfulness by being condemned to roll an enormous rock to the top of a hill, watch it roll down the other side, and then roll it back up, FOREVER.

Sisyphus is alive and well, it turns out, only now he lives in the White House.

You may recall, Dear Reader, the loud complaints by rich guys living in tony suburbs that banks were “redlining,” i.e., refusing to lend in neighborhoods inhabited primarily by deadbeat bums of particuar ethnic compositions. In response, great humanitarians like Congressman Barney Frank blackmailed the banks into making mortgage loans to the deadbeats. Unsurprisingly (except to idiots like Alan Greenspan and Paul Krugman) the mortgage lending sector of the economy cratered in 2008 when the deadbeats quit paying. Reacting to this crisis, other great humanitarians like Chris Dodd allied themselves with Frank the Pudgy to ramrod a law through Congress now popularly known as the Dodd-Frank Bill, or Dodd-Frank for short.

Dodd-Frank is a typical new age regulatory pain in the butt, but that is not its great failing from the point of view of the Obamaniacs. No, no. Dodd-Frank incorporates the outrageous requirement that banks only give mortgage loans to folks who have the capacity to make their monthly mortgage payments.

Heresy!

The banks actually started to obey the law, with the result that the deadbeat bums could not get mortgage loans to purchase houses they could not afford. So a great cry went up in the land, with much weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, and shrieks of racism/sexism/islamophobia/rich bastards/etcetera. which brings us to King Sisyphus.

Our masters in D.C. have now started screaming at the banks to make more loans to deadbeats. Again. Of course, they couch this demand in innocuous camoflage, such as “relax lending standards for the underserved.” The subtext of this message is, of course, “Lend money to the folks who vote overwhelmingly for us or we will indict you for showing some intelligence and tax you out of existence.”

So here we are again. The gummint, which has already flushed hundreds of billions of your tax dollars down the sewer of bank bailouts, is busily creating the next financial collapse. Of course, we don’t need to worry about that. Our Europhilic administration will just take a page from the Cyprus playbook and confiscate all our bank accounts to pay for the next bailout.

Fast forward to 2015. Citigroup, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and everybody else will have consolidated into the Universal Bank, which is 123% owned by the Feds. The Federal Reserve, still run by Prince Professor Benjamin Bernanke, will permit you to download as much money as you wish from the website www.freemoneyfromtheidiots.com as long as you click on the button labelled “I agree to pay this back someday if I feel like it.” Homebuilders, now converted into indentured servants and forbidden on pain of death from withdrawing from the home-building business, will be required to accept your downloaded funds, and will be forbidden from selling any house at a price above that charged for the average house in 1947.

But you, Dear Reader, will continue to work hard, creating the wealth that will be immediately confiscated and given to the more deserving.

Welcome to Paradise.

The ventriloquist Jeff Dunham uses a dummy named Achmed the Dead Terrorist, who periodically leans toward the audience, bugs out his eyes, and screams “I keel you!”

Achmed is a piker.

For the last several weeks, we have been subjected to hysterical eruptions of genocidal bombast from the current Dear Leader of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea to you). Kim Jong Un (Korean for “psychotic little shit”), repeatedly screams that he is preparing a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the United States, illustrating his point using YouTube visual aids which picture New York, Washington, or some  other den of iniquity like Austin, Texas, in flames. To give street cred to his shrieks, he is moving soldiers, missiles, and other military gear toward his borders.

Our fearless leaders, whose intelligence staffs managed to fail to warn them of 9-11, the Arab Spring (hah!), and other minor foreign hiccups, assure us that Mr. Kim does not possess the capability to drop The Big One on the U.S., this despite the fact that the DPRK has long range missiles, and plutonium bombs that fit in missiles. (These are the same guys who assured us that the North Koreans were abiding by their agreements not to develop nuclear weapons.)

The talking heads are divided on the reasons for Dear Leader’s behavior.

The optimists say that this is just the annual spring extortion exercise, foaming at the mouth to be followed by the whispering of sweet nothings into the Secretary of State’s ear to induce shipments of U.S. grown rice to be airlifted to the bellies of the DPRK Army, while the peasants continue to starve.

The pessimists say that Mr. Kim is not only immature but completely unhinged; accordingly, this is the countdown to Armageddon, and the pessimists are even now cowering beneath their desks.  I, on the other hand, have a much more credible explanation.

Kimchi intoxication.

Are you unfamiliar with kimchi, Dear Reader? Permit me to enlighten you.

Kimchi is a garnish that accompanies almost every Korean meal. It looks like purple cole slaw. When you take a forkful, it feels like the entire roof of your mouth has been removed using a dull file. You sweat, you writhe in agony, you attempt to strangle the waiter. These symptoms are indistinguishable from the behavior currently being exhibited by Mr. Kim.

Our approach so far to calming things down on the Korean peninsula has been to overfly the peninsula with B-52’s and B-2’s. Now, having noticed that this friendly gesture has not calmed Mr. Kim down one iota, the great minds of Washington have concluded that this approach is akin to attempting to calm a swarm of angry hornets by whacking their nest with a broom. So they have announced their intention to back off, counting on appeasement to work as well as it usually is expected to, although there has never been an instance of its working in the entire history of mankind (excuse me, personkind).

I have a better idea. We sneak a chef into the DPRK commissary to replace all the kimchi with vanila ice cream. Mr.Kim’s demeanor will suddenly soften. His army will stand down. His missiles will be beaten into plowshares. Everything will be great!

Potassium iodide, anyone?

The Pushtu President of the Afghans that we shoehorned into office accuses us of collaborating with the Taliban! The Mexican El Presidente demands that we ship his proto-wetbacks handbooks on how to squeeze welfare out of our taxpayers after they creep across the border! The Greeks and Cypriots march and scream that the IMF (which, face it, distributes OUR money to the incompetents of the world) should go away and not demand austerity, for example, that they should actually work more than fifteen minutes a day!

This is actually really great!

We are getting really good free advice: Yankee go home! What a neat idea! And it’s an idea that is going to catch on.

We got onto this international kick with Woodrow Wilson making the world safe for democracy (like in Tojo’s Japan, Hitler’s Germany, and Stalin’s Russia) and followed up with the post WWII reconstruction of Europe, the saving of Vietnam from the Commies, nation-building on the sand dunes of Iraq, etcetera, ad nauseum. And to top it all off, we instituted Free Trade with our friends like Mexico and China.

Now the entire international “order” is in free-fall, pinwheeling down an ever steepening slope like a gigantic snowball, picking up bodies on every rotation. When it finally hits bottom, squish!

But we still have time to avoid being squishees. We can become squishers!

Why are we buying all this junk from China? We have lots of crummy manufacturers right here at home! Put a 782% tariff on all goods and materials imported from China and see how fast our own swine will produce toys painted with lead and cyanide! See how quickly we can turn out toasters that burst into flame as soon as they are plugged in! We will have an explosion in manufacturing jobs and in jobs for physicians to treat the victims of our new industrial policy. And while we’re at it, let’s just default on all the bonds that Fu Manchu and his boys were dumb enough to buy from us! Not the bonds owned by OUR banks, or OUR folks, just the ones owned by furriners. When the international credit markets collapse. all the people we hate will starve. Good.

We also can pull our military home. Let the Germans have the Ramstein Airbase. They can lease it to Vladimir Putin, who can in turn use it to send troops and supplies to Bashar Assad.

We can pull out of Saudi Arabia, allowing the locals to continue with their quaint practice of chopping off each others’ appendages without interference, or even”tut-tut”ing. We can leave Afghanistan, allowing its denizens to resurrect their traditional form of polo, played with the heads of their defeated enemies. We can abandon Nigeria, leaving its inhabitants to their usual pastime of eating each other. We can leave the French to their diet of frogs, snails, and other garden pests.

And here at home, everything will be peachy. Our foreign policy will be greatly simplified. We ignore everybody else unless they threaten us. In that event, BLOOIE! We launch thermonuclear missiles at all and sundry, eliminating the threat. No boring peace talks. No dishonest diplomatic discussions. No American kids getting put in harm’s way so some egomaniacal politician can get his name in the history books.

That’s it! I will run for Malevolent Dictator!

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