Stern, nationally famous shock jock, was interviewing Catherine Scalia, who recently achioeved local notoriety in the New York area for offering sexual favors from her hot dog truck along a Nassau County highway.

Scalia, a married mother of four, was arrested last week by an undercover policeman after she brought him to her Far Rockaway home and accepted $50 for sex play,.

The show began with Stern and Scalia chatting amiably for a few minutes about her background. Scalia had been a go-go dancer in her twenties, she said. “Back in the day, I was a hot chick.”

“Well, I dunno,” the tapes reveal Stern said. “You’ve … do you realize you’ve, um, aged a bit?”

“Yeah, like fine wine, baby. Like cognac,”

“More like cheese,” said Stern. “Cottage cheese.”

Scalia said. “Mind if I show you?”

Stern began to say, “I mind,”, but Scalia was already in motion. “What if I start you off with a lap dance?”

“I don’t think so,” Stern said. Then, “Ooofff!” as Scalia dropped back onto his lap.

It was then that things took their fateful turm. On the tape, Stern can be heard repeating, “Get up, get off!” and, “Man overboard!” and, “Get thee behind me!”

Finally, we can hear Stern hollering, “Get the hell off me, I’m going to spank you.”

Scalia laughs. Then there is a sharp intake of breath, presumably Scalia, and what spunds like the beginning of the word “no” as a very loud sound is cut off. The recording ends.

Less than an hour ago, sources confirmed that Catherine Scalia had obtained through her own channels a sample of Al Qaida brand prototype exploding underwear.

“I don’t know how she got her hands on it,” said a source close to the story who refused to be identified. “But if anybody deserved to get some, it was those two assholes.”

Whenever I think of him, I think of Sandra Fluke, and I think to myself, “Why don’t you pick on someone your own size. Go down to Lakehurst and yell at the grease spot.” It doesn’t clear things up.

He’s still on the air, still selling hate, inflammatory lies and stench.

Rush knows, like the rest of us, that a Certain Segment of the Population Hates certain aspects of the abortion of human fetuses. Not all of it. This hatred doesn’t extend to the killing of human adults or any member of the animal kingdom. These folks can be said to “believe that God wants humanity not to abort human fetuses.”

Another Segment of the Population Hates being told what to believe.

Issues like abortion, racism, drug use and sexuality aren’t addressed rationally, much less satisfactorily, in Western culture. Centuries of prejudice and overlapping taboos have far greater status than empirical lab rsults and logic.

Rush recognizes that these ideas, streams of thought and emotion, follow deep faults in human society, cracks that extend all the way down through the bedrock of our culture. Like creeks that cross highways, they can’t be just paved over, or diverted; they won’t dry up or disappear. They can only be acknowledged. Allowance must be made for them.

Rush lives in these cracks. Like a torturer, he sticks his fingers in the gaps and wiggles them around. We all squirm. Thing is, some of us also get off on it. God knows why. It’s textbook perversion.

Civilization has long had use for perverts and neurotics. Obsessive-compulsives can find full employment as bank examiners and IRS agents, and are sought out as health and safety inspectors; anal retentives make exceptional bookkeepers and accountants and, if they can draw, cartoon animators. There are some neuroses, however, that need curtailment if they are to be used productively in society. Sadists, for example, They make geat meter maids, Do not give them guns, or ever accept them into medical or law schools. And never, ever, let them near broadcasting equipment.

In this case, incidentally, Nature provides a platform for balance. All sadists are also masochists. At some level, they really enjoy being restrained. Some even thrill at being beaten into Submission! Keep that in mind, whenever you are threatened.

But enough about Rush. My problems with him actually begin and end with me.

At some point about twenty years ago, through methods I don’t totally remember, I found myself free from hatred. I know it took a great deal of forgiveness, and some TwelveStep kind of stuff – going around, apologizing to people for stuff I remembered and they mostly did not – which sometimes got agonizingly embarrassing and, once or twice, even dangerous when people took swings at me (fortunately, Big Rudolph, whose fist was nore than half the size of my head, got stuck and couldn’t get out of his wheelchair before I made it to the corner).

It was an arduous procedure. I suspect I don’t remember the entire sequence because there were segments of it too painful to recall, or simply too ugly. Most of my life, before that transition, I’d fluctuated between postures of Total Arrogance and Complete Pussiness. I was “on” all the time. I’d tried to be “likable”, “charming”, “articulate”, “insightful” but not too hard to just be “myself”, so I wasn’t any of those things. By luck, I encountered a teacher who pointed out that real people are not interesting; rather, they are interested.

From that point on, I worked on finding, in whatever was going on, that part that fascinated me, or at least wasn’t absolutely transparent. I lived that way for years. I felt relaxed and alert. I welcomed most of my life, any way it came. If I didn’t like it, I did what I could to feel better about myself; and if I couldn’t do anything, I left.

Rush’s routine brings up the hate in me, and I don’t like it. I don’t like hating, not even hating Rush. It doesn’t do anything, and it makes me feel bad.

Worse, Rush is living off hatred, mine and everybody else’s. His bullshit doesn’t do anything, either. He appears to “explain” how things work, but he’s really only stating speculations, spinning them to make Republicans look good. Repression, supression, The Lord’s Work always can be twisted to look like “necessary evils”. Well, repression isn’t necessary, folks. It just makes you feel righteous, and bad.

Rush’s rap exploits our hatred. Strumming those ancient taboos and prejudices plays a surly and sad tune. I know I can stop it in me, and I know that’s the best use I can put Rush to.

Whew. I’m breathing better already.

When the cat was approached, a curious mumbling could be heard coming through the junk-food bag. The voice seemed vaguely familiar.

“The problem isn’t too little money in political campaigns, but not enough,” the voice said.

“The idea that a Congressman would be tainted by accepting money from private industry or private sources is essentially a socialist argument,” it said next. the voice had a nasal quality to it, and a hint of the Deep South.

“One of the reporters listening to it suddenly said, ‘My god, that’s Newt Gingrich,’” the sound man reported later. “And then it hit me. I was there when he said that. I damn near fell out of my chair!”

The cat, nicknamed “Chester” in misguided tribute to the Cheeto animated marketing icon, continued. “Well, go, you go talk to Tiffany’s. All I’m telling you is we –we are very frugal.” It ended this statement with a howl that apparently caused the soundman some pain, as he ripped off his headphones. In a minute, his eyes cleared. He shook his head, put the phones back on and continued to monitor the recording of the pussycat.

Chester appeared unperturbed. “It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say,” the voice of Gingrich said.

Throughout most of the episode, the cat remained seated sedately atop the 20-foot pole. It seemed to respond to each question in turn.

“I understand you want to change or repeal current child labor laws. Any statement on that?” shouted a Time, Inc. writer. “It is tragic what we do in the poorest neighborhoods,” said the Gingrich voice in the Doritos bag. “Entrapping children in child laws which are truly stupid! These schools should get rid of unionized janitors, have one master janitor, pay local students to take care of the school.”

“I have two grandchildren,” the voice continued. ” Maggie is 11, Robert is 9. I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they’re my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American.”

There was an awkward pause. Then, Roland P Vellum of the Chicago Tribune asked, “Now that your presidential run is over, do you see a national role for yourself?”

“I have enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I’m doing it. I am now a famous person. I represent real power,”  came the answer. Again, the sound man removed his phones. Perhaps he feared another howl. But nothing came from the bag, and he put them on again.

“My primary mission – Advocate of civilization, Definer of civilization, Teacher of the rules of civilization, Leader of the civilizing forces.,” the cat said.  Then, it raised both hind feet and attempted to remove the Dorito bag, without success.

Eventually, a fireman rode a cherry-picker up the pole and brought the cat down safely, to great applause.

The study, conducted by the United States Department of the Treasury, on behalf of the President of the United States, used a modified Richter scale to represent the emotional intensity of the response generated by various popuation segments to a spectrum of stimuli.

“We included numerous repetitions of fifty experiments,” said Dr Enid Krobyte, spokesperson for the Treasury. “Taking candy from a baby, for instance, incited reaction registering from 1.8, which is barely perceptible, up to 3.5.” The first value was when the baby was first grasping the candy, said Dr Krobyte. The second value was obtained when the candy was in the subject’s mouth.

Demanding that Workman’s Comp recipients return 5% of payment received generated a 7.8 response. “We were a litle surprised at that,” the researcher said. “After all, we explained that it was an ‘honest mistake’.” She attributed the subject’s fury to “survivor guilt.”

But the overwhelming response of the uncompensated prostitutes rocked the researchers. In fact, it seems, it might have destabilized the entire Department.

“We thought first that our graphic sensors had gone screwy,” said Dr Krobyte. “The needles were pinned to the max. The readings were literally off the chart.” Asked for a numerical value, she replied, “I have to say, 11.”

Echoes of the emotional blast were heard as far away as Connecticut and Ohio. More than three thousand female office workers in Hartford were sent home early with intestinal illnesses. Thirteen of the remaining forty-seven housewives of Columbus were reported as suffering severe headaches or stomach upset. And there was absolutely no sexual intercourse in Cleveland.

In comparison, women test subjects who were told, “I’ll call you,” registered 8.9 to 9.3, substantial but still well below the threshholds established by the prostitutes.

Good doctors treated patients, and charged market rates. Mediocre doctors treated diseases, and charged the same. Bad doctors made up ‘treatments’ and sold them to suckers for what they could get

Bad doctors gave all doctors trouble. They were visible; in this environment, they stuck out like diseased thumbs. They were scandalous, and since scandal sells newspapers, they were built up and built up. Doctor Scandals became a business all their own. Thus was the American Medical Society born.

The AMA instituted Ethical Stndards in the teaching and practise of medicine. They created specialty societies, which held seminars that kept their membership up to date with the progress in their fields. They also regulated, through political pressure on the medical schools, the number of doctors there were in the country. Too many would spoil the broth, as it were. This kept the market rates up.

The business of medicine is as complicated as it gets. As with most service businesses, there are differing degrees of complexity for different procedures. Specific machines and supplies are utilized, some costing millions of dollars. The rates vary accordingly. And this is common in many industries. However, in medicine, there could be wide variation in procedure and cost between two instances of the same procedure, due to differences in the patient’s condition.

To balance things out in olden times (i.e. the Fifties), physicians often looked directly at the patient’s ability to pay. Frequently, the same procedure that cost the Social Security recipient $15, cost the corporate executive $125. It was the doctor’s call, and nobody bitched.

I know this for a fact. My father was one of the leading specialists in the city where I grew up. This was how he ran his office in those days.

He saw what was coming, though, and he dreaded it.

“It’s all got to be run by somebody,” he said. When I asked, “Why?”, he simply said, “Because it does.” I know now, the reason it has to be “run” was “greed”.  All that money!!

Payments needed to be structured. Procedures had to be standardized. The Industrial Revolution had to be fulfilled. Manifest Destiny, and all that, don’t you know?

It was at this point that the insurance industry went berserk.

All that freakin MONEY!!!

Goddamm FDR! Goddamm Medicare!! Goddamm doctors!! Get Outta My WAAAYY!! I WANT THAT MONEY!!!

You’re not gonna let The Government get their hands on it!! What Government Agency is run halfway decently? Socialized Medicine, the investment agencies whispered to the AMA: let it in, and you’ll all be worked to death and broke besides!! Nooo, put the money in the hands of those who can handle it: us. The Insurance Companies. We’ll take care of it all for you …

And so the medical business came under the control of those who had the least stake in the health of the population, but absolute control of the trillions of dollars people willingly pay for their “healthcare management”.

Of course it didn’t have to be. But it was, and now we’re stuck with it. Bad decisions are regularly framed as “inevitable”, and excused with, “Well we didn’t have a choice.” Bullshit, I say. We always have a choice.

In this case, the choice would have involved crossing a raging torrent. Even then, the leading business schools at Harvard and Penn and Columbia were preaching the docctrine, “Greed is Good”, thereby setting the table for Richard Nixon, the Great Communicator, the Bush Generations and the two greatest bank robberies in all of history.

All that lay far in the future when the Insurance Companies assumed control of the medical business.

There’s really only one issue: profitable bullshit.

Here’s a low-level fly-by of two statements of that issue:

Problem: Gas Prices

The oil industry will set the price of regular gas around $5/gallon by summer. They don’t even lie any more about ‘why’. No one asks. Flush with a decade of obscene, barely comprehendible profits, they sit before Congressional comittees and say, “Because we charge that”. The Congressmen, refusing to indict their main sources of income, accept this.

Solution

This is called “price fixing”. There’s sufficient law on the books to put as many oil company executives in prison as are tried, and enough Congressmen for selling their offices..What’s the matter, the courts can’t touch Corruption by Direct Deposit?

<aside> There is enough technology to produce electric cars that go more than forty miles. Think about it. Diesel locomotives, the original “hybrids”, have been used exclusively by the railroads since 1950. What kind of alternators do they use to charge their batteries while on the road?</aside>

Problem: The National Debt

The US has faced this problem six times in its history, and solved it each time. Currently, the money source, the Government Printing Office, prints the amount of money Congress authorizes. It gives this money to the Federal Reserve Bank, a private organization, who passes it back to Congress to be spent according to the Federal budget. Currently, that budget calls for the spending of $4 for every $3 the Government takes in in taxes, more or less. So the Federal Reserve lends the Government that additional dollar, at agreee-upon interest. That loan is the National Debt.

It will never be made up through taxation, spending cuts, budget balanciing or any other economic measure.

Solution

The way this problem was solved the last six times it arose involved passing new laws removing the federally-chartered bank from the process. The Government Printing Office dealt directly with Congress: As now, it printed the amount of money Congress authorized. But instead of giving it to the Bank, it gave the whole amount to Congress. They paid it out according to the budget – including the interest accrued on previous loans. The debt was repaid in short order, and the economy thrived.

================================

Frankly, I don’t know much of anything. There are problems with both of these “solutions”.I can’t even imagine. I yearn for someone to bring them up.

I never lose track of the fact that any statement that begins with the phrase, “All you’ve got to do”, is a lie deliberately designed to distract you from the fact that it’s not all you’ve got to do. Reality needs attending to, here.

I’m really tired, though, of the only “Dose of Reality” being, “It stays this way because we’re going to beat you into accepting it.”

Come on. We know how that one turns out.

Tomorrow, I think I’ll talk about the the Third Issue: Health Care.  All I can promise is, I’ll be just as swift.

Richard "Dick" Cheney

Former Vice President Richard “Dick” Cheney underwent heart transplant surgery yesterday. Unlike most such operations, Mr Cheney did not have his heart replaced.

“He didn’t seem to have one in the first place,” said Dr Myles Corfendigus. who performed the operation. “Just a mess of veins, arteries and some kind of pulsing sphincter.”

The operation took place at an undisclosed location.

The donor heart, flown ovenight from a MASH unit in Afghanistan, had originally been intended for a 21-year-old Rhodes scholar in Dubai, world headquarters of the Halliburton Corporation. It was rerouted in midair, and arrived at the Vice President’s operating table by 9:00 am yesterday.

“It’s a very strong heart,” said Dr Corfendigus. “It’ll last at least fifty, maybe eighty years.” The Vice President is 71 years old.

“O, that rascal,” said Lynne Cheney.”Always stealing someone’s heart.”

“Dick is one of the most caring guys I know,” said Karl Rove. “He’d give anybody the shirt off his back. This was just another case of the national interest trumping an individual’s comfort.” Both Mr Rove and Mrs Cheney were immediately sealed into six-foot packing crates and shipped to undisclosed locations,

The Language of Braille

Ever since texting became the lingua franca of adolescence, visually impaired students have felt ‘left out’.

“We feel we’ve been denied one of the basic rights of our generation,” said Howard Smeets, 15. a student at the Flambe-Morganstern School for the Blind, in Emery, Georgia.

Mr Smeets raised a cry. Now, joined by 1500 of his homeboys and sisters, he has brought a class-action suit against Apple, Samsung, Motorola, and Google (“so it shouldn’t be a total loss”), asking the courts to compel the creation of a braille texting app,.

At first, no one would comment on this turn of events. Last week, though, Google released a statement.

“We are very concerned about the rights of the visually-impaired community,” said Google, through Moogle, its press-friendly public relations app. “As a commanding megaconglomerate in the communications industry, it is imperative that we surge into the forefront and dominate this untapped market.”

Moogle went on to issue a preliminary spec sheet listing Google’s requirements to support such a product. Imcluded was a revolutionary screen overlay. Utilizing 3D printer technology, the overlay would produce braille text on top of the touchscreen. This would identify the keys on iphone-style virtual keyboards, as well as displaying the text messages.

Google offered software developers the option of submitting ‘text-to-speech’ apps that recite the typed messages at frequencies above 12kHz, too high for most adults to hear.but within the range of children and adolescents, Moogle said. “We couldn’t preserve their privacy any other way,” said Moogle.

To accommodate blind people who want access to movies and TV shows on their phones, Moogle continued, Google would release the Google Braille Movie Service. In conjunction with Netflix, Google will lay additional narration over action-only scenes on an unused sideband sound track. Usually, these tracks are used for additional languages. Accessed by the Google Braille App, the GBMS track will provide continuity for blind people who insist on “watching” movies on their phones. The app will also come in handy for those sighted people who can’t follow complicated action on a palm-sized screen.

In a related story, Bel-Air Productions has released LipReader. This breakthrough application displays a pair of realistically animated lips on iphone-like screens for deaf people who don’t want to – or can’t – read written words. There is also an option for the message to be displayed in American Sign Language.

Not even his cohorts/conspirators/co-workers knew he was going to do that. You can imagine then, the kind of shock it was for those of us who loved his work from beyond his horizon. And for those who cannot, let me see if this does the trick:

A big light in the sky went out. Not the Sun; I could still see clearly, but the day was noticeably less bright, and a little more drab. After a swift physical assessment told me I’d had no seizure or aneurism or neurological failure, I looked around, to see if a light bulb had crapped out and I’d over-dramatized things, since sometimes I do that. Noting every bulb in the house burning brightly, I turned most of them off. Darned kids, I thought. Why don’t they turn them off when they leave the room? Or, in this case, the house, in 1999? When I returned to the computer, ever-present Facebook – now the brightest thing in the building – held the news.

Apparently, after his Tuesday broadcast on Radio Free Oz, Peter checked in to an LA hospital. He called people, then settled back into his capsule couch and resumed the countdown.

His last broadcast is transcribed at www.radiofreeoz.com, But I’d recommend hearing it here. There’s more love in his voice.

Firesign Theater’s history and origin tales can be found by googling. Instead of reciting old testament, I will tell you how I learned my first three words in Turkish.

Bath.

Towel.

Border. May I see your passport please? Thank you.  Hmm. Would you step this way, please, Sir? Just a few questions…

Firesign Theater was to radio what Escher was to the graphic arts. What was the floor in one sentence became the wall in the next. The entire scene shifted on the various definitions of a single word, and the contexts that surrounded each definition. The story modulated from one key to the next that way, all the time making sense like bebop jazz. This quartet worked as smooth as Gillespie, Parker, Mingus, Powell and Max Roach. that night in Massey Hall. The Quartet. Dave Brubeck. Time, Far Out as You Can Get.

Word Jazz.

Before them, there was this guy. Ken Nordine. He might have been a staff CBC announcer. With vocal pipes like the Great Organ of Chartres Cathedral, he might’ve been a god in some Polynesian sect of fire-worshippers. Nordine made two albums, the first actually entitled “Word Jazz”, the second something like “More Word Jazz”. I guess the first one sold to the “Hi-Fi Stereo” buffs of the 50′s and the hippest jazz fans (including All Those Madison Avenue types), so they figured Brand Recognition demanded a Recognizable Name = the same thing, again, would evoke the same success. After #2 sank without a ripple, Nordine went on to produce radio commercials.  He made a lot of money doing it, I guess.

And, there was Stan Freberg. Stan made a high-production “comedy” album about the “history of the United States”. Again, capitalizing on earlier successes in radio-style productions of deranged versions of fairy tales and TV shows – “St George and the Dragon Net” was a “#1 hit”  in 1953 – the “History” album was just plain cornball. Too late. We were already deranged, and getting weirder.

Firesign Theater, in their first album, “Waiting for the Electrician Or Someone Like Him”, presented a history of Western expansion. Included in it was a journey to (or from) Goshen to The Great Divide along two shining steel rails, slapped down on the Nation’s flank in the name of “Rock. A. Fel. Ler. Rock-a-fel-ler Rock a fel ler Rokafeller Rockafeller” Whoo Whoooo. Leaving the original residents of the place kinda stunned, kinda sad, and shit outta luck.

Their fourth album, “I Think We’re All Bozos On This Bus”, celebrates the journey of Ah Clem as he visits “FutureWorld” in search of The Answer … I’m not sure, really, what he was doing there, anymore. I know it took me four tries to hear the last line of dialog because I kept tripping out on my own thoughts while listening to it. And, I was straight, three of the four times. The album was Shakespearean in depth. Every word, it seemed, was equally valid in all its definitions. The imagery was holographic, three-dimensional, thoroughly rotational in all axes and so dense it took a calm ear and a steady cortex to sift through all of it, in a hundred hearings.

I haven’t listened to them in years. Still, lines of dialog deeply graven in my brain rattle into being at the oddest moments: “He just passed a gas station.” “Squeeze him again. He may pass another”; “How can you be in two places at once when you’re not anywhere at all” (lyric to a Tin Pan Alley tune; title of their second album); “Let me take your hat and goat. Just put your mukluks in the crinkling cellophane to dry off” (Catherwood the Butler to Nick Danger, Third Eye, having come in from the winter); “He’s no fun. He fell right over!” Among others.

They explained a good deal of what was happening then, and what would happen for years to come.  They’re an invaluable part of our culture. Their role will, I think, expand, because they affected so many creative lives in this country, elevating the level of consciousness across the board.

We’ll hear from them again. Only a few of us will know where it’s coming from. O well.

Limbaugh, Sandra Fluke

Ever since Rush Limbaugh’s three day long attack on Sandra Fluke in response to her testimony before Congress supporting the Obama administration’s policy favoring access to medical insurance that covers contraceptives, support has been pouring in for the third-year law student.

“Mr Limbaugh is apparently using something that inhibits correct mental conception,” said a column on the New York Times Op-Ed page yesterday.

Jesus Christ, appearing momentarily Thursday in Jerusalem, said, “Rush! For My sake – shut the fuck up!” Moses and Mohammed, who accompanied the Savior, simply nodded. Mohammed also gestured toward Jesus with his thumb.

“If there’s any justice, Sandra Fluke will graduate from Georgetown Law School in time to take her bar exam before the statute of limitations on slander runs out. Then, she’ll only have to try one case in her career. She could gut him like a grouper,” said a fellow student who did not give his name.

A grouper is a huge, fat, ugly, vicious fish that lives mostly on excrement. O, all right; that part about excrement was a joke. I didn’t really mean it.

“And, if there isn’t any justice, so what?” continued the law student, “She’s a law student, not a justice student. I guess she’d have to file her brief in time to suspend the limitation, and file extensions until she passes the bar. But what do I know?”

According to the latest Passamaquoddy Institute survey, unsolicited advice from unidentified law students is responsible for 6% of all suits filed in civil courts, with 0.06% of those suits ever resulting in settlement. However, the average of those settlements is $61 million dollars. Symmetrical, isn’t it? For crying out loud, don’t take me seriously, I’m just kidding.

When asked if he was ever on The Pill, Mr Limbaugh said, “Not that one. I’m no slut.”

Mr Limbaugh said that his statement was made “in the attempt to be humorous”. In a similar attempt, over 1299 comics have this weekend identified Mr Limbaugh from the stage as “a fat piece of s#!t.”

Mr Limbaugh has, by rough estimate, gained a little over 75 pounds since his last publicity stills were made three years ago.

“Why don’t you pick on someone your own size, “said Lenny Marcuse, addressing the conservative radio host directly from Uncle Vinnie’s Comedy Club in Point Pleasant Beach, NJ. “Go down to Lakehurst and yell at the grease spot!”

Of course, Mr Marcuse didn’t really mean it.