Anna Nicole Smith, Rest In Pieces

OH MY GAWD, what a spectacle, huh? Anna Nicole is dead but the story just won't die with her.

Poor Britney Spears had to shave her head just to grab some headlines away from Anna Nicole. It was the only part of her body left that the world hasn't already seen, shaved....

Apparently the skanks of the world don't like it when one skank gets all of the spotlight for too long. Especially when she's DEAD. They need to get their faces (or their vaginas) in front of, like, the Paparazzi's cameras, you know, like every few days so the public doesn't, like, forget about them or something. I mean, Anna Nicole is SO last week, already!

I fully expect Hillarity Clinton and/or Nancy Pelosi to start complaining any day now.

My friend Dave Wise wrote me yesterday, saying

I've heard the name Ann N.Smith mentioned (it's inescapable!) as the media marches on marketing anyone they feel you ought to be interested in ... or whatever heap of trash floated to the top of the media sewer. I'm still not certain what she is known for!

So I wrote back and enlightened him:

Well, she's news because... because stupidity is pretty damn entertaining, mostly.

Some Texas oil tycoon married her back in the 1990's when he was in his eighties and she was a nightclub stripper in her twenties. With his money and influence, she managed to make her way to the centerfold of Playboy.

Then the old fart died and all hell broke loose over his will. She's been a walking, talking blond joke ever since. Any time she did or said something to get in the news, it was so fucking stupid that I'd fall out of my chair laughing....

It isn't often that you get to laugh out loud from watching a train wreck.

So, now her formerly-hot body is brewing the next batch of Peter Pan peanut butter while people fight over who gets to bury her rapidly-decomposing remains. WHAT A STORY!

The train wreck just keeps going, and going, and going. All we need now is for someone to steal her body. Gawd, that would be funny!

So this morning, I turn on the news and there it was. It's inevitable. They always do it, after every feeding frenzy: a bunch of talking heads self-flagellating over the question of whether they're spending too much time on the Anna Nicole story. They even had the obligatory "expert" (whom no one has ever heard of before) pontificating that "we" are a "sick society."

It's about as informative as watching a bunch of people sit around and masturbate. Okay, I'll admit that there are people who are into that -- and for a good cause, too -- but still, the media's binge-purge bulimic excesses don't necessarily mean that all the rest of us are a bunch of sickos.

Myself, I think that all of this is great. The longer this Anna Nicole story goes, that's that much more air time that WON'T be devoted to Hilarity, Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and the entire Global Warming crowd. In fact, you might have missed this, but Pelosi's little Global Warming dog-and-pony show in DC had to be canceled because of... get this... unseasonably cold weather.

I hope the damn Anna Nicole story keeps going right up to the 2008 elections! It's a hell of a lot more entertaining, and that's all the news in this country is anyway: entertainment. What the hell, maybe it will get Hilarity Clinton to shave her coochie. Oh, wait a minute... I don't think I want to see that....

My friend Dave is concerned. "How the hell is Ron Paul and the message of liberty going to get heard above all this?" he writes.

Dave's a great guy, but I think he's being a little naive. Does he honestly think there's a Snowman's Chance in Hell that the media will ever talk about Ron Paul, or Liberty? Give me a break. It will be a Cold Day in Hell before they give him (or the message of Liberty) even so much as an inch of ink. If he gets mentioned at all, it's going to be something like this:

"Ron Paul, the failed 1988 Libertarian presidential candidate, spoke to a crowd of three people earlier today at the local airport."

And it will probably be the lead-in to the local weather report.

Anger! Obscenities!

USA Today headline: "Across USA, wave of anger building over gas prices" (http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-05-02-gas-prices-cover_x.htm?POE=NEWISVA)

Well, I'm starting to get angry too. Not about the prices so much, even though I should be. They're a disgrace. But anyone with half an education could have/should have seen this coming, and getting angry isn't going to change any of the facts. It's not rocket science; it's plain and simple economics. Unfortunately, no one learns economics in school any more -- and for that matter, no one learns critical thinking skills either.

So now we three-dollar-per-gallon gasoline, and people are screaming their heads off about it. The U.S. economy grew at an unbelievable annual rate of 4.8% in the last quarter, factory orders are up far more than anyone expected, and the service sector is booming. While the employment figures are not in yet as of this writing, they are expected to show that about 200,000 new jobs were created in the same period.

And people are screaming their heads off over gasoline that costs, after factoring for inflation, no more than it did in the 1980's. Now politicians are pandering to angry voters, promising what they can't deliver while doing everything they can to make matters worse; journalists and pundits are pointing fingers of blame all over the place (except, predictably, at the actual source of the "problem"); and a whole bunch of ignorant consumers are blaming the oil companies for <gasp> actually [caution: obscene word coming] making a profit!!

And now, to top it off, we now have ten attorneys general -- who apparently don't understand either economics OR the Constitution -- suing the Bush administration for not doing enough to screw things up even worse. In at least one of those states (New York), the AG is currently running for Governor. Hmmm, there can't actually be any pandering to angry voters going on now, can there? Oh, no... I'm sure that Mr. Spitzer is <cough> honestly doing his best to <cough cough> help the poor people of New York. Why, I'm sure he's just as honest as any other Democra... <horrible gagging noise>.

You cannot repeal the laws of science. Pass all of the stupid laws you want, and the Earth will keep spinning on its axis, water will continue to boil at 100° C (at sea level, of course), and, in obstinate defiance of diversity, triangles will continue to contain only straight lines.

Gasoline, and the raw materials from which it comes, is a commodity that is bought and sold in a competitive market. There are many suppliers: no monopoly controls the prices and there is no evidence of any shadowy collusion among the oil companies to control the prices either. Its price is determined by the market. Period.

Now, when you have a commodity that is in short supply, its price goes up. When you have a commodity for which demand increases, its price goes up. If you want prices to go down, you must either reduce demand or increase supply. This is pretty basic stuff.

So, the demand for fuels is up because the economy is doing better. That's not bad news, it's good news. And the supply... well, the same people who have been screaming the loudest about the high prices -- and even blaming the current President for them -- have done everything they can over the last 30 years to LIMIT the supply.

We have oil in Alaska. Lots of it. But the same people who are bashing the President -- for a problem THEY have spent the last 30 years creating -- continuously block every environmentally-sound effort to extract it. We also have oil off the coast of California -- but it's the same story. Environmentalists blocked efforts to drill for it decades ago, and now it's somehow George Bush's fault that we have high gasoline prices.

There hasn't been a new refinery built in this country for more than thirty years. But I don't suppose that has anything to do with the Law of Supply and Demand.

You would think that anyone with an education would be able to figure this stuff out. Instead we have people blaming the oil companies, blaming the President, blaming anyone but themselves -- for a problem that anyone with half a brain could see was going to happen someday.

And the stupidity goes on and on. Any time the oil companies [caution: obscene word coming] make more money than what someone thinks is "appropriate", we have politicians promising to take it away from them. Now, anyone who thinks he has a right to decide for someone else how much money s/he should be allowed to make -- really IS obscene.

But we still have politicians who think that they can persuade the oil companies to find and produce more oil by taking away their money when they make "too much" of it. Jimmy Carter tried that in the late 1970's with his "windfall profits tax" that caused domestic oil production to plummet. And the politicians think that this time around, they'll get different results? Isn't making the same mistake over and over, and expecting different results, the definition of "stupid"?