Posts Tagged Franklin D. Roosevelt
Crowbar Headlines President Warren G. Harding’s 12th Inaugural Celebration
Posted by Keith Spillett in The Politics Of Catastrophe on December 16, 2013
President Warren G. Harding was easily elected to his twelfth term last month in a landslide election, garnering a record 98 percent of the vote, easily defeating the New Whig Party candidate and Metallica guitarist Dave Mustaine.
Harding, leader of the Democratic-Republicans For God Party, continues to be the most significant politician in the history of the United States and is expected to be the leader of the nation until the world’s predicted destruction in 2173. Tonight, Crowbar will be the final act in what is expected the most widely witnessed television event since the execution of the ten leaders of the Kennedy Rebellion in 1969.
Harding’s political career is the stuff of legends. Even the youngest school child has heard the stories. After a relatively lackluster first term that featured corruption in the form of the Teapot Dome scandal and economic turmoil, Harding died of a heart attack on August 2nd, 1923. Had Harding not risen from the dead during his own funeral on August 4th, his presidency would have been a forgotten chapter in the history of the United States of the World.
Harding, who claimed God had allowed him to come back to life in order to lead the United States of The World to its current position as the most powerful nation on the planet, was reelected to a 4 -year term in 1924 after the still unsolved murder of Democratic Presidential candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Harding’s mission to bring “normalcy” to the world began during this term. He invaded Canada, England and Mexico days after his election and by 1934 the United States controlled all of North America and most of Europe. Only its defeat in The Great Nuclear War with Argentina in 1962 stopped America’s march towards world domination.
Argentina’s nuclear strikes destroyed most of Harding’s empire and led to the revolutionary forces of John Fitzgerald Kennedy taking control of most of the Northern United States and renaming it Camelotia. Harding’s forces regrouped and retook the North in what was known as The Second American Civil War. Still, many questioned Harding’s leadership and he looked like he might lose the election of 1972 to Paul Newman. It was then that Harding performed The Five Miracles.
Harding, Who Will Only Allow Himself To Be Photographed In Black And White, Celebrating His 12th Term As President
These miracles included Harding making the nation of Albania disappear, turning water into Coca-Cola, using lasers from his eyes to melt The Washington Monument, reanimating Thomas Jefferson and the creation of flying cars. Harding eliminated Congress and the Supreme Court and declared martial law, which lasted until 2003. He rebuilt the military and, with help from the visitors from the Planet Klorg, was able to take control of the entire world except for Mongolia, the last stronghold of anti-American forces.
Harding occasionally still allows elections, but few experts believe that the opposition is given a fair chance to be victorious. All people who vote against him are immediately executed and used to feed the multi-headed battle giraffe drones and robot oxen that the USW have used to militarily control many of the Outer Territories.
With the outcome of the election never in doubt, many television and Conquernet experts have spent their time speculating who would headlining the inauguration. The prevailing wisdom was that Pentagram would be the band because of the close relationship between President Harding and vocalist and former Vice President Bobby Liebling. However, it is also known that Harding is a huge Crowbar fan, particularly the Odd Fellows Rest album. Last Friday, Crowbar vocalist Christina Aguilera and her husband, guitarist Kirk Windstein, received a call directly from Harding announcing the news.
Rumors have already started to swirl that if Crowbar has an excellent performance, Dave Lombardo, the band’s drummer and former Ambassador to Mars, might be asked to be Secretary of State. Lombardo has refused to comment directly, but his manservant Kerry King did indicate to several reporters that the famed drummer would take the job if it were offered. King, many remember, was enslaved by Lombardo after the failure of his 2005 neo-disco solo album “I Like To Boogie, Boogie” drove him into bankruptcy.
Honest Validation of Unfair Cheese: Slayer and The Perils Of Free-Market Fanaticism
Posted by Keith Spillett in Articles I Probably Shouldn't Have Bothered Writing on April 12, 2012
In Slayer’s song Blood Red, singer Tom Araya bellows forth a challenging and powerful lyric that cuts to the core of today’s debate between a managed, centralized economy and a free market system where the “invisible hand” balances the wants and needs of the consumer against the production capabilities of the market. When he shrieks “Honest validation of unfair cheese” at the 41 second mark of the song, it is clear that he is undercutting a basic free-market premise posited by thinkers the likes of Milton Friedman and Frederick Hayek. The words are enlightening and deeply meaningful, particularly for an electorate on the cusp of deciding what sort of financial decisions it plans to make as it marches forward into a new millennium.
In order to understand the meaning behind Araya’s lyric, it is first critical that we understand the meaning of “unfair cheese”. Nothing is more disappointing to a lover of cheese than when, upon returning from the supermarket, a shopper finds moldy, poorly preserved cheese in their bag. Who is supposed to ensure the consumer is safe from a flood of this “unfair cheese”? If the supermarket is left to its own devices, it might well sell all the out of date cheese it could possibly get away with. After all, as Buddy Holly said in his 1981 hit song “Who is watching the detectives?” In this case, maybe we need someone to even watch the people who are watching the detectives. Or, it is possible we may need to hire detectives to watch the detectives who are watching the detectives.
Back to the cheese thing. If it weren’t for the Better Food and Cheese Act of 1938, under the esteemed and underappreciated Presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, humans would be consuming pounds upon pounds of rotting, vile cheese. The Act empowered the police to arrest and jail any store clerk found selling “unfair cheese” for a period no less than five years in prison. Higher quality cheeses began to appear. Productivity flourished. It was during this period that Gorgonzola cheese was first produced in a laboratory. It was originally meant to be used as a weapon against the Soviet Union, but later it became appreciated for its velvety texture and tangy flavor. In the preceding two hundred years, America’s cheese growers had not produced as much as a single new breed of cheese.
So, when Araya asks for “honest validation of unfair cheese”, he’s really questioning whether a purely free market can produce the quality goods needed in a modern economy. Sure, it’d be nice to believe that the market is such a perfect force that can correct itself and keep the desires of its members in line, but it’s this sort of utopian thinking that caused the Great Wall of China to fall in 1990.
We cannot simply rely on market forces to purify the market. Human nature tells us that humans, in a perfect state of nature, will do some really unnatural things. In short, only a neutral arbitrator with no stake in the outcome can possibly make decisions that protect the consumer.
Only when the positions of these regulators are depoliticized and not influenced by corporations or individuals with expensive cars will we truly see an “honest validation of unfair cheese”. Only then will children of all races and all creeds, of all nationalities and all socio-economic backgrounds, of all hair styles and all blood types be able to sit down at the table of friendship together and eat the same safe and healthy cheese. Only then will we truly be free.
The Tyranny of Tradition 