Suspected Drug Use

George Bush has just admitted that he’s authorized eavesdropping of Americans without search warrants at least thirty times since September 11, 2001, each time for 45 days. Now Democrats want an investigation.

OK, let’s see if this makes a stitch of sense!

Let’s say once upon a time there was a country, we’ll call it Democratia, where it was against the law for people to eavesdrop on citizens but the country’s leaders wanted to know what the people were saying all the time anyway. So what they did was something very very clever. It was so clever that if Stalin were alive to see it, he would say, in Russian, “Damn, these guys are good!”

First, they arranged for the wiretapping of all their citizens’ phone calls, or at least all of their phones that in any way involved international transmissions. Those included not only phone calls meant to be received in other countries, but also phone calls that use satellites, because “space is international territory.” How did they arrange to do this, since routine wiretapping was illegal in Democratia? Easy! They asked their friends to do it for them, in return for them doing it for their friends. By “friends” I mean “other allied countries.” “We aren’t wiretapping our own citizens,” they said. “Our friends are!” “We’re just wiretapping our friends’ citizens. What’s wrong with that?”

To be even safer from criticism the leaders of Democratia made sure their friends didn’t actually listen in to their own citizens’ conversations – that would be wrong. Instead they had their friends use super computers to do the listening.

The super computers had voice recognition capabilities far in advance of anything you can get for a PC, and they could record all the millions of calls being made at any instant and transcribe them to computer text-files in real-time, 24/7. Then the computers could scan the texts for keywords that would indicate whether or not people were saying things that the Democratian leaders might want to know about, and all those calls could be flagged for later listening.

Computers would do the transcriptions and scanning, not people. So the Democratia leaders could honestly say that “no one,” “not anybody,” was eavesdropping on their citizens, not even their foreign friends.

Of course, if the computers flagged a call as having suspicious content, like say, if it was made by a member of Greenpeace, or mentioned the president of Democratia, or if the words “drug” and “buy” were used in the same sentence, as in “I have to go out to the DRUGstore to BUY deodorant for my smelly Dad, so I’ll call you back later,” then the proper authorities could be notified. And then actual legal warrants could be obtained from on-call, easy, slutty, judges. Often this could be done within minutes, even before the calls in question had ended.

It’s like this. Suppose the police come to your door and say, “We’d like to search your house, but we don’t have a search warrant.” So you, fearing they’d find your stash of politically incorrect midget-on-stuffed-animal porn, say, “No.” So they say, “OK, then, step aside while this robot here rolls through your front door and through your entire house, and transmits images of everything in digitized form to a remote super computer which could spot the real Spock at a Star Trek convention. Then if the computer reports back that any white powder is visible anywhere in your house, like flour, or talcum, we can have a warrant faxed by satellite to our van waiting at the curb over here, and THEN we will search you.”

Would that seem like a fair way to sidestep your Constitutional rights? Well, that’s essentially what the ECHELON system, set up by Democratia (these United States, duh!) has done routinely with your phone calls at least since the Clinton administration, and the Democrats knew it at the time.

We should impeach everybody in both parties, simultaneously.

Questions For A New Millenium

Recently a satisfied reader plied me with questions about the year almost ended. These are my answers.

Q. What did you do with your life this year?

I abused it, as usual.

Q. What was the biggest mistake you made this year?

Waking up.

Q. Did you meet any of your goals this year? Which one(s)?

I said to myself on 1/1/99, lets see if I can't be flat broke by the end of the year, so that while everyone else is stocking up for Y2K, I can look forward to dying of thirst and starvation the first week of 2000! And it's happened!

Q. Are you further towards some of your goals this year than you were at this time last year?

I am exactly one year closer to my goal of dying of extreme old age.

Q. What were your successes and failures?

I survived a trip to Cleveland.

Q. What did you learn?

I learned that I am allergic to Cleveland.

Q. What do you have still to learn?

Why did you take so long to ask? I have so much left to learn I will need another millennium to find all the answers:

What are the names of the Brady Bunch? Why was it called the "Rocky Squirrel & Bullwinkle Moose Show", when Bullwinkle was clearly the star? How may I withdraw $200 at a time from an ATM, even though I have no bank account and no credit cards, without being caught? Suggested by my ex-wife: could I be any more stupid? How many barking dogs does it take to change a light bulb?

How may I hotwire a 747? What day(s) is(are) garbage pickup? What is the song "Louie, Louie" about? Instead of making two-ply toilet paper, why don't they just make toilet paper that's twice as thick? Who actually watches Regis Philbin and Kathie Lee? Is there really a two-pack-a-day Barbie? Is that two packs of beer or two packs of cigs? Why? What does "Jedi" mean?

Compare and contrast: the production of maple syrup in Vermont, and the times you've been kissed by your aunt. How many words rhyme with "purple"? What does "mean" mean? Why were there four musketeers? What does cat toe-jam look like? Why don't cats want you to look between their toes? What do they have to hide? Are anarchists out of control or what?

Will English ever be spelled fonetikly? Iph naught, waigh naught? How many eyebrows does Brook Shields have? Did Monty Python have legs? How auld _was_ auld lang syne? Who was the first guy who ever said "I shall fear no evil, for I am the meanest, baddest, m*f* in this whole valley of the shadow of death"? Why doesn't everyone just shoot "chartreuse" in the head?

Can you tell me the way to San Jose? What does chicken taste like? What is a dash of pepper? A dash of hippopotami? How many smidgeons make a pinch? Did Whitey really respect the Beave? How Tricky was Dick? Was it really easy to dance to, or were they just joshin'? Whose brilliant idea was poodles? Dachshunds? Irish red setters?

Compare and contrast: Brazilian hand-puppets, and a performance of Leonard Bernstein's Candide. What was Paraguay's finest hour? "I fought the law and the law won." What, exactly, did the law win? What would Palladin have done for a living if he ever lost his gun? Quick, what do you get when you cross Captain Kirk with a female alien elephant? Too late...

What happened to 001 through 006? Were their licenses revoked? If I were a little tea kettle, that wouldn't be my spout, would it? What was the strangest thing Mick Jagger ever did with his lips? Was Keith Richards involved? Was there a chihuahua in the room? Were lawyers for Taco Bell alerted?

Q. Why couldn't you have written this column entirely about Y2K?

I could have, but it wouldn't have made any sense.