Intelligence is for SOCAs

Let’s talk about subversion!

“The Raging Grannies” is a worldwide subversive movement. It aims to undermine our (your!) civilization’s underpinnings and metaphoric undergarments. It takes our most underpinned, our elderly women, and uses them as weapons of mass instruction. Its MO consists of nothing less insidious than the wearing of silly clothes and the singing of horribly silly, but instructive, songs.

Who is really behind The Raging Grannies? Could it be the world’s grannies themselves? Could it be that our Mothers and our Mother’s Mothers have become subversives entirely on their own? Or are these unveiled, exhibitionistic women, who wear the silly hats and sing the silly songs, not the brainwashed dupes of Al-Qaeda?

Speaking for itself, members of the local chapter of The Raging Grannies were recently quoted singing, "Oh, we're a gaggle of grannies, urging you off of our fannies. We're raising our voice. We want a new choice. No -- more -- war." Clearly they are intent on ducking the question.

One member, and herself intent on ducking the question, indeed on ducking any and everything, is Anitra “Not an Italian Duck, But Ducky-ish” Freeman. Ms. Freeman, like the others, won’t admit to being a tool of Al-Qaeda, even to me. But regular readers of this column will know that I have spent many years in close association with Ms. Freeman, and they will correctly guess that I have thereby been afforded deep insights into her devious ways.

What I know about Freeman tells me that the evil masterminds behind The Raging Grannies are truly masterful, for if she is any indication, these hardened women aren’t going to give up their secrets to the prying eyes of mere amateurs.

Thank goodness the Federal Bureau of Investigation has stepped in. America’s professional prying eyes have been surveilling the elderly female parodyists for a while now, and any day they will get the goods on them, revealing them for the threat they are. Or not. In either case we can sleep peacefully at night knowing that our trusted G-Men are on the job, protecting us from people who sing.

I wouldn’t have brought any of this up now if I hadn’t read the news from the other side of the Atlantic that Tony Blair is starting up an organization intended to be modeled on the FBI, to be named, and I swear on a stack of holy scriptures of all faiths true and false I am not making this up, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, or SOCA.

How can anything modeled on today’s FBI be called the Serious Organised Crime Agency? How about calling it the Silly Organised Crime Agency? That would fit. And since it won’t change the acronym to call it that, that’s what I’m going to call it. The acronym is perfect. SOCA to me, SOCA to you, yes.

The news stories say that about a third of the initial staffing for SOCA will come from British customs. Those are the twits who wear bowlers and carry bumbershoots and, if you’re a married man, dig through your suitcase during inspection until they find a pair of women’s lacy underpants, and hold it up where your wife can see and say, “What’s this now?” and she says, “Hey, those aren’t mine!” and you have to say to her, “Maybe they got in there by accident at the cleaners in Amsterdam” and she says, “As soon as we get home I’m filing for a divorce!” and you think, “Customs twit.”

It’s clearly better that Customs twits work in the Silly Organised Crime Agency than that they root through our suitcases. They will make excellent British equivalents of our G-Men. Blair is definitely on the right track.

That right track, of course, is the track to greater unity in our civilization, to be achieved by eliminating all traces of disunity, such as unapproved silliness and unaccounted-for undergarments, until we are all one great united government approved and accounted-for whole.

If You're Screwed, You're Screwed

For today's column I want to talk about how "Science Marches On!" I am very excited about a new discovery that finally gets at the underlying truth about life neither being a rose garden nor a bowlful of cherries. It also deepens the theory that the Rich Get Richer While the Poor Get Poorer, by sinking it to the level of biology and the reproduction of cells. It’s a very factual new discovery that is so scientific and at the same time so scary that it could make the basis for a great new film to bum out kids in high school.

The discovery is a long time coming. I remember reading in history books that way back in the Dark Ages the silly Dark-Ages-people all thought that life was "essentially" a waiting room experience with one good magazine that everyone fought over until they remembered that none of them could read, and then you died and went to heaven.

Then, in the Renaissance, science started, and all the beginner scientists started to believe that life blew. It wasn't until the 1800's before science-greats like Darwin and other guys who actually knew things figured out that life really sucks, as we now know today.

But it is one thing to know that life sucks. It is quite another to know HOW life sucks, or to possess the video. This is where 21^st century scientists have it all over 19^th century scientists: even though they aren't as smart, there's lots more of them, so when you put them all together they end up knowing more. Besides, they have cell-phones and digital cameras and laptops.

Anyway, here it is. Scientists just learned last month that if you experience long-term hardship, and if you experience it as chronic stress, then your telomeres will shrivel up. This is bad, the scientists say, because telomeres are the tips-of-the-shoelace thingies at the end of your chromosomes that need to be big and long so that your cells can divide and multiply. So it's like, you know, with shriveled telomeres your cells might as well be neutered, and pretty soon the cells you have die without replacements, and so do you.

There's more: they've actually figured out how much shriveling happens. As much shriveling happens in a typical case that we are talking about losing roughly a year of lifespan for each year of stress experienced. Give or take a month or two.

So let's say someone, we'll call him Herbert, was genetically predisposed to live 70 years if his life went as well as it does for normal people. But suppose instead the beginning of his life, for the first 35 years, is a genuine living hell, comparatively speaking. According to our old understanding we would have thought that at least Herbert would have had a second 35 years left to him during which things might start looking up. But now we know that Herbert's telomeres will be entirely useless as of his 35^th birthday and Herbert will die of premature old age within days. Or a couple of years. Or he's already dead. Approximately.

Now, some see a silver lining to this discovery. They point out that the telomeres only shrink if you experience the stress. In other words if you don't know you're miserable you won't suffer the ill effects of it. Right, that's it, I could just whack myself up-side my head so hard I don't notice anything at all ever again.

No, there are only two alternatives. Either you're so stupid you not only don't know when you're suffering you also can't fully know when you're having a good time, i.e., you're a fish, metaphorically speaking. Or else you're a sentient being and every year that you suffer you lose that much opportunity to make up for it.

So we may sum up this new discovery as follows. If you're screwed, you're screwed. Unless you're stupid, in which case you're screwed.

Has there ever been a time when we could so clearly see the need for justice as this? Let's stop putting people through genuine living hells, at least until we can find a way to enlarge telomeres.