It seems that the latest and greatest on the Internet is that by punching the wrong key on their computers, government bureaucrats wind up "killing" people. Not literally, of course, but figuratively is just as good when it comes to dealing with the government. I’ve seen several of these stories in just the last few weeks.

Once you’re "dead" in the bureaucratic system, it doesn’t matter how much you breathe or how much you get screwed over by the system, you’re going to stay dead.

And the problem can go on and on and on, for years. And who’s held responsible? No one.

When an insurance company, bank, or any other corporation screws you over through incompetence and shoddy work, then doesn’t respond to your complaints and make a real effort to fix it, they get fined millions and millions of dollars, may find themselves on the losing ends of gigantic civil lawsuits, people can get fired, reputations can get fried. And the watchdogs follow their later work, sometimes for years.

But when it happens because of "public servants" (an oxymoron if I’ve ever heard one), it’s business as usual. No one loses his or her job, people actually get promoted, and it’s more than just possible that you’re going to think that, just because you’ve been told the problem has been solved, the problem will continue to rise from the dead (even if you don’t) until…well, you’re really dead.

And even when you’re told it’s been solved, you’re going to need more lives than a cat because you’re more than likely to find out you’re dead again and again and again as the news of your "demise" spreads through the system like mold across an old piece of bread.

And the problem isn’t rare. Estimates are that there are tens of thousands of living people erroneously reported as dead by government bureaucrats, and there are at least another 35 new zombies every day. And for these new 35, as I said, their nightmares can go on for years and years and years…

In the meantime, the people who make these mistakes and the people who are supposed to fix them go home at night, get a good night’s sleep, pay their bills, go on vacations, and otherwise have pleasant lives. For the victims, it can mean tax refunds (and tax rebates) that never come; Social Security (including Social Security disability) checks that are discontinued; bills that don’t get paid, so utilities get shut off; credit cards that get cancelled; your life history is now an open book leaving you completely exposed to identity theft; health insurance and Medicare are cancelled so real and life-threatening ailments can’t get treated…the list goes on.

What can we do? There will never be a solution to bureaucratic stupidity, inefficiency, and incompetence until people are held accountable. And do you you know what that’s going to take? You.

And look at you. There you are, still sitting on your big butt doing nothing about it. Do something. Write or call your Congressman. Demand bureaucratic responsibility. And don’t desist in your efforts, even if they tell you they don’t have to listen to you because someone hit the wrong button and you’re dead.

Let me start this out by saying, I don’t care for the current President, George W. Bush. I believe he’s on track to be the second worst President this country has ever had, right after Franklin Roosevelt.

Having said that, let me, in his “defense,” try to put something to rest. I’m going to try to euthanize an opinion that won’t die. But even after I kill it, it’ll probably keep coming back like Freddy Kruger of Elm Street, Michael Myers of Halloween, and Kenny McCormnik of South Park.

Ready?

Bush isn’t stupid.

Over the last seven years, his critics, mostly his liberal critics, have taken some kind of comfort in making that assertion. And what do they have as evidence? As near as I can tell, it’s his malapropisms. Oh, and then there’s the widely circulated e-mail from the once fictitious Lovenstein Institute of Scranton purporting that he has the lowest I.Q. of any U.S. President in the last 50 years. (I say once fictitious because soon after the hoax was exposed, and it was shown the Lovenstein Institute didn’t exist, someone registered it on the Internet and now it does “exist” somewhere out in cyberspace.)

The problem with using his speaking ineptitude as evidence of a less than stellar IQ is that there are members of Mensa who speak like that. Yeah, I know one: Dave Duffy, the publisher of Backwoods Home Magazine. He’s a Mensa member, runs a successful magazine, and is one of the smartest people I know, but still says things a la Bush, that even after knowing him for over forty years leave me gasping for air.

Let me offer some real evidence that belies the rants of Bush’s critics:
He graduated from Yale. Yeah, daddy might have gotten him in, but he had to get himself out. And he might not have graduated at the top of his class, but he graduated.

He has an MBA from Harvard. Some have suggested daddy bought him the degree. Unless you can provide evidence, I’ve got to discount that assertion as more useless ranting. Besides, I’m going to ask you to provide a list of the Harvard professors who were bought off. There would then be a scandal here and it should be exposed.

He piloted an F-106. Yes, you can say he didn’t complete his National Guard obligation. I don’t know whether he did or not. But he did fly a complicated modern jet fighter. That’s not a piece of equipment you’re going to put an idiot at the controls of.

He speaks a second language. Now, I understand that even retarded people can speak, but not many are multilingual and none have graduated from Yale, Harvard Business School, or flown a modern jet fighter.

And this is what pisses me off the most: Time that could have and should have been spent criticizing his policies or rectifying some of the mistakes he made were spent on the self-serving fiction that he’s stupid. I’ve come to think of those who have let this supposed lack of mental acuity distract them as being the real idiots.

Duffy, if you happen to read this, I’ve changed my mind. I think you’re an idiot, after all. (Hey, having never complimented him in over forty years, I’m not going to start now.)

Yesterday, on the CNN website, there was a poll asking:

Have you listened to or watched any speeches or debates by the presidential candidates?

The choices were:

Speeches
Debates
Both
Neither

I voted. I checked “neither.”

Then I viewed the results. Here they were as of the moment I voted:

Percent # votes
Speeches 3% 536
Debates 14% 2374
Both 38% 6455
Neither 44% 7493
Total Votes: 16858

Those percentages will hold pretty constant even with thousands of more votes.

Why, you may ask, do I not bother to listen to the candidates’ debates nor their speeches?

Quite simply because what they say is more often than not meaningless. They say whatever they think they have to say to get elected. Often, what they say depends on who they are talking to. It often depends on what the polls say prospective voters want to hear. (It means these politicians are not standing on principles, they’re saying whatever the have to to get elected.)

I remember a long-ago speech, before tobacco farmers by Al Gore in which he promised them his support. This contradicted anti-smoking speeches he made both before and after that speech, anti-smoking speeches he made to groups that were clearly against tobacco. Like most politicians, he was firmly in the camp of the wishy-washies.

I also recall that in 1980, friends urged me to vote for Reagan, instead of the Libertarian candidate, Ed Clark, because we had to get a liberal like Carter out and a conservative like Reagan in. I said I couldn’t vote for Reagan because he wasn’t a conservative, he was a big-government Republican. I based my opinion on what he did as governor of California and not on what he said in his campaign speeches. And, as it turned out, I was right.

After listening to these guys for years, I realize if there is any positive the correlation between what they say and what they do when they get into office it is more a matter of chance and coincidence than a matter of them keeping their promises.

They all promise smaller government, lower taxes, peace, etc. But, once in, those speeches and promises are forgotten.

As an aside, I thought it was laughable when Clinton ran for reelection, in 1996, and simply appropriated the Republican platform. Not that he intended to carry out any of the promises for smaller government, lower taxes, etc., that he ran on. It was just neat stuff to say. And, when he was reelected? All the promises were forgotten–by both the voters and the press.

I even asked liberal friends why they were voting for him when he was backing away from the liberal agenda. They, of course, didn’t answer and Bill, as I said, abandoned all the small-government rhetoric he’d gulled the swing voters with. I knew he’d do so. I imagine even his supporters knew his speeches were bullshit–lies–but they didn’t care.

However, if you really want to know where a candidate stands, and assuming he was previously in an elective office, look at his voting record in whatever legislative bodies he may have been in, look at his track record if he was a governor. What they’ve done in the past, they’re very likely to do in the future.

Only one of the candidates says what he means and means what he says, and that’s Ron Paul. His voting record in Congress is a reflection of his campaign speeches and what he says in the so-called “debates.” But I don’t listen to him, either, because I already know what he’ll do if elected. He’s not going to say anything in his speeches or the debates that he hasn’t said and done before. He’s the only one there I trust. He’s the only one up there not trying to snow you. I’ll vote for him even if he doesn’t run.

This morning I woke up to a headline on CNN that read: Renewed ethnic clashes hit Kenya.

Why am I not surprised?

Many of the “nations” of Africa are going to be basket cases for generations to come. This has nothing to do with poverty, democracy, global warming, Jesus Christ, Allah, the surfeit or the lack of any of those things. It has everything to do with tribalism and the way the colonial powers, England, France, Belgium, Germany, Portugal etc., that once ruled Africa, set up many of the new nations that now exist when they withdrew and went home to Europe.

Colonialism in Africa did not occur along tribal lines. That is, the European powers that invaded the continent, drew up colonial boundaries that suited their purposes–without regard to tribal boundaries–then ruled them as they saw fit. The result was that tribes were often split between two or more colonies, and the colonies often included several tribes under one umbrella. Often, the tribes within a colony, such as Kenya, had antagonisms against each other that predated the coming of the Europeans.

Then, in the 20th century, when the the Europeans left, they left behind a bunch of fledgling nations that today have as their national borders the same borders the old colonies once had. This left fractured many of the tribes, and because the nations were formed along colonial rather than tribal lines, the “countries” formed now contain ethnic groups that still have the same age-old animosities toward each other.

Examples of the problems this has caused abound on the continent and include what’s happening in Kenya.

The largest ethnic group in Kenya is is the Kikuyu. Next in numbers are the Luhya then the Luo. But there are also the Kalenjin, Kamba, Kisii. and a host of others including Somalis. (A map showing the ethnic divisions in Kenya can be found in Wikipedia. It’s a nightmare.) Though there are shifting alliances among these groups, there is very little love between any of them and frequently a great deal of animosity. What is happening in Kenya is that large gangs of Kikuyu are finding single or small gangs of Luo and are either maiming them or hacking them to death with machetes. In the meantime, houses are set on fire as part of another age-old dispute: who owns what land?

Another example is seen in the clashes between the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda and Burundi, clashes that, occasionally, still fill the news. In Rwanda the Tutsis once ruled, though the Hutus were the majority. But when the Hutus came into control of the country, through “democratic” elections there was little the Tutsis could do when Hutu militias decided their country needed an ethnic cleansing–genocide along tribal lines. The result was the slaughter of at least 500,000 Tutsis and perhaps as many as a million. Along with them, thousands of “moderate” Hutus, who wanted to stop the slaughter, also died.

In neighboring Burundi, where the Hutus are the majority, ethnic cleansing goes the other way.

I remember back in the late ‘60s the attempt by the Ibo, in Nigeria, to secede and form their own country, that would include only them and their ancestral homelands. What followed was a bloody civil war that saw the Ibos decimated.

Forming the countries “correctly” would not have solved everything. There still would be wars. But had those countries been formed along tribal or ethnic lines instead of colonial line, or had the Europeans simply left and let the Africans settle the boundaries themselves, there would be many fewer internecine struggles and civil wars which, unfortunately, are going to continue unabated into the foreseeable future. But the Europeans couldn’t leave sensibly because their first concerns were the spheres of influence they wanted to maintain. They hoped to keep old allegiances and controls. The Belgians with what was once known as the Belgian congo, the French with Nigeria, the English with Kenya, etc. They each wanted to keep some kind of trading agreements that would satisfy themselves and to hell with the Africans.

Well, the Africans will pay the price for that into the foreseeable future. Ethnic wars will continue and millions–men, women, and children–will die.

w00t—pronounced as if it rhymes with boot. But what does it mean? It’s the Merriam-Webster 2007 “word of the year.” It’s spelled with the letter “w”, the number “0″, another “0″, and finally a “t”. It more of less means “Yay!” and apparently it originated as an acronym for “we own the other team,” but it came to be spelled with two zeros instead of with a pair of the letter “O” and it’s now quite popular with gamers on the Internet and is merely an expression of joy. For example, one gamer might text another, “I just reached Level 12 in Blow the World to Hell. W00t!”

Runner-up for word of the year was facebook, which is a verb among whose various meanings is “to upload a person’s photo to the website facebook.com.” E.G., “I’m going to facebook that cute girl I met this afternoon when I get on line, tonight.” And then there was another word being considered, blamestorm, which means more or less what brainstorm means, but it’s a brainstorming session whose sole intent to to find someone to blame when things are going wrong. At one time or another, we’ve all been there for such a blamestorm session, now we have a name for it.

These aren’t the only words popping into—and often out of—the vernacular.

In the past I’ve heard people use conversate, which means to have a conversation with; and flustrate, which is a combination of “fluster” and “frustrate”–you can imagine how it’s used. I hate the word, but it describes the way I feel when I hear a friend use it.

The question is, are any of these words? Many ask that question. I even saw a segment on the evening news where a trio of newscasters debated that very question in regards to “w00t”, with the distaff member of that trio asking, “But is it a real word?”

How you answer that question—whether any of these are real “words” or not—says a lot about you. First, it reveals whether you think dictionaries are prescriptive or descriptive. If you view them as prescriptive, then you believe a dictionary describes how you should speak and write. It’s kind of what the French do. They—or at least those Frenchmen who think their language should be kept pure, such as the 40 members of L’Académie française, the so-called guardians of French—are convinced the language should be regulated, and that neologisms, especially those coined from other languages (and the French seem to have a special problem with words coming from American-English) should be exorcised. On top of that, there are even French laws mandating French be used, or at least used in conjunction with other languages, for many purposes. One American company, GE Medical Systems, found itself fined 500,000 euros, plus another 20,000 euros a day, for having the temerity to have violated laws guarding the language because of some documentation and software it provided to its French subsidiary, despite the fact only technical people were going to see or use it. I guess they gotta protect the children.

The problem with this French approach (and the French approach is a prescriptive approach) is that when you use it, you are always fighting a losing battle. As words (especially those damned American words) survive attempts to expunge them, the guardians of that language find themselves having to give many of the offensive words an official stamp of approval. This gesture allows them to save face rather than having to admit that they can’t win. Just consider the fruits of their labors: what did they do with American words like e-mail, golden boy, and stock-option? They turned them into le email, la stock-option, and le golden boy. Yeah, now they’re French words. Le bullshit. In the meantime, they’ve tried to keep words like “software” out of their language by substituting “logiciel,” but with only limited success.

Likewise, in this country, many take the same prescriptive approach the French take and deem a neologism “not a word” if it doesn’t appear in a dictionary.

Of course, there are some logical problems with this approach. One is that of the approximately 6,800 languages in the world, about 3,400 are unwritten. To deem a word as a “real” only if it appears in a dictionary, means that none of those languages have real words. It also denies there were any “real” words in English before Samuel Johnson created the first English dictionary. Another problem concerns words that are part of the vernacular or slang that do make it into a dictionary. Do they appear there because the makers of the dictionary recognize them as “real” words, or does their appearance somehow magically and mystically transform them into “real”? Another problem is, what happens to the words that are dropped from dictionaries (and they are generally dropped because dictionaries have limited space and real production costs)? Are they no longer words. Another problem I’ll mention is what of the thousands of words used everyday, names of, e.g., chemical compounds that will never appear in a dictionary—even chemical dictionaries? Last, with today’s Internet, and the appearance of online dictionaries, new words are appearing in these dictionaries almost as fast as they are coined. So the prescriptive approach is dead–or, a least, severely limping.

On the other hand, if you view dictionaries as “descriptive,” you are not passing judgment on a words status as “real” or not and you see the dictionary as merely describing usage of those words the editors chose to include. But, taking the descriptive approach doesn’t mean you intend ever to use any of those words.

I, myself, prefer the descriptive approach. My reasoning, which is not without merit, says that no one owns the language. Not Congress, not your high school English teacher who always corrected you, not the folks at Merriam-Webster (who, by the way, take the descriptive approach). It also admits to the language’s malleability and the fact that it grows, shrinks, and otherwise changes no matter what any of us, as individuals, thinks.

The closest you can ever come to owning any part of a language is to trademark a word. And, even then, you only own a particular word, or combination of words, in a particular context. For example, I can’t go out and start another magazine and call it Time, or market another laundry detergent and call it Tide. At least not in this country. Those names are taken. On the other hand, neither Time Warner, the publisher of Time, nor Procter & Gamble, the manufacturer of Tide detergent, own the words when they are used in their general linguistic senses. “Time and tide wait for no man.” Those two words are not “owned” in that sense.

So, where do most new words come from? Until recently, from the black and gay communities. However, nowadays, many come from technology, especially the computer world. Words like software, Internet, freeware, website, blog, and laptop are new and are now indispensable to the English language, as are words like window, Windows, and hacker, which have taken on new meanings not intended when those words were first coined.

But who was the greatest single inventor of words in the English language? Most likely, William Shakespeare. Yes, The Bard invented at least 1,700 words (some say as many as 10,000) and lent new meanings to countless other words that already existed in his time. He did so because English, which was considered a backwater language until his day, didn’t have enough words for him to express himself. Today, English just wouldn’t be the grand language it is without him and the countless others who, down through the ages and even today, have molded it and taken into directions that could not have been imagined in the 16th century.

Will I use any of the words recently coined? Usually, I don’t. Like the word snobs, I feel uneasy with them. Many are just fads and will be gone with the crew cuts, bell-bottoms, and bubble hairdos of yesteryear. (Bubble hairdos are gone, aren’t they? Tell me they are.)

But I will admit that, after having resisted using one word for years, when I finally did say it, the webmaster of this site told me it was already passé. That was over 30 years ago. The word? “Groovy.” May I be struck dead if I ever use it again.

On the other hand, I find it very easy to use the word “google” to mean I looked something up on line, regardless of what search engine I used. It’s a good word. Everyone knows what I’m saying when I say it. Will it be here 10 years from now? No one knows.

However, I do not use the word “xerox” indiscriminately. I say “photocopy.” So, I have my limits.

Now, I’ll answer the question I asked earlier in this post and say w00t is a word. I’m not going to use it but, yeah, it is a word. Will I ever use it? Dunno.

Last, have I, myself, ever invented a word or introduced a new meaning to an already established word? Yes. When I’m trying to summarize something, instead of telling my listener that I’m going to give an abbreviated, abridged, or shortened version, I often say, “Let me give you ‘the Reader’s Digest’ version,” meaning I’ll “cut to the chase” and give only the pertinent facts. I don’t know if anyone else has ever used it, but when I preface what I’m going to say with those words, everyone has understood what I mean.

Long post? Yeah. Too bad I didn’t give you the Reader’s Digest version.

I carry concealed. About once a year, maybe less, someone who doesn’t likes guns asks me, “Why do you need a gun?”

No two of the ensuing conversations are exactly alike, but they all run something like this:

I tell them, “I don’t.”

There’s usually a little pause. Then I’m asked, “Then why do you carry one?”

“I carry one for the same reason I have car insurance.”

This usually evokes a comment like, “But you need car insurance.”

“No you don’t.”

“What if you get into an accident?”

“Then I need it.”

If that doesn’t clear things up, I add, “I don’t need car insurance until I’m in an accident. Then I need it. I really need it.”

This sometimes elicits the following comment, “Well, in this state you need it.”

“No you don’t.”

My incredulous acquaintance will then ask, “What if you get pulled over by a cop, and he asks for proof of insurance?”

“I need it then, too, but I don’t need it until I’m asked for it.”

If they can’t figure out what I’m trying to tell them by this time, I explain: “What I’m trying to tell you is that I don’t need car insurance unless I’m in an accident or I’m pulled over by a cop. Until one of those incidents, I don’t need it. And it’s the same thing with the gun I carry. I don’t need it until I need it, and if that happens, I’ll really need it and I’ll be glad I carry one. But, until then…”

I’ll often also sum it up: “What I’m hoping you’ll understand is that I carry for the same reason I keep my car insured at all times, because I don’t know when I’ll need a gun, or have an accident, or get pulled over.”

Some people see what I’m saying; others think I’m just being a smart ass. What can I do?

I haven’t played poker in eight days. Right now, playing is not about money; it’s about learning. But to learn anything from play, and improve my game, I need to focus, and that hasn’t been possible for the last week-plus.

That said, the last two heads-up matches I played, before my hiatus, were bizarre. The next to last one was a Friday-night match played nine days ago. It was to be my last match before I went to bed that night. I had a lot to do over the next few days and I knew I wasn’t likely to get much time in.

On the first hand, I was the big blind. I was dealt QhQc. I was trying to make a quick decision as to how I’d play the pair when my opponent went all-in.

All-in?

I hadn’t been confronted with this kind of decision, before. But here’s what I figured:

I was a dog to a pair of Aces or Kings. I was a coin-flip to AK (slight edge to me), and I was a pretty decent favorite to everything else–other than dead-even if he held QsQd. The only question I had was, given my newly-acquired hubris and the confidence I have in my play, was I better of nibbling him away than giving him an all-in-one-hand shot?

I really didn’t know. But there was no time to really do a complete analysis. So, after a few seconds…

…I called.

The computer revealed he had JhTs. I was a heavy favorite over that hand. (Later, using the free software, PokerStove, I would discover I was 85% to win, about 5.7 to 1.)

The board came up Ac Js 5h Ad As. I won–the hand and the match. I thought about all the things I had planned for the next few days and, after a few seconds, I went to bed instead of starting a new match.

I got up Saturday morning and decided I’d play again, though I had other things to do.

The first hand of that match I was the small blind and dealt 5d4c. I made it 40 to go. No, that’s not usually a raising hand, but I always come out strong early in these matches. I’m trying to discover what my opponents will let me get away with. My opponent went all-in. This was two times in a row that the guy I was pitting myself against had gone all-in on the first hand.

I folded.

Ironically, the next deal, second hand of the match, I was dealt a pair of Queens–the same hand that had made up my one and only holding of the previous night’s one-deal match. My opponent completed the small blind and I raised to 40. The flop put an Ace on the board and I made it 60 to go. He folded.

I remember at the time I was thinking, I’m still tired (having just woken up), I’m distracted because of all the things I had to do, and I wasn’t actually in the mood to play. What I hadn’t noticed was that my play had changed.

Though I was still pressing, to see what this guy would let me get away with, I also found myself making the wrong plays. In the sixth hand I called a raise trying to trap with AK from the big blind. That wasn’t the way to be playing at that moment. When the flop put an orphan (nondescript cards that probably helped no one, in this case, T 6 T), I took a stab at the pot with a bet of 80 and, apparently, didn’t think about what it meant when he called. Somehow, I convinced myself my AK were probably still good. It’s something I’ve seen many of the fish do, with similar hands, after the flop in .

The turn brought a third Ten. Not thnking about his previous call, I bet 180. He called. The riven brought a Queen; I checked. Okay, with his flop play and turn play, he was telling me something. But I wasn’t lisening.

The river card was a Queen. I checked, he bet 220, I called, still pretty much convinced an Ace, but especially an Ace with a King, were going to take this pot down.

He had pocket Fours. I lost.

I was down to 910 chips and I’d like to say that I finally learned something and turned my play around. But I hadn’t; and i didn’t.

Either he was beginning to oputplay me or, more likely, I was beginning to outplay myself.

Two hands later, I lost when he flopped a straight. He sent me signals through his betting saying I was a loser, but I didn’t listen.

In subsequent hands, he didn’t even have to bet. I was doing most of the betting. Instead of being the cool, calculating monster I usually am, I was getting overly aggressive. All he had to do was to set traps for me, and I was willing to obligeingly step into them. Finally, after a long string of well-fought matches, I was the fish. I don’t know if you can call this going on tilt. But if it wasn’t “tilt,” it was a first cousin.

On hand nine I poked my nose up over 1,000 chips when I made top pair and he made bottom pair and he played me to the end.

After this, I started playing passively. I wasn’t playing the smart, aggressive poker I’d been winning with for weeks. I was checking, then calling big bets when all I had were hopes and prayers. I’d already given up. Had this be a table I could have just walked away from, i would have. But it was a match where one of us had to lose everything.

On hand fifteen, I lost with trips to a flush and I was back under 900.

On hand nineteen, the blinds were still at 10/20 and I was dealt AhTh. I made it 40 to go. He made it 160 to go. I called.

The flop was 8c 7h 9s, giving me an 8-way straight draw. He bet 160. I went all-in. It was a semi-bluff. I was hoping to buy it then and there and still have a draw if he called. He called with QsQc. I was about 44% to win, something less than a coin-toss.

The 5d and Qh fell on the turn and the river, respectively. I lost the hand and the match.

What I discovered was that I am still entirely capable of playing badly, and to keep playing badly even when I realized I was doing it.

Ironically, the last hand I played, the one that busted me, was probably one of the few I played well. I was aggressive with my AT suited and I made a decent semi-bluff after the flop when the board looked dangerous. That, it seems to me, is the right time to make that kind of a play when I was outchipped more than 2 to 1. Otherwise, I played the match like a fish.

I lasted a mere nineteen hands. Just seven minutes. but it wasn’t in vain–I learned something: Don’t be an ass.