Daily Archives: 08/28/2017

M.A.D., MADMEN AND THE FIVE MINUTE RULE – BY TOM CURLEY

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The talk this week about our “So called President” being insane has ramped up to 11 out of 10.

It’s all anyone in the news can talk about. The biggest worry, of course, is that this nut-job has access to the nuclear codes and could start a war in under five minutes. During the cold war, the US and Russia and China operated under the idea of M.A.D., aka “Mutually Assured Destruction.”

Nobody considered what would happen if an actual Madman was President.

Everybody says nobody can stop him. That’s not quite true.

During the Nixon administration, at the end, with Nixon drinking a lot and freaking out over Watergate, the Chief of Staff quietly put out an order. If the President ordered a nuclear strike, or any military strike for that matter, check with him or the Secretary of Defense first. It was illegal, but they did it anyway.

They were right.

Maybe the current Chief of Staff (right now, it’s John Kelly, but hell, that could change next week) might be doing the same thing. We don’t know. But I have a couple of other ideas that might also work, a couple of options to get around the “I’m bored and in a bad mood. Let’s start a nuclear war” scenario.

Option One:

In order to start a nuclear war, he has to get the nuclear codes. They are in a briefcase called “The Nuclear Football”.  An aide, whose sole job is to carry “The Football” around, has to bring it to him.

Here’s how it would go.

SCROTUS: I’m in a bad mood! I want to start a nuclear war! Bring me the nuclear football.

AIDE: Here you go sir.

SCROTUS: Hey, it’s locked!

AIDE: Yes sir. You have to unlock it.

SCROTUS: I do? What’s the combination?

AIDE: I don’t know sir. You were supposed to reset it when you took office. President Obama was supposed to tell you that when he left office.

SCROTUS: I knew it! This is Obama’s fault!

AIDE: Well I guess we can’t start a nuclear war today sir.

SCROTUS: No wait! Try 123!

AIDE: Nope, doesn’t work.

SCROTUS: 000?

AIDE: Nope.

SCROTUS: 111?

AIDE: Uhh …. Nope.

Now the reason that his can work is because of “The Five Minute Rule.” He only has an attention span of about five minutes. After that he gets bored or forgets what he was talking about and moves on to something else. Usually watching Fox News.

Five minutes later.

SCROTUS: I’m bored. What were we talking about?

AIDE: We were talking about how much Fox and Friends loves you sir.

SCROTUS: Yea! Let’s watch TV!

Or …

Option 2: 

When he wants to start a nuclear war, we bring him an actual football.

SCROTUS: I’m bored! Let’s start a nuclear war! I want to bomb Rosie O’Donnell! Bring me the nuclear football!

AIDE: Here you go sir.

SCROTUS: What’s this?

AIDE: It’s “The Nuclear Football” sir.

SCROTUS: It is? It looks like a real football.

AIDE: It is a real football sir. Just nuclear.

SCROTUS: How do I use it?

AIDE: You just go outside and shout out the name of the country or person you want to bomb and then you just throw that football as hard as you can.

SCROTUS: It’s that easy?

AIDE: Yup.

SCROTUS goes outside, yells “Fuck Rosie O’Donnell and throws the football. A secret service agent catches it and runs away shouting “Rosie O’Donnell sucks!” and returns the football to the Chief of Staff’s office and puts it in the bin with all the other footballs — and the actual combination to the real “football.” By now, about five minutes has gone by and the aide turns on Fox News.

Crazy you say? I agree. But when you’re dealing with crazy, you have to think crazy.

 

WELCOME MAGNETO

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Magnetism: Takes you down, hoists you up

Magneto is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics, commonly in association with the X-Men. Created by writer Stan Lee and artist Jack Kirby, the character first appears in The X-Men #1 (cover-dated Sept. 1963) as the archenemy of the X-Men. So, Magneto is the “evil bad guy” in the X-Men movies (and of course, in the comics) — or at least in the first one and I think briefly, the second.

But he means well. That’s important. No random craziness. He knows what he wants and has an intended goal.

Magnetism — his personal beat — disrupts engines and technology. Makes the world behave in unexpected way. Sort of like our current world. Magneto struck me as an intelligent, thoughtful sort of guy.

I say lets elect him. Make him president. He’ll be unexpected in a Marvel Comics kind of way, but being an intelligent fellow, his behavior will have something we “other people” will regard as “motivated.” That’s gotta be worth something, right?

BEFORE CHILD PSYCHOLOGY – BY ELLIN CURLEY

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My mother was born in 1916 and was brought up before modern child psychology was a ‘thing’. Judging from her early experiences, no one in those days seemed to worry about damaging the psyches of impressionable young children.

For example, my mother was born left-handed. This was not acceptable at the time, so she was forced to switch to using her right hand as her dominant hand. She succeeded but as a result, developed a stutter. This is apparently common when you mess with the two sides of the brain. The expert my grandmother consulted told her that there was an easy cure. Just smack my mom in the face every time she stuttered! It did stop her stuttering. Let’s not even think about the psychological side effects.

At the age of around five or six, Mom developed a serious ear infection. It required a horribly painful draining procedure involving long needles. She had to go through this every few days for weeks. The doctor wouldn’t allow my grandmother to even be in the room with her terrified child during the procedures. Mom was literally ripped, screaming from her mother’s arms, held down by several adults, tortured and yelled at when she cried. Talk about trauma.

It sounds totally barbaric today. This may have just been a particularly sadistic doctor, or maybe that was how things were done then. Either way, my grandmother, a usually strong and vocal woman, was too intimidated by ‘the professional’ to challenge him.

But then my grandparents did some awful things too. As a child, my mother had a thick, black uni-brow. To me, she looked adorable, but in 1916-1926, she was considered ugly. So of course, all the relatives referred to her, in front of her as the ‘meiskheit’ or ‘ugly one’. Everyone said she was lucky she had such a great personality. She turned into a beautiful woman in her teens, but she never recovered from those early labels. For the rest of her life, her self-image was that of an ugly duckling.

Mom and her parents

Here’s another example of psychological obtuseness. My grandfather was a serious hypochondriac. He had made some money and he and his family were living comfortably. But over a seven-year period, he spent all of the family money on cures and spas for his imaginary illnesses. He even had an unnecessary surgery that actually almost killed him!

While Grandpa was ‘recovering’ in a sanatorium, Grandma had no money. She and Mom had to go live with relatives. One was my grandmother’s brother, Abe. For some reason it was decided that my mom, a young child, would sleep in a bed with Abe’s wife, who was a raging psychotic. She would regularly wake Mom up in the middle of the night and make her go to the roof. There Mom’s aunt would threaten to jump because she said that her eyes were falling out of her head. Mom would have to talk her down and get her back to bed. On her own. Who knows what these people were thinking putting a young child through an experience like that.

I’m just glad that by the time I was born there was some sensitivity to children’s emotional needs. When I had my tonsils out at the age of six, in 1955, the hospital didn’t automatically bring in cots like they do now so that parents could sleep with their children. But the hospital did let my mom sleep next to me in a chair all night. A far cry from my Mom’s horrific medical experiences.

Thank goodness for Doctors Freud and Spock!