For those who do not know what those two words mean, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kobayashi_Maru


Now: He intervenes in Syria he not only risks an outbreak of regional war, but worse, expressions of hostile outrage at Democratic Underground. If he doesn't intervene, then he risks further outrageous behavior by Syria and other countries defying the Paper Tiger which the USA! USA! USA! shall become, assuming that we are not already there.

Now, this is exactly why movies are movies and real life is real life. In a Hollywood film version, Harrison Ford, or E. G. Marshall or the guy from the Allstate commercial would come up with an answer which would be an unqualified success, as scripted by Tom Clancy. In an indie film version, the answer would lead to a catastrophic and most depressing ending, with the associated explanatory end titles. In real life, of course, thousands are going to die, one way or the other. No doubt about that. And President Obama will be the lightning rod from both the left and the right. No doubt about that either.

There will be blood...speaking of movies.

On a hot summer day a ten year-old PCIntern was playing outside in the front yard when a medium-sized truck pulled up to the curb. Out came three men who walked across the lawn and knocked on the front door of my house. My mother answered the door and let the men inside and I followed, curious. It turned out that my family wanted the piano which my virtuoso brother played to be moved to another room and had arranged for it to take place that day.

While standing in my living room, the TV was on, and a live broadcast of the March on Washington was on and there was a black man speaking to a reporter. I have no idea who it was, but it was clear from his position and his authoritative nature that he was important somehow. Even I realized that. The three men stopped in front of the set and one said to the other two, "Oh, an educated n-----." My mother didn't hear them: she probably would have asked them to leave. I knew that that was a bad word and never used by anyone in my family, but that somewhere I somehow knew that it was extreme.

I as a child had always thought that those who lived in the North were on the side of integration and civil rights, and those in the South were against them. That is precisely how limited education was in elementary school in those days. I realized that there was a lot more to all of this than I had ever realized. It was my political awakening which was punctuated and exponentially accentuated just a few months later in November of the same year.

I have never been the same since that day. I realized that I had largely repressed this memory until a few days ago. It became crystal clear in the last 48 hours.

NO! It is NOT analagous that "Even if Obama were born in Kenya..." HE WAS NOT BORN IN KENYA! He was born HERE. In the United States of America, in the 50th State WHERE THERE WAS EVEN A FUCKING TEEVEE SHOW CALLED "HAWAII FIVE-FUCKING-O. Because is the FIFTIETH STATE...from 1959! I was alive at the time in Bensalem, PA - I remember when Hawaii became a state.

AND HE WAS THERE WHEN HE WAS BORN TO AN AMERICAN MOTHER.

There is no, not one, iota of truth in that reprehensible birther lie. Not one. It was in the fucking NEWSPAPER at the time.

This is EXACTLY what the Rethugs always hope for: that we'll give an inch, then a foot, then a yard, then a mile, and then the whole game is theirs. NO. This Cruz has a real battle to fight. And that's his and their BIG PROBLEM. DO NOT MENTION Obama's name and whatsisface's name in the same sentence. They are not co-equal. That's what they WANT you to do...that's how it works.

BECAUSE IF YOU DO THIS, then very soon you're going to be seeing posts on D-fucking-U which start: Since we can all agree that the President, whom I adore, may or may not have been born here, then Senator Cruz deserves some respect/consideration/my vote(!).

Mark my words...it'll happen here. It ALWAYS does.
Remember what the guy said in the film 'Spaceballs': Evil will always win out over Good, because Good is dumb.

must be on a diet...or he had his pay cut and can't afford to eat.

Probably the former, though he deserves the latter.

Gee, what way is the wind blowing this year?? Oh...it seems that most of the people who might watch CNN but perhaps don't, believe in legalization of marijuana or medical uses of marijuana? Well...you can just COUNT ME IN AS OF TODAY, sez Dr. Gupta. I can only imagine the discussions in the CNN boardroom prior to adjusting the all-powerful, all-knowing Dr. Sanjay Gupta's brain via a cable-news mind-meld.

You know, or perhaps you don't, that Michael Moore figuratively beat the crap out of ol' Sanjay right there on CNN when they squared off in 2007 when Gupta criticized Moore's film "Sicko". Sure, Gupta's good-looking, articulate, obviously very learned in that rigid medical school/residency fashion - semi-old school with a little verve and an occasional smile to contrast with the "seriousface" which ALL medical personnel need to exhibit on the air. But as a clinician myself, I find his delivery and cocksuredness reprehensible, particularly that he is a specialist in a field, neurology and neurosurgery, which is described by its practitioners as an almost complete unknown. They really know very little, relatively speaking, about the brain, the brain stem or even the periphery compared with the unimaginably complex functions they carry out routinely from the embryo to our death and perhaps even, to some extent, slightly beyond. So, in the vernacular, other than what he's learned in books and practiced over and over and over again, he really doesn't know much about much in the GRAND SCHEME OF THINGS. And I mean the TOTALITY of science and scientific medicine of which we don't know as much as the lay person thinks we know.

He has a Perry Mason courtroom delivery: THIS IS HOW IT IS...even when I am unsure, I speak with certainty, and when called to task, which does not happen often.... I get strangely quiet......

He went on Larry King with Moore and started with a big swagger and then was diced into little bits. If I weren't so mad at the establishment crowd for denying medical care to the poor and middle class at any and all opportunities, I would have almost felt sorry for him. But believe me, I didn't.

So his pronouncement today, as Philip Roth would have his character say in Portnoy's Complaint, "...don't mean shit to a swan."

Philadelphia Inquirer Headline:

Heart Stent For G.W. Bush



On PAGE A10. That's not A1... that is A10!! and to add insult to injury, it is in the upper left hand on a page 3/4 filled with ads and ANOTHER ARTICLE under the stent piece equally long about "Hasan: I Am The Shooter".

...and BTW, the Inquirer is not the slightly progressive rag it was five years ago...they have plenty of anti-Obama editorials and stupid headers like "Electorate Dismayed by Obama" or words to that effect. So trivializing Junior Mint there is something else.

Good.

He predicted, via some fairly decent logic that Rand Paul would be the nominee from the Rethug/Fascist Party in 2016. Fair enough...

But what he said next was diagnostic of Tweety the Decompensating: "You Watch. This is what I do for a living."

Mr. Codpiece-reveler himself, asserting that he's paid enormous amounts of money so that his guess is better than anyone else's guess.

Horse.
Shit.

By way of introduction, I went to dental school with a guy who originally hailed from Long Island who wound up marrying a gal from outside of Williamsport, PA...so far outside Town that it made Williamsport itself look like Midtown Manhattan. Middle of Nowhere where the State Police drive once weekly on the roads, and that's it. Her family owned lots of acres of worthless land including a large valley among three mountains.

So this guy calls me up one night and says, " 'PC', I feel just like Jed Clampett must have. These people showed up at my door and offered me millions for the lease to my land adjacent to my house. All I can hear in my brain is Flatt and Scruggs singing that song."

After all the congratulations I asked him what he's gonna do and he replied, "Whatever I do, I'm sure as shit not going to stay around here. This process is so dangerous that I wouldn't let my old dog or cat near it, much less my family. Everybody who lives near one of these wells has spent time at the doctor or the hospitals for things that they have never seen around here before. They have to go to The Geisinger (medical center) and then to Philly or Pittsburgh. For a lot of these folks, that's the first time they've ever gone to the Big City."

And this was a couple years ago...you can only imagine what's going on now. This guy is also a political conservative - thought Palin was hot stuff, always pooh- poohed environmental/climate change claims, hates welfare except that he made a lot of money doing DPA dentistry For the poor up there. But now he's living the good life down South, playing golf three times a week and going fishing in the ocean. By the way, he "knew" the Gulf spill would've no big deal. One of those guys...but boy, did he get out of the way once the pros showed up to dig on his land. Smart enough to know evil coming right at him. "Too bad" for all the other "suckers", right?

Dear Sir or Madam:

In order to form a more "perfect union" you must fabricate a pornostaresque name for yourself. This is most reliably performed by doing the following:

For the first name take the name of your first pet whose gender is the same as yours, unless it was gender-neutral

For the last name take the name of the street upon which you were born or the first street thereafter which is not numbered or lettered (e.g. 42nd St., 5th Avenue)

Yours truly,

PCIntern

P.S. Believe it or not, mine would be Percy Large...

There's a whole group of nitwits, yes, NITWITS, who have opinions who don't know a goddamned thing about biology. This of course doesn't stop them from, well, it's an understatement that it's 'pseudoscience': don't believe me? try this one on for size which I heard JUST THIS AFTERNOON:

"Well, doc, when a woman gets stressed, like if she's been raped, she starts menestrating (sic, sick, and sicker) and then she can't have a baby. That violent sex against her will causes her to bleed and then she can't have a baby." Satisfied, he sat back in the chair.

My reply, real gently: First, you're confusing vaginal bleeding with, and please allow me to correct you, it's not 'menestrating' it's menstruating. In the latter (I really used that word) the blood comes from the uterine lining which sloughs on a more or less monthly basis. In rape, as you said, it's not sex. It's terrible and sick violence against women (nodding my head all the while). (And this is where I blew him away...verbally...not like a Zimmerman) (lowering my voice and speaking real earnestly, like the teacher explaining why you failed the science test) so when the guy's dick violates her private parts, the bleeding that results has nothing at all whatsoever with the sperm and egg part. It has to do with bludgeoning her with a weapon against which she has no defenses, so I don't think that you can sort of dismiss rape as casually as you have."

The guy just sort of sat there, more than vaguely stunned. He literally didn't know that there is more going on than his or anyone else's dick has anything to do with. What an asshole. I finished the procedure on him and asked him what he thought of the Eagles' riley Cooper using the N word which got videoed and sent around like an LOL Cats link. He thought it was not such a big deal, that "they' use the word. I just gave the fuck up.

Now I have to enter explanations of benefits on my computer for the next three hours because I can't afford another staff member to sit around and do this, while the insurance companies show record profits. Sheesh.