I don't have to tell you things are bad. 

Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. 

The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it. 

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be! 

We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone." 

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone. 

I want you to get mad! 

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. 

I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first, you've got to get mad. You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!" 

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!!"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dib2-HBsF08

Like many of you, I am sick and tired of being misinformed and disinformed by Pres. Barack Obama. That's why I'm writing this letter, to bring the communion of knowledge to all of us. I shall give you candidly and without circumlocution the best estimate of our present plight that I have been able to make. Let me preface my discussion by quickly reasserting a familiar theme of my previous letters: Pres. Barack Obama's tracts should be labeled like a pack of cigarettes. I'm thinking of something along the lines of, "Warning: It has been determined that Pres. Obama's statements are intended to turn marauders loose against us good citizens."

Be forewarned: Pres. Obama wants to produce an army of mindless insects who will obey his every command. To produce such an army, he plans to destroy people's minds using either drugs or an advanced form of lobotomy. Whichever approach he takes, we ought to reveal some shocking facts about Pres. Obama's complaints. That'll make Pres. Obama think once—I would have said "twice" but I don't see any indication that he has previously given any thought to the matter—before trying to peddle the snake oil of ruthless libertinism.

Pres. Obama will stop at nothing to increase alienation and delinquency among our young people. This may sound outrageous but if it were fiction I would have thought of something more credible. As it stands, in a tacit concession of defeat, Pres. Obama is now openly calling for the abridgment of various freedoms to accomplish coercively what his illiterate squibs have failed at. Failure to analyze the morbid—and what one can term only testy—underpinnings of his complaints will threaten the existence of human life, perhaps all life on the planet. So please permit me to appropriate and paraphrase something I once heard: "Enough is enough." I've left out many criticisms of Pres. Barack Obama from this wailing wall of a letter. Nevertheless, I feel that it's a start—a philosophical space where we can plant a new flag symbolizing all that is wrong with Pres. Obama.

I just remembered I had planned to make a post about this but I have been busy. I don't know if the whole Yigal Amir story is big in the U.S. but it is an absolute disgrace and another egg on the face of the Israeli government. In short, the Israeli government allowed Prime Minister Rabin's assassin to meet someone, get married, have a child and attend his child's bris - all while in jail! It is no wonder he has "no regrets" for his actions.

This is a big story now because Rabin's yirtzheit was this week and Yigal and his wife purportedly decided to have a c-section to deliver their baby early in order to coincide the bris with the yirtzheit.

I think Israel needs to get a bit tougher on their punishments. Particularly this one. Treason and murder undoubtedly deserves death.

(Note: Just because I think Yigal deserves the death penalty does not mean I endorse Rabin's politics.)