One of my neighbors is a pair of 30-ish people living together in an apartment which, like nearly all apartments, has the sound insulation of a cardboard box with a microphone inside and the corresponding speaker outside. They are the happiest couple you've ever seen, if your relationship-of-choice is life in the overcrowded den of tazmanian devils. About 30-31 random days a month, they can be heard screeching, thrashing, knocking, banging, and hating each other right into the street. When passing in the apartment hall, she's friendly, he grunts. Yet all the shrill screaming ("I hate you! Fuck you! I hate you!") is hers. Unfortunately I've been privvy to a glimpse of abusive relationships--with a male abuser--when living with my sister; the neighbor behind us beat his wife. All the screaming, the deep thunder of shouting, was male. Here, it's female. And it's so high pitched you think it might be him, if she has pliers on his balls and is plucking his pubic hairs out with electric tweezers. The police have been called. She disappears for a few days, and just when you think ah, maybe he did kill her! There she is again. But you don't see her; you hear her. And the disturbing devil dance begins again. So many people have asked me why don't I do something, why I don't more actively intervene. I've been tempted, at 2 a.m. when the pounding has gone on more than 15 minutes and then the screaming begins. But the reality is that I can't save someone who can't be saved. And such a phone call or personal visit by the police (or god forbid, me), is bound simply to result in death. Them shooting me, me shooting them, cop shooting them, the outcomes are all undesirable. And it also ignores one important fact; maybe, just maybe, they enjoy their devil dance and to live without it--in a so-called sane relationship--would be a life too devoid of depth to taste. Sick, maybe. But so is ironing your sheets and we don't call the police on that one... It's egocentric, bogus intellectualizing that assumes these dances are always unwanted and must be stamped out as surely as g strings on a family beach. I'll remember this at 2 a.m....

Sponge Bob's 15 minutes in the news has proven once again that the Sex Starved Trinity (evangelical, born-again, fundamentalists) still sees homo sex, baaaad homo sex that, dadgummit, don't even produce no babies. The homos are anywhere and everywhere they look for it and they want YOU. Under the table, in the MICR line of your checkbook, in cartoons. "They" are recruiting, so watch out. We're pretty sure there was a confirmed homo Cabbage Patch Kid, but the awakening really began with the she-tubbie, Tinky Winky. A Purple-Pursie was observed by a keen-eyed SST (none other than Jerry Falwell) flitting around his arm whilst seductively luring in the innocents by the lusciously plump, hypnotic sway of the Teletubbie bottom. It all but screamed, "Backdoor Babylon!" It's not that we're not all for the SST's revelations of rampant homo hedonism, the heightened awareness of active homo recruiting, or that we don't appreciate our enlightenment on the pervasiveness of homo perv, since frankly, we'd like to know where to find more of it and we really appreciate the tips. But we find it remarkable they care so much about what goes in or out of other people's asses. After all, we'd definitely rather not know the ins or outs of theirs.

The United Nations is an organization dedicated to something... does anyone know what? The homepage of the UN has a 20+ page "charter" which outlines its purpose--and it's nothing short of delivering nirvana to all the world. My personal favorite is the goal "to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom." Okay, where is my hot air pocket translator... One might say "larger freedom" is a person’s ability to exercise their free will to lawfully pursue and achieve personal successes as he or she defines them. Sound like a reasonable place to start? The UN makes our freedom smaller in countless ways; it endorses environmental policies to save trees that would so hinder economic health that survival of said trees is fabulously irrelevant; a poor citizenry would have to cut them down to burn for warmth. It endorses a global military authority which could override any single country's autonomy. They openly endorse the coercive practices of tyrannical governments as long as it benefits one of their charter goals, such as China's one-child policy and its coerced abortions; less people = environmentalist ecstasy. Standard of living is commonly defined by access to medical care, housing, heat, clean water. None of these things is achieved without a healthy economy to support it. Does the UN really believe we will exist on this earth with medical care, housing, heat, clean water, in a tattered economy and NO impact to the planet? Its stealth agenda seeks to continue, not relieve, the misery of the world. The UN would willingly trade the cure for HIV/AIDS or brain cancer for a fracture-free iceberg in the Arctic. Since the standard of living in Guatemala, Haiti, Tanzania, Namibia, South Africa, Sudan, Congo (how many should I list) haven't improved under the 50-year stewardship of the UN, we can put a check mark in the failure column of row number one... "better standards of life in larger freedom", since they have achieved neither.