Serving weak coffee is a serious character flaw.

Yes, boys and girls, it’s that time of year once again, when 35,000 Richard Simmons speedo-wearing maniacs take to the streets of New York City to run 26 miles as fast as they possibly can. For the 16th straight year, all this will be made somewhat easier for the runners by having the mighty Tash  Brothers Band play for them at the beginning of the course in Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge, right on 4th Avenue and 88th Street. This coming November 2nd starting around 9:30 A.M. until the last runner zips by about noon, The Tash Brothers Band rocks and roars and rumbles while the runners’ measured steps turns into boogie-woogie dance moves for a block or two.

Many of the runners pause to dance with the band, take photos and get a drink of water, then go on to run 25 more miles, refreshed and energized. It’s no coincidence that since the Tash Brothers started playing at The NYC Marathon that average finishing times have improved dramatically. And every year the crowds in Bay Ridge have multiplied to be a part of one of the more interesting and bizarre rock & roll extravaganzas in this interesting and bizarre city. The immediate area surrounding the band has become an annual pilgrimage for fans of music and street theater. A tailgate party of sorts surrounds the band, tables and chairs are set up, food spreads and stimulating beverages are enjoyed, tambourines are handed out and people line the sidewalk high-fiving and cheering on the 35,00 running maniacs streaming by the bandstand. It is an exhilarating if somewhat unsettling circus so early on a Sunday morning in Brooklyn.

This year The Tash Brothers Band is charging admission to our tailgate party in the form of a donation of non-perishable food items to be collected by City Harvest. The holidays are coming and a long, cold winter lies ahead, even colder and longer for the city’s poor and hungry. City Harvest collects food and distributes it to our less fortunate brothers and sisters. We are asking all who attend to bring groceries to be collected by City Harvest after the race. Bay Ridge Honda, the car dealership on whose property the Tash Brothers perform, will collect the food and turn it over to City Harvest.

We ask everyone to invest a couple of bucks in the form of food staples. Just drop them in our collection bin and City Harvest will do the rest, making sure it gets to those who need it most. Then you and yours can spend the morning enjoying one of the most unusual and exciting spectacles of Autumn in New York, the mad and mighty Tash Brothers Band turning the New York City Marathon into a rock & blues high octane Sunday morning party. Come one, come all, and prepare to be entertained. Afterwards you’ll feel like you’ve just run a Marathon yourself. It’s not a day you’ll soon forget.

Your gadgets and possessions don’t define you, your human nature does. People haven’t changed since the invention of the wheel. Don’t pretend otherwise just because you own an iPhone.

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has found easy pickings in this week’s news with an able assist from one Alan Greenspan. Mr. Greenspan was the chairman of the Federal Reserve Board for 18 years and big proponent of deregulation in an industry where billions of dollars change hands every day. We repeat his theory for emphasis: In an industry where billions and billions of dollars change hands every day, this man believed that human beings could be trusted not to get too greedy. Boy Scout’s honor would do the trick, he figured, and taking a cue from the Chairman of The Federal Reserve, the government didn’t keep an eye on the national cookie jar. 

The result? No more cookies and some very fat people smeared with powdered sugar while the rest of us wonder where our cookies went. So this week before Congress Alan Greenspan admitted he was dead wrong about the self-policing market. Not that it helps the rest of the world as one nation after another sees their economy going down the tubes. Not that Mr. Greenspan didn’t have enough obvious evidence of human nature all around him everywhere all his very long life. At no time in his 82 years did he ever enter a bank without a vault, shop at a store where the cash till was out in the open for anybody to help themselves or drive in a car that was not equipped with locks. Why he thought that human nature would change with the increase of zeroes behind numbers is a mystery. 

DOPOTO belatedly welcomes Mr. Greenspan into the ranks of those who can see what is so obvious it ought to be unspoken. The Department does wonder, however, what took the man so long. Presumably he had locks on the doors to his house and didn’t carry his entire personal fortune in his pockets or in a briefcase everywhere he went, preferring instead to keep the bulk of his money safely locked up in a bank like any other sane person with the slightest familiarity with the ways of the world. One wonders if Greenspan has ever watched or participated in sports, one of the more honorable human endeavors, and if so, did he notice that there are rules to every sport? Not guidelines, not suggestions, not blindly trusting the participants to play fair, but rules! One doesn’t bring a blackjack to a boxing match without getting disqualified.

The man also went to a lot great schools too in order to obtain the education required to become Federal Reserve Chairman. Those places have rules too, and failure to follow them and cheating are grounds for expulsion. He worked his entire life, and in every workplace there were rules in place and somebody to enforce them. So when he got the most powerful and influential economic job on the planet, knowing his decisions would affect the economy not only of the United States but the whole world, why did he abandon the obvious? His “my bad” in front of Congress doesn’t cut it, and his admission of being shocked over what any 6 year-old knows is ridiculous. 

A lot of people in this world will steal in spite of all the many laws and moral teachings against theft. In an atmosphere where there are no rules against stealing, well, the sky’s he limit, especially in the multi-trillion dollar financial industries. And why anyone listened for 18 years to Mr. Greenspan while aging chubby frat boys systematically stole a nation’s wealth is another huge mystery. There is nothing more obvious than a strong lock on a cash register, nothing so clear as the need for armed guards driving armored cars. That’s where the money is and people will steal it! The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious felt this point is so obvious it bears no mention, but like Mr. Greenspan, we were wrong. And so we call for making rules for these corporate princes to live by and enforcing them vigorously. As embarrassingly obvious as that point is, it seems someone had to make it. Even at the risk of appearing simple, we are willing to risk that perception and point out that the sky is indeed as blue as it ever was. That’s what DOPOTO is for.

Wage peace.

It is better to be good than evil, better to love than hate, better to help than hurt, better to give than take. Everybody knows and accepts that. So, what’s our problem? Is it so hard to do the right thing? Are we that perverse a race of beings? Religions sure as hell dropped the ball in their only mission, to make us better human beings. They all turned into political power entities bent on controlling people’s lives with threats of dire suffering. When the threats didn’t do the trick the religions started killing and torturing people to keep them in line, telling us they were carrying out God’s will.

God’s will? The Crusades? The Inquisition? Conversion by the sword? The slavery and brutality visited upon half the world’s Muslims, the female half, to this day? Even in Biblical times, the Jews justified conquering other people’s lands by saying God ordered them to slay those people down to the last man, woman and child. Look at two of the greatest figures of the Hebrew Bible, David and Solomon, a couple of poster boys for greed, lust and murder. In the Koran you’ve got only one star, Mohammed, as bloodthirsty a megalomaniac as ever breathed. The Hindu faith enforces a rigid and cruel caste system, elevating the few at the expense of the many. What kind of God would condone any of these people or the heinous acts they perpetrate? And what kind of fool would fall for any of their crap? And what sort of cruelty is it to teach your children not to trust those who follow a different faith? 

The only guy who had a decent message of love, tolerance, mercy and brotherhood was Jesus Christ, who started no religion at all, but was killed for taking the trouble to point out obvious truths. After his murder a crazy religion was established in his name that would go down in history as one of the most bloodthirsty and tyrannical organizations to wreak havoc and misery on the human race. They called themselves Christians, killing and torturing in the name of The Prince of Peace, doing their level best to keep the bulk of humanity in ignorant servitude. The bigotry and venality of organized religious practice of any sort boggles the mind.

What about the bigotry of forbidding intermarriage? That’s no different from Hitler’s ideas of racial purity, but hidden behind the skirts of some mother faith that makes hatred and intolerance okay. It’s not okay and never was. Not for Hitler and not for anybody else. All people share the same DNA, easily interbreed and can donate blood and organs to one another, regardless of skin color, culture or religion. There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between any of us. So why have we let our religions get so far off message? God doesn’t hate us, and there are no special chosen ones he loves more than others. We are all his creations, every one, as worthy as anyone anywhere. Religions all seem to preach the exact opposite, ignoring the reality that every faith has produced its share of evil human monsters.

True, there are some religious people who are motivated by love and a vocation to help others, but why do they need a religion to live such a life? Why not do good for the sake of good, fight evil because that’s the right thing to do? Forget about people’s souls and all that bullshit about eternal damnation if they are not “saved.” From what? From thinking for themselves? From seeing the world as a seamless whole populated by all sorts of decent people? Cherish and respect people here and now in the only reality we have ever known. All this talk of souls and heaven and rewards after death only make it easier to mistreat others in this world, to hate them, enslave them, make war on them and steal what they have. All in the name of some mystical, unproven fairy tale. There is no magic, there is no hidden truth, there are no people in closer contact with God than you are.

In this religious world, 36,000 people die every single day from starvation. In this religious world, you have fanatic fundamentalists of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, Animist and Christian persuasion bent on killing one another, hiding their hatred behind their faith as they seek to impose their will upon others. God has nothing to do with hatred and murder or tyranny. God is love and goodness, period. He has no axe to grind against any particular type of human. It’s a hard world no matter what your particular religious persuasion, a world that would benefit from people working together rather than being set at each others throats by one highly dubious and hypocritical theology or another.

When our governments act with evil intent we replace them, either by election or by force. Why not do the same with our religions? Every one of them divides humanity and teaches evil doctrines detrimental to the human race. They all claim to be the one and only truth. That does not mean the rest of them are lying but your faith. Yours is a liar too, and a thief of your humanity. What is good inside you has nothing to do with any labels attached to you like Jew, Christian, Muslim or Buddhist, it’s there because you are human. What evil you do is your responsibility. Let the churches and temples rot and let their various ministers get real jobs and make themselves useful. They’ve caused enough grief and spread enough evil. Turn your back on the profound evil of organized religion. Love your brother and do good works. Wage peace.

If nobody’s bleeding and nothing’s in flames, odds are the situation isn’t a calamity, just another problem. Relax.

It was 25 years ago today, 6 A.M. on October 23, 1983 that 220 United States Marines, 18 Navy sailors and 3 Army soldiers were killed by a suicide truck bomber in Beirut, Lebanon. Two minutes later, a similar attack killed 58 French soldiers stationed there. The Fundamentalist Islamic Jihad against The West had begun. The President of The United States at the time, a half-daft former movie actor named Ronald Reagan, talked a good game about keeping the Marines in Lebanon and seeking out those responsible, but ultimately pulled out of the country and did nothing to respond to the attack. Instead, two days later, he had the Marines invade Grenada, a tiny island in the Caribbean, perhaps setting the stage for Bush The Younger attacking the wrong country in response to the attacks on America of September 11, 2001. Must be a Republican thing, or an insane thing. Hard to tell.

For whatever reason, America did not notice or acknowledge that a war was being waged on us. There had been enough warning, starting in 1979 when Iran took American Embassy personnel hostage for 444 days and thus helped Ronald Reagan win the presidency. Then in 1981 Libya was found to be planning assassinations of American diplomats in Rome and Paris. American warplanes shot down 2 Libyan warplanes, with Reagan treating the whole thing as an isolated incident. Then when the Marine barracks was demolished in 1983 with 241 dead, Reagan did nothing, probably chalking it up to the long history of the politics of insanity that rule the Middle East instead of the opening salvos of a war.

In December of 1983 the American Embassy in Kuwait was also bombed. In March of 1984 the CIA station chief in Beirut was kidnapped and would later die in captivity. He was one of thirty Americans who would be kidnapped in Lebanon between 1982 and 1992. Reagan’s response to the kidnappers was to sell armaments to Iran secretly and use the proceeds to fund a war in Nicaragua, but only 3 hostages were released, and the most powerful government on earth was reduced to negotiating with terrorists. The Iran-Contra affair remains a black mark on American diplomacy that came back to bite us in the ass again and again. In September of 1984 the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon was bombed, killing 24 people.

In December, 1984 a Kuwait airlines flight was hijacked in Tehran, Iran and the captors demanded the release of 17 Kuwaiti prisoners responsible for the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Kuwait. When the demands went unmet, the hijackers killed two Americans before Iranian officials stormed the jet and released the remaining hostages. Then in June of 1985 an American commercial jet was hijacked and rerouted to Lebanon where the same demand was made and again unmet. The hijackers killed an American Navy diver and tossed his body on the runway. America blamed Hezbollah and secretly pressured our stooge in the Middle East, Israel, to start releasing some captives to placate these terrorists. That worked out about as well as Neville Chamberlain’s famous appeasement act.

In October of 1986 the cruise ship Achille Lauro was hijacked by Palestinians and they executed an elderly wheelchair-bound American tourist. In April of that year a discotheque in Germany was bombed that was popular with soldiers from the American Army of Occupation left over from World War 2. An American was killed and it was determined that Libya was responsible. This time Reagan bombed Libya in response. Then in the Alzheimer-ridden Reagan’s last few days as president in December of 1988, Pan Am flight 103 was destroyed over Scotland, killing all 259 on board, once again courtesy of Libya. No action was taken against anyone for the bombing until 2000, when one man was convicted and another acquitted.

Things were fairly quiet terrorism-wise during the four year presidency of Bush The Elder, other than him attacking Iraq over their alleged theft of Kuwaiti oil. Then when Clinton became president the attacks started all over again with attacks on the U.S.S. Cole, the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, simultaneous attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. At this point President Clinton had figured out that al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden were behind  a lot of this stuff and fired cruise missiles into Afghanistan and Sudan at terrorist bases. Richard Clark was assigned to track and kill bin Laden, but he proved pretty elusive. Several opportunities to kill the man were aborted when it was determined there would be too many civilian casualties. Bin Laden is a guy America once supplied with arms and training to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, yet another Iran-Contra type of fiasco that came back to haunt us.

As damaging as all these attacks were, they were as flea bites on a St. Bernard, irritating but not all-consumimg. Then came 9/11/01 and the devastating attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. That finally got our attention and made us realize we were at war. Unfortunately for America, at that point we had Bush The Elder’s son as our president, Bush The Younger, possibly the stupidest and most arrogant individual ever to hold a public office above the rank of dog catcher. After attacking Afghanistan where al Qaeda was based, he decided to invade Iraq, a nation not involved in any way with anti-American terror attacks. 

In this way he recruited more Jihad fighters than bin Laden ever dreamed of and 5 years later we’re still occupying a crumbling Iraq. Bush the Younger is using Iraq as a battleground to fight new enemies he has actively created while al Qaeda still thrives and plots in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden has practically become part of our political process and moron commentators on TV are wondering just how he will affect this election, perhaps with another “October surprise” like his endorsement of John Kerry in 2004, which some say swung the election to Bush The Younger for a second disastrous term. Other TV jackasses speculate that Bush will pull the capture of bin Laden out of his hat like Houdini to get John McCain elected instead of the heavy favorite in the polls, Barack Obama. Why anyone would vote one way or another because of our sworn enemy remains a mystery.

So perhaps on this 25th anniversary of the war against the United States by medieval-minded fundamentalists, it is fitting that we are about to elect a new president. Hopefully, Barack Obama and his cabinet will come up with a coherent strategy for battling terrorism and catching Osama bin Laden that doesn’t involve invading and occupying innocent nations. It would actually be quite difficult to do any worse than Bush The Younger, who never made any plans beyond his initial gut reactions, which were invariably completely wrong anyway. Impulsive behavior doesn’t make any more sense in politics and warfare than it does anywhere else. Our enemies plan long and carefully for each attack. We can at least do the same. Vote for Barack Obama for a fresh set of eyes to tackle this old problem.

The things we worry about happening usually don’t happen. It’s the completely unexpected fiascos that throw us for a loop. Don’t distract yourself worrying. This way you’ll have a clear head to deal with the 1,000 pound safe that falls on you when you’re walking down the street minding your own business.

The World Series is on, a splendid match-up between two young and hungry teams, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Tampa Bay Rays, and the best team in baseball is home watching them on TV like the rest of us. Yes, the Boston Red Sox, a scary-good team that never quits, lost to the Tampa Bay Rays in the American League Championship Series. The thinking here is the reason they were eliminated is because they traded away their best hitter, Manny Ramirez. Not only was Ramirez Boston’s best hitter, but the best hitter in baseball for many years now. He was the man most responsible for getting the Cleveland Indians, of all teams, into 2 World Series in 1995 and 1997, and getting the Dodgers into the playoffs this year for the first time in 20 years, hitting .396 and driving in 53 runs in 53 games. 

As for Boston, before they got Many Ramirez they had not won a World Series since 1918. In Ramirez’ 6 1/2 seasons with the Red Sox, they won two of them in four years and were the team to beat this year. That is, until they traded him. Without his feared bat in the lineup, they became a team that was beaten. They placed second in their division to the Rays, a perennial loser until this year, getting into the playoffs as the wild card team. David Ortiz, called Big Papi when he teamed up with Ramirez to be the most potent # 3 and 4 hitting tandem in baseball, wasn’t such a big deal without Manny behind him in the lineup. Opposing pitchers were quick to notice that and Ortiz had a quiet playoffs at the plate. 

Ramirez’ replacement, Jason Bay, played well but was no Manny Ramirez. Nobody is. A hitter of Ramirez’ caliber comes along once in a generation, a man who’s very presence in the lineup alters the opposition’s game plan drastically. Having Manny in the lineup also improves the batting averages of the hitters around him, since they get more quality pitches to hit. The fact that Ramirez is a lifetime .314 hitter is amazing considering that pitchers rarely challenge him, attempting instead to pitch around him. In two rounds of playoffs with the Dodgers this year, he still managed to hit 4 home runs, one of them off a pitch near his ankles. He drove in 10 runs and scored 9, batting an amazing .533. Many teams will be lining up to offer this 36 year-old hitter tens of millions of dollars a year as a free agent this winter.

It is said the Red Sox got tired of the eccentric Ramirez, much as they tired of their star player in 1918, a pretty eccentric fellow himself. Maybe you’ve heard of him. His name was Babe Ruth. Made a big splash with the Yankees. Hit more home runs one year than the rest of the league combined. Changed baseball forever. 714 home runs and 96 pitching victories for his career. That Babe Ruth. He had pitched and hit Boston to World Series victories in 1916 and 1918. Then they traded him to the Yankees for the 1920 season and the rest was baseball immortality for one team, bitter mediocrity for the other. After he left it would be 2004 before the Red Sox won the World Series again, people calling it “The Curse of The Bambino.” So, let’s see, the Red Sox won in 2007, then traded Manny in 2008, so that means the Curse of the Mannbino ought to lift in 2092.

Which is probably all for the best. Boston fans have not known how to act in recent years. They had themselves a perfectly good sore loser identity forged over four generations of futility. Boston fans had a perverse pride in fielding some of the best teams ever to grace a baseball field but never to win a championship. Manny Ramirez came along and burst their bubble. In 2004 it was a huge miracle, the end of 86 years of close-but-no-cigar. Then the Red Sox became perennial contenders and in 2007 won it all again. Now Boston fans were really suffering an identity crisis. Winning really does not become these Bean Town Belligerents. There was no reason any longer for the chip on their shoulder, but they liked it there! A sigh of relief went up in Boston when the man threatening their eight decades of satisfied mediocrity and ingrained hostility was traded away. They can breathe easier now that the threat to their identity is gone. See you in the winner’s circle in 85 years, Boston. Meanwhile, it must be good to be back to your old selves.