Good roads will build a country a lot faster than good intentions. Isolated pockets of water and people tend to stagnate. Build roads and they will start a journey.

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has long been in the business of pointing out the forest for the trees. As trained professionals in identifying the readily apparent, we sometimes overlook the need for not doing so at times. For example, the answer in the title is the logical reply to someone asking you if an article of clothing makes them look fat. However, furnishing that reply might not be in the best interests of your personal safety. Fat people can do significant damage when they charge in a rage. Besides, the questioner knows quite well they are a bit more hefty that they used to be and are simply asking you to deny that. Being aware of the obvious comes with the obligation to use that faculty with discretion.

Ask many of our staff, who have benefitted not only from their rigorous DOPOTO training, but also the powerful learning tools of black eyes, broken ribs, sleeping on the couch and alimony payments. We here at DOPOTO are only human and as such have generally learned the hard way. So, in the interest of public service and saving our readers a lot of grief, we have compiled a short list of answers to common questions that don’t always call for direct answers. Some do, but discretion is advised and the need to bear in mind with whom you are speaking. Honesty is not always the best policy. Here goes:

THE QUESTION: “How old do I look?”  

THE HONEST ANSWER: “About the same age you looked during the Eisenhower administration.” 

WHAT YOU SHOULD SAY: “Around 33 or 34.” (Younger people don’t ask that question so that’s a safe bet. If it is a younger person asking that question the proper response is: “Shut the hell up!”)

THE QUESTION: “Do you want fries with that?”

THE HONEST ANSWER: “Do you think I came to this friggin’ grease emporium ’cause I’m watching my cholesterol, you pinhead?” 

WHAT YOU SHOULD SAY: “Supersize me, dude.”

THE QUESTION: “Do you know how fast you were going?”

THE HONEST ANSWER: “Well, Barney Fife, you’re the one that pulled me over for speeding, so let’s assume it was somewhere north of the speed limit. Enlighten me! I sort of knew I was going pretty fast when the G-forces started curling my upper lip and spilled the whiskey all over my bag of weed.”

WHAT YOU SHOULD SAY: “No, officer, I don’t.”

THE QUESTION: “Do you know that cigarettes are bad for you?”

THE HONEST ANSWER: “Really? I had no idea! Where’d you hear that? And I thought they were good for you! Dang! Thanks for telling me, I think I’ll quit right now. You’re so very considerate to have pointed that out!”                                                                                                                                                            WHAT YOU SHOULD SAY: See above.                                                                                                                          

THE QUESTION: “Want to play some video games?”

THE HONEST ANSWER: “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather just tie me down and stab me repeatedly with a letter opener? I’d enjoy that just about as much as playing your virtual psycho killer video games.”

WHAT YOU SHOULD SAY: “Whoa, look at the time! Gotta go. Maybe some other time…”

THE QUESTION: “Who do you think would win in a fight, Ali or Dempsey?”

THE HONEST ANSWER: “Well, let’s see, Muhammed Ali has Alzheimer’s Disease and is past 60, but on the other hand, Jack Dempsey’s been dead for about 25 years, so I gotta go with Batman on this one.”

WHAT YOU SHOULD SAY: “They’d have had a great 3 fight trilogy ala Frazier/Ali and Bowe/Holyield, with Ali taking two out three.” (Sometimes nonsense questions are interesting food for thought.)

THE QUESTION: “Even though I’m breaking up with you, can we still be friends?” 

THE HONEST ANSWER: “No.”

WHAT YOU SHOULD SAY: “No.”

THE QUESTION: “If you could sleep with anyone else you wanted to, would you?”

THE HONEST ANSWER: ‘”In a heartbeat. You want the list?”

WHAT YOU SHOULD SAY: “No, of course not.” (Don’t overdo it here, they’ll know you’re full of it.)

THE QUESTION: “What color do you think we should paint the living room?”

THE HONEST ANSWER: “We? We? You’ve got me speaking French here! You know damned well it’s you who always picks out some sappy color and me, not we, who paints the walls I just painted a couple of years ago! Make it turquoise for all I care. Better yet, skip it!”

WHAT YOU SHOULD SAY: “You decide, honey.”

QUESTION: “Does this shoe come in my size?”

THE HONEST ANSWER: “No, ma’am, but maybe you should check out the Costume Department. They’ve got a nice selection of those giant clown shoes that ought to just about cover those Sasquatch feet of yours. Barring that, might I suggest a nice pair of canoes from Sporting Goods?”

WHAT YOU SHOULD SAY: “I’ll go check.”

THE QUESTION: “Would you rather be rich or be happy?”

THE HONEST ANSWER: “Do I look that friggin’ stupid to you? Every rich person I ever met looks happy as a pig in shit! They’re rich, you idiot! Ask a rich person that question. Maybe they’ll have one of their servants explain that being rich is pretty damned cool!”

WHAT YOU SHOULD SAY: “I’d rather be happy.”

THE QUESTION: “Why won’t you listen to reason?”

THE HONEST ANSWER: “Your idea of listening to reason is having me agree with every birdbrain idea that manages to penetrate your thick skull, that’s why! Being reasonable is a two-way street. Besides, I like being unreasonable!”

WHAT YOU SHOULD SAY: “I’ll try to be more flexible.”

So, there you have a short seminar on social survival in the confusing realm of interpersonal relations. We here at DOPOTO wish you luck with figuring out human beings. We at the Department have found that to be a lifelong learning curve with no end in sight. Keep trying, but tread lightly.

The character of the God people worship tells you a lot more about those people than the actual nature of God. Inside information is hard to come by in the God industry, so we pretty much make up his character to suit ourselves and insist he’s on our side in all matters great and small. Come Judgement Day, we’re all going to have some explaining to do. Odds are that will be a real eye-opener when we find out the joke has always been on us. Stay flexible and humble. We are not God’s spokesmen.

Regular people don’t feel so bad anymore about not knowing exactly how the economy works; the stock markets, commodities markets, money markets, futures (!) markets, the role of the Federal Reserve Bank, crises of confidence and all sorts of intangible “market forces.” Most of us figured, well, fine, if we  don’t know exactly how all this stuff works, then the trained professionals running these various industries and markets have to know. We don’t know how to remove gall bladders either but have faith that our physicians do.

So if we were puzzled as to why one day a company is worth $300 billion and a week later is only worth one hundredth of that even though nothing has changed about the company, we just assumed there was a good reason for that and we just didn’t understand it but the financial professionals did. Well, the joke sure was on us, eh? These doctors didn’t even know where the gall ladder is located! Not a one of them has stepped up and explained exactly how trillions of dollars just disappeared overnight. It seems that nobody understands the economy anymore, not even Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, who’s bailout plan needs a bailout plan. That’s not good.

Is there anybody out there who can fix this mess, or even understand it? Or maybe just explain to the rest of us how having faith in something makes it worth a lot of dough but having no faith in it makes the identical item nearly worthless. What is this, economics or religion? Whether or not you have faith that your voice can be carried to the other side of the world through a telephone wire doesn’t stop the person on the other end from hearing you just fine. And if you have all the faith in the world that very thin ice will hold your fat ass, you’re still going to get soaking wet. That’s just common sense. Why is big business any different? 

A bird isn’t a bird just because somebody tells you it’s a bird, and it’s no less a bird if they tell you that it is definitely not a bird, no matter what their alleged credentials in ornithology. It’s a bird because that’s what the hell it is and it’s damned obvious. And the bird sure doesn’t give a rat’s ass one way or the next what anybody thinks. It knows it was a bird both before and after anybody identified it as such. And so does anybody else with a lick of sense. So how did we get to the point where people can define the economy only by their guesses about it, or their faith in it or lack of same. Is this how we built the most prosperous nation in history?

When you knock all those zeros off the dollar signs, everybody knows exactly what the deal is with economics. If you have twenty bucks and want to see a movie, the ticket eats up ten dollars, the subway ride back and forth costs another four, so you’re left with six dollars for popcorn and Milk Duds. If those items cost you a 5 spot you go home with one dollar. That’s pretty simple, no? If the movie was great or if it sucked, it was still a commodity worth the $10 dollar ticket, so your faith in that film doesn’t mean you really spent twelve for admission, or your lack of faith in a crappy movie doesn’t get you two bucks back. And when word gets out that one movie is great and another one sucks, it’s still ten bucks apiece to see them. Of course one will attract a lot more business than the other but that’s how going to the movies works. Successful films make the big dough on sheer volume, with a whole lot more of those ten dollar tickets sold than the crappy films.

When you buy a coat, a leather one costs more that a cotton one, a well-made one more than a poorly made one. A Cadillac costs more than a Mini Cooper because you get more car and more comfort and performance. Steak costs more than hamburger, butter more than margarine. Everybody understands this and the reasons why. But somewhere on the way from small sums of money to hundreds of billions of dollars the rules of mathematics apparently change radically and common sense is not necessarily an asset. Somehow General Motors, a company in possession of 100,000 Cadillacs, is begging Uncle Sam for a bailout. Somehow Washington Mutual Bank with its $300 billion in assets gets sold to J.P. Morgan-Chase for less than 3 billion dollars in the middle of the night and nobody gets arrested. 

And nobody can explain any of these things. Not the Treasury Secretary, not the Chairman of the Federal Reserve and none of the CEO’s who rose to the  very pinnacles of their professions. Our current president Bush The Younger sure doesn’t have a clue. He’s still trying to figure out long division without much luck. Could it be incompetence, greed and larceny on a grand scale? You think? The flaw in any system is, after all, people. Capitalism built this nation and gave the people in it a pretty decent standard of living and made a great many of us wealthy. It couldn’t always have been so mysterious or we’d have abandoned it long ago. 

Maybe the answer here is to beat the current crop of top executives about the head and neck with blunt objects and fire their asses for screwing up such a good thing. You can’t be put in charge of the goose that lays the golden eggs and cook it for dinner too. That’s not just outrageously greedy, it’s insane. Artists can be insane, actors can be insane, movie producers and directors can be as loony as they come. Writers and musicians are pretty much all nuts. That’s how it is in the arts and we can all thank a lot if whacky people for some beautiful and interesting works of art and performances. Test pilots, astronauts and rugby players have to have a couple of screws loose to do what they do and that’s also acceptable. But bankers? Bankers? Since when did bankers and business executives think they could get away with going nuts? 

Money and business are not creative arts or daredevil high wire acts. This is other people’s money you’re dealing with here, their hard-earned that they work all their lives for and would like to have something to show for their efforts. They trust banks and businesses and the people who run them with the fruit of their life’s labors. Madmen need not apply. If that’s how you want to roll, fine, just stay away from everybody’s money. You want to be a wild man? Join the circus and fly on a trapeze. Start a motorcycle gang or something. Meanwhile, release the boring, cautious, tubby old guys with the rimless spectacles that you corporate pirates have been holding hostage somewhere. You know, the guys that used to run the economy and understood it and knew how to explain it and never shit where they eat. Those people. They weren’t exciting and dynamic and maybe they were a little rigid when they were in the house but at least they painted the place once in a while and didn’t steal the chandeliers or the knobs off the doors. The jig’s up, and you people can leave now.

Love is the answer, no matter what the question is, unless of course the question is: “How do you feel about snakes?” No one can be blamed for not loving snakes.

So here we are bailing out some of the richest people on the planet, leading bankers and industrialists, none of whom are volunteering any of their own vast personal wealth to help the companies they helped ruin. It’s a pretty odd state of affairs for the United States of America, one-time poster child among nations for Capitalism with a capital C, yet in spite of all the public bleating to the contrary, government bail-outs of large corporations are nothing new. The Airline industry was saved by Uncle Sam in 2001, the Savings and Loan sector in 1989, The Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company in 1984, Chrysler Motors in 1979, Franklin National Bank in 1974, Lockheed Aircraft in 1971 and the Penn Central Railroad in 1970, most occurring under Republican presidents. So much for being the “Party of Business” and the champions of unbridled capitalism. So let’s not quibble here about keeping some our vital industries afloat before they all wind up in Third World nations.

Bad enough we don’t make our own electronic gear, but that’s not nearly as embarrassing as our inability to make socks and underwear in the event of a war with China. Which leads one to wonder where they make toilet paper and soap and fervently hope those nations are staunch allies. We’re going to have to get rid of the Lex Luthors who have been running these corporations as their own personal piggy banks and make sure they start doing what they are supposed to do, what they’ve always done until the new breed of uber-greedy executives took over and started buying Rembrandts with company funds for the bathroom walls in their summer palaces. But there are limits. In the interest of public service, here is a list of companies who are definitely not deserving of a bailout.

WOLF FILMS - The production company that created the hit TV show “Law and Order” and then proceeded to spin it off into a dozen or more separate but unequal Law and Order shows. They have now applied for a government grant to create yet another one, this one called Law and Order: Sidewalk Vendor Unit, profiling the investigation and prosecution of guys selling hot pretzels and plastic Statues of Liberty on New York sidewalks without a proper street vending license. That’s one Law and Order too many.

MEGAGIANTBIGMART UNLIMITED- A box store company that sells everything that can possibly be sold, with each of their 12,000 stores the size of several football fields, so huge that they blot out the sun in the towns where they are located, killing all surrounding vegetation and adversely affecting the local climate. When they come to town every local business including the funeral parlor goes bankrupt and everyone in town is forced to work at MegaGiantBigMart for minimum wage.

METHANE ENERGY RECYCLERS - This company seems at first glance to be on the right track, providing a viable alternative energy source in a world crying out for alternative energy. But a closer look at their application for federal funds reveals that their whole plan is to install flatulence collectors on fat guys to harness their gaseous emissions. Their business profile includes providing the fat guys with a bean-heavy diet to improve yield. Whether or not it is feasible is beside the point. Let’s take a pass on this one.

NASA – Yes, NASA is already a government agency, the organization in charge of our space program. Anything they’ve done since the 1969 Moon Landing exciting anybody? Enough said. Replace them with some of the adventurous types that used to work there before they got bogged down in cautious, boring commercial enterprises and unmanned probes that don’t work all that well. Those flying tractor-trailer Space Shuttles are being mercifully phased out before another one blows up. And didn’t they install the lens on the Hubbel Telescope backwards at first, having to send up a space handyman to fix it? Meanwhile, there’s no shortage of skilled and daring aviators willing and eager to explore the solar system and beyond. Cut NASA’s budget back to weather satellite deployment status and let real men and women in an entirely new space agency lead us to the stars.

DONALD TRUMP DEVELOPERS- While The Donald has yet to apply for a government bail-out, ironically he was once bailed out by some of the financial institutions that are now taking government bail-out funds. He declared business bankruptcy once and came near to personal bankruptcy but managed to rebound with some fancy footwork and by ceding partial ownership of some of his properties to his creditors, among them Citicorp and Chase. While Trump was once a gifted real estate developer, those days seem to be gone as he concentrates on being a public nuisance. Perhaps as a condition of the bailouts Uncle Sam might include a provision designed to deny Trump any further financing until he starts developing something other than his mouth and his colossal ego. It’s a win-win public service situation, the banks regaining solvency and The Donald being effectively muzzled. A grateful nation would forgive the banks their incompetence and greed if they could make that small miracle happen.

AMERICAN EXPRESS – The credit card giant is in trouble in large part because they extended almost unlimited credit to wealthy customers. No problem there, you say? They’re rich and can afford it, right? Well, AMEX let their debts build up to several million dollars before bothering to send these high rollers a bill. Here’s the catch: In a stunning reversal of roles, in this latest financial collapse it was the rich who took the first hit, having lots of dough tied up in the stocks of those giant banks, insurance companies, investment houses and credit card companies than just blew trillions of dollars of their investors’ money. Guess what? The rich are stiffing AMEX. After their snooty ad campaigns selling themselves as the preferred double-dippped-platinum-diamond-gold-frankincense-and-myrrh card of the filthy rich, well, nobody’s shedding too many tears to see them fall victim to their own kind and their own pretensions. And it’s refreshing to the rest of us delinquent credit card payers to see that the rich really aren’t so different after all. We working stiffs have all been hard up against it for a long time now and as we all know, misery loves company and a lot of people love to see the mighty fall, especially the arrogant ones. See you guys at the unemployment office. And no cutting the line, either, Bub.

History is basically a record of what went wrong.

It’s a good thing our steel mills, shipyards and auto manufacturers didn’t go belly up in 1940, otherwise winning the two separate major wars in the Pacific and in Europe that together were called World War 2 might have been a problem for us. Odds are that Toyota wouldn’t have retooled their Camry factories to build thousands of Sherman tanks, countless Jeeps and other military vehicles like the Big Three auto makers did. And having our ships built in China and South Korea might have been problematic, especially since the steel to build them would have had to come from Japanese mills, a country we were having fairly heated disagreements with starting in 1941.

What enabled us to win World War 2 in just three and a half years was our huge industrial base, an infrastructure of heavy industry unmatched before or since. We not only cranked out endless assembly lines of tanks, guns, artillery, bombs, planes, ships and landing craft for our own 12 million men under arms, but also sent these items in vast quantities to England, China, Russia and other allies. In the event of another huge war, never out of the realm of possibility in this dangerous world, we’re screwed. We can make aircraft and guns alright, but that’s not near enough to fight a global war, unless we plan to blow up the world with our nukes, not exactly an optimal course of action. For big wars, we need soldiers and the means to fully equip them and get them to and from the battlefields. Who’s going to make their uniforms, China?

Likely the people who ruined the industrial capacity of the United States in the name of globalization and maximizing profits are going to be the first ones to bitch to the government when their foreign factories are overrun by enemy soldiers. That’s what happens in wars. When the factories were here in the United States nobody attacked them. And now comes news that the Big Three auto makers are going the way of the Dodo bird and the textile industry and the government doesn’t want to rescue them like they are doing with our giant banks.

The government has plenty of good reasons why they shouldn’t help General Motors, Ford and Chrysler. These businesses have been completely mismanaged for 30 years and outperformed by foreign auto makers for even longer. In the forty years that America has stumbled around trying to formulate a coherent energy policy none of these companies stepped up and mass produced energy efficient cars. Their response to the common knowledge that petroleum reserves were shrinking and its fumes choking the planet? Sports Utility Vehicles getting 8 to 10 miles per gallon of gasoline. For that alone their stockholders should have cleaned house and hired people with some brains to run these publicly held corporations.

And the United States Government sure didn’t lead the way towards 100 miles-per-gallon cars. It is within their power to mandate such goals but they consistently did not because so many legislators are in the pocket of Big Oil. Maybe the oil companies should bail out Detroit. They were the main reason why low mileage got such low priority. As always, corporations put profits ahead of country, but by letting Detroit collapse, the national security of this nation is further eroded. It’s not Al Qaeda who dismantled our manufacturing capacity, it was fat guys with private jets full of insatiable greed. 

The United States Government also contributed to the inability of American industry to compete with Japan and Europe by refusing to provide the basic right of health care to our citizens like every other advanced industrialized nation, thus forcing corporations to factor in the exorbitant cost of health care in their product costs. And in today’s super high tech world, any potential war will involve extensive use of electronic and computer technology, and we are a nation that doesn’t even make our own television sets anymore, never mind the highly advanced microchip devices essential to modern weaponry. Most of those things are made elsewhere too, just like this iMac computer made in Shanghai.

So what do we do about GM, Ford and Chrysler? Bail them out like the banks with no strings attached and watch them go crazy again? Hardly. Bail them out with steel cables attached, mandating that they immediately reverse their policy of building the same old, same old vehicles. A nation that put a guy on the moon forty years ago just for the hell of it can surely come up with a high-efficiency engine when the pressure’s on to do so. The question before was always “Why should they?” and it was a legitimate question. The answer now has to be “Because they absolutely must.” This nation allows no aspirin bottle to be sold without a child-proof cap, no step-ladder to be sold without a dozen warning stickers and requires all sorts of things of car manufacturers from seat belts to catalytic converters.

So now the law must state that cars absolutely must attain high energy efficiency if they take Uncle Sam’s money, or even if they don’t and still somehow survive. And the same laws should apply to imports as well, extreme high efficiency or go sell them elsewhere, and that applies to the many Japanese auto plants operating on U.S. soil. If they don’t measure up to standards, they don’t go on sale here, period. And while Uncle Sam is handing over $25 billion apiece to the Big Three, they should demand the resignations of the people in charge of these companies. 

If they let these clueless boobs remain, then, bail out or no bail out, our auto industry will disappear like our railroads did. We can get by with a few less banks and credit card companies since the money will be handled by someone, no problem, but rebuilding an automotive industry on the fly during a national emergency like the one we faced in 1941 isn’t something we should let happen, even if these companies were almost ruined by greedy assholes. A nation full of information processors and burger flippers but devoid of blue collar producers with calloused hands is a big fat target. Give them the dough, but ride them like rented mules until they deliver the goods.

The secret to peace of mind is a reclining chair. In your mansion.

Hot on the heels of the revelation that modern humans carry caveman DNA, scientists want to take the next logical step and take the DNA from tissue specimens of wooly mammoths to bring them back out of extinction. By modifying successive generations of a female elephant’s eggs until the DNA matches the mammoths, an actual mammoth could be brought to term and born into this world for the first time in about 10,000 years. Scientists have ample material to work with since perfectly preserved frozen mammoths are not all that uncommon, and their DNA is in pristine condition.

What does this mean to the rest of the world? Not all that much in the great scheme of things, but the caveman DNA inside of us rejoices at the prospect of great herds of our most challenging prey once again roaming the frozen steppes of Russia, the Alaskan wilderness and northern Canada, about the only places with climates suitable to these Ice Age beasts. There were many subspecies of mammoth, many of them a lot larger than today’s elephants and covered with long, greasy hair to insulate them from the cold and sporting curved tusks that could reach 10 feet in length. 

These magnificent animals roamed the earth for over a million years and were considered dinner for enterprising cavemen willing to risk being trampled by 12 tons of angry pachyderm or being turned into a caveman-kebab by getting skewered by those huge tusks. Since they were gigantic and travelled in herds, their natural enemies were also huge; saber tooth tigers, dire wolves and short-faced bears, all of these predators a lot bigger and fiercer than even their largest modern counterparts.

Of course bringing all these terrifying predators back to life could pose some pretty significant risks to people. But then again, scientists have not traditionally spent an excessive amount of time worrying about the effects of their work on the rest of us. Nuclear weapons and poison gas spring readily to mind. Love Canal, Chernobyl, Agent Orange and asbestos place high on that list. Generally, when scientists can do something, they just do it and damn the consequences. So be on the lookout for mammoths, packs of dire wolves, Volkswagon-sized bears and prides of saber toothed tigers the size of mules any year now. 

And science further informs us that all these were all very adaptable creatures and won’t necessarily stick to the frozen northern wastes, especially once they figure out that the further south they go, the more food there is to eat, with no stubborn tundra to break through to find plants for the Mammoths, and a lot of docile livestock for the predators. Not exactly good news for Iowa corn farmers and beef ranchers, and maybe a little disconcerting for townsfolk when the newly minted predators discover that humans are a lot easier to kill than mammoths. And you think the park rangers at Yellowstone have a tough time controlling the grizzly bears? Tourism there will become sort of like Russian roulette, seeing how many family members manage to get back in the Winnebago at the end of the day. Billy? Where’s Billy?

So maybe the real significance of this news is that the world is not really in such dire financial straits as the news media would have us believe when you have bunches of scientists engaged in completely frivolous projects like resurrecting extinct prehistoric creatures. There seems to be plenty of money in the research and development budgets of industries that have provided mankind with such indispensable amenities as lemon scented toilet paper and garbage bags, chewable aspirin and cars the size of light tanks to drop off the dry cleaning and get little Susie safely to her aroma therapy appointment.

So let these DNA science dweebs dream of woolly mammoths roaming the earth again, or even barn-size dinosaurs while they’re at it. They’ve proven themselves fairly useless when it comes to figuring out solutions to the real tricky problems around here, like curing cancer, diabetes, AIDs, dengue fever and even malaria, which still takes an impressive toll of human beings all over the world every year, or the problem of mass starvation which claims 36,000 victims every single day. Are they planning to feed the hungry mammoth steaks? Just one of those bad boys could feed an entire village for a month.

Or just maybe they’re thinking that bringing back giant land mammals and dinosaurs will replenish the fossil fuels we’re burning at an ever-increasing rate? Yeah, that ought to do it, repopulate the world with giant creatures, then kill them and let them rot and in a few million years we’ll have plenty more oil to burn. It worked once, right? Only this time we’ll control where they rot so that the oil is sitting underneath more reasonable countries, like our own! Diabolically clever, no? Perhaps there’s a method to their madness. Or not.