Nobody likes an incomplete idiot. If you’re stupid, be as stupid as can be and don’t pretend otherwise. People will know you’re an idiot but will respect your honesty. That’s about as good as it gets for idiots, but it’s at least something.

News from the world of science states that healthy human beings are hosts to around 1,000 species of bacteria, ranging from harmless to absolutely essential to our well-being. Without some of them we could not survive. That’s either pretty disgusting or pretty amazing, depending upon how you feel about bacteria. It does, however, put our vaunted world-domination into perspective, no? Our big brains, opposable thumbs, supreme adaptability and endless inventiveness would be impossible without germs. That must drive mysophobics (people with a fear of germs) nuts. Well, guess what? We’re all in this together, us and our 1,000 little friends.

So, for those of us earnestly scrubbing our skin with anti-bacterial potions and attempting to cleanse our innards of these little microbes, well, good luck. It’s not going to happen, and if you do somehow succeed in achieving sterility, you die. So it seems that little boys, with their propensity for getting all muddy and handling worms and frogs and the like, have it right. Germs are our friends, at least 1,000 of them anyway. As for the others, many of which can make us very ill or extremely dead? Better to let our immune systems sort out who’s who and get on with our lives. Barring that, there’s always doctors, and barring that, graveyards.

In other science notes, the deadliest animals in the world are rated in a Top Ten list. What could possibly be deadlier than lions, polar bears, cobras, crocodiles and charging elephants? That would be the Poison Dart Frog, #1 on the list, weighing less than an ounce and measuring about 3/4 of an inch long. These bad boys produce enough slimy toxin on their backs to kill 10 humans. They got their name from the practice of indigenous tribes in South and Central America of smearing frog neurotoxin on the tips of their arrows and darts. You need not be a deadly marksman to take down prey with one of these missiles. A mere scratch and you’re feasting on wild boar in no time, without having to chase a dangerous wounded animal through miles of rain forest.

In Japan, scientists are feverishly working on robots that people can have sex with, simulating human flesh and responsiveness. They’re working on simulated females, of course. You’ve got to figure that Japanese scientists are getting a little tired of their human lovers making fun of their small units. Here’s hoping they keep these sexbots away from foreigners, otherwise it’s back to square one. 

Astronomers are searching for Earth’s twin. What, separated at birth and all that? And which one is the evil twin? So far, they’ve only been able to locate distant cousins, but that makes them only hotter to find our long lost sibling. Maybe they figure we could use a spare the way we’ve been treating this one. And, with our population scheduled to hit 9 billion by the middle of this century, maybe some extra real estate will come in handy.

Speaking of robotics, scientists are looking to expand their impressive repertoire of artificial body parts from limbs, joints and heart valves to brain implants and even growing new penises (Are you listening, Japanese robot lovers?). Some of them figure they’d better start with men and kill two birds with one stone and just give in to nature by locating the brain directly into the penis, which pretty much runs the show for guys anyway. This way the head could be filled with spare parts for the rest of the body, or maybe as a reservoir for holding a lubricant to oil all our new metal limbs. Better yet, make the head a handy mini-keg of beer! 

And in further Science News, no cure is yet in sight for the common cold and the most effective remedy remains chicken soup. Colds are caused by germs, they say, but one we haven’t figured out how to kill. Maybe we need one more species of bacteria to come live inside of us to prevent colds? Why not? Make it 1,001. It seems that the only completely bacteria-free creatures on this planet are bacteria themselves. The rest of us are composites, hosts for bacteria and other tiny organisms. Perhaps evolution is just bacteria’s way of getting around without having to grow legs? And just maybe humans are the result of bacteria wanting to stand on the moon. Who knows? The bacteria aren’t saying much one way or the next.

Most people don’t care all that much about other people’s opinions of what we like to eat. On average they don’t live a second longer than anybody else.

President Obama and the Pentagon are creating a new branch of the armed forces, a cyber unit specializing in computer warfare. They will be trained to defend the nation’s computer systems against hackers, saboteurs and spies, and also to attack the computer systems of our enemies, thus disrupting their military communication and/or financial stability. Finally, a military position for the nation’s geeks! Armchair nerd warriors have been practicing their entire socially-challenged lives for just such an opportunity! Already there are CIA geeks in Nevada operating the unmanned Predator Drones in faraway Afghanistan that blow up houses and cars full of terrorists with pinpoint accuracy. Imagine the possibilities of an entire branch of the service manned by computer nerds and hackers?

They could steal the identities of people like Osama bin Laden, taking out bogus second mortgages on his caves, buying flat screen televisions, luxurious vacations and cars with his credit cards, stealing his ATM pin code and emptying his checking account, thus ruining his finances and making it  impossible for Al Qaeda to finance further terrorist activities. These official hackers could penetrate the computer systems of the North Korean army and reset their rocket coordinates so that the next time they decide to test fire a rocket it hangs a U-turn and goes after Kim Jong Ill. 

Imagine the snarky snickering that will go on in Geek HQ when they hack into the computer servers in Iran and flood them with pornographic photo-shopped images of the head mullahs having 3-ways with both boys and girls. Or better yet, goats. And the next time the Saudis announce they are raising the price of oil, have the Geek Marines threaten to flood their nation’s television stations and home computers with images of women leaving the house unveiled, unescorted and driving cars. Piece of cake for experienced hackers. And if that doesn’t work, have them electronically siphon off some of the royal family’s billions and transfer it to our own treasury.

Of course, organizing nerds and hackers into a disciplined military unit will be a challenge. They’re not exactly your typical gung-ho, physically fit recruits. They’re kind of pasty-faced and jittery, and tend to be either chubby or pencil thin and do their level best to avoid direct sunlight. They are not used to keeping regular hours or mixing with many other human beings. They are also full of whacky conspiracy theories and take science fiction movies very seriously, traits that no amount of training will erase. So maybe for this branch of the service, the Pentagon will have to rethink their one-size-fits-all approach to boot camp. 

Being that they need these geeks so much in order to be an effective organization, they might try to tailor their training and discipline to reflect the lifestyles of these people. Forget the 10 mile runs at dawn. Nerds and hackers are just getting to bed at that time after spending the whole night planting viruses in the computers of movie reviewers who gave a thumbs down to the Harry Potter films. Skip the physical exercise and forget about barracks. Let the recruits live in facilities that resemble their mothers’ basements, leaving them only to attend classes and Star Trek conventions.

Their work shifts should be elastic too. There are times when these people will work for 48 hours straight at their computer keyboards on some particularly challenging project, sustained only by Doritos and Pepsi. Then they might eat a box of dry raisin bran, drink a half gallon of orange juice and sleep for 14 hours straight. Not exactly military precision there, so you’ll have to recruit a whole lot of extra personnel so that when some of them collapse there will be others to man the computers. When an exciting challenge presents itself, they’ll all be willing to sit around in their underwear for countless hours at their computers, doing crazy impossible things just because they can. You have to coddle valuable people like this and overlook their eccentricities and their taped-together horn rim eyeglasses.

As far as uniforms go, the military can save a bundle by just providing them with T-shirts, jeans and sneakers, with maybe a North Face parka, a stocking cap and a scarf for cold climates. Military haircuts are also out of the question, as is shaving and showering on a regular basis. You won’t even have to pay them all that much since they’d be doing the same things for free back at home. Give them some state of the art computers and let them hang up their posters of Luke Skywalker and you’ll have cyber soldiers every bit as dedicated as regular soldiers, only a lot less personally appealing.

Which is fine, since they don’t like being out in public all that much and the military won’t want anybody to know who their official hackers are, so you can keep them secret. They’re used to people treating them like they were invisible anyway. More money can be saved by skipping the conventional arms training too. It might be a good idea to make it a point to keep these people away from explosives, firearms and sharp objects. Geeks tend to be sort of awkward and clumsy so maybe the automatic weapons and shoulder held rocket launchers are best left to our regular troops.

Concrning the boot camp practice of breaking them down emotionally and rebuilding their characters in military mode, that’s not a good idea either. These people are brilliant with computers and technology, but emotionally unstable in other areas. That’s a mind set the army won’t want to alter. Paranoia, resentment and childish maliciousness are the ideal emotional makeup for people charged with attacking and disrupting other nations’ computer systems. As far as rules go, if you tell a geek he cannot do something, consider it done before the close of business that day. Besides, if you fill these geeks with self-esteem and teach them to be well adjusted individuals, they’ll quit the army and go make themselves internet billionaires.

So the training and operation of Operation Geek Marines has to be undertaken very carefully, and mindful of the sort of monsters we could wind up creating. Look at what these people have done from an old laptop in Mom’s basement: penetrating the Pentagon’s and NASA’s databases, spreading computer viruses throughout the world and crashing untold numbers of computers just for the hell of it and wreaking financial havoc because they were bored one afternoon. Provide them with Cray super computers and state of the art gadgets and interfaces, there’s no telling what these geeks will do. We just might wind up with one of them as president when they decide to electronically alter the election results one year. We could wind up with “President Timmy.” Then where would we be?

The biggest gamble you’ll ever make is with your heart. There’s no two dollar window in love. It’s all or nothing.

The narrow strip of the Middle East known as the Holy Land to 3 religions is as unholy a patch of real estate as ever existed. Born of bloody conquest, the Biblical state of Israel was in its early stages run by a bunch of brutal warrior kings who claimed they we having conversations with God. That’s never a good prospect for living in peace. As they were conceived, in blood and conquest, so they were destroyed, time and time again. Of course whenever they were conquered and dragged off into slavery, the Israelites figured that they weren’t being religious enough to satisfy the singularly bloodthirsty God that they invented in order to justify their own insatiable bloodthirstiness. 

Not to be outdone in the hatred and slaughtering department, 2 other major religions, first Christianity and then Islam, rose up and began slaughtering people on a scale far grander that King David or his greedy son Solomon could have imagined. Indeed, these two religions went global in their savagery, reducing the Jews to a mere footnote in the history of God-inspired slaughter. By the time of the Crusades, the Jewish people had long since been dispersed to all corners of the earth, never really recovering from the brutal Roman conquest and occupation and the destruction of their temple. They were on the sidelines while Islam and Christianity duked it out over their former homeland, but they never forgot their salad days as the biggest and baddest haters and killers in the region.

The centuries went by with Christians retiring from the Crusades and taking their bloody act on the road to the New World, with Islam languishing in poverty and backwardness after centuries of domination of a huge empire called the Caliphate, stretching from Spain through all of North Africa and right into India. Enter the British, who took advantage of Islam’s decline by taking over over the Holy Land mainly to steal oil to fuel their Industrial Revolution. They fought off the Ottomans and many other armies to maintain control of the Middle East, relinquishing these lands only at the dissolution of their empire following World War 2.

So when the British left they hacked up regions of the area into a bunch of nations that seemed logical to them since they weren’t from around there. The reality was a bit different, though, and warfare and tribal genocide has been the order of the day over there ever since. Add the newly reinvented Israel with their Biblical visions of regional might into the mix and Bingo!, all the ingredients for bloody slaughter were back in place in The Holy Land. And since the end of World War 2, that’s what the world has been treated to: more killing in the name of God.

Now the United States, the current Rome/Britain, gets into the mix over there in the nation of Iraq, with the predictable lack of success in bringing any sort of order to the region. While our vastly superior military forces predictably annihilated any armies foolish enough to engage them, the wars over there tend to drag out in guerilla insurgencies with the added twist of suicide bombers. Everybody still hates everybody else, no form of government is acceptable to anybody and we’re wondering what the hell we were thinking when we got involved in this ridiculous section of the planet. 

Nearly 5,000 of our sons and daughter are dead, thousands more maimed, and the pinhead of a president who thought it was a good idea to stroll across a patch of quicksand is now industriously trying to clear dry brush from the state of Texas. Which is an appropriate metaphor, since in ten lifetimes he could never clear Texas of dry brush, anymore than he could clear the Middle East of millennia-old hatreds. Our new president has his hands full cleaning up after the Sage Brush Kid and is desperately trying to figure out a graceful exit from the Holy Land. Maybe it got the name the Holy Land from a mistake in translation, and should more likely be called the “Holy Crap, These People Are Insane! Land.” And while curing the insane is still a mystery, it is surely not an effective cure to join them.

People who disagree with you are generally not stupid or evil. They just disagree with you. Life goes on.

Looks like the Taliban are here to stay. Having been kicked out of power by America in Afghanistan, they took their act on the road and are threatening to topple the government of neighboring Pakistan, such as it is. The Pakistani government hasn’t been all that effective this past decade or so, so the Taliban figure that’s as good a country as any to bring back the MIddle Ages. No word on what their plans will be regarding Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, but if you want to really set a region back 800 years, nuclear bombs would do the trick handily.

These Taliban guys have a curious agenda: no music, no dancing, no movies, no TV, no education for females, no neatly trimmed beards (!), no embracing a different stripe of Islam from their own, no, no, no and NO. Radio’s allowed, but only the Taliban broadcasts, presumably by their equivalent of Rush Limbaugh. These clowns will tolerate no competing theologies, even going so far as blowing up an ancient statue of Buddha back in their glory days running Afghanistan. They would have you believe that, just like any other deluded fanatics, they alone speak for God.

Which would make them just another silly curiosity if it wasn’t for the fact that God has been telling them to kill everyone that they possibly can and to suck whatever joy they can out of everyone else’s life. This is not at all unusual with religious fanatics of any faith, but what is unusual is that they seem to be winning their war on sanity in a lot of places in the Ikstans of this world. A lot of people throughout the world are now more worried about Pakistan than any other place due to the very real possibility of a nuclear armed Taliban. Not that any other nation will do anything about it. 

They would prefer that America handle this problem. This way, they still get to criticize America for being an imperialistic super power while at the same time having the Taliban denied getting their mitts on nuclear bombs. It’s a win-win situation for everybody but America and the Taliban. We get stuck in another war in yet another shithole country fighting against suicide bombing insurgents and the Taliban get stuck being dead. 

This will come to pass if the Pakistani government can’t get it together to kill the Taliban themselves, a huge problem for them since their very powerful military intelligence organizations are often on the side of the insurgents, acting as a shadow government. Pakistan itself wishes America to solve their problems, and as much as they publicly protest the use of unmanned drones flying into their country to kill Taliban, they send strong private signals to send in the drones. If all this sounds confusing, well, it is. If there were no nuclear weapons in Pakistan, no one would give a damn who runs that country.

They never did have a government that was all that effective, with a huge chunk of their population living in the Bronze Age side by side with an educated, sophisticated segment of society, just like their blood enemies to the south, India. So this schizoid nation is the one America is expected to save? Or rather, to save the world from a nuclear holocaust at the hands of illiterate fanatics? So, whatever troops we pull out of Iraq will wind up in the land of the Ikstans, more of our good kids being sacrificed because no other nation will stand up to the fanatics and deny them their nuclear holocaust. Buckle up, it’s going to be another long and bumpy ride.

The first wars between humans began as conflicts over valuable hunting grounds. Nothing has changed except for the grand scale and the weapons.

So, it’s Memorial Day, and as usual for this holiday there has been no shortage of reminders that this is a day not only for hotdogs, beer and baseball, but for remembering the countless war veterans who fell in our many wars. Well, these days people sent out e-mails about this, elevating our soldiers into the ranks of sainthood, and challenging anyone to deny them their due canonization by daring you not to forward this message to everybody you know. Of course deleting these trivial things makes you someone who hates America. They attribute everything good about America to to our soldiers, driving home the point that our cherished rights and freedoms were won by the blood of heroes, every one a sainted martyr. The vast majority of these e-mails are generated by people who were never in boot camp, never mind a real live bloody war. Not so fast, Mr. and Ms. Superpatriot. 

Not every war is a grand crusade and not every warrior is a noble hero. And the enemy soldiers that fought against us were every bit as dedicated and patriotic as our soldiers, and every one of them had a mother who loved them and a family who missed them when they got killed, just like our guys. And not a man among them fought against American soldiers with the thought in mind to abolish our Bill of Rights or hoping to ban football on Sundays. The great majority of wars are fought for another reason, for money. So what our soldiers are defending is their homeland, of course, but the reason they are defending it has very little to do with our national values. It’s all about somebody wanting something more at the expense of someone else.

Contrary to what some say, violence has solved a lot of things. Not for the losers, of course, but the winners feel pretty good about things afterwards. Winning a war often means that you get to live in a nice place, while the world’s deserts and other barren wastelands get populated by the losers. Nobody volunteered to live in the shitholes of this world, no matter what they say about how unique and beautiful a place is their dusty homeland. It’s only dumb luck that the descendants of the people forced to live in the sandy wastelands of the Middle East find themselves sitting on top of a sea of petroleum. 

They sat on top of that oil for centuries and it did them about as much good as all that sand did until the Industrial Revolution made petroleum the new gold. And it still didn’t do them much good since corporations from powerful nations prevailed on their armies to take over these oil rich nations and steal their petroleum to make the rich nations even richer. It’s only in the past 75 years or so that the sand-dwellers have gotten control over their own oil and began behaving just as poorly as the nations who conquered them. So poorly in certain cases, that the United States of America used this poor behavior as an excuse to attack Iraq in order to steal their oil. A bunch of criminals running America at the time said it was about something else, but that was just a bunch of lies that many people saw through at the time and which have since been proven completely false.

Within weeks of having invaded Iraq, every meter measuring the flow of oil from Iraqi wells got broken all of a sudden so that there was no telling how much oil American corporations stole in partnership with the leaders of the American government. Nearly 5,000 of our soldiers were killed and many more maimed, getting turned into suckers by cynical billionaires. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died too, a whole lot more than their dictator ever killed. The dictator they used to have, that is, the guy we had hung by the neck until dead. Well, our soldiers are still there six years later, the gas meters are still broken and the price of gasoline is on the rise again. So, how noble are Iraqi veterans? Whatever their noble intentions, their personal goodness or their level of dedication, they are engaged in an illegal war of aggression and theft. 

Does the fact that they were blatantly betrayed by their own government force us still to honor them with accolades as if they were defending a kindergarten on Main Street, U.S.A.? These are volunteer soldiers who know going in that they would have to obey orders, no matter what. That is the only way a military organization can function, and what makes it an ideal instrument for greedy leaders to use in any way they see fit. You can’t blame the soldiers and veterans for having been forced to fight in crazy wars like in Iraq, Vietnam or inside America exterminating Native American tribes, they had no choice in the matter. It is never their idea to do these things. But do they need to be elevated to sainthood for participating in an illegal and immoral war? Exactly how does that work? 

Whose conscience are we assuaging here? It wasn’t our idea to attack Iraq either, an idea that was sold like a cure for the common cold and like suckers at a carney sideshow a whole lot of us bought that bottle of snake oil. Another curious thing is that having an all-volunteer military makes war hawks of many people who formerly were very vocal in their opposition to war, when their asses were potential cannon fodder for the military draft. They sure had plenty of questions then. Funny how so many of us are perfectly willing to let the other guy die for our wrong-headed ideas sold to us by con artists. 

The true hero would participate himself if he felt so strongly about it. For those who never saw limbs flying and faces burnt away and have zero chance of being forced to, we’ve become a pretty warlike bunch of paper tigers. Like the West Indians say; “Every dog is bad in his own backyard.” Let’s see how loud they growl when surrounded by other dogs with sharp teeth. If the government ever decides to reintroduce the military draft, look for a cottage industry producing peace signs to spring up overnight. Washington would once again be the site of massive antiwar rallies.

Still the crime of turning our brave and dedicated soldiers into suckers goes unpunished. To have exposed them to the horror of war for no reason but greed and geopolitical power is the real crime here. Such wars do not protect our nation or make the world safe for democracy or any of those other mindless slogans used to sell naked  aggression against a weaker opponent. So, fine, on Memorial Day let’s remember the bravery and sacrifice of our veterans, but let’s do so with eyes wide open. And let us hope that we never again send these brave young men and women on any more fool’s errands.