The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has been following the Occupy Wall Street movement, a popular protest against corporate greed and criminal business practices, as well as the responses of opponents of the movement. The protesters call themselves the 99%, referring to the fact that 1% of Americans are hogging all the money and impoverishing their countrymen.

Several small cities’ worth of foreclosed homes dotting the land attests to the validity of a rapidly shrinking middle class, and the corresponding spike in the wealth of the richest 1% of their countrymen. Senior Analysts at The Department are a skeptical sort by nature and training, and view this “coinicidence” as anything but a random occurrence.

Researchers at DOPOTO have discovered this is not quite accurate, because the 1% figure is an exaggeration. It is actually less than 1%,  but  about .0006% of Americans who have all the money, so technically, the Occupy Wall Street people should be called the 99.4%. In America, over 40% of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of six-tenths of a percentage point of the population, about 1,860,000 individuals and their families out of 310,000,000 U.S. citizens at last count.

Out of this tiny minority, 412 individuals stand head and shoulders above even them by being billionaires, the very tip top of the totem pole in the Owning Of Things Department. These 412 people and their families own more wealth than half of all American citizens combined. Their average wealth is 2.75 billion dollars, making them less than  one-quarter of a percentage percentage point of the 1%, or, one in 742,000 Americans (you do the percentage point math on that one, that being one of DOPOTO’s regrettable weak points).

It has been further ascertained that while these one-percenters pay taxes on their half of the nation’s income, most of their income is labeled as “capital gains” and so goes untaxed. On the other hand, the 99.4% pays instant withholding taxes at a higher percentage of their earnings than the 1% pays on their stated earnings (a whole different ballpark), with little or no access to loopholes or tax shelters.

Another surprising thing is that for the first time in recorded history, a popular mass opposition movement has been mobilized not against any government, but against corporations, which the population views as the biggest threat to their collective prosperity and well being, filled with people who steal vast sums of money even though they are already fabulously wealthy, and who infiltrate and corrupt their elected government.

The 1% responds to all this by basically declaring that this is good old American Capitalism at work and tough noogies if we’re smarter than you and can rig the game. Who is right and who is wrong is beside the point, and not the place of The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious to decide. Ours is only to point out the obvious, our only mission.

Our archival research indicates that any public compromise forthcoming will signal a victory for the wealthy over the many, for historically they have employed the better lawyers. There are but 2 possible outcomes to this popular rising: the mighty will fall or the mighty will win and things will continue as they are.

Analysts here at DOPOTO have collated this data with our research on the loss of American jobs to Third World tyrannies, the growing list of ghost houses, the 2 wars being waged on credit and the latest research reflecting the average 30% raise that corporate executives voted themselves this year, and have come to but one obvious (our only specialty) conclusion: It’s good to be King. While it lasts.

This was a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has been working overtime to absorb the global chaos that has thus far marked the year 2011. Researchers, senior analysts and interns alike have been barraged by reports of the odd, the unsettling, the surprising and the utterly catastrophic. Our earnest  efforts to fulfill our only function (pointing out the obvious!) has been a remarkable challenge so far this year.

For example, recent events in Japan started out as straightforward observations of the twin natural disasters of a major earthquake and a tsunami striking northern Japan, but those two events were quickly relegated to be relatively minor issues compared to the simultaneous failures of 3 out of 6 nuclear reactors located in the area.

While most observers have reported this unprecedented tragedy as strictly a Japanese problem, the discovery of trace elements of radiation from those reactors in milk produced by cows in Washington State and dangerous levels of radiation in the Pacific Ocean fisheries that feed many nations have identified the Japanese meltdowns as a global problem. Mainstream media outlets have been slow to recognize this 800 pound gorilla in the room.

Similarly, the widespread outbreak of popular revolutions in the Middle East and Northern Africa has riveted the world’s attention once again to the most politically volatile region on earth, all the while ignoring the West’s complicity in the deplorable conditions leading up to these events. European Colonialism, followed immediately by International Corporate Colonialism, has stoked the coals of resentment in a thousand dusty, impoverished towns for centuries.

When those coals burst into the flames of Islamic fundamentalist jihad against Western interests in the past 25 years, the blame was placed on people  (!) worshipping the wrong God, ignoring the obvious results of artificially mandated national borders, foreign and corporate interference in governments and the complete disenfranchisement of citizens within their own nations. Widespread poverty, disease and illiteracy in “oil rich” nations created conditions that had nowhere to go but downhill fast.

In belated acknowledgment of all this, NATO forces have been bombing Libyan dictator Muammar Qadaffi’s armed forces to prevent them from killing his own citizens who had risen in revolt against his 40-year reign, during which time Qadaffi has been a sponsor of state terror and a looter of his own nation’s treasury, amassing 140 tons of pure gold with which to pay his “security forces,” well-paid mercenaries loyal only to their paymaster.

Also during that time, international oil companies have reaped billions in profits from Libyan petroleum, paying a king’s ransom to Qadaffi to maintain the status quo of misery in Libya. The oil companies even chipped in to pay his $1.5 billion settlement with the relatives of Qafaffi’s victims of the Lockerbie jet bombing over Scotland, a savage incident of state-sponsored terror that outraged the entire world. And this was after they looked the other way when Qafaffi bombed a disco in Germany that killed American servicemen, an act that prompted President Reagan to retaliate by bombing Tripoli.

Qadaffi is not an anomaly, but typical of the leaders of these nations; greedy and power mad dictators and kings propped up by Western military might on behalf of Western business interests at the direct expense of millions of people’s lives. Those expecting that the Western nations’ belated verbal and military support of these nations’ human rights and popular revolutions will result in these new governments continuing the old relationships in the old way are bound to be sorely disappointed (especially since only those nations sitting atop a sea of oil qualify for military intervention while the poorer countries benefit only from our leaders bestowing them their most earnest “atta boys” and “‘way to gos!” to help them overthrow their respective bloodthirsty tyrants).

Another lesson lost on many people concerning the interdependence of all nations is the murder spree being conducted by Mexican drug cartels, an actual shooting war against the Mexican government and innocent bystanders by criminal gangs determined to win their share of the billions to be made by selling illegal drugs to American citizens.

The United States could end this war tomorrow by legalizing these drugs, but powerful interests stand in the way of ending this Prohibition: most prominently the DEA and other elements of a gargantuan drug-fighting law enforcement infrastructure, and the huge growth industry that the American penal system has become.

The unceasing demand for recreational drugs by American consumers has proven the futility of the War on Drugs, just as alcohol prohibition had failed 80 years prior, succeeding only in creating a wealthy class of murderous organized criminals. Yesterday’s bootleggers founded vast fortunes supplying the nation with booze, and there’s even more money to be made today on products made from weeds and wild plants.

With over 2,000,000 American citizens in prison, half of them POWs in the War on Drugs, and a neighboring nation being corrupted and destroyed by the habits of our consenting adults, almost no one considers implementing the only logical step: ending this futile prohibition and taxing and regulating the sales of drugs that are selling like hot cakes anyway, legal or not, just like we do with the most deadly drug known to man, alcohol.

Normal commerce, better relations with our neighboring nations, and a welcome shot in the arm to our treasury are what we have to gain. What do we have to lose? Half our prisons, for one, and the pervasive sense of hypocrisy that surrounds this issue. It’s getting harder and harder to see the forest for the trees. We deny that nuclear meltdowns in foreign countries affect anyone beyond their borders, support the revolutions of those we once helped to oppress and allow a good neighbor to drown in the excesses of our citizens. Pointing out the obvious is a thankless business, but we here at DOPOTO feel obligated to point out what is painfully obvious (our specialty!); that we are all in this world together and hurt one another at our collective peril.

This was a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.

At the Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), researchers and senior analysts alike have been immersed in the exciting developments in the Middle East. First Tunisians ousted their government, followed swiftly by Egypt, which overthrew 30 years of Hosni Mubarek’s oppressive dictatorship in just 18 peaceful days. Now the nations of Bahrain, Iran, Algeria, Libya and Yemen have seen their authoritarian governments rocked by mass demonstrations demanding, of all things, democracy.

Many so-called “experts” and observers in the West have long held the elitist opinion that Arabs and Muslims were “not ready” for democracy, the implication being that they are all tribal nomads with fealty only to their traditional warlords and chieftains. This is a widely held opinion in spite of the fact that during the Middle Ages, North Africa under Islam was the global center of medicine, science, scholarship, architecture, literature, philosophy, tolerance and multiculturalism, while Europe was mired in filth, plague, perpetual warfare, ignorance, fear, superstition, hatred  and intolerance.

While the West has gained acendency since those halcyon days for Semitic Culture, during the Middle Ages it was the East that boasted the important centers of learning and scholarship, and the West that was amputating perfectly good limbs with dirty tools, fouling their cities with their own waste and burning their brothers and sisters at the stake for pointing out obvious truths. So let us not claim any intellectual or moral high ground on our Middle Eastern brethren.

The fact that today our societies are more technologically advanced as well as being more workable and equitable to its citizens than Eastern nations is only a recent historical development, a situation that could change in a matter of a few short years. Ask the German or the Japanese people how they squandered centuries of hard work and achievement by following madmen to their nations’ near annihilation, their beautiful cities turned in to piles of smoking ruble. No Middle Eastern Nation ever caused the world a fraction of the death and destruction that European and Asian Fascism caused in a dozen insane years only 70 years ago.

The citizens of the Middle East have endured centuries of conquest, hostility, oppression and exploitation at the hands of Western Colonial Powers, with even many of the borders and ethnic makeups of their nations determined by foreign empires. The leaders left in charge when World War 2 finally put an end to Colonialism were also, for the most part, hand-picked by their former colonial masters; ruthless despots who would “keep them in line” while western corporations continued their business-as-usual of siphoning off the lion’s share of these nations’ national wealth.

Is it any wonder that radicalism and anti-westen sentiment took root in many of these countries? Being robbed from within by greedy tyrants and from without by rapacious corporate interests, little money was left for education and government services. Before many generations passed, a great many of the poorer citizens of such nations had regressed into the the same ignorant superstition and unreasonable hatred that had plagued Europe’s population of preceding centuries.

No al Qaeda, Hamas or any other terrorist group could succeed in attracting recruits from nations that were enjoying freedom, prosperity and equality in human rights, and whose nations were in control of their own natural resources. In an almost visceral understanding of this self-perpetuating predicament, the masses of the Middle East seem to have risen as one and said “Enough!” Starting in Tunisia and cemented by the stunning peaceful victory in Egypt, a popular revolution is sweeping the Middle East.

Western civilization has been taken aback by all this, and predictions of disaster are rampant. Too many Western leaders and “Middle East Experts” are of the opinion that Western powers should be directing this revolution and picking its leaders, just like we did when Colonialism disappeared in name only. They miss the obvious point that their meddling and domination were a huge factor in the shaping of these societies’ recent histories, and that this is the true end of Colonialism, where the people of the Middle East pursue self-deternimination in a way they see fit, not what is allowed them by their patronizing overseers both foreign and domestic.

The West should be complimented rather than appalled by this popular revolution. The form of government being demanded by the demonstrators is, after all, Western-style representative democracy, a form of government whose foreign policy operatives had withheld from Middle Easterners as being “too advanced” for them. Well, guess again, and people here in New York City are watching events in the Middle East very carefully, hoping that this international push for Democracy will free New Yorkers from 115 years of tyrannical one-man rule.

This group of American citizens has long been considered “unfit” for self rule and have seen their hopes for democracy dashed again and again by one megalomaniacal mayor after another unwilling to share power with a legislative branch of government. One result has been that the  New York City Court system has become the de-facto legislative branch by fielding challenges to the many autocratic and unconstitutional fiats dictated by our Strongman mayors, setting the dangerous precedent of the usurpation of legislative functions by New York City judges, a job for which they are unsuited, and not elected to perform.

New York City is one of the last places in America where representative democracy is not practiced. While citizens can vote for Mayor and members of the City Council ever since the 5 Boroughs incorporated into a single city in 1896, the City Council has no power and each new mayor exercises absolute power over 8 million citizens, more people than reside in Bahrain and Libya combined. Perhaps this Democracy Fever will sweep across the Atlantic and free New Yorkers of taxation without representation, finally completing the American Revolution that’s been the inspiration for liberation movements everywhere for 235 years.

This was a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.

The Department Of Pointing Out the Obvious (DOPOTO) welcomes human behavioral scientists into the fold. In a study of adolescent brains, it has been discovered that human teenagers’ brains are not fully developed, thus impairing their judgement. For which the Department is tempted to nominate these brainiacs for our coveted Golden “Duh!” Award.

While scientists are generally asked to tell us things we don’t know, sometimes it’s rewarding for the average Jane and Joe to get Official Scientific Confirmation of their findings based on exhaustive field studies of their own brain-dead teenagers.

Many experts feel that the research is incomplete, ignoring the almost universal loss of IQ points during “the regressive years” from 13 to 19. Close observation supports the assertion that teenagers’ brains actually shrink noticeably after puberty, robbing them of skills for which they were highly praised in kindergarten, things like “pays attention,” “plays well with others” and “has good communication skills.”

Children who had formerly mastered an extensive vocabulary and exhibited good manners and judgment suddenly act as if they have been lobotomized. Apathetic grunts replace conversation, sullen glares decorate formerly smiling faces, little bundles of energy become drowsy idlers, and an almost autistic emotional isolation from their families develops in almost every case.

Researchers and Senior Analysts here at The Department have been studying teenagers for many years and our findings overwhelmingly support the “shrinking brain” theory of human adolescence. The evidence is staring us in the face. Literally.

Can teenagers be explained any better than the fact that not one in a hundred of them ever needs more than the 140-character limit of Twitter messages to express what’s on their minds? To their shrunken brains, 140 characters is a novel, more than 4 consecutive syllables a soliloquy, and excelling at some dumbass video game is considered high achievement.

Unpleasant intrusions like school and other people are barely tolerated. Groans, sighs and gestures, often accompanied by dramatic eye rolling and aggressive posturing, is their main form of communication. In other words, pretty much the intellectual and social equals of Lowland Gorillas.

Many analysts here at DOPOTO are convinced that this is a genetic response designed to “thin the herd” of the unfit, so that those specimens who survive all the binge drinking, riding on the hood of speeding vehicles, multiple body piercing and tattoos, and the powerful impulse of normal human beings to strangle them, and only those get to reach adulthood and reproduce, at which point their brains begin to function properly once again.

The field studies are in, the evidence irrefutable; teenagers are annoying and make dumb decisions. The Department challenges Science to explain why.

This has been a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO) has had an easy time of it lately. Not that there has been a flood of good news or anything else so unusual, it’s just that the job of The Department is merely to point out the obvious, whether there is good news, bad news or neutral news. Our function is merely to point out the emperor’s new clothes.

The dominant story in the news lately, the massive oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, is for the most part a transparent and readily obvious tale, in little need of pointing out the obvious. Everybody with a marginally functional brain knows that this is a disaster of global proportions since the Gulf Stream circles the world and regulates Earth’s climate, that the executives at British Petroleum are a bunch of lying sacks of shit and that the United States Government is reaping the dubious rewards of a policy of deregulation started in the 1970’s.

The only shock about all this is that it comes as a shock to many people. Why? Everything described above is a matter of public record, with the slide into deregulation having already resulted in hundreds of serious economic scandals, culminating in the Economic Disaster of 2008, The Gulf Spill of Economics that saw $7 trillion in wealth and millions of jobs and retirement incomes disappear, and threw the housing market into the disarray of fraudulent practices, widespread foreclosures and property abandonment.

There are still many dangerous criminal cowboys disguised as bankers running roughshod (and unregulated) over the world’s money supply. In a world where every convenience store has a security camera trained on the cash register to prevent theft, the idea that the honor system was just fine when it comes to the people handling all the money in the world seems pretty foolish in retrospect. Since the Era of Deregulation began, the financial industries have attracted a small army of thieves, gamblers and con artists whose crimes have made history’s biggest bank heists nickel and dime affairs by comparison.

Similarly, oil companies are led no longer by self-made wild cat entrepreneurs, engineers and energy specialists, but by corporate thugs with no conscience. There are over 3,500 off-shore oil rigs operating off the coastlines of America, 3,000 in the Gulf of Mexico, each with the potential to blow and spew just like the BP rig. Every one of them operates almost regulation-free, and the only surprise about the BP Spill is that it didn’t happen sooner, in spite of the almost comic assurance of Big Oil press agents.

Few are fooled by the posturing of Big Oil executives or the politicians that are in their pocket. One picture of a greasy pelican trying to lift itself out of the black sludge that used to be the blue sea like some dinosaur in the La Brea Tar Pits puts the whole thing in its proper perspective. This could happen 3,000 more times in the Gulf of Mexico alone, never mind the rest of the world.

An obvious conclusion to be drawn here is that regulation is a fact of life for everybody everywhere. They are called laws and individuals are punished for breaking them, whether the charge is jaywalking or murder. The average person would be punished for putting raw garbage onto public streets or pumping their sewage into a river that supplies their town drinking water.

The head of the household would be held personally responsible and forced to clean up their act and make reparations to those they had harmed and/or face a jail sentence. They would not be permitted to blame their child or the family dog, or convince the town elders to clean up their mess. Then again, the average person has not spent billions corrupting the political process so that they don’t have to answer for their crimes, whether it’s stealing your money or polluting your children’s future.

One other obvious conclusion (our specialty!) to be drawn from all this is that there is no viable technology in existence to deal with catastrophic undersea oil spills. That was apparent the moment BP started to solicit high school students for ideas (We’re wide open!) on how to cap the well, and even tried stuffing it with (!) golf balls and garbage at one point. Rumor has it that they are even in secret negotiations with Vince the Sham Wow! guy to sop up the oil and wring it out into tanker ships.

That’s like Henry Ford deciding to install brakes and steering wheels in his cars only after selling thousands and thousands of them, something that should have occurred to him before letting all those people put the pedal to the metal. Building mechanized vehicles that can operate at high speeds, just like the feat of sucking that vehicle’s fuel from a mile below the ocean’s surface with giant machines, is very impressive technology, but not that impressive unless you can stop the damned things and operate them safely. Sometimes the obvious is the most elusive solution of all.

This was a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), the world’s foremost organization for not interpreting anything, has been as busy as ever keeping track of reality. Our job is simple, to observe and report. Not so simple, however, is sifting through attempts to explain away reality with “alternate explanations,” in effect telling people that what we think we see is not what we see, but what we are told to see. Big difference. There are no alternate explanations to truth. For example, water is wet, and nothing anyone says makes it any less wet. It is water, and nothing else. With this in mind, researchers and analysts here at DOPOTO have come up with a useful guide to people and words to beware of when trying to identify the obvious the news.

Corporate Spokesperson: Professional liar. Once called press agents, corporate spokepeople are individuals hired for several unique abilities; the capacity to lie with a straight face, the art of speaking while saying nothing and the ability to make even the biggest bonehead error seem like a stroke of genius. There is no reason to hire a press agent if you wish to announce what is actually going on (the truth) as opposed to what you want people to think is going on (lies). Always consider who is doing the announcing before accepting what they say at face value.

Lawyer: See above

Politician: See above:

Cable TV Analyst: These people generally analyze nothing and use carefully selected and misleadingly edited news stories along with out-of-context quotes to bolster whatever political view they are selling. In other words, attempting to redefine reality to conform with their views, even if their opinion is that water is a dry substance.

Words and Phrases That Sound Like Something But Are Nothing: The following are commonly used words and phrases often brilliantly employed by the above-listed individuals that do the opposite of what language is designed for – to communicate clearly. The beauty of some of these things is that they look like something, or sound like something, but are not.

Unseen Market Forces At Work: The phrase “unseen market forces at work” is often used by business executives (or their press agents) to assign blame for their latest dismal failure, citing the economy as a whole rather than themselves as individuals as the culprit. It also implies that the speaker is in possession of some special knowledge or secret code that ordinary people do not possess, complex formulas like literacy and simple mathematics. When used by corporate CEOs and politicians attempting to explain why the economy is a runaway train with the gold robbed from its safe by desperadoes in Brooks Brothers suits and everyone else got fired from their jobs, it means: “we have no idea how any of this works either.”

Free Markets: This phrase simply means a desire on the part of wealthy individuals and corporations to have no rules or regulations to obey or taxes to pay. Researchers here at The Department have confirmed that most people wouldn’t mind having any rules or taxes either but still see the wisdom of three-strikes-and-you’re-out and other laws and regulations we have formulated to assure a relatively smooth-running society. In a world where cashiers at McDonald’s have cameras trained on the cash register to discourage theft, senior analysts at DOPOTO have concluded that it is not a bad idea to scrupulously regulate the people handling many billions of dollars more of other people’s money than the average McDonald’s cashier.

Alternate explanation: This means anything you want it to mean, which generally adds up to meaning nothing at all. It was invented by a defense attorney desperately trying to convince a jury of sane people that there was an alternate explanation for the 27 dismembered bodies buried in his client’s basement and his set of human skull soup bowls. Most alternate explanations work about as well as that one did.

Right Thinking American: Invented a week after America was invented, this meaningless phrase all at once covers the speaker in the American flag while identifying anyone who disagrees with them as a puppy-drowning traitor. Right Thinking Americans would do well to skip this phrase and concentrate on whatever it is that this person is demanding you agree with. It just might be the opposite of what you really believe.

Foreign Policy: In a nation where foreign policy changes every 4 or 8 years, this is another elastic phrase that can mean whatever the current administration wishes, whether explaining away invading another country by mistake, trying to slap tariffs on China to prevent our last remaining factory from relocating there or to justify our dear friendships with misogynistic tyrants in gowns whose sandbox nations just happen to be floating on a sea of petroleum. Foreign Policy often means whatever foreign misadventure the current president is up to at the expense of everyone else.

Underperformance: Not a real word, but one made up by executives in relation to their company’s dismal stock price in an attempt to blame their colossal failures on “unforeseen market forces.” Think of it this way: when a trapeze artist misses the trapeze and plunges 50 feet to the ground, he has seriously underperformed. Unlike elite corporate princes, however, the trapeze artist doesn’t get to console himself by awarding himself and his fellow trapeze artists billions of dollars of other people’s money as a bonus.

Performance Bonus: Grand theft on a monumental scale. A simple concept, earning a reward for outstanding performance, the bonus is as old as commerce itself. In corporate circles, however, the bonus has become a tool for stealing other people’s money, the stockholders’ in most cases, no matter what sort of performance is turned in, with corporate executives feeling entitled to a huge bonus on top of their already obscene salaries. Until recent years the highest paid executives earned 20 to 30 times more than the average worker. These days, the average CEO earns 200 times the median wage, and collects a bonus even if they fail. When greedy people answer to no one, there is only one possible outcome, the results are predictable and yes, blatantly obvious.

The Liberal (or Conservative) Agenda: This phrase implies that all conservatives, or liberals, or Democrats or Republicans or any other large group of people, have identical goals. Usually this “agenda” is referred to by opposition groups to suggest that there is some sort of vast conspiracy afoot. In reality, an elite team of researchers in The Department assigned to uncovering these mysterious “hidden agendas” have found that these groups are often in sharp disagreement within their own ranks and can barely reach a consensus on what kind of donuts to serve at their meetings, never mind planning global domination. See: Right Thinking American (above).

This was report from The Department of Pointing Out The Obvious.

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), in our only capacity, that of drawing attention to what should need no explanation, cannot help but notice that the nation of Canada has emerged briefly from its self-imposed exile to host the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. For two weeks, Canada will occupy a most unaccustomed position, the world spotlight. While many people were under the impression that Canada had entered some sort of International Witness Protection Program, in fact they are alive and, while not exactly kicking, which would be unseemly for a Canadian, breathing.

Senior Department Analysts have long been aware of Canada, even if much of the rest of world has not, and that seems to be just the way Canadians prefer it. For the second-largest nation on Earth, Canada has been remarkably anonymous, even to the point of insisting that their most talented and ambitious citizens leave the country to gain fame and success. The fact that they share a 3,000-mile border with the squeakiest wheel on the planet, The United States, has only served to strengthen their xenophobia and made them more determined to isolate themselves, even though their nation is the mirror image of America.

A dull, awkward and shy mirror image, to be sure, as if America consisted only of Minnesota and Wisconsin, but nearly identical in culture, architecture, political structure, language and diet. At least Minnesota gave the world Prince and Jesse Ventura, and Wisconsin… well, there’s Liberace and lots of cheese… but the point is made. They gave us, who, Celine Dion? Canada, for all it’s interesting history, breathtaking landscapes and potentially fascinating internal conflicts between French-speakers and Anglophiles, has been for over a century the dullest place on earth. DOPOTO researchers and analysts have confirmed this through extensive studies of the place, and have filed the requisite reports, that is when they could keep their eyes open.

So it seems that hosting the Winter Olympics would be a natural for Canada to gain her place on the world stage, being that much of that nation enjoys perpetual winter. Two staples of the Winter Games are sports invented by ice-bound Canadians, hockey and curling. Unfortunately, hockey has been assimilated and dominated by the United States and Russia, and curling is a bunch of people (!) pushing a stone around a sheet of ice with a broom. Very few people on Earth, including the participants in Curling, have any idea what the object of the game is other than to generate enough body heat to avoid freezing to death.

To add insult to tedium, a Canadian Olympic team hasn’t dominated the Winter Olympics for decades. That would be like Australia getting soundly defeated in Australian Rules Football again and again. Well, this year, the Canadian Olympic Committee has vowed to try to win more gold medals than any other nation. Unfortunately for them, however, no one on the Olympic Committee gets to compete, and most winter sports experts deem this an impossibility, and Canada is not even expected to medal in Curling. The games also opened with a tragedy, the death of a luge sledder practicing on a Luge Run designed by someone unfamiliar with the sport.

While the opening ceremonies were conducted under flags flown at half mast, technicians were earnestly duct-taping wresting mats from a local high school to the sharp steel columns that line the Luge Run. And so the “quiet competence” that Canadians were so proud of turns out to be another illusion on their part. At least they can go back to their “prosperous anonymity,” somewhat of a national motto, when the games are over and Canada once again enters the International Witness Protection Program and the rest of the world goes back to conjuring up fuzzy images of Canada involving maple syrup, mackinaws, moose, Royal Canadian Mounted Police and pictures of another country’s queen on their currency. Then, The Country That Wasn’t There will return to their accustomed place – out of sight, out of mind, and quietly shivering.

This was a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), in the course of performing our our only function, pointing out the emperor’s new clothes, has been perusing the various sensational news reports concerning the election of a single senator in Massachusetts. The Senate seat in question had belonged to the late Senator Teddy Kennedy for 47 years but was won by a Republican  candidate, a former naked male model named Scott Brown. Republicans are boasting that this is a strong rebuke to President Obama, while Democrats are panicking that they’ve lost their Senate “super-majority” and have to rethink their thinking.

What operatives from both political parties fail to remember is that the Democratic candidate, interim Senator Martha Coakley, completely misread her Massachusetts constituency by being completely out of touch with how they feel about the Boston Red Sox, going so far as to claim that ex-Boston World Series hero Curt Schilling was a Yankee fan. Almost every human being in America realizes how grave an error that is and that Red Sox fans are basically a few million potentially violent psychopaths. That is the only reason Ms. Coakley lost the election. You simply do not open your mouth about the Boston Red Sox anywhere in New England with inaccurate information, especially concerning the hated New York Yankees, who they watched win 26 World Championships in the 86 years from 1918 until 2004, when Boston finally won the World Series again.

The government was not toppled by the election of Mr. Brown, their overwhelming Democratic majority remains intact. Nobody is longing for the return of Bush The Younger and Shotgun Dick Cheney. As far as President Obama is concerned, what America is seeing is a young president learning on the job, by no means an unprecedented state of affairs. All our young presidents, Clinton, Kennedy and Theodore Roosevelt, went through the same tough initiation to the halls of power, suffering some initial setbacks and disappointments. Hopefully Mr. Obama will come out of these experiences the wiser and like his fellow young presidents become an effective and memorable leader.

Certainly Kennedy and Roosevelt left their indelible stamps on America, and Bill Clinton won two terms and presided over a time of peace and prosperity, no small achievement in this wicked world. The Scott Browns of this world pose no threat to President Obama or the Democratic agenda, and odds are that his will be a short time in the Senate when Massachusetts Democrats wake up and run a properly Red Sox-sensitive candidate next time around. This election represents no snowballing trend, no sea change in American politics, merely a bonehead move by Massachusetts Democrats who assumed that Kennedy’s Senate seat was theirs by default. Complacency is to blame, and the Boston Red Sox factor. A slap in the face to complacency is never a bad thing. Nor is reminding politicians that their hometown baseball teams mean more to Americans than their Senators.

This was a report from The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), at the risk of rendering ourselves obsolete, has prepared this report to show the public exactly what it is we do. What we do, as our title so blatantly announces, is point out what is readily apparent in this world, in spite of the very many earnest efforts to obscure the facts and explain them in ways that make no sense at all. For example, if you think it is true that the real reason that President Bush The Younger invaded Iraq was that Iraq posed a danger to America, you have not been paying attention to reality, but instead have been  listening to people who rely on you to ignore what your own senses tell you.

Which is odd, since when it is very cold outside, few of us wear bermuda sorts and a tank top when we go about our business simply because some people insist it is a hot day and that we are very much mistaken about what we are experiencing. Our eyes inform us of the foot of snow on the ground, our ears register the howling wind and our sense of touch reminds us it freezing cold, and so we bow to the painfully obvious and dress warmly, or remain indoors if possible. Perhaps we wonder what those people were thinking when they insisted the day was a balmy one, since you are certain that they would not send their own children out into a blizzard dressed for the beach. Now you wonder their angle is.

Unless they are mentally ill people who lie just for the practice or for no reason at all, your senses tell you that they have an ulterior motive. Whether or not you are curious enough to discover that motive, you dismiss their convoluted arguments from your mind as ridiculous and completely contradictory to what is plain as day. Researchers here at DOPOTO have established that most human beings are very intelligent and quite adept at responding to external stimuli, in other words, recognizing the obvious. On the other hand, we are also capable of abstract thought and complex problem solving, and too often give liars the benefit of the doubt when they are lying very sincerely. We figure they are engaged in teaching us a more subtle truth, an abstract concept that has somehow escaped us, and that our senses have fooled us somehow.

Senior Department analysts, however, have determined that 99 times out of 100, what seems to be true is true and no alternate explanation exists. Our senses and our advanced brains are not lying to us, playing tricks on us or trying to fool us. That would be others attempting to do that, to circumvent our intelligence, and for want of better terms, to short-circuit our bullshit detectors. There are many areas of human endeavor dedicated wholly to lying, not all of them dishonorable. The arts of fiction writing, storytelling, music, painting, creative photography, sculpture, drama, comedy and acting, for example, are sophisticated ventures designed to use illusion, fiction, exaggeration and abstraction as vehicles to entertain, to challenge, to explore and to gain valuable human insights.

A fine illustration of this deception is that  famous painting of a tobacco pipe by Rene Magritte with the caption below it stating: “This is not a pipe.” In this Department’s opinion this a masterful illustration of the nature of art and a perfect example of stating the obvious. Many of mankind’s best minds have been dedicated to these fine arts of illusion and deception, but the deception and illusion are always accepted as part and parcel of the experience by patrons of these various arts. No one looks at a Picasso for anatomy lessons, or expect ducks to talk to us because they do in cartoons. For art we suspend disbelief, a two-way street beneficial to both audience and artist.

As to the other people who dedicate themselves to lying and obscuring what is obvious? Theirs is a less-than-honorable calling and the reason that The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious was founded. When the public relations professionals hired by industrialists carefully explain how wonderfully beneficial it will be to working Americans to eliminate their jobs in order to maximize profits for the already extremely wealthy, no one is under any obligation to treat their words with anything but scorn. When politicians wax eloquent about the necessity of traveling to exotic locations at the expense of corporate lobbyists to play golf and sail in yachts while studying poverty, why would anyone accept this as anything other than what it so plainly appears to be: bribery? An examination of this particular legislator’s voting record in regard to laws beneficial to the corporation that paid for the trip would be an educational insight to the art of noting the obvious.

When someone starts a war, there is almost always an underlying profit motive involved, and all the rhetoric, the nationalistic blathering about pride and righteousness or the punishment of evildoers is only a smokescreen to make us feel better about burying our children in the cause of profits for the very wealthy who do not send themselves or their own children into harm’s way. And when we are told that poverty, illiteracy, genocide, hatred and starvation are only regrettable but inevitable consequences of human civilization, what is that but an attempt to assuage our own consciences?

When you look outside your window and there is a foot of snow in the ground, you know instantly that it is a very cold day and traveling will be dangerous. This cannot be reasoned away or explained in a different light by anyone. We here at The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious urges everyone to apply these lessons to all they they see, hear, smell, touch and taste. Your intelligent mind and your keen senses are not wrong, nor are they playing games with you. There’s no shortage of people attempting to convince you otherwise.

This was a report form The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious.

The Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious (DOPOTO), in our continuing mission to go where everyone has gone before, has been perusing the news reports for kernels of truth and obvious conclusions. On Wall Street, banking executives whose corporations have repaid their federal bailout money are applying for gun permits in record numbers. It seems that this is the time of year when they traditionally collect tremendous bonuses, only this year they feel that the general public will strongly resent this practice. It seems that the deep recession the nation’s banks caused is only over for bankers, with the rest of the nation still in dire financial straits.

The bank executives rely on these multi-million dollar helpings of other people’s money in order to continue being proper bank executives, which in their eyes entails having mounds and mounds of money, enough to last several dozen lifetimes. While some say this is an unrealistic expectation in today’s terrible economy, the executives disagree. Hence the guns, so they can continue to flaunt their fabulous wealth in an increasing poor world of their making, perhaps a drop over-optimistically figuring they can get the drop on the more experienced desperadoes. On a related note, DOPOTO researchers have determined that in general, only two types of people carry guns; cops and robbers. The Department notes that bank executives are not cops.

Speaking of guns, it seems that President Obama is sending 30,000 more people who carry guns everywhere they go into Afghanistan. Those would be American soldiers, and they are on a dual mission; to kill Taliban rebels and to train a new Afghanistan Army. Afghanistan needs a new army because American soldiers destroyed their old one. Senior analysts at DOPOTO actually declared the war over when that happened, since one army annihilating another army is the dictionary definition of winning a war. When U.S. forces took the next step and dismantled the Afghani government, that was declared an even more decisive victory.

While we cannot be certain what the thinking is in Washington, it seems that America, in a new twist in the annals of warfare, refused to accept victory. And so 8 years later we remain in Afghanistan, training the replacements to the army we destroyed, in order to fight the insurgency movement our continued presence in their country has created. A decidely odd state of affairs, especially considering that we invaded Afghanistan only to kill or capture Osma bin Laden and his al Qaeda gang, who have since moved next door to Pakistan, leaving America with a destroyed Medieval nation on its hands, not really sure what to do with it.

Scientists point out that 99% of species that have ever lived have gone extinct, the obvious conclusion (our specialty) being that life is a difficult and precarious proposition on this planet. Our own species is the only species to know that, and so we hope that the old saying about being forewarned is being forearmed helps us avoid becoming just another footnote in the fossil record. And now some people are starting to give serious credence to the Mayan civilization’s prediction that the end of mankind and the world itself will come in the year 2012. Department researchers cannot help but point out that the Mayans came to an end a very long time ago, and if they were any good at predicting the future they would have foresaw the Spaniards, who ushered Maya into extinction in a big hurry.

End of Days scenarios are also popular with some born-again Christians, who are fond of recounting their version of that almost indecipherable and hallucinogenic book of the Bible, Revelations. Somehow they are looking forward to “The Rapture,” the trumpet-blaring gathering of saints, angels and Jesus after the world is completely destroyed in a battle with the Anti-Christ, seven-headed beasts and other highly imaginative horrors, none of which are actually mentioned specifically in the manual that supposedly contains all their religious beliefs, The Bible. It seems that the Bible leaves much to the imagination, and that is one area where human beings excel; making stuff up. Nothing like augmenting an already convoluted story with our own personal touches to really confuse people.

What DOPOTO analysts have concluded about this phenomenon is that simply, some people enjoy this sort of thing. While most people feel it is a bit silly, the general consensus is that it’s a harmless enough hobby, not really much different than bowling, stamp collecting or building model airplanes, and will have the same impact as these endeavors on how and when the world ends. None at all.

This was a report from the Department Of Pointing Out The Obvious