‘Another Chuck’ takes a stab at writing satire
Guest Post
Note from Dan: Apparently ‘Another Chuck’ has been smoking some funny stuff. That’s the only explanation I can devise for the strange, satirical scenario he’s dreamed up below, in which I’m a senator from Virginia, hashing out some budget stuff with Vice President Joe Biden. Here goes — first with the “DC World” and then AC’s imagining of the “Real World.”
By ‘Another Chuck’
DC World:
WASHINGTON, DC — After 4 years of the United States operating without a budget, many citizens are becoming restless over Congress not doing its job. Vice President Joe Biden has been appointed head of a task force to get to the bottom of this. His first order of business is to interview the majority party members on the Senate budget committee.
Joe Biden (JB): Dano, please come in and have a seat.
Sen. Dano Casey, D-Virginia, enters the office and sits across the desk from Biden.
DC: Thank you Joe, and congratulations on your re-election.
JB: Thank you, Senator. Time is limited so let’s get down to business.
DC: Yes sir.
JB: Dano, we are fast approaching 4-years in the greatest country on Earth without having an operating budget. From your perspective, what is the problem?
DC: May I be frank, sir?
JB: By all means.
DC: The budget outline submitted to us from the White House is so far-fetched we don’t even know where to begin. Even Patty Murray, D-Washington, says we don’t have that kind of money to spend.
JB: I know, but we have to leave Obama out of this. You are aware we are taxing the rich more. Will that revenue help?
DC: Not really, sir. You see all that money and more is already earmarked to pay down Obamacare. We are eating up all revenue faster than we can get it in. Then we borrow more money so we can keep spending.
JB: Dammit, there just isn’t enough money to go around. Bernanke is going to print some more, but the people are catching on that printing money decreases the value of the dollar, and this is the 4th time we’ve done it. We’re in a tight spot, Dano. What do you think we should do?
DC: Sir, the only thing I can think of is to transfer the blame to the Republicans.
JB: But, won’t that be hard? Obama is President and we hold the majority in the Senate….but I do like the way you think! Can we get Boehner, too?
DC: Well sir, Boehner’s a long shot ….since he’s in the House. But I think we can pin this situation on Jeff Sessions and John Thune.
JB: Really, How?
DC: In 2006, both Sessions and Thune supported Bush’s Medicare Part D expansion (Note from Dan: So did Rep. Paul Ryan). Talk about a spending quagmire. Warner and I can label them the big spenders which will take the heat off us for a while.
JB: Brilliant! But, what about the budget?
Both men break-up laughing.
JB: Thanks, Dano. You are a valuable asset around here. I’m sure you will have a long and prosperous career in the Senate.
DC: Thank you, sir. And on behalf of my colleagues and me, thanks for keeping us out of that Obamacare program-Whew!
JB: No problem, Dano. Not on my watch!
Real World:
Debbie Meade, Publisher for the Roanoke Times calls Dano Casey in for a meeting:
DM: Dano, you have been late on 4 out 5 of your last assignments, and just flat out didn’t do one. The traffic on your blog is way down due to the new kinder and gentler approach you enacted.
DC: Well Debbie, Melissa Powell took space from me on a fluff piece and even Doughty ran some kind UVA feel-good article in the Metro section.
DM: Dan, Enough! You’re fired!
January 4, 2013 - 6:00 AM
An interesting piece of fiction.
AWESOME !!!
AC’s been on a tear lately, from his request that Ron May quantify imaginary numbers ( http://bit.ly/1382zk1 ) to whatever this is above. He’s obviously rolling in some primo exotics.
Yo, Chuck! You’re not the only one who does that stuff. Share the wealth, man, because whatever that stuff is, it’s worth the price.
I haven’t noticed any fall off in the traffic on this blog other than the wane of the election season “surge”. Basically, the only thing that has changed is the fact that we don’t call each other names anymore. Dan, how is the traffic doing since the new rules were enacted?
And what happened to Hollins-educated matt? Since nearly every sentence he wrote had some kind of personal insult in them, is he a casualty of the new civility rules?
Isn’t satire supposed to be reality-based and witty?
Dan demonstrating the “give em enough rope” theorem!
hey JM,
dan has omitted several of my posts, each of which was made with using real names.
Good stuff Another Chuck!!Enjoyed.
Gee Frank,
I wonder what we’ve missed.
Comment by Frank — January 4, 2013 @ 11:22 am
Perhaps it’s because many of your posts read like they were penned by a semi-literate fully-rabid howler monkey and you say the same thing over and over again. Why should you get bandwidth to say something that you’ve said half a dozen times already? I also believe that if you truly stood behind what you post and weren’t often just trying to stir the pot, you’d get a lot more air time.
Just take one day, my friend; one day to make a concerted effort to capitalize, punctuate and use proper syntax and grammar. I’m sure that even your bizarre, completely unsupported theories would be approved more often and get a lot more readership.
Honestly, when I see you going on a tear with “hey”s, no capitalization, 437 periods of ellipses and the complete decimation of the English language, I often just skip over your comments. I shouldn’t feel like I need a decoder ring to peruse Dan’s blog, man.
aw, c’mon, J.M. the posts of mine that dan trashed were very easy to read, and were responsibly germaine in addressing the oft-repeated bashing of Walmart which occurs rather frequently on dan’s blog.
“aw, c’mon, J.M. the posts of mine that dan trashed were very easy to read, and were responsibly germaine in addressing the oft-repeated bashing of Walmart which occurs rather frequently on dan’s blog.”
–Comment by Frank
The germane posts I approved, Frank. The ones I trashed were not.
It is Dan’s blog and he can trash what he likes. No one has forced attendance here.
well, dan, that’s only half the story, isn’t it!
Ok, let’s change the subject!
Hey Dan,
Why don’t you explain to the good folks who make $50k in annual salary how good it is that the libs’ quest to “soak the rich” put the $50k earners’ right in obama’s tax increase cross-hairs?
Please explain how much more painful the tax-rate increase will be on the wealthy, vs. the pain which the $1,000 tax increase will have on the $50k earners.
Frank, your opinion of “easy to read”, and “responsibly germaine” are just that. You have a track record. Sight unseen, I think Dan is right for that reason.
“I haven’t noticed any fall off in the traffic on this blog other than the wane of the election season “surge”. Basically, the only thing that has changed is the fact that we don’t call each other names anymore.”
“Perhaps it’s because many of your posts read like they were penned by a semi-literate fully-rabid howler monkey”
J M is my new favorite poster.
Frank, I often feel like I push the limits around here, but I’ve worked to switch from direct metaphor to open simile when describing someone or their actions. The English language is full of subtleties and nuance; being able to insult someone without them knowing that you’re insulting them is an art. Being able to get that same person to actually agree with your insult borders on sublime.
Your opinion of whether a comment is germane or not is irrelevant; it’s not your blog. Dan is incredibly generous with his personal time that he devotes to this blog – a blog that doesn’t earn him a dime. I imagine it’s often like babysitting two dozen mealy-mouthed, disrespectful little brats for free. If you don’t like it, start your own blog. Until then, you’re complaining about a free lunch, buddy.
Dan demonstrating the “give em enough rope” theorem!
Comment by Dave Gresham — January 4, 2013 @ 10:47 am
And an apt demonstration it was! Too funny, Dave.
hey JM,
I agree, dans’ the decider on his blog.
I do think it’s a shame that he’s choosing to not allow any parallel be drawn between Walmart, and a major media company here in Roanoke. I’m empathetic about the repetitiveness of some things on dan’s blog, and only mention what he won’t allow me to mention, when I respond to lib-comments concerning Walmart….which seem to be pretty boringly frequent, ya know.
I do find Dave’s comment funny, Jason. But he is even more hilarious with his 911 truther routine.
Well Chuck, WTC 7 was imploded. This is a fact. Therefore, we have not been told the truth. You need to quit feeding from the crotch of billionaires (mainstream media news) and learn to think for yourself, even though it requires courage sometimes (when you find yourself standing in the minority, or alone). Here is the video that proves WTC 7 was imploded: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZEvA8BCoBw
And how about posting under your real name? Surely you have the courage for that at your age?
I hope you have something better than that as evidence, Mr. Gresham, because the video you provided debunks itself.
At 2:34, the collapse starts on the already-damaged corner of the WTC7. The video is shot from the non-damaged side of the building, but you can see the collapse beginning as the upper left part of the building begins to buckle. You can even see the structural faults progressing across the building – the windows blow out in a line like a crack across the face of the building. Corners are a pretty crucial to tall buildings, in case you don’t know. The critical failure of the building doesn’t occur until 2:42, eight seconds after the first sign of collapse.
Now I’ve watched a lot of demolitions, both in person and on television, but I have never seen a building take eight seconds from detonation until critical failure unless it was a botched job. Nor have I ever seen a controlled collapse begin on a corner; in almost all demolitions, including the ones in the video that they used for comparison, the building collapses inward, beginning in the middle, breaking into a saddle shape as it falls. WTC7 doesn’t achieve that until eight seconds after the initial signs of failure.
Causing a building to collapse is not hard. You just pick the right spot to strike and let gravity do the rest. 10 million tons of falling debris from above gives you pretty good odds of hitting one of those spots. Think of it this way:
You have a human pyramid, stacked five rows high. Though the weight is evenly distributed across the bottom row, the stability of the pyramid depends on all of that row staying rigid. If you kick the arms out from under the person on the end of the row, what happens? Gravity does the rest of the work and brings the whole thing down. The structural weight passes down the line like a zipper, the load growing as it unzips until the foundation gives way. When you’re watching the collapse from a distance, the top two rows of people still appear to fall straight down, even though it was the corner that failed.
It’s been over a decade and even the Loizeaux’s have disavowed this junk pseudo-science. The people that run this country can’t even keep their personal sexual affairs secret; do you seriously think that they could pull off something that involves that many people and caused that much death and manage to keep it secret? They can’t even balance a freaking budget!
This – http://bit.ly/Wgai9F – tends to do some pretty major damage to a building that carries much of it’s weight on it’s outer walls.
This – http://bit.ly/13aoYxl – is not conducive to keeping a 47-story building standing against the only force in the universe that is more powerful than light.
The towers falling were a lot like the column collapse of a volcanic eruption. When the force of the eruption (in this comparative, the structural integrity of the building) is exceeded by the weight of the ejecta (in both cases, the force of gravity + mass), the entire column collapses in on itself. The resulting debris is piled and pushed as the force of additional debris collapses upon it into a torus-shaped ring traveling outward at speeds in excess of 100 meters per second. This forcible rush of heated air, dust, and debris can carry heavy chunks of material with it, turning them into thousands of untethered wrecking balls, damaging anything in it’s wake.
In the case of WTC 7, many of the lower floors were literally decimated with this type of debris. With one corner already missing from the 18th floor down and many of the lower floors turned into Swiss cheese, gravity only had to do what she does – apply her ever-unrelenting pressure.
Even the largest stars in the universe can’t win against gravity. Much like these conspiracy theories, they collapse under their own weight. There’s a certain irony in that.
Dave, what you done is gather snipits of information to support a bizarre left-wing fantasy that Bush/Cheney were behind the attack on 911. I don’t believe you are necessarily exhibiting courage,but your theory in my opinion exhibits lunacy. Although I find Obama to be distasteful in terms of his policy, I would never accuse him of hating his country to the point of wanting 3000 of his fellow citizens to die for his political gain. Nor would I accuse any US president of having that much evil.
Dave Gresham, I generally respect you, but the truther stuff is just too much.
The video speaks for itself JM. You should watch it. If you have watched, then try listening this time (to the experts). Independent arctitects and engineers say it was imploded. Government employees say it wasn’t… and then sealed over 3,000 files.
As for your explanation of the events, they are completely false and illogical, though you have a whirlwind of words to help sell it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZEvA8BCoBw is the link to watch.
I know I cannot have the last word with you, so go ahead and reply and we’ll end this communication.
Frank, Dan actually didn’t delete your all-too-frequent posts parroting the exact same nonsense you virtually regurgitate here; he just got narcolepsy from your broken record shtick and dozed off before he could approve them. Your posts tend to have that effect after you tilt at another windmill for like the fiftieth time. Something to be said for brevity but I guess you would have learned that concept in English Composition 101 had you gone to college.
Dave Gresham@23
“The video speaks for itself JM”
No it doesn’t. It’s a bunch edited and cherry picked assertions that attempt to advance an absolutely delusional set of beliefs about one of our nations’s greatest tragedies.
For anyone who wants to go a little deeper than Ed Asner on youtube:
http://www.debunking911.com/pull.htm
or
http://conspiracies.skepticproject.com/articles/911/building-seven/
It’s amazing to me how easy it is to google any opposing point of view, but how infrequently someone advancing an amazing claim fails to do so.
#23 Another Chuck, that’s something you and I agree on. I didn’t like Bush or Cheney but I can’t believe that either of them could be that evil.
I used your very own video against you, Mr. Gresham. That is why I cited the timestamps of the collapse within that very video. I have indeed watched the video (long before you ever linked it here) and listened to the experts. I’ve also watched plenty of other experts who disagree with your experts. I don’t know any experts personally nor do I claim to be one myself, but I do know structures. Construction is what I do for a living and I’ve been doing it for twenty years.
I’ve also dropped and dismantled almost as many to the ground as I’ve built to the sky. I know what I see on your own video and I know what I’ve seen through my own independent research. All I offer is my opinion, just as you do. We are both entitled to our respective positions.
I would respectfully ask for you to clarify how my explanations were “completely false and illogical”. If you have any kind of refutation as to the evidence that I point out on your own video, please present it. If something I have claimed is false, please provide your proof. Given my extensive background in the construction/demolition field, either you are accusing me of intentionally presenting false information or you’re telling me that what I see with my own eyes isn’t real. Surely a gentleman such as yourself would answer to making such a bold charge.
” The people that run this country can’t even keep their personal sexual affairs secret; do you seriously think that they could pull off something that involves that many people and caused that much death and manage to keep it secret? They can’t even balance a freaking budget!”
This is where I end up. No way something this huge stays quiet for 10+ years. Also, when you consider that the same cabal who put 9/11 together subsequently went on to orchestrate our less-than-stellar outings in Iraq and Afghanistan, it seems unlikely.
I don’t think Bush is fhat evil. I’d put nothing past Cheney.
I am not a “9/11 truther” however, after the “Northwoods” incident, I can see why people would be skeptical of government complicity on some level in anything that happens. I do not believe we have the truth of Benghazi’S CIA Operation either, nor much else they do, but I do not call that conspiracy.
It is beyond doubt that the Obama “birther conspiracy” has BY FAR more prominent and more in quantity of right wing politicians who “support” it, than pols and prominent people from the left have “supported” the “9/11 conspiracy”. FWIW, I do not think the 9/11 conspiracy was as much “political” as it was people trying to grasp such a horrendous event.
http://scottsommers.wordpress.com/
http://www.sixwise.com/newsletters/07/02/28/the-9-most-shocking-conspiracy-theories-that-turned-out-to-be-true.htm
#23 Another Chuck — January 5, 2013 @ 3:26 pm, in your oh so gracious “faith” that President Obama’s actions would not rise to “hating his country to the point of wanting 3000 of his fellow citizens to die for his political gain“, do you believe that Reagan knew about and sanctioned “Iran/Contra”, or Bush knew about and sanctioned the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity, or refused to listen to any intel against invading Iraq? Do you believe EVERYTHING goes all the way to the top or nowhere at all?