Stoned Ideas

An Easy Guide to Political Ideologies Using Two Cows.

FEUDALISM: You have two cows. Your lord takes some of the milk.
FASCISM: You have two cows. The government takes both, hires you to take care of them, and sells you the milk.
PURE COMMUNISM: You have two cows. Your neighbours help you take care of them, and you all share the milk.
APPLIED COMMUNISM: You have two cows. You have to take care of them, but the government takes all the milk.
MILITARISM: You have two cows. The government takes both and drafts you.
DICTATORSHIP: You have two cows. The government takes both and shoots you. The government's wife turns your cows into thousands of pairs of shoes.
TINPOT DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. The government takes both, shoots you and sends the cows to Zurich.
PURE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbours decide who gets the milk.
REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. Your neighbours pick someone to tell you who gets the milk.
SINGAPOREAN DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. The government fines you for keeping two unlicensed farm animals in an apartment.
AMERICAN DEMOCRACY: The government promises to give you two cows if you vote for it. After the election, the President is impeached for speculating in cow futures. The press dubs the affair "Cowgate". The cows sue you for breach of contract.
BUSH DEMOCRACY: The son of the last President promises to protect you and your two cows under an impenetrable "missile shield" if you vote for him. You vote for his rival but he still gets in. The economy grinds to a halt, your pastures are turned over to oil exploration companies, and both of your cows, formerly valued at millions on the NASDAQ, are sold by your investors to recoup their tech-stock losses. The Military-Industrial complex still receives billions in corporate welfare to develop cow-based defences ("fetchez la vache") that don't work but antagonise your neighbours.
BRITISH DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. You feed them sheep's brains and they go mad. The government does not do anything.
EUROPEAN DEMOCRACY: You have two cows. At first, the government regulates what you can feed them and when you can milk them. Then it Pays you not to milk them. After that it takes both, shoots one, milks the other and pours the milk down the drain. Then it requires you to fill out forms accounting for the missing cows.
PURE CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell one and buy a bull.
APPLIED CAPITALISM: You ship both of your cows to the developing world and pay peanuts to have them milked there by children. You then ship the milk back to your own country and pay expensive PR companies millions to create a happy smiley image for your Burger Corporation and do very, very well.
HONG KONG CAPITALISM: You have two cows. You sell three of them to your publicly-listed company, using letters of credit opened by your brother-in-law at the bank, then execute a debt/equity swap with associated general offer so that you get all four cows back, with a tax deduction for keeping five cows. The milk rights of six cows are transferred via a Panamanian intermediary to a Cayman Islands company secretly owned by the majority shareholder, who sells the right to all seven cows' milk back to the listed company. The annual report says that the company owns eight cows, with an option on one more. Meanwhile, you kill the two cows because of bad feng shui.
TOTALITARIANISM: You have two cows. The government takes them and denies they ever existed. Milk is banned.
POLITICAL CORRECTNESS: You are associated with (the concept of 'ownership' is a symbol of the phallocentric, warmongering, intolerant past) two differently-aged (but no less valuable to society) bovines of non-specified gender.
COUNTERCULTURE: Wow, dude, there's like...these two cows, man. You have got to have some of this milk.
SURREALISM: You have two giraffes. The government requires you to take harmonica lessons.
WICCA: You have a cow and a bullock. You meet eight times a year to perform rites that celebrate the cow seasons: Covering, Grazing, Calving and Weaning, plus the two Solstices and the two Bovinoxes. You pay homage to the Earth Heifer and the Long Horned God.
HIERARCHICAL HIGH MAGIC: You have two cows, you declare yourself the leader of an ancient secret order called the Bubulus Order of the Golden Pail with roots back to the beginning of time. You initiate your cows into the first grade and tell them that with the appropriate practice they can gain access to great ancient wisdom and power over the physical universe. As your cows progress through the grades they read the same books you did, start to get their own ideas and form a splinter group called the Argentum Mulgere. After much unseemly argument you end up in court over the rights to the secret papers of the order which by now have been published in a dozen new age books anyway.

Whatever happened to the dinosaurs?

Many years ago the editor of The Stone was in a meeting of one of the many strange magical groups he has been associated with. During the evening, no doubt amid sensible amounts of beer and wine etc., one guy present gave his explanation of what had happened to the dinosaurs and at the same time explained all the world's UFO sightings.

His suggestion was that the reason the dinosaurs had disappeared with such apparent rapidity was not because they had been wiped out by a meteor strike but because they had built time machines and gone to live in the future. The UFO sightings some people see today are the occasions when the dinosaurs were travelling through time and ended up in our time presumably by accident. He told this story with all seriousness and we were unable to get him to admit to a wind-up. The idea seems to be that time travel is no less preposterous than the idea that it is possible to break the light speed barrier and thus travel across the galaxy. There may be other details to his theory but it was a long time ago and you would probably be better off working the rest out for yourself.

Smiley Faces

It has often been said the British Prime Minister Tony Blair, much in the news lately with his globe trotting antics, is said to smile rather more than is healthy. Has anybody noticed that his smile is exactly the same as that of Alfred E. Newman from Mad Magazine?

Curiously, since we put this link on the site, the smiley picture has dissapeared from the No. 10 Downing Street web site. Have we come to their attention? Are the Secret Police descending upon us as we speak, or is it just the Secret Chiefs that we hear knocking in the night? It matters not, as the link to Alfred E. Newman is sufficient to make the point. Now if the image of Alfred E. Newman was to dissapear we might call it a conspiracy.

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