IJMC - Pecans, Partitions, and Irish Cream

I need to keep from doing stupid things with my computer. Doing stupid 
things with my computer keeps me from doing other stupid things with my 
computer. For those of you following along in the sage, I have been 
trying to set up three operating systems on one hard drive. Allow me to 
say hello world, I have done it. Windows NT 4.0, Windows 98, and Red Hat 
Linux 6.1 all booting off of one hard drive. A piece of pecan pie and a 
glass of irish cream to celebrate the final touch...until I transfer 
everything over to the new drive, I can now boot a fourth operating 
system, my old copy of Windows NT. Yeehaw. Now, for those of you who have 
not fallen asleep...enjoy Michael Moore's final tribute for 1999.   -dave



---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 1999 23:17:02 EST
From: TVNatFans@aol.com
Reply-To: Michael Moore's newsletter <MICHAELMOORE@LISTSERV.AOL.COM>
To: MICHAELMOORE@LISTSERV.AOL.COM
Subject: A Letter from the 20th Century to the 21st Century Sent by Michael Moore

December 31, 1999

A Letter from the 20th Century to the 21st Century
Sent by Michael Moore

Dear Twenty-first Century,

Greetings from the 20th Century! Now, let's get one
thing straight from the beginning: We did the best
we could. We played the hand that was dealt to us,
we made our bed then slept in it, and we loved the
one we're with. What else can a century do?

Now it is your turn, to take over from where we left off.
All we ask is that you not judge us too harshly.

It is true that during the 20th Century we created, for
the first time ever, the means to blow up the entire
planet. But, look at the bright side -- we didn't blow it
up! Instead, we used the splitting of the atom -- and it's
cousin, radiation -- to pop our popcorn, illuminate our
wristwatches, and cleanse our food products. Although
we have left you with a few thousand missiles, armed
and ready to launch, we're confident you will figure out
some way to either put them to good use, or dispose
of them in their proper recyclable container.

I don't know any nice way to put this -- and I know
it doesn't look good on paper -- but, yes, we did
slaughter more of each other in the 20th Century than
in any previous hundred-year period. You have to
admit -- that took some initiative! I mean, to beat out
the bubonic plague century was no easy feat! Even
more interesting, unlike past holocausts, much of the
carnage in the 20th Century was initiated not by
heathens and barbarians, but by some of the most
intelligent people on the planet. Danke sehr!

But, hey, how 'bout TV! We came up with that! And
frozen foods in a box -- we invented that, too. Don't
forget jumbo jets -- and jumbo shrimp! In the 20th
Century, we figured out how to make ANYTHING
jumbo sized! The 20th Century also replaced the
humans who used to help us on the telephone with
a robotic voice that sounds just like, uh... just like,
uh... just like a robot!


Did I mention TV? Endless hours of entertainment,
complete with built-in cues so we knew when to laugh,
and a jiggly camera so we knew when to feel "tension."
We even got a whole network on TV devoted to showing
us fast-cutting videos set to music so that -- get this --
we actually KNEW what the performers were thinking
when they wrote their songs! This saved us a lot of time
we would have otherwise wasted trying to use our
imagination!


One thing we are confident of is that you will remember
our century as the Golden Age of Big Business. It's
been an era when the businessman has come into his
own  -- and he's ended up owning just about everything
and everyone! The early 1900s got off to a great start. If
you had enough money, you could buy up whatever you
wanted, obliterate the competition, fix prices, and
smash unions. True, there were a few of what we call
"speed bumps" along the way. Certain radicals started
breaking up monopolies, got laws passed protecting
workers' rights, and actually tried to hold companies
liable for their actions.

Well, there's nothing like a great depression and a
couple of world wars to sober the people up and set
them straight. A few other distractions, like a
"worldwide communist conspiracy" and Prozac also
helped to pacify the populace.

Did I mention television?

By century's end, the captains of industry had
supplanted elected governments as the ultimate
power. Competition was eliminated, monopolies
reigned, unions were near-extinct, and the citizens
stopped voting. They stopped voting because they
figured out that the two political parties on the ballot
were really the same party (though one of them did
seem to have a nicer face!) The two parties were
bought and paid for by the rich, the top one percent of
the population which owned about 90% of the wealth.

So the other 99% of the citizenry decided they had
better things to do with their time than participate in a
farce. Farce, a huge hit in the 1800s, never played well
in the 20th Century.

You will probably wonder why, then, we kept calling
our nations "democracies." This is a legitimate question.
One that I wish you would not ask. Unfortunately, we
invented videotape in our century, which means we have
left behind many visual images of our citizens running
around all slaphappy saying ridiculously silly things like,
"We are free! Free! Free! Free, I say! We live in a
DEMOCRACY!" Please explain to future generations
when they view these tapes that we meant well and we
had to come up with something to justify paying our
taxes and sending our sons off to die for what was
never going to be theirs. People in your next century
will ask, incredulously, "What delusional drug were
these people on? Not a single one of their
`representatives' represented THEM, for crying out loud!
If the richest one percent had both parties and all the
politicians, how in the hell did everyone else think they
were living in a democracy?"  Ask them, please, to go
gentle on us -- we know we've made an embarrassing
spectacle of ourselves -- and to resist, as best they
can, laughing at us in the same way we laughed at
the last century for using bloodsucking leeches to
cure their sick.

The United States of the 20th Century seemed like an
odd duck in many ways, even though we were the
self-declared Leader of the World. With more wealth
and resources than anywhere on earth, we let 40 million
of our people live in poverty -- with 10 million of them
suffering from some form of hunger. About 45 million of
our people had no means to health care. No other
industrialized country treated their people in this
manner. There was a higher literacy rate in Cuba than
in the USA, more children were immunized in Jamaica
and Kenya than in the USA, kids were better in math
in Jordan than in the USA ... well, after a while, you'd
think someone would have asked the Americans,
"Just what in God's name makes you people #1?"

I'll tell you what our secret was. French fries. NOBODY
made 'em like we did. Even if you went into an
American-owned establishment like a McDonald's in
Paris or Munich, they STILL didn't taste like they
tasted here in the USA! Mmmm. Just writing about it
makes me want to "Biggie Size It" right now! Personally,
I think it was the lard -- we just didn't have any
kerpunctions about slapping in as large a chunk as we
could fit in the fryer. Sure, we may have ended up a bit
"larger" than other humans around the world, (we ended
up nearly 30% bigger than we were in 1900), but do you
want the Earth's Only Remaining Superpower to look all
weak and scrawny? And consider how we adapted to our
new size  -- our American ingenuity led us to build huge
automobiles called "S.U.V.s," our movie theaters
now have "stadium seating," and nobody shops for
a small size in the men's section at Wal-Mart. No
wonder foreigners and terrorists were so jealous of
us!

The other thing that kept America ruling the world for
the latter half of the century was our arsenal of
weapons -- and I mean the ones in our bedrooms!
Two hundred million adults with 240 million registered
guns! And just to show everyone how proficient we
became with these firearms, we killed 35,000 of EACH
OTHER, every single year, with our OWN guns, proving
to the world that we will shoot at anything coming our
way. You have to admit, that's quite a sacrifice just to
show how brave and determined we are. Or let me put
it another way -- you want to kill a Beatle in America?
No problem! Easy as saying, "I'll take that Magnum in
the window!"  You want to kill a Beatle in Britain? BIG
problem -- they don't let their citizens, even the
deranged ones, own a handgun! Not even for sport!
So, if you want to off someone in merry ol' England,
you have to use a damn kitchen knife. No wonder
they lost their friggin' empire!

So as we enter the new century and the new
millennium, let us give ourselves a pat on the back
(even though the new century and the new millennium
don't actually begin for another year -- but who gives a
rat's ass! If WE say it's the new millennium, IT IS, and
if WE say the water is safe to drink, IT IS, and if we
say Bob Hope was funny, well, dammit, we're Number
One, so we can say whatever we very well please!
Sure half the world still doesn't have safe drinking
water, but are you people in the 21st Century going
to look at the glass as half-empty or half-full, 'cause
I'm a half-full kind of guy myself, and my glass of
water came right out of a plastic bottle from France
and it looks pretty darn clean to me!).

Yes, you, the people of the 21st Century, can send a
man, or woman, to Mars, thanks to us and a number
of our missing NASA landers. You can find the cure
for cancer, thanks to us giving you so many reasons
to. And you can figure out how to make these damn
cell phones keep a signal for more than 30 seconds.
Of course, that will cut into the phone companies'
profits (they've made billions off the most overheard
line of the late 1900s: "Hello?... Hello?... Hello?...
Can you hear me?... Hello?... Oh, there you are!
Uh... Hello?... Hello?... Dammit, I lost him!").

Profit was the reason to get out of bed in the 20th
Century. Success was measured by how much cash
we made. By the end of our century, the biggest
financial rewards went to the people who sat around
all day playing with their money, moving it around in
one big guessing game. If you were a good guesser,
you made more money. Gone were the days when
you made your money from your hard work, your
ingenuity, or that new invention you created. You
were no longer rewarded for discovering cures or
solar systems nor were you recognized for your
generosity.  A person's worth was determined by
how they did with their mutual funds as opposed to
how they did with their kids. A candidate was
guaranteed a public office if he had raised the
most money, as opposed to winning that office by
raising the REAL issues and gaining the public's
trust. A movie was no longer judged on its artistic
merit or its ability to entertain, challenge, or lift the
human spirit -- all that mattered was who was #1
at the box office.

I know I keep mentioning that term "Number One." It
seems to have been an obsession of ours. Maybe
you can correct that in the next 100 years. Like, how
about giving some credit to the SECOND and THIRD
richest men in the world? Whoever hears about them?
All we heard about was Bill Gates, Bill Gates, Bill
Gates and how his wealth "was more than the
combined assets of the poorest 100 million
Americans!" Now, if we would have just paid more
attention to the 2nd and 3rd richest men, we'd know
that their combined wealth with Mr. Gates was more
than the combined gross domestic product of the
bottom 146 countries! How's that for some numbers?
Try to top those in the Twenty-first Century!

Maybe you will.

Here's to the next 100 Years -- may you take
what we have given you.

And forget most of it. Except the french fries and
Ghandi and Dr. King.


Yours,
Michael Moore
December 31, 1999, 11:00pm EST
At the 45th Paralell, exactly half-way between
the Equator and the North Pole

(You may forward this to other inhabitants of the 21st Century)