The Celestial Navigator

The Bleating of Barack Obama....

2012-01-25T13:49:00.000-08:00

The Sorry State of our (Dis)Union

Last night, I heard something sincerely pathetic. I heard a man beg for his job on national TV.

Understand something. I detest reality-TV; it gave us Snooki and added “G-T-L” to the vernacular. It gave us Maury Povich and Jerry Springer, who from their not-so-rareified digs in the same studio in Connecticut, gave us “Who be my baby daddy?”, and “When it comes to Little Baby X, Cletus, you ARE the father!” That said, last night's escapade was one of the saddest pieces of reality-TV I've seen.

I’ll admit, President Obama tried to take the high road – last night, we heard the ‘statesman’ persona speak, in contrast to the goat-rodeo going on in the Great Traveling Republican Tent-Revival and Debate Circus – but once you peel back the onion just a bit, you’ve got pure shuck-‘n-jive.

Oh. There was ‘hope’ and ‘change’ involved, too.

Still in all, last night's speech was pure reality-TV. Through all the tap-dancing, it’s easy to forget how completely fragile his tenure in office really is, especially when watching that rodeo on the other side of things; admittedly, he looks good when the current crop of Republicans is considered. Still, last night I watched Obama give what may likely be the last major speech of his political life before he fades into obscurity and a well-heeled government-pension-with-perks. Why?

Because he doesn’t get it.

He doesn’t get that the nation is mean. Angry, and mean. Ten years of war; five years of recession, thirty years of other chicanery plus unemployment, homelessness and general national despair will do that to people.

He doesn’t get that we’re stupid. Having abandoned education, it’s small wonder that we have Tea Party types who can’t spell; have no idea what a ‘socialist’ is and less idea of how the government works. They're the same mob who managed to convince The Rest Of Us to vote in the biggest crop of losers we’ve seen in Congress since the Founding. What my grandfather said years ago is still true – you can’t fix stupid. It’s the one Achilles-heel of American democracy – if the whole country wants to engage in a full-on race to the bottom, then go batshit-off-the-rails crazy, there’s nothing to prevent it. The ‘greatness of America’ is horseshit.

Obama also doesn’t get that he’s failed, miserably (in making that last statement, I’m choosing to believe that he had good intentions.)

There’s still a core of ‘believers’ who’ll point out all of the things he’s done – things which he covered again last night. Conspicuously absent were the things he didn’t do, as well as the things he did which should never come from the pen of a genuine Progressive.

He perpetuated the crimes and Constitutional atrocities of the last Administration. He added to them (NDAA). He authorized Federal troops to take to the streets on the heels of inevitable civil unrest. He kept Gitmo in place. He authorized ‘targeted killings’ of American citizens and foreigners alike. He’s given the banking system a hall-pass for their behavior, and has steadfastly refused to acknowledge the elephant in the room – the criminal behavior of the Wall Street barons. His Justice Department has come down on the wrong side of far too many things. It's impossible to turn a blind eye any longer.

He's also ignored the huge consensus in America, both from the Progressives and the Tea Partiers alike – to hold the criminals on Wall Street accountable for their actions, and to do something real and concrete about the mess we call ‘health-care’ in America. He did exactly-squat about the first one - and passed a bill which the Republicans deride as 'Obamacare' for the other (something which does far too little for far too few of us, and which called in every marker and bit of street-cred the man had in order to enact.)

The cognitive dissonance grew so loud in places that it was impossible to ignore – there were people who refused to budge in their seats when the applause-on-cue began after he extolled the virtues of ‘retraining’ people to move from one factory job to another. To prove his point, he had his staff find a factory worker who'd gone through one such program at random; this woman was the resident of some Podunk town which had lost a lot of factory jobs; she'd retrained in a year or so at a community college and was now the proud recipient of - yep - yet another factory job.

She was flown to Washington to sit in the front row near Obama's wife, Michelle, so she could nod and smile and be generally grateful for the government grant. No mention of the fact that real education – the kind which prepares Americans to compete in a world where engineers and doctors and other highly-trained specialists are needed – is out of reach for all but the very few.

Meanwhile, most of America’s college-graduates aren’t nodding and smiling –they’re drowning in debt while the home they’ve shared for the past few years with their parents as ‘boomerang babies’ is in foreclosure.

Real courage would involve standing in front of the microphones and cameras and saying, “I fucked up, folks. As I speak, the arrests are being made, from Louis Blankfein on down – and we’re going to clean house in the banking system. Tomorrow, we're closing Gitmo. We're rolling back the Bush-era assaults on civil liberties. There will be no more drones at Occupy rallies. I'm putting a muzzle on Homeland Security. I was wrong to authorize the killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki. I was wrong to invade Pakistan to kill BinLaden, no matter how dangerous the man was. And I was wrong to brag about it, too. These things are in the past. I can't change them, but I can change what happens moving forward."

We didn’t hear that. We heard a lot about ‘sacrifice’; we heard hot air and noise about correcting the inequities in the country, and a lot of “Bring me this or that bill, and I’ll sign it!” – all the while ignoring the fact that Congress is now little more than a goat-rodeo all of its own.

The truth is that Obama has no plans to do any of these things – his one plan from now ‘till November is to do what every first-term President has done since the beginning – work on ensuring his second term. This is where his efforts will go, and that’s where you’ll see more of the same. More pandering; more sellout; more say-this-and-do-the-other.

Last night, Barack Obama begged for his job. You can’t call it anything else.

I’m not buying.

2012 - Welcome to the Jungle

2012-01-03T09:19:00.000-08:00

Forecasts, Predictions and Prognostications For A New Year

With pseudo-apologies to one of my least-favorite bands, I can’t think of a more-fitting title for this piece. Reason? It’s where we’re headed – either by rocket-sled or on roller-skates, depending on one’s point of view.

Let’s get to the show….

Politics – Whether it’s the Dems in Charlotte or the Reps in Tampa, both conventions are already prime targets for the Occupy movement. This is shaping up to make the Kodak Moment of Chicago, 1968 look like a church picnic. It’s a foregone conclusion that the Dems are going to nominate Obama for four more years of pandering and selling out to the variant grifters, hacks and hucksters on Wall Street, plus caving in to the remnants of the Bush-era terrorism-paranoiacs. The Reps are going to nominate Romney in spite of the gyrations of Paul, Gingrich, and the rest of the evangelical goat-rodeo which has come to symbolize the majority of the Republican party nowadays. The money-people won’t put cold, hard cash behind someone who believes that pushing the button down is part of ‘god’s plan’; they’ll look the other way on the whole magic-underwear bit as long as the rest of the man is docile and compliant – which is Romney, to a ‘T’.

Genuine change? Fuggetaboudit – that’s not going to happen. (I’ll issue a caveat here – there’s a chance that some random blue-uniformed corporate-stooge is going to overstep his orders and shoot a protester or three; absent that, count on the pepper-spray and tear-gas to be delivered in carload-lots to both convention locations well in advance, with orders not to open or use until things get dicey. As they learned well in ’68, even the mainstream media gets heart-flutters when they see the truncheon or the pistol used in lieu of conversation - but they don’t give a damn about anything else.

Culture – America is a moral wasteland. Our version of a national religion reflects the nation as a whole; a small minority of thinkers still preach a message of concern, while the big bucks go to the hacks and virtual racketeers who stand-up megachurches at a rate of one per day here in the Land of the (not so) Free – in fact, religion is one of the last growth-industries in America. We’ve got a bigger religious footprint than any other nation in the industrialized world (for all the actual good it’s done us) – and on a routine basis, we read about corn-fed white guys (and some black ones, too) who’ve looted the church treasury for hair gel and hooker-payments. Meantime, the nation has become little more than an agglomeration of pimps, ho’s, reality-TV ‘stars’ and other petty (and not-so-petty) criminals, taking their cues from their religious and business ‘leaders’ who’ve simply proven that if you do it long enough, you’ll make the big time, and if you ask, all will be ‘forgiven’.

Most of you are too young to remember a time when America actually exported culture – the State Department sent the likes of Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and other scions of jazz to the rest of the world. We were trying to prove why America really was a decent country. Who’d we send now, I wonder? Regardless, the rest of the world doesn’t respect us – and looking at what passes for ‘American culture’ nowadays, it’s not hard to wonder why.

Employment - We’ve no more industrial base to employ people at honest work; those jobs went south to Mexico or east to India and China. (Those three countries are looking pretty iffy right now, too, but that’s another story). What’s left is populated by PhD’s flipping burgers and standing at the front-door of WalMart with a smile while the legions of the dwindling middle-class whistle along with the Muzak past the graveyard of their American dream to buy cheap crap from China in a sort of economic self-immolation. Ask any one of them why they’re doing this, and they’ll tell you, “It’s cheaper.” Meanwhile, the guy who runs the sandwich shop or the local grocery can’t compete, and the vague sucking-sound overhead is the collective wealth of Midtown, America headed in the general directions of Bentonville, Arkansas and Beijing. Actual unemployment is just north of 22% in the U.S. of A; the government will only own-up to around 9%, but that figure, along with most of the rest of the government’s economic ‘news’, is complete horseshit.

Count on this getting worse, as the People in Charge have done a great job of convincing nearly everyone that shipping jobs overseas and eating our own future is a good idea.

Housing – First off, with apologies to the masses of former schoolteachers and other Americans late of the middle-class who’ve decided to cash in their master’s degrees for a certificate in real-estate, anyone who buys a house in this country today is a rank moron. The numbers are there if you care to do the research – one mortgage in four is underwater, and a fair number of those (about one in two) are going to cry ‘uncle’ this year and give those houses back to the bank – it makes no sense to make payments on something based on a value which went well-and-truly out the window on that sunny afternoon in October, 2008 when the rules changed and the financial systems melted down.

The value of real estate in every market in America is poised to sink without a trace; we’ll never see those numbers again; in fact, start looking for people in the real-estate industry to begin talking about things like ‘revised expectations’, and a ‘renaissance of urban renewal’, along with government hacks telling us that we’ll need to ‘reinvent the American dream’ or some such. The current housing-stock in America – suburban homes sprouting up like so many toadstools on the flatland – is obsolete where it stands. Count on living closer to where you work, if you're lucky enough to have a job when this is all over. Get used to using what land you have (or patio space) to grow vegetables. Forget the supermarkets; they're also unsustainable. Might as well get used to canned goods in the wintertime.

Transportation – It doesn’t matter a hang how many gel-battery plants are built in America; how many rare-earth metals they drag out of the ground in Utah, and how many solar or wind farms they stand up on the prairie – we are not going to be able to zip around in electric cars in a tawdry replication of the golden age of Packard and Pierce-Arrow. The era of cheap transportation is over. Why?

Because the oil companies have too much invested in keeping us addicted to oil, and then dragging us into a new Dark Age while they count their money.

This is where we could use some executive-order leadership – putting the Department of Energy on a war-footing, as Carter suggested thirty-five years ago – and developing a subsidized, cheap source of renewable energy which could be delivered through a network of government-run stations. Of course, this never happened, and never will, because those in charge any more aren’t elected officials – they’re outfits like Koch Industries and Enron and BP Oil, who’ve been buying our government for a long, long time.

In the meantime, we’d better get used to things like trains, buses and such. Eventually, we’ll have to adopt laws like (shudder!) Cuba, which mandates that no automobile is on the road without at least two passengers, and where it’s illegal not to pick up a hitchhiker.

Energy – While we’re talking energy, we should realize that “Drill; baby; drill!” is just a Conservative dog-whistle; a means of sticking their collective heads in the sand; the idea of polluting the Arctic just like we did the Gulf of Mexico is not only morally wrong, it's a bad idea. The math, meantime, doesn't add up - whether we're at peak-oil now, or whether we reach that point in 2020, the day is coming and coming soon when we're going to have to consider petroleum-based transportation a thing of the past.

(Don’t tell that last one to the Chinese. They’re planning oil explorations in the unclaimed far north, now that the icecap is melting and it’s possible to put drill-rigs in Arctic waters. The Russians want their piece of that pie, too, and it’s quite possible there’d be a showdown of sorts up there. We’ll probably get involved too, under the pretext that anything they pump out of the Arctic will affect our own Alaskan reserves.)

As I mentioned earlier, there is no way – the math doesn’t add up – to make the collective solar, wind, hydrogen and other energy sources we have make up for the lack of oil. The only aircraft which run on electricity are the kind my neighbor’s kid runs with a radio-control joystick. The only cars which run on electricity have a short range and take forever to recharge – and it’s not like you can sell them used; either – not when replacing a battery array is somewhere north of $10,000.

Trucks? Forget it – the technology isn’t there yet to run a tractor-trailer rig on electricity. Trains are a good bet – but we’ll need to invest something akin to the cost of going to the moon, and undertake it as a national priority, to create a nationwide network of electrically-powered mag-lev trains for both people and freight – and for reasons previously stated, that’s not likely to happen.

Economics – The Eurozone is screwed, and all of the accounting shuck-and-jive isn’t going to bring it back. They’ve suffered from a good dose of Chicago School economic theory-made-practice for the past thirty years; they’ve learned before we did that trickle-down doesn’t work. We’re about to see our future there, and it will not be pretty.

(Germany might make it. If you really want to see what we’ll look like in another fifteen or so years, take a look at Russia. They’ve coddled their 1%, and as a result organized crime is rampant while a handful of rarefied Russians take a dump in gold-plated toilets. The Russians are used to this, however – they’ve lived with it for a couple of centuries. We’re a different group.

If you want to see America in twenty or more years, look at the Balkans. The artificial-constructs created by redrawing the map of eastern and south-eastern Europe literally came apart when the Soviet bear had his teeth pulled; they simply went back to being what they’d been all along – nations which formed around cultural, ethnic and religious lines. The place is more peaceful, stable and prosperous that way – a lesson we’ll have to learn, I fear. Anyone who reads a U.S. map not with the notion E Pluribus Unum but along those lines will see six or more separate entities. Some might make it on their own. Others won’t.

There’s still a mountain of debt which the banks never wrote off in spite of the bailouts – they parked that money offshore, betting that they could come back and buy everything for a song. They might be right, until the rough beast I mentioned in a prior post awakens. It’s anyone’s guess whether the banks fail before the government, but when it happens, I don’t know anyone who’ll shed a tear.

_________________________

Frankly, I’m amazed that the mansions of the 1% haven’t been torched by howling mobs by now, and their occupants hanged in iron-cages – then again, we really do take a lot of crap, we Americans, because we’ve been conned into believing that we’re actually going to be allowed to join their club someday. The 1% isn’t missing any bets, though – they’ve hired private security; built their gated communities where they muse about the rest of us, and wonder why we don’t just eat cake.

Meanwhile, America is ungovernable in any conventional sense, at least, not as those who wrote the Constitution imagined it – ‘recovery’ is going to prove elusive, and when enough people finally see that our ‘leadership’ is really two sides of the same coin, the last great failure of the American experiment will happen – the crisis of confidence which leads to a change in government.

The system is broken; genuine change cannot come from it, and as Chris Hedges said recently, the only real decision we have is whether to be a rebel, or a slave.

I’m willing to bet that while 2012 isn’t going to see the fruition of a stone-age calendar, the ravings of a Harold Camping, or the lunacy of Nibiru, it is, indeed, going to see significant changes in how we view ourselves and the world. For some, that paradigm is going to shift without the benefit of a clutch; it’s going to sound like grinding gears and a shiteating clank in the transmission of everyone’s pet social theories.

I’ve said this before – somewhere, there’s a person; whether that person is a mother who’s watched one of her children die of a lack of medical care, or a fellow who lost his home to a predatory bank deal after losing his job, or a general who’s simply sick and tired of things and rounds up a couple of his buddies to drive across the Potomac and make an end-run around the Constitution – but somewhere, there’s a person who’s going to attract a sufficient power-base to slip the aforementioned rough beast off his fucking leash.

We’re almost there.

Happy 2012.

New Year's Eve; 2011

2012-01-01T11:09:00.000-08:00

Cognitive Dissonance and Other Party Conversation In The Clubhouse

I was invited to a party last night by one of my customers.

Understand, I’ve known this guy for the past thirty years – longer, on balance, than some of my readers have been alive, or at least cognizant of the world around them. Over those years, I’ve worked as a supplier of technology products, consulting advice and general sounding-board services to this man, so I’m virtual-family. On occasion, someone who’s up and coming either in his organization or in his own extended family will see me, not know me, and seek me out. This is what happened last night, with a young man in his (I’m hazarding a guess here) late twenties; one of those more-or-less distant relatives of the core-group; he was on the periphery of nearly every discussion.

He wasted no time asking me about my political beliefs. I was noncommittal, which led him to explain his – the country’s government is all screwed up, and all we really need to do is (1) get rid of Obama, then (2) a magical era will ensue, where life will be like it was when he was in his late teens and (I’m assuming) living at home with a set of parents who actually had a 401K and two cars and a house and the money to send him to college.

Shortly after that, he explained, we could get to the business of setting things right – you see, the government is bought and paid for, and we really need to put an end to all this money buying influence.

“And how would you go about that?”, I asked.

“Campaign finance reform!”, he said.

“And how would you accomplish that?”, I asked.

“Corporations don’t get to donate to elections!”

“And how would you accomplish that?”

And so the conversation went. It never occurred to the young fellow that he’d just engaged in something called ‘cognitive dissonance’ – holding two disparate and conflicting ideas in one’s head at the same time, and forcing them to make sense - as the very people he expects to solve this problem are the ones in charge.

(This condition is also called ‘suspension of reality’.)

Through the cigar smoke and the slight wine-buzz, I realized that this was how most Americans have survived the past thirty years – if they stopped to really think about what was going on, their minds – raised on a steady pablum of slick-media, mindless ‘entertainment’ and other horseshit – would simply cease to function. Likely, parts of them would go translucent and slip off to another dimension. Half of them would wind up gibbering on streetcorners.

“The other part of the problem is that we’ve lost our religion,” he said.

('Here it comes', I thought. ‘Might as well enjoy this.’)

“Really? How do you suppose that is?”

“There’s a war on religion in America. Our values have been destroyed by the media and technology.”

“Really? How do you suppose that is?”

(I thought, ‘This is how psychiatrists make money. They charge $250.00 an hour to repeat the same questions, nod sagely, and take notes'. Meanwhile, they have photos of boats and houses and cars and other ‘goals’ on their office walls – because make no mistake, psychiatry is like journalism or the ministry or prostitution and lap-dancing – all are ‘professions’ which bugger truth for money.)

I was then treated to an enthralling lecture regarding America’s ‘religion’; the ‘fact’ that ‘all we needed to do’ was invoke Article 5 of the Constitution to get the money out of Congress and establish a ‘godly’ country, and then we could set about getting rid of Obama and his supporters.

“I’d vote for Rick Santorum. He’s a good man.”

(This is where biting my tongue was a tough go. You’ll recall that Santorum was the guy who said that he’d do away with food-stamps and other food-related assistance to the poor, because ‘the obesity rate was too high.’)

I excused myself to chat with another group of folks. “You’ll be sure to tell me when you’ve ironed out that Article 5 issue,” I said as I walked off.

___________________________

The average American can’t find Ohio on a map (or, so says the National Geographic, and I rather believe them); most can’t tell you the major ‘players’ in World War II, or what the Cold War was about; people under forty usually can’t tell you where the Soviet Union was located; it’s a given that they really don’t understand the documents which form the framework for the country they live in.

In other words, the fellow helping himself to the free beer last night is rather typical of my fellow citizens - he's also part of a huge-assed problem.

And that, folks, is why I don’t hold out much if any hope for this country.

2012 is here; like it or not. We’re past the Age of Aquarius; peace, love and understanding are all thin on the ground, as well as a dose of common sense and reality, no matter how harsh it may be. That rough beast I mentioned the other day? He’s in the wings, waiting to make his appearance. His actions will be messy, uncoordinated, and deadly. His keepers have little education, less patience, and lots of guns. Lots of guns.

Plan accordingly.

A Rough Beast Prepares to Slouch - December 31st, 2011

2011-12-29T10:36:00.000-08:00

Imagine, if you will, the aftermath of a battle; the field is strewn with shattered artillery limbers, dead horses, stacks of dead infantry in hollow-squares, and smoke-tendrils wisping skyward from broken trees. In one corner of the field, however, is an untouched mansion. Not a hole; not a hoofprint in the lawn – the whole thing has passed it by.

Inside is a party, which was previously scheduled and which is going on apace; wine and whiskey is flowing, girls are getting pinched by lecherous old bastards with more money than either sense or morals, and the only thing anyone’s really worried about is whether they’ll run out of alcohol before sundown.

Afterward, everyone will take to their beds or their carriages, not knowing at all what’s just happened – nor will they care, much past the thought of what they had to pay the servants. They’re a class of people who gets to stay behind after sending a nation off to war.

You can damn well bet the servants knew – their fathers, brothers and uncles were among the infantry.

This is what has happened to America – the tainted mist wafting from the collective shattering of Middle Class America from three years of unrelenting social and financial warfare is the best clear indicator that the power-elite has destroyed an entire generation of young Americans, and all but wiped-out their parents.

The moneyed-classes in New York stood on the Stock Exchange balcony, sipped champagne and laughed about the first of the ‘Occupy’ movements. Frankly, I held my breath. I still do, every time the police pepper-spray pregnant women and old people – because one of these days, someone is likely to say ‘enough is enough’, and hang some police, stockbrokers, bank managers or who-have-you from the nearest lamppost.

We take a lot of nonsense from those in charge, we Americans. Perhaps that’s due to the fact that we actually believe that someday they’ll let us into the club; that voting still has power, and that we really do still have a chance. It was Steinbeck who said that socialism would never take root in America, because we don’t view ourselves as downtrodden; only as temporarily-displaced millionaires.

That’ll change when there’s enough disruption. In the meantime, the elite need not worry – there’s no strange-beast slouching toward Wall Street to sort them out for good.

At least, not yet.

Europe’s financial situation is hanging on by a thread; the result of thirty years of Chicago School/’trickle down’ economics has treated them no better than it's treated us, although they’ve connected the dots a little better than we have; they know that giving tax cuts to the wealthy only enables them to buy more toys, accumulate even more of the nation’s wealth, and instead of small business owners and people with futures, there’s now a continent full of unemployed students, cooks, housekeepers and drivers. Incredibly, America still views itself as ‘exceptional’, and hence exempt. Just ask any of the Republican candidates for President – they’ll tell you that there are plenty of jobs available; the only thing anyone has to do is take a bath.

Meanwhile, in spite of his pseudo-Liberal credentials, our current leader is really a Wall Street stooge; he’s ratified the previous administration’s assaults on civil liberties, and shows no sign of doing anything but pandering to those who got him elected by way of funding his campaign. It’s a full-on race to the bottom in 2012, with very little in the way of redeeming features. As the late Joe Bageant said, we now have an ultra Right and a center-Right, because so much oxygen has been sucked from the political discourse – it’s small wonder that the Republicans look crazy; the moderates abandoned the place a long time ago.

We’re many things now; this ‘America’, but we’re not a nation in any conventional sense; not with one person in six on food-stamps; one child in four living in poverty and one family in two below the Federally-accepted ‘poverty line’.

The basic math is dismal: Over 22% of the nation’s workforce isn’t working. Those are depression-level numbers, any way you cut it. The government’s steadfast denial of this problem is akin to the Japanese admirals who only reported cheery news to the Emperor up until they couldn’t hide the problem any longer. By then, two of their cities were little more than iridescent glass, and the rest of the country was rubble.

As 2011 ignominiously slips toward its end with the grace and dignity of a slug on the sidewalk, none of the problems from four years ago have been corrected – the banks are still in a disaster of their own making; half of the country is in threat of homelessness, and the only permanent solutions are those which the moneyed interests don’t want – because it will involve writing-down a lot of their debt, and accepting a higher tax-burden. The government’s income-problems are part and parcel of this; when the majority of revenues come from people who now work minimum-wage jobs, there’s no wiggle-room.

Meanwhile, America is becoming ungovernable in any functional sense – there’s no money to do it with, and Congress has either exempted or destroyed the only tax base from which to derive said revenue. Wall Street and its Congressional handmaiden have, with the collusion of the American voter, managed to destroy everything about this country which is worth saving.

Our leadership is little more than an agglomeration of grifters and thieves, with the rest of us fighting over scraps. While Wall Street finishes raiding anything worth taking and Congress is their willing accomplice, people with PhD’s are now growing illegal dope and selling it; you can go to CraigsList on any given Tuesday and find babies for sale, along with people who’ll sell you a perfectly-useable kidney. Moms are cooking Meth in the garage, selling it to their teenage-kids’ friends on weekends. Morality is a wonderful thing when there’s money in the bank and a job to go to on Monday morning; it’s an unsupportable luxury if there’s not.

I spend quite a bit of time volunteering in local food banks and homeless shelters this time of year, and I’ve watched the mood of America’s homeless go from shell-shock to righteous outrage. The pot is ready to boil over. Millions are ready to say to the 1%, “You don’t get it? Fuck you!” The ‘Occupy’ protests have been peaceful so far; they’ve only called attention to the problem, without taking serious action. Laughter from a balcony; pepper-spray; denigrating comments from Republican Congressfolk and presidential candidates – these are not appropriate responses.

I’ve a feeling that sooner than not, they won’t be laughing so smart and pretty.

That rough beast? He's getting ready to slouch toward Wall Street and Washington, and he's a mean and nasty bastard; he’s been fed on a diet of junk-food table scraps and attitude for some years now, and he’s about to slip his fucking leash. The result will not be pretty.

I’ll make a prediction – there will eventually be show-trials and other suchlike from a legal-system bent on mollifying an increasingly angry electorate; when these efforts do not produce the desired results, there will be violence.

At that point, the beast will be loosed. Kennedy’s statement will prove prescient; having made peaceful revolution impossible, violent revolution will be not only inevitable; it’ll be on everyone’s doorstep. The last thirty years have made a lie of my childhood, but the opportunity will be there to finally and for good-and-all do away with the corruption which has plagued this country for so long, or either split into separate nations or sink into a form of fascist neofeudalism.

(On balance, splitting up might be the best thing for America. We’re better off than most up here in the Northwest; if you don’t count the crazies in Montana who are bent on creating an anarcho-Fascist ‘paradise’, we’re actually pretty sane up here. The Teabaggers and Fundies don’t like us, but that’s fine by me. They’ve got Texas.)

I’d like to see America saved. It’s a good idea; this country – sadly, we now lack the educated electorate necessary to pull off self-government. That ship sailed a long time ago.

Blind rage is ready to take the place of reason or sense. The falcon sure as Hell can’t hear the falconer any more, and that beast is ready, if you’ll pardon the mixed metaphor, to disguise fair nature with rage, lend its eye a terrible aspect, and imitate the actions of a tiger.

The Indispensables – Fifteen Books Which Are Required Reading for the New Revolution

2011-12-24T10:12:00.000-08:00

Temple of Reason - Strasbourg

"To ignore the past is to remain forever a child."

-- Marcus Tullius Cicero; Roman statesman/philosopher

Every change-agent and visionary is a reader.

Why? Because ideas are immortal. Whether it was the French National Assembly, which wrote the Rights of Man and the Citizen; the Continental Congress, which wrote the Declaration of Independence, or the Occupy Wall Street general-assembly which wrote the list of Occupation demands, those ideas did not spring full-grown - they were taken from other writers.

It’s impossible to understand what’s going on in America without a solid background in what’s happened, and why. It's equally necessary to have this background to understand fully the nature of the problem and what's really at stake here.

I've created this list assuming that the reader is going to have a real grasp of world, as well as American history, and that they don't ascribe to the recent witch-hunting and book-burning approach of the ultraRight with their attempts to rewrite history in Texas and elsewhere.

Having a solid understanding of current events is necessary for a fundamental reason: Understanding the causes helps us connect the dots. Connecting the dots gives us a good idea about changing things and bringing about a better future.

To that end, I’ve created this list of fifteen books I consider indispensable to the education of people who want to involve themselves either with an Occupy group or another organization which is active in bringing about legitimate, permanent change.

It isn’t intended as a definitive – I’m sure you’ll all have books you consider ‘required reading’. Feel free to suggest them.

The Myth of Separation – David Barton

This one makes the list because of the danger David Barton represents. He (along with people like Gary DeMar and Gary North) is one of the main proponents of a ‘Christian nation’ philosophy. In this book, Barton attempts to discredit the commonly-held interpretation of the First Amendment which holds that religion and government are separate, and that the U.S. was founded and should remain without a ‘state religion’.

In his book, Barton either quotes out –of-context or entirely misquotes several early Americans, including many of the founding personages of the American government. I don’t list this book because of its scholarship – which is sloppy and faulty in the extreme – I list it here because of its influence on those who would radically alter the U.S. government along religious and extreme ultraRightist lines, and because those same people have co-opted one of America's main political parties (the Republicans).

Death of the Liberal Class – Chris Hedges

Hedges is one of my favorite living writers. He’s one of a handful who’ve connected the dots between the sellout of our bulwark institutions (education, religion, arts, media) to a ruling class of moneyed elitists. In this book, Hedges describes that process – and the consequence, which is the end of the liberal traditions which actually made up most of America’s founding principles.

In this, Hedges posits that the real threat to American liberalism isn’t the Tea Party, or Obama’s failure to promote genuine Progressive ideals – but the sellout of American liberals themselves.

Empire of Illusion – Chris Hedges

The second of three Hedges books I’m recommending here, this is a deep piece, dealing with the wholesale abandonment of the core ideals of education and literacy in favor of utilitarianism (education not for the betterment of the person, but in order to get a job/be ‘productive’/feed the ‘machine’). Hedges uses several examples, from the adult ‘entertainment’ industry – which commoditizes the very nature of women – to Abu Gharaib, which he describes as the end-result of a national moral bankruptcy.

The American Empire, he posits, is based on illusion – illusions which are created by a corporatized media and fed to us through everything from film/TV to advertising, and which have created a nation of mental slaves.

American Fascists – The Christian Right and the War on America – Chris Hedges

This last recommendation from Hedges’ pen peels back the layers of slick packaging and ‘family values’ tripe to expose the ‘Christian nation’ movement for what it is – a Fascist hate-movement, driven more by a drive for power and control than for the welfare of all Americans; in fact, it’s roots are very similar to the Fascist movements in Germany and Italy prior to WWII (which also had their foundations in religion).

A deep hatred for a liberal, progressive, ‘open’ society, coupled with an uberNationalism and a dismissive ideology have combined to create a movement with a laser-like focus and one goal: The transformation of America to a ‘Christian nation’, where their brand of religion is the only one allowed; where the law of the land is measured first by its adherence to ‘Biblical principle’.

Hedges doesn’t draw direct conclusions – that’s not his style; it’s also not good analysis. He makes the case that the Christian right has Fascist roots; that their efforts are against the basic tenets of the U.S. Constitution and are therefore anti-American, and that theirs is a significant component in a greater danger – the commission of evil, in the name of a better world. Read this as a warning and a cautionary tale writ-large.

Idiot America – How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free – Charles Pierce

Pierce begins this tale with a trip he took to the Creation Museum in Kentucky, where he saw a large fiberglass Triceratops in the lobby – wearing a saddle. Listening to the narrator of one of the ‘presentations’ say, “We’re taking the dinosaurs back from the evolutionists!”, Pierce decided to write this piece on the triumph of idiocy in America.

In it, he describes America’s addiction to ‘cranks’ – which are, in the main, likeable creatures in the vein of those who promoted the existence of Atlantis in the 1880’s, but which are different than the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly, who, in his words, “spew bilious nonsense at 50,000 watts from 1,000 radio stations nationwide.”

Beneath the humor is a serious message – having abandoned our standards of education, plus the liberal traditions of reason and critical thinking, we’ve turned the country over to people who believe that the earth is 6,000 years old; that Obama is ‘coming for their guns’, and that human beings actually rode dinosaurs.

Unequal Protection – How Corporations Became People (And How To Fight Back) – Thom Hartmann

Understand – I like Thom Hartmann.

He lives here in Portland. I’ve heard him speak, at one of my favorite bookstores here. He’s not a great speaker; he’s a bookish fellow who sticks to his research. In this, you’re going to find ‘Unequal Protection’ one of the most thoroughly-documented stories of corruption you’ve read.

The premise is pretty simple – corporate attorneys have used the Fourteenth Amendment to convince the Supreme Court that corporations are people. Further, they’ve been doing it almost since it was ratified, with the Citizens United ruling being just the most-recent (and most egregious) misuse of the Constitution in this regard.

As an attorney-friend of mine is fond of saying, “Government power has never not been used.” Read this one to understand what we’re all up against. The good news? We can fight back – and should. (Note: This is only one of Hartmann’s books on the American sociopolitical system. All of them are good reads).

Kingdom Coming – The Rise of Christian Nationalism – Michelle Goldberg

This is one of my top-five books of the past twenty years; Michelle Goldberg was one of the first journalists to ‘connect the dots’ of the American Fundamentalist movement and call it out for the danger that it is.

Today, it’s impossible to be a Republican without being a radical, Fundamentalist Christian. Because of their ties to the Republicans, they are by nature well-funded (the moneyed-elites in Washington and on Wall Street give generously to Fundamentalist organizations). Any candidate who is vetted for anything higher than state office has to be examined under their lens and found ‘worthy’. In this book, Goldberg explains in plain language (no need to have studied American religious history in any depth here) the ‘parallel universe’ occupied by the Fundies; why they created their own ‘America’ in the first place, and why they feel bound and committed to foist it off on the rest of us.

It’s that last step which has everyone from Goldberg to myself more than a little worried – because these people have influenced domestic and foreign policy itself, co-opted an entire political party, and created a political scenario where there is real potential for outright Fascism. Read this, and understand why the notion of ‘Christian nationalism’ is such a threat to us all.

Republican Gomorrah – Inside the Movement Which Shattered the Party – Max Blumenthal

Blumenthal’s seminal work on the co-option of the Republican Party by the Religious Right belongs on every shelf in America – and while this book has been universally excoriated by the Fundamentalists and other religious Fascists in America, it was received by the rest of us on its publishing as the final ‘connect the dots’ moment regarding the deep ties between Fundies and Republicans.

I’ve said it before – it’s impossible to be a Republican now and not be a Fundie. This book goes into the ‘why’. (Note: This book is less about the politics of the thing than about deviant psychology. If you’re a bit squeamish reading about religious ‘leaders’ who have their roots in child abuse, prostitution and other such behavior, you might want to pass. If, on the other hand, you want to really learn what makes these people tick and how they’ve come this close to running America, then read on.)

Griftopia – Matt Taibbi

Matt Taibbi, one of my favorites among the new generation of political writers, exposes in ‘Griftopia’ the behavior of Wall Street – written for the layman, Taibbi expertly uses plain-English to describe the techniques used by the Wall Street crowd to demolish our economy; he awards “Biggest Asshole in the Universe” to Alan Greenspan, who dismantled what little regulations remained over the financial sector and set the stage for the 2008 meltdown.

You’ll laugh; you’ll cry – and you’ll finally understand after reading this one.

The Party’s Over and The End of Growth – Richard Heinberg

I put these two together because they really ought to be read at the same time.

In “The Party’s Over”, Heinberg lays out, with some pretty incisive statistics, the reasons why we are not only past the point of peak oil production, but discusses some of the inevitable changes which must occur. You’re not going to find this read pleasant – and you might find yourself disagreeing with him on several points, mainly because they go to the heart of many of America’s treasured institutions – the suburb; the car; the yearly vacation; fresh fruit in January – the list goes on. Whether he’s right, or whether we have a little time left (the USGS says we won’t hit ‘peak oil’ until 2020), the time to make those changes, starting with our own lives, is now.

In “The End of Growth”, Heinberg details something he glossed-over in the first book – the fact that Americans use over five times their share in energy resources; the Chinese are catching up with us rapidly, and the overall value of our vaunted ‘American lifestyle’ is rapidly becoming unsustainable.

With seven billion people on the planet, we are clearly headed for an energy crisis of global scale and proportion. The ‘Occupy’ movements have called attention to this – what remains is to see if we’re going to be any more successful than Jimmy Carter in 1978 (his stance on energy cost him the election in 1980), or if we’ll finally wake up.

The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klein

This book is indispensable for one reason – it’s a chronicle of the collusion between the corporate world, the universities, and government. From Chicago School economics, which succeeded in destroying the economies of Chile, Argentina and the newly-liberated Soviet Union long before they destroyed ours, to the agent provocateurs which America has used time and again to destroy entire governments – there’s a common thread: Governments (and ours is one of the most-egregious practitioners of this tactic) can pass draconian laws and edicts during unsettled times far easier than they could when things are ‘normal’.

In this, Klein steps us all back and points out the things we’ve done in the name of ‘emergency’ – and the tacit support given to our Wall Street elites to loot the treasuries not just of our own country, but those of others as well, for no other real reason than economic imperialism and the enrichment of a few. We see through this well-researched piece that America is not, and hasn’t been, a ‘democracy’ in any sense of the word for decades – we’re a plutonomy, run by and for a very few who’ve wasted no time in using every leverage to rape the world.

Albion’s Seed – Four British Folkways in America – David Hackett Fischer

To understand America, you have to understand how it came to be – and if you’re still stuck believing the tripe you learned in grade-school (Columbus came and ‘liberated’ the natives; the Pilgrims made ‘friends’ with the natives in New England and lived in peace and harmony; etc.), then you’re in for an eye-opener here.

In this piece, Fischer deconstructs the four major migrations from England – the Puritans, the Cavaliers, the Quakers, and the Scots-Irish. Each brought a distinctive culture to America, along with the seeds of future conflict (by example, the descendants of the Puritans and Cavaliers were the cultural-combatants in the American Civil War).

This is a long book – but it reads well, and is quite probably the best explanation of America’s roots that you’ll find in print. If you really want to understand the country, you have to understand the beginnings of its culture – and why ‘borderer philosophy’ has influenced the far Right in America from the beginning to the Tea Party today.

The Eliminationists – David Neiwert

I’ll warn you – this is a scary book.

In spite of our Enlightenment/Jeffersonian roots, America has always had a history of eliminationism. Settlers were dismissive of the basic humanity of Native Americans; ‘sundown’ towns prevented persons of color from living there; the Klan was pervasive until comparatively recently (and still has a presence in some parts of the deep South) – on balance, we shouldn’t be surprised at the hatespeech of the far Right, which tends to come out of the woodwork during a real or manufactured emergency.

We now have a ‘war on terror’ – something the Right has used to demonize its traditional opponents (which really boil down to anyone who doesn’t look or think like they do). Neiwert explains in very plain language in this book that the first step in a long slide toward Fascism is the demonization, objectivizing and eventual elimination of their opponents.

The process is simple – first, the Right engages in eliminationist rhetoric and full-on hate-speech to create ‘non persons’ of a group or class; next; they demonize the group, after which it’s very easy to deny them basic civil rights – or imprison them outright.

The conclusion is simple – traditional American conservative movements, including the Republican Party itself, have been co-opted through a skillful use of media by an ultraRight, eliminationist and proto-Fascist subgroup which view elements of American society (gays, Muslims, liberals and others) as ‘un-American’, and which deserve to be eliminated entirely.

Don’t blame me if you don’t sleep terribly well after reading this – but then again, you shouldn’t.

The Conscience of a Liberal – Paul Krugman

The award-winning economist sets a few things straight here – first, the postwar boom wasn’t the result of a free-market economy and the vindication of Conservative ideology, it was the result of the policies of the Roosevelt Administration, severe regulation of the financial markets, and the efforts of the Eisenhower administration to create a genuine progressive tax system which put the burden of running society on those who’d benefited from it the most.

Things started going south when the neoconservatives, championed by Reagan, began dismantling the programs which made our prosperity possible.

Krugman also makes it clear that wealthy people (the ‘job creators’, as the current group of Teabaggers call them) don’t create jobs – customers create jobs, and customers don’t exist if they have no money to spend.

America is a wealthy country, Krugman concludes – the wealth is in the wrong places, and will never be used to create more wealth unless it winds up in the hands of customers who can create demand.

Read this one to understand where we are economically, how we got here – and how we can get back.

As I mentioned above, this list is far from definitive – you may have other suggestions; my intent here is to create a framework for the discussion of reading material which will educate and motivate those of you who want to create genuine change. Again; please feel free to suggest your own.

Thanks again for reading!

Batshit of the Year Award

2011-12-18T05:51:00.000-08:00

(I know; I said these pieces were too hard to research, and didn't get anywhere near enough response - and while all that is still true, I had to drag this column out of retirement to bestow the Batshit of the Year Award.

In doing so, I had to consider three things - first, there were a LOT of bugfuck-nutsoids and batshit-crazoids to choose from. I mean, there's Rick Perry, who came in a close #2, for terminating 6,000 firefighters when half of his state was on fire, then renting a *whole friggin' stadium* to beg his Invisible Friend for rain - so whatever the winner did, it had to really stand out as true, unadulterated, no-holds-barred-and-hold-your-nose batshit.

Second, the award had to have meaning - in that, it had to go to a party which had really earned it, by the twin-virtues of being bugfuck-nuts and batshit-crazy all the time - as well as having performed a jumping-the-batshit-shark piece of egregious craziness which left everyone else wondering what happened.

Last, it had to reflect a microcosm of a much bigger, more significant - and hence, dangerous - bugfuck-nuts and batshit-crazy segment of society. So, submitted for your approval is my Batshit of the Year Award - The Duggars)....

Before I get started here, I'll (re)clarify a couple of things.

First, (as if the regular readers of this small corner of the 'sphere don't already know by now), I'm an atheist.

This means that I don't believe in ghosts, angels, phantoms-of-any-stripe, and especially gods - I'm convinced they're the creations of people who were seeking in the main to subject other people to their whims.

This means all of them. I'm an equal-opportunity dismissive in this sense; I've got next to no use for the rantings of a misogynistic pederast (Mohammad); the rantings of a group of social-overlords who turned both classism and racism into an art (the Bhagavad-Gita); the rewritten, recycled rantings of a bunch of bronze and iron-age goat-herders (the Bible), or the current rantings of the handful of mystics, charlatans and other "holy people" tramping the earth today, busily buggering truth for money when they've never so much as held a real job or balanced a checkbook (I'm putting everyone from the late 'Osho' to the Dalai Lama in this last category).

Today, however, I'm going to comment on one of my most-encountered (and hence, least-favorite) of these, the American Fundamentalist Christian.

Most of us are pretty well-aware that Fundies are a fucked-up bunch. First off; they hate a lot of things - gays; most modern culture; the American political system - the list does go on (I know; there'll be at least one of them who'll say, "But we don't! We just hate the 'sin'! We love everyone!" That's bullshit - but it's also not the purview of this piece.)

On the other hand, there are things they love. Lawrence Welk. Side-hugs. Purity rings (even if they don't work). And fetuses.

Damn, but Fundies love fetuses.

All kinds of fetuses. Big ones that are just about to be born. Small ones that would never live on their own. And, in the case of this tale, in-between ones that look like little humans. They love 'em so much, they'd like to pass a law against getting rid of one, no matter what. They even support organizations which sponsor some pretty twisted laws; amendments to State Constitutions which would grant these things the same rights as people-walking-upright.

Now, the other day, the Mom and Dad in this family suffered a miscarriage. That's a sad event, and something which should be left to the persons involved to deal with in private.

But that's not their style.

See, they've already bred 19 other humans, and in spite of the fact that this ultimate piece of 'family values' arrogance (the average American consumes 300 times the resources of his/her Third World counterpart - sort of like taking the food/clothing/shelter allowance from 5,700 other people; a reverse-World Vision sort of thing; seeing how much they can take away, rather than donate, to starving children elsewhere) is already an egregious example of the command in their 'book' to 'conquer the earth and subdue it', they've also done this in the public eye, spawning (pardon the pun) one of the worst examples of a dismal medium, their own 'reality-tv' show.

So, it shouldn't surprise us that they pulled off a piece of theatre to capitalize on what would have been a very private, grieving moment for most sane families.

Nope, they took fetus-love to a whole new level. They insisted on cleaning it up immediately after 'the event'; then had a 'naming ceremony' where they gave it a name.

Then, they hired this outfit to do a photo-shoot.

That's right - they named the aborted fetus, then had a company which specializes in such things take pictures of It.

Events didn't quite end there, either. Afterward, they had a 'funeral' for it (much, I suppose, like Trimalchio's feast in Petronius' "Satyricon", or Virgil's funeral for his pet-fly (but hey - at least Virgil's funeral meant that with a mausoleum on his land, the government couldn't confiscate his property - a good-old-fashioned-and-understandable ulterior-motive - but again, I digress.)

Opinion:

Words fail here. They really do. I've heard of and seen some pretty fucked-up things in my life, but this takes the entire prize. I do not understand this fascination with all-things-fetus; I really don't. I understand that Christianity is a catch-all religion, with innumerable branches (and more being founded, it seems, by the year); I understand that there are Christians who won't 'claim' other Christians because of their behavior.

Sitting on the outside of things, however, makes me wonder why, after a three-ring circus like this, every branch of the religion on the planet didn't gang up and disown these people outright.

As mentioned, this takes the prize - at least, in my own mind - for the Most Fucked-Up Thing Anyone Did in 2011- beyond Michele Bachmann's insane rants; beyond the donut-shovelling and gay-hating of Rick Warren; beyond the ultraRight sentiments of people like Matt Barber and Bryan Fischer, and the idiocy of people like Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan - these Duggar-people take the cake.

And yes - in case you are wondering - yes, I'm better than they are - because I (an atheist), unlike they (members and practitioners of a supposedly life-loving religion), actually respect the dead - in whatever form.

(So, even though 2011 is not-quite-done, I'm awarding this year's Batshit of the Year Award to the Duggar Clan - especially Mom and Dad Duggar - because of all the bugfuck-nuts and batshit-crazy stuff I've reported this year, this has to be the creepiest, skin-crawliest, dead-disrespectful-ist, bugfuck-nuttiest and batshit-craziest thing I've seen in a long-assed time.

Also unlike them, I have propriety. If you want to see the aforementioned photos, go here - I won't post them.)

1984; Redux....

2011-12-16T11:10:00.000-08:00

The other day, our President, Barack Obama, the first African-American elected to the nation’s highest office and a man who should by virtue of his skin-color if nothing else know a thing or two about a thing or two about the concept of the word, ‘freedom’, stated that he would not veto the National Defense Authorization Act.

Understand something.

The NDAA is a catch-all bill, made necessary because we decided after WWII that, as a nation, we were better off with than without a standing army. Because the Constitution calls for re-funding of any military appropriations beyond those to fund the Navy, Congress has to resort to a large, unwieldy piece of legislation to fund everything from the Iraq War to those $800 coffee pots about which you’ve all read.

It’s a huge document – and one in which all kinds of appropriations can (and are) hidden in the political weeds. This year is different, though, because the NDAA now contains verbiage which states that the military can declare anyone a ‘terrorist’ – then detain them without trial.

Let me make this clear: The government can swear someone is a ‘terrorist’ – then the military can detain them in one of their ‘camps’ without trial, for the length of their War on Terror – a conflict which, because it was never officially ‘declared’, can never really end. No trial, no hearing. You do not get to pass ‘go’, or collect two hundred damned dollars, either. You’re done. Forever, if they feel like it.

Theoretically, I could be declared a terrorist for writing this piece, then slammed into a cell next to a guy named Ahmed or Mohammed or Joseph or Luis or – well, you get the point – and have the key thrown away. For good. Period.

There’s a name for this sort of behavior. It’s called Fascism.

There’s also a name for what America has become. It’s called a Police State.

David Neiwert, author of “The Eliminationists” (one of the best books on the subject of the far Right and its media efforts to demonize, objectify, and eliminate its opponents) makes a case for five stages of Fascism – (1) a rural movement toward national ‘renewal’; (2) coalition of or transformation of the movement into a political party, either by the creation of a new party or the hijacking of an existing one; (3) the legitimization of the movement – a nation’s real leadership-elite throws-in with the thugs; (4) assumption of control via established electoral process; (5) radicalization through the achievement of political or military victory.

It’s easy to dismiss the evangelical-freakshow on the Republican debate-circuit; Gingrich looks for all the world like 300 pounds of mashed-potatoes stuffed into a suit – but he’d also cut off all forms of public welfare if he were elected. Romney can’t seem to figure out what to say next – but he’s taken a page from Obama’s book, and he’s pandering to any group which will get him elected. Rick Perry’s extended urka-durka-thon continues apace, even though over the past few encounters with his worthy-opponents he’s all but taken out a bazooka and blown up the metaphorical campaign-bus. It’s great theater.

So was Hitler, with his Charlie Chaplain mustache and his funny salute – he walked around playing soldier in his homemade uniform; he and his brownshirts – until they won an election.

Last November, the entire country lost its sense of self and voted in the Teabaggers (the inheritors of Bush's philosophy that the Constitution is 'just a goddamned piece of paper') – and believe me, they’ve wasted no time in making their agenda felt. They’re the brownshirts of the new era, and having hijacked the Republican party, they’re going to make their mark in history – and they’re taking down the Constitution to do it.

These people are serious as a heart-attack, and they’ve brought Fascism to America. It’s wrapped in a flag, carrying a cross, just as Sinclair Lewis warned us it would be. The powers that be at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are using these people in a last-ditch effort to save their power; on the opposite side are a handful of unemployed students, homeless veterans, and people like me. And, hopefully, you.

We’re there. Every one of our best thinkers – from eloquent writers like Chris Hedges and Noam Chomsky to hard-nosed researchers and political scientists like Robert Paxton - have made this abundantly clear, and have stated in no uncertain terms that once we cross the line from legitimacy to control, no nation has ever returned.

America will now become whatever the powers that be want it to – unless those of us who believe in what used to be are willing to stand in front of the tanks.

It’s come to that.

The Empire's No Longer Laughing

2011-11-17T18:58:00.000-08:00

Dispatches From the Class War

“And then what are you prepared to do?”, is one of my favorite lines from “The Untouchables” (an otherwise-droll film which not even Sean Connery as a beat-cop-turned-Federal-agent could save). This is the line Connery’s character uses on Kevin Costner’s Elliot Ness, when Ness was confronted with his first defeat – and later, as Connery’s character lies dying on his own living room floor, as a galvanizing statement to Ness.

It’s a good question.

I learned a lot during my trip to Washington. I met some good people (shared a tent with one for a couple of nights), and heard Chris Hedges speak (probably the only journalist who’s sufficiently connected the dots to know what the extended ‘Occupy’ movements are about).

Perhaps the defining moment for me wasn’t the pepper-spraying of several of our members outside of the Air and Space Museum, or the pathetic attempt to interrupt a Pentagon hearing – it was standing in the plaza during a general-assembly, in essence debating the First Amendment.

One half of the group (myself among them), wanted to tell the D.C. police to go to hell. They wanted us to understand that our ‘permit’ to be in the plaza ended that weekend, and that they could take action against us, up to and including arrest.

Their official negotiator asked us if being arrested was necessary to achieve our ends. This struck me as an odd question, but I later came to understand its true meaning – the best way to clip the wings of something like this is to co-opt it entirely. Arrest (or any other action by the authorities) loses its meaning if the aggrieved-party all but asks for it, and it’s carried out in a well-choreographed pageant.

We assured them that none of us wanted to go to jail – but that we were willing if it were necessary.

That’s when they extended the permit through February.

“But wait a minute,” I said to someone standing next to me, “I agree with this other guy here. We don’t need a permit. We have the First Amendment. It’s not up to them to tell us when to leave – it’s up to us to tell them when we’re leaving.”

The organizers of October2011 had other plans and saw it differently – they voted to accept the City’s offer to extend the permit – and thus, perhaps the only real, meaningful confrontation of the protest was avoided, entirely.

Four hundred people in a D.C. jail, supported by the American Civil Liberties Union and two legal-advocacy groups could have succeeded in setting a legal precedent, added to First Amendment case-law, and eventually influenced national policy.

Instead, the organizers allowed themselves to be co-opted by the authorities. This is not how change is made using the protest-model, which is the reason why I came home. And yes, folks, it really is that simple.

Now, that said, here are some things everyone should take away from the Occupy movements:

1. They’re attracting people from all walks of life. I met working-class folks from Massachusetts and Virginia; white-collar people from California; recent college graduates and retirees, alike. They all had one thing in common – they were sick to death of ten years of war. From what I’ve seen, the people in Zuccotti Park are the same – the only difference is the message.

2. Contrary to the media, they’re not a disorganized rabble of opportunists – the organizers of these protests are some of the most-lucid, best-educated people I’ve ever met, and they do have a message. In fact, they are the message.

3. They’re in this for the long haul. Clearing the camps (an event which seemed to be coordinated for the same day last Sunday, whether in New York City or Portland, Oregon) isn’t going to shut these people up or make them go away – in fact, the People In Charge of Repression might do well to realized that while these people were encamped, they were docile; rousting them from their temporary, voluntary living-arrangements in city or private parks only puts them on the move. Don’t expect these people to go away over the winter.

4. Gandhi was right. “First they ignore you; then they laugh at you; then they fight you; then you win” is a quote oft-attributed to the bespectacled little man who did much to bring about freedom for his native India. It appears that the laughing-stage is over; the nation’s media hasn’t been able to dissuade these people or their supporters; the right people ‘get it’, and their numbers are growing in spite of recent events.

_____________________________

Last Saturday, I decided to have a look for myself at one of the three most-active ‘Occupy’ camps in America – it didn’t hurt that it was going on right in my hometown.

Chapman and Lownsdale Squares are collectively a pretty place, most of the time; it’s in the government district, with the Federal building and City Hall a short walk away. The park there has been part of Portland’s scenery since the 1860’s – in 1861, the first fireworks display in Portland’s history were set off there, reinforcing in the public’s eye both Oregon and Portland’s commitment to the Federal union.

Lownsdale Square - Occupy Portland

There’s a well-equipped brick building which houses the park’s bathroom-facilities (it was built around the turn of the century), along with a statue of Teddy Roosevelt as a ‘Rough Rider’ from the Spanish-American War.

In Lownsdale square just to the north, there’s a statue of a member of the Oregon Volunteer Infantry; at its granite base are two small cannon from Fort Sumter.

As I entered the camp through one of the many paved paths, I noticed a handmade sign – “This Isn’t A Party – Do Some Dishes”. About ten paces more, and a fellow asked me what I was doing. “Well, I wanted to see this for myself,” was my response. He identified himself as part of the ‘safety committee’; he pointed out that there were several people who’d come there to pick fights, and he wanted to make sure I wasn’t interested in causing trouble. “No. Not here for that. Actually, I wanted to see what the media weren’t telling us.”

We had a short conversation about the bathrooms – the city had shut them down several days before, and the odor of urine was evident. Where the campers were taking care of more-substantial business was anyone’s guess by now – but my new host informed me that the city had also asked local businesses to deny bathroom-access to ‘obvious campers’. Clearly, a ploy to make everyone leave.

If so, it didn’t work. I’d a feeling that anyone who’s camping in the rain in Portland in November wasn’t going to be deterred by a lack of ‘facilities’ – or much else, either.

I was invited to continue my walk. I walked from one end of Chapman to the other end of Lownsdale – and while I saw some very irregular living-arrangements, I didn’t feel particularly unsafe.

I did see a lot of scared people. Young ones. Old ones. A middle aged man who’d gone to the trouble of buying a gas-mask at a local army-surplus store. People who were in small groups, talking about what to do next. I got the feeling of a group of people on the eve of something they couldn’t define; something which was greater than they were. The apprehension was palpable; the city had given them three warnings to leave, and they expected a police-presence at any point to forcibly evict them from the park.

About halfway into my walk, a police officer asked me what I was doing. Somehow, I didn’t feel quite as safe around him as I did with the man who’d asked the same question earlier – he was armed with pepper-spray, a baton, and a firearm. Not exactly friendly attire – as I read recently, “If you want to know who’s there to start a riot, look for the people dressed for a riot.” I didn’t see any campers dressed for rioting (unless you count the gas-mask I saw earlier).

“Taking a walk”, I said.

“Well, be careful. This isn’t a place to sightsee.”

“I’ll be careful, sir.”

(Cops, by the way, call that behavior ‘P&C’ – polite and courteous – and they look for it; it’s a sign of submittal to authority.)

Although the media were quick, early on, to mention drug use and alcohol, I didn’t see any evidence of this. All I saw was the result of a community which turned no one away. When I reached the end of Lownsdale Square, I pondered what to do.

I crossed the street, and walked back on the Art Museum side. While I did, I read some signage: “How Is The War Economy Working Out For You?”; “I’ve Been Out Of Work For Three Years. I Am The 99%”; “Wall Street Got Bailed Out – We Got Sold Out”. As opposed to the hate-filled and misspelled signs at Portland’s only Tea Party rally, these used proper English, were spelled correctly, and didn’t rely on half-truths or outright lies.

Dorli Rainey, 84 year old pepper-spray victim (Occupy Seattle

(The next day, a large number of Portland riot-police surrounded the squares and began clearing out protesters. Mike Reese, Portland’s police chief, was interviewed by local media, saying that he was ‘pleased with the outcome’, and that there was ‘no violence’. Video posted to YouTube and on Occupy Portland’s website tells a different story.

Justin Bridges and Portland Police

A local musician and Occupy Portland’s sign-language interpreter, Justin Bridges, was beaten by Portland police on Sunday morning. Taken to the hospital, he still does not have the use of one of his legs, and one arm hangs limp. On the same day, Zuccotti Park in New York was cleared thanks to the machinations of the New York Supreme Court; an 84-year-old woman got a full face of pepper-spray during the clearout of Occupy Seattle, and the media praised the police in every case for their ‘restraint’.)

___________________________

The Empire’s no longer laughing.

They are on to the next stage of things – the point where they fight back. Just today, over 500 protesters were arrested nationwide, as they took the fight to the halls of the Elite’s money-machines (over 50 were arrested here in Portland for shutting-down the offices of Wells Fargo Bank). As this plays out, the Empire’s Fox News-worshiping supporters should remember some things:

First, it wasn’t a ‘liberal conspiracy’, ‘freedom-hating Democrats’, or ‘lazy hippies’ who melted down the nation’s economy. It was a cadre of impossibly-wealthy plutocrats and uberCapitalists who built a virtual Corporate State to serve their own interests at the expense of everyone else – and when their greed got the better of them, they were perfectly willing to bring down the nation’s economy and then whine like tittybabies for the rest of us to mortgage the future of our grandchildren by way of a ‘bailout’ so they could continue to live like gods.

They’ve created their gated communities – Versailles-on-the-relative-cheap – and continue to rake in upwards of $1,000,000 an hour while one person in five on the outside are unemployed, and one child in four goes hungry.

Second, it wasn’t AlQaeda which brought us to war ten years ago. It was an administration which had been bought-and-paid-for by those same plutocrats – the ideological descendants of the Reagan era political apparatus which had elevated support for Israel into a holy crusade. AlQaeda was a response from the people oppressed by the regime in Jerusalem; a special-delivery package from a group of people who’d long ago connected the dots on the motives for Israel’s behavior.

Third, these same ‘hippies’ who are denigrated on the evening news are the message – and they’re making it, loud and clear, to anyone who’s listening. Joe and Josephine Sixpack aren’t paying attention – they’re too busy getting their soundbite-education from Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity to realize that the beginnings of a revolution are in play here, and the message is simple: The Plutocrats bought the government and proceeded to rape, pillage and rob the entire nation. In response, the protesters are camping in city parks nationwide to call attention to this crime, and set it right. They might not have a chance in Hell - but they know, as I do, that they (and we) have to try.

You can bet that the bastard-whores on Wall Street and their political counterparts on Capitol Hill know this – that’s why the camps were cleaned out. Laughter didn’t work. From where they sit, it’s time to fight back.

So, the question remains – “And what are you prepared to do?”

It’s still a damn good question.

You have to do something. It’s no longer possible to sit on the fence and make excuses that you have kids, a job, a suburban house; the leaves need collecting, etc. The time for half-measures has come and gone. It was time to pick a side a good while ago.

I did – and I like those people; the protesters - the homeless ones; the kids who went to college and in return are drowning in $100K+ of student debt, with the greatest lesson learned being that the American dream had been killed by champagne-swilling cocksuckers on a balcony in New York; the guy with the gas mask.

They realize that the only ‘upward mobility’ in America has been the drain of cash upward into the coffers of the very few. They realize that these same people bought and paid for the government, and that if genuine change is going to occur, it’ll happen either with peaceful, or barring that, violent, revolution.

So far, the Elites have gotten a ‘bye’ – the protesters have been peaceful. To paraphrase Kennedy, they’ve asked that peaceful revolution be made possible.

The Elites have answered. They’re not laughing.

The next move is ours.

Why We Fight

2011-10-06T08:28:00.000-07:00

Homelessness; In Real-Time

Before I get on a plane to put myself between our homes and the class-war’s desolation, I wanted to take a moment and show you all, first hand, why we’re engaged in this fight, and what’s really at stake here.

First, don’t think you’re immune.

The forces at work here are vast. They’ve taken on a life of their own, even though no one ‘owns’ them – they’re the forces of an economic tsunami, and they’re yet to break fully on our shores. You may well say, “I have assets!” You may well be right. I can tell you now that unless you’re in a position rivaling that of a Colombian drug lord, complete with your own private army, you have nothing which cannot be taken in a flash by the next bursting bubble.

Such was the case of a woman I’d met in a writing-group here on-line.

What amazed me about her in the beginning was her strength. She’d survived not just one, but two, abusive parents and an abusive husband (she freely admits that the last one was her decision, and that the statistics are correct; people who are raised in abusive situations usually seek them out, for complex reasons).

She was one of a very handful of women who’d connected the dots and developed the inner strength to say, “Today – and for the rest of my life – I will refuse to be a victim.” She’s raised two very bright, capable children into their teens. She’s accomplished what a lot of people couldn’t, and for that, I admire her. However, while she could beat abuse and its effects, the relentless tides of economic collapse - things over which no person in America can exercise any real control - have finally caught up with her.

Three years ago, she lost her job – an all-too-familiar story; she exhausted her unemployment benefits, then began selling homemade jewelery (along with the family furniture) to survive. In December last year, I organized a fund-raiser among my fellow online writers and friends to help keep this woman in her house. We raised a little over $1,000 – money which went a long way toward seeing to it that she spent Christmas in their modest apartment, rather than a homeless shelter.

Still, what she needed was a job. While she’s a capable admin, the destruction of America’s economy by an unregulated financial system translated into a complete dearth of employment. With 80 people applying for any given job in America, the odds are long against one person.

This week, her luck, time, and support all ran out.

“(We) determined after weighing all the facts, of which there are too many to name, that we have quite literally and thoroughly exhausted all of our options.

As such the following has been decided. (1) At the turn of the month (November) we will hold on to the last of our funds and (2) begin processing to the homeless shelter.”

That’s it. In her small case, the fight is over. She lost.

“(My daughter) and I will go to the Women's Shelter. It is guesstimated that we may be there anywhere between a couple of weeks and a couple of months before we can be placed...kind of like rejected pound puppies, it seems. Though in this case it's a matter of suitable housing within the program, which roughly means Section 8, I think.

My son will (hopefully) be with his father (he has not asked yet). His options were either the Men's shelter (complete with who knows what or who) or his dad's house. We as a family decided that he needed to be somewhere safer than a men's shelter. He would have rather have stayed with his sister and I, but the shelters split adult males from adult females and their children. My daughter and I can take care of each other, but my son would be left on his own...which is unacceptable to us as a family. We may be a lot of things, but we never leave one another unnecessarily exposed.”

I want you all to think about this – and picture your own family, when your children were in their teens.

This is why we fight.

If the smug CNN reporters who ‘don’t know why these people are here’ at the Occupy Wall Street demonstration still need a clue, they need to read this.

Every Teabagger in America needs to read this.

So does every Republican presidential candidate.

So does Barack Obama, who can’t seem to get his head out of his ass long enough to take on the banks and the brokerages and the other people who caused this mess.

Because if the people in charge don’t fix this, we’ll do it for them. And it won’t be pretty.

Her note went on, “As soon as we know that the agency has agreed to help us with the move then I'll take some of the funds I have left to secure a space, in the hopes that this is temporary. However, because of the instability of the situation, we are preparing for the possibility that whatever goes into storage will be lost…the books, the mementos, the small things, the things that make up our lives...that's going to be hard to handle if this is what takes us out of the picture. All of my research books, all the things that gave me a sense of who I was because they became part of me when I had nothing else...is on the line.”

That’s what happens when you become homeless, folks – your options are gone. Someone else is in charge of everything, from your Grandmother’s photo-album to your very person. At that point, your body isn’t even yours, any more.

“I saw the Action Agency last week (end of September 2011). They gave me a point of contact for the eviction process and made some rather interesting observations. The big one being that they noticed I am exhausted. I'm about as wound up, and ready to shatter as I have ever been in my life. I am wholly against tears in any form coming out of my face, but I'm so fried that I burst into tears at the drop of a hat when I am struggling to get through talking....to anyone about THIS situation. I, who usually know what to do to fix any situation...have no idea how to fix this, because it seems I have been trying to avoid this kind of reality since ....since I was born. Currently, I'm thankful I don't own a gun because I would blow my brains out."

This is what homelessness is like, folks. The stress develops into post-traumatic stress disorder when it’s over – but until then, the stress never leaves. Many homeless people take their own lives – not because they want to die, but because it’s the only measure of control left to them – the choice not to live as the nation’s economy has dictated.

Then, there’s the guilt, and the shame:

“I am angry because I couldn't get my daughter to University - she is so damned smart it's offensive to not be able to give her the boost she deserves so she can have what I was never allowed to have…support; encouragement; options.

I'm frustrated that my son, the musician - gifted even without formal training, self taught, getting into play at first chairs, being acknowledged for his skill and talent, never got a instrument that was in keeping with his skill and talent. And right now, he's so worried about how we are going to live that he can't focus on school, and worse...he can't even begin to hope for going to college.

I'm overwhelmed, because in the last bit....I can't even provide a meal without worrying about where it's coming from and I worry about how to make $168 last a month for 3 people, because that is all the food stamps we qualify for right now, until the paper work is adjusted...I hope. And I'm humiliated because we have to go to charity food banks with our welfare voucher that says we are broke, so they can give us day old bread, and cans of food.”

This is what poverty is like, folks.

I wrote her a reply, and said that I felt guilty in a way, because I and those who graciously donated last year weren’t able to solve the problem permanently.

“You all gave us 10 months...it's more than anyone I am related to ever tried to do in my whole life. You gave us time, without asking for me to pay you back in blood, or to prostitute myself for it. You gave me the endorsement of knowing that I would do whatever it took to make it work. Even my mother would not give me that much credit, without demanding that I let her treat me like hell because she gave me money.

It's not your failure. It's the failure of the coward, the manipulator, the user, the narcissist, the greedy, the abusive. This was just that I'm tapped out, I need help and I have nowhere to go. This is the worst case scenario of kids that grow up in abusive homes, and then get slammed by an economy that collapses or a society built on indulgence and no accountability, from the smallest social structure of family to the largest parts of government.

It’s the worst case scenario of a truth that is undeniable; an economy that will not provide a fighting chance; a society that is greedy, selfish, top heavy and bloated, gorging on the impoverished.”

Today, I’m going to Washington.

I’m going for this woman, who has no chance.

I’m going for her children, who have no future.

I’m going for everyone in her position. I’m going because the lesson of a smoking hole in the ground in New York was never learned. I’m going because the people who sipped champagne and sneered at the protesters on Wall Street are the problem, not the solution.

I’m going for all of us.

This is why we fight.

A Short Trip To The Unknown

2011-10-01T18:30:00.000-07:00

Or, "Will Goes To Washington."

"There are no excuses left. Either you join the revolt taking place...or you stand on the wrong side of history. Either you obstruct...or sink into the miasma of despair and apathy. Either you are a rebel or a slave."

-- Chris Hedges; author

"No person shall be...deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..."

-- Amendment V; U.S. Constitution

I've made my decision.

The time for half-measures - indeed; any measures other than civil disobedience - are over. The rich cocksuckers running the country via the Casino on Wall Street are holding the nation in thrall to a political system which has been purchased, via rulings like Citizens United and the tender ministrations of the Koch Brothers, their stooges in the Tea Party and the variant Fundie groups which would have us believe that their Imaginary Friend, Jesus H. Christ, Esq. (CEO of the Republican Party and founder of America), is in Charge of it All, and looking down beneficently while he polishes his flamethrower, ready to sort-out everyone who dissents.

Y'know what? Fuck him. Fuck them, too. I want my damn country back.

This might be my last post for a while. I'm headed to Washington at the end of the week to help occupy the Capitol Mall as a part of October2011; depending on where you read this (my main writing-site or over on Subversify) I may be getting ready to go, or already there. Regardless, wish us luck.

Yes, us.

We're all going to need it. Not because I'm afraid of J.H. Christ, Esq. (he doesn't exist); I'm far more fearful of winding up in a Washington jail or worse, because I've violated one of the many and bizarre arcane rules, late of the last ten years, which preclude a citizen from speaking his or her mind. Frankly, yes - I'm afraid I'll wind up with a 500 pound cell-mate with love on his mind, while a Federal 'keeper' laughs at the antics of such people in his human zoo.

I'm still willing to go through with it.

So should you. Because whether or not you know this, you don't have a choice.

The other day, an American citizen by the name of Anwar al-Awlaki was unceremoniously killed - assassinated, it turns out, without trial or leave of appeal in spite of his rights as a citizen under the Fifth Amendment. Citizens in New York City are being pepper-sprayed and arrested outside the New York Stock Exchange by police who stand more to lose from the bastards sipping champagne and sneering from the balconies than they do by joining the protesters. Every one of the bastards in the photo below? They deserve a rope and a slow-haul to the top of a lamppost - which, by the way, is no better than what al-Awlaki got from the U.S. Government.


Brokers, sipping champagne and watching protest.

From top to bottom, America has no sense of itself, and I'm given to wonder if the terrorists have really won, after all. I know one thing - the cure (ten years of assaults on our civil liberties, two unwinnable wars which have bled the country white, Gitmo, and a host of other things) was (and is) worse than the 'disease', and we have to do something about it.

Yes, we.

Because, as I mentioned earlier, you no longer have a choice. You're in this up to the hatband, and your only decision left is to either join the side which is demanding its freedom and its country back, or sit back in apathy and watch the country go to a Hell of the aforementioned bastards' devising.

I won't candy-coat this - the cost may be high. Ask this fellow. You may wind up in jail with me. You may wind up pepper-sprayed; assaulted, or worse - because your rights as a citizen no longer apply - the family of al-Awlaki can tell you that.

"I can't," you say. "I have a job." Take some time off. There's a damn good chance in six months you won't have it anymore, anyway. "I have kids," you'll say. Take them with you - you'll be teaching them several valuable life-lessons; the first of which is how to make history, rather than study it in a classroom.

"I can't get there." That never stopped you when you were younger. Hitchhike, if you have to. "But I don't have a room when I get there," you'll say. Fuck that. Neither do I. I'm packing this cool little tent, some long underwear, and a heavy coat.

"But I have a family, and too much to live for." This is the lamest excuse, really - what are they going to do? Take away your youth? Your freedom? Here's a clue, Mr. and Mrs. American - they've already done that. If you give a damn about your kids, you'll grow a pair and do this. For them. For you, too.

The choice is yours. You can watch the country go to Hell on CNN, or you can do something about it.

I've made my choice.

Join me.

Slouching Toward Washington

2011-09-17T15:37:00.000-07:00

The evangelical freakshow which has become the Republican Party seems poised to anoint either Mitt Romney (my personal choice; perhaps because I really do like whistling past the graveyard and he’s the least mentally-challenged of the lot), or Rick Perry (a fellow who makes G.W. Bush look like Thoreau). Both are followers of a particularly-nasty brand of Christianity – Romney is a Mormon, and believes in things like baptizing dead people and wearing magic underwear; Perry is a Fundie, who believes that renting a whole stadium to pray for rain while getting rid of several thousand firefighters is the best solution for a drought and wildfire problem in his home-state of Texas.

Romney gets at least a point or two for not bringing religion into the general discussion. He has, however, made it pretty clear that he thinks Bush was a genius, and that undoing everything done by Obama is his first priority.

Perry doesn’t get points. At all. His Imaginary Friend is a particularly scary bastard; a guy who founded America, but who wants to destroy it the moment we quit supporting a gang of equally-nasty thugs who are busy pissing-off half the world by way of running the show in Jersusalem; He’s the sort of fellow who’s coming back on a white horse, packing a flamethrower and ready to sort-out anyone who doesn’t believe not only in Him, but in guts, guns and the Republican party.

Meantime, the bow of the Economic Ship of State is well-underwater, and there are some pretty serious signs that the pumps aren’t working at all – we didn’t create Job One in August; first time claims for unemployment were the highest in several months, and leading indicators are pointing to that double-dip recession-with-a-cherry-on-top which I predicted a year ago.

Further, the mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, said in front of the whole world the other day that prolonged unemployment could cause civil unrest (read: riots).

When the bankruptcy rate for college graduates is through the roof, and when PhD’s are standing in line to apply for the few jobs which are available screwing wheels on BMWs in South Carolina for half the pay of their German counterparts, we don’t have a temporary problem in America – we have a problem with our economic structure; the kind of thing which requires government re-regulation to set right, along with the prosecution of those who created the collapse in the first place.

One doesn’t solve these kind of problems by continuing to bring up the strawmen of abortion and same-sex marriage, calling them ‘America’s real moral issues’ – not when the privileged few are worrying about preserving their largesse and discussing where in the world they’ll take this year’s three-month vacation, while there are people dying of bad teeth and starvation. You solve that problem by holding the perpetrators accountable, and setting the circumstances to rights which cause the problem in the first place. Both, however, require a kind of courage which is missing in the Oval Office.

Deep down, Americans know this. Tanning BinLaden’s hide and hanging it from the White House fence as a trophy might have helped a little, but the same problems were here when the party was over. You can only cheer so much for the demise of one man, no matter how evil, when you’ve no job to go to on Monday morning; no paycheck come Friday; no food come Saturday morning.

Going broke slowly is something which even the rank-and-file can see coming – going broke quickly is a conundrum; one of those things which induce good old-fashioned panic. (James Carville said the other day that with two special-elections going the way of the GOP; both in traditionally Democratic territory, it’s time to do just that – and use the old Soviet method of firing everyone in sight, putting privates in charge of regiments if that’s what it takes to stop the relentless tides of Republican Panzers from overrunning his political Stalingrad). A kind of panic is now setting its shadow across the land; the kind of uneasy fear that precedes things like revolutions.

You may not be fully aware of this, getting your news from CNN and Fox, but Europe is actually in pretty bad shape. The Euro is rapidly becoming worthless in its home-countries and convertible into very little else; from Great Britain to Greece, European economies are teetering on a precipice named ‘debt’, and none of them have any real solutions. The closest most of us get to the problem is the Dow, which either rises or falls 150+ points each day depending on whether one of the Eurotrash nations is going to default.

Such a catastrophe would certainly carry more than a few American banks with it. This could be the nick in the nation’s fabric which causes the whole thing to unravel; it could be (as I postulated in a piece of alternate-history a while ago) the default of a major state, or something entirely as mundane as a howling mob of a few thousand 99ers deciding to apply a pitchforks-and-rope solution to the mansions and persons of the wealthy in Anytown, America.

America is rapidly becoming ungovernable in any conventional sense; people who are working are just hanging on, terrified of losing their jobs; the unemployed are rapidly losing hope and coming to the realization that they’ve nothing to lose in a nation run by a hapless but well-meaning President who surrounded himself with, instead of men and women of some courage, a thoroughly disappointing gang of cowards, amoral grifters and chickenshit politicians. On the other side of the radio-dial, the Tea Party is nothing but the collective mouthpiece of the plutocrats who are pulling the puppet-strings on everyone from Limbaugh to Bachmann in order to continue turning the United States into the economic equivalent of a 1970's-era Argentina or Chile.

It may well be that Obama is the last president, at least for a time; maybe forever. Certainly Romney or Perry (or whoever the plutocrats choose to replace him; the last great hope of the common American) will have to face that possibility; that they could be the Romulus Augustulus of the 21^st century. The falcon sure as shit can’t hear the falconer, and the center quit holding a hell of a long time ago.

Somewhere, someone is thinking. That person might be a recent college graduate, incapable of finding a job, or an unemployed steelworker, fed up with beans at the homeless-shelter, or someone who’s watched one too many children die from a lack of medical care. Whoever they are, I don’t doubt he or she exists. For one thing, there are too many people just like them everywhere in America – sooner or later, one of them is going to take action. Just what that action is, what form it takes, and whether our civil liberties are intact on the other side is anyone’s guess. As I've said before: When they start handing out those crisp new brown shirts and armbands, think hard – because it’s a lead-pipe-cinch they won’t tell you the price-tag.

September 11th, 2011

2011-09-10T21:47:00.000-07:00

Accurate scholarship can

Unearth the whole offence

That has driven a culture mad;

What huge Imago made

A psychopathic god.

I and the public know

What all schoolchildren learn:

Those to whom is evil done

Do evil in return.

–- W.H. Auden

It is a wild-eyed terrorist gang

They boardeth planes by four and three.

“I am off to fly to hell,” they quoth

“And who flieth now with me?”

-- Bill Purkayastha

Ten Years On, We've Learned Exactly Jack-Shit

It’s 9/11; we’re ten years down the road and up to our fucking necks in a collective politico-religious insanity.

The media, for its part, is now engaged in a giant circle-jerk; a group-orgasm over the meaning of the Twin Towers; the city of New York is going to wrap itself in the flag and shout ‘we’re the greatest!’ from the top of the Empire State building. What they don’t understand is that ten years on, most of the world simply views New York as America-Writ-Large; bragging on being The Place Where It All Began isn’t going to get them any brownie-points with most of the planet’s population – they got all the mileage they’re going to get from that event some time ago, and the rest of the country would do well to realize that, also.

(If you’re interested in the root-cause of 9/11, I’ve got the answer for you in the photo above, if you care to read and understand it. If not, that’s fine. I’m beyond caring now, anyway. Soon, you won’t be, either. Your life might have begun courtesy of a four-door sedan bringing you home to the family ranch-house, but your future is arriving on shank’s-mare and public transit to row-housing, if you’re lucky, all courtesy of Americas Great Collapse, ushered in since 9/11. More on that in a moment).

The other evening, I saw an advertisement on the tube which turned my stomach. Y’see, right now (operators are standing by), you can go to justicecoin.com and buy the item in the photo to the upper right. It’s done up in either silver or gold (your choice; depending upon the limit of your last non-maxed credit-card); you’ll get a faux ‘military operations map’, detailing the publicly-provided details of the operation to Get Bin-Laden. As you can see, one side of the coin shows armed-to-the-teeth Marines, Seals, or somesuch, and the legend, “You Can Run, But You Cannot Hide”. On the other side are two quotes by Bush II and ~~Bush III~~ Obama; both invoking the concept of ‘justice’ (which, in this case, equals death without trial).

Before any of you get uppity about that last statement, let’s remember something: In the America which existed when your Momma and Daddy brought you home from the hospital, everyone – right down to the Nuremburg defendants and Charles Starkweather – deserved a fair trial with adequate representation. America had laws against arbitrarily killing people who hadn’t been convicted of something worthy of the death penalty – and there are plenty of us who’ve fought the concept of legalized murder (execution), tooth and nail, for as long as we’ve been alive.

Put another way, the notion of breaking international law by sending an armed body of troops across another nation’s border to kill a civilian who was living in that nation was considered not only immoral, but was against the law in America – and believe it or not, it still is.

Yes, Obama and his underlings broke not only international, but American law by killing Bin-Laden (I’m assuming that what we’ve been told is true.)

The cavalier nature of such activity is in stark contrast to who-we-were-before; in the 1970’s, we wouldn’t have tolerated such assaults on our civil liberties as the Military Commissions Act; the Patriot Act, the military’s Civilian Inmate Labor Program, or any of the other bullshit perpetrated by the Bush Administration in the wake of the attacks on the World Trade Center.

The Department of Homeland Security (a catch-all polyglot agency responsible for administrating everything from the aforementioned Acts to some other unlovely things, like detention-without-trial of suspected ‘terrorists’) owns up to exactly 33 (no; that’s not a typo – that’s thirty-three) deaths in the United States due to terrorism since 9/11.

In response, we’ve killed over two million people, the bulk of whom are in Afghanistan and Iraq – neither county which was at war with us at the time they were invaded (you can add at least 10x to that number if you’re looking for the enemies we’ve created in the process – far more than we can kill.) Then again, disproportionate response is the minor theme of this play, and we’re likely to see it again and again as things wind down.

All of this ‘git-‘r-dun’ horseshit, perpetrated by a backwoods yokel of a President who had his papers written for him at Harvard has bankrupted the country. Twenty percent of America is out of work when you add up everything; the nation’s budget surplus is now a dreadful deficit, and the only response which most Americans agreed upon in the last election was to send a majority of people to Congress who support the rantings of a quasi-theocratic bunch of hillbilly Hooterville-dwelling eejits calling themselves the “Tea Party”.

Teabaggers aside, over 60% of Americans now support the Republican party; put another way, while most, if asked, don’t like the “Tea Party” or its ideals, they’re willing to hold their noses and pull a lever to put another backwoods yokel in the White House – only this time, he believes that his Imaginary Friend founded America and that it is not only ‘exceptional’ as a result, but as long as we toe the mark as laid down in a book written by a bunch of Bronze and Iron-Age goat-herders, we’ll be ‘blessed’.

‘Blessings’ are dependent, however, upon the same course of action we’ve taken in the Middle East for some sixty years now – supporting a group of racist thugs who founded a bastard-state in what used to be Palestine.

I’ll point out that it was this action (along with a few minor ones) which led to Islamic fundamentalists taking-out the Twin Towers – our continued blind support of the regime in Jerusalem, no matter what, is the ultimate Smoking Gun. Sadly, no one has the courage to point this out in the American media, because of the massive support which the Zionists and their supporters have everywhere here in the U.S. from the press to Congress.

Yes; before you decide I should be pilloried for saying it, I’ll help you along: We did this to ourselves.

Because of this idiocy, Bin Laden and his network of operatives have won.

Their objective was to bring down the American economy by forcing us to bleed ourselves white. That was accomplished, in spades – not only is gasoline twice as expensive as it was, nearly everything else costs more, and there are no jobs with which to earn the money to pay inflated prices. The one bright spot – there are a lot of boarded-up houses which you can get for a song.

For all this, we’re not the first country which struck a medal commemorating the ‘justice’ of mass murder.

It turns out that the German Empire, in existence for a brief period from the 1870’s through 1918, did the same thing.

Back then, they’d unleashed another kind of depredation on civilians – unrestricted submarine warfare. Because they were such nice guys, they told the nations of the world with which they were at war that they’d sink any of their shipping, without warning. On May 7, 1915, the U20 under the command of a Captain Schwieger, did just that – torpedoing the British liner Lusitania.

A medallion-manufacturer from Munich struck the medal you see on your left. It depicted Death, selling tickets to the Lusitania, with the legend “Business Above All”.

The German Empire was one of the countries which lost the First World War. While nearly no one apart from historians and ocean-liner buffs are even aware of the German propaganda medal, it serves as both a statement and a warning – if you make enough enemies, sooner or later you’ll run out of friends.

Epilogue: America is out of friends; out of money; and out of time. We’ve destroyed our economy, and failed to recognize that humility is one of the greatest strengths of both people and governments. By all accounts, neither our people nor our government are very humble nowadays, preferring to throw a modern-day legion across the border to start teaching neo-imperial ‘lessons’ rather than making any attempt at getting along.

Newsflash: It didn’t work for Rome. It didn’t work for Germany. It’s not going to work for us, either. The empire is collapsing, and from where most of the world sits, the sooner, the better.

As to Rome, we all know what happened – they created so many enemies that they inevitably ganged-up and beat the crap out of the Romans, trashing their city and making off with everything right down to the treasury.

Germany endured a shitty ‘republic’ for a little over a decade; its main accomplishment was cranking up the printing-press and literally spinning currency out of thin air, out of which it ‘paid’ its onerous reparations. What happened afterward is another cautionary-tale; proof that when they start handing out those brown shirts and armbands in the name of national unity, recovery and self-respect, it’s worth taking a second look – because the perpetrators haven’t told you the price-tag.

With any luck, we’ll Balkanize in a more or less orderly fashion, rather than suffer the final indignity of either civil war or a takeover by the corn-pone Nazis waiting in the wings to do just that.

Objects in your mirror are closer than they appear.

(As some of you know, ten years ago a very close friend of mine lost her older sister in Tower #2 on 9/11.

Out of respect for the family, I will not mention any names. Both she and I had similar upbringings, and have remarked on more than one occasion that our respective parents would spin in their graves to know what’s being done in the name of ‘security’ here in America.

While we’re better than that, it doesn’t appear that we’re going to act like it any time soon.

It’s a grave dishonor to everyone who died – not just my friend’s sister – to do less than look the causes straight in the eye, and correct them, no matter how painful.

Just don’t hold your breath.)

Obama, Perry, and The Economy

2011-09-03T22:16:00.000-07:00

Why Neither (and None) Have The Answers

Very soon, the President (after allowing himself to be beaten like a scabby dog over the date of his speech), will dust off some tired, aging ideas and present them as the New Way Forward for American employment. He’ll likely interrupt the beginning of a football game, pissing off legions of Red Staters and other residents of Hooterville America – because at this point, they’re either running so scared of losing what work they have that they’d sooner forget reality by any means possible, or they’re unemployed already. Either way, football is better medicine than learning (again) that their President has nothing to offer them – and hey; he took the 12-gauge shotgun out of America’s economic pie-trap last month by way of ending the debt-ceiling fight. Maybe he’ll get points for that - but don’t count on it.

The Republican frontrunner, Rick Perry, is telling everyone that he can solve this problem – and he holds up his own state of Texas as a shining light of employment in the face of a national economy which has gone to Hell.

Peeling back the onion, we have two solutions: Obama is likely to tell everyone to work for free via a ‘workfare’ program; Perry is going to tell everyone that they can have jobs – as long as those jobs are flipping burgers and washing cars.

Neither is addressing the real issues. Meanwhile, people are increasingly fending for themselves, much like the residents of Saigon simply walked to the edge of town and started digging tank-traps in April of 1974, while the government radio told them everything was fine, and the North wasn’t anywhere near the capital.

History proved them wrong. It’s about to do the same to the current American government.

So, how do we fix things?

First, we’re going to have to admit that both Bush and Obama have failed.

Bush failed (and Congress did, also) when he/they bailed out the nation’s banks, violating one of the unwritten tenets of capitalism; that anyone who fails is left to sink. Instead, they’re all sitting on a load of our grandchildren’s cash, parking it offshore and waiting for the inevitable failure of the American economy.

Second, we’re going to have to look at the elephant in the room.

The elephant – trillions of dollars of uncollectible debt, propped up by tax money and kept on the books by the nation’s banks - still has to be dealt with, and foreclosing on the nation’s housing-stock isn’t the answer.

Those of you who took a little economics in college are going to tell me, “But Will – how can the banks just write those loans off? They’d fail.”

Absent the bailout funds (which are probably accounted for differently), yes, they’d fail. And you know what? That’s fine. It’s about time.

(We can take a look at North Dakota for our paragon. They have maintained the lowest unemployment in the nation – this is largely due to the fact that they were insulated from the effects of the housing-bubble.

This is because they have a state-owned bank, which is well-run and well-regulated, and which is where most North Dakotans do their banking business (although private banks are chartered as well). As a result of responsible loan practices, they ‘took a pass’ on loaning cheap money at subprime rates – and North Dakotans were spared, in turn, the ugly economics of speculation, ‘flips’, and other things which have destroyed housing markets all over the country.)

Yes; I’m advocating a return to small business and local economy. Why?

Because small-business is what creates jobs. Until we quit pandering to large corporations for job-creation, what we’re doing is little more than the cargo-cults during WWII – building idols of airplanes and making marks on tapa-cloth as ‘invoices’, in the hope that the magic silver birds will appear out of the sky and drop massive boxes full of Spam and condoms.

Large corporations – anywhere – are loyal to one thing and one thing only: Massive profits; generated globally and invested wherever they can make the most return. They have zero loyalty to the nation; to the community; to employment.

Forget ‘stimulus’ – in spite of the current administration’s claim that the ‘stimulus’ ‘created’ 2.9 million jobs, when you pull back the skin on that rotten turkey, you’ll find the maggots of faulty accounting and the decay of make-work jobs.

If we want to create permanent employment for millions of Americans, we need to do four things, and do them now – the first is to tell the banks to write off the trillions of dollars they have in bad mortgage-paper; the second is to create a genuine single-payer health-care system; the third is to rewrite the tax-code to emphasize saving and investment, putting a genuine progressive schedule in place which puts the tax burden on the wealthy and accounts for inflation, and removing deductions for classes of consumption; the fourth is to reregulate the financial system.

What we’d see is an immediate, yet controlled, drop in housing prices – and before you cry ‘Socialism!’ to my suggestion that the banks simply write off their uncollectable mortgages, you should really consider that it was free-market conservatives who got us in this mess in the first place – allowing them back in the tent to do more of the same sort of damage is insanity.

Yes; I’m suggesting that the banks write off uncollectable paper, and start handing out deeds – because the alternative is millions of people in the street – and therein lies a nasty word called ‘revolution’.

We’d also see a drop in inflation, and an increase in the value of the dollar, as reflected by a drop in overall prices. Wages would drop, also – but it wouldn’t take a six-figure income to buy a house and put our kids through college anymore, either.

This is the same medicine which some European and Latin American countries had to swallow – but the sooner we accept this and quit saying, “This doesn’t apply to us! We’re ‘exceptional’!”, the better off we’re going to be.

Now that the debt-ceiling debacle was pandered to a sorry finish by Obama, the US can get back to its systemic collapse in an orderly manner, and neither Obama nor Perry have any answers. Half the world is starving to death, so we can forget about selling them iPods; one in five Americans is out of work; one in four American children live in poverty, and half the damn country is on food-stamps (a self-reinforcing ‘fish-for-a-person’ program if ever was), so we can forget about selling them anything, either.

Sooner or later, big business in America is going to have to realize that absent someone to buy things, making them is a worthless exercise – and they can’t just keep trading their stock back and forth and telling themselves that they’re all ‘making money’, any more than Cletus McSixpack was an instant millionaire by flipping houses – because someone, or multiple someones, have to be the last ones to get a chair when the music stops.

Personally, I don’t believe my four points, above, have an ice-cube’s-chance-in-hell of ever being done. Actually, I don’t believe we’ll ever really solve this debt-and-unemployment crisis; the government will continue to rearrange the deck-chairs and ignore the problem completely until we’re broke completely, and the obvious is staring us in the face. Will American ‘pluck’ finally rise to the occasion? I doubt it.

The reason is a conversation I had with a fellow in my neighborhood the other day. I began mentioning some of the obvious things – and he returned with a Fox News summary of ‘liberal’ failures, and why we needed a ‘God fearing’ man in office again. In that, his comment was America-writ-large; a statement of the 60%+ of the American electorate which believes to the core of its being that if we just double-down on the past thirty-years of insanity, we will by some magic alchemy achieve a different result.

I didn’t continue the conversation. I needed to mow the lawn anyway.

The Waterfall at the Edge of the World

2011-07-21T10:16:00.000-07:00

Here; there be Dragons - Congress is ready to let the country default on its debt obligations, no matter what.

“I will not vote to increase the debt ceiling.”

-- Michele Bachmann

As I write this, the United States is a little over a week away from the financial equivalent of Hiroshima. Absent a miracle now, the U.S. will fail to raise the debt-ceiling (something which Congress is required to do if they want to go on borrowing money), triggering a default on interest payments on current debt and bringing the entire American government to a hard stop.

From Iraq and Afghanistan to the local National Guard armory, American military personnel will not be paid. Social Security checks will not go out; domestic organizations from the Post Office to the local Department of Agriculture and FDA inspectors will cease work.

For their part, the Tea Party types in Congress have made it clear (Bachmann being their unofficial leader-of-sorts) that they will not vote to increase the debt ceiling, no matter what sort of ‘deal’ gets made in Congress between now and then. They’ve not made a statement regarding perceived consequences; perhaps they really just want to see the pretty fireworks when it all implodes, or (most likely) they just don’t fucking know any better.

Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is making contingency plans – there are at least some who see the truth, and they’re engaged in the moral-equivalent of the citizenry who spontaneously went to the outskirts of Saigon to dig tank-traps in the spring of 1975 while their government told them to ‘remain calm’.

I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

So, what are the consequences? Let’s take a look.

First, our debt-rating would be downgraded. Already, three credit rating agencies have stated flatly that our coveted AAA debt-rating could drop to the status of junk within days.

Second, the stock market could collapse. (Now, I’ll warrant that this has less impact on Joe Average than you might think – most 401K’s are history, thanks to the recession; the only people who own stocks are that sliver of the middle-class which survived, and the wealthy) – however, there’s an immediate effect on things like employment when a company’s stock loses 90% of its value overnight.

Think an official unemployment rate of 9+% is bad? Try 30%.

Third, you’d start seeing dominoes fall in a hurry. Stocks get hit; employment gets hit; everything from the local grocery to the corner sandwich-shop go out of business. In fact, most things would grind to a halt.

Fourth, everything in America would likely double in price overnight. Stating that we’re no longer going to pay our bills is sort of the ultimate ‘fuck you’ to the rest of the world. Anything we get from overseas (which is a lot) wouldn’t show up for fear of nonpayment; anyone sitting on goods would likely hoard them against payment in something which had value (either trade, or gold/silver).

Speaking of gold and silver, count on those going through the roof. Gold is now at $1,500+/ounce; that set an official dollar-for-dollar record recently, but not a real, adjusted-for-inflation record – it’d have to reach $4,500+ in today’s dollar to do that. There’d be nothing to prevent that from happening.

By the time all of these things happened – and they’d happen at unholy speed – we could start looking for serious civil unrest. (If you like the genre of future-history, you can go here and read a piece I wrote this past spring regarding just such a scenario – it begins with a default by one of the nation’s largest states).

There’s a better-than-even chance of balkanization if we get to that point – and there’d be little the government could do to stop it, because the military, National Guard stipends, and most of the nation’s police-forces’ salaries would stop immediately. (History’s on my side here with plenty of examples of soldiers not showing up for the particularly dangerous work of putting down domestic insurrections when they’re not getting paid.)

At this point, it’s anyone’s game. Most people who start revolutions expecting to have a semblance of control don’t quite realize that when ‘power lies in the streets’, everyone is a leader – and when they all show up to the party, no one is in charge.

Obama has the habit of entertaining nuclear-options (remember, he and Bernacke cooked up the whole quantitative-easing thing late last year as a means of injecting money into the economy when the banking bailout didn’t work) – and it’s quite possible he could simply invoke the Constitution and his oath to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ by way of issuing an executive order to raise the debt ceiling.

While this would make the problem go away – at least, until the next election – it would send a clear message to the rest of the world that our government was permanently broken; cries of ‘Dictator!’ would be heard from the far Right, and in this case, they’d be partially correct.

Polarized and incapable of making a decision, Congress may well be handing Obama something he doesn’t want and no sane person would contemplate unless disaster was looming. With their simplistic and skewed understanding of economics and politics, the Tea Party faithful in Congress are behaving now like a gaggle of schoolboys in a room ankle-deep in gasoline who've all-of-a-sudden decided that playing with a lighter is a good idea. A default at this point would cost the American economy 10% of its GDP outright, sending us into a depression-with-a-capital-'D'. Obama is losing his support-base over his bizarre stance on Social Security and Medicare, and now Bachmann and her Teabagger minions are already clapping, anticipating the fireworks.

Meanwhile, no one is at the helm of the Ship of State - and no one hears the vague rushing sound of the waterfall at the end of the world.

Two Anecdotes

2011-07-06T09:28:00.000-07:00

Returning to the Past is America's Future....

#1 - The Future of Public Services - Bracketed by three main freeways (at a distance), the little town of Alto, Texas lies southeast of the Dallas metroplex on the way to – well, no place, really. It’s one of America’s small towns – grown from farmland and farming people, and largely independent of most things except the land.

Now, however, Alto is getting some press – although it’s now famous for something which I’m sure the citizens wouldn’t want.

It’s the first city in the nation to downsize (read: fire) its entire police force.

Local county sheriffs fielded 20-something calls in the first week of this debacle – over 75% from the little town of Alto (including the arrest of four men from the Dallas area who’d decided to knock-over one of the town’s banks in broad daylight).

#2 - A Return To The 17th Century - About a month ago, a man in his late ‘50’s from North Carolina – unemployed for three years and badly in need of hospital treatment for a chest condition – robbed a bank in his hometown for $1.00. The reason? So he could go to prison in order to get proper food and medical care. This Dickensian return to debtors-prison 'logic' by way of looking after the least-fortunate in American society hardly raised eyebrows.

We only need to read these two stories within the greater context of what’s happening in America to understand that catastrophe is just over the horizon. I’m not talking about ‘severe recession’, where the populace is kept in check by unemployment compensation and variant welfare programs.

I’m talking about the kind of thing which only requires a spark to set off some very unpleasant consequences.

All over America, states and cities are either engaged in or contemplating variant degrees of ‘shutdown’ in order to balance their budgets. The Federal government, misled by a group of people who’ve caved-in at every turn and in thrall to a mob of economically-illiterate morons calling themselves the ‘Tea Party’ is all set to give the far Right everything it wants by way of budget-cuts.

We can forget any additional safety-net. We can count on the Affordable Health Care Act (disparagingly called ‘Obamacare’ by its detractors) being defunded. Say goodbye to parts of Medicare; count on the retirement age being raised on Social Security (and count on some early moves to privatize it).

Speaking of privatization, you can count on private corporations being handed prisons, schools, fire departments, and anything else which can be sold-off (corruption is the usual result of such actions, as evidenced by the recent test-cheating scandal in Atlanta, and multiple instances of corrupt judges sentencing people to for-profit prisons for financial kickbacks).

What’s the outcome?

I think it’s safe to say that we’re going to see a lot of sick people. A whole lot of them. Babies; too. Plenty of banks out there to be robbed for a few dollars – because the fear and stigma of a prison-sentence is nothing compared to starving in the street with a treatable medical condition.

Speaking of starving, there’ll be more than a few people living in the street this fall and winter. By Thanksgiving, it’ll likely be impossible to ignore the problem – parking your car downtown will be a risky affair after dark – and in some cities, because of the lack of police and the increase in desperate people, it’ll be dangerous anytime.

Retail businesses in city-centers will have to organize, pooling resources to hire additional security.

“Wait until October”, said Ralph Nader, recently. “That’s when the budget cuts will hit home.” He’s right, of course – the timing of Federal, nationwide budget slashing, cold weather and desperate people will be a perfect storm of sorts; a trifecta of disasters.

With the Democrats now behaving like Republicans and the Democratic leadership from Obama on down now obsessed with reelection rather than leadership, and with the true tenets of Liberalism now little more than a memory, we cannot look there for solutions. The extremists in charge are not being met by extremists on the other side; instead, they’re met by a group of ‘intellectuals’ led by Obama and promoting the idea that logic and reason will prevail in the face of a group of people who’ve already bought and paid for the government, the courts and the military. What Obama and his supporters don’t realize is that they’ve already lost.

America’s religious institutions are now engaged in the business of self-preservation through endless expansion and fund-raising; some have created themselves anew, touting a weaponized gospel of conquest and radical extremism. Speaking out for truth and justice are a thing of the past; advocating the lot of the least among us is by and large history.

The real question that’s left isn’t “What do we do?” The real question is, “What happens next, and when?” Frankly, we’re likely past the point where the Bush era destruction of the rule of law is reversible; we’re past the point of reversing the damage to the economy from thirty years of Chicago School economic idiocy, as the ‘trickle down’ theories which brought us to this pass are now firmly ensconced as Holy Writ among the new crop of Teabaggers and suchlike; we’re also likely past reversing much of the damage done to our environment (that issue being mired in a politico-religious morass based on the far-Right’s rejection of science).

No; the only real issue left is to do a little math – and ask ourselves whether it’ll take 50 towns like Alto before the whole thing collapses, or 500; whether it’ll take 1,000 people robbing banks for health care, or 10,000 before a revolution occurs.

I don’t put much faith in the ballot-box any longer; the inmates now run the asylum, and current trends are calling for more, and not less, of the same. Elections are an ineffective illusion; a means of giving people the misled notion that they’re actually participating in their own government.

Two anecdotes. The future, as I’m fond of saying, isn’t set – but connecting the dots is becoming more and more a bleak affair; a Greek tragedy where the outcome is more and more certain. We’re out of money, out of time, polarized down the middle, and past the Age of Aquarius. Peace, love and understanding are thin on the ground; the storm you see in the rear view is the New Dark Age, coming to bite us all in the ass. Objects Are Closer Than They Appear.

Plan accordingly.

The Surreal States of America

2011-06-28T09:38:00.000-07:00

Happy Fourth of July

If you can convince the people to believe in absurdities, eventually you can convince them to commit atrocities.

--Voltaire

In David Lynch’s “Twin Peaks”, there’s a Red Room, where a fellow called The Man From Another Place helps people find the truth. The problem is that this only happens in the subject’s dreams – it’s up to them to sort out the truth when they wake up back in reality.

Those of us who Stayed Awake in Class have the habit of pointing out reality on a regular basis to the Rest of America – the problem is that we don’t get the props we should, because most of America has Gone ‘Round The Bend.

Welcome to the Surreal States of America, folks – where reality doesn’t apply.

Today, over 60% of Americans believe that a guy named ‘Jesus’ is coming back, Real Soon Now, to sort-out all the bad-people (read: ‘anyone who doesn’t believe like us.’) He’s going to raise all of the dead-people who believed just like the semiliterate assholes above-ground nowadays (you’ve seen them on Fox News and on Glenn Beck’s show; they’re the folks who think David Barton is a real historian, that Obama’s a not-so-secret socialist, and that the only way to set things straight is to listen to the dog-whistle of ‘take America back’).

When ‘Jesus’ comes back, he’s going to take his legion of Born Again Zombies and establish a Thousand-Year Reich here on earth (where, ostensibly, there’ll be no crime, unemployment, or worries about things like Kim Kardashian’s ass).

There’s a subgroup of that 60% who not only believe that ‘Jesus’ is coming back – He’s so pissed that He’s exacting ‘judgments’ on America and the rest of the world (this is why we have such an abysmal economy and why we’re mired in two and a half wars, as well as suffering from tornadoes, drought and flooding).

In their world, our economic issues don’t exist because we’ve elected a succession of Presidents and representatives who’ve Fucked Things Up, royally – it’s because of everything from gay marriage and abortion to a general rejection of All Things Jesus. In their world, if we loved Jesus enough, we’d already be living in a paradise akin to 1955 America (minus polio, lynchings in Mississippi, and the Cold War).

In their world, tornadoes, drought and flooding don’t exist because we didn’t heed the warnings of futurists who told us that too many people on the planet would create such things – they’re because ‘God’ doesn’t like what we’re doing – we need to stomp the gays; put women and minorities back in their place. Oh, and we have to support Israel. We’re ‘cursed’ if we don’t.

This subgroup of that 60% are called Dominionists – they’re bent on ‘taking America back’ (that’s the aforementioned dog-whistle for ‘let’s-go-back-to-the-17th-century’). Y’see, in spite of the lessons of history (from the Crusades and the Inquisition to one of the reasons for America’s founding – the persecution of one religious group by another), this bunch wants to form a theocracy in the United States.

The legal system is complicit in all this – if not, the Supreme Court would have shut down Bush II’s ‘faith based initiatives’ for the hare-brained, unconstitutional idea it was. Thing is, we’re now one justice away from a Fundie-dominated court. They’ve all but ignored the Constitution with rulings like Citizens United – see; in the Surreal States, corporations are now people; by allowing the government to use taxpayer money to fund religious groups, the First Amendment no longer applies, either.

According to people like David Barton, the First Amendment only applies to ultraRight Christians – all other religions are not covered – this is because the Founders somehow intended Christianity to be the nation’s religion after all. “Congress shall make no law regarding the establishment of religion” means “Congress won’t allow any but Christians to hold office or make laws.”

Gee; when you put it that way, it all makes perfect sense – that is, in a country where logic and reason play second-fiddle to religion.

Dominionists have made it clear that they want the legal system – and they’ve done a good job, both infiltrating it and creating a new crop of ‘Christian jurists’ courtesy of outfits like Liberty University; they want the military, too, and they’ve done a good job of that, also (organizations like the Military Religious Freedom Foundation have raised the alarm on this one more than once).

Economically, we’re no better off. Our current President was elected on the back of a ‘bailout backlash’. We expected him to deal with a lot of the problems created by the eight years of the Bush regime; those of us who connected the dots on these things realized that he had a very narrow window in which to accomplish anything of substance; instead, he set about planning for a second term by way of pandering to people who wanted him gone in the first place.

The facts are available for anyone who wants to spend ten minutes doing some real research – everyone from the GSA to Fortune Magazine has the data – it was the Republicans who wrecked our economy. Their only solution is to let the perps off the hook and make the rest of us pay for their behavior.

Now, we have two and a half wars, one which has been going on for ten years now – and no way to pay for anything. Nearly one fifth of the country is out of work. The current status-quo is unsustainable, and the man in charge squandered his chance to set things right. The banks which got that bailout money are all sitting on that pile of cash, waiting to buy up what remains for a song and a dance when the whole thing falls off a fucking cliff.

In any sane world, most of the nation would have put an end to this a long time ago. Instead, there are two kinds of people in America now: Those who are aching for a religious-themed Fascism, and those who still believe that the current President has answers.

The first group is likely to win this fight, because they’re better organized, better focused, and more passionate about their position. They also believe that they have a deity on their side who’ll show up with a bronze-age book full of religious hoodoo in one hand and a flamethrower in the other to sort out anyone who stands in their way.

It is impossible to argue with this kind of insanity in a manner which appeals to logic and reason. The sitting President is about to learn this, and then some; it’s the lesson every pandering centrist has ever had to learn – you don’t reason with snakes. You cut their fucking heads off.

Don’t think that pointing out any of this is going to make you any friends, either. In fact, thanks to some of the caprices of the past administration, if you step out of line too very far by way of protest, you’re more likely to have a couple of taser-prongs shot into your hide and your ass thrown in a jail-cell, while the ‘progressives’ stand meekly aside and wonder what happened – violence begets violence, and we’ve had a decade of body-counts, photos of half-burned children and all that follows to desensitize us to the maltreatment of our own citizens.

America is a police state. Try applying for a passport; you’ll be asked to provide a complete biography now (hey; why pay people to compile dossiers on the citizenry – get the people to do it themselves).

Don’t believe me? Do some research. It’s all there.

Thinking about retiring in the Surreal States? Guess again. The Right isn’t content to take your civil rights. They’re coming for your Social Security; your Medicare; your private pension. They’re doing so in the name of ‘deficit reduction’. See, in their world, these programs are not funded by payroll taxes; they’re ‘entitlements’ – and hence ‘bad’, because no one deserves a ‘free ride’. This is what happens when a nation goes insane – they change the definitions; then the rules. Lies become truth. All that’s lacking is the Two Minutes Hate.

In a few days, American flags will pop up in neighborhoods all over the Surreal States, in a vain attempt to remind us of where we used to live – meanwhile, there’s no Red Room and no Man From Another Place to remind us of what’s really going on, even in our dreams. The country continues on an insane path to self-destruction, and anyone who tells the fucking lemmings that they’re marching dutifully toward a cliff labeled “Fascism” will sooner or later be sorted-out for good and all by a Big Bull Lemming with one of those tasers I mentioned earlier.

Happy Fourth of July, America.

The Economy, the Government, and The Sound Over The Horizon

2011-06-16T10:16:00.000-07:00

The Economy's Headed For a Cliff, and There's Nothing We Can Do About It - Except Smile As We Go Over.

In spite of the best efforts of Ben Bernacke, the Fed, Tim Geithner, Barack Obama and the Usual Gang of Idiots in Congress, the American economy is poised to fall off a cliff. For their part, the only thing the Republicans can say about it is “Kissing rich people’s asses is good! Regulations bad! Ugga-ugga!”, in some primal dance-around-the-fire bullshit-session, catering to the equally-primal urges of the semiliterates who make up most of their constituency.

While the Great Dickpic Scandal of 2011 has taken most of the attention and bandwidth of America’s political commentators, and the rest of America’s newspeople are transfixed by Little Caylee's murder-trial in Florida, the Fed quietly announced that it wouldn’t be engaging in ~~printing more money~~ another round of quantitative easing, and the Obama administration has made it clear that they’ve blown their entire load on the bedsheets by way of ‘stimulus’, with not even a goodnight-kiss to follow.

Should the Fed change its mind and provide a third round of QE, it’ll be the strongest signal we’ve had in a while that the current brain-trust in Washington is well and truly out of options – there won’t be another extension of unemployment compensation; no one will address the real issue of jobs and how to create them. Meanwhile, all of the stats point to another recession – or worse.

When Clinton left office, the American economy could have been likened to a mansion; we were running a surplus, and if we’d stayed that course, we’d’ve had at least a fighting chance at maintaining the status-quo while we tackled the larger problems of deficit and empire.

Instead, we elected a man who couldn’t pronounce ‘nuclear’; who thought cheese curds, French-fries and gravy (‘Poutine’) was the Prime Minister of Canada, and who gave us the lovely thought that the Constitution was ‘just a goddamned piece of paper’. The critical-mass of Worst Possible Leader and Worst Possible Event kicked us all in the collective nuts on 9/11 – and the trained-chimp we elected President had the casus belli he felt he needed to go to war with half the world. (Think about it – ‘god’ told him to do it; what more was necessary?)

Flash forward almost ten years – and thanks to the decade-long waste of blood and treasure, the American economy now resembles a double-wide in the cedar-brake of west Texas. The roof leaks; the plumbing doesn’t work – and the propane-tank which ‘Cletus’ Bernacke jury-rigged into the kitchen-stove is leaking.

He’s sitting on the couch in his poly-T and sweat pants, getting ready to light a generic cigarette with his buddy “Bubba” Geithner, by way of propping up the fortunes of his buddies on Wall Street.

His other option – continuing the QE scam by way of printing money ‘till Hell won’t have it – is the only way he’ll keep the economy going. As I mentioned before, he can keep the double-wide together, or he can blow it off the cliff and into the next county by way of taking care of his banker-buddies; one or the other – but whichever one he does, the other goes off the cliff.

Now, I’ll allow that there are people who've consumed the government's Kool-Aid who'll point out that the unemployment rate dropped a tick and a half last month, and that foreclosures are down – but if you peel the skin off that rotten onion for a moment, you’ll see that most of those jobs were created by a mass hiring of burger-flippers by Mickey-D, and the only reasons foreclosures haven’t gone inexorably higher is because they’re stuck in processing – Obama and his minions have managed to stave off the inevitable there, but only by way of pulling a stunt which is more reminiscent of King Canute than FDR – he’s put his throne in the surf and is attempting to order the tide to recede.

It didn’t work for Canute, and it fuck-all isn’t going to work for Obama, either.

If you’re looking for answers, I don’t have any. I can connect the dots, and point to a future which, if we were smart, we’d begin to embrace: A future where we restricted our breeding; developed a smaller personal ‘footprint’; used less; worked for the common good; accepted that there are limits; etc.

Only a minority really ‘gets’ this – the rest are saying, “I don't want to go there! Leave me alone! I want things as they are! No regulations! No taxes! Only then will we be ‘free’!”

These people are fucking idiots – and frankly, I don’t have the time nor inclination to explain why. Those of you reading this missive who understand the reasons are among that minority who ‘get it’ – and the rest are part of the great undereducated, nose-picking, poo-flinging monkeys who don’t. If that sounds elitist, that’s fine. Another thing I’m done with is the political-correctness of dumbing-down for the benefit of the Teabagging majority.

The tacit agreement between the Rest of Us and the rich cocksuckers who run things is this: We more or less agreed to leave them alone as long as they agreed to pay taxes and not fuck things up. Instead, they’ve gotten around paying taxes, and they’ve fucked things up so badly we’re likely not going to recover. Why the CEO’s and their minions – about 2,000 in all – haven’t been hung in iron cages at the corner of Wall and Broad streets in New York still amazes me; after this much economic pain, I’d think that a guillotine next to the big bronze bull in the plaza would be a nice touch. After all, the French revolution shares a lot with our current condition – it was mainly economic, and was brought about by a fundamental failure in leadership.

The assholes who believed we could borrow ourselves into prosperity (you know at least a couple; they were the pre-Teabaggers and their minions who voted for all this nonsense) – haven’t a clue; they don’t hear the sound of impending doom over the horizon for the roar of the engines at the Fourth of July demo-derby. Meanwhile, the spastic efforts of the wealthy to retain their largesse will be a pathetic counterpoint to the suffering of the masses during the Recession (Depression?) of 2012.

In a couple of weeks, you’ll see flags pop up in neighborhoods all over the country, as people try to remind themselves not just that we were great once, but that they still live in America. Not one of them has the foggiest idea what’s coming.

Obama, Geithner, Bernacke, the fools who run Wall Street and the greater fools with the Slurpees at the county-fair are powerless to do anything about the Sound Over the Horizon. You can count on a lot of pontificating; a lot of speeches, hot air, and bullshit. Lots and lots of bullshit.

They can’t fix it. They can make it worse, though. Let’s hope Bernacke doesn’t light that cigarette.

Hope is all we have left.

Get to a boat.

Astra's Batshit Roundup....

2011-06-03T16:34:00.000-07:00

General Batshit; 'WTF' Moments; Our Favorite Fundies; Batshit Of The Week Award....

There’s a bumper-crop of batshit this week – mainly because I’ve been busy as hell and haven’t had time to entertain all of you fine people for a bit – so here goes….

This week, we were treated to the news that the economy appears headed for a double-dip recession (about six months later than I thought it would be, but there it is) – and please know, I take no pleasure in being right. Really.

While I was in Anaheim last week, I saw the HBO film “Too Big To Fail” on the hotel-telly; the questions I repeatedly asked myself were, “Why, for fuck’s sake, were these assholes allowed to succeed, when better, smarter, more-enlightened people didn’t?”, and “Why aren’t these same assholes now not hanging in iron cages at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York, with signs attached which read, ‘I Fucked Everybody in America?’”

Life is random, shitty, and wrong, most of the time. That’s why. Morons succeed, while the rest of us Eat Shit and Die.

In saving online-gems for this missive, I often come across things which aren’t so funny. By example, a gal here in my home-town of Portland walked out of a jewelry store with a $40K necklace – and the store-clerk ran her down and tackled her, putting her in an arm-hold until the police arrived. Turns out the woman hadn’t eaten for a week.

I’ve a feeling that we’re going to be looking at a lot of things which we used to think were ‘bad’, and realizing that they’re simply acts of survival desperation. The lines are blurring as you read this.

It’s time to start being good to each other, in ways we probably never thought we’d have to – because it’s a lead-pipe-cinch that the Powers That Be aren’t going to do anything remotely like look after us peons.

On with the show….

General Batshit….

This guy likes to slash his balls: Turns out that a fellow in Minnesota has thing for taking a knife to his balls. Sort of….

File this one under, “Why Is This Shit Legal?”: There’s this gal, who snorted the equivalent of Drano and Meth to gibber uncontrollably about evil spirits while she trashed a hotel room (I can’t make this stuff up. I’ve tried. Really….)

What do you do on a three-day ‘tweak’?: In this guy’s case, you steal 75lb storm-drain covers. A whole lot of them….

There’s something very, very wrong here: I imagine you could file this one under ‘Failed Children’s Book Titles’. Thing is, it’s been published. Has an Amazon listing and everything….

Vladimir Putin is a reincarnated apostle: Who knew? Some gals in Russia, as it turns out….

You, too, can spend thirty dollars on a completely useless book: In this case, it’s the Mozipedia – the complete encyclopedia of everything dealing with Morrissey (you remember him; the guy who insists he’s not gay, but sings like he is….)

What’s next? Josef Stalin’s Favorite Fart-Jokes?: Some guy has written a humor book about Adolf Hitler….

Here’s the good news – if you missed it, you can still participate: May was national masturbation month….

Note To State Board of Health – This is not how you get people to go to the doctor: The State of Washington greenlighted a bunch of billboards aimed at getting people to go to the doctor. Just which moron made that decision is unknown….

Why didn’t he just sell it at his garage sale?: A guy here in Oregon who was cleaning his garden-shed found something which looked like a bomb – so (natch) he tossed it in the ol’ minivan and took it to the police-station….

‘WTF’ Moments….

“But – officer – I was celebrating national masturbation month!”: A guy in Florida decides to have one off at the wrist – in a rather confined, yet public place….

“But – officer – they’re so well behaved afterward!”: A teacher in California encouraged her students to huff (Note: It wasn’t paint….)

Is this the same guy who invented hair tonic?: Turns out there really was a St. Vitalis….

Do parents just not think when they name their kids?: Remember this, Mom and Dad – someday; there’ll be an obituary – and it’ll read like this one….

I love my hometown. Really; I do: Except, of course, when I read stuff like this. (Understand – this guy lives maybe two miles from me. Up the hill, there are homes; gardens; stuff like that. Down the hill in the flatlands are shitty apartments and a whole gaggle of semiliterate hooligans. Like this guy, who got creative with his quick-draw technique….)

But did Medicare pay for it?: With friends like this, who needs – (I didn’t just write that, did I?) Turns out a guy recovering from surgery had a home-visit from a nurse….

Where in the world is Carmen Montenegro?: She’s in county lockup, after pushing a trash-can down the friggin’ street….

Cartman would be proud - the brown-note has been discovered: Vuvuzelas and dogs don’t mix….

Our Favorite Fundies….

Here’s what’s keeping Huckabee from running for President: He’s created an ‘educational company’ to 'fix' the 'errors' in American history....

Janet Porter knows why we have tornadoes: It’s because of those pesky gays….

Turns out the Bible is like duct-tape – it can fix everything: Including, if we believe this book, government interference in everything from playground equipment to light bulbs….

Don’t want to do Easter dinner? Do this, instead: A cab-driver from Korea found an interesting way to spend Easter weekend. He’s dead now….

Curses; Red Bachmann!: Michele Bachmann, potential rubber room candidate and extremist Fundie from Minnesota, says we’re all cursed if we don’t support the use of white phosphorus, genocide, and other stuff. Well; not really. But really….

It’s the end of the world as we know it (redux): Don’t worry. The end of the world is still ‘on’ – at least, according to Family Radio….

More batshit from the Huckster: According to Mike Huckabee, gays caused Noah’s flood, and Obama’s a ‘Soviet mole’. (Note: The Soviet Union, which dissolved in 1991, couldn’t be reached for comment….)

Batshit of the Week Award:

This one was tough. The aforementioned Michele Bachmann was a serious candidate this week, as was John Edwards (nothing says ‘love’ like spending campaign money on your South American mistress and getting indicted for it); Jerry Boykin (nothing says ‘batshit’ like accusing the president of funding a brownshirt army from the ‘proceeds’ of the healthcare bill); and Georgia representative Bobby Franklin (who accused his fellow Georgians of ‘praying to their god FEMA’).

Sarah Palin deserves honorable-mention, for rolling in to a rally on a motorcycle (albeit riding in the #2 ‘bitch’ position) to blather on about American Exceptionalism (and to kick off her ‘We The People’ non-campaign tour).

So did Mitt Romney, who doesn’t ride ‘bitch’ – flying in a rented jet to a small town in New Hampshire is more his style – but hey; he says the same things as the rest of the Teabaggers (he just does it with a little more class).

Nope – this week, there’s only one guy who really, truly exemplifies American political batshit; he’s a true professional who’s managed to gather every wingnut and bugfuck-crazy nutball in 50 states to play on his team this year: Newt Gingrich.

The Newter is an original. He’s the only guy who had an affair because he was so busy saving America from Muslims, atheists and other baddies; recommends the ravings of people like Matt Barber and David Barton; tells us ‘debt is unBiblical’ while owing half a million in credit-card debt to Tiffany’s, and makes what may be the Worst Campaign Promise Evah.

With Huckabee officially out of the race, I run hot and cold over the Newter-man. I mean, on one hand, it would be funny-as-all-hell to have a chucklefucking moron like Gingrich to laugh at, much like the poo-flinging monkeys at the Portland zoo; on the other hand, there are enough unibrowed mouth-breathers with double-digit IQ’s holding voter-registration cards to actually elect the guy.

Enjoy your fifteen minutes; Newt. I’ve a feeling you’ll need them to keep you warm in a few years when everyone’s forgotten about you.

Until next time….

Cognitive Dissonance and Self-Mutilation

2011-05-23T08:28:00.000-07:00

A Post-Rapture Commentary....

"And the sun stood still, and the moon stayed, until the people had avenged themselves on their enemies. Is not this written in the book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the middle of heaven, and hurried not to go down about a whole day."
-- Book of Joshua; 10:13 (KJV)

Y'know, I gotta admire a guy with the sack to shoot himself in the balls.

That's pretty much what Harold Camping did this past week, by way of making his proclamation about the end of the world.

When 6:00PM came and went with no earthquakes; no Rapture - and no Jesus - there's not much he could say; he'd painted himself into a pretty tight metaphysical corner.

"I don't know what happened," said Robert Fitzpatrick, who on balance is one of Camping's most-loyal followers (he's the guy who spent $140,000 of his own money on Rapture-ready billboards.) He didn't get a money-back guarantee, and I'm pretty sure the subway-company isn't going to cut him a break, either.

It's worth remembering that ambiguity, vagueness and doublespeak are the prophet's best tools. Back in the Bad Old Days, bribing priests for a good augury was common (Caesar did it, and became de-facto king of Rome - until the Senate decided the Republic was worth saving, after all.) Alexander sacrificed to the gods prior to invading Persia - but it was his superior tactical skills which won him the Persian Empire at Gaugamela. I'm sure Crassus sacrificed to Jupiter prior to entering Parthia. He got his head handed to him (literally) after Carrhae; I'm supposing Jupiter was in a foul mood that day, but we'll never know.

On the other hand, Marcus Aurelius' sacrifice to Jupiter and Mars brought about the Rain Miracle - or did it? Naw; probably not. That's the thing about 'miracles' - they're the things people remember; the 50% of the time when a prayer or a sacrifice works, it validates the belief which brought it about.

Religious texts are full of sheep-and-shepherd metaphors. What they don't tell us is that the sheep are kept for a reason; the shepherd might be an employee of a landowner, or the landowner himself. The outcome is always the same: The sheep are first shorn; then eventually turned into Souvlaki when their wool turns coarse. The shepherd looks after the sheep; in return, the sheep provide - well; everything they possess, up to and including their lives.

Galileo learned what happens to uncooperative sheep, back in the early 1600's; in spite of providing overwhelming proof, the religious powers in charge at the time realized the real threat - if Galileo were permitted to challenge the Pope's authority and win, then a whole continent of sheep would get it in their heads that it was all right to question the Church on anything and everything else. The People in Charge had a cushy life, thanks to the quiescent obedience of those millions of sheep. It's not that the Cardinals gave a damn about the sun, the earth, or the solar-system; they gave a damn about the status-quo, and keeping it together. If Galileo was right, then their 'god' couldn't make the sun stand still so Joshua and his buddies could kick-ass on their enemies-du-jour - another explanation entirely would be necessary, and the Authorities didn't want to go there. At all.

To do otherwise would have been to admit "We were wrong!" - and wind up like the guy in the picture, above. They knew what successful religious leaders have known for centuries: In order to remain in power, you never make black-and-white comments. If you do (or if your Book does it for you), then you'd better be capable of enforcing them with the crushing weight of law.

This is where Camping went wrong.

After all, he had it easy - we live in a age of cognitive dissonance; people from all walks of life are faced with logical decisions all the time, and ignore that logic even when faced with overwhelming fact. (By example, while there's ample proof that Congress is 'owned' by corporate interests and that both major political parties are equally corrupt, Americans continue to vote for them in droves. Religious organizations are corrupt; yet we continue to support them. In either case, those of us who point out unpleasant truths are either ignored, shouted-down, or sorted out for good when ignorance proves insufficient). It should have been an easy matter for Camping to make vague statements about the End Times, and keep the money rolling in.

Now, to keep things clear, I won't mention why a Creator would bother to date his Big Comeback and Great Snatch based on a human dating system - we'll leave that for those who've already ignored their own cognitive dissonance and are hence completely comfortable denying logic in favor of endless, pointless arguments - how many angels can dance, etc.)

Among those who were anxiously awaiting the aforementioned Great Snatch at 6:00PM this past Saturday was a fellow who'd maxed out his credit-cards after being out of work for quite a while. He said, "I suppose I was involved in wishful thinking." He probably has plenty of company - pretty much anyplace is preferable to staring down the muzzle of a gun labeled 'bankruptcy', and if that place is a vaguely-defined paradise, so much the better.

As to Camping, he, along with people like Hal Lindsay (remember "The Late, Great Planet Earth?"), will simply tip his hat in another direction, say, "Aw, shucks!", and "I guess I need to do some more reading." Meanwhile, his sheep will have been shorn, and even though cognitive dissonance will reign in place of Dashboard Jesus for a while, eventually things will settle back to normal - his 'flock' will continue to send him millions of dollars every year.

Now, that takes 'sack'. Plenty of it.

(People all over the world share two traits - first, they don't want to know what's really going on in the world, much less have to face real solutions - both are far too scary. Second, people love to create alternate realities, which involve greater or lesser forms of insanity.

I've long held that insanity is simply a matter of degree - the first involves the person who sings "The Old Rugged Cross" on Sunday morning; the second involves the person who 'speaks in tongues', rolls in the aisle and climbs the stovepipe in church, and the third is the person who stands in the corner of the local mental hospital and babbles uncontrollably. Three people; three degress of separation. The last two can't be helped; the first one really ought to give serious thought to the system he or she is helping perpetuate.)

Astra's Batshit Roundup (Special Rapture Edition)

2011-05-19T10:30:00.000-07:00

(One of Camping's "Rapture Buses")

Unless you've been living under a rock (or located, say, in a place where it Doesn't Matter, like Bhutan), you know that there's a Fundie moron in Boulder, Colorado named Harold Camping, a 'Christian broadcaster' with a slick website and a good hustle, who's predicting the End of The World As We Know It on May 21st. At 6:00PM. Preceded by an earthquake.

This isn't Camping's first rodeo.

Back in '94, he predicted the End in his book, "1994?" (he calculated that the Tribulation would end on September 6th, followed by the Last Day and the Second Coming of Christ between September 15-27th.)

That's Great; It Starts With An Earthquake*- According to Camping, we needn't worry about being ready on time - because the Big Guy created time zones, too, and will hence Rapture everyone at 6:00PM in their own time zone (sort of like Santa Claus manages to visit everyone on the same night.)

(Fellow Portlander; Keeping Portland Weird)

Let's Party - Some folks (mainly us godless atheists) are holding rapture parties. (Rats. I'm not at home right now; I imagine the Portland chapter of American Atheists is holding one, and I'd like to go. Dammit....)

Just Don't ~~Screw~~ Forget The Pooch - Worried that Fido isn't gonna be Raptured along with? Relax - these guys have it covered (although they've raised their rates)....

So, How Did He Figure This Out? - It's simple, really - but first, you have to believe, like this clown, that the Earth is only 6,000 years old. Once you accept that idea, everything else is easy - Camping figures that Noah's Flood happened 4,990 years ago; if you add 7,000 years (minus one, because there's no Year Zero), then Judgment Day is the 17th day of the second month (which, according to Camping's Magic Biblical Calendar-Translator, equates to May 21st of this year)

Glad he cleared that up for me. I was worried there, for a second....

(This is my favorite R.E.M. tune, by the way - and, it follows, this is my favorite End of the World song.....)

Pathetic Special Rapture-Edition Batshit of the Week Award....

This week, it goes to a retired Staten Island transit employee named Robert Fitzpatrick, who spent all $140,000 of his retirement-savings on a series of bus-and-subway advertisements, heralding the Reverend Mr. Camping's prediction about Rapture.

"Judgment Day will surprise people," he said recently. "We will not be ready for it." He went further, stating that "A giant earthquake will render the earth uninhabitable." (Hey. Personally, I'm of the belief that Fundie morons are doing a good job of that already.)

(Robert Fitzpatrick and one of his billboards)

As to Fitzpatrick, he doesn't want to consider that Camping may (shudder!) be wrong.

"I don't want to talk about it. I don't want to think about it," he said (I guess he didn't get a money-back-guarantee from Mr. Camping.)

Something tells me you're going to be doing a lot of thinking about it, Mr. Fitzpatrick. Enjoy your fifteen minutes; life goes on a long time, pal. Me? I'm gonna be here on the 22nd - and for a while after, I suspect.

Until next time....

*This is the first line of "It's The End Of The World (As We Know It), by R.E.M. Thought you'd like to know....(Note: I'm hoping you appreciate this, folks. I gave up my break-time to dash this off...)

Astra's Batshit Roundup

2011-05-09T10:10:00.000-07:00

General Batshit; 'WTF' Moments; Our Favorite Fundies; Batshit of the Week Award....

Well, Osama Bin Laden is busy feeding crabs right now; the Mississippi is getting ready to prove that (1) climate change is real, and (2) it's not a good idea, ever, to build houses and factories and who-knows-what-all in 500 year flood-plains, no matter how good the view is in the summertime.

I'm reminded that (as one of my favorite authors put it so well today) "...science is only appreciated when it delivers results that can be consumed in the home or blown up abroad...." Other than that, it's (obviously) the province of educated 'elites' - people who the far Right (essentially an agglomeration of Fundies, Teabaggers, and semiliterate Hoverournd-ridin' mouthbreathers) view with disdain, no matter what their credentials.

The entire nation of Kiribati (that's pronounced "Keer-i-bash") is about to go decks-awash (go look it up if you don't believe me). Meanwhile, our very own Tim Pawlenty, former governor of Minnesota, apologized recently for 'caring about the climate'.

As if that wasn't enough, two of our Congresscritters actually introduced legislation which would have 'repealed' the EPA's findings regarding greenhouse-gases and climate change. (What's next? 'Repealing' the law of gravity?)

Batshit abounds, folks. It's nowhere more evident than in the halls of Congress. While H.L. Mencken might well be right ("A nation full of people capable of original thought may well be unendurable"), right now, I'd trade that for the lunacy which passes for 'common sense' in America nowadays.

On with the show....

General Batshit....

But Did He See Me Run That Yellow Light Yesterday? - Don't steal from this guy. He invokes a higher authority....

I Think I Saw One Of These In 'Saving Private Ryan' - I have to love this rig. He gets bonus points for the drive-system; I think it actually works. Does that make it a truck (and subject to higher tax?), a car, or an SUV? I'm pretty sure the gun is a welded-up gaggle of spare parts and water pipe, though....

A Guy I Knew Actually Did This - I love redneck engineers. They're the guys who make the keg-stand gizmos out of spare lumber, on the offchance they can get little DaisyMae Sixpack to consume far too much alcohol in her party-dress and actually use it. They're the ones who built the redneck-halftrack in the picture above. And, they're the guys who made this....

'WTF' Moments....

Now, Hold Your Tongue And Say, "My Dad Works At An Apple Factory" - No, it's not quite like that. It's worse. Turns out the employees at a factory in China making gizmos for Apple have to sign a rather interesting employment agreement. (Check out the nets below the windows in the article)....

Note: Don't Attempt This At Home. Or Anywhere Else - Turns out this guy (a 'performance artist' from Colombia) decided to tie a plastic bag around his head as a part of his show. Yes; he ~~asphix~~ ~~asphics~~ ~~asph~~ - cut off his friggin' air supply and died....

Leave This To The Japanese - They've invented a French-kissing machine that can be used long-distance via the Internet. (I can't. It's too bizarre. You'll have to read the article yourself....)

Maybe It Was That 'Tick-Tick-Tick' Sound They Made In The Hallway - A teenage boy has been suspended from school in Florida....

'Don't Worry - It's Just Something I Ate' - A guy in Ann Arbor, Michigan caused a local hospital to call the hazmat team. (Note: This goes way beyond "I farted")....

Dead. Wrapped in Plastic - Remember Twin Peaks? Well, this ain't it....

It's My Money, And I Want It Now! - Remember the moron who went to northern Pakistan to hunt Bin Laden and got himself arrested? Well, he wants recognition. And plenty of Dead Presidents.....

Finally; Words Just Fail Me Here - I'll just say that this guy got arrested in Seattle for a rather creative way of meeting women....

Our Favorite Fundies....

The Fundies Behind The Birther Movement Just Won't Let It Go - Along with my old buddy John Lofton, the Usual Gang of Idiots is at it again - and you won't believe what they're saying now....

Osama Bin Laden's DNA Confirms That Darwin Is Bunk - Only from the surreal mind of David Klinghoffer can you find a connection between Bin Laden's I.D., Darwin, and the repudiation of evolution....

So, Does He Share The Money With That Other Guy?- One of my favorite whacknut Fundies told us all a few years back that his prayers led to the capture of Saddam Hussein. Well, guess who's really responsible for finding Bin Laden....

Batshit of the Week Award....

Most of you are unaware of Pam Geller. You're better off not knowing about her. That's because she rides a line between Batshit Crazy and Bugfuck Nuts. Pam is what you get when you take an aging wannabe-supermodel, deprive her of oxygen for three minutes and give her a computer.

The only guy who'll publish her with any regularity is Joseph Farah, King Whackjob over at World ~~Nut~~ Net Daily. This week, she came up with a winner - now that the birth certificate thing is over, she's decided that Obama is illegitimate, and due to some convoluted interpretation of the Constitution and a line or two from Deuteronomy, he can't be allowed to remain as president one minute more.

Hey. I give her props. She's published (proof of the incessant demand for batshit); her blog gets far more hits than mine.

If that's what it takes, I'll forego celebrity.

I value my sanity - plus what people may think about me.

So, enjoy your fifteen minutes, Pam. I imagine it's fleeting.

Until next time....

Empire is a Disease

2011-05-02T08:55:00.000-07:00


(Th New York Skyline in a world without religion)

Dancing With Bin Laden's Corpse At The Twilight of Empire....

"A nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its laws made by cowards and its wars fought by fools. Empire is a disease. The tyranny we impose on others we will finally impose on ourselves.” –Thucydides

Well, he’s dead. Or extremely sleepy. I can’t ever tell which from his photos. I don't imagine releasing a pic of Bin Laden dead is going to prove much.

However, now that the Coroner has certified him as ‘really, most-sincerely dead’, and the Munchkins have left-off hanging on the White House fence singing “Ding, Dong; The Bastard’s Dead!”, it’s time to look at a few facts.

First, Bin Laden was more of a finance-guy/spiritual head of AlQaeda. It was his millions which jump-started the organization; something I learned long ago is that it’s the guy with the gold what makes the rules; by default his opinions become Holy Writ, and his word becomes law, if only in his organization.

Second, it was other people who did most of the planning and were the ‘idea guys’ within AlQaeda’s senior organization. It’s rare that the boss makes the decisions in an outfit that large; he hires a legion of Don Drapers and other ‘Mad Men’ to come up with the corporate vision.

For those two reasons, killing Bin Laden might make a few people feel good – but it’s not going to solve anything. Quite the contrary; just as we’ve created more enemies than we can kill, we might have created more problems with this action than we’ve solved.

We can count on the Usual Gang of Idiots, spreading conspiracy theories. We can count on Obama's approval-rating going up a few points. We can count on the euphoria of death, and several million rednecks screaming, "Yeah! We won! Fuckin'-'A'!" (It doesn't take much to get the proles whipped up into a good old-fashioned Two Minutes Hate any more - the media have that down pat.)

We can count on more of the same nonsense from the Tea Party types. Judson Phillips, head of the Tea Party Nation, said today that Bin Laden’s death came in spite of Obama, and that “The bad news is Obama is going to do what most politicians do, especially the liberal politicians. He is going to take credit for something that not only he had little to do with, but had we actually listened to him, the event never would have happened.”

Fox News is going to bloviate on all this, as well as CNN, the big three networks, and a half-dozen newspaper and magazine pundits. It’ll all amount to the same thing – hot air. The same people are going to say the same things, availing nothing.

Let’s go back to reality:

America is still an empire. We’ve created more enemies than we can kill, folks (the fact that the State Department issued a world-wide travel advisory for Americans is mute testimony to this). Bin Laden's death isn't going to end the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq; it's not going to close Gitmo (in fact, the government has carefully-spun this event as an apologetic for its Guantanamo concentration-camp and the torture of illegally-detained citizens of other countries); it's not going to roll back the Military Commissions Act or any of the assaults on our civil-liberties, and it's not going to cure the heartbreak of psoriasis, either. Bin Laden's death is going to be a footnote of sorts in a couple of weeks (drop me a note using the 'PM Me!' link at the top of the page if you'd like to place bets.)

Everyone is still cheering for the American stock market as ‘proof’ that our economy is ‘recovering’ – when what’s really happening is an inflation-scheme by way of the Federal Reserve selling bonds to itself through a handful of Wall Street banks. This wholesale looting of the U.S. Treasury is possible because (1) we are the world’s reserve currency, and thus (2) we have the luxury of buying our own debt. Everyone’s grandkids are well and truly screwed – but the real hope here is that we’ve pushed the problem off two generations before the bill comes due - and once this tawdry attempt to pump up the securities-markets fails, as it must, we're going to have to admit that the 'recovery' is a sham.

Oil is still over $100 barrel; I’m sure that the government will take credit for the fact that it dropped a dollar when the news about Bin Laden was released, but that’s still not going to make it any easier for people to get to work this week plus pay their bills. In a few years, the cost of the stuff is going to be so prohibitively expensive that it’ll be impossible to drive from Portland to Seattle without taking out a loan, let alone do any of the grandiose things which the government is discussing (going to Mars; etc.)

45% of Americans still have no health care.

25% of American children live in poverty.

One in two mortgages in America are ‘underwater’

One in ten homes will foreclose this year.

Nearly 20% of the American workforce is unemployed. Many are homeless and living in the street.

________________________

While we're at it, we should remember a few more things by way of perspective...

First, we were the ones who brought Bin Laden and his henchmen to the party and taught them how to dance. We shouldn’t be surprised that they got good at it.

Second, we should remember that in fighting these people, we’ve become what we feared. We are not safer today for our ‘war on terror’ – in fact, we are far less safe than in the days before 9/11. Further, there are now draconian laws on the books which leave the average American one stray comment from having a couple of Taser prongs shoved up his or her ass and their writhing body thrown in a cell. If the government has their way, the next time you renew your passport, you'll have to complete a dossier for them - in essence, telling the government everything you've ever done. (Count on passports becoming a requirement in a couple of years, by the way - they're locking the borders down; one of the requirements of an Empire which needs a constant supply of slaves for the mines, cannon-fodder for the wars, and bright-minds to keep designing cluster-bombs and the like).

So, before you celebrate – remember: Empire is a disease. America is sick; everywhere the evidence abounds, from Fundie preachers who promote violence as a means, to government and business ‘leaders’ who are trying desperately to keep the stench of a dead democracy and a dying economy from frightening us all into panicked action.

Remember that anyone can be imprisoned or killed. There’s a ‘detention facility’ at Guantanamo Bay which proves this; a place where fourteen year old farmer’s sons and cab-drivers are held without trial.

Remember we were great, once.

Astra's Batshit Roundup

2011-05-01T09:24:00.000-07:00

General Batshit; Our Favorite Fundies; Political Batshit, and the Batshit of the Week Award….

(Before I start, you’ll be interested to know that someone is ‘praying’ that I’ll be forced somehow to stop my Batshit Roundups, because they’re “anti ‘god’”. Relax – I have it on good authority I’ll be here next week. Something called 'reason' tells me it's true….)

This week, in an unrelated conversation, I was called-out by a couple of folks on the meaning of the term, ‘batshit’. The comment was made that the term was ‘dismissive’ and ‘smug’ – and that it really was just a subjective opinion. There was further mention that the term was simply a means of refusing to ‘engage an idea’.

“No, it’s not,” I replied. “Insanity is pretty well defined.” I used some examples (Hitler’s beliefs and actions were among the more-egregious forms of batshit and bugfuck-nuts behavior).

Not even most of the Old Yahoodies lived up to the Book of Leviticus – they couldn’t; if they had, there’d’ve been no one left for the Romans to conquer. (If you want a near-textbook definition of sociopathic writing, you can’t do much better than the Old Testament – but I digress).

Today, we’ve got the likes of David Barton, who believes the Bible told us that Social Security, Medicare, and trade-unions are all wrong. I’d posit that if you want the ultimate in dismissive language, you need go no further than someone who holds up a Bible, makes a declaration, then says, “If you disagree with me, you’re going against ‘god’!”

Yep – sooner or later, the term ‘batshit’ and ‘religion’ come around to the same thing. Me? I can hope we’ll shed the shackles of such superstition sooner than later; hopefully before we use some of the military-swag and other party-favors we’ve created to turn the Teachings of Weaponized, Republican Jesus into reality.

“But,” you’ll say, “Not all batshit is religious,” and I’d agree. A fair amount is political. There’s a bumper-crop of it this week (just look at our Batshit of the Week award-winner for your archetype there). Some of it, of course, is just plain stupidity.

Most of it’s funny to a degree – but that’s where the real subjectivity comes in.

On to the show….

General Batshit….

But Is There Complimentary Gin-‘n-Juice; Yo? – Turns out there’s a bulletproof, drive-in/drive-through funeral-home in (where else?) Compton, California. I’m serious….

Victoria Jackson Wins 'Dumbass Quote of the Week' - From Ed Brayton at 'Dispatches from the Culture Wars' comes this gem, from the ukelele-playing gal who gave us, 'There's a Communist in the White House'....

When You Go Batshit, Sometimes You Start Your Own Country – Down in Texas, there’s a guy who claims he’s a citizen of the “Moorish National Republic”, and among other things, he doesn’t have to wear a seat belt….

(This is how diapers get changed at Wal-Mart)

Note: Never Use A Water-Fountain - A reader sent this one to me (hat tip to Peopleofwalmart.Com); it turns out that water-fountains also make convenient Baby Bidets....

(Crime Tape Crasher)

He’d’ve Stopped, But Something Came Up – Here in good old Portlandia, Oregon, a fellow plowed through some crime-scene tape. He had more ‘urgent’ business, it turns out….

Big Pimpin’; Cedar Rapids Style (or, ‘Maybe It’s Time To Find Another Line of Work’) – Mary Doolin of Cedar Rapids is 61. That didn’t stop her from engaging in the World’s Oldest Profession – for (at least) the third time….

(Hoveround Guy)

‘The Fast and the Furious – The Hoveround Chronicles' – A guy in Florida was arrested for stalking and chasing a woman – in his electric wheelchair….

Bring Your Towels And a Quart of Hand-Sanitizer To This Gym – Turns out you can do naked workouts in this gym in Spain. (Yes; there are photos)….

(Paint huffer or Tin Man? You decide....)

But Maybe He Was Just Trying Out For The Tin-Man’s Part – Then, there’s this guy, who got arrested for – get this – the 48^th time, for paint-huffing….

Note To You Ladies - Don't Shave And Drive - Turns out there's this gal in Florida who was more than a bit creative while shaving her hoo-hoo....

Political Batshit….

You’ll Let Me Know When Those Lambs Stop Screaming; Won’t You; Clarice? – In Kyrgyzstan, the Parliament has an unusual way to kick off the legislative season….

Hey; Are We Gonna Be Graded On This? – Turns out Newt Gingrich himself is gonna teach a class on (what else?) ‘American Exceptionalism’ at Liberty University….

Speaking of The Newter-Man - …he’s probably running for President. Seriously. He’s also got some interesting things to say about gun-rights, the United Nations, and – well, read the link. He’s Newt. What’s left to say?....

There’s Always Someone Who Didn’t Get The Memo – Monday, there’s an attorney named Gary Kreep (?) who’s going to file a ‘birther’ lawsuit in Pasadena (Uh? Gary? The birth-certificate? Uh – it was released already)….

It’s Settled! Obama’s Ineligible! – That’s the actual title of this article from (where else?) World ~~Nut~~Net Daily….

Hey - I Paid A Quarter To Get Into One Of These At The County Fair- (Of course, I was ten years old). Lastly, it appears carnival-floats are substituting for weapons in Iran - It was Army Day in Iran last week. The photo tells it all:....

Our Favorite Fundies….

Pat Robertson Teaches Us All We Need To Know About The ‘Liberal Woman’ - In between cold-reading his audience and issuing loopy ‘predictions’, The Patster had some enlightening things to say about liberal womanhood….

It’s Official – Obama Hates Easter (Again) – Turns out that because Obama didn’t issue an ‘official’ statement honoring Easter, he’s an America-hating Muslim. Or something….

Dating Tips For Women (Circa 1972) – A reader sent me this one; it’s a blog by a teenager who goes to Liberty University. In it, she provides us gems like “…With our self-esteem constantly targeted by the media, it is sometimes difficult to remember that the Lord created us to be a treasure won by a determined and respectable man….” (Hey. I love alternate universes. But truth to tell, the ‘70’s weren’t that much fun to begin with….)

That’s Right, Pal – Blame It All On The Invisible Guy – Bryan Fischer is up to his old tricks again; this time, he got a guy who has a doctorate in Scottish history to weigh in on the recent crop of tornadoes being ‘God’s judgment’, and all (no word on whether the last scene in ‘Braveheart’ was accurate, though)….

Speaking of Fischer – He’s at it again, with some creative words about Medicare and Social Security; turns out both of those programs are going to sell us all out to abortionists. And Muslims. Don’t forget the Muslims….

Can You Whip Up A Few Million Jobs Down There, While You’re At It? – The Cinco de Mayo Border Prayer Initiative (I know; I cringed when I typed that) says that “…prayer is a high priority for the border.” They want to stop the illegal immigration and violence. No word on whether they’ll address Mexican poverty (which is the real issue down there)….

Batshit of the Week Award….

This week, it couldn’t go to anyone other than Donald Trump.

The Donald can’t seem to keep his mouth shut. What amazes me (and nearly everyone else on the planet), is how this guy managed to become so important to so many people. Since his first very public and very messy business bankruptcy, he’s become a bloated parody of himself, showing up on everything from ‘Sex in the City’ to his very own ‘reality’ show. Now, he’s an expert on politics; he’s running for President (or so he says).

Charlie Sheen should be his running mate....

So, because it takes a special kind of batshit to name a helicopter after oneself and stage it outside a news-conference while he proves to the whole world what he doesn’t know – this week’s Batshit of the Week Award goes to the inimitable Donald Trump.

Enjoy your fifteen minutes, Donald. Next fall, you’ll be on the same shelf with the Spice Girls….

Until next time….

Astra's Batshit Roundup

2011-04-21T10:32:00.000-07:00

General Batshit; Our Favorite Fundies; ‘WTF’ Moments; Batshit of the Week Award; More….

“The world is so full of a number of things; I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”
-- Robert Louis Stevenson

“Don’t worry about him. He’s just as happy as if he were in his right mind.”

-- My Grandfather; Ruminating on Yours Truly as a Small Boy

I’m given to think that Stevenson was really saying, ‘simple minds love simple things’. I know for damn sure that was the intent of my grandfather.

Perhaps it’s the fact that I’ve always been easily amused. I can stare for hours at the structure of a leaf in the garden if I’m so-inclined; it’s why bonsai is a hobby of mine (among many). There are endless things with which to occupy one’s mind. Like eating glue, or misreading instructions on the back of paint-cans (this actually happened with a fellow I knew in college. Burned his apartment out when he was refinishing a piece of furniture – the instructions called for ‘boiled linseed oil’; the fire started when he poured a half-gallon of the stuff in a pot and proceeded to boil it himself, not knowing that it comes ‘pre-boiled’ to remove the impurities.)

These are the same people who put sharp things in their ears and lemon-scented dishwasher-soap in their iced-tea. They’re the people who ‘win’ the Darwin Awards. The difference between Some of Us and Most of Them is that We Read The Instructions.

So, by way of acknowledging two of my favorite philosopher/writers (R.L. Stevenson and my grandfather) – this week’s Batshit Roundup is dedicated to the Usual Gang of Idiots (as the writers of Mad Magazine called them, so many years ago) - the faceless masses who provide The Rest Of Us so much entertainment.

Be careful out there….

General Batshit….

Most of the time, the batshit-things people do are funny. This one’s not-so, but if you look past that for a moment, you might find a bit of levity in a couple of half-wits who pass up helping their own Mom off the kitchen floor so they can go back to watching the tube. (I know - words fail.) Turns out two guys (48 year old twin brothers, no less), were watching a ball-game on TV when their mother fell down in the kitchen. They ignored the whole situation, even talking to her for a while - preferring to go back to the game. (Note: While most of the people I write about are mentally-ill, disturbed, or Living While Fundie, this one goes to a whole new level)….

Neither Rain, Nor Snow, Nor Lack of Charmin…. – It’s a misdemeanor in the city of Portland, Oregon to take a dump in public. This didn’t deter a local mailman (excuse me; ‘Letter Carrier’) from the swift completion of his appointed rounds – not even the lack of a bathroom. (Yes; there are photos)….

Some Reporters Wait Their Whole Lives To Write A Headline Like This – Those of you under 40 or living outside the U.S. are going to have to have someone explain the irony of this one to you – and why it really is true that the reporter will never have another chance to write a headline this cool, ever again….

‘WTF’ Moments….

Remember The Gal At Duke U., Who Accused The Lacrosse Players? – She’s in the news again….

But Can She Chew Gum and Walk At The Same Time? – A gal in Cincinnati was busted for ‘encumbered driving’ – turns out she’s just a very talented multitasker….

They Should Be Glad There’s No Longer a Gulag – A Russian art-collective had some fun with a drawbridge, right across from the State Security building….

You’re Allowed to Like Boobies Again in Pennsylvania – Just sayin’….

Political Batshit….

The Donald Does It – Again: I’m still trying to figure out if this guy is serious, much less sane….

That’s It! Get the Unemployed to Leap Tall Buildings! - $16,500 on capes and foam cutouts to turn the unemployed into superheroes in Florida (no, I didn’t make this up. I couldn’t….)

Someone Finally Reviews The Biggest Political Batshit Site on the Net – Yeah; It’s World ~~Nut~~Net Daily (but that should be no surprise). But hey. If it weren’t for them, I wouldn’t have a quarter of my material….

Finally – The Most Fucked-Up Thing Rush Limbaugh Ever Said:

Our Favorite Fundies….

(Note: You’ll notice this department’s name has changed. I’m finally owning-up to the fact that the most forehead-slapping, groaning, eyeball-rolling batshit comes from American Fundies. So there.)

But Will They Outlaw Barbecued Pork Ribs? – Matt Barber, one of Fundiedom’s biggest batshit-artists, is now saying there’s a Vast Conspiracy among radical Islamists to unite and destroy Christianity. Yeah. Right….

I’ll take ‘Obvious Conclusions’ for $1,000; Alex – (Al Mohler, if you’re not familiar with him, is the result when someone’s Momma sends their little boy to a ‘college’ which only teaches from a book written by a group of Bronze-Age goat-herders about three thousand years ago. It’s also the result of a system which actually grants accreditation to such places, and allows their graduates to put ‘Dr.’ in front of their name....) In this case, Al Mohler asks “Why is the Muslim World So Resistant To The Gospel?” (this qualified for Dumbass Question of the Day at ‘Dispatches From The Culture Wars’)….

Speaking of Deranged – I loves Me Some Pat Robertson - He’s about three thousand years old, himself. To listen to him, he’s got a direct-line to the Big Guy – and he doesn’t mind making predictions. Like this one:

This Is a Cool Website – If you click here, you can then go pick any year, and read the crazy shit people thought was going to end the world in that year (Note: Batshit goes back centuries)….

Let’s Ask Joan of Arc How Well That Worked Out – This has got to be the most fucked-up article I’ve seen in a bit - while it originated at the Monitor, it was also picked up on CNN’s website – the author’s logic goes like this: Since Fundies in America are ‘virtuous’, it follows that all Fundies are ‘virtuous’ – so the countries currently in rebellion in the Middle East should all incorporate Islamic Fundies into their government. Batshit 'logic' abounds; folks….

Can You Work On My Light-Bill, While You’re At It? – There’s a preacher in Georgia who wants to pray down gas-prices. Seriously….

California Fundies Want Constitutional Protection – Because they’re so persecuted, and can’t attend their megachurches on Sunday. Or something….

Who’d’ve Thought? John Lennon’s Writing Songs in the Afterlife – Maine is usually one of those states I consider ‘sane’. Strange people occupy every corner of the planet, though, and Maine is no exception. Turns out there’s this guy (he calls himself a ‘minister’, among other things, which is why I put this entry here) who says he can ‘channel’ dead celebrities, artists, and the like, and bring their ‘music from the other side’ to life on This End of Things. 'God' also told him to run for president (Warning: Both of these sites are among the most bugfuck-nuts things I’ve read in a while. Enter at your own risk).

Batshit of the Week Award….

This week, it goes to Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin – who wrote the ‘Path to Prosperity’ budget for the GOP, which goes like this: (1)Throw 30,000,000 people in the street; (2) take away what medical care they have now; (3) Ensure that the 15,000,000 now unemployed never have a chance to work again – cut nearly everything else (except the military – that’s sacred) – and in two years you’ll have 3% unemployment.

(Of course, this would work. What surprises me is that he didn’t have to balls to come out and say that we could reach 0% unemployment by simply shooting everyone – because that’s the kind of math which works in the mind of a guy who’s as deranged as Ryan obviously is.)

Enjoy your fifteen minutes of fame, Paul. I’ve a feeling you’ll need a fond memory or two come the Revolution….

Until next time….

Class War for Dummies - Part One

2011-04-18T11:47:00.000-07:00

It’s Tax Day – Do You Know Where Your Leaders Are?

Today is Tax Day.

Tax-compliance in the U.S. is high – inordinately high, given what most of us have been dealt over the past three decades. To put things in perspective, however, let’s look at some stats:

1.   1% of the American population controls 85% of the nation’s wealth, and 90% of its income.

2.   Increase that number to 5%, and you have between 95-98% of the nation’s wealth, and over 95% of its income.

3.   The rest of us fight over what’s left.

4.   45% of the nation’s households pay no tax. Several of the nation’s largest manufacturers (who exported more jobs in the past thirty years than they’ve created domestically) have been rewarded by a system which does not require them to pay any taxes at all on their earnings.

5.   Most of the nation’s banks fall into this category.

6.   So do most of the one-percenters and a high number of the five-percenters (their marginal tax-rate is 17% - before deductions).

I’ll posit that tax-compliance in the U.S. is high for the same reason that the majority of Americans still support tax breaks for the super-rich and large corporations in America – because the system is run like a lottery, and they believe that someday, they, too, can through pluck and application wind up in the top-rung of American society, where they can take their turn thumbing their noses at the Rest Of Us.

Incredibly, Cletus and DaisyMae believe that the rich and famous will let them into the ‘clubhouse’.

On balance, we shouldn’t be surprised. Cletus and DaisyMae believe that the entire universe was created 6,000 years ago; that dinosaurs cohabited the place with humans, that climate change isn’t happening, and that America will become great again if only we’ll ‘turn to God’.

They believe that a book written by a bunch of Bronze-Age goat-herders holds the truths about life. They know this is true, along with the other stuff above, because a guy who puts “Dr.” in front of his name (never mind that he got that ‘doctorate’ from an outfit which only teaches from that book by the Bronze-Age goat-herders) told them so in a little cinder-block church-house yesterday morning, about an hour before they got in the pickup and went home to their Hoverounds and NASCAR-on-television.

America, in case you haven’t heard me state this before, is a nation of morons. Morons who failed eighth-grade math. Morons who never studied biology. Morons who will cheerfully feed us all to the machinery of chickens-for-health-care and Glenn Becks’ chalkboard.

We’ve got to face some unpleasant facts, those of us who Stayed Awake in Class: This demographic comprises a majority of Americans, and hence a majority of its voters. This is not a demographic which has the skill-sets to solve two-part math problems, let alone advanced economic issues. These are people who are accustomed to doing what they’re told, and relying on Jesus for the rest.

Those of us who tell them that this sort of ‘hope’ isn’t a strategy are roundly shouted-down – because there’s no arguing reason and logic in the face of mythology.

The other day, I read an article by George Lakeoff, a Berkeley professor who stated that “Obama had returned to his moral vision” by way of making a speech. “It was a landmark speech,” Lakeoff said, without bothering to acknowledge that Obama has made plenty of speeches, beginning with one which got him recognized on the national political stage during the 2004 Democratic convention.

Speeches are easy to make.

I still marvel at Obama’s election – I think in retrospect more people feared a Palin-presidency-via-McCain-heart-attack than they feared anything Obama might do. Regardless, he made a lot of speeches; a lot of promises, the important ones of which have gone unfulfilled, and will likely continue to languish because he’s now pushing for the one thing which eventually seduces every first term President – the desire for a second term.

With American infrastructure crumbling and somewhere around 20% of the workforce unemployed, there is only one choice left for any American president to make – increasing taxes on those most able to pay them (this is the demographic I discussed earlier – the large corporations and banking houses, plus the five-percent of the population making all the money.)

The Republicans are dead-set against this, preferring to double-down on the Neocon economic policies which got us here in the first place – the notion that, if you keep taxes low on those with money, they’ll magically ignore millions of years of hunter-gatherer hard-wiring and old-fashioned greed, and start opening their purse-strings voluntarily, creating jobs and building roads and bridges out of their own pocketbooks.

Because, of course, they’re nice guys – just like the guy in the picture, above.

I’m asked, “What do we do?” by a lot of people who read this site. I’ll start out by saying I don’t have any answers; frankly, I don't believe we can avoid complete breakdown at this point. I’ve got some suggestions, though.

First, we need to understand that there are five engines of political change in any society – its government, its business and financial institutions, its religious and philosophical community, its military, and lastly, its general population – that last of which is the source and origin of governmental consent.

Second, we need to start by admitting that the most-obvious and legally-sanctioned form of change – our current political system - is unworkable. Congress is bought-and-paid-for; instead of national service with the idea of a start-and-end-date, people who run for Congress are looking for a career.

They have world-class health care, good salaries, perks aplenty, and if they want to get re-elected, they know that taking hundreds of thousands of dollars at a crack from a corporation, bank, or wealthy individual (they’re all the same now, thanks to the Citizens United ruling) is a hell of a lot more efficient than asking the general-populace for $10 at a time - because we no longer expect to see our representatives speaking to us in person – unless we’re the fortunate few who can afford $150-and-up for a fundraising ‘dinner’.

Asking these people to give all of that up by way of legislating a workable system is insane. It won’t happen. You don’t ask the fox to legislate his way out of the henhouse. Nope; Congress isn't part of the solution, either - it's either busy pandering to Cletus, DaisyMae and the Teabaggers - or its incapable of doing anything past caving-in to the wolverines on the far Right.

Third, we need to realize that the business and financial system is not a force for positive change – in fact, as I outlined above, it’s actually working against us. We’ve let the Djinni out of the lamp by way of deregulating much of the economic system – if you stayed awake in class long enough, you learned that unregulated capitalism is at fundamental odds with any form of representative democracy. Unregulated capitalism and fascist ideology go together like ham and eggs. The business and financial-people caused most of this to begin with; that we shouldn't look to them for a solution is beyond-obvious.

Fourth, we need to realize that there’s a reason, dating back to the Roman republic, why any representative democracy didn’t allow a nation’s military to operate within its borders for any reason save to repel an invasion – the chance of a military leader saying ‘might makes right’ and taking over the whole affair is just too great a temptation. Today, thanks to the implementation of an all-volunteer force and the gradual skewing of its members toward ultra Right ideologies (including extreme fundamentalist Christianity), the most we can expect from our military is to support the current system – if not to implement something even more extreme if given the opportunity. Don't expect the military to be any sort of solution - if we have to rely on them to set things right, we have to accept all that follows - look to places like Liberia for your archetypical end-game if you want the military to solve the problem.

Fifth, we need to realize that if genuine change is going to happen anytime soon, it’s going to be up to us – those of us who Stayed Awake in Class. Cletus and DaisyMae drank the Kool-Aid a long time ago.

Here’s the problem: We’re a serious minority.

People as diverse as Margaret Mead and Vladimir Lenin have said that a small group of people, sufficiently motivated, can effect change (Mead went on to say that this is the only thing that ever has). Let's hope they're right - even so, there's a fundamental problem, at least here in America with that - the minority which really grasp the problem is doing fuck-all about it.

I’m continually amazed at the fact that even though we're a minority, those of us who’ve connected the dots are still silent. There are no protests. Frankly, I’m equally-amazed that someone hasn’t driven a moving van full of Semex into the New York Stock Exchange; that someone hasn't parked a Suburban full of nitrate-fertilizer and diesel in the underground parking garage of the Bank of America building, and that the Hamptons and other enclaves of the Rich and Corrupt haven’t been torched to the ground by a mob of angry 99ers and homeless people.

Sooner or later, we’re going to have to realize that pitchforks and rope are likely our only remedy.

More on that later.

I've Been Nominated For The Blogger's Choice Awards - In Four Categories, No Less!

2011-04-15T07:21:00.000-07:00

Well, after a couple of false-starts due to heavy use of the site, the Blogger's Choice Awards are underway.

I've been nominated for four categories - the links are below.

Now, if you want to make a guy smile - go to one or all of 'em and do a little voting/commenting by clicking on the blue-grey links below. I'd appreciate it!

Categories:

Best Blog - Religion

Best Blog - General

Best Blog - Political

Best Blog - All Time