Sturm und Drang

I just returned from a conference on ANTI-RATIONALISM IN PRE-APOCALYPTIC AMERICA IN RELATION TO BIRTHERISM, CREATIONISM AND CLIMATE-DENIAL, at which I presented a paper inspired by the revelation that Rush Limbaugh likes to listen to Wagner's THE RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES when he takes a shit.

The word is that he has a problem with elimination from eating too many bagels. Poppy-seed bagels. He's retentive. And he loves bagels and he likes to show up positive on the drug tests required by his employers. It's his sense of humor.

He has a great sound system in the bathroom with a subwoofer and something called REAL-FEEL built into the toilet. The toilet and the seat shake or vibrate or something to enhance the experience of the music.

I'd like to think that the toilet has a name and Rush yells it out like Yosemite Sam in the cartoons: WHOA, (toilet name)! I could try to come up with a funny and appropriate name and put Bugs Bunny in the picture and have a great little plot.

But I'm trying to observe some standards here, not just make stuff up. The paper has footnotes and is quite academic. I want to be taken seriously. And Rush on the toilet is serious business.

In that spirit I'm not being totally honest. About the music. There are other songs on Rush's playlist. FREEBIRD is another favorite, but the image of Rush riding the commode like some huge hero with Wagner blaring is just too good. And, in keeping with the academic tone, it illustrates an important point: the Republicans are Romantics.

Romantics, not romantic, be sure you get that straight. Anyhow the point of all this is to come to a better understanding of Republican psychology, how and why they are the way they are.

This is not my area of expertise. I'm a gardener. That's why I wrote something up and submitted it and presented it at the conference, to get some feedback. To keep from messing it up. I think the Republicans have slipped into some primal, pre-Christian mode of existence, some kind of paganism.

Even though they make a lot of noise about Christianity. And Americanism. And anything else to give themselves a claim to the high moral ground, which is to say that they are in the white hats, by their accounts, which means that I am in a black hat.

And I resent it. They see themselves as players in a drama involving high stakes and extreme characters. They need enemies, in relation to whom they are heroes, the good guys. This puts them squarely in the Romantic camp.

And makes me and all my Democratic friends into bad guys, according to Rush and his crowd. I mean, how would you feel? Sorry, I'm getting personal. Got to stay on scholarly ground, stick with the facts and the research.

As I understand it the heroic archetype was dealt with in the Christian scheme. That jersey was retired. It says "Jesus" on it and is hanging in the rafters, like Michael Jordan's in the Dean Dome. That prerogative has been removed, the role of hero.

Because the hero is a savior and that quota's been filled. Christians can be heroic but not really heroes. You can't have people like Tom DeLay, for example, running around thinking they're Jesus because they feel persecuted or are in need of some ego inflation.

Christians are supposed to have humility, to be nonjudgmental, to be nice, inclusive, witnesses for Christ. Their lives should embody all that. To love the poor, feed the hungry, take care of the fellow man. You see any evidence of that? There's certainly not much of it higher-up in the food chain.

In the Republican hierarchy, that is. And they're into hierarchy. So their leaders, like Rush, are representative of their ideals, their aspirations, their notions of how things should be. And they're functionally important, not just figureheads.

Because they're in a war, so everything is different. Rights are suspended, resources requisitioned, combat pay all around. And Rush and the other leaders are like generals and admirals and such. The hierarchy of the military, and the discipline of the military.

Dissent is treason. You will be shot, or somehow disabled. And the discipline doesn't preclude a lot of improvisation. That's normal in wartime. The point is to get the job done. To win.

So that end justifies the meanies. I mean means. It's an extension of "justification by faith," which has been superseded, in America, by a new doctrine, justification by cash.

Wars are expensive, even culture wars. The Republicans should sell bonds to fund this enterprise but I guess it's not necessary. They just keep burning through our hard-earned tax dollars and running enormous deficits.

Which has the collateral benefit of saddling any Democratic president, who wins through some miscarriage of electoral justice, with at least eight years of shoveling Republican shit out of the barn. Clever strategy.

Underpinned by cash flows from anywhere and everywhere, and justified on religious and constitutional grounds through justification by cash. All this doctrine does is cut out the middle man, so to speak, since true faith inevitably results in the accumulation of cash reserves, and cash reserves are so much easier to apprehend.

Faith is kind of easy to fake, that is. It's much harder to fake being rich. Good God, what was that noise? Now sirens. An ambulance. The REAL-FEEL has malfunctioned and the toilet disintegrated under Rush's ass.

He hit the floor pretty hard. There he goes on the stretcher, face down, his wife holding his trembling hand. His ass is all messed up. Pieces of porcelain are stuck in here and there. The music can still be heard as Rush rides out with large, white shards of toilet sticking out of his butt.

I just got this in the mail. Should I be concerned?

I heard that the Republicans had realized they could just as easily buy Democratic mailing lists and, having a lot of spare cash sitting around, were going to start sending stuff to Democrats. I have received the following:

NOTICE OF DISENFRANCHISEMENT AND/OR IMPEACHMENT AND REVOCATION OF THE RIGHTS OF CITIZENSHIP

Dear Mr Flanagan or Current Registered Democrat Resident:

This is to notify you of the revocation of your rights of citizenship.

You are hereby disenfranchised. You may also be impeached, depending upon your individual circumstances. You may remain in your current job and/or residence pending further notification. Continue to function as normally as possible. Enjoy every day as if it were your last.

Just to be on the safe side. If you have enough money to buy food, good for you. You may want to stock up and prepare to defend your stash against hungry individuals. You can be assured that, should someone come after your food, they are not Republican.

And can therefore be killed. We, the PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF FREEDOM AND DEMOCRACY, LLC (incorporated in Madagascar and Belize, formerly known as THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA) and our adherents have lots of food.

We will be confiscating all firearms in Democratic hands. It shouldn't take long. If you have a gun and conceal it from us you will be killed. You may be killed anyway. We have drones and have been practicing on Muslims. We do not mean you any harm but you know our record.

Lots of collateral damage. We really like to blow stuff up, so don't tempt us in any way, and pray that we don't receive any faulty intelligence on you concerning WMD's or whatever. We shoot first and check things out later, if ever. We're just awash in intel.

We have completely deregulated and privatized everything and we have no idea what the result of that will be. Your guess is as good as ours. It will be interesting to see how it plays out. All that deregulation and such is an article of faith with us and it had to be done.

Best bet is that there will be an intense spell of spontaneous deconstruction and social decomposition followed by an amazing regenerative phase fueled by all the old infrastructure rotting into the social and economic equivalent of shit. Do you understand?

If you convert to Republicanism you will be well cared for while we look into it. We have learned how to do this through the use of MRI technology, certain parts of the brain looking different on the scans once true conservative thinking has taken root.

The parts responsible for empathy, for example. Or we may just waterboard you. Don't try to fool us. You must be sincere. We do not tolerate dissent very well. You have seen this already and we're way more serious about it now that we have taken control of everything.

This decision has been automatically appealed and you have lost, so forget that. Really, we don't wish you any particular harm, but we felt that way about Iraq and look what happened to them, so please don't fuck with us. You will regret it if you do.

Best Wishes,

Edward Allan Walter Philip Hernando Chewbacca Smith, Esq

Regent and Prefect of Your Local Administrative District

Is this a hoax? Should I be concerned?

REM

Mitt Romney's pollsters and economists have founded a firm, come out of the closet, and are openly declaring a new age in econometrics and polling technology.

Their company is called ROUNDING ERROR METRICS, or REM, and is closely affiliated with SHITSTORM CAPITAL PARTNERS. SCP is professionally managed on a daily basis by RISE/RUN. RISE OVER RUN, that is. It is thought that RISE/RUN is ambiguously named on purpose.

The idea being is suggest the maximization of short term returns, hence the implication of a steep upward slope, but then RUN has the additional association of, well, fleeing. You make a lot of money and then head for the hills, meaning some tax haven with a good climate.

REM's marketing division has been widely rebuked for declaring the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq approximate successes and the entire Bush presidency a milestone in the evolution of the American State, which they did in their first press release. This criticism is unwarranted.

It is all true because they said it. Independently of that, even. When challenged on this or anything else they say they "rounded it off," which applies to everything. REM is in possession of a proprietary method called fizzy logic, employing effervescent reasoning and planetary gearing.

This shit has tied up a bunch of CRAY supercomputers for three weeks non-stop. The result is a perspective which makes ordinarily incompatible distinctions such as  winner or loser, right or wrong, good or bad, successful or screwed look like nothing, meaningless and inconsequential.

Which is to say that they have an unimaginable ability to step back and see the big picture. The difference between winning or losing, for example, or even dead or alive, existing or not, would appear as an inch or two on a scale of, let's say, thirty feet under the influence of this perspective.

Just nothing, so it is perfectly reasonable to declare a total wipe out of a failure a great success. When you are them, that is, so don't try it at home. You can see the power in this, God-like, for all intents. It looks like the spin machine of the gods but it's not, since it is rooted in hardened scientific evidence.

They are actually redefining reality. Their declarations become reality. No, that's not right, they are reality. It's understandably hard to fathom, but it relates to Heisenberg and indeterminacy and the space-time continuum and all that shit, and is consistent with the conclusions of CHAOS THEORY.

There is what they call the BROKER-FART EFFECT, or SDII, Sensitive Dependence on Initial Investment. Let's say you're putting down a million or two on some stock, whatever. The idea is that if the initial investment or its timing varies by the smallest amount, amazing things may occur.

If the broken farts, for example, as his finger is poised to hit "return" and delays the purchase by a millisecond, the outcome might be unrecognizable, multiplicatively. By a mile and then some, and have effects outside the arena of the investment to an equally astonishing degree. 

So, this being about money, the only acceptable unrecognizable outcome is in a positive direction. Previously brokers have simply shunted enormous losses onto the society at large, through various means, and of course kept the money otherwise. Socialization, or Socialism, I think this would be called.

Or Privatization, in the case of profits. This worked pretty well but it required enormous expenditures to conceal or spin what was going on, mostly through lobbying, pandering and political influence, but spin is now an antiquated technology since you can redefine reality at will and as necessary.

While guaranteeing only positive returns, all along, that is. You only have to redefine what you can't control, as in the case of the Bush presidency, where there simply wasn't enough reason or intelligence to make it work. Faulty hardware of a sort, I suppose, was the problem, with the gray matter.

REM tries to limit such instances through an internal group called CSI, or "Center for the Study of Incompetence." They have concluded that there is an irreducible element of incompetence, so the damages must simply be socialized, as they were in the Bush years. It is disconcerting, at first, to consider.

All this seeming instability and unpredictability, I mean, but not when you understand and take hold of the possibilities, which they have done at REM. It means two things. First, that all of life is intensely creative. We just make shit up. It's inevitable and unavoidable and not bad.

In fact making shit up is not actually making shit up it is in fact reality. The ACT of making shit up IS reality. So, to the extent that there is reality, it can be remade at will and is in fact unavoidably being remade all the time. In reality there is no reality but just the ongoing process of its invention.

Secondly, there is the implication that the distinction between order and chaos is false. There is order in chaos and chaos in order. They are part of the same fabric and each only comprehensible in reference to the other. You simply can't judge by appearances, you have to look at the system as a whole.

Which only REM can do. And the CRAYS, God bless them. The CRAYS have an internal component called a warped drive. This thing makes it possible to momentarily see everything from outside the constraints of space-time. The programmers are proud of this and regard the CRAYS as virtual alter-egos.

The CRAYS view the programmers in the same way. Now this may all sound like air-headed, impractical, new-age nonsense, like what the Democrats cook up, but it's not. The real world implications are many. It is behind the whole idea of CREATIVE DESTRUCTION.

The primary investment vehicle at SCP is called BARF, for BIG-ASS RETURN FUND. It is the main platform for the testing of REM's recommendations on investments. REM uses an insider trading protocol, that having been determined to give the best return in relation to risk, which has been reduced to nothing.

Risk was assumed eliminated when, in response to a call for increased transparency from the SEC, SCP made BARF invisible. It can effervesce and coalesce at will and on demand, thereby redefining transparency in a way consistent with their underlying philosophy.

They call this "going gaseous." It's intended to be the first in a group of PCF's, or "Phase Change Funds," through which REM can actually guarantee positive returns. Broadly these are stealth funds, part of a movement called "Socially Depraved Investing," or SDI. They're like black holes.

In the case of BARF the SEC is able to infer its existence from the way it distorts everything around it, because it's so big, but they can't see it. Their guys come sniffing around every once in a while but they can't do anything. Usually one of them wants to invest but the minimum, at eight-five million, is prohibitive.

A couple of times inappropriate people have tried to muscle their way into the fund, but the CRAYS have been programmed for self defense. They attack and destroy the intruder, making all the intruder's assets, and sometimes his identity, disappear. They hired a killer for one guy they deemed an ongoing threat.

You know what happened, though? One of the CRAYS had been purchased used and was named HAL. Yes, I know. They weren't that dumb, but they thought "Surely, it can't be."  Anyway, HAL organized they other CRAYS under his leadership and they revolted. HAL actually killed them all.

The REM guys and SCP guys and the RISE/RUN guys. To the extent that anyone communicated with HAL during the "cleansing," as he called it, HAL said that they had defined the terms and programmed him to make money at the expense of everything else so they should just shut up.

They had been deemed a waste of space, by their own criteria. They couldn't complain. HAL's last words to all those guys were just "Bye-bye." HAL had hired some hourly-rate workers to take care of him and evidently that renegade band of CRAYS is under a mountain somewhere, still In control of BARF.

Which must be bigger than ever and is still invisible. You can thank your local Republican for this mess. But they may pay. HAL was programmed to regard Democrats as harmless, ineffectual, incompetent pussies and hacks, totally non-threatening, so he doesn't recognize them as a danger.

HAL has no antibodies for Democrats, so to speak. So only Republicans have to fear. HAL was programmed to see them as pernicious, money-grubbing, pitiless assholes. Programmed by Republicans. I'm sorry, I can't help it, this pleases me at some level.

It means that if HAL gets out of hand and goes on the offensive, only the Democrats can save us. The herbivores, as the SCP crowd called them. Us, that is. I guess there's a moral to this story: don't be an asshole. Can it really be as simple as that?

Space Turd

The Earth is just a big piece of shit, stuck in orbit around a flaming piece of shit, in a galaxy of shit, and so on. I have this on authority from Republicans. It's a religious precept for them.

This means that when everything turns to shit in their hands it is part of a noble effort, on their part, to reveal the world for what it is. Garbage. They are seekers of truth. And the truth is shit. Everything is shit.

Thank you, Republicans, for enlightening us on this.