The Pain Ready Already Born Iraqi Heathen Child Protection And Reeducation Act and Genocide Reauthorization Bill

I can only hope the Republican-led Congress will support the bill I'm proposing through my legally-elected representative, Thom Tillis, in an effort to get him off his hand-washing kick. Iraq, after all, is a bit of an abortion all its own. A Republican abortion. They should all travel there and see how their nation-building is working out.

Iraq is arguably the cradle of civilization, anyway, and a cradle is just one step from a womb and wombs are high on their list of interests and heavily investigated by them. Maybe there, in Iraq, they will discover the womb of civilization, maybe Eden, and stay there in that wonderful society they have aided and nurtured. 

GNN

Continuing this jag I'm on about news, I saw that the KKK is out again in Alabama or Arkansas all worried about the decline of everything good. To my disbelief they still think Jews run the media, so I'm targeting a network to them, the white supremacists, called GNN, the Goyim News Network. 

The plan is to take as much of their money as possible, thereby diverting it from Pat Robertson, and give it to the JDL. If they catch me I'll claim it's the Jesus Defense League. The Klan membership tops every list I've ever seen of incomprehensibly stupid and gullible white people, so it should work.

Conniption News

I have a plan to save CNN. Firstly it must cease to be CNN, as we know it. There are times when the middle ground is a no-man's land and this is one of those. It's not that they do their thing poorly but that they are doing the wrong thing. The world has changed and CNN hasn't.

The new way is high emotional-content reporting. News organizations now own their subjectivity and run with it. The reinvention of CNN will be so pronounced it will be unnecessary to sell the transformation to the public. It will sell itself. Conventional reporting is dead. 

Let's bury it. The lines between news and entertainment aren't blurred but nonexistent. It was an illusion that there was ever a distinction. Since the change in actual reporting will be dramatic it would be an enormous waste to change the name "CNN" itself, so it will be kept.

But it now stands for the CONNIPTION NEWS NETWORK, a division of TANTRUM MEDIA. This is modeled on certain right-wing news sources, whose ratings speak for themselves, that being the democracy of the marketplace. If the people want garbage you feed them garbage.

 It's happy-meal journalism. Enjoy.

Long-Term Capital Mismanagement

Here's one for the fact column. We knew in 1998 that hedge funds weren't hedging anything. Any hedging going on was courtesy of the free insurance American taxpayers were providing to a bunch of already fantastically wealthy people. Not a bad gig for those rich people.

We knew it because in 1998 a hedge fund imploded and the feds had to step in and ensure it didn't screw the economy up too badly. In other words, we covered their asses. Two of the fund's directors had invented the math which made derivatives markets possible.

They won a NOBEL PRIZE for it. This was as close as you could get to a controlled experiment showing that derivatives markets and hedge funds and reckless investment banking were evil and irresponsible and should have been banned or taxed into oblivion.

But that didn't happen because one of the things these rich people buy is protection, just like with the mob, protection from regulation. This is called "regulatory capture," when those supposedly being regulated buy off the regulators, fixing the game in their favor.

So we are fucked. This is why the whole world economic system nearly ceased to exist in 2008 and why the pathetic re-regulation enacted after that mess is being attacked and repealed by Republicans who are characteristically on their knees before rich people.

This is not government, let alone inclusive, democratic government, but organized criminal activity and thuggery. It's an insult to anyone who ever gave a shit about anything. Those rich people don't. It's all just barbarism made up to look civilized, hoping no one notices.

Typically, Thomas Frank expressed something essential about this when reflecting on the death of Harold Ramis, one of the writers of ANIMAL HOUSE. Recall when certain persons borrowed a Cadillac in that movie and returned it looking a lot like that '08 economy.

Their defense? How could you be stupid enough to entrust us with something nice you actually care about? Those are the people running everything. It's Bluto-land. I must be in a bad mood but this pisses me off. I used to be proud to be an American, when I was younger.

But the America I was proud to be a part of doesn't exist anymore. We threw it away for nothing. NOTHING! Out of carelessness and distraction. We are the loser generation running through its inheritance. Future generations will despise us. What a waste.

What the World Needs Now is Guns, Sweet Guns: Our Zeitgeist

Are the Chapel Hill shootings the story of a hate crime or of a mentally ill person? A story about personal space played out in a parking lot? A couple or all of these, I'm sure, but more than anything an NRA, gun rights, second amendment nonstarter of a story.

A nonstarter because if you try to take guns away from Americans or even prevent them from increasing their arsenals or even so much as talk about it they will go nuts and probably shoot you. In fact they may do that in anticipation of it, from anxiety, as they have shown.

With regard to Barack Obama. They thought he looked like a guy who might go after their guns so they went ahead and went nuts, just to be on the safe side, as did that pig of a white guy who shot those intelligent, attractive, responsible, law-abiding young Muslims.

He was just being proactive and forward thinking in ensuring a well-run parking situation for everyone. So he overdid it a little. Nowhere near so much as George Bush did cowboying his way into Iraq and was he ever held responsible? I want a library of my own.

To justify the stupid shit I've done in my life. It's only fair. We might not like how it looks but that pig of a white guy is us. It's what we now stand for. To the extent that there is a unified Muslim menace we are Nazis. If we're going to go broad-brush we need to be consistent.

And apply the same brush to ourselves. The Nazis were as representative of white, western, Christian culture as ISIS is of Islam. I'm really against tribalism and Muslims may actually be more tribal than Christians but we can't know what the truth is.

Because we started messing with them, in our arrogance and presumption, and might have caused them to go tribal on us, instead of only tribal on themselves. Our record on this is not as good as we like to think and the Middle East is our parking lot.

A self-declared area of strategic interest. And we happen to have all these guns sitting around, our munitions, so it's no surprise they get used rashly at times and with little or no provocation. The stuff is so cool and easily deployed and we're so enamored of it.

Open Source Journalism

I have an idea for a new kind of journalism, open-source. Any one can contribute, subject to the contribution being deemed an improvement, as judged by the Lord High Moderator, me. Original articles would be supplied by me and other writers approved of by me. 

I guess this is a wiki but I want it to be monarchical. 

No Yeomen

Where are our yeomen? The Supreme Court is ruled by people who call themselves "originalists" and a certain political faction seems to rant on about the Constitution in direct proportion to their disregard for it, but those revolutionary times were super different from our own.

There were yeomen, or the equivalent, lower class people with land and therefore some stake in the society. Lower class, that is, in relation to the founders, who were upper class people. But the country then evolved with the ideals put in place by the upper class guys, enlightened ideas and ideals.

The ideals were inclusive, for that era. I think the Declaration and Constitution exhibit a kind of survey bias. The founding documents embody the Enlightenment idealism of the founders and only partly reflect the reality of their lives and the times, so the documents are aspirational to a degree. 

This is good, but it places a burden on us, the inheritors of those documents and their idealism. We have done okay, by the standards of the sad history of human governance. It didn't hurt that we were loosed on a continent full of unexploited natural resources with the know-how to exploit them.

And a continent largely depopulated by depredation and disease, depredation by us. It was our destiny, evidently manifestly. We got up a hell of a head of steam and then realized that the natural resources weren't in fact limitless. So we thoughtlessly embraced plundering other places.

Notably the Middle East, where God mistakenly left a lot of oil in the hands of heathen. Again the writing is on the wall. Those resources have a limit. And again it appears that thoughtless plundering is option number one. But why? And where are our yeomen or their equivalent?

That would be our disappearing middle class, people at least invested in the society, if not landowners, and engaged in primally productive stuff. That shit went to China, because of a political system corrupted by money and emptied of Enlightenment optimism and idealism. 

And this is to say nothing of the lower classes, which were increasingly enfranchised as the burden of those ideals of the founders played out in real life, but they are now super-screwed. Now all the good stuff goes to people unfamiliar with primally productive activity, hangers-on and inheritors of wealth. 

Everyone else is disempowered. They're internationalists, among other things, our new ruling class, and not rooted to any land, region or productive activity, unlike their predecessors. The whole system assumes this rootedness, enfranchisement and idealism. Without it we are lost.

Canard Cruises

The famous seven dwarves testimony from 1994 has been on my mind lately. It was hard to regard it as emblematic of anything at the time. A bunch of rich guys, CEOs, showed that they had sold their souls and it didn't seem like a big deal. After all, they got a good price.

Those people were paid well by the tobacco companies. But I think it's been on my mind because it was, in fact, emblematic. Americans will do anything for money. Money is powerful enough without being associated with moral goodness and the approval of God. 

But with it?

Total crack cocaine. It's a puritanical innovation, I believe, that association, but you convince them of that. I think it's not possible. Nobody even seems to care enough to ask the pertinent questions. There's an entire entity, FOX NEWS, devoted to the denial of reality.

Not to say that they're liars. They may be delusional. But they are well paid and it makes me suspicious. The stuff they put out there is as patently and provably untrue as "nicotine is not addictive" and they go unchallenged. Their ratings are great and they make lots of money.

There's no equivalent in opposition to their propaganda machine, meaning a reality machine. Maybe reality is too mundane. That faction, those insisting on sanity, isn't getting the job done. A lot of it is the money. The motivation at FOX NEWS is all enmeshed with that.

I view FOX like a cruise line. Canard Cruises, let's say. The ships stay out of port until they sink, which they eventually must, because they are unsupported by reality. The passengers have to live on whatever they embark with in the way of ideas, floating around all misinformed.

One boat is the BIRTHER QUEEN, captained by Orly Taitz, which ran aground in Hawaii. Another is the CREATIONIST, which is floundering about somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle. And the HOMOPHOBIA is taking on water off a nude gay beach in the Bahamas.

SUPPLY SIDE and RISING TIDE, sister ships, previously sank but have been raised and are again out at sea with paying passengers. I mean, how much can a good, used gunboat cost these days, I find myself wondering, but the complicity of the people on those ships is uncertain.

The well-paid people at CANARD don't care at all about them at all and those higher up in the food chain are really making out, in real time, so they don't care even if FOX ultimately fails. The investment is about income and the income is immense.

So the whole cruise line is sinking along with its ships under the weight of the craziness. The sad thing is the damage they leave behind. This wonderful country of ours--wonderful in spite of its many faults--is left way worse off by these people and their fantastic greed.

Wrong on Race and Everything Else

What you see now in a state like North Carolina, heading backwards in a hurry, is extreme defensiveness on the one front, the denial of the wrong being done, and inappropriate pride in achievements accomplished elsewhere or by people not identified with the system.

Like Dean Smith and the Wright Brothers. North Carolina has rejected everything Dean stood for, and the Wright Brothers had nothing to do with the state. What we should put on our plates is "from the state that gave you lung cancer," and we should get back to white-boy basketball. 

North Carolina has returned to being about privilege and exclusion, so it's just disingenuous to pretend otherwise. As recent scandals have proven, the state is very happy to use young, black college athletes like horses in stables, and then it's off to the glue factory on graduation. 

The Artificial Honkey

I've got a new job for my 3-D printer, making effigies of the white guys running things here in the South, for use in various ways representing their well-paid subservience to the interests of big business and America's wealthy elite.

They could be holding a lantern in front of some corporate headquarters or kowtowing to the Kochs and their other corporate masters. They take their servility seriously and like being associated with wealth. I would put them all over the place at the golf courses.

This is their most appropriate habitat, an environmentally catastrophic and inverted place, unsustainable and dependent on resources from elsewhere. I picture them everywhere at the courses as hazards, follies and yard-art, some hanging from trees.

And half-buried in the ground upside down and so on. There's an element of satire to this, but the white boys will probably be unaware of it since they're already oblivious to how ridiculous they look padding along the fairways in their polyester shorts and such.

There they fecklessly whack their little balls around. May the gods of waste and impotence bless them and keep them from harm. Their days are numbered anyway. The next generation is poised to inherit a severely compromised and debilitated society.

Thanks to those white boys, but the new generation doesn't even understand the old values well enough to reject them. The white boys have lost. Their racism and homophobia and religious intolerance are incomprehensible to the young people. 

Bon Voyage, white boys. We watch in sadness and disbelief as you sail over the horizon into oblivion, never having learned to what degree your values are being abandoned. And is it any wonder you have failed, since everyone else is still cleaning up your mess?

Amazonian

The most interesting aspect to me of some of the newer work being done on American slavery, such as Edward Baptist's, is not in how it shows that slavery got the entire American economy off the ground but in how much working at an Amazon warehouse resembles that slavery. Slavery had to make sense within a limited context or it wouldn't have been used. The problem was the context. 

The model for me has always been sports, in relation to competition. You have extremely rational, reasonable and well-enforced rules within which participants can behave all the more aggressively because the rules protect the larger system and ensure that the competition can continue on to the overall benefit of everyone indefinitely. This is the brilliance of having a good set of rules. 

Which is to say regulation. Regulations protect everyone. A system that doesn't work for all of the enfranchisees is barbarism and is inherently unstable. Why should the people being unfairly used continue to acquiesce to the system? They won't. They have to be kept down somehow, through force or some other means. As for the context you look at extent and sustainability.

Is everyone included in some way and is the system stable over time? I think these are exactly the things the American system is designed for, breadth and stability. It isn't designed for efficiency. Hell, no. Tyranny is efficient. Monarchy is efficient. Any kind of totalitarianism is more efficient than Democracy, in the short run, so suck it up, I say to those haranguing on about efficiency. 

You can't blame nutballs like Bezos. The problem is imbedded in the system itself. Bezos just plays the system well. The system is the context and the context is corrupt. It serves only a minority, a small percentage of the population, and even them only in the short-term so the system must be recalibrated and returned to factory settings, meaning the letter and spirit of the law.

This is not the Amazonian rainforest, our civilization and economy. It wasn't intended to be a jungle. We're supposed to be better than that. Let's start behaving as though we are.

The Invisible Hand

has a whip in it. It's the hand of servitude.

Googled

Only Google remembered my birthday, but we're like that (picture a hand held as in a victory sign but with the fingers tight together).

Ship of Fools

The first step in resisting the crazy stuff coming out of the Middle East is not to embrace the tribalism which fuels it. Oh, wait, too late, the Republicans have already done just that and accepted the battle on tribal terms, the battle that wasn't a battle before then, so it's open season on America now. 

Another great job of running things, thanks to some imbeciles from Texas and elsewhere. Are they all on peyote? Someone look into that. I called one of their think tanks, CANNON FODDER, to question them but they were in a meeting with the arms manufacturers who fund them and couldn't comment. 

Thom Tillis Wipes His Ass

You read it here, folks. I knew Thom Tillis would make us proud. See my post on that. Now he's wiping his ass in Washington and serving up a heaping helping of Republican reform, without having washed his hands. So, if it smells funny or makes you sick, don't blame me.

I didn't vote for him. He's North Carolina's new Jesse Helms, a deregulatory doofus and disgrace, so hold your noses and hope for the best. Thom Tillis is taking America from bathroom to the hallowed halls and beyond. And be sure, if you visit Washington, to take some disinfectant.

If you don't know what I'm talking about google "tillis, bathroom" and all we be clear. It will make you glad not to be a North Carolinian, if you're aren't, and ashamed if you are. And may all of America wise up and feel the shame of our nutball, Republican government in Washington.

A Fiasco to Remember

Thank God I usually sleep well, because I now wake up to the nightmare of witnessing the work of the new Republican majorities, a lot to handle. About a year and a half ago I stopped listening to NPR in the morning because I couldn't stand hearing about all the evil-doing.

Now I may have to give up print journalism. I can't take it anymore. After thirty years of failed Republican economic and social policies they continue to push for the same stuff. How can this happen? We witness with horror. You cut taxes and you don't reduce overall spending:

Deficits skyrocket. You deregulate everything: Financial markets go berserk and take the world economy down. You get on your knees before big business and they want cheap labor: Bye-bye jobs, bye-bye happiness. I've had enough of instant forgetting.

How about some accountability?

Cannonball

My brother has said that he thinks that he has made only about three real decisions in his life, and those probably badly, and then been a "projectile" the rest of the time. A whole bunch of issues are imbedded in his reflection, those coming to mind firstly for me being autonomy, self-determination and personal responsibility. But in making the observation in the first place he has shown how free he is by questioning his own autonomy. 

And showing that he has a sense of humor about himself, reimagined as the human existential cannonball, which is funny to me in a sad way because we all know the feeling of stepping back from our immersion in everyday life and seeing the pettiness and absurdity of our existence, that naturally narrowed field of vision and involvement in the animal reality of our daily routines. However, "we all know" may be an overstatement.

Not everyone questions themselves. It's a good sign if you can. And it's a real sign of a lack of autonomy if you can't, an indication that compulsion is at work, so it's a paradox, that people who can see just how limited their freedom is are the most free. And it shows how incredibly important it is to be able to laugh at yourself, as an expression of human limitation. If you think you aren't limited you really are nuts. Self-importance is nihilism. 

A refuge for the unrighteous, since the single thing we should be most familiar with in life is our own limitation. It's the most objectively subjective truth there is. Behold yourself with bemusement. The denial of human limitation is the denial of reality and our humanity, so it's all about how you fly. Tell me, did you picture my brother with a smile on his face? With maybe a shrug, as he speeds through the air to his inevitable end.

That may be the best that we can do, the most that we can hope for in life, some style points along the way. We could, you know, maybe hold hands and support one another, in our collective flight. Take care of each other, in so much as we can. I'm all for that.

Left Behind

It's so odd how America's relationship to Europe and the other places that contributed to its founding and colonization has been reversed. We are now the intolerant ones. All those failed political, economic, social and religious precepts that originated elsewhere now exist in purer and more primitive forms in the United States, and it makes you want to get away. 

The stuff that people fled from to come to America is now America's métier, but it's worse here because it represents a betrayal of our traditions and is illegal. England was proud to be an empire and they conceitedly thought they could only improve a country by invading it. We were a product of that, rebelled against it, and defined ourselves in opposition to it. 

So there's an element of denial on top of the illegality which makes it worse and more perverse. We can't admit to ourselves what we're doing, so there's no way to bring it honestly within the system and to try to do it well, to the extent that something indefensible can be done well. On that high note I'm off to work, with the unhelpful realization of how messed up we are.

Born Fighting for the Wrong Side: the Confederacy of Dumbasses

Jim Webb is running for president or at least sniffing around in that direction. I think he's okay but his Scots-Irish chauvinism worries me. This group he extols is more belligerent, backward, bigoted and servile than any other American subgroup. 

I don't doubt that Webb is personally above this but the current status quo, in which the Scots-Irish pseudo-southern cabal has leveraged its way into political dominance, must go. We have had a quiet coup in America, with bigots and dumbasses now in charge. 

And the Scots-Irish have no history of political involvement other than in minority rule and exploitation, first in Northern Ireland and then in America. They were the core of the Confederacy more so than any other group and make undeniably great cannon fodder.

They're wonderful to have around when you need stupid people to die in a hopeless, immoral war, but they have turned America into this, another doomed empire and lost cause. This was not supposed to be our destiny. Webb should run for vice-president instead. 

Just declare for that, I mean, and set a cool precedent by acknowledging his appropriate role, as an underling to a Democratic or even Republican president. He can then carry on in his tribe's tradition of unreasoning devotion to a cause irrespective of is merit.

But we need someone in charge who can reinvent America as it was intended to be, a nation of independent people who own their own government and understand that disenfranchising anyone else is the first step in seeing yourself disenfranchised. 

The Order of the Goiter

Since America has made the choice for nobility and a class society we must have appropriate honors. I nominate George H. W. Bush, as the first in what I hope will be a long line of honorees, to the Order of the Goiter. In addition he will be the president of the society, the Head High Protuberance, until he dies, which will probably be soon.

Then one of the sons will take over, blood and succession and a male heir being important things to the nobility. Competence of course is not a factor among the heirs and issue since they have the ultra-refined stuff in their veins, by which is transmitted all the goodness of the ages in the genes and in other ways as yet undiscovered by science.

No Country for Old Anybody

I don't like predictions because predictions affect expectations and expectations affect outcomes. Judging from that you might think that I believe in positive thinking and creative visualization and such but I don't, though I prefer anything to pessimism. I'm trying to figure out what I do believe in and it's probably incremental change, with feedback, in the direction of good outcomes.

What an appealing title. And it makes a nice, knotty acronym if you want to try it. There are always assumptions, sometimes hidden, underlying everything, which is where the trouble usually starts. The assumption of rational markets is a notorious failure. And the assumption of rational actors within markets. And the self-correcting thing. What next? That people prefer pain to pleasure? 

Maybe. You have to wonder when you witness the American people voting themselves a heap of hurt, even when the hurt is almost immediate and the causal mechanisms are clear. When the recipients of social services vote against those services, for example, probably from an instinct for comparative disadvantage, meaning that other people they don't like will be hurt more. 

If this sounds sick to you I won't argue the point. Then consider longer term examples with less clear causal mechanisms, such as the case of the care and feeding of aging baby-boomers. I think we're heading for a crash on this one, unnecessarily. The good intent isn't even there. In fact there are people in power who seem to want to deprive the boomers of their security.

When it could be easily ensured through incremental means starting now, but there isn't the collective will. It makes me want to move to Scandinavia. They must have internet dating sites there, maybe I can marry a Swede and get citizenship. Shit, I better lose some weight, if I want to marry a sexy Scandinavian, but I'm motivated, by this, my new retirement plan. Good-bye, cruel, American world!

Better Living Through Misery

I wish I could say there is a single, core difference between progressives and conservatives, an attitude toward authority, for example, or the ability to deal with change and uncertainty, but I can't. Every time I come up with something I find holes in it.

But this in itself is instructive. Monocausal is not my style, and I'm proudly progressive. Conservatives seem to love it. Simplicity, I mean, and monocausal explanations for everything. Maybe it's due to a belief in determinism and innate qualities.

Inborn attributes, and nature over nurture, but there I go again, slipping into a simple outlook, though we can see that this does capture something fundamental to conservatives, that people belong in certain classes or clans and should stay put.

All the goodness going to the few, those born worthy, that is, and the misery to the many. Someone can change camps, but this is so associated in conservative minds with the drama of a conversion experience as to only be possible in that way.

So it is comforting to them to think that the piling on of all the goodness to the elect, and the misery to the non-elect, is not only natural but God's will, because suffering, misery and deprivation are means through which you might be transformed. 

And accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior, so, when conservatives add to the world's suffering in denial of and revolt against their ability to alleviate it, they are on God's side and looking out for us, in the remote hope of our salvation through suffering.

This seems unchristian to me and presumptuous, but they evidently like to see people suffer, from a belief in just deserts or in the efficacy of suffering in self-improvement. Conservatives are strange people. I can conceive of the validity of their beliefs. 

If humans are, in fact, nothing more than animals, but the beliefs are irreconcilable with Christianity and our national ideals, so I wish they would give up on the ruse--fat chance--in which case their victims might more easily see the truth and fight back.

The truth being that they have no ideals at all, but are only intent on grabbing all the power they can, while hoping their victims never figure out how they're being messed with, which is exactly what they fear, the end of their one-sided battle for domination.

Apologizing for America

It's easy to put this trite accusation to rest. We're not apologizing for America, we're apologizing for a rogue version of it invented by Republicans. The entire world is now on edge trying to figure out where, in the monstrous mutation of our country we now inhabit, are our ideals. 

Which is to say those principles on which we were founded and which, as they abandon them, Republicans scream about all the more loudly. No one has ever expected us to be perfect, let alone the beacon that certain right-wing blowhards proclaim us to be, but only to keep the faith.

The faith in freedom and individualism and respect for the rights of others, and at the keeping of that faith we have failed. We lay the failure at the feet of Republicans. Why? Every rational outsider I've spoken with has said the same thing, that a certain presidential election was key.

When we reelected the most criminally incompetent and morally defective leader in the history of the country. That's when the world gave up on us or at least began to wonder and worry, what the hell is happening over there, meaning here, in the land where we are no longer created equal.

We are created privileged and predestined, in keeping with the beliefs of the ruling coalition of bluebloods and rednecks, both of which factions were somehow embodied in the winner of that election, who went on to show the world the extent to which we think we are above the law.

It makes sense that we would be defensive and self righteous in proportion to our failure, and unwilling to assume any responsibility to a degree commensurate with the crimes, which are ongoing, the legacy of those horrible years of Republican hegemony, for which I again apologize. 

The Luxury Tax

What we now see in North Carolina as part of the Great Regression, the new social movement of the resurgent right, is an increased reliance on sales and use taxation in generating revenue.

Meaning that poor and middle class people will pay a higher rate than ever, food and clothing and shelter being luxuries for them. Similarly second homes and pleasure craft are now necessities.

And are subsidized for those who can ill-afford them, this being the appropriate venue for affirmative action, since the well-off have already demonstrated their innate worth and should be rewarded.

Big boats are durable goods by definition. Food turns to shit within a day. And we've all seen what poor people do to neighborhoods. They've been creating affordable housing forever just by relocating.

The equity bottoming out at zero, or nearly, which goes to show that poor people destroy value. This is why they are poor, so any attempt to help them is money up in smoke or down the drain.

Burned in crack pipes or flushed down the toilet when the police raid their drug dens, that is, and wasted in other imaginative and debased ways. It's about character, when you get down to it.

Compare someone like Franklin Roosevelt to George Bush or Tom DeLay and it all becomes clear. Ask yourselves, then, what kind of people you really want running our state and the country.

People with brains and compassion or thugs and morally-defective good-for-nothings.

A New Measure

I want to propose new measure and standard of genocidal destructiveness. Let's call it a COULTER, in honor of Ann, defined as the deaths of ten thousand amalgamated individuals, meaning a hypothetical mish-mash of people of every known tribe and tradition.

This unit is unavoidably indeterminate, but we've got to start somewhere, and a HOLOCAUST, another possible measure, is just too big. People can't relate to it. And the targeted persons were all of one tribe, so if messes with the valuation of the currency.

Whether or not someone identifies with the tribe being decimated, I mean to say, would have an effect, so thank God we have Ann, since she's so unabashedly ethnocentric and shouldn't object to the honor, genocide being the ultimate expression of tribal militancy.

And Ann has long ago owned her ethnic chauvinism. That gauntlet has been thrown down with emphasis. Starting with the invasion of Iraq we can see immediately that it's too one-sided to be called a war and may qualify as genocide. It can be assigned a COULTER score.

Let's say of ten, for the sake of argument. I have no idea if it makes any sense or is accurate. None, whatsoever, at all. It's not the point. The point is that by assigning a number you are forced to make an evaluation, to pay attention and, one hopes, to care. That is the goal.

It's what Ann and her followers refuse to do. To look, evaluate, and care, so we have made good use of her in the end. The karmic balance of the universe may not have been restored, as it never probably will be, but a step has been taken in that direction. Thank you, Ann.

For once your name has been well used.

They Started It

There's an important principle in the world of human affairs often overlooked off of the schoolyard because of its aboriginal simplicity: who started it?

A Very Convenient Jesus

It's one of the most confounding things I've ever encountered, when I recognized that intelligence could be mechanically associated with some very bad stuff, which is to say fear, because primally fearful people can exhibit overdeveloped intellectual abilities in response to the fear. They have incredibly inquiring minds because they never assume that what is on the surface is reality.

In fact they assume it is not, so they dig deeper in search of the truth, usually coming to rest in a place which justifies the fear, that being the only real thing for them. This is hard to detect, because the stuff piled higher and deeper on top of the fear is very nearly impenetrable and, like most everyone I know, I admire intelligence, a reasonable prejudice in so far as that is possible. 

The other impediment is that the fear is usually unrecognized in proportion to its severity. The more fearful people are the more likely they are to be unaware of it, that is. If it's wholly beneath the threshold of awareness their lives are unconsciously consumed by the fabrication of threats, since the fear is easier to tolerate when it has a focus. Paranoia strikes deep.

Into your lives it will creep. The edifice of rationalization on top of the fear is usually internally consistent and highly evolved, the weak point being the false premise of the fear. The edifice is also defended to the death because primally fearful people are irrationally and erroneously operating on the assumption of impending annihilation. Normally they themselves go on the attack.

Thinking that they are under attack, of course, which they aren't initially, but then they are in response to their own aggression. It's dizzying to think about it. I better admit it, against my will, but I got started on all of this when I googled something innocuous and Ann Coulter popped up in the results, first in line. And then there was Ted Cruz in the news. Evidently he's brilliant. 

How do you explain these people? It's as though they're in a psychological submarine, trolling in the murky waters of the unconscious, a submarine which can never surface because of fear. There's an autistic aspect as well to this in the enormous element of isolation in their ideation. They are also usually incapable of empathy and don't appear outwardly fearful.

Try to make a Disney movie out of this. It's the antithesis of innocence, and yet they're probably not responsible because of the delusion. They're mentally ill, but I say that knowing that there's a catch underlying the insanity defense. If you have to be crazy to kill someone then no one can be held responsible for killing anyone. I prefer to decide first on the crime and who did it.

And then on broader culpability. The crimes of the Coulter crowd are approaching another threshold of comprehension. Like a light-year, you can't get your head around the damage they've done. All of South and Central America, destroyed by us. The Middle East, wrecked by us. The world economy, on the ropes because of us. The natural environment, reeling from us.

Is it any wonder Ann and Ted won't open the door an inch on admitting any fault in relation to anything? The weight behind that door is immense. It also means that their religious convictions, out of which they make so much, are a sham, just another mechanism of defense against the imaginary threats. The self righteousness and obliviousness have real utility.

Their Jesus doesn't care about Muslim lives, food for children, care for the elderly, hope for the poor, or anything other than their own aggrandizement and increasing wealth and power. What they have there is a very convenient Jesus, but they can't honestly believe in the existence of God at all. If they did then they would really have something to fear, judgment day.

Cui Bono

There's so much uncertainty in the world, it's good to return to simple, proven rules whenever possible in finding one's way through things, one of which is: who's making out here? Not smooching, obviously, though there's that angle as well, but getting rich and benefiting in other ways.

I think I remember once, in reading the Church Fathers for a class--it was another life--running into some axioms for judging true and false prophets or preachers. Two indications of unrighteousness: they steal your money or sleep with your wives--reasonable sounding criteria.

If a little sexist. Luckily there's an easy answer to this, the issue of self interest, in our situation. With the advent of Reaganomics we were repeatedly reassured that the Republicans weren't intending to institute the greatest upwards redistribution of wealth in the history of the world.

Well, they have accomplished that anyway, and damn efficiently, one must say. What's truly remarkable is that they can deny it at all--that it has happened or that they caused it. It has happened and they caused it. J'accuse. They've convicted themselves through their defensiveness.

Why would they bother if they weren't guilty? I will vote for any Democratic presidential candidate who will insist on enforcing this charge. And I here propose a new marginal tax rate on the rich, 110%, branded "confiscatory plus," to help right the wrongs. They've had their party. It's time to pay the bills.

Beans and Rice

The great leap backward is being fully implemented in North Carolina, with pools and schools, as always, the first items of concern for the privileged white people of the South. These were the most urgent issues after desegregation, for visceral reasons.

Pools were never a problem. You close the public ones and send your kids to private ones. Similarly the push for privatization everywhere now is not about efficiency but exclusion. Schools weren't as easy to get in hand but the necessary forces are now in place.

It's turn-back-the-clock time for the schools and it will simply have to play out. Nothing can be done to stop it, and I have other things on my mind following the violence in France. The terror is something we have to begin to take seriously and to really comprehend.

We should be preventive and not only reactive and responsive in relation to terrorism, and understand it deeply and at the molecular and atomic levels, initially with some soul searching and the owning of our own inner terrorist, whatever that may entail.

The problem is that it feels good to be part of a group with a mission, and to believe that you are unequivocally right and that you are justified by God and will be redeemed and sit at the right hand and all that shit. It has to be an incredibly powerful experience.

To get people to blow themselves up, I mean. And to overcome the misgivings that must be there because they are, in fact, wrong in their understanding of their own religious precepts, as we are rightly reassured by respected and informed authorities.

Are we really so far removed from this ourselves, I wonder. The Klan was a terrorist organization. I think that is beyond arguing, which means that a third of the US was ruled by a group in no way functionally different from the Taliban, as late as the 1960's.

And of course before that the slave states were in even worse shape, though the terror was institutionalized and so there was no need for the underground, guerrilla aspect of the thing. So to this day there are memorials all over the South honoring terrorists.

What a thought, but it's indisputably true that defending the South meant defending slavery and therefore the terrorism which sustained slavery and segregation. Man, that's sobering, because it's so close to home and recent and so much a part of our history.

It does mean that all those Confederate memorials should be destroyed and that the South should finally own its shit, if we are to have a consistent and credible stance in opposition to terror. We could use the Stone Mountain memorial for bombing practice.

If we don't how can we really condemn the people who practice terrorism. They have a thing for schools, too, I remember now, and are all about remaking education in their own countries so that it's in line with their religion and the will of God, as they see it.

Just like the guys in charge in North Carolina. Damn, it's so discouraging to think that, but my friends who encouraged me to write told me this would happen, that writing things down would force you to think things through and sometimes take you to unforeseen places.

It's time--I decree it--to decompress from this unpleasantness with a beer and some savory Southern food, spicy beans and rice. May we all eat well tonight, it's my wish for you, and survive this insanity our country is going through, with the help of God.

I Am Waiting

I keep thinking that the defenders of torture, those patriots, lovers of Jesus and self-appointed guardians of truth and the Constitution, will one day raise the question of the morality and rightness of the practice, and not only argue for its effectiveness.

I'm still waiting.

A Loaf and a Fish, If We're Lucky

I have decided to brand the Obama crowd THE ACHIEVERS. Until they get a clue and ask for my help in making all those important decisions I'll have to work on impressions gleaned from the best available sources, which are crap, the fourth estate having been crushed into pulp by the business interests.

The information available to us is just terrible, but I think the people shaping the policies are, like Obama himself, smart kids whose identities are entirely invested in success within a certain context, which is to say that it's all about them. It's not about us or the country or the world or the planet or rightness.

Look at the cult of efficiency, a good example. The US produces food with incredible efficiency, when viewed myopically, and then throws 40% of it away and people are hungry at the same time. Where I come from this is called crazy. In Washington it evidently passes for success or is at least acceptable.

Obama and his team put points on the board in such a way that it looks good on paper. The end for them is a great report card, graduating with distinction and from an ivy league school, of course. It makes them feel good about themselves. Meanwhile our country is being destroyed and utterly stripped of hope.

For people who need it, anyway. It's probably unfair to say they don't care but you have to hold people responsible even if they're only enablers in the franchise of doom. I'm sick now so I have to go. Every time I get sick, though, I'm reminded of how vulnerable I feel about aging in America.

In the land of plenty of insecurity, I suppose I mean, and I'm in way better shape than most people in my health and finances, but who wants to worry at all. There's no reason whatsoever for people in a country as wealthy as ours to have to worry much. It's a failure, with a big grade of "F," for the policy people.

And it's an inversion of the miracle of the loaves and fishes, reducing plenty to poverty. They manage to depersonalize this as though it goes no further than a graph or spread sheet or some power-point bullshit, but we're talking about hunger and food here. Oh, Bobby Kennedy, may you appear to them.

Plague them in their dreams. May they see the disgrace of hunger and hopelessness in the new America, our sharecropper society, and not get shot before they can fix it.

Overcooked

I apply the principle of "al dente" all over the place. It works for me. Rules are good but they only get you so far. It's best to stay engaged with the processes and be willing to make decisions on the basis of incoming information.

Immediately the idea that more is better falls apart when you use the tooth. One of my ongoing gripes is that aging white people finish their lives in their biggest houses ever, after the kids are gone but before the retirement villa.

As though it's some kind of flourish or crescendo in relation to their existence, that is, when it's really just dumb and wasteful and doesn't make their lives better in any healthy way. And look at the mess our government is in.

It's overcooked into indescribable nothingness, burned beyond recognizing or reduced to an undifferentiated mass. I want to apply the tooth--not me personally, but you know what I mean--to bite on Boehner and McConnell a bit.

Or we could throw them against the wall and see if they stick. I'm sure we'll decide to turn down the flame on the money pouring into the capitol from private sources. Fucking jet fuel, that's what the stuff is. It's way too volatile.

You can see it in the restlessness of the new majorities. They're boiling over. So let's just turn down the flames, people. Are you with me?

Leftovers: The Brokers' Banquet

I just woke up early from a vivid dream, which I conclude, unbiasedly, is representative of the new reality of our society, the broker's paradise. In it the working people--I am one--are allowed at the end of a banquet to have a go at the leftovers, which are enough to feed an army of adolescent boys, but there are no plates or utensils. 

Wait, I've found a few paper or plastic ones the size of a small saucer. I grab them and walk around the buffet struck stupid by the amount of amazing food remaining. I'm so stunned I don't feel hungry anymore or even resentful, just frustrated and disgusted at the waste of the capital partners, who have so much more than they can consume. 

But they would rather see the leftovers thrown away than used because that's the way they are, greed incarnated, which--an interesting word--points to the brokers' own eventual end, to be consumed by death, as with us all. They must be in denial of that but it doesn't matter because my reservoir of feeling is entirely taken up by sadness at their insanity.

They are nothing more than animals, sophisticated meat, without an aspiration to be better because they have been so well rewarded for their predatory drives. What else can be said, but behold them with wonder, and from a safe distance, though there are crates for such creatures and we would be well advised to use them.

Begging the Question

As I understand it this phrase is misused all the time. It means something along the lines of assuming information not in evidence, stuff not proved. It's a logical fallacy, "petitio principi" in Latin, discovered by people who cared about logic and reason and argumentation and the truth. Neurotics, that is.

Too much of our internal energy has been allocated to the intestines for digestion, it would seem, and there isn't enough left to tackle the truth and other such naggingly abstract topics, and what does it matter anyway. The whole point of our existence as a species was to master the world and we have pretty much done that.

So it's time to relax and kick back and enjoy the fruits of our good fortune. But, you know, I'm neurotic and I can't let it go, that anachronistic concern for reason and reality, due to a faulty upbringing, no doubt, so I wonder what the elephant is in the bathroom taking a shit. The elephant, the false premise, has got to be fear. 

We assume there's something we need to be afraid of and that, even if there is, it's somehow productive to live in a chronic state of fear rather than dealing with the scary things above-board and rationally. So we argue about how to deal with the threats on the assumption that there are threats but there are not threats in evidence.

Prove to me that there are. How many times over do you have to be able to destroy the world before you feel safe or what the fuck good does it do you, having enough nukes to annihilate the entire solar system, or at least all of the planets. We might as well get rid of the whole arsenal, an interesting idea. We could bury it in Alaska.

We could then try to live in peace with our fellow humans or even bribe them into submission and still come out ahead. It turns out, though, according to my sources, that the rest of the world is pretty fed up with us. And scared, since it seems that we think it's our right to attack anyone we want whenever we want.

Interesting, to think that we are the thing to be afraid of, even the thing for us to be afraid of, and that we should be afraid of ourselves. I'm heading off now to try to neurotically get a handle on that and consider that it might be a mechanism or in some way true, that the fearers are to be feared. You can be my bot.

Help me grind it out by processing all the info, that is, be a bot for truth. Better than bots for fear, I think, or bots for war, though I believe that bot-hood generally is not the way to go. People can and should do better. It would help if we could get past the fear. Let's work on that. Oh, no, I just remembered the elephant.

The plumbing, now there's something to worry about.

They are NOT Neutral

There's something about neutrality that weirds Republicans out. They believe in polarity, partisanship, and blackness and whiteness. They are against ambiguity and uncertainty and ambivalence. I guess it keeps them up at night if they feel that neutrality is on the rise, or anything other than the clear delineation of sides.

They toss and turn in their beds if there's an uncertain moon arising. They are DC. Keep that alternating shit away from them. It sounds kind of bisexual to them, I suppose, but the world is full of it, all kinds of ambiguity and uncertainty. It seems to be the norm, at least wherever there's stability. Are they unstable, our conservative friends?

I think not. They're not unstable but destabilizing. They have opted for certainty in an uncertain world to reassure themselves but it's not reality and what do they care. They care only about themselves. The rest of us can take a flying fajita, if I got that term right. The instability is all ours. It's their gift to us.

Rising Tide

How did we get to be the old world? America feels old to me now and Europe feels young. Even the screwed-up places in Europe and Asia and Africa feel young in comparison with us.

I guess that's what we get for taking on the role of world parent. Am I wrong or didn't we do that voluntarily? So at least we should set a good example for the young ones, you know.

But now they all want to be like us, to consume stuff like there's no tomorrow, which, if we keep it up, will mean there really won't be a tomorrow. Food for thought, you would think.

Not, of course, if you're Republican. They are against it. Thinking, I mean. They believe in belief, which sounds circular and ingrown and somehow incestuous, an idea involved with itself.

It's time for resolutions, as of today. A new year is upon us. Let's just resolve to do better, as a country. Lose weight, stop drinking and so on. Be kinder and gentler and maybe points of light.

All of that rings kind of familiar. I wonder who came up with it. I wouldn't want to unwittingly steal somebody's stuff. I could be sued for plagiarism. I know I didn't come up with "rising tide."

But I keep hearing those words in my head in relation to global warming. Was that the context, maybe, because the tide is rising on us all. Circumstances are changing. We should adapt, I suppose.

There are fireworks planned for tonight. I'll mull it all over while I'm enjoying that. I don't want to overreact out of urgency or anything. There's always tomorrow. There is, isn't there?

Sons of Ham

It's time the American people take a harder look at Billy Graham's empire, and an empire it is, what with its size, wealth and abundance, internationalism, paternalism, nepotism and adherence to primogeniture, as evidenced in the passing on of the organization to the founder's unworthy son, Franklin Graham.

For those who have seen poshness portrayed in film, the lives of the Grahams is instantly recognizable as a throwback to empire and nobility, no one in the family having made an honest living since the birth of Billy. They are also, as revealed privately, firmly rooted in traditions of bigotry and exploitation.

The innovation of Billy was not in purity or piety or even simple discipline, but in marketing. He is about ambition, which he would have us believe is ambition on behalf of Christ, but, since Billy and Jesus are indistinct in his own mind, the argument is specious. The family's incredible wealth betrays them.

As with many of these reactionary, retrograde people who call themselves Christians, their secret dealings show the truth. Billy's taped antisemitic outbursts and his behind the scenes battles against Catholicism reveal the inner workings of his soul and indicate who is in charge there. It certainly isn't Jesus.

The most fundamental aspect of Christianity, the sine qua, is that you must live for something outside of yourself, firstly Jesus. The rest follows, and is effortless once your soul is transformed by Jesus, though it may look odd to an outsider, since you are no longer selfish, grasping, greedy and mean.

The hallmark is humility. Contrast this with the Grahams. These crackers live like kings and carry on into the fourth generation, but it goes back beyond Billy when you consider his true father-in-Christ, Mordecai Ham, a renowned bigot. A big-shot bigot -- he was not obscure -- so you can look him up. 

Please do so now. All will be clear. 

It was with Mordecai's guidance that Billy found Christ, under Southern Baptist auspices, that group which renounced slavery as early as 1995, for the sake of appearances. Billy's ambition, addiction to power and striving for status are also most tellingly revealed in his glomming on to US presidents.

He loves that stuff. The son, Franklin, shows how a nobility degenerates quickly due to insularity and inbreeding, an inbreeding of pernicious and unchristian beliefs among the Grahams. Many traits alternate generations, I've been told, and you can see this in Franklin, who is so obviously a son of Ham.

As he demonstrates daily in his outpourings of ignorance. Franklin, if you read this, take the first step in repentance, lop off the offending hand, and you know what your weakness is. Sell all you have and give it to the poor. Blows your mind, I bet, to consider it. Maybe Jesus meant it, when he said do it, man.

Boom and Bust

The best way to understand the right-wing, Republican social and economic model is by observing predator-prey relationships in nature. Republican deregulatory policy results in boom and bust cycles due to over-harvesting and irresponsible exploitation of resources, human or otherwise.

by

Over-harvesting by Republicans, that is, of any available prey or surplus. Republicans are represented by the coyote in the bottom of the graph above. The rabbit represents the prey, obviously, but more importantly also illustrates that power disparities are crucial to the functioning of the system. 

Picture the rabbit with an Uzi in its grip and everything changes, which is why Republicans seek to consolidate power in their own hands while disenfranchising everyone else. They don't want fair play but easy prey. This is also why they want to have all the guns and drill through to China for oil.

It's all about power. So they insist on drilling the hell out of our own territory in the frantic search for more petroleum even though it's money in the bank, our bank, the bank that includes rabbits as clients, so there's the problem. The Republicans want it all, fearing the rabbits might fight back.

Once this is understood many things become clear. Why the Republicans pick on children, the elderly and the poor, for example. Why they send poorer, younger Americans off to fight in wars that don't make sense unless you have Halliburton stock. Why they sabotage and cripple the social safety net.

And it makes you wonder about their opposition to birth control. More prey? That would be primal indeed. Now I head off to work for my wages, in this Christmas season. You know someone told me, the other day, that there's a bounty on coyotes where I live. I wonder if that applies to Republicans.

Eve, Honey...

There are always unholy alliances on the road to minority rule. It's one of the reasons right thinking people go for democracy, because it's presumably not rooted in domination and exploitation, internally, as minority rule usually is which makes it immoral and unstable. And it makes sense that people would only give up their franchise by force or by the foolishness of taking it for granted.

Which, I think, is closely related to original sin, Eve having failed to realize how incredibly fucking lucky she was, probably while Adam was engaged in the Garden of Eden's equivalent of watching football on TV. Now I'm super curious to see how the Republican unholy alliance will play out, which should be interesting because they have redefined crazy to such a degree. They're off the charts.

Unholy alliances are an easy form of interference leading to illegitimate government in comparison with, let's say, a coup. Illegitimacy is what minority rule usually gives you though it's unavoidable in the face of extreme factionalism. Only a plurality is possible then, anyway, and it's more likely that the resulting government will be illegitimate. Alliances are unholy by definition when they're reductive.

When the town isn't big enough for both or all of the factions, for example, and when their militancy and self-righteousness rule out compromise. Does the name Ted Cruz come to mind? So the current Republican coalition is an affront not just to our democracy but to civilization in general. They are discontented with that. The coalition is unholy as hell and bent on destruction, the annihilation of everything.

They are against the basic mechanisms underlying civilization, the giving up of some power for the greater, long-term good. The Cruz crowd doesn't believe in it, the greater good and the long term. The long term is annihilation for them because they are religious fanatics. It's the Apocalypse. And there is no "greater good" in the land of the elect, so any appearance of legitimacy is a smokescreen.

They are God's chosen people. Try to argue with that. It's outside the realm of argument. It's experiential and exclusive and insane. Think on that and try to comprehend it because they're coming after us, the heathen and the non-elect, meaning Democrats and other unworthies. And their greatest ally is our complacency, the complacency of the majority, and this is a hard thing to grasp.

Because none of it makes any sense, that we should have to worry, being the majority and not insane but I'm working on understanding it sitting here on the sofa. Meanwhile, there's football to watch and Eve, honey, will you pass me another cold one?

Aloha, Obama

For Immediate Release: The American President, Barack Obama, is vacationing again in Hawaii, where it is said that he continues to look for his balls, having left them there in adolescence. They are not exactly coconuts, by all reports, and have proved to be hard to find. May you finally find them, sir.

It's too late to do the country any good, but maybe you will write a book on your epic failure with what you learn after reacquaintance with your manhood. Or, if your nuts continue to elude you, testosterone injections may be the thing, coupled with assertiveness training. I'm curious, though.

Why did you ever run for president? You have been a disgrace.

The Discreet Harm of the Bourgeoisie

I'm not against specialization, and I'm a fan of a well-differentiated society, one that looks like an ecosystem, but in the case of humanity it's important for people to realize that they are part of a system or they can engage in all kinds of antisocial behavior by accident, out of ignorance. Probably willed ignorance, but, whatever. The ignorance doesn't mean it doesn't count.

It's not a fucking video game. People can get hurt. A classic example is that of pacifist meat-eaters. You are killing cows by proxy, you want to say to them, you have a responsibility to ensure that it's done humanely, which is to say nothing of the killing of humans. People have to own even that or simply stop doing it. Now there's an idea. And torture, of course, soul-slaughter.

But they're immersed in ennui, the perpetrators--insulated, numbed. As people so often do they double down on a mistake, thinking they haven't done enough of the thing they shouldn't have done in the first place. And as they invest more in the mistake it becomes harder to own it and reverse direction, to the extent, sometimes, that it can only end in death, their own deaths.

The realization of the mistake and the wrong they've done is more than they can handle. They are not actors and autonomous entities but addicts, so it only ends in death and dehumanization or in the ditch. And it can happen to a whole society, evidently. Here's the point, it has happened to us. We think if we consume more it will make us happy and it never will. No way, white people.

There's nothing wrong with it, consumerism per se, I don't think, if it works in the system as a whole and doesn't throw it out of balance, but we're way beyond that. Way beyond. Beyond beyond, probably already in the ditch but we don't know it yet, the denial of the addiction is so strong. What's the solution? I don't know. I think individuals can change but a whole society?

That's a big boat. Remember, though, the talk Franklin Roosevelt gave which kept people from succumbing to panic and saved the banks? It makes you wonder. If the right person said the right things maybe we could escape the fear, the fear that if we give up the quest for more shit we'll be lost. We won't be lost. In fact we may find ourselves again. At least we might stop torturing people.

That would be good. I wonder if Dick Cheney believes in the existence of souls?

Rubes

America has become a Rube Goldberg machine. I love his stuff but he was also an engineer and the machines were an amusement and counterpoint to the engineering. My God, people, doing things in inconceivably inefficient ways is not actually good! I have to believe our current American political contraption is the equivalent of throwing virgins into the mouth of a volcano. 

Inefficiency as an offering to the gods of capitalism, at the cost of more than a few virgins. Maybe we should go with the virgins. It would mean fewer lives lost, by a lot, than what we are doing now, plundering the world, though I understand that some people find virgin-burning distasteful. Now I'm concerned, since I brought it up, that Republicans will want to add virgin-burning to planet-plundering.

They're so opportunistic and susceptible to suggestion. I'm sorry I ever mentioned it. Someone delete this post. Who has the keys to this thing?  Oh, darn.

  Dolores on the Road to the Volcano:

Hiccups

I'm so confident that guys like Dick Cheney will eventually be seen as hiccups in history, but I'm pushing for regurgitation. Throw-up. Right now. ASAP.

There was so much confidence after World War II that the world had functioned as it should while doing not that. That civilization had rejected the poison.

But tell that to the Jews. Better yet tell that to them as it was going on. It all worked out? The good guys won? It never should have fucking happened period.

Just as Dick Cheney should never have happened. He's an affront to the very idea of decency, and the existence of accountability and hope for humanity.

I give up. Whatever he is, I am not. He says he's a capitalist, a lover of freedom and democracy? Okay, I'm a fucking commie. A Marxist. Call me comrade.

Anything other than him. Join with me wherever you see this sign:

Selectively Weak Stomachs

All those FOX NEWS people consistently amaze me, they get so upset about the most trivial things. No humans were harmed, I say to them, in whatever it is they're ranting on about, like the war on Christmas or declining moral standards.

But they don't seem to care at all about the young Americans they sent off to get busted up or killed in their pet nation-building projects in the Middle East, or the millions of people whose lives were ruined by their bankrupt economic theories.

They have funny stomachs, for sure. It must have to do with their insulated lives and weighty salaries, so I recommend that they spend some volunteer time taking care of those veterans, or the homeless, or the disabled and mentally ill.

Other people do it and without any lasting ill-effect. Maybe, then, they will think a little about their beloved tax cuts, for the rich of course, in relation to the social services they so despise. Their mantra should be "more Santa, less Scrooge."

At least for the duration of the holiday season. It's all I dare hope for.

Experts at Assertions

With the release of the torture report Republicans are crawling out of the crevices to defend it. Torture, that is, and defender commander Dick Cheney is out in front, their expert as always in assertions which can't be proven wrong. If they ever teach a course on the difference between intelligence and cunning they only need to look to Dick.

Maybe he'll come to the class and explain it, if he can, or they can just study him in action. He's the master of deception and mischaracterization, ambiguity and dissimulation, but not miscalculation. He's shrewd as shit. A little poking and prodding would be interesting, as well, as we study the guy, now that I think of it. They say he has a tough hide.

So let's enhance that. Waterboard him. Force feed his ass. And I mean his ass. See how he likes it. Hang him from something, from somewhere. I like the sound of this. Think of what we might learn and not just about the mechanisms of depravity. He might actually tell us stuff. He says this shit works, the torture. And there are those nagging questions.

Hanging about as to the legality and constitutional compliance of half of what he did, to say nothing of the morality. So we can dig in on those assertions of his, all that annoyingly unprovable stuff, that he kept America from further harm, for example, and that 9/11 necessitated militarization and the creation of a huge new security apparatus.

As did that Reichstag fire, once. The Twin Towers calamity was not a calamity for Republicans. It enabled the realization of their fantasies of war and militarization and the consolidation of power and so on. It's the best thing that ever happened to Dick Cheney. How else could he have gone so far in turning America into a police state.

They Shoot Niggers, Don't They?

For the white people in the dance marathon of life, trying to keep going while knowing that the minute they stop they'll face the increasingly unpleasant reality of mortality, nigger-shooting can only be understood as a death wish, a perverted form of envy, reflecting white folk's desire for a simpler life such as they enjoy who are unafflicted with the white man's burden, the deaths of whom mean nothing, or at least not much. The burden of being a higher echelon of humanity, that is, weighs heavily on white people.

They have miles to go before they can sleep. The lives of black folk are envied because they are more immersed in the natural world, a subspecies of humanity closer to our collective roots, unaware of the cares of their more intelligent and evolved cousins. But white people don't understand that the ennui is all their own. It's probably mistaken association. To the extent that black people are different, as a class, they feel everything more. Maybe it's not mistaken or white people just don't give a shit to too great an extent.

Actually I think it's envy, purely and simply, black people being seen as nearer to the condition of humanity before the fall from grace. So black people are a standing insult to white people, since they are in some way closer to God, a standing insult in the same way Jews are to Christians because the Jews have a claim on Jesus the Christians can't have and so are killed with all kinds of invented justifications. This is so fucked up, though I wouldn't dispute that there are people closer to God than white people.

Godliness being associated with less in the way of worldly power, it seems, because all power is God's by right and can only be properly employed in the furtherance of His ends, which didn't include killing black people the last time I checked. White people just can't see black people as they are, both more and less like them at the same time, and so shoot them out of misunderstanding and fear. They are still, sadly, Puritans burning witches, the witches bearing the burden of their own unacknowledged darkness.

Grover at Burning Man

NIXON IN CHINA opened my eyes. Opera can be about current events. I'm now working on an exciting, new opera of my own, GROVER AT BURNING MAN. What pathos there will be, what weightiness and momentum, what utter inertia and ennui! It'll put the sturm in your drang. Evidently Grover really liked Burning Man. Ahhh, the spectacle.

I assume he actually went. Republicans are so quick to don fatigues for the photographs when it comes to the military stuff while some kid from Idaho, who joined the military because there weren't any jobs because the Republicans sent the jobs to China, gets his ass blown off defending Grover's freedom, but I digress. 

It's a good thing Grover liked Burning Man. You don't want to be on his bathtub list. And what's not to like, as Burning Man so perfectly embodies the aspirations of Republicans of Grover's type, to remain an adolescent forever--the eternal frat boy, living on the family's money with bluster and bravado, totally arrested. 

And challenging authority at every opportunity while embracing the delusion that they aren't implicated in anything. Will Junior ever reach escape velocity, the parents wonder, and grow up, finally, for the love of God, and quit sucking up resources like there's no tomorrow. And treating women like crap, as well. What greater freedom is there? 

All the benefits and none of the responsibilities. You just get born into it and it's one big ski vacation after that. Look at the presidential candidates these guys cough up, showcasing affirmative action in full flower. It's legacy land. You can see how Obama and Clinton would drive them nuts, since they actually did get there on their own merits.

Since they started out without the advantages of the country club crowd. They are usurpers, faux fathers, in the eyes of the Norquisters, who are still very much in touch with their fathers. It's where the checks come from. Or "daddiness," existentially, as it works out, there being some source of subsistence flowing out of Wichita or wherever.

Truly, they have made an art of living with access to tons of resources while not contributing anything. What has Grover ever done for anyone besides himself? An entire life sucking off the system he says he hates. Is it any wonder these guys are prickly and overly defensive? And crazy nuts about their opponents who did escape puberty.

The important thing is to maintain the privilege, by whatever means they can, while keeping the opposition on their heels by accusing them of all the stuff they're doing themselves, as they insist that they are the most independent and productive guys ever. Just like Grover, whose life in politics belies his avowed hatred of government.

What would he do without it? It's his sustenance. The Republicans refuse to cooperate with any legitimately elected official they don't like, meaning every Democrat, thereby controlling everything, and then blame anybody but themselves for the results. Satanic, really, but shrewd operating procedure if you don't give a shit about anything.

Now I'm a fan of Burning Man but someone should clue Grover in. It's a fucking vacation. It's not a model for anything. It can only exist on resources from outside itself, just like Grover, but that is the model. Hell, the Groverites have even got it structured so they don't have to tell you where the money comes from. It's a secret.

I guess it's understandable, though. Grover's life has been one long vacation. They say Ronnie Reagan got the movies mixed up with real life. A working person wouldn't make this mistake. So with Grover. A working person can tell real life from a vacation, but Grover can't because his life has been one huge, College Republican suck-fest.

The simple test is to ask if a way of life would work if everyone embraced it. This takes you in the direction of Scandinavia. That wailing was a tenor practicing the Grover part on an important song in the opera addressing this conundrum, "THEY'RE ALL FUCKING COMMIES, BLONDE COMMIES, BLONDE COMMIES WITH HEALTH CARE."

The song actually rocks, though I know you can't tell it from the title. I will say, in Grover's defense, if it's a defense, that he makes one hell of a subject for opera. The self-importance alone gets you there. Picture him singing with his mouth wide open and head thrown back, completely the center of his own universe. A buffoon, of course, to those who know him. 

It may have to be a comic opera in the end, Falstaffian, but with a touch of Wagner for pathos.

 http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/my-first-burning-man-grover-norquist

SAPS

Self Aggrandizing Pieces of Shit.

No, Virginia, There Isn't a Santa Claus

And you had better get over it now. There is no free lunch. No school lunch. Probably no health care and a crappy education ending early or in an insurmountable mountain of debt. The job market is sketchy so say your prayers, Virginia. You're just an Irish ragamuffin anyway, aren't you? You're probably screwed.

If there's one thing the Republicans worry about it's unworthy people getting free shit. Indiscriminate largess. I qualify that. Needy, unworthy people. It's the road to bad habits, sloth, and unending sucking off the state. That's the prerogative of corporations and the wealthy. My God, I see it now. It all began with Santa.

How could we have missed it? All those so-called "underprivileged" Americans imprinting on Santa, expecting free shit forever. Obviously a commie plot to undermine America and weaken its moral fiber. This is worse than fluoride, rotting our brains, having hoards of people stuck in a state of spoiled dependency forever.

So toughen up, Virginia, you little wastrel. Where are your parents? Working two jobs each just to keep food on the table? Good for them. Make sure you tell them the minimum wage isn't going anywhere, so they better knuckle down. You say your school sucks? Well, welcome to Pottersville.

The new Republican America. Screwers and screwees. Which do you want to be, Virginia? Wise up. Get a clue. It's all about competition. For your sorry-ass class, anyway. The rich, now, are in high cotton. Behold them with envy, and get over that Santa thing. The Republicans downsized his ass.

And the elves's jobs went to China and they ate the reindeer. Sorry, Virginia, I don't want to be mean, but you have to understand how the world works. Good luck to you, really. You'll need it. And Merry Christmas.

Insanity Means Never Having to Say You're Sorry

All I want for Christmas is for the Republicans to say they're sorry. For Iraq and the deficits and Katrina and trashing the world economy and destroying the middle class and so on. And so on and so on. This is my letter to Santa.

But now there's no miracle on any street. Except maybe Wall Street. And watching the gloating of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner as they slobber all over themselves in anticipation of the gutting of our democracy is a lot to handle.

But great imagery for those holiday cards. Maureen O'Hara was not my type. Jimmy Stewart I can handle. But Eva Marie Saint? Oh, to be Cary Grant in NORTH BY NORTHWEST. To be Cary Grant in anything. Now I'm not overly sentimental.

And I'm not that susceptible to unrealistic holiday wishes. Give me suspense. A mystery. I like to figure things out and I have. The Republicans did it. They're the bad guys. Hell, it's Christmas and I just really want an apology from the Republicans.

For all the mayhem and misery they've caused. It's not a wonderful life, for far too many Americans, to say nothing of the Iraqis. Unnecessary suffering on all sides, and not enough caring. And the Republicans absconding with everything, all the while.

Santa, are you there?