Signs, portents and frames of reference

It is the best of times, it's the worst of times and if you're like Glen Beck; if you're like nearly every blathering godsmitten idiot in the last few thousand years, it is always the end of times. There are always signs, always comets, always wars and rumors thereof -- earthquakes, storms, floods and droughts. There are always famines and pestilences, always cause to go to the mountaintop to await or dress in purple and take poison for the magic trip to the mother ship.  If Jesus said the end times would be during the lives of his followers, it's no contradiction.  There are always plenty of  editors, redactors and other verbal shell-game operators to redefine and revise the prophecy to suit the game.

Someone smart once said that if we live only in the moment, there is no difference between falling and flying and if we've read Einstein we know that truth is a matter of the frame of reference you occupy. If your idea of "the world" is the Mediterranean, the Roman Empire, the end of it means one thing.  If you mean the Universe, a mid 20th century concept of something incomprehensibly larger, the importance of things like coveting your neighbors' ass or eating a Philly cheese steak becomes hard to see or justify as is the importance of anything that concerns a peculiar, transitory trick of chemistry on an infinitesimal dust mote we call life.

But the Grand Wazir of Beckistan said yesterday on his radio show that  the Book of Mormon is "really a calendar" and perhaps like the Mayan Calendar, accurately predicts the end of all things.  It's a level of rank stupidity that, like the size of the universe itself, utterly defies any attempt at analogy.  He told his staff a long time ago, he said yesterday, that if he mentioned that book, it meant "we are at the end."  It's the "Story of America" he said, but a story of things that never happened, cities that never were and people who aren't who it says they are and a story written by a charlatan with a demonstrated history of fraud.

But of course although each Plank length of time (tP) the smallest possible interval according to quantum mechanics, is the end of something, it's not likely the end of anything we would notice -- like the end of Glen Beck.  It's not likely the end of the US government nor either political party, nor is it yet the moment of the "within 24 hour" predicted whistleblower he talked about earlier this week to an audience whose memory of world begins anew every morning


In a frame of reference where such a length is significant, not only are falling and flying indistinguishable, beginnings and ends are a bit meaningless in a frame that includes weeks and days and hours and indeed, human events.  In the frame of reference where the stupid dwell, where anyone would credit anything Beck might utter, a report of cannibalism, although at least as old as the Neanderthalers, is so unique as to mean impending cosmic calamity.  The Book of Mormon, like the Bible (only harder to read with a straight face) and many other religious texts inhabit a frame of reference so at odds with the physical universe and its properties and dimensions that talking animals magic fruit and other things and events that never existed abound,  can be and always are used to frighten us to the profit of prophets. 

"We are living in Biblical Times" Beck tells us; a statement hard to decipher since the last ravings of the Christian versions end sometime in the late first century, but of course there we have another blurry, woozy, foggy and crepuscular magic frame of reference where nothing really has much to do with anything outside of it; where nothing is true and all things are true and words have power.  No offense intended to individual Mormons, but the book in question is hardly a calendar unless it be for a universe that never existed, inconsistent with the observable universe and inconsistent internally -- just like the Bible and Quir'an and others  which speak of imminent calamities and events and places that are pure fiction.

Pure fiction, just like Becks mysterious 'whistle-blower.'  Predictions of the impossible based on things with no significance selected for the purpose. Concepts like the end of time are far beyond science at the moment.  We don't know when life will end, but the end of stupidity might just be as far off.  There are signs.

It was the end of times, it was the beginning of times

I called God this morning after breakfast.  (You don't want to talk to him before he's had his coffee, ) but I just had to ask him about the Texas Problem.  I mean I have friends there and I'm concerned that if he applies the Sodom and Gomorrah standard of needing ten good people to be granted immunity from destruction, they're going to get blasted.  Hell, I think the place is long  overdue, but maybe my friends could be given a warning or something.  There's precedent.

But no, he says.  I try to be fair and Texas has a vastly larger population than those mud brick slums did and I have to grade on the curve. No problem if I only needed ten, but I figure I'd need about a million to keep me out of smite mode what with the population explosion and all, but one of the problems is corporate personhood.  I mean, do I consider Texaco to be a person?  Is ZZ Topp one person or three? (That would count on the plus side, like Janis.)  And of course I have to think about certain Texans as perhaps counting for more than one minus point on account of extreme douchebaggery and assholeness.  I'm thinking of certain current and former Governors.

I'l tell ya, those people who insist that they're my exclusive authorized agents really get to me and they sure as hell don't stick to anything like 15%  I don't see a dime out of any of them, not that I need it, mind you, but it's the principle of the thing and if anyone is going to give out the kind of conflicting and ambiguous commandments I enjoy, it's not going to be some pencil neck twit with a comb-over like Robert Jeffress.  The man is an insult to my authority and I can't believe I created somebody who can tell you that Obama is just like Hitler with a straight face.  Not that his face is all that straight, come to think of it and I have to wonder what's happened to quality control.  I don't recall having outsourced it to Dumbfuckastan like I was a Republican or something.

Anyway, sure, the dipshit is right.  Mormonism is a cult, just like any other followers of any of the other uppity pricks who insist I gave them some kind of exclusive commission or something.  Jesus?  Hey, I never touched that girl and that Saul or Paul or Raul or whoever he calls himself is full of shit.  Has been since he fell off his jackass, as if that were a coincidence.  So if you believe that mierda, you're no smarter than if you believe Joe Smith wasn't just trying to get laid by pretending he had my private number.  I don't have a private number as you well know. Ahem. You try taking 7 billion calls a day and see what it does to your mood!

Actually, I was just thinking about Texas myself this morning 'cause I read in the paper they banned wearing those fucking "Vote the Bible" T-shirts in polling places. They get some credit for that but how much do I subtract for them not stoning the cocksuckers* who insist I wrote that pile of political shit myself. Why the hell would I ban cheeseburgers but allow slavery?  Think I'm fucking stupid?

I'm thinking damnation is what I'm thinking and maybe some shitload of boiling brimstone as an amuse bouche and fuck y'all with this rapture-crapture. It's crowded as hell here and I closed the border a long time ago, what with Cousin Krishna pestering the female help and cousin Wotan stinking up the john every morning. That Ganesh is eating me out of house and home you know -- he has an elephant stomach to go with that elephant head.  Look - I don't need any more damn company, OK? Y'all can stay where you are and it was a damn decent place when I gave it to you and the warranty was up a long time ago. No deposit, no return. Live with it.

Anyway yeah, Texas is a pain in the ass, but not the only one in your part of the mudball planet. The way you treat each other and blame it on me has put me off my feed and the old lady is bitching about my temper and about how I'm not doing enough about that human infestation I started on her otherwise perfectly nice planet and I'm thinking smite night Fogg.  I mean it.  It's ass kicking time.  You either get rid of the trash yourself, or I'll jiggle the ballot box and give you Romney and Ryan and maybe Reverend Phelps as Secretary of State. Noah is long gone and no stupid boat is going to save your asses this time.  And by the way, stop calling me.  I'll call you, and that's all the warning you're gonna get.

________________________________

*And by the way, about that particular practice -- I don't give a shit what you do as long as you don't do it in the road and scare the horses.  If I don't participate, it's because I don't have that appendage - or any other. Why the fuck would I want to look like you? What? In my image? Monkey's image, dude. Monkey's image. I told you I didn't write that book.

Ablow the man down

So, another Monday morning in this best of all possible countries; this greatest there ever was since the Big Bang and greatest there will ever be until Jesus comes back. And what do I read in the news this proud American morning?

Mark Sanford, as though he hadn't disgraced himself enough as Governor of South Carolina, calls President Obama a spear chucker.  Don't tempt me, Mark.

The American Family Association, that Far Right group of  Freaky Fundies masquerading as an American Family Association tells it's cult members to keep their kids out of school for an Oct 30
anti-bullying event, “Mix It Up For Lunch Day,” they insist, is 

"just another thinly veiled attempt to promote the homosexual agenda."  

Imagine trying to tell kids it isn't the Christian thing to do to beat up gay kids or torment them to the point of suicide.  What would Jesus do, after all?

And on Fox & Friends some alleged psychiatrist aptly named Ablow declared that Vice President Biden was probably demented based on what he saw in the 'debate' with Lyin' Ryan.

“I did not evaluate Joe Biden, but if someone said to me, we want you to do what’s really required. You have to put dementia on the differential diagnosis. You have to say bizarre laughter, interrupting. If this were your dad or your grandfather, wouldn’t you say if you brought him to me, Keith, tell me, is he suffering with dementia? Because he can’t seem to listen, he’s laughing inappropriately.”

I did not evaluate, so I know the problem. How very Fox.  Is this what they call an Ablow job?    to tell the truth, Ryan makes me laugh at him  too and I just can't listen to the goddamn lies and sedition from the foreign owned Fascist propaganda organization any more, nor do I think laughter is what is really needed here as a national response to the Idiot's Crusade. Bring back the laughing stock!

I read this morning at Raw Story that "A Florida judge has ruled that a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who believes he is the “Prince of God” and is convinced that he will be resurrected to sit for eternity at God’s right hand is sane and can put to death next week."

Good to know that such people are considered sane in Florida and perhaps that explains why according to my local paper 81% of this county's inmates plan to vote for Mitt the Shit and Lyin' Ryan. So the hell with the Supreme Court ruling against killing the insane, We don't need no damn government and we're gonna do the Christian thing anyway.  Jesus is going to need a man like Prince John Ferguson when it comes time to shove the Jews into the lake of fire after the Rapture.

My current issue of Newsweek has a lurid cover story proving that heaven is real because some guy who went into a coma from meningitis says he went to heaven and met beautiful women there.  Another straight to the recycling bin issue.

So perhaps we have to put dementia in the differential diagnosis of our national psyche and definitely we have to be grateful there isn't a YHWH to blow America to kingdom come or to wherever Sodom wound up, because if this is the best of all possible countries, no god worth his apocalypse would stand for our sad, demented, ugly and hate filled planet. Or perhaps I'm wrong about that and perhaps that's what the newly discovered comet 2012 S1 (ISON) due to fill the sky in about a year is all about. If it doesn't blow us all to hell, perhaps the fundies and righties and all the other dimwitted, demented friends of the Fox will dress in purple robes and tennis shoes and take the Cyanide Express to the Mother Ship.  Even in the worst of times, there's always hope.

Fear and Loathing in 2012

the sane man disappears and is nowhere when he enters into rivalry with the madman.

-Plato-

At a New Year's Day Yacht Club brunch yesterday, I suggested to a newly thin friend worried about overeating at the bulging buffet, that we declare January 1st as a National Who Gives a Shit day. We need a break from all this fear and loathing and self flagellation.

For my part, I'm chronically worried about things far more dire than gaining a few pounds; things like a Napoleonic Republican in the White House again, the deliberate collapse of the world economy for the benefit of a few oligarchs, plutocrats and other assorted brigands -- and of course the coming Zombie Apocalypse, the Mayan Catastrophe and the end of an error prophesied on all those bumper stickers.

Of course there are many other things to be depressed about and most of them, unlike that Zombie thing, can't readily be dealt with by stockpiling ammunition. But we need a break from all the apocalyptic insanity, the hate commercials all over the TV with Mike Huckabee howling last night about how Romney's health care plan was "stuffed down our throats" ( by a large majority of voters) even though Obama was elected largely on the promise of health care reform. We need a break from having our basic fundamental liberties torn from us by small minded big mouth authoritarian radicals like Vaneta Becker, the Republican State Senator from Indiana who wants to make it illegal to sing our National Anthem "inappropriately," the constitution and all that freedom we're told isn't free, be damned -- at least in Indiana.

Oh say can you see, our boot on your face -- would that be inappropriate? Now which third world countries can we invade to protect her freedom to sanctify the trappings and rituals of Chauvinistic self worship while rebelling against any government power other than the power to crush the people?

No, I'm afraid National Who Gives a Shit Day barely made it past those chocolate truffles I couldn't resist last night and all those Happy New Year wishes have already turned to ashes with my first glimpse of today's news. It's the same old madness we had two days ago, the same inconsistent, persistent, self-negating rhetoric, the same greedy, angry, irrational revenge-seeking of the idiot mob. Who can worry about brain eating zombies or rampaging Jesus with a flame thrower or Kenyan Kommunists stuffing civilization down our throats when that great slithering thing we call the media are stuffing insanity into every orifice; howling like some Lovecraftian horror from every high place, importuning us from every telephone, billboard and car bumper that obedience is freedom and civilization is tyranny - that prosperity comes from doing what always leads to catastrophe.


For those of us not about to die, or at least not to die immediately, it's January 2nd and I give a shit. I'm fed up with being told that rational discord with marauding barbarians will lead to understanding and progress, that authoritarians will become tolerant of freedom if only we show them respect and exercise patient restraint and all the ancient evils mankind has perpetuated and treasured and nurtured will somehow wither away if we're polite and sincere.

If it is true that fighting monsters brings the risk of becoming one, it is also true that not fighting them, being quiet and polite and respectful toward mad moralizers and authoritarians and fear mongers and every snark-snarling witless witling posing as a philosopher carries the bigger risk. It's time to stop pretending we're on some fence between one reasonable place and another. We're not.

T minus 34 hours and raving

Dies iræ ! dies illa
Solvet sæclum in favilla:
Teste David cum Sibylla !


Well the End is neigh and a Day neigher than it was yesterday, but the proof is certain, says Harold Camping, even though he formerly had 'proof' 1994 was the big one; the Dies Irae, the End time.

But he has proof that God is allowing us to have gay pride parades and same sex marriage as a set up for the fall and the proof is in something called the Book of Jude, which I'd never heard of, my Bible ending somewhere around the book of Daniel or so and being in various Semitic dialects, not Greek. Anyway Camping says God all gaybashing mighty explains it in Jude 7 which is funny because although the Bible has at least two names for God ( and two versions of the stories to go with them) Jude isn't one of them. The real Tanach doesn't tell us that the elder Yahweh or the somewhat later Elohim wrote it either. That was Moses, it supposes -- nor did the prophets claim to actually be God, but that's a long road I won't go down today, you'll be pleased to hear.

But seriously -- it's important now in these last days before John the Revelator's ( also not God) psychotic episodes come true, to be familiar with the words of God, speaking through Jude and Camping (the least godlike of all) of course, so I looked it up to see just who this fellow was, but although I did find a site that explains it all, I had to stop reading the explanation when the writer accused Theologians ( as to be distinguished from believers) of incompetence.

" This subject is under constant dispute by many theologians. The trouble with them is they can't read English."

Stunning and in the interest of brevity I could quit right here -- but I won't.

I certainly can read English, but I can't claim to be an authority on this questionable early second century book, since I can't read Greek, so score one for The Bible Study Page. I'll even overlook the gaseous certainty that whoever the author claimed to be, he must then be, and the ubiquitous practice of naming anonymous religious texts for long dead prophets. I'm just not in an argumentative mood.

So I'll have to believe them when they say that God himself guarantees that Jude, like James, the Upright, was the brother of Jesus, but as the English language was more than a thousand years away in the future and out of respect for Mrs. Christ, or Miriam as poor old impotent Joseph ( who none the less made other kids with her) called her, let's call them Jehudi and Jacov just like their mother did. Not nice to contradict Jewish mothers, I can tell you -- I mean you want to talk about days of wrath?

So then -- just what does Jude 7 give us as the WORD OF GOD that can't be attributed to Jehudi son of Miriam or some other writer in another country?

"In a similar way, Sodom and Gomorrah and the surrounding towns gave themselves up to sexual immorality and perversion. They serve as an example of those who suffer the punishment of eternal fire."

Well I guess Jehudi would know, being the half brother of the son of God or maybe the full brother - who the hell knows, but it's funny that neither of the real Gods, Yahweh and the Elohim mentioned this a thousand years and a half earlier and what they did mention didn't need some adopted son to relay the message. I thought it mentioned something about inhospitable treatment of strangers, and condoned tossing your virgin daughter to a crowd to be gang raped, but as the book was likely written quite a long time after these cities disappeared, who the hell could possibly know?

Anyway, since neither Lot nor his daughters were blasted to hell for incest, I think we can dismiss the sex thing entirely, OK? If Mrs. Lot was fossilized for looking over her shoulder, but Lot gets off for free (yes, that's a double entendre - aren't I wicked?) the whole God-hates-perverts thing came right out of Jude's ass and into Camping's mouth.

As far as I can gather from Bereshit, or Genesis, Gay Pride wasn't the problem with the cities of the plain at all, and as far as we know, ancient Greece wasn't blown to hell by a firestorm like Gomorrah, nor was Egypt whose kings made Oedipus look like a prude, but who am I to argue and point out contradictions?

Like the Wrong Reverend Phelps, Camping believes "God hates fags" and is going to kill most of us for allowing them to live in peace like other people, just like he killed the Sodomites and Gomorrans for their gay pride parades and same sex marriages. And he'll find proof somewhere whether it makes sense or not, and since none of his followers are really quite sane, it doesn't matter.

The real proof of Camping's high fecal content will come at the International Date Line ( no, not the phone sex number) on 6:00 PM Saturday when nothing at all happens and the Repo men will begin to pick up all those vans, The leases on the billboards will expire, his followers will stand around like fools looking at them and wonder how they're going to get their property back and the 18 million dollars Camping has raised will likely disappear into various "good works." Perhaps he'll rapture himself to Marbella or Monte Carlo.

Anyway, Even though there are two sets of commandments given in two slightly different settings by Gods with two different names in the Bible, it's obvious to me that God doesn't like having words put in his mouth and for those who believe Jesus was Divine ( no, not the Drag Queen) I think Jesus didn't think much of you putting hate speech or damnation in there either. Of course in my personal religion, God not only speaks through our mouths, he speaks only through our mouths and thus nobody can be certain of what he's all about. Certainly for those like me who escaped out the back door during those weekend religious study classes and actually read it in its entirety, Psalm 77:19 comes to mind.

"Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great waters, and thy footsteps are not known. "

Like the Poet said: nobody knows where God is going or where he has been and his wake is long lost in the waves, so stop pretending you know.

Apocalypse fer sure

Well folks, here it is again. The doomsday circus is back in town and guess what's happening in the big top in less than three days - that's right, it's the rapture and we're all gonna die screaming! OK, maybe some of y'all are actually Holy Smoke Church members and won't have to sit here through the tectonic shimmy, the lakes of fire and all the other rides while Jesus, like some Mexican wrestler with a gruesome mask is gonna kick some infidel ass, but not yours, Mr. camo pants. You get to go to the magic kingdom. You'll have to leave the truck behind, of course.

Yes, May 21, 2011 is right around the corner and Doomsday, as it has been countless times before, is almost here. For perhaps the first time however, these prophets have recognized that there are a dozen time zones and so Saturday at 6:00 PM, starting at the International Date Line out in the pacific, the apocalypse will march across the planet at a thousand miles per hour - boy can those horses move! That means we'll get to watch it all on TV as that Titanium robot, or whatever Jesus comes dressed as these days. kicks hell out of Asia and moves on toward Europe. That will give a lot of people her in God's own US of A enough time to convert and yes, you can do it on line through Paypal.

Not me though, It's going to be months before the planet is cleansed of disbelief and animal life and since the righteous will no longer be here, I get to grab their trailers and second hand pickup trucks and ATV's and guns and stuff and me and the other heretics can shoot guns and barbeque like Ted Nugent. It's gonna be a hell of a party - as long as the beer don't run out before that lake of fire thing.

Anyway, the Rapture should hit the fan at my house at 7:00 PM Eastern Daylight time according to God's infallible plan and I'll be watching it all unfold from poolside and I'll have plenty of ice on hand. Perhaps I'll live blog the whole thing. Stay tuned.

The long history and bright future of the end of the world

Prophets are always disappointed dear Nostradamus. That's why new ones are always in the wings updating the catastrophes

-Andre Codrescu-

I remember the late 1970's when the new-agers were petting their pieces of quartz and telling us in solemn reverential tones that Mother Shipton had predicted the end of the world in 1982; although some said 1981.

The world to an end shall come
In nineteen hundred and eighty one.

Such is the malleability and durability of prophecy. Although prophecies said to be from the Yorkshire prophetess born in about 1488 were published in 1641, eighty years after the reported end of her days, they really didn't predict the end of the world but rather a series of catastrophes in the vague idiom of soothsayers and fortune tellers throughout time. In fact it's questionable that she ever lived, much more questionable that she was Satan's daughter, glowed in the dark and was not the fabrication of 17the century writers. Her prediction of the death of Cardinal Wolsey, for instance, was published years after the man died.

In the air men shall be seen,
In white, in black and in green….
Iron in the water shall float,
As easy as a wooden boat.

It wasn't until the mid 19th century in 1862 that Shipton's startling predictions of things like balloons and telegraphy and diving bells and England finally allowing Jews to live there appeared courtesy of Charles Hindley, who wrote it and publicly admitted of having done so. Of course he had predicted eighteen eighty one as the end time, but someone in the wings was happy to update it for the next century's crop of 20th century gulls.

Carriages without horses shall go,
And accidents fill the world with woe.
Around the world thoughts shall fly
In the twinkling of an eye.

Perhaps not so startling having been written in the age of steam transportation and the telegraph, of iron ships and submarine boats and hydrogen balloons, all of which existed already in Hindley's time. It's almost biblical in having predicting things ex post facto and passing off of current idiom as the dialect of the remote past. Any passing familiarity with late 15th century English should have set off alarms, I should think, but it's no surprise to find such ignorance amongst the hip and eager cognoscenti.

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest truths, while reality is fabulous.

-Henry David Thoreau-

Few of the crystal gazers, if any, bothered to risk the delicious feeling of being in the know to the extent of finding out that it was a hoax. Indeed, even today one finds lengthy and utterly fictional web posts about stealing the prophecies of Mother Shipton from secret rooms at secret libraries where the scrolls had been hidden "by the government" so as not to panic the people. Delicious indeed and it seems to fill some human desire for arcana, for ancient wisdom and the cheap high it brings. There is always someone to fill that need whether it be political groups with dire warnings about NATO hiding H bombs under Philadelphia, Obama hiding death panels in his health care reform, Mayan prophecy or some equally ludicrous cataclysm from John of Patmos.

Certainly most things will in time have an end; perhaps time itself, but it's not so much the knowledge of the inevitable that intrigues us, enthralls us, but the idea that the processes of entropy, the chaotic randomness of the universe have something to do with our species and its thoughts and actions and the myths of our more ignorant ancestors. Secret, undetectable energies and entities with the secret hopes and fears are delectable and they distract us from the utterly uncaring, incomprehensible emptiness of existence. They create a universe in which we might mean something, might feel at least temporarily superior to the other lumps of fragile mortality around us and so in twenty one and eighty two, Old Mother Shipton will have predicted yet another end and perhaps the Mayans math will be updated or reinterpreted and mankind reprieved for a hundred years. Jesus' ETA will still be imminent, the hidden Imam about to be revealed and the last days yet at hand. We'll still wave pieces of quartz and utter powerful words and formulae from an invented past. We'll still have some ancient calendar and myth. We'll still follow, as we were meant to

One that would would fain seem wise and learnt, and is but a fool and an ignorant self-conceited gull.

-John Florio-

There will be no final day I hear
While prophets whimper in our ear
of signs and portents in the skies
and issue forth unending lies.

Into the crystal ball we'll gaze
the obvious shall seem a maze
But never mind and never fear
It won't all end until next year.

-Father Fogg-

Saving our way to penury

many years ago, I worked for a 120 year old company producing industrial boilers. At it's apogee, it had over an 80% market share and a reputation for quality products.

Then came the accountants.

During the storm of leveraged buyouts in the late 1970's the profitable old company was bought by an accounting firm along with several related businesses by leveraging its assets. Within a very few years, it had a rapidly declining market share of 2% and a mountain of debt. In another few, it was gone and sold for scrap. Yes, I'm going to make a comparison between the fate of the boiler company and the fate of our nation.

Having been stripped of its reserves, the first of the fatal cost cutting practices so dear to the hearts of conservative accountants was maintenance of the aging production equipment. Soon, quality began to suffer. Advertising was curtailed: "we have to cut costs." The quality control department became overburdened with fixing problems caused by shabby construction caused by failing equipment. "We can't afford them. We need to be a 'leaner' company."

Bad welds, a dangerous thing, began to show up as welding inspectors, which for a short time I was, were eliminated. "we can't afford them." The problem of declining quality and the rising cost of redoing bad construction was blamed on the union although they were willing to bend over backwards to fix the problem and even volunteered for a wage freeze. Necessary design changes that had formerly been made in the quality control department in secret, were deemed "too expensive" although the dedicated guys in QC had been doing them by hand with parts bought at the hardware store and hand tools with their own money.

The quality control department was eliminated. "We can't afford them." We began shipping products that would not work. Field warranty repair costs skyrocketed. Our reputation nosedived.

People just short of retirement were fired to save on insurance and pension expenses "we couldn't afford." Management held the hard line on pricing. "People will spend more for our product because of the quality." Middle management was warned they'd be fired for showing that lower pricing would increase revenue.

Professional cost cutters and business school graduates with no knowledge of the equipment, its manufacture, its uses or the nature of the market were hired to fill the shoes of people who had led the company to its former heights. We had continuing optimistic reports from the new owners predicting that the cost cutting would soon turn things around.

Then came the bankruptcy, the sale, the quick demise, the economic collapse of the town surrounding the plant.

When I watch the antics of the far right, insisting, for instance, that we can't afford to stand up for equal pay for women, I can't help remembering. When we're given endless arguments about cost cutting and austerity being the way to prosperity, I remember. When we can't afford oversight, maintenance, pensions and health care and we deliberately neglect to do anything to improve revenue because it costs money, I remember.

Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

Yes, those were the days Archie and Edith Bunker sang about and the man who led us from market crash and credit crunch into full blown depression by blaming the workers instead of the actual causes. Somehow we've forgotten that Archie the lovable, small minded bigot and ignoramus was supposed to be a joke.

I admit it, I went and hid my head in Caribbean sand for a week so I wouldn't have to watch the madness, the hysteria and the lies, or endure the Fox News fits and fables -- or most of all, witness the continuing spectacle of my country eating itself alive out of a desperation to keep doing what always produces everything we're trying to fix. Sooner or later however, and Hurricane Tomas argued for sooner, one has to come back and face the discord.

It isn't easy. It isn't easy to accept that Americans will support politicians that truly are nowhere near as smart as a fifth grader and that Americans will elect politicians who don't think the government has any business interfering with our "right" to abuse and exploit and segregate other Americans or to accept that Americans will just childishly stay home and let some 20% of the voters put a plutocrat affiliated with a billion dollar medicare scam in the Florida Governor's mansion out of contempt for "elitism" and because Obaaaaaaama and the 'Librils' haven't restored the Bush bubble, the Bush soaring debt, the Bush job loss, the Bush expansion of Federal size and power, the Bush redistribution of wealth, the Bush disenfranchisement of voters and infringements upon civil rights soon enough to please them. Yes, that's a hell of a long sentence, but how we sank this low is an even longer story and when it comes to telling it, it's not me whose head is buried in the sand.

No, after 8 years of job stagnation, job loss and declining earnings, all we'll be hearing about is about that 9.6% unemployment Obama created without any help from Bush's tax cuts and wars -- and we won't be remembering the 9.5% unemployment in Reagan's first term. ( nor his tax increases nor the effect they produced) We'll hear the gloating and bragging about the president's low popularity although Reagan's was lower at the same point in his career. We'll hear about profligate spending, but not a word about the payback with interest that tells a different story. We'll keep hearing about the debt, but not the policies that produced it and how it can only be solved by a policy that has produced the largest government sponsored redistribution of wealth in our history without creating a single new private sector job -- a policy that must be maintained for fear of Communism. Like Archie, we'll keep longing for that romanticized version of a Hobbesian hell with every white man for himself, minorities in the minority, stragglers will be shot and no prisoners taken. We'll keep ignoring reality and we'll keep repeating the slogans as we count our beads, fabricating facts and citing false history when we pay attention to history at all.

Meanwhile the sand is warm and the hurricane is moving out to sea. . .

Corporate club

One hears about shadowy groups of people who run things from behind a screen. Some of it's crazy, some of it isn't and with some of it, you just never know. There never was anything like the group said to be behind The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the book was actually re-purposed from an earlier anti-Napoleonic screed to vilify Jews. Rather successfully too.

There are, however uncountable but influential think tanks and other agencies pumped full of cash from the deep pockets of hidden global interests. There is a real Bilderberg group and you'll hear from some that it has all kinds of sinister purposes related to globalism and world government. Whether that agenda includes corporate feudalism or worldwide socialism depends on whose axe is being ground, and their guarded secrecy only invites speculation: but the most successful of secret groups would probably be invisible or apparently innocuous and would include entities quite a bit more powerful than effete European aristocrats and the selection of politicians and industrialists who attend annual Bilderberg meetings.

To me, the most likely home for such a group or groups would be right here in the USA and The New York Times' Jimmy Zuma gives us a candidate: the notorious industrial barons, the Koch Brothers who

"regularly convene secret conclaves of industrialists aiming to prevent government from regulating business."

Has the rightward tilt of the United States Supreme Court been facilitated and encouraged or even paid for by Oil money?

Was the Citizens United decision granting corporate ability to pump unlimited amounts of money into campaigns designed to repay that money, to influence elections and guarantee the allegiance of politicians bought and paid for? Despairing minds want to know. The decisions of Supreme Court Justices allowing corporations the power to slander and libel ad libidum, the decision eviscerating any attempt to influence elections and legislation with secret, untraceable Gigabuck contributions: did the attendance of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia at Koch Brothers secret meetings about which the press never talks ( although it attends) have anything to do with the biggest handover of political power to the very, very rich in our history?

"Now that we know Supreme Court justices attended Koch’s political planning meetings, it is time to ask some important questions… "

Yes it is and now, while we still can.

Stop the Universe, I want to get off

So Stephen Hawking tells us there may be a nearly infinite number of universes. I had to wake up in this one, this morning.

Illegal immigrants should be shot on sight, says one Republican. It's like Stopping Hitler, you know -- worth the price.

President Obama looks like a Demon, says Rush.

"And I don't say this lightly. There are a couple pictures, and the eyes, I'm not saying anything here, but just look."

Of course there's no separation of Church and State, says Constitutional Scholar and former witchcraft dabbler, Christine O'Donnell, who in spite of her publicist's best efforts, isn't me.

Nancy Pelosi is a puppy killer says the GOP.

O'Donnell isn't a nut job, says John McCain -- because she won the Republican primary.

You know, I'm not even going to comment on all this. Too busy packing my bags.

Bullshit

"The wheels of commerce are greased with bullshit"

I don't know who first said it, but it's been passed down in my family for at least a couple of generations. It's true, of course, and it's doubly true of politics. Americans seem to have more fondness for the substance than an African dung beetle and far more ability to swallow huge quantities of it. Bullshit is perhaps the one thing you can have and eat and you certainly can do both and pass on more. Despite our horror of wealth distribution, we do love to share it.

A local souvenir shop made the papers over the weekend, for a huge display of Obamahate items, including an alleged explanation by the president of why Michelle hates the flag. Of course he never said it and it was long ago exposed as having been invented by the Bullshit machine formerly known as the Republican party. Yet it's too precious to let go and the dung beetles formerly known as Republicans are still eager to rub it all over themselves, smear their own walls with it and share it with you without any concern for facts.

Remember the headless bodies Arizona Governor Jan Brewer talked about - the rising crime rate that necessitated 'special handling' for anyone appearing to be of native American descent?
You guessed it, like Saddam's WMD, it's all bullshit and unlike the perpetrators of that disastrous hoax, she's willing to admit she made the whole damned thing up to get votes. Think that's the end of it? Surely not and the headless Mexicans will be talked about long after Washington Irving's tale of Sleepy Hollow disappears into the past -- and they'll be blamed on Obama. It will all be blamed on Obama and more so because more aliens are being deported than by the previous administration, fewer are getting in and crime associated with illegal immigration is going down. Why drink the watery light beer of fact when that Bullshit brew is so much more filling?

Does it matter that the President is not a Muslim? Not as long as Fox is out there spending millions, contributing millions, to tell you he is and that they are doing it is Obama's fault anyway. Bullshit sells the worse it smells.

Think Climate change has nothing to do with human activity? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't, but what you think you know about it has much to do with the Oil Tycoon Koch Brothers who spend a fortune fighting the idea and financing the "Tea Party." Why does that tea taste so much like bullshit?

Think those Climategate e-mails were proof of a vast conspiracy? Sure you do and sure you don't care that they were edited and redacted to make them seem to say something they didn't. Rupert Murdoch and his Arab Oil allies spent more millions to produce enough bullshit to roll in to make all the dogs in America happy.

Those incriminating ACORN pimp videos --- smell that warm bullshit! Why give it up just because it was another right wing media hoax? Since Fox never bothered to tell you that, you can pretend it's still true and you can just keep rolling in it.

I could go on, because the bullshit never stops, but I'm tired of the futility of living in a country where "if it feels good, believe it" is the state religion and where people will fight for their beliefs to the death. We don't live in an information age, we live in a bullshit age. We love Bullshit because it fertilizes the egos of the uninformed.

If these are indeed at last the end times, we can be sure it will not all end with floods and it won't be by any divine agency. It will end with bullshit nd it will be your own damned fault.

The ownership society

So now it's "Obama's Mosque" and why the hell not, since there appears to be no bottom at the deep end. All the hysteria about the "most far left liberal politician since Trotsky" has all the traction of a bald tire on a wet road as Obama panders to the right, the Birther blowhard, Orly Taitz, would up in contempt of our most conservative high court and the legion of dire prediction demons has failed to infect anyone but the swine. We didn't fall into a deep depression and slowly, most things are getting better. Half the TARP funds have been repaid at interest. No army has poured across our weakened borders into the arms of Obama, the flow of illegal aliens has diminished and deportations are up substantially despite all the howling. Obama isn't rounding up Republicans, we haven't turned the army over to the UN, and yes, his ratings although they've fallen since he was elected, are still better than Ronald Reagan's.

Of course the predictions of recession that were denounced as treasonous by the right wing chorus during the previous administration did come true, the reasons for the most expensive war in our history were false and the benefit of the radical tax cuts not only failed to materialize but produced no new private sector jobs and earned us a 8 trillion dollar loss. But enough of that liberal America hating treason -- it's Obama's fault for bailing out US business, even though Bush asked for more money and less oversight. It's Obama's fault and the Mosque that isn't actually a Mosque located in what isn't the World Trade Crater in a neighborhood with a substantial Muslim population and where there's already a Mosque must be shown to belong to Barack Hussein Obama.

And why not? They're already snickering that he isn't Jesus Christ and if he were, I'm sure they'd make sure the analogy was perfect. It's Obama's Mosque and when that blows over, there will be some other idiotic calumny and on and on, while there continues to be nothing useful and nothing that hasn't been debunked or proven disastrous coming out of the racist right wing rabble of hare brained hooligans posing as patriots.

So now it's Obama's Mosque as if his predecessor hadn't spent far more time in them, praising (to his credit) Islam and Muslims as a religion of peace and peaceful people and good Americans. It's Obama's fault and they'll take back America: xenophobic, imperialist, feudal, monopolistic, theocratic, undereducated, over opinionated, 'we're number' one America where Beethoven is a dog, Michelangelo is a virus and a Mosque that isn't a Mosque is Obama's and a recession that isn't Obama's is.

Interview with the Christian

Ann Rice didn't invent the vampire, but our infatuation with them and our vision of them has a lot to do with characteristics she gave them. I enjoyed Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat, but soon lost interest as she seemed to be trying to force these supernatural creatures into her supernatural Christian beliefs, which to me are far harder to swallow and far less fun.

What a surprise to read that she's declared that she's dropping out.

"Today I quit being a Christian ... It's simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else.”

I can understand that quite well. Of course she's not quitting her mythological beliefs or her belief in the supernatural:

" My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn't understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me."

Crucial?

The definition of an addiction has more, I think, to do with how bad you feel without the junk than how good a fix makes you feel, but in truth, I cannot tell the difference between the addiction to a belief and the addiction to a substance except that you don't have to pay for the former: at least not in dollars. One believes because it feels good, but one needs to believe because in fact the "pessimistic view" removes all importance to us, our deeds, our passions, our loves and hates; the importance of existence itself. If reason and fact assures us that we will die, our species will die, our planet, or sun, our galaxy and all that is in the Universe will disappear in time, as though we had never, for a brief instant, been here, it's crucial to give up reason and deny the facts.

Still, I do understand. I wouldn't want to be associated with what has been the motivation for murder, torture, oppression, conquest and the suppression of science either and I have to give her credit for insisting that the addiction to magical beings doesn't have to result in those hideous things. Belief addiction may be something we're subject to by nature, but it's possible, if rare, to seperate it from the creature that sucks the blood of mankind.

Why I hate the World Cup

For the same reason I dislike the Olympics, of course and I dislike the Olympics for the same reasons I dislike McDonalds and Coca Cola and Nike and all the other rapacious multinational corporations that milk humanity like a herd of cattle while pretending it's a noble endeavour. Hosting this event costs huge amounts of money and it doesn't necessarily repay the investment, at least not to those out of whose hide it comes. With the hordes of foreign visitors being herded away from local vendors selling local food and African products; with long-time venues for those vendors being reserved for large, foreign sponsors, McDonalds and Coke will get the lion's share and the locals will have to forage like jackals for the leavings.

Will South Africa be a better place for South Africans after the noise stops and the clean-up begins? Does history hinge on whether or not a bunch of ball kickers from the Netherlands beat their counterparts from Uruguay and will international relations be more peaceful or tolerant because of anything that happens here? Will any of it matter ten minutes after it's all over? I have a hard time believing that the health or the wealth or the education of South Africans will see a benefit commensurate with all the noise and expense. Even the infernal Vuvuzelas are made in China.

It's true, I have little taste for watching men running around kicking things or for the feral screams of crazed viewers blowing into noisemakers as though anything happening in the arena was of any consequence whatever unless it was to the already huge profits of Nike or the sellers of beer and cigarettes -- or plastic horns. I have a greater distaste for the mass purveyors of opiates, even the real and quiet ones.

Panis et circenses, bread and circuses; it's a tried and true way to calm the animals in the feed lots and holding pens; to pacify the proletarii and the slaves while the emperors and the senators grew fatter. Gooooooooooooooal!

Fear and Trembling in the Court

OK, so now I'm worried. I was willing to make some excuses for Obama's new support of offshore drilling; blaming it on previous administrations' infiltration of oil men into the department of energy and the drowning of environmental regulations, but if what I'm hearing about Elena Kagan is even partly true, I'm worried that we're going to have a more dangerous court, more friendly toward unfettered Presidential powers and willing to cut a wider swath through the law to root out nebulous, ever shifting devils and their agents -- making any accusation, any suspicion a de facto conviction without representation, without trial, without appeal: in some cases without anyone even knowing about it.

"Battlefield Law", said she to Lindsay Graham last year, should be applied to anyone we have a feeling is financing Al Qaeda and one's rights should not be read to anyone that might be construed to be a "terrorist" despite the lack of any real definition of what a terrorist might be. Vague definitions and accusations of shadowy connections leading to indefinite detentions without due process? Why have a court at all if we're no longer a civilized nation but a band of warriors on a worldwide battlefield?

Attorney General Eric Holder said on ABC's This Week Sunday, that even US citizens don't need to be read their rights if they're suspected of being involved in terrorism. Suspected is the key word here and in a time when everyone seems to be suspected every time they board an airplane, it's a scary word.

“I think we have to give serious consideration to at least modifying that public safety exception." Chopping a piece out of the Bill of Rights is “one of the things that I think we’re going to be reaching out to Congress to do – to come up with a proposal that is both Constitutional, but that is also relevant to our time and the threat that we now face.”

I think it's worth mentioning that the most recent attempts at terrorist acts were hardly impeded by the reading of rights as the terrified terrorists , one of whose gonads had just been blow off, spilled their guts as fast as they could get the words out and when we're happy to torture people so thoroughly their testimony becomes invalid, what's going to change if we tell them they have any rights at all -- which, practically speaking, they don't. I'm afraid we don't either. It's certainly harder not to cry when reading about our forefathers' noble ideals about all mankind being endowed with inalienable rights when we're told that's just too risky these days.
It's always been risky and taking that risk has been one of our valid claims to greatness.

The last thing I expected or wanted from the President in the way of restocking the Court was another battlefield lawyer, supporting the degradation of our most basic American traditions and laws from gutless cowardice. We have more to fear from fear of terrorism, it seems, than from terrorism itself. At a time when the very concept of a government is so frightening to so many, I would have expected a selection with a more obvious commitment to taking the risk of Liberty and willing to face saboteurs without sabotaging our own freedom.

Let only one flower bloom

According to the Foxspeak dictionary, a school of thought is defined as a scheme, usually by Roger Ailes or Rupert Murdoch that they wish to attribute to a broad segment of the public. People say, or Some people are saying are alternate disguises for propaganda. If there really is a school of thought that believes cutting the minimum wage will be good for workers, I would like to see its accreditation and I suspect it's a school where employers such as McDonalds and Wal-Mart are heavily represented.

"One school of thought says lowering the minimum wage will actually create more jobs,"

pronounced anchortwit Juliet Huddy from the Fox News Podium in an attempt to give credit to the idea if not to the school of one promoting it.

As Raw Story describes in detail, Fox reduces the entire concept of a minimum wage to "social justice" which sounds sufficiently close to Socialism that they deemed it unnecessary to point out any contrary ideas, no matter how credible. Blind slogans and doctrines being so much easier to sell than truth in all its complexity -- or justice for that matter.

At one point I was foolish enough to think that the failure of doctrine driven economic, social and military policies would be an embarrassment to Fox and its friends, but it seems now that with America down and out, the opportunity to kick us while we're down is irresistible. It seems that their dream of building a new, invincible corporate oligarchy from the ruins of our country, is the only school of thought that isn't a strategic fraud.

The Christian kings of Uganda

It's not healthy to be Gay in Uganda, even with Idi Amin Dada gone. In fact it's a life sentence if their right-wing government gets hold of you, but that's not enough to please President Yoweri Museveni who has proposed a bill making it a capital crime to be homosexual and that assigns a three year sentence to anyone who knows but does not report the "crime." Speaking up for gay rights would bring a seven year jail term.

Don't feel too proud that we're a bit more liberal here, some of the backers of this hideous legislation are Americans; politicians who identify Christianity with conquest and total domination of society. You may have heard of them as "The Family" and this secretive, powerful and wealthy group isn't confining its efforts to make life miserable to the United States.

If author Jeff Sharlett is correct, the Christian Right group that's been in the news recently is giving financial support to this Hitleresque policy, if indeed, they didn't actually draft it.

"[The] legislator that introduced the bill, a guy named David Bahati, is a member of The Family," he said. "He appears to be a core member of The Family. He works, he organizes their Ugandan National Prayer Breakfast and oversees a African sort of student leadership program designed to create future leaders for Africa, into which The Family has poured millions of dollars working through a very convoluted chain of linkages passing the money over to Uganda"

said Sharlett to Terry Gross at NPR. Is it any wonder to you that I cringe when I hear the word Christian? Is it any wonder that I snicker at the idea that Islam is the biggest danger to peace and justice and liberty?

The no option option.

Now that my 65th birthday is less than 6 months away, I'm starting to get large numbers of e-mails trying to sell me motorized wheelchairs, "mobility" devices, diabetes supplies, reverse mortgages, medicare supplement plans and other stuff I don't need and don't want and have no use for. What do they know that I don't know? Nothing at all, it's just that we're all being sorted and filed like those old Holerith cards the young and hip no longer remember and finding that the many headed beast of commerce has put us in the out box can come as a shock.

For some it may be a shock to find that we haven't been a nation of individuals and individualists able to define ourselves for ourselves as the myth would have it, but things to be sorted, labeled used or put on the shelf as the corporate barons decide. It gets increasingly hard, but keeping off the conveyor belt that the great Deus ex Corporation uses to transport us from cradle to grave is worth it and I think all the more with every passing year and with the diminishing respect that goes with it.

Why, when retaining that respect, retaining the ability to steer one's life, to change it's course, to decide which road to take next, is increasingly the center of an aging person's consciousness do people insist that it's in my best interest to cover my eyes, take my hands off the wheel and trust to luck and to someone who benefits from my dying soon?

When the people would just as soon get rid of you, that's when -- and people like Sarah Palin and her coven of demented familiars certainly don't care if there are "Death Panels" in the Democratic health plan because they know of, tolerate and are supported by the death panel industry: the insurance companies. Every one that can read and does read knows that it's absolute fiction, but they keep trying to keep the meme alive and alive it remains despite absolute proof to the contrary: the government will come to your house and talk you into suicide. A government panel will decide to keep you from getting treatment to keep costs down. Sarah Says. Fox says. the billions the Insurance companies are pouring into lobbyists says. over and over until the lie becomes flesh.

How can the President make a speech and speak louder than all that money? I don't know, I can barely bring myself to hope that for once in my lifetime the magic word "socialism" won't stun our minds into submission to authority. I hesitate to hope that people will even bother to listen to him, or at least not the people who need to. I don't bother to hope much at all these days.

Hateful twits, hateful tweets

". . . and forgetting long passed mischiefs, we mercifully preserve their bones and piss not on their ashes."

-Thomas Browne-

Unless of course the vitriol of human meanness courses through your veins, in which case you don your rabid Pit Bull apparel and gnaw on what bones can be found. I've rarely seen such hate, even at a time like this where hate is the entire foundation of American Conservative politics. As fast as the greasy fingers can type, the internet begins to fill with accusations of murder, treason and more formless forms of evil known as "liberalism." There is no restraint in Mudville now that Ted Kennedy has struck out.

Too many blogs, too many twits, too many accusations to dignify with a reply, but one thing is held in common: the tribe that represents the worst traits of our remote ancestors feels victimized and therefore free from any obligation to decency. They lost an election, their worship of Feudal Corporatism, equal rights and civic responsibility is being challenged - at last - and their true values finally revealed. It's as ugly as it's ever been.

I recently and reluctantly signed up for Twitter. I should have stayed at home. the necessity to keep it all idiotically short as brought out more unadorned ugliness than one finds on blogs.

"Kennedy was a special pile of human excrement,”

rages the ridiculous Breitbart

“IF a GOP possesses 1/100 of human failings of T. Kennedy he/she is TOAST,”

is another one of his staggering lies with endless examples to prove it false. Malkin laughs that he didn't go to France for his treatment as though it were funny or actually meant something, others follow suite and Chappaquiddick references spurt like pus from the septic boil of Republic sentiment; from those who would and do accept any act of Presidential treason, dishonesty and manslaughter -- and yes drunken driving. How many people died because George W. Bush was President? No, Kennedy was a “villain,” “a big ass motherf@#$er,” a “duplicitous bastard” and a “prick.”

Pissing on Kennedy's ashes is just a small part of the psychotic rage that fills the void once filled by Conservatives. A conservative by nature does not respond to disagreement by using chemical, biological or nuclear weapons, that's what a madman does, that's what Mr. Breihtbart is, that's what Ms. Malkin is and this is what the end of everything sounds like.