"What, me worry?"
There might be something to all of this radioactivity concern here. Here is a very recent photo of me. I can honestly say it has not been Photoshopped or retouched in any way.
I have always wanted nice, blemish-free complexion but this is ridiculous. Maybe all of those people in India who are spending thousands of rupees on skin-lightening cosmetics should move here to Japan.
"You just want my milk. I'm going somewhere where they appreciate my artistic sensibilities."
Witnessing the drama unfold as to whether the government will shut down or whether Congress will break the current gridlock is like watching clowns at a circus engaged in a water balloon fight.
Michele Bachmann actually said something useful in an interview I watched today on MSNBC. She pointed out that last week alone the government borrowed $99 billion just to pay its bills. I admit I haven’t had time to fact-check this __ certainly a smart thing to do when anything comes out of her mouth __ but whatever the exact figure is, it is very large and puts into perspective the current debate on how much to cut deficit spending.
The Tea Party claims its candidates were charged by those who elected them to cut $100 billion from current fiscal year spending. Somehow that has been reduced to $61 billion and now the debate is where the reductions should be made. Republicans have made it clear they are across the board for cutting anything which is beneficial to middle and working class citizens. I won’t bother even going into all of the programs they have demonized over the years and have on their hit list. Everyone already knows.
The point is that in the two weeks Congress has been bickering over the $61 billion, the country has borrowed three times that just to keep afloat. Let me add that in those two weeks $48 billion of that total borrowing was just interest, i. e. debt service on the debt.
Something is seriously wrong here.
And we know what it is: A bloated defense budget, two pointless wars, tax cuts to the rich, corporate welfare, bailouts for banks, tax loopholes for the wealthy, and incentivizing the destruction of our economic base, which includes everything from our disastrous trade and labor policies to subsidizing the export of whole industries, have made it impossible to balance the federal budget. Vast amounts of money are being spent for things that the public does not support and by any measure are contrary to the understood values and interests of the nation.
None of this comes up in any of the discussions I have been following. Bernie Sanders and Dennis Kucinich have made the broader case for the huge imbalances that exist in society and in the economy, but what they have to say is being lost in the microscopic nitpicking over funding NPR, planned parenthood, Headstart, on and on.
The one thing that the Tea Party people have gotten right is that time is running out. The government is broke and quickly leading the entire country __ probably the world __ into the abyss of economic collapse.
So maybe it’s time for some serious discussion.
Isn’t it time to end the wars and bring the troops home?
Isn’t it time to walk away from our imperial fantasies and reduce our military?
Isn’t it time for the rich and mega-corporations to start paying their fair share?
Isn’t it time to reign in corporate power and their influence over our elected officials?
Isn’t it time for people to come first and government by the people to be reinstated?
Sometimes the devil is in the details and focusing on the tiniest minutiae is what needs to be done. Microscopes are great for looking at tics and bacteria. But they are pretty useless when it comes to finding a cow that is wandering over 300 acres of grassland. You can magnify a single bacteria a thousand times but it will not tell you that your entire herd is missing or that everything is dying on the farm.
The far right is certainly effective at getting the public stirred up about this or that. They know our hot buttons, our vulnerabilities, our sensitivities. They know what pisses us off. They know how get us to focus on the details, at the expense of the big picture. Now there is way too much at stake to give in to these kinds of distractions. The devil is no longer in the details. It’s in the direction. It is time for our elected officials to seriously talk about and redress those things that have gotten this nation so far off track and heading in a direction which will ultimately be fatal to the America we know and love.
“You’re stepping on my foot, cretin!”
A press release has just come to my attention that Dante’s Inferno is being dramatically remodeled. The need has apparently arisen to accommodate a new class of condemned individuals, sinners who are so loathsome and evil that the traditional punishments of Hell are just too tame. The existing tortures, horrible as they are, just don’t fit the magnitude of the sins against humanity of this new breed of miscreants, particularly their war against the truth.
Names of some of those prompting the upgrade are mentioned — Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Rupert Murdoch, Newt Gingrich, Sean Hannity, Michele Bachman, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Ann Coulter, Scott Walker, Sarah Palin, David and Charles Koch, Donald Trump — though the list is certainly not exhaustive and every day new individuals are being added (adding themselves is probably more accurate).
The Devil is quoted as saying, “I thought my good friend Adolph was about as scummy as they come but this new crop makes him look like Mother Theresa.”
As described in the first part of Dante’s epic poem the Divine Comedy, Hell currently consists of nine levels, or as Dante calls them ‘circles’. Descending in order they are: Limbo, Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Wrath, Heresy, Violence, Fraud, and Treachery. Limbo is relatively benign, more of a park than a place of suffering, and is entirely reserved for the unbaptized and virtuous pagans. The next eight circles offer eternal punishment for the host of sins which individually fall into the named categories. There is no way to itemize them all here but as you would expect, the list includes everything from selfishness and hoarding to hedonism and beastiality, deception to murder and betrayal, theft to bigotry and idolatry.
“We hope you guys are enjoying yourselves. Because we’re not.”
Punishments typically fit the sin. Unfortunates are eternally hacked to pieces by sword, perpetually chased by ferocious dogs through flesh-ripping thorny undergrowth, blinded to be left sightless and alone for all eternity, mercilessly crushed by huge stones, drowned and forever left gurgling at the bottom of a sea, immersed in a river of boiling blood and fire, cruelly condemned to permanently sit in a desert of flaming sand with lava pouring down on them, savagely whipped and driven by demons, mockingly having their heads wrenched around to face backwards, sadistically submerged in a lake of boiling pitch, and even spending eternity upside down with their heads entirely submerged in human excrement.
Details are not available at this time, but apparently these time-honored tortures will be like getting a foot massage compared to what will be in store for those who end up in the 10th Circle. Good luck, mega-sinners!
One other interesting aside: Since Hell hasn’t been remodeled for quite some time, the renovation work is providing a terrific opportunity for some equipment modernization. According to the Christian Science Monitor, the Devil has ordered several hundred nuclear reactors from GE, which should give a real shot in the arm to the struggling nuclear power industry. GE was chosen because not only will the reactors provide unprecedented amounts of heat down there, they will also most probably melt down and subject the trustees to radiation poisoning, cancer, and having their flesh fall off their bones in slabs of greasy fillets.
“What I would do for a beer right now.”
The new 10th circle has not been officially named but rumor has it the top contenders are Shit Storm of Evil and Malevolent Assholes With No Redeeming Qualities.
You can vote on these. Just text *666 and hit ‘1’ for Shit Storm and ‘2’ for Malevolent Assholes.
Results will be announced by Ed Schultz on MSNBC on an upcoming show.
This is one of the most fascinating things I have seen on the internet about the devastating seismological events which just occurred in Japan. It starts slow but stay with it . . . http://www.japanquakemap.com/
I have also run across some idiotic comments to the effect that the quake was the heavy finger of God pushing our buttons down here on Earth. That he is sending us a message about our misuse of the planet, that he is fed up with all of the sinning going on down here, that he is punishing the Japanese (for what? making great automobiles? being Buddhists?).
Hey! Maybe they’re right!
Maybe His patience has run out. Maybe He has had it up to his God eyebrows, so He is putting us on notice . . . “Clean up your act down there, or you ain’t seen nothing yet!”
Humans have certainly mucked things up over the years. Wars, genocide, plunder, destruction, reality TV shows. Okay, we have done some good constructive things too. But then it seems like we are always turning around and tearing down what we have painstakingly built, or at least what someone else has built, killing off a few million along the way.
So maybe God feels the need to teach us a lesson every now and then. Remind us of exactly Who is in charge. Just scare the bejeezus out of us. That would explain the rumors hovering around all the time that the world is about to end. A little bogeyman-under-the-bed psychology from the Big Guy in the sky?
But hold on a minute.
This can’t be right.
Really stopping to think about it ___ stepping back and getting some perspective ___ how could anyone actually believe that God gave a flying fuck about what goes on around here?
If the Universe is as big as astronomers and astrophysicists claim, this little wet chunk of dirt in our solar system which we call Earth ___ but which He may not even have a name for ___ is one billionth of a trillionth of a quadrillionth of a gazillionth of the whole shebang.
It would be like us obsessing over a piece of lint at the bottom of the ocean.
Yes, if God is indeed God, the Guy thinks big. Really big! He certainly is not some sniveling micro-manager. What we mere humans do here on Earth wouldn’t even come up on his radar screen. We’re more like microbes clinging to a worthless piece of space rock ___ regardless of how many prayers we say, how many candles we burn, how many hymns we sing, how many services we conduct, how many churches and cathedrals we erect in His honor and to His greater glory.
There is only one conclusion . . .
God probably doesn’t even know about the 9.0 that devastated Japan.
Unless, of course, He watches CNN.
Do they get cable in Heaven?
[ The above comments about God are excerpted from my full-length novel 11-11-11, which came out June 1, 2011, published by Melange Books in tropical Minneapolis, MN. ]
Mr. Hope and Change 2025
If a man decides he needs to be healthier and adds a little exercise to his daily routine, there will be a difference. Now he will do twenty sit-ups every single morning after breakfast. Assuming he hasn’t exercised before, this will be a big difference to him.
This man weighs 375 lbs (170 kg) and still consumes over 8000 calories a day in his excessive high-fat, high-starch, high-sugar diet. Guess what?
His twenty sit-ups aren’t going to do a damn thing. It is really a difference that makes no difference. In fact, he may actually be doing himself harm. The twenty sit-ups might stress his balking, grossly overworked heart and kill him.
This is what is going on with politics in America now. There are differences being debated and some laws in place which are “different”. Liberals are extolling them as revolutionary new innovations which will put the country back on track towards recovering the vision of an egalitarian society with opportunities and fair share for all. Conservatives are damning them as treasonous abdication of true America to some horrifying socialist model.
Neither is true.
Most of the legislation passed in the past two years — an impressively long list of left and liberal leaning items — will make no difference whatsoever to the long term prospects of America’s rapprochement with its fundamental ideals or its prospects for survival.
Differences that make no difference.
It’s a simple concept and an effective way of calling out and eliminating distractions and falsifications: Those actions and ideas that on first glance appear to have merit but don’t really solve the problems. Laws and programs with big gloves but no punching power.
Health care reform: The problems are skyrocketing costs and the still rising 17% of GDP it carves out of the national budget, and the lack of truly universal coverage. The rising costs are not sustainable and will bankrupt the country. Moreover, since America is not a very healthy country, until every single person is given comprehensive preventative services as well as treatment for acute and chronic ailments, it will just get sicker. The solutions to this crisis are 1) offering a path to health care services which is not profit-driven, 2) truly universal coverage, and 3) establishing true competition in the marketplace to drive down costs. The health care bill just passed does none of the above. Health care will continue to be sub-standard and only get worse, and quality health care will soon only be a privilege of the rich. No matter how you slice it, Obama’s great historical claim to fame is a difference that makes no difference.
Economic reform: The United States of America has little or no control over its money. The Federal Reserve Bank is an autonomous privately-owned corporation. As long as the country itself does not have absolute authority and control over its currency and matters of monetary policy, it will never be able to effectively address economic issues or solve the daunting problems it currently confronts. The nation is over 36 trillion dollars in debt and counting. It will only get worse. The tinkering that is being done with bank regulations will create some hollow differences in policy but make no substantive difference in the outcome. The rich will get richer and the poor and middle class will get poorer. The country will with increasing rapidity flail and sink into the quicksand of insolvency.
Corporate control: As long as corporations have “personhood” under the law — a highly questionable ruling by the Supreme Court back in 1886 — legislation which attempts to trim the sails of corporations will be completely ineffective. The personhood privileges of corporations actually go far beyond what we as in-the-flesh humans have. We have rights and privileges but also culpabilities under the law. We can be imprisoned for our illegal actions. How do you incarcerate a corporation? Do you put the home offices in jail? The 17,262 stockholders? The receptionist at the front counter? It is laughable to see debates going on about trying to reign in corporations, keeping them from exporting jobs, from off-shoring profits, from avoiding taxes, and on and on. It won’t happen. Corporations have no real accountability. And they certainly have no conscience. Caring is not in their corporate by-laws, nor is it in their nature — this by definition. Anything we do with the personhood legal sanctuary corporations currently have in place, will be a difference that makes no difference.
Corporate power: Corporations now own Congress. And the White House. I posted a piece called “Is President Obama Under House Arrest?” It could have been called “Who Really Owns The Highest Executive Office In America?” We have seen President Obama rubbing up against the legs of Wall Street and corporate America like a cat who wants to be fed. He has personally made his case before the U. S. Chamber of Commerce, as well as the movers-and-shakers on Wall Street. What a joke! Of course they nodded and smiled and offered him reassurances that they were on board. What were they going to do? Put a whooppie cushion on his seat and throw tomatoes at him? It was all a nice show. To his credit, President Obama as always was funny, articulate, charismatic, and charming. It was a love fest. But! Words are words. Deeds are deeds. The President, tragically and naively thinks he can nudge these people into doing the right thing with a nicely crafted appeal. But realistically the man has no levers to pull. Corporations can make unlimited contributions to political campaigns (see ‘personhood’ above), have outgrown any loyalty to the country (40,000 factories closed in America over the past decade), have managed to pull levers themselves which puts the country at enormous risk ($9 trillion bailouts and guarantees), and will continue to do whatever they have to do to make money. Tons of it. The President can do what he will to try to tweak consumer protection laws in order to reduce some abuses — credit cards, home loans, whatever — but here we have a classic case of differences which will make no difference. The Treasury has already been looted. And it was our money, yours and mine — the 98% of America which is not disgustingly wealthy — that was taken.
Can anybody spare some change?
A limited nuclear war will go a long way towards brightening our future.
There seems to be no limit to human ingenuity. And again man’s creativity in confronting monumental challenges has come to the rescue.
A fascinating article published over twelve years ago in New Scientist, implies that a modest nuclear war would likely reverse the apocalyptic effects of severe global warming. Now experts aren’t recommending a sizeable nuclear exchange, because that might go too far and actually throw us back into an Ice Age. Apparently, about 50 to 100 medium size nuclear bombs would do the trick.
Which happens to be about the number that Pakistan and India currently have in their nuclear arsenals.
What are we waiting for? Go to it, guys! Everyone knows there is tremendous untapped bad blood between these two countries. With a little nudging from our State Department, we should be able to keep Florida from turning into a fish farm and New York City taxi drivers into gondoliers.
Granted there may be a few drawbacks to the nuclear option. But I don’t think this is the time to be nitpicking, considering the magnitude of the crisis we see looming ahead, with prospects of having to watch on the nightly news, herds of Komodo dragons causing traffic jams in Minneapolis, offensive footage of drowning polar bears, and unnerving reports of people’s hair spontaneously combusting.
Sure, a few eggs might get broken. But that’s how you make an omelet, right?
It’s India and Pakistan, after all. So who cares?
Moreover, in the event that all of the radioactivity ends up making the surface of the Earth too inhospitable, we can always turn to Monsanto. It seems to me that with their expertise in genetic modification, it would be no problem to insert ground mole genes into human embryos in vivo, guaranteeing that our future generations would be perfectly adapted to burrowing and living underground for a millennium or two.
Bingo. Human ingenuity at work again!
“John Rachel is right! I found these a long time ago. Now will you turn off the smoke machine?”
I propose a new commandment. Not an 11th Commandment because ten is such a nice number (we have ten fingers, ten toes . . . well, most of us do). I suggest we replace the 10th Commandment, which according to my Google search, now apparently reads . . .
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbor’s.”
This obviously has to go. Not only do we totally ignore this particular divine directive, but frankly our whole consumer ethic is built on coveting. Without hungry insatiable lust for everything around us material and flesh, the shopping malls would be empty.
That taken care of, here is my suggestion for a new 10th Commandment:
“Not doing the wrong thing is no excuse for not doing the right thing right.”
Who said that?
I just did. Probably someone else too. Whatever.
I don’t know where we need to go to get this commandment thing changed, but I’m all over it. So all of you apologists and compromisers out there, beware! When I get this done, you are in big trouble for all of your waffling, excuses, halfhearted and half-baked remedies, your wholesale wimpiness, your cowering centrism.
You know who you are.
First, let me qualify my bumper sticker by saying that there are a lot of ‘I’s which belong in the fabric of what we call the USA. Integrity. Intelligence. Initiative. Innovation. And America has always venerated those persons who have exercised their Individualism in positive and constructive ways.
But the point of my naive blog title is simply that if it is all about ‘I’ and not about ‘us’, the USA goes away. As it is doing right now before our eyes in a slow, painful disintegration and decline, a process which powerful people in this country currently cannot seem hasten enough to suit their personal ambitions. Doing the bidding of this tiny, historically myopic and self-serving elite class are rampaging Republicans who either totally lack perspective or totally lack moral sensibilities (probably both), and are openly determined to destroy what meager, frail, barely adequate safety net has been meticulously woven over decades, by more caring and patriotic statesmen. Wrapped in the red-white-and-blue, spewing empty slogans about economic priorities (deficit reduction, smaller government, reduced taxes) what is being proposed these days is nothing short of collective genocide . . . the elimination of any possibility of survival by the middle and working classes of the country.
It’s crazy and it’s evil.
If the rich elite were farmers, their approach apparently would be “If we can just get rid of all of this dirt, there will be more room for the crops.”
I lived in India for six months. If things keep going the way they are in America and you want to see what your country will look like in 25 years, just go to India. India has more super-rich individuals than any other country in the world. And over a billion pathetically poor people to do their bidding.
Just watch where you step. Or wear tall boots. Very low taxes in India. But no one to clean up the shit in the streets.
What can account for the President’s frequent silence and muted response on so many demanding issues of today? Or his contrary positions, ones that are 1) against the best interests of the country, 2) politically suicidal in terms of his re-election and/or his ability to lead the country at a time which demands forceful, creative leadership, and 3) contrary to the narrative of his own life, the story he offered to get elected in the first place that told of his rise from relatively humble beginnings to positions of political responsibility where he could make a difference in the lives of common people?
Is he under house arrest? Is it as the most fanatic and fantastical conspirators have been alleging, that there is some conservative cabal of absolute power and real control which is really running the country and holds the president of the hostage, rendering him a mere puppet to their self-serving agenda?
What is going on now in Wisconsin is an inspiring display of good, patriotic Americans demanding that the vampirish bloodletting of the American economy by the corporate elite be stopped and the viability of the middle class be restored. Why is the President so silent on this? If there was a recent historical moment when the bully pulpit of the office of the president could be used to stand up for decent, hard-working citizens, it is right now. Is President Obama under some self-imposed gag rule? Or maybe he is gagged.
Maybe the gag is on us.
It’s not very funny.
Register your baby at toddlers-r-us.com!
Register your baby today at toddlers-r-us.com and they will send him or her a Visa card, a gift certificate for his/her first tattoo, and a trial membership with Groupon.
It’s never too early to get these little chunks of protoplasm acquainted with the exciting prospects of life as a consumer and a mindless participant in the distractions of modern life, I say.
Don’t you agree?