The Friday Blurb-Fest: Caption This!

Here's a triple shot of Caption this! Have fun, and be rude.


Here's a triple shot of Caption this! Have fun, and be rude!

The Friday Blurb-Fest: Caption This!

The Friday Blurb-Fest: Caption This!

FRIDAY AFTERNOON

Written amongst the noise.
The this, the THAT
Whines, no wine, the forced coughs
The pitter, the padder and fashion shows.
Somehow the baby sleeps
He struggles with digital music
Wifi signal unstable
Where's the beats!

OH, RIGHT, SUPPER

They are restless,
I have been shushed
'Don't look, wait for the fashion show!'
I will look! What fashion show?
I don't wanna watch no fashion show
hrrumph!
Oh it was musical theatre
Mario Bros the theme

AND STILL NO SUPPER

I suppose a fella should look into that.
Turn on a frying pain,
boil some water,
that sorta thing
That's what a fella should do,
But will he?
Perhaps,
with proper motivation.
The blibs and blonks of video games might do.

Thoughts thunk whilst walking

There aren't very many things better than a walk to clear the mind. I do some of my best thinking on my afternoon walks to the school to pick up my kids. Yes, there are those days that I wimp out, when I hop in the car to pick up the kids. But we won't talk about those days... days like that rarely do anything for the creative spirit.

I have a routine. I leave the house at the same time every afternoon. I take the same route. I check the time on my cell at the same place everyday and 9 times out of 10 it's 2:37 pm. Yep, I am that weird.

Despite my neurosis, I love these walks. I tend to have a mini-epiphany each and every day at the same spot. It is like my brain sorts through the static until it gets onto the sidewalk on Waggoners Lane. A peak into the wooded area attached to Odell Park and WHAM, I am filled with all sorts of weird and wacky ideas.

So thank heavens for my cell phone. Why, you might ask? Well, because of my neurosis (did I mention I was neurotic?) I tend to muck around with my cell phone so that I don't have to socialize with the other parents standing and waiting outside the school for the bell to ring. It was this mucking about that lead to the discovery of my cell's memo pad. It only allows me 80 characters and I can only save 20 memos at a time, but the wacky thoughts I have while walking can now be recorded. No longer would they disappear like dreams which were never written down. A bad habit, one which I have yet to remedy.

Back to the memo pad. That the was the point, right? Here are some of the memos:

~ Notes written on cells... wows and what the hells?

~ Babies stare, as do their mothers.

~ It feels like Titan hockey sticks, frozen orange hockey balls & Mylec goalie pads.

~ Dudes that wanna small talk; don't they know the routine? Oh and the pacing... argh.

~ An inordinate amount of old men with canes today. A plot?

~ Both the Left and the Right are so blind with hate for the other side, that they are incapable of holding their own side accountable.

~ Is the most significant thing about Obama's Presidency gonna be the color of his skin? God I hope not!

~ I need an agent! Again with the dreams of grandeur. Or are they illusion?

~ To the dude wearing pink shoes, I am sorry I stared & giggled, but you were wearing pink shoes!

~ Now old fellas wearing pink hats. Did I not get the memo?

~ Is there anything more bleak than the crusty brown/gray snow after the January thaw?

~ Like zombies we trudge through the slush & snow.

~ Outside it as crisp as an ice cream headache.

There, random thoughts saved. My walks not a waste of time. Bundle up, put on some warm boots, trudge through some slush, but never, ever trust a fella with pinks shoes, pink hats or a cane.

Dean's Damned Westy

“Where is the fucking chainsaw?” Tex says, slamming a large wooden box marked 'T'.

“'T' for tool, right? Isn't the chainsaw a tool?” Tex opens another box, then quickly slams it closed.

“Listen,” Says Derek, a smirk on his face. “what ya hear?”

Off in the distance, but plain as day, we could hear the destructive drone of a chainsaw.

“Fuck off, I didn't hear it at first, I was afraid that we weren't packed one.” Tex trudges off, head down, mumbling. That whole punchline of a joke thing, sucks.

“Don't worry about him, he really shouldn't be allowed to play with a chainsaw, he'd probably lose a limb.” Says Derek, still smirking. Tex, hearing this, flips Derek the bird.

“OK boys, wanna help me put up a dry shack?” Asks Derek.

“Sure.” Says Ed; “You bet.” says I.

Derek, Ed and I quickly lay out a square white (well, it used to be white, now more of a gray-brown) tent.

“What do we use as posts?” I ask, looking around.

“We are in the woods, we have billions of posts. All we need for this tent are 4 corner posts which are about 7 feet tall and a center post that is about 10 feet tall. Curt has been knocking down trees all morning, he should have a good pile of stuff junked up by now.” Derek points to a pile of slash not far from where the bus was parked. I head that way.

Halfway across camp I meet Leeann and Sylvie, they are rather smitten, it would seem, with Dean's Westfalia. Please say it's his Westy they like, not Dean. I mean look at him, he has douchebag written all over him. Ugh, that shit-eating grin. I wave at Leeann, I stay cool. Try not to let the girls sense your awkwardness, your fear, your silly jealousy.

“Isn't this an awesome bus? I have one back home. I wanted to bring it, but my dad freaked out, saying that the woods roads would wreck all the work we had done to it. I miss my bus, man, sleeping in it would be way more comfortable than on the ground in a tent.” Leeann says, arm and arm with Sylvie.

They are the picture of hippy perfection. I want to have them both then and there. Composure Joe, they can sense weakness. Head down, focus. A witty remark, then back to work. Don't blow it, especially not here, not in the presence of the ladies and Dean. Fuck Dean, fuck his ratty old Westy.

“I bet your bus thanks you" I say, blushing, God please don't stutter, "I don't imagine she'd have much liked that ride in. I gotta get some posts for the dry shack. Talk to you all later.”

Dean knows I have lost this round, I can see it in his eyes, he is getting cocky. The dude with the coolest car always gets the girl, even if the car is a '74 Westfalia, with a cooked transmission and a suspension system that is about to fall off. Fuck Dean. Head down, go get the wood. She is only a girl, there will be lots of girls.

Blind Allegiance

During my walk to pick up the kids from school my mind wandered, as it does, the most recurring theme of my wandering mind was US partisan politics. It boggles my mind why I am as obsessed as I am with American politics. I am a political animal, that is for damned sure.

A couple of things set me off this afternoon. The first was the mini-feud that has erupted between comedian/political satirist John Stewart and journalist/left wing high priestess Rachel Maddow. Here is the abridged version of this 'feud'; Stewart called out Maddow for her irresponsible comments on the heels of the disaster in Haiti. Maddow tried to score political points for her side, by taking a poke at the previous administration and their ineptitude in past natural disasters. Maddow may be speaking the truth, but Stewart's point, and I agree with him, was that now was not the time for partisan politics. Maddow and her minions are pissed, not only because Stewart (who everyone thought was the high priest of left wing) had the audacity to poke fun of one of his own, but also because he lumped her in with such luminaries as Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh. Maddow and her raging left fans hate being the punchline of a late night joke. The poor serious things.

So that had me wondering about how fragile and humorless the left has become. Gone are the heady days when the left, powerless, had the perfect nemesis in George W. Bush. Back then poking political fun was almost too easy, hell it was expected. The left now find themselves in charge and quite frankly things are not going as well as expected. Their guy (he was mine as well), Obama, the once mighty beacon of hope and change. Has changed very little, his message of hope is now muddled and is fading fast. But how dare a political satirist poke fun at them. I mean really, this is the left, the left is beyond reproach, right?

I now had about ten minutes to kill before the kids were off school. So to kill time I began thinking about the Massachusetts senate seat left open because of the death of Ted Kennedy. The political punditry in the US (which outnumber its citizenry, I swear) are all aflutter. This senate seat should be a gimme for the Democrats. This is Kennedy country, give the seat to the Democrat challenger already. But wait, the Democrat challenger Martha Coakley has made a whole series of political gaffs, the worst being her proclamation that former Red Sox picture and World Series hero Kurt Schilling was probably a Yankee fan, d'oh! Gaffs like that have allowed the sexy Republican challenger Scott Brown to build momentum and take a lead in the polls. The polls now closed, I am told it's still too close to call. But the political punditry see this (no matter who wins at this point) as a referendum on health care, the first true test of the political waters for the Obama Administration, proof that the Democrats are losing hearts and minds, a sign that Obama will only be a one term President, the sky is falling, Massachusetts is the canary in the coal mine. Ye gods, what would Teddy think?

If the Democrats lose in Massachusetts it means they no longer have a super majority in the Senate. Which sucks, sure, but it's one seat, one, that's it. The symbolism of the Democrats losing Teddy Kennedy's senate seat stinks, yes, but let me repeat my previous point, it is one bloody seat. How is it that the Bush Administration governed for 8 years with nowhere near the majority numbers that the Obama Administration has and yet was able to bully any damned piece of legislation through both Houses without even breaking a sweat? Are Fox News and the religious right really all that powerful? Does the minority truly rule?

Which lead me to think that the Republicans for whatever reason, blindly follow their leader, no matter how ugly it gets. Whereas the Democrats seem incapable of following their leaders. Instead the Democrats seem obsessed with the idea of bipartisanship. Instead of producing legislation that is representative of their party or any sort of liberal movement, the Democrats are forced to produce legislation that is bogged down, filled with capitulations towards the far right and the conservatives within their own party. The healthcare reform bill is a prime example of that point. The Democrats are incapable any sort of liberal agenda because they are too afraid the Republicans across the floor might yell boo.

So where was I? Oh yes, I was madly pounding keys on my cellphone. Not only because I like to pretend I am text messaging in order to avoid eye contact and awkward conversations with the other waiting parents. But also because this idea popped into my head; The Left & Right are so focused on disdain for the other side, that they are incapable of holding their own side accountable. I believe this to be true. Especially in American politics, where there truly are only two parties. One representing the right (the Republicans, well duh) and one representing the left (the Democrats, double duh). And so it is that each side spends the majority of its time not rebutting political ideas or debating important pieces of new legislation. No that's not how politics works in the world's most successful democracy. Politics is a pissing match between two very abstract notions. The conservative right versus the liberal left. In the end it is all hogwash, because the status quo remains no matter the administration, no matter the party in power. America is a center right country, it will be governed thusly. Forget hope, never you mind change.

Bear!

Morning arrives, it always does and it wasn't the sound of the generator the woke me up. Which is a shock, because there is not hell of a lot more earth shattering than the sound of a gas powered generator. It obliterates the idyllic peace of the deep bush every damn time. Goddamn humanity's incessant need for power. Nope, it wasn't the deafing drone of a Honda generator that woke me up, not this time. This morning it was this;

“Bear! I think there is a fucking bear outside my tent! Holy fuck help! Somebody check and see if there is a bear outside my tent.”

Cue the chuckles. Lots of them.

“Your crazy dude. I am not sacrificing my head, to save yours. Not a chance”. Says a voice a few tents away from my own... Ed? Probably.

It got quiet. One could hear the odd chuckle, a guffaw, a quiet taunt, maybe a subtle tease. Everyone's ears were cocked, senses were sharp. Was there really a bear in camp? I distinctly heard a tent unzipping. We may have all teased and laughed at this dude's proclamation that he was being 'attacked' by a bear, but there was not one of use willing to be the first to test his bear theory. Every man and woman for themselves, is that not the law of the bush? Silence...

“False alarm. It was just some heavy snow that fallen from a tree close to my tent. My tent has caved in, but the coast is clear.”

More chuckles, heavier taunts, vicious teasing.

Ed says to the fella; “Oh man, you aren't gonna survive long in these parts if you confuse snow for bears. There are lots of both, but I'd rather wake up to snow.”

Ed was right, he didn't survive long. No, bear boy didn't die, he wasn't mauled, he didn't sink to his death in snow. He simply quit within a week, probably from the shame of it all. Human groups are savage and unforgiving. It is unBEARable (pun intended) to be the punchline of the communal joke. Poor fella.

12 Signs That 2010 Is Going To Be A Really, Really Bad Year For The Democrats And The Obama Administration

A special guest post by Micheal Snyder.

Michael Snyder is a conservative blogger who lives and works in Arlington, Virginia. More of his work can be found at his daily news blog (http://themostimportantnews.com/) and on his blog about conservative politics (http://thetruthwins.com/).


The 2010 election is still almost 10 months away, but already every indication is that if the election was held today, the Democrats would suffer a crushing defeat. So will things get better for the Democrats by the time election day rolls around? Well, actually the truth is that things are only likely to get worse for the Democrats and the Obama administration in 2010. As the U.S. economy continues to fall apart, and as health care and national security continue to take center stage on the national scene, an increasing number of voters are likely to become disenfranchised with the Democratic Party. The following are 12 signs that 2010 is going to be a really, really bad year for the Democrats and the Obama administration....

#1) Health care "reform" has been a total nightmare for Obama and the Democrats. The majority of Americans have been horrified to learn that the plan put forward by the Democrats will make purchasing health insurance mandatory, will raise taxes, will give the government unprecedented control over health care decisions, will result in much fewer health care choices for the average American and will push U.S. government deficits through the roof. Approval ratings for the health care "reform" bill have been hovering in the 30s, and considering that this is the centerpiece of the Democratic agenda, this is a really, really bad sign for Obama and the Democrats.

#2) In fact, more Americans than ever are sick and tired of the financial mess that the U.S. government is getting us all into. The truth is that the U.S. government is drowning under an absolute mountain of debt and all of the spending that Barack Obama is doing is only making it worse. To finance this debt, the U.S. Treasury has been forced to issue so many new bonds that the rest of the world cannot possibly buy them all. So who is buying them all up? The Federal Reserve. In fact, the Fed is now purchasing approximately 80 of all new U.S. debt.

#3) But even with all of this reckless government spending the unemployment situation in the U.S. is still absolutely brutal. When even Wal-Mart is closing stores you know things are really bad. Wal-Mart just announced this past week that it will close 10 money-losing Sam's Club stores and will cut 1,500 jobs in order to reduce costs. So if even Wal-Mart has to shut down stores, what chance do other retailers have?

#4) In fact, some areas of the U.S. are a total economic nightmare at this point. The mayor of Detroit recently said that the real unemployment rate in his city is somewhere up around 50 percent. When things get that bad, the party out of power starts to look better and better.

#5) So just how bad are things when compared to past recessions? During the 2001 recession, the U.S. economy lost 2% of its jobs and it took four years to get them back. This time the U.S. economy has lost more than 5 percent of its jobs and there is no sign that the bleeding of jobs will stop any time soon. Those who do not have jobs are much likelier to consider voting for the party out of power.

#6) The reality is that more Americans are in financial trouble than at any point in recent times. Americans are going broke at a staggering pace. 1.41 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009 - a 32 percent increase over 2008. This is not a trend that is going to help the Democrats.

#7) We are also seeing a record number of mortgage defaults. According to a report that was just released, delinquent home loans at government-controlled mortgage finance giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac surged 20 percent from July to September. In fact, things are such a mess at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that the Obama administration recently removed the caps on the amount of financial assistance that the U.S. government will be giving these two entities. Whether or not Obama created this mess is not the issue. What is the issue is that an increasing number of Americans are blaming him for this mess.

#8) In fact, many analysts believe that the the housing crash is far from over. They say that a massive "second wave" of mortgage defaults is getting ready to hit the U.S. economy starting in 2010. In fact, this "second wave" is so frightening that even 60 minutes is reporting on it. When this second wave does hit, most Americans are going to place responsibility for it in the laps of the Obama administration.

#9) Now there is even concern that the recent global deep freeze could end up seriously affecting food prices in American supermarkets in 2010. As the past several decades have clearly shown, Americans tend to vote according to how their pocketbooks are doing, and if food prices shoot through the roof that will not help Obama and the Democrats at all.

#10) In addition, recent polls indicate that the majority of Americans are so concerned about terrorism that they would be willing to sacrifice certain freedoms in order to feel safer. Considering the fact that terrorism is considered to be an issue that greatly favors the Republicans, this has got to be very concerning to the Democrats.

#11) On the foreign policy front, Obama risks alienating the Jewish vote by continuing to insist that Israel give East Jerusalem to the Palestinians. The truth is that the Jewish vote is crucial for the Democrats and Obama in places like Florida, and by taking such a hardline anti-Israel position, Obama is not winning any new friends in the Jewish community.

#12) Also, Barack Obama is continuing to push for a treaty with Russia that would reduce the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal to approximately 10 percent of the size that it was at the height of the cold war. Such an irresponsible approach to national security is surely not going to win Obama and the Democrats many friends among moderate voters who are concerned about security issues.

Any way you cut it, 2010 is shaping up to be a very bad year for the Democrats. Barack Obama's approval rating has already been plummeting like a rock, and there does not seem to be much hope of that turning around any time soon. In fact, if the signs above are any indication, the 2010 election could end up being really, really good to the Republicans. But with Obama still in the White House until at least 2012, will they be able to do much to clean up the mess?

It's Friday; Caption this!

A lesson in the avoidance of shitter digging

“Are we there yet?” A smart ass sitting towards the back of the bus asks.

“Soon, soon. A couple more twists, a hill, maybe two.” Dean says.

I can't wait to get off this bus. There is something about the way Dean drives, there is a look in his eyes that tells me that he is just barely in control. I can do without the dangling from a cliff, thank you very much. Dean isn't quite right, I think he might be manic depressed, he is slightly off, heaven help us all.

Dean pulls the bus off the main road onto an adjacent woods road. After a brief jaunt through heavy bush, we roll into a large clearing.

“Home sweet home kids.” Dean says as he slows the bus to a crawl then parks it.

Thank God, we survived that bit, the adventure continues.

“Ok, here is how it is gonna go,” Dean says standing up, facing all of us in the bus. “first I want everyone to find a spot for your tents and set them up. We have a couple hours left of day light, so I want you set up your gear as fast as possible. The plan is to get the kitchen tent, the mess tent and at least one shitter dug and set up. Ready, set, go!”

Gear flew from the Ryder truck; duffle bags, backpacks, tents, boots, flung everywhere. There is one of my bags, there is the second. Where am I gonna set up my tent? I notice Clark and Ed head towards the treeline, I will follow them, they seem to know what they are doing.

“Hey boys, mind if I am a neighbor?” I say, huffing and puffing, overloaded with gear.

“Nah, it's cool.” Says Clark, his tent laid out, fiddling with poles.

“So what's a Maritimer doing way the hell out here in God's country?” Ed asks, attaching a tarp to a tree, shielding his tent from the elements.

“I was promised fame, fortune and treasures. Actually I have come for your buxom womenfolk.” Says I, a glint in my eye, my 50 dollar Canadian Tire tent nearly up. Tarp, ha, who needs a tarp?

“For real? I hear that the trick is simply surviving your first year.” Clark says tossing his bags into his already set up tent.

“Probably, I dunno, I just had to get as far away from Nova Scotia as I could. I guess we should head down towards camp, I wanna get on kitchen tent duty, no way I am digging a shitter.”

“Smart man, I will meet you guys down there, I just wanna blow up my air mattress.” Clark says, dipping into his tent.

Ed and I made are way across camp towards Derek, Dean and Kurt, the orange-vesters, the guys in charge.

“What can we do boys?” Ed asks.

“Why don't you hop into the Ryder? Help Tex unload it.” Derek says.

“Sure thing.” I say, spinning on my heels. Ed and I saddle up to the Ryder, there will be no digging of shitters for Ed and me, nope, not this time.

Caption This!!

Thought I would try my hand at a pic for y'all to caption. Have fun, and don't be nasty! (Okay, you can get nasty...)

Fallen from a Great Depth

I am lying on my couch, trying to read. I do that a lot these days. Trying to read. Trying to accept that this is a slow time for me, a season of healing from old wounds and more recent ones, some self-inflicted. Trying to find a place of peace in an ecology that has shunned peace.

Although the blank screen saver has darkened the computer behind me, I can still hear you within the infinite waves of Twitter ever changing the guard; ranting, cajoling, flirting, pushing out declarations of fleeting news and grim prognostication. Beyond, I listen to black tires sighing along shining black streets, in them hearing old girlfriends and lost verse, burned books and crushed revolutions.

In contrast to my wish for both solitude and new friends, I have descended to what amounts to a basement apartment - the sort that has a couple of iron-barred windows right onto the sidewalk. I peer at your rustling feet there, revealing myself to you only for the short bus ride to and trudge back from a cigarette trip to the store. Lock the door. I own pepper spray now. Perhaps I am healing; but I still feel broken. There is nothing for it but time and emotional Kevlar ...

Writing at CounterPunch, Bruce Levine asks, "Are Americans Too Broken for the Truth to Set Us Free?":

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them? Has such a demoralization happened in the United States? Do some totalitarians actually want us to hear how we have been screwed because they know that humiliating passivity in the face of obvious oppression will demoralize us even further? What forces have created a demoralized, passive, disCouraged U.S. population? Can anything be done to turn this around?

Can people become so broken that truths of how they are being screwed do not “set them free” but instead further demoralize them?

YES. It is called the “abuse syndrome.” How do abusive pimps, spouses, bosses, corporations, and governments stay in control? They shove lies, emotional and physical abuses, and injustices in their victims’ faces, and when victims are afraid to exit from these relationships, they get weaker; and so the abuser then makes their victims eat even more lies, abuses, and injustices, resulting in victims even weaker as they remain in these relationships.

Does the truth of their abuse set people free when they are deep in these abuse syndromes? NO. For victims of the abuse syndrome, the truth of their passive submission to humiliating oppression is more than embarrassing -- it can feel shameful; and there is nothing more painful than shame. And when one already feels beaten down and demoralized, the likely response to the pain of shame is not constructive action but more attempts to shut down or divert oneself from this pain. It is not likely that the truth of one’s humiliating oppression is going to energize one to constructive actions ...

Later in the piece, Levine asks,

When human beings feel too terrified and broken to actively protest, they may stage a “passive-aggressive revolution” by simply getting depressed, staying drunk, and not doing anything – this is one reason why the Soviet Empire crumbled. However, the diseasing/medicalizing of rebellion and drug “treatments” have weakened the power of even this passive-aggressive revolution.

Many claim that we have been betrayed by our President. We have not. We have been betrayed by our own hope in a magic cure from a system that is itself at once broken and evil. We have sold ourselves for silver coin and now we're just angry at each other. Look around for someone to blame. Eventually we encounter the mirror. We should ask the guy in the mirror, "How could you dare to do this to me?"

How broken are we? Writing at Rense, Paul Levy declares:

We are truly in a war. It is not the war we imagine we are in, which is the way our true adversaries want it. It is not a foreign war against a foreign enemy. It is a war on consciousness, a war on our own minds. The global war on terror that is being fought around the world is an embodied reflection in the material world of a deeper, more fundamental war that is going on in the realm of consciousness itself ...

The underlying core of our government has become rotten such that the entire operation simply feeds into and is an expression of the same underlying corruption. All of the scandals continually coming out are like the superficial skin rash of a much deeper systemic disease, like a cancer that is infecting the greater body politic. Citizens who are not aware of our government's insidious intrusions into our lives are unwittingly feeding the corruption they are looking away from -- in their very act of looking away ...

It does no good, in these circumstances, to blame anyone. We would have to assume that accurately assessing blame would result in The Fix. Thanks for playing. Next?

For me, the only "fix" lies in creative, nonviolent non-cooperation. No credit cards. No money in big banks, just in a small credit union. No money to any big box corporation; no participation in commercial christmas this year. No car to leave a massive footprint of belch and steel; public transportation only. No cable TV, no DVD player, no Blackberry, no big screens or surround sounds. No movies with their indoctrination scripts and Oscar marvels of mass hypnosis. The only avatar I see is my own - a little pic of Django Reinhardt next to my tweets: hot jazz for the world forum. Living like this is not hard, but yes, it can get lonely. A couple of coffees with friends takes care of that (no Starbucks, thank you).

Am I being self-righteously narcissistic here? You are free to judge. I certainly am not suggesting that you sell your possessions and follow Christ. In fact, given the times, I begrudge you no comfort - you gotta do what you gotta do, right? Just don't feed insanity.

In "The Human Ecology of Collapse", John Michael Greer poses ...

The old legend of the Holy Grail has a plot twist that’s oddly relevant to the predicament of industrial civilization. A knight who went searching for the Grail, so the story has it, if he was brave and pure, would sooner or later reach an isolated castle in the midst of the desolate Waste Land. There the Grail could be found and the Waste Land made green again, but only if the knight asked the right question. Failing that, he would wake the next morning in a deserted castle, which would vanish behind him as soon as he left, and it might take years of searching to find the castle again ...

The essay is primarily about peak oil, but is worth a full read for its insights as to what questions need to be asked and answered. Most of us ain't gettin' it quite right yet.

One source of humor for me these days is the transhumanist movement, pushed by "techno-optimists" who think combining machines with humans in the next evolutionary phase is the answer to all our deadly ills. As if the answer to war and grand larceny and racism and infidelity and even death is to just make humans into something else. Many of these folks promise immortality. Oh, please. I'm happy to have at most thirty more years on this crumbling orb. And I don't believe in an after life. This is not a suicide note. But I am telling you that I'm at least as afraid of living through what's here and still coming as I am of dying.

I also find a dark humor in the growing alarum warning of "socialism" in the US. Most of these people have not a clue about Marx and Engels and cannot fathom the humane possibilities of democratic socialism. To continue to hope that capitalism (or whatever the system is that has allowed the few to steal all our money and enslave us) will right itself and sail along happily is just downright sick ...

My old blogging colleague, George Washington, urges us to:

Abandon false hope ... and get some real hope ...

... remember that hoping that Obama will change things is a "hopiate". We must stop smoking the "hopium" - no good daddy or heroic leader will save us.

We have to save ourselves.

The truth is that:

* "Hope has never trickled down. It has always sprung up."

* "It's time to stop waiting for hope to be handed down, and start pushing it up, from the hoperoots."

The truth is that real hope is an act of will. Real hope is like a muscle that needs to be developed. Real hope is an act of freedom, defiance and courage in the face of power, corruption and tyranny.

If you've dropped by here in the past, you know that I have never had hope that Nobama would do anything but cheerlead for the elitists who stole us. I didn't vote for him. I didn't vote for anybody, since Cynthia McKinney wasn't on the ballot in my state.

And I haven't had much faith in the PR pushed out by "our leaders" in fifty years, since I watched the system grind my school teacher father into dust for trying to actually educate people instead of train them to be cogwheels. If you haven't yet, you simply must read Zinn's A Peoples History of the United States.

We have never been the country we've pretended to be. We have simply fallen from a great depth.

Categories: alienation, Americanism, asylum, democracy, hopelessness, post-politics, post-society

[originally posted at P! ...]

The End of a Crappy Decade

The end is near. Those were the words spoken from more than a few nutballs at this time of the year 10 years ago. We were collectively all aflutter about the Y2K bug, the Internet might go kaput, chaos was bound ensue, some of us were about to party like it was 1999.

And then again some of us were stuck in the suburbs of Montreal because of the weather, some of us watched Celine Dion sing us into the new millennium, some of us hoped the end was indeed near. But we won't speak of any of that again. Le sigh.

The Internet survived, the Y2K bug was a huge bust, the Clinton years ended, the party was over. I blame Monica Lewinsky, she was a GOP operative, I know it. George Dubya Bush stole an election, that was how it began, that was the beginning of all that would suck about this last decade. OK so I blame Bush and Lewinsky. Wait, wait then 911 happened, I blame Bin Laden for this most shitty decade. Then the wars began. Colon Powell lived up to his first name and stuck a pole up the ass of the UN and rest of us with is magical made-up 'evidence' of weapons of mass destruction.

Wars, wars and more wars. Bush became known as a War President (thank God he had lots of practice with his G.I. Joes, GO JOE!). Bin Laden's infamy faded. Iraq was quickly squashed, Saddam was hung, Mission Accomplished... ha, ya, right. Genocides in Africa, no one paid any attention. Iraq quagmired, giggidy, giggidy. The International Community, mainly Canada, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands battled on in Afghanistan, it quickly became America's second war, Iraq dominated the headlines, it emptied the American treasury. The weapons of mass destruction were never found, there were no ties to Bin Laden or Al Qaeda (well duh!), but Saddam was still a bad dude, America because of its moral authority had every right to force a regime change (right, right? Ummm...?).

Oh and then there was the spending like drunken sailors thing. It started with the folks in the White House, it spread to the banking industry. Everyone could get a loan. Credit boomed, then burst! The global economy was in shock. America's economy went down the toilet, we the rest of the planet acted as best we could as toilet paper (flush!).

Hope and change that was what the new and improved President promised. I believed him, I swallowed his Kool-Aid. He is just so damned charming. He packaged himself so well. He looked to be just what the world needed; smart, charming, black... how could he fail? Has he? Is it too early to tell? I dunno. He is a big step up from his predecessor, but how couldn't he be? Bush lowered the bar.

Are things gonna get better? I think they will. Hell they have gotta. After an ebb, the inevitable flow occurs, thats how it works. So good luck dear readers. Happy New Year, bon decade. Things are about change for the better, I promise. Santé!