Land of Broken Promises

Greetings good citizen,

The rubric of ‘gradualism’ crept into public awareness during the (largely fabricated) ‘Red Scare’.

The analogy of a frog in a pot of water was used to exemplify how ‘gradualism’ worked (by the time you realized you were being boiled alive it was too late.)

We’d go about our lives and the insidious ‘commies’ would be infiltrating American Institutions and ‘contaminating’ them with their evil socialist poison!

(Which is what capitalists call every social ‘protection’ you have that they are required to fund.)

At the end of the day Bubba, it’s not their money but yours! But they still ‘view’ your social welfare as money THEY could have kept.

Who gives a fig what happens to you when you stop working? (Or at least that’s how the typical capitalist thinks.)

How disturbing is it that you can easily exchange the word capitalist for the word Republican? Even more disturbing is how the label Republican is now synonymous with the notorious >One Percent!

Now let’s bring the two concepts home

Water Torture, as American as Apple Pie
What does it mean when torture, already the definition of “cruel,” becomes usual?
February 24, 2013 |

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Try to remain calm -- even as you begin to feel your chest tighten and your heart race. Try not to panic as water starts flowing into your nose and mouth, while you attempt to constrict your throat and slow your breathing and keep some air in your lungs and fight that growing feeling of suffocation. Try not to think about dying, because there’s nothing you can do about it, because you’re tied down, because someone is pouring that water over your face, forcing it into you, drowning you slowly and deliberately. You’re helpless. You’re in agony.

In short, you’re a victim of “water torture.” Or the “water cure.” Or the “water rag.” Or the “water treatment.” Or “ tormenta de toca.” Or any of the other nicknames given to the particular form of brutality that today goes by the relatively innocuous term “waterboarding.”

How evil is it that you are being denied your RIGHT to ‘due process’ while the (hijacked rogue) government reclaims the right to torture its ‘enemies’ with impunity?

Even more disturbing is how even you might come to find yourself on the ‘enemies list’.

The question creeping through the back of everybody’s mind these days is whether or not, somewhere in their murky past, they may have (unknowingly) befriended a current Enemy of the State…and how that accident of fate has made YOU a ‘Person of Interest’.

Put two and two together. Let’s suppose this ‘old acquaintance’ that you haven’t laid eyes on IN DECADES is blamed for some act of civil disobedience. For the sake of argument let’s say this act resulted in the loss of a multi-million dollar facility and some first responders were injured will doing their job…but nobody died.

Guess who becomes a lightening rod if they can’t find a more recent ‘acquaintance’ of the suspect?

Let’s make it even more interesting…let’s suppose you never said a word to this geek, the only thing you’re guilty of is being a member of the same high school class as he/she was.

They’re not about to water board you…unless the suspect was one of those people you stayed in touch with after leaving school.

Now it gets more ‘interesting’…guilt or innocence is irrelevant, so is the, er, ‘intensity’ with which they pursue clues to the suspects whereabouts.

You get to take a ride on the government’s new toy whether you know anything of not!

“Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Your lawyer can’t get you out of this because you won’t be allowed to contact him…yes good citizen, in the name of ‘national security’ you’ve lost that right too.

Counsel will be advised he/she will be disbarred if he/she files any action against the torturers…and that should be the end of your search for ‘legal representation’.

Welcome to the NEW U.S.A. good citizen, (if you’re smart you’ll find the nearest exit before you’re trapped here and can’t escape!)

THIS is what those commie hating, capitalism loving patriots were trying to create to block the insidious spread of ‘socialism’.

Sort of puts the >One Percent thing in a whole new light, doesn’t it?

Bad enough they made you struggle through seven years of college and didn’t even offer you a job. Now you’re supposed to be ‘happy’ they’re not water-boarding you!

Yessiree Bob, the good ol’ U.S.A. has become precisely what the Native Americans called it long ago, “The land of broken promises.”

With that chilling thought in mind good citizen, I’d be extremely careful about who you cross.

The point of a gun is the only ‘law’ these psychos understand.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Cracked

Greetings good citizen,

Probably just the effects of being unemployed for two years but it seems I can’t look at anything these days without applying the basic principles of A Simple Plan.

The latest to rise to the test is this long overwrought issue:

A Titan’s How-To on Breaking the Glass Ceiling
By JODI KANTOR

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer, is attempting to start a national discussion for women in the workplace with her new book, and a social movement.

How does ASP apply here?

IS (as the capitalists claim) the ‘problem’ with the world’s management team the fact that there aren’t enough women at the top…

Or is it a lack of qualifications, (which seems to me to be the more obvious problem…)

Which is to point out that under A Simple Plan, the most qualified and only the most qualified, regardless of gender, will be promoted to tackle the planet’s top jobs.

(Um, the ‘goal’ of A Simple Plan is to achieve global dominance…fairly quickly.)

Regardless of how they are fixed personally, the world’s top people won’t view the world through their personal plumbing!

Which generally appears to be the source of this ‘gender diversion’.

So let’s make a big deal about the ‘number’ of women in boardrooms and PRETEND that this is the reason the global economy is scroomed!

But lets look at a different piece of the puzzle:

Neighbors Kill Neighbors in Kenya as Election Tensions Stir Age-Old Grievances
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

In less than two weeks, Kenyans will line up by the millions to pick their leaders for the first time since a disastrous vote in 2007, which set off clashes that killed more than 1,000 people.

Um, you know I’m down on elected office in the first place and under A Simple Plan there wouldn’t be any.

How else will we ‘get over’ the human tendency to hold grudges if we don’t select our leaders through comprehensive competency testing?

While the test can’t erase an individual’s color, gender or the, er, ‘supreme being’ he/she believes in, it does ‘eliminate’ the most critical factor, incompetence.

So it is that these people are being given the ‘illusion of participation’ and killing one another over what must be some pretty foul choices.

How sad is it that we aren’t too far from succumbing to the exact same set of circumstances.

Perhaps that’s the hell of it good citizen. Elections merely exemplify our powerlessness to control our situation, especially when the only options are BAD and WORSE.

IF we are to have ANY hope of correcting what’s wrong in our society we first need to get the BEST POSSIBLE Candidates a shot at the job then have the candidates PROVE they are the ones who can get the job done!

HOW do we find ‘the best people’?

The Tests start when you join the workforce and lead to the top job…so EVERYBODY has a chance of becoming King of the Heap!

Every year you step up or move aside, depends on what’s inside you (and how far you’re comfortable with going. Fully 90% of all candidates want no part of the ‘top job’ regardless of the ‘perqs’.

And admittedly, most people want no part of the responsibility that comes with the turf.

Ironically, people who do well in the tests also thrive on the challenges the tests present.
But that’s neither here nor there…but it does raise the ‘better than you’ issue that somewhat haunts our current broken society.

Which is something the tests will be designed to screen out. If power gives you a fat head then you aren’t going to be seeing very much of it.

My but I’ve had a ‘full day’, sorry for the tardy but it is what it is…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Burn

Greetings good citizen,

While some of you are appalled that the problems of the world CAN’T be solved with a spoonful of sugar. Let me offer the comforting thought that I designed the plan more so with an eye towards what most of you WOULDN’T like done to you rather than the conservo-whacko way which is we’ll do this, this and this…but ONLY to BAD PEOPLE.

Weirdly, everybody can get behind castrating a hypothetical stranger…but it’s not such a good idea anymore when you find YOURSELF on the receiving end of the bargain.

This is why A Simple Plan was designed to be ‘HUMANE’. We don’t ‘execute’, er, those who refuse to live by some pretty basic rules. We merely strip them of their right to live among us.

Not that playing ‘defense’ has helped. You either support the plan (which is holistic, it’s ALL or NOTHING) or you don’t.

If you take nothing away from this web page take that. You can’t ‘cherry-pick’ A Simple Plan and get anything even approaching the correct/workable results.

(And if you want the creator here to guide its implementation, you all had better shake a leg ‘cuz I haven’t got a lot of time left.)

Not much of a sales pitch but it is the truth.

Readership would rapidly dwindle to zero if all I did here was pitch A Simple Plan, I’ve taxed your patience enough.

today’s offering tackles the issue of the ‘dehumanizing’ nature of capitalist society.

The human body, with its need for rest, nutrition and hydration, is such an inefficient tool for capitalist production. But while machines are unlikely to replace human workers anytime soon, new technologies can deftly strip workers of their humanity!

The Irish Independent reports that grocery giant TESCO has strapped electronic armbands to their warehouse workers to measure their productivity, tracking their actions so closely that management knows when they briefly pause to drink from a water fountain or take a bathroom break. These unforgivable lapses in productivity impact workers' performance score, which management then apparently uses to terrify them into working faster.

"The devices give a set amount of time for a task, such as 20 minutes to load packets of soft drinks. If they did it in 20 minutes, they would get 100pc, but would get 200pc if they were twice as fast," writes the Independent. Although TESCO denied that bathroom breaks impact productivity scores, one former staffer the Independent spoke with said he got a "surprisingly lower" score when he took a bathroom break.

"Sometimes, management would call staff to an office and tell them they had to do better if their scores were low."

"I had really easy assignments and when I'd come back after a break, I would get a horrendous score and wonder why," he said.

The rational mind screams ‘how did we come to this?’ While the capitalist sees nothing wrong with ‘squeezing as much value’ as he/she can out of their workers.

What’s ‘wrong’ with this picture is why we do what we do.

We ARE NOT ‘machines’, tied to a specific task for certain number of hours BUT that is how our COLLEGE EDUCATED MORONS are taught to treat us.

When we ‘work for money’ the purpose becomes secondary…despite money being an invention, a tool.

It is tool that is all too commonly abused. More often used as a hammer than a reward.

What do you suppose management’s ‘complaint’ was when the employee took a bathroom break?

You’re costing me MONEY! When the correct employee response would be, ‘I was keeping your floors clean which, overall, saves you money.’

(Get a clue fathead, ALL money is FUNNY!)

Yet we are evicted from our homes and have to subscribe to supplemental nutrition programs for a lack of the ‘funny stuff’!

Which is to point out that our social model is broken and headed for collapse…because the bean-counters have decided to see how far they can ‘push it’.

Weirdly, they are pushing for riots in the street.

What would those charged with ‘protecting us’ from exactly this sort of treatment think if they knew what our self-professed ‘betters’ had in store for them?

You KNOW this ends with cops in body bags (more civilians than cops but still…)
All because ‘stingy’ wants to see how much he/she can get away with (and it secretly ‘tickles them’ to wield this kind of ‘raw power’.)

For some reason they don’t believe ‘The Horror’ lurks just beneath the (mostly placid) surface of a (‘desensitized’) modern civilization.

What do I mean by ‘desensitized’?

Let’s just say ‘mercy’ isn’t one of modern societies strong suits.

They have shown none so they shouldn’t be too surprised when they don’t receive any in return.

Somewhat surreal to frame the coming debacle as similar to admonishing a child not to play with matches.

They do it and they get burned for their…impudence.

How sad is it good citizen that this time they are going to ‘burn’ us all?

Thanks for letting me inside you head,

Gegner

PS: (Seems to be a lot of these recently) I have 'updated' and posted a copy of A Simple Plan on the Civics 202 page , my apologies to all who tried to read a Simple Plan and found that unedited mess! It is unforgivable as well as being fixed.

That's what 'cut & paste' gets you!

Pillar 2

Greetings good citizen,

There were too many competing items for yesterday’s spot and I did what I do ‘best’ (because I do it so often!) I digressed.

So it’s back to our primer on the pillars of A Simple Plan.

The second pillar is Justice, as many of you know (more interestingly, many of you would be content if this single pillar was all there was.

But, and it may be my twisted mind that thinks this way, I don’t think Justice is possible without Equality. Part of the reason I rank Equality number one is everything starts with it.

Seems a bit priggish to talk about equality and justice in a society that has abandoned both but that sinking feeling in your gut is due to angst…

It’s your angst as you watch the society you live in sink into barbarism.

A Simple Plan lays out how to restore the kind of ‘equality’ necessary to get the economy functioning…‘normally’.

It also lays out how to restore the Justice system.

Put on your galoshes good citizen, it’s time to jump down the rabbit hole we call ‘Justice’.

Let’s start with a ‘blanket approach’ and theorize that most of us have an ‘inner sense’ of what justice is and when it is achieved.

Sadly, most of us confuse justice with revenge.

This is where our current justice system has been sabotaged. The jury is ignored and the judge decides guilt, innocence and punishment.

Why does nobody get prosecuted for ‘White Collar Crime’? Because the judge won’t issue a warrant or even an investigation.

Why won’t the judge do this? Because it’s not what they’re paid to do…by their capitalist benefactors that is.

Judgy plays the same game he sees/believes everybody else in his position plays, he does what’s ‘good’ for HIM.

If he fails to investigate (but ‘comes into’ a ‘lucky’ stock pick by turning a ‘blind eye) fair dinkum!
Under A Simple Plan there are no judges. (Besides being nothing to bribe them with, sort of a ‘redundant solution’…)

Does our ‘lack of judges’ automatically fix our justice system?

Of course not…we have the daunting task of redefining the term ‘criminal’ ahead of us.’

Understand good citizen crimes under capitalism are quite different that crime under A Simple Plan.

The capitalist didn’t give a fig for ‘human rights’ where we ‘humanists’ care about them more than we care about MONEY!

Which is to point out another major difference between capitalism and its alternatives. In capitalism almost all crime is money centered, under A Simple Plan most crime will be people centered.

Ironically, theft will remain a huge problem after cash becomes a historic relic.

Then there’s the issue of punishment.

We have witnessed, under capitalism, the escalation of punishment (mostly the elimination of due process and legal protections against torture, preformed ‘unilaterally’ by the One Percent…or as the founders liked to call them the ‘owners’ of the land!

Which is to belabor the obvious, anyone who ‘idolizes’ the ‘founding principles’ of this nation is an elitist pig!

As I have pointed out repeatedly in the past, the central pillar of the US government is this: Let those who OWN the land, RULE the land!

Since you and I weren’t here when these predators were dividing up the nation among themselves, we missed out on our chance to own a ‘voting share’.

Those shares were all gone shortly after the revolution ended. (And continued to be gobbled up by the same people who had helped themselves to the original ‘pie’ when new regions ‘joined’ the Union…)

But I digress.

Which is to point out that the History books tell us one thing while history itself tells us an entirely different story.

SO how do we become the just and humane society we hope to evolve into if we don’t adopt a ‘humane’ system of punishment?

Yes, good citizen Exile was developed as that ‘humane’ system. Often the most fitting punishment is to let the criminal who doesn’t appreciate the rules to live as they wish without those rules.

But we need not let these selfish people disrupt social cohesion with their blatant disregard for the most basic courtesy. Want to behave ‘like an animal’? Then go live with the animals!

Which, unfortunately for you, will be others just like you!

So what will get you exiled? Mostly theft and coercion…although theft is pretty stupid in a society where you can’t sell anything to anybody (because nobody has money they can give YOU…but that doesn’t mean they won’t try!)

The other thing that will get you ‘barred’ from society (and the gene pool) is treason.

Of course, treachery, which is commonplace today, will be illegal under A Simple Plan because treason will be ‘redefined’.

It is common today to ‘mis-represent’ things or situations only to later claim you were ‘mis-understood’.

While sometimes the ‘mis-understanding’ is genuine, other times the ‘fraud’ is intentional.

This willingness to harm others for personal gain is a nasty trait

Will your kids get exiled for YOUR crimes?

Only if they do as you did.

No one would be punished out of hand (or through ‘association’) under a ‘just society’…but if your tend to be ‘twisted’ a certain way then the odds start to tip against you.

Honestly, I think we are all the ‘product’ of the society we were raised in. Raise a child with tolerance and forbearance and you will produce a solid citizen who appreciates AND values the benefits of civil society, not just some of them but ALL of them.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Wildly Optimistic

Greetings good citizen,

I was watching the idiot box by myself last night and what should come on but a show about global warming titled 2100. I am fully aware that the Discovery network is a subsidiary of NewsCorp, so I shouldn’t have been surprised by the amazingly optimistic timeline presented as a ‘worst case scenario.’

Turns out this little ‘made for cable’ pseudo horror show was produced in 2009 in association with ‘Mr. Flat-Earth’ himself (Thomas Friedman, a bonafide >One Percenter.)

The premises put forth were optimistic in the extreme. Fantasies such as commercial air travel (in futuristic jetliners and not dirigibles, which would have been more ‘realistic’) still existing in a post energy scarcity world, a topic which was, for the most part, ignored!

I shouldn’t say that, they did include a mention of gas stations being out of fuel but the knock on effects of this event weren’t factored it.

Oh, the real icing on this fantasy cupcake was that the nation’s most populous city (and the hometown of Mr. Flat Earth) was showcased as a shining example of sustainability!

The (cartoon) buildings all had wind turbines on them and the rooftops all had gardens to sustain the residents below…which is total BS, the numbers don’t work.

Another ‘curious’ feature of this ‘countdown to doomsday’ (after Humanity becomes sustainable it still manages to collapse!) is how the global population keeps dropping as the true bogeyman of global warming and over population is revealed to be water shortages.

Incidents of civil unrest are met with lethal force by the, er, ‘government’…and nobody protests. (Although in the show our protagonist protests a rate hike by the privately owned desalination plant and the people ‘win’…and she meets her future husband…

But again, like most ‘capitalist fairy tales’ this too goes against its own principles!

Anyway, the hero of this epic has a baby girl of her own, which she and protest boy (both allegedly ‘liberal do-gooders’, she’s a nurse and he’s an engineer.) move to NYC to raise…(it’s now around 2040)

This is during this cross-country trek that the energy situation is touched upon, yet they make the trip in a gasoline-powered vehicle!

Oh, and they show gas stations advertising $5 a gallon gasoline…when as soon as this summer we will be hit with pumps that can’t handle the new ten plus dollars a gallon prices.

And if you can’t pay…or worse, how much more ‘irresistible’ will this increase in prices make knocking over convenience stores?

Remember, all crime is ‘cash and carry’!

The same people who can’t afford double-digit gasoline will likely be the ones robbing the place after dark.

The ‘wildcard’ here is next generation ‘gangs’.

Will outlaws start traveling in numbers again?

But this, er, ‘eventuality’ wasn’t explored in last night’s (wildly optimistic) ‘worst case scenario.’

After the sustainable grid fails (inexplicably…well, okay, there is a plague but the assumption that it only kills the people maintaining the equipment is a bit far fetched…(although you can see one of the deep seated fears of the One Percent in this situation.)

The plague won’t get them (or the damn liberals) they’re ‘too good’. It will be their faithful servants who will be struck down by the terrible disease, leaving them helpless and alone in the dark and the cold.

Funny how this whole scenario circles back to the inability of the wealthy ‘to conceive of a society without slaves.’

More ironic is how these worthless creatures will perish without someone to do the heavy lifting for them…

This is how it will end for the champions of the ‘rugged individual’.

But not so for our liberal protagonist! At 75 years old (and recently widowed, her husband dies when the dam he designed fails…) She sets out through the wasteland on foot to find her long lost daughter living in upstate NY.

And like most capitalist ‘feel good’ disaster films, she finds her…and isn’t she widowed too!

I wonder how much of this story Tom’s wife contributed? I’m seeing a pattern here.

So, back to reality…

The ‘slow fizzle’ depicted in this 2009 ‘dramatization’ wasn’t even close to how it will likely go down.

They use the (failed) global warming summit of 2009 as the ‘turning point’ that sets mankind on its path to doom.

Makes you wonder how disappointed the One Percent are that the retail economy collapsed, basically shutting down worldwide consumption?

Somehow the pinheads don’t see this as an ‘opportunity’.

Remember what I keep saying, ALL ECONOMIES ARE LOCAL! Here is the ‘chance’ to rebuild local economies around the globe, considerably lightening their ‘carbon footprint’.

It starts with LOCALLY PRODUCED ‘renewable energy products’. You know the capitalist pinheads want to sell you CHINESE wind turbines and solar collectors…but unemployment is too high!

So the turbines and panels need to be built locally (maybe incorporating A FEW ‘imported parts’) Unfortunately the idiots don’t understand what ‘a few’ means but this can be straightened out at the border, so to speak.

Maybe the capitalist pinheads will figure out that the Chinese need solar panels and wind turbines too…

But for this to work the rest of us need to abandon capitalism and its predatory ways…and we may want to put the boots to communist leaders whose ‘cats don’t hunt’ as well.

Because the worst case is a lot closer and much worse than the >One Percent ‘imagines’ it will be…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Albatross

Greetings good citizen,

Looks like it’s that time again. It’s bad enough that our betters turn a deaf ear to our ‘petty’ (as far as they’re concerned) issues but when they converge on Davos to, er, difficult to find the proper word here…I’m torn between ‘discuss’ and ‘grandstand’ what THEY THINK the world's problems are...and nothing ever comes of it.

Pitiful to consider how ‘out of touch’ the elite are despite these conferences (which are intended to provide ‘the impression’ that they are listening and they care.)

While I have repeatedly accused the global elite of plotting to ‘thin the herd’, I suspect the desire to do so isn’t universal, so we have these conferences where the evil-conniving blend in with the clueless and pretend nothing’s going on.

Some of these powerful people still subscribe to traditional values of customer satisfaction and safe work places…how unfortunate is it for the rest of us that these people are old and on their way out the door?

Let us visit our ‘herald’ to learn what we can of this latest ‘invitation only’ gathering.

DealBook Column

Prophesies Made in Davos Don't Always Come True
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

Many influential people will gather this week at the World Economic Forum to make predictions, and some of them will be right, and some wrong.

And we all know words can sometimes have two meanings…so sometimes what was ‘predicted’ has merely been ‘mis-interpreted’.

And, unsurprisingly, Davos is so popular it has TWO headlines!

DealBook
At Davos, Crisis Is the New Normal
By ALISON SMALE

While global capital remains a driving force of our age, it won't solve big world issues. For those tasks, we must rely either on the nation state or on international institutions whose effectiveness is regularly questioned by the Davos crowd.

Is it from headlines like this that we get the meme that ‘private industry’ would solve ALL of our problems if government would just step out of the way?

Now government is ‘in the pocket’ of private industry and anything even smacking of regulation is nothing more than window dressing, routinely ignored by those ‘in the know’.

Is our civilization ‘functioning perfectly?’

Don’t think so…unless you’re a card-carrying member of the One Percent, then you’d opine things were ‘pretty-good-okay’ (if only for the safety of those you love.)

You gotta love the old ‘go along to get along’ routine. Step out of line and the next thing you know you’re on the outside looking in.

(And it’s cold out here!)

We can only wonder where our intrepid reporter has been, Disaster Capitalism has been all the rage since the Seventies!

Why would she infer that Crisis is the ‘new normal’? (Especially when the vast majority of the ‘crises’ our elite are so focused on are utter fabrications?

Not only do they know why it’s happening but they also know who is responsible!

That pandemic I mentioned yesterday? It won’t be ‘naturally occurring’ in case any of you were wondering…and if we knock around the right heads we could even learn who is behind it!

How many of you would be shocked to learn it was major contributor to the Republican party?

Which is total speculation on my part! I’m just spinning a yarn here and a peasant like myself has no knowledge of what actually goes on ‘behind the scenes’…but I can guess.

Might even call it following a ‘line of logic’ that goes like this: if you’re ‘demented’ enough to fund the party of the One percent it only stands to reason that you’d have an interest in ‘significantly reducing’ the threat posed by ‘the rabble’.

And while showering the rabble with money would accomplish the same goal, for some twisted reason these conspirators would favor a ‘more permanent’ solution.

Talk about ‘unintended consequences’…imagine a plague that wipes out everybody BUT the privileged!

It would be an extinction level event! The pampered few don’t know how to take care of themselves, they’ll be dead in a month! About the same time the lights go off and the phone towers power down.

Worse, planning ISN’T the oligarchs ‘strong suit’. You can bet they have totally ‘overlooked’ this rather obvious aspect of the plan.

While ‘a select few’ could rebuild civilization, most of us wouldn’t know where to begin. Like all puzzles, the pieces are greater than the sum of the parts.

So killing off what these dopes consider to be ‘the useless’ could very well condemn the rest of us to certain death.

We all have our albatrosses, how unfortunate is it that our particular albatross has it in for us?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Trivia!

Greetings good citizen,

Okay, break time’s over. Everybody back your heads!

Taking a day off can be liberating, gives you time to put things into perspective…and a wandering mind like mine is always tilting at windmills…when it isn’t considering some mighty outrageous ‘whys’.

Like how our, er, ‘cleverly designed’ political system doesn’t permit us to alter anything about our life…and this is used to brew contempt, strong and hot, against the opposing political ideology.

When in fact it has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the oligarchy, our supposedly long deposed Kings and Queens!

"What are our leaders doing?" Isn’t an unfair question. We are living in a world being devastated by climate change while our civilization’s ‘founding premise’ (cheap and abundant energy) races towards exhaustion.

And our politicians are locked in mortal ideological battle, will the Democrats and their wishful half-measures restore prosperity or will (more) Republican tax cuts (for those who need them least) do the job?

Because we all know the answer is neither.

The ONLY thing that will restore ‘viability’ to our civilization is a radical shift away from the predatory mis-management of what remains.

You had best believe good citizen that the clock is ticking

George Orwell argued that pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible. I found that whether or not we believe we can change the world, even in a small way, acting as if we can is the healthiest emotional stance to take in the face of injustice and destruction.

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"He who fights the future has a dangerous enemy," said Søren Kierkegaard. Life is stressful. We think something is wrong with us, but the problems are endemic and systemic. As a people, we've lost our grounding in deep time and in our place. At root, our problems are relationship problems. We have a disordered relationship with the web of life.

Right now, the more we connect the dots between events, the more frightened we become. This reminds me of a night I slept in a tent with three of my grandchildren. Kate was 6, Aidan was 4, and Claire was 2. Claire and Aidan were blissfully happy. They snuggled and listened to the sounds of the cicadas and night birds. Meanwhile, Kate kept telling me she was scared and that she wanted to sleep in the house. Stupidly, I chided her for her fears. I asked, "Kate, you are the big sister and the oldest. Why can't you be as brave as your sister and brother?" She wailed, "Nonna, they're little. They don't know enough to be scared!"

These days, I often feel like Kate did that night. I know too much about deforestation, nuclear power plants, our tainted food supply, and our collapsing fisheries. Sometimes I wish I didn't know all these things. But if we adults don't face and come to grips with our current reality, who will?

Personally, this now ancient theme of ‘Grandma has a wake up call’ is getting more than a little thin.

But it does highlight an interesting point. Why do we ignore the obvious and not object when we are misdirected with the trivial?

Who gives a crap about gays marrying one another? Let ‘em, it’s not the sort of thing our legislators should be wasting their time on.

Except…the pinheaded ‘job creators’ don’t want to give these people the same ‘benefits’ that they increasingly aren’t giving their, er, ‘straight’ employees.

Remember good citizen, at the end of the day ALL MONEY IS FUNNY!

This screaming about ‘the cost’ is BULLSHIT! Just as it is proving out that austerity measures actually do more harm than good.

It is also becoming obvious that income inequality is caustic to civilization as well…as we watch whole segments of our society crumble.

Keep the, er, ‘uncertain’ value of money in mind good citizen as we take a moment to explore why the US has the LARGEST CRIMINAL POPULATION ON THE PLANET!

This is the sort of bullshit that happens when an entire civilization is ‘managed’ for the benefit of a few…

Most of you are aware that it cost a solid, er, ‘middle class income’ (twice as much as the average working class person earns per year) to incarcerate anyone, per year.

One percent of this nation’s population is behind bars and more than half of them are there on ‘drug related’ charges.

Wouldn’t it be ‘more intelligent’ to ‘manage’ this problem rather than foolishly pretending that prohibition works?

I am fully aware that the ‘for profit’ prison industry is a premier ‘conservo-whacko job creation program’ writ large…

And I have already pointed to the ‘correlation’ between conservatism and dope (which oddly, explains much!)

Don’t even get me started on the population explosion that the oligarchs like to pretend isn’t happening…because the more of us there are, the more likely it is that we will kill one another off.

That’s the ‘truth’ behind the push to reverse Roe v. Wade. ‘Let ‘em drown in their own cesspool’.

How retarded is it to think their mercenaries can/will protect them when that cesspool bursts…

It won’t be just OUR money that goes bad when the bottom drops out.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Change

Greetings good citizen,

Stock markets around the globe traded sideways today as the markets once again showed a definite ‘lack of direction’.

I’m currently reading Michael Lewis’ book titled ‘Panic’ and it sort of hit me between the eyes how the stock market went from right around a thousand to the current thirteen thousand figure around the same time the US’s manufacturing capability was being off-shored wholesale.

Which is to point out that the stock market is basically one gigantic fraud and the Justice Department simply pretends it isn’t happening.

Which is disturbing enough but now the Justice Department is ignoring other, more troubling things and once again, there isn’t anything we can (legally) do about it.

Talk about your timelines. When I was dating my wife the Dow had just breached the 2000 level. I just recently celebrated my 22nd Wedding anniversary and not so terribly long ago the stock market was only two thousand points.

Since that time my entire career ‘disappeared’ from these shores. Sure, there are still some small shops out there (cutting each other’s throats for what little work is left.)

And for some bizarre reason the stock market, with record unemployment and the lowest labor participation rate since WWII, is over thirteen thousand points.

And it rose 225 of those points last Friday when the Fed announced another trillion-dollar giveaway program that is going ONLY to the too big to fail banks.

FOR THE THIRD TIME (since our financial markets went insolvent.)

And the pundits can’t figure out why the recovery is essentially non-existent.

I mean they’re pumping trillions of dollars into the coffers of people who already have more money than they can possibly spend. Raising the question of ‘why’ the One Percent’s government is giving the already super rich even more money when a full half of our nation’s population doesn’t earn enough to feed themselves!

Well good citizen, every coin has two sides and here’s one of them!

Unemployment is still above 8 percent, job gains aren’t even keeping up with population growth, the economy is barely moving forward. And yet, according to most polls, the Romney-Ryan ticket is falling further and further behind. How can this be?

Because Republicans are failing the central test of electability. Instead of putting together the largest possible coalition of voters, they’re relying largely on one slice of America — middle-aged white men — and alienating just about everyone else.

Start with Hispanics, whose electoral heft keeps growing as they become an ever-larger portion of the electorate. Hispanics now favor President Obama over Romney-Ryan by a larger margin than they did six months ago.

YOU’D THINK Mr. Reich has a damn good point, wouldn’t you?

After this latest fiasco they’re saying Mitt’s own father wouldn’t vote for him…but that doesn’t matter.

In fact, even if NOBODY voted for them the ‘Gruesome Twosome’ will be our next commander in Chief and trusty side-kick.

Because the ballot box is broken.

Sure, it wouldn’t ‘hurt’ the oligarchs to let their other boy win again. Hell, he’s obedient enough.

But the agenda isn’t moving forward fast enough and the shit is almost ready to hit the fan!

They don’t care if coming events make Republican’s look bad, they’ll never have to hold fake elections again.

If they are going to cement the yoke of monarchy around our waiting necks they’re going to have to be quick about it.

As well as brutal.

They have to let the public know that ‘justice’ has returned to the land and that their newly minted royals are dispensing justice.

But understand good citizen, the sudden interest in prosecuting criminals won’t be ‘retro-active’, it will be ‘pro-active’…basically exterminating anyone who MIGHT object to the restoration of god given leadership.

I’m sure you all know that the kings of old were all appointed by God. It’s part of the reason the original royals inter-married with one another extensively…in (stupid) attempts to keep ‘the lord’s bloodline’ ‘pure’…

Always trying to strengthen the claim to the throne…although all of this in-breeding did little to improve the quality of leadership those Chosen by God provided.

And here we can see the seeds of animosity that were harbored by God’s appointees against God’s chosen people.

Again, the reason for this is simple. They don’t want you to think they want you to accept…

It doesn’t matter if it’s ‘good for you’, you’re missing the point. It’s GOOD FOR THEM, that’s what matters!

Worse…after the shiny newness wears off they’ll get tired of all of the intrigue that will return with a vengeance.

It seems nobody remembers why the Kings of Old (willingly) walked off of their thrones and ducked safely inside their treasuries.

It’s because they were sick to death of always being the ‘target’. If this one wasn’t trying to kill you, his brother was.

And the ones that didn’t want you dead were perpetually trying to crawl into bed with you.

How’s that for some gruesome choices?

Again I close with the question of ‘is this how you want it to end, good citizen?

Of course you don’t, that’s why you need to get behind A Simple Plan, ASAP!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner