3 ' Fer

Greetings good citizen,

Happy weekend to you! Today’s three offerings are all from this morning’s edition of Alternet, those closeted Libertarians pretending to be Democrats.

Um, I have long opined in these posts that our, er, ‘understanding’ of economics is both deeply flawed and (purposefully) incomplete.

You, the average individual, are provided with the most basic of equations, you work you eat…and if you don’t eat everything you make then maybe you can buy yourself a toy or two!

That’s economics 101 for the average dope.

That’s all the employer commits to these days, you’ll be paid enough to buy food to keep you alive so you can come to work tomorrow.

So the rest of this bullshit is just so much hocus pocus

Nearly everything economists do is based on some model. For example, the famous story that prices are determined by supply and demand is a model. Consider the price of oil. On the one hand, there is supposed to be an upward-sloping “supply curve”: the higher the price of oil rises, the more oil producers want to pump. This curve is an imaginary construct intended to describe the different amounts of oil that producers would pump at any given time, if oil prices were at different levels.

On the other hand, there is supposed to be a downward-sloping “demand curve”: the lower the price of oil falls, the more businesses and consumers want to buy. This curve is likewise an imaginary construct intended to describe the different amounts of oil that consumers and businesses would buy at any given time prices were at different levels. The point where the imaginary curves intersect—where the price is such that the amount of oil producers would pump just equals the amount of oil businesses and
consumers would buy—is supposed to determine the actual price of crude oil and the amount of oil that is pumped.

All we ever see is the point where the imaginary curves are supposed to intersect: the actual oil price. Nobody has ever seen supply or demand curves; they are models. They can be useful, but should not be mistaken for a literal picture of reality. If you trace, over time, the movement of actual gasoline prices versus consumption, you see loops and zigs and zags that don’t look anything like imagined supply and demand curves.

Take a good look at today’s gasoline prices. It’s almost $4 a gallon and the price of a barrel of oil is less than it was when gas cost $3.30 a gallon!

Now the liars on Wall Street say that the refinery in CA that went offline is squeezing capacity and causing prices to rise…

Did you know that the refinery in CA distills gasoline for CALIFORNIA ONLY?

I can appreciate the (alleged) refinery outage in the Golden State has to be made up somewhere else but it doesn’t explain why a new refinery hasn't been built in this country since the Bicentennial! (1976)

Um, did I mention that our civilization is BADLY MISMANAGED?

Let’s roll around the idea that there’s no place to invest any more as we contemplate our crumbling infrastructure.

Why do investors no longer desire to invest in America?

Hold that thought because this isn’t the time for that particular question, although our next topic is also one of neglect:

It’s just astonishing to us how long this campaign has gone on with no discussion of what’s happening to poor people. Official Washington continues to see poverty with tunnel vision – “out of sight, out of mind.”

And we’re not speaking just of Paul Ryan and his Draconian budget plan or Mitt Romney and their fellow Republicans. Tipping their hats to America’s impoverished while themselves seeking handouts from billionaires and corporations is a bad habit that includes President Obama, who of all people should know better.

Remember: for three years in the 1980’s he was a community organizer in Roseland, one of the worst, most poverty-stricken and despair-driven neighborhoods in Chicago. He called it “the best education I ever had” and when Obama left to go to Harvard Law School, author Paul Tough writes in The New York Times, he did so, “to gain the knowledge and resources that would allow him to eventually return and tackle the neighborhood’s problems anew.” There’s a moving line in Dreams from My Father where he writes: “I would learn power’s currency in all its intricacy and detail” and “bring it back like Promethean fire.”

Oddly, though, for all his rhetorical skills Obama hasn’t made a single speech devoted to poverty since he moved into the White House.

We see things like this and we can only wonder, is the man that tone deaf that he doesn’t remember who put him in the White House or is this and example of being so tightly muzzled that he CAN'T point out his handler’s ‘shortcomings’?

Um, if I’m right, ‘We the People’ DIDN’T put this sorry excuse for a Democrat in the Oval Office, the > One Percent did!

Thus does the ‘meat puppet’ make serious gaffes nearly as comical as the ‘legitimate rape’ mis-step made by the Missouri Senate hopeful.

So fearful are they of the public’s wrath that they don’t permit their own ‘meat puppet' to behave the way he should.

Perhaps Mr. Obama is refusing to ‘play the game’ because it is the only option open to him.

It will be curious indeed to see if he changes his tune now that this glaring oversight has been made public?

Understand good citizen, MOST US citizens are ‘poor’, you just won’t find that many who are willing to admit it!

Not only are forty plus percent of US households on some kind of federal ‘food assistance program’ (the only thing staving off a full out revolution!) but MILLIONS of US citizens have ‘food assistance’ as their ONLY source of income!

And yet the poor aren’t even mentioned by either candidate…

Must not ‘need’ their vote…

Which begs the question does it have to be this way?

Earlier this summer we explored some things we could do as a nation to improve work-life balance, from the basic (paid sick leave, anyone?) to the truly innovative. This time, we're looking around the world: which countries fare better than ours in helping citizens survive without working themselves to death?

Of course, it’s hard not to respond to this question: “hmmm anywhere without child labor and a two-day weekend!” After all, not only do we rank among the worst in terms of paid leave for parents or family sickness and have zero mandatory vacation hours, Americans often don’t even take the vacation we’ve got!

Again our Libertarian leaning buddies want you to believe/ignore the deep schisms capitalism has left upon the world.

Paid sick leave (something you only get if you have a government job these days…or if you’re in management.)

Once upon a time even ‘Joe the Plumber’s’ boss offered paid sick leave because it was hard to attract workers if you didn’t offer benefits they could get with a ‘factory job’.

Now there are no factories…

No (soul-sucking) factory jobs means no benefits.

Now you work you eat…and if you don’t spend everything you make on food, maybe you can afford to buy yourself a couple of toys…

But hey, the Libbies are cool with that. If you don’t ‘own’ then you don’t deserve nothing.

But riddle me this Libbie baby, How do you get ahead if you can’t get a break?

Short answer, you don’t!

Sort of along the lines of ‘the world needs ditch diggers too!’ (Back in the day when such labor-intensive work was done by hand…now, not so much!)

But I digress…the last article’s point is other countries can do it which means we can too.

Ironically, our lives would much better just by reshuffling the deck a little bit.

Otherwise it’s ‘eat the rich’ because if you get hungry enough, ‘what you eat’ matters less and less.

Three rather thought provoking ‘topics’, the pieces themselves are worthless.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Sympathy for the Devil

Greetings good citizen,

Must be ‘one of those days’. In what I would call a major gaffe, (You will never read one of my pieces where I refer to our species as ‘animals’…inferring, as in this case, that they are ‘mindless and needy’.)

Yet from the headlines of today’s NY Times we have this:

QUOTATION OF THE DAY
"As human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache."
TERRY GOU, chairman of Foxconn, which has more than a million employees worldwide but is using a growing number of robots.

Speaking of which:

The iEconomy
Skilled Work, Without the Worker
By JOHN MARKOFF

Robots far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other industries are replacing workers in both manufacturing and distribution.

I am sore tempted to type this in ‘caps lock’, the writer’s version of screaming but I’m going to ask you to simply imagine that I’m ‘screaming’ until I say otherwise:

[Scream on]

Hello, is anybody fucking home? This is what I mean when I say these assholes are blind as well as Deaf!

How much luck do you think Sparky would have selling his worthless bullshit to his fucking robots?

Because when it’s all said and done, that’s what’s left of the ‘paying economy’.

Who is raising these freakazoid capitalists to believe that money grows on trees and comes for divine entities that don’t need an income source?

Because there’s a name for this phenomenon, it’s called ‘counterfeiting’.

Not wanting employees is the same thing as saying ‘I don’t want customers’.

Hello?

Did I forget to mention the close correlation between workers and commerce? Without workers there is no commerce (because you have eliminated the ‘paying customer’.)

Somebody remind me why we let these morons manage our affairs? (WTF!)

[Scream-off/Rant-on]

Perfect fucking timing, just received a phone call to verify that I received a pledge card for the Cancer Society…is THIS how they’re spending my donation? Even if we assume the sweet person on the phone was doing it out of the ‘goodness of her heart’, the phone call itself came from Michigan and must have cost a chunk of change as I live next to the frigid North Atlantic.

Again WTF!

Eliminating real jobs through automation to create, er, ‘idiot jobs’ like the phone call I just received is not the path to universal prosperity we so desperately need to switch to.

Note I do not say we need to ‘find the path’ to prosperity, it’s already right there before us…we need to step onto it but first we have to eliminate the greed heads blocking the way.

Have I mentioned lately that our civilization is severely ‘mismanaged’…although this has been true for time out of mind.

People just don’t ‘get’ the whole ‘money thing’.

Examples like the one above happen when the object of doing a given task is reduced to its monetary terms.

MONEY IS NOTHING!

IT IS NOT AND CANNOT BE 'THE GOAL', yet our entire economic system is based on the opposite belief, that money is the 'be all, end all.'

If capturing large amounts of our ‘medium of exchange’ is all it took to achieve success, why not just run the printing presses until everybody had pockets overflowing with MONEY?

Is it because once you do something like that the whole ‘incentive to work’ flies out the window?

Giving money away destroys it.

Sucking all of the money out of the ‘bottom of society’ destroys civilization…and will destroy our species.

Which has no rational reason for happening save an elite group trying to destroy the government and its monopoly on the law.

There is one theory that explains this irrational behavior…and that’s so far off the reservation I refuse to go there, even if it’s true!

Unfortunately, good citizen, the more [evidence] I see, the clearer that one possibility becomes.

So as you lay your ‘little animals’ down to sleep, remember what their future employers regard them as.

I can only pray your mind rebels at the prospect.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

The Former number 2...

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are once again ‘cliff-diving’ as jaw-boning a global recovery becomes less and less effective…a tactic that continues to be proven wrong at every juncture and by every measure.

When ‘improvement’ is seen it has proven to be both miniscule and massaged…which is to say it is ‘statistically indistinguishable’ from the margin of error in the reported data.

Which usually turns out to have been ‘wildly optimistic’ when it is examined again later.

But hey, what’s happening doesn’t matter, it’s what YOU BELIEVE that matters.

Well, every once in a while things pop up to remind us that the world’s second largest economy tanked over two decades ago (due to globalization) and has yet to recover.

The preliminary estimate for the three months through June is sharply lower than the revised 5.5 percent annual rate of gross domestic product growth in the first quarter. The second-quarter figure fell short of the median forecast of 2.3 percent among 24 economists surveyed by Bloomberg News, and it signaled that the recovery after the earthquake and tsunami of last year might be stalling.

The slowdown has also highlighted economic worries just days after Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda won his bid to double the Japanese sales tax to tackle swelling public debt, with the upper house of Parliament passing the increase Friday. The last sales tax increase, in 1997, snuffed out any hope of a strong recovery from the Japanese banking crisis of the 1990s, and opponents of Mr. Noda have warned that the latest increase in the tax could lead to a similar slowdown.

At a board meeting last week, the Bank of Japan held back from easing monetary policy, saying that reconstruction demand in the wake of the tsunami was continuing to drive economic growth. But the central bank cut its outlook for exports and output, citing global economic risks, and it signaled that it was ready to expand stimulus again if needed.

Do we really need to play ‘Mirror, mirror’ here? Aren’t we headed down the very same ‘primrose path’ Japan was forced down more than twenty years ago?

Which begs the question of, ‘was Japan the ‘dry run’ for what the oligarchs eventually DID to the US?’

National ‘economic suicide’ through financial fraud.

Ironically, Japan’s banking sector problems are being blamed on ‘Organized Crime’.

Worse good citizen, take a drive down any US highway and what do you see? Toyota’s and Hondas, all being driven by unemployed Americans!

What does this tell you good citizen?

That SOMEBODY in Japan is still raking in the big bucks…but all of those ‘profits’ are going into the pockets of a decidedly corrupt banking sector.

I know you were thinking something different and you’re right, but that’s not the point I am attempting to make.

The ‘focus’ here is on the ‘global’ > One Percent.

Which I’d like to think I’ve made it pretty clear the problems our civilization is faced with are ‘global’ in nature…meaning the perps are operating on a global basis.

So when I comment that ‘the destruction of our civilization proceeds apace, I’m not just talking about the USA, I’m talking EVERYWHERE!

You might want to ‘test drive’ the idea of a ‘global monarchy’ in your head (as reprehensible as that idea is) for a while so you aren’t totally blind-sided when they, er, ‘coronate’ the new King and Queen of the planet!

(It’s either that or we go ALL ‘Orwell’ and find ourselves divided into perpetually warring factions with the ‘third’ party alternating between the role of ally and enemy, meaning you can never completely trust them.)

For the second time I emphasize the point: Reality doesn’t matter, it’s what you BELIEVE that counts!

And the bought and paid for corporate owned media regularly fill YOUR noggin with shit pudding, occasionally swapping the cherry on top with a different variety of turd.

Worse, good citizen…the media keeps on (subtly) blaming YOU for not acting when you actually never had the opportunity to act!

After convincing you that 20% is somehow 50%, it is the ‘unknown’ whackos out there who keep voting against what’s ‘good for the country’.

This is how they’re going to sell the Romney/Ryan ticket to you…that there are more whacko Tea Partiers out there than you know!

Mind you they could only account for 30,000 of ‘em at the peak of their popularity but you’re gonna be told that they ‘carried’ the election for a >One Percent ‘underdog’…

And it’s a meaningless question to ask ‘how stupid do they think we are’ if you continue to do nothing about it?

Look at everything they’ve gotten away with to date:

They have effectively ‘ended’ welfare.

The have exported our manufacturing sector.

They have provided aid and material comfort to our enemies (and profited mightily in the exchange.)

The have cheated tens of millions out of their retirement funds. They literally bankrupted the global financial network…and nobody has been prosecuted.

So maybe it’s time to step back for a moment and look at what happened to the world’s ‘second largest economy’ and think about ‘why’ it happened?

You don’t suppose there was a little ‘criminal element’ involved, do you?

Just keep standing there, the boys will be along in a little while to fit you with your new cement overshoes.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Crap, Crud and Corrosion!

Greetings good citizen,

Today went right out the window as everything took ‘longer than anticipated’. I’m zonked and barely lucid, haven’t taken my meds and should probably do that before something bad happens.

Alrighty then, where were we?

The day is done instead of just beginning so I can say with confidence that the destruction of our civilization/culture is proceeding ‘on schedule’.

Which brings us to the first headline in this afternoon’s business section of the NY Times:

Record Penalties for Fraud, Few Charges for Executives
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and EDWARD WYATT 1:33 PM ET

Settlements for defrauding the government are on track to reach $8 billion this year, but relatively few executives are being charged at the companies getting the penalties.

We can only marvel over the leveling of charges but the utter lack of prosecutions. Crimes have definitely been committed but NOBODY actually committed them so nobody is being prosecuted.

Like fining somebody’s ‘funny money’ is ‘punishment enough’. Like they won’t just go ahead and ‘steal/print’ more…

But that’s okay because they think we’re stupid…

.
‘Les Riches’ in France Vow to Leave if 75% Tax Rate Is Passed
By LIZ ALDERMAN 2:37 PM ET

President François Hollande’s call to raise the tax rate on France’s wealthiest citizens to 75 percent has some considering a move to Brussels or London.

Excuse me? Are they any truly wealthy people living outside the numerous tax havens they have so painstakingly set up around the globe?

Because if they are then they aren’t really ‘rich’…they’re ‘Joe the Plumber’ rich…[AFTER he buys the company and gets his plumber’s license…]

Aren’t you kind of amazed that Mitt hasn’t dug up his own tax defying patriot like Waldo the Drug mule or some other soon to join the ranks of the uber wealthy wanna be?

Ya think good ‘ol Joe blew up in McCain’s face?

No worse than his choosing ‘you betcha!’ Sarah for a running mate…

Just to remind you of what kind of farce our political system has devolved into.

Speaking of farces:

Company Earnings Drive Shares Higher
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 4:10 PM ET

The focus of investors is once again turning primarily to the health of American corporations.

Considering how the US consumer is defunct, we can only marvel over the ‘creative accounting’ that is producing robust sales from non-existent customers.

It was recently found that most sales data reported to Wall Street is fraudulent.

Yet every once in a while the truth manages to wiggle free and wave it’s tiny pinky at us:

Euro Watch
Economy Slumps in Italy and Germany
By DAVID JOLLY

Italy’s economy shrank again in the second quarter, official data showed, and orders for German machinery declined sharply.

Uh, did I mention that the average European customer is just as broke as his US counterpart?

Left to our imagination is the question of what’s left of the Italian economy these days?

Wine and olive oil...?

And naturally there’s no need for German machinery if people aren’t buying what that machinery produces…regardless of how cheap they make it.

And the beat goes on:

Shares of Standard Chartered Slide Amid Money Laundering Inquiry
By MARK SCOTT 2:35 PM ET

Shares of the British bank tumbled on Tuesday as investors reacted to accusations that the firm schemed with the Iranian government for nearly a decade to launder $250 billion.

Regulator Says British Bank Helped Iran Hide Deals

Oh my head…

Can you believe it…more corruption in the financial markets?

Can you keep a secret good citizen?

The whole fucking financial system is corrupt! This whole ‘cheaper there bullshit is an ‘invention’ of ‘Wall Street’ et all.

So if you go looking for corruption in the financial markets, don’t be shocked when you find it…everywhere!

Pfizer Settles U.S. Charges of Overseas Bribery
By KATIE THOMAS 1:30 PM ET

The pharmaceutical company and a subsidiary will pay a total of $60 million to resolve accusations that it paid doctors in several countries to prescribe its drugs.

Did I point my finger at the financial sector and leave you thinking Healthcare/Pharmaceutical was squeaky clean?

Well, shame on me! How horrible of me to leave that door open and give you the wrong impression.

Let me just close that little loophole by adding that capitalism is corrupt, through and through.

If it is run by capitalists it is corrupt without question.

But you KNEW that…

What’s it going to take to reverse course and get back on the right track?

I’d say we need some courage and a healthy dollop of intestinal fortitude…just for starters.

Thanks for letting me inside your head.

Gegner

Pigs & Ducks III

Greetings good citizen,

News of the collapse of our civilization has now reached the corporate owned media, just to give you an idea of how far gone the situation is.

Observe this headline plucked from this morning’s business section:

Economic Scene
The Spreading Scourge of Corporate Corruption
By EDUARDO PORTER

The misconduct of the financial industry no longer surprises most Americans, and trust in big business overall is declining. We should be alarmed.

DealBook: Assessing the Chances for Criminal Charges

“Eddie” is correct, you’d have to search far and wide to find someone this news, er, ‘shocks’.

We’re all used to it by now.

Worse, we also read what the ‘infamous they’ are prepared to do about it if any of us should call them on their decidedly criminal behavior.

Don’t gather in large ‘unarmed’ groups, you’re just making it easier for the Drones.

We all know our ‘civil disobedience’ will be punished far more severely than how their criminal actions will be dealt with…

Which brings us to the last line in today’s offering.

What do you think the chances are of ‘justice’ being done?

The consensus is ‘slim to none’.

All the have to do is claim ‘everybody is doing it’ and they’ll get off with a slap on the wrist and a chicken feed sized fine.

That’s what blows most people’s mind…who said Crime doesn’t pay? Steal a billion and they ‘fine’ you a couple of million! (But you get to keep the billion…and you ‘walk’!)

WTF!

Um, good thing there aren’t billions just laying around waiting to be stolen or everybody would be doing it!

Sure beats the bag out of busting your ass every day for a paycheck you can’t live on!

But stealing billions isn’t an ‘everyman’ sort of crime, is it?

You need to be born into that kind of money, Making the crime that much more heinous.

Bobo is already ‘rich’ (comparatively speaking) but he’s ‘light-fingered’ anyway.

What do you do with a wealthy criminal?

I recommend (public) hanging but hey, I’m not a judge.

They used to hang criminals publicly for its ‘deterrent’ value…although I doubt it actually entered the criminal’s mind that THEY’D ever get caught (especially the ‘privileged criminal’.)

All they have to do is whisper the magic word and all charges against them are ‘dropped’, hell, go high enough and all traces that they were even suspected of a crime vanish as well.

But that’s not how it works for YOU.

If they want you bad enough (depending on how desperate they are for a scapegoat) you’re going down even if you’ve never stolen so much as a paperclip in your entire life!

Given those two ‘constants’ good citizen, what do you suppose the prospects are that anyone will be ‘prosecuted’ for robbing investors?

Isn’t the first test ‘how can they tell?’

Of course I am referring to how there is no ‘rational basis’ for determining the value of a given stock…but if we take that to the next level there also isn’t a rational basis for determining the value of money either!

It’s all a matter of ‘opinion’.

And somehow the opinion of the weirdo has prevailed lately.

Which is why nobody is ‘surprised’ that our entire system of commerce is ‘untrustworthy’.

But fear not good citizen, barter is making a strong come back!

Soon you will be able to trade ‘directly’ for your wants and needs, so you’ll know right then and there EXACTLY what you’ve got.

If you have nothing of ‘value’ to trade then you won’t be able to buy or sell.

And that’s going to kick the shit out of the ‘fuck you, pay me’ supply line.

They won’t be able to ‘re-supply’ if they are unable to pay for their inputs ‘in kind’.

When the bottom falls out beneath money it will be because of its original failing…nobody knows the answer to the question of how many ducks equal a pig…or how many pigs equal a duck (If the pigs are small and the ducks are large!)

Leading us back to our original conundrum.

If a pig is a pig and a duck is a duck then why isn’t a buck a buck?

(Because bankers are corrupt…)

Thanks for letting me insider your head,

Gegner

All Opposed

Greetings good citizen,

After a butt-kickin’ Friday the markets lack the confidence to advance even further…but, equally as interesting, they haven’t ‘cashed in’ on Friday’s irrational run up either.

Ironically, it’s all the same to the ‘paper rich’ but for the rest of us it is not so much

Across America, freaked-out employees are coping with sweat-drenched nights and heart-pounding days. They’re reaching for the Xanax and piling on the work of two or three people. They’re running the risk of short-term collapse and long-term disease.

The hell created by three grinding years of 8 percent-plus unemployment brings us plenty of stories of what people suffer when they lose their jobs. But what about the untold millions who live in chronic fear that tomorrow’s paycheck will be their last?

Research shows that the purgatory of job insecurity may be even worse for you than unemployment. And it's turning the American Dream into a sleepwalking nightmare. From young temporary workers to middle-aged career veterans, Americans are being pushed to their physical and psychological limits in what has the makings of a major national public health crisis.

Those of us who, er, ‘depend’ on what could kindly be termed as (in conservo-speak) ‘the kindness of strangers’ often find themselves deeply concerned about the stranger deciding they no longer need our services.

Just ask any of the TENS OF MILLIONS of ‘homeless’ out there what happens when the ‘stranger’ no longer requires your particular ‘expertise’…

And trust me good citizen, homelessness is just the beginning!

Let us, if you will, ‘marry’ the onus of being unable to support yourself (or your family) with the totally counter-intuitive meme that the conservatives keep on winning

Have you ever wondered why it is that Progressives repeatedly lose ground in American politics? We almost always have the facts on our side. The experts agree with us. Hell, a lot of us are the experts. And yet history clearly shows that Conservatives have the best political game in town. They dominate political discourse, establishing which frames shape the most important issues of the day. Their values associated with rugged individualism, mass consumption, and a contempt for civil society are blasted at the American public through massive media outlets that they have acquired and built up over the last several decades. And when the global economy melts down as a direct result of their economic and fiscal policies, who gets blamed? In a word, liberals.

What’s going on here? Why is it that Conservatives are so good at winning and Progressives produce a lackluster resistance at best? The answer comes from a fundamental insight from evolutionary biology. Stated simply, it goes like this:

When two groups compete, the one with the most social cohesion wins in the long run.

This insight arises from research on group selection that reveals how social animals capable of working as a team readily out compete those individuals who must struggle on their own. The astute observer will already note the profound irony here — a political group whose ideology elevates the individual over the group (Conservatives) has managed to cultivate more group cohesion than the political group whose ideology blends community well-being with that of the individual. I’ll come back to this irony in a moment.

Because the ‘minority’ party of the >One Percent happens to OWN the fucking media, it is the ONLY reason we are told (ceaselessly) that our nation is ‘divided’.

And it is ‘divided’…80-20.

Yes, good citizen, a full 19+ percent of the population ‘mis-identifies’ itself as being part of the > One Percent.

So where do these turkeys get off telling the rest of us that a full half of us support what amounts to economic suicide?

Because they can.

Impossible? You can bet the Germans thought so too.

Look at what the Nazis regularly got away with right under the average German citizen’s nose and compare it to what our current government is pulling now.

Extra-judicial murder, concentration camps, disappearances…under these circumstances, good citizen, no-one is ‘safe’.

But our second article makes a very succinct point, the, er, ‘alleged opposition’ can’t seem to actually oppose any of these things.

Which tells us what, good citizen?

That there is no genuine ‘opposition’ to the criminal regime that has taken over this nation’s (nuclear armed) government.

More disturbing is the fact that the US is the largest nuclear power in the world…(not that ‘overkill’ means much once the damn button is pushed.)

We can only wonder to what extent the US nuclear arsenal was used to ‘extort’ the governments of the rest of the world into ‘compliance’ with the capitalist agenda?

Sort of brings to mind the old saw about being careful of what one wishes for…because you just might get it.

The greed-heads wished for universal capitalism and destroyed the global economy in the process, now the myopic bastards have no clue how to fix the disaster they created.

Nor are they willing to surrender any of their ill-gotten gains…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

One Thousand!

Greetings good citizen,

Welcome to the one thousandth post of A Simple Plan! Truth be told I haven’t been keeping track. Blogger tells me when this one hits the net; it will be labeled as post number one thousand.

So whoop de do, good citizen!

And I suppose one thousand posts would be as good a time as any to restate the reason why this blog even exists.

Regular readers may remember me from the original blogger, which, back then, billed itself as a ‘get paid to write site’ based on the popularity of what you wrote. I didn’t go by my current handle then but I’m still pedaling the same ‘ideology’ I was then. So we’re talking the mid-nineties.

Which is to point out that there are a lot more than a thousand posts possibly triple that amount, maybe more.

Like I said, I’m not keeping track.

Posted on Daily Kos for a couple of years before the Libertarians chased me off in that heavily polluted pool, then I joined Conceptual Guerilla and stayed there for about three years.

For the record there is no ‘bad blood’ between Joe and me, he told me he wanted to take the site in a different direction and I respected his request, stopped posting there and started posting here, end of story.

Which brings us back to today and the 1,000th post here.

Same shit, different venue.

But, naturally, (and for me it appears to be consistent thing) I digress…

I was going to explain ‘why’ (my reason) this blog exists, what makes Gegner write?

Um, to say I was born ‘disadvantaged’ would be both an understatement and an exaggeration.

I was never hungry or naked. In this respect I am MUCH ‘luckier’ than my ‘third world’ counterparts who were born (and died) in war torn hellholes where they never stood a chance.

But I found myself at the bottom of the food chain, born to a crippled and uneducated father who had no ‘trade’ to pass on to me.
Ironically, since my ‘trade’ got off-shored, I have nothing to pass on to my son either, an outcome that I find, er, ‘worrisome’.

But it’s not just MY kid who will find himself behind the eight ball when he graduates High School in a couple of years, he’ll have plenty of company.

So this is not a ‘woe is me’ platform where I cry foul for the advantages I never enjoyed because that’s not the point.

This post (and the multitude before it) exists to prove the meme of ‘there’s nothing out there better than capitalism’ is a boldfaced lie!

But is it a lie if you can’t prove there IS a ‘better way?’

Some would say A Simple Plan is ‘unprecedented’ and therefore, ‘unproven’. I would counter that the Native Americans lived under something very close to A Simple Plan and their society flourished for centuries longer than any European civilization ever did!

Um, the more astute would ask how lucky I am to arrive on the scene just as Capitalism enters its death throes?

As you have seen repeated here countless times, nobody can survive in an ‘economic desert’ and capitalism has turn the whole world into a gigantic one with only sporadic oases of wealth scattered around the globe.

It really does boil down to the question of whether civilization exists to help all humans prosper or if it exists to make a few humans wildly prosperous?

We know how things have turned out but we also know this isn’t ‘as advertised’.

Worse, we continue to believe that ‘someday’ it will be ‘our turn’ to live in the big house and play with all of the ‘toys’ until we die…

As irrational as that ‘belief’ is.

Since this model is ‘unsustainable’ it will invariably collapse, and what is poised to replace it, so far, ain’t looking to, er, ‘equitable’.

Part of my ‘goal’ is to point the way to a more equitable future. The rest is centered on raising awareness of the eminent failure of the lifestyle we have all become accustomed to.

The ones who have buttered their bread on both sides are expecting a reasonably smooth transition from their self-destructing ‘free-state’ to the all-powerful slave state.

Which should explain why our bought and paid for politicians are sitting there ‘twiddling their thumbs’ as (what passes for) our justice system sits there, inert.

We all KNOW our civilization is rushing headlong off a cliff, NO ONE denies this, not even the corporate owned media but only a hand full know that this no accident.

That handful has only THEIR best interests in mind, you get what you get (and only after they have determined you deserve it.)

We MUST hunt them down and cast them out or our species is doomed, good citizen.

Some of you think it’s not possible and the simple minded think it’s not desirable but I tell you that the ‘parasites’ among us exist only at the top of our civilization!

Some of you recognize this and it is my intention to show you that you are not alone, others only suspect and it is my purpose is to show you that your suspicions are correct.

If we fail to identify the enemy, they WILL defeat us.

And that’s your ‘thought to ponder’ on this 1,000th post

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Answers?

Greetings good citizen,

Temporarily on the back burner the mis-labeled ‘Greek debt crisis’ isn’t going anywhere.

Um, stock markets around the globe are tanking at the moment but I have little doubt the mysterious forces that defy all logic will push them back up to new highs (again)

And I will once again remind you that the >One Percent are, for the most part, only rich ‘on paper’, a really dodgy reason for share prices to rise ‘inexplicably’.

So what of the Euro-Zone? (Because we all know it’s not just the Greeks or the Mediterranean countries that are, er, ‘wiped out’.)

Take away Germany’s luxury cars and what’s left? Same thing as Japan…not much.

Worse, factor in that the US accounted for the bulk of BOTH nation’s sales and now where are you?

Ironically, building ‘luxury cars’ in China will only keep those who profited from the ‘desertification of the West’ in bad ass wheels. You’re left with a market too small to keep even a single manufacturer running.

But the ‘criminal class’ doesn’t care, if it keeps the ‘mud people’ clubbing each other over the head instead of prosecuting the people responsible for bankrupting the global economy, so much the better!

But the ‘progressives’ at Alternet keep their eye (and by extension, yours) on the ‘little picture,’ just like the Corporate Owned Media:

1. Pretend Politics. Prior to the June 17 vote, Greek voters were intimidated with a massive number of threats from Germany and elsewhere of what would happen if they didn't vote "the right way" (i.e. anybody but the "radical leftists" in Syriza who would have negotiated harder with the financiers). The conservatives barely led the vote count from their main anti-austerity rival. Yet New Democracy leader Antonis Samaris suggested in his victory speech that the results reflected a vote for "growth." There is more than a touch of Orwell at work when you can redefine the kinds of programs the Greeks will be forced to swallow as "growth policies." Germany's suggestion to cut the minimum wage, for example, will only take more money out of the pockets of regular people, which, as Keynes taught us, further weakens the economy.

But it looks like the Greek government will continue to plug away at austerity. And the "Troika" -- the three organizations that have the most power over Greece's financial future, namely the European Commission (EC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Central Bank (ECB) -- will continue to pretend that such policies will ultimately lead to a Greek economic recovery. There will be some fake advertising about Europe making it easier on the Greeks, but it will be a "something" without substance.

Have a gander at the (now old) Keynesian argument about removing income from a society.

What these fucktards fail to point out is ‘Keynesian stimulus’ only works in a ‘closed’ society! (Where those who are paid more CAN ONLY buy ‘locally made’ products.)

Take your typical US highway worker and give him an extra $100 to spend, it does the economy ZERO good if he goes out and buys a new Chinese big screen TV!

Do that and the Chinaman goes out and has steak for dinner, the people living in cardboard boxes down the street get nuthin.

Perhaps the question should be is it going to take YOU being moved into a cardboard box before YOU give a shit?

If the attitude of today’s youth is anything to go by that is precisely what its going to take…

And the Devil take the hindmost!

Um, did I mention that our civilization is crumbling right before our unbelieving eyes?

And yeah, when you move into a cardboard box it will only be a matter of days before they come to collect you to go to ‘the camp’. (This will be a place to hold you in case you entertain any ‘funny ideas’ like revenge or something equally as trite.)

Because you’re ending up in a cardboard box won’t be an ‘accident’ either…and you may even work that out for yourself…eventually.

You have become so used to being systematically cheated and robbed that you no longer find it ‘questionable’.

Well, I’ve got news for you little man. This is NOT your grandpa’s USA!

Take a good look around you and ask your Grandpa (if he’s still around) He’ll tell you straight up ‘Hell no!’

What nobody is talking about is how the ‘game of survival’ has turned into a game of ‘winners and losers’ with the self-styled ‘winners’ pushing the (sorry) ‘too stupid to live’ losers over the edge of the cliff!

What does this mean, good citizen?

The still ‘too few’ ‘winners’ are playing a desperate gamble, that they can dupe enough losers into following them so they can push the hapless but otherwise law abiding ordinary people literally to their death.

The law abiding must die if the cheats have any hope of pulling off their crime against society without being prosecuted!

So if things seem a little ‘out of whack’ to you, don’t dismiss it, you’re right!

The headlines tell you every day of the failure of the justice system on a global basis.

The unhinged (more for me!) conservo-whackos are actively blocking their own prosecution for crimes against humanity.

They have succeeded in creating a global monopoly that has ‘shattered’ the economies of the Western world while they themselves have waxed incredibly rich (on paper.)

We are left to ponder what we can do about this and the answer is:

As long as they retain control of the justice system, we can do NOTHING.

Which means we have to…what?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Retrograde

Greetings good citizen,

Personally I find it difficult to figure out how they’ve kept it glued together over the past four years…not that there have been any overt reasons to revolt.

Well, the ‘foreclosure crisis’ was kind of a self-inflicted wound. Most of the borrowers KNEW it was ‘too good to be true’ so few were honestly surprised when irresistible force smashed head on into rock solid reality.

Home values can only climb as high as a buyer’s salary. And the past three decades of the global race to the bottom found salaries pretty much ‘stagnant’.

You can hang any stupid price you want on your ‘stack of lumber’ but that doesn’t mean the greater fool is going to come along and pay you that amount!

(Although it was not uncommon during the run-up to the crisis for herds of them to come along and bid up the asking price to get their foot in the door of the next big thing.)

How ironic is it that this is the sort of shit banks are supposed to prevent?

Worse, now banks are borrowing money from the public just to keep their doors open!

(Seriously, how ‘insane’ is that? Isn’t this what ‘bankruptcy’ is all about…but what can we expect from people who are obviously ‘unclear’ on what a bonus ‘is’, never mind when you should be awarded one…)

More interesting is ongoing disaster created by the business owner’s alliance:

Claims for Jobless Benefits Rise
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS 41 minutes ago

The Labor Department said weekly applications for unemployment benefits were up last week, while the Consumer Price Index dropped 0.3 percent in May.

Now wait a minute Slim, you know this is being done just to ‘sour’ Obama’s chances of re-election this November.

Although I personally believe the fact that he has run ‘unopposed’ speaks volumes about the current state of the Libertarian dominated Democratic Party.

Sort of makes you curious as to what they’ll do if Mitt doesn’t get elected…although I suspect we’ll be just as fucked either way.

Let’s suppose we put all of the doom and gloom aside and look to the ‘bright side’.

As you WILL note, the economy ISN’T getting any better…and that’s unlikely to change if the status quo remains unchallenged.

In fact, in case you didn’t notice, the economy is actually (albeit slowly) getting worse.

This is how you ‘slip’ into Banana Republicdom.

And remember good citizen, this IS looking at the ‘best case’ scenario here.

More ‘chicken scratching on the wall’, energy prices…they haven’t been discovering any ‘new’ energy reserves so the ones we’ve got continue to be depleted at an alarming rate.

Someone recently observed that we are already on a ‘see-saw’ where energy prices climb and the economy tanks, causing energy prices to drop which results in a ‘faux recovery’ where energy prices start to climb again!

Suspect this coming winter we will see energy prices rise and stay there.

The unspoken question is how much will they rise and what will we do when people start freezing to death in large numbers?

Will it be ‘too late’ to riot then?

I know, let’s wait and see what happens…who knows maybe next winter will be milder than last winter (although that’s not how it went in Europe…)

Do any of you actually BELIEVE things are going to get better?

I’ll bet you DON’T, you just (mistakenly) don’t think they will get ‘much’ worse.

And that’s where you’ll be proven, er, optimistic.

(Not to put too fine a point on it but the Donner Party started off as ‘optimists’.)

More disturbing is Hollywood’s recent obsession with Zombies…a creature that is only a half a step removed from a (very real) cannibal.

Don’t think there are cannibals around? You haven’t seen ‘hungry’ yet!

But I digress, we are SUPPOSED TO BE looking at the ‘bright side’ here.

How fucking sad is it that capitalism doesn’t offer us a ‘bright side’ once resources are reset to ‘finite’ (and I’ll kill you if you touch mine!)

Because we all know how the game is going to play out if the adults don’t return, pronto.

Which is to make another plea to remove the criminals from power and bring them to justice before they abandon ship, taking the ‘keys’ with them.

Naturally, this is where ‘be careful of what you wish for’ comes into play. One of the things that keeps us watchdogs up at night is the likelihood of a ‘witch hunt’ where ‘semi-innocent’ people are thrown under the bus while the guilty make their escape.

We can look at things like the Forbes 400 list but what we don’t know is how ‘complete’ that sort of list is…especially during a time like now, where ‘class animosity’ is out in the open.

You can bet a lot of ‘truly wealthy’ people have ‘done what it takes’ to keep their names off of those lists.

The top ten probably have contracts with Blackwater to ‘spirit them away’ if the shit hits the fan, the rest are rolling the dice.

So, will the social clock turn back a hundred years or a thousand when the energy crisis hits full stride?

Sadly, good citizen, a hundred years is only going to happen if the adults return in time, if not…it’s ‘barbarian time’ all over again!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Ballot Box

Greetings good citizen,

Markets opened ‘up’ but were heading back down as of mid-morning in fact it had the precise appearance of a ‘nosedive’…but you never know, those traders may pull out of it in time to save yesterdays record 293 point gain.

Again, for absolutely no apparent reason.

The global economy is still in operative and so is the global political system, as evidenced here

Before pressing on I would like to point out that the, er, ‘psychologist’ being quoted is a Brit and he provides us an example of what WE look like from across the pond.

Rest assured I will chime in with my ‘opinion’ as to why working people vote Republican.

Here's a more painful but ultimately constructive diagnosis, from the point of view of moral psychology: politics at the national level is more like religion than it is like shopping. It's more about a moral vision that unifies a nation and calls it to greatness than it is about self-interest or specific policies. In most countries, the right tends to see that more clearly than the left. In America the Republicans did the hard work of drafting their moral vision in the 1970s, and Ronald Reagan was their eloquent spokesman. Patriotism, social order, strong families, personal responsibility (not government safety nets) and free enterprise. Those are values, not government programs.

The Democrats, in contrast, have tried to win voters' hearts by promising to protect or expand programmes for elderly people, young people, students, poor people and the middle class. Vote for us and we'll use government to take care of everyone! But most Americans don't want to live in a nation based primarily on caring. That's what families are for.

One reason the left has such difficulty forging a lasting connection with voters is that the right has a built-in advantage – conservatives have a broader moral palate than the liberals (as we call leftists in the US). Think about it this way: our tongues have taste buds that are responsive to five classes of chemicals, which we perceive as sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and savoury. Sweetness is generally the most appealing of the five tastes, but when it comes to a serious meal, most people want more than that.

Right out of the box I’d opine that this is about as ‘Ivy Tower’ as you can get!

I would further ‘opine’ that comparing British conservatives to our own ‘neo-cons’ is like comparing apples to elephants!

The Brits actually HAVE a monarchy, here the pretentious assholes merely pretend to be ‘gods elect’.

Why do our ‘working people’ vote for obviously odious conservo-nazis?

The answer is as simple as the spineless Jellyfish the Libertarians run as democrats!

The obnoxious Republicans may be repugnant but at least they stick together!

The spineless democrats stood and watched while the conservo-nazis stripped the working class of union protection and off-shored 99% of our productive capacity.

THAT’S WHY THERE ARE SO MANY INDEPENDENTS!

You don’t need ‘psycho-babble’ to figure this one out.

Did I mention I suspect the wing-dings at AlterNet (who are supposedly ‘progressive’ are in fact Libertarians?)

That is why we see so many articles like this one.

The Brits would call it ‘rubbish’ (and we should too!)

Which brings us to the union busting conservo-nazi’s victory in Wisconsin yesterday.

It seems the mindless masses in Cheeseland think the only time a politician should be ‘rebuked’ is when he is guilty of mal-administration.

So it appears the ‘union busting’ falls right into the governor’s bailiwick as far as the people of Wisconsin are concerned.

Again, we only have the ‘pretend democratic’ view on this upset. My gut tells me the corporate owned media reported the outcome they desired and flipped the public the middle finger!

But we have no way to prove that…and there will be no such thing as an independent probe to examine the ballots, not going to happen.

Pseudo-democracy is already on mighty shaky ground as it is.

We don’t need ‘proof positive’ that the media has been ‘fixing’ elections for the past hundred years to surface just months before the next presidential bid.

Yeah, it is little ‘demonstrations’ like yesterday that make the working voter throw in their lot with those who would exploit them.

Because ‘choice’ has become an illusion, although I must admit, the ‘illusion’ is wearing thinner all of the time.

Look at the choices being presented to us this November…a ‘burn and churn capitalist’ and a make believe Democrat who doesn’t deserve a second term.

Yes, we need look no further than the current occupant of the White House to learn why ‘working people’ vote against their own interests…because voting their interests produced nothing…and that’s the hell of it good citizen.

We come full circle to the ‘what can we do about this’ problem?

They have already shown us the outcome of the November elections and sadly that outcome is ‘more of the same regardless of who they crown.

And most of us have had more of this than we can stand.

Will we make it to November?

We’ll see.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Cyberwarfare Alert!

Greetings good citizen,

As you might expect, markets are down (for the moment…but you know those ‘silly’ traders, they are unable to resist a ‘bargain’ for very long…

So how sad is it that ‘equities’ are (still) overpriced by a factor of ten? (Which is to ask 'what bargain?)

Um, on a more ‘indicative’ note, oil is down to $80 a barrel and Gold is back over the $1,600 an ounce mark. (Just because I call it funny money doesn’t mean the people holding it ‘acknowledge their folly’. Their wealth is YOUR stupidity!)

Just another factor to ponder as our trip down the ‘rabbit hole’ proceeds.

Newspapers Cut Days From Publishing Week
By CHRISTINE HAUGHNEY

Some daily newspapers are cutting printing and delivery schedules and shifting their emphasis to the Web, but industry analysts warned that such moves might alienate once-loyal readers.

What’s wrong with THIS PICTURE, good citizen?

For those of you unfamiliar with newspaper industry, the subscription cost of having the paper delivered barely covers that expense, paying the reporters and the printing staff is totally reliant on ADVERTISING.

Which should pop the bubble of all of those ‘free press’ idiots!

THERE IS NO SUCH THING!

Worse, a press ‘reliant’ on advertising revenue is/becomes the ‘captive’ of the advertiser!

Guess where non-existent housing, auto and the whole spectrum of ‘personal advertising’ leaves the newspaper industry?

People who are living hand to mouth can’t afford the basic $30 it costs to run a ‘personal ad’ in the paper, especially when you can post it on Craig’s list for free!

Which is to say that ‘cascading systemic collapse I’ve been warning you about, well guess what? It’s begun!

But this is a ‘natural side effect’ of the mis-management that allows the wealth of a society to flow (unhindered) ‘to the top’.

Even more (I am torn between which Alice in Wonderland reference to use) ‘rabbit-holeish’ is the asshat running under the Republican banner is calling for even more tax breaks and ‘free-trade agreements’ to lube an already badly damaged chute!

We (the US Public) are ‘bleeding out’ and these assholes want to cut us again!

And, naturally, the corporate owned media remains mute while it cannibalizes itself.

(How much more ‘Wonderland-like’ does it need to get good citizen before you wake the fuck up?)

Um, now it’s time for a quick trip ‘off the reservation’ as we visit another ‘Doomsday scenario’:

Expert Issues a Cyberwar Warning
By ANDREW E. KRAMER and NICOLE PERLROTH

Eugene Kaspersky says his discovery of the Flame virus adds weight to his warnings of the grave dangers posed by governments that manufacture and release viruses on the Internet.

I won’t ‘candy coat’ it good citizen, if we ‘lose’ the web, life as we have come to know it literally vanishes.

You don’t believe that…everything is ‘backed up’ right?

Wrong. The people who believe funny money is real have drunk their own kool-aid and believe that ‘redundancy’ is expensive (and therefore unnecessary!)

Even worse, any virus worth its salt would take out the back-up systems too.

The destroyers of our society, in their haste to ‘reduce headcount’ have automated the infrastructure of all of western civilization.

Ironically, the only places that MAY escape (total) devastation are in remote Africa or Siberia.

Link time (since we’re going off the reservation, we may as well go ‘all the way’)

IF you were an ‘oligarch’ seeking to extend your control beyond ‘peak oil’, the only sure way to do this is to ‘kill-off’ the ‘surplus population’.

What would be the ‘most efficient’ way to achieve this goal?

By pushing the useless masses into their own cesspool.
[Turn off the lights and the phones, sit back and watch the ‘fun’!]

Totally ‘interconnected’ are the power and communications grids. Better yet, it’s 2012!

How ‘handy’ is that? The Ancient Mayans ‘predicted’ the end of the world…which, suspiciously, NOBODY has a handle on…

Which is not to opine that Mayan ‘end time’ prophecy is any more reliable than Christian end time prophecy!

But at least the Christians left the time factor open so it could be dragged out on an ‘as need’ basis. If the Mayan prophecy doesn’t come through, they have the Christian one in their back pocket as back-up!

Turn off the electricity and the phones for a single week and our civilization would be on the brink of collapse, two weeks and it would take years to rebuild.

Worse, some areas would have to be ‘re-conquered’ from the despots who seized power after the lights went out!

And some of them may not go ‘quietly’.

But the ‘aftertimes’ are a story for another day.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

I’m sure you can find your way back to the reservation from here…and nobody would blame you if you didn’t want to go back.

Bad Joke

Greetings good citizen,

A quick check of the stock markets shows us another day of bleeding from the eyesockets for markets worldwide.

And what would one expect, the global economic desert isn’t restricted to just the labor markets!

The ‘source’ of our current worldwide financial collapse started twenty years after the end of the second world war, when the completion of rebuilding a bombed out Europe caused investment opportunities to ‘dry-up’.

This is the same source that created what became known as Happy Days for the sole survivor of that European war, the USA.

During the post war period, jobs went begging. There literally weren’t enough workers to keep things going.

This led to better benefits and the steady rise in living standards we all take for granted today.

But was this just a historic fluke? The short answer is no. We could have enjoyed lifestyle improvements introduced in the fifties long before then, but the same fucking greed heads who want to push us back to living in mud huts kept them from us.

They were ‘afraid they’d spoil us.’

With that thought firmly in mind we move on with today’s offering :

The title of Ferguson’s book certainly gets the reader’s attention, and he powerfully delivers the goods, with a scathing, detailed history of what led to the biggest financial disaster since the Great Depression. Ferguson takes the reader on a revealing journey -- a sordid and corrupt trail that leads from the Pandora’s box of deregulation from 1980 through 2000, through the two major economic bubbles. The first was the dot.com stock market bubble of 2000, exacerbated by the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. Then came the much larger housing/mortgage bubble, fueled by sub-prime lending and the emergence of a host of new esoteric financial tools, meant to protect investments -- in fact, they did the opposite, provoking the financial crash.

The economic disaster was driven, Ferguson writes, by a combination of “very low interest rates, pervasive dishonesty through the financial system, massive lending fraud, speculation, demand for high yield securities, and not insignificantly, a squeezed American consumer desperate to maintain living standards, and told by everyone – including George Bush and Alan Greenspan, the brokers and the banks, that home borrowing was the way to do it.”

Along the way, Ferguson debunks the right-wing meme that Freddie and Fannie Mae caused the bubble; he holds the pure private sector responsible, especially its least regulated shadow banking parts.

As we can see, Reaganomics failed. All of the liberal hatred and gay bashing are intended to distract the rest of us from the failure of conservative ideology.

A conservative ideology so ingrained in the power structure that the media blindly protects it.

But wait a moment…what’s that you say? Reganomics WORKS?

It’s just that the outcome of Reganomics is so ‘anti-social’ that it would never sell if it weren’t camouflaged as something else!

Thus do we have the world’s greatest scam ever perpetrated upon a civilization.

And now that civilization is collapsing.

Which is neither here nor there good citizen because in the end the question remains; will YOU survive the collapse of civilization?

Yeah good citizen, at the end of the day the very same self-styled ‘pranksters’ are going to accuse you and I of failing to protect ourselves from being ‘scammed’.

Yup, this was all 'our fault'!

And somehow making it illegal to scam on such a scale would never occur our once fine legal minds…would it?

Free Speech is sacrosanct, you can’t muzzle Liberty (like you regularly muzzle the truth)…you despicable fuckers!

Which is to point out what you already know, we are dealing with unadulterated evil here, good citizen.

There is nothing to ‘redeem’ (although they would all offer us wealth beyond our wildest dreams if only we would spare their children…)

And it ain’t gonna happen because that wealth already belongs to ‘us’. It isn’t theirs to give.

Yet another thing they must laugh themselves breathless over.

Well, the day is rapidly approaching when they won’t be laughing much longer.

And they will learn the true meaning of the term 'being hunted to the ends of the earth’.

We have arrived at a ‘make or break’ point for our species. If we don’t turn our current situation around it will be ‘game over’.

And I, for one, actually like ‘us’ and think we have the potential to be great, someday.

But first we have to remove the few who think this whole thing is a joke from power.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Free Falling

Greetings good citizen,

Perhaps more useful than specific articles, the snippet of headlines in the business section provides us with a clearer picture of the contradictions being fed to us by the corporate owned media.

Were we to back away a couple of steps and, er, ‘pretend’ the media is the victim here, that they can’t help what the news is which is totally wrong! We would come away shaking our heads trying to figure out which parts of the media’s stories are in fact lies.

Because if the news doesn’t make sense then somebody is lying.

It really is as simple as that.

In fact, I’ll go you one better. The news should make ‘holistic sense’; it should all be related by a clear cause and effect chain!

But is that what we’re seeing?

After Facebook, More Fear of Stock Market
By NATHANIEL POPPER

The financial industry had hoped that Facebook would rekindle ordinary investors’ excitement in stocks. But the Facebook faltering just added to a growing retreat from the stock market.

DealBook: Talk of Facebook Interest Drives Shares in European Web Browser 8:56 AM ET

The long-term unemployed face the end of benefits. | Microsoft still working to integrate Skype.| After Facebook's troubled debut, smaller investors shy away from stocks.

U.S. Winds Down Longer Benefits for the Unemployed
By SHAILA DEWAN

In February, Congress phased in a reduction of the number of weeks of extended aid and made it more difficult for states to qualify for the maximum aid, adding a financial burden to the long-term unemployed.

Wall Street Rallies
By 27 minutes ago

Stock indexes in the United States raced higher, after their first weekly gain since April, on a report that home prices showed marginal improvement in March.

Home Prices Show Mixed Improvement 9:58 AM ET

Spanish Data Point to Further Decline
By DAVID JOLLY 3 minutes ago

Spanish retail sales fell by a record 9.8 percent in April, and the Bank of Spain forecast that the economy would continue to shrink through June.
Euro Isn’t Loved, but Few Want to Drop It, Poll Says
By PAUL GEITNER

A poll of citizens of five nations using the euro indicates they do not want to revert to a system of different currencies, a survey by Pew Research Center shows.

So, if we read the current headlines (and admittedly, they change from minute to minute) we can’t make heads nor tails of the current news environment. This is because you are being bombarded with independent snippets, many of them generated by people that want YOU to remain ignorant of the truth!

It’s like the highly massaged and politicized ‘government statistics’ that don’t tell you the truth about anything.

Then you get some idiot that insists the government data isn’t ‘wrong’ if you know how to read it!

Which brings us full circle to the issue of what use is incomplete data?

And the short answer is, it is very useful when it comes to covering up inconvenient facts.

This is usually done with the disclaimer, we don’t have all of the data right now (nor will we ever) but this is what it looks like so far, if we back out this information and lump these three piles together!

Why back out this and lump in those, because it distorts the data to show the situation in a ‘favorable light’.

Once the ‘real data’ is available you end up with the results you suspected it would yield but by now the spotlight is being trained on different (albeit incomplete) data.

And as long as they can keep your attention focused on the irrelevant, you won’t notice that they aren’t doing anything to fix the here and now.

Let’s focus for a moment on this series parting shot, that the Euro isn’t ‘loved’ but few want to ‘drop it’.

Why do you suppose that is?

Is this not a perfect example of ‘perception management’?

People who would be much better off outside the currency union don’t want to abandon the Euro because they ‘fear’ that their nation’s currency wouldn’t be as ‘strong’ as the currency backed by 27 nation states!

And every time you open that particular door the bankers give you what you wish for.

Which is to (once again) point out that whosoever controls your money controls YOU!

With that as a given, don’t YOU want a ‘level playing field’?

This is why under A Simple Plan ‘your money is for you…and no one else!’

This is the major ‘flaw’ in monetary design and why our civilization is so badly mismanaged.

Money is only ‘useful’ to the individual (and then only as a regulator.) Especially in a world where too many things have price tags hanging off of them!

Think every thing has a price…how much would you sell one of your children for?

If you can arrive at a price, regardless of how ridiculous, you are a monster!

We could temper that with the notion that your kids aren’t yours to sell but, conversely, YOU are not ‘Yours to sell’ either (because there are no buyers!) [Want to see a Libbie’s head explode, tell he doesn’t own himself and watch him FREAK!]

The whole justification of buying someone else’s labor is unjustifiable, it allows the undeserving to skate…and that is unjust!

Not that repeating how ‘unjustified’ it is makes the point any clearer…

It all starts with management and a clear goal, specifically, the ‘common good’, which the challengers of labels like to call ‘socialism’.

Which should mystify most of the sycophants out there, how do capitalist knotheads rail against socialism while screaming for the common good?

The two terms are interchangable.

OFW!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Chutzpah!

Greetings good citizen,

Time to spend one of my ten NY Times ‘freebies’ for the month, if only because the story itself makes my blood boil.

Um, let me digress for a moment as we take a quick look at the decidedly disturbing phenomenon I’ve pointed to several times before and that is the Opening bell at the NYSE and the ‘miraculous’ recovery of global stock markets…

Fucking criminals!

You’d have to be blind not to see it. Opening bell in New York and stock markets around the globe go straight up…and this is AFTER J.P. Morgan announces a $2 BILLION dollar trading ‘loss’.

WTF!

Remember good citizen, the only thing the stock markets tells us today is how rich the already wealthy have decided to make themselves AT OUR EXPENSE!

Higher stock prices for them mean higher prices for us! (Worse, the nearly wiped out ‘real economy’ can’t take much more of this!)

Let us proceed with that which should shame us all

The evidence is easy to spot. An American company, Element Electronics, for example, has made flat-screen televisions for years at a factory in China but is now expanding in America. It recently opened a factory near Detroit that is producing the first televisions made in the United States by any company in years.

At General Electric, local tax breaks and a concessionary union contract contributed to G.E.’s decision to manufacture its latest electric water heater in Louisville, Ky. — instead of in China. Similarly, the Otis Elevator Company is moving production to a new factory in Florence, S.C., from a plant in Nogales, Mexico, and Master Lock has switched the manufacture of combination locks back to Milwaukee from China.

At P.A.M.A. Furniture, in Jamestown, N.C., the owning Pennisi family has begun to manufacture upholstered chairs and sofas “from scratch,” according to Anthony Pennisi, a vice president.

Until recently, the Pennisis imported chair frames from Italy and Indonesia, and finished them at the family’s Jamestown factory. Manufacturing everything here is more expensive, Mr. Pennisi said, and he has asked for government help. “I think we are a prime example of a small manufacturer producing a Made-in-America product and trying to survive,” he said.

This nation has become a HUGE economic desert…but it wasn’t always so.

Worse, a whole generation has grown up thinking Japanese cars are the best and imported anything was superior to domestic everything…

NOW, the very same fuckers responsible for putting the United States productive capacity on a barge for points unknown are back, crying for MORE government subsidies!

And guess where our witless politicians will carve these ‘lifelines’ from?

From our fucking social security!

Burn them! Burn them to the fucking ground!

Our civilization cannot tolerate this ceaseless onslaught from those already so rich they CAN’T spend it productively anymore!

Burn their factories and HANG their politicians!

OR we could just slap their little wrists and tell them to cut the shit…but you know what they’ll do then, don’t you?

They’ll declare WAR on us (and hijack our own military to fight it for them!)

So we’re back to burn their factories and hang their politicians…and anyone else stupid enough to stick their heads above ground!

Enough is enough, good citizen!

These people need ‘subsidies’ like the rest of us need an extra hole in our heads…something THEIR bought and paid for politicians would gladly provide for us, free of charge!

Somehow ‘dead constituents’ are so much easier to answer to…

(And it’s not like the fuckers haven’t killed off a bunch of us without really trying!)

Look a little closer at ‘stop loss’ and the ‘left-handed draft’ created by the economic desert these fuckers are responsible for!

Now they have the chutzpah to return to the US and, er, ‘ask’ for ‘subsidies’?

You know what the definition of chutzpah is, don’t you?

It is when somebody murders their own parents them petitions the court for mercy because they are suddenly ‘orphaned’…

Same thing!

And, as I point out above, where do you suppose our ‘out of control’ politicians are going to fund these ‘subsidies’ from?

They will continue to ‘cannibalize’ what’s left of the social safety net…never once being asked to explain why a Chinese dollar will buy four times what an American dollar will yet one American dollar will still buy SIX Chinese dollars!

WTF!

In the meantime, good citizen, all (except the mom & pop furniture maker at the bottom of the list) are all fortune one hundred companies that pay virtually zero taxes!

Um, dunno about the electronic company but you can bet their ‘parent company’ is globally ranked.

Which is to point out (AGAIN) that the individuals who run these companies ALREADY HAVE more than they can rationally spend…so we’re subsidizing them, why?

Oh how sad is it good citizen that I find myself ‘bitching’ when our overlords (having read the handwriting on the ‘energy wall’) are trying to sneak back into a market they cruelly abandoned decades ago?

Yeah that’s me…a crank who is never satisfied!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Click, click...

Greetings good citizen,

The ‘Drums of Doom’ are pounding again (and I dislike running back to back posts on the topic of revolt.)

But today we have been, er, ‘gifted with’ yet another grim assessment of the state of our civilization

We’re really regressing back to the dark ages. It’s not a joke. And if that’s happening in the most powerful, richest country in history, then this catastrophe isn’t going to be averted -- and in a generation or two, everything else we’re talking about won’t matter. Something has to be done about it very soon in a dedicated, sustained way.

It’s not going to be easy to proceed. There are going to be barriers, difficulties, hardships, failures. It’s inevitable. But unless the spirit of the last year, here and elsewhere in the country and around the globe, continues to grow and becomes a major force in the social and political world, the chances for a decent future are not very high.

Let’s begin by asking how many of you disagree with Mr. Chomsky’s assertion that we are headed straight for another ‘dark ages’?

The other question would be how many of you appreciate precisely what this means?

And I’d have to opine ‘too few’. (Even for those of you who are in to ‘swords and sorcery’.)

Ironic that the world described the popular novel Hunger Games is very much like the world we are headed for.

Worse, we will end up there the same way the inhabitants of the story got there…‘spinelessness’.

Because it is never enough for a single individual to speak or act out against tyranny, a lone voice is easily silenced.

(That’s a land mine I tap dance on every day…but someone’s gotta do it.)

Then there’s the flip side of the OWS movement; we all know nothing is going to happen if the most action we take is point a finger and cry ‘shame’!

So good ol’ Noam is betting with me that when the party starts, we’ll have plenty of company.

Strange thing about backbone, it’s contagious. Simply seeing someone else ‘nut up’ sort of inspires you to do likewise. It is especially inspiring when you see those you wouldn’t ordinarily consider ‘courageous’ daring to do great things (even if they are cut down in the act!)

Weirdly, it is precisely this quality that the Vikings revered, facing certain death with unflinching valor is the stuff heroes are made of.

And sadly, we will need a great many heroes good citizen if we are to provide our children a future free of tyranny.

How sad is it that the time to start executing traitors was thirty years ago? (And finding them was as simple as looking for the R after their name.)

Worse, it is STILL that simple.

Where is (Gen.) Smedley Butler when you REALLY need him?

Seems our (generation’s) Smedley was asleep at the switch when the interlopers came creeping.

But the more logical answer would be that because of Smedley, the conspirators were forced to choose a different avenue of egress.

Finding a general to lead a coup was much riskier than it needs to be, especially with so many corrupt politicians just looking for an opportunity to be ‘of service’.

No, unsurprisingly the take over of our political system began at the grassroots level, where the ‘sniff testing’ is done and party endorsements are awarded.

Those people are appointees and it was a fairly easy matter to stack the deck so both sides of the fence were drawing from a singular pool of candidates.

This is why we the people can’t get a break!

And, worse, we can already see it coming again this November!

Our choices are O Bummer or Willard…

Sort of makes your stomach churn, doesn’t it?

Interesting choice…a guy who twiddled his thumbs for four years vs. a guy whose only trick seems to be sitting on his thumb!

Uh, how screwed are we?

Let’s look at it this way…the chances of anything improving economy wise are still ‘slim to none’.

And until we, er, ‘demand’ better, NOTHING is going to change.

Don’t underestimate them, good citizen. They are ready to pull off a coup the second there is a serious assault mounted on DC, they’ve been preparing for it for the past two decades!

This, weirdly enough, would work to our advantage if it were to happen sooner than later…

Just my two cents for anybody planning anything…

I’d tell you not to do anything ‘rash’ but, at the end of the day, it’s all up to you! (and ‘rash’ is always a matter of perspective…)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Foresight

Greetings good citizen,

You know what they say, if something sounds ‘too good to be true’, chances are it’s not.

One could dismiss this latest round of ‘republican bashing’ to the ‘Monkey see, Monkey do’ playing to the base variety of campaign tactic.

More disturbing is the notion of who are they bashing if there aren’t any Republicans anymore?

Nowhere on the horizon will you find a ‘champion of the working man’ just as you WON’T find the ‘let’s think about this some more’ Conservative.

Ironically, the conservatives are all done with thinking. They know what they want…the frightening part is they don’t give a damn if anybody else wants it too! (and most of us DON’T!)

You needn’t peel back the skin too far here to reveal this ‘tempest in a tea pot’ for what it is, pure, orthodox Republican ideology!

I often have similar thoughts about Mitt Romney. A surpassingly perfect villain for our times, he appears to come straight from central casting as the slick, shifty-eyed C.E.O. who’s fixing to downsize your ass — and implement his evil scheme for world domination while he’s at it. The G.O.P could not have run a more astonishing incarnation of the self-parodying cluelessness of the 1 percenters if they tried. For all practical purposes, it’s as if the the top-hat-and-tails-wearing Monopoly guy was their candidate.

Think I’m exaggerating? The Mittster’s latest Richie Rich moment from the campaign trail has him regaling an audience of economically anxious college students with some swell advice on how to succeed in business: just be like his “friend” sandwich shop entrepreneur Jimmy John, and get your parents to bankroll the costs of a start-up! Hey, that sounds easy — why didn’t I think of that?! Here’s Mittens:

This kind of divisiveness, this attack of success, is very different than what we’ve seen in our country’s history. We’ve always encouraged young people: Take a shot, go for it, take a risk, get the education, borrow money if you have to from your parents, start a business.

There is nothing more ‘sinister’ here than what’s been preached by conservatives throughout the ages: Borrow from your well-connected kin…and if you don’t have any, tough!

It’s the same thing they say about you’re not being able to live on what you’re paid…it’s not their problem, it’s yours!

Which, ironically, ‘pinpoints’ the main flaw in conservative ideology.

It is impossible to construct a viable social model using selfish, self-centered principles.

That’s why capitalism doesn’t work (but we’re saddled with it anyway, thanks to the bought an paid for courts/justice system.)

Which is to point out that these things AREN’T ‘accidents’ or the ‘unfortunate side-effects’ conservatives moan about liberals taking too seriously or that they make more out of them than what they are.

Worse, conservatives KNOW this is not the case…but they prefer this to the alternative, a level playing field where they face the ‘danger’ of not being as successful as they currently are.

Sadly, good citizen, ‘fear’ that their situation will deteriorate instead of improve is enough to drive some people to support ideas and institutions that DO NOT have their best interests in mind.

And a good politician is capable of exploiting this dread…which is why we will ‘do away’ with elected political office.

Under A Simple Plan there are NO ‘legislators’, the people make the laws and vote directly on their passage. (So we don’t find ourselves where we are today, where ‘law-makers’ are capable (and commonly do) exempt themselves from their own legislation!

This is what happens when any government starts playing with ‘the cloak of secrecy’.

Worse, good citizen almost EVERY ACT of the PAST TWO administrations has been declared ‘secret’ and placed beyond the reach of a public that very well might prosecute the criminals involved for their misdeeds.

Although my point with the above paragraph is how the situation has worsened in the recent past, State Secrets and Executive privilege extends all the way back to the founding of this nation…which DOESN’T make it ‘permissible!’.

A government that has to hide its actions from the people it serves IS corrupt!

If the people of today would ‘misunderstand’ the actions taken it is highly likely those acts were criminal.

If you (as a representative of your people) cannot stand up and say, ‘hey folks, this is what happened and this is what we intend to do about it.’ You have either chosen the wrong course of action or you are guilty of trying to deceive the public, a crime that automatically strips you of your membership in society.

Which is to ‘opine’ that preventing a public panic is, in my humble opinion, ‘overused’. If you’re faced with this situation then you have let something else go on farther than it should have and you (again) don’t deserve a position of public power and trust.

The people who ‘win’ positions of public power and trust will demonstrate that they already possess the foresight to avoid these situations by choosing the actions that win them the position.

It is this singular quality that our species needs to cultivate if we are to advance beyond being a species that exists merely to waste planets.

Do we have what it takes? Awareness is 99% of the battle.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Housing markets

Greetings good citizen,

Today’s top headline is The BIG rip off

Builders and analysts say a long-term shift in behavior seems to be under way. Instead of wanting the biggest and the newest, even if it requires a long commute, buyers now demand something smaller, cheaper and, thanks to $4-a-gallon gas, as close to their jobs as possible. That often means buying a home out of foreclosure from a bank.

Four out of 10 sales of existing homes are foreclosures or otherwise distressed properties. Builders like Mr. Meier who specialize in putting up entire neighborhoods on a city’s outskirts — Richmond is some 50 miles northwest of downtown Chicago — cannot compete despite chopping prices.

Shelter is the single largest ‘purchase’ a tad over half of us will ever make, although in the not too distant future, nobody will ‘own’ a home/moneypit.

Because the court system that upholds said ownership will cease to exist.

What an outrageous claim you must be thinking! The whole enchilada is held together by the ‘men with guns’, where does Gegner think they are going?

And the answer to that question is, ‘in business for themselves’. Funny thing about the ‘men with guns’ if you stop paying them they are pretty quick to adopt ‘independent contractor’ status.

That’s the ‘flipside’ to a civilization ruled by money. Once the money proves worthless, things revert to the ‘old order’…the only thing that still trumps ‘gold rules’ is ‘gun rules.’

Before guns it was bows and arrows, and spears and swords before that.

But I’m getting ahead of myself; there’s still one last stage left before the global real estate market ‘implodes’.

It is the last ‘variant’ on what has increasingly proven to be a ‘suckers bet’. In this ‘final stage’ of the ‘own your own home’ game. In the future you will find that the ONLY way you will be able to secure financing is through a ‘full recourse’ loan…an extremely hazardous proposition, as those who took out student loans already know.

So, is a ‘new car’ thrown in with a new house really a winning combination? Could be if you happen to have exceptionally deep pockets (and don’t mind driving a ‘base model’ Chevy/GM product…)

Oh, and make no mistake about it, YOU ARE paying for the car, it is just being ‘financed’ with the house!

This begs the other question…if you can’t secure financing for a car, is throwing a house into the bargain really a wise move?

Bizarrely, this strategy is ‘working’ but you can make a damn good bet that the whole scam relies heavily on ‘creative financing’ (which is another way of saying the customer takes it long and deep!)

But in the end we wouldn't be providing the level of service our readers expect if we failed to point out the REAL problem here is the rapidly diminishing pool of potential buyers.

If you view a home as an ‘investment’, you are making the ‘assumption’ that someone will someday come along and buy the property from you for more than you paid for it.

Maybe not as much as you’d like to get, but more than you paid!

That’s the ‘whole point’ of ‘real estate’, you buy it expecting to turn it around for a profit.

Have you spotted the ‘fly in the oinment’ yet?

What fly is that?

The big hairy one commonly called the ‘payroll distribution chart’.

With the demise of the Autoworkers the number of people pulling down a ‘living wage’ in this country shrunk radically.

This, in turn, diminishes the number of future homebuyers.

Want to throw some gasoline on that fire?

Factor in the 2 billion Indian and Chinese people who used to walk but now want to ‘cruise’.

Which is to say you can stop wondering ‘why’ the price of gasoline is headed for ‘boing’, the machinations of the greedy capitalists are biting the rest of us in the ass!

All racism aside, was exporting our, er, ‘lifestyle’ to the most populous place on Earth really a ‘wise’ move?

Which is to state that it won’t be long before the price of energy alone will make ‘homeownership’ cost prohibitive.

You think operating a motor vehicle is an expensive proposition? Try heating a home! (Especially in the frigid north…)

Not that energy is the only thing rising in price.

As retailers have been warning, their costs are rising as cotton and other materials get more expensive, laborers in China demand higher wages and fuel prices go up. By this fall, many have said, they must charge customers more. Because retailers pay for items about six months in advance, spring merchandise on the shelves for a few months was ordered and paid for in late summer, before costs soared. And when costs first started creeping up, clothing makers used an array of tactics to keep prices flat, whether by moving production to lower-cost countries like Bangladesh, using cheaper fabrics or ordering early to lock in prices.

Um, one is tempted to say ‘I told you so!’ here but that would be counterproductive.

What did I tell you?

A few of you might remember that I have in the past pointed out that once you give up the ability to produce your own (whatever) you instantly place yourself at the mercy of those who still can produce the item (pricewise, cheaper goes right out the window!)

How bizarre is it good citizen that this is precisely the type of ‘economic voodoo’ that crowned Ronnie Reagan as an economic genius and the savior/hero of capitalists everywhere!

But that isn’t the only incident of fiscal irresponsibility on display today.

And may I say that now is an especially peculiar time to think that taxes matter only if they reduce consumption. We have lots of excess capacity in the economy; the government can easily buy more goods and services without requiring that the private sector buy less. The only reason to raise taxes now, or promise future rises, is to address solvency concerns.

Discussions like this really disturb me; they indicate that there are a lot of people with Ph.D.s in economics who can throw around a lot of jargon, but when push comes to shove, have no coherent picture whatsoever of how the pieces fit together.

Not to put too fine a point on it good citizen but if the people with Ph.D’s can’t get it right, what chance do YOU have of making sense out of it?

But then we are falling right into their trap, aren’t we?
The main ‘excuse’ for most of the ‘excesses’ foisted upon us is ‘complexity’.

Which is more closely related to the ‘if we told you the real reason you’d say no!’ excuse…which is why ‘national security’ is so often invoked whenever somebody starts sniffing around a ‘sacred cow’ that is most likely an embarassing boondoggle.

ONLY (no exceptions): thieves and scoundrels require the ‘cloak of secrecy’ to hide behind.

Why politicians keep claiming the need sort of speaks for itself.

In a somewhat related story, More Drivers Running Out Of Gas

We have this observation from today’s Cryptogon:

Wow. Some people are in so much denial about gas prices, and not wanting to think about filling up, that they are simply driving until they run out of gas. This is a fantastic lesson in cognitive dissonance.

If you’re not familiar with the term ‘cognitave dissonance’ it is linked to the wikipedia in the actual article.

And, finally (a bit overlong today, but nowhere near the 9 pages they used to be…) we have this brilliant observation:

“If those in charge of our society - politicians, corporate executives, and owners of press and television - can dominate our ideas, they will be secure in their power. They will not need soldiers patrolling the streets. We will control ourselves.”

Howard Zinn

We are fed such an incredible, steaming heap of toxic bullshit it is a small wonder that a majority of us are indeed ‘psychotic’! (The airwaves are packed with ads for ‘mind/mood altering’ drugs for a reason.)

Ironically, the ‘crazier’ they make you, the easier it will be to exterminate you…

The sad part is they are more than a few fries shy of a Happy Meal too!

Have a nice day!

And thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner