Politics or False Advertising?

Greetings good citizen,

Top headline on today’s NY Times is how the, er, ‘inflated’ holiday hiring augers a reawakening for the US economy.

Ironically, this is all being attributed to an up tick in ‘online sales’ which is pretty much completely driven by Credit Cards

There currently is no data available regarding how much of online business was conducted with credit/debit cards and how much was purchased with gift cards…

As I pointed out previously…and as has been hinted at by several financial sites, a large part of the, er, ‘collapse’ of the financial sector (not that you’d ever know it with them showering themselves with billions of dollars worth of ‘bonuses’) is defaults on both credit card debt as well as heloc’s/2nd mortgages.

So what is behind this latest ‘surge’ in online sales that has driven a spike in hiring by America’s major delivery services?

While you ponder that, peruse this:

As shoppers felt more confident about their finances and shopped more online, credit card usage rose after three years of major cutbacks in credit card use, a study by the America's Research Group showed.

"January post-holiday sales are expected to plunge to some of the lowest levels in years, thanks to a surge in credit card spending over the Christmas season," said America's Research Group Chairman Britt Beemer.

Beemer said credit card usage this year was up around 25 percent over last year.
"Now that those credit card bills are hitting mailboxes," shoppers will cut back in a very significant way relative to January and February of the last few years," Beemer said.

That said, the retailing sector was higher today, so I guess the "smart money" knows something we don't.

Or do they?

So, no pay increases in the past DECADE…leading to ‘tame’ inflation (at least according to the manipulators of official statistics more commonly known as lies.)

Why the fuck anyone would believe that the US consumer is ‘back’?

Sometime you have to wonder just how far this belief in the fantastic extends.

The next thing you know they’ll be telling us that all of this is THE WILL of some omnipotent being!

Oh…wait a minute…

I guess if you swallow one lie, what’s one more…and then another.

Apparently there’s no need to stop as long as you’re willing to eat shit indefinitely…and the assumption is you will rather than repudiate your guaranteed spot in the glorious ever-after!

(Even more bizarre than this is how many of you simply refuse to, er, ‘decide’. You won’t accept the bullshit BUT the jury is still out as far as ‘spirit in the sky’ is concerned. You’d hate to pass up that deluxe bachelor pad/condo just steps from the beach/lake/river/unicorn ranch/etc.)

But I digress…

Which is to say I think I’ve made my point about the, er, ‘unreliability’ of people with, er, ‘faulty belief systems’.

Er, not for nothing, the, er, ‘fantastic nature’ of some of our images connected with the ‘afterlife’ speaks volumes about our general dissatisfaction with our current plane of existence…

How ironic is it that it is up to us to make this life better.

The good news right now is mixed with the bad news…SOME of us succeed in finding heaven on earth.

The bad news part is these assholes turn your existence into hell on earth so they can have all of theirs and yours too!

Which is to point out that heaven on earth isn’t achievable on a practical level BUT it doesn’t have to suck out loud either!

We could all have it ‘pretty damn good’ if we just learned to be content with ‘our fair share’.

Why don’t we have it ‘pretty darn good' right here and now?

Mismanagement.

The ‘system’ isn’t designed to provide a uniform level of comfort for all participants. It is designed to reward those who grab whatever isn’t nailed down for themselves.

And like our ‘fantasy afterlife’, the greedy have no conception of how much is ‘enough’.

Odd how we start off examining the deceptive advertising of the self-interested and we end up parsing how blind greed affects overall prosperity!

How incredible is it that the top ten percent constitutes 80 percent of what passes for our entire economy, good citizen?

How did we end up in this warped and twisted place, all the while being assured by those who were supposed to protect us that all was well?

There’s stupid and there’s treason. How sad is it that stupid can’t see the treason?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Democracy Now...

Greetings good citizen,

One of the, er, ‘problems’ of being a revolutionary is the competition. Believe it or not, there are many, er, ‘alternatives to capitalism’ out there…

Unfortunately, most of ‘em are not alternatives at all but the exact same shit with different, er, ‘rules’

For example:

America Beyond Capitalism: Is It Possible?

January 3, 2012

        “Black Monday,” September 19, 1977, was the day 34 years ago when the shuttering of the Youngstown Sheet and Tube steel mill threw 5,000 steelworkers onto the streets of their decaying Midwestern hometown. No local, state or federal programs offered significant help. Steelworkers called training programs “funeral insurance”: they led nowhere since there were no other jobs available. Inspired by a young steelworker, an ecumenical religious coalition put forward a plan for community-worker ownership of the giant mill. The plan captured widespread media attention, the support of numerous Democrats and Republicans (including the conservative governor of the state at the time), and an initial $200 million in loan guarantees from the Carter administration. [snip]

The developmental trajectory from Youngstown to today illustrates what might be called “forced institutional innovation”—a process that, once underway, also suggests further possibilities for larger-scale and more refined development both within Ohio and elsewhere—especially as many other parts of the nation now experience the massive job losses and community decay that hit Ohio and other rustbelt states three decades ago. Critically, all involve new ways to give concrete meaning to the idea of democratizing capital.

Did ‘democratizing’ the company help it to survive?

That’s not what these pictures show

Which is not to say that they don’t have other facilities still in operation, but this is what a web search yielded.

Maybe maintaining a strong web presence isn’t foremost on the mind of the worker/owner.

Maybe they’re too busy thinking about the fuck job of being very silent, er, ‘partners’ in a company that owes its survival to the politics of globalization?

I admit to not reading beyond the first page of today’s offering and maybe there’s ‘full disclosure’ in there somewhere…but the first page sure reads like we could save our entire economy if we just ‘democratized’ capitalism!

If we made all of the workers ‘shareowners’ then they would all have a stake in the company’s future…and maybe they’d work harder and be more careful (which would boost company profits, thank you very much!)

Yeah, the capitalists LOVE giving away tiny shares of the company…hell, it’s ‘free’ to them!

That said, most people are completely clueless as to how ‘corporate democracy’ works.

Let’s fix that! First, you are issued ‘shares’ of the company and it is those shares that carry your ‘voting rights’.

Unlike our political system, under corporate democracy, one share equals one vote…so the more shares you own, the more your vote, er, ‘counts’.

Now, just like our political system, what you get to vote on is already decided for you by the ‘directors’ of the company.

SOME companies have by-laws that permit share-owner initiated ballot items but if you start circulating a petition to round up enough votes to put an issue on the ballot, chances are good you will be terminated before you can vote your handful of shares.

And understand this good citizen, for every share they ‘give away’ they give themselves two!

So you get to vote ‘your’ shares along the predetermined lines the company’s directors ‘recommend’…

Which is pretty much the same thing that happens when you step into the voting booth to find the media’s candidates lined up under their party’s designation.

All of the ‘deciding’ has been done for you…but you didn’t go out in the freezing cold to NOT vote, so you hold your nose and pick one!

Not that they don’t have their ways of fixing the outcome…they do.

But now everybody knows you can’t trust the ballot box, which turns the next election into a real interesting can of worms!

But I digress and time/space is running short.

‘Democratizing’ the workplace is NOT a solution much less an ‘alternative’ to capitalism.

In order to ‘fix’ our economy (both globally and locally) we need to put an end to ‘income streams’.

The term ’profit’ has to be redefined from what the owner ’nets’ to what society reaps in exchange for the effort expended!

There are too many worthwhile things that need doing that can’t be done because ’it is not profitable’ and we can start with the proper disposal of waste as the lead example!

So, back to the original question…can there be an ‘America after Capitalism?’

Oddly, the answer is, if we don’t stop capitalism in its tracks TODAY, there won’t be an America (or anything else) in the not too distant future.

How’s about them apples?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Ordinary

Greetings good citizen,

Markets are down again on (surprise!) renewed fears over the collapse of the Euro-zone!

I mean, ‘who knew’?

The oddball part is tomorrow they will pretend it’s not happening again and the markets will rise again…for absolutely NO discernable reason.

But then there’s a lot of things that don’t make sense going on in the, er, ‘business world’ these days…a world that is becoming increasingly less distinguishable from a carnival with each passing day.

Only tangentially related to current events, we can only wonder what flushed this well-beaten hobby horse back into the public arena?

Harder for Americans to Rise From Lower Rungs

WASHINGTON — Benjamin Franklin did it. Henry Ford did it. And American life is built on the faith that others can do it, too: rise from humble origins to economic heights. “Movin’ on up,” George Jefferson-style, is not only a sitcom song but a civil religion.

But many researchers have reached a conclusion that turns conventional wisdom on its head: Americans enjoy less economic mobility than their peers in Canada and much of Western Europe. The mobility gap has been widely discussed in academic circles, but a sour season of mass unemployment and street protests has moved the discussion toward center stage.

Trust me good citizen, no where in this article will you find the necessity of ‘moving up’ questioned.

That said, isn’t there something wrong with this picture from the get-go?

Isn’t the whole 1% phenomenon inherently ‘wrong’ in itself?

Why isn’t the corporate owned media asking the ‘right’ questions?

Could this be because the people who are, er, ‘favored’ by these wrong-headed policies also own the media?

How about ‘right in one’?

Yes good citizen, the media perpetuates these obvious ‘myths’ because they are used to justify that which is unjustifiable and undesirable.

The myths hide nothing. They carefully explain how ‘right place converged with the right time/stuff’ to achieve the desired result.

Ironically, this also explains why, er, ‘upward mobility’ is such a rare thing.

Ben Franklin would be Ben who? if he attempted to start his media empire today, just as Henry Ford (even with an Ivy League degree) would find ‘no takers’ for his now antiquated ideas in the modern world.

Which is to point out the obvious, there is no ‘prize’ for coming in ‘second’…

However, there is a considerable ‘penalty’…and THAT should not be.

No irony should be lost on the fact that the question of ‘mobility’ exists solely to justify the unjustifiable!

Just as there has never been an ‘equitable’ answer to the puzzle known as a ‘fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work’, how much compensation does (and let’s not scrimp here) ‘genius’ deserve?

Understand good citizen, people who are far from geniuses are regularly rewarded with more than they can spend (mostly to prevent the, er, ‘undeserving’ from getting it.)

Are bankers ‘worth’ their multi-million dollar ‘bonuses’?

Is any irony lost on the fact that the only people who think so are the people the bankers work for? (Ahem! And that WOULDN’T be YOU, small fry!)

Understand, banking is a ‘non-productive’ activity (even activities such as ‘creative accounting’ are, in the end, ‘counter-productive’.)

The idea that a few of us, er, ‘deserve’ to have more money than we can spend is patently ridiculous…yet many subscribe to the idea!

Worse, the best ‘justification’ for this perversion is ‘why not’?

Well, good citizen…take your fucking blinders off and drink it in because the real reasons ‘why not’ are all around you!

The world is a cesspool and the reason why has been staring you in the face for this entire article!

So ‘a few’ could be rich!

Funny, this is the identical catch phrase used to sell, er, ‘limited capitalism’ to the Chinese.

Well, they weren’t lying…a (very fucking few) got rich…the rest just didn’t have the ‘right stuff’!

Understand…nobody can tell us what that ‘right stuff’ is…the most they’ll admit to is ‘they know it when they see it’…

But can they really (when 99% of the time the ‘right stuff’ is found at the bottom of a smoking gun barrel?

Um, if you’ve read A Simple Plan then you know I don’t subscribe to the ‘equal pay’ nonsense often spouted by communists.

A simple plan is a ‘meritocracy’ with generous provisions made for the, er, ‘ordinary’…because when it’s all said and done, an ‘ordinary world’ is just fine with me!

No irony should be spared on the fact that the shit hole we’ve been saddled with is often made off to be ‘extraordinary’ when it is in fact beyond sub-par…

You need only open your eyes to see the truth in this.

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Tilt!

Greetings good citizen,

We all know the corporate owned media, er, ‘manipulates’ the information it provides us to ensure it has just the right amount of spin on it. Too much and you won’t believe it but not enough and you might just detect that something is amiss.

And you have to admit, the fuckers are good at what they do, despite the clownish appearance of some of the stuff they are forced to deliver…and that’s another important thing to keep in mind, the default setting is to not tell you ANYTHING. If something is said at all it is because saying nothing would be worse.

Thus do they often say stupid, nonsensical things in order to avoid saying nothing…

But every once in a while even the best ‘slip’. Certain details shake loose that prove nothing by themselves but ‘point’ in a particular direction…

And that’s what I think I have uncovered today…but you already know I’m a few fries shy of a Happy Meal!

So it could be something and it could be nothing…

If I’m right, we’ll know either way sooner than any of us suspects!

Today started off typically enough with this story that provides ‘evidence to the contrary’ to yesterday’s inexplicable market rally:

For four decades, US real per capita disposable income has risen at ~20% a decade. For the average working man, that is a doubling of disposable income in a typical working life. The last 5 1/2 years, however, have seen no change whatsoever - the worst performance in at least half a century.

Naturally, I stumbled upon the, er, ‘evidence’ next…but it was something that happened YESTERDAY that made it click together: (so the following is from yesterday’s SAR)

From Wikipedia: The Constitution does not authorize the President to use signing statements to circumvent any validly enacted Congressional Laws, nor does it authorize him to declare he will disobey such laws (or parts thereof). When a bill is presented to the President, the Constitution (Art. II) allows him only three choices: do nothing, sign the bill, or (if he disapproves of the bill) veto it in its entirety.

Obama’s use of signing statements has clearly shown his willingness to continue the George W. Bush legacy– not only of torture and illegal detainment, but in the dangerous trend of de facto rule by “executive fiat.” Worse, such signing statements put in place a precedent for future presidents to follow– or expand upon.

Further, Barack Obama has continued to backslide on his campaign promise not to use signing statements and executive orders to circumnavigate legislation signed into law. RELATED (Feb. 2010): Obama Breaks Yet Another Key Campaign Promise on Executive Orders, Signing Statements

Is anyone ‘surprised’ that ‘Uncle Tom’ signed this odious piece of legislation…intended to rob any who disagree with the status quo of their rights by denying them a trial?

The Constitutional Lawyer I voted for never would have done this…but this nigga did.

Then we have this article this is what leads me to think things are going to fall apart in pretty short order:

These are serious offenses. But it becomes even worse if JPM afterwards sought to withhold the stolen funds and cover up the transactions, impeding an official investigation. And then their legal maneuvering afterwards to cut the customer interests in the courts is of course beneath contempt.

Nasty business indeed. I wonder how long the Obama Administration and the Congress are going to cover this up. I am sure the details are known to the regulators already.

Am I making mountains out of molehills?

Probably…but you have to admit these are mighty ‘ballsy moves’ being made by the status quo and it’s happening right under our (largely unsuspecting) noses.

If we take each case individually they are all easily dismissed. The stock market being up 250 points one day only to be down 50 the next can be brushed off as ‘animal spirits’.

Um, Il Duce’s signing away of our constitutional rights can easily be dismissed as not wanting to appear ‘weak on defense’…(or weak between the ears/knees, pick one.)

Perhaps this is merely ‘the price you pay’ for being a puppet…let someone else pull the strings and history will still point the finger of shame at YOU!

The question without answer is, once all is said and done, was it worth it?

I suspect the public ‘fails to appreciate’ the true significance of ‘selectively suspend able’ rights.

Perhaps this is another incidence where I am giving the public more credit than it deserves.

We shall see…because yesterday, good citizen, the ‘true rulers’ of this capitalist clusterfuck, the ‘Royal wannabes’ if you will, declared war upon the 99%!

And if it is war they want, then it is war they shall have!

Happy New Year, good citizen!

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Brief post script: The rule of law is predicated upon ‘equality’. Once you start deciding who, er, ‘deserves’ the protection of the law and who doesn’t, the ‘rule of law’ goes right out the window and you’re left with the ‘do as I say and not as I do’ situation.

As of yesterday, the rule of law ‘legally’ ceased to exist here in the USA…and Gegner is NOT a Lawyer.

Let’s see how this turn of events plays out on the world stage? (Now that we are officially a lawless, rouge nation.)

Final bit of advice…don’t let them take you alive.

Spotless Minds

Greetings good citizen,

First day back and the markets are up 250 points at the open! How’s that for ‘reckless, baseless optimism?’

Um, because something more disturbing caught my eye first we are going to have to execute a sharp left here and return to the nonsense markets later.

What caught my eye this morning is neither new or news yet it is another disturbing example of the mismanagement regularly displayed by the politically powerful (Ironically proving how ‘unfit’ for power they truly are.)

There is broad agreement on the left, right and center that $450 billion in cuts over a decade — the amount that the White House and Pentagon agreed to last summer — is acceptable. That is about 8 percent of the Pentagon’s base budget. But there is intense debate about an additional $500 billion in cuts that may have to be made if Congress follows through with deeper reductions.

Mr. Panetta and defense hawks say a reduction of $1 trillion, about 17 percent of the Pentagon’s base budget, would be ruinous to national security. Democrats and a few Republicans say that it would be painful but manageable; they add that there were steeper military cuts after the Cold War and the wars in Korea and Vietnam.

“Even at a trillion dollars, this is a shallower build-down than any of the last three we’ve done,” said Gordon Adams, who oversaw military budgets in the Clinton White House and is now a fellow at the Stimson Center, a nonprofit research group in Washington. “It would still be the world’s most dominant military. We would be in an arms race with ourselves.”

It is this last paragraph I find most disturbing…we have indeed slashed military ‘infrastructure’ across the nation. To the point where the word most commonly associated with military base these days is ‘abandoned’.

It’s like living in the sickest of the industrialized nations and learning we spend the most on medicine (which is obviously doing us no good.)

We spend more than the rest of the world COMBINED on our military and it took ten years to, er…I dunno, we can hardly call it a ‘win’ and the ‘bad guys’ are still there so what was the point of being over there again?

Ten years and a trillion dollars for ‘nothing’…well, not exactly nothing. They did mange to cripple a hundred thousand or so of our volunteers while they were playing invade the peaceful brown people and slaughter ‘em!

But, naturally I digress.

Why we spend nearly a trillion dollars a year on our global military is a mystery.

Who is going to ‘invade’ a nuclear superpower, one capable of wiping any foreign power completely off the map at the push of a button?

Only the chimera that haunt the fevered minds of the conservative hawks…who stand ever vigilant, ready to defend us against non-existent threats anytime or anywhere!

So damaging were the relentless raids of the marauders that our psyches have never recovered…and the fuckers play us by pretending the next attack could come at any moment!

That attack, good citizen, is never coming again…the marauders no longer exist.

Oh, but they’ll be back…once conditions favor them again! (Like when defense budgets are limited to what an individual can afford…)

How sad is it good citizen that we currently have a handful of people that can ,er, ‘afford’ personal protection of a higher caliber than that provided to the average individual?

Which is to say once the Banana Republic is firmly entrenched, your only ally will be the gun in your hands.

Anyway, it’s time to say ‘right face’ and return to the first disturbing development I dropped at the open.

On Wall Street, Renewed Optimism for Deal-Making
By EVELYN M. RUSLI

[Jim Wilson/The New York TimesKinder Morgan’s Rockies Express pipeline runs from Colorado to Ohio. The company’s $36.2 billion deal for the El Paso Corporation was one of the largest in 2011.]

Before Europe’s debt crisis flared anew last summer, rattling markets and choking off a revival in mergers and acquisitions, huge corporate cash piles and cheap debt had fostered hopes that deal-making would recover strongly last year.

In the first half of 2011, the dollar volume of announced mergers worldwide neared its highest levels since the financial crisis. But that momentum proved fragile as deal volume tumbled 19 percent, to about $1.1 trillion, in the second half of 2011, compared with the same period the year before, according to according to Thomson Reuters data.

Now, with stock and credit markets steadier, deal makers are growing confident that 2012 will be better for business. Not only do they point to cheap financing and the large amounts of cash on corporate balance sheets, but they say that companies that have already cut costs may decide that they need to make acquisitions to drive growth in the face of a tepid economy.

Notice how nobody is interested in solving the ‘tepid economy’ problem?

What is their response to the mismanagement that is ‘globalization’?

Buy up more ‘market share!’ that’s how you ‘grow’ in a shrinking economy!

Okay, time to go ‘screaming off the Reservation’ (again!)

This is the THIRD ‘jobless recovery’ good citizen, the labor force today is SMALLER than it was in 2000 AND THEIR RESPONSE IS TO BUY MORE MARKET SHARE!!!

Guess who’s the ‘fuckee’ in this decidedly shitty deal?

Do you THINK you can fix this with the BALLOT BOX (that you obviously have zero control over)?

AAAaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhh! (the scream of mental anguish!)

What puzzles me is what your reaction will be when the totally contrived ‘famine’ hits?

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Cyanamid Rain

Greetings good citizen,

Welcome to ‘the beginning of the end’ if you make any connection to the Mayan calendar thingy…

I’m probably being ‘picky’ when I note that our solar system’s ‘orbit’ around the Milky Way takes roughly a quarter of a million* years so their 5,000 year start to finish appears to be a bit ‘off’.

I appreciate much of the data was destroyed before it could be studied, there may be another reason why the Mayan’s believe you won’t need the last fortnight of this years calendar.

Whatever…

While definitely not being a member of the ‘serious people’s club’ (better known as the eternal sunshine of a spotless mind club!) we have , er, bigger problems to contend with.

Once again, today’s offering only touches the edge of today’s topic

When those at the top of the corporate pyramid are this tone-deaf and lacking in any sense of public responsibility, we are in treacherous waters.

“The biggest danger to America is that the people in the financial sector and corporate leadership convey no awareness of what is needed to create a coherent and prosperous society,” economist Rob Johnson, head of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, told AlterNet. “Leadership is not simply about how much money one makes.”

Many dollars. Very little sense. Ultimately, hoarding everything at the top is not sustainable, and bankers like Dimon will end up destroying the very society that makes their enormous wealth possible. If we let them.

To-wit: The Masters of the Universe know we are powerless to stop them from, er, ‘robbing us back to the stone age’…nobody is debating this…WHOEVER, they depend upon the existence/enforcement of certain, er, ‘standards of behavior’ as much as we do.

So why are these retards ‘pretending’ that their double standard will hold?

They KNOW it won’t!

Um, and it is foolish to think that they ‘don’t care’. Stealing as much as they have stolen is completely pointless if they end up incapable of holding onto it!

Thus do I keep encountering rather disturbing theories about what they’re up to and why…

I am still of the opinion that (in the US) the current form of government will, er, ‘collapse’ (the ‘pressure’ to bring criminals to justice will become too intense and the corruption is so pervasive that there will be a defacto ‘coup’ [likely military] to, er, ‘maintain order’.)

No one will be surprised to see that the key figures will remain unchanged…(and predominantly conservative…which will make beaucoup trouble for their, er, ‘supporters’.)

It remains to be seen if this coup is pulled off by the military acting, er, ‘independently’ or if it will be a ‘reaction’ to a Conservative ‘walk-out’.

And as we have seen recently, I highly doubt the military will assume control to, er, ‘uphold’ the Constitution’.

(Most conservatives would like to use the Constitution for toilet paper!)

But I digress!

I am not saying we will see this during the course of this year (but it wouldn’t surprise me.) I bring it up because that is the direction things seem to be going in…and the traitors among us are suddenly anxious to, er, ‘cover their asses’.

If they don’t pull off a major shift in the status quo they WILL be prosecuted for their crimes…and, as irrational as it may sound, some have been ‘promised’ that they will not stand trial.

Now who could/would promise anyone (in a free society) ‘exemption from prosecution’?

Wouldn’t that person have to be ‘king’ to pull that one off?

Which is to opine that the, er, ‘game’ these assholes are playing has been carried more than a bit too far!

Oh well, the damage is done.

All that remains will be implementing a system that will prevent this sort of thing from happening again in 50 years!

This is why I favor the ‘elimination’ of legislators. The ability to alter (never mind make up as you go along) the nation’s laws is more dangerous to the individual’s freedom than Cyanamid rain (otherwise known as superglue.)

You are instantly ‘stuck’ with whatever the despot dreams up, despite their, er, ‘good intentions’.

(I never said I was any good at whipping up analogies on a moments notice…good thing part of my, er, ‘purpose’ here is to provide the occasional grin or two!)

Even if my sense of humor is somewhat twisted…

So, it’s the ‘beginning of the end’ (even if you aren’t a Mayan!)

I don’t expect it to be a ‘Happy’ New Year in the traditional sense by any stretch of the imagination…although we can ‘take heart’ once the death spiral has been arrested!

But we’re still left with the question of ‘when’?

Until that answer makes itself apparent…

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner

Under the ever so awkward 'this is embarrassing' category I had previously misstated the time it takes the solar system to orbit the galactic center by an order of magnitude.

How ironic that on the very day I misstate such a thing the actual number is broadcast on the Science channel that very same night!

Unfortunately for us all my staff is too lazy to fact check what it thinks it already knows...I stand abashed.

Me First!

Happy New Years, good citizen!

Does it piss you off that the crooked bastards running this recycled manure operation are already pretending that the ‘turning of the page’ is all it’s going to take to put everything right?

How disturbing is it good citizen that that nothing (of substance) has changed?

Observe:

A Year of Me-Firsts, and of Lessons Relearned

By GRETCHEN MORGENSON

Published: December 31, 2011

LIVE and learn. And well we should, given that 2011 was packed with teachable moments.

Some of this stuff we already knew. Like the fact that banks love the perks that come with being too big to fail. They will lobby shamelessly to hang on to their riskiest businesses and stay perilously large. No surprise, really. A heads-we-win, tails-the-taxpayers-lose model has a lot going for it, at least for executives atop these institutions.

Here’s another lesson we didn’t need to relearn: Penalties levied on corporate miscreants, and the legal bills they rack up defending themselves, never come out of their own pockets. Insurance policies and shareholders wind up paying.

Another win for the me-firsters.

While Ms. Morgenson’s first shot lands smack between their eyes, her remaining shots also hit their mark…leaving one that much more galled over our collective inability to do anything about it.

If it’s this easy to dig up the evidence, then why is nobody being prosecuted?

Understand good citizen, as far as the one percent is concerned, we’re all ‘slackers’.

‘Overzealous’ law enforcement is a two-edged sword. The tendency is for it to catch the honest players in the gray areas so that the process is halted…er, ‘prematurely’.

But we aren’t talking ‘one time’ offenders here…and it is these ‘serial criminals’ who are behind throwing the prosecutors under the bus!

Weird how the guilty escape prosecution by calling the search for justice a ‘witch hunt’.

This is why it is imperative that we alter the game itself so the guilty get theirs regardless.

Like the outlaws all know, there are some things ‘worse than death.’

Take watching your hard won spoils literally ‘evaporate’ before your eyes and being powerless to stop it for example!

Who said the payback ain’t a bitch!

Let ‘em call their high priced political operatives; they’re all ‘unemployed’ (and likely facing the gallows to boot!) Let’ em call the (now defunct) law firms (who engineered this whole fiasco)…the silence will be deafening!

Which is to admit right up front that it is indeed ‘unlikely’ we will succeed in prosecuting all of the guilty parties involved…but we can say with a high degree of confidence that they will ALL be put ‘out of business’!

AND, we can also say with an equally high degree of confidence that those who slipped the hangman’s noose WILL find themselves EXILED in short order.

They’re obsessive compulsive, they literally can’t help themselves…but, ironically, society’s new reply to this is lifted directly from the Capitalist playbook…

“If you can’t play by the rules it’s not our problem, it’s YOURS!

How close are we to righteous retribution? good citizen?

Er, this COULD BE a ‘massive coincidence’…but the timing was ‘impeccable’!

January 01, 2012 — PERU, Ill. (AP) — A large fire broke out at a massive former Peru clock factory as revelers were ringing in the new year, drawing firefighters from surrounding northern Illinois communities to help out and leading to the mandatory evacuation of residents from nearby homes early Sunday.

The fire at the former Westclox clock complex, a city landmark that covers a two-by-four-block stretch of downtown Peru and encompasses several buildings, including some converted into working shops and businesses, began around the time people began counting down the seconds to 2012, Gary Eccles, an engineer with the city's fire department, told The Associated Press. [snip]

The National Park Service in 2007 deemed the building eligible for the National Registry of Historic Places "because of its significant contributions to the social and economic development of Peru and the nation," the newspaper reported.

Um, one can only wonder about the ‘effectiveness’ of burning down facilities in the middle of the economic desert that nobody gives a shit about.

But it does produce a ‘headache’ for an insurance company somewhere…and if they keep burning (and I’m predicting they will, just as the ‘car fires’ across Los Angeles will, er, ‘graduate’ to more ‘property damage intensive’ items.)

And I’m clear on the other side of the country…just saying, ya know?

Of course, there’s a rather fine line between ‘predicting’ and ‘enciting’

What I’m calling predicting is someone else’s idea of ‘advocating’…thus are we once again bitten by that gnarly beast known as ‘the imprecision of human speech.’

That said, I’ll shut up and wish you success in the New Year, regardless of what ‘yardstick’ you use to measure it!

Thank you for letting me inside your head,

Gegner