Patriot or Traitor?

When one of the two Facebook billionare scumbags, Eduardo Saverin, announced that he would renounce his American citizenship to save on income and unearned income (investment) taxes when the Facebook IPO made him a multibillionaire, I began to suspect that Facebook wasn't a place for me to spend time. Saverin is Brazilian-born rich kid who, like the current Repuglican candidate for President, considers himself a "world citizen" rather than an American. He was naturalized in 1998 and latched on to Zuckerberg as a "friend" (virtual and financial friends are all Zuckerberg can manage) when the two cloned the Facebook idea from the dozens of on-line social networks that were already in place in 2004. The two Harvard fratbrats unfriended each other as part of their money grubbing to control the monster Facebook became. The usual Faux News zombies heralded Saverin as a "hero" which made me think that their definition of hero has been pretty consistent over the centuries. They loved Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr (an upper-crust ex-Vice President who tried to steal Louisiana for England) Joe McCarthy who betrayed the US government for a stiff drink and a head full of delusions and the Rat Pack of Repuglican Presidents from Tricky Dick to Little George who all considered the Constitution to be "just a goddamn piece of paper."

All of this reminded me of a man I met almost 40 years ago, Louis Dinklage. Mr. Dinklage was introduced to me by my employer as "the man who paid the most personal taxes in the United States." That did not make him the richest man in the US, but by Faux News standards it would make him the biggest sucker. Louis Dinklage was in his 70's when I met him. He was a legend in Nebraska farming and almost everyone I met in that part of Nebraska had a story about how "Old Man Dinklage" had bailed them out, financed their business or farm, or carried them in tough times. In fact, the night I met him I'd been run around the state for 14 hours and was, then, expected to be at a Wisner, Nebraska mill first thing in the morning. I left home expecting to be back by lunch, so my cash was expended and there were no ATM's (on the planet) or open businesses in that town to cash a check. Most small businesses did not take credit cards in the 1970's.

I stopped at the Wisner grain mill, because there was a light on, and found an old man sweeping up the office. I explained my predicament and asked if he knew where I might be able to get a check cashed. He asked me "How much do you need?"

I said, "Twenty bucks would get me through the night, but I'd like to have fifty so I can get something to eat and buy gas tomorrow morning."

He unrolled a wad of cash from his back pocket and said, "I think I can do that. I know who you work for."

I later learned I had met Louis Dinklage.

Mr. Dinklage was a first generation American, the son of German immigrants, who knew that all of his success and wealth came from the community and the country where he lived. He poured back into that community and tried to give as much as he got. He created charitable foundations that still finance his old community. He built the town a city swimming pool in 1982 and they named the park after him and his wife. Thirty years ago, I knew more of his story that I remember today, but I suspect I know what he'd think of a man who hid his cash in foreign banks to avoid paying taxes on his millions of speculative income. I know what I think of a boy who lucked into a fad made possible by the investment of the US government and who would leave the country rather than help support the community that made him rich.

This all further cements my opinion of rich people. I do not care what happens to them, under any circumstances. If they all contract syphilis from too much contact with $1,000 bills I will hope for an antibiotic shortage. If their children are born with two empty heads and dysfunctional organs, I'll cheer for the extinction of their linage. There is, literally, no bad thing that can happen to any rich asshole that will cause a moment of sympathy from me. One of the obvious qualities of being the 0.1% is that no one will miss them when they are gone. They are dead weight.

A Minor Revolution

The existence of Bernie Sanders ought to be an inspiration to some state. He's on his second term, so I'm not holding my breath. If one state were to reach critical mass of intelligent voters, and all it takes is one measly state, the rest of the country could be shamed into reconsidering the regular down-breeding of politicians and political discourse that has continued since Republicans purged Teddy Roosevelt and progressives from the Greedy Old Party early in the last century. All it takes if for one state to attract a slight (50.0000000 . . . 1%) majority of intellectuals ("elites," according to Repuglican dogma) who consistently vote and are unfazed by conservative political correctness and other girlyman mass media crap and the New American Revolution would be begin. That's all it would take. One freakin' liberal state with balls.

It won't be California, as disappointing as that is, because southern California is the home of redneck retards and conservative bullshit and the average SoCal IQ is something below a toad. As much intelligence and mental horsepower as central and northern California contains is completely offset by the Reagan marching morons and that is all there is to say about and hope for from the once-innovative, nation-leading California Dream. Oregon, Washington, Vermont, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, Wisconsin, and (a long-shot might be) Michigan are the only hope the nation has for this revolt. All of those states are taxpayers, instead of welfare-dependent red states. (Funny how that worked out, isn't it? "Red" used to be socialist/commie and now it means redneck, welfare-sucking conservative deadbeats. Nothing really changes.)

In my delusional democracy-regenerating wetdream, this revolution would begin with a liberal majority getting its act together and electing nothing but liberal politicians from national to local levels and the voting majority standing behind the people they elected. When that happens, the gentleman's agreement in Washington would instantly collapse when those representatives consistently stood up and said "You assholes are a pack of crooks and we're not putting up with this shit any more." Characters like Larry Summers, Timmy Geithner, Harry Paulson, Milton Friedman and his band of Chicago School of Economics morons, Wall Street's shills and crooks, and everyone who ever exposed and promoted their ignorance and corruption on Faux News would be terrified to raise their gnarly heads in this educated liberal stronghold.

Moments after this lone state stands on its hind legs, the migration begins. Intellectuals from all over the country pack up and move to this liberal, tolerant, educated place, which repulses the remaining redneck population who move to a red state where they will be more comfortable taking welfare and complaining about how insensitive the liberals are toward their superstitions, laziness, and general genetically damaged stupidity.

I've been waiting for this place to emerge for more than 30 years. I was enticed to move to Minnesota on the state's deteriorating reputation as a liberal stronghold. Minnesota has dropped that ball so many times in the post-Reagan decades that it may be a lost cause. Bachmann territory is notoriously uneducated, simple-minded and . . .  old, so that demographic may just die off naturally. While she made it to the dismal U.S. House, our Senate representation is considerably more enlightened by Al Franken and Amy Klobuchar. We have some pretty substantial people in the House with Betty McCollum (D), Keith Ellison (D), and Tim Waltz (D). The rest of the MN House pack are somewhere between hopeless and too-dumb-to-have-a-drivers'-license. I'm not putting a lot of hope in Minnesota's return to sanity. For me, all it will take is for one state's representatives to make a statement and for that state's voters to stand behind them,  and I'm moving. I'll take my real estate losses, sell all of my crap, and we're on the road within a week. I expect a lot of people to do the same, in one direction or the other.

Book Review: American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History

Almost every word in this book is an explanation of why our mercenary military is doing to be the death of democracy. If "American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History" had been written 236 years ago, Chris Kyle would have been British and he would have been saying exactly the same things about the American "insurgents" he had slaughtered. His lack of empathy for the country he invaded and the people who fought to regain control of their country is embarrassing. The fact that he considers himself a great patriot and brags about decorating his vehicles with a Texas flag is telling.

When you read a book like this, you hope that there will be some sign of personal growth in the journey the author makes. The biggest disappointment was that Kyle is exactly the same amoral, bloodthirsty corporate tool at the end that he was in the beginning. He is the kind of guy you won't be surprised to hear assassinated a president, blew up a government building, or fell in with white supremacists and died in a gun battle with the ATF in some cultist whacko's suicide war. He loves to kill people and can find justification in the smallest ways. The most informative quote I found in the book was, "After the first kill, the others were easy." Scary stuff. Characters from these two irrational wars will be biting back on this country for decades.

Kyle appears to believe he has done something patriotic in his part of the Iraq invasion. He seems to have nothing resembling an analytical capacity regarding the reasons for that invasion, the feelings or motivations of the invaded, or a rational ability to see the inconsistencies in his own statements. In one paragraph, he calls the Iraqis "cowards" and "evil" and the next he is disgusted by their "courage" or "stupidity" as they try to fight an overwhelming enemy with primitive weapons. He is unable to assume responsibility for his part in the slaughter. When he witnesses war protesters, he contests their patriotism or courage because they don't properly honor his half-witted understanding of a citizen's personal responsibility. If Kyle were typical of the kind of people who volunteer for our military, it would be pointless for war protesters to try to provide insight, moral encouragement, or context to the volunteers. Fortunately, he is just one kind of poverty draft victim and I have known soldiers who were moved and informed by war protests aimed at the warriors.

On the best pages, this book is barely a soldier's diary; a recounting of the tools, days, and shallow mind of a man who lives to kill other men, women, and children. You'd like to believe that this kind of man would grow to recognize how much of a tool he had been, but that is as likely as Chris Kyle is to discover make useful scientific breakthrough. The day he and his fellow soldiers storm through a Wall Street bank's doors and "liberate" that company's assets for America will be the first day Chris Kyle performs a real patriotic act. Until then, he will cover himself in the Texas flag and chant the slogans he has been trained to repeat and his "service" to the country will be one of many acts that destroys the United States of America.

Who's in Charge?

A while back, I was talking to a friend about the general level of uselessness typified by CEOs that that scum-sucking, pond-muck sub-species of almost-humans. He argued that in the company he'd just left, the CEO was a "great guy," but all the middle managers were idiots and backstabbers. After arguing about business life in general, we left it at "we're going to have to agree to disagree."

A few moments after I hung up the phone, it struck me that it should have been obvious that the good guy CEO hired idiots and backstabbers to do the dirty work so he could pretend to be half-human. After all, what does upper management do except select and direct middle management? Middle management usually reflects the best intentions of the corner office crowd, not the worst. As the Temptations said,

 Smiling faces, sometimes pretend to be your friend
Smiling faces show no traces of the evil that lurks within(can you dig it?)
Smiling faces, smiling faces sometimes, They don't tell the truth
Smiling faces, smiling faces tell lies and I got proof  I can dig it.

Why Health Care Costs So Much

Pretty funny topic, right? I just received the bill for my hip replacement (for about $50k, by the way). Since I have a "Health Care Account" to pay for some of the bill, I called the hospital's accounting office to ask them to flag my account so that I would know when the account had paid out and I would know what my share of that expense would be.

"We don't have anyway to flag an account for notification. We service at least 100 accounts in this office."

"I didn't mean you, personally. I assumed you had a computer system that you could access and that system might have a way to note when money had been credited to an account." (Yep, I was being sarcastic.)

"No, we don't have anything like that." (Yep, he was being too dumb to recognized sarcasm.)

Oh boy. It's hard to imagine that long bill was hand typed, but I guess it's possible. There were a lot of people typing shit into computers while I was in the hospital, but maybe all that stuff just ended up on a piece of paper for the accounting department to copy into their ledgers. Then, the accountants handed off their papers to the customer service characters and they will toss paper back and forth until someone realizes the bill is paid (or not).

Heard this Before?

When Rick Perry endorsed Newt Gingrich, he had this overwhelming recommendation for Newt, "Newt is not perfect, but who among us is?” I wonder how many times that has been said before?For a character who fashioned himself as the representative for traditional family values, Perry has gone off the deep end with Newt. The only family value tradition Newt has is that he trades in his wife for a new model every 4-5 years. The boy is Penthouse Magazine's dream President.

Perry justified this ethical flip-flop by saying, "I believe in the power of redemption.” Really? Newt Gingrich is born again? Somebody really believes that? I can't decide if I want to sell Perry the Brooklyn Bridge or my own real estate for 500% of current value.

Short Memories, Tiny Minds

The poofs at Faux News are upset that the Muppets are waging class war on the 1% and the poor oil billionaires. Obviously, they've missed the last couple hundred years of American life and literature. The basic theme of practically every story in our history is about the battle between the rich and powerful and the rest of us. If you can find a western, even a Ronald Reagan or John Wayne western, that isn't about some powerful rancher, mine owner, crooked sheriff or marshal, or some other rich gangster who has taken over the town, corrupted the characters who usually work as enforcers, cops, or gangbangers for the interests of the ruling powers, and bought the town with money and guns. It has to be the oldest story in the US.

Face it, girls. It isn't a story unless it's about the rich and powerful against the rest of us. Call it "class warfare" or call it reality. Either way, it's an American story. If we aren't fighting our side of the battle, it's just class slaughter.

Customer Service (with the agricultural definition)

I just bought a laptop that came with Windows 7 Lite (or whatever POS name Microsquash put on the cheapest, most limited version of their lame new OS). I thought I'd use it for a while and see if I found a reason to put up with a new interface and learning curve. A week later, I'm stumped. I can't find a thing to like about the new system.

I admit, I lived with my old Dell laptop for more than 10 years and the only reason I'm replacing it is because the keys are coming off when I type. Nothing about the system is slow, cumbersome, or inconvenient. While I worked at finding a reason to like the new OS, I stumbled on this website, "I don't like Windows 7 and I want to go back to Windows XP. Is this possible and if so how can I do this?" on the Microsoft "Answers" webpage. An older user asked how to turn back the software clock on a new laptop similar to mine. What she got was attitude and arrogance from Microsoft's "help desk" (a business oxymoron if there ever was one). I am amazed (a little) that Microsoft's management has left the condescending replies on the site for old users to see, but it's a little enlightening.In my case, I bought a reconditioned Dell that originally had an XP/7 OS option, so I don't have to worry about having drivers for XP. Other users are less fortunate.

The question the Microsoft characters completely avoided answering was in providing some reason for "upgrading." Since most of the new OS features are only visible to IS dweebs, that makes for a lame sales pitch. Without a practical justification for changing, most computer users don't care one way or another how the work gets done, let alone what the OS number might be. And that's, apparently, all that changed for Win 7.

Mac users have put up with this crap forever. Apple could care less about legacy users. The company regularly blasts out "upgrades" that disable older computers and, sometimes, does serious damage to customers' data. I have often found myself in the position of needing a computer to fix one of my Apple computers, when an OS X update disabled my machine. Since I have a fully functioning audio/video Mac and haven't seen a reason on the planet to change what works, I expect my current Mac tower rig to outlive me. If it doesn't, it will most likely outlive my career and that is good enough.

Corporations have grown past the point of considering customers to be the people their products serve to imagining customers obligated to buy the crap they build. As a society, we're no longer "citizens" but "consumers." As individuals, our rights are subservient to corporate profits. As a nation, we're far past the point of no return on the path to when greed and power are the sole motivations of those who imagine themselves to be the "job providers" and when citizens are left with no democratic method to regain control of government and our lives. Microsoft and Apple are perfect examples of how indebted crass corporations imagine citizens to be and they are equally powerful examples of confused businesses that are likely to fall hard when they fall.

(Postscript: I did replace Win7 with WinXP and experienced a dramatic improvement in performance. Things my computer was unable to do with Win7 in charge, the computer did easily with WinXP. That settles it for me, I don't need Win7's features and can't tolerate the lack of performance.)

Occupy Wall Street, the right message

http://occupywallst.org/

https://www.wepay.com/donate/ows

https://www.facebook.com/#!/OccupyWallSt

Contradicting Yourself

NASA and other astronomers have identified a large (aircraft carrier large) asteroid that will be passing between the moon and the earth Tuesday, November 8. There appears to be no sign of panic from the global warming deniers or the usual panicked crowd of conservatives and religious nuts. This thing is going to be close, an estimated 202k miles from the earth and about 150k miles from the moon. Still, no panic.

Explain this to me. According to conservatives, these same scientists are incapable of accurately measuring the temperature of the earth or calculating the extremely predictable expected increase in temperature based on the last 100 years of measurements and experience, but we're all supposed to be warm and cuddly since these same people say the asteroid is going to miss us "this time?":  How do they hold these two conflicting opinions in their tiny little minds?

Even more comforting, the scientists say we're safe, "this time." For at least the next 100 years, we don't have to worry about this thing hitting the earth, causing "a magnitude-7 earthquake and 70-foot-high tsunami waves." At my age, that is comforting; sort of. For my grandkids, that will certainly have impact (no pun intended) on their children's lives. Being the short-sighted animal we are, I'm sure planning for the actual impact will begin a week before the expected hit.

Apple's Inventions

What wouldn't exist without Apple and Steve Jobs? 

Personal Computers
1976 - Steve Wozniak was selling a 30-chip circuit board, the Apple I computer.
1977 - The Commodore PET was the first commercially available personal computer.
1978 - The Tandy TRS-80 computers and the Apple II began shipping.
1980 - The  Commodore 64 sold 17 million units and was the best-selling single personal computer model in history.
By 1980 there were dozens of personal computer companies in the US, making a variety of computers using a collection of operating systems.

Graphical User Interface
1973 - Xerox developed the Alto personal computer with a bitmapped screen and a graphical user interface (GUI), but didn't use it in a commercial product until 1981 with the Star personal computer.
1982 - Tandy pasted the Deskmate GUI over MSDOS and made it available on their  TRS1000 machines and for other PC's.
1984 - Digital Research Inc. offered the GEM GUI operating system for Intel machines and the OS came standard on the Atari ST personal computers.
1984 - Apple introduced the Mac computers.
1985 - Windows 1.0 was introduced, the GUI-based operating system for the IBM and clone computer market.
1985 - Commodore introduced the Amiga with its Workbench GUI that introduced widgets, graphics library, multi-tasking capability, keyboard, mouse, and and other input devices.
1985 - Sun Microsystems introduced PostScript-based NeWs OS. Sun's systems ran both NeWs and X-Windows concurrently. 
1986 - X-Windows or the early version of UNIX was introduced by MIT engineers, this has become the standard layer for GUI systems, including Apple's OS X, since its introduction.
1986 - Apple released the Apple IIgs, an upgraded Apple II that ran Apple GS/OS with the introduction of the4 "folder" concept (instead of the more technically correct "directory" terminology) and a new video graphics chip.

Laptop Computers
1968 - Alan Kay began to work on his Dynabook concept at Xerox PARC facility and demonstrated the first concept portable personal computer in 1972.
1975 - IBM introduced the first commercially available laptop, the IBM 5100.
1981 - Epson introduced the HX-20 portable computer, with an LCD screen, a rechargeable battery, and a small printer. HP and Tandy also offered portable computers with similar features that year.
1982 - The GRID Compass, followed by the GRID Gavilan, portable laptops were used by NASA and the military. The GRID products were commercially available, but at an $8,000 price tag they were rare.
1991 - Apple introduced the Mac Portable to slight notice from consumers. By 1991, IBM, Compaq, HP, Epson, and several other companies were on their 3rd and 4th generation laptop product lines.

MP3 Players
1979 - Kane Kramer designed a digital audio players, the IXI, which managed about 3 minutes of playing time and never became a commercial product. but it did not enter commercial production. Apple hired Kramer as a consultant and used his work to claim "prior art" when Apple tried to take ownership of personal players.
1996 - Audio Highway announced the Listen Up player, but only a few were sold.
1998 - SaeHan Information Systems marketed the  “MPMan” player sold as the "Eiger MPMan" in the US. The MPMan had 32M of flashRAM and could manage about 20 minutes of playing time.
1998 - Diamond Multimedia introduced the Rio PMP300, another 32M player.
2000 - Creative released the 6GB micro-drive based Creative NOMAD Jukebox.
2001 - Apple introduced the first generation 5G iPOD. 

 Smartphones
1992 - The IBM Simon is demonstrated as a concept product at COMDEX.
1996 - Nokia introduces the Nokia 9000, which combined a cell phone with HP's personal digital assistant (PDA) features.
1997 -  Ericsson coined the name "smartphone" when the company displayed the concept phone GS88
2000 The touchscreen Ericsson R380 Smartphone was the first device to use an open operating system, the Symbian OS.
2000 -  Nokia 9210 communicator was the first color screen smartphone.
2001 - Palm  introduced the Kyocera 6035, the first widely used smartphone in the US.
2007 - Apple release the company's first iPhone.


Graphical Pads
1968 - Kay's Dynabook was the first concept for a graphical pad.
1991 - GO Corporation, Pencept, and Linus introduced a variety of tablet computers to little consumer success.
1993 - Apple introduces the Newton to minimal customer notice.
2000 - Microsoft attempted to market a line of Windows-based Tablet PC  touchscreen pads to little consumer interest. The Windows CE operating system was used by several Japanese and US mini-computer companies, including the NEC MobilePro product line that used touch screen operation, a drawing pad feature, and communications. Compaq, Acer, and other computer companies introduced and attempted to market a variety of touch-screen computer devices.
2010 - Apple introduces the iPad and the iOS interface.

A New PC Code Word

Foreign Policy recently published an article by Phillip Longman claiming that Darwinism was going to make this a "conservative world." Because, as he explains, "conservatives" in places like Salt Lake City are reproducing at the highest rate in the nation, he says "conservatives" are going to rule the future. He quotes statistics that proves Vermont (one of the most liberal states) and other liberal states have a dramatically lower birth rate than Utah, Alabama, and other hot best of "conservative" ideology. He notes that states that voted for G.W. Bush spewed out at least 10% more children than those states that voted for Kerry and Gore. He concluded the article by claiming we in for "a far more conservative future, one in which patriarch and other traditional values make a comeback, if only by default."

All through the article, I couldn't help substitute the word "conservative" for "stupid." C.M. Kornbluth told this story in his classic, The Marching Morons, in the 50's, but who would have believed it would come true so quickly?

Ponzi Schemes

Texas lunatic, Ricky Perry, claims that Social Security is a Ponzi Scheme. That's cute, isn't it? An ex-cheerleader Texas governor who claims to be a "conservative" and who brags about running a state with a balanced budget (and who "balanced" that budget by paying of an $18 billion deficit with federal TARP funds) and who barely passed his college Economics class at Texas A&M (not a rocket science university) pretending to understand multi-syllable words and criticizing a 75-year-old federal institution that has provided stability and security for three generations of Americans.

Even funnier, the bozos on Wall Street and the Wall Street Journal are joining in with Perry in trying to tear down what's left of the US economy to enrich themselves as they scavenge what's left of the nation's bank accounts. Normal humans would be embarrassed to be so wrong, so often; which is why the Extreme Court has given more rights and privileges to corporations than to real people. As Andy Borowitz said, "“Rick Perry is qualified to be President in the same way that Olive Garden is qualified to be Italy.” That fact, unfortunately, doesn't stop Repuglicans from running raving lunatics, complete idiots, vicious criminals, and sociopathic corporate executives for office.

All this is distracting the voting, taxpaying public from the fact that the real Ponzi scheme is all of Wall Street. Any idiot who managed to remember the news of the last 20 years would know that the SEC has been cut down to a fraction of the police force required to keep Wall Street and international corporations from running wild in the streets, setting fire to every corner of the country. The number of companies that have crashed and burned after years of filing quarterly profit reports without a glitch in the pretty picture painted by their "accountants" until the trail of lies started crashing around the CFOs' heads ought to stretch the credibility of any numbers posted on the stock market.

Until Americans wise up and realize that "regulation" means the country is policing the biggest crooks in the nation, we're going to keep trashing our future to enrich the Wall Street sleazebags at the expense of everything worth protecting and preserving. "Amoral" is an insufficient word to describe their character, but it's the best English has to offer. Perry, on the other hand, isn't smart enough to warrant any adjective more complicated than "idiot."

Crazy People

One of Michelle Bachmann's constituents, Nancy Bjorkman was quoted in an MPR article saying,  "I think she's willing to take a stand and stick to her guns, even when the guns are against her. And I appreciate that." I think that says it all. Minnesota District 6 is clearly one of the places we put the tube when the world gets an enema.

For some reason, my wife and I watched the July 4th show in Bachmann's eastern territory last night. Three things were apparent:

1. There is a lot of money in that place
2. Musical taste is not a right wing quality
3. The people in Bachmann's world can't drive for shit. 

Damn! There are a lot of dumb folks in Stillwater. Escaping that silly town after the fireworks show was like getting out of Stillwater Prison. It reminded me of driving through a small Midwestern town at noon, when all of the churches let out their inmates. Traffic resembles random motion.

Why Do They Hate Us?

"Why do they hate us?" I heard this question a year ago from a young man who had just dropped out of a state university engineering program because it was "too hard" and was pursuing one of the most remedial and disgraceful programs offered by any educational facility: criminal justice (talk about an oxymoron!), police science or law enforcement. Pick a program name, they are all the same and they are all equally simple.

My response was lame, at best. "You're kidding?"

The kid was, of course, excelling at the idiot program because he is of normal intelligence and moderately conscious. If you are unable to pull an "A" in classes like:

• CPS 103 Particular Forms of Crime - Analysis of conventional property crime, criminal markets, criminal organizations, white collar crimes, and corporate crimes. Consensual and non-consensual delinquency, and "victimless" crimes. Factors that can be used to differentiate several dimensions of forms of crimes. (4 credits)
• CPS 105 Deviance and Social Control - Competing theories of deviance, deterrence and control, relations between deviant actors and reacting audiences, and how deviant individuals explain or justify their behavior. 
• CPS 170 Domestic Violence - Comparative approach to power and violence in family systems including detailed and in-depth analysis of the devaluation of family relations. 
• CPS 171 The Criminal Mind - Psychological aspects of criminal behavior, personality of criminals, the psychological processes affecting behavior, and the violence that is often associated with criminal behavior. Dealing with fear and anger, offering and counter-offering, and negotiating in high-risk situations.
• CPS 172 Comparative Police Systems - Selected police systems in the United States compared with a variety of police systems in other countries. 

Honestly, I can't go on. The titles of these classes sound like exactly the kind sociology program titles that would study the anti-social behavior of police officers around the world.

This goofy kid appeared to be completely clueless about why ordinary citizens hate the police. Even in St. Paul, where the local police and country sheriff's deputies went 1968 Chicago-style on local and visiting protesters during the 2008 RNC debacle, it appears that a police candidate can remain ignorant of the history of the occupation he desperately wants to join. He asked me, repeatedly, to cite reasons why so many citizens "hate cops." As you might expect, he had excuses for every abuse and every anti-social police act committed in modern history. As I should have expected from someone so disconnected from human history, he imagined none of this violence applied to his possible future.

It's hard to imagine this level of avoidance, but it's critical if what's left of our society expects to create "order" from the chaos of corporate socialism and pusedo-capitalism. The fact is, fear is not respect. Fear is a close emotional relation to hate and as far from respect as love is to hate. While there are cops who deserve respect for trying to do the right job in a system designed to repress human dignity and freedom, most are exactly the vicious characters pictured in these video links and the photos on this page. For example, any animal capable of intentionally smearing pepper spray in the eyes of environmental or political protesters is unfit for socialization. Any society decadent enough to instruct its stormtroopers to commit such a crime is undeserving of history's charity. Cops have been used to break up legal protests, as strikebreakers, as an armed force dispossessing citizens of their legal property, and as a protection force for corporate criminals and other organized crime figures since the middle of the 1800's.

The fact is, most of us don't hate cops. We do fear them, however. They represent us in our national decay and "we have met the enemy and he is us."

Cops serve the worst of our society and repress the best. Regardless of the deranged fairy tails Hollywood and television create of hard-working, dedicated, clever police protecting society from terrible criminals and solving complicated crimes, many cops are nothing more than lazy, cowardly, tenured, over-armed, arrogant, brownshirt terrorists who repress any attempt of the public to regain control of their nation. (Not just true in the US, but in many corporately controlled nations.) What kind of person wouldn't fear that kind of police force? When some citizens get past fear and hate, and act accordingly, we call that "revolution." Remember that when you finally get your corporate welfare job and are asked to remove your badge and any other form of identification before committing a psychopathic act of brutality. Being ignorant of your own motivations and the history of your chosen occupation is no defense. When you are the fist of repression and the weapon of fear, you will have to get used to being the object of fear and hate.

Why Say It Then?

". . . it is important to recognize that profession of noble intent is predictable, and therefore carries no information, even in the technical sense of the term." [Noam Chomsky, Hedgemony or Survival]. Chomsky was making a technical and detailed explanation of the old saying, or "actions speak louder than words."

If claiming patriotism, nationalism, the moral high ground is exactly and predictably the "last refuge of a coward" or a criminal or a con artist, why does anyone listen? "Why" is the right question. The fact is the majority of the thundering herd (or the "beast" as Alexander Hamilton called us) are primed and ready to stampede off of the nearest cliff like lemmings chasing a change in weather and overpopulation. Why are humans so inclined? Why doesn't our education system provide some immunity to our idiot natural inclinations?

I'm sorry to say that it appears to be because we, as a species, are freaking morons. Someone with a far better grasp of the history of human societies said, in the middle of this past decade, that America is on the cusp of the point of no return. If we continue to waste our wealth and talent on the military, the military-industrial complex, phony finance schemes, our inclination to provide military assistance to any international corporation's demand for other nations' natural resources, and the rest of the perverse fascism that is in the long list of failed world powers playbooks, we're going to become the next fallen empire.

Obviously, the real downside to our failure is that we are likely to be inclined to take the rest of the world with us in our demise. It's a terrible truth, but the current random proliferation of nuclear weapons in the 3rd world may be a good thing, since nuclear retaliation is the only thing that appears to stand between an attempt by the corporations (represented by our government and its military) to take over the world's resources and to destroy all forms of democracy. If those psychopathic CEOs and CFOs weren't worried about a terrorist lugging a suitcase nuke into their palaces, they would order the forcible takeover of every asset on the planet.

Of course, that's a double-edged sword.

As we found in 2003, any hope that we can defeat the rest of the world's crazies by employing our own crazies in that battle is probably a defend-able definition of insanity. Arming all of the Bin Ladens, Kim Il Sungs, Moammar Gadhafis, and Dick Cheneys of the world is not a formula for world security. Sooner or later, one of these idiots is going to say "to hell with all of you" and start launching bombs for the fun of it. And they will do so claiming "defense of the motherland, fatherland, little brotherland" or whatever. As we're all going up in nuclear smoke, the last words we'll hear will be G.W. Bush babbling, "I just want you to know that, when we talk about war, we're really talking about peace."1


1 G.W. Bush, being his usual irrational self.

Dumbing Down the Nation

A recent poll found that 26% of the country doesn't know that the American Revolution was a revolt from British rule. Fox News has 3.3 viewers every day. Americans listen to the voices of fools and corporate shills and ignore pretty much any information that comes from sources with above sub-human intelligence. I actually had an acquaintance recommend that I listen to Limbaugh and Beck to "learn something."As George Carlin said, "."

NOTE: When I want to learn something I look for intelligent sources. I have absolutely no interest in what the fools of the world are thinking and saying; if you are willing to give them credit for the capacity to think.Listening to Glenn Beck in the hopes off "learning something" would be as stupid as asking G.W. Bush to explain quantum physics.

In 1950, the country listened to the inane babbling of Joe McCarthy and voted for Ike because the conservative majority was terrified of an intellectual President: Stevenson. Nearly half of the country voted for Nixon in 1968 out of the same fear of Kennedy's intellect. Nixon won two elections, even when there was every expectation (and hope) that his criminal regime would end in a huge collection of jail terms (for folks who ended up in the Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II regimes) . A look at the interesting and informative list of those pardoned by past Presidents says a lot about the ethics of those people.

The conservative majority has little respect for law and even less respect for our Constitution or our history. Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, and all of their cronies and fellow mobsters are all working for purposes that serve a collection of masters who are disinterested in the best interests of the United States and its citizens. The Republican congress is working for those same un-American, un-democratic, regressive wealthy interests. Unfortunately, those interests are not in sync with the interests of the nation as a whole.

Desecrating the nation's education system is a terrific way to convince the public that "four legs are better than two" or "two legs are better than four," depending on the propaganda of the moment. Even a conservative as wingnutty as Phyllis Schlafly is worried about the quality of the US education at the college level. Of course, she wants the world rewritten to reflect her nutty view, but that's nothing new for the far right. The problem with providing a scientific, mathematical education is that knowledge goes in all directions at once. That was the reason the religious right dumbed down public science education in the 1950's, to suppress all discussion of evolution. At best, I suspect today's idiot public education system motivations are to create more gullible consumers.

One of the nation's founding fathers, Roger Sherman, suspected we'd end up in this condition if the country opted for "one man, one vote" democracy. He said, "the people . . . should have as little to do as may be about the government. They want information and are constantly liable to be misled." The gross ignorance of much of the media's audience proves Sherman's fear that the public would lack ("want") information. Their willingness to follow the advice of fools and criminals proves the are easily "misled." The dumber we get, the more likely this advice will be prophetic and accurate. Without an active, focused attempt to rein in the media's corporate propaganda, the idiots will rule and the criminals will profit from the fall of this nation. 

A Nation of Assholes

This weekend, I'm polishing off a book titled, The No Asshole Rule by Robert Sutton. The book reinforces a lot of the arguments I've made in the past on my old Rat's Eye View website from the days when that collection of essays was mostly about business practices and management/mismanagement.

However, toward the end Sutton has a chapter titled "The Virtues of Assholes" where he attempts to explain the success of so many certifiable assholes (one prime asshole he constantly returns to is Apple's Steve Jobs). After describing how some assholes manage to become rich and powerful, he lists three "blind spots" successful assholes often have. One of those blind spots is that "experienced victims use [defensive measures) to protect themselves from cruel and vindictive actions, measures that have the side effect of shielding assholes from realizing the damage they inflict . . . victims avoid their oppressor's wrath by reporting only good news and remaining silent about, and even hiding, bad news." Sound familiar?

In 1816, the north eastern United States went through a catastrophic "year without a summer." The prevailing theory describing the reasons for that "last great subsistence crisis in the Western world" is that a record low solar activity and the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora caused record world-wide crop failures at least 200,000 deaths in Europe and similar devastation in North America and China. 200 years later, science is in a position to be able to predict the results of this kind of event and, even, allow for planning that could moderate the effects.

The real question is, are scientists likely to provide that information? I'm betting the answer is no.

The hostility aimed at scientists who have made predictions about global ocean and climate changes most likely has an effect similar to the distortion of reality created by asshole bosses. First, scientists will be inclined to keep their cultural heads low to prevent the anti-scientific "community" (read "Republicans" and pseudo-conservatives) from going ballistic with their loony counter-arguments. Unfortunately, going loony isn't all that the Republican drone crowd does. They attack scientific institution funding, eliminate critical national and state research facilities, and go after state university research funding. Since they can't understand the data, they attack the messengers. Our primitive citizens aren't the first monkey-people to use these tactics, failed empires liter history with their foolish ancestors. However, it's possible that the costs of allowing these idiots to speak in public might be a lot higher than it was in pre-industrial times.

Imagine yourself as a climate scientist, an astrophysicist, or a biologist. Your research finds that something international corporations is doing is likely to cause a worldwide disaster. Or your data tells you that our society's inability to wean itself from its excesses will cause climate change, famine, and war. Or your observations spotted a fast moving asteroid heading in our direction. The problem is, you're doing science not something simple like banking or something idiotic like pretending to know the minds of the gods. Science allows for predictions with tolerances. In the case of the asteroid, maybe the odds are 2:1 that the asteroid will strike the planet somewhere and the odds are, if the strike occurs, the same 2:1 odds exist that the strike will cause a world-wide disaster. What do you do, if you're one of those scientists? Do you tell an ignorant, superstitious world about the problem and the cure or do you keep it to yourself knowing that your fellow humans are too stupid to do the right thing even with the right information?

Based on what we've seen over the last 25 years of the global warming crisis, I'd suspect that any scientist with a lick of sense would keep quiet and let nature (human and global) take its course. Especially in the superstitious US, we're too dumb to care about our children or their planet. We're too greedy to be concerned with the welfare of any generation beyond our own. We're willing to burn up the world's natural resources in a single generation, leaving future generations to suffer for our greed. Who would step into the political cesspool for a species as foolish as that? A nation of assholes, led by a pack of corrupt and vicious corporate assholes who are as psychopathic as the worst serial killers in history.

Factual Statements

The dumbest state in the Union appointed one of its many idiot residents to jabber on the floor of the US Senate until his monkey-talk becomes common "knowledge." Yes, Arizona's junior three-term moron senator, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (whose parents were incapable of spelling either of his names correctly), stood slope-shouldered on the floor of the senate and claimed that abortion was "well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does." Of course, Kyl is as clueless about Planned Parenthood as he is about every other subject the Senate might address. CNN's Don Lemon described Kyl's response when he was asked why he made up these "Republican statistics" (politispeak for "lies"),"We did call his office trying to ask what he was talking about there. And I just want to give it you verbatim here. It [Kyl's response] says, 'his remark was not intended to be a factual statement, but rather to illustrate that Planned Parenthood, a organization that receives millions of dollars in taxpayer funding, does subsidize abortions.'"

As Stephen Cobert rightly exclaimed, "this is so liberating!" We can say anything we want, just like Faux News, and explain it all away by claiming what we said was not intended to be a factual statement. Or, in more plain words, we were lying.


So, with the playing field wide open here, I'd like to enter the following information into the public consciousness:

First, Jon Kyl is an alien. Not the kind of alien that Arizona wingnuts are terrified of, but the kind of alien that Arnie fought in Predator (the kind that killed Governor Ventura just after he said "I ain't got time to bleed."). The kind of alien that killed off a ship full of astronauts and practically molested Sigourney Weaver in Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and I'm not sure which of his relatives were which in Aliens vs. Predator. I suspect that last documentary was produced by Kyl's alien Republican bosses to confuse the issue. Kyl's species was even more accurately depicted in John Carpenter's 1988 masterpiece documentary, They Live, which exposed the infiltration of of aliens into the ranks of the Republican Party, trendy yuppie grocery stores, and corporate middle and upper management. 


The 170-year-old Kyl announced in February that he would be giving up his seat in the senate because he had been recalled to duty in the Klingon Air Force. Insiders suspect this is an early sign that the Klingons will be attacking Earth in the next century. Kyl served four terms in the House before invading the Senate in 1995, under the leathery wings of John McCain. Terrifyingly, Time Magazine labeled Kyl one of the 100 "most influential" people in 2010, a clear sign of the alien apocalypse.

 As is obvious by his picture (at left), Kyl was the inspiration for television's favorite zombie,Gomer Pyle. From his dopey, crooked face to his "gollee, Sargent" and the phrase he always uses when he remembers that Arizona voters were dumb enough to send someone of his ilk to Washington, "surprise, surprise," anyone could see that the braindead alien executives who cobble together network television comedies were inspired to create a carbon copy of Arizona's boy idiot senator.


Kyl's easy political successes in Arizona politics has led some to feel that the state may no longer boast of any triple-digit IQ residents. The more obvious conclusion might be that all of the carbon-based, humanoid residents have been terminated by Kyl's alien relatives.

Of course, it goes without saying that some of the above comments were not intended to be a factual statements but rather to illustrate that Senator Jon Kyl is the dumbest, most dishonest, enemy of rational thought produced by the state of Arizona; probably the world's hub of dumb ideas and irrational people.

The Daily Show - Countdown to the Next Countdown - Jon Kyl's Planned Parenthood Statistics
Tags: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

The Colbert Report
Tags: Colbert Report Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,Video Archive

Thieves with Fountain Pens

"They remind us that where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost. They remind us that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. You and I must protect and preserve freedom here or it will not be passed on to our children and it would disappear everywhere in the world. Today the workers in Poland are showing a new generation how high is the price of freedom but also how much it is worth that price." Ronald Reagan

"Yes, as through this world I've wandered
I've seen lots of funny men;
Some will rob you with a six-gun,
And some with a fountain pen.

"And as through your life you travel,
Yes, as through your life you roam,
You won't never see an outlaw
Drive a family from their home." Pretty Boy Floyd, Woody Guthrie

"The thieves who rob you with a fountain pen, they take it all." Elvy Day, 2011

We're right back in the corporate welfare mode. Wisconsin's corporate shill government is stripping away middle class protection, Minnesota's Republican majority is working toward the same ends, the country is being prepped for whichever hopeless idiot the Republicans will foist off as their 2012 presidential fodder, the US Congress is focusing on completely useless crap, and the specter of "socialism" is being hyped by the nation's right wing press as the worst thing that could happen to the country. 

Meanwhile, the "too big to fail," under-talented, perfectly corrupt financial institutions are sailing along as if they hadn't bankrupted the nation and a good bit of the world with their shenanigans. While they are dipping into the nation's credit, free of interest (thanks to their boy Bernanke and Obama's collection of financial idiots - particularly Geithner and Larry Summers), the new Mob is charging consumers nearly 30% interest on credit cards, stifling anything that resembles liberal and rational reform and regulation of banking, speculation, insider trading, derivative roulette games, or any of the giant money-stealing scams that pass for "financial services" in this demented place and time. 

It's long past obvious that the solution to the nation's pressing problems is to refocus criminal prosecution from the bottom of the social ladder to the very top. The Organized Crime Control Act of 1970, the basis for RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) states that "a person who is a member of an enterprise that has committed any two of 35 crimes—27 federal crimes and 8 state crimes—within a 10-year period can be charged with racketeering." Among that collection of RICO crimes is embezzlement, fraud, gambling, money laundering, obstruction of justice, bankruptcy fraud, securities fraud, bribery, and theft. If you don't haven't noticed at least five of those crimes committed by every one of the major banks in this country in the last five years, you are both a Republican and a fool (redundant, I know). You could educate yourself here or here or here or here or here or here or here or any number of places that accurately recorded the catastrophe we call "finance" or "banking." 

[Of course, one of the beauties of being "conservative" is not having to read, think, or investigate the truth; conservatives just chant "two legs better than four" until they are unable to babble. As Mr. Cobert wisely warned, "reality has a liberal bias." Better to keep what's left of one's head deeply buried in the shit.]

As long as the FBI remains incapable of investigating and prosecuting these worst-of-all-criminals, they are a useless and feeble arm of law enforcement and deserve to have their funding cut to levels insufficient to maintain a secretarial staff. In fact, I recommend that we follow the libertarians' idiotic advice and eliminate all regulation, including regulation of the airwaves and, when what's left of this once great and democratic nation is reduced to rubble and chaos, the rest of the world will have a fair warning of everything to avoid.

A Look at Reality

One of the basic precepts of modern quality manufacturing is that you can't fix a problem that you don't acknowledge. In manufacturing, that means you count defects, analyze processes, and keep it all out in the open so that everyone stays focused on fixing problems. That, of course, is the exact opposite of the 1950-1980 American manufacturing process and that is why we got our asses handed to us by Japan in the 1970's and why we are still a second-rate manufacturing nation. We're a hell of a lot better than we were in 1970, but so is everyone else. Today, the United States is only #1 in markets where reliability is unimportant (military-industrial garbage) or where cost is a non-factor (US medicine and military-industrial garbage). It also helps that nobody else is seriously competing in those markets, because Japan and Europe could kick our asses in either area if they gave it a half-hearted shot.

My wife and I had a heated discussion about the future of humanity tonight that brought up my manufacturing experience. She is an eternal optimist. She desperately wants to believe that humanity will pull its head out of its ass and find solutions for social inequality, global warming, overpopulation, and vanishing natural resources. I do not. She believes that a few dedicated, intelligent, hard working idealists can fix these catastrophes-in-waiting even though the mass of humanity is perfectly clueless about the problems; let alone the likely end results of ignoring these problems. I do not.

She was on a pretty fine altruistic roll with her argument for a "few good humans" until I asked her how that worked out for her at Home Depot; her last inhuman employer. To be clear, she was exactly as successful as I was at influencing my equally psychopathic past employer, Guidant. We didn't make a scratch in those institutions' hard callous patina.

Nor will a few million dedicated environmentalists, social reformers, Planned Parenthood volunteers, or the world's scientists. As long as the head is dead, a few sentient organs will have no effect on the actions of the body. The human brain has been officially pronounced "dead" for centuries.

The problems are obvious. We are running out of fossil fuels. We have no viable alternatives. Our natural resources are vanishing as quickly as the energy to abuse those resources. Human population is far beyond the point of sustainability and when the energy issue comes to a head billions will starve. The world's air, water, and climate are being stressed beyond practical recovery. Social injustice has been ignored for so long that many of the world's democracies are that only in name, the United States especially.

With those big problems facing every semi-intelligent person, what are the big issues our own government wants to address? Reducing taxes on the filthy idle rich. Banning gay marriage. Removing all barriers from corporate pillaging of the nation's savings and resources. Providing a more regimented education to people who will never have a job or a purpose in their lifetimes. Eliminating labor unions. Freeing the corporate media from any social responsibility or even the pretense of honesty.

Not a one of those "big issues" will amount to a second thought when one of the true big issues comes to a head. Of course, by then it won't matter one way or the other. Every single big issue will solve itself the way every major human issues is resolved; in catastrophe. When we hit the rapid downside of the Hubbert Peak, the population issue will take care of itself. Before the Industrial Revolution and the energy-driven society, world human population stuck to 100-200 million for tens of thousands of years. After we harnessed cheap energy, population exploded. As we burn through the last of the oil reserves, we're going to see the other side of that population curve as reality informs our not-so-bright species about sustainability.

I was suffering a National Geographic show on human evolution a while back. One of the "experts" repeatedly chanted the foolish pipedream that "humans are the most adaptable animal on the planet." I'm unconvinced, considering that we are somewhere between 100,000 and 1,000,000 years old, as a species, and that there are crocodiles that have survived virtually unchanged for 200 million years, sharks that can track their linage back 400 million years, and cockroaches whose relatives were pretty much the same 300 million years ago. Roaches can live on postage stamp glue. Crocodiles can and do eat anything and tolerate fresh or salt water and do pretty well on land. Sharks are . .  sharks. I wouldn't bet on human adaptability against either of those opponents.

Our claim to fame is our amazing ability to comprehend our own demise. However, most of us (84%) have invented a Big Rock Candy Mountain imaginary afterlife because we can't comprehend a universe without us.

Our confidence in finding the next great solution is well documented in science fiction, but reality tells a different story. Every big break science has provided has produced a secondary effect that is likely to be a much bigger catastrophe in the future. "Solutions" actually solve problems. Stop-gaps are notoriously dangerous tactics when applied to life-threatening problems.

Until I see some significant portion of society begin to work on solving the big problems with the kind of long range focus and objectives that these problems require, I will stick with my belief that humanity is just a blip in the evolutionary process and no more significant than any one of the tens of thousands of now-extinct species from the earth's bloody past. We are one failed growing season, one moderate-sized asteroid, one environmental disaster, one giant volcano, one world war away from a massive culling of the species. So don't bring your superstitious happy talk my way. My patience for fools is damn close to exhausted.

What's It All About, Newt?

Listening to the new Republican majority in the house list their top priorities this morning, I realized that it is entirely possible for this crowd of morons to pull off an unintended conspiracy. Their agenda is to strip the Environmental Protection Agency's ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, to eliminate any federal funding of Planned Parenthood, to bankrupt the Social Security system, and to undermine health care legislation. Their campaign monkey-talk about "jobs" and "it's the economy, stupid" was a smokescreen for the brainless morons who vote Republican but live Democrat. Now that they are in the driver's seat, their "plan" is to eliminate every federal government activity that provides value to working people. That was the idea behind Newt Gingrich's "Contract on America" and Ronny Wrinkle's "government is the problem" and Bush/Cheney's outright pillaging of the nation's banking account.

None of that is new news. The only question one might ask is "Why?" I think the species-suicidal green house gas agenda is the key to the answer.

Republicans have always--with the momentary exception of Teddy Roosevelt and, sort of, Abraham Lincoln--been the tools of international money. Every action an American conservative takes is intended to either preserve the assets of the idle rich or put more money in their pockets. Global warming, especially ocean warming, presents an emergency to these powerful, useless, corrupt, and lazy people.

If the working class woke up to the threat to our species and to the world, huge resources would be spent on saving future generations. The only people who have huge resources are that 1-10% who own the majority of assets in the industrialized world and who control the world's income. Those people have two characteristics: they are incredibly greedy and incredibly foolish. Those qualities have worked for them for centuries and they expect them to keep working indefinitely.

Apparently, their theory is that the world is going to suffer a catastrophe regardless of what we do now. After all, scientists have been saying the world is heading toward a point of no return since the mid-1960s. Fifty years late, we must have past that point, right? So, if we can't save the world we might as well finish raping and pillaging every culture and resource on the planet right up to the end of life as we know it. Because many of those filthy rich families have pulled this off for the last several hundred years, they expect it will keep working for them, at least, for the rest of their lives. And they are probably right.

Worst case, my generation will suffer the result of the last 100 years of unrestricted industrial pollution and profiteering near the end of our lives. Which leaves out children to live lives of suffering and misery, one environmental catastrophe after the last, depleting resources, collapsing societies, and many of the horrors that science fiction has depicted in thousands of apocalyptic end-of-times scenarios. While most of us worry for our children, the rich have no such limitations. The ruling class has been willing to eat its young for convenience, entertainment, and profit since Roman times, at least. Every one of these crusty old families is willing to sacrifice humanity to preserve another week or two of their own opulence.

Since the 2010 elections, they have accelerated their misbehavior; tossing off even a pretense of doing what they do "for the good of the nation." Today, it's all about grabbing as many resources as they can hoard with the hope that they can hole up in their gated castles while the rest of us suffer the consequences.

The media is doing a damn good job of distracting the marching morons from issues that matter, too. Jabbering about Charlie Sheen's latest stupidity, Justin Beiber's ass, and all of the rest of the mindless crap that passes for "news" is just a way to eliminate any focus on anything that actually matters.

The real question is, "Will it work when the sky really begins to fall?" Ask the Roman ruling elites or the German Nazi elites or the British ruling class or King Louis the 16th's buddies. Obviously, it worked for a few of them, but a bunch of those useless inbred horse-faced, big-toothed, cousin-marrying hillbillies went down in a wave of pissed off peasants. I hope I live long enough to see our Rockefellers, Rothschilds, Girards, Biddles, Morris, Fords, Hiltons, Mellons, Kochs, Vanderbilts, Bushs, Murdocks, Trumps, Waltons, and the rest of that pack reap the humiliation and lynching they so well deserve.

Sad Times for the GOP

The Gay Old Party is having a tough time with getting its act together. The crazies in the House of Representatives pledged to focus on the economy ("It's still the economy, stupid.") and immediately turned their toilet-tube focus on abortion, union busting, and jabbering about socialism (a form of government that their hero, Reagan, badmouthed and loved at the same time). The crazies at the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) wrangled publicly about who was going to sponsor the event; crazy religious freaks or self-destructive pseudo-conservative gays.

 The CPAC event is wrapping up showcasing the micro-intellects the Republicans have to offer for the 2012 presidential campaign: the corporate criminals' best friend and the poster boy for everything-not-family-values, Newt Gingrich; Abramoff's buddy and medical tort reform hypocrite, Rick Santorum; the trust-fund baby with the dead squirrel comb-over; and the Minnesota state bird masquerading as a US Representative. Palin was probably there, too, but I can only digest so much crazy before I lose all faith in my country.

 Eventually, you'd think these loony memes would self-destruct and the species would begin to rebuild. Wouldn't you?

I am often accused of being a pessimist. As soon as my constant downgrading of expectations begins to prove wrong, I promise to accept that label. As long as expecting the worst from my fellow human is a reliable predictor of future behavior, I'm sticking with what works.It's a sound investment strategy, too.

NPR drew some sort of idiotic conclusion from interviewing some "young Republicans" at CPAC. That bunch (NPR and the spoiled brats at CPAC) confirmed my expectations from that crowd. Supposedly, these were "college students," but when asked about their field of study the response was repeatedly "business," "communications," "theology," and other fluffy subjects barely suitable for an adult's afternoon recreational reading. Not a science, engineering, or pre-med student among them. This isn't higher education, its a continuation of the K-12 babysitting service. I know that reflects the "education" distribution in the general college public, but that is nothing to brag about. The dumbing down of the American public began with the watering down of "higher education."

The only upside to all this nuttiness is the entertainment value. Suddenly, Republicrats are as disorganized as Demolicans. The only thing that has allowed me to pretend that Demolicans slightly represent my positions is the lack of lock-step marching from members of that party. While both parties are corrupt, inept, and corporate sponsored, the Demolicans occasionally show signs of independence. Republicrats are wholly-owned subsidiaries of international corporations and, therefore, useless as the tits on my chest. Is it possible that actual citizens of the United States have crept into the GOP?

What Our Government Is Doing in a Time of Crisis

I'm lying. No one in our government has near enough talent to intentionally put together a funny YouTube video. They are accidentally hilarious, though.