The title refers to the horse race for the white house and its interpretation and labeling by the court jesters of the major media. It is a pre-scripted, outcome-based black comedy which numbs minds “habituated to accepting unreality as reality” while the bodies attached to these minds are prepped for poverty and recycling per environmental dogma.
The mass media continue discovering ways to distract the public from the core issues America faces. I use the neutral term “public” rather than “citizens” though we are citizens still, partly. What else could we be, subjects? Well, bad laws, capricious, post-modern application of laws, and, for decades Television has been directed toward reducing reason and, thus a sense of justice, of right and wrong; reducing too the ability to think or act with the result that most of us, to varying degrees, have been reduced to a glop one might term, “the masses.” Experimental psychology and the entire Pavlovian project, from advertising and ‘news’ to the classroom intertwine with this development but that’s another essay.
To television we can add computers and the various screen-experiences they provide from blogs to “games,” the worlds of X-Box and Play station. This is the world of see, push, point and click, of sense-and-respond, an animal world; or perhaps it’s a war zone in which emotions and hormones go wild. Do more people use the internet to study, learn history and write analytically or to “surf” for imagery, for various kinds of pornography, including simple voyeurism, if this kind of morbidity is ever “simple.” (more…)
While the economy implodes, the President pledges $30 billion to Africa for its AIDS epidemic. The Blue Team’s frontrunner, Mr. Obama is lubricating through the Senate a “Global Poverty Relief” act that should gladden Communists and batter Americans to the tune of $70 billion/year for twelve years. Foreigners in America illegally send about $50 billion generated by our economy out of the nation each year. The GAO estimates that the actual national debt runs into the trillions of dollars; social security and Medicare are held up tenuously by income taxes that fall hardest on middle income Americans who are watching their costs rise, benefits fall and jobs leave for the East. The price of Medical insurance (not health care) skyrockets while covered benefits shrink, Big Pharma and the insurance industry swagger while ordinary people are crushed and education becomes special education for those damaged by bad vaccines and “whole language.” (more…)
Some Americans may know of legislation to disarm Veterans returning from military service as part of ongoing attempts to negate second amendment rights. This tendency distinguishes modern dictatorial regimes that prefer servants to citizens, that dislike accountability and, perhaps worst, intend to do things to citizens that might occasion ordinary decent people to seek justice as supported by Second Amendment rights.
The following real life horror story relates to these matters. It was brought to my attention by a post from the “5301 Club.” (more…)
“A social system based on lies will bring ruin to mankind more than any overtly brutal force…the most dangerous symptom of moral corruption is the depravity of human speech… whatever is done nowadays ostensibly for the common good is actually motivated by clever calculation of the advantages such acts will bring to those initiating them…[1]
Few are more cruel than those endlessly prating about “compassion”; few more intolerant than those forever enforcing codes proclaiming tolerance and diversity. Corruption of language marches together with corruption of youth, families, social relations, law and the Constitution itself. (more…)
“What will it be, Rip: grim humor and satire or just plain grief?”
Regular readers know that Rip and I (that’s Rip van Winkle, a not-so-fictional character born about two hundred sixty years ago, skilled in time travel and handling the shock of ‘progress’) have been following the horse race for the White House, assessing the official handicaps the nags are carrying and those they are bequeathing to us serfs. Rip’s inclined to grim humor and even more inclined to don snow shoes, grab an axe and head off to the woods for some ice-fishing. Needing the fire and more enmeshed in the collapse of the American era, I tend to serious grieving which includes diagnosis and prescription.
We decide to compromise in terms of satire or grief, something we will not do on Super Duper Tuesday or in November ‘08. (more…)