Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Dear Readers


I have done my duty. I will fight on this site no more forever against the high and mighty of this odd, sad, dumb juncture in human history. Anyway, thanks for all the encouraging hits.

And to any future (non-corporate) persons who might find these 104 news stories and this note in the e-equivalent of an archeological find, I am so sorry that my year’s stint as a citizen journalist reduced not a drop the astronomically high likelihood that the imperishable immorality of the powerful is making life as miserable for you as it did for us.

Sincerely,

Larry Greer
lmgreer@ucdavis.edu

Friday, August 9, 2013

Shining City on Fire


A team of the world’s most luminary beaconologists today issued its much anticipated report on the example America has been setting for the rest of the world so far in this millennium.

Said the team’s lead beaconologist, Ecuadorian Rolando Garzon, “We have some good news for America and also some bad. The good news is that she will keep her designation as the Shining City on a Hill. The bad news is that America has become the brightly shining example of how a country should not conduct herself.

“So I would say to my so time-honored neighbors to the north—take solace in the knowledge that while it may now be by deplorably immoral counterexample, you continue to clearly point out the way for the rest of us nonetheless.

According to the report, titled “Through the American Looking Glass,” the flipping of America from the best to the worst kind of exceptionalism was caused largely by the dizzy, mind-boggling imbalance created as power and wealth have rushed upward in recent decades in such floods of obvious anti-democratic unfairness posing night and day as its opposite that America has no idea which way is up anymore as she grasps at what she stands for.

Said Norwegian beaconologist Alfhild Folkestad, “In this brave new topsy turvy American world the Makers take. And take. And take. The victims at the bottom of an economy crashed by a breakneck, greed-fueled crime spree by the Makers at the top are the culprits. Watchdogs do nothing but grow into fat cats.

“Terrorism makes the world safe from terrorism. The truth tellers are the felons and the felons they tell the truth on can look forward to America never taking their eyes off the truth tellers long enough to look backwards at the actual felonies. A legally illegal killer drone program that does and does not kill the innocent by the hundreds does and does not officially exist in a Global War to kill all the terrorists a Global War on Terror is bringing to life.

“Whistleblowing is great until the whistles start blowing. Transparency is great so long as the openness doesn’t play out in the open. Post racialism is great until election season or one’s ground in a gated community must be stood. The science that finds the earth-destroying oil is great but the same science that finds the downside of the earth-destroying oil is a hoax.

“Journalists don’t cover government and/or corporate outrages but cover them. He always says up and black, she always says down and white, respectively and vice versa.

“The Jesus lovers are the haters. And in perhaps the most disorienting development of all, the right left their right minds with the left right behind them.”

Said Philippe Trudeau, senior press secretary for the world outside the Shining City on a Hill, “The longstanding debt of gratitude we owe our American torch bearers continues to grow even as she now goes up in flames, her illustrious best and brightest lighting the way off the road to self-immolation.

“The eye-watering, earth-circling miasma of toxic stench emanating from the Potomac will be a constant reminder to the rest of us of what happens when the wealth and power of a sociopathic, unbelievably greedy and self-important overclass are allowed to reach critical mass and reality starts becoming so thoroughly what the powerful say it is that it somehow even becomes the official reality that the powerful would never ever do everything in their unprecedented power to instill in the country a deep, shameful fear of the truth that its people are deeply and shamefully afraid of the truth about what they have become thanks to the catastrophic social climate change America’s hot shots have wrought with their not so human activities.”

In related news, the US Department of Tradeoffs is admitting today that it was a careless decimal error during the Reagan administration that led to the really bad decision to take care of the One Percent at the exorbitant expense of Everybody Else.

“Boy,” said the department’s Molly Albright, “you move the decimal point over to where it belongs and it begins to really look like maybe it should have been the other way around.”

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Thoughts from the Editor


Wednesdays and Fridays over the past year have brought stories that in aggregate have likely given rise in many readers to a little wistfulness with regard to the old days before our Shining City evolved into this present-day post-Christian society deriving its American exceptionalism less from adhering to the principles associated with Jesus and more from our ability now to act as much like God as God does Himself. Or maybe a little more.

Unquestionably it’s impressive that American man and woman have risen to the Old Testament God’s heights in terms of His power to rain Bible-scale death and destruction down on those who need and/or deserve it. The awesomeness of the omniscience we’ve achieved in our Surveillance State is undeniably something to behold—or not behold, as the case may be. Who would have thought man and woman could beat God out for control of the weather? And in many ways our readiness to forsake Jesus as a means to greater ends is an amazing accomplishment in all its God-likeness.

Certainly it’s also true that many Christian principles have become obsolete. The whole notion of atonement is not really a good fit in a world where so many are above both God’s and man’s laws. Obviously the Golden Rule hasn’t turned out to be so golden after all. The Makers just can’t make enough money treating their neighbor like they’d like to be treated themselves. In fact, they’re not even neighbors anymore with about 99% of their former neighbors. As for our enemies, they just won’t stop not turning the other cheek when we take an eye from them for the eye they took from us for taking an eye from them.

The meek are clearly not up to inheriting this dog-eat-dog world, and compassion has been a disaster in terms of toughening the meek up enough to compete with the big dogs currently in possession of the world.

And certainly there are some aspects of Christianity we haven’t completely abandoned. The whole Messianic concept of some poor dirt-poor guy paying for humanity’s tendency toward sinfulness is still alive and well in our economic philosophy. We still treat Israel like it’s our mother country. We even see Jesus’s face in the occasional vegetable or rock formation or carpet stain or bowl of soup or oatmeal.

Is it just me, though, or have we lost a little something in advancing to a mostly pre-Jesus way of doing business? I can’t be the only one in America feeling a bit nostalgic for those former times before the whole wide world was transferred to the magic hand of the free market.

It can’t just be me missing Jesus as we proceed into our future by advancing ever backward and backward into even the pre-Moses times before the now so outdated commandments against killing and stealing and lying and coveting and not taking a break from all the avaricious and prideful striving for at least one day of the week.

Sure mammon is great. I couldn’t be happier that humanity has managed to so dramatically widen the proverbial eye of the needle posing as the gateway to heaven. I also totally get that Darwin won the whole survival of the fittest contest with Jesus regarding who would father our way of relating to our neighbor. And playing God obviously has its upsides.

But wouldn’t it be nice, for old time’s sake if for no other reason, to have some bold someone to applaud for taking a stick and driving all the modern-day scribes and pharisees out of the Temple?

Does anyone else out there get an atavistic twinge of satisfaction from the quaint old Christian notion that acting like God means not acting like God?

In these times of so many outrageous earthshaking accomplishments, who among you still has a place in your heart for the simpler miracles of walking on water and pulling loaves and fishes out of thin air for the hungry and helping the uninsured blind to see, the deaf to hear, the dumb to speak, the leprous to stop crumbling? 

Friday, August 2, 2013

America Danger to Self, Others

In little reported FOIA news, the Obama administration has lost the Bush administration's lengthy behind-the-scenes legal battle to keep concealing the horrifying results of the routine 50-year psychological check-up that America underwent in the late fall of 2000.

Said acting US Surgeon General Dr. Boris Lushniak, "The American people need to take some deep breaths and try their best to hold it together now that their collective mental health is being further undermined by this shocking revelation that for the last 13 years the nation's bill of collective mental health has been a really far cry from clean."

At the risk of spreading hysteria, some news outlets including this one are reporting that with astonishing prescience the team of mental wellness professionals charged with conducting America's semi-centurial check-up over a dozen years ago determined that since her previous check-up in 1950 America had ventured out onto a psychological footing so fragile that she was perhaps one trauma away from turning into a full blown monster.

Said Dr. Harvey Whitman, head Analogical Psychologist on the millennial check-up team, "The period from about the mid to late 70's to the fall of 2000 were particularly damaging to the rightness of the nation's mind.

"A full year before 9/11, we were already a ticking nuclear psychological time bomb, from the mushroom cloud of which on 9/12 we would of course emerge Godzilla-like--a big angry irradiated id-crazed thing on steroids lashing bloodthirstily out in every which direction.

"America, her mind already terribly compromised by a generation of neoliberal thinking, would be reduced to basically taking her orders from nothing but a raging primordial brain stem.

"Look at it this way. If America were a person person, as opposed to a corporation person, she already belonged in a straitjacket and a padded cell well before the terrorists drove her completely mad. The alarms were going off so loudly when we tested for whether America had become a danger to herself and others that you could hardly hear yourself thinking, 'I wonder if a national lobotomy is an option.'"

Said the millennial team's head Prognosticational Psychologist Dr. Phoebe Wright, "Neoliberal America was manifesting so many psychotic tendencies in November 2000 that it's no wonder at all that we were able with such precision to predict the course of her degrading into near total derangement in these post 9/11 years.

"She was really a homicidal/suicidal paranoid megalomaniacal and kleptomaniacal empathy-free pathological liar waiting impatiently to happen.

"As my colleague Dr. Whitman would put it, in the schoolyard, she'd have been the cowardly overgrown 4th grade bully and braggart and big fat liar who would go on to make all the kindergarteners pay dearly for it when a second grader had the gall to give her a taste of her own medicine.

"And as Dr. Whitman would say with regard to America's mental health outlook from here on, in the wells of America's mental wellness the superego is so long gone that she doesn't have the slightest moral inkling that she really really needs to start importing some more by the boatload.

"Put another way, we can't begin to imagine the number of Hoover Dams it would take to generate the unimaginable number of mega and gigawatts it would take to administer the extreme electric shock therapy America is screaming for."

In related news, the Obama administration has announced that it will definitely be proceeding with its legal efforts to add another one hundred or more years to the sentence of convicted whistleblower Bradley Manning for his essentially having also blown the whistle on the travesty the Obama administration is making of the American justice system.

Said White House spokesman Jay Carney, "We're well aware that this might seem like overkill, but Mr. Manning has left us no other options with respect to distracting America from the travesty we're making of the American justice system."

Wednesday, July 31, 2013

American People Damned After All

An exhaustive ten-year inquest by an ecumenical team of the world's foremost authorities on divine and/or cosmic judgements has determined that Americans' various godheads and other powerful retributive forces have, after all, been and will continue to be holding the American people accountable for their nation's mortal post 9/11 sins against humanity such as the subjecting of their fellow woman and man and girl and boy to both large and small-scale slaughter, to dismemberment and other forms of maiming, to almost unbelievably widespread displacement, to physical torture and population-wide psychological torture by drones and other sources, to lifelong unwarranted detainment, to depleted uranium and white phosphorous poisoning and the relentless multi-generational specter thereof, and to a host of other known and as yet unknown and/or uncategorized horrors.

"As it turns out," said Dr. Shivani Patel, chair of the Karmic Studies department at Yale University, "9/11 didn't quite change everything. Human beings, American or otherwise, still can't with cosmic impunity have other human beings just go around on their behalf and slaughter and maim and torture and displace and inhumanely detain and genetically devastate other human beings.

"We can't quite yet say with 100% certainty that human beings after 9/11 can't without karmic and other repercussions ruthlessly persecute other human beings who disclose post 9/11 American acts of savagery and other kinds of sinfulness. But the preliminary data from our enquiries into recent whistle blowing cases is pointing decidedly in that direction."

Said Dr. Matthew Peterson from the Eternal Damnation Studies department at the College of William and Mary, "We've found unequivocally that there is no divine statute of limitations that saves a peoples if they can only let themselves be led long enough to believe that they don't need to feel guilty for all the horrific sins committed in their names.

"In fact, there's growing evidence that on their day of judgement the American people will pay dearly for the special circumstance of allowing the horrific sinfulness of their leaders to keep escalating by convincing themselves and allowing themselves to be convinced by others that all the horrific sins committed in their name are actually acts of righteousness.

"At any rate, for their part, Christian-Amerians should probably start facing the hard truth that there aren't enough bedtimes or Sundays left in most of their earthly lives to say enough Our Fathers and Hail Marys and Glory Bes to put a dent in the Old-Testament vengefulness their god has relapsed into in the face of his American children wallowing again in an olden day barbarity.

"We must keep in mind as well that all this unforgivable bloodthirsty American brutishness abroad comes at a time when greed and pride and wrath and envy and lying, cheating and stealing and trampling all over the poor and otherwise breaking the Golden Rule and not even thinking about forgiving the trespasses of others and hating and not loving not only our enemies but also our neighbors are running rampant at home.

"So anyway, all of us in the Christian tradition are in a real hole with respect to what the afterlife holds. A rather warm hole."

"That's just great," said Christian-American Ted Davenport from Ohio, "I spend a whole lifetime devoted to the teachings and examples of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and now I'm going to hell just because I was on board with all my country's slaughtering and maiming and torturing and displacing and inhumanely detaining and genetically wrecking generations of my fellow man and woman.

"It's just not fair. Even those of us who suspected at some level that what our country's been doing isn't right thought the price for all the evil would be paid by the soldiers and CIA agents and maybe their civilian leaders and these leaders' corporate leaders and definitely all the media personalities who've been selling the whole thing to us as perfectly normal in a post 9/11 world.

"So here I am now doomed to go from the frying pan of a minuscule threat of terrorism into the fires of hell and I'm way too busy keeping my small business thriving in this tricky economy to even begin to say all the prayers and do all the good works it would take to buy myself a little divine leniency.

"My only hope now is to throw myself at the mercy of St. Peter, who by the way is also going to get an earful from me about where to send the likes of Brian Williams and David Gregory and Ed Schultz and every damn one of the talking snakes on Fox News."

In related news, President Obama today used the occasion of another public statement on the Trayvon Martin case to announce an "exciting new tool" in the Global War on the Threat of Terrorism. Called Operation Stand Your Airspace, the new program substantially lowers the threat level that triggers the drone bombing of patterns of questionable Muslim behavior.


Friday, July 26, 2013

Career Counselors in Crisis

The Associated Press is reporting on the news from this month's annual conference of the National Career Development Association in Boston that the nation's career counselors are abandoning their five-year campaign to steer America's best and brightest young job seekers into careers re-writing the woefully outdated book on which skills, abilities, values, and personal traits and proclivities go with which vocations.

"Oh my god," said Nate Armstrong, career career coach with 25 years in the field, "I have no idea why any of us are bothering at this point. About the only skill I'm bringing to the table myself these days is an outstanding aptitude for pulling all kinds of bad advice out of my ass.

"I don't know what happens to this industry now that we've failed to steer the right people into a career in completely re-doing the job key that goes with assessment tool standards like the Values and Preferences Exercise and the Transferable Skills Worksheet. We're all this close to career coaching ourselves to take the transferable skill of just making stuff up with us into the field of Economics or maybe the school reform movement.

Said Margaret Thill, headhunter for the Establishment Journalism industry, "Who the hell coached these career coaches into careers in career coaching? How do you look at a guy with a dynamic aptitude for growing moss on his back and not launch him into an exciting career as a fossil regardless of how overqualified he might be.

"These Mr. and Ms. Van Winkles keep waking up just in time to send us another service-oriented, principles-ridden truth-teller who flames out in about ten minutes, five and a half if it's a day when another story comes up that would blatantly expose this democracy as the sham it's become if it weren't reported on properly.

"Memo to the Museum of Vocational Guidance Advisors: The boat left a long time ago and you guys missed it. Establishment newsrooms are obviously only hiring ambitious scruples-free ass-kissers with egos nonetheless equal to or bigger than those of the big shots whose fat asses they're kissing. You can start steering all the world savers toward careers in homelessness."

Said US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, "I'm not sure how America starts meeting the challenges of the 21st century if our schools don't start mass producing career guidance professionals who can place people at the head of the nation's classrooms who can mass produce career guidance professionals who can channel the nation's employment seekers into the jobs they're made for in a rapidly changing labor market.

"What nobody ever mentions in all the talk about America's crumbling infrastructure is the dire need to modernize the bridges between the right workers and the right work. What we have now in education, for instance, is a situation where far too many union enthusiasts way overqualified in the nurturing arts are leaving all kinds of children behind in the Race to the Top.

"America would have been much better served had all these workers currently racing their own former students to the top of the pension and benefits heap been steered into careers perhaps in over-coddling workers as state-mandated psychological wellness professionals in the real world's HR departments. They could even have helped themselves and each other get over their painful misconception that they do not have to work summers like everybody else.

"And with a little vocational rehabilitation, the unemployed, union-burned workers from America's decimated manufacturing sector could easily step in and implement the standardized, high stakes test preparation and delivery system that the current teaching corps is having so much trouble with."

In related news, a routine quality control inspection of the nation's career development industry has confirmed its dismal performance in most sectors but has found that the industry continues to do a remarkably good job of guiding the nation's greediest, meanest, most dishonest and self-important citizens into the fields of finance and politics.


Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Obama Pushes Government Personhood

In little reported judicial news, a case working its way through the courts may well soon decide whether or not the American government is in fact a person.

Based on information rumored to have been obtained through the judge-sanctioned adjudication-free illegal surveillance of the US adjudication system, the Obama administration is certain enough of an ultimately favorable outcome to have begun a full court press so to speak in getting the American people used to the idea of their government legally immigrating as a person to America from the realm of the inanimate.

Said Obama spokesman Jay Carney at a morning press conference, "We have very good reason to believe that thanks to an eventual 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in the United States v. Non-corporate Citizens United we will all soon be welcoming into our big democratic melting pot a new Abstraction-American well known already by everyone as Government.

"We the persons should all be proud. We, after all, gave birth to this dogged entity whose unrelenting upward mobility, particularly in recent years, is a true American success story.

"Ipso facto, of course, and by the commutative property of arithmetic, or maybe it's the associative or maybe distributive property, this all means that each of us traditional Person-Americans will also be a government and should thus be subject to the checks and balances that keep government working on behalf of and not against the American persons.

"It also of course means we now must all direct our healthy American distrust of government at one another and must each of us put up with the moderately inconvenient but extremely indispensable transparency that will keep us from abusing the power we come into as governments.

"We need to start thinking, for instance, about making the Freedom of Information Act go both ways.

"And with all due respect to aging former one-term president Jimmy Carter, he's dead wrong when he says America has no functioning democracy. How can he say that while Government, Corporations, and people are all coming coequally together as one under the democratic banner of personhood?"

Conservative groups have been quick to argue that the last thing America needs is another foreigner with a pathway to citizenship and/or personhood. "If anything," said Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham, "we need to start taking personhood away from some peoples who already have it."

Even more quickly, a host of Obama partisan groups ranging from The Vocal Obamajority to Democracy Now and Then! have hailed the endorsement of Government personhood as pure political genius.

Said Janet Pentz from the already formed Obama support group We the Governments, "As per usual, President Obama has put the right in a real bind. He's giving them their wish to shrink government to the size of something that fits in a bathtub, but that something he's shrinking government to the size of is a person. Not even the right wingers would drown a person--not in the middle of this right-to-life battle to the death they're waging."

For their part, a coalition of Taker-American groups is expressing doubt about the wisdom of opening the nation's door to another would-be Abstraction-American.

Said the coalition's Allen Greenberg, "Isn't anybody bothering to consider what kind of person a new Government-American is likely to be? I mean, what are the odds he doesn't turn out to be a big white plutocracy-curious dickhead from the Maker class? What democratic society's border patrol decides to roll out the big red welcome mat for an undesirable like that?

"And how much do you want to bet that nobody ends up ever seeing the new government person in the same room at the same time with any of these new Corporate-Americans who turned out to be such great persons?"

Friday, July 19, 2013

Greater Chain of Being Needs Redo

The long anticipated official reintroduction of the Neoplatonic ranking system known as the Great Chain of Being was interrupted today by a moment of awkwardness when someone in attendance at the gala ceremony held in Stanford University's elegant main reception hall wondered aloud why he wasn't seeing the common man on the newly modified Great Chain.

When the so-called little man failed to turn up after a quick double and triple check of the PowerPoint slide presenting the new alignment of the entities making up the known celestial and earthly world, a visibly embarrassed Tom Ridley, spokesman for the Hoover Institute's so-called Order of the Orderer, nonetheless deftly lightened the mood by quipping, "I certainly hope this unforgivable oversight doesn't get anybody dropped any links on the Greater Chain.

"But seriously though," continued Mr. Ridley, "to appreciate how honest a mistake this was, one would have to fully understand just how much shuffling was involved in bringing the scala naturae, or stairway of nature, up to date.

"In the centuries since the simpler times of St. Gregory and St. Thomas Aquinas, the divisions between the tidy descendingly ordered classes of beings and things in the nine-tiered system of assigning worth have all but dissolved.

"A certain tricky fluidity now complicates somewhat the great staircase where God, angel, king, nobleman, wild and domesticated animal, plant, and mineral are naturally arranged. Oh, and man too, of course.

"Where, for instance, does one place a Red Tibetan Mastiff or a show quality Pharaoh Hound or Cavalier King Charles Spaniel in relation to a white African diamond? Or a blue one for that matter? Or a pink one? Where does a white or blue or pink diamond stand in relation to the king whose land it was extracted from? Does that African king stand on a rung above or below a minor sheikh in a Middle Eastern land dripping with oil? Where does one place this oil in relation to all the above and everything else?

"Such puzzlers and many more just like them and many many more even more puzzling had a way of throwing the re-ordering of all things under and I suppose even over the Sun, not to mention the Sun itself, into a barely controlled disorder that kicked up quite a bit of dust--which itself by the way wasn't exactly a breeze to place on the Greater Chain, nor of course was a breeze exactly a breeze to find a spot for.

"At any rate, in light of all this upheaval, and I suppose you'd have to say downheaval as well, I hope the average man will not take his accidental absence from the Greater Chain of Being personally.

"And speaking of downheaval, the common man might do well, as he waits to find out where along the Greater Chain he belongs, to think about how God must feel now that the top link belongs to America's Makers and his new link is situated way down the line between the rainbow and a flammable variety of bush known as Dictamnus albus."

In a footnote to this story, one member of the Hoover Institute's Order of the Orderer told Shining City Gazette that he distinctly remembers the Order tabling the little man when an impasse was reached in a debate over whether he and she should be placed above or below the baser minerals he and she is made of.

According to this source, the Order must simply have forgotten to go back to the little man after they moved on to the tricky business of deciding how to order America's vast statuary of its Founding Fathers given the unbelievably complex relationships between the variable worths of these men and the various grades of stone and metal they were rendered in.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Ed Writes Back to Harris-Perry

Through an anonymous leak from the Surveillance State, Shining City Gazette has obtained the private letter that fugitive whistleblower Edward "Ed" Snowden recently sent to MSNBC's rising media star Melissa Harris-Perry in response to the open letter to him in which on her own TV show she stagily tells Mr. Snowden off for fleeing certain injustice and thereby getting in the way of her covering any of the unbelievably widespread government encroachment on the Fourth Amendment he uncovered before fleeing certain injustice.

Mr. Snowden's letter is printed here in its entirety:

Dear Melissa,

This is Edward. You apparently know me as Ed. May I call you Mel? Thanks, Mel.

And thank you so much also, Mel, for your advice on how to make sure attention gets brought to our government's frightening abuse of its frightening privacy-invading powers. I don't know why I didn't think of turning to the Establishment Media for guidance in this matter from the very beginning.

And Mel, let me please just say I'm so sorry that my selfish attempts to avoid persecution by the corrupt government whose corruption I uncovered have gotten in the way of your covering our government's frightening abuse of its frightening surveillance powers.

May I request, however, that you maybe jot down a reminder to yourself to cover this abuse once our government has illegally caught me and rendered me unable to stand in the way of your reporting on all this government abuse (did somebody just say "rendered"?). And by "cover this abuse" I actually mean "report on it".

And may I please add, Mel, that if you've grown tired of not talking about our government's frightening abuse of its frightening surveillance powers, perhaps you could move on to not talking about how my giving up so much of what I love in refusing to submit to our government's frighteningly unjust conception of justice is shedding light on the new reality that even American citizens can no longer trust a single branch of their government to treat them legally.

You see, Mel, this way, my fugitive status wouldn't force you to make the story be about you being griped about me making the story be about me.

Oh and Mel, in the future, to save yourself the trouble of writing an open letter to yourself for making the unconstitutional surveillance story be about you by writing open letters to me about making the story be about me, just type your letters to me on any computer or dictate them into any phone or just go anywhere and say them out loud and my friends at Booz Allen will make sure I get them. You could actually just lip the words, believe it or not. Soon you will only have to think them.

And Mel, speaking of my friends at Booz Allen, they're having some difficulty finding any drafts of any open letters you're writing to James Clapper for trying (albeit somehow unsuccessfully) to make the story of illegal government surveillance be about him and his lying to Congress about illegal government surveillance.

And they're also, Mel, not finding any letters from you to the president of the United States glibly criticizing him for overseeing a formerly secret Surveillance State so egregious that a coward like me would blow the whistle on it and then escape unjust justice and thereby keep you from doing your job as a journalist by reporting on the so egregious Surveillance State in question. Actually, Mel, it's not in question at all.

Anyway, Mel, hope all's well over there in America.

Sincerely, Ed.

In related news, Shining City Gazette has received word from an unnamed Booz Allen agent that MSNBC's rising media star Melissa Harris-Perry is now drafting an open letter to Shining City Gazette in which she stagily calls us out for printing Edward "Ed" Snowden's private letter to her and thereby distracting her from further reporting on Mr. Snowden's distracting her from reporting on the government's illegal surveillance program.

In even more Melissa Harris-Perry news, MSNBC's rising media star Melissa Harris-Perry's colleagues in the Establishment Media are reportedly beginning to wonder out loud if the completely nonsensical calling of attention to herself in calling for Mr. Snowden to stop calling attention to himself is a matter of her going way over the top on purpose to covertly expose the Establishment Media's commitment to running interference for the ruling class they're supposed to help hold in check.

Said media superstar David Gregory, "Sounds like she's blowing a dog whistle to me. I think the media watchdogs out there are picking her up loudly and clearly.

"If this once-divorced, slightly speech impaired implant from the Ivory Tower is secretly betraying the media, she should really find the courage to do it out in the open so we can cover it."

A spokesperson for a prominent media watchdog group, requesting anonymity to make it more difficult for the media to make the story be about him or her making the story be about him or her, told Shining City Gazette that if Melissa Harris-Perry is blowing any whistles "on her own pack of narcissistic Establishment Media lapdogs", nobody can hear it over "all the sound and fury of the toothless lapdog yip-fest that has done nothing but grow and grow ever since Edward Snowden let the latest big bad cat of Establishment criminality out of the bag."

Friday, July 12, 2013

Elite Purchasing Power Unleashed

In a transaction reportedly making the Louisiana Purchase look like the acquisition of a postage stamp, a limited partnership of Plutocrat-Americans has just bought up all the vast expanses of social distance between the ruling elite and the rest of America.

This so-called "Deal of the Century So Far" is just the latest spectacular example of the course conspicuous spending has taken in America now that the fantastic irresistible purchasing power of its richest citizens is stretching beyond recognition the human conception of what's salable.

Said Rick Simmons, the so-called unreal estate agent who brokered the sale of all this social swampland now being called the Mother of All Moats, "Oh my god, anybody out there who can sew could singlehandedly reintroduce upward mobility into the system by making billions patching up the unbelievably gaping holes left by all the money burning the pockets of these incomprehensibly big spenders.

"Seriously. These guys are turning us old fashioned free-market go-getters into regular tree huggers saving the global climate by giving these pyromaniacs something else to do with all that money they have to burn."

Among the exclusive new goods and services the elite can now go shopping for on Easy Street is an insurance policy that protects their unprecedented illustriousness against any and all backlashes against this Gilded Age that the masses may yet find the courage to wage in the decades or centuries to come. Image groomers and their progeny and the progeny of their progeny are now reportedly being retained to usher the legacies of the nation's best and brightest as far into the future as the natural devaluation of a dollar over time allows.

According to sources, one of the pricier packages includes the super slow motion unnoticed morphing of the faces on US currency and on iconic public statues and monuments like Mount Rushmore into the likeness of a client.

For a reportedly astronomical fee the elite can now even experience the novelty of paying corporate taxes.

Said Elizabeth Sanders, founder of a very popular boutique where the elite can buy the unconditional love of a deceased mom or dad, "Most of these people made their billions out of thin air anyway, so they really don't bat an eye when they're buying the kinds of pretty rarefied products popping up on the market.

"I'm actually thinking about starting up an imagination emporium modeled after those Sky Mall magazines you see on commercial airline flights. I've got an unemployed uncle who's going to use his background as an engineer to start a business turning all the clocks in super rich people's mansions and on their persons back to a time in human history before Pride and Greed were added to the Five Deadly Sins."

Said consumer protection activist Ralph Nader, "It looks to me like all the smartest guys and gals in the room are being hit by a wave of good old fashioned scamming.

"But hey, if it takes putting the shoe of charlatanism on the other foot to re-redistribute the wealth in America, I'm all for it."

In more plutocrat news, the beleaguered Obama administration is announcing that it has reached some middle ground it believes will satisfy both the privacy-seeking American people and the corporate stakeholders in the Surveillance State.

At a morning press conference, White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters that the American public can now purchase minutes of surveillance-free communication. Also now for sale are the records of having bought these suspicious surveillance-free minutes.

According to Mr. Carney, however, the president, "in the interest of holding the line against those who would do harm to America," will not be authorizing the sale of the records of the sale of the records of the purchase of these minutes spent outside the Surveillance State.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

Pope Blasts Obama Trespass

At the Vatican, Pope Francis has issued a statement condemning America in the "strongest terms possible" for its reportedly having warned God not to even think about intervening on behalf of fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden.

According to reports, the infallible papal statement characterizes the Obama administration's premonishment of God as a grievous if not a mortal insult to His almighty sovereignty, not to mention a clear violation of natural and divine and possibly international law or at least etiquette.

The Argentinian Pope also spent an infallible paragraph conjecturing that if he were of European and not Latin American descent there's no way the Obama administration would have so trampled all over his papal bailiwick.

In terms perhaps even stronger than possible, the Pontiff went on to condemn the widely rumored cyber scrambling of the air space over all the world's Christians in a bid to keep their prayers on behalf of Mr. Snowden from even reaching the ears of Our Heavenly Father.

Said the Pope in his statement, "In their singleminded merciless pursuit of one of God's children, the Americans are willing to render our Lord and Protector deaf to all his other children's petitions.

"Whose guiding hand will now make the football matches come out in a supplicant's favor? Who now will deliver the birthday ponies? Who at bedtime will bless the mommies and daddies and brothers and sisters and dogs and cats and guinea pigs and parakeets? Who will forgive the trespasses of all the trespass forgivers?

"One begins to wonder what happened to the Americans' hearts and minds. How could they not have thought of simply folding their hands and closing their eyes and begging the Lord to deliver Mr. Snowden into their custody?"

Said White House spokesman Jay Carney, "With all due respect for the infallibility of Mr. Francis, with regard to beseeching God through regular channels for the delivery of Mr. Snowden into our custody, why should we bother competing with masses so to speak of rosary-wielding anti-American Latin Americans rattling off pater nosters in a language built for speed?

"The other thing is, our legal team is having some trouble finding the commandment that says 'Thou shalt not tell the Lord Thy God to keep his nose out of your business when it comes to protecting yourself against one among you who would question your all-seeing and knowing benevolence.'

"I hate to sound impious, but God's just going to have to get used to the idea that he's not the only omniscience game in town anymore.

"And with respect to the scrambling of the air space over Christian heads, let me just say that while we're not confirming or denying that an Operation Don't Go There exists, we are prepared to announce that we may or may not have almost finished work on a filter that would allow most if not all non-pro-Snowden-related supplications, particularly in times of life or death crisis and championship level sports series, to travel unimpeded if not unmonitored to the ears of God."

In related news, tensions have escalated between Russia and the US as President Vladimir Putin has refused to punish or even condemn the confederation of Sheremetyevo Airport Transit Area day and night laborers who are openly defying America's explicit will to keep the movements of former Surveillance State agent Edward Snowden "confined to a space that a Soviet bloc shot-putter turned Aeroflot stewardess couldn't even stuff an article of Mr. Snowden's overhead luggage into."

According to sources, with complete impunity Mr. Snowden has been crossing the beats of one private airport security cop after another as he has breezed into and out of the domains of washroom attendants and lounge hosts and hostesses and non-smoking and smoking area custodians and food court managers alike.

When asked by a United Press International reporter if she will continue resisting US pressure to join the global effort to isolate Mr. Snowden, Oksana Belova, manager of the Sheremetyevo Cinnabon, said, "Of course I will. What do I look like, Spain? France? Portugal? The a**-sucking spawn of a jellyfish and something truly spineless, like the two-faced a**-sucking head of an American puppet state?"

Friday, July 5, 2013

Armchair Whistleblowers Gather

According to event organizers, the McCormick Convention Center in Chicago has been stretched to well beyond capacity by the record number of the country's pundits attending the 42nd Annual Armchair Whistleblowers Conference in the Windy City.

Said Nate Russell, the so-called armchairman of the Conference Planning Committee, "There's just so much to talk about this year here at what we're calling the mother of all water coolers. It's like one big month of Superbowl Mondays, but without the hangover and onion dip breath and GI issues.

"I just hope an actual whistleblower didn't sneak into this Chicago fire waiting to happen all over again while we violate who knows how many fire codes in all the packed break-out sessions.

"But then again, what whistleblower's heroic enough to stoke the fire breathing ire of a mustered army of professional second guessers when it comes to the disclosing of lawlessness."

NBC's David Gregory began his lengthy keynote address by congratulating the standing room only crowd in the Convention Center's Main Ballroom on a job well done with regard to uncovering all the real stories behind the story that the whistle has been blown on unbelievably widespread unconstitutional government spying.

Said Mr. Gregory, "Two cents worth at a time you have piled up a truly newsworthy jackpot of column inches over these past few weeks. Well done everybody."

Mr. Gregory went on to remind conventioneers that it was on a Sunday in 1971 that Chicago's native son Daniel Ellsberg helped kick off this annual gathering of Monday morning whistleblowers when the New York Times published the first installment of the Pentagon Papers he leaked.

After a rousing hand for the Times and/or Mr. Ellsberg, Mr. Gregory exhorted his audience to never forget the debt of gratitude the Establishment Media owes the institution of whistleblowing.

"For one thing," said Mr. Gregory, striking a lighter note, "thanks to Edward Snowden you can all put your pens and notepads away. We've been able to arrange for the NSA to provide us a full and complete set of notes on any and all conference activities."

Continuing in this jocular vein, Mr. Gregory asked Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, seated on the dais, if he wouldn't mind thanking his former boss for having lured so many whistleblowers out into the open by lavishly praising them in advance in his 2008 presidential campaign.

Quipped Mr. Emanuel, "Thank him yourself. I'm sure he's listening in."

Ending on a more serious note, Mr. Gregory introduced the theme of the 2013 conference--"Uncoverage". Said Mr. Gregory, "Uncoverage. Let us all keep resolving over the next few days to always keep covering the uncoverage of the stories that too often get covered when the blowing of whistles starts kicking up dust."

Said Planning Committee armchairman Russell, "The titles of the conference sessions give a good sense, I think, of just how exciting this year's gathering is: 'Hey, the Cat out of Your Bag Just Crapped in My Garden'; 'Deep Throat This: Blowing it in the Time of the Benevolent Unitary Executive'; 'Whistleblowing Dixie'; 'Smile, Big Brother's Watching You Not Watching Big Brother'; 'La La La La La: Not Facing the Music of Your Whistleblowing'; 'Thanks a Lot: Extramarital Conference Sessions (or Lack Thereof) in a Post-Snowden World'.

"I'm personally looking forward to CNBC's Andrew Ross Sorkin's 'Tuesday Morning Armchair Whistleblowing: Protocols for Commenting on the Comments of Monday Morning Whistleblowers'.

"And MSNBC's Melissa Harris-Perry's 'Squeal Like a Flying Pig' should also be great. I hear Professor Harris-Perry's boldly proposing that all government and/or private employees with top secret clearance status be made to sign an oath to the effect that if and/or when they break their oath to not blow the whistle on government wrongdoing they will submit to the penalties imposed by a government prone, if not addicted to, chronic wrongdoing.

"Professor Harris-Perry's expected to unveil a table for keying the degree to which one may claim to be a whistleblower to the degree of unjust persecution one suffers for revealing injustice."

Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Beltway Assails Beltway Leaker

The Establishment Press is reporting today that the spokespersons for a multitude of government and corporate and Establishment Media agencies are coming together as one to denounce what they're calling the grandiose narcissist from inside the Establishment Press who is reportedly blowing the whistle on the grandiose narcissists in the Establishment Press who have decided they are so much smarter than the rest of us that they are the last word when it comes to deciding what the government and corporate America and the Establishment Media itself will, but more to the point, will not, be held accountable for.

Said Bob Schieffer, Establishment Media personality and grandiose narcissist, "Who does this guy think he is? Did he just wake up one morning and decide he all of a sudden knows more than all the people who know more than all the people outside the Beltway?

"I've got a simple little IQ test for this boy genius. On a scale of one to ten, how smart is it to start bad mouthing all the arbiters of who should be bad mouthed and how and for what?

"And for the record, I somehow don't remember Martin Luther King or Rosa Parks ever deciding they knew more than the Establishment Media who decided how America should think about them."

Said Jeffrey Toobin, senior legal analyst and grandiose narcissist for CNN and the New Yorker, "What, one wonders, did this leaker think the Establishment Press did. 'Hey look at me everybody, I'm blowing the whistle on the obvious.'

"Here's my own little news flash for my junior colleague--you're going to have to think of a better way to take attention away from your fellow Beltway journalists than by shining a spotlight on them for being whorish egomaniacal glory hounds running interference for corporate and government and media America."

In the government sector, Congressman Peter King, chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, told Establishment journalists today that in his mind the journalist in question should be prosecuted both as a whistleblower and as a journalist enabling a whistleblower.

At the White House, press secretary Jay Carney told Establishment reporters, "The president has already pointed out the problems we're going to have if people can't trust the president or Congress or the courts.

"Well let me tell you, we're really going to have some problems if the people stop trusting the Fourth Estate to make these problems go away."

In the corporate/government/Establishment Media sector, Jeffrey Immelt, president and CEO of General Electric, told Establishment reporters that he personally feels grateful to the whistleblower.

Said Mr. Immelt, "It's always nice to get confirmation that the arrangement is still working."

In more whistleblowing news, the Guardian today has released a chilling document recently leaked by Edward Snowden that shows the NSA and its affiliate public and private agencies and individuals and other entities still have no idea how many terrorist plots went unfoiled in 2009 when the Surveillance State had to be shut down for repairs for several hours when the main NSA supercomputer processing the mountains of data the Surveillance State was gathering kept spitting the NSA itself out as the nation's primary engaged in unAmerican activities.

In brighter Surveillance State news, the government is now assuring a nervous.American public that a team of the nation's best and brightest computer engineers has almost worked the last of the bugs out of a butt-dial recognition program that would exonerate any American who made contact with a Muslim or someone who knows a Muslim simply by sitting wrong on a cell phone.

The team reportedly is now just waiting for the finishing touches to be put on an algorithm engineered to expose those who might exploit this safeguard against wrongful persecution of innocent American citizens by training themselves to butt-dial Muslims and/or acquaintances of Muslims on purpose.

Friday, June 28, 2013

Media Hails People's Leaker

 According to a government leak being widely reported in the Beltway media, a whistleblower from the American public has just leaked to the US government the common people's plan to disrupt the Surveillance State by wildly befriending vast networks of random people at home and abroad in a bid to overload the NSA algorithm designed to tease patterns of evil out of mind-boggling amounts of private personal data.

According to reports, the hope was also that one or more supercomputers in Utah might even explode.

The plot is also said to have included the encouraging of Americans with Arab and even Indian surnames to repeatedly speed-dial and otherwise establish a preponderance of damning connections with Senator Dianne Feinstein and other members of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Unconfirmed reports suggest that this effort to flood the system with billions upon billions of unexpected data points included the tasking of all regular Americans with no more than five degrees of separation from an American with an Arab or even an Indian surname with the mission of using their social media networks to ensnare in a web of suspicion any and all beltway pundits so personally innocent as to invite Big Brother into every American home and to exhort him to destroy anyone who blows the whistle on him or reports favorably on the blowing of the whistle on him.

Said the unnamed leaker and immediate Beltway media darling from an undisclosed and unspeculated on location, "I couldn't in good conscience allow my fellow regular Americans to waste our tax dollars by leaving so many government-Americans pissing in a whirlwind of misinformation.

"And besides, the new Surveillance State is now one of the nation's most populous. How democratic is it for us in the other 50 to decide all by ourselves that all those in the 51st should go on a wilder, even more costly goose chase than they're already on? These people pay taxes too."

For its part the Establishment Media is taking time out from directly vilifying whistleblower Andrew Snowden to hail the so-called People's Leaker as an American hero.

Said David Gregory, Establishment Media personality and moderator of NBC's Meet the Press, "Thanks to the People's Leaker we now know the full scope of the damage whistleblower Edward Snowden and his putative criminal accomplice Glenn Greenwald are trying to do to the country by subverting the Surveillance State.

"Had the Surveillance State not produced an Edward Snowden to blow the whistle on the Surveillance State there's no way the American people produce a People's Leaker to let us know that now more than ever we need a Surveillance State to foil all the homegrown plotters determined to blow up our government's supercomputers."

Said Chuck Todd, Establishment Media personality and chief White House correspondent, "What the courage of this People's Leaker means for the country is that we can now get to work on engineering a new, more powerful algorithm that filters out any and all phony data points that get pumped into the system by regular Americans.

"And if I might be permitted a little pushing of the journalist's envelope here, the government might even think about inserting into the Pledge of Allegiance a clause that says something like 'I will never under any circumstance whatsoever engage in misleading activities or behavior or make any false or misleading statements while under government surveillance.'

"I have to think the large-scale setting of disloyalty-minded Americans up for perjury charges does nothing but make life easier for all those charged with watching America."

In related news, completely lost in the media circus that has erupted in the aftermath of Booz Allen agent Edward Snowden's blowing the whistle on unconstitutional government surveillance is the news that Booz Allen agent Ramona Diaz has blown the whistle on unconstitutional government surveillance.

Said Ms. Diaz, "I just couldn't sit by and watch America remain oblivious to all the unconstitutional government surveillance that's been concealed by the media circus that erupted when my colleague Edward blew the whistle on all the unconstitutional government surveillance."

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Luntz Tosses Obama Lifeline


In breaking Surveillance State news, the Obama administration has enlisted the services of the GOP’s boyish Orwellian supergenius Frank Luntz in its so far flailing efforts to still the qualms of an American public creeped out by the unbelievable sweep of the government’s eavesdropping.

Mr. Luntz, or Frank as he prefers to be framed, is framing this helping hand he’s giving a Democratic administration as nothing more than the humanitarian tossing of a life ring around the overboard skipper of the American ship of state.

Through an interpreter, Frank told Shining City Gazette in so many Orwellian words that frankly it’s been very hard for him to not feel sorry for the incompetent weasel wordsmiths on the left.

Breaking at one point into plain English, he said, “’Modest Encroachments on Privacy’? Wow. Gosh. What could possibly be the problem with making a populace feeling awkward about being watched think of the word ‘modest’? ‘Encroachments’? Oh yeah. That’s so much better than ‘invasions’ or ‘infringements’ or ‘treading’ or ‘trespassing’.

“Hey I know. Why not have the president defuse the problem everybody has with not being able to trust the president or Congress or the courts ‘to abide by the Constitution with due process and rule of law’ by giving a speech wherein he reminds everybody about the problem of not trusting the president or Congress or the courts ‘to abide by the Constitution with due process and rule of law’?

“And George Orwell probably isn’t rolling over in the aisle in his grave at all over the acronymic downside of the Scrupulous National Ounce of Prevention System these hopeless amateurs I’m sure were ready to unveil but only because they didn’t think of the Protect Everybody’s Environment Program.

“It wouldn’t be quite so sad if spinning this Surveillance State weren’t such child’s play. How hard is it really to figure out that the best way to take the dark and creepy edge off your dirty little underground domestic spy program is maybe not to keep evoking a nest of beady-eyed disaster-prone moles with a word like ‘shaft’ written all over their grime-stained faces by referring to your spooks as ‘data miners’?

“Let there be light, for god sake. The dawn’s early light. Oh say can you see the terrorists by the sea to shining sea of torchlight radiating from the cell phone and computer and iPad screen of each and every self-respecting American lightening the load of our star-spangled shining city’s brave men and women in uniform by rising to the EAST, as in the Enlightened Americans Sharing Transparency project?

“And if simply adjusting the brightness setting on the controlling narrative proves too complicated for these brightness-challenged dimwits, I’m hoping I can at least talk them into going with the simple but effective option of calling the problematic policy in question the exact opposite of what it is—calling the spade of their heartless unconstitutional data stripmining a heart in other words, and then selling the big lie with a FACT, as in the Fourth Amendment Caretaking Team that day and night is ferociously protecting your privacy like nobody’s business.

“And then for god sake resisting the temptation to get carried away and call Russia to mind by swapping the Big Brother metaphor out for a Mother Bear.”

In other Surveillance State news, pundits Thomas Friedman, David Brooks, and Bill Keller are now bitterly complaining about the “insidious” Big Brother who has thanked them for all their support by tricking them into revealing their unbelievable stupidity by launching into such trainwrecks of thought as the argument that if we don’t keep giving away more and more of our civil liberties something might happen that makes us give away more of our civil liberties, or that violating workplace etiquette by blowing the whistle on those violating the US Constitution is far worse than violating the US Constitution, or that the government’s aggressively never letting the American people see the president and Congress and the courts check and balance each other with respect to all the public and private unconstitutional domestic spying we know about only because of whistleblowers is no reason to not trust a government that has so many checks and balances constitutionally built into it.

Friday, June 21, 2013

Operation Possum Is Dead


The nation’s public interest groups were rocked to their foundations today by reports that in the trove of classified information leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden was found the revelation that in early 2003 a government metadata analyst successfully connected the millions and millions of dots on the American public’s decades-long scheme to lure the ruling class into so thorough a false sense of security that they would someday carelessly lay the groundwork for their own long overdue undoing.

Said Chuck Webster, media relations volunteer for a collective of grassroots organizations tasked with keeping up the subterfuge that the American people were not strategically rolling over for the oligarchs, “Oh my god. I can’t believe Operation Possum is really dead. Thirty years of just lifelessly lying there biting the dust down the drain.

“The sad part is we really thought we were getting somewhere. I mean look at how half-heartedly they’ve been going through the motions of maintaining the paper-thin democratic façade they’re building their sprawling plutocracy behind.

“Look at all the blatant crimes they’ve been piling up and the rhetorical safe houses of cards the serial felons have taken up residence in.

“Look at all the nonstop barrages of haymakers they’ve been throwing at us round after round after round while we’ve been patiently waiting for the rope-a-dope to pay off.

“And now it’s not ever going to pay off. Taking all those head and body shots and all the blows below the belt and the rabbit and kidney punches and the eye gouges and head butts has been for nothing.”

Said Operation Possum’s chief architect Debbie Martin, “In hindsight, we may have committed a tactical error by giving the ruling class a blank check when it comes to surveilling us. But who could have known that we’ve been so successful at convincing the plutocrats of our chickenhearted impotence that they would abuse the blank check we gave them so recklessly as to find out that we gave them the blank check by way of teasing a catastrophic hubris out of them?

“In many ways, though, I have to say, we have nothing to hang our heads about. Look how successful we were at truly convincing the enemy that we’re spineless, that they had so beaten the courage out of us that they did not need to keep their guards up.

“We can also be proud of how disciplined we the American people have been in sticking to the plan of allowing the ruling class to keep walking all over us until they took the right wrong step.”

Said Peter “Pete” Peterson, billionaire former US Secretary of Commerce and driving force behind the American austerity movement, “You just have to feel sorry for the masses sometimes. I almost wish I could take each and every one of them aside and give them a few bucks to make up for them losing to us again.

“Of course you also really have to laugh at these people. No populace could possibly be as dumb and gutless as they’ve been making themselves out to be. I mean did they really think we didn’t know something was up when they kept letting us sell them such bills of goods as the ridiculous idea that they have to give up their freedoms to protect their freedoms and that war and corporate criminals are not above the law and that money trickles down and that corporate America can regulate itself and that perpetual war is not about profits and that Obama is not a corporate con man?

“If I didn’t already know how dumb the American people are I’d suspect that the underlining of their unthreatening dumbness by dumbly allowing the ruling class the unchecked surveillance capabilities to find out about their dumb plan to give us enough rope to overconfidently hang ourselves was just more rope for us to hang ourselves with.

“On the other hand, it would be just like these rope-a-dopes to keep feeding us rope when we’ve already got so much of it we’d have to hang ourselves from the moon if not Mars for our feet not to reach the ground.”

Wednesday, June 19, 2013

700 Dwarves Blow Whistles


A band of NSA and Booz Allen data miners calling themselves the 700 Dwarves have reportedly just leaked the highly classified intelligence that the government has just launched a counterintelligence offensive called Operation Snowden White in response to the highly classified intelligence that a band of NSA and Booz Allen data miners calling themselves the 700 Dwarves have launched an offensive to, in their words, “undermine” the government’s all out efforts to undermine the heroic act of whistleblowing by data miner Edward Snowden.

Said White House spokesman Jay Carney, “Now that everything’s criminally out in the open it’s safe to announce publicly that this administration sure hopes these treasonous little data miners took a canary along with them when they decided to go underground because as they obviously already know we’re going to work tirelessly to gas them out of this big dark hole they’re digging for themselves.

“And I don’t think it’s saying too much to say that these 700 little people insensitively calling themselves dwarves represent an infinitesimal fraction of the corps of good people mining America’s private information. What we’ve got here is a classic example of a one bad apple situation.”

Ironically using the thousands of top secret Twitter accounts now known to trace back to the so-called Whistleblowback wing of the Department of Homeland Security’s Division of Citizen Vilification, a dwarf with the code name Mouthy has been repeatedly tweeting “Hi Ho Hi Ho, motherf***er.”

In a series of unprintable tweets, Mouthy has also patched together a rambling “ho” laced rap song featuring the Evil Queen Obama and various unsavory permutations of the word ‘blow’ and also including a presumably fictitious dwarf named Donkey.

In a similar vein, a data miner code named Punsy has been filling the Twittersphere with tweets like “Dwarves going to keep whistleblowing your mind” and “Our boy Snow’s never whistleblowing over.”

For his or her part, a dwarf going by the name of Nosy has reportedly just shared with the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald a phone conversation he/she personally intercepted between director of US National Intelligence James Clapper and Senator Dianne Feinstein, Chair of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

In this long, highly jocular private phone conversation periodically broken up by stretches of incapacitating laughter, Mr. Clapper is said to have feigned great concern about how he was going to keep his pants up with all this “lying of his ass off” about not having lied his ass off to Congress about whose private information the government is collecting and on what scale.

Senator Feinstein, after recovering from a jag of laughter, is said to have asked Mr. Clapper why he would want to keep a pair of pants on that were on fire.

In a quip made difficult to hear by the chortling on both ends of the line, Mr. Clapper is said to have asked Senator Feinstein to please hold while he stopped, dropped and rolled in the aisle while risibly pissing himself.

Toward the end of the conversation Senator Feinstein can reportedly be heard begging Mr. Clapper to stop as he goes on a roll about what a good thing it is that there’s no law against Congress lying about not being lied to by the people they have oversight over.

“You’re killing me, Jim,” the senator can be heard repeating as Mr. Clapper then begins hoping out loud that leaker Edward Snowden doesn’t take a page from his playbook and start claiming with a straight face that the triple negative in the oath he took to not unveil unconstitutionality meant he was supposed to unveil unconstitutionality.”

Unconfirmed reports are also coming in that Nosy has intercepted a Father’s Day bedtime exchange in the White House in which President Obama assures a very disappointed Sasha that he had his fingers crossed when he told America the obvious lie that he welcomes a conversation about the Orwellian Surveillance State he’s creating.

In more bad news for the president, a surveillance camera also reportedly captured the fingers crossed behind his back when he told his youngest daughter that he had his fingers crossed when he lied to the country.

Said Mr. Greenwald from the Guardian, “These geniuses in charge of Intelligence aren’t even intelligent enough to not get themselves tangled up in their own dragnet.

“Right now the only thing protecting the country is the lucky fact that any bunch of hopeless idiots too dumb to see the problem with creating an Orwellian Surveillance State is too dumb to create an Orwellian Surveillance State that doesn’t go the way of the poor nation the Orwellian Surveillance State is so stupidly supposed to be protecting.”

Friday, June 14, 2013

Patriot Acters Raise Stink


The private public relations firm recently hired by Booz Allen Hamilton on behalf of the sequester-strapped public public relations wing of the National Security Agency is now pleading with anti-whistleblower activists across the country to stop flooding the Surveillance State with complaints about all the fallout from the recent leak revealing the unbelievable scope of the Surveillance State.

Said Peter Blalock from the home office of The Corkers Group International, the self-styled worldwide leader in genie bottling, “We’re asking all members of the rapidly growing 527 group known as the Patriot Acters to please go back to doing just their normal amount of complaining on the Internet and on their cell and smart phones and in their face-to-face conversations and in their speeches about the traitors among us.

“For the good of America, the NSA is asking that everybody return to thinking of the vast repository where the Surveillance State’s gathered data goes as a big black box or a black hole as opposed to a bottomless, always-open complaint box.

“It only makes America less safe when Patriot Acters swamp the NSA and all its corporate partners and individual contractors with floods of input, no matter how helpful any individual instance of animated feedback might be by itself.

“The system, in other words, is not really equipped to handle such an explosion of patriot action at this time. There’s actually not an unlimited number of barely high school educated Americans looking for multiple six-figure salaries for moving to Hawaii and gathering data on the private communications of their fellow Americans, and the Obama administration is not prepared to start shipping these highly sensitive surveillance jobs overseas.”

Said Patriot Acter Brenda Udall, “We get that the Surveillance State is undermanned. I mean, duh. It obviously doesn’t even have enough data miners to surveil the data miners. But we think a thorough stress test is exactly what the doctor ordered now that this whistleblower has blown the lid off the holes in the system.

“And I’m going to make this next point nice and slowly so whoever at the NSA or one of its affiliates is listening in can be sure to make a full and complete note of it: we’re not likely anytime soon to stop putting in our two cents worth about what ought to be done to this leaker who’s let the terrorists know that all their communications are being monitored.

“And I just wish this genius leaker was still sitting in his palatial cubicle so he could hear me explain to him in nice, simple words that thanks to his little Constitution-saving crusade in his greatest role as a domino, the Surveillance State now has to take even more drastic measures to keep us safe until the next copy-cat domino comes along and blows the whistle to kick off the next wave of more drastic measures taken to keep us safe until along comes the next domino and so on until before you know it the Surveillance State is beginning to infringe on our constitutional rights.

“Hey all you data miners out there, do me a favor. Ask your buddy Ed this: Can you say ‘self-fulfilling prophesy?’

“Or better yet, tell him this for me: I guess the 3-page GED unit on American history didn’t quite cover the simple well-known fact that America’s always a better place when Americans don’t question America.”

In other breaking Surveillance State news, various sources are reporting that in the nation’s bedrooms, at its keyboards and workplaces, on its sidewalks, and in its bathroom and boudoir mirrors Americans are experiencing an epidemic of performance anxiety and other near-crippling issues in the wake of revelations that their every move is being watched.

Said one citizen who just laughed when Shining City Gazette offered her anonymity, “My poor husband can’t begin to get it up with Big Brother watching. You might as well call it Big Mother.

“And now I’ve got this great big immovable writer’s block between me and my social network. Have you seen how smart this whistleblower is? Do I really want a bunch of guys like him sitting around laughing behind my back at my grammar and spelling?

“And don’t get me started on my perfect record of fails when it comes to making myself presentable in the morning with a frat-house load of little twenty-something Big Brothers looking over my shoulder. I can hardly hear myself thinking I’m not good enough with all this stomping of my crow’s feet all over my self-esteem thanks to all the high definition surveillance cameras I now know are keeping a sharp eye on this fish bowl this Glenn Greenwald guy tossed us all into.

“If you’ve got his address in your reporter’s Rolodex I’d love to have it so I can send him my therapy bills.” 

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Big Brother Takes Beating


In a mass show of contempt reportedly straining the media’s image fuzz-out capabilities, members of anti-government groups across the country are flipping a collective bird at the hidden cameras of the nation’s Surveillance State over new revelations that the government has been trying its hand at achieving all-seeing and all-knowing status.

Said anti-tax activist Vern Murphy at a so-called “Survaill (sic) This” rally in Wichita, Kansas, “I feel kinda dumb up here delivering this speech for the government’s benefit when they most likely knew everything I was going to write in it before I did, but here goes.

“Isn’t it just like Big Government to grow itself even bigger on our tax dollars so it can take and stake out every nook and cranny in the nation when the private sector could do the job twice as good all by itself at half the cost.

“Let me ask you something. When a government of and for and by the people starts using all the people’s money to spy on the people, doesn’t that mean the people are paying the tab on keeping tabs on themselves? Now how much sense does that make?

“I don’t know about you all, but it just busts my ass to think of myself paying the wages plus benefits and a pension of some Big Government affirmative action sponge out there sitting around secretly listening to me gripe about paying the wages plus benefits and a pension of some Big Government affirmative action sponge out there sitting around with nothing better to do than secretly listen to me gripe about him or her but probably her.”

“Of course we’re seeing all the fingers,” a visibly irritated Jay Carney told a reporter at a morning White House press conference. “What part of Surveillance State are you not getting?

“And we’re picking up the raspberries too and the Bronx cheers and nose thumbings and crotch grabbings and bare asses and that aggressive Italian gesture that looks like something out of Nazi Germany and some other ethnic gestures we’re still trying to decipher. And yes we’re getting some bare breasts. And people’s kids are sticking their tongues out as us and making faces and giving us the evil eye. Ha ha ha.

“What the American people and their children really ought to be spending their time doing, though, is trying to wake up to the realities of this post 9/11 world.”

Said Sandy Taylor, spokesperson for the Little Brothers and Sisters, a pro Big Brother group devoted to putting Americans’ civil liberties in the care of their benevolent oldest brother figure, “Just when those of us who woke up immediately to the realities of a post 9/11 world can start getting a little sleep again, we find out our Big Brother can’t even find out by himself who leaked information about the so-called complete and total scope of our Big Brother’s oversight over us.

“Here we are now in the year 11½ PNE and Big Brother’s supposedly big bad dragnet can’t even catch the snake in the grass ironically squawking about Big Brother’s big bad dragnet--to an outfit calling itself the Guardian no less.”

For their part, a consortium of the nation’s government watchdog groups told Shining City Gazette through a visibly shaken spokesperson, “This new insight into the government’s quite scary watching capabilities is really kind of freaking us out. Frankly it’s a little hard to keep watching them watch us watch them watch us and so on sort of into infinity.”

In related news, pro Obama groups are hailing Obama himself as the source of the leaked information about all the new constitutional ground the Surveillance State is breaking.

Said a spokesperson, “It’s him, working through Edward Snowden. He’s not only letting us know he’s got our backs but also letting us know he’s given us the 24/7 opportunity to let him know how he’s doing with regard to giving us the 24/7 opportunity to hold his feet to the fire of all his promises to make his feet unprecedentedly available to us for holding to the fire of all his promises.

“To a degree I would not have thought possible so shortly after the Bush era, this president has the government really listening to We the People.”