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."