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

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.”

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? 

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."

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.

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.

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?"