Tag Archives: current-events

Questions up for debate

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We can imagine the U.S. presidential debates to contain questions like these:

  • Do you consider the sense of global cooperation higher or lower than when you took office four years ago?  Examples: Middle Eastern countries considering formation of their own Internet after U.S. insult of historical religious figure; China/Japan/Taiwan tension; European economic/political unrest; a war in Syria that threatens peace in Turkey, one of our friends; al Qaeda still strong enough to surprise a consulate and kill our own…
  • You say you are for the people.  Which people?  For instance, were Wall Street banker bonuses smaller or larger after the bailout?  Who has benefited the most during your term in office?  Hasn’t it been the very same people you blame Bush for the recession?  What has fundamentally changed?
  • Reagan didn’t blame the economy on Jimmy Carter four years later.  Why do you keep blaming your predecessor four years later?  Doesn’t that mean you admit you don’t have the power base to make the fundamental changes this country needs other than plugging a few holes in a dam that’s still losing a lot of water on your watch four years later?
  • How many more Solyndras do we need until we can see your administration’s track record on picking winners is no better than throwing darts in the dark?
  • I am financially independent enough that I can make my own decisions.  You are a pure politician who has not united our government, let alone the real world.  Which one of us has the real global power to make the U.S. economically strong again?
  • They say you’re a quick thinker.  Okay, try this.  A preacher, a rabbi, and an imam walk into a bar.  Finish the joke, making sure a Buddhist priest says the punchline…

Having politicians to play with is like herding cats — open a can of food and watch ’em come running to eat, despite whatever else they thought they were doing that was important enough to pretend to ignore you.

The Illusion of Freedom, Continued

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When does a person who has one of the highest government security clearances which prevents that person from speaking freely about government secrets without repercussions have the right to lecture us on the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution?

According to the singer Madonna, a Black Muslim in the White House does.

Welcome to the topsy-turvy world in which I live, where citizens are being asked to accept hypocrisies as their only valid choices.

On the one hand, we can keep the incumbent, which allows us to pretend that we’re a free country.

On the other hand, we can oust the incumbent, and admit that there are few freedoms available to the majority of American followers of pop culture figures.

Or, as one writer suggests, we can, if we choose to vote at all, cast our ballot at Gary Johnson.

Oh well, enough fun playing the person who cares about political issues — it’s about to make me insane with boredom.

A Virtual Nation Hidden Amongst You

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For years now, with the near-ubiquity of the Internet, our virtual nation has collected the company charters and business contracts to make a legitimate alternative to land-based countries.

In addition, our advantages allow us to circumvent the usual necessities — a standing army, a bloated government, etc. — that hinder real progress.

The zombie computer in your technology-illiterate relative’s spare bedroom may well be one of our minions, processing bank transactions, serving B2B support roles and generally keeping our network of millionaires and billionaires off the books of cash-strapped governments looking to leech onto successes.

You are well aware that some of our businesses are [in]directly subsidised by the goverments to which you swear loyalty and, naturally, you expect us to share our wealth.

You are wrong.

Just because you have been suckered into giving away your hard-earned income/investments for the social good, don’t think we are like you.  We competed for those subsidies fair and square, just like all our other secret business deals you aren’t aware of.

Look at yourselves.  You talk about freedom yet you easily give up your freedoms for job security.

It’s the same thing here.

You talk about openness and honesty yet you readily buy your goods from our companies when you know we required nondisclosure agreements, secret R&D labs, and security guards to protect us from the openness and honesty you want that would put us out of business in a heartbeat.

Talk about a schizophrenic, shortsighted subculture!

Look at the companies you give your personal data for free: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and the like.

Every single one of those companies run their businesses out of view of the public eye, earning gazillions from the sale of your personal data, yet you know next to nothing about them.

We just took that concept to the next level.

We millionaires and billionaires have been cooking books since our ancestors discovered fire.

We’ll keep feeding you ledgers and financial spreadsheets from which we’ll pay our pittance of a tax burden to lead your eyes away from our virtual nation and its coffers.

The Chinese are some of our best customers.  In fact, they have insisted that we keep our current U.S. president on board because he and his staff are easiest to manipulate into toeing the line and pretending to serve the people although their secret stashes are larger than most.

That is why I take no salary for my work here because I know I am taken care of.

We do this for your own good.

How? You continue to show us you don’t know what’s good for you by buying the frivolous products we manufacture that are dangerous for your health.

Until the day comes when the majority of you realise your unhealthy lifestyles and do something to stop supporting us, who are employing you to desire, design, manufacture and buy the goods that are destroying you (a great feedback loop if we ever saw one), we’re going to keep profiting on your ignorance from now until time immemorial.

Our virtual nation will continue to fund the ultimate project — getting some of us and/or our biotech representatives off this planet  — because we know you, collectively, just aren’t smart and disciplined enough to stay focused on such a longterm goal.

This blog entry may seem like a reverse method for encouraging you to listen to our hypnotists but it has worked for thousands of years and will continue to do so.  Just in case, let’s reword it — repeat after me:

  • I am important.
  • There’s a unique place in society for my quirky personality.
  • My talents are not always obvious but my subculture depends on my contributions, anyway.
  • Some days it feels like unseen hands guide me — I will let my elders tell me what that means.
  • These instant food packets that contain nothing which resembles the animals or plants from whom they are supposed to have been derived are good for me.

Please ignore the last one — we have assigned that statement to our staff of advertising/marketing hypnotists to make it much more appealing to the false sense of personal tastes and preferences we ingrained in you during your formative years.

Why I worry for my un/underemployed friends…

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…or, statistics are valid best when comparing apples to apples (not Google Maps to Apple Maps, however):

Amazingly, a new look at statistics from reason.com shows that Bush’s record on job creation was better than Obama’s.  Of course, Bush was able to grow the public payroll — different times, my friends, different expectations…

However, I ask myself, what about the quality or standard of life that these jobs provided, public or private, during both the Bush and Obama administrations?

Now you see why I can’t see Obama is any different than his predecessors.  But maybe that’s the point of the whole process?

Hope, change, thousand points of light — does any of it matter as long as we feed from the same Koolaid-flavoured trough?

Oh well, back to the future…if only I had Dad as a counterpoint to my arguments…maybe Mom can give me her input and get me off this track of thinking the Romney/Obama ticket makes no sense…

Esoterically Obscure

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If it weren’t for spam, I’d get no email.

If it weren’t for game/group invitations, I’d have no contacts with online friends.

If it weren’t for political surveys or pleas for pints of blood plasma, I’d have no phone calls.

If it weren’t for bulk flyers, I’d have no mail.

If it weren’t for my wife, I’d rarely have any face-to-face contact with a person of our species everyday.

In other words, I am normally a solitary writer, a feeling I first had when I was five years old.

I never wanted to write to profit myself financially — I just want to entertain myself using our universe as fodder for a lifelong joke of mine.

I don’t have to be good or great when I write, just get down on paper or online some of the thought patterns that circulate through me when I’m away from pen/paper or electronic writing device.

Cartoonists draw, engineers calculate, artists sketch, gamers play, … and so on.

I, despite the love/hate relationship with symbols, use symbols to represent myself in this moment of our time together.

I use a countdown clock that shows 13742 days left to keep me on track with this storyline.

Speaking of which, so far we have encouraged millionaires and billionaires to not want to share their wealth, building up a larger and larger spread of income/wealth inequality so that, when the time is right, we can foment a worldwide economic class war that results in the destruction of nations as we know them today, leading to a New Newer New Society (conveniently called the NNNS) that is a formalised competing marketplace of ideas, where what we thought of as nations will be simply large tracts of land that are bought and sold to the highest bidder.

We are experimenting with Greece to see if we can use it as a prime example to give you a glimpse of your future.

Since many consider Greece one of the first seats of modern civilisation, we feel it’s only right to use the land mass as a test case for you, breaking it up into sections based on the debt owed/owned per capita, letting the highest bidder decide how to buy the debt, and thus the land, and determine how to profit from it, or repackage it into derivative bonds and resell it, land being the only tangible asset for collateral, the people and their skills being too mobile/transient, more an error correction in formulae for financial accountants.

Many of us are watching the heated argument between the Chinese and Japanese governments over a similar right to sell national property even though people all over the world own islands.

We often forget that Ted Turner owns more land than some national leaders have under their leadership, although Ted has wisely not raised a ruckus about the contiguous pieces of land having more power and solidarity than the nations that say the land is part of them.

Some question whether Barack Obama is the last populist leader of the United States of America before it is officially broken up during the pre-NNNS war.

While we’re on the subject of war, keep in mind that we aren’t talking exclusively about a military war.

It is more a cultural war than military one, although we certainly will use military engagements where the application of the shock doctrine is more efficient.

By the way, we want to thank Naomi Klein for allowing us to make our shock doctrine policy a part of the public, rather than part of our covert/secret, policies; that’s why we allow open discourse on political issues so we can steal appropriate implement our opponents’ ideas as our own and advance our causes more rapidly than closed societies; we also allow foreign nationals to steal our corporate/military secrets so we can gauge their ability to match our business/manufacturing prowess, in case they find a better way that we can steal back from them — we want a headstart on being part of the NNNS’ cutthroat marketplace of ideas.

Many of you will not see the changes taking place because you have not seen the changes that have already taken place, due to our keen sense of timing, our use of the best advertising/marketing teams out there, and our staff of hypnotists we call motivational speakers.

Already, many of you have been convinced that living with less material wealth than your ancestors is a good thing.  Your examples make our hypnotists’ jobs easier, a trick as old as our species, the cumulative effect of mass hypnosis.

So you can see why writing is fun, can’t you?

I can talk all day about phrases like “the emperour’s new clothes” and “anti-government revolution” and make you think you are being radical by writing news articles that “fact-check” the political candidates or being a snitch hero by releasing a secret video as grandson of a former U.S. president, when in fact you are helping our bigger cause (again, “cause” is a symbol for this storyline and not to be confused with Cause, which matches Effect and is only applicable to scientific observations).

I was lucky enough to see how we were able to use the press to our advantage during the Nixon presidency; in fact, Nixon himself told us what was going to happen and to go along with his resignation that would be his stroke of genius, written as plain as day on headlines and in history books, our future signposts in guiding people toward the light.

Nixon made me understand two things: one, every person is important, and two, make sure I emphasise their importance.  If a person wants to believe s/he is an opponent of yours, cement that relationship so you can maximise the exploitation of their ideas by squeezing them for what they’re worth before you take their ideas as your own.  Whether they think they have conquered you doesn’t matter as long as their ideas are flipped around and turned into the next mainstream focus you use to keep people off-balance.

Never, ever let the whole population be in total agreement, or you’ll lose your idea generator — tension between subgroups is the greatest fuel to fire the generator.

If a conflict doesn’t exist, make one.  Avoid the creation of a happy, complacent population that has no incentive to invent, unless they are more useful as income [de]generation for the storyline.

Well, that’s where we are today.

I want to make the U.S. presidential election more exciting but, right now, the storyline is going exactly as planned regardless of the outcome of the election.

I wish I was more important than the storyline but I’m just a writer recording the events for esoterically obscure reasons — your ideas are more important than my observation of them, don’t you see?

Deconstructionist

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To see that I exist, that there is a set of states of energy that can be traced back to the union of two sets of states of energy, one still living…

This “I” cannot justify its existence after playing with a Wacom Bamboo graphics tablet, updating an Apple iPad 2 to iOS 6, adding contacts to a Samsung Galaxy SIII and asking if I, all references to “It’s A Wonderful Life” aside, have made sufficient contributions to say I deserve calling myself my father’s son, Richard Lee Hill II.

There are brief moments like these when I ask myself if my blue-eyed, red-haired, freckly-skinned genetic material goes to the grave without any attempt to reproduce myself, then why did I live at all?

Silence follows accusingly, guilt-ridden, mocking, watching others who do and do not reproduce themselves build legacies that live…

Why am I here if nothing matters?

I have accumulated and continue to accumulate toys in an attempt to fill in the gaps of my life where [grand]children should be.

The massive waste in our species’ endeavours that we dedicate to the excess time our social network has given us outside our basic childrearing tasks is phenomenal.

We have become the emperour’s clothes.

I am a prime example.

I should be dead yet I still live, the personification of self-preservation, a set of states of energy perpetuating itself as long as it can.

Devoid of meaning.

A transparent being.

Time to dull my brain with alcohol, a legal means of escape from the torture of living with myself, happy in my comfortably suburban misery with no motivation to escape from the multiculturalism that is smothering me, who is the son of a father who thought that pot-smoking hippies like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are giving our country away.

Dad, what can I do to make things right?  Legalise the recreational use of substances like marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms and LSD to raise them up to the legally-destructive level of alcohol, tobacco and prescription medication?  Show secret videos we have recorded of private speeches that Hillary/Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have given over the years that will destroy international relationships, let alone upset the balance of voters’ opinions?

Dad, I tried to support Mitt Romney, I really did.

But without a child of my own to say that I have preserved the genetic heritage of which you were so proud, having descended from one of the American Revolutionary War heroes, it’s difficult to swallow the bitter aftertaste of the two-headed monster we call the duopoly of the Republican/Democratic political machine that promotes two people I can barely distinguish from one another, Obama and Romney.

Dad, I never supported Bill Clinton.  But I never supported George W. Bush, either.

Our political system has become such a convoluted, commercialised, nondemocratic system that I’ve given up fighting it — we’re just one, big, international conglomeration of interdependent business functions now, a group of nations in name only.

The dogs of war are eating the scraps and I can’t stand the stench of income inequality that our nation has dissolved into, despite it appearing better than many political systems around the world.

I agree the “haves” should not be taxed when they have competed to earn their gains for themselves and their heirs but many of them have become too greedy, driven mad by the spectre of recession/depression hanging over them and the lifestyles to which they’ve grown accustomed.

Look at me, living in the lap of relative luxury, surrounded by piles of useless crap that demonstrates the excess our society generates for our childrearing-free moments.

Has the Great Recession taught the upcoming generation to appreciate life without gizmos just as the Great Depression and WWII taught your mother and yourself to appreciate enriching the mind through education that enhances one’s family rather than mind-numbing distractions that turn us into technological zombies?

Dad, I’m sorry I never gave you a grandchild from me, your older, sole male heir, a son you almost lost when he got dragged into the muck of pop culture for a while as he tried to define/find himself out from under the shadow of your strong personality.

There’s nothing I can do about it now.

All I can do is make sure your wife of 55 years, my mother, is taken care of the rest of her life, however she wishes to live it, until one of us dies first, as I give my wife the time she deserves with me.

It’s not enough but it’s all I have to offer in a country that had grown too druggy, multicultural and unpatriotic for you.

Otherwise, I’d prove the real balance of power by encouraging our nation to go to war with nations that are ill-prepared to handle our massive firepower, economic and popular culture power be damned, while I sit back and enjoy the show on all my useless gizmos, before those nations complete their detente arsenals and ruin the fun we closet warhawks truly enjoy.

Dad, maybe that’s the idea.  Should I use the transition of leadership in China and the discord in the U.S. as well as the turmoil in the old Ottoman Empire to start a good, old-fashioned, patriotic ass-whooping of a war?  I’ve got enough profiteers on my side around the world to make it interesting and a savvy business investment, besides.

We’ll see…

When ifs are won wheat is fun

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Hmm…predictive texting…when ifs are won what is fun?  Wheat sounds better, though, doesn’t it?

If your country was facing a potential economic crisis and your leadership was in transition, wouldn’t you want to find an external enemy to conjure up for the masses to pay attention to?  I would, if I was a Chinese political or business leader or even someone doing business with China.

A cornered rat is a cornered rat, a rodent that is rarely loved, just trying to make its way in the world.

Yeah, that’s the way we can feel sometimes.

Me, I’ve figured out that I never enter a room, especially one with corners.

I find a way to challenge everyone to perform at their best, whatever they imagine their best to be, by holding up a funhouse mirror to them and let them see themselves in an alternate world of strange shapes, sizes and colours.

Artists are the same way around the world.  A musician from Trinidad, Nicki Minaj, has shown support for Mitt Romney in her song lyrics.  So, too, in a way, Randy Newman and his song, “I’m Dreaming of a White President.” And, finally, Marvel Comics shows us an alternate universe where Captain America is president of the U.S.

What these artists don’t realise is they are endorsing the very opposite of the satire they create.

It is the sole intent of the opposite sketch to get people to think outside their way of thinking, causing many to ask, “What if…”

That’s why I’ve never mentioned certain pop culture figures in my blog, because mentioning their names, even in the most obvious satire possible, endorses their place in my alternate universe as well as promotes them in the universe we share together.

That’s why we in the popular press no longer talk about certain former political candidates or political officeholders.

As for me, my goal is to make everyone richer in the lives we share together in this moment, getting some of you to promote people you’d never mention in normal conversation.

Satire is making fun of all of us, including the satirist.

Why do I not have a problem with Mormonism when I don’t actively practice a set of beliefs outside of the new slogan, “Business. Science. Competition.”?

Because I am my own god of this blog, a god whose power is Comedy, whose strength is Tragedy, who lives outside of space and time, no different than anyone else who feels strongly enough about one’s self to take charge of one’s thought patterns and align them for self-preservation in a neutral universe.

A god inside a blog does not darken the Sun that holds the solar system together in which the blog resides.  A god inside a blog is a literary device but any religion, including Mormonism, Islam, and others, is a literary device, isn’t it?

Speaking of gods inside their thoughts, it is fun watching the purveyors of mass media scramble to tell stories that support their points of view when they claim to be insensitive to the needs of viewers/watchers/listeners.

How often do we hear stories sympathetic to the aches and pains of world leaders who’ve been labeled cruel, vicious, dictatorial and destructive?  Very rarely.  We’d rather hear about sufferers of terrible treatments.

What about those who like to be dominated as along as they’re provided a narrow pathway on which they walk in fear, their plates and bellies full?  Rarer still.  We’d rather promote people who don’t want to live in fear.

Am I wrong to want people to have true freedom, including the freedom not to hear about lifestyles they deny are real because they take the phrase, “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” to mean staying away from those who don’t pursue the same things, no matter how repressive they want for themselves or don’t want for others?

Should cable/satellite/Internet TV companies offer packages geared toward specific lifestyles, rather than a smorgasbord that appeals to some, offends others and is of little interest to the rest?  Do people have to even see the names of channels they want blocked or haven’t paid for when they flip open the online guide?

This is all old territory I’m covering, where we get to peek into the lives of those holed up in private communities (e.g., simply escape to their one-room flats; personal privacy is not just for gated communities), preventing their families from seeing practitioners of lifestyles they do not condone.

The United States of America and similar countries are not just physical states, they are states of thought sets, too, a magical place where we can be whomever we wish to be, imagining a populace with leaders sympathetic to our joys, sorrows, plights and accomplishments, or fighting against them, the populace and/or leaders, in perennial cycles.

Today, I overcame my aversion to entering a house of worship for political purposes in order to cast a ballot against a state initiative to once again play funny money game with tax revenues.  Knowing the conservative nature of the state of Alabama, I’m assuming the initiative will pass but I’ve been wrong before.

Well, the political satire related blog entries come to a close with this one.  I joined major artists in giving the Romney/Paul ticket a backhanded compliment and will let the ball roll on its own from now until the election is over.  It was fun.  Time to look at places farther along the spacetime continuum, talk about how we’ll get there and what it looks like from an anthropomorphic futurist’s point of view.

= = =

Thanks to George, Joyce and Minnie at the voting booth today; Margaret and coworkers at the Marketplace Cafe (hope the wedding goes well on Friday!); Steak-Out; Google Play.

Truly Disillusioned

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[Personal notes — feel free to skip]

I sit and stare at the computer screen while the antivirus software performs a “quick scan” of the hard disk drive after the IE10 web browser software on my evaluation copy of Windows 8 acted funny.

Not that I trust the antivirus software to find anything amiss.

These days, when flood/drought cycles flow over land and our species has a short-term memory problem about scientifically-tested ecological history, I am not as easy to hypnotise into believing that the bits and bytes that comprise the virtual world I pretend exists in order to add electronic words to the pile make any sense.

Better to believe I am insane than believe I can see through solid sheets of molten sand called windows.

Two more tenets of my belief set:

  1. Don’t take myself seriously.
  2. Don’t take myself seriously that I don’t take myself seriously.
  3. Jokes are almost always better in threes.
  4. Time is an illusion.

The quick scan has almost finished running — the antivirus popup/miniwindow shows 94% progress.

Needless to say, I am not chewing my nails or suffering anxiety about the pending results of the quick scan.

Yet, hickory nuts are pounding the roof loudly, waterlogged from an overnight rain event, seeking a closer relationship with Earth, sharing a gravitational love with each other.

What if there is a connection between the house roof, the hickory nuts and the antivirus software?

What if there isn’t?

By asking questions about which item does not belong in a list, can I show myself if I am sane?

Was it sane to wait and watch, having an ounce of belief that Obama might have made a difference, seeing that his two best accomplishments were the Affordable Care Act and institutionalised drone killing?

This is progress?

This is why tens of thousands of soldiers died in the American Civil War 150 years ago?

Meanwhile, Chinese military experts expect a sea-based conflict to protect Chinese economic interests because Chinese authorities believe they don’t have to anticipate land-based military skirmishes with their Russian neighbour?

Thank goodness, the antivirus software declared “NO THREAT FOUND.”

I can relax.

Technology has come to save the day, so I can now let autoupdate install the iTunes 10.7 software that flashes me a message via the User Account Control function before making my computer compatible with devices running iOS 6.

It was good to relieve some domestic tension and give Obama his four years to show that skin colour alone does not determine a person’s qualifications.

For that, we have the events of the American Civil War and its eventual outcome to thank.

However, now that we’ve accomplished that goal, let’s look at other more important issues such as defining for a large part of the disillusioned world what their subcultures can contribute to world history better than being crushed by homogenising muliculturalism.

Me, I’m still getting used to the fact that some of my childhood friends from 30+ years ago were/are gay/lesbian/transgender/bisexual, let alone the fact that the U.S. president was “outed” by his VP to support gay marriage.

Force-feeding multiculturalism on the general population has unintended consequences that, if I am to understand our species correctly, leads to battles between us over how we believe we fit into the role our sets of states of energy play in the [un]observable universe.

Another four years with Obama at the helm shows scenarios that I’m not comfortable with — more suppression of groups opposed to government oppression of longstanding subcultural beliefs, including overt mockery of Mormonism, which means a reduction in the economic strength of the people who have lost their viability/trustability as productive members of society.

The U.S. has a large population of unemployed, underemployed, and incarcerated citizens who are quickly losing their belief in the American Dream, a net drag on our place in international worth.

I care about the lost opportunities we have here, right now, that the current U.S. president has been unable to address: those who bought into Obama’s hope and those who didn’t, both having no hope for their futures, many worse off than their ancestors.

Ultimately, we may not be able to address these issues domestically because we are fighting an uphill battle against the negatively growing sine wave of economic history.

However, I love change.  Obama was a change.  Romney will be change.  Nader would have been a great change, too.

The candidate who admits he’s willing to improve our nation’s education/economic status while keeping an eye on ecological sustainability without forcing us to compromise our beliefs is the one I want to support.

The liberal arts of chemistry (i.e., a set of states of energy tries to talk)

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Next best comment attributed to a salon.com news article responder:

I agree with many of your arguments as written, but to be fair, I think it is more complex than that. Other contributing factors include the following:

– The “two cultures” of the arts vs. (not and) the sciences is a major issue. For various reasons, our society takes sciences more seriously than the arts. (Just look at the reward sizes of typical NSF vs NEA grants, or salaries and employment rates of graduates of science vs. arts programs, or who we give H1 visas to and for what.) The wedge between the arts and sciences–which is epistemological and political and waged from both sides–makes them “separate but equal” in the historical sense of that phrase (i.e., not at all equal!).

– While the sciences make an obvious case for their own state support (technological innovation, etc.), the humanities have not been as successful since the 1960s. It used to be that people believed that teaching Great Books made us model citizens. But the humanities were among the first to deconstruct that argument as ideological. And they were right: there is a problem with only reading dead white men. But if we don’t teach dead white men, then what can we teach that the public will agree should be taught? Multiculturalism and grand theory have been two answers proffered since the 60s, but (I’m stating a fact, not advocating for it) these have not achieved consensus in the way that dead white men had in the past.

I also think that the humanities themselves have their more recent origins (since the 19th century) in upper class culture. If only well to do men could go to college, then all that Latin and TS Eliot and critical thinking was another way they could demonstrate their fitness for their white collar professional jobs over everyone else. But with college becoming more accessible since the 1950s, the class alignment has changed, and people have become more specialized in order to be competitive. It’s not enough to be smart any more, you also need to know C++. (Of course, now knowing C++ seems to excuse one from being smart, which is a problem.)

Of course a concerted cross-generational conservative political attack on critical thinking and the humanities hasn’t helped. But neither has the hard turn to postmodern theories that to the public just sound crazy (like Baudrillard–and I am not saying he was crazy, well maybe a little bit, but very few outside of comp lit departments really understood what he was trying to do) so it just seemed like a waste of public resources–not saying I agree!

Anyway, my point is that we humanists need to make our own case for public support of what we can offer–and this is a slow and long-term commitment. Critical thinking is a very good argument and I agree with it. I think we can strengthen that argument with a more compelling rapprochement with scientists and technologists than humanists and scientists/technologists have collectively done so far (it’s a two-way street).

The best comment attached to the same news article:

I’m dismayed to see that you are equating the liberal arts with the humanities. The liberal arts include the social sciences and the natural sciences. Chemistry is a liberal art. Music is a liberal art. Psychology is a liberal art. So while I agree with your analysis, this article is itself a symptom of the decline of the liberal arts amongst those who think they’re defending them. Which is the saddest part of this all.

Repeat after me:

The Emperor Ming: Klytus, I’m bored. What plaything can you offer me today?

Klytus: An obscure body in the S-K System, your majesty. The inhabitants refer to it as the planet Earth.

When 102000+ people were gathered to recite the Lord’s Prayer

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So, the world now has proof that the most violent religion is Islam, if global protest headlines speak louder than words, and cult followers don’t have a sense of humour/irony, willing to kill others and die because a few actors were conned into making fun of a religious leader and his god in a video?

Meanwhile, our covert operatives, assigned to no country, used the noise and chaos to slip into place, as always, ready to assassinate at the first word from the Committee, keeping this 3D chess game moving forward into new areas of the protestors’ territory.  If a protestor or a person who incited a protestor dies off-camera in a horrible traffic smashup or accidental fall/food poisoning at home, who’s going to pay attention?

Yes, you’re right again, of course.  “Assassinate” is such a strong word.  Should I have said remove the chess pieces from the playing board, instead?

However, when using the globe as our playing field, we do what we must to accomplish a goal greater than a species or nation ever outlives, changing the anthropomorphic state of sets of states of energy as the need arises.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration will forever be tied to the use of cowardly strategic murderous drone strikes, instead of putting himself and his drone option last, when he should say our military personnel, both those directly employed by our government and those indirectly employed as contractors/mercenaries, are, in person, used to carry out secret death sentences or actively engage in the legal right to proactively defend themselves during war.

In place of a HOPE poster, there will inevitably be found on the side streets of the Internet a picture of Obama looking like BIG BROTHER in “1984” with his finger pointed at you, saying, “Remote-controlled killing is love.  A dead citizen is a happy citizen.  Coercion is freedom.”  All in the name of feeding this storyline, which appears to question the old storyline that stated the latest enemy is Islam, but only in the strictest radical sense, whatever that means in selling headlines more succinctly, a tradition of every country that divides killing into bins: socially-unacceptable murder or organisationally-acceptable restructuring.

Then, on an opposite street will be Romney, smiling, saying, “I do not kill unarmed Muslims without open due process.  I love all people, regardless of religious affiliation, bad comic timing or alleged criminal guilt.  Only my God can judge you, whose teachings I follow to the letter of the writings I read most often with more conviction than my opponent.”

Would it make more sense if public trials were held for defendants in absentia, who are given time to appear, even via the Internet, to face their accusers before being convicted of murder and sentenced to death by any means necessary, as long as it was not cruel and inhumane, including instant death by drone strike?

Are drones becoming too politically risky, creating the wrong kind of unintended consequences, scaring people and reinforcing rather than changing their subcultural beliefs?

This weekend, I stood in the midst of a group of 102000+ people gathered to celebrate their right to peaceably assemble and watch the three-ring circus we call a modern college football game, none of us expecting to be hit by a drone strike but willing to be filmed with no monetary compensation by dirigible-, crane-, guidewire-, hand- and helicopter-mounted cameras.

At the beginning of the game, on a public/state-sponsored university campus, a man spoke over the public address system to say a prayer before the players started tossing themselves at each other.  This week, the speaker happened to lead us in a rendition of Christian text called the Lord’s Prayer.

We also watched the uniform number of Johnny Majors, a college classmate of my parents, retired from active use by the university football team, which brought a tear to my eye knowing one of my parents could not be there in person to join the festivities.

During the break between the two halves of the game, called the halftime show, for some strange reason, the university “Pride of the Southland” marching band included a Scottish pipes and drum ensemble which played both “Scotland the Brave” and “Amazing Grace,” as well as the inevitable “Rocky Top.”

And today, as we left Knoxville, we saw dozens of old muscle/classic cars/trucks leaving east Tennessee, as well as a few stragglers from a large motorcycle gathering heading north from a Trail of Tears ride.

Can I extract trends from these last few data points, wondering where, anywhere and everywhere on this planet, people were reinforcing their beliefs due to recent news headlines?

Me, I’m happy to see people do what they want, as long as they don’t physically harm others.

Then again, I enjoyed the football game, even if my alltime favourite college football team, the University of Tennessee Volunteers, was unable to post the higher score by the time the game ended, when many a player could easily show evidence of physical harm.

So, I’ve got a basic belief of mine to reconsider: freedom to be in the act of “first, do no [physical] harm.”

If nothing else in my beliefs this weekend, there is a sense of poetic justice, where, on the same weekend my team lost its game against a formidable opponent, a team now coached by a man who claimed to love the Vols but left us high-and-dry — Lane Kiffin — also lost.  I can’t remember and maybe you can help me…which players with questionable ethics attended the same school?  Was it O.J. Simpson and Reggie Bush?

I know our new coach, Derek Dooley, instills a real winning attitude of moral and ethical beliefs in his players as they reach successful goals in their career paths, in and out of the physically-harmful sport of American football.

While straying into sports, I keep having fun with this comical tirade on behalf of a political election campaign, seriously yet cynically satirical (or is that cynically yet satirically serious?), when I need to go on down the trail this storyline was going to take after the last blog entry but I’ve let myself get caught up in eddies and swirls of news headlines again, haven’t I, either way?

Old age, I guess.

Well, I’ve got to help my wife clear space in our space (“our space” is a house, in this case) to make room before we move her mother’s furniture from her sister in-law’s house, the furniture having worn out its welcome, as all guests are prone to do, including family.

Tomorrow, I’ll thank folks for their help this weekend, including Cassie at Bel Air Grill and Silvia at the Airport Hilton, my cousin Cindy and her husband Ron, and more…

Thank goodness I do not live in the ultra-regulated city-state of Singapore, because it considers illegal the flash mob performance of a haka that was as fun to watch as a spontaneous Scottish Highlands bagpipe concert.