If We Were Any Dumber...

I was told by a good friend, that my first post was boring, so, at the risk of breaking my own rules, have decided to touch on a more sensitive topic that we should all relate to, if we know what is good for us.

Sheep are just adorable to look at and cuddle and talk baby-talk to but, to anyone who has spent more than five minutes at a petting zoo, sheep have shown themselves to be seriously dumber than dirt. We, as a people, as a nation, are not far behind in the DTD department and it ain't just evolution either. We lay claim to life, liberty, and property, (the property part was in the original language) but in reality I believe that corporations actually own everything from our houses, to all media outlets, to our means of transportation, to (and especially to), our politicians.

We live our lives as champions of freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures, yet our computers and even those Kindle-type reading devices contain chips that record our every move and employ various media bidets to pump their messages up our unsuspecting, and ever widening and protracted recta. And we can’t seem to figure out how the ubiquitous they knew just what we wanted!

You have to laugh at the incoming House O Rep’s plan to read the entire U.S. Constitution aloud...once...on the floor of their, (not our) sanctified chamber. Morons like Michelle Bachman are organizing actual classes in the Constitution, and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has even offered to teach some of the more remedial in the Tea/GOP, his own brand of what is known as a strict constructionist approach to interpreting the Constitution. The first question you should all be asking is, how did these gerbils get elected to one of the highest offices in the land, without knowing the contents of our Constitution and its historical significance?

How? Because either we voted for them, or took no serious steps to actually support somebody else with a brain, that's how. In the last mid-term election (I can already hear a moan coming from those poor folks who had to endure all of those awful commercials that interrupted Dancing With The Stars, or Monday Night Football, or Buffy reruns, or whatever) and thanks to the strict constructionists like Justice Scalia, a corporation is now considered to be a person, just like you and me, so BofA, and Black Water, Fox News Corp can now exercise their personal freedom of speech by funneling billions in attack adds into any state of the union. And they and other persons did and on both sides. Billions. Billions.

And you Tea Party folks? You had nice ideas. Don't Tread On Me. Lower taxes. Less gummint spending on pork. Less intrusion into our private lives. I got that. I agree. Any sane person would. The problem is that the charlatans that you got elected don't give a spit about you or your ideas. The Tea Party wing in congress is solely beholden to one of those I-am-a-person-now groups called Americans for Prosperity, a wholly-owned subsidiary of a couple of billionaire brothers named Koch. The Koch Bros. want less gummint too. They want to ship more jobs overseas, continue to pay NOTHING in taxes, shelter their enormous wealth in the Cayman Islands, and de-fund the recently enacted bank regulations, (remember the depression we just had? The banks gambling our savings by bundling up worthless sub-prime mortgages and selling them as worthless derivatives? The bailouts we paid for? The golden parachutes for CEOs who ran companies into the ground? The ponzi schemes?).  The Koch Bros also want less gummint so they can de-fund the milk toast, yet unprofitable (for them) health care law, keep the EPA from enacting rules forcing their companies to clean up the poisons that they and other corps have been spewing into our air, water, and underground, and this list of why they want less gummint goes on and on, but has nothing to do with you or me, or anybody else who is not part of the upper 2% of the wealthiest individuals, who reap 25% of our nation's wealth and are fighting to give nothing back. Of course they want less gummint. Gummint is the only kid in the school yard, big enough to stand up to those bullies for the rest of us. If gummint leaves town, the bullies rule the hood forever.

 But it’s so hard for we bleaters to pay attention because we allow ourselves to be so easily sidetracked by non-issues like gays in the military, (like there aren't any now?) prayer in schools, (nobody can stop you, as long as you don't force others to do it too) abortion, (if you don't want one, don't have one) guns, (Canada has four times as many guns per capita. They just don't use them to increase the size of their genitalia) Muslims (seriously, Muslims?) illegal immigrants (if they were white, you wouldn't give a shite, and you know it. Did you know it now takes an average of 17 years to legally become a citizen?). And the list of distractions goes on and on and we spend what little amount of time we have left from working two jobs (just to pay the bills and shovel in all the crap that we are convinced we are inadequate, if we don't have) fretting about those Godless, (or the wrong God) colored, illegal, fairies, who aim to take our AK47s, then rip the children out of our wombs, placenta and all.


There was once a downside for the corps, in their plan to sheepify America. As you know, the middle class is so rapidly disappearing, that it may not exist in a generation, and we will no longer have any disposable income to buy that Happy Meal, with a shelf life of 30,000 years. But don't worry; these big corporations are way ahead of us. They have already opened new markets in developing suburbs like South America, Asia, and Africa. We are already last year’s prom date and, if someone like me can see it coming, please ask yourself, why can't you?

So the question for the day is: are you going to start the New Year as a sheep, or another animal who actually has the brains to get off of the tracks?

Sincerely,

J. Brandeis Sperandeo

My First Post

I really have no interest in blogging my latest interesting bowel movement, or frothy-yet-unpretentious micro-brew. I hope that you will not feel cheated, offended, or intimidated by a different discussion.

The reason I decided to host this blog, was to offer a forum for my friends (and anyone else, for that matter) to muse, vent, listen, and exchange ideas, regarding the various issues of the day which interest or in any way affect  them. I could not care less who's right, or wrong, right, or left, righteous, or irreverent.  We could argue causality, until hell freezes; why your job just went to a teenager in Mumbai, or why your health insurance works, only when you aren't sick and costs more than your mortgage payments. To a certain extent, getting to the "who done it and why" can be helpful in figuring out what, if anything can be done about it, but please, no wandering diatribes that are too circuitous or vitriolic, if you can help it.

I did specifically include the word vent above, so go for the commiserative effect, if you want, but the ultimate goal is to pool our collective knowledge, expertise, and just plain horse-sense, to actually try and figure a way out of whatever cluster-@#$% we are discussing. I don't care if you use the King's English or Pig Latin. Some of my most trusted and respected friends barely graduated high school with D's and F's and, as you can no doubt already discern, I am not jonesing for a Pulitzer either.  This is an adult blog, so feel free to emote in the vernacular of the day. If you feel more comfortable writing in a language other than English, don't let that stop you. I will be happy to translate your comment and respond in kind.

I will select a daily/weekly/whenever-I-get-around-to-it topic, say some stuff to get the ball rolling, and you take it from there. Since it is my blog, I reserve the right to muse, wax poetic, or even rant at my discretion.

It is not necessary that you use your real name, as opposed to the usual nom de plume. In my cursory perusal of various blogs as of late, I have found that the many helpful ideas or candid comments seem to flow from anonymous donors. It is not necessary that you to propose a solution or even pose a question, but, if you do either or both, it would be nice if they did not require interstellar space travel to discuss.


Sincerely,


J. Brandeis Sperandeo