The Collapse

[pan]

OK, I'm an idiot - how do you upload video?

Watch this

[pan]

Glad you are still full of piss and vinegar - would hate it if that part of your brain got scrubbed and it was all happy, smiley faces and Christian love, like my sister-in-law after her heart attack/strokes.

Ms Medusa adds, "Better check your forehead to see if they ground down your horns".

[Mouse]

tTea?

[Cal]

Phew  -:)

 

[waldopaper]

ooo... did you know where Mittens is getting the 12mm new "jobs" from... (i am not making this up... and no- it's not from my disturbed stroke-fucked brain)... it's from calling China a "Currency Manipulator' ...that's right... so then China will give us our "intellectual property" back... and then we create new jobs with the money.  Sorta like Santa Claus praying to a rifle and boots and then God gives a flag so we learn about "giving." 

It's not I woke into a a Bizarro World... just forget how to talk or write about it... so now there is no time left to sift turds or tootsie rolls or puckered dis-bodied assholes.   It's all or Packers or Bears... God or Santa Claus... turds or tootsie rolls... whatever.  We are all Hutus and Tootsie Rolls now. 

[pan]

Romney, "Government doesn't create jobs"  "As President I will create 12 million jobs".

Flip-flopping within the same debate.  Yet no one sees  the Not Sees are so eager to get rid of the "kenyan marxist/socialist, muslin(sic), - we aren't saying the N word" that they have convinced themselves that the shape-shifting smoke is real and the man(men) behind the curtain aren't.

[pan]

Rise of the Golden Dawn, the Greek Fascist Party.

[hannah j]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azJqG4r2sYA&feature=share&li...

[pan]

It was so much fun the first time.....

Secession is back. White supremacists, Christian fundamentalists, and other malcontents lost in the back streets of Crazytown, post petitions on the White House's "We the People" website, demanding that their state be allowed to separate from the Union. While the polar ice melts, the US army's top brass struggle to contain bimbo eruptions and Israel does its damnedest to start the third world war, these sore losers want to re-enact 1861.

Petitions have now come in from all 50 states, though the top seven are Texas, Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina and Tennessee. All were once part of the Old Confederacy, and all (except Florida) went for Mitt Romney. At the same time, they take almost one-quarter of the federal dollars allotted to the.... But irony, as everyone knows, has a liberal bias.

[pan]

A good article about the sinkhole

Bayou Frack-Out: The Massive Oil and Gas Disaster You've Never Heard Of

[waldopaper]

the bayou frack-out is a telling metaphor.  what isn't these days?  this increasingly reclusive old man is seeing everything as a metaphor... because... well... it IS a metaphor.   Everything... that is. 

part of my self-imposed stroke therapy is to start writing again... because the aphasia seems to have affected the written word in similar ways that it has effected speech.  For one thing-- spelling has really gone to hell. 

so i am attempting to crack the code of the local "christian conservative," most of whom appear to be simply garden-variety dominionist krakkkers.  The assumption here is that somewhere among the neo-fascists and authoritarians exists a reasonable person.  Not so far-fetched, is it?  

We in the RBC have been watching this slow-motion train wreck for years.  The CCs have noticed it too... but then they start yammering the usual pyramid-hierarchy  wrapped in middle-ages mumbo.  So maybe the collapse is seen differently.  Now the local kraks seem to have their drawers in a wad over "abortion." 

Eavesdropping on a couple of local teeper poobahs at the bank, couldn't help but be struck by how this all seemed to be some kind of "us vs. them" sports contest.  We already know they don't do nuance very well.  I seem to be giving to the idea that "those people" must be marginalized.  Uncomfortable with that. 

But some of "them" are beginning to see shades of gray. 

[waldopaper]

Awright... how would you respond to this message to "christian conservatives," who-the-ever-the-hell they are ?  

Hail fellow-well-met; a resident of the same heartland... and fellow stroke victim.

With these things in common, we are quite different in the labels we wear (in my case- involuntarily).  You would call me a "secular humanist," or you know- a... um... "liberal."  

"Can Christianity and political conservatism coexist?"  Short answer: no. Why?  Beca-se in this culture (NE Indiana) so many people who blithely slap that ("christian conservative")label on themselves are neither "christian" nor "conservative."

I have read much of your material here with great interest, especially the distinction you seem to draw between "bible-believing" and (what I would call) "text-understanding" readers. "God" did not "write" the "bible."  People did.  Therefore (as I see it), calling some text "God's word" is a simplistic authoritarian cop-out.   

The desire to impose one's will on others has always been with us.  Saying that doing so because "God wills it" is a weak clean-up that will not last in the crucible of History.  Like a stroke victim, Culture demonstrates the same kind of plasticity that the brain has.   

Making new connections is Nature's way of enabling us to survive and endure as do all living organisms.  "Magical thinking" will always be part of our culture, but the USA can no longer afford (thanks to the usual suspect demagogues)to let "magical thinking" determine Public Policy at this time.

Sir, what at stake here is beginning a dialogue... a civil dialogue...  in hopes of avoiding a war...a civil war- and the suffering and famine that follows such things. Did you miss, "...my Kingdom is not of this world?  Did you miss, "...the Letter and Spirit giveth Life," or "... when ye pray, pray in secret?"  

Because there are some things that even we "tolerant liberals" will NOT tolerate, we must speak plainly.  

g.b.
aka: waldopaper, author of Slipcraft Manifesto

    

[pan]

Oh Waldo....you make me smile.  It will be interesting if you truly get a discussion, rather than a diatribe, from this individual.  Keep us posted.

It is one thing to see the "other side", the magical, authoritarian folks as unable to see their own contradictory, mythic rhetoric, quite another when dealing with "liberals" in the academic setting who say all the Left things when speaking of Government and Business and Upper Administration but, when faced with the status quo of their well-tended moats surrounding their individual kingdoms being threatened in the least, they become the sleaziest facists around.  In our own Trial, it seems not at all inconsistent with history that the Technical theatre faculty wear Black Shirts when they work a show.....