Finale – Why The Bad Guys Always Win
There is ample reason to believe that rich guys always win because they have enough money and power to change what is true. I don’t believe for a second that John F Kennedy was killed by a lone gunman. But rich oil men, other politicians, CIA operatives who were fighting for their continued existence after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the FBI, and probably Vice President LBJ all wanted us to believe that, so it is still the official story today. And don’t get me started on 9/11 with that whole bag of spiders and incongruous inconsistencies that Dubya refused to investigate further.
There are a lot of evil Bond villains out there, but the 007-type superhero agents don’t really exist. No one is thwarting the things that seriously need to be thwarted.
Converting from oil and fossil fuels to solar and other renewable energies does not profit the Moonraker schemes that are going on out there. Some rich folks have even talked loosely about schemes to reduce the population of the planet to make the damage to the environment into a more manageable mess. After all, what are the Georgia Guide Stones really all about? You can look up what is actually written upon them. It is worrisome. And who is advocating for us, the common people in these sorts of schemes?
The truth of it is, no matter what we do, or who is out there trying to advocate for us, the United States will not last forever. Neither will humanity as a species. Neither will life on Earth. Forever is simply not in the realm of the achievable. Only destruction and renewal are guaranteed. So, in some ways, it is okay if the bad guys ultimately win. My life will end in the next few years no matter what. And my children will not last forever either. But the ending of the book does not take away all goodness and value to be found in the main text. I have lived a good life, and not even God Himself can take that away.
That is not to say that we are without hope. As I said, we don’t actually know who is out there standing up for us now. There are some very good and noble people putting immense effort into the task of securing our future. We don’t know what adaptations and breakthroughs are yet to be made.
Here are some things to think about. It is statistically almost certain, given what we know now about life science, that there is life on other planets in this vast universe. And if there is life, there is almost certainly intelligent life, some of it far more advanced than we are. And if interstellar distances can in any way be crossed, then they already have been. If time travel is possible, then time travelers already walk among us. The only reason we don’t have actual proof of these things is that someone doesn’t want us to know. It is possible that they don’t want us to know for our own good. Not all of the most powerful and wealthy among us are evil.
So, while it is true that bad guys always win because the system is rigged, and they are the ones who rigged it, that doesn’t mean that there will be nothing for the rest of us. There is a limit to how much money you can actually benefit from owning. There is also a limit to how much pain and suffering a single bad guy can inflict upon us. And even if they band together in large, powerful groups, there will always be more of us than there are of them.
Filed under angry rant, feeling sorry for myself, humor, insight, politics, rants, satire
“Because I Said So!” (Why Bad Guys Always Win – Part 3)
Didn’t you hate it as a kid when Mom or Dad used to pull the royal decree maneuver on you rather than give you the real explanation? “Why can’t we get a new dog to replace the one the junkyard dealer ran over with his truck?” “Because I said so!”
Yes, they pull rank or site ultimate power of authority or simply bully you into letting them win the argument. Nixon said, “If it’s the President of the United States who does it, then it is legal.” Remember, though, that Nixon was forced to resign shortly after that.
Now, Donald Trump says, “The President can’t have a conflict of interest,” by which he means that he doesn’t have to sell off his international real-estate holdings and put his assets into a real blind trust (not one run by Ivanka).
Does he get away with it? It will mean, according to ethics lawyers from both the Obama and Bush administrations, that he will be in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the U.S. Constitution as soon as he takes the oath of office. So, of course he will. Just like Mom and Dad after we buried Scamper.
Obama, as President, was forced to do most of what he did by Executive Order because he was a Democrat, and to a Republican Congress, that means he is automatically in the wrong. Still, he managed to enforce his will with the I said so’s at least until the righteously heroic Republicans achieved their miracle victory with President-Elect Babyhands Von Clownstick. Now, of course, his overreaching abuse of the I said so power to do terrible things, like allow undocumented children fleeing from violence and persecution to take shelter in this country, will now all be undone.
Of course, when a Republican is President, that’s different. Republican Presidents are automatically good and patriotic and protecting the people even when they are lying to create a profitable war in Iraq to benefit Darth Cheney’s Halliburton interests. Lonesome George the Rodeo Clown when he was President issued all sorts of Executive Orders that were not questioned even by Democrats, let alone opposed or reversed. In the hands of a Republican President, I said so power is more absolute than Emperor Palpatine’s use of the Dark Side of the Force.
So under President Donald J (for Joker, revealing his secret identity as a Batman villain) Trump, the “Because I said so!” will be absolute. Rosie O’Donnell, Bill Maher, and Jon Stewart had better get used to the idea of waterboarding in Guantanamo. We had all better get used to the idea of the White House being plated in gold leaf. And I had better hope, having written an essay revealing the Cinnamon Hitler’s actual super power, that nobody actually reads this blog anymore. If you would like to help ease my fears, you could always leave a comment in the comment section that includes the words, “I did not actually read this post.”
Filed under angry rant, feeling sorry for myself, humor, Liberal ideas, politics, rants, satire
Lizard Politicians
This scary-faced man is the nutball known as David Icke. My essay today is not about him, but about his amazing conspiracy theory that puts to rest once and for all the notion that intelligent life exists on the planet Earth. His theory clearly shows that the correct answer to the notion is, “No, there is absolutely no intelligent life on the planet Earth.”
Seriously… this man believes there is a race of reptilian aliens living in the center of the planet Earth which is apparently hollow. But not content to live in the center of the Earth and kidnap people to eat, they morph into human form and replace world leaders and important humans with cold-blooded reptilian aliens. Queen Elizabeth of England is one. Both Presidents Bush are also aliens. He offers as proof that sometimes they begin to let their disguises drop and photos have been taken that reveal the true nature of these disguised individuals. Particularly if they are photographed or videoed poorly.
Or, you know, maybe the photos were altered slightly to bring out the change.
And you know that this theory must be true. David Icke has all those years as a soccer commentator to back up the validity of his analysis.
Anyway… I believe he is right. At least, metaphorically speaking. Many of the bad guys that keep winning against the odds and the interests of the American people are obviously cold-blooded lizards underneath. Especially Republicans.
Notice the simpering lizard grin. The self-satisfied smile of a blood-drinker who has recently slaked his thirst on the blood of other immigrants. He is elected by a State that is is largely made up of Hispanic immigrants, yet his idea of immigration reform centers around deportation and cruelty to people who nominally share the same cultural background as he does. He loves to eat machine-gun bacon, cooked on the hot barrel of an assault weapon that it is his sacred second-amendment right to own and to open carry. He is ever ready to stand his ground and shoot down anyone whom he might perceive as a threat, including, no doubt food-stamp-fed grandmothers and their children… or rather “Abuelas y nietos”. It is not hard to believe in his cold-bloodedness. And since he is obviously the darling of the Koch Brothers and other scions of the greedy right, it is easy to believe that he eats little children for breakfast. Or at least wants to take public assistance monies away from them to give it out in tax breaks to the wealthy corporate elites.
Senator Tedhkruzh, the lizard-man from the doomed planet Galtorr Prime.
These lizard politicians have sympathy for no one but the wealthy and the powerful, most of which are also presumably lizard people. And now that the Trumpasaurus Rex has taken over the White House, the lizard people are going to feast, stripping the bones of the poor and the helpless, along with the ground meat from the withering middle class.
Does all of this nonsense about lizards scare you? If it doesn’t, it probably should. But none of it is my fault. If you have to blame someone… it’s David Icke’s conspiracy theory.
Filed under aliens, angry rant, horror writing, humor, monsters, Paffooney, politics, satire
Why the Bad Guys Always Win
Donald Trump is picking cabinet members worthy of Goldfinger.
Now that the Cubs have won the World Series and Donald Trump is the next President of the U.S. and the world has ended, I want to take my time mulling over the meaning of this title and this essay. I have to think it over carefully, because, after all, with the new leadership we have selected for ourselves (at least the only people whose votes really matter have selected) I will probably end up in prison or executed. It doesn’t really matter how it all turns out for me. If the Great Orange Face With Tiny Hands does away with Obamacare after everything he’s recently said to the contrary, I am doomed anyway because any health care I am going to need in the next decade I won’t be able to afford anyway. Dying is the only option I will be able to pay for. So, if they execute me, they will even be saving me that expense.
Mike Pence talks a lot about “religious freedom” when he proposes to take away LGBT rights.
I am not suggesting that Trump is like a Bond villain… Oh, wait! Yes I am. But unlike a Bond villain, when he talks about the evil he is going to do and how the hero is about to die an excruciatingly horrible death, he isn’t necessarily telling the truth, or even knows the truth. So we will not be able to pull an unlikely harrowing escape at the last second, because we won’t accurately know what to counter. He’ll tell us about the anti-Muslim piranhas in the water, but it will be the nuclear-proliferation lasers that will boil our heads off our torsos.
The Trumpinator monologues a lot on Twitter, but doesn’t mean it or didn’t say it when you quote it later.
So, one of the most important factors behind why the bad guys win in real life while Bond villains always get their comeuppance by the end of the movie has to do with manipulating the story. Telling the tale the way they want it told, even if it is a Limburger-cheese-smelling stinky-bad lie.
You can bet that whatever Putin is planning, it will be bad, but he is a KGB-trained spook, so you will not win even that bet.
This is only the first essay in a series of related essays I intend to write about the world situation as I see it. So there is the first bit of terrible news I have given you, independent of the bad news swirling around our brand new Cinnamon Hitler. I intend to inflict more things on you that you will probably not believe, but may give you a chuckle or two at how goofy and idiotic I can be as I try to explain the stinky-bad nature of reality in terms of my own paranoid delusions, hopes, and fears. I can’t help this criminal explaining-the-world thing I try to do in writing. You have to remember, I was once a middle school English teacher, which goes a long way towards explaining abnormal psychology in essay form.
Filed under angry rant, battling depression, clowns, conspiracy theory, feeling sorry for myself, humor, insight, politics, satire
Two Years of Daily Word- Munching
Recipes for Gingerbread Children
Yes, I finished the illustration. No, you didn’t see it wrong. Sherry Cobble, sitting between Todd Niland and Sandy Wickham is stark naked. She and her twin sister Shelly are dedicated naturists and go clothing-free whenever possible. That is just another bizarre detail in the life of a surrealist. At any moment you can encounter naked people. And not just when they are not wearing any clothes. Sometimes you see their bare souls through multiple layers of clothing.
And looking back over the last two years of posting every single day, I have to say it looks quite like I am not the only idiot who sometimes sees through clothing to the center of the person as if I were Superman with x-ray vision. (Come on, you always knew that Superman could tell you what color underwear the girls were wearing at any given moment.) My most popular post, Be Naked More, was written in December of 2015 and has been viewed 306 times in the last year. That’s almost once a day! I believe that proves that I am not the only pervert out there who can’t stop worrying about naked people.
Speaking of naked people, I just got the manuscript for Magical Miss Morgan back from the editor. It is a story based on the naked details of my teaching career. They want to change the title to Magical Ms. Morgan for some reason. I may have to argue that one a bit. But it also means I am well on my way to having another book published and in print. I will very probably be one of those writers who only loses money over being a writer. But I can accept that. Holding a copy of my own book in my hands is a worthy enough accomplishment for a Midwestern brick-brained cornfield philosopher like me.
My second most popular post is Maxfield Parrish Pictures which I wrote in 2014, but the one gaining the fastest is What You Should Know About Filipino Families at only 102 views. I wrote this because I have been married to a Filipina for 20 years, and I have learned a lot of laughable things about Pinoy culture that are worth sharing. 102 views suggests that not all of my Filipino relatives have seen it yet… not by a long-shot. But they generally have a good sense of humor and are far better at laughing at themselves than their current leader in the Philippines, the Pinoy Trump.
So how much longer can Mickian monkey-headed-ness continue on a daily basis? I don’t really know. I am in poor enough health to drop dead at any moment. I never imagined I could do every day for two straight years. But who knows? It is possible that writing regularly is what keeps me alive.
Filed under Uncategorized
Stardusters… Canto 23
Canto Twenty-Three – On the Terrible Surface Amidst the Ruined Palaces
The tadpoles had been totally on edge for half an Earther hour by the time they reached the bio-dome that Sizzahl had guided them towards. Only Tanith and Davalon had been trusted enough to carry skortch rays, and Tanith had nearly disintegrated the grav-cart by which they were moving the precious plants merely because she heard a loud, un-explained sound from the near distance.
But the door to the bio-dome was in sight. It appeared that they were going to make it without seeing, hearing, smelling, or even suspecting the presence of those nasty, horrible scabbies that Sizzahl had warned them about.
“What is that sound that sounds like claws clicking on concrete?” said Brekka through her helmet. “It sounds real close!”
Tanith whirled around and skortched a stone gargoyle drain-spout.
“Not there!” cried George Jetson, “It is behind us and coming fast!”
The dinosaur-like creature the scabby was riding disappeared in a fog of disintegrating atoms as Tanith whirled and fired. The scabby landed on Tanith and drove her down into the rubble at their feet. Davalon immediately launched himself onto the crazed lizard-man’s back, grabbed him around the throat and rolled him headfirst to the ground. As it was momentarily stunned, Davalon lifted Tanith and carried her towards the rest of the group.
“Look out!” cried Brekka. “There’s another one!”
The second was not a lizard-man, scabby or otherwise. It was some kind of mechanical man made of corroded and discolored metal. It had blades instead of hands, and it leaped on the prostrate lizard man, cutting, filleting, and murdering the scabby.
“It’s rescuing us!” cried Menolly in surprise.
“It’s going to kill you as soon as it is done with that scabby!” said Sizzahl from the shadowy doorway. “Come inside as quickly as you can and strip off every stitch of your clothes!”
Davalon was surprised, but never-the-less took action. He pushed Tanith to lead the way to the voice in the shadows. Then he forced Brekka, Menolly, and George into the shadows after her.
“Please, Dav, come with us,” said Gracie Morrell pulling on Davalon’s sleeve. Alden took hold of the other sleeve.
“Mother, I need to make sure that thing doesn’t catch up to you.”
“You may not sacrifice yourself to save us,” said Grace. “You may not!”
“You do not have permission,” said Alden.
“If you don’t come with us now,” said Gracie, “then we all stay and die together.”
“Um, Gracie…” said Alden nervously.
Davalon looked at the monster as its metal claws finished ripping the heart out of the lizard man’s lifeless corpse. Its metal visual sensors focused on the three of them. “Okay… let’s go fast!”
*****
Filed under aliens, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney, science fiction
Saturdays With Gingerbread
This is the pen and ink start of an illustration of the novel I am working on, Recipes for Gingerbread Children.
I admit that my obsession with the benefits of gingerbread is mostly in my head. Specifically, in my sinuses. I find products with ginger in them, diet ginger ale, ginger teas, and especially gingerbread cookies, help reduce the tightness in my COPD-laced lungs, clear my sinuses, and make breathing mercifully easier. Gingerbread cookies are also seasonally wonderful in that they are slightly Christmassy and help bring my family together.
So, yesterday, a Saturday, my daughter the Princess and I executed a perfectly evil plan to commit evil acts of gingerbread and whip up some wicked little gingerbread men in a frenzy of deliciously evil bakery.
Okay, maybe not evil exactly… but I have diabetes and the Princess desperately wants to lose some weight, neither condition being one that benefits by having the temptation of wicked little gingerbread men around.
And, as with any evil plan, many things proceeded to go awry. We did not have any actual flour available to make the gingerbread dough less butter-and-egg sticky. All we had was some corn starch… which had bugs in it. After struggling to craft sticky little bodies a few times, we decided to go ahead and use the tainted corn starch. After all, a few little larvae that get overlooked and not picked out will only add a bit of extra protein, right?
And we had the added bonus that you can make just as much mess with corn starch and margarine as you can with flour and butter!
But we did get the corn-starchy little buggers baked. (And they were probably literally buggers due to the potential for having bugs in them. Oh well, it should fortify the old immune systems.)
The only decoration we had was chocolate frosting, since someone ate all the sprinkles and sugar dots we bought last year for the gingerbread house. (Don’t look at me. I have diabetes.) So we frosted them, prompting the Princess to begin calling them “little burnt souls blackened in hell”.
So then the cookie cannibals could allow the eating to begin.
Mmmm! Good cookie!
Okay, I know it looks like the Princess did all the work, and all I did was eat them. But somebody had to do the hard work of taking all the pictures, right?
Filed under bugs, fairies, family, humor, illustrations, imagination, Paffooney, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Penny Dreadful (Thoughts from the Uncritical Critic)
I confess to binge-watching the show Penny Dreadful, all three seasons on Netflix. Good God! What was I thinking? It is everything that I cringe about in movies. Blood and gore. Gratuitous sex and debauchery. I almost gave up and stopped watching when the Creature came bursting through the chest of Dr. Frankenstein’s latest creation. And yet for a monster to be introduced to the series in such a way, and then to become the one character that strives hardest for redemption… I was hooked.
Sin and redemption is the major theme of the whole series. And each character strives so painfully for redemption that you cannot help but love them… even though they are monsters.
You see, I, like all other people, am aware that one day, sooner than I would like, I will die and live no more. And life, though filled with heartache and suffering and regret, is a priceless treasure to be guarded for as long as I can hold onto it. There is poetry in that condition. The greatest beauty that can be beheld is soon to pass away into ugliness. The candle flame lights the darkness briefly and then is gone.
The story is built from Victorian era literature and includes Mary Shelly’s Dr. Victor Frankenstein, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, a couple of werewolves, numerous witches, demons, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, and a character named Lord Malcom Murray who is obviously based on the African explorer Allan Quartermain from King Solomon’s Mines by H.Rider Haggard.
The characters all do a lot of suffering and striving. Friendships are formed and made blood-and-family deep by shared adventures and brushes with pure evil and death. The main character, Vanessa Ives, is variously possessed by a demon, courted by Lucifer, hunted by witches, and then seduced by Dracula. She uses her deep faith in God, which wavers continually, to defeat every enemy but the last. She is also aided by a cowboy werewolf and sharp-shooter who is her destined lover, protector, and killer. It all swiftly becomes ridiculous-sounding when you try to summarize the convoluted Gothic-style plot. But as it slowly unfolds and reveals new terrors with every episode, it mesmerizes. The sets, the cinematography, the costumes, and the horrifyingly sweet-sad orchestral background music puts a spell on you that, when you awaken from it, you realize you want more than is available. Three seasons was simply not enough.
As I believe I indicated previously, the character that almost made me give up on the series, Frankenstein’s Creature, became the most compelling character of all to me. He began as such a violent, repellent, selfish thing… and in the end became the most self-sacrificing and tragic character in the entire drama. He took the name of the English poet John Clare for himself, and became a tragically beautiful person.
Do I recommend that you watch this thing? This poetic and sometimes deeply disturbing depiction of what it means to be human and be alive? I cannot. It was a moving personal experience for me, one that made me weep for beauty and horror at almost every episode. No one can find that sort of thing through a mere recommendation. It is entirely between you and your God.
Filed under ghost stories, horror movie, humor, insight, monsters, movie review, review of television
Just Call Me Joe
Yes, the rain clouds are hanging over my old gray head. I am plunged deeply back into credit card debt by increases in property taxes, a lawsuit by Bank of America, the city forcing me to get the cracked pool repaired though I can’t afford to do anything more than fix it myself and rain keeps refilling it, a recent car accident, my wife forgetting to pay the phone bill for two months, and the @#%&! family dog chewing up another of my son’s expensive retainers. Good fortune occurs once in a blue moon, but bad fortune comes in daily waves.
So today is about complaining. Life sucks… in the sense of a vacuum cleaner (the addendum I always had to add as a school teacher whenever the word “sucks” was used in class). Life especially sucks (remember… vacuum cleaner) now that we have a dyspeptic orangutan running our country.
The answer, of course, is that we simply have to live with it. Life will go on. At least, until it doesn’t. We are all going to die some day. Humanity and life on earth will be extinct some day. We live within the borders of birth and death. The beginning and the end.
But life is actually like a book. It begins and ends. But the important part is the pages in between. And we can fill them with good things and lots of love and even more laughter. Hmm, maybe I should stop complaining now.
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Filed under commentary, Depression, feeling sorry for myself, humor, self pity, strange and wonderful ideas about life
Tagged as bad luck, complaints, humor, Joe BTFSPLK