Top Ten

Clearly, Truthdig readers were there for it all over the last year, tuning in weekly for the reality checks Hedges was uniquely able to provide in his pieces. He fixed his sights on what many others in the media treated as the most glaring problem with which the U.S., if not the international community, was faced: President Donald Trump. But for Hedges, the current occupant of the Oval Office didn’t serve as a catch-all for the country’s political woes, nor did Trump’s considerable presence obstruct Hedges’ view of many other critical issues calling out for attention.--Truthdig

A "best of list" of stories worth reading (and reading again).


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RP Thomas

Pond reflection.

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Reporter

Hedges on Hersh.


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Goodbye, Bitch

Each New Year’s, my wife and I indulge one of our favorite traditions: the household purge. We scour our closets for stuff that’s just taking up space, quietly draining our home’s energy, and move it along. I can’t recommend it enough.

This year, America’s doing the same thing — and putting House Speaker Paul Ryan out on the curb.

For years, the ten-term Wisconsin Republican — who’s retiring as Democrats prepare to take over the House — enjoyed an improbable reputation as a “deficit hawk” and “deep thinker” about fiscal issues.--PC

A fond farewell.


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Two Populisms

Two very different “populisms” that have arisen in response to neoliberal capitalism in the West.--PS

Note the differences.

The whole deal.


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What it is...

Over the last eighteen years as I wrote for many progressive outlets, editors often asked me not to mention the word “neoliberalism,” because I was told readers wouldn’t comprehend the “jargon.” The situation is even worse with literary journals, my main territory, which are determined not to have anything to do with this vocabulary. This has begun to change recently, as the terminology has come into wider usage, though it remains shrouded in great mystery.--AS

A friend asked me to define neoliberalism over the weekend.  I gave it my best shot, but here's the real deal.

From CP.


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Gawd

Google is a menace to society.  The behemoth has my account all screwed up.  Have to create a new password every time I try to log on.

Why, I ask you?



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Shiny Gifts

My new used computer arrived today, along with a cash gift from a friend who simply has good timing.

Thanks new used computer, and thanks friend.  You both made my day.

Now, sorry for everyone else.  I'm about to start blogging again after a month of Sundays. 

You know you want it.  Even likely need it.

Haha...


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The Grand Theatre

The American political drama, or electoral theatre, is reinforced so aggressively because it is the most basic and effective distraction people have for their social malaise and misery. Voting is a reflection of binary models, it is really just exchange value. And voting makes everyone equal. And Americans have even taken to wearing little stickers that proclaim they voted. So electoral theatre as a shaming device. But voting becomes even more than just a threadbare symbol of equality, it takes on almost occult significance for many. It is one of the few rituals in bourgeois society that seems to encompass something almost magical. Voting is an affirmation of one’s existence, of one’s autonomy and even freedom. I can vote for whoever I choose. Well, off a menu of two.

But I have seen leftist writers proclaim lesser evilism is not to be debated. This is, apparently, because Trump is some sort of special category of evil. This is a hugely regressive and politically immature position. Firstly, voting is not going to solve shit. Full stop. No, the entire apparatus of elections and voting machines and voter suppression or corrupt counts is part of this grand theatre. And this emphasis also promotes a popular idea with the ruling class, that of individualism.--JS

This is an especially bright essay.  Highly recommended for truth seekers. People whose brains have transmogrified into nests of snakes are urged to read it as well.


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What Next?

Anthony DiMaggio lecture.

A shortened, accompanying text.


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Tom Clark, 77

I'm a little late with this, as with all else, but the poet Tom Clark died August 23 at age 77, three days after being struck by an auto near his home in Berkeley.

I didn't discover the info until I went to his blog, Beyond the Pale, and noticed that the last entry was written on August 18. I had a hunch and searched for the worst and immediately found this Times obit.

This was Clark's second run-in with a car on a busy street near his pad. Surviving the first accident, he complained about the uptick in traffic on his street. The first accident put him down for a month or more, and it is just damn weird and tragic that a similar accident ended his life.

I had a short and lively exchange of emails with Clark six years ago as Round Bend Press brought out a pair of poetry books by Charles and Bill Deemer. Clark wrote to tell me how much he liked the work.

"Those Deemer boys really know how to write," he said.

Indeed. And so did Tom Clark, RIP.

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Happy Birthday of Death

Sadly, as a nation, the U.S. doesn’t recall Cheney’s lies, or his role in planning the contemptible “Shock and Awe” saturation bombing campaign that destroyed a sovereign nation, which posed no threat to the United States, and left the world’s cradle of civilization in ruins. Conveniently, it doesn’t recall the over 500,000 deaths from war related causes, as reported by the Huffington Post in its 2017 updated article; nor does it recall that obliterating Iraq’s government created a sociopolitical vacuum that enabled the exponential growth of the CIA’s unique brand of Islamofascism and its resulting terrorism, which has culminated in war-torn Syria and Yemen.--LS

I've always wondered why I seem to be the only U.S. citizen outraged by this. I know I'm not alone, but damned if it doesn't feel like it most days.


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American Psychosis

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Ignore Him

Here’s a thought: What if the media just stopped covering Trump on a daily basis? Why must they dutifully replay every infuriating word from every canned, rigged, reality-TV campaign rally and faux news conference and then bemoan his total narcissism, his complete lack of empathy, his wedge-driving failure of leadership, his dog whistles for racists, his winks and nods to neo-Nazis, his total and unrelenting lack of human decency?--SK

I like this. 

And that's just one; there's much, much more to be had here.


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Guilty

DURHAM, NH—Blaming those with a differing worldview for sowing rampant discord in society, political scientists at the University of New Hampshire announced Wednesday they had traced the current polarization in American democracy to those fucking idiots on the other side of the aisle...

The rest of the story from The Onion.


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Pass the Popcorn, Please

The efforts by the Democratic Party and much of the press, including CNN and The New York Times, to discredit Trump, as if our problems are embodied in him, are futile. The smug, self-righteousness of this crusade against Trump only contributes to the national reality television show that has replaced journalism and politics. This crusade attempts to reduce a social, economic and political crisis to the personality of Trump. It is accompanied by a refusal to confront and name the corporate forces responsible for our failed democracy. This collusion with the forces of corporate oppression neuters the press and Trump’s mainstream critics.--CH

I hear and read a lot of this from Trump critics. Based on their conviction, one would think that before Trump rose out of the muck America was a sweetheart ideal located somewhere in the West, an idyllic Eden where no wrong was ever attempted, no murder was ever committed, no shackles were ever in vogue, no pain existed or unfairness exploited, no hearts were ever broken or corporate robberies committed, nor evil ever imagined much less acted on.

Following Hedges thesis here, one imagines the wailing anti-Trump noise is itself cultist in nature.

Hey, we get it man.  He's an asshole and lawless president who should have been impeached yesterday.

Keep yelling. It's doing a world of good.


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Post Politics

It’s election season again, that joyous time of the biennium, and you know what that means: a renewal of the perennial left-wing debate over “lesser-evil voting.” Is it wrong to vote for a Democrat, rather than someone on the genuine left, in order to keep a reactionary or a fascist out of power? Or, on the contrary, is it wrong to vote for a leftist who has apparently no chance of victory, thereby denying a vote to the Democrat and so increasing the odds that the reactionary candidate will win? The most famous advocate of “lesser-evil” voting is Noam Chomsky, who argues that the most immediate moral imperative is to prevent the worst possible electoral outcome from occurring. Critics of lesser-evil voting are legion, as a simple Google search indicates.--CW

A sensible argument for LEV, which I can no longer abide by. The duopoly has had its day and will continue to have many more of them in a fraudulent political process that both sickens and embarrasses me. I do not think it my civic duty to support fraud.

I know many people--I should say most people I know--buy Mr. Wright's thinking, if they think at all. Those who do not think an iota are inconsequential, and hence the real problem.

As I've said over and over, the level of political discourse in the U.S. bottomed out long ago.  The U.S. is a police state.

As long as that little problem lingers, whom to vote for hardly matters at all, despite Wright's painstaking argument.

(Picture: Obama's war in Yemen)


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Mr. Fish

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Art Bastards

Louis Proyect goes in-depth on the commodification of art in this compelling piece.


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Hedges Visits Portland's Street Roots

PORTLAND, Ore.—It is 8 a.m. I am in the small offices of Street Roots, a weekly newspaper that prints 10,000 copies per edition. Those who sell the newspaper on the streets—all of them victims of extreme poverty and half of them homeless—have gathered before heading out with their bundles to spend hours in the cold and rain.

“There is foot care on Mondays starting at 8 a.m. with the nurses,” Cole Merkel, the director of the vendor program, shouts above the chatter. “If you need to get your feet taken care of, come in for the nurses’ foot care. Just a really quick shout-out and thank you to Leo and Nettie Johnson, who called up to City Hall this week to testify about the criminalization of homelessness to City Council and the mayor. Super awesome.”--CH

A Street Roots vendor whom I speak to frequently told me Chris Hedges visited the newspaper's Portland office last week.

Here is Hedges' resultant column at Truthdig.

A good read.


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Give

Give to CounterPunch, the best online zine in the world.

My computer was down, finally responded briefly and I heard something like a whine in the fan area.  I slapped the fan encasement a couple of times.  Presto.

Probably not the best fix. We'll see how long it lasts.


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Beyond Alleged Assault

In the hearings, Kavanaugh tried to pass himself off as a regular guy who worked his way up the ladder on merit, not connections: “I got into Yale Law School,” he pointed out. “That’s the number one law school in the country. I had no connections there. I got there by busting my tail in college.”

Nope, no connections. It’s just coincidence that he’s a Yale “legacy” (his grandfather graduated Yale in 1928), that he attended high school at the exclusive Georgetown Prep (his father graduated Georgetown University), and that his father headed a large DC lobbying group representing more than 600 companies (the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Association, now known as the Personal Care Products Council). Surely Brett Kavanaugh would have risen to the top of his field even if he’d been born in a public housing project and attended public schools, right?--TK

No silver spoon, right?  Ha ha.

Beyond the "did he do it?" obsession.  Kavanaugh has done plenty, most of it harmful.

Corporate media, television and big newspapers, have America paralyzed with stupidity and sleaze.  Powerful drugs.  So glad I kicked the big-media habit many years ago.

I don't know the next big thing, that is the next pop sensation being manufactured by big money for my salvation, but neither do I walk around with worms in my brain.


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Happy Weekend!

What are you doing here reading this crap when you could be here reading the stuff that counts?

I'm too tired to have a good weekend, but that shouldn't stop you from having all the fun your incredible shrinking brain is capable of conjuring up.

Seriously, break both legs on your way to the exotic foods specialty shop.

Have fun.


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Circus

What exactly is the god damn point of the circus in DC?

The retrograde swine on the judiciary committee are going to pretend to listen before mumbling a few inanities about how they support and respect women, and then tell us that we've all seen a teachable moment, a remarkable thing, but that we (they) must move on.

The halfwit will be seated on the court.

That has been our American reality since Clarence Thomas showed Anita Hill his porn collection.

As Chomsky is fond of pointing out, the Republican Party is the most dangerous terror organization on the planet.

Yet people refuse to believe the truth.


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Fatigue

I feel I may be slowly gaining.

For the past two weeks I've been dog-sick, tired, out of it and generally wiped out by something like the flu.

Tired beyond belief.  Hard-to-walk tired. Tired with mortal fire. Never experienced it before.

Slow comeback?


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Providence Advantage Plus (my ass)

I literally had to tell my new doctor, whom I met for the first time this morning, three or four times that the reason I've seen so many doctors in the past five years is because I regularly went to Good Sam's clinic in Northwest Portland. Residents there are run through on a conveyor belt for educational purposes.  I rarely saw the same doc twice, unless I was being treated for my shingles and subsequent facial neuralgia, or some other malady.

Even then I think I had three or four residents through the long course of step, missteps, etc., in my neuralgia treatment.  Fortunately I had a good nursing assistant who more or less took over the therapeutics and put me on the road to recovery.

None of this impressed the asshole, my new doc.

My new doc acted like I was putting him out.  I was an obtrusive parasite.  Even after I reminded him that my original HMO went out of business and I lost Good Sam in favor of Providence, and the new HMO hasn't been able to hook me up with a PCP, he grumbled on about it.

Then, remarkably, he actually said, "Why didn't you talk to any of them about your health?" meaning the residents at Good Sam.

This is where I turned on the bitch. This is where I almost set him on fire and destroyed his golf game.

Because dumb-ass, this is a sudden new problem.  And because Providence is so inept I've been without a doctor for 4 fucking months. Got it, finally?

Thanks to a dumb-as-rocks Medicare Agent who blundered my first efforts to find a Providence associate. Thanks to the HMO itself, which is better quite honestly at promoting Portland Soccer than providing health care--and can't seem to organize its way out of a wet paper bag.

Stupid fucking fucks.

Everywhere.


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The Race

What a difference a month makes.

In early August Seattle rolled into Houston like a team on a mission.  The Mariners were sitting 5 or 6 back with the A's, both looking up at the Astros, but with a real chance to make a move.

Lo! Seattle took four from Houston and looked like it was making the mother of all moves into real contention in the AL West.

But then, as is the fate of Seattle every season, the fade started. Meanwhile the A's and the Astros kept the pressure on.

The dog days bit Seattle plenty hard.

The Mariners get their last crack at the Astros tonight in Houston, and the scenario is different this time.  Houston is playing to keep Oakland at bay.

Seattle is looking for pitching from its minor league system.


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Orgiastic Weekend

Trump is not the problem. Think of him instead as a summons to address the real problem, which in a nation ostensibly of, by, and for the people is the collective responsibility of the people themselves. For Americans to shirk that responsibility further will almost surely pave the way for more Trumps — or someone worse — to come.--AB

My favorite retired general in the whole wild world does some heavy lifting here.

The regular CP crowd puts it all down here, fat with gem after gem. If you really want to know the truth it's all a little too much for me.  I've already shot my wad three, four times, and it's not even noon yet on Friday!


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Some Like It

A fast-moving thunder storm just moved through Portland and left a boom behind like none I've ever heard before. Sudden and loud, it crept upon us like a mega-IED and made me go to the window and survey the cityscape for hijacked aircraft.

Nothing like it before, it frazzled my nerves.

Earlier today a squall moved in dumping an inch or two of rain in a very short time. Good times.


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Bad Future

Economic austerity, the mantra and clarified butter of the national Democrats, is the claim that the only legitimate expenditures by the Federal government are for unnecessary wars, Wall Street bailouts and prisons. Other expenditures— for housing, education, health care, food and retirement, are burdens on our children and grandchildren. If this reads like the program of the radical right, you might be on to something. And if you don’t understand the implications for bottom-up political reform, please read on.--RU

If you don't understand that Trump is a bad guy by now, you must be one of the "deplorables."

But what comes after him when liberal/centrist Democrats deny progressives and undermine democratic socialists?

Will we understand then that it was a mistake to be preoccupied with a singular monster when so many other monsters are positioned to seize power?

The difference between a racist and a capitalist is less than zero.


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Street of Dreams

How do the “masters of the universe” – the members of the world’s “unelected dictatorship of money” (Edward S. Herman and David Peterson’s excellent phrase) – feel about the dire threats posed to human existence by the system that has generated their outsized opulence and power? Perhaps they fantasize that their fortunes will permit them to somehow escape to other worlds or (less fantastically) to insulate themselves with armed guards and special resource stockpiles on this one.--PS

Mr. Street delves into our present and looming eco-disasters and provides one possible antidote.

But as usual there is much, much more.

Get to work!


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Quote of the Day

"American money has no gender!"--the mad woman of 11th Ave.


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Prisoners

Prisoners, once released, often after decades, commonly suffer from severe mental and physical trauma and other health problems including diabetes (which is an epidemic in prisons because of the poor diet), hepatitis C, tuberculosis, heart disease and HIV. They do not have money or insurance to get treatment for their illnesses when they are released. They have often become alienated from their families and are homeless. Stripped of the right to public assistance, unable to vote, banned from living in public housing, without skills or education and stigmatized by employers, they become members of the vast criminal caste system. Many are burdened with debts because of monetary charges in the criminal justice structure and a predatory system of prison loans. Over 60 percent end up back in prison within five years. This is by design. The lobbyists for the prison-industrial complex make sure the laws and legislation keep the prisons full and recidivism high. This is good for profit. And it is profit, not justice, that is the primary force behind mass incarceration. This system will end only when those profits are wrested from the hands of our modern slaveholders. The only people who can do that are the slaves and the abolitionists who fight alongside them.--CH

Chris Hedges unloads on the prison-industrial-complex.


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Kickoff

I probably won't have much to offer through the weekend (Hmm, how unusual) as football gets started in earnest tonight.  Wouldn't hurt you either to take a break from your RBP addiction.

Do something else with your internet life.  You don't have to be an idolater for awhile, I'm not going anywhere, unless I die and go to hell.

That could happen, and OSU could beat tOSU Saturday in Columbus.  Actually, I give my demise a higher probability.

This is it, the day we've been waiting for, the real deal.  Last weekend was a small taste.

Tonight one of the most entertaining quarterbacks in college ball, McKenzie Milton, takes the field for Central Florida versus UConn.  UCF was undefeated last year, then head coach Scott Frost unsurprisingly split for Nebraska.

Be interesting to see how the team rolls without him.


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Neo-Slavery

In 1911 a congressional special committee convened to investigate the impact of new business practices on the lives of workers. Of particular interest to the committee was something called scientific management, a technique that sought to measure and improve worker productivity. The system’s most vocal proponent, a mechanical engineer named Frederick Winslow Taylor, had just published his magnum opus, The Principles of Scientific Management. Taylor’s work would become an inspirational touchstone for the management profession. Indeed, his influence continues today. Articles profiling management pioneers often begin with him, lauding his efforts to apply precise metrics to even basic processes.--CR

No big surprise here if you've ever held a bullshit job.


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Crunchy

In the Age of Trump, American politics has come to resemble a drearily formulaic, militantly lowbrow, cutthroat, reality TV show.  As per the formula, each day’s news all but invites us to imagine a contest in which the most deplorable wins – gets to stay on the island, as it were, or to avoid being fired.

Trump would be a strong contender in his own right, though, if he were still only a sleazy, politically connected, wheeler-dealer flimflam man with bad taste, too much money, and a penchant for riding around in golf carts, nobody would pay him any mind. There are plenty more where he came from, and most of them are more interesting than he is.--AL

The always illuminating and crunchy Andrew Levine.


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New Book!/Oregon Football Diary

I've published my football diary, Third and a Mile.

You can read all about it at Round Bend Press Books.

Just in time for the 2018 kickoff, it's a hella deal for under 20$.  Read it at halftime of the big game.

Read it in bed...Well, maybe not.  You've already ignored your family all day while you were watching football.

Give everybody a hug instead, but read the book when you can.


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McCain, RIP

McCain was a scumbag and big fat liar.

I never respected the warmongering fraud when he lived, and I damn well can't comprehend why I should mourn him in death.





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Rewrite

If you buy into the notion that the Democratic Party is viable and representative, and capable of making itself over (I don't), this news is for you, but it's a little like advocating for coitus interruptus as a surefire method of inducing pregnancy, i.e., the percentages are against you.

Here's what the U.S. needs: a Second Constitutional Convention, and this time let the women, the slaves, the people of color, the unpropertied, the prisoners and the poor in on the deal.


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Blind Spot

It’s about more than news censorship, however. The “mainstream media” work relentlessly to reduce their consumers to view issues from the point of the merely personal and private. It erases the social, historical and institutional. It inculcates the primitive level of consciousness where one can grasp something as childish as “Omarosa and Stormy Daniels were treated badly by Donald Trump” but nothing more complex beyond the individual scale than “America Good, Its ‘Enemies’ Bad”—and certainly nothing as involved and ideologically verboten as “the American Empire and military-industrial complex is invested in the murder of children in the Middle East.”--PS

Paul Street nails it like a man building a shelter from the coming storm.


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This Season's Scandal

Meyer stood in front of a room full of reporters and television cameras Wednesday night, taking center stage in what was the biggest story in sports, and apologized more to "Buckeye Nation" than he did to Courtney Smith.

It's not just what Meyer said or the adolescent, bumbling way in which he delivered it. It's what he didn't say -- starting with her name.--HD

No surprise here, and a great piece.

Canzano does a good job here.

Folks, when I bring "Third and a Mile" out all of your questions will be answered.


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No There There

That is what is happening in the case of Julian Assange. Many American news outlets are willing to selectively use the documented evidence made available by Wikileaks. To do so is to draw on what the website has placed in the public domain. But they will not stand up and publicly defend the “whistleblower” who makes the information public. I imagine publishers, editors, and media moguls, and the vast majority of those they employ, just don’t have the courage to support the individual who breaks some unprincipled law or regulation designed to enforce silence in relation to official crimes and hypocrisy.--LD


Here is a terrific article on the abdication of the press regarding the case of Julian Assange. For the most part the press delivers a yawning silence followed by a 24-hour news cycle of yammering about the criminal Trump and his associates.

There's so much more out there, but who's going to get it?

Potatoes, no meat.


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Dressed for Success

Oregon has flashed some good ones over the years but nothing beats this 90's retro uni from 2014 (above), when Marcus Mariota and the Ducks thrashed Washington yet again on the way to the national championship game.

This is the one Oregon ought to go with.  Fuck the rest of them.

A lot of Duck fans think Oregon has rebounded enough this year to beat Washington, a poll favorite to make the CFP.

We'll see.  The game is in Autzen.


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AL West

With the A's and Astros tied like a granny knot for the AL West lead, and Seattle just 2.5 games behind them, it's coming down like a flash flood tonight in Seattle.

Seattle and the the Astros in the second game of three gets under way in about 45 minutes.

Meanwhile Oakland is hosting Texas.

As Jim Morrison said, "The West is the best."


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Land of the Freaks

What started as a post-9/11 drive to get an American public to “thank” the troops endlessly for their service in distant conflicts — stifling criticism of those wars by linking it to ingratitude — has morphed into a new form of national reverence. And much credit goes to professional sports for that transformation. In conjunction with the military and marketed by corporations, they have reshaped the very practice of patriotism in America.--WJA

Hear, hear!

Or as I wrote a couple years back.


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On the 300 "Victimized" Newspapers

In other words, Trump isn’t — despite what 300-plus newspaper editorial boards would have us think — a root cause of American crisis. He is a symptom of preexisting conditions. This is important. Because if we delude ourselves into thinking that getting rid of Trump will fix what ails us, things will only get worse.

Running down the list of what offends people about Trump, there is nothing here we haven’t seen before — and ignored when other presidents did them.--TR

Ted Rall cuts to the bone here about corporate media's state of agony over being dissed by DJT.  If corporate media actually served a purpose other than collecting billions and billions of advertising dollars and giving platforms to corrupted/insider Washington hacks like George Will, David Brooks and E.J. Dionne, all of CNN and MSNBC (you Rachel), NPR and a crew of other nonsensical voices, I'd be worried as well--but they don't, and I'm not.

On the other hand, when the Washington Post colludes with PropOrNot to silence the voices of disagreeable, independent journalists--Julian Assange among many others for instance--I do see the problem with verbal attacks on a free press.  It's just tough to say who's actually leading the most dangerous attacks if not the corporate hooligans themselves.

And it is at that pinnacle of shame, when FOX begins to howl, that the charade is in full bloom--Hannity and Maddow in an ideological cage fight that will have no winner.

Ignorance marches on, but here's some more common sense.

Finally, and powerfully, here is Paul Street's opus on the media from the weekend.


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Where's My Team?

Curious, the Oakland A's are contemplating a move because their old stadium is about to fall down, they're drawing around 10K fans a game, and Portland is said to be a player if the organization chooses to move.

After Matt Olson's walk-off homer (his first) in the 10th tonight Oakland's a game back of Houston in baseball's best division, the AL West.

What should the billionaires do?


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Weekend Rebellion

You want to know something?

Okay then read this.  All of it, even if it means forsaking television and CNN for a day.



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New Book: Charles Lucas

I've published a new book of photos by Charles Lucas, his second for Round Bend Press.

I like this one a lot as Lucas explores color and form to the extreme and imaginatively re-evaluates the status of rust, something generally not given much consideration beyond its basic scientific properties.

You can see the purchase info here.


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So a sick man walks into a clinic...

I signed up with a new HMO about four months ago after my former group went out of business due to a protracted monetary fight with the state of Oregon.  Family Care Inc. and Oregon's healthcare bureaucracy shattered the system in a spasm of mutual greed, flitting away their sweetheart Medicare deal, and left many without a provider, including me.

My Medicare agent hooked me up with "Providence Advantage Plans," but as yet I've been unable to find a personal care provider who will take me as a client.  This incompetent agent, nameless for now, has given me three PCP's names and sworn I was in the HMO's loop each time.  Even had slick membership cards printed up with my supposedly new primary care physicians' names embossed on them.

Beautiful, except not one of the docs named would see me because of the caseloads in front of them.  Yesterday I finally got a Providence associate to set me up with one of its clinics and a doctor.

I have an appointment scheduled--six weeks from now!

However, recently I've been in pain because of my ongoing  battle with trigeminal neuralgia.  So I went to an urgent care center and met for the first time in my nearly 68 years with a doctor that can only be described as a hack, a quack, an idiot, and an arrogant asshole.

The American healthcare system needs to change ASAP.

Definitions:

Urgent Care, as in urgent to take your money and move on quickly to the next sap.

Medicare agent, as in a fraudulent middle-man insurance scammer who is ripping off the system.


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America is Stupid

The more business and bureaucracy collides with alternate humanistic realities, in what amounts to a centrifugal-mixture of illogical and unattainable social meaning, the more horseshit one it forced to endure as a breathing, living human being.

The unbearable always comes from one's inferiors, people simply following a code of belief or rules made by even more ignorant superiors.

You can't be yourself, because you're owned by your overlords.  You are who they say you are, unless you rebel against their asininity.

The effort has killed many a man and woman.

I spend way too much time certifying who I am at the behest of my overlords in the upper echelons of society--the very Lords of housing, education, employment and  health, who are threatening to monetize me to an early grave, er, cremation.

The bullshit makes me alternately depressed and angry.  I am very tired of irresponsible, meaningless, useless power.

Here's a thoughtful review.


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Book Cover

Pushing toward publication of my Oregon football diary.

Some people hate it, others like it.

That, friends, is the story of a writer's life.


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