A Rant From williamyard

Some old friends are having an email exchange. As usual, williamyard makes his presence known:

I have two reasons for optimism: SCOTUS' Citizens United ruling coupled with the release of "Avatar."

I believe that SCOTUS will use Citizens United to give "personhood" to artificial constructs--i.e., avatars. This way, flaws can be intentionally Photoshopped from (or, in a populist nod, added to), holograms of future candidates. Clones are another way to go; why limit ourselves to only one Scott Brown when you can spin off a dozen or more to ensure that like-minded "individuals" control not just a Senate seat but a Governor's mansion, a mayor's office--even a school board presidency? If Scalia survives long enough, look for "Brown vs. Board of Education--the Sequel" to be a big decision in Palin's second term.

Yesterday while shaving I listened to a Vegas bookie being interviewed about the Super Bowl. He did okay, although his traffic was a little lighter than expected, considering two high-powered offenses had at it. I wondered if he's making bookon dystopia and its discontents--who's the favorite to send us sliding back to the Dark Ages? I'm reading the planet's Racing Form: you got your nukes, your biologics (man-made and free-range), you got your expanding class division, your obesity, your infototalitarians (Google, China, et al.), your fundies of various persuasions, your grid collapse, your rising sea levels etc. etc. Each has its assorted twists and turns; as a guy from UCSF noted recently, the U.S. basically exports four things: weapons, entertainment, blue jeans, and food. In the food category, we use fructose to keep the consumers addicted. Downside: we're becoming a planet of fat pigs. Cut the fructose and you've just butt-fucked the U.S. economy. Good luck with that: the Farm Bill enjoys rare bi-partisan support. We are
killing more people with corn than the Taliban are with opium.

Speaking of which I just carbed up the bird feeder and a riot of chicadees, wrens, rock doves, and assorted other human-supplied-seed-addicted hangers-on are swarming all over the deck, jostling for one of the four feeding perches like basketball forwards elbowing for turf under the hoop. The red-winged blackbirds are back--a large cloud of them just rose from the grasses in my neighbor's cattle ranch and banked overhead. Ken, I hear it's foggy in your 'hood but here in Contra Costa it's clear as a moonrise in Democracy's cemetery.

The Beltway punditry and the government it feeds is so obviously out of touch with and purely reactive to the greater society that criticizing it is like shooting fibs in a barrister. Scott Brown was such a delicious Black Swan I wish someone would remake "Groundhog Day" with Bill Murray as a liberal blogger so we could see him squirm again and again and again as the results came in. If anyone deserves anything, the voters of the Great Uncommon Wealth of Massachusetts deserve a vacuous Playgirl model carpetbagging on hip nihilism after they took Teddy Kennedy for granted forever. John Murtha's district, as Zengerle recently noted, is in the toaster as we speak. Evan Bayh: turn off the lights when you leave, and don't try pocketing any pens or Post-it notes. The critical difference is that the punditry is watching but the rest of us are seeing.

Oops: I said "Palin's second term." There will be no second term for whoever ousts Obama after his first term. We are in for a succession of one-termers, because the spoiled, entitled, fat, stupid, lazy, and increasingly broke American people think the President, not them, is responsible for the mess we're in, and they'll keep shitting their diapers, waiting for someone to wipe their asses, rather than touch the fucking Monolith and learn to squat over the damn potty.