From the High Priest: Abject Despair & Pessimism Still
I’m still Dorian. Dorian Grey. More grey every day.. We live in a grey world. Not the grey before dawn but the grey before the dark. I'll state upfront that I have lots of problems with the way the owners of the world are running it!
But how can I have problems when there aren't any problems anymore? You can experiment with this yourself. Try slamming a door in someone's face. If you're on a crowded bus, let your boot come down on someone's foot. Bang a shopping cart into someone else's. Then apologize. The other person might do a takedown. That's the risk. But more likely they'll say “No problem.” Like I said, no problems!
Our problems have transmogrified into “issues.” “We have a few traffic issues this rainy morning, a 17 car pileup blocking all 8 lanes....”
“Issue” is a curious term. You'll find about 3 dozen meanings in an unabridged dictionary. We ISSUE blankets to flood victims (or not).We TAKE ISSUE. There are still a few magazines left and these have ISSUES. Our progeny are ISSUE. The mint ISSUES (worthless) money when it wants to mess up the economy some more. We seem to have borrowed the word “issues” from psychotherapy. Their patients have ISSUES. Some can have issues with their parents even when they themselves are 75 years old. Maybe everyone does. Instead of borrowing a dim word like that, we should have borrowed all the Abilify we could get our hands on.
Now let me hand out some advice and some after dinner mints. You might take the mints but no one ever, ever takes advice, especially if they're the ones who ask for it. They don't really want advice, they want their own conclusions to be bolstered.
First: Whatever you do, don't dare go to a store! Only for food. I have issues with this whole system of consumer capitalism. How does it make sense to have an economic system that will founder AND flounder unless every person runs out to stores or goes online and spends everything they can afford, everything they can't afford, and spends months into the future with all the bank cards? This kind of spending is encouraged. If you're lucky enough to have some credit cards, why do the issuing banks mail you these extra checks to spend, at interest of around 20%, and then tell you that they are being nice to you by giving you a way to buy even more stuff? (I cut these checks up, send them back to the card company with a note that, first, I have no intention of running myself into debt and, second, I refuse to be responsible if these unsolicited checks get stolen.)
OK, here's where it gets into fuzzy logic:
The economy works only if people spend money more than they have .The worst thing a person can do is squirrel money away! BUT...
The government also expects people to save for their old age. BUT...
After the bills are paid, most people have nothing left to save. And...
Even if a person has a few dollars or pounds or euros or bitcoins to save, there is no longer a safe way to save. No more Savings Banks. No more safe utility stocks. No more jobs-for-life. No more pensions)! AND...
Many people can't finds jobs anyway because of automation, outsourcing, and having no chance to get trained for the few jobs that are out there.
Therefore, large numbers of people can't join the Great Consumer Orgy. You'd think our institutions would look for a way to help them. It certainly found a way to harm them during the big real estate boom-bust, convincing them that they, too, could afford their dream home. That's where the math gets fuzzy as well as the logic!
If you do go into a store, never go to a checkout line that doesn't have a human being attached to it. Mess around as much as you can with automated phone menus, so that you get to speak to a person. I don't like the word “menu” unless I'm sitting down in a restaurant. Even worse, the word HARVEST, which once made me have beautiful visions of autumn sunsets and red leaves and ripe fruits bursting from the vine now makes me think of dead organs.
Privacy? Don't even look for it! How do stores get off asking you for your phone number and email even if you plop down your few wrinkled bills for an item? Shouldn't that be the end of the transaction? Apparently not. They want to sell your personal information so that someone, somewhere, can categorize you into a “demographic” and tantalize you with adverts. Never give this info to them. If you want to give them some phone number, make up one and make sure it starts out with an area code from another country.
Before my grey days I used to have a poster on my wall which read “Just because you're paranoid does not mean that they're not out to get you.” Keep that in mind.
Another issue: The forced imprisonment of Julian Assange. He has been cooped up in the
Why doesn't
The big villain in this fiasco is the
The United States should ISSUE a sworn statement, signed by the (less than) Supreme Court, stating that they have no business with Julian Assange, and that none of their array of spy agencies will snatch him from the streets of another country and spirit him to the UsofA where, on arrival, he would face waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and eventual death from hypothermia. They should let Snowden alone too, while they're at it.
The
Cheers! Dorian
