What Ever Happened to Bush and Cheney???

... No, really, what ever happened to the previous President and Vice-President of the United States? You know, the guys who were in office for EIGHT YEARS, from 2001 to 2008? The guys who were in charge when September 11th, 2001, went down? The guys who used September 11th, 2001, to pass the Patriot Act, basically ushering in a twenty-first-century version of McCarthy-Era blind persecution? The guys who used September 11th, 2001, as an excuse to mercilessly invade Afghanistan and Iraq for their oil resources? The guys who wasted BILLIONS of American taxpayer dollars invading the two aforementioned countries? The guys who sent DOZENS of soldiers into peril for the sake of their multi-billion-dollar corporate oil-greed? The guys who allowed (and probably even CAUSED) Wall Street to spin wildly out of control and land the entire nation into the 2.2-trillion-dollar hell-hole that is still affecting us today?

WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO BUSH AND CHENEY, THE REAL REASON THIS NATION IS AN ECONOMIC MESS TODAY???!!!

Every time I turn on CNN, I sit dumbfounded as the Republicans boldly declare that America's economic nightmare was all President Obama's fault, AND A MYRIAD OF AMERICANS BLINDLY AGREE WITH THEM, AS IF BUSH AND CHENEY DID ABSOLUTELY NO WRONG! How about we engage in some common-sense thinking for a minute, you know, BRING YOU TURKEYS BACK TO THE REAL WORLD. Was Obama President in 2008, during the 2.2-trillion-dollar economic meltdown that left you jobless today? "No," you say? Well, then, WHO was President in 2008? "W," right? OK, excellent, now we're back on Planet Earth! Now, who was President in 2007? ... 2006? ... 2005? ... 2004? ... 2003? ... 2002? ... 2001? Again, it was "W," and not his good twin brother, right? That's what I thought! See how easy it is when you use common sense?

Oh, and here's a kick in the head. When "W" (a.k.a. baby-Bush, because his father was also Bush, and was also President from 1988 to 1992) took office in 2001, didn't this nation have AN ECONOMIC SURPLUS INSTEAD OF A DEFICIT??? This means that in eight years time, Bush ("W") and Cheney wrecked the American economy, used terrorism to terrorize the American people into submission, invaded two countries for the sake of big oil, and forced America to put out enough petrochemical waste to make the nation one of the major polluters of the world, right up there with Communist China, contributing to global warming in a major way. Oh, and here's another major kick in the head. The American people knew that Bush and Cheney were up to no good back in 2004, WHEN WE HAD THE CHANCE TO ELECT A DIFFERENT PRESIDENT. But instead, America mindlessly put those two clowns BACK in Office. (I voted for Kerry and Edwards back in 2004. I don't know why the heck all you other people voted differently, but maybe it had something to do with that stupid fear-tactic the Republican-owned newsmedia used against you all right before the polls opened, i.e. "Osama Bin Laden plans even more terrorist attacks against the U.S.," or some ridiculous report like that.) So in reality, if you truly wish to know why America is such a mess today, don't just point at Bush and Cheney. Find yourself a big enough mirror and point one of those bony fingers at yourself.

Our Falling Society

In the dead of night, between Friday evening and Saturday morning (July 22 and July 23), some creep smashed out the entire rear window of my vehicle while it was parked on the street in front of my home. I was sleeping so hard, I didn't hear anything. I wasn't even aware of the damage until my next-door neighbor alerted me to it that Saturday morning. I was always aware that American society has been slowly decaying right before our very eyes. Now I have become one of the victims of that societal decay. People try to reason with me and tell me that I should be thankful the damage wasn’t any worse, and that the thug or thugs didn't actually try to attack me in my home while I was asleep. But the fact that someone could actually stoop so low as to attack someone else's property means that they have little to no respect for themselves and for their fellow citizen. Worse, several other vehicles in my neighborhood were attacked in the same way, which means that what was once a quiet, peaceful neighborhood is now being overrun by yet another crime wave. It's bad enough that we have an increasing number of reckless new commuters speeding down our streets, ignoring almost every Stop-sign while mindlessly chattering on their handheld cellular phones (which is now illegal in the State of California), and threatening our children. It's bad enough that we have an increasing number of derelicts and prostitutes wandering through our streets. (I even had to throw one derelict off of my front porch when I discovered him trying to camp out there for the night, and he had the nerve to cuss me out when I told him he had to leave: my home is NOT public property!) It's bad enough that an increasing number of new "neighbors" insist on disrespecting everyone else in the neighborhood by having loud house parties at 1:00AM on a weekday, inviting all of their non-carpooling friends to take up every inch of street parking AND totally block your driveway (which is also illegal in the state of California) so that you can't even get your vehicle out of the driveway, and then letting their dogs and their kids tear up YOUR front lawn in spite of the fence you've placed around it. (Yep, ALL of this has happened to me recently.) Now we have an increasing number of miscreants who have nothing better to do than attack your property. But think, this is not that far removed from having an increasing number of miscreants who have nothing better to do than attack YOU.

You know what really makes all of this so ridiculous? ALL OF THIS COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED. How, you ask? BY ACTUALLY TAKING THE TIME TO CORRECTLY RAISE YOUR CHILDREN BACK IN 1991, 1981, OR EVEN 1971, SO THAT THEY WOULDN'T GROW UP TO BE THUGS, FELONS, CON-ARTISTS, AND DISRESPECTFULLY SELFISH ADULT BRATS IN 2011. Whenever you allow a corrupt society to eviscerate your children's souls of all virtue, meaning, culture, learning, wisdom, discipline, tradition, and history, you can only expect anarchy to follow, even if it comes many decades later. There are incredibly tall trees that have been growing for hundreds, even thousands of years, but they all started out as a tiny seed. As a bad seed, poor parenting and a lackluster education may take decades to manifest themselves, but rest assured, they will bring forth their bitter fruits, resulting in the destruction of everything we Americans hold dear.

To All High School Students Seeking a College Counselor ...

If you're a High School student who needs counseling on which College to go to after graduation, and the first words out of a College Counselor's mouth are "You can be anything you want to be," then you need to avoid that Counselor as though he or she were the Plague. That's because he or she is really saying, "I have to counsel dozens of other students who look and smell just like you, so I really have neither the time nor the desire to get to know you better as a person, find out what your true gifts and talents really are, and sincerely spend the days, weeks, or months it really takes to point you in the right direction for a successful life before, during, and after College." Saying "You can be anything you want to be" makes as much sense as saying a fork can be a plate, or a knife can be a cup, or a washcloth can be a pneumatic jackhammer. Every individual human being was born with a unique set of innate gifts. Focus on those gifts, and you maximize your life, fulfilling it with purpose and meaning. Ignore those gifts, and you waste your life, wallowing in frustration and mediocrity. If anything, that lackluster College Counselor took the job as a means of paying bills or affording a new luxury car, and not because he or she really cared about any High School student's future. And his or her choice to become a Counselor probably resulted from having long since ignored his or her own true gifts, wasting his or her own life, and wallowing in frustration and mediocrity. You simply cannot expect excellent advice from a mediocre Counselor.

"Miraculous Empowerment from a Government Perspective"

Everyone at some point in time has imagined what it would be like to have superhuman powers. Some people have dreamed of being faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to leap over tall buildings in a single bound. Others have wondered what it would be like to walk on water, multiply loaves and fishes, change water into wine, heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out real demons, and command the weather with a single word. And some have even conducted scientific research into human paranormal abilities such as telepathy, telekinesis, clairvoyance, and astral projection. Every human being has, at one point or another, fantasized about being capable of seeing more, doing more, and being more than a mere flesh-and-blood being trapped within the tight confines of space and time. And when the average person actually does catch a glimpse of the superhuman, a taste of life beyond the restrictions of space and time, he or she is filled with excitement and inspiration. But what fills that average person with excitement and inspiration actually causes the average government to cringe. That is because what the common civilian sees as an exciting and inspiring new way of life, government sees as a potential for the worst threat against all forms of legislative authority and law enforcement.

The reason governments perceive the development of civilian superhuman abilities as a threat arises from the very nature of every government's intrinsic purpose. All governments consist of a political organization that dictates, manages, and protects the rights, privileges, and affairs of its subjects. The political organization can consist of one or more persons, and some large organizations can contain more than one legislative office. Nevertheless, all governments must be able to control their subjects in order to effectively govern them. Any government that can no longer control its subjects effectively ceases to exist, and this means that the very society once upheld by that government also ceases to exist. An important part of government control is law enforcement. In most societies, law enforcement protects law-abiding citizens while punishing law-breakers. In extreme cases of law-enforcement, officers must be capable of arresting, subduing, and neutralizing a suspected criminal, and government agencies must be capable of punishing convicted criminals according to law. Many non-government individuals might wonder what any of this government talk has to do with a perfectly harmless quest for miraculous empowerment and superhuman abilities. In the government official's mind, no such quest is harmless. Suppose a civilian does find some way to withstand certain forces or elements that would otherwise kill a human being outright. And that civilian wants to use his or her newfound power for good, to help others in distress. To the government official, it doesn't matter how benign, virtuous, heroic, or law-abiding this super-civilian may be. That same power could also be used to withstand any and every instrument or weapon used by law-enforcement to control the civilian population, and that threat is simply unacceptable. Worse still would be the realization that such a superhuman power could be acquired by anyone. According to government opinion, if nearly all law-abiding citizens and criminals alike acquired the power to withstand all of a given government's traditional instruments and weapons of control, then that government would be struggling for its very existence, if it hadn't already been extinguished. And if that government finally does cease to exist, then social order would vanish right along with it, and the violent anarchy arising from superhuman rivalries and cataclysmic turf-wars would swiftly fill the gaping void. Furthermore, such a horrific problem would scarcely remain isolated within the borders of one city, one state, or one nation alone. With every human being craving this power, the problem of superhuman anarchy would rapidly become a global crisis, threatening every government throughout the world. One would very well reason, "Why should I obey any government when I have the power to be my own God?"

This is the nightmare that ultra-secretive government organizations have been striving to prevent for decades, if not for centuries. Such organizations keep their existence a secret in order to carry out their agendas without any resistance from the public at large, and they exist as an integral part of every major government throughout the world. In order to maintain their agenda of preventing and neutralizing the civilian manifestation, development, and utilization of extreme miraculous and superhuman abilities, these secret organizations work tirelessly to suppress, conceal, neutralize, and destroy any and every object, element, substance, nourishment, phenomenon, place, event, or idea that could lead to even one civilian acquiring such superhuman abilities. Throughout the world, these secret organizations have methodically spirited away every major, detailed ancient writing that successfully teaches people how to acquire and utilize superhuman abilities. These writings have either been hidden in the most remote, unknown, inaccessible parts of the world, only to be used by the nameless members of the organizations that have hidden them, or they have been completely destroyed due to their "lethality." The current global library of spiritual, esoteric, and occult writings is nothing more than a dumbed-down version, one that the world population at large has been deceived into accepting as the original library. Throughout the more modern decades of our society, these same secret organizations have enacted ubiquitous technological countermeasures against civilian superhuman abilities. These countermeasures include, but are scarcely limited to, the constant broadcasting of specific electromagnetic signals from both the power grid and numerous modern electronic devices, the tight regulation of available foods and beverages, the creation and use of special synthetic chemicals throughout society, the tight regulation and constant use of specific chemicals in the food supply, the genetic reengineering of the food supply, the constant pollution of the environment with specific chemicals, and the carefully orchestrated use of specific patterns of phrases, images, sounds, and advertisements in printed, graphical, audio, cinematic, and video media. Nearly all of these modern countermeasures have been refined by decades of ultra-secret mind-control experiments to the level of an art.

And yet, even centuries before the existence of modern technology and covert mind-control experiments, ancient governments have had the same fears against the presence of superhuman powers within the civilian population, even if their efforts against the civilian manifestation and utilization of such powers were far less covert and considerably more violent. Consider this peasant carpenter named Jesus who lived in Nazareth during the days of the Roman Empire. As a holy man who preached that he was the long-awaited Messiah, he demonstrated incredibly miraculous powers, including the ability to walk on water, multiply loaves and fishes, change water into wine, heal the sick, raise the dead, cast out real demons, and command the weather with a single word. Furthermore, until he chose to lay down his life, no one was able to kill him. But when he finally did lay down his life, the Jewish religious government wasted no time in having him crucified. After he was resurrected from the dead (which the same Jewish religious government has denied even to this day: they claim that his disciples stole his body), he then commissioned his disciples to continue preaching in his name. And because those men also manifested the same superhuman miracles, both the Jewish religious government and the Imperial Government of Rome viciously hunted them down and had them put to death. It wasn't until enough of the early church had been infiltrated over the centuries, and the superhuman powers were no longer a threat, that the Roman Government finally ceased persecuting the church. Three centuries after the church was born, Emperor Constantine, claiming that a divine Christian revelation gave him victory in battle, finally made Christianity the religion of Rome. Emperor Constantine's pro-Christian legislation was also another example of how high-ranking government officials encourage their own miraculous empowerment while discouraging the same empowerment within the masses. As long as the highest leader was the one working the miracles, all was right with the world. But if a civilian possessed more miraculous power than what the leader possessed, then that civilian was considered the ultimate threat, and therefore had to be put to death immediately. Regardless of the time and place, no government likes to be upstaged when it comes to power, and especially not by one of its own lowly citizens.

Now if you ask any American government official whether or not the United States Government is actively pursuing an agenda of neutralizing the civilian development and utilization of miraculous, superhuman abilities, that government official might openly respond with either a sincere denial or scornful laughter against the idea, or both. That is how he or she would respond openly. But don't get it twisted. Behind closed doors, in the highest offices of power, those same officials either discuss this ultimate threat with their colleagues or work on existing covert projects against the threat (think Black-Ops), or both. All of these aforementioned risks and dangers should give any seeker of miraculous, superhuman powers pause to reconsider the reasons for his or her quest. If you are such a seeker, then are you ready for the severe responsibilities these powers will bring? Could you really handle the government hunting down either you or your loved ones? Here's an even more serious consideration: if your power somehow does exceed any and every power throughout human society, then can you really say that you would police yourself? Do you really think that you would be fit to have such superhuman powers if you are still a slave to the same carnal lusts and selfish corruption? Even Jesus the carpenter refused to use his superhuman powers to turn stones into bread, no matter how hungry he was in the wilderness. No matter how noble or impassioned you are in your quest for the miraculous, always consider the big picture. And if you can't do that, then maybe it's a good thing the government is hindering you after all.

The Shot Heard 'Round the World

No, this is not an article about American patriotism. But by the time this article has been up for a few minutes, the entire world will be able to read it. In this modern, wireless, iPad-enabled cyberculture of ours, we Americans tend to take this unparalleled freedom of information for granted, and no attitude could have more disastrous consequences. Every time we post a picture on FaceBook, or tweet to our heart's content on Twitter, we are basically exposing ourselves to the entire world. This is the same world that contains nations of people who would love nothing better than to see every last American slaughtered. And they have probably voiced their violent sentiments a billion times, but the average American would never know this, because those same angry people don't speak English. Just because HTML, XHTML, XML, and God-knows-how-many-other Internet languages were written in English, that does not mean that the rest of the world now speaks English by default. Americans desperately need to get a clue: the presence of the Internet does NOT mean that everyone is a willing participant in the global village. If anything, some of the cyber-participants are basically cyber-predators. And here you are, throwing your naked butt up in the air for everyone to see, including those same cyber-predators, who could be from anywhere in the world, and I mean anywhere. Here go some scenarios below that should give you pause for thought before you go indiscriminately hanging your naked butt out in cyberspace ever again.

What if you belonged to a strictly orthodox religion (like Christianity, Judaism, or Islam), and for your political science project in college you wrote a detailed blog defending gay and lesbian rights. Now imagine going to your church/synagogue/mosque a few days later and finding that you and your family have been banned from ever having fellowship there again. Then a few days after that, you start getting threatening emails and phone calls from people you don't even know, some of whom live in other cities, other states, or even other countries. But they all have one thing in common: they were deeply and religiously offended by your blog, and they felt that the world would be a much better place without you in it. And who's to say they have to respect the sanctity of human life? If they happen to come from a radically religious nation that firmly believes in the death-penalty for all infidels, then you're basically marked for death. This is one example, a worldwide example, where you really need to think before you speak.

Or how about this one. (I've actually seen this happen in real life.) Let's say that you wrote something heinous and detrimental towards Republicans on your FaceBook page. You've even gone as far as saying, in so many words, that the only good Republican is a dead one. You even went on the warpath and cursed both the Tea Party and the Religious Right with the most graphically violent words possible. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, you go to work that Monday morning and find that you have been fired, without even so much as an explanation. Worse than that, every subsequent attempt at finding another job has been met with one rejection-letter after another, for months on end. You'll probably never find out how this lasting misfortune happened to you, but rest assured, some of the Republicans you cursed on your FaceBook page, including those radical Tea Party people and the Religious Right, turned out to be the very business owners and supervisors you worked for. And the reason you can't find another job in your field is because they then used the same Internet you used against them, only they used it to cyber-blacklist you on every private hiring-database throughout the world. Did you ever stop to think that every last piece of information you've ever carelessly barfed out in cyberspace has been meticulously collected and stored on these databases as a neat little record of who you really are, and of how far you'd foolishly hang your naked butt out in cyberspace for all the world to see and laugh at?

Or how about this dangerous tidbit. Let's say you've gone just a bit too far in repeatedly insulting a particular radical religion, and let's say that someone from another country really does want to kill you for your blasphemous words. Well, if you also happen to be one of those cute little social butterflies who loves to tweet about their next party or where they're gonna be hanging out next week at 9PM, it wouldn't be that difficult for your would-be assassin to masquerade as, say, another cute little social butterfly, then gain access to your Twitter stream, find out where you'll be next week, show up there unannounced, and then suddenly blow your head off with a 9mm semi-automatic that was concealed under the jacket.

And the list of cyber-dangers doesn't end there. Aside from the crime of identity-theft, people still have to contend with that even more subtle yet no less dangerous crime of identity-fraud, i.e. that person online really isn't the same person in the real world. That's where you have horror stories consisting of your teenage daughter cyber-chatting and texting with what she thinks is another teenage girl, but who really happens to be a forty-something-year-old sexual predator who has his sights set on violently raping your daughter and then selling her into sexual slavery on the other side of the planet. Yep, I thought that last bit about sexual slavery on the other side of the planet would get your attention. How do you know that your teenage daughter won't be kidnapped and sold into some underground sex-slave market outside of this country? Spiriting people out of this country is just as easy as spiriting them in. That might be the reason so many young kidnap victims are never seen alive or dead in this country ever again. No evidence, no body, no nothing. And all it took was the lure of the Internet, someone following your kids on FaceBook without you knowing it, monitoring you or your kids on Twitter to track your every move, your every habit, hunting you down like a skilled predator stalks his or her prey.

And yet, for all the extreme dangers that still exist in cyberspace, institutions and organizations are still insisting that people conduct their affairs online, in an environment that is barely a few decades old, and has thus scarcely been burn-tested. The Internet began as a US Government project in the 1970s. It then became open to public use some time in the late 1980s. Then the Worldwide Web exploded onto the scene in the mid 1990s. Ever since then, the use of the Internet has increased exponentially, devouring that much more of every American's life in every area imaginable. I remember the days when you had to search for information at the public library, using everything from card catalogs to microfiche. (That was so many years B.G., "Before Google.") Computers were still the stuff of science projects, and to program one, you had to know Fortran77, ... on punch-cards! The best a computer monitor could give you was green text streaming across the screen, with absolutely no graphics, and certainly no mouse to point-and-click your way around: you had to know what system commands to type into the keyboard (when keyboards finally replaced those pesky punch-cards), or you were screwed. As for storage, think rooms and rooms of reel-to-reel tape. Yep, no floppy diskettes yet, and when they were finally invented, those dinosaurs were far bigger than 5-1/4", but stored less! Nowadays, you can't even swing a dead cat without hitting a computer. My BlackBerry smartphone is practically a computer, one that has far more processing power than those room-sized reel-to-reel monsters ever had. I am typing this blog on a PC that can outstrip several THOUSAND room-sized Uni-vacs without even skipping a beat. And all of our most recent and impressive advances in information technology have barely taken place over the past thirty years. That's scarcely enough time for any human society to truly and meaningfully measure the overall impact such advances will really have on us all. Human beings need time, time to grow, time to learn, time to adapt, adjust, and improve on themselves. Computers enable people to get things done in mere hours, minutes, or even seconds. But human life requires days, weeks, months, years, even decades to learn and mature. It takes almost twenty years for a human being to go from birth to mature adulthood. That feat will never be accomplished in mere days or hours. Nevertheless, the Internet has given Americans this "fast-food illusion" that has absolutely no basis on reality. And understanding the impact of the Internet on human society will still take years, even decades to fully understand and document. Regardless of how thoroughly integrated into daily American life the Internet has become, Americans still need to learn the value of slowing down and unplugging themselves from cyberspace in order to truly live as human beings again. Countless centuries of human wisdom cannot be cancelled out by a mere few decades of cyberspace, and if you really want to find your true path in life, you will still have to do it in the real world, and not in cyberspace. After all, real-world wisdom still applies: hanging your naked butt out in the open will only make you the butt-end joke in any venue, even in cyberspace.

"Musical Ascension"

Attuning the mind,
bringing focus to the specific frequency,
space/time continuums reverberating with the groove, hypnotic,
like that exotic melody running through your soul the other day;
and at moments like this,
epiphany, you
got it, and you
rejoice with sublime elation,
feet involuntarily strutting with a coolness recognizable only to the
truly hip. You could swear it
would never end, the quintessential rhythm
speaking syncopated syllables swiftly stroking smooth souls systematically,
dramatically elevating the conscious mind to a better place,
a higher dimension,
musical ascension. In this blissful state,
notes and verbs conjugate to relate the divine progression,
expression of dialectic wisdom interwoven with prophetic vision of the
mindset. Even when silent,
one speaks, and you
get it, renewal of the mind conjoined with the wholeness of the rhythm
precisely planting perfectly placid patterns peacefully perceiving plateaus
in the elevation of the soul, sole entity
speaking be-bop beyond the forces of digital being,
whispering in tongues that only drums can understand
as the heavens unfold before the ones who can truly
feel it.


Copyright (c) 2009, All Rights Reserved

"Blues for the Monument"

There is no such thing as darkness without purpose.
Faces walk through the night like keys opening forgotten doors to
ancient answers. They never speak, and yet,
our dreams read their souls like open books,
only to forget the truths when we awaken from slumber,
wisdom tight-lipped before the foolishness of the everyday.
My mind has become a candle walking through the depths of
inner reason, burning with the flame of undiscovered meaning as we all
circle the galactic center silently. We read the book from cover to cover,
only to find that the end is also the beginning. As adults,
we learn not to trust anyone who is of this corrupt world,
and yet, they are our kin, and the similarities between us all
are at best unsettling. The darkness of humanity has become
vast and threatening skyscrapers of technological intellect without
peace. There are blank stares that open up the night sky, as if
the heavens wept bitterly.


Copyright (c) 2006, All Rights Reserved