It's a Hard Knocked Moral Life Thing

Dear America,

this blog just might come in stages...levels, if you will...possibly eight.

it might come in one fell swoop, but then again, it might not.

and doncha just love the creative license at play, and surely, at fault.

This is what happens, you see, when multiple dimensions -- most likely eight -- come at me all at once.

There is just so much to say...

from the everyday and nameless cynics to the Book of Job, that's how it all begins for me, G, in this new day...

from there, from the mindset of organizers and radicals to the consciousness of revolutionaries and freedom fighters -- from the absence of light to the deliverance of evil -- from the very essence of how power tends to corrupt to the evolution of absolute power corrupts absolutely -- from the self interests of the common good to self interests of the common not so good.

It's all right here at the tip of my tongue.

How ironic that Saul Alinsky handpicked the Bible verse, "The life of man upon earth is a warfare..." [Job 7:1] to set forth the premise of his entire work, a "pragmatic primer for realistic radicals."

For Alinsky could have chosen anything he so pleased.

But he chose this... 
making it a bullet point, no less, to stand out -- for emphasis -- in order to capture the fullness of his lament (that being Alinsky's, not Job's) and organize his thoughts into that one thing.

To characterize Alinsky quickly and without pomp and circumstance, he's the epitome of a true American cynic.  End of story.   Narrowing the perspective even further:  reading what ultimately becomes the operation's manual for the up and coming progressives of the last fifty years, Rules for Radicals, the task grows into something insufferable, weighted down by a constant stream of whining. 

It's heavy.
Jaded.
Dropping even a few F-bombs along the way, remaining true to the story -- which had to be revolutionary for it's day, no?    Alinsky was cool like that.

What is a cynic anyway?

To the standard, everyday understanding:   "a person who believes all men are motivated by selfishness."  

And that is all well and good; and yet, searching it's origins revealing a certain caveat, then we discover another view, "a member of a sect, founded by Antisthenes of Athens, of ancient Greek philosophers who believed virtue to be the only good and self-control to be the only means of achieving virtue."

 Returning to the Book of Job, it begins with this focus on how hard life is, the suffering that seems too great, too much to handle -- that all life is, and ever will be, can be summed up to being  a hard service, like that of a hired man, and synonymous with war itself.

Alinsky LEADS with this one idea and continues to lead the education of an organizer with a plethora of tips and tactics capitalizing on a theme -- the struggle to gain control (absolute power). 

Revealing the importance of making the moral justification and citing,  "all great leaders, including Churchill, Gandhi, Lincoln, and Jefferson, always invoked 'moral principles' to cover naked self-interest in the clothing of 'freedom' 'equality of mankind' 'a law higher than man-made law' and so on."  Alinsky doubles down, saying, "all effective actions require the passport of morality."  Once a cynic always a cynic.


So it's funny, isn't it?

For just how does Alinsky begin but by channeling Job, invoking God into the discussion right from the start.   Linking to the deeper, moral argument in hopes of making his argument not only legitimate, but worthy of attention and worth fighting for no matter the costs, the suffering, the labor, the hard service to something greater than...  It's on behalf of the common good, of course!

Prompted by Job posing the basic question,  why do the righteous suffer if God is so loving and all-powerful -- Alinsky capitalizes and profits in the making of a movement, as if asking, why do the people suffer at the hands of the establishment, if not also by God, all over again.

Attaining a wee bit of deep background via my handy-dandy Nelson's Bible handbook, we discover that "suffering itself is not the central theme; rather, the focus is on what Job learns from his suffering -- the sovereignty of God over all creation."  In the end, Job sees the light and repents and no longer demands answers from God as to why; in the end, Job realizes how great God is, and becomes humbled by his own humanity under God.

Oh if things could be so simple.

What have we learned?

The thing is, what began as a movement complete with rules for radicals et.al. and everything -- and quite possibly whittled down to eight levels of control to create social change -- has evolved.

And some may even say, the rules have changed; they had to change in order to facilitate the simple truth that "radicals must be resilient, adaptable to shifting political circumstances, and sensitive enough to the process of action and reaction to avoid being trapped by their own tactics and forced to travel a road not of their choosing...radicals must have a degree of control over the flow of events."

And come to think of it, we might as well begin concocting the Eight Stages for Fundamental Transformation BY President Barack Obama right now.

wait a minute...

we did that...

for it's all the same thing.

• Control healthcare, nationalize it even (and sign up by March 31st! or not);
• increase the poverty level...they won't fight back if the nanny state is providing everything for them;
• increase the national debt, by 10 trillion dollars before the end of eight years in office -- then increase taxes because it's morally the right thing to do;
• make it impossible to own a gun, or get the ammo for your gun, that way the people can no longer defend themselves and grow to depend upon the police state to control everybody;
• elevate the welfare rolls to levels unseen... just give people the fish... the roof over their head, the cell phone, unemployment, food stamps, ...;
• take control over news rooms, planting government spies and propaganda... implement government controls over education material... and basically indoctrinate the people from birth;
• remove the belief in Divine Providence and foundation under God, allow the atheists to usurp religious rights and the free exercise thereof;
• divide and conquer -- create conflict between the have's and the have-nots -- make the moral case for income redistribution...and while we're at it, let's polarize our cultural traditions and cornerstones.

Ah indeed,
as Alinsky declares war, in peaceful celebration, saying:

"History is a relay of revolutions; the torch of idealism is carried by the revolutionary group until this group becomes an establishment, and then quietly the torch is put down to wait until a new revolutionary group picks it up for the next leg of the run.  Thus the revolutionary cycle goes on...

wow, you don't say.   Go on...

...I believe that man is about to learn that the most practical life is the moral life and that the moral life is the only road to survival."

That last bit sounds real good until we recognize the context.

It should be understood that when Alinsky speaks of this "moral life," he makes the distinction to embrace such changes as a group, fully organized as a community; it is neither rooted, or cultivated, from the seeds of self-reliance and personal responsibility of the individual according to this nation's original intent .  

And to that end, this bad influence shows up when our current president speaks of being "my brother's keeper..." and when a certain first lady (Clinton) chimed in, saying, "it takes a village."   Just two out of the many Alinsky students gazing up to the heaven's with contempt, questioning everything, all the while making a mockery of our foundation in the every day.

Going a totally new direction (but not really), here's a link that encapsulates the changes afoot -- and it comes out of NASA of all places.

Top of the list --  according to NASA -- of all things leading to total collapse of civilization as we know it?  The immoral action of income inequality and the immoral depletion of natural resources.

Job would tell us to get on our knees and pray.

Make it a Good Day, G

oh and you bet...

this girl's got plenty more to say, to cynics and comrades alike.  come back now, ya' hear

It's Extraordinary, Extortionary Times Thing

Dear America,

In brief, let's get linked to a post @ The Heritage Foundation, from Andrew Kloster:, and skip to my Lew to the end:

"...the President has broad authority to manage government payments to avoid defaulting on federal obligations. He can choose which payments to make and in which order, and these choices will impact the effects on the average U.S. taxpayer and the economy."

Okeydokey? And thank you, Andrew, for breaking down the debt limit -- and the payment on the debt -- to an elementary level translation.  Don't be a low-information voter and ignore the easy read...


Oh, and according to Moody's, President Obama can stop threatening a credit rating doom and gloom scenario:

"At this time we don't see that (rating cut) as a consequence of these short-term events," said Steven Hess, Moody's lead U.S. sovereign credit analyst.

"The rating is based more on the long-term outlook for the debt, rather than what we think will be short-term events."

Indeed.  Matter of fact, I would be willing to bet Moody's would really like to see the United States gain some control over our debt, reform entitlements, stop allocating hard earned tax payer money to things we can no longer afford, and be smart with our money.  But I digress.


Now, moving on.

Currently, little old gthang is running a wee bit scared; sitting here, wondering, shaking in my jammies, what in the world is he going to do later on today (and quite possibly before I get to the end of this post)?

Speaking of the Speaker, of course --- who is set to meet up with the president, offering an interim pacifier on the 17 trillion dollar debt limit and the tantrum throwing 44th president of the United States, who's fiscal trajectory is set to double the National Debt over his two terms of "service" to the American people. [yeah, right, raising the debt ceiling won't raise the debt so much as a dime...oh okay]

Along came a spider...and I just want to crawl through the world wide web and shake him something fierce, screaming, don't do it, don't do it!

The National Debt should be under a national review and microscope of all 300 million of us, starting today.  Here's a flashback to 2011, CNS News offers an immediate reality check of then and now -- and all within a matter of a few years:

"As of Monday, Obama had been in office 986 days—or about 32 and a half months. During that time, the debt increased at an average pace of $4.27 billion per day. Were that rate to continue until Obama’s term ends on Jan. 20, 2013, the debt would then stand at about $16.86534 trillion—an increase of more than $6.2 trillion for Obama’s four years."

Remember now, this is the projection from October 5, 2011!

So read it again.

And where are we at...October 10, 2013...16.962066 and escalating.  Was CNS right on target, or what?    So, at 4.27 billion per day, continuing until the end of his second term, another 27 months later...we add another 3.2 trillion!...and arrive at 20 trillion dollars, or more,  in DEBT by the time he is done (and without even trying to calculate the bureaucratic nightmare that is Obamacare -- because it is incalculable!).

Speaking of which -- how much did we pay for this guaranteed IT motherlode of a contract to keep up and running -- first projected to be @ a cost of 93 million dollars?   Try a bite of this.  OR go to the digital trend re-do, here.  Either way you look at it, it's a lot of muckn' funny...
 
So, you know, health care is an industry that spans, affects, controls one-sixth of our national economy.   We should all be afraid.

[Oh holy crap -- he caved.]

BREAKING NEWS:  floating a six week debt limit extension with no strings attached.

Aw geeze louise, might as well commit myself to a rubber room right now.

"If Ands or Buts were candy and nuts, then every day would be Christmas" -- what?

So what do we call the kind of government that begins to control absolutely everything, and not very well, to boot?

Hold up.

What?

Oh, you need another example, besides our amassing of great debt with nothing good to show for it?

How about this news, coming to us via The Fiscal Times:  how about the humongous, privacy stealing, unconstitutional, earth shattering bureaucratic mess that is the NSA spy center being unable to operate without starting an electrical fire?


If only Lefties (and the righties falling into the same camp and trap as the Speaker of the House) would simply take off their rose colored glasses, surely with shades of grey showing just around the temples -- they might just see how upside down America is right about now.

• Mainstream media controlled by the boot to the neck of this administration.
• Monthly incomes of half the population, through federal entitlements... disability, welfare, food stamps, unemployment -- supported solely on the other half, the backs of the taxpayers.
• Executive Branch unilaterally making up law, changing law, and ignoring law according to it's need [see DOMA, DADT, Immigration Law, and the general usurping of Constitutional Authority].
• Executive Branch creating a police state, to inflict hurt and pain on the American people, controlling access to taxpayer funded properties, memorials, and benefits -- under the guise of a government shutdown [see current events]. 
• Executive Branch controlling our children's education, through Common Core [see new D of Education reforms].
• Executive Branch controlling the closure of our churches for military personnel [see this].
• Executive Branch controlling the use of the National Mall, when during a shutdown, it makes an exception for an amnesty march...[really?]  
• I refuse to continue.

Defining fascism, (Concise Encyclopedia)...

"Philosophy of government that stresses the primacy and glory of the state, unquestioning obedience to its leader, subordination of the individual will to the state's authority, and harsh suppression of dissent. Martial virtues are celebrated, while liberal and democratic values are disparaged. Fascism arose during the 1920s and '30s partly out of fear of the rising power of the working classes; it differed from contemporary communism (as practiced under Joseph Stalin) by its protection of business and landowning elites and its preservation of class systems. The leaders of the fascist governments of Italy (1922–43), Germany (1933–45), and Spain (1939–75)—Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco—were portrayed to their publics as embodiments of the strength and resolve necessary to rescue their nations from political and economic chaos. Japanese fascists (1936–45) fostered belief in the uniqueness of the Japanese spirit and taught subordination to the state and personal sacrifice. See also totalitarianism; neofascism"


Make no mistake,  what is happening in America is the will not of the people, but glory of the state.

Oh the irony when our president spoke a few days ago, saying, "we can't make extortion routine," directing his ire over the Republicans in the House, firmly planted on this nation's foundation advocating for smaller, limited government and insisting Obamacare be, at the very least, delayed, as a condition of increasing our nation's debt limit.

When all along, it has been the very conditions of this administration -- firmly planted in remaining steadfast, headstrong, and fully committed to designating the debt ceiling non-negotiable, that has brought America to her knees; and when further pressed -- resorts to cutting off services to Veterans, access to open air memorials, stopping the transfer of death benefits to military families, closing church doors, threatening non-payment of social security payments, threatening default on our debt when, in fact, the president is fully authorized to control who gets what and when!

extortion?

knock, knock,
who's there?
Extortion.
Extortion, who?
Extortion Dude-in-Chief, at your service -- specializing in extraordinary, extortionary means for extraordinary, extortionary ends [opening his cape and flashing his pearly whites, making all the stupid girls swoon]

[Yes, juvenile it is. Bite me.]

On that note -- there's enough here to gnaw on for awhile; not to mention, with the House being on fire as we speak, it's enough to spin me into a tizzy-fit.
And nobody needs to see that.

Make it a Good Day, G

Oh the extraordinary, extortionary, strateegury of creating new language on the fly...it's what I do.   thank you, thank you very much, be here all week, or at least until the end of the day.  come back again real soon, ya'll.

Oh what's this?  What's the first to go, according to Jack-o-lantern-Lew?  And love the boots, where'd you get 'em?

Dear America,

"WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Sales at U.S. retailers posted their largest gain in five months in August on strong receipts at gasoline stations and clothing outlets, further assuaging fears of a double-dip recession."

1)  re: gasoline reciepts:  congress was on vacation; congressmen and women and staffers were traveling the world, and maybe even returning home to their districts, upon their private jets -- the quintessential gas guzzlers of them all.

2) re: clothing outlets:  the little people were preparing to send their children back to school (and maybe driving over the hill and through the woods to grandmas house -- but that's just speculation-- national parks and recreation were in full swing, too)  either way, it was a swell time to be a kid; and equally noteworthy, is the use of a particular key word, that would  be "outlet"-- for it's not like the majority of us were going to Nordstroms; our smart money was on volume, and no doubt we made a bee line to outlet malls and discount chains from sea to shining sea.

 So really, what this "news" is telling us then, is simply that the economic indicators are in sync with the season; nothing extraordinary is going on -- and should be of no surprise to any of us who survived the month of August...we have used more gas and we have bought more clothes in what's commonly known in the business as enjoying the seasonal fluctuation.  The habits of the homosapien are right on cue.

Let's just go out on a limb and predict, pumpkin sales is trending up as we speak -- along with bags of chocolate, candy corn and cavities; six months from now, we should also expect to see an rise in dental work and toothbrush sales, that is over and above the incremental rush in annual toothbrush projections, standard issue in the bottom of our Christmas stockings in about ninety days from now. Woohoo, and what a boon that will be. Yes, good times are swiftly coming our way.

I guess they, journalists in general and reuters in particular, feel a need to inject optimism and pump us up; looky-here! we are buying clothes, sucking up gas, and eating red velvet cupcakes, happy days are here again... the recession must be over... long live the king.

Here's a news flash:

The weak rise in sales has nothing to do with "our fears being over;" the reality is, it's quite the contrary.  We spent money because we had to, and what we did spend was not much.  Real consumer confidence and reasonable economic security remains at an all time low.

The thing is, we are still stuck; and in order to further evolve and grow and sustain life here on earth, it relies on our ability to steer clear of the tar pits, somehow find comfort in the makeshift home on the side of this slippery slope we live, and wait the storm out in the short term -- but in the long term, counts on all of us to use our intelligence and stamina and innovation to reinvent the wheel that is falling off fast and furious, and upon all cylinders.

To make way for the next generation, permanent consumer confidence calls upon us to return to the principles that made this country great and good, gracious and grounded -- and nothing else will really do; gallivanting around town in that trade in from cash for clunkers, buying petrol, while donning brand new bonnets and pantaloons is simply feeding into the consumer nation infatuation; the sustenance of common sense must be self evident and be found at the heart and soul of whatever we do, wherever we go -- for as the age old wisdom of alchemists and neanderthals alike agree,  wherever you go, there you are.


Compensation and consumption in life comes with the greater understanding of the law of dual realities at play at all times; the polarity factor of everything under the sun falls under simple truths of action and reaction, lightness and darkness, the measure of yin and the yang accordingly, to all things, lives in every moment, in every facet and capacity.

From Ralph Waldo Emerson:

"...because of the dual constitution of things, in labor as in life there can be no cheating. The thief steals from himself,  The swindler swindles from himself. For the real price of labor is knowledge and virtue, whereof wealth and credit are signs.  These signs, like paper money, may be counterfeited or stolen, but that which they represent, namely, knowledge and virtue, cannot be counterfeited or stolen.  These ends of labor cannot be answered but by real exertions of the mind, and in obedience of pure motives.  The cheat, the defaulter, the gambler, cannot extort the benefit, cannot extort the knowledge of material and moral nature which his honest care and pains yield to the operative.  The law of nature is, DO the thing, and you shall have the power; but they who do not the thing have not the power...

On the other hand the law holds with equal sureness for all right action.  Love, and you shall be loved.  All love is mathematically just, as much as the two sides of an algebraic equation.  The good man has absolute good, which like fire turns every thing to its own nature, so that you cannot do him any harm...

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.  As no man thoroughly understands a truth until first he has contended against it, so no man has a thorough acquaintance with the hindrance or talent of men until he has suffered from the one and seen the triumph of the other over his own want of the same."

Isn't that just sublime.

If only;

if only, just before we closed our eyes at night, or at first sight of the morning sun, we read to our children from the master of self reliance himself, as if plugging into the source of all right action, elevating the new hybrid human being into another realm of living and creating, illuminating our personal power in the moment, while protecting our very future -- by doing the right thing, actualizing right thought, right from the start.

Things were all so simple then, when we hadn't a wheel or a gigabyte to our name; and likewise, as with any advancement, greater responsibility and mindfulness is absolutely required for long lasting prosperity and for broadband benefits to sustain. Cogs and controversy, corruption and cannibalism can wreak havoc upon an otherwise vibrant and growing civil society and community.

We are way beyond the rush to summer's end -- flying and dining, hunting for fresh fig leafs and roadkill to throw on ; the greater concern should be, what is it about the humble wheel that truly works?  What does the little round disk that moves things, move us to do -- by way of lesson or contention? 

How has the abuse of the doers and the shakers and the candlestick makers all but obliterated the simple life and the humble man -- with the loss of sound virtue and proven principles paving the way -- driven us into this bureaucratic ditch of despair and despotism? No matter who rules -- a ruler is a ruler is a ruler; if it rolls, if it has wheels, then wherever you go, there you are...

Man was made in the image of God, born in this nation under God, to rule ourselves; to do for ourselves; the more we have fallen away from respecting this duality of natural law, in existence since the beginning of all time, the greater the chance for the mechanisms at play to falter. Call it Darwinian, if you must; but truth cuts both ways, and is equal to all under the rule of law -- while the only common denominator is who?

YOU.

so -- puleeze --
if you are going to make one,
make it a good, G

Truth is, this isn't about re-inventing the wheel at all; for the wheel works just fine.

After further review -- and according to the aero-dynamics back behind running basically every thing --
thank you for waiting;
operator error seems to be more the root cause. 

Somebody should get to the bottom of it some time real soon,

your patience is appreciated.
beep.