Esca?...Later

 

Typical condition of most escalators in Grand Central Station complex at any given time.  Especially the ones that run alongside VERY long up-stairways.  

In a society where most of the technological progress that impacts the everyday consumer consists of replacing reality with something else (e.g. I-phone 15) especially something that convinces one to buy new crap, making a stupid escalator that won't break down every month is too much to ask.

There was a time however when things were built to last, thus note the ancient wooden escalator, still extant at this writing, in Macy's NYC where it's kept running probably mostly for sentimental reasons (but without a lot of effort).

Mirror of America!

Here's What We Have Devolved Into - Way Down Deep in Our Heart of Hearts

  

  ...about 50% of us.  And yes, the Founding Fathers are spinning in their graves

Here's the problem no one in the media seems to want to talk about: 

There are have been thousands of Trumps throughout history.  Loud, ignorant, low-class egomaniacs who vault themselves into prominence via wealth and media coverage.   Nothing new about that, and nothing rare and special about this Trump.  What is new is the depthless stupidity of the people who think he is some kind of messiah.  That's the real embarrassing and depressing issue.

And now as all the cryptofascists, neofascists, ultranationalists and blatant racists begin strutting around in full sunlight for the first time in decades, the solid core of White America cheers itself hoarse.  Unfortunately once the "people have spoken" we look like a third-world nation of arrogant and violent morons.

"...death's head upon the wall, afield lies nothing but disorder, no good can come of this, whatsoever I can tell you..."

 

Fretting Over Demitasse Etiquette While the Barbarians Rape and Pillage

Friday the 13th,  2016

While I'm happy to call myself a Progressive, I'm becoming increasingly uncomfortable with being a "Liberal".  The reason is that Liberals now spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about niceties and nonsense while howling madmen, shrieking with bloodlust, are battering down the gates of civilization.

I mean, for God's sake, hooting ISIS subhumans are sawing the heads off children and gleefully posting the videos to YouTube, while Liberals have better things to worry about, like the transgender rights of morose self-absorbed teens in North Carolina.

Federal Title 9 requires the abolishment of sex discrimination, which is a "good thing".  However, what is a "stupid thing" is extending Title 9 mandates to the point where serious federal dollars are spent fighting heartland America over which bathroom tetchy adolescents should be able to use at their schools.

We have a multi-billion dollar USCIS which is one of the most deplorably broken and incompetent federal agencies on the planet, we have an utterly porous immigration system that allows in terrorists and abusers and punishes law-abiding applicants, we have one of the most poorly educated populations of any "first world" nations, and now in consequence of the above, we are looking at unarguably the least qualified and potentially most dangerous Republican candidate for president in the past century.

Utopian refinements of our basically primitive nature are important and good and needed, but let's save them until the world is a bit safer and more civilized eh?    Alas, poor Lavoisier!

THE MONSTERS UNITE!

Yep,

Just watch them all line up behind the unbelievably ignorant foulmouthed neofascist demagogue while millions of morons cheer themselves hoarse.

• The Shrieking Harpy who continually played to troglodyte mentality and won almost every time!

• The Bloated Boss who fixed the tollbooths and anything/anyone else that bothered him!

• The Reality Show Phonies who make millions off the manipulation of reality as a career anyway.

and now...!

•  The Aging Rich Boy Darling of the Bush Era who served the other Rich Boy manipulators and liars  

There is just no bottom to the stupidity of voters in the USA.

Just none.

Want to know who we really are as a people?  ...at least a huge silent majority of us?   Just look at the bids for the gun Zimmerman used to kill his very own uppity nigger.
 

Cryptocybernomia Obscurus

 "...Because our options have changed."


Noun:  /cryp’do bt̬b.si.bærn.ə.tmy a

(The art and practice of preventing access to key persons and corporate employees by concealment: 1) behind impenetrable websites and 2) behind endless automated synthetic voicemail routing systems.)


Cryptocybernomia obscurus is the sociopathic corporate practice - pandemic in the 21st Century - of preventing direct access to actual individual humans lodged within a company or organization.  CO is a particularly useful blockade in the case of callers wishing to discuss some issue related to their interactions with that company or organization.  

A notable recent case was an unaccountable overcharge of fifteen thousand dollars on a $41.53 website hosting invoice.  The victim was able to get as far as the third abrupt disconnection from yet another robotic voice advising him to please select from one of eight different slowly-explained systemic possibilities "...because our options have changed..."  before suffering a fatal apoplectic seizure. 
  

PSEUDOREALITOPHILIOPATHY

Noun  /su’do.ri.æl.ə.t̬o.phili.

(Trans: the compulsive desire to stare at small screens)

A severe neurological disorder, pandemic in the 21^st Century, in which the patient avoids observing and interacting with the immediate environment by focusing all visual, auditory and tactile attention on small beeping electronic devices manufactured in China. In its terminal phase the patient is unable to ride an elevator, run on a treadmill, walk down the street or drive an automobile without repeatedly and nervously taking out one of several devices and staring at it for as long as possible.  At present, the only known treatment is a widespread and enduring power failure although this frequently leads to confusion, disorientation, uncontrolled weeping and thoughts of suicide.  Some patients will recover sufficiently to notice that trees have leaves and oncoming buses can be dangerous to health.

Trump for Dictator! 

Trump for goddam DICTATOR!  Sure, why not?   He has the right level of political experience and diplomatic sophistication.  A cruder more loudmouthed demagogue cannot be found...and that's what we want now.  So dictator sounds good.  The people have spoken.  Anyway, the office is more suitable for the kind of society we have become.  And the times should get the leaders they deserve. 

It's High Noon in this country. Time to toss aside the moth-eaten façade of democratic humanitarian political correctness we’ve been limping around behind.  Time to either put civilization on steroids or jettison all that half-hearted nonsense for a hard look at who we really are in the 21st Century; an age of rampant insanity where mass murder is an almost daily event, and extremist sects, dedicated to little more than wholesale carnage, have thousands of eager recruits and adherents.  Not a few of them come from the U.S.A.

In order to better understand the motivating factors behind the whole grotesque Trump/Palin/ISIS/militia/Tea-Party/al-Qaeda lunatic show let’s take a peek at some of the less-well-known and more subtle reasons why there are always so many ready to join up:

I was at the gym the other night and did a few laps in a large mirrored room originally intended for aerobics. As usual, it was full of stylish 20-somethings doing their “workouts”. These consisting primarily of lightweight efforts with 10lb barbells and a lot of looking at themselves in the mirrors and resting. As always, someone had routed inspirational music through the loudspeakers. This time it was French Montana, an Arab-American vocalist whose rap output consisted mostly of lyrics like “I like to FUCK…shit, yeah…ummm… uhhh…FUCK!” shouted in semi-coordination with a lot of drum pounding and mixed over orchestral excerpts from…surprise…Beethoven. Everybody in the room seemed to be heavily into the profound lyrics and were bobbing their heads to the beat. Tattoos were de rigeur and none of my companions spent more than a few seconds looking away from either the mirror or a smartphone. Earbuds remained firmly in place, regardless of what was blasting out of the speakers. Apart from the really pumped guys outside bench pressing 200-plus and generally looking like they acquired those skills in prison, no one was even breaking a sweat.  But everyone was thoroughly ensconced in a small-screen private world.

That’s just the gym. Outside, on the train, on the street, in the elevators, I doubt that even a fully armed terrorist would penetrate the cloud of self-absorption.  Just forget about getting noses out of I-pods any time before the bullets fly.   In an age of cyber-narcissism where favorite realities are virtual, being asked to notice and think about what is happening in one's immediate vicinity is a tough sell.   Why interact with hard reality when you can live in your own personal world of adolescent nonsense - or interact with mutant megazoids in cyber war games?  As the latest withdrawn mass-murderer in Oregon noted, one of his favorite interests was killing zombies online. 

It really surprises me that people who have morphed into creatures like this are expected to: a) fully understand, and b) truly espouse the ideals intrinsic to the advanced democracies of the new millennium.  No damn chance.  Bottom line...what’s easier and more appealing; thinking though the intricacies and imperatives that shaped the framing of the Iran nuclear accords, or fuckin’ killing zombies, trolls, orcs etc. on some gaming platform?  Who wants to understand the complex subtleties governing immigration reform when you can be checking who's following your Twitter feeds?  Let’s get real! 

As Americans, we’ve never been a particularly studious or refined people; sales of the lurid pink pages of the sensational Police Gazette, which specialized in crime and sex in the 1890’s, attest to our constancy. But there was always some forum; school, family, or literature, promoting the higher ideals of civilization. Now, for the first time ever, imbecilic juvenility is instantly available and totally immersive. 

Commentators wonder why the globally violent world of 2016 sucks. I'd like to suggest it's because a very large proportion of the people in it are inhaling with their lips pursed. In the old days it used to be legitimate governments who waged wars and committed atrocities. The soldiers led by these governments did unspeakable things they would not consider otherwise. But hey, times have changed. None of us are very nice anymore, at all, anywhere.

Check the news videos from China/Russia/Georgia/Detroit. A child is hit by a car and lies bleeding in the street. Passersby rush to the scene…and begin snapping Instagram pictures.  John A. Whoever waltzes into a school, restaurant or theatre and opens fire with an awesome and legally-purchased arsenal of death and suffering. We wring our hands for a few days, do some boohoo weeping, get photo’d leaving flowers and candles and teddy bears and then move on to something more entertaining. We watch real-time videos of loathsomely evil torture and murder in Mexico and the Mideast and then make moronic comments that that the imagery isn’t clear enough. We see pictures of clear-cut rainforests in Brazil and click over to  read about a volunteer doctor in Pakistan machine-gunned by three subhumans on a motorcycle, barely get out a “tsk” and then flip to celebrity news. The outrage meter saturated long ago. There is so much obscenity in the world, nothing registers very deeply anymore. Anybody remember the Hutus and Tutsis? Boko who? 

We are now logging just about one mass murder every two weeks in the USA and frankly it’s a little surprising it’s not more. When we no longer have any identity as real people or any power to change things; when all our reality is either online or on portable little screens; when our lives are pre-programmed, predigested vidbites, when the level of mature social interaction rarely rises above that of early junior high school, when the world news is almost universally bad, there is very little difference between shooting zombies online and one day just going ahead and shooting those wetware entities you don’t particularly like at school. 

No one should be surprised that ISIS has over-the-top success with recruiting new cannon-fodder for its armies of murderers. Guns are real. They give power. Pull the trigger: Cause and effect. Pain and suffering aren’t real. No way to do it online.  Anyone see the late-night cable TV program "Ridiculousness" aimed at the 20+ demographic?   Hour after hour of people smashing into light posts, falling off bicycles, dropping off the sides of buildings.  The host and panelist all sit there guffawing and making crude comments.  The suffering of others is hilarious when it's all just imagery.  We have way too little experience with painful reality...and its getting less real all the time.

Trump is definitely the guy for these times. Low grade abuse of anyone who crosses him.  Not even a vestige of decorum on any level.  Pure appeal gold for aggressive troglodytes. You don’t have to think, you don’t have to ponder, you just have to react. What your gut tells you is right is right!   You’ve watched enough Fox to detest Obama and his Liberal Socialist cronies. You know those Mexicans are all either retarded trolls or killers and drug lords.  You know that global warming is a liberal myth. Fuckin' A!

Trump’s clearly the man for this kind of a civilization, or lack therof. He plays the game perfectly as the line continues to blur between reality and the the World of the Little Screens.   Don’t think, don’t reason…that’s the domain of bleeding heart liberals. Doesn't matter if you've got no plan for effectively dealing with the root causes of terrorism.  Just talk bombs and Booyah! it always works. Bush knew it too! Don’t reason, don’t hesitate or backtrack, just blast your way in there and git those WMDs!

And if the morons prevail from sheer numbers, and the world just gets too dangerous from too little wisdom...well, when you've got more money than God - it's not a problem.  "Hey, it was fun while it lasted, but you know, I've got some castles in Switzerland that need looking after..."

C'mon America! Your gut knows what’s right and if you need to verbalize it in more than a sentence, you’re a dangerous faggot. Make America Great Again!

Elections are no obstacle. Time for a dictator, again.